[Part 2: fond memories, growing up or growing apart, and tears hidden in another universe]
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It's fascinating, almost unbelievable, how Hoyoung ended up here.
The past years have been a whirlwind of scenes, rushing past Hoyoung's eyes as if someone pressed fast forward against his clear instructions.
Being a proper adult with a job and everything does not feel like how he has imagined it to be, not in the slightest. He still doesn't know what exactly he is doing, if he's living correctly, if there is a right way to these things at all. Sometimes when he enters the company early in the morning, the swivel chair and the angle of his screen never quite the same as at home, he thinks he will never fall into place like he is supposed to. Sometimes he still forgets how awful the instant coffee on their floor tastes and that the trip down to the cafeteria is definitely worth it.
Sometimes he forgets to drink at all.
More often than not, he leaves with a headache and Minchan has to sit and watch him gulp down three quarters of a bottle like he has never even seen a drop of clear water in his life.
But sometimes, it doesn't feel as foreign anymore.
*'☆°*
It's returning early from lunch break and napping with his head on his desk in the far corner. It's waking up with a piece of the infamous blackberry candy from the cafeteria in his palm. It's smiling as he watches Kangmin rush out of the room because he's going to get scolded for the second time this week for running off to another department when his seniors are looking for him.
Kangmin working for the same company is still something Hoyoung can't wrap his head around — he didn't think he would end up working together with any of them, least with the once puppy-eyed boy who used to doze off on Dongheon's shoulder and hide from the mall security with Gyehyeon.
They don't really see each other all that much as Hoyoung would like to. The finance department doesn't have much to do with the visual design team, where Kangmin works. But it's the small gestures that make up for it. In exchange for the candy, Hoyoung regularly makes the effort to accidentally press the wrong button on the elevator just so he can ruffle Kangmin's hair.
He is taller than Hoyoung now. By two inches.
He's still a puppy, the way he beams at him with wide eyes.
*'☆°*
It's tapping away on his phone during his train rides, indulging Dongheon's endless complains about his stuck-up, conservative older colleagues at the middle school where he is teaching. I swear it's not the kids. The kids are the best part of it all, Dongheon always clarifies. It's the adults. The fucking adults, Hoyoung, please don't tell me that is my future.
I'm sorry, but we've already established that you are disconnected from the current generation. You don't even know what Loss is, Hoyoung likes to text back and snickers to himself when Dongheon aggressively floods their chat with defenses and further laments.
They meet up for wine every other week, Dongheon, Minchan and him. Well, they have their glasses of expensive wine Dongheon receives from his colleagues who don't know him enough to gift him anything else for his birthday, while Hoyoung quietly sips on apple soda. He doesn't drink. Never saw the appeal in the burning sensation and he has seen enough drunk people during high school alone to stay away from it. He's quite sure his weak stomach would throw it all up, anyway.
Admittedly, it's funny when the alcohol makes the two even more emotional and sappy as usual, so he joins them. Though sometimes, it gets a bit tear-jerking too.
Dongheon has always been a melancholic guy, but even for him, a two hour long sob about how on bad days, I wish I could run away into the past and never return means that something has been going horribly wrong. That night, Minchan held him close and didn't let go until they both fell asleep on the couch. And Hoyoung had brought Minchan's blanket and his own from their rooms, as well as all the pillows he could find to give them the necessary physical comfort in the early autumn chill.
He doesn't remember where he spent the night. It wouldn't have made a difference; the floor next to the couch was painful, and his own bed cold.
What he does remember is the warmth in Dongheon's eyes when he wordlessly poured him a glass of water in the morning and how he let Dongheon pull him into a hug that he still thinks about to this day.
Because that's the thing with physical closeness — Hoyoung used to flinch when he wasn't the one deliberately choosing to engage in it, suck in an uncomfortable breath. But he finds himself making more and more exceptions as time passes, and he thinks that Dongheon's openness with his affection is, while not the sole reason, definitely one part of this change of heart.
More than change, Hoyoung thinks, it's acceptance. Or maybe it's both, one thing fading into the other until all that's left is a warm feeling lingering in his chest like a candle has been lit in an abandoned room.
*'☆°*
It's facetiming Yongseung on the quick ten minute walk between the train station and home. Yongseung lately has been difficult to see, his days packed with classes at the Performing Arts school he diligently attends, his part-time job at the retirement home and the reliably regular visits at the coffee shop at the end of his street. He still plans out his day by the hour and gets upset when he gets thrown off his schedule. It has gotten better though; Hoyoung remembers when he used to plan by minute and basically set himself up for frustration because life never operates exactly how one wants it to.
And Yongseung has eventually managed to squeeze Hoyoung into the little spare time he has without sacrificing his careful order so Hoyoung thanks him by making the most out of it.
He talks about the practice room videos Yongseung occasionally sends, admires his body control. He mentions Minchan still stumbling over the books in his bedroom floor just to see Yongseung grin. He asks about Yeonho, who lives in the same apartment complex as Yongseung but refuses to use his phone if not to send unrelated dog memes and other silly photos into the group chat, so Hoyoung doesn't really ever know what he is doing, and chuckles at the disastrous stories Yongseung tells of the two of them being a menace to their neighborhood together.
"You're a menace to him," Gyehyeon would scoff and give Yeonho a good shove that might send him straight to the floor. Hoyoung is too glad that Yongseung is overcoming his serious people-pleasing to care.
He doesn't see him face-to-face except for fleeting seconds in front of the library. Somehow, Yongseung finds it in his week to get some reading done in the evening and when Hoyoung feels like it's been too long, he deliberately drives a little detour back from work just in hope to catch a glimpse of him. It's too much to ask of fate to have them meet at the traffic light, but it has happened before: Yongseung, leaning against the streetlamp, carrying a heavy looking book under his arm and slowly blinking in surprise before grinning at him through the window.
And as long as he knows he's possible, he'll keep trying. Yongseung has a pretty smile. Hoyoung hopes that even if everything else in his life twists and changes against his will, this stays the same.
*'☆°*
It's reacting to Yeonho's dog memes in the chat and sending back some of his own. They don't really text or call apart from that and Hoyoung guesses it's only natural that the two of them have drifted apart the most over time. They are different, from the way they look at the world to the things they like, their hobbies and all the other major minor stuff that connect people. While Hoyoung moves through life like an actor reluctantly cast into his role and has only recently started to feel truly comfortable in what he is doing, Yeonho is laughing.
He's always laughing and smiling, and he just doesn't care as long as he doesn't hurt anyone else.
There are days on which Hoyoung wishes he could be more like him. A bit more thoughtless. Maybe then he would text Yeonho first, call in sick to work to visit him instead and catch up. He doesn't even know where Yeonho works, or if he is studying instead. Yongseung always gives him descriptions so vague, it could be either.
But maybe it's alright like this. Distance and space is healthy, and when Hoyoung sees glimpses of him in Yongseung's video calls, Yeonho still beams at him with the light of a summer sky and laughs like he is drunk on sunlight and needs to let it spill out. Maybe Yeonho really doesn't care that they never properly see each other. And, well, if Yeonho doesn't care, Hoyoung will not be the one to agonize himself over a worry that is so clearly one-sided.
He knows that Dongheon, Gyehyeon and Yeonho have semi-regular game evenings where they play PC games and give each other life updates through voice call. Very rarely, Minchan joins as well. Which Dongheon is especially happy about, because he can pass the role of the worst player and bully victim down to him, as Minchan likes to whine to Hoyoung afterwards.
Whenever Hoyoung hears them shouting and cursing from behind the door of Minchan's room, he wonders if he should get up his ass and try to join them as well. He has played some games when he was young, but he's lost the energy for it since the second year of high school.
It's in times like these where he often feels like he will never get back what that hellhole has drained from him.
So he stays away. Lingers at Minchan's door, asks Dongheon and Yongseung and listens. It's easy to hear from Yeonho, and it makes up for the lack of conversation between the two of them.
Yeonho's voice booms loudest through their apartment walls, and Hoyoung never feels like he is too far away.
*'☆°*
It's meeting Gyehyeon at the bakery opposite the theater he works at, almost coincidentally. Almost, because Hoyoung doesn't remember his exact schedule and Gyehyeon doesn't bother explaining it to him, but he knows that if he lingers there on Thursdays, in the late afternoon hours shortly after work, they are bound to meet sooner or later.
Gyehyeon always squints at him and frowns when he spots him on the couch seat in the corner furthest away from the door, as if he is about to scold him for being here. But he doesn't walk out. He keeps walking, orders his piece of cake and an iced coffee and plops down next to Hoyoung, deliberately ignoring the seats on the other side of the table. Gyehyeon hates sitting opposite of someone else; something about eye contact and feeling watched and exposed.
Hoyoung doesn't care much about where he sits, so he doesn't ever comment on it. Either would hate to hear it, but he thinks that Gyehyeon is a bit like Minchan, in a way — pry and get sit with silence, try to hastily fix what has been broken and be shoved aside. And who is Hoyoung to judge? Shit happens, people suck, and sometimes scars stop hurting without ever truly healing.
More often than not, they sit in silence, scrolling through their phones and ganging up on Dongheon together in the group chat. Even if the clatter of forks against plates and the pointed sips they take from their drinks is way louder than their occasional verbal comments, Gyehyeon appreciates the company.
"You're just... someone who I can co-exist with and doesn't make me think I'd rather be somewhere else?" he once told him on the very same seat. It felt clumsy, and he didn't dare to meet his eyes until two weeks later, when it was almost his birthday and Hoyoung gave him an early present — a console game he had been looking forward to buy for at least the past two months and never came around to get his hands on it.
He'd stared at the plastic case then, for a good while, until he slowly broke out into a grin. One of the more careful kind, so subtle and soft that it almost looked out of place on his lips. A suspicious sparkle had then appeared in his eyes. But even if the Hoyoung back then didn't fully understand what he and Yeonho saw in these games, he knew that Gyehyeon especially found some sort of comfort in them, so he had searched the entire mall, and at some point, eBay for the best offer the past weekend.
The choked "you remembered the long ass name?" made it all worth it.
Gyehyeon doesn't cry. Ever. Hoyoung doesn't either. But when Gyehyeon finally looked at him again, he imagined that in another universe, they might have hugged and started sobbing in the bakery without any care.
*'☆°*
And then there's Minchan. Despite his clumsy, messy nature a constant in his life, a whirlwind with a home, a light glimmering in the rippling reflection in the river.
It's the endearingly familiar noise of his stumbling feet in their apartment.
It's his hugs that he gives out like he has an endless amount of warmth to share.
It's him reminding Hoyoung to drink and making sure he fills his cup at least halfway up. It's his luminous laughter and starry smiles. It's sitting on the kitchen counter on silent Sunday nights, while Minchan is lost in rainy thoughts, and Hoyoung stirs cheap cocoa powder from the mall into steaming hot milk and always ends up giving it to him, saying his stomach can't take the sugar at this hour.
Most of all, it's just Minchan being there and breathing. Because holy fuck, does Hoyoung's heart leap out of his chest whenever he realizes that Minchan stays despite it all.
Hoyoung doesn't cry. Instead, he whimpers and curls up and when he forgets how to breathe, the floor cracks open underneath him and then he feels himself falling through the nothingness swallowing him whole. He still doesn't quite understand how the pain from more than a decade ago still haunts him, but he lets it come and go, sweep over his mind like the tide, and lifts his head and breathes when it eventually retreats.
Feelings, he figures, are like water.
They come in waves. Flow into nooks and crannies Hoyoung didn't even know existed until it was too late. If he waits long enough, they start to leak out of every bottle and break every dam and wall in their way.
Sometimes it all freezes up until his chest feels numb and his fingers start to shake.
He's not always easy. Hoyoung knows that. He isn't easy in the way Minchan isn't easy when he goes extremely quiet and stops responding all of a sudden, a kind of not easy that is more a vicious little whisper from a bad dream than grounded in any reality. It's tempting to tell himself that he's worse — actually the worst. That anyone who has ever scoffed at the sight of him was right.
But then his eyes fall onto the filled water bottle on his desk at home. The water bottle he has placed there himself, because he has decided to take on the habit of taking at least a sip from it first thing in the morning.
That's when Hoyoung knows he can't be the terrible, weak, selfish monster his brain makes him out to be. Because he cares.
He cares for himself for the first time in what feels like eternity, and he cares for his friends more than he ever thought he could after getting bullied by his supposed close people when he was still a kid trying to make sense of the world.
And the friends he now cares for, care for him too. How crazy.
There hasn't been a day Hoyoung hasn't paused to wonder if he will ever grasp how much of a blessing this is.
As long as they are willing to stay, Hoyoung is too. And when Minchan is still by his side after each and every one of his foul days and weeks, Hoyoung will always gladly return the favor, make hot chocolate for him, and listen to his silence when nobody else will.
Perhaps this is...
Home? Forgiveness?
Love?
No. He will not say it yet. But he is certain there will be a moment in the future when he can, and until then, he'll just continue to care.
It's almost as easy as breathing now.