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fic: the air you breathe is full of ghosts
I am so entertained with myself for writing this when I ship Hyunsoo/Yerim SO HARD. And yet this is really Hyunsoo/Jihyuk if it's anything at all. Oh, self. And this is not the SUFBB fic I told y'all I was working on--that one might pop up later.
Title: the air you breathe is full of ghosts
Fandom: Shut Up! Flower Boy Band
Characters/Pairing: Hyunsoo-centric, Jihyuk, Byunghee, Yerim, Dasom (little sister), Hyunsoo/Jihyuk (of sorts), Hyunsoo/Yerim (of sorts), mostly just Hyunsoo/Angst
Rating: PG-13 for language and angst
Canon: Vaguely AU, in that Hyunsoo’s estrangement with the other guys lasts longer than it does on the show
A/N: This fierce little boy with his fierce pride, and his fierce, proud anger, and his fierce, proud love for his friends…he gives me a lot of feelings. Over 4,000 words worth of feelings, apparently. And he's not even my favorite!
Summary: When Hyunsoo first started teaching himself to play the guitar, his fingers bled.
Hyunsoo hates Byunghee.
Scratch that.
Hyunsoo loves Byunghee.
No.
Try again.
Hyunsoo has never understood Byunghee.
Getting closer.
Hyunsoo tries not to think about Byunghee.
(Hyunsoo fails).
--
When he sits on the park bench that night and tells his sister his pathetic little story, he isn’t telling it to her, because of course she can’t understand. She doesn’t understand a lot of things: why there’s this pain that won’t stop, why Omma and Appa are always gone, why Jihyuk-oppa doesn’t come around anymore. The world, for Dasom, is made up of things she doesn’t understand, but Dasom accepts them, because Hyunsoo tells her to, and she trusts him completely.
(Later, when he tells her that Jihyuk will come visit her if she eats and sleeps well, he isn’t lying. He would never lie to her. He and Jihyuk might not be speaking at the moment, and his feelings for Jihyuk might be a matted tangle of things he couldn’t sort out even if he had the courage to try, but he will go to Jihyuk, and he will humble himself and ask him to visit his sister, and Jihyuk will agree, and he’ll do it in such a way as to not hurt Hyunsoo’s pride—off-handed, gruff, a shrug of agreement. And they may go back to not speaking again afterwards, but for that moment, when they sit in the hospital room with a little girl who is all hope and pain, they’ll both smile and mean it. The one thing that Hyunsoo will never, ever do is give his little sister reason to distrust him.)
He doesn’t speak the words for her; he speaks them for himself, and even while he’s doing it (they slide out slimy and acidic) he hates himself for it.
(Just because things are true doesn’t mean they need to be said.)
--
Hyunsoo is grateful to Byunghee.
Hyunsoo blames Byunghee for everything.
--
It’s been three weeks (four days and seventeen hours) since he last talked to Jihyuk. That shouldn’t really matter—it’s not like they were the kind to chat on the phone or anything (the idea of Jihyuk chatting makes Hyunsoo smile, and there’s hardly any bitterness in the expression at all. The noona doing his makeup squeals over him). They actually really didn’t talk that much at all even when they were together, when Hyunsoo thinks about it. It’s not like he’s missing that much, not seeing Jihyuk.
That knowledge should make him feel better.
(It really, really doesn’t.)
--
“You don’t actually have to do this,” Yerim says, but he knows she doesn’t mean it, because he knows that she knows that he doesn’t have any other choice (there’s a little girl in a hospital room by the Han River. Yerim, it turns out, has two little brothers, and he doesn’t need to explain to her). “It’s a terrible life, and it’s only worth it if you really love performing more than anything. You don’t have to do it. You could go back to school tomorrow and just be yourself.”
She’s pretty when she lies (she’s pretty when she tells him what he needs to hear).
(Just because something’s not true doesn’t mean that sometimes someone doesn’t need to hear it.)
--
It’s really quiet in the dorm by himself. But Hyunsoo is used to that.
--
“You’ve already figured out what you are and aren’t willing to do to get what you want,” Yerim says. “What’s harder is figuring out what it is that you do want.”
(He pretends to ignore her, rolling his eyes, but he thinks about it later. Tossing in bed—he doesn’t sleep much these days. And he goes over and over the question in his head the way he goes over and over the same notes on his guitar: his fingers bleed and then calluses form and he keeps going. But the only thing he knows that he wants—absolutely knows, no uncertainty whatsoever—is that he wants his sister to be happy and healthy.)
--
When Hyunsoo first started teaching himself to play the guitar, his fingers bled. (Jihyuk’s didn’t.)
His parents had been cautious about his newfound interest in music. They encouraged him, because they encouraged him in everything he did. But their eyes said, “Don’t get too invested. Don’t expect too much. Don’t be disappointed if it doesn’t work out the way you want it to.” (That’s the lesson they wanted to teach him, he knows. But it’s the one he’s never been able to learn, no matter how hard he tries.)
Hyunsoo ignored that look in their eyes and thought instead about the way Jihyuk had readily agreed when Byunghee had announced that Jihyuk needed to learn to play the guitar so that they could be in a band.
(Jihyuk picked it up so easily. Hyunsoo practiced until his fingers bled.)
--
When he can’t sleep, he goes to a practice room in the middle of the night and plays a borrowed guitar until his eyes are gritty and his fingers are sore.
(But they don’t bleed. Not anymore. There are calluses there now, but Hyunsoo doesn’t use the hand lotion Yerim gave him, even if he doesn’t throw it away either.)
--
Hyunsoo resents Byunghee.
Hyunsoo misses Byunghee.
--
Hyunsoo always liked bright and shiny things. (It’s because he went to the cabaret since he was little.)
No, that’s not quite right. Hyunsoo was always fascinated by, drawn to, enthralled by bright and shiny things. And he always hated that about himself, because that was the cabaret world, and the cabaret world didn’t have anything to do with the real world (the skinned knees he got playing soccer in the streets, the rough edge of Jihyuk’s triumphant laughter when they beat yet another neighborhood gang, the darkness of the house when he got home at night and his parents weren’t there). He tries to fight it, but he isn’t strong enough (nothing in the world is so beautiful as the gleam of Jihyuk’s teeth when he smiles.)
(Hyunsoo always liked bright and shiny things. Jihyuk never did.)
--
Just because someone’s good at something doesn’t mean they enjoy it.
Hyunsoo is very, very good at being an idol. He knows what to say and when to say it and what expression to wear while he does. He knows how to exude honesty without revealing anything at all.
(Hyunsoo’s parents are cabaret singers. They wear gaudy colors and too many rhinestones—any rhinestones are too many—and the lighting that gilds them on stage is ugly and the music that wraps itself around them is tinny, and they’re the most honest people Hyunsoo’s ever met. They go on stage, and they mean every single note of every single song. Maybe that’s why they’re not successful—a cabaret isn’t a place for honesty. It’s a place for glitz and camp and too many rhinestones.)
There’s a satisfaction that comes with a successful interview. And if that satisfaction is edged in bitterness, well, what isn’t?
( Just because someone’s good at something doesn’t mean they enjoy it. But it doesn’t mean that they don’t, either.)
--
(Hyunsoo doesn’t make it through a single interview or photoshoot or appearance on a variety show without, at least once, remembering the contempt in Jihyuk’s voice when he talked about “slapping on a fake smile and act.” He starts popping antacids before every appearance.)
--
Byunghee thought Hyunsoo’s parents were great. He would go and sit cross-legged on top of a table at the cabaret while they practiced, a big weird grin on his face. At first, Hyunsoo thought Byunghee was mocking them (he’d never wanted to hurt someone so badly in his life). It took him some time to figure out that Byunghee was maybe the only person in the whole world who appreciated Hyunsoo’s parents’ performance.
(Like Hyunsoo needed more proof that Byunghee was insane.)
--
They used to say that Hyunsoo could freeze someone with his glare. He knows, because he always listened to whispers. (He always cared about them. Jihyuk didn’t, and Hyunsoo’s always hated him a little bit for that, for being able to not-listen, to not-care.)
He learned how to use that glare pretty early on, when older boys made fun of his parents and his too-pretty face. Contempt is a potent weapon. (Some of them backed down when he glared that glare. It just enflamed others, but Jihyuk was there and then Doil and Byunghee and Kyungjong and Hajin, and they were all really, really good at kicking ass. Hyunsoo can’t remember a fight they ever lost, not really.)
But it slides out sometimes when he doesn’t mean it to, a flick like a switchblade and it’s on his face. He apologizes earnestly to the girl who asked him about “that boy who hugged you on the video,” but he knows his anti-site just got one more member.
--
(Hyunsoo knows: when Eye Candy played, for Jihyuk Byunghee was the only other one on stage.)
--
It comes at the last time Hyunsoo expects it.
It’s just another interview, plastic-faced host asking the same plastic questions on a plastic stage, but Hyunsoo’s almost enjoying it, finding it relaxing to think about these little things instead of everything else that’s cycloning in his head.
And then the plastic-faced host says that she heard something about a friend of his dying and that was why he and his friends did the battle of the bands and that must have been very hard for him—how is he dealing with that?
Everything goes white. (Not red; not black; Lee Hyunsoo is made of ice, or at least that’s what people say.) There are too many emotions and not enough concrete thoughts, and when he finally latches onto one, it’s the most ridiculous one of all: Hajin must have been talking to a reporter, running his mouth again about things that no one should ever talk about, and if he was here, Hyunsoo would kill him.
The delay is only a few seconds, but a few seconds can kill on television. They tick by, and Hyunsoo swallows thickly and is about to open his mouth and snarl that it’s none of anyone’s fucking business, but Yerim is beside him.
“Don’t you think that’s a bit of a personal question?” Her voice is light, tinged with amusement, but he can see her eyes and they’re fierce in a way he’s never seen before. “Especially when we’re here to talk about a love song? You’re ruining the mood, you know.”
It’s enough; Hyunsoo gets himself under control, the subject changes smoothly, and Hyunsoo doesn’t do anything that would get him chewed out by Director Yoo later. (He doesn’t do anything that would endanger his contract, anything that would lose him the money he’s going to make that will buy Dasom every surgery she’ll ever need.) It takes only a few seconds, and a few seconds can win hearts on television.
(Yerim saved him. Again.
He loves her for it.
He hates her for it.)
There’s some buzz about it on the internet later, the question Hyunsoo didn’t answer. He knows without actually seeing or hearing about it. People are predictable. Hyunsoo doesn’t think about it anymore.
(That’s a lie. He watches the interview over and over, watches his own face go tight at the question, so tight that he almost doesn’t even look human, and he wonders what Jihyuk thought when he saw it. If he was even watching it at all. He probably wasn’t.)
--
Hyunsoo once wished that Byunhee would just—disappear. Not anything so violent as death or anything like that. Just that he…wouldn’t be there anymore so things could go back to the way they were before him.
Hyunsoo thinks about that a lot now.
--
Mourning happens at strange times and in strange ways.
Byunghee was always weird and a little scary and mostly just…completely different than anyone else Hyunsoo has ever known. At first, he’d been so sure that Jihyuk’s fascination with Byunghee was just a passing thing. Hyunsoo could understand where it came from, but it wouldn’t last; sooner or later Byunghee’s weirdness would get a little too weird and Jihyuk would drift out of his orbit.
(It didn’t work like that. Life never does.)
Byunghee and Hyunsoo never spent much time just the two of them. Jihyuk was almost always there, and on the rare occasions when Hyunsoo got to the pool hall before Jihyuk, Doil was there (Doil has a presence about him—even when he’s totally silent, you can’t quite forget about him completely. He makes everything…easier, somehow. He eases the way). When Byunghee and Hyunsoo did talk, they talked about the band and about fighting and about Shil Ba. Occasionally which girl Byunghee was chasing. But nothing else. They were friends because of Jihyuk and then because of the band, and Hyunsoo was always very aware of that. (He was never very sure of whether Byunghee knew it, because he was never very sure of how Byunghee’s mind worked. He probably didn’t even notice things like that.)
But Byunghee made him laugh sometimes, and the trouble he got the band into was usually the fun kind (Hyunsoo’s always suspected that there was some not-as-fun kinds of trouble that Byunghee got into when he was alone, but Hyunsoo has to give him this: Byunghee was always very careful not to let that touch the band. Not to let that touch his friends). He made life more interesting, gave it an edge that it didn’t have when he wasn’t around. And his dreams were what the whole band fed on.
(And nobody could make Jihyuk smile like Byunghee. Hyunsoo knows he’s never made Jihyuk smile like that. He knows, because he’s tried.)
Sometimes he finds himself sitting in an interview listening patiently to a question he’s heard one hundred and forty-seven times before, and he wonders how Byunghee would answer it. (Fire burns around the edges of his eyes, but Hyunsoo’s makeup never smudges.) He’s walking past the practice rooms at the company and a door opens and he hears someone singing—just a few notes of a rock song, but Byunghee could have sung it so much better. (He finds that his face stretches in differently ways depending on whether his smile is forced or not. The real smiles actually hurt more.) Kyungjong cried that food could still taste good when Byunghee was gone, but Hyunsoo doesn’t cry. (Not anymore. Not since that night in his bedroom, and that maybe wasn’t about Byunghee at all.)
(He thinks of Jihyuk in his rooftop apartment, and suddenly has the fierce wish that that damn muse girl is sitting where Byunghee used to sit, because at least then Jihyuk won’t be alone.)
--
Byunghee was Hyungoo’s rival.
Byunghee was Hyunsoo’s friend.
--
“You should call him. I know he misses you,” Yerim says.
“What do you know? You don’t know anything about him.”
She just smiles at his growl, like she finds it cute (sometimes he hates her so, so much, but every time she offers to go, he finds a way to invite her to stay without ever having to ask. Sometimes he thinks she’s the only person in the world who looks at him and sees him).
“No. But I know you. And he misses you.”
He isn’t sure what that means, so he scowls at her, and she drops it.
(She’s actually good at knowing when to let things go. She lets him pretend that she doesn’t know that he pulls out his phone a thousand times a day and scrolls through the numbers till he gets to that one. She lets him pretend, and sometimes he loves her so, so much.)
--
Hyunsoo likes to sing.
He’d never tell her (he doesn’t need to tell her: she knows, in that way that she somehow knows everything important without him ever having to tell her), but the times when he’s singing with Yerim—recording in the studio, performing on TV—are the only times he relaxes these days.
When he was a little boy, he sang with his parents when they were at home (cooking, cleaning, playing, studying—his parents made everything into a song), and his voice was clear in the way that only a little boy’s can be, and he was happy (the lights were on and there was someone else in the room, and he was happy).
He’s not lying when he tells Director Yoo that he’s never been ashamed of his parents. He isn’t, and he never has been, but he resents the world they live in (the world that treats them as cheap as lycra and rhinestones), and all the songs he knew were cabaret songs, and as soon as he got old enough to realize that, he stopped singing, and he doesn’t start again till that day in the studio with Yerim.
But he likes it just as much now as he did when he was a little boy, and the songs are new songs that aren’t worn out by thousands of repetitions in grimy dance halls, and when he sings them he doesn’t hate himself (much).
They make him practice hours and hours a day, and there are stylists and tutors to teach him how to be charming and so many, many interviews and still trying to keep up with his studies, and he’s pretty sure he’s forgotten how to breathe.
“You’re lucky. If you were anyone else, they’d have made you apprentice for years—four, seven. But you went viral and the company is desperate for some male talent, and you get to skip most of it,” Yerim says, and he knows she’s right. (He thinks of what it would be like to grow up in a dorm instead of in his dark apartment, a place where there would always be someone watching, watching too closely, and he’s thankful to Byunghee for helping him skip that part).
He doesn’t like vocal lessons, all the practicing, but he’s done things he doesn’t like before, and he knows how to work hard, and he can hear himself getting better, and there’s some (bitter-edged) satisfaction in that.
(Hyunsoo likes to sing, and if he was still in Eye Candy, he would never have figured that out.)
--
(Hyunsoo hates his own weakness: always standing just out of Jihyuk’s line of sight, begginging silently: lookatmelookatmelookatmelookatmelookatme.
But Jihyuk is always looking at somethingone else.)
--
Hajin calls him, and he ignores it. Kyungjong sends ridiculous texts and he smiles a little bit. The only person he ever sees who feels like a person and not a plastic idol crafted to make the company money is Yerim, and the irony of that isn’t lost on him.
(He doesn’t even feel like a real person himself most of the time.)
--
Once upon a time, Jihyuk and Hyunsoo were inseparable, and they were going to be soccer stars one day, together. They ruled their neighborhood (well, the parts of it that mattered, anyway) and they were an unstoppable team.
(It isn’t till years later that it occurs to Hyunsoo that maybe the reason they spent so much time together was because they were the only ones who didn’t have someone to go home to, and that both of them put off and put off going home so they wouldn’t have to face the dark alone.)
Jihyuk was tough without being loud or aggressive, and Hyunsoo liked that. He was tall and skinny and didn’t talk very much, but he played soccer like a dokkaebi , and he was loyal in ways that small boys couldn’t articulate but that spoke to something in Hyunsoo.
(Jihyuk was the most constant presence in Hyunsoo’s life. He saw more of Jihyuk than he did of his parents.)
Then they grew up, and there was Byunghee, and one day Jihyuk didn’t come out to play soccer.
(Hyunsoo sometimes wishes that he could remember the last time they played together, but of course he didn’t notice at the time because why would he think it would be the last time?)
Then they grew up, and there was Dasom, and Hyunsoo had looked into those unfocused baby eyes in that scrunched up little face, and he swore that he would never, ever let her come home to a dark house.
(Jihyuk loves Dasom, but he doesn’t understand; he’s an only child, and only children are like a whole different species. Byunghee was an only child, too.)
Then they grew up, and it felt like Jihyuk was pulling further and further away (Hyunsoo didn’t let himself think like that, of course, but that’s the way it felt), and then there was the band. And there was Doil and Kyungjong and Hajin and even Woo Kyung, and there were reasons to be together, all the time, and Eye Candy ruled Dong Nae High School.
(If he could be honest with himself, he’d be able to admit that Eye Candy was as much of a way of holding onto Jihyuk as it was anything else. But there are some truths he can’t face, not even inside himself.).
--
(Hyunsoo thinks he remembers a time when he was Jihyuk’s best friend, when he could be pretty sure Jihyuk liked him as much as he liked Jihyuk. But that was a long time ago and the memory is faded, and he can’t be—quite—sure that it was ever really real at all.)
--
Hyunsoo is staring out the window in the dressing room, waiting for the director to call him in to film his next CF (some brand of cell phone? He didn’t really pay attention; he just hopes they don’t ask him to dance). His makeup is done (makeup: this is his life now) and the coordi noonas are bustling around behind him doing who knows what, but he doesn’t even hear them.
Down in the quiet street below, a group of boys in t-shirts and ripped jeans are playing soccer. The ball is old—probably inherited from someone’s hyung—and scuffed up so that the black sections are more a browny-grey. Hyunsoo can’t hear them through the thick glass, but he can tell from their faces that they’re loud in their play: shouting encouragement and insults, crowing with laughter and victory, groaning at missed goals.
Hyunsoo stares out the window until one of the coordi noonas rushes him out of the room and out into the harsh-edged white lights of the studio.
--
Byunghee is the worst thing that could have ever happened to Hyunsoo’s life.
Byunghee is the best thing that could have ever happened to Hyunsoo’s life.
--
The truth comes out, because if there’s anything that’s true about the world, it’s that there’s no such thing as a secret (Yerim says it takes most idol trainees a lot longer to learn that; he’s ahead of the curve. He laughs, and it’s only the slightest bit bitter).
--
“You two aren’t so different,” Yerim says (and when did he tell her everything? And why is she still here? And why does he both resent her presence and feel this scary, endless gratefulness for it?). She takes his hand in hers (she’s always doing that) and runs her fingertips over the scar there (she has this fascination with his scar that he will never understand, like she thinks it’s the key to understanding everything about him). “You’d both do anything for your friends. You both have done everything for your friends.”
He looks at his scar and thinks of the blood he didn’t notice, the pain he didn’t feel (he thinks of the way Jihyuk’s hair smelled—cheap, off-brand shampoo scent—and the rough, cheap fabric against his cheek and the bite of the edge of Jihyuk’s guitar being pushed into his stomach as Jihyuk pulled him closer). He thinks of Jihyuk (the one who tore up the contract and threw the pieces of it into Director Yoo’s face, the one who told the reporters flat-out that he had a girlfriend when he easily could have lied or deflected) on his knees in front of Yoo Seunghoon. He probably had that same look on his face when he told Director Yoo that he would do anything if the company kept Hyunsoo. That look makes Hyunsoo want to throw up. (It makes him want to punch Jihyuk in the face. It makes him want to wrap his arms around him and never let him go.)
Hyunsoo feels like he hasn’t done so much for his friends.
--
He knocks, remembering a time when he didn’t have to, and then he goes inside, and Jihyuk is sitting on his bed and then Hyunsoo is sitting beside him and they’re telling their truths (or as close to them as Hyunsoo will ever get: he’ll never have the courage to go all the way, but he thinks he might have the strength to live with all the things he’ll never say) and laughing and Hyunsoo is still an idol and Jihyuk is still the guy who helped destroy Eye Candy, but they’re also two boys who wanted to be soccer stars and then rock stars and who went home in the dark.
--
And weeks or months later, they’re playing on a stage in Rock Kim’s grungy club (so very, very different from the cabaret, but somehow exactly the same) and Doil is there, too, and Kyungjong and Hajin and Byunghee isn’t, but for the first time that hurts in the right way instead of the wrong one.
(That night, Hyunsoo plays till his fingers bleed, and he doesn’t even feel it.)
--
Byunghee is gone, but Hyunsoo is still here.
Title: the air you breathe is full of ghosts
Fandom: Shut Up! Flower Boy Band
Characters/Pairing: Hyunsoo-centric, Jihyuk, Byunghee, Yerim, Dasom (little sister), Hyunsoo/Jihyuk (of sorts), Hyunsoo/Yerim (of sorts), mostly just Hyunsoo/Angst
Rating: PG-13 for language and angst
Canon: Vaguely AU, in that Hyunsoo’s estrangement with the other guys lasts longer than it does on the show
A/N: This fierce little boy with his fierce pride, and his fierce, proud anger, and his fierce, proud love for his friends…he gives me a lot of feelings. Over 4,000 words worth of feelings, apparently. And he's not even my favorite!
Summary: When Hyunsoo first started teaching himself to play the guitar, his fingers bled.
Hyunsoo hates Byunghee.
Scratch that.
Hyunsoo loves Byunghee.
No.
Try again.
Hyunsoo has never understood Byunghee.
Getting closer.
Hyunsoo tries not to think about Byunghee.
(Hyunsoo fails).
--
When he sits on the park bench that night and tells his sister his pathetic little story, he isn’t telling it to her, because of course she can’t understand. She doesn’t understand a lot of things: why there’s this pain that won’t stop, why Omma and Appa are always gone, why Jihyuk-oppa doesn’t come around anymore. The world, for Dasom, is made up of things she doesn’t understand, but Dasom accepts them, because Hyunsoo tells her to, and she trusts him completely.
(Later, when he tells her that Jihyuk will come visit her if she eats and sleeps well, he isn’t lying. He would never lie to her. He and Jihyuk might not be speaking at the moment, and his feelings for Jihyuk might be a matted tangle of things he couldn’t sort out even if he had the courage to try, but he will go to Jihyuk, and he will humble himself and ask him to visit his sister, and Jihyuk will agree, and he’ll do it in such a way as to not hurt Hyunsoo’s pride—off-handed, gruff, a shrug of agreement. And they may go back to not speaking again afterwards, but for that moment, when they sit in the hospital room with a little girl who is all hope and pain, they’ll both smile and mean it. The one thing that Hyunsoo will never, ever do is give his little sister reason to distrust him.)
He doesn’t speak the words for her; he speaks them for himself, and even while he’s doing it (they slide out slimy and acidic) he hates himself for it.
(Just because things are true doesn’t mean they need to be said.)
--
Hyunsoo is grateful to Byunghee.
Hyunsoo blames Byunghee for everything.
--
It’s been three weeks (four days and seventeen hours) since he last talked to Jihyuk. That shouldn’t really matter—it’s not like they were the kind to chat on the phone or anything (the idea of Jihyuk chatting makes Hyunsoo smile, and there’s hardly any bitterness in the expression at all. The noona doing his makeup squeals over him). They actually really didn’t talk that much at all even when they were together, when Hyunsoo thinks about it. It’s not like he’s missing that much, not seeing Jihyuk.
That knowledge should make him feel better.
(It really, really doesn’t.)
--
“You don’t actually have to do this,” Yerim says, but he knows she doesn’t mean it, because he knows that she knows that he doesn’t have any other choice (there’s a little girl in a hospital room by the Han River. Yerim, it turns out, has two little brothers, and he doesn’t need to explain to her). “It’s a terrible life, and it’s only worth it if you really love performing more than anything. You don’t have to do it. You could go back to school tomorrow and just be yourself.”
She’s pretty when she lies (she’s pretty when she tells him what he needs to hear).
(Just because something’s not true doesn’t mean that sometimes someone doesn’t need to hear it.)
--
It’s really quiet in the dorm by himself. But Hyunsoo is used to that.
--
“You’ve already figured out what you are and aren’t willing to do to get what you want,” Yerim says. “What’s harder is figuring out what it is that you do want.”
(He pretends to ignore her, rolling his eyes, but he thinks about it later. Tossing in bed—he doesn’t sleep much these days. And he goes over and over the question in his head the way he goes over and over the same notes on his guitar: his fingers bleed and then calluses form and he keeps going. But the only thing he knows that he wants—absolutely knows, no uncertainty whatsoever—is that he wants his sister to be happy and healthy.)
--
When Hyunsoo first started teaching himself to play the guitar, his fingers bled. (Jihyuk’s didn’t.)
His parents had been cautious about his newfound interest in music. They encouraged him, because they encouraged him in everything he did. But their eyes said, “Don’t get too invested. Don’t expect too much. Don’t be disappointed if it doesn’t work out the way you want it to.” (That’s the lesson they wanted to teach him, he knows. But it’s the one he’s never been able to learn, no matter how hard he tries.)
Hyunsoo ignored that look in their eyes and thought instead about the way Jihyuk had readily agreed when Byunghee had announced that Jihyuk needed to learn to play the guitar so that they could be in a band.
(Jihyuk picked it up so easily. Hyunsoo practiced until his fingers bled.)
--
When he can’t sleep, he goes to a practice room in the middle of the night and plays a borrowed guitar until his eyes are gritty and his fingers are sore.
(But they don’t bleed. Not anymore. There are calluses there now, but Hyunsoo doesn’t use the hand lotion Yerim gave him, even if he doesn’t throw it away either.)
--
Hyunsoo resents Byunghee.
Hyunsoo misses Byunghee.
--
Hyunsoo always liked bright and shiny things. (It’s because he went to the cabaret since he was little.)
No, that’s not quite right. Hyunsoo was always fascinated by, drawn to, enthralled by bright and shiny things. And he always hated that about himself, because that was the cabaret world, and the cabaret world didn’t have anything to do with the real world (the skinned knees he got playing soccer in the streets, the rough edge of Jihyuk’s triumphant laughter when they beat yet another neighborhood gang, the darkness of the house when he got home at night and his parents weren’t there). He tries to fight it, but he isn’t strong enough (nothing in the world is so beautiful as the gleam of Jihyuk’s teeth when he smiles.)
(Hyunsoo always liked bright and shiny things. Jihyuk never did.)
--
Just because someone’s good at something doesn’t mean they enjoy it.
Hyunsoo is very, very good at being an idol. He knows what to say and when to say it and what expression to wear while he does. He knows how to exude honesty without revealing anything at all.
(Hyunsoo’s parents are cabaret singers. They wear gaudy colors and too many rhinestones—any rhinestones are too many—and the lighting that gilds them on stage is ugly and the music that wraps itself around them is tinny, and they’re the most honest people Hyunsoo’s ever met. They go on stage, and they mean every single note of every single song. Maybe that’s why they’re not successful—a cabaret isn’t a place for honesty. It’s a place for glitz and camp and too many rhinestones.)
There’s a satisfaction that comes with a successful interview. And if that satisfaction is edged in bitterness, well, what isn’t?
( Just because someone’s good at something doesn’t mean they enjoy it. But it doesn’t mean that they don’t, either.)
--
(Hyunsoo doesn’t make it through a single interview or photoshoot or appearance on a variety show without, at least once, remembering the contempt in Jihyuk’s voice when he talked about “slapping on a fake smile and act.” He starts popping antacids before every appearance.)
--
Byunghee thought Hyunsoo’s parents were great. He would go and sit cross-legged on top of a table at the cabaret while they practiced, a big weird grin on his face. At first, Hyunsoo thought Byunghee was mocking them (he’d never wanted to hurt someone so badly in his life). It took him some time to figure out that Byunghee was maybe the only person in the whole world who appreciated Hyunsoo’s parents’ performance.
(Like Hyunsoo needed more proof that Byunghee was insane.)
--
They used to say that Hyunsoo could freeze someone with his glare. He knows, because he always listened to whispers. (He always cared about them. Jihyuk didn’t, and Hyunsoo’s always hated him a little bit for that, for being able to not-listen, to not-care.)
He learned how to use that glare pretty early on, when older boys made fun of his parents and his too-pretty face. Contempt is a potent weapon. (Some of them backed down when he glared that glare. It just enflamed others, but Jihyuk was there and then Doil and Byunghee and Kyungjong and Hajin, and they were all really, really good at kicking ass. Hyunsoo can’t remember a fight they ever lost, not really.)
But it slides out sometimes when he doesn’t mean it to, a flick like a switchblade and it’s on his face. He apologizes earnestly to the girl who asked him about “that boy who hugged you on the video,” but he knows his anti-site just got one more member.
--
(Hyunsoo knows: when Eye Candy played, for Jihyuk Byunghee was the only other one on stage.)
--
It comes at the last time Hyunsoo expects it.
It’s just another interview, plastic-faced host asking the same plastic questions on a plastic stage, but Hyunsoo’s almost enjoying it, finding it relaxing to think about these little things instead of everything else that’s cycloning in his head.
And then the plastic-faced host says that she heard something about a friend of his dying and that was why he and his friends did the battle of the bands and that must have been very hard for him—how is he dealing with that?
Everything goes white. (Not red; not black; Lee Hyunsoo is made of ice, or at least that’s what people say.) There are too many emotions and not enough concrete thoughts, and when he finally latches onto one, it’s the most ridiculous one of all: Hajin must have been talking to a reporter, running his mouth again about things that no one should ever talk about, and if he was here, Hyunsoo would kill him.
The delay is only a few seconds, but a few seconds can kill on television. They tick by, and Hyunsoo swallows thickly and is about to open his mouth and snarl that it’s none of anyone’s fucking business, but Yerim is beside him.
“Don’t you think that’s a bit of a personal question?” Her voice is light, tinged with amusement, but he can see her eyes and they’re fierce in a way he’s never seen before. “Especially when we’re here to talk about a love song? You’re ruining the mood, you know.”
It’s enough; Hyunsoo gets himself under control, the subject changes smoothly, and Hyunsoo doesn’t do anything that would get him chewed out by Director Yoo later. (He doesn’t do anything that would endanger his contract, anything that would lose him the money he’s going to make that will buy Dasom every surgery she’ll ever need.) It takes only a few seconds, and a few seconds can win hearts on television.
(Yerim saved him. Again.
He loves her for it.
He hates her for it.)
There’s some buzz about it on the internet later, the question Hyunsoo didn’t answer. He knows without actually seeing or hearing about it. People are predictable. Hyunsoo doesn’t think about it anymore.
(That’s a lie. He watches the interview over and over, watches his own face go tight at the question, so tight that he almost doesn’t even look human, and he wonders what Jihyuk thought when he saw it. If he was even watching it at all. He probably wasn’t.)
--
Hyunsoo once wished that Byunhee would just—disappear. Not anything so violent as death or anything like that. Just that he…wouldn’t be there anymore so things could go back to the way they were before him.
Hyunsoo thinks about that a lot now.
--
Mourning happens at strange times and in strange ways.
Byunghee was always weird and a little scary and mostly just…completely different than anyone else Hyunsoo has ever known. At first, he’d been so sure that Jihyuk’s fascination with Byunghee was just a passing thing. Hyunsoo could understand where it came from, but it wouldn’t last; sooner or later Byunghee’s weirdness would get a little too weird and Jihyuk would drift out of his orbit.
(It didn’t work like that. Life never does.)
Byunghee and Hyunsoo never spent much time just the two of them. Jihyuk was almost always there, and on the rare occasions when Hyunsoo got to the pool hall before Jihyuk, Doil was there (Doil has a presence about him—even when he’s totally silent, you can’t quite forget about him completely. He makes everything…easier, somehow. He eases the way). When Byunghee and Hyunsoo did talk, they talked about the band and about fighting and about Shil Ba. Occasionally which girl Byunghee was chasing. But nothing else. They were friends because of Jihyuk and then because of the band, and Hyunsoo was always very aware of that. (He was never very sure of whether Byunghee knew it, because he was never very sure of how Byunghee’s mind worked. He probably didn’t even notice things like that.)
But Byunghee made him laugh sometimes, and the trouble he got the band into was usually the fun kind (Hyunsoo’s always suspected that there was some not-as-fun kinds of trouble that Byunghee got into when he was alone, but Hyunsoo has to give him this: Byunghee was always very careful not to let that touch the band. Not to let that touch his friends). He made life more interesting, gave it an edge that it didn’t have when he wasn’t around. And his dreams were what the whole band fed on.
(And nobody could make Jihyuk smile like Byunghee. Hyunsoo knows he’s never made Jihyuk smile like that. He knows, because he’s tried.)
Sometimes he finds himself sitting in an interview listening patiently to a question he’s heard one hundred and forty-seven times before, and he wonders how Byunghee would answer it. (Fire burns around the edges of his eyes, but Hyunsoo’s makeup never smudges.) He’s walking past the practice rooms at the company and a door opens and he hears someone singing—just a few notes of a rock song, but Byunghee could have sung it so much better. (He finds that his face stretches in differently ways depending on whether his smile is forced or not. The real smiles actually hurt more.) Kyungjong cried that food could still taste good when Byunghee was gone, but Hyunsoo doesn’t cry. (Not anymore. Not since that night in his bedroom, and that maybe wasn’t about Byunghee at all.)
(He thinks of Jihyuk in his rooftop apartment, and suddenly has the fierce wish that that damn muse girl is sitting where Byunghee used to sit, because at least then Jihyuk won’t be alone.)
--
Byunghee was Hyungoo’s rival.
Byunghee was Hyunsoo’s friend.
--
“You should call him. I know he misses you,” Yerim says.
“What do you know? You don’t know anything about him.”
She just smiles at his growl, like she finds it cute (sometimes he hates her so, so much, but every time she offers to go, he finds a way to invite her to stay without ever having to ask. Sometimes he thinks she’s the only person in the world who looks at him and sees him).
“No. But I know you. And he misses you.”
He isn’t sure what that means, so he scowls at her, and she drops it.
(She’s actually good at knowing when to let things go. She lets him pretend that she doesn’t know that he pulls out his phone a thousand times a day and scrolls through the numbers till he gets to that one. She lets him pretend, and sometimes he loves her so, so much.)
--
Hyunsoo likes to sing.
He’d never tell her (he doesn’t need to tell her: she knows, in that way that she somehow knows everything important without him ever having to tell her), but the times when he’s singing with Yerim—recording in the studio, performing on TV—are the only times he relaxes these days.
When he was a little boy, he sang with his parents when they were at home (cooking, cleaning, playing, studying—his parents made everything into a song), and his voice was clear in the way that only a little boy’s can be, and he was happy (the lights were on and there was someone else in the room, and he was happy).
He’s not lying when he tells Director Yoo that he’s never been ashamed of his parents. He isn’t, and he never has been, but he resents the world they live in (the world that treats them as cheap as lycra and rhinestones), and all the songs he knew were cabaret songs, and as soon as he got old enough to realize that, he stopped singing, and he doesn’t start again till that day in the studio with Yerim.
But he likes it just as much now as he did when he was a little boy, and the songs are new songs that aren’t worn out by thousands of repetitions in grimy dance halls, and when he sings them he doesn’t hate himself (much).
They make him practice hours and hours a day, and there are stylists and tutors to teach him how to be charming and so many, many interviews and still trying to keep up with his studies, and he’s pretty sure he’s forgotten how to breathe.
“You’re lucky. If you were anyone else, they’d have made you apprentice for years—four, seven. But you went viral and the company is desperate for some male talent, and you get to skip most of it,” Yerim says, and he knows she’s right. (He thinks of what it would be like to grow up in a dorm instead of in his dark apartment, a place where there would always be someone watching, watching too closely, and he’s thankful to Byunghee for helping him skip that part).
He doesn’t like vocal lessons, all the practicing, but he’s done things he doesn’t like before, and he knows how to work hard, and he can hear himself getting better, and there’s some (bitter-edged) satisfaction in that.
(Hyunsoo likes to sing, and if he was still in Eye Candy, he would never have figured that out.)
--
(Hyunsoo hates his own weakness: always standing just out of Jihyuk’s line of sight, begginging silently: lookatmelookatmelookatmelookatmelookatme.
But Jihyuk is always looking at some
--
Hajin calls him, and he ignores it. Kyungjong sends ridiculous texts and he smiles a little bit. The only person he ever sees who feels like a person and not a plastic idol crafted to make the company money is Yerim, and the irony of that isn’t lost on him.
(He doesn’t even feel like a real person himself most of the time.)
--
Once upon a time, Jihyuk and Hyunsoo were inseparable, and they were going to be soccer stars one day, together. They ruled their neighborhood (well, the parts of it that mattered, anyway) and they were an unstoppable team.
(It isn’t till years later that it occurs to Hyunsoo that maybe the reason they spent so much time together was because they were the only ones who didn’t have someone to go home to, and that both of them put off and put off going home so they wouldn’t have to face the dark alone.)
Jihyuk was tough without being loud or aggressive, and Hyunsoo liked that. He was tall and skinny and didn’t talk very much, but he played soccer like a dokkaebi , and he was loyal in ways that small boys couldn’t articulate but that spoke to something in Hyunsoo.
(Jihyuk was the most constant presence in Hyunsoo’s life. He saw more of Jihyuk than he did of his parents.)
Then they grew up, and there was Byunghee, and one day Jihyuk didn’t come out to play soccer.
(Hyunsoo sometimes wishes that he could remember the last time they played together, but of course he didn’t notice at the time because why would he think it would be the last time?)
Then they grew up, and there was Dasom, and Hyunsoo had looked into those unfocused baby eyes in that scrunched up little face, and he swore that he would never, ever let her come home to a dark house.
(Jihyuk loves Dasom, but he doesn’t understand; he’s an only child, and only children are like a whole different species. Byunghee was an only child, too.)
Then they grew up, and it felt like Jihyuk was pulling further and further away (Hyunsoo didn’t let himself think like that, of course, but that’s the way it felt), and then there was the band. And there was Doil and Kyungjong and Hajin and even Woo Kyung, and there were reasons to be together, all the time, and Eye Candy ruled Dong Nae High School.
(If he could be honest with himself, he’d be able to admit that Eye Candy was as much of a way of holding onto Jihyuk as it was anything else. But there are some truths he can’t face, not even inside himself.).
--
(Hyunsoo thinks he remembers a time when he was Jihyuk’s best friend, when he could be pretty sure Jihyuk liked him as much as he liked Jihyuk. But that was a long time ago and the memory is faded, and he can’t be—quite—sure that it was ever really real at all.)
--
Hyunsoo is staring out the window in the dressing room, waiting for the director to call him in to film his next CF (some brand of cell phone? He didn’t really pay attention; he just hopes they don’t ask him to dance). His makeup is done (makeup: this is his life now) and the coordi noonas are bustling around behind him doing who knows what, but he doesn’t even hear them.
Down in the quiet street below, a group of boys in t-shirts and ripped jeans are playing soccer. The ball is old—probably inherited from someone’s hyung—and scuffed up so that the black sections are more a browny-grey. Hyunsoo can’t hear them through the thick glass, but he can tell from their faces that they’re loud in their play: shouting encouragement and insults, crowing with laughter and victory, groaning at missed goals.
Hyunsoo stares out the window until one of the coordi noonas rushes him out of the room and out into the harsh-edged white lights of the studio.
--
Byunghee is the worst thing that could have ever happened to Hyunsoo’s life.
Byunghee is the best thing that could have ever happened to Hyunsoo’s life.
--
The truth comes out, because if there’s anything that’s true about the world, it’s that there’s no such thing as a secret (Yerim says it takes most idol trainees a lot longer to learn that; he’s ahead of the curve. He laughs, and it’s only the slightest bit bitter).
--
“You two aren’t so different,” Yerim says (and when did he tell her everything? And why is she still here? And why does he both resent her presence and feel this scary, endless gratefulness for it?). She takes his hand in hers (she’s always doing that) and runs her fingertips over the scar there (she has this fascination with his scar that he will never understand, like she thinks it’s the key to understanding everything about him). “You’d both do anything for your friends. You both have done everything for your friends.”
He looks at his scar and thinks of the blood he didn’t notice, the pain he didn’t feel (he thinks of the way Jihyuk’s hair smelled—cheap, off-brand shampoo scent—and the rough, cheap fabric against his cheek and the bite of the edge of Jihyuk’s guitar being pushed into his stomach as Jihyuk pulled him closer). He thinks of Jihyuk (the one who tore up the contract and threw the pieces of it into Director Yoo’s face, the one who told the reporters flat-out that he had a girlfriend when he easily could have lied or deflected) on his knees in front of Yoo Seunghoon. He probably had that same look on his face when he told Director Yoo that he would do anything if the company kept Hyunsoo. That look makes Hyunsoo want to throw up. (It makes him want to punch Jihyuk in the face. It makes him want to wrap his arms around him and never let him go.)
Hyunsoo feels like he hasn’t done so much for his friends.
--
He knocks, remembering a time when he didn’t have to, and then he goes inside, and Jihyuk is sitting on his bed and then Hyunsoo is sitting beside him and they’re telling their truths (or as close to them as Hyunsoo will ever get: he’ll never have the courage to go all the way, but he thinks he might have the strength to live with all the things he’ll never say) and laughing and Hyunsoo is still an idol and Jihyuk is still the guy who helped destroy Eye Candy, but they’re also two boys who wanted to be soccer stars and then rock stars and who went home in the dark.
--
And weeks or months later, they’re playing on a stage in Rock Kim’s grungy club (so very, very different from the cabaret, but somehow exactly the same) and Doil is there, too, and Kyungjong and Hajin and Byunghee isn’t, but for the first time that hurts in the right way instead of the wrong one.
(That night, Hyunsoo plays till his fingers bleed, and he doesn’t even feel it.)
--
Byunghee is gone, but Hyunsoo is still here.