Work Text:
SUNGCHAN [01:07]
You’ve never liked the rain
It’s his first time texting in six months and twenty-two days. Sungchan is still the only one that knows this about him, and is probably the only one that ever will, because Sungchan is the only one that Wonbin sees on a rainy day.
It rains. Wonbin runs. It’s all routine.
The cusp of summer takes its sweet time to lazily pull the blanket of darkness across the sky, and Wonbin drums his fingers on the leather wheel to the beat of the raindrops bouncing off his bumper. Water courses down the windscreen in rivulets that criss and cross and Wonbin twists his engine back on just to feel something. The weather is ripe for nicotine—for a flavoured ghost to displace the stagnant swamp in his lungs.
Ants crawl beneath his skin, and his drumming reaches a crescendo, and Wonbin has half the mind to wind his window down to let the rain stream in and make an aquarium out of his car. Two units of hydrogen, one unit of oxygen, bonded in the shape of a needle that pokes and prods and pierces until it finds the point that will slow his heart. Wonbin knows a bit about basic chemistry.
WONBIN [22:34]
i’ll be there soon
read
Sungchan still hasn’t moved out of their old apartment, and while Wonbin has grown guts since then, he hasn’t grown enough to ask him why.
The door swings open before Wonbin rings the bell, and they must’ve done this so often for Sungchan to get the timing just right; Wonbin doesn’t have to steep his soles in the murky puddle on the concrete step and think about how easily he could be washed off it along with other things that skulk and stain.
Light from the corridor leaks out onto Wonbin’s feet and the aroma of takeout Chinese wafts towards his nostrils, wresting something warm and feathery from his chest. Sungchan stands before him, cloudy-eyed and freshly laundered in pyjamas and mismatched socks, a hint of oil drying at the corner of his lip.
“There isn’t much left,” He smiles sheepishly. “I couldn’t wait. Too hungry.”
And it’s all so inane and inconsequential, yet it’s everything he needed. Wonbin feels the fight in his bones seep out and slink back to the shadows where his car is parked as he flops against Sungchan’s chest. Cotton in his nose, rain in his ears, and Sungchan’s arms wrapped carefully around his back.
“Wait— I didn’t get to wash my hands, I’ll get you dirty,”
Wonbin snorts. The tips of his hair turn Sungchan’s shirt translucent. “Thanks, that’s what I came for,”
There’s a sound caged in Sungchan’s throat. “Right.”
Wonbin and Sungchan are not good at being broken up. Sungchan has never redecorated their old apartment. Wonbin never returned his key.
It rains. Wonbin falls out of his car and into Sungchan’s bed. It’s all routine.
Gravel crunches beneath their feet as they hit the crumbling sidewalk. The side of Sungchan’s basketball shorts swish against Wonbin’s leg as it does every morning before the yolk-yellow sun rays run further along the sky and drip onto the pavement. Their path is golden in spite of the dawn; the trees shed their leaves and the leaves shed their clothes and the weary cracks of asphalt masquerade themselves in crispy warm-dyed foliage and think of themselves as beautiful.
Sungchan’s running shoes come to a halt. Wonbin pauses alongside him.
“It’s fall, the leaves have fallen, and I have fallen for you.”
Wonbin’s ears are a fickle thing, never acquiring immunity after all these years, but the season’s breeze graces him with an excuse for the redness. “All of a sudden?”
“It took me this entire round to come up with it,” Sungchan grins, ruddy-cheeked and boyish and free, and pulsing with a life that beckons on Wonbin to get on his toes and kiss him. “You’re not impressed?”
“I think it wouldn’t hurt to spend a couple more rounds coming up with something else,”
Sungchan lets out a loud laugh, and a few leaves mottled and curled at the edges shift at their feet. “Words don’t have to be revolutionary, they just need to leave a lasting impression. And if not that, then they should be memorable.”
Wonbin doesn’t think Sungchan’s cheesy one-liner ticks any of those boxes, even if the helices of his ears still betray him, even though his heart has grown its own roots and branches. A couple more leaves scatter aside when Wonbin raises himself taller to press his lips against Sungchan’s dry ones.
“All of a sudden?” Sungchan mimics him, but it doesn’t deliver with half his mouth curving upwards. He looks at Wonbin with a fondness the weight of the earth, and the emotion lodges itself in the swell of Wonbin’s neck.
“It only took me a second to decide to do that, it wasn’t revolutionary, but you’ll remember it right?”
Sungchan pulls Wonbin’s hand into his own, massaging the hardened ridges and letting his fingers slide into the gaps. “I don’t know, ‘guess you’ll need to remind me.”
Gravel and leaves begin to crunch beneath their shoes again; home is on the horizon. Wonbin thinks Sungchan is better at breaking down his literature than creating it, but he’ll never tell him that. Especially not now, when it’s fall, the leaves have fallen, and he has fallen for Sungchan.
Wonbin steps out of the shower light-headed and ready to sleep through to next year. His thighs burn with something more than the fading bruises that lie like freckles along his skin; he’s gotten good at forgetting to cool down after a workout. The bathroom mirror is too fogged up with dripping condensation but Wonbin stands before it anyway. He feels as blurry as his reflection — smudged at the edges, barely recognisable and not too eager about attending Genome Sequencing at nine thirty.
Two paper cups sit steaming on the coffee table by the time Wonbin emerges from the shared bedroom, towel rolled around his neck and a tee that does not belong to him. Americano - XTRA shot next to Hot Chocolate - XTRA cream and Wonbin runs a pruny finger across the labels addressed to SUNGCHAN, penned in barely-there black ink. Wonbin switches his go-to’s like his strings switch beneath his fingers and Sungchan keeps track every time.
“Remember this when you’re on a billboard,” Sungchan grins from above him. “No one knows and keeps up with you like I do.”
Wonbin doesn’t know which comes first — failing his biological sciences degree or giving up on this university thing entirely, but come this time next year, “We’ll go see my billboards together.”
SUNGCHAN [13:27]
saw your billboard today
your face will be on my fave beer from now on
congrats
WONBIN [13:29]
Thanks
u shouldn’t drink too much
maybe my face will save your liver
SUNGCHAN [13:33]
maybe.
SUNGCHAN [13:40]
you know
my friends don’t believe i know u
and u always come at night and it’s so dark i can barely see your face
so sometimes it feels like i can’t remember what u look like
I was glad to see the billboard
you look good
WONBIN [13:57]
im not the only one who comes at night
you’re pretty much a fountain
SUNGCHAN [18:36]
aren’t u ever going to grow up?
Far too much time has stretched from the day he’d stared at the definition of growth etched in chalk across him in the classroom with the air conditioner that never got fixed. That day had been warm, in the horrible way that clings and sticks and ushers in the summer flies to hum little hymns of hypnosis as they flit about the wooden desks and unzipped unwashed bags hanging off the chairs. Wonbin hadn’t committed a single word to memory that day.
Growth is the stretched timeline of messages sent back-and-forth with Sungchan, with all their breaks and unsent texts and glaring lines of conversation begging for attention only to receive cowardly deflection as a parting gift. Talking to make time, talking just to waste time. Growth is what Wonbin scrolls through in the gaps of his schedule, the ever lengthening wall of texts.
Growth is the way he knows that no matter how far up the wall he pushes Sungchan, Sungchan will always offer him a rope to climb up after him. And Wonbin will make a noose out of it instead.
Growth doesn’t always have to be positive, right? If Sungchan is a stem, inching upwards bright and pulsing with life, Wonbin is the root — destined to always tunnel around in the dark.
Four hours is how long it takes to load up their four year relationship into the back of a moving van, and that’s only because it had taken Sungchan an hour to grab more cardboard boxes. The three hours where Sungchan was actually at home helping Wonbin uproot himself is the most time they’ve spent together in a while. Wonbin can’t help but think that Sungchan took that long with the extra cardboard just to get away from him.
“You’ll be okay,” Sungchan says to him, hands shaking on his shoulders. “This is the turning point in your story.”
Wonbin hasn’t told his parents that his coursemates have moved on without him, that he’d ignored one too many emails about his absences, that he’d deleted their details and used Sungchan as his emergency contact, that he’d planned to flunk from the start. His manager leans against the shitty paintwork on the moving van in disinterest, and it’s only when Sungchan touches him that Wonbin’s heart leaps into his mouth.
It’s only when he’s leaving Sungchan that a cold metallic fear sits heavily on his tongue, oxidising and eroding him into silence.
I’m going to miss you, will you miss me too?
“Tell me you’ll be okay,” Sungchan looks at him, eyes frantic, desperate, pleading.
“He’ll be fine.” Wonbin’s manager answers for him. “Wonbin, let’s go.”
“Sungchan,” He starts, something like panic searing across his nerves—like he’s taken a step too far off a ledge.
Sungchan sweeps Wonbin into his arms in a singular motion, pulling him close so their hearts rattle against each other, so they cannot see each other’s faces. “We’re going to see your billboards real soon.” He says it like a prayer.
SUNGCHAN [14:53]
i know we haven’t had much time together lately
but don’t be a stranger
if things get tough remember you can always come here
WONBIN [14:54]
What if everything goes wrong
SUNGCHAN [14:54]
Nothing will go wrong
WONBIN [14:55]
We’re going to have even less time together
SUNGCHAN is typing…
“It’d be better to break up with him sooner rather than later,” His manager says, eyes flashing up at him through the rearview mirror. Wonbin instinctively tightens his grip around his phone.
WONBIN [14:55]
We’re going to have even less time together
read
It rains. Wonbin is a tiny succulent in a cracked pot. Soil leaks everywhere.
“Why do you only come when it rains?”
Wonbin lies on his back, heaving against Sungchan’s sheets and regretting brushing off his manager’s suggestion on stamina training. Sungchan’s gaze crawls along the slope of his neck and sticks there, waiting as he always does for Wonbin to give him an answer that doesn’t disappoint. Wonbin focuses on the ceiling while the hairs on his arms focus on Sungchan and how close he is, committing to memory the body heat that radiates off him so they can mimic it later when he inevitably has to leave. Until the cycle repeats.
Sungchan prods the space between his ribs with his index finger, dead set on not allowing Wonbin to sleep or pretend to sleep, dead set on prying out his answer. Sungchan gets oddly sentimental after he’s filled the rubber inside Wonbin, and Wonbin gets stubbornly territorial when Sungchan lets the post-fuck haze cloud the memories of the day he dumped Wonbin and denied himself the entitlement to Wonbin’s honesty. But today’s question is the mildest, and Wonbin’s terrible itch had been the worst it’s ever been, so Sungchan’s dose of a temporal fix tranquilises him more than usual.
“Because you told me to.” His voice is shot, like it had been clawed out of him. He’s going to have to tell Giselle straight-faced that it’s a new stylistic direction he’s trying out while she debates tightening the noose around his neck.
Sungchan snorts. “I meant it more metaphorically, you know.”
Wonbin wouldn’t know. He wasn’t the language student.
“On days when you don’t feel so good, you can find me.”
“So you want me to come everyday.”
Silence offers Wonbin his disappointing response, but Sungchan had handed him the rope first, and Wonbin was going to tug.
“Sungchan,” He presses. “Are you asking me to?”
The mattress dips as Sungchan rolls over. The prickling at Wonbin’s neck ceases. “Just come on rainy days then.”
Thunder grows in Wonbin’s throat, a dark cloud sparking and rumbling and threatening to burst. His chest rises and falls unsteadily, damp and waterlogged.
Karma, Wonbin realises, smells like petrichor.
The room is preserved in the same state he’d left it in six months ago with all his heart and half his spirit in tatters on the floor beneath the bed frame. The walls reek of heartbreak, bleached with all the wanting and not-having that bled off their tangled bodies every night they chose to shove their words beneath their pillows and get off as a form of communication, hoping they’d still understand.
It’s eerily comforting, reuniting with the ghost he’d left behind as he sits on the bed now, feeling the familiar springs as the mattress dips under his weight. Sloppy emotion washes over him, his ghost snapping into the locks of his body and bringing him back to life. He runs his fingertips along the thread of the dark grey bed sheet where he used to lie, wrapped up in Sungchan and both their doubts and then the duvet. Nostalgia feels like discount polyester pulled off the shelf of a closing department store.
“I missed these sheets,” Wonbin says, but the material gives him an itch now. It’s not quite like his Egyptian cotton, it’s not quite a conversation starter, it’s not quite what Wonbin wants to say at all.
Sungchan laughs, a very light airy thing—like he doesn’t quite believe him. And Wonbin—famed to be refreshingly detached from all opinion on himself and the carbonless copy of his ghost printed in his lyrics and on the fingerboard of his guitar—is desperate to be believed. He sets his rings down on the nightstand, in the shade of a brand new cylindrical bottle of Hugo XX. A whale breaches in his chest and blows.
“You have a bottle of my old perfume,” Wonbin’s voice patters out softly, almost a whisper. He isn’t even sure if Sungchan can hear him over the sound of the washing machine rumbling through the apartment.
Sungchan shuts his bedroom door gently. “I missed your scent,” He says, even gentler.
“It doesn’t look like you’ve used it though,”
“Didn’t smell the same.”
Wonbin doesn’t really use perfume these days, doesn’t like his presence to be easily perceived, doesn’t really want to be perceived anywhere off a stage where a defibrillator exists in the form of an amp and a mic stand. “I read something about fragrances smelling different on different people — something about body chemistry,”
Sungchan raises an eyebrow, the side of his mouth cocking up into somewhat of an amused smirk. “You finally started reading?”
“I guess the time away from you did me good,” Wonbin’s eyes track the movement of Sungchan’s shirt getting pulled over his head, and the rigid expanse of skin it leaves behind.
“I guess it did,” Sungchan replies once his vision is no longer obscured by fabric. His eyes comb through Wonbin’s, searching for something Wonbin doesn’t know if he’s got. Sungchan is as beautiful as he was the day Wonbin walked away from him, and Wonbin wants to ask him why he texted him again, wants to tell him that he waited for that text everyday since they split up, wants to check if they are friends now.
Instead, Wonbin throws off his own shirt and lays supine on that familiar grey sheet, staring at the muscles of Sungchan’s back that expand towards his shoulders and converge at his waist, wishing he was made of microfibre polyester. He thinks of his palms against those muscles, and the lines slashing through his palms burn for a pen and a pick, to strike out a chord that can translate the feeling in his belly. The washing machine hums around the closed door, and Wonbin traces the notes into words in his head. What did we normally talk about? There are conversations stuck in my throat but did we ever even talk?
“You know, it was my birthday yesterday,”
Of course Wonbin knows this — he just wasn’t aware he was allowed to do anything about that knowledge this year. “Happy belated birthday,”
“Thanks,” Sungchan says. He’s kicking off his trousers. Wonbin’s eyes are glued to legs that stretch for miles, then they’re glued to the ceiling. “It was weird.”
“Weird because you’re getting older? Or because something happened? Or just like weird different?”
Sungchan considers for a second, his side of the bed dipping beneath his weight. “Weird different. I celebrated it differently, spent it with different people — my friends… you know, people from work,”
Wonbin doesn’t know. He thinks about what he spent yesterday doing instead of hanging out with Sungchan. Two commercials. An interview. A studio sesh. Late night drinking with loud-mouthed Shotaro, gone enough to think he hallucinated the notification from Sungchan pinging his phone earlier this morning. “Was it fun?”
They’re talking in circles. They’re talking just to waste time. Sungchan sits, Wonbin lies, Sungchan leans onto the headboard, Wonbin blinks up at the ceiling. Sungchan inches a little closer, “Yeah. Just…”
“Just?” Wonbin’s bones ache with a desire he cannot admit to understanding. His hands do nothing at his sides. They should be doing something. Not burning curved lines into the bedsheet.
“Weird different.”
Wonbin could write a song about two people who can never say what they mean because they already know what they mean. He could throw in a hook about how that’s an excuse. It would mean a lot to actually say and hear the words they tiptoe around like they’ve been walled off by hazard signs.
I missed you, you missed me too right?
Wonbin could hatch the embryo of the song in his voice memos before it drips off the edge of his brain into the void where his dead things go. Or he could fall into old habits and sling a leg across Sungchan’s waist and make up for time lost and hope Sungchan understands.
Oh wait — he could make a song about that too.
[LIVE] WONBIN Airport Departure ✈️ 2024.5.24
WATCH NOW => https;//www,youtube,com/live/JHMvff… @YouTube
#WONBIN
Singing sensation WONBIN is leaving for the United Kingdom in the morning of May 24 for the London leg of his ‘WE NEED MORE TIME TOGETHER’ World Tour to be held over the weekend.
SUNGCHAN [07:32]
safe flight
you look good today
WONBIN [07:32]
U watched that??
Creep
Giselle gives him a disgusted look when she sees the stupidly wide grin splitting his face open. “Isn’t it too early for you to be this gross? Would’ve been nice if you’d summoned some of this energy for the reporters.”
“None of your business,” Wonbin yawns.
“Last time I checked, you were my business,”
“Lucky you,” He drawls.
His manager flops into the seat beside him in resignation. She looks as tired as he feels, but he’s feeling too kind to tell her that. “I can’t stand you Park Wonbin.”
“You love me,” He states, because it’s the only reason she sticks around.
WONBIN [07:35]
Thanks
SUNGCHAN [07:36]
you wore that pendant
didn’t know you still kept it
SUNGCHAN [07:40]
can’t believe u get to visit London before me
stop by Poets’ Corner if u have the time
say hi to charles dickens for me
It’s funny, Wonbin thinks, sitting in a corner of the lounge and trying not to sink into the recliner. Once upon a time he’d dreamed up plans of travelling with Sungchan while bingeing vlogs together on Sungchan’s laptop. Sungchan was the only one with actual destinations in mind; Wonbin’s interest dwelled solely in the flight — being wedged between his favourite blue and his favourite boy as they reached the highest point in the world they could.
They never did get that plane together — not even when Wonbin had chanced upon those cheap one hour travel tickets for one of those no-name airlines, not even when Sungchan’s cursor had hovered above a booking before closing the tab. Wonbin has gotten several planes now, and Sungchan hasn’t been quite as unfortunate. Wonbin wants to tell Sungchan that aeroplanes aren’t as cool as he’d expected, that they split his eardrums into two, that he’s discovered he’s afraid of heights.
Wonbin would’ve liked it if Sungchan was right here beside him, talking his ear off about English literature legends and sitting close enough for Wonbin to lean into him, away from the chill of the air conditioning. The weather forecast says it’s going to rain in London. Wonbin wishes he had a Sungchan there too.
WONBIN [07:43]
I’m not saying hi to dead people
Plus it’d be weird
“Hi dick, sungchan says hi”
SUNGCHAN [07:44]
LOL
you’re unbelievable
and you owe dickens a lot u should at least get his name right
WONBIN [07:44]
Not like he could say “wonbin” right
Okay i gtg board now
SUNGCHAN [07:45]
safe trip
WONBIN [07:45]
You already said that LOL
But thanks again
SUNGCHAN [07:45]
I’m almost at work
ttyl
WONBIN [07:46]
Ttyl
[so LUCKY★ to meet SHOTARO♥] SHOTARO has this to say about WONBIN?! 😳 #SHOTARO #WONBIN
3,079,243 views | 6 hrs ago | No. 4 Trending in Entertainment
CLIP TRANSCRIPT:
ANTON: There’s a legend that anyone who meets you instantly becomes your friend — How true is that Shotaro?
SHOTARO: [LEANS FORWARDS, SMILES] It depends… are we friends now Anton?
ANTON: [BLUSHES, NODS FURIOUSLY] I’d be honoured to be your friend now Shotaro.
SHOTARO: [LEANS BACK] Please, there’s no need to be so formal around a friend. Taro is fine.
ANTON: [COUGHS] Okay, Taro! Looks like the legend is true! That means someone like you who meets a lot of people must have tons of friends… We’re all dying to know who your closest friends are, at least among those in the public eye.
SHOTARO: Ah… I feel like I’m close to quite a few people and I don’t want anyone to feel left out… this is a harder question than I thought?
ANTON: How about this — Who would you call first in an emergency?
SHOTARO: [LAUGHS] You mean beside the emergency services? Probably Wonbin. Park Wonbin. Not that he’d be much help. I’m imagining like my house on fire and me calling Wonbin and he just starts screaming and I’m screaming and I’m also very much dead.
ANTON: [LAUGHS] I can’t imagine Wonbin screaming. You clearly know a side of him we don’t. Actually, you’ve been posting a bit on Instagram with Wonbin and it’s become quite a hot topic! Your fans are both excited and surprised about your friendship because from what we can see, the two of you couldn’t be more different!
SHOTARO: Is it that unexpected? We’re really really so close. We’re our realest selves around each other and between you and I…
[SHOTARO LEANS IN CONSPIRATORIALLY, ANTON LEANS IN TOO]
SHOTARO: I’m his only friend.
ANTON: No way.
SHOTARO: [NODS SOLEMNLY] Yes way. Though he will try to deny it and insist that he has other friends, we both know that I’m right. You know why?
ANTON: [INTRIGUED] Why?
SHOTARO: On my birthday, Wonbin sent me a lengthy voice note telling me that I’m all he has and his one true friend. That was honestly the best birthday gift I’ve gotten.
ANTON: [AWED] Wow… I’m jealous…
SHOTARO: Right? I’m jealous of the past me who got to receive those words… He’s never been sweet or gentle to me since then. [MIMICS WIPING TEARS]]
ANTON: [LAUGHS] Wait, Taro! Isn’t revealing this quite bad for people who think they’re friends with Wonbin?
SHOTARO: That’s the point! I’m bragging!
ANTON: [SHAKES HEAD] You’re unbelievable Taro. So how can the rest of us non-SHOTAROs become friends with Wonbin?
SHOTARO: Isn’t this episode about me? Why are you asking me about Wonbin?
[FLUSTERED, ANTON MOTIONS TO APOLOGISE. SHOTARO WAVES TWO HANDS, GRINNING]
SHOTARO: I’m just joking. Wonbin is shyer than he looks. And it’s hard to be friends with him. He doesn’t reply to messages on time. You need to pour in lots of effort and stick to him — and you might want to give up but once you fill up that level-up bar, he’ll be stuck to you too. I was really annoying to Wonbin and he still keeps calling me a creep. I actually think he’s saved my contact as Creep. [GIVES ANTON A KNOWING SMILE] You look like you want to say something.
ANTON: No no please continue.
SHOTARO: [TEASES] You must be thinking that he’s a pain.
ANTON: [WAVES THEIR HANDS, FLUSTERED] Not at all! I was just thinking that you really had a lot to say about him.
SHOTARO: Well, he’s my best friend.
SUNGCHAN [19:07]
You reply to me pretty quickly tho
WONBIN [19:08]
?
SUNGCHAN [19:08]
See!
SUNGCHAN [19:10]
So i’m not the only one you call a creep
WONBIN [19:10]
???
Wonbin groans and lets his ballpoint roll off the vanity and onto the rug. He doesn’t pick it up — it’s for the best, because he’s only been scribbling bullshit on the hotel-branded serviettes since he’d gotten back from prowling Westminster. Shotaro laughs from the single-seater he’d colonised and leans to snatch Wonbin’s latest napkin crime before Wonbin can toss it in the tiny pedal bin underneath the table.
“Lazy summer flies around overripe fruit—”
Dust particles suspended in the air glint in the shafts of the evening sunlight, disturbed by ripped paper as Wonbin tears the serviette from Shotaro’s hand. He doesn’t need his embarrassment spelled out for him; he’s had enough of that today. The truth as he’s phrased it is hardly befitting of a song, but how else could he describe what he and Sungchan were doing to the thing between them that they cling to so helplessly?
Shotaro is still laughing. “First you drag me all over a graveyard in the height of the summer sun, and now you’re leaving me to talk one-sidedly while you write over and over about overripe fruit?” Wonbin stifles another pained groan as Shotaro continues, “Does this fruit happen to be a banana? Ha, is it that sweet?”
Wonbin throws a well marinated expression that has Shotaro suddenly remembering his need to wash off the sticky grime of the London summer, and he makes sure to yell a disgusted “Grow up!” before the door to the ensuite can slide shut. It’s the loudest he’s been since yesterday’s concert, and he supposes that’s what makes Shotaro so great. Shotaro is even louder, his voice breaking through even the steady stream of water. “No no, don’t be shy now — I want to know your flavoured condom recs!”
Perhaps Shotaro’s presence was a punishment from the future for griefing Giselle with an impromptu schedule change. Wonbin had the decency to look ashamed as she rescheduled their Monday morning flight to Paris around 1 AM the same day in the car, en route from the O2. Somehow, even more mortifying than standing pathetically in a corner of their hotel lobby while a disgruntled Giselle tried to talk her way into extending their stay (the receptionist on-duty had apologised, wringing her hands, “I’m very sorry, but there are no longer any rooms available for reservation today….”) was explaining to Shotaro—who happened to be in the country—just why he’d dislodged the bricks of his reputation to go traipsing around a memorial site.
“He wrote our favourite book,” Wonbin said, lamely, as the points of their shoes framed the cramped black stone. He’d expected something more grand, for a literary icon, and perhaps a poetic inscription rather than the crude capitals of Dickens’ name alongside the dates of his birth and death.
“Our,” Shotaro decided to focus on, uninterested in the memorial at their feet. He wiggled his eyebrows through his sunglasses, and suddenly Wonbin regretted saying anything at all.
“Favourite book, yes.” He completed firmly. “A Tale of Two Cities.”
“Ah,” Shotaro nodded with a look of infuriating understanding. “And I suppose you pissed everyone off to see the dead author of your favourite book just because of the person who happens to share the same favourite book. Which means my question is, who is this person?”
“He’s—” Wonbin had faltered on an uncertainty, a wobbly wooden tile on a rope bridge. Before they were exes they were partners, and before they were partners they were friends, and now they did half the things they did as all three. They were a Frankensteinian hybrid of all the dregs of their different dynamics, and Wonbin wasn’t quite sure what to call such a relationship. Pretty fair, he’d never learned what the fictional scientist had named his monster. “A friend…”
Shotaro had laughed in his face, an embarrassingly derisive sound, but this time Wonbin had regretted the words as soon as they’d weakly slipped off his tongue. “You know, you should send your—friend—a proof shot. So he knows how much effort you’re putting in on his behalf.” He’d sniggered further still as Wonbin stretched his phone out to capture himself with the gravestone; Wonbin had tugged a little at the hem of his tee so the shadows of the room rested artfully in the nooks of his collarbones. The metal of his pendant caught the light just right, and for a second he’d hesitated, and then his cowardly index finger had capitulated to a crushing self-awareness; today, unlike all other days during this trip to London, had been a sunny day.
Shotaro is on the phone, and Wonbin is on his seventh consecutive yawn over the past three minutes, and Giselle still isn’t back from her self-assigned mission to pick up Asian food from an allegedly really good hole-in-the-wall, and it’s been long enough for him to worry a little. Wonbin has no idea why she had to go all the way to Uxbridge for takeout when they’d all be perfectly fine Ubering in something close by, but if Giselle was anything remotely like him, Wonbin would hedge his bets on it all having to do with the contact registered on her phone as the type of heart you’d find on a playing card — and the airy voice of the woman that had laughed softly from the other end of the line.
WONBIN [22:57]
Is everything alright?
GISELLE [22:57]
Yeah?
Why’d u ask?
SHIT i forgot to place the order
WONBIN [22:58]
Dw about it
GISELLE [22:59]
Im so sorry
R u guys that hungry
Do u have snacks?
WONBIN [22:59]
Relax gigi
Taro and i already got room service
Im not a newbie anymore
And dw - i dont mind that u forgot me ❤️ everyone gets forgotten at some point
GISELLE [23:01]
You’ve grown up ❣️❣️❣️
Pls forget me now for a few more hours <3
WONBIN [23:01]
Have fun
Don’t let ♥️ make u forget our flight is early tmrw morning
GISELLE [23:02]
🤬🖕
Oh and btw i just remembered but
Have u heard of the artist HWISEO?
Her manager told me she’s into u and would like to pass on her contact
By “she” i mean hwiseo, not her manager
WONBIN [23:05]
Are u encouraging me to date ?
Shocking
GISELLE [23:05]
I just think dating is nice,
I was wrong back then u know?
When u moved out of his apartment.
GISELLE [23:07]
Im sorry for that.
GISELLE [23:11]
Or maybe im Just drunk and will regret this in the morning when i have to remember to be a good manager
Anyway
Love and be loved while u can
gtg
“No one is perfect,” Yeonjun says with a confidence that takes up more than half the couch in his cramped studio. Wonbin doesn’t know why the dude insists on simultaneously running the space as a makeshift home when his actual apartment block is only a couple minutes away, and he isn’t close enough to Yeonjun to ask. Regardless, Wonbin wishes Yeonjun could refrain from spreading his legs so obnoxiously apart at least when he has guests over.
Actually, Wonbin has no idea why he’s here in the first place with a drink in his hand. He supposes Friday evenings are meant to be spent like this, in the midst of bodies and bottles. He sees it when he refreshes Instagram every week and feels a thready pulse of loneliness, a brief spark before it’s buried beneath the work that Giselle passes onto him. He looks around the room now; four people splitting a six-pack can hardly be classified as bodies and bottles, and there had barely been any chatter over the ums and ahs and the chilled out head bopping to Yeonjun’s unreleased tracks — until someone had brought up the subject of perfection.
The soft wool of the custom rug feels good beneath Wonbin’s wrists, and he contemplates asking Yeonjun where he commissioned it. Tufts of wool tickle the grooves of his palm lines as he runs his hands over it, and he lets his mind wander to another time — a time where everything and nothing mattered at all, and a gentle hand replaced expensive wool and cheap beer. Giselle had found a fancy name for this habit of Wonbin’s, and recommended a therapist, but Wonbin shut her down with a word of his own — reminiscence. It was a lot less scarier than anything in association with the term maladaptive. The latter sounded like a life sentence, a terminal diagnosis, or some character trait of the killer in a true crime documentary. Wonbin didn’t need another reminder that something in him was broken.
Wonbin doesn’t even realise he’s phased out again until Yeonjun throws the scrunched up plastic wrapper that originally held their cans of beer together at his head. He probably shouldn’t have been the one to get a second fill. “No one is perfect, everyone is inherently useless in one area — even you.”
Wonbin shivers slightly, his skin bristling with mild irritation because surely that much is obvious, and realising that there’s no way Wonbin in all his elusiveness was going to have no flaws does not make one an enlightened prophet. Sometimes Wonbin doesn’t feel like a human being, and sometimes it’s less to do with his emo proclivities and more to do with the way he’s perceived. But how was Yeonjun to know that? They are not close, and Wonbin chokes down the dark oily knot in his throat and remembers who he is when he’s not at home.
“What’s your weakness then Wonbin,” Yeonjun leans in conspiratorially, a wolfish grin pulled across his face. “Your small dick?”
A sound makes its way up Wonbin’s chest and out of his mouth. A laugh, or maybe a scoff. “What, you’ve seen it?”
“He actually doesn’t have a small one,” Taehyun pipes up, matter-of-factly. He’s been sat with his headphones on and a tablet balanced across his thighs, and he hadn’t so much as cast their humble congregation a glance since he’d switched the device on — Wonbin had no idea he’d been paying attention to the drifting conversation at all. “There was this viral bulge down the leg of his pants while he was performing at the Christmas Festival.”
Taehyun speaks with a clinical nonchalance that embarrasses Wonbin more than the subject of his anatomy being zoomed in on and dissected by thousands and thousands of unknown faces, and by his friends right before him. Kai hunches over the tablet as Taehyun pulls up the clip which he’d apparently saved, and Wonbin tries not to dissociate, letting go of the rug to tangle his fingers in the hem of his graphic tee instead.
“Wait, send me the clip, I’m not going over there,” Yeonjun says from his perch, and then there’s a silence as they watch in fascination. Wonbin abandons his tee and busies himself with jumping from application to application on his phone, a budding frustration threatening to burst out from the pads of his fingertips at the lack of notifications to distract him. His call log, his messages, his emails, Instagram, all sterilised and stale and aseptic in their inactivity.
“Okay,” Yeonjun huffs in begrudging respect when he’s done. “But there’s gotta be something,”
Wonbin thinks of doe-eyed Sungchan who probably only really thinks about him when he shows up at his doorstep. He thinks about the rain that haunts him, a melancholy ghost that gnaws at him and tempts him with temporary respite only to jab and poke at him when it’s 4 am and he needs to roll out of Sungchan’s bed and into this life of his. The rain leaves him unsure of what is real and what he’s conjured up in a daydream. Wonbin thinks of the silver key that burns so very coldly in the pocket of his jeans, the frostbite emblazoning his thigh with a tattoo of numbness. He thinks of the pendant he wears around his neck like a leash.
“Maybe I don’t have a weakness,” He says aloud.
“Maybe denying your weakness is a weakness in and of itself,” Yeonjun replies.
When they break up, there is no dramatic fight or meltdown, there’s no unfollowing on any private or public social media account, Wonbin doesn’t even return his key — and Sungchan doesn’t ask for it back. There isn’t much of anything. Wonbin stops coming over, they stop texting for a bit, and perhaps the fact that there isn’t really much of a difference says enough for itself.
Wonbin and Sungchan are not good at being broken up. Wonbin and Sungchan have only ever broken up with each other. So Wonbin isn’t sure how it all works; he supposes experience would’ve come if they’d both had skeletons of past exes to extrapolate from, or flings like milk teeth fallen off and laid out as a rubric. Wonbin wonders whether he is now Sungchan’s milk tooth, left under the pillow so Sungchan could wish for someone better than he was.
Untethered. Adrift. Breaking up instils a spirit of aimlessness, a loss that cannot be mourned. When can he start talking to Sungchan again? A full stop where a comma should be. An unfinished script. It comes at Wonbin like an itch. No definitive argument to label them enemies, no conversation to finish off as friends, so what now do they become? And is it right to transition from everything into nothing at all? Was time and all the years it contained really so fickle? The more Wonbin scratches at his itch, the itchier it becomes. A mosquito bite turned into a rash. It’s why Wonbin had sworn never to take nicotine despite it coming with the job.
One withdrawal syndrome is enough for him.
SO WONBIN IS RELIGIOUS…
Q&A with Rising Star WONBIN!
👤: How are you coping with the stress and pressure that comes with being under an intense focus by the public and the industry? Do you smoke or vape?
WONBIN: [LAUGHS] This sounds like a health checkup question. And my answer is no, to both.
👤: Is there a reason why?
WONBIN: I already worship one god that controls me, I don’t need another.
COMMENTS
alternategod
What’s with this line of questioning?
soulfood
He’s fucking likable
starstrucksiren
My mama wanted me a church boy so I guess i can introduce her to Wonbin
kingwonbin
So that’s what that pendant he wears all the time is all about
dreamsoftea
im religious and why doesn’t his god sound familiar
↳ wonbinthealbum
do u think there’s only one religion in the world ?
stageworship
i can’t imagine him going to church
↳ gatekeepgoat
but he prays before performing?
summerscent
i feel like we’re all missing a point here
↳ pisces_season
not the lyric theorists — they’re going crazy on twitter
SUNGCHAN [01:00]
u know u can still come over anytime
WONBIN [21:29]
Tell me about your friends
Wonbin thinks that more than anything, Sungchan is an open book. And Wonbin has always found comfort between his pages, rolling down each paragraph and letting the lines bleed into his skin. It’s been just over a month since they started talking again, and eight months and four days since he’d tied a knot around his tongue and tossed Sungchan in a box he felt guilty for allowing himself to attempt to pry apart. Wonbin stalks Sungchan’s instagram with a compulsive indulgence, chasing after each ping of activity with crippling alacrity. Wonbin is the worst he’s ever been, much worse than the period they’d been together, and he can’t help but think Giselle was right, now that two years ago feels like many years ago.
Perhaps had they broken up sooner, Wonbin could’ve walked away with a better deal on his dignity as alimony. Yet deep down inside him where a shred of honesty lies dormant and neglected, he knows there’d have been no difference. Wonbin is nothing if not steadfast and consistent at best, and recalcitrant and unadaptable at the least convenient of times. The disease of never letting go was a long-standing affliction; Wonbin holds fast to his strengths, his flaws, and to Jung Sungchan with a greed that refuses to give.
So here Wonbin splays himself on the unfamiliar chaise in a foreign room, on a halloween weekend when everyone is out with a friend or two to get their faces painted with UV and their throats sprayed with enough alcohol to get them dancing without the guide of a beat. Wonbin has the company of a contract he needs to sign, and a timesheet he has to fill in if he wants to soundcheck before the christmas show — that’s two festivities he’s slated to miss out on. Tonight, Wonbin is a party of one, and in the soundless hotel room it’s frighteningly easy to believe that he’s disconnected from the rest of the world, a displaced alien in a lonely planet. Moments of stillness like this act like fertiliser for the shadows that cling to the folds of his brain, enabling the melancholy choir of voices to thrive as they echo a resounding rhetoric of scorn and self-doubt.
They say the days around Halloween blur the boundary between the realms of the living and the dead; Today more than most days Wonbin strays closer to that margin, feeling like a flicker of a mortal and something more akin to a mere manifestation. One day he’ll wake up without a corporeal form. He wonders if he’d have done enough to hit big in Giselle’s books by then.
Wonbin drags his thumb down his screen, and the green circle with Sungchan’s face on it pops up again. He’s posting a lot tonight, Wonbin thinks as he taps through each upload, a bird growing in his chest. He knows the face of every stranger smiling into the camera; in comparison to the more lavish celebrations, their little get-together is a modest affair with drinks and cheap accessories. And yet they appear to be having the most fun. Sungchan is wearing a headband with twin bees adorning the end of two antennae, and Wonbin lets out a short laugh — they must’ve run out of the devil horns at the local store. His fingers light up with a familiar itch and suddenly he’s in his notes typing out lines about the little Sungchan–shaped crack in his screen that lets the light into his room, that feeds the bird in his chest, that tethers him to reality.
In Wonbin’s party of one, Sungchan opens a circular window for him to come through.
SUNGCHAN [22:52]
uh well
SUNGCHAN [22:58]
They don’t like you
“Don’t you dare ruin this,” Giselle had said to him, when he’d threatened to elope in a clothing rack off the shoot if she didn’t negotiate him a break. There had been little weight behind his words but he’d felt her fingers taper off into talons that stretched from where she stood and into his flesh.
Heat simmers unpleasantly beneath his skin, crisscrossing along the route carved out by his veins. “We agreed to free up this afternoon a whole month ago.”
“I didn’t expect this either but we’ve got to seize the opportunity,” Giselle continues, like any of that should matter to Wonbin. “You don’t know how lucky you are; sometimes I wonder if I want this more than you do.”
“Oh like you’d know what I want,” Wonbin retorts. The minutes on his digital watch seem to blink away like seconds, each changing number heightening the pulse in his wrist and cranking up the dial on his rumbling emotion. “Attending his graduation was non-negotiable. I’ve done everything else you’ve told me.” His tone toes the line between testy and the kind of resentful that makes the corners of his eyes smart with tears.
“And you’ll continue to do what I tell you, because I want what’s best for you,” Giselle says. Her perfectly manicured expression betrays no underlying sentiment; there is no sympathy to be dug up, to be tugged upon. “This schedule is non-negotiable. Get yourself together; today will be the day you go from up-and-coming to right-up-there.”
“So what I think is best for me doesn’t matter?” Wonbin searches desperately for a lifeline, a crevice in her insurmountable cliffside of authority to find purchase, but his hands grasp at nothing, and he tumbles, rock crumbling in between his fingers.
“I don’t think you know what’s best for you,” Her words come out frigid, like stalactite, and Wonbin bleeds from where they impale him. “Was that guy putting his degree on hold to attend all your shows? Would he skip an exam to show up to your award ceremony? If anything, his milestone should be a wakeup call, because you can’t let yourself be stagnant while he strides forward. Do you really think he’d wait for you to catch up? Because he certainly isn’t doing that now. You need to grow up. Until then, the answer to your question is yes.”
Giselle walks out of the bathroom and leaves him to grip the sink and dial Sungchan. His knuckles look so blue in the dim lighting, the skin stretching towards his wrists becoming a translucent veil above his screaming veins. The phone rings louder still in the cavern of the bathroom, an ominous and janky repetitive siren, and Wonbin grips the edge of the sink tighter still, trying to come up with words that will not sound like practised excuses later down the line. Water drips off the icicles puncturing him like drill bits into a puddle on the floor, and Wonbin does not recognise the reflection forming on its surface — it looks nothing like the person he used to be, a person drifting off the edge of his memory now. Yet it looks nothing like the person he wants to be, nor does it look remotely like the person his label expects him to be. And Wonbin still has no words to offer Sungchan.
If miracles existed and Wonbin could show up before Sungchan right now, as promised, would Sungchan even recognise him?
“Wonbin,” Sungchan says immediately he picks up. His voice is a blend of life, of excitement, and poorly disguised anticipation. Wonbin is a blend of frustration, despondency and a bleak bleak sense of inadequacy. Parts of him want to stick his phone down his throat to feed on Sungchan’s voice and the vitality and comfort it has to offer; other parts cower in fear because once again he will play the harbinger of disappointment, setting off a wave of wilting wherever Sungchan’s existence meets with his. “Are you looking for somewhere to park? I knew it’d be chaotic so I saved you a space — don’t ask how, let’s just say my friends are very excited to meet you,”
Wonbin swallows down the turbulent wail that threatens to erupt like a geyser from the bottle of his throat. It is the worst of times, it is the worst he’s ever felt, and he can’t let Sungchan go on if only to spare them both the worsening ache, but he still hasn’t come up with the words he wants to say, so what comes spilling out instead is, “I can’t make it.”
The words taste like concrete as they fall out of his mouth, and gravel is left on his tongue. Insincere and unfeeling and entirely the opposite of the sentiment he’d wanted to convey, and yet some pathetic corner of his heart pleads for Sungchan to understand him so well, since no one knows him as well as Sungchan does, and no one ever will, and if Sungchan doesn’t understand him then no one in the world ever will. The line is silent, dead and decaying, an abscess, necrotising, and Wonbin knows he’d gone past the expiration date on Sungchan’s understanding the day Sungchan had let slip a passing gripe about him and his excuses. So Wonbin continues to look for words that aren’t excuses and words that don’t exist in his brain or on a stray manuscript and words that just don’t exist at all, and he comes up with nothing to fill the silence or staunch the flow of blood from the gaping wound he’s carved where there hearts should sit superimposed on each other.
Does ‘I tried my best,’ sound like an excuse?
“Is this a prank?” Sungchan laughs uncertainly. It sounds unnaturally generated, laced with hurt, soured by a familiar disappointment. The idea of Sungchan getting used to being let down fires another javelin through the gap between Wonbin’s ribs. “‘Cause the bin I rolled onto the parking space is about to be returned to its rightful position…”
“I’m sorry,” Wonbin replies mechanically. He wonders what it means for him if he has no other sentences in his repertoire besides excuses. I had a clashing schedule last minute that I couldn’t get out of. It’s all excuses. A bird dies in the cage of his chest.
“Right,” Sungchan lets out a sound. Wonbin wants to melt and gurgle down the rusty drain along with all the chipped off limescale and the dirt clinging to the nozzle of the cold water tap. He doesn’t recognise this Sungchan, can’t quite picture the face he’s pulling, and it’s terrifying because he no longer knows Sungchan as well as he did, and they’d always believed they had something strong and evergreen that could never be eroded — and if he no longer recognises Sungchan and Sungchan no longer recognises him then how easily could their prints be washed off each other’s lives like lipstains on a chipped worn mug? And if the only person in the world that knows him lets the memory die, then Wonbin himself would cease to exist. “I didn’t expect anything more from you anyway.”
“I’m sorry,” Wonbin forces the words out, because if he does not speak he will cry. His skull fills with his water, and his brain is a sponge that cannot hold it all. Sungchan’s voice is calm and atypically detached, foreign in its lack of usual passion, and Wonbin wants to throw a tantrum, scream and shake him till he gets back to normal, but he knows that between the two of them, Wonbin was the one to break first. He’s used to getting his heart stomped all over, a hazing in the industry that never quite ends until you cave and get rid of it. With an undiagnosed naivety, Wonbin had silently considered himself something special and superior for holding onto his, for possessing a strong, malleable and unyielding heart. So it hits him now, with the weight of a judge’s hammer, that Sungchan could absolutely break his heart. It had been an option too alien for Wonbin to ever imagine at the time, but Wonbin must’ve buried a part of himself inside Sungchan’s heart — making a fucking horcrux out of him — so that by breaking Sungchan’s heart he’d inadvertently break his own. Like some karmic Newtonian law.
“Don’t worry about it,” Sungchan replies tepidly. “I figured this would happen anyway; I already told my friends not to get their hopes up.”
It hurts Wonbin more than it should; he wonders if that was Sungchan’s goal. He was always good with goals. Always achieved them, always kicked true. There’s a fresh bruise blooming to the left of Wonbin’s sternum where his heart is. Blistering with thorns of resentment from the unfairness of it all.
Sungchan hangs up when muffled voices call for him with festive gusto, and Wonbin cuts his fingers on the newly shattered glass of his screen protector. Watching the red turn into a pink under the running water proves to be more calming than expected, so he stays there as his heartbeat slows to baseline, till the water runs clear. It’s been a long enough bathroom break to get the staff on set a little agitated, and he estimates it won’t be long before Giselle comes to haul him out of there. But Wonbin is calm now, too calm, and because he doesn’t know what’s best for him, he exits the bathroom and takes the wrong turn down the hallway. He takes a couple more wrong turns until he’s got the open sky above him and a flagged down cab winding its window down before him.
The glass window feels cool against his skin, and he lets the vibrations of the engine coax his thoughts away from the debris of his career he’s just hightailed from, and the carnage of his relationship he might just be hurtling towards. Releasing a breath, Wonbin adjusts his gaze from the prying rearview mirror to the streets swimming past his line of sight. The verge of spring peeks through in the growing buds polka-dotting the waving tree branches, a montage of nature’s resurrection. Wonbin blinks once and traps the image behind his eyelids, tucking his head in the crack between his headrest and the window; the polyester webbing of his seatbelt carves a fault into his neck, and he hopes to dream of his resurrection too.
It’s a couple of minutes shy of dusk when Wonbin alights from the cab, a distance away from Sungchan’s place. He’d bid the driver a quiet goodbye, swearing silently as soon as the vehicle was out of sight — he’d just paid the fare for a trip from outside the city with his company card. Wonbin doesn’t need a casual elbow in the ribs from his manager, or a carelessly left out printout from the label’s quarterly revenue meeting, to tell him he isn’t of the calibre to draw from the company’s fund at will — least especially for personal endeavours. He stands there by the side of the empty road feeling like a stranger in his former town, the lack of civilians populating the street juxtaposing his growing tally of misconduct. He wonders briefly — ever briefly so, — if it was all a cruel foreshadowing of what is to come. Perhaps he just might lose it all.
Nostalgia needles into him with a sharp grudge; he hasn’t stepped foot here since the day before the day before Christmas last year. The pavements are even worse for wear now, gravel practically disintegrating beneath the heel of his boot as he treads the familiar route and thinks of a time when he’d run laps around these stores with Sungchan, their footfalls cushioned by fallen leaves.
I’m always tallying something, aren’t I? Wonbin thinks bitterly. His absences from university, the instances he falls short of his relationship’s expectations, infractions on his management. Always on some path of self-destruction.
Castigatory thoughts chauffeur him up to Sungchan’s doorstep, and yet it’s only when he’s got his silver key pushed into the troublesome lock with practised ease that he’s graced with an epiphany. Stupidity sets in on slow-release, and Wonbin is way too good at making mistakes for his own good. Sungchan isn’t home; there’s a celebratory dinner going on that Wonbin was supposed to be in attendance for, and as far as dinners go with drinks consistently being cycled around the table — there isn’t a nil possibility that Sungchan could bring people over for a more informal post-celebratory gathering. Wonbin runs the simulation multiple times in his head, but the ending is always the same.
I don’t think you know what’s best for you.
The jagged end of his key feels particularly cold and hostile as he slips it back into the pocket of his jeans. The wind shouldn’t carry such a chill this close to the end of winter. Wonbin walks away from Sungchan’s front door thinking of all the things he should’ve done instead. He should’ve brought headphones instead of the cheap tangled heap at the bottom of his bag. He should’ve learned to smoke a cigarette. He should’ve remained on set. No, he should’ve swallowed the accusatory finger in his mouth and gone straight to the restaurant instead of waiting to intercept his boyfriend like a stalkerish ex.
Wonbin doesn’t know how long he waits in the nearby gap between the wall of Sungchan’s building and the corrugated iron fence separating his street from the back of another perpendicular street. He sets up camp there, back to brick, ears plugged with nothing playing through them and awash with his own silence and the ghosts of lines he might say until it’s nightfall and a cab’s headlights flood the drive, carrying with it cheery voices that spill over each other. Trepidation waxes and wanes in Wonbin’s chest, and he curses himself for digging a hole and walking into it. Shoving himself further into the clinging shadows, he prays to Sungchan to go in alone.
“Are you really not coming with us to Hani’s place?”
“Nah,” Sungchan replies to whoever is inside the car. “I’m tired,” He explains, stretching out his limbs for added effect.
“You only just graduated and you’re already acting like an old man,” The same voice grumbles, voice a little slurred. “Hey, hey!”
Gravel crunches as the person seems to lunge for Sungchan, and Wonbin’s heart pulsates rapidly with the decision facing him. Would he be able to break up a drunken fight while he isn’t even sure if Sungchan wants to see him?
But Sungchan only laughs, a pretty sound Wonbin realises he hasn’t heard in a while. So Wonbin sucks in his stomach till his lungs balloon up against his chest, and he inches around the edge of the building to get a closer look, feeling much like a rat in the story Sungchan has once told him of the Pied Piper of Hamelin. More gravel crunches obnoxiously loud as Sungchan wrestles someone much smaller than him—the same height as me, Wonbin swallows—into the car with a playful grin on his stupid red face. Something loathsome and bitter sears its way up the back of Wonbin’s throat and settles behind his tongue.
“Give him a break, Sohee.” Another voice comes from beyond the open vehicle door.
Sohee seems to still at the casual command, folding himself back into the car and—thankfully—away from Sungchan’s hands. “Acting like I’m a nuisance when you also want him to come with,” he mutters loudly under his breath, and with the subsequent yelp that comes from the car, Wonbin can only assume that Sohee had turned his attack on friend number two.
Sungchan laughs again, nudging the door shut with a little more force than necessary as he always does, more power behind his palm than he ever anticipates. “Thanks for today guys,”
Sohee, clearly inebriated, leans through the open window—almost falls out of it—and pinches Sungchan’s cheek. “Don’t thank us, just let us know if you change your mind. Eunseok will pay for your Uber.”
The guy in the car—probably Eunseok—seems to tug at Sohee’s shirt so he falls back in and away from the window, much to Sohee’s displeasure. “Goodnight Sungchan,”
“Have fun,” Sungchan replies, as the car reverses away from the building. He waits until his friends are completely out of sight before he releases his sigh.
And Wonbin waits a beat and a half before he steps out from his hiding place.
“Hey,”
“Hey,” Sungchan replies. He doesn’t look surprised to see him. He doesn’t startle at Wonbin waylaying him in the dark. Instead, he looks at Wonbin more like he’s a stray cat he’s not quite sure what to do about. His eyes, Wonbin thinks. They carry frustrating fondness, and indecision, soft around the edges but tough and condensed in the middle. Wonbin’s gotten rather adept at reading eyes, with the countless of pairs he focuses on in the crowd, and the appraising, analytical and avaricious ones he battles the urge to stab a guitar pick through when he sits across them in meetings. Somehow, Sungchan’s right now feels worse.
Wonbin steps forward uncertainly, feeling even smaller beneath his gaze and Sungchan pulls him into a hug. Sungchan’s arms wrap around him with the familiarity and cosiness of an oversized sweater but the hesitance of one carrying a newborn. Caution chips away at the places they join, and Wonbin feels his stomach drop with unease because it feels like he’s on a dreadful high-speed thrill ride of doom and Sungchan is his padded restraint and Sungchan is about to let go. There’s a bite in the air outside Sungchan’s apartment building, and neither of them are appropriately clad for the weather, but Sungchan doesn’t hurry them in or make a sound of complaint — rather, he holds Wonbin closer, forever painfully receptive to all that runs through him. Sungchan’s sudden renewed vigour is probably more for Wonbin than anything else. Rigor mortis. A dying breath. A final one before the eternal worm devours them up.
“I brought you a present,” Wonbin breathes into Sungchan’s chest, lips caught on a wrinkle in his shirt. He smells like hand soap and alcohol and fading cologne. Wonbin doesn’t want to let him go.
“You didn’t have to,” Sungchan mumbles into his hair. Wonbin decides not to dwell on the multiple meanings a graduated language student could weave into a single sentence; it doesn’t help that both their fields had honed them into wordsmiths — albeit Wonbin’s skill only manifesting in lyric format — or that Wonbin’s got a tenebrosity in his veins where Sungchan currently has alcohol. He lets the warm breath dance down the shell of his ear, wishing the sensation could cling there forever.
“But I wanted to,” Wonbin says. There’s a penitential cross welded to a band made of 925 sterling silver sitting just beyond his key in the depths of his pocket. “So I did.”
For all they laud themselves as wordsmiths, Wonbin and Sungchan have always been better with their hands than their tongues, but neither of them will acknowledge the fact — not when they entertain each other’s tongues in their throats and Sungchan’s fingers create a belt of bruise-coloured dents around Wonbin’s waist and Wonbin is rocking a rhythm against Sungchan’s pelvis. Wonbin isn’t entirely sure how they’ve ended up here so fast, grunting and groaning and grateful that they’re situated on the ground floor with no one to disturb beneath the floorboards of Sungchan’s bedroom. But Wonbin feels so good with Sungchan fucking into him just right, flushed and sweaty and holding onto him for dear life, and Wonbin’s eyes feel so good, warm and wet with tears and more tears that leak and burn when they rub against the skin of Sungchan’s shoulder. It's far too easy to slip away from the harsh edges of reality and into that space where nothing else exists but them, to give up his life for one where closing in around Sungchan’s cock is regular routine, to drift into a world where he only ever feels good.
Sungchan aims for his throat, but Wonbin ducks in favour of leaving his own avant garde bite-shaped tattoos around the crest of Sungchan’s collarbone, and sliding back up to cover Sungchan’s mouth with his own once he’s done. When Sungchan’s breath hitches, Wonbin feels it on his tongue, his movements becoming messier as the circulating high hits his brain and sends his nerves into overdrive. All the cold that had settled in his bones defrosted when Sungchan had him pinned to the bed, flawless and fuschia, and then his bones had melted in suit when he’d straddled himself atop Sungchan’s thighs one near-release later. Shuddering, Wonbin comes to completion with a shaky sigh and Sungchan’s name on his lips, staining Sungchan’s midriff with his spend. Sungchan joins him right after, drawing out a gasp from Wonbin as he sinks into him once, twice and releases into rubber with a grunt that rumbles against Wonbin’s chest.
The electric high evaporates off Wonbin’s skin all at once, leaving him to flop onto Sungchan like a paper doll as the fight exits his system. Sungchan eases his grip and strokes Wonbin’s hair, mussed with motion and man-made humidity, until his heart slows and he succumbs to the tiredness that’s been tugging at his eyelids. Somehow, just like this, nothing has changed. And yet, everything has changed.
Wonbin wakes up to the default tone of his alarm at midnight — except it isn’t his alarm but a phone call from Giselle that hangs up as soon as he picks up the phone. He’s had his phone set to Do Not Disturb since he’d walked off the site, more for fear than actually being disturbed. There’s a text floating on his screen that tells him to be back on set by 4 am. It’s the only message he’s gotten from Giselle since he eloped and it’s frightfully calm for what he deserves. Sungchan is asleep, cocooned in the duvet he’d monopolised at some point during the night; he must’ve opened the windows while Wonbin slept, clearing the air but inviting a chill that nips at his feet and bare skin as he extricates himself from the tangled sheets to head to the bathroom.
The room is colder when he walks back in. It looks warmer where Sungchan is, all bundled up from neck to toe in comfort and all that love and beauty have to offer. But his phone on the dresser is an omen maybe, a warning definitely, so Wonbin tugs his clothes off the floor of his side of the bed and slips them on surreptitiously. If he can’t sleep he hopes Sungchan can get to sleep for the both of them. He hovers there momentarily, torn by the sudden urge to clamber back into bed with him.
His phone makes the decision for him, lighting up with a notification alerting him to his taxi’s arrival. He’s going to have to tell Sungchan he left early to wrap up work via text from the makeshift dressing room onsite once the clock reads a more normal time. Sending off a brief I’m omw to Giselle, Wonbin heads to the door, wondering when next he’d have the time to visit again.
Maybe when I’m fired, his brain supplies mirthlessly.
“You’re leaving already?” Sungchan asks, voice suspiciously absent of grogginess for someone who supposedly just stirred out of sleep. Right when Wonbin is reaching for a jacket he’d left in Sungchan’s closet last year.
“Yeah,” Wonbin frowns, the jacket doesn’t look as nice as he remembers. “I’ve got a shoot in the morning. Sorry, I didn’t mean to wake you,”
“I thought you’d at least spend the night,” Sungchan says, eyes piercing in a way that makes Wonbin bleed on contact.
“I wanted to, I just can’t,” Wonbin tries to explain, hoping Sungchan will understand. “I sort of ditched everyone in the middle of things yesterday just to get here—” Uh oh, he thinks. He’s crossing into excuse territory now. “I’ve been asked to be there by 4, I’m honestly probably going to get tossed by the agency—” Wonbin’s phone lights up with an annoyed text from the driver, and Sungchan doesn’t miss the way Wonbin’s eyes dart anxiously towards it. Painfully receptive.
“It’s fine,” Sungchan cuts in, suddenly sounding exhausted. “I get it,”
“Sungchan—”
“I think it’s better we end things here.”
Wonbin opens his mouth, then closes it, a rush of static flooding the spaces beneath his skull all the way down to the tail of his spine. He opens it again. “Okay.” And then he stuffs the ugly jacket under his arm and leaves.
It’s nearly 1 am, Wonbin falls out of Sungchan’s bed and into the back of a taxi. He’s just walked out of Sungchan’s life, a wraith dissipating in the mist on a day that balances precariously on the cliffside of winter. He’d been naive to ever think that spring was knocking at the door.
It’s all too damn calm.
WONBIN CHARACTER CONTROVERSY → VERY INSINCERE…
I’m a staff that worked tirelessly on the set of one of Wonbin’s recent shoots and I was also a fan of Wonbin before that shoot. It broke my heart to see how different his attitude was in real life compared to on screen. He was very difficult to work with, was constantly distracted, took many breaks that halted the schedule the director painstakingly prepared. And then the worst part — he just disappeared and did not return until the next day. It’s unheard of!!! Honestly we were all so shocked and disappointed. What wrong did we commit for him to walk all over our efforts like that? We stayed waiting for him and had to be there very early again just to adjust to him, working so hard only to get paid a tiny percentage he’ll get paid for being an insincere and unprofessional and disrespectful hindrance.
COMMENTS
[1] So he’s a nuisance
[2] Insane power trip for a newbie
[3] He should retire immediately as a nobody. You guys hyped him too much and it got to his head
[4] Lowk been praying on his downfall
[5] Show me ur proof OP…
[ → 5] [10] “Im a staff” + “was a fan” + no shoot name + no evidence… typical formula for anti post
[ → 10] [11] Are u being dense on purpose? NDAs exist
[ → 11] [12] No proof, don’t post. simple.
[6] I knew there was smth i didnt like about him, glad to know he’s horrible irl
[7] Idc his music hits and he’s nice to look at. Its ur mistake for expecting anyone in the industry to be a decent person
[8] U can tell that OP is mad as hell as they should be LOL
[9] Must be nice to be rich and famous… i’d love to just walk away from work when i feel like it
[ → 9] [13] He's not even that famous
[ → 13] [15] He is famous enough if everyone here knows him
[14] What a shame. He had such good momentum going
WONBIN TO GO ON HEALTH BREAK
Wonbin’s agency have announced that he will be ceasing activities temporarily to recover from ongoing health issues he’s been dealing with. Their statement assures fans not to worry and that he will return stronger after resting.
COMMENTS
[1] he must have endured so much while doing his schedules to the point of breaking. he’s actually one of the most sincere artists out there and it shows
[2] did anyone else notice that insincere OP deleted their post 😂 within minutes!
[3] everyone looks real stupid rn
[4] they’re overworking him… hope he gets better soon
[5] come back quick we need new music
[6] apparently he collapsed on set and had to go to hospital
[7] guys i don’t think the staff OP was legit.. apparently there wasn’t any filming in the first place and he was just sick at home
[8] if the staff OP was telling the truth then it’s still wrong of him to attend schedules while sick. at the end of the day he’s still wasting time for other people
[ →8] [9] did you consider for a second that maybe he had no choice ?
ISN’T WONBIN DATING YIZHUO?
Someone compiled their sneaky lovestagrams and the points where they’ve made references to each other and picked up the same phrases and own matching clothes and accessories. I also thought it was just a coincidence but even there are many times they’ve been in the same place at the same time on what appears to be personal schedules. Even yizhuo’s ideal type she’s been talking about a lot lately seems to describe wonbin exactly – and their mood playlists are almost the same! I’d get it if it was music currently trending on the charts or on tiktok but they’re sharing the same obscure songs with lyrics that hint even more towards their relationship.
They say that around the time of wonbin’s attitude scandal last year yizhuo had an accident and Wonbin must’ve rushed to see her in hospital. His songs might even be about her. He is known for being very private but actually everything was hidden in plain sight!
COMMENTS
biskychama
they really suit each other. it’s like watching a disney prince and princess get together so i can’t even be mad or jealous
melodyplaysmusic
if everything is true then wonbin is a great guy. last feb for him seemed like hell but he still stuck by his gf in her time of need when he was also finding his feet, dealing with his own health and getting bashed by the internet. and yizhuo stuck by him too. maybe it’s her perfection and flawless image but i thought she wouldn’t be able to maintain relationships because her standards would be too high and she’d be very uncompromising but wow… they’re a great support system to each other and my respect for the both of them just soared. i hope they’re happy always
LAYorio
the attitude scandal??? they must’ve been dating for a long while then
the_chain_user
his fans sure are taking the news surprisingly well
↳ kuroro
it’s only because it’s yizhuo
fakezoldyck
↳ freakyfreecss
ngl i thought he was gay too at least a little bit
rippokkle
he didn’t strike me as the type to date but as expected he went for the best of the best
↳ queenponzu
didn’t strike you as the type to date?? have u heard even one
song by him?
↳ rippokkle
i know like every song by heart pls 😭 it sounded to me like he
has a lover that he still hasn’t gotten over
and i don’t think he can ever move on and love again
↳ notanenuser
bs anyone can write a love song
↳ bungeegum
shut up you’ll get his fans to start writing essays about his lyrics
like WE GET IT
thirteenthzodiac
better yizhuo than anyone else
kakinprince
glad no one is really bashing either of them but damn you guys sure are elitist about celebrities that have nothing to do with you. even a D-list celeb is more relevant than anyone commenting on this site
“Is it true?”
It’s the first thing she says to him when they’re alone in one of the many rarely used meeting rooms in the agency building, dull in all its monochrome and reflective dark screens. Giselle finally quits pretending to be typing anything comprehensible on her laptop to face an unperturbed Wonbin, slouched against the plastic of his seat.
Not in the mood to play dumb, Wonbin levels her with a hard stare — which probably isn’t fair given that he’d imagine she’d actually rather not ask him the question; she most likely is just following management protocol handed to her by the bigwigs of the label. But resentment is a bitter pill to swallow down without choking back up, and the speculatory posts projected at his face from the interactive screen do nothing besides stir up bile and dig grubby fingers into slow healing wounds.
It’s the anniversary of his breakup and Wonbin will allow himself the liberty of being cranky.
“With the amount of free time on my hands it’s more believable that I’m dating you.”
She looks away without a word, busying herself with her keyboard again, busying herself away from all her guilt that clings like dirt beneath a fingernail. She’d been apologising a lot lately, like the new year had heralded a desire for reconciliation — not that Wonbin would ever judge her for that. Or perhaps, he wonders at times, that was one of the prizes for sacrificing his soul in the wee hours of February 24th 2023, a prize that came with his growth in popularity.
It’s a little too late to smart at an event that occurred a year ago, to find someone in need of blaming when Sungchan had let go of him first and he had accepted without contest.
The analogue clock on the wall ticks as they stew in an uncomfortable silence with Giselle glued to her screen and Wonbin glued to the articles plastered with his name and another bigger celebrity. Yizhuo is pretty much a household name. And that’s it. Wonbin knows nothing more about her. Except that Shotaro probably knows her. But then Shotaro knows just about everyone.
“Are you going to do anything about the rumours?”
“No,” Giselle replies, seemingly grateful for even the faintest indication of interest from Wonbin, or for simply having something to talk about. “We’ll just let it be. The reactions are mostly positive and are even giving you good press and stamping out the remnants of hate from the attitude scandal last year.”
Wonbin wants to say something but the words die before they can materialise off his tongue. There is something so damning about February, where he can never quite say what he wants. His words are shackled and tossed into the ocean, his intentions made to walk the plank.
Giselle levels him with a look of her own, mirroring a similar intensity that makes Wonbin hate himself for nearly squirming under. He’s grown past that now.
She always seems to think she knows him.
He hates that he thinks she’s close.
Wonbin likes to believe that she only knows best the version of himself that she wants him to be — this dark and enigmatic musician who floats about without a soul because he fed it all into his music. But these days he wonders whether there’s any other version of himself that exists in the first place.
“Yizhuo’s team could also denounce it of course, but they haven’t yet.” Giselle continues. “Evidently the association with your name is of benefit to them too. So don’t feel bad about using her. Such is the way of life in the industry, use and be used.”
And where he may have butt heads with Giselle openly or within the confines of his mind on several occasions, Giselle has never lied to him.
It isn’t as beautiful as he’d pictured it to be in conversations with Sungchan back then. He’d crawled on his hands and knees to discover that his dreams were set in a place which at its core is a rudimentary or crude trade by barter system. Where feelings that run deep and labyrinthine are haggled like grapes at a market. Where a breakup is exchanged for a big break.
Inside Wonbin a child screams, puny and pitchy, this isn’t what you promised me! But Giselle had never promised him the opposite either, and ultimately, she had never orchestrated their breakup.
No, the breakup was entirely his and Sungchan’s doing.
SUNGCHAN [10:16]
How long have u been seeing her?
WONBIN {10:17}
Does it bother you ?
SUNGCHAN [10:17]
Would my answer change anything?
WONBIN [10:18]
You’d find out if the answer is any of your business or not
WONBIN [10:33]
Sungchan you don’t need to overthink it
SUNGCHAN [10:34]
I was just joking
WONBIN [10:34]
About what?
Ah. of course.
He probably shouldn’t be relying on the comments left under the posts uploaded by his staff on his public account for some sense of self, but he’s been feeling like shit today and he’s got a bad habit.
Wonbin’s fans tell him that his life means something, and Wonbin doses himself on the reminder as he combs through each like and compliment and emoji. It’s all under a clip from one of his concerts — the one from his second night in Paris where the crowd had drowned out his voice with their own singing, leaving him to stare back at them in wonder while his fingers danced along his guitar strings on autopilot.
Now he’s in Brussels for one night only because he hates it so much. And maybe it’d all sting a little less knowing his friends are also experiencing the woes of work, but Yeonjun is on holiday and Taehyun’s current gig has him touring from gym to gym (with Kai tagging along in usual Kai fashion) which isn’t really a woe when being a workout junkie comes as part of his character kit. Shotaro’s official account tells him he’s been exiled to Jakarta on business — which is miles better than Brussels, Wonbin thinks — but at least they both aren’t having fun.
Switching to his private account tells Wonbin a different story. He’s immediately bombarded with an array of photos that slide into infinity beneath Shotaro’s secret username. The lit up sign on the wall behind Shotaro and his partying friends reads the name of an exclusive club in Japan — Wonbin can’t quite remember exactly where ‘cause he’d been smashed when Shotaro had dragged him club-hopping last August. Wonbin had been given a week off and he’d had nowhere to go, so Shotaro invited him home, except that home wasn’t a crib in the city but home home in the country he’d grown up in.
Jakarta my arse, Wonbin snorts.
fuckinhatewinter LOL you fraud
fuckinhatewinter Jakarta sure looks nice 🤩 ur fans must be proud 👍👏
Sungchan’s weekly story updates and Wonbin knocks back against the mounted pillows to tune into the latest showing of his favourite series. It’s always the same thing, post-work soju dates with colleagues at a joint serving food so authentically traditional for a guy who once dreamed of living abroad, but there’s a comfort to be derived from the familiarity of Sungchan’s regular routine, even if he’ll never know the merry-faced Sohee or which one of the faces around the table belongs to Eunseok.
Wonbin’s going to tell Sungchan that Brussels sucks, and then imagine him laughing, pink-faced and beautiful, while his friends don’t know he looks like that because of him.
Sungchan’s angles have improved a lot since Wonbin had last ribbed him over it; Wonbin has to keep the pad of his finger flush against the screen to stare at him for longer. It’s something to obsess over, that dusty coral glow that says he never did manage to stretch out his limit — Wonbin thinks he could go a couple more glasses than Sungchan now, if they ever went out for drinks together, or went out together at all.
Wonbin’s finger slips, and blushing Sungchan disappears in line with the arrival of another blushing Sungchan, this time lips pressed against a girl’s rather than around the rim of a shot glass or puckered into the camera. Wonbin’s vision saturates from floral pink to lacerating red as he grips his phone like a live wire. Fury courses through the circuit of nerves from his fingers and up his arms, awful and vicious and taunting — and painful, like shards of cut glass from a window blowing up in his face, like the bottom half of a broken beer bottle digging into the soles of his feet from beneath the sand at a beach.
fuckinhatewinter
it’s fucked up for you to post this when i’m the only one on your close friends list
Wonbin never wanted to be the clingy ex. The notion was both mortifying and terrifying; they’d both been repulsed by drama characters that exhibited such behaviours and Wonbin had sworn to never end up like that. So pitiful, so low. And so Sungchan had dumped him, and Wonbin had taken it without a fight. He still read their messages, still thought of him, but never contacted him. Sungchan had dumped him, and Sungchan had reached out again and Sungchan had told him he could still come over. Sungchan let Wonbin back into his life in September like Wonbin was his birthday wish, so if Sungchan was going to act like they weren’t broken up and do to him things that lovers do, then Wonbin is going to react like a jilted lover without guilt.
fuckinhatewinter
why would you show me this
did u want me to congratulate you or smth?
im asking u genuinely what you’re thinking
cos i really don’t know anymore
did u just want me to react? to be upset?
cos i’m fucking reacting
Once he starts he can’t stop. It all comes tumbling out. Wonbin thinks the kettle has been set to boil for a while now without him realising, or pretending not to realise. And now the water’s hit 100 degrees and wires of thermal red scorch the whites of his eyes and burn them raw pink.
fuckinhatewinter
can u try to think about how i’m feeling
for ONCE
telling me to fucj off would hurt less
sungchan
i know you’re reading this can you at least not ignore me
just tell me to fuck off then and i will
FUCK.
don’t make me feel crazy when you pushed the button because you posted that on PURPOSE knowing i’m the only one that can see it
bambibambibam
i think we should call it off
this thing we’ve been doing
the meet-ups
everything
fuckinhatewinter
why
bambibambibam
i’ve always been the one who stays
waiting indefinitely
never knowing whether things will ever amount to anything
or if all i’m doing is watering a seed that will never grow
this time i’m the one who leaves
fuckinhatewinter
lmao FUCK your poetry
are you being serious???
you’re the one who left ME
Sungchan doesn’t even know the half of it. Sungchan talks like he alone put in the effort. Sungchan should be dangling off the edge of sobriety yet he sounds the most lucid he’s ever been.
Sungchan, Wonbin realises, is very unfair.
A bitter rose blooms in the balloon of his lungs, painful and purulent as he stares through his phone, spasming in his hands. Sungchan kissed a girl and his friends had cheered because they accept her unlike they do him and Sungchan kissed a girl and people kiss girls all the time and it means nothing but Sungchan hasn’t ever kissed anyone besides him for all the years Wonbin has known him and it means something that Sungchan is kissing someone new now while he still has Wonbin on speed dial. Had. Probably.
His phone buzzes with a new notification, and Wonbin hates that he momentarily hopes Sungchan apologises for being drunk out his mind or pulling a far too realistic prank, but it’s just Shotaro’s reply to Wonbin’s earlier comment.
no1favor1te0sak1 🖕
And it’s so stupid, that even concepts like timing can be so utterly an anti-fan, so much so hot tears crack across his face when he shouldn’t really be crying at all. He and Sungchan broke up over a year ago and that was that.
Wonbin fucking hates Brussels.
WONBIN [12:23]
i can’t do the show
i just need a fuckig break
GISELLE [12:27]
let’s talk about it over the phone
can u at least do tmrw night? a lot of people have already flown in to see you
📞X MISSED CALL
i know it’s hard but please try for me
i’m coming to your door okay
KAI [06:34]
great job in belgium 👍
It's the worst Wonbin has felt since Friday, now that his endorphins have crashed from last night’s performance high and he’s headed back to where life hurts the most. It’s odd to get a message from Kai since they never talk outside the group, and he’s always been more of Taehyun’s friend, and sometimes even Taehyun feels like more of a drinking buddy than a friend. Wonbin thinks the latter is more his fault than Taehyun’s.
The truth is Wonbin can barely remember the performance. He hadn’t registered a single face in the crowd either like he usually did. Rather he’d let his vision swim in the blur of LED neon glow sticks and mobile phone torches, off his head on the volume of his AC30 with his vessels pumped on spring reverb, chorus modulation and toxic melancholy instead of blood. He was becoming more of a spectre these days; leaving his body on autopilot was dangerously simple with his heart in his boots and his brain in the clouds or tangled in the overhead wires and his soul spilling out his open mouth and nebulising in the elevated temperature.
Prickling discomfort gnaws at the edges of his stomach; he probably isn’t going to monitor the concert. It only takes one direct observation of his wraith-like state to make it real, and when Wonbin looks at something once, he looks at it seven times, and then seven times over and it rotates in his mind like a record on loop, programming him, brainwashing him, erasing him. Not that anyone would care if he disappeared now. Except maybe Shotaro — but Shotaro could find a better friend. He likes to think that Giselle has grown somewhat fond of him, but he knows leaving behind nothing but the shell of his persona would help her know peace and Sungchan… well as far as Sungchan was concerned, he’d already disappeared. Good riddance.
Fuck. It’s the worst Wonbin has felt since Friday. He’d headed straight to the airport from the concert venue’s dressing room because he’d absolutely refused to spend another night in Brussels — refusing even a room at the Sheraton a few steps away from the terminal — despite Giselle’s passing remark that the airport was still in Brussels. So he hasn’t slept, his back hurts like a bitch, it’s raining outside and he feels like utter shit.
KAI [06:36]
taehyun and i just watched some clips with his staff
everyone’s going crazy
there’s even a tweet with a ton of likes
“he’s so hot when he’s sad, i hope he’s sad forever”
WONBIN [07:21]
thanks
KAI [07:23]
but seriously i just wanted to let you know
that you looked really good
you’re really cool
TAEHYUN [07:02]
congrats on another viral moment 👏👏
u should’ve gone for forest national or ING… but u always underestimate yourself
u could even challenge sportpaleis in a year or two
i hear antwerp is prettier than brussels too, chiller too. i think you’d like it
ur gonna have to book a stadium for your next home concert
Wonbin thinks Taehyun is exaggerating it, wide eyes in awe of a crowd that rivals his amp and pulse with an almost maddened enthusiasm that rises like a wave and crashes onto the stage. A million social media engagements don’t equal a million individual fans. Sold albums and concert-goers don’t exist in a one to one ratio. It’s all just numbers at the end of the day, intangible strings of pixels on his screen; It’s hard to even imagine online supporters as real people that actually like him until there are bodies full of life and heat screaming his lyrics in front of him. And even then he still wakes up fitfully from dreams where he shows up to a stage and there’s no one there.
He wouldn’t blame them. It’s even harder to consider himself a real person, one day his fans will wake up and see it too.
TAEHYUN [07:14]
kai has watched your ‘No-Good Guy’ performance for the past hour
i think he has a crush on you. LOL
not a surprising development
you’re exactly his type
WONBIN [07:20]
haha
Wonbin spends his entire plane ride reading the first conversation he had with Sungchan after over six months of not talking. He’s mulled over it enough to assume that Sungchan had waited till the clock struck one o’clock to send his message. One hour into the day after his birthday. Most days, Wonbin believes that Sungchan must’ve missed him particularly strongly that day. Other days he wonders whether Sungchan regrets it.
SUNGCHAN [01:00]
U know u can still come over anytime
WONBIN [01:06]
anytime?
SUNGCHAN [01:07]
Or on your rainy days
You’ve never liked the rain
Today the anger rolls beneath his skin in the tracks of his veins. Sungchan had talked about waiting, and about their lack of progress, but Sungchan had made them exes, gotten weak and let Wonbin back into his bed over and over again without ever implying that he wanted them to be anything more. Sungchan had given him permission to visit, but he’d never invited Wonbin even once — Wonbin was the one who came, Sungchan never went out of his way to meet up, so why on earth was Sungchan the one with expectations?
Fury scorches and sears his nerves, branding him with a pain so excruciating he’s unable to breathe. Hating Sungchan hurts more than loving him; it scars him viscerally, a perpetual reminder that he could never be enough despite trying the most. And Wonbin was sick of trying, sick of putting himself out there for the most terrible coward he’s ever met. Sungchan is better at reading his words than speaking them, and Wonbin was tired of trying to interpret signs that were as legible as the shape of a stratus cloud in the sky.
“Are you okay, sir?”
A flight attendant peers down at him in concern, furrowed eyebrows and gloved hands resting at the side of his seat. She’s a little too close, eyes too probing, and Wonbin suddenly feels too hot in this vessel and in his clothes and in his skin. He can sense Giselle’s stare burning through the back of his head as he swallows, parched. “No, I’m fine.”
“Anything I can get you?”
“Water’s fine.”
Wonbin tries to bury his head deeper into the foam cushion of his headrest as the attendant pours him a cup. There’s a song in his head but he doesn’t know the words to it yet.
“It was the best of times, it was the worst of times…”
It should be 1 am by now, so Wonbin only has three hours to sleep before the car comes for him in the morning. But his muscles are still wound taut from the day he’s only just crawled into bed from, and his skull is a gourd filled to the brim with notes and criticisms sloshing against his ears and eyes and sandwiched between his fatigue is a sliver of excitement, because it’s a new year and they’ve been putting him to more work that feels like real work and he’s so so close to becoming something — to becoming someone.
He’d gotten his own manager right before christmas — his own and not someone to be shared with other music star hopefuls, someone to watch over him instead of have him shadow and wait at their beck and call like a gofer begging for a scrap of spotlight off the table. Giselle was new to the business too, prim-faced and fastidious. She was barely older than him, fresh from overseas with something to prove, and Wonbin had liked that. Her ambition had mirrored his own, and her hand had not quivered once while shaking his.
“...we were all going direct to heaven, we were all going direct the other way… and Wonbin isn’t listening is he?”
Sungchan pauses his reading to stare down at Wonbin’s prone form, using his middle finger to push his glasses further up his nose bridge. He looks ridiculously good like this, with his unstyled hair flopping over the rim of his glasses and his large pale hands—prominent veins and all—mapped across both covers of his hardback copy of A Tale of Two Cities.
Wonbin yawns an apology, nestling himself further into Sungchan so his ear rests against the warm skin of Sungchan’s lower belly where his shirt has slightly lifted. Grinning, Sungchan presses his index finger against the space between Wonbin’s eyes, not hard enough to elicit a yelp but Wonbin does it anyway. “You’re supposed to clear your mind with the oh so difficult words of Dickens, not fill it up with more of your own. You think so much I worry this precious head of yours will explode one day.”
“If it does you’re allowed to take the prettiest bits,”
“Not all of it?”
“What would you do with all of it?”
“Dunno, maybe what the ancient Egyptians did with their pharaohs?”
“Ew,” Wonbin says, but he’s smiling against Sungchan’s skin. “You’re gross,” he adds, even though he doesn’t even know what the ancient Egyptians did with their pharaohs. “Carry on with your story already, I need to sleep!”
Sungchan makes a sound between a snort and a sigh, thumbing his way back to his unfinished line. “It was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair, we had everything before us, we had nothing before us, we were all going direct to heaven, we were all going direct the other way…”
It’s well past 1 am now, and they both have places to be in the morning, but Sungchan sits up a little longer to read out passages filled with words that mean nothing and everything to Wonbin — words that are mind-numbing enough to suffice as a melatonic bedtime story. And Wonbin dreams of himself and of Sungchan, sailing on an open hardcover book across the sea of cacophony in his brain.
The worst part about harbouring an addiction is being unable to get enough of it despite possessing a hatred for its control. At least that’s what Wonbin thinks as his plane begins its descent. To hate means not much more than to love so deeply and twistedly, to nurture such an intensity of emotion the object of your hatred permanently occupies a portion of your brain that you’ve carved out for it yourself until it metastasises and consumes your entire being.
It’s still raining when his plane touches down on the concrete runway. It was morning when he left and it’s morning now that he’s arrived; with his narrow view of the landing strip in the muggy weather, Wonbin can hardly tell if he’s even left Brussels. Six refilled cups and then an entire bottle after hadn’t been able to douse his anger, the coals in his fingertips and on top of his diaphragm had only continued to smoulder and reignite every time he thought he could succumb to some form of sleep.
Most of his luggage had already been sent ahead to his next tour stop before he’d bailed on the entire thing, so the airport ritual is less harrowing than usual and getting through to arrivals is a simple affair. If his staff like him enough there should be no one aware of his impromptu return — for now; he knows Giselle is hoping he can change his mind before they have to formally cancel Germany and face backlash from the fans, the media and the label. But she holds her tongue and confirms the approach of one of their company cars before marshalling him towards it.
Fortunately no one he has to slide a mask on for appears to welcome him at the terminal doors.
“Get some rest,” Giselle says to him through the wound down tinted window as soon as he’s shut into the back and bound for his apartment.
“Yeah,” He replies, because it’s the only response he can think of.
Wonbin takes one look around his frigid apartment, at the dust catching the light in the air before twirling to the ground, at the walls starved of colour, and opens his mouth to scream. But no sound comes out. A self-imposed gag order, a silencer much more potent than the mask he dons outside, and Wonbin doesn’t know how to get it out of his throat.
How is it that no place on earth feels like home?
He drops his duffel on the rug before the end of his bed and grabs the keys he left hanging on the coat stand, never bothering to remove his rain-stained boots as he steps all over the floor he’ll have to clean later. None of it matters though, not when he hastens to his car parked beneath the building with his pulse galloping to a crescendo until the car blinks to life and the hum of the engine assuages him.
Wonbin feels some minute and insubstantial sense of control when his hands are over the familiar leather wheel, so he lets his feet guide the accelerator to Sungchan’s place despite knowing he probably shouldn’t.
It’ll be fine, he thinks. It’ll be the last time.
It's raining. Wonbin stands sodden on Sungchan’s doorstep, completely drenched in the absence of an umbrella. It’s so far from routine.
He’s definitely going to get a cold from this, with each heavy droplet sinking into his bones, and since Giselle and a few thousand are expecting him to sing his lungs out this weekend, he’s definitely due for a scolding. Not that he’d be able to process it all while he’s fever-ridden and heart-broke and bleeding all over the place.
His brain must’ve been diluted in all the water drip-dropping from his person, it’s a Monday afternoon and Sungchan should be spending it as an educator should, and even if he is home, there’s every possibility that she would be in there with him, occupying the space that Wonbin used to be entitled to. Wonbin bites his lip grimly; if the fact that he shouldn’t be here had deterred him then he simply wouldn’t be there at all. He had his car to host his waiting game after all.
So it’s so far from routine, because he always comes at night when it’s certain that Sungchan will be home, and he always texts from the car so Sungchan is ready to open the door when he gets to it. It’s stupid to just stand there when he’s got the key and the excuse to use it — it’s the last time after all — except he doesn’t really have an excuse because he could simply return the cursed thing through the mailbox, and his entire need to be there — even if it’s for the last time — holds no water because Sungchan doesn’t want him there anymore, and isn’t that the problem here after all?
Wonbin wants to give Sungchan a piece of his fractured mind and to watch Sungchan crack and bleed too and to maybe break something too just to make sure Sungchan feels something. He wants to run the jagged end of a broken mug along the walls to leave marks that no amount of redecoration can hide away, so Sungchan doesn’t have to rebuild a home — to superimpose memories — with that girl over everything they shared together, not while Wonbin returns to a husk of an apartment with nowhere to call home.
The rain is getting vexatious now with the onslaught of wet bullets battering his scalp and smacking into his eyes. His hands look translucent in the downpour when he reaches for his phone, but they tingle with that familiar heat that has been plaguing him for the past few days.
WONBIN [1:13]
where are u
SUNGCHAN [1:13]
wonbin…
we talked about this
WONBIN [1:14]
no YOU talked
are u home?
it’s a fucking rainy day
Sungchan opens the door before Wonbin can type out another damning message.
Sungchan looks equally damning in a slept-in t-shirt and with hair that sticks up in a way that says he hasn’t really slept at all. He keeps his head turned and tears his vision away from Wonbin’s gaze, but lets his eyes crawl over the places where rainwater adheres fabric tightly to skin, and across dips where droplets fail to form a pool, and he swallows as if parched while he continues to shy away from Wonbin’s face. He’s so fucking obvious it hurts, he’s so fucking obvious it hurts, and Wonbin so desperately just wants him to say what he truly wants.
But the walk from the corridor to Sungchan’s room is a lonely one; they exchange no words and Sungchan hurries his pace ahead of Wonbin, like he’s running away, as if he could run away in a space that small for the two of them.
Wonbin bites his tongue and grips Sungchan by the shirt before he can sit himself in bed, pulling him towards and then against the door. The pressure of Sungchan’s back forces it shut with a sound that travels loudly along the walls of the apartment, and Wonbin notes with satisfaction that Sungchan is finally looking at him.
Wonbin thinks of all the words he wanted to say with Sungchan’s eyes on him, of the fury he planned to let loose with Sungchan pinned before him. He looks at Sungchan, his features delicate and harmonious on his face, his eyes slightly widened and converging, his lips slightly parted and dry with his tongue darting about cautiously yet instinctively, and Wonbin wants to ask why he can’t be more honest when it counts, and why he finds it so easy to break his heart, and why he chooses to break his heart when he still looks at Wonbin like he’s in a desert and Wonbin is his only oasis.
Wonbin looks at Sungchan with his shirt still twisted in Wonbin’s fist, and he thinks, I’m going to kill him.
Then he surges towards Sungchan’s mouth, catching his bottom lip between his teeth and biting hard. Sungchan winces, tugging himself away from Wonbin’s grasp in recoil while the taste of metal mellows on Wonbin’s tongue. Wonbin, momentarily lost, turns his head up to toss Sungchan a look of spite, but Sungchan’s eyes flash with an intensity that freezes Wonbin, and then inflames him. Sungchan does not have the right to call things off at his own whim and pretend that nothing matters and then look at him in a way that screams everything matters, and yet he does it all the time. He claws at Sungchan’s shirt again but Sungchan kisses him first, overwhelming him with his stature as he licks into Wonbin’s mouth voraciously. Wonbin pounds his fists against Sungchan’s chest until they break away and then he jumps and wraps his thighs around Sungchan’s waist in a position more advantageous to him.
Sungchan stumbles a little, rotating so he has Wonbin’s back against the wall for more balance. Wonbin clings sharply to his shoulders, letting his anger and dizziness ricochet in his skull until his vision clears. Sungchan doesn’t wait for him though, diving into the crook of Wonbin’s neck and feasting his tongue on the warm pulse beating down the side. Wonbin lets out a low moan at that, and it startles him back to reality. It’s far too easy to lose himself in Sungchan’s ministrations, so he searches for his anger again and holds onto it tightly. Pulling his neck away, Wonbin realises he can look down at Sungchan from this vantage point, really look down, so he grabs a fistful of Sungchan’s hair and tugs on it til Sungchan’s face is in full view.
Wonbin has never wanted a monopoly on a man more so than now.
The feeling spreads through him like an aggressive infection, and Wonbin’s nerves are filled with the desire to sink his nails immediately into every fibre of Sungchan’s being, to plant them there and propagate more hands til there’s nothing left of Sungchan for anyone else to touch. Yes, Wonbin thinks sickly, I want to colonise him; He wishes to chip Sungchan with a flag of ownership so no person or girl will dare to stake claim of him.
Sungchan clearly isn’t a fan of whatever string of thought is keeping Wonbin from leaning back into him, stealing a hiss when he nips at the skin above Wonbin’s sternum and between his collarbones. Wonbin tugs again harshly at Sungchan’s hair, smiling at the grunt that escapes his mouth and swallowing the rest of the sound down his throat.
They’re going at it far rougher than usual, with both of them destined to walk away with bruises that will not bode well at work this week, but to Wonbin it’s the least of his problems as he rolls his hips against Sungchan’s hard-on, chasing the pleasure of friction while Sungchan chews off the side of his jaw. Sungchan’s arm moves around uncomfortably beneath him, and then Sungchan’s pants are on the floor and he makes to slide off Wonbin’s.
He’s really going to fuck me against the wall, Wonbin smiles sardonically up at the ceiling while Sungchan struggles with his rain-soaked jeans. Coward. No resolve. And yet here Wonbin is, ready to let him do it anyway. Not like Wonbin could fight it anyway, not when his body is a lit fuse and he so desperately needs to come to regain some form of mental clarity again.
Wonbin’s jeans fall to the floor in a beaten heap. He keeps his eyes on the light hanging from the ceiling. His mouth tastes like salt water fresh from the source, and he knows he can’t let Sungchan see him like this. So he throws his head over Sungchan’s shoulder, pressing his chin against the muscle of Sungchan’s back. Then he asks, “Is she your girlfriend?”
Sungchan’s breath catches in his throat, a cruel hesitation. His erection throbs glaringly against the line of Wonbin’s ass, and his body is so warm and so achingly present unlike any other part of him, and Wonbin parses through his own mind for any shred of goodness in himself and comes up with nothing.
“Please, don’t make me answer that,”
He’d already answered the question from the second he’d hesitated. Sungchan is absolutely terrible at being honest when it counts. Wonbin blinks back the blurriness in his eyes, gasping when Sungchan grinds against him and thumbs around him with purpose.
“Wait,” Wonbin breathes, twitching shamefully in Sungchan’s hold. “Bed. Let’s go to your bed.”
Wonbin thinks he brings out the worst in Sungchan. If equilibrium is more than just a concept then hopefully that means he once brought out the best in him too.
Sungchan presses into him deeply, and without the buffer of their usual rubber he feels far bigger than usual, so Wonbin finds himself latching onto any breath he can as he shudders under Sungchan’s frame. His movements are rougher, treading a line between covetous and punishing — as if Wonbin was the one with a foot out the door. Wonbin clenches around him, relishing the unfettered groan he drags out in retaliation, but it only makes Sungchan work him in with more resolve.
Wonbin is a fool for cultivating a taste for his own demise; his mercurial emotion betrays his driving resentment the second his heart skips a couple beats when Sungchan holds him close. A useless seed of hope germinates, a weed that keeps him hanging on when he shouldn’t. It might just grow to choke him one day. But it feels good to lock his limbs and keep Sungchan fixed against him, to squeeze his eyes shut as pleasure erupts in red behind his eyelids, to pretend that life is as simple as being grounded by the familiar weight of Sungchan’s body.
It doesn’t feel good to know that Sungchan is crying into his neck.
When Sungchan spills into him he utters hoarsely, “You bring out the worst in me.”
“At least I bring out anything in you at all,”
Sungchan pulls back, propping himself up on his forearms to stare wide-eyed and glossy at Wonbin. And because Wonbin’s every sentence is a rope to trip up and hang himself on, he continues, “Given your track record it’s certainly more than anyone else has been able to,”
And Sungchan does that aggravating thing where he lets out what sounds like a laugh but isn’t really, and it’s worse than usual because it morphs into something short of a choked sob and he’s biting his lower lip right after and his usual milky complexion gives way to a splotchy and ruddy one, and he’s still hovering over Wonbin’s direct face and matching it with a gaze like splintered glass. Even like this he is beautiful, and Wonbin wants to poke him where it hurts.
Sungchan’s lip finally trembles, chewed through and blistering. Wonbin waits expectantly beneath him, unblinking—almost un-breathing—and ready for Sungchan to poke him back harder in their pain game relay. But Sungchan’s sting doesn’t come through. The film across his eyes breaks through and sheds onto the crests of Wonbin’s cheeks — wet diamonds, so rare, so damaging.
Wonbin has always hated the rain.
He pushes Sungchan off him with two palms flat against his pecs. “Quit being such a baby,” He mutters harshly. “I didn’t force you to do anything.”
“I cheated,”
Well, yes, Wonbin thinks. “So she is your girlfriend,”
Sungchan offers him silence save for a sniffle.
“Yet you want me.”
Sungchan’s eyes drop from Wonbin’s face but land on a spot along his exposed thigh and freeze there.
“—and I’m giving myself to you.”
There’s a minute shift in Sungchan’s breathing pattern. In the quiet of the room, Wonbin catches it easily.
“You don’t want her.” Wonbin presses. Probes really, searching for the answer in all the ways Sungchan gets away without talking. “You don’t want her like you want me.”
Sungchan’s silence is discomfiting, chipping away at Wonbin’s every belief and careful assumption.
“I need you to say something Sungchan, for once in your fucking— you only ever speak one-sidedly—” Wonbin’s voice cracks and it jerks Sungchan’s gaze immediately back to him. Wonbin blinks furiously, beating the burn down.
“I was at your every show, you know?” Sungchan begins, low and measured. “Until I wasn’t. You never noticed.” He smiles wanly.
“What do you mean?”
Sungchan's smile grows weaker still. “You say you’re giving yourself to me. I guess at some point I stopped believing you.”
Wonbin opens his mouth, shuts it, then opens it again. “A year ago? Or last week when you got yourself someone new?”
“You never make it easy do you,” Sungchan’s non-answers are as consistent as ever, complete with the heels of his palms pressed into his temples like he’s the one being persecuted.
“Right, because you’re the epitome of simple.” Wonbin retorts, suddenly exhausted. “Sungchan, why did you text me again in September?”
“I don’t know,”
“Okay then,” Wonbin inhales deeply. “Why did you fuck me in the middle of last month, talk to me like normal until I went overseas and then get a girlfriend without telling me and when I confront you about it you just throw me away because apparently I’ve meant nothing to you for over a year— oh wait, did I just answer my own question?”
“I..” Sungchan makes a pained expression. “Don’t know,”
“You don’t know.” Wonbin sneers. “Is this you punishing me for missing your graduation and not visiting as much? Because I honestly think you’ve done enough with added interest.” Sliding out of the bed, Wonbin hunts for his jeans that he’s definitely going to feel gross in. “Point taken, you’re possibly even more of an asshole than I ever was. The fact isn’t that bad a parting gift.”
“You always leave so easily,” Sungchan blurts suddenly, and it’s the most wretchedly straightforward he’s been all afternoon that Wonbin halts with one foot halfway down the leg of his jeans. “Sometimes I can’t tell if the you that appears before me is real or an illusion. Why do you think it’s so hard for me to want to hold onto you?”
Wonbin revolves on him then, a mosaic of hurt and disbelief and rancour. “You’re the one who lets me go so easily. And I try so damn hard to hold on. In case you’re wondering, you’ve cut me off twice now, and at the same time I’ve risked my career—my dream—twice, just to keep us together. Don’t you dare lay the blame on me.”
“Wonbin, you…” Sungchan gasps, on the dawn of some dumb epiphany. “You want me.”
Voice grating, Wonbin bites out, “Of course I want you. Hell, isn’t it obvious I want you.” He laughs, soullessly. “You’re always in my fucking head, you’re the reason I get into trouble and I don’t even care because it’s you. You have me standing in the rain just for you. You have me delaying flights just to traipse around a city I care little for because you sent a single text. You have me bailing out on my tour because you kissed someone else. You’re in all my songs, you hover before my every decision, your single negligible action informs my every significant action. Against my will your existence became so deep-seeded into the root of my brain; my body is no longer my own. To phrase it your way, what I’m trying to say is,” Wonbin hesitates. “You’re my Achilles heel.”
Wonbin’s vision swims from where he’s sat in his car, seat belt strapped and clinging to his wheel for dear life. He isn’t sure how or when he got there, back with the shadows that writhe and jeer, and though the systems blink to life the car itself doesn’t — without the hum of the engine he sits in the deathly silence of a metal coffin.
This is what being ‘in control’ gets him; Wonbin gets nothing he wants and gives nothing he wants, a fuck up, a net loss for everyone. Every resolution results in him making a right mess of things, his fingers are smeared with the curse of decay. It is too big a task for him to love without breaking.
Everything means nothing. The wet jacket pooling in the passenger seat, his skin still smelling like Sungchan, his ears blocked like he’s on a long haul flight with no landing in sight, the watercolour of lights on the windscreen.
Nothing means everything. Wonbin had come clean like a man needing absolving, laying his vulnerability on the scales and hoping it would tip in his favour.
I give myself to you, and you still reject me. What more do you want from me?
And softly, devastatingly, Sungchan had replied, You give yourself to me in a currency I cannot receive.
Wonbin grips the steering wheel tightly. He’d exploded after that, and it wasn’t beautiful. No piñata, no fireworks, no fucking supernova. Just a sordid mess of guts and raw bloody feelings, nothing pretty enough for Sungchan to keep as a souvenir.
Then tell me what currency you desire!— How do you want me, on my knees?!
Sungchan had not wanted him on his knees. Sungchan had not wanted him at all. Now Wonbin sits in solitude in damp jeans and the drying remains of Sungchan’s release, feeling ten parts shame and a hundred parts wanting to die. Wonbin wonders ever so briefly, ever so dangerously, a fleeting thought, an idea so tiny and insidious—a portentous termite crawling out of woodwork. What if he could just cease control completely, and let the confines of his body drown in the aquarium of his car? What if he could just let go of the damn leather and allow the pedal of the accelerator to spin the wheel of his fate?
He exhales. The engine isn’t on; he hadn’t turned his key in the ignition all the way. He wipes his hands on his thighs, picks up his phone and considers sinking back into a bad habit. Then he thinks he’s tired of thinking at all.
Lulling listlessly in the back of his car, Wonbin tries not to make eye contact through the rearview mirror with the designated driver he’d hired for the drive back to his apartment. The guy seems to be taking the scenic route to ramp up the tab, but Wonbin couldn’t care less when he’s uneager to get back to where he has to be someone.
Is Sungchan content with the person he chooses to be? And the person he’s chosen to be with? Sungchan has always been one to arduously agonise over significant decisions—like going into employment before applying for a postgrad degree, or adopting a kitten (and then giving it to his cousin three weeks later because it turned out he was allergic)—so really Wonbin must’ve seen the signs, that there was someone else — a girl, somewhere in Sungchan’s periphery.
Wonbin’s memory is a decrepit and primitive village, useless for recording anything but that infallible mountain of exchanged messages between him and sungchan, read so often the texts came off his screen and became engraved on the walls of his brain, like cave drawings and ancient inscriptions. Wonbin remembers one of such exchanges; it had been inconsequential as their texts usually were since they became exes-not-good-at-being-broken-up, and the conversation had ended with Sungchan pissing him off (as their conversations usually tapered off into) and Sungchan hadn’t realised, and Wonbin hadn’t pushed it further.
He wonders if it had started then.
WONBIN [3:26]
how long have you been seeing her
SUNGCHAN [3:27]
are you serious wonbin?
are you seriously asking me that now?
SUNGCHAN [3:41]
i don’t think that’s any of your business
WONBIN [3:41]
okay
Wonbin Answers Rapid-Fire Questions | Off The Cuff | Vogue
Watch Here (Transcript Provided Below)
👤: I’m going to ask you rapid fire questions you have ten seconds to answer
WONBIN: [SMILES LAZILY] Sure
👤: [FLUSTERED] …
WONBIN: [LAUGHS] I thought the questions were supposed to be rapid fire?
👤: [CLEARS THROAT] What are you thinking right now?
WONBIN: [LOOKS OUT THE WINDOW] On rainy days I like to go home
COMMENTS
- take me home wonbin
- lol he’s so cute
- even on sunny days i like to go home
- lmfaooo it was raining so doesn’t that mean he wanted to go home right then?
- he’s so charming omfg if i was the interviewer i would die right there
- he’d look pretty all drenched in the rain, a wet cat
- i was thinking more sexy don’t you think?
- then you could take him home and towel him dry
- then get him drenched again and he could towel you both dry
- thought he was the mysterious and serene type of guy that would stand in the rain with an umbrella and write a song about it, but turns out he’s a homebody that wants to stay as warm and comfy as everyone else
- yeah i like that he’s relatable
- yeah he’s just like us wanting to just be at home
- if i lived where he did and looked like he did i too would want to be at home. with a mirror on the ceiling above my luxurious bed.
- no if i looked like him i’d walk around even in the rain to show my face off
- walking around with that face and bringing healing
“I want to be the closest to you,”
Today’s a lazy day for the both of them; Sungchan’s classes had been cancelled last minute and Wonbin had called in sick at the agency — not that they cared much about a guy that sort of stood around, in the way mostly — so they’re sort of sprawled half on half off the mattress in a manner befitting their temporary freedom. And Sungchan definitely turned down offers to hangout just to be lazy with him, and Sungchan never does lazy, so while Wonbin basks in the privilege of being Sungchan’s priority he wants to be a little weaker, a little more spoiled.
And there’s that too; it’s a side effect of Sungchan’s charm that gets him a new friend every instance he steps out, a new name that Wonbin won’t recognise, a new facet of Sungchan’s life he won’t be privy to, a new contact buzzing up Sungchan’s phone in the only free time they have together, a new shareholder in Sungchan’s attention. It only gets lonelier when Sungchan tells him about his colourful day and Wonbin has none more to exchange than another day spent lugging around equipment in the name of forming connections — favours bought with manual labour (and really he’s one of the luckier wannabes) — and sneaking into one of the abandoned storage rooms to send SOS’s to his boyfriend.
Forget being squashed and relegated to the corner of Sungchan’s mind by the greater personalities and presences charting their territories each passing day; one day Sungchan’s circle will grow so big and filling there won’t be any need for boring old Wonbin to be in it at all.
“I sound stupid as fuck,” Wonbin tacks on quickly, shame and self-consciousness digging their nails through the gaps between his ribs. “Ignore me.”
But Sungchan is marvellous at exceeding his expectations. He manoeuvres his way towards Wonbin’s ragdoll form and pulls him against his chest. He holds his phone at a distance Wonbin doesn’t need to blink at, so they both get a clear view of all the foreign handles occupying the bulk of Sungchan’s close friends list.
And Wonbin watches as Sungchan removes every account but his.
Wonbin turns to look at his Sungchan who wrenches and oils the gears in his chest til they spin into proper motion. Stupid little things like this are the worst for him, make him tear up at the notion of being wanted, knowing that he’ll want Sungchan even more. Sungchan doesn’t meet his eyes, still focused on his phone with sincerity and intent.
Wonbin’s phone vibrates right after.
TIME SENSITIVE
bambibambibam
just added to their story
Wonbin’s grin crawls its way across his face before he can even register its presence.
It’s just white text in the classic font on an orange-yellow background that reads ‘Only the person closest to me can see this’. It’s so dreadfully cheesy Wonbin’s face fucking hurts from where his smile falls into a split, and he tells Sungchan this — well he tells Sungchan’s shirt, as he’s buried his steaming face in it.
“Motherfucker,” He sighs, pleased. “Cheesy cheesy motherfucker.”
Sungchan’s subsequent laugh is shaped by the smile of smug satisfaction he’s definitely sporting. “You’re gonna have to ease up on the cursing so it doesn’t ruin you later,”
“It’s not like I’m becoming an idol,” Wonbin scoffs, pulling his nose off the cotton so he can shimmy up to where Sungchan’s lips are, close enough to go cross-eyed. “Besides, my point was—huh, I don’t remember,”
“I think I could jog your memory,” Sungchan beams.
The last thought Wonbin registers before Sungchan’s lips meet his is, Woah his eyes are so twinkly.
WONBIN [21:06]
What r u up to
SUNGCHAN [21:06]
We went out for drinks after work
Our boss got promoted and is treating us all
Some girl claims she looks like you
She doesn’t LOL
WONBIN [21:09]
LOL
I'm jealous
I want a drink too
SUNGCHAN [21:11]
She just got offended
She says everyone tells her that a lot
LMAO eunseok is so mean to her
WONBIN [21:14]
Maybe he likes her
Aren’t ppl mean to ppl they like
SUNGCHAN [21:15]
Maybe
SUNGCHAN [21:23]
She said she’s a better drinker than you
It’s so funny… she couldn’t even finish her glass
She actually is like you after all
SUNGCHAN [21:30]
Ohh she’s a fan of yizhuo
WONBIN [21:30]
Should u really be on your phone while out drinking
SUNGCHAN [21:31]
They think i’m recording LOL
Imagine if they knew i was talking to the real wonbin rn
WONBIN [21:31]
I hate it when you talk like that
SUNGCHAN [21:31]
Like what
WONBIN [21:32]
Nvm.
Ignore me it’s stupid.
SUNGCHAN [21:33]
Okay
WONBIN [21:33]
Im gonna sleep now. Early day tmrw.
SUNGCHAN [21:33]
Goodnight.
Do u need the a tale of 2 cities audiobook
Or my recording?
WONBIN [21:34]
No im good thanks
I got it
Gn
Wonbin has only just finally succumbed to sleep when the jangle of his ringtone pierces through the veil of his unconsciousness and pulls him out again. Unlike the lethargy that comes with his battles against insomnia, when he’s awoken he’s really awake — with his hairs alight with tension and alarm that rolls off him like static.
Momentary panic washes over Wonbin like a cold shower; could he have mixed up his schedule? No, he’s technically on a “break” until he can haul himself back to his tour at the end of the week. Then, did his parents die? That’s the only way he’d imagine someone from home calling him, especially at this time. Because Wonbin doesn’t usually get phone calls.
Once his arm stops shaking he reaches for the phone with the trepidation and caution of one approaching a complex bomb. Seeing Sungchan’s name lighting up on his screen does nothing to allay his fears, because he hasn’t spoken to Sungchan over the phone since Sungchan’s graduation day.
A stone, ice cold and heavy, settles itself in the pit of his gut. Did Sungchan get into an accident? Wonbin had been in a shoddy state when he’d gotten back into his car that afternoon; Sungchan could’ve also been swayed by that black wave of negativity — a parasite that propagates and proliferates, a vector of doom Wonbin is convinced he passed on by proximity. And while Sungchan has always boasted a mental fortitude that Wonbin has always envied, it stands that Wonbin holds the advantage with his own being shattered so often. Sungchan would fall apart if his fortitude wavered. Wonbin has gotten better at plastering the cracks.
Maybe Sungchan hadn’t called for a designated driver—but he doesn’t have a car so—maybe he’d walked into traffic with his mind scrambled and flipped up into the air and maybe Wonbin is still at the top of his speed dial, and if he isn’t then maybe a bystander had called his girlfriend but she didn’t know enough about Sungchan to be of help so he’d been next. Or maybe Sungchan had an accident at home, and Wonbin had been the last one to message him and see him.
Wonbin can think of many vicious ways in which karma could smite his life away in the ways it’ll hurt him the most, and his pulse spikes in his wrist like a needle pistoning in and out with vitriolic glee. He swipes on the final ring before his brain can conjure up worse scenarios.
Wonbin waits, back against the headboard with his heart in his mouth as the call connects. The other end of the line is silent; no sirens, no street noises or whirs of passing cars, no mechanical clicks or beeps from medical equipment, there’s no sound at all and the call could entirely be unintentional — then he hears it, a faint crackle of a muffled sniffle. The trickle of calm that had unknowingly began to work into Wonbin’s bloodstream instantly gives way for the reboot of his alarm sequence.
“Sungchan, what’s going on?”
Sungchan’s voice comes in hot and slurred and far too close, like he’d just switched from speaker mode to cradle his receiver by his mouth. “I fucked up. I’m going to hell.” He heaves brokenly, and Wonbin can practically taste the salt off his tears through the cool glass of his screen.
He’s not dying, is the first thought that springs to mind, then Wonbin’s less than sympathetic retorts fissure up his throat and push against the back of his lips. Same, is one of them. Join the club, is another. But he remembers that Sungchan isn’t used to playing the role of the asshole; he’s paddling in foreign waters, and Wonbin’s got to make the choice to save him or let him sink. But part of Wonbin wants him to suffer a little more, to microdose on the state of being shitty and feeling all the more shittier for it. Part of Wonbin wants to shove Sungchan off Pride Rock and tell him to survive the fall just like he did.
“Minjeong is a lovely girl,” Sungchan continues undeterred despite Wonbin’s silence. Or perhaps because of Wonbin’s silence. Wonbin remembers a time when his family had attempted catholicism, and he’d been dragged to the saturday confessional to receive a pardon for his sins. He hadn’t minded it, because the sacrament of reconciliation sounded cool, and it was terribly cathartic to unload all his salacious thoughts into that silent ear and wonder if that holy man would think about his words at night. Every condemnable facet of his brain could be let loose from the fragile confines of his skeleton and shoved onto another in the name of absolution. Then he’d found salvation in a similarly aged boy and gone off to uni with his confessions made public in a recording booth.
Maybe this is the instalment where Sungchan shoves his cross onto Wonbin’s shoulder for him to bear, for all the times Wonbin has tried to run from carrying his own.
“She’s really pretty, inside and out,”
Oh, Wonbin realises. She has a name. Minjeong. That shadowy image of the girl whose lips were on Sungchan’s becomes defined in high resolution. She was no longer a concept, or a trick of the light. She’s real, realer than Wonbin will ever be. And she’s pretty, inside and out, just in case Wonbin didn’t get the memo the second he’d seen that post, just a casual pointer that Wonbin isn’t. Pretty. On the inside at least.
“She wants to adopt a dog together,” Sungchan swallows audibly. “She wants to build something with me—something good. And I’ve gone and fucked it up. She doesn’t deserve that. I don’t deserve her. I’ve even—It’s not just her I’m hurting, I’ve racked up bad karma for—for future kids. She was telling me the other day so happily about her dreams of having a family… Long term goals—”
Wonbin laughs. Raucously. Callously. Hah.
Sungchan really—Fucking—
Hah.
He’s still laughing. At least it puts a stop to Sungchan’s snivelling.
“You bastard,” He begins. “Are you upset because you’ve hurt lovely Minjeong and her lovely ovaries, or is it because you’re going to hell alone?”
Sungchan gasps sharply, like he’s just been slapped. He might as well have been, with Wonbin sparing not even a microlitre of venom in his tone. Then he hiccups, because he’s a selfish motherfucker who’s evidently been drinking and subjecting Wonbin to deal with him sober when he knows Wonbin can’t sleep, when he tossed Wonbin out of his life for the third time just this afternoon. Wonbin was so so wrong—Sungchan wasn’t new to playing the asshole, he’s been ad-libbing the whole time and just wasn’t aware til he’d been handed the script.
“You’re the cruellest person I’ve ever met,” Sungchan cries, obliviously, ignorantly. Stupidly. Clearly they were made for each other. “I wouldn’t have believed that if I was warned in the past by my future self.”
“Oh shut up,” Wonbin scoffs harshly, voice lacerating and disdainful. “You avoided my question. Again. Like you always do.”
Sungchan doesn’t reply, and that’s okay, because Wonbin didn’t expect him to. Wonbin is too good at picking himself to pieces while staring at his reflection. Sungchan is terrified of looking in the mirror in the first place. And usually Wonbin would never subject his Sungchan to the same self-destructive ordeal, but Sungchan wasn’t the only one who changed after his graduation.
“I’ll give you a hint,” Wonbin sneers. “Why is it me you’re calling? Are you asking for my hand? To be saved? To no longer be alone?”
Maybe Sungchan will pick himself apart and realise he isn’t as pretty on the inside as he might have thought. Maybe he’ll see that he and Wonbin are made of the same thing—made of each other.
“Or perhaps to jog your memory, you could think about why you decided to plan a future so quickly with a girl who claims to look like me—a girl you say is like me after all. Is she a version of me in a currency you can receive?”
He’s going to realise that despite peeling off his skin and finding a monster, he won’t be able to break up with Minjeong. Bad Man’s Land is a bog that won’t let you go once you’ve stepped on it; Wonbin would know because he wrote a song about it. Sungchan will keep coming to Wonbin in search of absolution, to prove that he acknowledges his transgressions, and to ease his mind when he goes back home to Minjeong under the pretence of now being blameless. Sungchan will try his hardest to be good, and to pretend that he is good, despite knowing deep down that he’s on his way to hell. He will get to a crossroad with both routes still leading down to that fiery pit; he will have to choose if committing to being good is worth it if he’ll end up in the same abyss either way.
Wonbin smiles. If Sungchan comes to him in search of salvation, who is Wonbin to say no to him? The simple unadulterated truth is that Wonbin is still in love with Sungchan, and if he can help palliate Sungchan’s inevitable damnation then he will.
Wonbin’s course is not quite permanently set for hell just yet, with his many minor misdemeanours higher up on the scale than Sungchan’s big fuckup—but it can be.
He really should’ve learnt his lesson by now. But Wonbin is a bigger fool than Sungchan is a coward, and he’s lousy at sticking to convictions that antagonise his non-relationship with Sungchan, so no matter what he thought minutes ago about shoving Sungchan off a cliff, the fact of the matter is that if Sungchan is falling off a precipice into hell with Wonbin’s hand as his only lifeline, Wonbin would fall right with him.
Shit, Wonbin thinks when he readjusts his pillows and rolls onto his other side. A drink would be nice. Not even the jetlag can save him from the thrall of insomnia, and there’s nothing in the fridge to dampen his consciousness. His nerves bounce with the weight of his new resolution, a culmination of his mutual exchange with Sungchan. He transmitted a brain-eating parasite, Sungchan passed a bone-breaking cross. Wonbin has a fear of thrill rides and heights, and he feels like he’s strapped in a gondola of a drop tower with no ground in sight.
Sungchan’s voice comes calmly and soothingly through his phone, reciting that difficult book. Back then they were so different. There’s a perpetual edge to Wonbin’s voice now, and an ever-present fatigue in Sungchan’s. The recording preserves the magic of that time that only became magical in retrospect, and it works its way through the folds of Wonbin’s brain as sleep begins to encroach his periphery, slowing the tumbling velocity of his thoughts and relaxing his synapses.
A Tale of Two Cities. It was the best of times, it was the worst of times. Sungchan is both the best and worst person Wonbin knows, and Wonbin finds this realisation a little comforting. At the very least, he no longer finds himself to be the worst person he knows.
Sungchan brings out the best and worst in him, and Sungchan has said the same for him. They are uniform, matching, one and the same. So when Wonbin wakes up in the morning, he will take Sungchan’s hand and jump into hell with him.
WONBIN [07:00]
Hi
This is Wonbin, i was given your contact?
HWISEO [07:17]
OMG!
Dating Hwiseo for the most part is remarkably simple. She’s pretty, and nice enough, and she doesn’t worry about him being on tour for most of their first month. Her idol group is also busy with schedules, and Wonbin finds an appreciation for having a relationship with someone in the same field who shares an understanding for the irregularities of life.
She’s a pleasant distraction too, and Giselle doesn’t give him any shit for it — at least he doesn’t flip out and cancel on things last minute anymore. She doesn’t soothe the itch but she’s a good placebo, and for that Wonbin tries to do his best by her. Be a better texter. Take her on the classic dates when he can. And it’s surprisingly easy, because she isn’t well known, and because Wonbin has always been good at hiding.
“Hmm,” Shotaro had deliberated, over coffee on one rare occasion at his place. “You sure she isn’t using you? It wouldn’t be unheard of for a D-lister.”
“That would make me feel less guilty,” Wonbin shrugged. “I’m kinda using her too. Besides, I don’t have anything to offer an idol, I don’t run in any of those circles — or any circles really.”
“Why bother using her though?” Shotaro continued, oddly insistent. “If this has anything to do with that friend of yours then surely you could find no-strings company with a comfortable little NDA? I could help you with that too.”
“You know me Taro… I do better with routine. And with my life a fucking mess these days, a little steadiness goes a long way. And the NDA stuff didn’t turn out so great with your friend Riki’s label mate did it? All it takes is one drunk moment of weakness for a one night stand to post something damning on twitter or instagram and there’s no lawsuit that’ll erase what’s already been exposed. At least Hwiseo also has a career to protect, and we laid ground rules on keeping things private.”
“Jake was an idiot so that doesn’t count,” Shotaro frowned, seemingly still frustrated over the media storm from a couple of months ago. “And Hwiseo has her own career to protect, not yours. And even if she does have pure intentions, she could be telling her friends things just like you’re telling me. And not everybody is a friend like me.”
“How humble of you,”
“I mean it Wonbin,” Shotaro leaned forward. The crease in his forehead hadn’t eased out since they started their conversation, and his coffee sat cold and dark on the island of his kitchenette. “I’ve heard things here and there, her circle is kind of notorious, and idols are landmines you know. Especially the ones that will do anything for a scrap of recognition. If you really wanted a relationship then it’d be better to make the rumours with Yizhuo true, and if not I know a few people interested in you.”
“Giselle made the suggestion you know,” Wonbin argued weakly. “I just feel like everyone else has these grand images of what they expect me to be like, and the bigger their status the more they’d expect from me. I don’t know.”
“When did you develop such blind trust in your manager? And you don’t think Hwiseo has any grand images of you?”
Wonbin ignored the first question. He wouldn’t have had an answer for it anyway. “She doesn’t ask me for anything.”
“She doesn’t?” Shotaro had raised an eyebrow, and Wonbin’s stomach had flipped with anxiety.
“Nothing significant,” Wonbin mumbled.
Shotaro had softened, perhaps taking pity on Wonbin’s shrunken form. “Look Wonbin, if you’re scared to have a real relationship then maybe you should hold off until you aren’t anymore.”
“I can’t do that.” Wonbin stated stubbornly. The I’d probably die goes unspoken, the sentence more honest than he’s willing to be.
Shotaro had fixed him with a ruminating stare that made Wonbin feel more like a child than he’d ever felt before, like a toddler left alone in a complex mall with no courage or voice to cry for help. Then he’d sighed.
“I’m on your side Wonbin, do whatever you want and I’ll help you deal with whatever comes next.”
“Thank you,” Wonbin had replied, swallowing the massive lump in his throat. And his thank you had been the most meaningful one he’d ever said.
His tour had wrapped up with nothing really left to be desired, and Wonbin should be relieved to let his bones relax from constantly pushing them to the brink for hours every concert day. His team had thrown a party to celebrate the end, and a tipsy Giselle had embraced him and thanked him for sticking to the end, and being tipsy himself he’d gotten misty-eyed as he hugged his staff for tolerating him.
It had almost been a perfect end. Almost. Because Hwiseo was a little miffed for being denied an invite to his wrap up party.
Wonbin sighs and massages his temples. Shotaro’s disapproving words were making him think more than usual, almost like a curse more than a warning because lately things with Hwiseo were bordering on… difficult. Not even Shotaro had come to the wrap up, and he’d shown up for a few of the stops despite them all being abroad — the get-together was really a small and ultra personal affair.
He’d swung around her dorm to placate her with souvenirs but all she’d wanted was his jacket. So he’d borne the withering gazes of her bandmates as he’d been lead to her room. And though he’d sat on her bed intimidated as she bitched about the pretentious girls sharing her group’s waiting room at a music show, he’d also felt a little warm when her smile was directed at him. It felt nice to make her smile.
Wonbin can’t define what exactly he feels for Hwiseo when she snuggles against his neck and bathes him in her perfume, or when she hums his songs while he paints her nails at their airbnb rented in Giselle’s name, or when she sings with all her lungs out to the songs on the radio as he drives her back to her dorm. Her voice is immaculate, he thinks first of all, fit for a much bigger stage.
Gratitude perhaps. She pushes back the shadows that have hijacked the lonely vacuole of his car, and she drowns out the nagging worms of thought, and she takes his hand off the wheel and clasps it in her own and lets him feel warm skin instead of air-conditioned leather. So he doesn’t have to fidget for his phone. So he doesn’t fall into the labyrinth of old text messages. So he doesn’t reach to add new lines and angles and dead ends to that unforgiving maze.
But Sungchan texts him after a month to congratulate him on completing his tour, and unsends a message that says I miss you, and Wonbin—reading it all through the notifications—gets the urge to reopen the wound. To damn himself like he’d intended to when he decided to date Hwiseo. Surprisingly, it’s difficult to be a willing asshole. Wonbin had underestimated the weight of bartering his conscience for a ticket that would bring him down to Sungchan’s level.
Hwiseo’s dark curls fall in his face as she leans over the centre console to kiss him goodnight. She’s like nicotine gum; no matter how desperately he chews he’ll never sate the craving for the real thing between his lips with all its calamitous toxins. Sungchan between his lips. He moans into her mouth and she giggles before pulling away.
He lets her rifle through his glove compartment and slide his rings up her fingers and around the chain of her necklace, and says nothing still when his sunglasses end up on the bridge of her nose. They suit her more anyway. Then she’s out the car and the shadows come roaring again and he could reach for his gearstick or the steering wheel but his hands fly to his phone instead.
It’s so fucking hard to quit.
WONBIN [21:13]
You miss me?
read
Fuck. Fuck.
Three perilous dots dance along his screen. Then they stop. Then they dance again. Wonbin bites his lip. His gums sting instead. Isn’t this what you wanted?
SUNGCHAN [21:15]
Apparently
It’s going to rain within the hour
Fuck it. Sungchan wanted the real thing too. Wonbin slams his foot on the pedal and accelerates towards his addiction, cessation be damned. His heart beats frantically in his mouth as the city lights blur past his window, he can hear his blood rushing in his ears and stifling the song on the radio. His knee bounces at every red light, joints too jittery with the promise of a high.
Because this is what he wanted.
Wonbin wakes up with a crick in his neck that makes him curse as he stretches his body out of its awkward position. He’d stayed up till the early hours of the morning for the fourth day in a row, hunched over his guitar in his makeshift studio because the blessed lyric demon had patronised his brain again and fuelled the need to blaze voraciously through page after page of his notebook. Through his bleary morning vision it all looks like a flaming load of gibberish, the perfect formula for the makings of a killer EP before the year ends.
His label knows not to bother him when he descends into this state, allowing him to seclude himself away from the trappings of broadcasts and video guestings that come bundled with mandatory PR briefs as a prerequisite. And it’s spells like this that remind Wonbin why he endures it all in the first place.
His lips curl upwards as he picks up his pen, a frenzied melody still rattling in his skull begging to be released. Then his stomach ruins the mood and he’s reaching to order takeout and that’s when it happens. Well, when he sees it.
SUNGCHAN [08:46]
from yizhuo to hwiseo i didn’t realise you had a type
Wonbin freezes, eyes wide, mind blank. The first domino must’ve dropped at some point but he doesn’t know how or to what extent the tiles had fallen. His spine tingles with the mocking question, isn’t this what you wanted? but his heart is too far down in his foot to respond to the jab.
There’s three missed calls from Shotaro, and one from Giselle, all silenced. Messages too, identical. Call me. From Giselle it’s nothing he hasn’t braved before. Shotaro sounds livid.
WONBIN AND HWISEO —> DATING NEWS CONFIRMED
An article on a popular forum exploded last night with a rumour that star of the hour WONBIN could be in a not-so-secret relationship with HWISEO, vocalist of three year old girl group KEYS. The article identified several items famed to belong to WONBIN in many of HWISEO’s instagram posts, cryptic captions as well photo angles that featured his presence beside her such as his hands. Keen-eyed fans had pieced together these instances over the past two months but yesterday a photo of the two of them seemingly on a late night outing was uploaded, garnering a lot of attention online.
This morning, HWISEO’s agency FULLTALENT released a statement confirming the rumours: “HWISEO is an artist that has never disappointed the fans and has continuously worked hard to deliver good performances and feelings that the fans can relate to through her music. We have full faith in her dedication to her activities with KEYS regardless of her personal life and fans can look forward to seeing the greater things in the works with KEYS comeback at the end of the month. We hope fans can be excited while remaining supportive of her happiness with WONBIN.”
WONBIN’s agency has yet to release a statement.
SHE’S SO SHAMELESS —> WONBIN HWISEO DATING REACTION MEGATHREAD
I’ve never even heard of her before today and I can tell she orchestrated this for clout. She was way too freaking obvious with her instagram, showing off Wonbin’s clothes and accessories. She wanted to be caught. They don’t even suit each other she just looks like a tacky wannabe. Everyone knows Wonbin is a private person, he just makes his hot emo music and only shows up to perform and the occasional interview. He keeps to himself even within the industry. Then here comes hwiseo and her agency immediately jumping on the rumour with a confirmation and fucking PROMO POST for her groups comeback. I freaking hate social climbing clout chasing D list nobodies. They’re a little pretty and think they deserve the world.
THREAD
- she looks like a bitch
- well if she’s been posting him for months maybe he didn’t mind?
- he doesn’t even follow her on IG so he wouldn’t know
- his official IG is managed by his staff, he could be following her on his personal one
- nah some of his earliest fans found his personal account back in the day. i’m in a gc with them and even THEY didn’t know because he hasn’t posted or followed any new accounts on there in two years. they know he’s still active on there too because they’ve seen him like viral cute animal reels just last month.
- she kinda reminds me of discount yizhuo. wonbin-yizhuo shippers are saying wonbin got his heartbroken and couldn’t move on from yizhuo and that’s how he ended up with hwiseo.
- UGHHH THE SONGS ARE ABOUT HER (YIZHUO)
- god made wonbin too hot and too talented he had to balance him with a sad love life
- the next album is gonna be a fucking hit
- i hope they break up <3
- can we please not give her and her grifting group any attention?
- she actually doesn’t deserve him. she should know her place
- i bet the date photo was staged. it’s way too obvious like the person who took the pic knew exactly where to find them.
- also the fact that it was posted on an egg account and the algorithm managed to make it viral within an hour. smells like money was spent on this promo
- even the first rumour article was media play because no one keeps up with hwiseo enough to monitor all her posts and link it to wonbin. it’s way too obvious. the articles that came out earlier about this barely had any engagements so they had to leak a photo since the cb is around the corner.
- just look at how even the company statement ties wonbin’s name at the end. they’re incredibly shameless. they couldn’t even wait to discuss with wonbin’s label before posting their statement. the article had maybe 60k views late at night when no one is working in the office and they had a statement pushed out at 7am on the dot today almost like it was scheduled. they couldn’t even wait for the rumour to properly “explode”
to a low tier agency like that 60k is a nuclear bomb LOL
congratulations to KEYS on their peak chart and trend entry with their negative virality. i hope they enjoy their 15 mins of fame with a whopping large dislike to like ratio
wonbin fans are fiercely loyal lmfao. meanwhile the ten keys fans that exist will be feeling betrayed. did she forget that she’s an idol? she doesn’t have the same kind of audience that wonbin does. it’s over for that nobody.
people saying wonbin fans are jealous really don’t know anything LMAO. no one had a problem when his rumours with yizhuo came out. we’d all probably be fine with hwiseo too if she wasn’t so transparently using him.
barely into september, the weather sucks, exams around the corner and now wonbin is dating a conniving bitch OH lord it’s too early for me to want to kms
SUNGCHAN [08:46]
from yizhuo to hwiseo i didn’t realise you had a type
WONBIN [18:31]
right and you’re soooo similar to yizhuo and hwiseo
get off my phone
“The music is going to be a hit,” Shotaro snipes from the barstool at his kitchen island. It’s the first thing he’s said all evening since he’d let Wonbin in, opting to fix Wonbin with reproachful glances with the hopes that Wonbin would simmer a little in discomfort. Which he does, before deciding he hates it and springing towards the wine cabinet occupying most of the wall of the kitchenette. Perusing the bottles on display with measured interest, he waits for his best friend to blow the lid off his exasperation. But Shotaro has more self-control than Wonbin had given him credit for, so the pregnant silence persists until Wonbin sets a moscato and two glasses on the marble counter in front of him.
“Out with it already,”
“So,” Shotaro drawls testily. “What excuse did she give you?”
Wonbin fills Shotaro’s glass first, making a placid show of the procedure, thankful that his hands don’t shake. “None, actually.”
“Of course.”
Wonbin cringes at Shotaro’s burning gaze as he fills his own glass and slides into the adjacent stool. “We haven’t talked. Yet.”
“Right.” Shotaro grimaces around the rim of his glass. “Do you know what you’re going to tell her when you do talk?”
Wonbin pauses, swallows. “I’m going to ask to end things. I’m sure she’s gotten what she wanted anyway.”
Shotaro nods approvingly, but continues to observe him with a curious expression. “You know… you don’t look too upset. Not what I expected from the guy that looked like he’d die without her two months ago.”
“Well, I don’t have the right to be upset at her. It’s not like I approached our relationship with pure intentions either.”
“Huh,” Shotaro considers. “So you started dating a girl because you were hung up over a guy. Sorry—I meant to say friend. The music really will be a hit.” His arm extends across the distance so his index finger pokes Wonbin’s chest where his heart should be. “But I hope your heart doesn’t take too many hits.”
“Hey,” Wonbin sits straighter, a furrow in his brow. “How do you know it’s a guy I’m hung up over?”
“Stupid question. So how is your guy taking the news? Did you get what you wanted?”
Thoughts of Sungchan’s text message yesterday morning stoke his ire. Hotly, he replies, “He’s not allowed to take it in any way, not when he did the same thing.”
“So you did all of this for revenge?” Shotaro’s glass isn’t empty yet but he tops it up anyway. “What kinda shitty revenge leaves you worse off?”
The alcohol sits warm and foreign in Wonbin’s belly, and it rises up the pillar of his neck to squeeze its palms flush against his cheeks. He grits his teeth, voice strained. “This isn’t revenge.”
Shotaro frowns. “Then what—” He coughs, eyes wide. “Don’t tell me—oh my god Wonbin. Oh my god.”
Wonbin focuses on the bubbles in his glass.
“Bastard,” Shotaro shakes his head, eyes heavy with the weight of realisation as he pushes both their glasses away. “You should’ve told me earlier. You mean to tell me you love him that much?”
The brunt of his feelings was easier to deal with when they were buried in a dark place he couldn’t see or reach, but Shotaro in all his scrutiny and care excises the ugly tumour and debrides the festering wound and dunks the gory mess on the counter for them to recoil at in horror. Wonbin doesn’t know whether it’s the exhaustion hot on his heels or the temperature-raising moscato or the sheer state of being seen in a way that he yearns for but is afraid of, but he feels the reservoir within him crack with pressure and the water builds up around his eyes.
“So you’ve been meeting while both of you have your respective girlfriends.” Shotaro finds his words after a few minutes, when Wonbin has beaten back the worst of his teary emotion with the evidence of his vulnerability drying on the back of his wrists and in the watercolour red of his sclera. His words are question-shaped, despite not being a question at all, and Wonbin appreciates the delicacy with which Shotaro tiptoes towards the elephant in the room. Ever so considerate, as always. Wonbin doesn’t think he deserves Shotaro shelving his frustration to treat him like a house of cards.
He isn’t entirely sure he wants it either.
“We met twice,” Wonbin confesses, solemnly. Then he whispers, “The guilt eats him alive.” He buries his face in his palms, his elbows sore on the cold marble as he shudders at the memory. Was the sweet sweet reprieve worth the subsequent look of abject torment that took over Sungchan’s being post-coitus? It scared Wonbin to slowly dismantle him like that, to see his demons latch onto him and drip-feed off his soul. But the look of regret pissed him off; he never told Sungchan to secure himself a girlfriend in spite of his unclaimed baggage, that was all on him.
Shotaro inhales. “Did you decide to get a girlfriend for the sake of cheating just to make him feel less shitty about himself? Or was it to make yourself feel shitty enough to deserve him?”
“I’m a monster, right?” Wonbin smiles wanly.
“Holy shit, Park Wonbin.” Shotaro massages the bridge of his nose with his fingers. “Maybe? That’s no good. No good at all.”
“You think I don’t know that?” Wonbin snaps. Then he looks at Shotaro’s usually good-natured expression pulled into lines of stress that mirrors his own, and of underlying kindness. “Sorry, it’s just—” He gestures to himself, “There’s something wrong with me, I know I should quit—should’ve quit—but I just can’t. It’s like an autoimmune affliction. Fighting the urge is like fighting myself,” Wonbin laughs brokenly, each soulless fragment of sound creating a gash in him and in Shotaro, judging by the latter’s pained visage. “And I don’t know if there’s an atom of myself that isn’t dedicated to him.”
“I think,” Shotaro begins, after a couple beats of silence, “We needed something stronger than a moscato.” Wonbin makes a weak noncommittal noise in response. Shotaro continues. “I’m probably a monster too for saying this, but I don’t care about whether or not you’re a saint. I only care about you being good to you. I don’t really get all these hoops you guys are jumping through to be together, but I know if it was as simple as me telling you to get over him, we wouldn’t be here right now in the first place. My problem now is, is this guy even worth it? All I see is everything you are doing to be with him but you haven’t shown me an iota of his own dedication. I don’t see the fuel for this obsession of yours.”
“It was there, but I took it for granted.” Wonbin mumbles. “I took him for granted. I think I blew up too fast, Taro.”
“Was. So not anymore?”
“No,” Wonbin replies quickly, charcoal burning in his eyes. “I know he loves me still. I know it for a fact. That’s why I still try.”
Shotaro slides out of his stool and plods towards his wine cabinet. “If what you guys have going on is love, I don't think I’ve ever known love in my life. Just make sure it isn’t one-sided.”
WONBIN [23:59]
happy birthday
SUNGCHAN [23:59]
are u still mad at me?
are u coming over?
HWISEO [17:36]
being the korean harry styles doesn’t make you infallible
i know that you think you’re better than me
you’re a decent pretender
but you’re full of the same shit
hope you crash and crash hard x
WONBIN [19:59]
👍
There’s a hidden track tacked on to the end of the folder on his drive. It’s the quickest he’s ever drafted a song, and he’ll probably have to fight his team to keep it on the EP. It’s called Delilah.
But Samson loved Delilah. Wonbin did not love Hwiseo. He erases the title and replaces it with Jezebel.
Her presence pervades even his bathroom, and all at once as he steps out of Sungchan’s shower he feels like a trespasser. Soap-blinded and breathless in the hot steam, he’d almost reached for her hair mask instead of the usual convenience store shampoo, and skincare tubes and bottles line up his shelf in rows. Floral hand wash, floral hand cream, an air freshener he sprays just because. It smells like fabric softener. The mirror he used to stand in front of might recognise her face more now.
Sungchan is still naked and waiting and glowing, and lost in thought until Wonbin re-enters the room. Today was different; Sungchan was gentler, and Wonbin had been too timid to leave marks—he’d been stingy with his nails, doubtful with his grip and his teeth and the strength with which he’d lock his knees. And his eyes stung when Sungchan latched his lips around a spot on his neck, massaging the area with his tongue, so Wonbin cast his sight away and it caught on the nightstand to where an AQUA DI PARMA stood beside Sungchan’s TAMBURINS CHAMO. Today was different; he’d cried when they came, and Sungchan hadn’t.
Sungchan sidles past him, steps back and hesitates before him.
Wonbin doesn’t let him figure out whatever puzzling decision keeps him rooted awkwardly in place. “Go shower already,”
Sungchan nods and disappears out the door.
Wonbin breathes through his nose and tries not to think about smelling like Sungchan’s girlfriend, and of what that could mean to Sungchan. The Hugo XX is gone. Cheap lippies lie scattered across the vanity, too cold for his skin tone. Sungchan must’ve moved his stuff from the closet to somewhere she won’t find them. Wonbin breathes out, and perches on the edge of the bed. He lets the apple fall on the crown of his skull and knock into him a universal discovery.
What the fuck am I doing here?
Clearly she was filling the empty spaces he’d left behind, minimising every trace of him that lingers. No, he was the one tearing holes in what they were stitching together.
Sungchan returns, and Wonbin is still looking at the pair of perfumes on the nightstand when he says, “Tell me about her.”
Sungchan begins with rustling around in his drawers, maybe waiting for Wonbin to chicken out and say he’s joking, but Wonbin waits with crumbling resolution, small and tense and suddenly feeling the miles between them despite occupying the same small room. When Sungchan finally speaks, his voice cracks, low and gruff. “I’ve known of her since college, same graduating year and everything. All of us in the English department got along well but we never really spoke… ‘cause she was quiet and a homebody. She was closer to Eunseok out of anyone in my friend group, and that’s how our respective circles merged.” Wonbin offers no commentary, so Sungchan swallows and carries on. “They like her a lot—my friends, I mean—sometimes I worry that Eunseok might like her more than he lets on.”
Wonbin digs his feet into the punch-needled mini rug that suggests he’s sitting on her side of the bed.
“She teaches too, and does a much better job than me. Well, that’s where her passion lies, while I scrounge pennies for more academia.” He chuckles lightly at that, and Wonbin blinks rapidly. They fall into silence again, and right when Wonbin decides he should leave, Sungchan says quietly, “Tell me about yours.”
It’s weird, exes talking about current partners while cheating on their current partners with each other. It’s weird, not so much paying attention to the words falling from their lips as micro-analysing each other’s reactions to said words. It’s weird, not meeting each other’s eyes while talking—or while asking each other to talk. Waiting for each other to snap.
“You should probably do something about the hate she’s getting though,” Sungchan says, pulling the sheet off the bed. “Even I’m seeing it.”
Which is bullshit, Wonbin thinks, scoffing under his breath. Sungchan always seemed to be up to date on all his news, often before Wonbin himself would be in the know. It’s annoying that he would suddenly pretend otherwise. “What the hell am I supposed to do? They were the ones to break the news. Wasn’t it enough that my agency confirmed it instead of leaving them out to dry?”
Sungchan frowns. “She’s your girlfriend, isn’t it a given that you would confirm the news? And shouldn’t you want to do more to curb the hate she’s receiving? I don’t know how, maybe say something to your fans?”
Wonbin feels his nerves fraying, fanning his temper. “Having fans isn’t like teaching a classroom of kids Sungchan, I can’t just tell them, be nice children or else, or some shit like that.”
“Alright,” He says, pulling a face. “I just think you should care more, Wonbin.”
“If I cared I wouldn’t be here right now would I?” Wonbin challenges, eyes sparking as he meets Sungchan’s eyes head-on. “I’m breaking up with her anyway.”
Sungchan coughs, looking away, and somehow it irks Wonbin even more. “Does she know that? That you plan to end things?
“Beats me,” Wonbin snips. “Does one need to know that their partner wants to break up with them before the partner actually says it aloud? ‘Cause I was under a different impression.”
“Point taken,” Sungchan replies uncomfortably through gritted teeth. “But I think your timing could be a little better,”
“What’s wrong with my timing?” Wonbin scowls. “If anything I’ve been patient. She knows what she did, she’s been avoiding my calls since everything came out, and I’ve been politely texting her to find time to meet up but she’s too busy all of a sudden. We’re running at her pace while she delays the inevitable.”
“It’s just so it doesn’t look like you’re abandoning her at her low point.”
“This is probably the highest point she’s ever been at.” Wonbin retorts harshly.
Sungchan cocks an eyebrow. “Didn’t know you of all people could get like that, is it the fame?”
“You don’t get to judge me as a person when you are cheating on your oh-so-awesome girlfriend,” Wonbin’s shoulders shudder with every word, liquid fury and hurt erupting and scalding him from within. “Just why do you think I’m doing all this?”
“I don’t know,” Sungchan replies helplessly. “I won’t know if you don’t tell me,”
Wonbin takes in his appearance, ever so clueless and taken aback, eyes deer-wide and unaware of all the landmines scattered around them. Shit. He deflates, as much as he can. “Listen, she doesn’t even like me like that. She’s gotten what she wanted. Why can’t I get what I want? I wish I could just get what I want.” His volume tapers off with each sentence, diminishing to a mumble at the end. He can’t help feeling a little childish, or the hot shame that comes with it.
“I’m not sure Wonbin,” Sungchan sighs, lowering himself to the bare mattress. “How you see things isn’t always the way things actually are… More often than not, it’s when it seems like a person doesn’t harbour more than a shallow interest that the reverse tends to be the case.”
What’s with Sungchan?
What feels like the most he’s talked unprompted in a long while and it’s all to lecture Wonbin on his relationship with Hwiseo. What did Sungchan know about like and interest and affection anyway with his portfolio of a grand total of two relationships and their terrible terrible trajectories? Why was Sungchan seemingly on Hwiseo’s side, horribly hell-bent on keeping her tied to him?
“What are you trying to do here?” Wonbin asks sharply.
There’s no reason for Sungchan to splutter defensively as he says “I’m just offering friendly advice!” Maybe because it’s bullshit so blatant it’s insulting, or he’s fully committed to sticking to his lie like it’s a buoy in treacherous waters. But it’s enough.
“We’re not fucking frie—fuck this. I can’t do this anymore. I’m done.”
Wonbin is drained. A white hot neutron star of blankness after surrendering and exploding. It’s all white in his head too. White behind his eyes, as he stuffs his feet haphazardly into his sneakers and ruins their heels and collars. White as he storms towards the door with finality.
It’s so stupid. They’ve been done for a while. Wonbin was only delaying the inevitable.
Sungchan follows him, and Wonbin is determined not to be reeled by words that carry no weight, to not listen to him at all really, since Wonbin’s brain is little more than a sponge for the guy. He’s almost at the front door, and he won’t look back once he crosses that threshold.
“I know I'm shit you know,” Sungchan says after him miserably. His voice easily cuts through the wall of noise Wonbin built up in his head. “I just don’t want you to be shit too. So please, stay out of hell.”
Wonbin doesn’t blink once until he presses his forehead against the wheel of his car.
“I’ll always be able to spot you in a crowd,” Wonbin announces with conviction to his audience of one—Sungchan, of course—from his spot on the stage.
The venue is a very modest one; functioning as a grungy bar during the day and on evenings when the chairs and tables haven’t been cleared away to form a decent sized mosh pit before the otherwise ignored stage. Wonbin is here to let his feet say hello to the platform, and to tell his nerves that his first official performance will be okay, and Sungchan is here to hold his hand and tell him that the gig will be okay, because Wonbin has trouble believing himself.
Standing up there sort of makes Wonbin feel like he’s on top of the world, and not in a scary acrophobia kind of way, because the stage is elevated to a height he can jump down from easily, but in a I was born to be here kind of way, with the music-loving attention-seeking devil in him throwing a party inside his ribcage. And the fears of screwing up his vocals or tangling his fingers on his guitar strings or something else of the rookie brand of stupid melts away a little; there’s a great deal on cocktails and beers at the side of the room, and the venue lets in gig-goers two hours before his set begins so they’re guaranteed to be buzzed enough to enjoy anything as long as he doesn’t look like he’s fucked up… And he says as much to Sungchan while pacing around the platform, praying he doesn’t trip later.
“But really,” Wonbin pauses, a hand on his hip and another reaching for his lips before he retracts it, nasty habit cessation. “I’ll just look for you. Everything will be okay if I just look at you. I think.”
“Says the guy that would rather perform blind than wear contacts,” Sungchan’s grin is cheesy and teasing and full, and contagious, because suddenly Wonbin is biting back a smile of his own when he should be working the freakout out of his system with the difficulty becoming of a debut. But Sungchan’s smile is simplifying, and it mends something tangled in Wonbin’s gut.
“Excuse me,” He tries for indignation, but he’s always been a terrible actor so he just sounds incredibly fond. “I can wear contacts perfectly well now!”
“Sure,” Sungchan rests his elbows on the stage, beaming up at him with all teeth and charm. “But you’ll need more than adjusted 20/20 vision to find me when you move to bigger live houses and then stadiums and arenas.”
Wonbin huffs, stepping towards Sungchan and crouching down till he’s almost face-level with him, and he sandwiches Sungchan’s cheeks between his palms, relishing the warmth and the flush and the contrast of Sungchan’s skin to his rougher fingers and knuckles. “You are the most important person to me, so you will always be in my sight even if my eyes are closed.” He kisses Sungchan’s forehead, lingers there, then pulls back. “Secondly, you’re skipping a few steps between live house and stadium, and you mean well but please don’t say this now; I’m trying not to spiral with my small crowd so the thought of anything bigger and more serious is gonna make me sick.”
“Aw,” Sungchan places his hands on top of Wonbin’s. “You were being so romantic and then you ruined it.” He talks nonchalantly, but his cheeks reek of the vision of cherries, ruddy and bursting, and his eyes dart about Wonbin’s face, because he’s equally as bad at acting.
“I’ll always be able to spot you in a crowd,” Wonbin repeats, insistent and brimming with the need to flood the boy before him with all the affection he’s been infected with. It’s a mantra. A prayer. A promise.
Sungchan gulps, eyes impossibly bright and dilating as Wonbin brings their foreheads together. “You’re the most important person to me too.”
WONBIN [23:59]
why don’t your friends like me?
SUNGCHAN [23:59]
it’s complicated
WONBIN [23:59]
you always make everything more complicated than it should be
It’s scary how easy it is to come up with excuses.
Wonbin really shouldn’t have heard Sungchan’s last words on the 22nd of September 2024. He should’ve blocked his ears, or something. But it’s Sungchan’s fault for saying them.
Wonbin has always been fickle of heart. But he was born that way, definitely inherited the trait from his equally fickle parents. Flip-flopping through Christian denominations. Flip-flopping on whether they like him or hate him.
Sungchan said the words, effectively telling him Do not go in peace, so he didn’t, and because he is fickle by nature, he lived through the rest of the year with Sungchan on his mind. And Wonbin was really trying, sating his type-hungry text-yearning finger twitches by bothering Shotaro (who seemed happy to be bothered, despite his manager’s requests to Put the phone down please) and ramping up his designated driver bills by accepting more invitations to chill with Taehyun and the gang. So in spite of the challenge posed by Sungchan’s words and his own fickle nature, Wonbin really tried his best to stay away.
Hwiseo and her cronies kept badgering his chats, so naturally he changed his number, and Sungchan should know his new number, just in case, because they’ve known each other the longest, and Wonbin still has things at Sungchan’s place, and What if Sungchan forgot his security password? Even if they never talk or meet, Sungchan should have his number on hand.
But to tell Sungchan his new number, he has to text Sungchan. So he does. And well, it’s like giving in to nicotine after going clean for a month or two.
Sungchan said the words, Wonbin is phenotypically fickle, Wonbin texts Sungchan again because he has to, it all amalgamates into a catalyst for his self-destruction.
For all of Wonbin’s self-flagellating weakness, Sungchan is weak too. Because for a guy who proclaimed to not want Wonbin to follow him to hell, he drags Wonbin along with him anyway. He masters the art of getting drunk on winter ale and sending and deleting messages that Wonbin has to pretend not to see at all. And it’s been bad ever since Wonbin noticed, because he swings his eyes to his screen constantly like a pendulum, and he thinks about when this habit of Sungchan’s must’ve begun, and of how many of these unsent messages he’s missed in the time prefacing their breakup.
Sungchan misses him. Wonbin goes back to seeing him.
Only on the rainy days. When the magic works. A rule that is shaped like a talisman. A law that lets it all happen without condemnation.
Sungchan holds him and tears up sleepily, and he mumbles I don’t want you to leave me into his ear, and Wonbin please don’t leave me into the mess of his hair, and nods off into unconsciousness. Wonbin, highly conscious, has to pretend not to hear it all. In their little pocket dimension, Sungchan no longer wears a look of tormenting guilt after they’ve rolled onto their backs. He whispers his wishes as he cradles Wonbin to his chest, and it’s so hard to not get carried away and mistake their bubble for the real world.
Wonbin feels on top of the world, not in an acrophobia kind of way, but like he was meant to be here, held like this by Sungchan, like he was finally getting the good times to balance out all the horrible they’ve experienced. He leans into the fantasy. He’s on top of the world. He’s too close to the sun.
It all cumulates to a point, when the wax melts off his wings and he comes hurtling down.
One day Wonbin fishes out that silver key that sits in his pocket like a paperweight and guides him to Sungchan’s doorstep like a dial on a compass. Today he actually uses it, and it feels liberating to twist the metal into the lock and watch it open in fascination. The action transports him back to 2022, when things were far easier even if they didn’t feel that way, back when he’d held the world in his palms without realising. Sungchan isn’t home, and Wonbin hadn’t bothered to text; he’s tired out of his mind freshly rolled out of a long-haul flight and he’d slipped and instructed the driver to bring him to the wrong address. Was it really the wrong address? Wonbin is too tired to think.
Sungchan probably won’t mind, so Wonbin slides into his empty bed, a sleepwalker in daytime. Sleep has never been easier, and the cheap sheets are cozier than anything he’s ever bought. Right now with the comforter drawn up around him feels like the best decision he’s ever made. But he should’ve known better. It wasn’t raining.
“Oh.”
Wonbin comes to with the glow of golden hour caressing the side of his face not currently squished against the pillow, blinking groggily at the source of the gentle gasp— all at once his blood freezes over because standing at the door is a girl who can only be Minjeong and Wonbin remembers exactly where he is and why he shouldn’t be there.
Minjeong’s face is a traffic light of emotion; there’s alarm, and then awe and then the dull set of realisation. Her soft brown eyes congeal into something like mud and Wonbin wants to throw up. His mouth is so fucking dry, and he doesn’t know what to say, but he opens his mouth anyway if only to look like he does. But Minjeong backs away from the room with her long skirt swishing loudly over the sound of his galloping heart as she disappears down the corridor.
Fuck! He screams silently into his wrists. He was so stupid! A fucking idiot! It had all been so much easier when Minjeong wasn’t a real person and just a name, and a forgotten face from a long-deleted upload from months ago, and a scent that lingered in the apartment. Wonbin’s fingers find his teeth as he lurches out of bed and drums his foot against the floor. Should he text Sungchan? Sungchan was absolutely going to break. Wonbin’s vision swims. His mind-hands grasp for anything, an excuse, a lie—but Minjeong wouldn’t buy it, probably. Not when she looked at him like that. Not when she already knew all his friends and not him. His tongue tastes metal; fuck, he’s bleeding. He sucks at the wound, tastes more metal. Fuck!
Minjeong returns and Wonbin jerks his fingers out of his mouth, rubs them on his trousers and cringes. He didn’t know she was still here. Well, the place is more hers than his. He feels sick.
“Coffee?”
Lord, she’s perfect. She really is a pretty thing, put together and immaculate in all the ways Wonbin is not. It’s easy to tell why Sungchan can’t leave her like Wonbin did Hwiseo. She radiates the aura of stars, carries so naturally the magic Wonbin begs for just a smattering of, and Wonbin feels ridiculously like a void next to her. Of course she’d offer coffee to the guy she just found in her boyfriend’s bed. Wonbin smiles bitterly, in spite of himself. Sungchan liked his princesses, and he’d found the cream of the crop.
He can’t say no, and she’s already made the coffees, so he accepts his mug wordlessly and bites down the bile that rises as he’s treated like a guest in his own place. No, his knee bounces. It’s her place now. Minjeong stares at him as he stirs the murky content with no indication that he’ll actually drink, and offers him a vapid smile. “I didn’t poison it.”
He replies, “I’m grateful you didn’t.”
She pulls over the chair from Sungchan’s desk and deposits it a short distance across from him, collapsing into it with a sigh, gracefully so—like a fairy—and Wonbin feels his hairs stand on end. The rays of light cast by the setting sun filter through her dyed blonde curls and spin them gold like he’s watching an aesthetic animation, but with her back to the window, her face gets caught in the shadow hanging off the brilliance.
If she catches him shiver she makes no mention of it. She’s still looking at Wonbin curiously as she sips her coffee, both palms wrapped around the ceramic. “I didn’t know Sungchan knew you personally.” She begins evenly, eyes darting to the ceiling as if to pluck out a high flung memory. “I just assumed he was a fan or something, and that he was embarrassed of the fact. ‘Cause he’d pause and look up at your billboards—even when we’d all carpool he’d gawk out the window at them. We actually got closer by going to your concerts together, funny right?” She smiles wryly.
It isn’t. Obviously.
“When I asked him about it—whether he was a fan, that is—he told me he’d noticed me watching a lot of your videos, and he remembered the poster I had of you in my dorm back in uni, so he got me tickets to impress me. I guess I do recall our mutual friend, Eunseok, saying something about Sungchan having a celebrity friend, but from the way all the guys talked about it, it sounded more like a running inside joke.”
“Why are you telling me all this?” Wonbin asks.
Minjeong ignores him. Her nails tap at the ceramic mug in a rhythm that grinds at the sutures in his skull. They’re so neat too, not unlike his own, but they only dig up the ache for him to ruin his nails between his canines and incisors. “And I believed him, you know? That he wasn’t a fan. That he didn’t really care in any way that was significant. We’d go to your shows and he’d never seem to know a single lyric. He never ever got any of the perks of having a connection to you—no special tickets, no backstage passes, no shoutouts, nothing. One time though, I caught him staring up at you so hard, and I actually thought he was sizing you up, getting jealous that you had my attention. And I found him so so cute getting all worked up like that over nothing. You must think I’m so naive, right? But Sungchan tends to be sincere like that.”
I know, Wonbin thinks. He’d know about Sungchan’s bleeding sincerity more than anyone else. Verbally, he offers no response, and Minjeong’s expression is unreadable.
“But after I asked him about it he never went with me to any of your shows again, though he still bought tickets for my friends and I.” Minjeong’s gaze is piercing, and Wonbin chooses to flick his own down to the cooling mug in his hands.
“I still don’t get why you’re telling me all this.” Wonbin mumbles.
“You don’t?” Minjeong’s eyes flash. Wonbin decides that Sungchan was wrong, that they’re nothing alike. “I thought your pen game implied that you were capable of reading between the lines. Unless that’s another thing that’s fake about you.”
And that’s what cracks the material insulating his nerves. What would Minjeong know about him at all, to have the right to classify aspects of himself as real or fake?
Perhaps ticking him off was one of her intentions from the beginning, as her presence opposite him begins to pick him apart. She sets her mug down on the nightstand, behind both her and Sungchan’s perfume bottles. “I had a hunch, I really didn’t want to believe it, but here you are in the flesh and in his bed, comfortably, like you own the place.”
Again, Wonbin wants to know what makes her so sure. To himself, his entanglement with Sungchan is something all too real and palpable and breathing, but after getting over the initial shock of getting caught, he’s aware enough of what he looks like right now from a camera’s point of view. It’s the least reprehensible position he’s been in, in this room, since he broke up the first time with Sungchan; he’s fully clothed in everything but his outdoor coat and shoes, strewn onto the seat by the vanity — he could easily pass for an acquaintance crashing over. But he can’t bring himself to lie, to vocally kill the flame he’d laboured so hard to keep alive between him and Sungchan, even when Sungchan was at the peak of denying it all.
But he can’t give the truth either. Not willingly. His ugly heart wouldn’t even be doing it out of a sense of morality his conscience beckons on him to embrace again, or out of guilt and justice for a girl who deserves none of the shit he and Sungchan give her. Wonbin would only hold back the truth for the sake of how it’ll affect Sungchan, and consequently, whether Sungchan would forgive him.
And that’s it really, Wonbin thinks his resilience stems from the knowledge that absolutely nothing can break him or bog him down besides Sungchan’s feelings for him and their placement on the positivity-negativity spectrum. In most ways it makes Wonbin invincible, but in smaller, more damning ways, it makes Wonbin incredibly, frighteningly, fragile. Such is the fate of one whose world is their Achilles heel.
So Wonbin, who doesn’t want to lie, yet cannot tell the explicit truth, replies weakly, “Well, I used to live here.”
Minjeong scoffs, finally ditching her poker face. “Why do you still have the keys?”
Wonbin doesn’t answer. He never quite came up with that answer, and he’s been haunted by the same question for over a year now.
Minjeong laughs derisively, and Wonbin’s blood freezes and clots over. “I thought I was drained from work and all the kids there but, things would… move. Things that Sungchan never otherwise touches.”
“Sometimes I get tired and end up here. Like today, I just got off a long-haul flight. Sorry if I bumped into your things. I can also leave the key behind.” It all just tumbles out Wonbin’s mouth at a speed that he himself marvels at, especially without his characteristic stutter that only ever manifests when he’s stressed and has to speak without thinking, courtesy of Giselle’s pre-debut training drills. She’d cry if she heard him now, if her tears aren’t already wasted on the absolute fuckfest he’d managed to drill himself into first.
“How often do you get tired and end up here?” Minjeong begins snidely. She harbours no sympathy for a girl that was supposed to be his fan. But former fans make the worst anti-fans, he remembers Giselle had warned him about it years ago. Back then, he’d thought it’d never hurt him even if they did their worst. It hurts him now. “How good are the berry condoms? I never got to taste them—they were gone from Sungchan’s drawer before I could try.”
There’s something liberating about having someone peel off the bandaid. The panic sitting heavily like a brick atop his heart sublimates and dissipates in the air, leaving behind the gunk and dregs of all the feelings he’s left to accumulate inside him. That he can deal with. That is his baseline. Misery is a longtime companion.
“You never believed him,” Wonbin says simply, calmly meeting Minjeong’s punitive gaze. Because he can be unfair, or cruel like that. Because it feels good to recognise the liar in her, to find the blip of bad hiding under all her overflowing good. To know he isn’t the only one who isn’t perfect. To know that Sungchan could never find someone perfect, so no one could well and truly replace Wonbin’s position.
Minjeong wears her frustration like camera makeup; she doesn’t look used to the expression that mars her dainty features and cracks across her face in the natural light. “It’s not that I didn’t trust him, I just know how dumb he can be. He’s too kind for his own good, his big heart is his weakness and I knew someone would try to take advantage of that. That’s why I littered his room with more and more things, and filled the vanity every time I visited just to give a hint!” Her voice wobbles, and she glares at Wonbin.
Wonbin at least has the decency to feel bad. I got the hint.
“But you didn’t get the hint.” Minjeong swallows thickly before continuing. “We were going to get a dog. He was going to name her princess. We talked about the future, and about nearer futures, like a summer vacation. We were thinking idyllic streets with colourfully painted houses all attached in a row, artsy plazas with historical landmarks, a pier and a river to dip our feet in. We were going to send postcards to all our friends, buy trinkets to stick on the refrigerator. We were looking up tickets just last night. He was supposed to put in a request today for annual leave. I even—I even dreamed of him proposing to me, of me saying yes because he’s the man I want to marry.” She laughs mirthlessly, tears forming and falling like pearls down the crests of her cheeks. She doesn’t make to wipe them away, and Wonbin focuses shamefully on his lap. “I could make him happier than anyone, let alone a guy with no personality besides looking perpetually haunted by a cloud of darkness, a guy who cannot for the life of him form any meaningful connections with any other human being, a guy who looks down on everyone from his high stage, a guy who has nothing to offer besides dick or hole or both.”
Every word is sharpened to kill him repeatedly, but it isn’t her insults that maim him. Wonbin imagines himself in Minjeong’s picture-perfect plans with Sungchan, runs a simulation where it’s him with Sungchan instead. Wouldn’t Sungchan breathe life into the sights Wonbin has seen already? But Sungchan is never going to break up with Minjeong, and Wonbin doesn’t have the right to tell him to do so.
He feels a little bad for Minjeong, but she will never have it as bad as he does. She’ll find other people who will love her just the same and even more. Wonbin only has Sungchan. Her Sungchan is textbook, his Sungchan is the bible. She loves him for the cookie-cutter perfect gentleman she thinks he is, he loves him in spite of the fact that he is not. She and Sungchan are never going to make it; not today, and not in the future, but Wonbin should take fault for the way she comes to this realisation. Yet it’s difficult to be genuine about it, when his heart is currently mired in the eye of a miasmic whirlwind because really, “You’ve barely been together for a couple of months.”
“To people like you it may not be much.” Her tone is castigating. “I’ve heard of your famous flings. You may not believe it but time can be such a precious and valuable and meaningful thing. Our ‘couple of months’ to you stretched out for a long time to me.”
Wonbin grits his teeth, thoroughly irked. What the hell does she know? Did she not realise that through the couple of months she’s spent with Sungchan, Sungchan has spent the same time with him? How dare she compare this labyrinthine thing he shares with Sungchan to a hypothetical fling? His brief stint with Hwiseo had been for Sungchan too—another meandering route in their daedalic maze of a relationship. He’d listened to Minjeong harp on about her precious months with Sungchan, would she ever be able to comprehend the years he’s spent with Sungchan and dare to draw a comparison again? Wonbin lost Sungchan, sure, but Minjeong never even had him.
He’s dating you as a placeholder for me, he wants to say to her. He wants to watch her face contort with rage, wants to dole out some of the hurt from his reservoir and see it reflected in eyes that are not his own. She’s supposed to be just like him right? Let her hurt like him too then. Wonbin’s heart thunders heavily behind his chest, pulsing with a rhythm that tells him he should be sorry. The conditioned area of his brain nudges him to unclench his jaw, lower his head and apologise. But his heart and brain have long since given up controlling him. He worships only one god that controls him, and his worship is not orchestrated by heart or mind; it is simply a primal instinct.
Minjeong looks repulsed by his visual and silent defiance. “I loathe you.”
“At least we’re on the same page there,” Wonbin replies with ease.
“I wanted to spill that hot coffee all over you, but I just lectured my kids at school on fighting and how to handle anger, so I won’t be a hypocrite and do something so uncouth. I won’t stoop down to your level.” Minjeong spits resentfully. “I even made the coffee especially bitter but you didn’t even drink it. You dodged it now, but I hope karma hits you and hits you good. Right where it hurts the most.”
Maybe this is what he’s sorry for. Wonbin is sorry to disappoint her, because he’s grown accustomed to the visceral hell trapped in his body and the permanent ache that lives in his bones, and the scorching pain that radiates across the entire map of his skin, so much so he’s not sure he’d even tell when karma hits.
Or perhaps the entire story of it all, as he knows it, has been karma hitting him all along.
THE REAL WONBIN IS SUCH A SHITTY GUY [DUMP]
[IMG]
*Trending star WONBIN in a bed alleged to belong to an unidentified partner*
The original article of the same title was posted on this forum last night but deleted this morning. The article consisted of just the title and a leaked photo with no following explanation. Whoever took the photo must’ve been really close to Wonbin to get such a clear shot of him sleeping, and the person is speculated to be a sexual partner likely upset with him and releasing something somewhat comparable to revenge porn. But since Wonbin’s body isn’t shown, the attention is being drawn to Wonbin’s character as he has been embroiled in multiple dating rumours in the past year, and netizens are beginning to discover patterns that suggest that he may really be a “shitty guy”. Sympathies are swayed in favour of the person that leaked the photo, but there are a few who think OP’s post and quick deletion was all part of some blackmail plan or really eager threatening from Wonbin’s agency and legal team. Wonbin’s agency has yet to release a statement.
Truly the height of foolishness for a celebrity is to piss off their own fans. Fans of Wonbin have pieced together that the leaked photo is not Wonbin’s bed or room. They haven’t recognised the background from any photos he’s shared. His childhood bed was featured on the cover of his 2022 single ‘Meet me at mine’ [image below], and the recent GRWM he filmed for Vogue was set in what should be his current bedroom. Fan sleuthing goes as far as to analyse aspects of the photo to deduce that he wouldn’t own such sheets or such a bed with his status, aesthetic and income. His fans are scary!
But why does this make him a shitty guy? I’d argue that it isn’t so much the idea that he’s sleeping around again but the idea that he’s being a dick about it too and hurting people. I think last night’s post was what set off the avalanche that was already building up. The thread below contains some of the more popular comments as netizens try to build a timeline of Wonbin’s questionable behaviour and call out some other patterns…
WONBIN LATELY [TOPIC]
- Why are people surprised that he turned out to be a narcissistic egotistical heartbreaking whore? Isn’t it what it says on the tin? All of you worshipped him like god immediately when he looks exactly like the type to behave this way.. Have you not even watched any of his interview interactions? He’d talk about things like clearly not even wanting to be there and the interviewers would be blushing like fools it truly felt like i was watching mass brainwashing
- It’s like everyone collectively forgot his attitude controversy and the trouble he brought to the staff when he wasn’t even that big yet. If he can act like that as a fledgling celebrity imagine how he acts now that he’s everywhere! Even worse, if he can act like that publicly on a set with staff that have no ties to his agency then imagine how he behaves behind close doors in his private life. I wish leaker OP wasn’t silenced and can tell us what happened
- Thinking about it, his relationships are so messy. It seems like he’s careless at managing them. Wasn’t he dating yizhuo only for the hwiseo rumours to come out a few months later? Poor Yizhuo might’ve even found out from the same rumours
- He never confirmed the yizhuo rumours though
- Hwiseo’s agency confirmed the rumours immediately, so he had no choice
- He absolutely had the choice. I think he only confirmed because hwiseo had dirt on him
- He moved on from hwiseo pretty quick too iirc, she and her influencer friends was making a fuss about him but no one tuned in LOL
- It kinda is crazy to think that there could be so many other women he’s whizzing through and potentially hurting but we never know. His one slip up being dating a crazy girl. Also it feels so icky since yizhuo aside it feels like he goes for people lower in status than him, maybe some power play? Like look at OP’s room, and his last public relationship
- His real personality slipped out when he dumped and left hwiseo alone at the peak of her hate train that he basically brought to her with his fanbase, hate that he allowed to happen without saying a word when he could’ve. I’m not saying that hwiseo isn’t a weirdo but he obviously didn’t gaf about the person he was supposed to be in a romantic relationship with, and it’s unfair what happened to her. I really don’t think Wonbin is capable of loving anyone. So this is an eye opener to those who idolise and fantasise over him. Either you only care about the music or you leave, because music is all he has to offer.
- Apparently he was a delinquent before debuting. He was registered in uni but was never once seen. How does one go to a uni like that and not a single person has any anecdote on him?
- Either he skipped all classes → delinquency, or he was terrible and he/his agency paid people off to stay quiet about it → delinquency LOL what a guy
- Skipping ALL his classes isn’t funny at all because there were people who worked so hard and failed to get a spot in that uni only for him to waste it
- Even his song lyrics self-report that he’s a bastard. I thought he was singing about a bastard but he’s singing about himself
- I’ll never listen to no-good guy the same way anymore
- Bastard in love*** LOL but maybe all these flings of his are just experiments to fuel his songwriting? Geniuses are always weird that way and ngl it works… everything about him might be shit but his music never is
- Notice how he doesn’t have a single friend besides shotaro, and shotaro is a saint that is friends with everyone so it’s more like charity.
- But shotaro was seen hanging out with wonbin at tour stops, he was even seen out with wonbin in london. That’s rather dedicated for “charity”
- That’s cos shotaro is a paid actor
- Yup that’s deffo PR at play, wonbin’s team is ridiculously good at it with the things he gets away with. Besides, shotaro also exposed his unfriendliness in that viral clip, i have no idea how everyone fawned over it instead of noticing the obvious red flag. If anything that clip was a cry for help. Wonbin does NOT like him.
It’s weird that it hurts him this time.
The words get to him in a way they haven’t before, burrowing into the gaps between the bony prominences of his spine and paralysing him with an uneasiness that keeps him locked in place on the corner wedge of his sectional sofa. Wonbin doesn’t need to check his silenced notifications to know that he’s missed a bunch of calls from Giselle and Shotaro; he’d ditched his phone in the shell of his room and picked at the threads of his cardigan for the past two hours, wishing for the paralysis to affect his thoughts too.
He’d seen the articles by total accident a couple of hours ago; A rare buzz drawing his attention to a recommended tweet for his inactive account graced his lock screen, and he’d clicked as soon as he’d read his name on the caption of an article linked by one of those entertainment blogs. It was somewhat of a nervous tic, his thumb bouncing reflexively after a few nights of waiting for Sungchan to indicate his awareness that Wonbin had fucked things up.
Wonbin supposes Sungchan’s radio silence is enough of an indication. They haven’t spoken since the night before he’d decided to make the mistake that would ruin both their lives. Sungchan could hate him, or think he’s spiteful enough to have been intentional about it. Is he still with Minjeong? Wonbin wishes Sungchan was here with him instead, to hold his hand and calm the jittering, to wrap a reliable palm around his bony wrist and stop him from pulling apart his cardigan just to keep his fingers out of his mouth.
Weren’t they supposed to be in hell together?
But Wonbin is learning that his mental machinations don’t translate well in reality as he stumbles before each roadblock he’d set up himself. He doesn’t actually want Sungchan to feel what he does, he discerns. It’d only be self-sabotage.
Maybe it was for the best to finally commit to the pain that is determined to cling to him for the rest of his life. Too little too late perhaps, but Wonbin knows Sungchan, and Sungchan will bounce back, unfettered by Wonbin and his unwieldy capital F feelings. It was uncharacteristic of himself to try so hard for a relationship that would never be perfect anyway.
But he really fucking wanted them to work.
Wonbin must be Tantalus, and Sungchan his eternal punishment. What had Wonbin ever done to be deserving of love anyway?
Ignoring the ache in the knuckles of his flexing fingers, Wonbin fixates on the unraveling threads of red, rotting and retiring into the creases of his couch with listless abandon.
It’s weird that empty resignation hurts him more.
Wonbin isn’t entirely sure what day it is. With the curtains persistently drawn, his phone on exile, and the absence of a wall or alarm clock he assumes is normal for houses that are ‘lived in’, there’s no authentic way to tell the time either. Not that it bothers Wonbin, who’s taken up simply existing and drifting in and out of sleep on his sofa.
He’d ventured into his room once, days or hours or weeks ago, and he’d been assaulted by a violent loneliness deterring him from ever stepping foot in it again. He’s going to have to psych himself into doing it soon though—he doesn’t need time nor date to tell that his shirt needs changing. But with no one to see him, was there really any point in risking the journey to his closet? It’s not like his nose-wrinkling attire could bother anyone besides himself, and he wasn’t bothered. Maybe. Wonbin lets his seclusion and sedentary behaviour dull his senses; indulging in the art of emptying himself purges him somewhat of pestilent thought and it’s enough to get by on.
Better than caving to consternation about what the rest of the world is doing in his wake, how quickly his societal cavity is being filled and chewed down again so it’s like he never existed, his career prospects and if they survived the crash, if all the people that ever cared about him condemn him now, cranky emails filling up his inbox unread, cross voicemails waiting to carve a crater out of his ear—if Wonbin doesn’t tread with caution he’ll trade his vacuum of not-bothered calm for the disquiet that cracks the metronome and conducts an erratic rate and rhythm for his heart, and breaks a panicked sweat across his skin.
Wonbin would much rather stick to engaging cruise control. A state of being yet not-being. Schrödinger’s man.
Giselle shows up at his door, and the first thing he realises is that his estimate of the current time was far off. He’s probably been observing vampire hours for days or weeks. Maybe not weeks—Giselle hasn’t updated her hairstyle since the last time they were together. Giselle appraises his appearance with a similar scrutiny, albeit a saddened one, and Wonbin belatedly remembers he hadn’t thought to do something about his shirt before answering the door.
She glances around the living room and at the den he’d built on the couch, and suddenly the space is a lot more cluttered and untidy than it had been before he’d let her in. The mild embarrassment further seals his tongue; she’s never seen him anything short of pristine, and he’s aware of the dumpster fire he’d left her to deal with and he’s kept her in the dark about Sungchan and he dealt with it all by giving her the cold shoulder. She may have clashed with him at times in the past but she’s always undoubtedly wanted to help, whether altruistically or not. This is why he doesn’t deserve good things.
Wonbin takes a shallow breath, the percussion of his heartbeat pounding too loudly in his ears. There’s an ache building up behind his eyes too, and the cold sweat only makes him hyper aware of how gross and useless he feels. His throat itches and now he kind of wants to cry, but his lips are glued shut and he doesn’t want to let the horrors out—not now while Giselle is here, not here where it’s the safest place in his apartment. He needs to empty himself; it’s easier to pretend he hasn’t been stripped at the seams when there’s no one there to witness and point it out, to hold the mirror to his face.
He slides back into the perfectly moulded vacancy he left between his comforter, shredded cardigan and the ugly throw cushion on the couch, observing Giselle’s subdued expression one last time before turning his face into the backrest. He remains like that and doesn’t say a word, counting up the seconds of the duration of Giselle just doing her best. After about forty minutes of her trying to say anything at all to get him to talk—and then later, to fill up the silence—she gives up and goes about cleaning up without so much as a complaint under her breath.
Wonbin is oddly reminded of what his mother used to be like, and it’s even more odd considering she’s barely got more than a year on him, and he doesn’t think she’s ever been familial in nature to him like that. Initial clouds of grey shame give way to a warm sky of reassuring comfort; her puttering noises, the vacuum cleaner, they give chase to the encroaching loneliness that seeped through the gap underneath his bedroom door and swaddle him in memories of when life was far more simplistic.
He doesn't register when his eyelids grow heavy, or that he sleeps at all, until Giselle’s voice jolts him out of it.
“I left lunch in the microwave, and there’s more in the fridge. You only need to heat it up.” She explains. “Where’d you toss your phone?”
“My room,” Wonbin mumbles hoarsely, facing up towards her. “Thanks Gigi, I mean it.”
Giselle’s eyes mist over and the moment is probably a little awkward for the both of them. She disappears and reappears just as quickly with his phone, throwing it gently where his feet lie buried beneath the folds of his comforter. “Keep an eye on my messages at least, promise me that. You’re not alone, we’ll try our best together.”
When he’s scaled the mountain of getting himself to the kitchen and settled back into his cushions with his spoils of war balanced carefully on his lap, Wonbin braces himself to unlock his phone. Fortunately, the most recent notification is from Giselle, who apparently sent him a voice note ten minutes ago.
GISELLE [17:23]
▶︎ •၊၊||၊|။||||။၊|• 0:53
“Wonbin… I’m sorry. I didn’t do a good job, but I know how to fix things—I’ll do my best to fix things. Don’t worry about the press, I promise you I can and will handle it. The team—we’ve all got your back. I’m not going to ask you what happened, at least not until you want to tell me—scratch that, I might have to ask you a little bit, like if you are being blackmailed but my point is: Remember that it’s your talent that brought me to you in the first place, and it’s the same talent that you’ve been polishing that brought your fans to you. People actually like listening to you, that’s why you’ve gotten this far in spite of all the bumps along the way, coupled with you not having the easiest personality to deal with. This isn’t a jab at your character; your uniqueness can be refreshing—”
▶︎ •၊၊||၊|။||||။၊|• 0:27
“You’ve worked so hard and sacrificed so much to pursue your music, to communicate through your own sound. Even if it’s challenging to have faith in anything or anyone, even if it feels like everything is crumbling around you, hold onto music like it’s your lifeline. You’re fucking brilliant at it, and it has never failed you. Gossip will come and go, but music stays always.”
▶︎ •၊၊||၊|။||||။၊|• 0:15
“Fuck everything I’ve ever said to you and go fucking express yourself. You’re overflowing with so much you’ve been struggling to bear alone, so much so you’ve become a creature of thought rather than a creature with thoughts. Write a hell of an album and let it all out. Let it fall like heavy rain.”
It turns out that Wonbin hasn’t been outside in just under two weeks. Doing nothing is nice enough, but after a while the thoughts start to ricochet off the walls and collide with his scalp, and he hasn’t been able to write yet or hum or pick up his guitar. The view of his living room ceiling is getting suffocating; Wonbin longs for a patch of grass to lie on, with a puddle of sunlight to soak in, and to simply look up at the sky as the ending credits roll up for winter and usher in spring.
Gingerly, he draws back the curtains lining his largest window for the first time this March.
It’s raining.
Wonbin sits cross-legged in front of the window until his back cries out, peering at the movement of traffic and pedestrians, and at the shards of rainfall slicing through the air and making oceans out of dips in concrete. He hates it and yet, the sight is peculiarly captivating—hypnotising—and Wonbin doesn’t conceptualise that he’s been sitting and staring for roughly eight hours until the intercom buzzes and he blinks and the sky has taken on a darker hue.
Two minutes later and Wonbin stands face to face with the guy he has struggled the most not to think about.
Sungchan is heartbreaking and heartbreakingly beautiful, soft eyes framed by hair lengthened in the rain, carrying with him the damp scent of petrichor and dripping at his doorstep. Looking like a figment of Wonbin’s imagination.
“It’s a rainy day,” He says.
Wonbin stares at him blankly, unamused. He glances down to where raindrops trickle off Sungchan’s windbreaker onto the welcome rug and wrinkles his nose in distaste.
“You still don’t like the rain.” Sungchan tries again, smiling awkwardly when Wonbin looks back up at him.
Wonbin eyes him suspiciously. “I never have, and I never will.”
And Sungchan smiles at that too, winningly. “I know.” Like it’s an achievement. “Am I still the only one that knows this about you?”
It’s the first time Wonbin has opened the door to Sungchan in over eight hundred days, they’ve broken up three times since then, and Wonbin is pretty sure he’s tanked Sungchan’s grandiose plans for the future along with his own flailing career. So why is Sungchan here, at his door, smiling at him like that? Wonbin has been cooped up for so long, and he feels like he hasn’t been right for much longer, and with the tragicomedy his life is shaping up to be, he doesn’t exactly trust his mental state to not conjure up his lifeline now that he’s at the end of his rope.
Why does Sungchan look at him so affectionately, like he’s the ghost of Sungchan past—an apparition to remind him of the good times? Why does he act so normal when things couldn’t be further from it? Why does Sungchan look like that, when Wonbin looks the worst he’s ever been since they met way back and watched each other grow through puberty?
Wonbin thinks of touching him and never letting him go. Wonbin thinks of slamming the door in his face. He’s not sure what he’ll do if he reaches out and his fingers slip through.
He inhales, taking in the notes of wood and musk that emanate from beneath all that petrichor, glaringly and undeniably his Sungchan, and he inches towards him hesitantly till his nose is a hair’s length away from the zipper of Sungchan’s windbreaker. Tears fill Wonbin’s eyes in an instant as he jabs a finger into Sungchan’s chest. “You fucking idiot.” He jabs him harder and Sungchan has to take a step back. “You insufferable ignorant dumbfuck. I’ve always been the one who comes. Why are you here?”
Tightly coiled knots around Wonbin’s sternum come undone as he cries, and Sungchan waits a beat before setting down one of his bags and wrapping his free hand around Wonbin’s finger, pulling it down till both their hands hang at their sides. “This time, I am the one who comes.”
Wonbin isn’t sure whether it’s the exhaustion, but Sungchan’s words rip an immature giggle out of him. “Comes. Yeah.” Like a fountain, a vague memory tugs at his lip. It’s—
“Not funny.” Sungchan says firmly. “I’m being serious here,” he insists, but Wonbin catches his shoulders shaking, and there’s a look in his eye that has Wonbin trembling, and then Sungchan laughs and Wonbin dissolves swiftly in suit, and Sungchan looks like a dream and suddenly Wonbin’s tears come falling again. Sungchan’s eyes cloud over, like he’s on the verge of breaking too. He brings a thumb to Wonbin’s cheek and his voice cracks as he whispers, “You’re so beautiful.”
It snaps Wonbin out of his daze, strange and uncalled for and out of place. He backs away, tearing his eyes to Sungchan’s feet, noticing he brought with him a drink carrier holding two familiarly branded paper cups. Sungchan’s kindness is confounding, and his air of nostalgia disorienting, and Wonbin still isn’t quite convinced his vision isn’t a hallucination. But Sungchan’s touch was real enough.
“Please,” Sungchan asks weakly, picking up the shopping bag he’d dropped moments ago. “Can I come in?”
“Nice place,” Sungchan nods appreciatively, dwarving the furniture as he settles into the unclaimed part of the sofa.
“No it’s not,” Wonbin retorts quickly, but he agrees as he drinks in the quietly fizzing excitement that Sungchan bolsters his living space with by simply being there. It’s… different, good different—Sungchan brings life to Wonbin’s design, retires the stifling shadows and makes Wonbin see his confines in a new light.
But Wonbin is also reminded again that this is Sungchan’s first time here, and Wonbin moved in during the August of 2023. Sungchan had never requested his address either, so Wonbin is unaware of how Sungchan got to know of it to end up here right now. The thought is sobering.
“Shouldn’t you be begging your girlfriend to take you back?” He asks morosely, dropping himself into a desolate armchair. “She doesn’t know how… deep… our thing was.” He looks pointedly away from Sungchan’s general direction and mumbles, “You could still convince her.”
“Wonbin…” Sungchan begins measuredly. “Minjeong and I aren't together anymore.”
Wonbin jerks his face back towards Sungchan. “I figured, which is why I’m saying you could still—”
“Wonbin,” Sungchan interrupts. “I don’t want to get back with her. And she doesn’t deserve any more lies anyway.”
Something akin to shame, and then something else cotton pink, blooms delicately along Wonbin’s neck. “Sorry.” He furrows his brow. “Wait—sorry—I’m confused.”
“We had a pretty long conversation,” Sungchan muses, maintaining Wonbin’s gaze. “She’s kinder than you’d think.”
“Right. So?”
“So I went away and did a lot of thinking.” Sungchan shifts forward. “It’s really so stupid—stupidly obvious—but I think I’ve been lost for a long time. I’ve never really been this lost in my life, so I didn’t know how to deal with it. It’s like my brain is a library, filled with shelves and shelves of books, and the one book that could guide me forward was just one of thousands, and I didn’t know how to find it amongst the maze of shelves and rows of books. But there’s nothing difficult to find when you know where to look; it’s taken me this long to figure out where to look. I’m sorry Wonbin, but I’m about to talk for a while.”
Wonbin would be the last to complain; it’s what he’d been seeking every time he’d hijacked Sungchan’s doorstep. He nods at Sungchan’s solid determination, hoping the wobble of his lip isn’t as noticeable as it feels. I’m not going anywhere.
“I’ve been filled with so much guilt that I didn’t know what to do with, and since I’m a one track mind kind of guy I just started to fall apart on all of it and all the feelings. It all built up so insidiously; I was used to having you always there, always mine, and then it felt like you were taken from me. Then you were on stage, shining so brightly like I knew you would, and there were people besotted by you in the crowd all around me, chanting for a scrap of your attention. And I knew you would be loved, because it’s all I’ve ever known of you. There were more people to see you in the way I do, and it was incredible. But it also meant that there was less of you for me to see, and it soured the delight. The last time I saw one of your shows, you were at your most glorious, and I realised just how far away the stage is.” Sungchan’s voice trails off, almost uncertainly. “When the people around me need cameras to zoom in on you who blazes front and centre as the protagonist, how could I ever hope for you to see me?”
“Sungchan…” But Wonbin doesn’t know what to say. He hadn’t known that Sungchan attended more than just his first few gigs until Minjeong mentioned it; Sungchan’s university schedule had been punishing and Wonbin hadn’t had the heart to guilt him into prioritising him for the night shows. I’ll always be able to spot you in a crowd, he’d promised naively back then. His heart sinks. From beneath the layers of his subconscious he hears Sungchan’s words from a time ago, I was at your every show, until I wasn’t. He hadn’t kept his promise.
“It was childish of me, it felt stupid to me back then too. I didn’t want to hold you back or let my selfish feelings make you feel guilty for chasing your own dreams—I mean, they were our dreams from the start weren’t they? To go see your billboards together?” Sungchan smiles reminiscently. “I just couldn’t reconcile that your success came part and parcel with a life that would minimise our time together, or the fears that one day I wouldn’t be enough for you.”
“You oaf,” Wonbin whispers. “Why didn’t you just tell me?”
Sungchan taps his head meaningfully. “I was lost, remember? Missing book and all that. Plus it didn’t feel right for me to talk about it; you get stressed when you think it’s your fault things aren’t perfect. You were starting out, getting a feel for it all, and I absolutely was not going to jeopardise your flying start over feelings I thought would go away.”
“But they didn’t go away,” Wonbin concludes sadly.
“They didn’t.” Sungchan agrees in a matching tone. “So I dealt with it badly. And I’m sorry.”
“What changed?” Wonbin asks.
“I stumbled across a poem.” Sungchan answers simply. “One a student showed me, by Mary Oliver. It just hit me—like Newton’s apple, but it’s that mental book I was telling you about. It just made sense. I do find it rather cliche though — of course I figure it out through literature. Anyway, the bit that hit me was right at the beginning, and it goes: .”
Sungchan looks down at his hands stretched out palms up on his thighs, and he sighs. “I think I’ve been thinking too much, and I wish I just let myself love you as I wanted, even if it meant having to say the things that scared me, or admitting that my darker feelings exist. I think I’ve been trying to be so much of a good person, and not so much the right person, that my efforts got twisted and warped me into this unrecognisable monster. And I don’t want to lie and say I know how to fix it all—or if it’s even possible—but I know that I have to give Minjeong a better apology, and I owe Sohee one too since he sort of knows it all, but first I needed to see you. To tell you about everything now that I know how, to apologise for the journey it’s taken me to come to my epiphany long after you did, and I wanted to ask—” He looks directly at Wonbin, “will you let me see you even when it doesn’t rain?”
“I’m sorry,” Wonbin murmurs breathlessly, running his arms down Sungchan’s back. He snorts as Sungchan tenses up at the apology. “I was an asshole too.”
“Yeah you can tell me all about it later,” Sungchan yawns tiredly. His head nuzzles deeper into the crook of Wonbin’s neck, and Wonbin gasps quietly when his hair brushes against the underside of his jaw.
“I thought you wanted us to talk more,”
Sungchan yawns again right into Wonbin’s neck and Wonbin—ticklish with affection—pokes him in retaliation.
“We can talk more later, over the cake I brought,” Sungchan amends, poking Wonbin lightly back.
“Cake?” Come to think of it, Giselle had deposited a cake the size of a mini lunchbox in his fridge during her visit. He hasn’t eaten it yet. Prodding Sungchan’s sleeping form again, he repeats his question.
“Hm?” Sungchan grunts. “Your birthday. Did you forget?”
Wonbin beams, suddenly filled with child-like happiness, awake and caffeinated with a blissful liberation—“You remembered?” It’s not exactly what he wants to say; Sungchan sent him a customary Happy Birthday last year, and he’d only skipped on it the year before because they were days into being exes and figuring out what that meant for them. But Wonbin is giddy right now, because Sungchan is here in his arms, and Sungchan is his again in a way that truly matters, and Wonbin’s birthday doesn’t really matter to him—not so much as the man who has chosen to celebrate it with him. Wonbin wraps his arms around Sungchan’s back and squeezes tightly in contentment.
“Wonbin please,” Sungchan begs to Wonbin’s delight. He’s real! He’s here! “Can we please go to sleep?”
“You love me.” Wonbin declares, mercifully easing his hold a little.
“And I promise I’ll still love you in the morning,” Sungchan presses a sleepy kiss to Wonbin’s sensitive neck. “So sleep already.”
When Wonbin shuts his eyes, the darkness isn’t a scary or suffocating one, it doesn’t skulk or slither, neither does it sneak nor slip dreadful thoughts into his ears. It drapes across him gently, like a blanket made of velvet.
The rain clears up. Sungchan falls into Wonbin’s bed and still loves him in the morning. It’s a new routine.