Sorry it's a bit late, hope you're all doing well ❤️
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Things had never felt more wrong for the six remaining men who could only weather the end of the storm they'd been thrown into. Renjun had left some sort of eternal scar on the complex, on the relationship. They felt his presence even now nearly two months after his departure. It hadn't been the best, if they were honest.
Mark trailed through the halls slowly and was both relieved that they were finally nearly packed and ready to go, yet listless with a piece of this place missing. They weren't talking about it, avoiding the truth like a plague as the healing process took longer than they wanted. In fact, the six of them hardly acknowledged each other for fear of starting the blame game again.
He trailed upstairs to the next level and felt a rush of nostalgia upon seeing doors with untouched paint, floors without a single scuff mark. It sent him back to when Taeyong led him down the corridor below and told him 'this is it. Your new home'. Mark's chest seized as he stared down the unused passage, wondering if from the start they could've done something differently. Was there ever a chance they could've kept him? Did he just choose a potential who was never meant to be theirs?
Before memory lane could claw him underwater and drown him in more misery he was trying to repress, he went back down and down again, to the second floor. Again, all the debris of construction was gone and everything was immaculate for the families who would soon be moving in. The prospect of leaving this chapter behind made the actor swallow harshly and lean back against a cream wall.
He extracted his phone from the pocket of his unsightly tracksuit bottoms and peered once more at the cottage in the suburbs they'd be leaving for. This motion of settle-move, settle-move, settle-move was causing his senses to numb, and he wasn't sure he could do this much longer. Any excitement he felt at the start when it was just him and Hyuck, and then Jaemin, was fading, and now the effort of finding new places to escape to was becoming a bit much. His agency assured him this one was safe and secure, and he in turn promised them that this was it. New boyfriends and the alike would halt and they would take this opportunity to lick their wounds.
"Ah, here you are," Jaemin's suspicious voice rattled the silence and soon enough, he was leaning against the wall beside Mark. "Y'know, we have half an hour before we have to go, right? The reservation is for eight?"
"Yeah, I'll get dressed," he hummed with clear distance in his eyes. "I hope...I hope this dinner works. The radio silence is killing me."
"I'm sure it will. The stages of grief are pretty rough, so I'm defying all reason and pretending this all never happened." As he tapped his chest proudly, Mark couldn't help but chuckle.
"You know denial is a stage, right? Near the start?"
"Oh...damn."
Jaemin, unlike the others, had taken about two or three weeks to scream and rage before cutting off the emotions there and deciding that Renjun shouldn't have still been able to ruin his life when he was gone. Chenle ripped into him for that stupid logic alone, but he wasn't the one walking away. Jaemin's profound logic seemed to work for him.
"It's never gotten this far before," the elder mumbled and ran his hands down his tired eyes and face. "I've never seen you guys so miserable and for once, I don't know what to do."
"You know you're allowed to grieve too, right? It may have been you who introduced him to us, and you may our fearless little leader who shies from no battles...but Mark, you love him too. We're not blind to that."
"If I melt down then there's nobody left to keep things afloat. Had I let this get to me more...we'd be on our asses looking for somewhere to live right now."
"Maybe. We'd have been the hottest homeless rich boys ever though—" Mark shoved his shoulder playfully and pushed off the wall to head upstairs again.
"I'll grieve when I have time and space to, Angel. For now, let me bottle it up. We have a dinner to talk over."
The restaurant wasn't as fancy as their usual choices. This time a rustic, plucked-from-an-eighties-movie joint housed the conversation they'd needed to have and huddled them into a booth shaped like a semi-circle. Jisung slumped down in the middle and the others filed in around him.
"Just water for now, thanks," Mark informed the waiter before he wandered off and left them to it. The actor wasn't entirely sure how to approach this sore subject, and so he checked their faces to see if anyone would meet his gaze. Alas, they seemed quite distracted by nothing. "So...boys," he cleared his throat, "let's discuss Renjun, shall we."
Chenle elicited a long and moody groan before pushing back into the leather of the booth and tilting his head, purple hair straying over his eyes. "Must he follow us everywhere?"
"That's the point," Mark assured. "This can't go on, can it? I'm not immune to the pain, you know. I understand how you're all feeling...but we've been through it before."
"Oh no, not that," Jeno shook his index finger and didn't even meet his eyes, "this is nothing like what you're about to say. 'Oh but we've had failed potentials before'," he drawled, "'we're able to rise from the ashes wiser and stronger~'. You know as well as any of us that he is different!"
"In fairness, he's right," Jisung nodded reluctantly. "He may as well have been married to us, Mark. If we wore rings, he would've had one."
"But he's gone," the oldest narrowed his gaze with a little more firmness in his tone than previously. "He's gone. Before Renjun, it was us. We survived, and we can survive again. Essentially, having him was like growing an extra arm. We became too reliant, too used to something we didn't always have...and now we're paying for our shortsightedness."
"I'd really like that extra arm back..." Donghyuck whispered darkly while staring at the table, and Mark would've come up with a response for that had the waiter not returned with a jug of water and a tray of six glasses. Once he'd set them all up, he tottered off again and silence fell once more.
They all eyed one another and seemed to shoot their sights back to nothing in particular, like they were actually seeing each other for the first time and hadn't been dating for years. This slippery slope was a dangerous patch in their relationship...for none of them had actually seen each other go through a serious break up. The tears and words they didn't mean to say and angry nothings were tearing a void...and it didn't sit well with Mark.
"Look at us!" He hissed, giving Jaemin's shoulder a light shove as he was directly beside him. "Look. Since when did someone else do this to us? Since when were we this unsteady against a storm?"
"Storm Renjun was more like a damn hurricane," Donghyuck retorted.
Mark skilfully ignored him and continued to try raising morale. "We're about to move to a new home together, okay? We're turning over a clean slate, and we're doing things differently." His breath hitched and he felt so weak in this moment. To his own lovers who couldn't even meet his gaze. "No more potentials."
"Really?" Jisung perked up, eyes finally travelling across the table to him. "This is it?"
"This is it." The actor extended his hands over the scratched, knots of the wood and Jaemin dutifully accepted the one nearest to him. Hyuck took the other from furthest away and from there they knew another promise was about to go down. As each of them linked fingers and uncomfortably sat up straighter to face this, Mark nodded with a small smile. "It's gonna be fucking terrible, I won't lie. I'm not a liar, and I never lie to you. It's going to hurt like a bitch trying to get over him. Each day will feel like someone's pushing our heads under cold water and asking us if we're okay. Can we handle it? For now...probably not. But one day, when you start to realise the cold water isn't so cold anymore, and that voice asks you if you're okay, you're going to lift you're head up and realise that, yeah, you are. Nobody was drowning you at all."
"Mark..." Jaemin sniffed, and it was then that he realised they'd all started to well up with tears. In fact, he himself blinked away a blurriness threatening to blind him and was a little surprised to find salty, traitorous streams gliding down towards his mouth.
"I know what it feels like," he admitted. "I'm the asshole, famous guy using people, remember? It's a kick to the stomach being left behind, but you move on. Life keeps tumbling onwards even when you've forgotten to follow the current and end up fighting upstream."
"I feel like someone's constantly standing on my chest," Jisung croaked and stifled a sob as Chenle took his hand from Hyuck's and wiped the youngest's tears away. "I can't breathe."
"I keep having these nightmares," Jeno added softly and released both his hands to press the heels of his palms into his eyes to halt the crying. "Like he's punishing me or something. It feels like a punishment."
"He loves us," Chenle scoffed to replace a choked sob like they all knew he wanted to. "The irony of it is that he's punishing himself. If he wants to kill himself from the inside just to fit in, then he can be my guest. It's a lot of fucking effort trying to please everyone all the time. And eventually he'll realise that deep down inside, there's a little Renjun curled up in a dark corner in a chamber of his imprisoned heart that never got to feel a thing. Little Chenle is a happier person now that he's out, and it's a shame to see Renjun deny himself."
Trying to pick something to eat felt like an ordeal from there. They did finally open up to each other and confess to all the grievances they'd been bottling up alone...and when the waiter returned, ordering food had never looked more like a comedy sketch of sobbing pretty boys and a stranger not sure whether to laugh or cry.
Their hands didn't link again that evening in the restaurant, but as they talked and reconnected and spilled their feelings onto the table for each other to see, their feet and ankles were a messy chain in the shadows.
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