Chapter Text
Nicholas' ears are ringing. Piercing white noise rattles his brain, a deafening high-pitched beep that only affects him. He can see movement in his periphery, Harua's strained smile as he explains himself to the rest, Fuma's amused smile, K's vacant eyes; none of it in focus. Nicholas' eyes are glued to the obvious.
On good days, Euijoo's work smile isn't all that plastic. Today isn't special enough to be an outlier. Nicholas wants to believe he knows the difference, the details, the exact pull of the skin in his face that makes them the real deal. On bad days, Nicholas can't stomach the lie.
Euijoo is smiling his plastic smile, looking to the side, unable to face any of it. Nicholas is looking at him, slipping up once more, fingers twitching on the cheap foldable tables they're using for props. He hears himself ask about the stupid plants, trying to keep it light, knowing he missed the mark when the words come out too stupidly tender. Euijoo doesn't look at him in the eyes but he snaps at him. Only him.
"Yes, they're alive. Of course they're alive."
Nicholas' stomach rolls. He smiles through it all, clarifying to Fuma he bought them for Euijoo's birthday, unable to add anything else, lie or truth or otherwise.
Of course they're alive. Nicholas wants to ask what is so obvious about that.
𝄞
The day their managers told them they were splitting them up into three dorms, Nicholas was mostly relieved. After a short while, nine people coexisting under the same roof became too much even for him. To Nicholas, home always sheltered at least four heartbeats; going down to three wasn't a big deal.
To claim relief was all there was to it would be laughable. Dread, uneasiness, uncertainty; Nicholas is entirely too acquainted with these feelings to find their knocking at his door all that surprising. The reason wasn't unfamiliar either.
Not living with Euijoo was never part of the plan. Nicholas just never thought about it. Why would he bother with that when Euijoo has been down the hall this entire time? To face the possibility of losing it even for a second was – It doesn't matter. It comes and goes between two breaths. For a moment Nicholas and Euijoo didn't live together. In the next, they're unpacking glasses in their new kitchen, taking turns telling Harua which song to play next on their brand new TV.
The move doesn't change much. They're hardly at their dorms to begin with, barely have time to make the place a home, rarely see each other's faces after spending every waken moment together. It's a routine they have perfected down to the seconds. Block the view of the padlock, rush inside, throw their bags on their tiny shitty sofa, claim the shower. Fall asleep, rush out, fly away for weeks. Rinse and repeat. Nicholas was never a homebody anyway.
Euijoo gets shit about his bare bones room twice before he starts buying mismatched stuff to fill in the gaps. A blanket from some store online he winces when he touches, ambient lights he keeps in the default sunset colors, a beige set of bedding for his stupid stacked pillows. He doesn't seem to understand his room is still empty until Nicholas gives him the plants.
Nicholas bought them from a nice auntie a few blocks away from their company. She told him that these ones are too stubborn to die, that a little neglect wouldn't do much. Nicholas had laughed a little too loud and told her she didn't know his friend as he picked two out for her to wrap.
At 12:35am on his 23rd birthday, Euijoo opened the little cardboard box Nicholas handed to him with an excited glint in his eyes. The year prior, Nicholas' gift left a silhouette on his ring finger once he finally took it off. This year, Euijoo stared at the plants like they were the carnivore type.
Nicholas twitched in place, started rambling about Euijoo's empty room, the shitty blanket he hates and the stupid lights he keeps in the default setting, before quieting down when Euijoo finally looked up.
"Do you really trust me to keep them alive?" Euijoo's eyes were big, full of nothing like his room and everything Nicholas never learned how to lie to.
"No," he said, like it didn't bother him. Like he accounted for it, took it into consideration while handpicking the plants and still decided to bet against it on their lives. Sacrifice is embedded in everything they have ever done to each other. "But I can't stand how empty your room is."
𝄞
"So, to recap," Harua's voice travels across the scrape of metal hangers against metal racks. "You gave Euijoo another thing to take care of for his birthday because you think his interior design skills suck?" Harua pulls a baby-t out to see the full design on the front before putting it back with a mildly disgusted look in his face.
Shopping with Harua is fun. They share similar tastes, similar loose wallets, and neither is afraid of being brutally honest if needed. Nicholas is a firm believer that there's no wrong way to be fashionable, Harua not so politely disagrees. He isn't stupid enough to deny Harua's inspiration source, either.
Sometimes, when Nicholas scrolls fast enough through their Instagram, he sees himself in pictures that he never took. At base level, it's flattering. Diving deeper has never been his style.
"His room is empty, Harua," he remarks exasperated. Nobody seems to get the gravity of what he's saying. Maybe he's enunciating the words wrong, maybe he needs to find better ones, but his point is simple enough to understand. "The guy doesn't even have curtains."
"Then why didn't you buy him curtains instead of something that can die on him?" Harua looks at him pointedly over the racks. He knows Nicholas hates when people look bored around him, so it's only natural for him to do it when he wants to get under his skin. It's been too frequent of an occurrence lately for Nicholas' liking.
"Curtains are hardly a birthday gift," Nicholas waves the thought away carelessly. He pulls a shirt off the rack to measure against his torso before discarding that too. "And he's so fussy about colors and fabrics, I just know whatever I got him wouldn't have been right." It's one of Euijoo's quirks he can understand the most, even if it's frustrating. Nothing new there.
"Still, isn't he troubled enough already?"
The way Harua talks about Euijoo has always been a bit off. He's never outright rude, never impolite, rarely cruel. It's hard to pinpoint, something elusive loitering in the intersection between pity and resignation. Each day it gets closer to the way one would talk about a rescue dog hiding under the couch. Some days late at night, Nicholas fears he has something to do with it. In which way that might be is up to a debate Nicholas has no desire to bet on.
"They're plants, Harua, not a turtle." Nicholas' jaw tenses as he grates his molars together. "It's not the end of the world if he forgets about them in some dark corner."
Nicholas is trying to show him that, at least. He's really hoping to showcase it with facts; not everything is a personal moral failure tallying up against his soul.
Sometimes you're just a kid, sometimes things just die. Most of the time blame is never part of that equation.
"So it wouldn't upset you?" Harua doesn't like being loud, but he speaks with arrow-straight precision nonetheless.
Nicholas still remembers a time when he had to ask Harua to repeat himself more than three times to understand what he was saying. Harua's skittishness didn't mix well with his still tender grasp on his fourth language. They found a rhythm eventually, made it work for them before that and afterward too. Harua speaks more clearly now, gentle voice not dulling his sharpness, and Nicholas only asks him to repeat the more niche words to add to his ever-growing vocabulary.
There's pride in the way they communicate; Nicholas was the first one to pull a brick off Harua's walls. On the other side of the coin, Harua learned how to word things to deal the utmost damage to his fences. The paint is chipped, the wood is warping, and Nicholas still views it as a labor of love. Maybe he's the twisted one. Maybe this is just how things are meant to go. Maybe the splinters in his hands are proof enough of complicity.
"What? If they died?" Nicholas wants to laugh. It comes out forced and ugly. "I'm counting on it." For too many reasons, Nicholas can't wait for the decaying scent to reach him.
"Wow. Setting the poor guy up for failure on his own birthday, uh?" Arrow meets bullseye. "Great gift, hyung."
Nicholas really wants to laugh now. Knowing Euijoo is a cross he has been carrying long enough to forget the weight of. The issue with loving to the point of flaunting is that not everyone can fathom the grandiose. Nicholas wouldn't be able to articulate it in any of the tongues circling through his mind anyway. Harua could never get it in the account that spoken language doesn't cut it.
He came to terms with it a few unheard conversations back: Euijoo and Nicholas have their own syntax and alphabet. A to C to W, a period here, an empty space there; none of it privy to anyone but them. Even then, Nicholas knows they speak in different dialects. How is he meant to explain it to anyone else when it's all situational, so intuitive, so hands-on?
Nicholas is counting on the plants rotting on Euijoo's shelves; he prepared his reaction, the speech pattern that will be needed of him, the carefully practiced dance between teasing and carefree. At least he has shelves. At least there's space to fill up. At least now Euijoo knows what not to do next time. It's fine. It's meant to be fine.
Compost the thing, throw away the pot, upscale it into something unrecognizable. Nicholas is ready to give Euijoo each gardening tool he might need to uproot it all. If he's included in that, then, well. Maybe Nicholas really is twisted.
"You just don't have faith in him," Nicholas waves it away, pushing a hanger too harshly to the side.
Nicholas isn't being obtuse; he knows they aren't speaking about the same thing. Harua is unconcerned with Euijoo, that's not his abused dog even if they share a couch. Harua and his relationship is its own zoo. The lack of concern is why he just wouldn't get it.
"I'm not the one admitting I'm counting on my neurotic friend neglecting my gift to death," Harua doesn't spit words, he doesn't force them out, they rarely escape him without thought. He picks them out with the sort of vitriol that is learned, with calculated awareness. Harua isn't made from revulsion; he's carefully polished with it.
Sometimes, Nicholas worries Harua shaped himself too closely to the blueprints to see the glaring flaws in them. Maybe he should stop taking credit for these catacombs.
Nicholas stays quiet long enough for Harua to take pity on him. The disgraceful bitterness sticking to the roof of his mouth clogs his throat up as he swallows it down.
"You should have thrifted something for him," Harua tries changing gears, arrow-sharp voice turning sweet in that way reserved just for him. The effort is nothing but more acid to swallow.
Nicholas has yet to come to terms with the fact that Harua and he won't ever see eye to eye on a few pivotal things. A brutally selfish wish Nicholas will be forced to face in no time. The clock has been ticking for longer than Nicholas has been able to hear it.
"Like what, a belt? Another watch?" Nicholas throws his hands up in frustration. "I'm sorry for trying to make his gift special," Nicholas spits the word with every bit of humility that fills his lungs with wet concrete.
"Since when are you so mean to your beloved hyung, by the way?" He pivots, shoving the attention away from him without letting it go entirely. Shifting blame, switching sides; how mortifying surviving a conversation can be. "You're hanging out too much with Yuma," Nicholas bites his tongue a little too late.
Harua pulls his hands away from the clothing rack like it caught on fire. His arms fall to his side, eyes shooting up to stare at him. Harua is a professional; his micro-expressions are tightly under his control. Nicholas just has the fortune of carrying too many crosses on his shoulders.
There's betrayal, indignation and a sick type of amusement swirling in Harua's face that make boulders drop to the bottom of Nicholas' stomach.
Stupidly, half-way hysterical with penance, Nicholas focuses on Harua's outfit to distract himself. He counts the items they bought together in his head. Next come the ones he has an identical copy of in his own closet. Hoodie, jeans, boots. Necklace, tank top, cap. Repeat the process until he's numb enough to look up.
Recently, Harua got a new piercing on his left lobe. Nicholas doesn't know where he got the jewelry from.
Harua tilts his head back, looking down on him centimeters below him. Nicholas is acutely aware from exactly where he picked that up from. Spin the thought endlessly, loop it, stare at it hypnotized. Nicholas is a spiral, twisted by design.
"You just say shit, don't you, Nico-chan?" Harua's sardonic voice stings like a paper cut.
Nicholas focuses on him, on his voice, on the warm metal beneath his hands. He's overheating in December. What a fucking joke.
"Whatever, Harua-chan," he waves it all away. Not the time, or place, or life. He's fucked and always has been, there's nothing new there. "These shirts are boring, let's go to the jackets section. I'm freezing."
𝄞
It's easy for it to become blurry. Home, that is. Nicholas loves being in constant movement, he does; he seeks it out even when his job doesn't demand it. It's hard to accept that over the years, home became a bit hard to conceptualize concretely and entirely too intricate to explain.
Regardless of shape, homesickness has always been a part of Nicholas. It's woven into the very fabric of who he is; multiple lines of thread overlap and crosshatch across every inch of his soul, drawing a map to nowhere in particular. Out of survival, left with no choice, he patchworked his way into carrying home inside of him.
That leaves the perpetual dilemma; no matter where he is, Nicholas will always ache for something he can't touch. Call it greed, call it need, call it love, it really doesn't matter. It's there in its harrowing absence and it shall remain there.
It's only natural that Nicholas became deeply intertwined with language. It's the bridge away from land that connects it all, it's the soothing nature of kinship, the numbing balm to alienation. He's clumsy with it, always has been, but he thinks the courage it takes makes up for it.
Nicholas might not have all the words, may get lost in the nuance of translation, may always speak a little bit off, but he's brave enough to try.
To Nicholas, language makes homesickness a little less emptying. It doesn't even have to be his own mother tongue, as long as it helps him communicate.
But, when it is his first language, when he isn't the only one trying, when he is met somewhere he's aching – every word falls short.
"How do you say plant in Mandarin?"
Nicholas is so used to Euijoo's voice it rarely startles him anymore. He carries it in him like he does a thousand different things about Euijoo, each tied to an emotion, or the other, or perhaps three. This type of question isn't unusual between them, yet it surprises a tiny part of him each time.
"What?"
"Plant. In Mandarin." Euijoo says in Korean. They returned to their dorms in Japan not too long after their Korean debut, but Nicholas learned eons ago that location rarely dictates anything. "Teach me," he prompts, and Nicholas likes pretending the eagerness means more than what it really does.
"植物。" Nicholas says, smile growing at the slight twitch of concentration in Euijoo's eyebrows. "Zhí Wù," Nicholas pronounces each character a bit slower this time, waving a finger in the air to match the intonations. "Zhí," he does a motion with his index up to the right, encouraging Euijoo to repeat after him.
"Zhí," Euijoo repeats the character a few times, letting it roll on his tongue and the back of his throat until Nicholas nods when he gets it right twice in a road.
"Wù," Nicholas repeats twice, index finger going back down in the air.
"Wù," Euijoo mimics the motion of his finger with his chin, going over the character until he's satisfied with it. "Zhí Wù," he says slowly, big eyes looking for approval, slight smile pulling the corner of his lips to the left.
"Yeah," Nicholas nods, confirming he got it right, unable to tame his pride, and he dutifully ignores his trembling stomach.
"植物、" Euijoo says more confidently now, and Nicholas feels his lungs staggering against his ribcage.
"Yeah, you got it," Nicholas breathes out, trying with all his might not to spill his guts all over their kitchen's floor.
"Hm," Euijoo hums, satisfied with himself and his new knowledge, before getting up from his chair and beelining to the sink. He grabs a cup, opens the tab and turns to him with a small smile. "植物口渴。"
Plant thirsty. He's trying to tell him that the plants Nicholas bought him need water. Euijoo is piecing together a sentence in his own mother tongue, out no need other than to simply connect, out of – Nicholas feels delirious.
When Nicholas was five, his cousin went through a major break-up he never understood the details of. All that he needed to know was that his cousin was very sad for a very long time. Nicholas took it upon himself to cheer her up with one of his awesome drawings; she always gushed about them, never forgetting to kiss his forehead in gratitude. To this day, Nicholas remembers the hushed whispers between his mother and aunt as he drew.
藕断丝连。
He was too young to understand what lotus roots had to do with his sad cousin. What did lovers know about gardening? Why would anyone uproot a healthy plant? None of it made sense to him, not the weird saying, or why his mom and auntie cared about it when his cousin's eyes were red during dinner, or why anyone that loved her would do that to her.
When he gave his cousin his drawing, she kissed his forehead, and smiled down at him. Nicholas never forgot the sadness in her eyes despite it.
It's been almost twenty years, and Nicholas thinks he gets it now. Definitions are unimportant; Nicholas knows he won't ever be able to uproot himself completely from Euijoo.
Regardless of shape, a part of Nicholas will always ache for Euijoo.
"Ah," Nicholas stumbles over his own tongue, rushing to say something when Euijoo's face begins shifting into embarrassment. "植物缺水。" He corrects on autopilot, hurriedly picking up his guts from all over spacetime continuum.
"Oh," Euijoo's stupid bow lips drop open in a soft O shape. "植物缺水？" He repeats carefully, figuring out where he went wrong quickly. His attunement to languages devastates him. Nicholas feels like throwing up.
"Yeah," he encourages, voice stupidly small for the behemoths stomping on his stomach. "You sounded like a caveman," he clarifies, laughing airily. "Plant thirsty," he says in Korean. There's viscera everywhere.
"Oh," Euijoo hums in understanding, turning the tap off once his glass is half-full. "植物缺水。Got it." He walks past him, steps careful, and Nicholas does nothing but achingly stare. "Thank you," he says quietly, lingering long enough for Nicholas to feel his absence once he's alone.
"Any time," Nicholas says to the empty kitchen. The hum of the refrigerator is his only answer.
𝄞
Nicholas' ears are ringing. There's nothing in his periphery, nothing in his head; tunnel vision never felt so visceral. He doesn't remember what his hands were supposed to be doing with the shirt he's holding, his suitcase is black-hole stationary somewhere he can't reach.
"What?"
Seeing Euijoo in his room isn't special. His lanky body gets lost right in between the bulky dresser and the full length mirror; like another pair of boots in his three-tier shoe rack, he fits right in. Nicholas is delusional, hopeful enough, to imagine that the layer of discomfort Euijoo always carries dissipates just so once he steps on his lawless land.
"Can I join you guys on your trip?" Euijoo repeats his question, boulder-carrying shoulders bowed inward just slightly. The hesitation is to be expected, they leave in two days, it's a big ask. It's a selfish, reckless ask.
Euijoo is asking for something big. He's standing in his room and he's asking for something Nicholas can give him. Nicholas knows he shouldn't bare it all, knows dropping to his knees with a prayer on his tongue would be unwise, he knows he needs to fucking chill out. Knowing that doesn't make him any less giddy. He feels like a child on New Years Eve, eagerly counting down the seconds left to see the fireworks.
"In Hawaii?" He asks for clarification, mouth taking a second to catch up with his buzzing mind, instinctively trying to reign in his expectations.
Euijoo nods, meekly looking away when Nicholas' only response is to stare.
"I know you're going with your friend and it's kinda last minute," Euijoo says quietly, voice deep and hesitant. Nicholas has to bite his own tongue to let him finish. "But my mom encouraged me to have fun instead of just seeing her and dad when they gets off work and –"
"You think it will be fun?" Nicholas blurts out. It's more gasp than words. The fireworks started early.
"How could it not?" Euijoo looks at him with that annoyed twinge reserved only for him. Only him. The fireworks are purple and blue. "It's the beach and–" he stops, takes a second to consider the words, consider him. "And you will be there. Of course it's going to be fun," Euijoo says quietly.
Nicholas doesn't need any more than that. A promise, a wish, whatever it might be. The shape is unimportant, the details, the dictionary definition, none of it matters. The sentiment is being communicated, the bridge is down. There are fireworks to see, a map to nowhere to read; the ocean, the waves, the seashells.
If they come back to nothing on Euijoo's shelves but rot, then so be it. Life is nothing without decay.
Of course it's going to be fun. It's obvious; Nicholas will make sure of that.