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The story starts like this: Renjun is sixteen years old when he debuts as an idol. He meets the six people who will change the trajectory of his life forever.
The story arcs like this: Renjun is twenty-two years old when he wakes up one day and realises he can’t breathe, because his heart has crawled up into his throat and threatens to choke him alive. It stays there for a week, a month, another two whole, stubborn years. In those two years, he falls in love, breaks his own heart, and falls out of love.
The climax is something of a non-sequitur—unrelated to the first two steps and painfully out of place—and it goes like this:
Renjun is twenty-four years old when the world ends.
The world restarts with a headache that threatens to split Renjun’s skull in half clean down the middle. Vaguely, Renjun registers a distant noise adding a dull throb to the already searing pain, but it’s gone in the next moment, leaving him to come to consciousness in blissful silence.
He blinks a few times, trying to clear the spots dancing across his vision, and as his senses seep back into his body one by one—morning breath bitterness, the hum of air conditioning, faint perfume, windows leaking slivers of morning sunlight, and a source of warmth pressed right against his side—Renjun finds himself dangling in a recollection of space-time: of stirring to another heartbeat against his back pulsing in tandem, of a night light illuminating the room in soft red, of Donghyuck already awake and holding his phone up above his face with one arm to scroll, the other one inevitably tucked under Renjun’s body.
BEEP BEEP BEEP! BEEP BEEP BEEP!
The shrill alarm rips through the air and yanks Renjun out of his thoughts right back into his headache.
In a second, the sound is turned off again, but the damage is done.
Renjun grimaces and opens his eyes all the way.
It’s warm—too warm. The air is stifling from humidity, far too hot for Seoul even during the summer. The body next to him is clammy. The mattress is too stiff. Renjun’s sleep shirt sticks to his back from sweat.
The curtains do nothing to lessen the harsh light pouring through the two-metre tall windows, the scent in the air has the acrid base note of lit incense, the AC beeps quietly with some kind of warning he can’t decipher from the distance, and when he swallows, he tastes a sorry memory of the complimentary airport lounge champagne from last night.
Airport lounge champagne from the airport.
The airport in Shanghai. Shanghai Pudong International Airport.
Shanghai.
Shanghai. Right.
Renjun squeezes his eyes shut. Shanghai.
BEEP BEEP BEEP! BEEP BEEP BEEP! BEEP BEEP—!
“Turn that shit off,” Renjun growls, voice hoarse as it scratches against his throat.
Beside him, Chenle makes a garbled noise and Renjun feels him wriggling around under the sheets, patting for his phone. Renjun glances over once the default sound stops, and with the soft click of the phone unlocking, they both hiss at the max brightness of the screen.
“Eight?” Renjun snaps, “Why the hell are we awake at eight?!”
Chenle’s voice lilts up and down the way it does when filming ticks past midnight or on particularly demanding red-eye flights. “My mom wants us to have Sunday breakfast with the family,” he explains through a yawn.
Renjun knows he’s currently in the generosity of the Zhongs, knows it’s disrespectful at best and downright offensive at worst if he bites the hands that are feeding him, but the thought of being anywhere other than sprawled comatose on top of Chenle’s shitty mattress appeals to Renjun less than jumping out of the Lotte World Tower—a thought he’s become well acquainted with in the past couple of months.
Plus, he looked the absolute worst he’s ever looked in his entire life when he met them for the first time upon arriving at the Zhong house, and he’s certain he looks worse now. He’d appreciate saving whatever face he still has left.
“Couldn’t it have waited until dinner?” he protests.
What Chenle says next is partially muffled by the pillow his head is buried in, but it’s ridiculous enough for Renjun to shoot upright.
“Other plans?” he echoes with a frown. “What other plans?"
Chenle lifts his head so just his chin rests on his pillow and mumbles, “Global Harbour, Waitan, Nánjīng Road for dinner—”
“That’s so touristy,” Renjun groans, falling back down on the bed. He winces at the impact from Chenle’s shitty mattress.
“Yeah, and you’re a tourist.”
“We landed yesterday.”
“We barely have a week here.” There’s more wriggling, then Chenle is looming over Renjun’s vision, blocking out the sun. His face is almost easier on the eyes.
Until he opens his mouth.
“Look,” he huffs, more and more awake with every second, “If you want to stay in bed and rot, be my guest, but you could’ve just done that in your own apartment back in Korea, the way you’ve been doing for months now.”
The words are pointed. Renjun swallows.
He doesn’t know what expression he’s making, but whatever it is has Chenle furrowing his eyebrows. “If you really hate it, we can call an early day and come back, get takeout, and drink to reality shows, but at least get off your ass and try it before you make your final judgement.”
The weight of his piercing stare makes it harder for Renjun to nod his head, and Chenle’s resulting smile makes his chest squeeze in pain. Smiling back is hard. Everything is a little hard nowadays. Everything is a little painful too.
“You can have my bathroom, since I know you like morning showers,” Chenle says as he clambers off the bed. The hair on the back of his head sticks out in every direction, and his basketball shorts ride up his thighs, completely unflattering. “I’ll use the master bathroom. My parents are out doing tàijí with their friends, they’ll be back to pick us up around nine. There’s extra towels under the sink. The valve controls the temperature and the weird buttons on the side control the pressure.”
He’s out the door moments later, leaving Renjun alone in his oddly warm bedroom.
Without the shroud of the night shadowing the space or the thick veil of exhaustion over Renjun’s eyes, hiding the details from view, he’s able to take the room in full.
It’s a lot smaller than he expected; it certainly doesn’t feel like the home of a musical prodigy, Huángpǔ luxury home, one-child policy second child. The overflowing shelves are packed tightly into the corners, the desk chair doesn’t even fit under the desk, and the extra space near the door is taken up by their suitcases and a stack of cardboard boxes. Hidden in corners, tiny frames on his desk, and obscured by furniture are photos of a younger Chenle, a little more dignified and cuter than the ones he’s seen floating around on the internet. The boxes cover almost all the faces of the Black on Black poster taped to the wall, leaving Ten, Jungwoo, Renjun himself, and half of Johnny’s bangs peeking out from the top.
There aren’t any dog toys hiding in each crevice, no random photos from Christmas Gayos nailed to the wall; it’s just small and a little sterile and decidedly not very Chenle.
Renjun supposes a Shanghai square metre is a bit different from a Jilin square metre. After all, even if it isn’t lived in, even if it’s a tight fit, the room is still bigger than his own by the size of a small car.
Every little aspect that reminds Renjun he’s in Shanghai leaves him off-kilter. When Chenle mentioned flying out to visit his family during the month-long break between the Singapore and Manila stops, Renjun lunged for the chance to tag along. The emptiness of his schedule, the quiet of his new apartment, the absence of the closest people in his life, it all amounted to a deep-seeded longing for familiarity again.
And if there was anything he knew, China had always, was always, and would always be familiar.
Except, Shanghai isn’t.
Shanghai is busy in a way that leaves Renjun’s skin itching, loud in a way that has his ears ringing, full in a way that makes him want to curl up into a ball on the floor.
The street signs, the food vendors, the sharp tones—it should be familiar, yet it isn’t.
It should be etched into his skin, yet it isn’t.
Pushing himself up to a sitting position makes his headache double in intensity, so Renjun shoves his fatigue down and forces himself to pad over to his suitcase. His pill box is nestled in the zipped pocket on the outside, and he shakes the first day’s contents onto his palm; the rattling of the pills already soothes the throbbing against his temples. He knocks them back and grabs Chenle’s half-finished bottle of Pocari Sweat to down them all in one go.
After taking a few seconds to breathe, Renjun exhales and rises to his feet to pull the curtains aside.
It’s another day, the sun peeking out of a clump of clouds. It’s another day, the flowers in Zhong-āyí’s garden blooming bright and beautiful.
It’s another day.
Renjun closes his eyes and lets his forehead fall against the glass.
🪷
Renjun cries at the aquarium.
The weight has been lodged in his chest all summer—all his life, if he considers the years it went unacknowledged. It’s been sitting right in the centre of his chest, pushing against his diaphragm with every breath, growing with every imperfect passing day, moulded permanently to the shape of his organs until one day he realised it took up more space than the parts of him he needed to stay alive. It stuck to him all throughout DREAM()SCAPE promotions making all of his emotions feel like ticking time bombs, it weighed him down when he filed for hiatus, it made itself home in the boxes he packed as he moved out of the dorms to his own apartment, and it pooled at his feet on the flight across the Yellow Sea.
It moves like a restless ocean, in and out in cycles, always somewhere between knee height tugging incessantly, and well over his head dragging him into the furthest depths. There’s never anywhere to dock, nowhere to swim towards, just a choice between constant treading to stay alive no matter how deeply his muscles burn or lying back and letting the water in his body keep him afloat while waiting for the inevitable wave to crash over.
Even with the meds, Renjun could tell today is a high tide day, without any hope of the sea level budging.
Breakfast was fine, Chenle’s parents were fine, the park beside the restaurant’s commercial complex was fine, but Renjun knew something inside him wasn’t. His hearing was muffled, and it made the ordinary conversation over dim sum nearly impossible to keep up with. He couldn’t see past the small pieces of pastry on his plate, could hardly look at the faces around him without being overcome by vertigo. His muddled thoughts agitated his nerves, and neither the bathroom break to splash water on his face nor the cups of tea he downed to help swallow his portions helped keep him steady.
The weight presses against his lungs from the front and centre now.
All the rooms of endless glass and water were mesmerising, yet somehow, it’s at the final stretch of the aquarium, right next to the gift shop, where Renjun’s feet come to a stop right next to the glass. He stares down at the touch pool, at all the stingrays floating towards the class of school children leaning over the glass wall, and he watches one stingray jerk back from one of the kids, and—
And Renjun feels himself jerk forward, and suddenly he’s in the touch pool, suspended in the water, staring up at distorted faces and distorted hands and a world he’s never been able to comprehend—
And he’s back at the Koo House, inside the fibre glass cage, curled in on himself and staring out at the bars surrounding him on all sides, trapping him—
“Look what I got from the gift store—"
Renjun whips around at Chenle’s voice, hastily wiping at his eyes. “Sorry,” he mutters, the word getting choked by a hiccup on its way out. He fishes out the pack of tissues from his purse and pats around his face until he can’t feel the wet streaks anymore. The stinging, however, doesn’t subside, worsened by his contacts. “I just—sorry.”
Chenle drops the arm dangling two plush keychains—a dolphin and a seal—and clears his throat. He glances around at the crowd, then tugs Renjun out of the aquarium building, towards a more secluded part of the sidewalk. “Are...are you okay?”
Renjun scowls and mutters, “I’m so fucking sick of that question.”
Chenle flinches, and for a brief, sickening moment, Renjun feels satisfaction unfurl in his chest. After months of patronising smiles and professional frowns, it feels good to see someone viscerally react to his words; it feels good to know he’s capable of garnering a reaction more than pity.
Then Chenle shakes his head, his expression muted like he’s thinking something over.
“What do you think about the Shanghai Tower?” he muses, playing with the keychains in one hand. His voice is light again, back to Zhong Chenle. “The pollution isn’t as bad today as it usually is, so you’ll be able to see most of the city from the top. It’s only a few blocks from here, so the DīDī will be dirt cheap. I guess there’s some museums too? They’ll be full of kids this time of year and I can’t lie, it’s not really my vibe, but you might like the science one—”
For some reason, that’s it.
That’s all it takes.
“Chenle, stop.” Renjun takes a shuddering breath, unable to stop the tears from falling now. “Get angry at me.”
“What the hell? No, I’m not doing that.”
“Why aren’t you angry?”
“Renjun, you’re—” Chenle lowers his voice and places an awkward hand on Renjun’s shoulder, his thumb rubbing against Renjun’s collarbone. “You’re crying, why the hell would I be angry at you?”
“I want you to get angry at me,” Renjun snaps, voice hoarse as his chest burns. “Fucking—get pissed off and raise your voice and fight, instead of standing there taking it all.”
His sharp inhale stings on the way in.
When he looks up, Chenle is staring at Renjun with a conflicted look, before he finally pinches the bridge of his nose and sighs. “You’re stubborn,” Chenle says flatly.
The bluntness startles a humourless laugh out of Renjun.
“You’re stubborn and reckless and downright impossible most days of the week,” continues Chenle, “You refuse to tell anyone when you’re hurt, you bottle everything up inside until it explodes with the blast radius the size of a small country, and you insist on picking through the wreckage by yourself. You listen and you listen, but you never talk, and you carry all the issues you’ve ever listened in on because you think it’s more important than the weight of your own problems. Even though you know about my worst nightmares and my biggest fears and my ADHD, in the past nine years we’ve known each other, I don’t think I’ve ever been let in on a single honest thought from your head. That’s what pisses me off the most about you.”
He exhales, then raises an eyebrow. “Did that make you feel better? Because that made me feel really shitty."
Without waiting for a response, Chenle clips the seal keychain onto the strap of Renjun’s purse and says, “You’re all those things, yeah, and sometimes I think it really does make me mad, but you’re also my best friend. You were my best friend when we ate together in June, you were my best friend before your hiatus, nothing’s changed that. I’m gonna treat you like my best friend, idiot.”
Bèndàn. Idiot.
It sounds so childish coming from Chenle, in his low voice after his long, wordy spiel, and Renjun finds himself laughing again—with amusement this time around. It makes him feel like a kid again, arguing with Chenle over the colour of their Bluetooth earbuds, back when nothing mattered yet everything carried the weight of the world. If only he’d known then, how much easier he’d had it.
“Sometimes I wish I thought as simply as you did,” Renjun murmurs, placing his hand on top of Chenle’s where it’s still resting on his shoulder. “Sometimes I wish I could see things from your eyes.” An ounce of his confidence, an ounce of his earnestness, Renjun thinks he’d be a lot happier if he had a piece of Chenle to himself.
“See things from seven centimetres up?” Chenle jokes.
Renjun rolls his eyes—now dry enough to roll—and shoves Chenle lightly. “You know what I mean.”
“Not always,” Chenle counters, “That’s why you have to talk, instead of staring angrily out windows like you’re trying to explode Shanghai in your brain.”
“It’s—it’s hard.”
“I know it is.” Chenle softens. “But you have to promise me that you’ll try anyway. That’s what this life stuff is all about, isn’t it? Everything is hard and everything sucks, but you gotta try anyway.”
Renjun opens his mouth, closes it, then opens it again. “I like the sound of the Shanghai Tower.”
Chenle beams. “I’ll call the car.”
🪷
“—and that ugly modern building there, is where I had my first proper recital. Moonlight three. Very overplayed.”
“Yeah?”
Chenle hums, as the two of them lean over the railing, closer to the floor-to-ceiling windows of the observation deck. He reaches an arm over Renjun’s shoulders and points somewhere on the other side of the river, though Renjun can’t concentrate on the building, too lost in the warmth of their strange half-hug. He still feels murky on the inside, but it’s gone from oppressive to subdued, a strange in-between he doesn’t mind as much.
“My dad has a business partner there, but he’s closing the whole office to open a noodle shop with his second wife. The business partner, not my dad. My dad can’t cook to save his life.”
“Are they any good?”
“The noodles? Best in the city, if you ask me. The real difficulty is running and operating the place. My dad’s complained about his finances way more to me than he probably should’ve. Now look across the river, that’s where all my schools were.”
Idol life is driven by excess, all the lights and crowds and noise spinning at a haste unique to the glamour of hallyu. Days fly by in the blink of an eye, each blurring the line between work and life even further until it’s impossible to tell which memories don’t come from rewatching recorded videos, which parts of existence aren’t on camera. There’s too much to do, too much to be, too much to uphold in front of an audience that would sooner forget than ever, ever forgive.
Idol life is—a lot.
In contrast, falling in love is a boring affair, a small pocket of air within the overflowing ocean of Seoul.
For someone that shines brightest in the limelight, as fast-paced and quick-on-the-draw as the chaos around him, Donghyuck likes to take things slow. He’s the last one at the dinner table nibbling the extra charred pieces off the barbecue grill, he preps his ingredients and sorts them into their individual bowls before he turns on the stove, and he underfills his wine glasses so it takes him longer to get through the bottle. As if the world is one of those oyster platters he loves to sample shell by shell with a flute of champagne, Donghyuck embodies a languid, honey-like sweetness that only comes with patience.
When they were something more than nothing, some place less than together, Donghyuck’s gaze, his touch, and the space he occupied in Renjun’s mind lingered, like they had all the time in the world when it was just the two of them. He’d dim the lights, put on his music, spritz the room with his favourite cologne, and undress Renjun like he was a gift to relish, another performance to indulge in. It made sense that falling in love with Donghyuck took its time, a gradual build Renjun never noticed until he was several hundred feet under the surface.
The end of the world wasn’t as kind—it took all of seconds for the bubble to pop and the pressure of the ocean to collapse in on Renjun’s space, crushing him alive.
Time isn't kind, but it's patient.
Days fold into weeks fold into months unfold back into days when Renjun starts crossing off dates in his calendar, catching up with the squares he’s missed. He counts the bottles of water he drinks in between practising choreography, he doodles birds in the margins of the lyric sheets for their comeback tracks, and he lets his hair grow down the back of his neck. He picks up the pieces Donghyuck left in him and trades them back for pieces of himself, dedicating hours in and out of therapy to put himself back together. Either Renjun’s grown stronger than the pain or the world finally starts being easier on him, because Renjun finds he can slow down while still withstanding the strength of the rip currents.
And in comparison to the end of the world, falling out of love might as well have been the easiest thing Renjun’s ever done.
Now, he knows to let himself breathe.
At the train station, he smiles at the ticket clerk when she accidentally charges the premium prices, he shifts backward to let a particularly insistent elderly woman cut him in the boarding line, and he gives a businessman their overhead compartment space for filing boxes that barely fit, all while squeezing Chenle’s hand to keep him from wandering off and blowing too much money on the lāmiàn vending machines.
The gratification of doing a good deed, of making someone else’s day a little better, doesn’t taste like much at all, but the instant noodles Chenle buys for their lunch make up for it. Without a manager staring over them like a hawk, they both clean off their cups in a minute flat.
Renjun doesn’t remember the bullet train windows ever being this massive, nor does he remember Southern China in his textbooks or late-night Weibo scrolls looking so gorgeous. Endless lakes sprawl the whole terrain after they leave the city, broken up by rice paddies and small clusters of forests glowing a lush green under the summer sun. Growing up by the Songhua Lake meant living with landscapes covered in snow for the better half of the year, never melting into as vibrant of colours as here—it practically feels like a different country entirely, more akin to what he saw on his trip to Thailand a year ago.
He takes a few photos to save for himself, pinching Chenle’s side when Chenle whispers, “Tourist.”
“Tongli?” Renjun reads on the platform sign once they’ve filed out of the train with the last of their bags. It’s now that he notices a few foreigners in the crowd with them, clutching travel pamphlets and investigating the train maps by the elevator.
Chenle hums as he ties his backpack straps to the metal handle of his suitcase. “Just outside of Suzhou. My grandparents bought a house here that my dad received after the war, and we came all the time when I was a kid, whenever my mom was getting sick of the city.” He flashes a grin. “I have a feeling you’ll like it more than Shanghai.”
“Why’s that?”
He shrugs. “Quieter, prettier, less smelly, you know. Just because.” Renjun raises an eyebrow and Chenle nudges his shoulder. “Trust the vibes!”
The wording isn’t anything particularly profound or even any different from Chenle’s usual offhanded comments—maybe that’s why Renjun stills as they settle in his head.
Trust. Renjun doesn’t think he’s trusted much of anything in the past few months, much less the vibes of a place he’s barely ever heard about. From the constant PR meetings to the endless practice and preparation to legal teams whose faces all blur together, the only consistent solace Renjun’s found has been from the tight grip he’s held over all the messy pieces inside his chest. Even then, trusting in himself feels like a near impossible task when half his thoughts don’t believe there’s any part of him worth staying strong for.
But the look Chenle fixes on him is so open, Renjun offers his best smile in return. “Alright, I trust you.”
🪷
If there’s one thing Renjun can say about Tongli, it’s that it’s beautiful.
With wispy trees shading them from the sun and the river shining a rich jade green, the view looks straight out of a movie, unlike anywhere Renjun’s been before. Even though every traditional house has paint peeling off the front and the stone paving is darkened from generations of collected grime, it just serves to add to the ambiance. Birds chirp, leaves rustle, and faraway conversations in heavy dialect fill the otherwise quiet air, rounding out the quaint village into the complete antithesis of Shanghai.
As their boatman steers their wooden sampan off the main river towards a more residential side of the canal town, Chenle shifts from chattering on about a TV show he’s been invested in recently to pointing out different buildings lined up against the water. “That restaurant is really good,” he says, eyes lighting up, “We can go there for dinner tonight. You can’t get steamed fish like that anywhere in the city.”
Renjun makes an affirmative noise, but he doesn’t know how Chenle can think about eating another meal while they’re making their way through over a kilo of mangosteen forced upon them by a pushy fruit cart hawker. The wooden case is starting to pile up with their shared peels and a little pile of chewed up seeds from Chenle, who spits the harder ones out like he’s an eighty-year old man.
“Oh, that stall is new,” Chenle says mid-chew. Juice runs from the corner of his mouth down his chin, and he wipes it away with the back of his hand to keep talking, unaware of Renjun’s grimace. “It used to sell dumplings, and you’d get the boiled ones in a plastic bag that burned your hands if you tried to hold it from the bottom.” He leans forward to read closer and the boat rocks from his movement. “Looks like the new vendor sells miánmián gāo, we can get that for dessert.”
“You’re a local?” their boatman asks curiously. He’s been silent for the duration of their ride so far, letting the two of them talk about anything and nothing at all, but now there’s a curious lilt to his gruff, low accent.
“I haven’t been back in a decade,” Chenle answers, offering a half-peeled fruit to him. “I just remember a thing or two.”
Their boatman hums, his paddling slowing as he bites the exposed white flesh of the fruit. “Zhang Weitian moved to Guangzhou to live with her daughter for university, and they’re planning on staying now that she’s engaged. No one’s been able to match her chive filling since she left. Not much else changes day to day. More tourists some years, less tourists some years. More rain one year, more droughts the next year. Less rice one year, less potatoes after. People just like you and Zhang Weitian go and come back and go and come back again, sometimes wearing embroidered silks and sometimes wearing the same shoes they left in.”
The spin on the idiom reminds Renjun of something his grandfather would say, or Kun on wine-drunk nights.
With that said, their boatman guides them towards a set of stone stairs leading up to a small bridge, docking by looping a simple rope around the balustrade. “Here you are, son. Watch your step, you won’t believe how many of us slip off those stairs,” he says with a laugh.
Chenle gets off first with their case under one arm. When he extends a hand to help Renjun up, their touch is sticky from the sugar.
Before their boatman departs with the generous tip and a couple of extra mangosteens Chenle throws in, he smiles wide with a few missing teeth and says, “Water spinach is in season, get a plate of it with your fish at the Tengs’ tonight.”
At the bridge, Renjun waves for Chenle to set the case down and lean over the railing edge, so he can use his water bottle to rinse off both their hands. There’s only one tissue left in his pocket tissue pack, and Renjun doesn’t get the chance to offer it to Chenle because Chenle just shakes his hands off midair.
“Would you come back with me again?” Chenle asks, drying his hands all the way on his basketball shorts. “After the year ends? New Year’s lands at the end of January next year, right during our break. It would be the perfect timing.”
“Even if we somehow don’t have a surprise schedule they don’t tell us until December, do you really think they’d let us visit?” Renjun asks wryly, wiping his hands off on the tissue.
Chenle nods silently, the way he does when he wasn’t expecting the answer he received. The gesture is immediately noticeable to Renjun, though it could just be that Chenle’s always been easy to read, heart on his sleeve staining his whole arm pink. Renjun sighs and fights the twinge in his heart by tugging Chenle’s collar down to wipe the juice off his face, keeping his hands and his thoughts occupied on cleaning Chenle’s stained lips. Up this close, it’s almost—startling, how plush Chenle’s lips are, how much smoother and better kept they are instead of the chewed up messes he’d leave when he was fifteen.
They’re pretty.
Chenle’s…
Pretty.
It’s not a revelation, yet it sends a shiver through Renjun’s system like one nonetheless.
He swallows and mutters, “No one would believe in a million years that you were raised high class with the state of your manners.” Once Chenle’s properly cleaned, Renjun nudges him back upright and says louder, “If we had the chance, of course I would. You know that.”
There’s a funny facial expression on Chenle that stays for a second before shifting into a cheeky smile. “We’ll have a lot of chances when we retire. I’ll ask my dad for the house every now and then. We can take vacations when we’re forty and our bones are creaking and Mark has two daughters.”
“Don’t speak about age so lightly,” Renjun chides, “Kangta is only forty-four.”
“When we’re fifty and Mark has three daughters?” Chenle tries again.
“Do you think it’s just going to come to a stop like that?” Renjun counters with a frown. “Everything we worked for, our careers, our lives in Seoul—in Korea. Does it just fade out?”
Chenle shrugs. “It doesn’t have to. Yin Zhengyang has that show with his wife. Wang Fei sang on TV during corona. Liu Dehua is still kind of everywhere. There’s a million other things outside of idol life to do, though. I’ve always wanted to open up a restaurant.”
Renjun almost never thinks about the future like this, his mind too used to stopping wherever the schedules on his phone stop, focused on getting by day to day, minute to minute. Conceptualising anything broader often leaves him overwhelmed with a crushing sense of not enough not enough never enough.
Now, he folds his arms and leans over the bridge, staring down at the carp flitting around under the surface as he lets his mind wander.
He tries to picture himself in ten years at thirty-three, in twenty years at forty-three, in thirty years at fifty-three. The years are both too close and too far in Renjun’s head, completely intangible yet as easy to pick as the ripest bundle of lychee on the lowest branch of the tree—a supposedly sweet promise with a thorny outside. Inevitably, they’ll both go back to China once their visas expire, and Chenle will undoubtedly stay in the south; Shanghai’s entertainment industry and the vibrant culture are too strong for him to let go of, and Chenle’s the kind of person that’s born to be in front of an audience. The kind of person who lives for himself so wholly, it allows other people to live through him. Renjun can’t see him anywhere else.
But where would Renjun go? Would he stay north, in Beijing? Would he leave performing behind entirely?
Would he be happier than he is now? Would he learn to love himself instead of constantly seeking it out in other people?
Would he be happy at all?
No matter how hard Renjun thinks, his imagination can’t seem to conjure an idea of what he’d be doing alone. A single summer in solitude was already too much, nevermind a future.
Renjun drags his eyes off the fish to look at his hands, at the ring on his right middle finger. The promise to stay together forever loops around his digit, safe and secure.
But how long is that forever anyway?
Beside him, Renjun notices Chenle fidgeting with his ring, flipping it up and down between his fingers. One wrong move, and the ring could tumble down into the river. One wrong move, and forever would slip out of his grasp.
Eventually, Renjun shakes his head and tosses his last piece of mangosteen into the water, letting the sight of the fish splashing around in their fight for the fruit bring him back to the present. It’s far easier to picture himself submerged down below. Being amongst the school, clambering on top of the other fish, wouldn’t be too terrible of a fate. Fish don’t think about the remaining decades of their career.
“I can’t think as far ahead as you without losing my mind,” he answers honestly, pushing himself away from the bridge. “I don’t know how you do it.”
“Isn’t it less scary when you know which way your GPS route leads to?”
“Thinking about not having anywhere to go after reaching the destination is scarier to me,” Renjun murmurs.
Chenle slips his ring back on and bumps their shoulders together. “Good thing we have a lot of kilometres left.”
🪷
Dinner is a simple affair.
Sitting outside under a detached awning against the river gives them a unique kind of privacy amidst the steady flow of pedestrian traffic beside and boat tours below. Their rickety little table is a tight squeeze, but Renjun finds himself relishing in the way their knees knock and their legs tangle, a grounding comfort even when Chenle bounces his foot at two-hundred beats a minute. Instead of poking him for not wearing his ring, Renjun has to scold him for nearly flinging it into the river as as they eat, an assortment of dishes all lightly seasoned and lightly sweetened, opposite to Renjun’s tastes; it’s made more enjoyable by watching Chenle relish in the flavours, with the funny noises he makes when he’s impressed. Chenle keeps up a steady stream of winding thoughts at a mindful lower volume, Renjun chiming in whenever Chenle’s train of thought sputters out and he isn’t sure where to steer the conversation next.
After arguing over the last piece of fish cheek that they ultimately offer to a stray cat, and arguing again over the check that Renjun sneakily pays for when Chenle is distracted giving directions to a lost American family, they take a thinner path through a small market. Renjun takes the time to admire the trinkets on display while Chenle chatters on and on with the elderly vendors. Miánmián gāo, Renjun discovers, is a cake made out of glutinous rice flour, dry and oddly squidgy, sweetened by the osmanthus syrup drizzled on top. It makes the perfect snack for their evening stroll through the village, the sunset stretching their shadows across the stone roads.
Chenle’s house is situated by the widest bend of the river, identical to all the other buildings. Beside the door are two long rectangles slightly brighter than the grey of the outer walls, and Renjun wonders what kind of duìlián the Zhong parents hung before.
Chenle unlocks the door with a key dug up from the potted bamboo by the front window. He switches on all the lights, which flicker a few times before shining steady, then reaches for the nearby tiered console. “We don’t have to take it all off, since we’re not staying here for the whole week,” he says, passing over a pair of plastic slippers a size too big for Renjun’s feet. “If we just clean up the bedrooms, it’ll save us time when we pack.”
Renjun glances around the space with a frown. Despite the worn exterior, the inside is quaint and well-decorated, all the furniture protected by plastic covers. With a few paper lanterns and a bonsai in the money corner, it’d be impossible to tell that it was a vacation house vacant for most months of the year. Leaving the furniture covered sucks out all that life.
He doesn’t know how to say what if the furniture feels neglected? without sounding insane, so he tries to workshop the thought a bit. “Will we be in that much of a rush when we leave? It’s more relaxing if we take off the covers.”
Chenle pauses in consideration, then narrows his eyes. “Okay, but you have to actually help, you can’t just lounge around making me do all the work.”
“I wasn’t planning on doing that!”
“You definitely were, that’s what you did when you ‘helped’ me clean my apartment last year—”
Renjun shoves Chenle on the way to uncover the carved wooden couch. “Oh my God, give it a rest.”
It doesn’t take nearly as long to clean up the space as Chenle’s overdramatic moaning and groaning implies. The slices of watermelon they got discounted for being the most handsome customers to come by this year, so don’t forget to come again tomorrow taste sweeter served on one of the porcelain plates dug out of the kitchen. Alongside the tea brewed using the dragon-themed tea tray they find underneath the coffee table, it relaxes them into the silk cushions of the couch, in the cosy elegance of the Zhongs’ decor.
It’s late into the night when they both decide to call it in, though Renjun leaves the shower and forgets to think about where his feet are taking him until he’s standing under the door frame of Chenle’s designated room, watching him fiddle with the ancient box TV. For some reason, his standing fan is turned off and the windows are thrown open, allowing the humidity from outside to seep in and settle like a liquid inside the walls of the room.
“What’s up?” Chenle asks, not looking up from where he messes around with the TV buttons. “Are you hungry again? I have some chips from the train station, if you want.”
“I—”
I don’t want to be alone.
The thought hits Renjun with such intensity, his mouth dries up and his throat closes up.
Maybe the past three months have been a little harder than he’s been willing to admit to himself.
He swallows. “It’s too hot to sleep.”
Chenle snorts. “Take my fan, I don’t need it. Have one fan aiming at your face and the other at your feet. My mom always says that’s good for circulation.”
“It’s also too loud,” Renjun quickly adds. “The window faces the road and noise leaks through.”
“It’ll get quieter in an hour, after everyone closes shop and goes home after drinking,” Chenle replies easily, squatting to take out a DVD storage case with a Pleasant Goat print on the outside. While Renjun scrambles to think of a third excuse, Chenle finally looks at him and tilts his head. “Oh, do you want to swap rooms? I gave you the bigger one, but I don’t mind.”
“I’m—I’m not that tired actually,” Renjun murmurs, shuffling over to sit down on the bed. The box spring squeaks from his weight, just as unyielding as the one in Chenle’s childhood bedroom had been. “Jet lag.”
A strange sort of light seems to shift in Chenle’s gaze, piercing right into Renjun. The sudden intensity fades as quickly as it arose when Chenle’s eyes scrunch as he jokes, “Gēgē could’ve just said he missed me.” The comment is too close to comfort.
Renjun frowns and swings a foot out to kick Chenle, missing by a centimetre. “If your ego gets any bigger, your head won’t be able to contain it all and you’ll pop like a balloon,” he huffs, hoping the deflection doesn’t give away how quickly his heart beats.
“Maybe that’ll make my face easier to size on merchandise.” Once he finishes flicking through the plastic pages, Chenle lifts the DVD case to show Renjun. While a few discs have pictures on the surface, most are plain with faded permanent marker writing denoting the contents of each. “The TV isn’t connected to cable, so pick your poison: soap opera, actual opera, Journey to the West, or Ultraman? None of them will be as good as our Transit Love nights, but the vibe is there.”
Renjun picks a title he remembers his grandmother enjoying, and soon enough, the TV crackles to life with its two pixel resolution. Chenle finds his place on the bed right next to Renjun, head resting against his shoulder; his skin runs warm pressed against Renjun, and he taps his foot against Renjun’s ankle at a constant rhythm, slow and steady enough where it doesn’t bother Renjun as much as his knee-bouncing usually does. With the distant sounds of the flowing waterways and the occasional breeze cutting through the heat, Renjun feels his bones sink into a relaxed daze.
Maybe that’s why he doesn’t flinch when Chenle speaks up, a hair’s breadth away from Renjun’s ear. “Are you happy here?” His voice is low, seconds from falling asleep.
Processing the question in the midst of his growing exhaustion takes Renjun a few seconds. “…Why are you asking me that so suddenly?”
“Hey, can I ask you something?”
“You’re so—” Renjun flicks Chenle’s thigh. “You’re so you.” He considers the question properly. “Where’s ‘here’?”
“On this trip.” Renjun opens his mouth to reply, but Chenle beats him to the draw, “I know it’s only been a couple of days, and I know we’ve been travelling around a lot within those days, and I know you don’t really like Shanghai, but be honest with me anyway.”
“I like Shanghai,” he protests weakly. Chenle lifts his head up just to give Renjun a look in return and Renjun closes his eyes, letting his head fall back against the wall. “I do. I just—” He opens his eyes and looks up at the exposed wooden ceiling, at a thin spider web tying together two beams. “Moving out of the dorms was—hard, especially moving out by myself. I’ve spent so much time alone at my apartment because I thought living in the space would make it feel more like home, but—it didn’t. Shanghai, here in Tongli, this doesn’t feel like home either.”
“What does home feel like to you?”
For the first time, with a wavering voice, Renjun says aloud, “I’m not sure anymore.”
He hasn’t been sure in a long, long time.
“Then what does it taste like?”
“What?”
Chenle lifts a hand and wiggles his five fingers. “Five senses. If you don’t know what home feels like, what does it taste like? Smell like? Look like? Sound like?” He drops his hand and rests his head back in the crook of Renjun’s neck, still focused on the arranged marriage plot unfolding in front of them.
The question is odd coming from Chenle, only because it’s the last kind of question someone like him would ask—it’s something Renjun would ask, if anything. Renjun pauses to consider. “Like nothing,” he says eventually, as the main female character confesses to the second male lead, “Not because it’s empty but because I don’t have to think about the sensations. Home just…is, I guess.”
When Chenle hums, the vibrations seep into Renjun’s body too. “It tastes like hóngshāoròu to me.” Something taps at Renjun’s thigh, and he glances down to see Chenle handing over his unlocked phone, still open to a text thread with Jaemin. “Buy our tickets for tomorrow,” he says through a yawn, “Hongqiao Station services almost every bullet train line in China.”
“Every line?” Renjun asks. “Any line?”
“Any line,” Chenle repeats, though when Renjun looks back at him, his eyes have fluttered shut, fast asleep.
The next morning, Renjun wakes up too early, takes a shower, goes back to the fruit hawker, picks out a variety box of street food takeout for breakfast, and returns by boat to their house all before Chenle stirs.
They dust the corners, sweep the floors, and cover all the furniture with the TV on full blast from the bedroom, just so they can hear the end of the episode; they both whoop when the female lead leaves her arranged husband at the altar to run away with her true lover, riding the high even when the credits cut on a cliffhanger implying her mother might have an incurable illness.
When he finds out they’re headed to Dongbei, their DīDī driver shares stories of his childhood in Liaoning the whole drive into Suzhou, spirited and the perfect amount of lively to make the morning a little brighter.
And on the G1236 bullet train to Changchun, eleven hours leaning into each other’s space watching all of China go by the window, the dragon fruit they slice into tastes extra sweet.
🪷
Renjun frowns, shutting the drawer after upending the contents. It was only a year since he was last in his bedroom, yet just like last time, he can’t find his candles anywhere. Not even medication has fixed the empty gaps in his memory, though all the therapy has him sighing in resignation instead of digging his nails into the heel of his palm in an effort to keep himself from screaming.
“—enjun? Renjun.”
“Hmm?”
He looks over his shoulder to see Chenle standing with a hand on the bedroom door, towel wrapped around his waist. His bare body is nothing Renjun hasn’t seen a million times before, but their proximity and the bashful expression on Chenle’s face makes Renjun’s cheeks go warm, until Chenle says, “The shower isn’t working,” with a pout, dissipating all the heat in the air.
Renjun laughs and walks directly across the hall to the bathroom, rapping his knuckles on the yellowed box at the top corner of the shower. “You have to heat up the water tank first. This toggle adds a bit of cold water if it’s too hot for you. The pressure is the same no matter the temperature.” Rotating the dials up to temperature comes as muscle memory, and he sets the heat lower to fit Chenle’s preferences. “There’s less steam to fog up my screen when I’m on my phone”, Renjun recalls from a late conversation last tour with them and Jeno. “I tried getting my parents to replace it after one of the pipes burst a couple of years ago but they wouldn’t listen. Apparently, it saves a lot of money in the winter, more money than my career can cover for.”
Saying it aloud has the reality of the situation dawning on Renjun.
There he is, adjusting the heat level on an appliance practically older than his parents, in the dingey bathroom his parents still refuse to replace the rotting tiles of, inside the smallest apartment in the building. The taxi back from the train station led them down a series of weathered, cracked backroads to reach the neighbourhood, and after hugs were squeezed out and pleasantries exchanged at the first level courtyard, Renjun had to break the news to Chenle that the building didn’t have the foundations to support an elevator, and they would have to walk up all nine flights of stairs to reach the front door. Renjun almost cracked a joke comparing it to their trainee dorms, only to remember Chenle had spent barely ten weeks in the company before debut, in the luxury of his Gangnam apartment.
It meant nothing—no, it meant everything to Renjun growing up, the way his parents and his grandmother and his favourite pencil case he saved sidewalk coins to buy meant everything to him growing up, but.
Renjun turns around and looks at Chenle, who now sits on top of the toilet lid, carefully removing his two million won watch off his pale, bony wrist. For all the times they were lumped together as one and the same in their rookie days, the worlds they grew up in were so far apart, Renjun sometimes wonders how they had enough space to fit all the mismatched parts of themselves under the roof of the token Chinese members.
“Sorry it’s not a lot,” he blurts, “They’ve been living here for their whole lives, with the same neighbours and all our relatives in the city, so they won’t move, even when I can afford somewhere nicer for them—”
“You have nothing to say sorry for,” Chenle interrupts, the corners of his mouth tipping down. He sounds almost offended. “It’s where you grew up.” He sets his watch down on the counter and glances around, as if taking in the space for the first time. “The Huang family’s royal estate.”
When Chenle keeps the comments at that, Renjun shrugs, more to himself than anything. “Along those lines.”
Renjun turns to look at the sink mirror right next to Chenle, leaning closer to examine his face. His return last year feels like a lifetime ago, and the boy who stood at three-quarters his height, washing his hands in preparation of leaving the country for the first time in his life, feels like a different person entirely.
Chenle clears his throat and Renjun stands back up straight, looking over with a tilted head. While avoiding eye contact, Chenle shifts his weight on the toilet lid and comments, “You don’t have to stay in here and watch me. I can figure out the rest of your funky shower myself. Unless you’re into that. But I’m not really into that.”
He forces a laugh, like it’ll hide the fact that he’s blossoming in red from the tips of his ears all the way down to his chest.
Renjun wrinkles his nose. Here Chenle goes again. “Don’t be crass. Just because I’m gay doesn’t mean you always need to clarify you aren’t. Constantly defending yourself against accusations no one brings up is more telling of you than anything else.”
“Well, I’m bringing it up.”
“Chenle, that—what? That doesn’t even make any sense—”
“And I’m not defending myself.”
Renjun blinks.
As he picks apart the tangled noodles of implications, Chenle’s burst of energy builds as he fiddles with his ring and bounces his leg at a worrying speed. “I’m into a lot of things, a lot more than I realised I was, and it’s been weird as fuck learning to think of myself different, especially this year with all the bullshit going on, but I’m— I like— I—” Chenle rubs his face with his hands, his breathing starting to come out short. “This is so much harder than it was telling the others.”
Renjun’s breath hitches. Before he can think better, he asks, “I’m the last to find out?”
“It’s not like that!” bursts Chenle, “I just— I was drunk—we all were—and I told them all in our hotel rooms, because they were all there, and it was easier to just rip the bandage off, and I was going to call you but it was four in the morning in Seoul and I couldn’t just leave a text because—”
Chenle sucks in a breath, then exhales and deflates, his slouched back hitting the toilet tank. Quietly, he admits, “I guess I cared too much about what you would think. I still care too much about what you’re thinking now.” He finally, finally looks up, his eyes wide and far away, lost. “What are you thinking?”
“I think—”
I think you always forget how much I care about you.
The thought hits Renjun with so much force, he has to resist a flinch, but the way his chest tightens up tells him it’s the unfiltered, unwavering truth.
And a terrifying one at that.
Both Renjun and Donghyuck had ticking timers over their head, never a matter of when they’d figure out their sexualities, rather when the company would force them to reckon with it by taping their teenage confusion onto their public personas while barring them from actually living it through. They were only allowed to be who they were so long as it was marketable, everything else kept a shameful secret underneath the covers. Knowing Chenle had the space to come to his own terms, in between the time in front of cameras or on stage, comes to Renjun as nothing but an overwhelming relief; he cares about Chenle too much to wish him any more than all the time in the world.
Renjun crosses his arms, hoping the feigned annoyance hides the blood staining his pyjama sleeves from where his heart sits, far too close to his hands. “I think you’re an idiot. Forget that we’ve been best friends for nearly a decade now, why would I care that you like men?”
“And women,” Chenle is quick to correct, “Mostly women. Eighty-five percent.”
“Of course,” Renjun snorts. “I don’t think you needed to remind me of that part.”
“Hey, the other fifteen percent puts up a strong presence.” With his tongue running over his teeth, it’s like Chenle’s tasting his next words. “Moon Seonggon, he’s on KT Sonicboom, the Korean basketball team I like. He’s, uh. Really hot. He’ll probably win best defensive player again this year, too.”
“I believe you,” Renjun says lightly. “I’m proud of you for telling me.” That truth is easy to say aloud. Maybe one of the easiest things to tell Chenle. “Thank you for opening up in person.”
“It’s not that impressive,” he mutters. “I’m so late to the party.”
The water tank beeps now that it’s up to temperature, and the noise must startle Chenle, because his ring drops out of his fingers, bouncing away and rolling to a stop at Renjun’s foot.
Renjun bends down to pick it up and carefully slips it onto the jewellery hook he glued above the sink when he was ten. Next to the hook is the candle he remembers buying last year, which he lights with the matches under the sink they use for incense, filling the air with a gentle citrus. Before he leaves, Renjun squeezes Chenle’s shoulder and uses a finger to tilt his chin up so they’re eye to eye.
“Knowing yourself isn’t a race,” Renjun murmurs, thumb ghosting over the mole near Chenle’s jaw. His skin is rough from a day without shaving, warm to the touch, his expression open and vulnerable; Renjun thinks Chenle’s prettiest like this. “Besides, we still have a lot of kilometres left. I think you’re right on time.”
Renjun wakes up to a text from Donghyuck, the first time in months for what was once a daily habit.
It doesn’t surprise Renjun, how long it takes for him to make sense of the careful selection of uncaptioned photos. Over the course of—whatever it was that they had, Donghyuck seemed dedicated to being unknowable, habits sewn together by nonsensical reasoning to make a patchwork quilt of mixed signals, double entendres, and off-the-cuff, last-minute decisions. Falling in love with Donghyuck meant falling in love with the in-betweens, bits and pieces of his whirlwind mind that had to be understood independently to decipher the larger puzzle that was Lee Haechan, the frame that encased Lee Donghyuck—and even to this day, Renjun isn’t sure if he ever got to that point.
But the photos make sense after a few minutes of staring, as the remnants of sleep daze are chased out of his head.
Chinese takeout dinner—I’m thinking about you. Lyrics inside the recording booth—I hope you’re doing okay. Trees at the park—I hope you’re healthier. A screenshot of a Baek Yerin song—I hope you’re happier. The back of what looks to be Jisung’s head at an internet café—I’m sorry.
Renjun taps out a reply, deletes it, taps it out again with better wording, deletes it, and finally settles on sending a few photos from Shanghai and Tongli without a message either, wondering if the carp, the sunset, and the little wildflower growing between the stone brick road convey it was never your fault and if you apologise one more time I’m going to kill you.
He moves to set his phone on his desk only to realise the weight around his waist is heavier than usual, trapping him against the bed.
“Chenle.”
Grumble grumble. Their sleep shirts are so thin, they might as well be skin-on-skin, a warmth that has Renjun’s heartbeat picking up speed by the second.
“Chenle, hey.” Renjun tugs at Chenle’s arm, only for Chenle to tighten his hold, drawing Renjun even closer to his chest. He knows his bed is the smallest they’ve shared in the past few days, but he does not remember Chenle ever being this clingy. The proximity isn’t out of the ordinary for them, but it doesn’t usually occur in the middle of the summer, when their skin is practically hot to the touch and the humidity in the room settles over their bodies like an extra blanket. Renjun hasn’t been held this close by anyone other than Donghyuck in the past year, either.
He could stay like this, for a little longer.
The thought scares Renjun in a way he can’t place his finger on.
“Chenle, I know you’re awake.”
“Don’t wanna move,” Chenle grunts, right against Renjun’s ear. His voice vibrates through both their bodies, low and scratchy.
“Can I at least get up to take my medication?”
At that, Chenle sighs and loosens his hold just enough for Renjun to reach over to his desk for his pill box and the cup of tea leftover from last night. With one elbow to prop himself up, he swallows them down before the taste hits his tongue, then lies down on his back while Chenle drapes over his side.
“What do you take?” Chenle asks, right into Renjun’s ear with his chin on Renjun’s shoulder. His voice slurs together from his half-asleep stupor.
Renjun lifts the pill box above their heads, letting the sunlight from the sheer curtains illuminate the labels. He runs his thumb over the clear plastic cover of the next day, pills all in place. “This is for depression, this is for anxiety, and this is a mood stabiliser that I take at night. I don’t know how long I’ll be on them, but they help a lot more than I was expecting, and my psychiatrist says I’m reacting well. The rest are nutritional supplements, since my appetite has been all over the place this summer. Why do you ask?”
“It’s less scary knowing what all of it is, and knowing what you’re going through,” Chenle answers honestly. Renjun doesn’t get the chance to linger on how the statement makes his chest pang because Chenle moves on just as quickly as the sincerity came, pointing to the days of the week that have passed, where the vitamins and minerals remain untouched. “You’ve been eating well.”
“I have to, when you demand no less than three meals and dessert every day.”
“And a snack.”
“And a snack.” Renjun shakes his head and sets the box back down so he has a free hand to ruffle Chenle’s hair. “I don’t know any special restaurants that have been here for decades, by the way. We’ll have to search on Diǎnpíng and Xiǎohóngshū like real tourists.”
After a moment, Chenle mumbles, “What about the rest of the day? You should show me around the indie stuff.”
“I have no idea what that entails anymore,” Renjun admits. “I don’t even think I processed the change when I came back last year. I almost got us lost at the railway station yesterday.”
“Then show me what you did locally as a kid. Reminisce a little.”
Huái gǔ. Reminisce.
It sounds so elegant coming from Chenle, in his low voice, relaxed from the morning.
“Reminisce,” Renjun echoes. “That’s a good word. Reminisce.”
“Reminisce,” Chenle repeats in a terrible approximation of Renjun’s accent. Renjun doesn’t get to tell him off though, because a little more shuffling and Chenle’s breathing goes thin again, somehow slipping right back into unconsciousness despite the conversation.
Mulling over his suggestion, Renjun racks his head for the bits and pieces of his life that haven’t been under the intense scrutiny of a lens. All the ideas he conjures are humble; he enjoyed anything and everything as a child, the kinds of easy fun his older cousins or his grandmother could sit back and watch him entertain himself with for hours on end. Being a kid was so much simpler, it aches a little whenever he remembers Chenle didn’t get that luxury, too busy touring in Europe and filming commercials and pasting his entire life on live broadcasting; the first time they met, it seemed like all Chenle knew was how to be on camera, his bright smile tailor-made for being shown on a screen.
Now, he sticks himself to Renjun like a cat, breathes too heavily against Renjun’s skin, and in the reflection of Renjun’s desk mirror, he can tell Chenle’s face is definitely not ready for anything other than foaming cleanser.
After several minutes go by without budging, Renjun starts contemplating the merits of giving up and accepting his fate, Chenle shifts and unintentionally tangles their legs. Their bare thighs touch, sending Renjun’s heart jumping out of his chest—
And something else brushes against Renjun’s hip, making him swallow his heart back down with a loud laugh. Whatever weight was lodged in his ribs evaporates in an instant as he shoves Chenle off in a fit of giggles. “I think if you don’t go to the bathroom right now, your bladder’s going to explode.”
“Sorry, sorry,” Chenle splutters, scrambling out of the small double bed in an instant. His ears are practically on fire and his hands unconsciously fall to cover his crotch, as if hiding now will erase the unfortunate timing of his body waking up. “The three glasses of water I had last night just hit me all at once. I’ll go turn on the water tank for you.”
🪷
Summer has always been a strange time of year for Renjun, full of listless, lonely memories made blurry by the humidity and sweetened by bars of lǎo bīnggùn. From tutoring to endless trainee practice to the whirlwind of his career, he spent more time staring at summer through windows than he did getting rosy burnt red and sun drunk. While it made the cancelled schedule days spent lounging in the living room of their dorms—iced milk tea to the cheek, cold packs on each leg, ceiling fan at max speed—its own kind of special treat, all Renjun associated summer with was the hum of a metropolitan city steaming from the hustle and bustle of wasted weather and ordinary days. With festivals, concert tours, and promotional events, summer always flew by the fastest, leaving him in a heat haze vertigo.
Standing under the shade of the willow trees by the Songhua River, fingers looped around delicate string while the breeze rustles his loose t-shirt—it’s the perfect way to spend a perfect day out, making up for the many perfect days he missed out on as a child.
Renjun closes his eyes and lets the wind blow through his hair. He breathes in, a gentle inhale of the city; it settles somewhere close to his bones.
The quaint bubble of tranquility is shattered by Chenle’s loud, loud noise of frustration.
“This is fucking rigged!” he shouts, shaking the butterfly kite in his hands back and forth like it owes him money. The careful construction of red paper and bamboo does nothing but flop limply from the jostling. Renjun’s pretty sure he sees the branches around them rustling from the volume of Chenle’s outburst.
“Calm down,” Renjun laughs, batting Chenle away from the butterfly so he can take a hold of it with his fingers pinching the spine. “There’s kids all around us. Any louder and you’ll rupture some poor child’s eardrums.”
“This is the worst day of my life,” Chenle laments, shaking the kite line off his arms until it falls into a tangled heap on the ground by his feet.
“I can get it in the air for you first,” Renjun offers, pressing the butterfly’s wrinkles out with his shirt sleeve.
Chenle crosses his arms and shakes his head, eyebrows drawn close together and resolute. “It’s kite flying, it isn’t that hard,” he says, more to himself than anything. “Give it back. One more time. I can do it this time, I swear.”
“Okay, but we’re taking a break first,” orders Renjun, as he sits down with the string still in his hand, making space on the ground to untangle the mess of line. The grass against Renjun’s bare ankles is a haptic memory, as soft as it was during his primary school years spent lying down doodling in his notebooks while dreaming of sprouting wings. Chenle gives him a thumbs down like a teenager, but takes a seat in compliance anyway.
Coming to the park was his mother’s idea, though not first without an hour of humiliation as his parents recounted every embarrassing story sprinkled across Jilin City. Apparently, piecing together an itinerary off the beaten path meant explaining in excruciating detail to Chenle how Renjun lost balance on a pony rider outside the local fish market and fell face first into an open catfish tank. It didn’t help that Chenle egged them on, chiming in with Renjun’s worst moments getting lost, tripping, and walking straight into glass doors back in Seoul.
They eventually settled on a loose path around the neighbourhood starting by Renjun’s old school district and ending by the river. Up and around each block, Renjun waited for Chenle to comment on the gaping cracks in the sidewalks, the water trails staining the sides of each building, or the iron window cages pried open to fit outdated HVAC units. While summers in Dongbei are marked by bright green trees, vibrant blue skies, and the kindest heat in all of China, without a thick white blanket of snow, Renjun knew his city didn’t hold a candle to the glamour of Shanghai. If Chenle noticed, he didn’t pay any mind, plucking mulberries off low-hanging branches and chattering a little too loud like all the other passersby.
Here, no one gave them double takes, no one leaned over to whisper and point, no one hides across the street with a phone camera aimed at their faces, and when they stopped by a vendor for children’s games, no one pretended to run into them on their way to buy the same kite.
On the grass, as Chenle’s fingers deftly pull apart the knots in the string, he looks right at home with the families sprawled around them. His hair is bleached and his unassuming t-shirt is designer, but the rest of NCT Dream’s Chenle is tucked away in a closet in a different country, while Chenle who doesn’t remember to wear sunscreen despite being from Huadong gets to enjoy his time off to the fullest.
A few metres away, a young couple curls up against each other over a shared novel, and the sight of them reaching for the same cup of bubble tea tugs at Renjun’s heart.
In Seoul, he and Donghyuck never got the chance to be anything nearly as open or honest, in public or otherwise. At the top of their company building were the hands that controlled their marionette strings, and the tension never gave unless Renjun left the city bounds. Donghyuck had it even worse—too many nights were spent studying his eyes, wondering if it was Donghyuck or Haechan in front of Renjun, holding him, touching him.
Maybe if their lives had been a little kinder to them, they could’ve worked things out.
Maybe if the world was a little kinder, things would be easier.
“Can you show me one more time?” Chenle asks, prodding Renjun’s knee and pulling him out of his thoughts. The kite line is all neatly wrapped around the spool again, leaving a metre for the initial start. “I need to get the strat down.”
“You’re so persistent,” he sighs, “Who’s holding you at gunpoint?”
“My pride,” Chenle answers sagely, extending a hand to hoist Renjun to his feet. His palm is rough, practically tree bark from how long he’s gone without moisturising. “If you could do this as an eight year old, it’d be a shame on my family name to give up as a legal adult.”
“That’s a pretty feeble family name. You have to fix your hold first, here.”
Renjun doesn’t remember Chenle’s hands being much bigger than his, and the realisation now as he pries Chenle’s fingers apart to slacken his grip sends an odd shiver down Renjun’s spine. “There,” he declares once he’s adjusted Chenle’s hold on the kite bridle, though he finds himself letting his hands linger over Chenle’s wrists as he demonstrates. “Tug the kite a little, bit by bit. My grandmother taught me that you want to lift it upwards, not towards you, so it can watch the air. They’re fragile, they need to be handled with care.”
“High maintenance,” Chenle jokes, “Reminds me of someone I know.”
“Is his surname Zhong? Does he complain every time the air-con is a degree up or down from his preference?”
Chenle aims a sharp elbow right at Renjun’s ribs, but the sudden jostling jerks the kite forward into an unexpected breeze,
“Feed it more line!” Renjun shouts, hastily backing up to unravel the spool. “Don’t pull down!” The butterfly is a splash of red against the blue above them, gaining height as its little wings flutter from the wind as it stretches its bamboo bones for the very first time.
Following the direction of the wind, Chenle lets the string slip through his fingers at a gradual pace, enough to keep the butterfly climbing higher and higher at a steady pace. “Holy shit, it’s working!” he hollers in delight, “I’m fucking doing it!”
Chenle steps out of the willow shade, the afternoon light splashes across his face brighter than the sun, practically too bright to look directly at.
For a second the butterfly’s twin tails, trailing behind like a shooting star carrying wishes into the air, cast a fleeting shadow across Chenle’s face, and Renjun can see then, so clearly that his heartbeat startles to a stop, just how wide Chenle’s smile can stretch.
🪷
The rooftop of the apartment building used to feel like the top of the world to Renjun, a small pocket of heaven in the form of a sprawling garden his father cultivated with the rest of the husbands on the top three floors.
It’s disorienting, watching Chenle duck under the makeshift arbor right outside the stairwell to avoid being hit in the face by flowering vines, but he marvels at all the greenery and the bright pops of ripe vegetables dotting each planter nonetheless. It probably would’ve been easier to water them before dinner, like Renjun’s father initially suggested; watering all the plants is practically impossible in their shared tipsy states, both of them getting splashed in the process. As Renjun leads him past the maze of chicken wire, trellises, and overflowing wooden beds towards his favourite corner, they trip on fallen fruit and the occasional small tool, laughing at the funny suishing noises they make as they lean on each other for balance.
The ledge by the magnolia tree overlooks the entirety of Renjun’s neighbourhood from a bird’s eye view. Clotheslines and telephone circuits crisscross into each building and through the apartment windows of families Renjun’s known his entire life. Birds streak past the watercolour sky to land on signs advertising the laundromat, corner store, and apothecary, which buzz and flicker to light as the sun sets.
Taking a seat on the stone with their legs swinging over the ledge, Renjun thinks the view from nine stories up still feels like nine stories up, nine years later.
Next to him, Chenle struggles to uncap what’s left of the gāoliángjiǔ from dinner. “I’m too drunk for this,” he grunts, unsteady hands pouring out the liquor into their little porcelain cups. “I don’t even get drunk on gāoliángjiǔ.”
“That’s what happens when you challenge my father of all people to chuī niú. He’ll drink you under the table while convincing you he rolled five sixes.”
They toast without Chenle wrestling for ten minutes to undercut Renjun’s cup for once, and Renjun sucks in a breath through his teeth as the burn slashes his throat.
“I think my alcohol tolerance got worse over my break,” he muses, running his nails over the cup, where a painter of sorts is intricately glazed on the side. “This is my first time drinking since I left the hospital.”
He meant for the comment to be offhanded, a casual observation about a moment in his life he hasn’t mustered the courage to look in the eye yet, but Chenle must take it the opposite way, because he freezes up against Renjun’s shoulder, cup still in the air.
They lapse in a thick silence for what feels like an hour, broken by the clink of glass as Chenle pours himself another shot. He opens his mouth, closes it, opens it again, then knocks the liquor back with a scrunched nose and blurts, “Was that because of Haechan? You know. The hospital and all.”
Renjun sighs. It was only a matter of time. He puts his feet up on the stone and rests his folded arms on top of his knees. “Was it because of him that I almost died, you mean?”
Chenle shakes his head, fidgeting with his ring over the nine storey drop. “…Yeah.”
“Between you and me—” Renjun tilts his head up and stares at the clouds brushed onto the sky and breathes, “It’s not his fault we were the wrong people for each other, at the worst time possible in a life of bad timing. We were barely even together. It never was and never will be about him. It never was and never will be about anyone other than myself.”
The words spoken aloud drag him back to the end of the world that April night, fading in and out of consciousness on the stiff hospital bed. It’s impossible to make out specific details beyond the sterility of his inpatient room, the acid in his mouth, and the weight that crushed his organs from within the bounds of his skin. Even recalling the hurt the moment he tugged on his nurse’s sleeve and begged her to make it stop, all of it is impossible to fish out of the muddy water washing it further and further away. Ankle deep in his own pain and Renjun can’t even make out the shapes swimming around below the surface.
Since then, heʼs wanted nothing more than to forget the end of the world.
Like all the morbidity in his head, it refuses to let him go.
“Waking up with all those tubes in me, the black hole in my memory, all the doctors, I—I’d never been so scared. There are days—too many days, where I think it would’ve been better if I was never born, but I never thought of death as an escape. I just—wanted everything to go slower. I didn’t realise I’d been neglecting my body so much that it couldn’t move any slower without completely shutting down. Self-harm wasn’t the intention, but it’s always the outcome when you don’t see yourself as worthy of caring for.
“Knowing how close I was to the end that night, knowing those thoughts can just close in on me again, it—it terrifies me. I don’t want to forget myself like that ever again, but most days, it feels like I don’t have the choice to control that. It hurts less, telling myself that I spiralled over a breakup, than it is accepting the truth that depressive episodes can just happen to me, any day of the week, for any number of days, for the rest of my life. The promise of someone out there that can save me if I just love them hard enough is easier than the truth: that I’ll always be depressed, unless I change myself and move on from it.
“But I don’t—” Renjun’s voice cracks, at the same time the first tear breaks free from the corner of his eye. “I don’t know how to. Twenty-four years, and I still don’t know how to save myself. Twenty-four years, and I still don’t know how to fall in love with myself.”
Renjun looks back down at his hands, where his heart rests in his cupped palms, spluttering like a bird with a broken wing.
When Chenle speaks again, it’s quiet—too quiet. “How’s that fair to you?”
Renjun can’t bring himself to look over.
“Maybe you have to be the one to save yourself, I don’t know,” he continues, “but that doesn’t mean there aren’t people that will help you get to that point. You don’t have to back yourself into the corner of a cage, you just have to reach out and ask. Asking for help is hard, I know that better than anyone, but how much harder is it than battling on your own?”
“It’s my personal struggle, I don’t want to drag anyone in to deal with me—”
“Do you know how many people love you and want to help you?”
“How do you know that—?”
“What about me?” Chenle argues, “What if I want you to drag me in?”
“You don’t know what you’re asking for,” Renjun snaps.
“I don’t care what I’m asking for, I care that you know I would do anything for you, so long as you let me!” Chenle explodes, “But you clearly didn’t know and that fucking terrifies me.”
In the ensuing silence, their ragged breathing fills the space between them.
Renjun finally, finally looks over.
Chelne’s face is twisted into something ugly, something Renjun’s never seen on him before, yet still strikingly familiar. Behind his eyes is a flickering zoetrope of feelings Renjun can’t decipher. Despite how close they are, despite how all he can see is Chenle, Chenle, Chenle, looking down at the gaping ravine separating them leaves Renjun dizzy from vertigo.
Chenle schools his expression into something distant, slips his ring back on, and flips his cup over, balancing it on his index finger: his has a dragon.
“You’re stubborn,” he mutters, “You’re so fucking stubborn and reckless and impossible. But I’m all those things too, and I’m not going anywhere until I know I did my part in making sure you’re okay. You can try all you want to out stubborn me, but you’ll lose.” Chenle looks at Renjun with a frown, fire starting to flicker back to life in his gaze. “So wouldn’t it be easier to concede now and let me help you, out of your own volition? I’d rather make dinner for you now, while you sit at the counter and get drunk on the wine I’ve been saving and make fun of my hair, than make dinner waiting for you to return from another trip to the ER, while you’re barely conscious and swimming in a bucket of painkillers.”
His next words take all the air out of Renjun’s lungs with one fell swoop.
“I love you,” says Chenle, “and the night our manager called us, telling us you were in urgent care, all I could think about was all the times I didn’t get to tell you that. There’s so much time left. There’s holidays and reality TV shows and ice cream and tourist traps and concerts and the rest of the whole, wide world ahead. There’s so many more plates of food to eat, cities to visit, so many more ‘I love you’s to hear from the people who never knew how to tell you until now.”
Chenle takes the cup off his finger and pokes Renjun’s chest. “At least ten of those dishes are cooked by me. At least ten of those cities, I’m going to let you drag me to a theme park or a museum while I’m running on two hours of sleep. At least ten more times, I need to tell gēgē I love him, so he has to stick around just a little longer.”
When Chenle brings a knuckle to brush the corners of Renjun’s eyes, Renjun realises his whole face feels wet.
With a croak, through the lump in his throat, Renjun whispers, “Only ten?”
“Maybe more,” Chenle murmurs, wiping more of Renjun’s tears and patting it onto his jeans. “I’ll let you know after the first ten.”
Renjun swallows. “I love you.” The words taste new in his mouth, in a way he can’t quite put his finger on. “Now say it back.”
“I”m not playing your games right now,” Chenle scoffs, “You’re not getting me to count down all ten right here.”
“What if I just wanted to say it?” Renjun lets his feet fall back over the ledge, running his tongue over his lips. The warmth settled in his stomach has spread all over his body now, buzzing gently. Combined with the residual heat of the evening, Renjun feels impossibly warm from head to toe, the first time in months. “I love you.” The taste is still there, but Renjun decides he likes it.
Chenle gives him a careful look, his bangs shrouding his expression. He closes his eyes when Renjun reaches a hand out to push them out of his face, opening them again when Renjun’s hand comes to rest on his cheek.
“Then say it again tomorrow,” Chenle sighs, “and the day after. Stay with me so you can say it to me as many times as you want.”
“You might get sick of hearing my voice.”
“I’d rather get sick of your voice than miss it for another four months,” he answers easily, sincerely, reaching for the gāoliángjiǔ again.
Moments later, Renjun feels cold porcelain pressed against his lips, and sees Chenle tilting the cup towards him. His eyelids flutter halfway as he lets Chenle tip the contents into his mouth without protest.
With Chenle’s fingers falling down to rest against his neck and thumb over his pulse point, Renjun finds the liquor doesn’t burn on the way down this time.
🪷
Side by side, they brush their teeth, wash their faces, change into loose sleep clothing, and collapse on the bed.
Side by side, their legs tangle under the covers, their hands brush as they curl up, and their slow breathing evens out to the same steady pace.
By his side, Renjun finds himself staring at Chenle, the even slope of his nose to the cut of his cheekbones to the curve of his lips, a face he could paint with his eyes closed, a person he’s had memorised head to chin, mole to mole, for as long as he can remember.
It’s one thing to know Chenle is beautiful; it’s another thing entirely to come to terms with why that thought makes Renjun’s heart skip a beat.
And as he feels the tide of sleep pull him further from the shore, Renjun wonders what Chenle’s “I love you”s would taste like on his tongue.
For Renjun, all it would take is letting go of his self control, so it can float away with the rest of his inhibitions. All it would take to cross the rift, the ravine, is tilting Chenle’s head down to close the space between them.
In that moment, before the gentle waves can engulf him entirely Renjun thinks nothing has ever seemed easier.
The realisation of his feelings settles into Renjun, dried flowers sinking to the bottom of his pot as they steep and unfurl into tea.
When Renjun opens both layers of his curtains and Chenle hisses from the sudden exposure, Renjun is still in love with him. When they stumble into the bathroom together, Renjun scrubbing himself down in the shower while Chenle shaves less than a metre away, Renjun is still in love with him. When Renjun’s parents pile them into his father’s ancient car and Chenle falls asleep with his head on Renjun’s shoulder, Renjun is still in love with him.
Mulling it over on the hour-long drive to his mother’s countryside village has Renjun uncovering years and years of moments he never acknowledged. In a new world of complicated language and complicated life, his relationship with Chenle was a life raft of easy back-and-forths, thoughtless and simple the way Chenle liked to take each day: thoughtlessly and simply. Bowls of rice split in half, compliments given over nothing at all, and jewellery slipped on and off were effortless actions, since Chenle never felt the need to place intention on his unending sincerity. For everything Chenle gave, Renjun returned as much as he had in him, not out of obligation but because doing things for Chenle was always as easy as breathing.
Loving Chenle is as easy as breathing, because the air around him has always been the same as the air at home: scentless, the perfect humidity, the perfect temperature.
Watching Chenle slot into Renjun’s sprawling family, joking around with his parents’ generation and kicking jiànzi with the children, it’s just as easy to imagine he’s always been here in this part of Renjun’s life.
Once the mothers start organising the whole family into teams to help prepare dinner, Renjun has to drag Chenle away from his heated badminton match against a cousin half their age, forcing a ladder into his hands so they can break off from the chaos towards the hill of peach trees.
“Watch your foot, there’s a weird thing jutting out!” Renjun calls out, once Chenle starts scaling the largest tree along the uphill path. Watching him from the ground is nerve wracking, a taste of what his jiějiěs must’ve felt watching him swing around in old sneakers pretending to be the Monkey King. It doesn’t help that Chenle’s never been outdoorsy, foregoing hikes to play basketball in the same air conditioned courts. “Are you sure you don’t want to swap? How many times do I have to tell you not to step with your bad ankle? That branch is too thin, it’s going to snap—!”
“I’m fine!” Chenle shouts back as he tests the weight of a branch, “This is pretty fun!”
Three peaches sail out of the leaves and Renjun quickly ducks to avoid them knocking his head clean off. They thump into his bamboo basket, jostling the contents with enough force for him to feel it against his back.
“Whoa, six points!”
“Be careful or they’ll bruise!” he chides, taking the straps off so he can reorganise the fruit inside. Thankfully, the impact only marked the peaches at the top, the more delicate grapes and apricots underneath unaffected.
“Can we hike higher up the hill?” Chenle asks as he steps down the ladder with a few more peaches held in a makeshift cradle from his shirt, “The view is incredible, and I wanna see more.”
“Since when did you care about what the sky looks like?”
“I’ve been appreciating it a little more these days,” he replies lightly, “Not a lot of time between schedules to relish anything but the smaller stuff.”
The sentiment takes Renjun by surprise, though Chenle dumps his peaches into the basket and shakes his shirt off without any regard.
“Like what?” asks Renjun, slinging the basket back on.
“Restaurants is a big one,” Chenle hums as they start up on the dirt trail again. He reaches up to pick a random peach, digging his nails around the stem to rip the soft flesh in half. The pit falls onto the dirt path, rolling to a stop near a bunch of other pits chewed up by animals. “Chinese food at every stop with Mark. Taking more photos. Basketball with locals. Ad-libbing for no reason other than to show off. Asking strangers if I can pet their dogs. That sort of thing.”
“Me too, actually. Flowers, perfume, classical piano, watching your concert recordings…” Renjun trails off. It’s been a long spring and a longer summer, the longest in his life. “My therapist says it’s easier to take in each day if I find something small and constant to look forward to, because if I hinge all my hopes and expectations on a big event, I’ll get trapped in a cycle of bigger and bigger expectations I might never meet. ‘Don’t borrow pressure from the future’, or something along those lines.”
“Are you worried resuming activities will be too much pressure?” Chenle asks, still occupied with his peach. The bits of skin he tries to pick off keep tearing into small shreds and sticking to his messy fingers.
Renjun waves his hands away and takes the peach halves in his own hands, peeling the skin off with practiced ease. “Of course I’m worried. It feels like the whole world is waiting for me to rise from the dead.”
He offers them back to Chenle, who curls one of Renjun’s hands over one half to keep, fingers leaving a trail of peach juice on his birthmark. “Should I tell everyone to cancel the balloons, the streamers, and the dance crew flash mob?”
That draws a quiet giggle out of Renjun. “They still have to wait a little longer, anyway. I need a little more time, but—”
He pauses as they reach the jagged point at the top of the hill, overlooking the rolling hills and the Songhua Lake. Every bit of land, from the distant mountains to the patches of tilled land, are painted a deep emerald green, resting atop the sprawling waterways: the perfect image of a Jilin July. Renjun grew up with this very view, yet it feels bigger now, endless across the horizon like an ancient handscroll.
Or maybe he’s just a little smaller. The thought is almost…comforting.
“I’m getting there,” Renjun tells the mountains and the lakes and the sky and the peeled peach half in his hand, “I’m almost ready.”
Chenle bumps their shoulders together; the contact is electric. “We’ll be there whenever you are.”
They bite into their halves at the same time, and the sweetness tastes completely new to Renjun, yet as familiar as the thrum of his veins.
🪷
“Renjun-ah?” Donghyuck’s tone is coloured in surprise when he picks up the phone, sending a pang of guilt to Renjun’s stomach. He missed Donghyuck’s voice.
“Haechan.” Renjun crosses his legs on top of his plastic stool. He made sure to find a secluded spot for the phone call, and right outside the kitchen shaded by the tile roof, no one can see him peel back his skin. “It’s been a while. How are you?” The Korean is oddly pleasant in his mouth.
“Good,” Donghyuck answers too quickly, with too much pep. Renjun frowns, and as if Donghyuck can see him, he lets out a long exhale that crackles in the receiver. “Bad. Fucking tired. Sorry.” After a pause, he adds, “I’m flying to LA on Sunday for the start of 127 schedules. Will we see each other before I’m out of commission for another month?”
Renjun winces. “We had to cancel our original flight to Korea, and now it’s an overnight layover.”
“Ships in the night,” Donghyuck sighs. “How is Chenle, by the way? I can’t remember the last time the group chat was this quiet.”
“My family is eating him alive,” Renjun jokes, peering into the open window to see Chenle juggle a cutting board stacked high with enough ingredients to feed a small nation, the best of his family’s cooks ordering him around with loud shouts. “They’ve been down a pair of hands in the kitchen since my cousin moved to Singapore, and they’re putting him to work.”
“Family?” Donghyuck echoes. “I thought you were in Shanghai.”
“We took the train to my city.” Renjun watches Chenle admire one of his uncle’s cleavers before flinching at the stern order to focus back on cutting the radishes. “Aside from his accent and his ridiculous watch, he fits right in.”
Donghyuck makes a noise of understanding, and Renjun knows they’re thinking of the night he visited the Lees, a pleasant but subdued dinner that ended early as the two of them were called to practice. He never grasped the layout of Donghyuck’s family apartment or his dorm, never remembered which spices sat in which shelves nor which house slippers were his to use. On the same hand, Donghyuck squirmed away from the camera when Renjun video called his parents and couldn’t figure out which products in the bathrooms were Jisung’s, off limits. Their footsteps were awkward in their two-man tango, all the steps memorised but none of the compatibility that made them click.
But the time wasn’t wasted.
Never in a million years would Renjun think that.
“Thank you.”
Donghyuck balks. “Where’s this coming from?”
“For the past two years, for everything, thank you.”
“I—I don’t think I did anything to deserve that—”
“Thank you for taking care of me,” Renjun interrupts, letting his back rest against the stone wall. “Thank you for slowing this life down for me, even by just a little. You deserved—no, you deserve so much more than what I gave you. I don’t know how many times I have to keep telling you it’s not your fault for it to get into your head.”
“Are you dying again?” Donghyuck tries to joke, “You’re scaring me.”
“Definitely not dying,” Renjun chuckles. “Definitely not dead.”
“Keep it that way,” Donghyuck warns, though his stern tone of voice sounds more like he’s talking to a misbehaving pet than his ex-something or other. “You were perfect, Renjun. You were everything a man could’ve ever wanted.”
“Somehow, I don’t think that’s possible.”
“You think I would lie to you?”
“I think you’re lying to yourself a little,” Renjun retorts. “I wasn’t perfect, because I don’t think any person can ever be perfect. My point is that there’s nothing wrong with that.”
“Ninety-nine percent?”
The answer is undeniably a Lee Donghyuck answer. God, Renjun missed him. “Say hi to the others for me.”
“I’ll settle for ninety-eight but no lower! I wouldn’t fall in love with anyone less than a ninety-eight, I have high class tastes.”
“Go finish packing.”
“Hey, how do you know I’m not already finished?”
“Because I know you. I know you’re drawing out this conversation because you’re too scared to tell me what’s really on your mind, so I’m telling you to go pack to pressure you into talking it out.”
The resulting silence on the other end signals to Renjun that he’s right on the money.
“It’s not the same without you,” Donghyuck confesses, the most vulnerable he’s sounded all phone call so far. Renjun can picture him with crystal clarity, lying down on his bed with his glasses askew surrounded by a mess of clothes for the trip, computer set up playing music and never-opened curtains remaining unopened. Maybe in the corner somewhere is a lit candle and a glass of before-bed wine. “It’s never the same without you. I miss your voice. I miss you. I can’t wait to see you shine again.”
“I might not be as bright.”
“Somehow, I don’t think that’s possible,” he sings. The whiplash between solemnity and terrible humour would be harsher if it wasn’t Donghyuck—if Renjun hadn’t had almost ten years to get used to it.
Chenle steps out of the kitchen with a large plastic tub of potatoes at his hip, one hand holding a little soup spoon. “Taste this for me?” he asks in Mandarin, holding the spoon up to Renjun’s mouth. Balanced on the ceramic is a small ball of cooked meat and chives. “I think it needs more soy sauce, but your jiùmǔ is threatening me at knifepoint about meddling with the seasoning of her secret filling recipe.”
Renjun pulls his phone away from his ear and leans closer to nibble off the spoon. After chewing and swallowing, he can definitively say he has no idea. “Needs more soy sauce.”
“I knew it!” Chenle exclaims, poking his head back in to shout at the kitchen before dropping to an unflattering crouch by the outdoor spigot.
With him now proceeding to wash potatoes, he’ll be able to overhear anything on Renjun’s side, though it dawns on Renjun that he’s spoken all that’s been on his mind. His shoulders already feel lighter.
He puts his phone to his ear again. “I have to help with dinner soon.”
In the second Renjun takes to check if Donghyuck hung up on him, Donghyuck asks hesitantly, “Is it different with Chenle? Was it any different than how you felt towards me?”
Renjun stops to consider the question. It’s strikingly perceptive, and he can practically feel Donghyuck’s eyes on him, staring right into him with uncanny attention.
He looks down at Chenle fiddling with the spigot and filling up his potato tub. Chenle notices Renjun’s gaze once he starts scrubbing the skin and whisper shouts, “Check the technique!”
“I don’t know,” Renjun replies honestly, “I can’t tell yet. All I know is that how I feel about myself is different. Does that make sense?”
“Don’t soften the blow, or I’ll take the chance that we could’ve worked out and run with it.”
“Don’t bother with your flirting when we both know you fell out of love too,” Renjun snorts. “I hope you find someone that loves themself from the get go, so you don’t have to give up all the love in you and have nothing left for yourself to keep.”
“Well, I hope that—” Donghyuck falters— “I hope that you eat well.”
Renjun shakes his head, an unconscious smile playing at the corners of his mouth. ”Goodnight, Haechan. Donghyuck.”
With that, Donghyuck makes a gross, wet kissing sound before hanging up, the call cutting him off mid-laugh.
“Sounded pretty serious,” Chenle comments, still in Korean.
“I guess it was.” Renjun pockets his phone and kneels on the dirt. “But he needed it. I needed it too.”
Chenle hums. “And you’re alright?”
“Yeah.” Renjun reaches for the smallest potato in the tub to wash. Two of the eyes poking from the side and a thin smudge of dirt give the potato a lopsided smile.
He watches Chenle’s watch dip into the water, tracing a path up the veins of his arms, over his shoulder around his jaw to his face, knit into deep focus on the potatoes. For some reason, that’s what has Renjun’s posture softening.
That’s what makes Renjun fully smile.
“Yeah,” he repeats, “I think I’m alright.”
🪷
After dinner, drinks, and cards, everyone gathers together to clear the outdoor tables and make space for the truck bed of fireworks Renjun’s gūfù drives behind the house. Lighting up the sky has been a post-family dinner tradition amongst the Huangs no matter how much the rest of the village complains, though Renjun finds himself drifting away from the large crowd to sit at his favourite spot, under the towering Mongolian oak tree closer to the house. With his vacuum flask of wūlóngchá, he gets to watch the show with a full view, away from the commotion of his jiějiěs, their rowdy children, and their rowdier husbands.
A few minutes after the first fountain is lit and the crowd of his family burst into cheers, Renjun notices Chenle jogging over with a mini sparkler in hand, bright enough to illuminate his grin in the dark.
“I got you one,” he says, handing the stick over in exchange for the extra cup of tea. He takes a seat next to Renjun, in the same space bracketed by two roots. The sudden contact, shoulder to shoulder and thigh to thigh, sends an involuntary shiver down Renjun’s spine. All day, he kept a careful distance from Chenle, not wanting to deal with odd looks from the family members he didn’t know as well, but it didn’t stop Chenle’s natural inclination towards physical touch, under the table where their knees knocked into or over the table as their hands brushed during dòu dìzhǔ.
All the little fleeting moments were the exact same—Chenle was the exact same—but it felt different.
Everything now is a little different to Renjun, a little off kilter, like coming to terms with his feelings meant realising his vision is twenty-three-point-five degrees off centre.
“Why are you sitting so far away?” asks Chenle, bringing Renjun back to the present. He has one knee drawn to his chest, elbow resting on top. His other hand holds the cup, his ring glittering from the sparkler.
“The firecrackers used to hurt my ears. It’s just a habit now,” Renjun explains, twisting the sparkler in his fingers. The crackle of orange reminds him of all the different music videos and photo books they’ve shot over the years, bright pops of light that were captured beautifully on camera. “You can see all the colours better from here, anyway.”
“I’ve never lit fireworks before,” Chenle says after a sip of tea, “They’re banned in the cities, and we didn’t have any country family growing up. My sǎozi has relatives outside of Shanghai, but I haven’t gotten the chance to meet them all yet.”
“First time flying a kite, first time fruit picking, first time lighting fireworks,” Renjun counts off, “What’s next, first time having a little fun? First time playing around?”
“Your yífū suggested first time fishing.” Chenle giggles at the affronted noise Renjun makes in response.
“You’d hate it. You hate doing things you’re bad at.”
“Hey, where’s your confidence in me? I feel like I’d be pretty good! I figured out those kites, I can figure out some string on a stick. How hard could it be?”
“Famous last words. You’d get bored within the first five minutes and tangle yourself in the fishing line seconds later.” Renjun sets his tea down so he can pinch Chenle’s side, making him jolt and almost spill tea over himself. “I’m glad you’re having fun in Jilin, but I promise you won’t lose anything if you leave fishing off the agenda.”
“I’m glad you brought me,” Chenle says, finishing the rest of his tea. “You’re happier here.”
And he’s right.
Chenle’s right, the way he always is, the way he’s always been able to look right through Renjun’s skin and bones, directly at the bits and pieces he keeps tight to himself.
Still, Renjun mumbles, “Where’s ‘here’?”
“Home.”
Gù xiāng. Home.
It sounds so soft coming from Chenle, in his low voice, hoarse after so much laughter and happiness around the table.
“How do you know I’m happier when you didn’t ask?”
“I don’t need to ask, I can sort of just tell. Taking me here, I feel like gēgē let me into his mind a little bit. You’re more—you, here.”
Renjun stares at the sparkler as it fizzles to the base. Just like that, its last light fades into the night. “I think it’s because it’s easier to be myself around you.”
“Is it?”
“I have an accent when I speak Chinese now, my family has been teasing me about it all day,” he starts, “Half my dreams are in Korean. I got used to eating the last grains of rice in my bowl with a metal spoon. I keep taking out the red bill to pay for things, and I only realise it’s the wrong amount when I get a bunch of spare change in return. I know I’m never going to be Korean, but it feels like I’m drifting further and further away from the tiny strands that keep me tethered to the mainland. I don’t know how long I’ve been suspended in between, but regardless of which country I’m in, I always feel like I’m putting on a front, on stage or off stage. I’ve felt like that for years.”
Renjun sets the extinguished sparkler down on the grass and nudges Chenle. “But so do you, don’t you?” he implores.
Chenle rests his cheek on his raised elbow and nods. “Trust me, I get it. I fucking get it.” His eyes flick over with a small smile as he says, “Lán yáng hǎiguī.”
Renjun returns the smile, their own little secret. “We’re both somewhere in between China and Korea, huh? Floating around in the Yellow Sea with our loaner words.”
“Awkward half bows when we don’t know if we’re supposed to bow or not,” Chenle adds.
“Ordering zá cài and getting noodles.”
“Knowing how to read historical signs better than the rest of Dream.”
“Always us,” Renjun sighs. “You’ve always been able to see me for who I am, no matter how close or far we are to China.” Reaching a hand out to lace their fingers together has their friendship rings brushing right against each other, the tiniest electric spark fading into warmth. “You’ve always been right here with me, talking my ear off in Koreanese on this little boat.”
As the first rocket shoots up in the distance, the explosion of red light Chenle’s face up, speckling him with dancing colours. They’re so much closer than Renjun realised, close enough where he can lower his voice and whisper his next words under the boom of the fireworks. “It’s always been you.”
“I think—” Chenle says in a rush, then he stops. He squeezes their hands together tighter, exhales, and speaks again, slower, “I think you’ve always been it for me but…in a different way than you’re suggesting.”
Renjun’s mouth goes dry. “How different?”
“I don’t…” Chenle studies Renjun’s face with deep, dark eyes. They flicker down to Renjun’s lips and Renjun’s entire body seizes up, but they’re back on his eyes in an instant as Chenle admits, “I don’t know.”
They stay there, too close yet not close enough, and Renjun is in love with him.
When another firework bursts in the air, Chenle glances away, his face turning gold.
And Renjun tugs him right back, so he can squeeze his eyes shut and press their lips together.
All the noise around them, the whistling and the explosions and the shouts, come to a complete silence as the kiss encompasses Renjun fully. Chenle tilts his head to deepen the kiss with a quiet groan, and Renjun practically falls into him when his hands come up to cup Renjun’s face. The burst of heat evens out to a low hum that courses through every vein, every nerve, every last inch of his body, déjà vu over a foreign feeling somehow as familiar to his senses as his heartbeat—like he’s been waiting all his life for this without realising.
Separating for air is terrifying, not because of Renjun’s own feelings but because of Chenle’s, the way he lays them out bare on his face and in his eyes. Renjun’s never had all of Chenle in front of him like this before, and he wants nothing more than to hold him close and kiss him again—love him again, again, again.
“I think,” Renjun murmurs, “it’s not that different at all.”
And after the longest, heaviest pause in the world, Chenle nods and tilts Renjun’s chin up again, this time with his eyes closed.
🪷
On the drive back to the city, Chenle falls asleep on Renjun’s shoulder again. He smells of fireworks, fruit sugar, and something else Renjun can’t quite put his finger on.
He has to help Chenle up all nine flights of stairs, careful to keep a tight hold around his waist as he takes each step in his dazed, exhausted state. It takes some quiet scolding to get Chenle to change into sleep clothes, even more nagging to have him wash his face.
Eventually though, they both fall to bed, and as Renjun wraps his arms around Chenle again, this time from the back, he presses his nose against Chenle’s neck and realises he smells like home.
The sun filters through Renjun’s layer of sheer curtains, lighting up his bedroom in the same gentle saturation as his childhood memories. It’s warm against his skin, easy on his eyes, and everything he didn’t realise he missed. He thinks the windows are pushed up just slightly, the sound of morning traffic humming in the distance. Even though Renjun knows he’s prone to squirming around in his sleep, his blanket is somehow drawn neatly under his chin and tucked under his mattress. There’s no urgent texts, no ringing alarms, no places to be in his corner of quiet. With the residual warmth on his left side, it’s hard to pull himself out of the comfort.
Eventually, he musters the energy to pull himself from under the sheets, padding around for his slippers and his pill box—until he notices the latter is already on the bedside table, accompanied by a steaming cup of what smells like pǔěrchá, his parents’ favourite.
He clicks open today’s and blinks at the contents.
Nestled within the plastic walls, pushing his pills into the plastic corners, is a longan. Running his finger over the skin, Renjun can tell it’s been washed and dried, ready to eat at a moment’s notice. The thought of Chenle waking up earlier than him, digging around the bags of leftovers from last night for the bunches of longan, washing them in the half-broken kitchen sink, and slipping back into the bedroom to squish one singular fruit into the pill box is as absurd as it’s endearing, and Renjun can’t help collapsing into a fit of giggles on top of his bed as he peels it.
The tea is the perfect temperature, the pills go down without a hitch, and the peeled longan bursts with sweet juice when he bites down.
As Renjun moves to pick out his outfit and the skincare products that don’t fit on top of the sink, he hears a muffled argument leak through the walls. Opening the door to peek into the rest of the apartment, he sees Chenle serving his parents using the antique wooden tea tray they only take out for special occasions, pouring tea on the tea pets in between filling their cups.
Maybe in another world, Renjun didn’t have to tell which steps Chenle needed to avoid on the way up to the ninth floor. Maybe in another world, Chenle was just as comfortable with the steps, the building, the city, as he is at Renjun’s dining table, shouting with his parents.
All three of them notice Renjun at the same time, and Chenle calls out, “There’s millet congee on the stove for you after you shower,” at the same time his father demands, “Do you think swimming or basketball is the better spectator sport?”
Chenle rolls his eyes so hard, he looks like he’s getting possessed. “Swimming lasts for a few minutes tops, I know shūshu isn’t so busy where he can’t sit down for two hours to appreciate a real game.”
“Swimming is an art form, Zhong Chenle, basketball is just sweaty men shoving each other around—!”
“I think you two are both forgetting your roots!” his mother cuts in, “Ping pong is our national sport—”
“Gymnastics,” Renjun answers loudly, shutting the bathroom door on the argument. The sudden quiet following makes him laugh so loud, he’s sure they can hear it from where they sit.
🪷
They’re not drunk when they water the plants on the rooftop this time around, but they still trip and laugh and shriek as they aim the two hoses at each other, doused head to toe in no time at all.
“This is my last clean outfit!” Renjun whines, shaking the water out of his hair with his hands. “I can’t wear any of the stuff in my closet, they’re all three sizes too small!”
Chenle sticks his tongue out as he sprays one last shower onto the squash bed. “You started it.”
Instead of humouring his immaturity, Renjun pokes Chenle’s extended tongue with his finger, making Chenle stumble back with a screech. The hose flops out of his hands and fires at him head to toe again, to Renjun’s delight.
They spend so much time wringing their shirts out and sniping at each other that Renjun’s mother has to tell them off through the window, but under the mid-morning sun, surrounded by green, blue, and gold, Renjun thinks this is what summer should feel like.
🪷
Seeing his parents’ favourite temple in the midst of a stunning July day, unmarred by snow, ice, or rime, takes Renjun’s breath away the moment he steps through the páifāng.
The wide space is far from the bustle of the city, maintaining a serenity that’s complemented by the light smell of incense and the distance strumming of a gǔzhēng. His parents guide the two of them to buy incense, explaining to Chenle each of the gods in lengthy spiels Renjun remembers from years and years ago. He’s never felt particularly inclined towards faith, but seeing his parents light up recounting fables and beaming proudly whenever Chenle marvels at the architecture, Renjun finds himself appreciating the last minute trip a little more.
In the middle of each towering building, everything feels still.
While Renjun’s parents spend their own ample time at each statue, Renjun bows three times and leaves incense at every burner without much thought, Chenle following shortly behind him.
Towards the back near the very last hall is a large wishing wall stretching beside a rectangular carp pond, attended to by two people adorning robes, one sweeping the stone paths while the other quietly plays on a dízi. The wooden charms cost eight RMB each, and Chenle takes the change given back to him and stuffs it into the donation box.
As Renjun rummages through his purse for the marker he uses for impromptu autographs, he stops to squish the aquarium seal charm from the start of the trip, which still dangles from the strap with a cartoon smile. He glances up at Chenle and wonders if Chenle knows all the little things he’s done for Renjun in the past lifetime have changed him in ways impossible to quantify.
He wonders if loving him is as easy for Chenle as it is the other way around too. If all this time, Renjun just never looked closer.
Chenle finishes writing his charm in only a minute, and knots it in the midst of a bunch of charms asking for blessings for academics, wishes for good fortune, and prayers for direction in life. Once it stops spinning around, Renjun squints up at the perfect calligraphy.
Let’s stay healthy and not get hurt. Let our comeback win at least two music shows.
Renjun raises an eyebrow. “Spoilers? This soon before promotions? We haven’t even recorded all the tracks yet.”
Chenle shrugs with a lopsided grin. “The Five Great Immortals are on the exclusive pre-release list. I bet Chángxiān’s favourite track is ‘I Hate Fruits’.”
Returning to his own charm with his pen steady and careful, Renjun writes on the red paint, Please let the world be a happier place for everyone I love.
At the bottom of the charm, he adds, including myself, and draws a little butterfly with twin tails.
Over his shoulder, Chenle teases, “Your handwriting still looks like a bunch of little worms.” He points to the middle of the first sentence. “You wrote the wrong de here. You need the one with the chì radical.”
“The Five Great Immortals will forgive me this one time,” Renjun huffs, tying his to a vine right under Chenle’s, beside a charm asking for their next door neighbour’s cat to be by the window every day.
The moment they step away from the wall, a strong gust of wind blows through the temple, rustling all the wooden charms. Right before his eyes, Renjun loses sight of whichever one his was, as the red clink and clack into each other, a strange melody from the makeshift chimes. The entire wall sways with life, each wish carried up into the air, hopefully with enough momentum to ride all the way to the heavens.
Briefly, Renjun wonders if there’s a spot up there for him too.
Not now, not for a long, long time if he can help it, but one inevitable day.
When Chenle slips his hand into Renjun’s, Renjun amends his thought: one inevitable day, he hopes there’s two spots side by side, maybe even with enough space for a dog and a few friends.
But if it can be helped, not now—not for a long, long time.
🪷
The first flight to Tianjin is short and sweet, two hours spent lounging in the cushy first class seats Chenle splurged on. They share the complimentary wired earbuds to watch an action movie, trying and promptly gagging on the mini bottle of wine from the drinks cart.
Tianjin is a beautiful city, glittering gold underneath as their plane cruises over the reservoir and the spider web of lit up streets. Admittedly, Renjun hasn’t seen much of China, and seeing one of the national central cities laid out before him has his mind wandering into the possibilities of seeing the rest some day in the future, with a proper amount of vacation days spent at each. Their hotel is on the same street as the Tianjin Zhī Yǎn, and after a bit of tugging, Chenle concedes and lets Renjun drag him into the line for the ferris wheel.
Renjun gazes at the view from their capsule as they climb to the top. The sea of lights reminds him of concert views from the stage, though it makes him smile now instead of filling him with regret. Soon, he’ll see the green turn to yellow, and it’ll have been worth the wait.
“Everything looks tiny from up here,” he remarks, “I always forget how small the world is.”
“I don’t think eight billion people is that small,” Chenle comments, leaning over to look down too and pressing their shoulders together in the process.
“I always forget there’s eight billion people on this planet,” Renjun amends, “It’s hard to remember people outside of me, sometimes.” At the funny look Chenle fixes on him, Renjun frowns. “What?”
“You get flowers for the staff at every stop. You get us Christmas and birthday gifts every year,” he points out, “I’m pretty sure you of all people don’t need help remembering to consider others.”
Renjun feels his cheeks bloom with warmth. “That’s nothing.”
Chenle shrugs. “Maybe that’s why you always forget. Because you’re so used to thinking of yourself as nothing, the rest of the world fades out into the background, even though that’s so far from the truth.”
“Well!” Renjun shifts his weight at the sudden observation. “I’m working on it.”
“I know you are,” says Chenle, with nothing but earnestness. He points to a young man walking a little girl down the street, both of them holding pink balloons. “Do you think he dips his fried food in sauce or pours the sauce on top?”
Checking into their hotel leads them to discover that the restaurant is jam packed with a thirty minute wait time for seating, so they grab a few menus and place room service orders instead. As Chenle sinks into the couch with his iPad to watch Olympic basketball, Renjun draws a bath using the fancy salts provided on the counter. The ambiance isn’t all there with Chenle shouting and cheering every few seconds, but after days being on his feet up and around cities—after months of practice preparing him to return to stage—getting to sink into the water loosens all the muscles, undoing each knot in his spine one by one.
After Renjun pats himself dry and bundles himself in the hotel bathrobe, Chenle slinks into the bathroom to take a shower, in and out in an offensive five minutes.
“How do you even—?” Renjun swallows when he makes eye contact with Chenle while he’s tightening a towel around his waist, water dripping down his bare torso. “—get clean…”
“Soap, rinse, shampoo, rinse, done,” Chenle rattles, wiping himself off with a smaller towel. Renjun has to force himself to focus on his skincare routine to avoid unashamed staring, though Chenle seems none the wiser, rummaging around Renjun’s products for the hotel body lotion. “You’re the one who’s getting scammed by the makeup industry. Does any of this even do anything?”
“It’s a ritual,” Renjun chides, smoothing moisturiser over his face. “Even if it doesn’t do anything, I enjoy the process. It’s therapeutic. Plus, it smells nice.” He squirts a dollop on his fingers and lifts it for Chenle to get a whiff.
“I don’t get it,” he says flatly, but he doesn’t protest when Renjun dabs it on his nose and smooths it over his nose and his cheeks.
Renjun’s so used to applying moisturiser to his own face, he doesn’t think about his actions until he’s using both hands to rub over Chenle’s face and it dawns on him how close they are; Renjun’s fluffy sleeves brush against Chenle’s chest, and Renjun can count each individual eyelash on Chenle’s closed lids. Plus, Chenle is so pliant in his touch, leaning into Renjun’s touch without protest, like a cat. Seeing Chenle so relaxed, clearly enjoying the ministrations, makes the pads of Renjun’s fingers tingle.
His hands come to a stop around Chenle’s neck and Chenle’s flutter open. He’s gorgeous like this—like always.
Renjun thumbs over Chenle’s pulse point. “Do you, um, want face oil—?”
Before he can finish, Chenle surges forward to kiss him, hands on his waist as he brackets Renjun against the edge of the sink. Unlike their first kiss, this one carries urgency, all unfiltered want that melts Renjun against the marble counter. He lets Chenle take the lead and set the pace, spreading his legs so Chenle can step in between, the two of them separated only by two layers of thin cotton now. Chenle nips Renjun’s bottom lip and Renjun parts them with a soft exhale, making space for Chenle’s tongue to swipe over his teeth and the roof of his mouth. The progression has Renjun dizzy as everything below his navel stirs with need.
When they pull apart, Chenle drops his forehead onto Renjun’s shoulder with a gasp. “Fuck.”
Renjun tangles one hand in the wet strands of hair by Chenle’s nape, pressing a soft kiss to his reddening neck. Always so sensitive, Chenle trembles from the light touch. “Are you okay?”
“I just,” Chenle breathes, “I like you so much. I’ve never felt this way about someone before.”
“We can take it slow,” reassures Renjun, “We don’t have to do anything.”
“But I want to.” Chenle slides one hand up Renjun’s bare thigh so he can press closer. The pressure offers an immediate surge of pleasure, Chenle just as affected as Renjun despite how little they’ve done. “God, I—I want you.”
“I don’t have anything to prep—”
“Just like this,” Chenle practically begs, the needy edge in his tone going straight into Renjun’s bloodstream, down south. “Please.”
Renjun pushes Chenle’s damp bangs out of his face so he can look at Chenle properly; Chenle’s eyes are dark and filled with heat, boring into Renjun with an intensity that makes his nerves sing.
When he nods, Chenle immediately starts undoing the belt of the robe, baring Renjun’s skin to the steamy warmth of the bathroom. His hands trail upwards, running along Renjun’s stomach, his ribs, his back, every last corner, as his mouth trails over to nibble over his collarbone. Renjun’s never been marked before, and the groan that tumbles out of his mouth when Chenle sucks over a particularly sensitive spot is loud enough to echo off the tile. He can feel Chenle smile against his skin as he repeats the action, drawing another out of Renjun. As Chenle focuses on leaving his signature while exploring Renjun’s upper body, Renjun focuses his attention elsewhere, tugging on Chenle’s towel to expose the rest of him.
Chenle shudders when Renjun wraps his hand around him, letting out a guttural moan from somewhere deep in his chest. Renjun doesn’t miss the way Chenle’s nails dig into his waist to steady himself, the way he bucks forward as Renjun slides his fingers down to spread his pre. The motions must overwhelm Chenle because he halts his hands and the path of his mouth to focus on breathing, hot and ragged puffs of air against Renjun’s ear. Renjun takes the opportunity to nose around his neck and his chest. He’s much gentler, opting to do little more than press his lips over the moles he’s never seen before. He runs the tip of his tongue over one of Chenle’s nipples, revelling in Chenle’s resulting whine. It’s a detail Renjun notes and shelves for the future.
They moan in sync the moment Renjun takes both of them in hand, the sudden heat and wetness far too much at once but not nearly enough. Chenle fucks up into the circle of Renjun’s fingers and the friction from the slide is downright sinful, so much so that Renjun has to slot their mouths together again to muffle the embarrassing noise he makes from the back of his throat. Chenle responds without hesitation, dragging his nails up Renjun’s back to dig his fingers in Renjun’s hair. Renjun doesn’t remember the last time sex felt this good to him, if it ever had, and he can’t tell if he’s drowning or if he’s floating at the top of the world.
Chenle finishes first with Renjun following soon after, their kissing reduced to just panting into each other’s mouths as they fall back to their senses. Renjun can’t even bring himself to get mad at the mess on his freshly bathed skin, not when Chenle runs his fingers through the streaks and the bruises, eyes wide like he’s touching something holy.
“You’re so beautiful,” Chenle murmurs.
Out of everything over the course of the night, somehow that’s what gets Renjun to flush the deepest. “So are you.”
He doesn’t know how long they stay like that, basking in each other on the comedown with lazy fingers and lazier kisses, but they both freeze up at the loud knock on the door a moment later.
A second, more insistent knock follows.
“Hello?” Renjun calls out, praying his voice doesn’t sound as wrecked through the door as it does to his ears. “What is it?”
“Room service? Your dinner is ready!”
On cue, Renjun’s stomach grumbles a little too loud for a little too long to be dignified.
When Chenle bursts into a fit of laughter, bright with his whiskers on full display as he slaps the counter in delight at whatever expression is on Renjun’s face—
Renjun is so, so in love with him.
Aside from a few more random things scattered around the space, Chenle’s apartment doesn’t look much different from the last time Renjun visited, after their dinner in June—which itself wasn’t that different from all the regular visits before. It smells about the same as he remembers too, a whole lot of nothing.
As Renjun flicks on the lights and swaps his boots for his usual pair of slippers, Chenle runs into the living room to meet a giddy Daegal, scooping her up while cooing. “Daddy’s home!” he squeals, saccharine sweetness dripping off every stretched syllable, “I know you missed me, I know Kun doesn’t cherish you like I do.”
Daegal barks and licks all over Chenle’s face, to Chenle’s absolute delight. Once she’s done, Chenle cradles her against his shoulder and looks over at Renjun with his now wet face; Renjun has to bite his cheek to keep from laughing.
“Want to walk her with me?” he asks, “I usually order food that I can pick up on the way. We can get whatever you want.”
The question is innocuous, a question Chenle’s asked him hundreds of times before, but looking at him hug the little tissue they adopted together in the midst of lockdown, the familiarity strikes Renjun like Chenle’s asked it thousands of times, millions of times maybe, in other worlds where they’re not idols, instead university graduates or colleagues at the same company or childhood family friends.
Other worlds where they get each other to themselves too.
Renjun pads over, wipes the spit of Chenle’s face, raises his heels just the slightest to match their heights, and kisses him.
He kisses him with everything he has, then steps back and giggles at the bright red painting Chenle’s whole head and neck, no makeup to hide it.
“I think I want to cook with you actually,” Renjun answers.
And it’s another day, as hands settle over his an hour later, helping him slice through tomatoes and whisk together eggs.
It’s another day, of a loud dinner around reality TV, shouting at terrible arguments and crying out at heartfelt moments between lovers.
It’s another day, as the world keeps turning.
And in the midst of the world, in the midst of the ocean, in the midst of Chenle’s bed with him and Daegal curled up beside him, Renjun thinks he’s a little happier.
The falling action follows like this:
Renjun is twenty-four years old when the world restarts, and twenty-four years old still when he falls in love again. Work is still busy, but life is a little kinder: the world is a little kinder.
The conclusion doesn’t wrap up neatly, but nothing in Renjun’s life has ever seemed too; there’s so much more time after all, too many more tides to come in and out, too many more fruit trees to ripen, too many more chances for the bigger conclusions to come full circle. There’s so many more schedules, so many more concerts, so many more days ending with all seven of them collapsed on the floor of the mirrored practice rooms, their breathless panting in sync. There’s so many more nights spent falling asleep on Chenle’s shoulder on car rides back to his apartment, scratching Daegal behind the neck where she likes it, arguing half-heartedly over who gets which side of the bed.
Now, more than ever, Renjun has time. And maybe it isn’t kind, but it’s patient.
For this chapter, the conclusion finishes something like this:
Renjun is twenty-four years old when he realises the world, steady and constant under his feet, has never stopped turning.
And Renjun is twenty-four years old when he picks up his feet and starts walking again.
画龙点睛 (painting a dragon and dotting in the eyes)
to add the finishing touch.