Chapter Text
Donghyun
There was a particular kind of loneliness that came from being loved by an entire building.
Kim Donghyun had never said this out loud to anyone, because saying it out loud would require someone to ask, and no one ever did. Why would they? He was the boy whose name teachers gushed to each other about in the staff room, the one whose test scores got photocopied and pinned to hallway boards as proof that excellence was achievable if you just tried hard enough. He was the student kids pointed to during assemblies, the one his homeroom teacher trusted with the attendance sheet, the one who somehow remembered everyone's birthdays, favorite snacks, and exam schedules without ever seeming to try.
And he was handsome.
The compliments had started so early he couldn't remember a time before them.
Look at that face.
Such a handsome boy.
He's going to break hearts someday.
Aunties at his mother's old workplace used to pinch his cheeks and laugh about it. Teachers slipped it into report card comments where it had no business being, tucked between notes about academic performance and classroom conduct like it belonged there.
Diligent, kind, and quite the handsome young man.
As if beauty were an accomplishment.
By middle school, he'd heard every variation of the same praise so many times that the words stopped feeling like words at all. They became background noise. Weather. Something that happened around him instead of to him.
His face had always carried the kind of beauty people instinctively trusted. First-years asked him for directions before anyone else. Strangers smiled at him in convenience stores. Parents seemed to relax the moment he introduced himself. Before he'd even spoken a word, people had already decided he was polite, dependable, and kind.
That didn't mean they knew him.
It took energy, all of it. A specific, constant expenditure, like keeping a plate spinning on a stick—smile here, laugh there, ask about someone's weekend before they could ask about his, remember a birthday, remember a name, remember who was stressed about exams and who had a dentist appointment after school and who'd been having a rough week at home. He'd gotten so good at the choreography of being liked that most days he could do it without thinking.
He didn't resent it, exactly. It was simply the shape his life had taken, the same way water takes the shape of whatever it's poured into. Still, sometimes—usually when he was exhausted enough to stop policing his own thoughts—he wondered whether anyone would notice if he stopped performing for a day. Not stopped being kind. But stopped being Kim Donghyun. The version everyone expected. The version everyone loved.
He was thinking about this—vaguely, uselessly—when he found a folded note tucked beneath his pencil case at the end of lunch.
The handwriting on the front was unfamiliar.
Kim Donghyun.
That alone was enough to tell him where this was going.
He stared at it for a second before sighing quietly and slipping it into his bag unopened.
Sure enough, when classes ended, a girl from the class next door was waiting outside the building near the shoe lockers, twisting her fingers together and looking like she regretted every decision that had led her here.
"Donghyun-ah," she started as soon as he approached, and he already knew. He could feel the conversation coming a mile away, the way you can smell rain before it falls. "I know this is sudden, but..." She swallowed hard. "I think you're really cool. And really handsome. Would you maybe want to—"
"I'm sorry," he said gently before she could finish, because finishing would only make the rejection land harder. He kept his voice soft, made sure his face did the apologetic thing it was supposed to do.
"I really appreciate you telling me," he said. "But I don't think I can right now. I hope that's okay."
Her face immediately flushed bright red.
"Ah. Right. Of course."
She laughed awkwardly, bowed once out of pure embarrassment, and immediately looked like she wanted the ground to open beneath her feet.
"I'm sorry," she blurted.
"You don't need to apologize. You didn’t do anything wrong."
"Okay. Right. Sorry. I mean—not sorry. Um..."
Donghyun smiled despite himself.
The girl groaned, covered her face with both hands, and turned away.
"I'm just going to leave now."
Donghyun watched her disappear down the hallway and felt nothing he could neatly name. Not smugness, not flattery, not even much surprise. Just a low, familiar tiredness, like hearing the same song for the four-hundredth time.
Because here was the thing nobody at Seoul Jungang seemed to understand: being handsome had never once bought him anything real. If anything, it had done the opposite.
It had turned him into a kind of prize half the school wanted to be seen holding, a name to drop, a photo to angle themselves next to during field trips and festivals. Sometimes, standing in the middle of a laughing group of classmates, Donghyun couldn't tell whether people liked him or the easier, shinier version of a social life that standing next to him seemed to offer.
Eventually, he'd stopped trying to tell the difference.
He gave everyone the same warm, careful kindness—the same smile, patience, and practiced attentiveness that made people feel seen. It cost him nothing to be nice, and it meant he never had to find out which of them would've stayed without the grades, the popularity, the face, or the reputation. Which of them would've stayed if all he had to offer was himself.
Maybe that was cowardly. Maybe it was practical. Either way, it was easier not to know.
***
Lunchtime arrived in the same way it always did.
The cafeteria was crowded, loud, and full of people pretending not to stare.
Donghyun sat down across from Sungho and immediately settled into another familiar lunch period. Around their table, the usual traffic had already begun to form: students drifting past a little more slowly than necessary, lingering near nearby tables despite empty seats elsewhere, finding excuses to circle back through the cafeteria after they'd already collected their food. Every few minutes he caught someone looking. Sometimes they waved. Sometimes they hurriedly looked away when he noticed. Most simply stared for a second too long before moving on. Donghyun had stopped finding it strange years ago. It was just another part of the routine, as predictable as the lunch menu and twice as repetitive.
"You’re really good at it," Sungho said.
"At what?"
"Pretending not to notice."
Donghyun smiled and took a bite of rice.
Sungho sighed. "See? Exactly that."
A group of girls passed by the table. One immediately looked away when Donghyun's eyes accidentally met hers, another nearly walked into a chair.
Sungho watched the entire thing happen. "I genuinely think people schedule this."
"You're imagining things."
"I'm not."
Before Donghyun could respond, Sungho launched into a rant about the mock exam curve, gesturing with his chopsticks for emphasis, and Donghyun nodded along in the right places without really absorbing a word of it, some practiced back-corner of his brain doing the work of look interested while the rest of him drifted.
Across the cafeteria a chair barked against tile, too loud, followed by a laugh that carried over every other conversation in the room. Donghyun didn't have to look up. He already knew.
"Han Dongmin got dragged out of Ethics again," Woonhak reported, dropping into the seat beside them, eyes bright with the particular joy of secondhand chaos. "Third time this month. Apparently he told Ms. Baek that lecturing them about respecting elders was rich coming from someone who screamed at a barista last week."
"Did she actually scream at a barista?" Sungho asked.
“Yeah, some kids filmed it.” Woonhak shrugged.
Donghyun let it slide past him like it always did—a burst of noise from a life running parallel to his, never once close enough to touch. He'd built a loose, secondhand picture of Han Dongmin out of years of these stories: red hair he'd dyed because he thought it looked cool and refused to re-dye back even after two weeks of detention over it, both ears lined with piercings Jaehyun had apparently given him in a school bathroom with an actual piercing gun, a permanent record thick enough to require its own folder. A boy who seemed constitutionally incapable of sitting still and being told what to do.
Must be nice, Donghyun thought, to be so careless.
He didn't examine the thought any further than that. He never let himself examine anything for very long, that was another skill, maybe the most important one, right up there with the smiling.
***
When the final bell rang, he peeled off from Sungho and Woonhak with an easy wave and headed toward the east stairwell. Most students flooded toward the gates. Donghyun went the opposite direction.
The truth was, there wasn't much waiting for him at home. Not because home was unpleasant—quite the opposite. It was simply quiet.
Too quiet.
His mother spent more nights at Yeonhee Medical Center than she did in their apartment these days, and an empty apartment had a way of making every sound feel louder than it should. The hum of the refrigerator. The creak of a floorboard. The ticking clock above the sink. Silence settled differently when there was nobody around to break it.
So Donghyun stayed busy.
Most nights, he remained at school until eight, moving from regular classes to self-study sessions and evening programs, finishing assignments before he ever stepped onto a train. Teachers loved it. Parents pointed at him as an example. Other students assumed he was simply disciplined.
Nobody knew he was making his life fit together with military precision.
Every day followed the same carefully constructed schedule. Homework was finished at school whenever possible. Hospital visits were squeezed into whatever gaps remained. Then came a quick stop home, a few hours of sleep, and another shift waiting on the other side of the city.
On weekdays, he'd usually collapse onto his bed around eight-thirty, set an alarm for ten-thirty, and close his eyes for exactly two hours. Then he'd wake up, shower if he had time, change clothes, and become someone else.
Leehan.
The name had started as a practical necessity. An eighteen-year-old honor student working nights at a club wasn't the sort of thing teachers, classmates, or hospital administrators were supposed to know about. So when Jiwoong had offered him the job nearly a year ago, Donghyun had given a different name without thinking much of it.
The name stuck.
At Seoul Jungang High, he was Kim Donghyun—the boy teachers bragged about, the one parents wished their children would emulate, the face everyone seemed to know.
At the club, he was Leehan.
Donghyun studied, earned perfect grades, and made his mother proud. Leehan flirted with customers, accepted tips, worked until his feet hurt, and paid hospital bills.
One identity kept the other alive.
Most nights, Donghyun's shift started at eleven and ended sometime around four in the morning. By the time he got home, the sky was already beginning to lighten at the edges. He'd sleep for a few hours, wake up, put on his uniform, and arrive at school by eight looking rested enough that nobody ever questioned it.
The schedule should have been impossible. Maybe it was. But impossible things had a way of becoming normal when repeated often enough.
On weekends, when there was no school to occupy the hours, he'd study alone in the apartment instead. Sometimes he'd lose track of time entirely, textbooks spread across the coffee table while afternoon sunlight crawled slowly across the floor. Other times, he'd spend the day at the hospital, finishing homework beside his mother's bed while she slept.
When exam season arrived and there were simply too many assignments and not enough hours, Jiwoong let him bring his books into the back kitchen during breaks. Donghyun would sit on an overturned crate with history notes balanced on one knee while cooks shouted orders across the room and dishes clattered around him.
Jiwoong never made a big deal out of it. He never asked questions, never told Donghyun to get more sleep, never commented on the dark circles that appeared beneath his eyes whenever midterms approached. Instead, he'd slide a bowl of food onto the counter every now and then and grumble when Donghyun forgot to eat.
For that alone, Donghyun would've worked twice as hard.
By the time he stepped off the train that night, the city looked different than it had a few hours earlier. Neon signs glowed against dark streets, and office workers had long since given way to clubgoers drifting between bars and restaurants beneath the electric haze of Seoul after dark. The version of the city that knew Kim Donghyun had gone to bed.
The version that knew Leehan was only just waking up.
***
The club was quiet in the hour before opening, all the neon still dark, the air thick with the smell of last night's cleaning solution. Donghyun liked it best this way—before the noise started, before he had to arrange his face into the specific, practiced warmth that made strangers want to tip well and leave quickly.
"You're early again," Jiwoong said without looking up from the register.
"Wanted to check the count. Mrs. Shin was short last week." Donghyun tied his apron with hands that had done this so many times the motion barely required thought anymore. He'd learned, a long time ago, that if he kept his hands busy his mind couldn't wander somewhere it wasn't allowed to go.
"You worry like it's your bar." Jiwoong glanced up, and something flickered across his face—not quite pity, something gentler and more helpless than that—before he smoothed it away. "Eat something before your shift. You look thin."
"I'm fine."
"You're always fine." Jiwoong went back to counting. "That's what worries me."
Jiwoong was the only person on earth who knew both halves of him—the top-ranked model student and the boy who mixed cocktails and did anything for tips.
Even then, he didn't know everything.
He knew about the hospital room on the fourth floor of Yeonhee Medical Center and the steadily growing stack of bills. He knew Donghyun needed the job so desperately that, since the age of seventeen, he'd been surviving on four to six hours of sleep.
But he didn't know about the tubing taped to the back of a hand that used to comb Donghyun's hair every night before bed. He didn't know that Donghyun's mother still believed her son's exhaustion came from studying too hard, or that she apologized sometimes for not being able to pack his lunches anymore—as if that were the failure between them. As if the real one wasn't sitting three subway stops away in a strip-lit bar, wearing a stranger's smile for cash.
He knew exactly what people wanted from him and how to recognize it. Sometimes it was a conversation, sometimes it was the temporary comfort of a warm body for an hour or two after closing. Donghyun had stopped being surprised by people a long time ago. A smile held half a second longer than necessary, a hand lingering against his wrist, a phone number scribbled onto a receipt, a hotel key left beside an oversized tip—after a while, the patterns became easy to recognize.
A man old enough to be somebody's father once left too large a tip and a phone number scrawled on a napkin. Donghyun thanked him warmly, slipped the money into the register, and tossed the napkin into the trash the moment the man's back was turned.
It's just a transaction, he told himself, the thought worn smooth from repetition, like a stone handled so many times it no longer had edges. I give them a good time, they give me the money my mother's hospital needs, and everybody walks away even.
If anyone had asked—though no one ever really did—he wasn't sure he could explain when he had started seeing the world that way. Somewhere along the way, life had become a series of exchanges: give something, get something, move on. People who talked about passion or purpose struck him as either very lucky or still naive enough to believe in them. He used to think he might have been like that once.
He couldn't remember it clearly enough to miss it.
***
Dongmin
Nobody at Seoul Jungang understood that the red hair wasn't rebellion. It was just the first thing that had ever actually felt like his.
He'd sat in that salon chair for two hours after telling his parents he was staying late for a study group—a lie so easy it hardly counted as one anymore, since neither of them would've noticed either way—and watched the color bleed out of his own reflection and something bolder bleed in. For the first time in longer than he could remember, the face looking back at him had belonged to someone who got to choose things. He'd gotten three days of detention for it. Worth it. He liked walking down the hallway and watching teachers' mouths go thin with disapproval, and liked that it announced something about him before he had to say a word.
The ear piercings had come the same way—sudden, half-dare, Jaehyun cackling in a school bathroom with a piercing gun he definitely wasn't supposed to own, both of them wheezing so hard from nerves and laughter that the first one came out slightly crooked. Dongmin liked that too. Liked that it wasn't perfect. Perfect things made him suspicious.
He didn't smoke, though half the school assumed he did. Sure, it went with the hair, the piercings, the whole aesthetic people had built around him without asking. But smoking wrecked your voice, and his voice was the one thing in his life he actually protected, carefully, jealously, the way some people protected money or reputation. He sang sometimes, low, mostly to himself, mostly late at night in Riwoo's studio when he couldn't sleep and didn't want to think about why. Music was the only place the noise in his head ever actually went quiet. He'd decided a long time ago he'd rather lose every other reckless thing about himself before he lost that.
So when he said, mid-lecture, perfectly reasonably in his own opinion, "—and I'm just saying, if you're going to lecture an entire classroom about respecting your elders, maybe don't scream at a nineteen-year-old barista over oat milk, because that's, at minimum, a little ironic," he wasn't expecting applause. He also wasn't expecting the room to go this silent.
Ms. Baek's face did something complicated—flushed, then pale, then flushed again—chalk still raised in her hand like she'd forgotten what she'd been about to write.
"Out," she said. "Hallway. Now."
"I was just making an observation—"
"Now, Han Dongmin."
He went, because there wasn't really a version of this where he didn't, dragging his feet just enough to make the point that he was leaving on his own terms. The classroom door clicked shut behind him with a finality that felt personal.
Ten minutes later he was kneeling on the hallway floor, arms raised straight overhead, shoulders already burning with the specific ache of a punishment built less to teach a lesson than to humiliate you in front of anyone who walked by. A first-year rounded the corner, saw him, and very deliberately looked at the floor instead. He didn't blame her. He'd probably have done the same at that age, before he'd learned that being stared at for being in trouble stopped meaning anything after about the fifteenth time.
What actually burned, more than his shoulders, more than the tile digging into his knees, was the unfairness of it. He hadn't lied. He'd been at that café last weekend, waiting for Riwoo, and watched Ms. Baek—off-duty, out of uniform, but unmistakably her—snap at some kid behind the counter over a milk substitution like the kid had personally wronged her family for three generations. He hadn't even brought it up to embarrass her. It had just been sitting there, this obvious, glaring contradiction, and it was already public anyway; some first-year had posted a clip of the whole thing online days ago, twenty-second video, comments full of people cringing. He'd said it out loud because it was true. That was the entire crime. Saying a true thing at the wrong volume in the wrong room.
His arms started to shake, staring at a water stain on the ceiling tile above him. I don't even lie. I just say the thing everyone else is too scared to. And somehow that always ended with him on his knees in a hallway while the person actually in the wrong got to keep standing at the front of a room, chalk in hand, moral high ground fully intact.
He was still stewing in it, knees numb, jaw tight, replaying four sharper things he wished he'd said instead, when a familiar set of footsteps slowed to a stop in front of him.
"Okay," Jaehyun said, crouching to eye level with the unbothered calm of someone who'd found Dongmin like this more times than either of them could count. "What'd you say this time."
"I made an observation."
"About?"
"Ms. Baek being a raging hypocrite."
Jaehyun exhaled through his nose, somewhere between a laugh and a sigh. "You gotta stop observing people out loud, you're gonna run out of teachers to observe eventually." He glanced down the empty hallway, then back at Dongmin, arms still shaking overhead. "Do you get any detention out of it, or just the kneeling?"
"Just kneeling. Thankfully."
"So you're still able to make it tonight?"
Dongmin's arms nearly dropped on their own, some reflexive spike of don't you dare jinx it going through him. Three days ago Riwoo had come back practically vibrating, phone still in hand, saying he'd talked to a guy who talked to a guy and gotten them their first real gig—an actual bar, actual paying crowd, with a stage that wasn't Riwoo's cramped office turned studio. The owner, from what Riwoo had heard, was the type who didn't ask too many questions about ages as long as nobody got visibly wasted, high, or loud enough to bring the cops sniffing around. Which, in the very specific math of five teenagers desperate for a real audience, translated roughly to: fine, as long as we don't get caught.
"Yes," Dongmin said, with feeling. "Why would I miss this."
"You and your mouth," Jaehyun said, standing back up, brushing invisible dust off his knees on Dongmin's behalf. "I'm not worried about you missing it on purpose. I'm worried you'll land yourself in some new disaster and miss it by accident."
"I won't. I'll be at Riwoo's by nine."
"Great." Jaehyun knocked a knuckle lightly against the top of Dongmin's head, somewhere between affectionate and a warning, and just like that the conversation folded itself back into normal; Jaehyun launching into some complaint about a b-side lyric he couldn't get to scan right, Dongmin's arms finally allowed to drop as the bell rang, both of them falling into step down the hall like the whole kneeling incident had already been filed away and forgotten.
He genuinely didn't spend much energy worrying what teachers thought of him, if he was honest, or what most people thought of him at all. Except sometimes, late at night, lying on the floor of Riwoo's studio because going home meant walking into a house where the air itself felt like holding your breath, a quieter thought surfaced: that maybe none of the noise he made, the red hair, the mouthing off, the reputation he'd built brick by gleeful brick, was really about not caring what people thought.
He didn't examine that thought for long. Some doors were better left shut.
They passed Hanbin near the stairwell, walking alongside a boy Dongmin only vaguely recognized: tall, quiet-looking, hovering just slightly behind Hanbin when he noticed the two.
"Dongmin-ah, Jaehyun-ah," Hanbin said, easy as always, lifting a hand.
"Hyung," Dongmin said back, and the boy beside Hanbin gave a small, shy sort of half-wave, murmuring something that might have been a hello, might have just been air.
"That's Zhang Hao," Jaehyun said once they'd passed, like it explained anything.
"Hi," Dongmin said, already thinking about the gig again, and let it go.
***
By lunch, his stomach had mostly forgiven his knees, and he was standing in the cafeteria line behind Jaehyun and Hanbin, half-listening to whatever they were debating, when he noticed the crowd.
It wasn't hard to notice. It took up half the room, a loose, orbiting cluster of students near the far wall, all angled toward the same center point, laughing a half-beat too eagerly at whatever had just been said, a couple of girls whispering behind their hands with the specific, giddy energy of people trying very hard to look like they weren't staring.
At the middle of it: Kim Donghyun, tray in hand, nodding along to something with that same warm, practiced smile Dongmin had seen plastered across three separate school bulletin boards and tons of pictures on sns.
"God, that's stupid," Dongmin muttered, mostly to himself.
Jaehyun caught it anyway, glancing over with a grin already forming. "What, the crowd? You sure you're not just jealous? Guy gets confessions like every other day."
"And rejects every single one," Dongmin said, "very nicely, very considerately, like he's doing them a favor by letting them down so gently." He rolled his eyes. "It's an act."
"I don't get your problem with him," Hanbin cut in, mild but pointed, sliding his tray forward as the line moved. "Donghyun's genuinely nice. Like, actually. I've known him since first year."
"It's not a problem," Dongmin said, though even to his own ears it sounded a little defensive. "He just tries too hard. Everything about him is so—polished. Nobody's actually that nice for no reason."
"He's a good guy, Dongmin."
"He's a goody two-shoes." Dongmin shrugged, already bored of the topic, grabbing his tray. "Not everything has to be that deep. I just think it's funny, watching everyone lose their minds over someone just because they’re nice and sort of good looking. Like it's some rare talent."
It wasn't a grudge, not really—he didn't think about Kim Donghyun outside moments like this one, and even now the thought didn't run much deeper than the crowd itself. In Dongmin's head, Donghyun existed mostly as a category rather than a person: shiny, easy, the kind of kid every parent wants to adopt. His friends occasionally complained about how effortlessly girls fell over themselves for the guy, and Dongmin usually tuned it out the way he tuned out most gossip that didn't involve him directly. He'd decided, without much evidence beyond hallway glimpses, that someone that polished probably didn't have an interesting thought behind the whole face. Too busy being liked to ever actually be anything.
It was a strange thing to be sure of, considering he'd never once spoken to the guy. But certainty had never required proof, in Dongmin's experience, just enough distance to never have to test it.
Hanbin rolled his eyes but let it go, muttering something about Dongmin being impossible as the three of them peeled off toward their usual table, the crowd around Donghyun already dissolving back into ordinary lunchtime noise behind them. On the way out, they nearly collided with Woonhak, half-jogging into the cafeteria with the wild-eyed urgency of someone who'd slept through the start of lunch.
"Watch it," Jaehyun laughed, sidestepping him.
"Sorry, hyung—sorry—" Woonhak called back, already gone.
Dongmin huffed a short laugh and didn't think about any of it again for the rest of the day. Not Donghyun, not the crowd, not the certainty he'd never bothered to check.
***
He got to Riwoo's a little before nine, first as always, mostly because he'd gone straight there from school instead of looping back home—his stage clothes had been sitting folded on Riwoo's studio couch since Tuesday, exactly where he'd left them, exactly so he wouldn't have to walk back through his own front door before tonight.
Jaehyun showed up twenty minutes later, then Yujin, backpack still half full of school things, then Gyuvin and Ricky together, already bickering about something that dissolved into laughter before anyone could ask what it had been about. They ran through the set twice: the 말 달리자 cover loose and messy and fun, the way punk covers were supposed to be, then 예뻤어, which Jaehyun always sang like it cost him something, and then two of Dongmin's own songs, the newest one still rough at the edges, a bridge he hadn't quite finished deciding how to end.
By ten-thirty they were piling into Riwoo's car, guitar cases and amp cables crammed into every available inch of trunk space, and it was somewhere on that drive that Jaehyun leaned forward between the front seats and said, with the tone of someone stating an established fact rather than asking a question:
"So, Riwoo. You got us, right?"
"What?"
"The alcohol. Duh."
"I don't know what you're talking about."
"It's Friday, we're playing a bar, and you think we're gonna stay sober the whole night?"
"I am not buying you guys alcohol."
"Please."
"Jaehyun, you're nineteen. Buy it yourself."
"I don't have money."
"Then you got us, right, Riwoo?" Gyuvin cut in from the back.
"I am not buying minors alcohol. Especially not Yujin."
"You've literally seen us drunk before!"
"I didn't even say anything!" Yujin protested from the far seat.
"I've never bought it for you, though. I don't even buy it for myself. Why would I buy it for five teenagers."
“I’m an adult!” Jaehyun protested.
“You’re a broke nineteen-year old, so basically a child.” Riwoo intercepted.
"Becauseee you love us?" Ricky offered, batting his eyelashes at the rearview mirror.
"No."
***
The bar, when they finally pulled up outside, was better than Taesan had dared to hope. It was a low brick building with a hand-painted sign, warm gold illumination spilling through frosted windows while the glare of neon glowed against their faces. A muffled bassline already leaked through the walls from whatever act was currently on stage. Inside, the venue opened up wider than it looked from the street. A low stage at the far end was bathed in blue and amber, facing a scatter of round tables. Running the length of the opposite wall was a bar, where bottles stacked up to the ceiling caught the ambient shimmer. The band currently playing was mid-song—all distortion and raw energy—and the small crowd near the stage bounced along loosely, drinks sloshing over the rims.
"Damn," Ricky said, head tipping back to take it all in. "This is nice."
They wound their way backstage, dropping bags and cases in the cramped room, trading nods and half-introductions with a couple of the other acts scheduled that night. A girl with a lit cigarette balanced between two fingers gave them a once-over and a lazy "you guys new?" before wandering off, and another group waved them toward the mini fridge like old friends.
It was on the way back out, weaving toward the stage to check the setlist order, that the girl found them again—or found Ricky, specifically, peeling off from her group with a slow, deliberate walk and a smile clearly built for exactly this purpose.
"Hey," she said, stopping just a little closer to Ricky than strictly necessary. "You're playing tonight?"
"Yeah, in like thirty."
"Cool." She tilted her head, and Dongmin, standing a few feet off with Yujin, watched Ricky's expression do something complicated—not quite interested, not quite disinterested, some third thing hovering in between, the specific look of someone doing quiet math. "I've got a bunch of shooters back at our table. Figured I'd share, if you wanted to come say hi before your set."
Ricky opened his mouth—and Dongmin genuinely couldn't tell, watching, which direction the sentence was about to go.
He never found out, because Gyuvin was already there, sliding an arm around Ricky's waist with the easy, unhurried confidence of someone who had zero intention of losing this particular exchange. "Sorry," he said, pleasant as anything, "he's taken."
The girl's smile flattened out fast. "Sure," she said, and turned on her heel back toward her table without another word.
"Seriously?" Gyuvin said, the second she was out of earshot, tone light but eyes not quite matching it.
"What? I didn't do anything."
"She said she had a bunch of shooters. I watched you consider it."
"I was considering the shooters, not her."
"I'd rather stay sober all night than watch my boyfriend flirt with a stranger to get us drinks."
"Okay. Sorry." Ricky pressed a quick kiss to the side of Gyuvin's head, easy, familiar, the whole argument already dissolving. Jaehyun, watching from a few feet away, reached over and clapped both hands over Yujin's eyes.
"Don't look, child. You’re too young."
"I'm sixteen, not five," Yujin said, ducking out from under his hands. “Literally playing at a bar.”
"Sixteen, five, same thing, basically."
"It is not—"
"You've got two more years before you're even close to understanding how young sixteen looks from up here," Dongmin added, entirely too pleased with himself.
Gyuvin, already steering the conversation back to something more useful, jerked his chin toward the bar. "Let's just see if we can get something over there."
And so they went—Ricky first, all easy confidence, Gyuvin and Jaehyun trailing after him, Dongmin bringing up the rear mostly out of curiosity about how badly this was going to fail, guitar case still slung over one shoulder, in absolutely no rush to drink anything himself but very much in the mood to watch someone else's attempt at charm crash and burn.
"Excuse me," Ricky said, sliding onto a stool at the bar with the ease of someone who'd never once been told no in his life, "four beers, we're the band playing tonight—professional courtesy, right?"
The bartender, older, a little tired around the eyes, laughed, not unkindly. "My shift's over in five, kid. Let me get you someone who actually cares about that line."
He turned, cupping a hand to his mouth. "Leehan! Table's yours!"
And a boy walked out from the back in a fresh apron, dark hair falling just so, looking—there was no other word for it, pretty, the kind of face that made the low light of the club look intentional instead of just cheap.
Jaehyun's mouth fell open first.
"No way," he said, delighted, elbowing Dongmin so hard he nearly dropped his guitar case. "Dongmin. Dongmin. Do you know who that is?"
Dongmin looked again—really looked—and felt something in his chest do a slow, disbelieving flip as recognition landed.
He knew that face.
Everyone at Seoul Jungang knew that face.
It was on the wall outside the principal's office half the time, some certificate or another, top of class, model student, everyone's favorite. He'd seen it in the hallway trailing a wake of admirers like a comet. He'd rolled his eyes at it more than once, decided a long time ago that it belonged to exactly the kind of person he had no interest in: shiny, easy, trying so hard to be good at everything that he'd never once in his life had to actually feel anything.
That face was currently frozen behind a bar in a nightclub, apron half-tied, staring at Dongmin like he'd just watched his own coffin get delivered.
A slow, delighted grin spread across Dongmin's face.
"Wow," he said, leaning an elbow on the bar like he had all the time in the world. "Kim Donghyun, right?" He tilted his head, watching the panic flicker—just once, just barely—behind that perfectly composed face before it smoothed back over. "Who would've thought?" His grin widened into something sharper. "Maybe you're not such a try-hard after all."
"Wait, you know this guy?" Gyuvin asked.
"Yeah!" Jaehyun said, delighted, already leaning across the bar like they were old friends. "He's in my friend Hanbin-hyung's class, everyone knows him, this guy's basically school royalty—"
"Great," Ricky said, utterly unbothered by the unfolding disaster, tapping two fingers against the bar top. "So, hypothetically—Mr. school royalty—think you could slide us a few beers?"
Donghyun stood perfectly still behind the bar, a clean glass gripped in one hand and a white polishing cloth in the other. All the effortless charm he usually wore like armor had completely vanished. His eyes, usually bright and welcoming to customers, were wide and sweeping over his two classmates in disbelief.
Somewhere above them, the club's speakers cycled to a new song, bass sliding low beneath the noise of the room, and Dongmin thought, with the particular cruelty of someone who has just discovered an excellent secret: this is going to be so much fun.
"Look, I can't serve minors," Donghyun admitted, finally finding his voice, though it came out thinner than the one he'd used on the older bartender's shift not ten minutes ago. His eyes flicked toward Jaehyun, then Gyuvin, then again—briefly, landed—on Dongmin, before skating away again like touching that particular spot too long might set something off.
"I'm nineteen," Jaehyun said, entirely unbothered, already pulling out his student ID like he'd rehearsed this. "So I can drink."
Donghyun stared at the ID for a second too long, not really reading it, Dongmin suspected, so much as using it as an excuse to look at literally anything that wasn't Dongmin's face—and gave a short, jerky nod. Something in his shoulders hadn't caught up to his hands yet; he grabbed a glass off the rack and nearly knocked another one over doing it.
He's actually panicking, Dongmin thought, watching with the specific fascination of someone who has just discovered a crack in a wall he'd assumed was solid concrete. Kim Donghyun. Who are you?
It was, objectively, the most interesting thing that had happened to him all week.
Before Donghyun could recover any further, Yujin materialized at the bar with the triumphant energy of a man returning from war, both hands cupped around a genuinely absurd stack of cash.
"Dude, what the hell," Gyuvin said, half-laughing, staring at the money like it might be counterfeit. "Where did you even get that?"
"I beat some guys in rock paper scissors over there." Yujin jerked his chin toward a table of visibly wrecked adults near the stage. "They were so drunk they kept throwing scissors. Every single round. It was actually kind of sad."
"Impressive," Dongmin said, deadpan, though he meant it.
"Here—" Jaehyun swept the cash up before Yujin could get attached to it, sliding it across the bar toward Donghyun, who was still moving like a man on autopilot. "Four Terra beers. And a Shirley Temple."
Yujin's face fell instantly. "Let me guess. The Shirley Temple's for me."
"Bingo."
"Give me my money back. I did not win an entire rock-paper-scissors tournament to be handed a Shirley Temple."
"Yujin. My precious child." Jaehyun pressed a hand to his own chest like he'd been personally wounded. "You cannot try alcohol yet. You're too young. Maybe next year, hm?"
"I've had it before."
The table went quiet for exactly one beat.
"Seriously?" Ricky said, mouth dropping open in genuine betrayal. "When?"
"Gyuvin gave me some. Back in like, February."
Every single head at the bar swiveled toward Gyuvin.
"You've poisoned him!" Jaehyun said, scandalized, pointing an accusing finger. "This is a crime, oh my days, Gyuvin—"
"Woah—I don’t remember this."
“You were super drunk.” Yujin clarified.
The argument spiraled from there, gloriously, uselessly, Ricky and Jaehyun tag-teaming Gyuvin while Yujin stood in the middle looking equal parts delighted and unbothered by having become the center of a scandal that wasn't really about him anymore. Dongmin let it wash past him without really listening, because his attention had snagged somewhere else entirely on the boy behind the bar, methodically pouring four beers with his jaw tight and his eyes fixed determinedly on the glasses, on the tap, on anything at all that wasn't the group of people currently making a scene six feet from him in a place he very clearly did not want to be seen in.
It was strange, watching him like this. At school, Donghyun took up a room the way sunlight took up a window, easy, warm, entirely without apparent effort. Here, he'd gone tight and careful, every motion slightly too precise, like a person walking across ice he wasn't sure would hold.
Dongmin found he couldn't stop looking.
"Here you go." Donghyun slid the tray across the bar without quite meeting anyone's eyes, four beers and one sad, cherry-red Shirley Temple that Yujin accepted with the enthusiasm of a man facing a firing squad.
"Thanks, dude." Jaehyun clinked his glass against the counter in a mock toast. "You're actually pretty chill."
"I've been told," Donghyun sighed, and it came out almost dry, almost like the version of him that existed in school hallways, but his eyes still hadn't found their way back to Dongmin's, not once, not really.
Dongmin considered pushing it. He had at least four more comments loaded and ready, each one calibrated to make that composure crack a little further, and honestly, some petty, gleeful part of him wanted nothing more than to watch it happen. But Jaehyun was already tapping his shoulder, tilting his head toward the backstage door, mouthing ten minutes with the particular urgency of someone whose set was about to start whether he was ready or not.
The others peeled off first, Ricky and Gyuvin still bickering half-heartedly, Yujin trailing behind with his Shirley Temple held like evidence in a case he intended to reopen later.
"Um, before you guys go—" Donghyun voice caught them at the edge of the crowd, and Dongmin turned back to find him gripping the edge of the bar like it was the only thing keeping him upright. "Why—why are you here?"
Dongmin let the question hang just a second longer than it needed to, watching something flicker behind Donghyun eyes—dread, unmistakably, the specific dread of someone who already suspected the answer and was hoping, uselessly, to be wrong.
"Oh," Dongmin said, letting a slow grin spread across his face, "we're performing. Should be on stage in like ten minutes." He paused, savoring it. "See you after.”
Donghyun's whole face did something complicated and stricken, color draining out of it in real time, and Dongmin felt a laugh escape before he could stop it: short, delighted, entirely unrepentant.
He winked, because it felt criminal not to, and turned to follow the others backstage, Donghyun's expression burned into the back of his mind the whole way there. Not the practiced smile Seoul Jungang knew so well, but something rawer underneath it, something that looked, for just a second, almost like panic.
How interesting, Dongmin thought, hooking his guitar strap over his shoulder as the stage lights came into view.
***
Donghyun
The moment they disappeared through the backstage door, Donghyun's carefully composed face fell apart.
He gripped the edge of the bar with both hands, head dropping forward, and let himself have exactly three seconds of silent, undiluted panic before he had to look normal again.
Okay. Okay. Think.
Han Dongmin knew. Not suspected—knew, had seen him with his own eyes, apron and all, name tag and everything, and worse, he hadn't looked like someone who was going to sit on that information quietly. He'd now just found the best toy in the store and had every intention of playing with it for as long as it stayed fun.
That alone would have been bad enough. Dongmin barely crossed paths with Donghyun's real life—different friend group, different lunch table, different classroom entirely. If it had been just him, maybe he could have negotiated something. Bribed him with free drinks. Appealed to some shred of decency he was frankly not counting on.
Donghyun stomach dropped somewhere below the floor. Because it wasn't just Dongmin.
Yujin was in Woonhak's class. Woonhak's class. Which meant Yujin was one careless sentence away from Woonhak, and Woonhak was one careless sentence away from Sungho, and Sungho was one careless sentence away from every single person at Seoul Jungang who had ever looked at Kim Donghyun like he hung the moon.
And Jaehyun—Jaehyun was friends with Hanbin, who Donghyun had known since first year, who trusted him, who'd probably laugh it off as a joke for exactly as long as it took to actually believe it, and then—
None of them know. Nobody knows. Sungho doesn't know. Woonhak doesn't know. My mother doesn't know. The whole architecture of his life ran on a single load-bearing wall: that these two versions of him never, ever touched. And in the space of about ninety seconds, four strangers who weren't even strangers had just walked in and put a crack straight down the middle of it.
He thought, distantly, that he should probably be angrier. Mostly he just felt sick.
Beg them, he thought, already rehearsing it, some numb, practical part of his brain taking over while the rest of him spun, he didn't care if he was losing his dignity. Beg Dongmin after the set. Offer him free drinks for a month. Offer him anything.He didn't know yet what currency someone like Han Dongmin dealt in, but he intended to find out fast.
He was still turning it over, a dozen different apologies and bribes, none of them landing right, when the house lights dimmed and a low hum of feedback rolled out from the stage, and every other thought in his head got shoved aside without his permission.
"Please welcome to the stage," the emcee's voice crackled through the speakers, "Ashfall!"
Donghyun hadn't meant to look up but the sudden echo of the microphone startled him.
They walked out to a scatter of half-interested applause—the kind of polite noise a room gives a band they don't know—and Donghyun watched with his arms crossed and his jaw set, fully prepared to find this unbearable on principle.
He did not find it unbearable.
The vocalist—Jaehyun, apparently, though up here under the lights he looked like a completely different animal than the one who'd been asking for free beer ten minutes ago—grabbed the mic like he'd been born holding it, said something short and easy to the crowd that got an actual laugh, and then the first chord hit and the whole room's attention snapped forward at once.
Donghyun hated, immediately and completely, how good they were.
The stage lights swept through blue and amber and back again, and every time the light caught Dongmin's face at the right angle, it lit up the silver in his ears, turned the sweat at his hairline into something that looked deliberate, cinematic, like someone had planned exactly where he'd stand and exactly how the light would find him there. His fingers moved over the guitar strings with a violence that had nothing to do with anger, fast, precise, completely unbothered, like he'd done this ten thousand times before.
He looked, Donghyun thought, with real and immediate resentment, like he belonged up there in a way most people never belonged anywhere.
The drummer, dark-haired, sharp-jawed, a face Donghyun recognized from him standing next to Dongmin, hit the kit like it owed him money, grinning the entire time. Beside him the bassist, the one who'd tried the professional courtesy line, had his eyes half-shut, swaying into the rhythm like the song was something private happening only to him. Yujin, sat off to the side behind a keyboard, layering something underneath the noise that Donghyun couldn't quite isolate but would have missed instantly if it disappeared, his voice threading in on the choruses in a way that made the whole thing sound bigger than four instruments had any right to sound.
They ran through a cover first—something loud and fast that had half the room jumping before the first verse even finished—and then another, softer, Jaehyun's voice doing something unexpectedly aching with it that didn't match the eyeliner or the attitude at all.
Then Dongmin stepped up to his own mic, and said, with a grin that was audible even without seeing it, "This one's ours," and the band dropped into something slower, moodier, guitar line circling like smoke.
"City lights don't ask my name,
strangers smile but stay the same—
I've been running just to stay in place,
chasing something with no face."
Donghyun's hands, still resting on the bar top, went very still.
"You call it lonely, I call it free,
nobody's got a hold on me—
but some nights I forget which one is true,
some nights I just wanna run to you.
Running back to you.
Running back to you~"
It wasn't the words exactly. It was the way Dongmin sang them like he actually meant them, throat a little rough at the edges, nothing polished about it at all the opposite of everything Donghyun had spent a year perfecting behind this exact bar.
"They're good, aren't they."
Donghyun startled, found Jiwoong standing beside him, arms folded, watching the stage with the mild, assessing look he usually saved for liquor orders.
"They're okay," Donghyun said quickly, eyes still on the stage.
"Mhm. Sure." Jiwoong didn't bother hiding his smile. "Honestly, I didn't know what to expect when their manager first reached out. This is their first real gig anywhere."
"Huh." It came out flatter than Donghyun meant it to, some disbelief leaking through despite himself.
"Guess they were made for it." Jiwoong nodded toward the stage, where Dongmin had thrown his head back mid-riff, hair damp, grin wide and unbothered, looking exactly like someone who had never once in his life worried about what anyone thought of him. "Some people just look right up there."
"The crowd seems to enjoy it too."
"Yeah, glad I just talked with their manager." Jiwoong said it lightly, already reaching for a rag, entirely unaware of the small bomb he'd just dropped. "They'll be performing here every Friday from now on."
Donghyun's stomach dropped clean through the floor.
Every Friday.
Not a one-off. Not a lucky booking that would run its course and disappear back into whatever corner of the city these people had come from. Every single Friday, indefinitely, which meant every single Friday Han Dongmin and his entire band were going to walk through that door and find Donghyun standing right here behind this exact counter, and there would be no version of his life after tonight where that wasn't true.
"Every Friday," he repeated, voice coming out strange even to his own ears.
"Yeah? Something wrong with that?" Jiwoong glanced over, brow lifting slightly at whatever expression had apparently crossed Donghyun's face.
"No. No, that's—that's great." He forced the corners of his mouth up into something that was probably closer to a grimace than a smile. "Great for business."
"You okay? You look like you just saw a ghost."
Worse, Donghyun thought. I saw three of them.
"I'm fine," he said instead, which was, as always, a lie so practiced it barely registered as one anymore.
"Hey," Jiwoong said, nudging him lightly, apparently deciding not to push it. "Toss me a beer."
"What kind?" Donghyun asked, finally, reluctantly, pulling his eyes off the stage to look at him, grateful for literally any excuse to think about something other than the next Fridays of his life.
"Any."
He turned to grab a bottle, and behind him the song built toward its ending, Jaehyun and Dongmin trading the last line back and forth like they'd rehearsed the exact moment for a hundred nights instead of just tonight, and when the final chord rang out and cut, the room actually roared; glasses lifted, someone whistling sharp through their teeth, the whole floor in front of the stage clapping as they'd just watched something worth remembering.
Donghyun set the beer down in front of Jiwoong without a word, and did not look back at the stage again.
He turned his attention to wiping down the counter, his hands moving automatically while his mind replayed the sharp, unexpected weight of Dongmin's words. See you after Every clink of glass and burst of laughter from the patrons felt distant, muted by the sheer panic tight in his chest.
He dreaded what would happen the second the band returned to the bar.
***
Dongmin
Backstage was chaos in the best possible way.
The second they stumbled through the door, guitar cases dropped without ceremony, someone from the band that had played before them—the girl with the cigarette, gone now, replaced by a guy with a lip ring and an easy grin—clapped Dongmin on the shoulder hard enough to stagger him.
"Yo, that last song? The slow one?" He shook his head, looking genuinely thrown. "Who wrote that again?"
"Me," Dongmin said, and something in his chest did a small, embarrassing flip at getting to say it out loud.
"That's insane for a first gig. Like, actually insane." The guy turned to say something to his bandmate, already moving on, and Dongmin stood there for a second just holding onto it, the specific, unfamiliar warmth of a stranger meaning something nice about him.
"Hey—hey, you guys!" Riwoo came skidding around the corner of the room so fast he nearly took out an amp stand, face lit up in a way Dongmin had genuinely never seen on him before, not once, not even when they'd landed the gig in the first place. "That was—" He stopped, hands on his hips, like he needed a second to physically catch up to his own excitement. "That was amazing. All of you. I'm—I'm so proud of you, I don't even—"
"Are you crying," Jaehyun said, delighted, already reaching for his phone like he intended to document it.
"I am not crying." Riwoo was, a little, around the edges. "I just—you guys worked so hard for this, and it showed, and I just watched an entire room fall in love with you in real time, forgive me for having feelings about it."
"There it is," Ricky said, grinning, throwing an arm around Riwoo's shoulders and refusing to let go despite the halfhearted shove he got in return. "Manager of the year."
"Get off me."
"Never."
They fell into a loose circle after that, still buzzing, still sweaty, passing feedback back and forth the way they always did after a set,carefully, because even one careless comment could sit wrong in someone's head for a week, but honestly, because none of them had gotten this far by being precious about it.
"Your bridge on the new one still drags a little," Jaehyun said to Dongmin, not unkindly, tapping out the rhythm against his own thigh. "Like, right before the last chorus. I almost came in early."
"Yeah, I felt that too." Dongmin nodded, already turning it over in his head, already half-writing the fix. "I think if I cut it by two bars it'll hit better."
"Yujin, your backup vocals on the second cover were so good, I almost forgot you were only supposed to be doing keys," Gyuvin said, and Yujin lit up so fast it was almost funny.
"Gyuvin, you rushed the bridge on the fast song a little," Dongmin added. "Not bad, just—noticeable."
"I was excited!"
"We were all excited, that's not an excuse."
It went like that for a while—small and specific—the exact opposite of every critique any of them had ever gotten from a teacher, because this one actually meant something. Nobody here was trying to prove a point. Everybody here just wanted to be better next Friday than they'd been tonight.
Somewhere in the middle of it, Dongmin remembered the bar. The image of Kim Donghyun, standing frozen behind that counter, apron half-tied, eyes wide.
"We should go celebrate," Dongmin said, cutting into whatever Jaehyun had been saying about set order. "At the bar. Right now."
"Obviously," Ricky said, like this had never been in question.
Riwoo's excitement dimmed a half-degree into something more managerial. "Fine. But—be careful. All of you. I mean it. Don't ruin it."
"When have we ever ruined anything," Jaehyun said, already walking backward toward the door.
"I'm not answering that on the record."
"Yujin," Ricky said, throwing an arm around the younger boy's shoulders as they filed out, "please tell me you've got more of that rock-paper-scissors money."
"Yeah, obviously." Yujin unzipped his bag, revealing a genuinely alarming amount of crumpled cash still stuffed inside. "I wasn't gonna spend it all some drinks I didn't even get to drink."
They came around the corner toward the bar still loose and loud with adrenaline, still riding the high of the set, and then all four of them stopped at once.
Kim Donghyun was leaning across the counter, laughing at something, all easy charm and half-lidded warmth, aimed directly at a woman who had to be in her thirties, polished, gorgeous, clearly someone with money, her manicured hand resting just a little too long on his forearm as she said something back that made his whole face do that same gorgeous smile Dongmin had seen plastered on school hallway walls and whispered about in the halls. She slid a folded bill across the counter with a wink that had absolutely nothing platonic about it, and Donghyun tucked it away with a grateful little bow of his head, like this was the single easiest thing in the world.
Jaehyun let out a short, disbelieving laugh. "Okay, what."
"I genuinely never thought I'd see Kim Donghyun act like that," Yujin said, voice hushed with something between awe and secondhand embarrassment, "anywhere, let alone in a place like this."
"Wow," was the only word Dongmin could get out.
"Whatever—what are you all waiting for, let's drink," Ricky said, already striding forward, Gyuvin trailing after him with the resigned fondness of someone who'd stopped trying to slow him down years ago.
Ricky reached the bar first, leaning across it with an easy grin. "Yo, bartender! We're back—what'd you think of our set?"
Donghyun looked up, and the second his eyes registered exactly who was standing there, the practiced warmth on his face flickered, a faint, unmistakable flush creeping up his neck as he realized precisely what they'd just watched.
"It was good," he said, quick, clipped, already reaching for a rag to wipe down a spot on the counter that didn't need wiping. "Now what do you want."
"Mm—" Ricky trailed off, squinting at the little name tag pinned to his apron. "Leehan, right?"
"Give us the best thing you've got," Gyuvin said, sliding onto a stool with the easy confidence of a regular. "We're celebrating tonight."
Jaehyun ordered next, more beers, then, at Ricky's insistence, a round of soju, and then something with a name none of them recognized that the dude two seats down swore by—and Donghyun moved through the order fast and businesslike, clearly grateful for an excuse to keep his hands busy and his eyes anywhere but on the five of them, before peeling off to handle a cluster of new arrivals at the far end of the bar.
The second he was out of earshot, Jaehyun leaned in over the counter, voice dropped low with disbelief. "Okay, am I dreaming, or did we just watch Seoul Jungang's golden boy flirt a tip out of a lady old enough to be his mom?"
"Not dreaming," Yujin said, still staring.
"This is the same guy who like, walks old ladies across the street," Jaehyun said, shaking his head slowly. "The same guy Hanbin-hyung won't shut up about. Model student. Straight A's. Rejects confessions so gently girls actually thank him for it."
"And also apparently works underage at a bar, serves alcohol to actual minors, and just got tipped by a woman who was very clearly into him," Ricky added, delighted. "Incredible range, honestly."
Dongmin didn't say anything for a second, just watched Donghyun work the other end of the counter with an easy laugh, that same warm, disarming expression turned up to full brightness for a total stranger, not one flicker left of the boy who'd nearly dropped a glass twenty minutes ago.
"Insane," he said, mostly to himself this time, and reached for his beer.
"Donghyun!" Jaehyun called out, waving him over the third the woman finally wandered off toward a table near the stage. "C'mere, we've got questions."
Donghyun came back reluctantly, wiping his hands on his apron, shoulders already braced like he knew exactly what kind of questions those were going to be.
"It's Leehan when I'm here," he said, before anyone could even ask, voice pitched low, eyes flicking once toward the nearest table like he was checking who might be listening. "Please. Not—not the other name. Not here."
"Oh, we know," Jaehyun said, grinning, propping his chin on one hand. "Leehan. Got it. Very cool, very mysterious. Does the eyeliner come with the name, or—"
"I'm not wearing eyeliner."
"Could've fooled me."
Donghyun exhaled through his nose, the exact same sound Dongmin had heard Jaehyun make a hundred times when he was trying very hard not to laugh at something he technically shouldn't find funny. "Do you guys want more drinks or not."
"We're good for now," Dongmin pointed out, tilting his glass slightly. "We want answers."
"There's nothing to—"
"How long have you worked here?" Yujin cut in, leaning forward with the open, guileless curiosity of someone who genuinely wasn't trying to torment him, just wanted to understand. "Like, actually. Does anyone at school know?"
Donghyun's jaw tightened. "No. Nobody knows. That's—that's the whole point."
"Not even Hanbin-hyung?" Jaehyun asked, and panic flickered across Donghyun's face fast enough that Dongmin almost missed it.
"Especially not Hanbin."
Beside him, Ricky caught Gyuvin's eye, some silent conversation passing between them in about half a second, and then Ricky was sliding off his stool, tugging Gyuvin along by the sleeve. "Okay, this is very entertaining, but we're gonna go dance, or find a dark corner, or possibly both," he said, already backing away. "Have fun interrogating the golden boy."
"Don't do anything I wouldn't do," Jaehyun called after them.
"That's not a very high bar," Gyuvin shot back, and then they were gone, swallowed into the crowd near the stage, leaving Yujin, Jaehyun, and Dongmin still parked at the counter like three people with absolutely no intention of letting this go.
Donghyun's eyes tracked them for a second, like he'd been hoping numbers might dilute the situation, and was now realizing that hope had just walked off to go make out with someone in a corner, and then came back to the three of them still sitting there, patient, curious, and in Dongmin's case, thoroughly enjoying himself.
"Look," Donghyun said, voice dropping even lower, leaning in over the bar like proximity might make the request land harder. "I need you guys to keep this—all of this—a secret. Please. Nobody can know. I'll comp your drinks tonight, I'll comp every Friday you play here, whatever you want, just—"
"Hm." Dongmin let the sound draw out, tapping one finger against his glass, watching the way Donghyun's whole body seemed to lean into that single syllable like it was a life raft. "We'll see."
The effect was immediate. Donghyun's face went from tense to something close to stricken, eyes widening in a way that would've been almost funny if it wasn't so genuinely, pathetically desperate.
"We'll see?" His voice cracked slightly upward. "What does that mean, what is there to see, I'm asking you to just—not say anything, that's it, that's the whole ask—"
"Dude." Jaehyun reached over and patted his arm, somewhere between comforting and deeply amused. "Dude, calm down. Have some dignity."
"I don't have dignity right now, you three are basically holding my entire life in your hands—"
"You're being a little dramatic," Dongmin said, though not rudely, swirling what was left of his beer. "Nobody's trying to end your life. We just watched Seoul Jungang's pride and joy, get tipped by a woman old enough to have a mortgage. That's not the kind of thing you just casually forget you saw."
"I need you to forget it."
"That's not how memory works."
"Dongmin."
"That's not my name here, either." Dongmin smirked into his glass, watching Donghyun's face do something complicated at the sound of it (somewhere between exasperation and genuine, bone-deep panic).
"How long's your shift, anyway?" Yujin asked, chin propped on both hands, apparently deciding this was a more useful line of questioning than watching Donghyun spiral.
"It's Friday. So—until six."
The number landed with a beat of silence.
"Six?" Yujin repeated, sitting up straighter. "Like, six in the morning?"
"Yeah."
"Wait, do you always get off at six?" Yujin said, doing the math with visible effort.
"No, Monday through Thursday I get off at four."
"How do you even function?"
"I sleep Saturdays. Mostly." Donghyun said it flat, already turning to grab a bottle off the shelf, the kind of tone that made it clear the conversation was closed whether they liked it or not.
"That's insane. That's actually insane, how are you even—"
"I just do." Donhyun stated, already turning to grab a bottle off the shelf, the kind of tone that made it very clear the conversation was closed whether they liked it or not. Nobody pushed. There was something in the set of his shoulders that made it feel, briefly, like the wrong thing to poke at—even for Dongmin.
***
By three, the edges of the night had gone soft and warm and a little unreliable. Jaehyun had somehow ended up standing on the bottom rung of his barstool, gesturing wildly through some story about a teacher from two years ago that made no sense to anyone but clearly meant a great deal to him. Dongmin, who'd stopped being entirely sure how many soju shots he'd had somewhere around the fourth one, had his head tipped back laughing at absolutely nothing, one hand braced on the counter to keep the room where he'd left it.
Yujin, stone-cold sober on his second Shirley Temple, was filming the whole thing on his phone with the delighted expression of someone gathering blackmail for later.
"You guys are so embarrassing," he said happily, zooming in.
"We're fun," Jaehyun corrected, nearly toppling off the stool to prove it.
Ricky and Gyuvin reappeared sometime after that—hair thoroughly wrecked, Ricky's lip color smudged well past its original boundaries, both of them looking extremely pleased with how their night had gone. Riwoo trailed a few steps behind them, took one look at the two of them, then at Jaehyun on the stool, then at Dongmin laughing at the ceiling, and let out a long, world-weary sigh that seemed to age him several years on the spot.
"Okay," he said. "We're done. Everybody up."
"Riwoo-hyung, no—" Jaehyun whined, arms flopping.
Dongmin, blinking slow and unfocused, tilted his head toward Riwoo. "Where're we going?"
"I'm dropping you all off at home."
"Riwoo-hyung," Yujin said immediately, snapping his phone shut and sitting up. "Can I sleep at your place? My parents think I'm at a friend's tonight."
Riwoo pinched the bridge of his nose. "...Fine."
"Wait, me too." Dongmin's hand shot up like he was in class, swaying slightly with the effort. "I can't go home."
Riwoo's expression didn't even shift. He'd clearly had this exact conversation enough times that it barely registered as a request anymore, just a fact he had to plan around. "Fine," he said again.
"Jaehyun?" Riwoo turned, already bracing for a third yes.
"Nah, I'm good." Jaehyun waved a hand, nearly overbalancing off the stool in the process. "Got a whole tub of ice cream waiting for me at home. Calling its name."
Riwoo glanced toward Ricky and Gyuvin next, one eyebrow raised.
"Can you just drop me at Ricky's?" Gyuvin asked, as Ricky looped an arm loosely around his neck.
Riwoo nodded, already herding them all toward the door with the tired efficiency of someone who had clearly done this dozens of times before and would do it dozens more.
***
Donghyun
Donghyun noticed the empty stools a few minutes later, mid-pour, and felt something in his chest loosen slightly, not quite relief, but close enough to it. They'd left without saying anything else. No parting shot, no last threat, nothing. Maybe that was good. Maybe Dongmin had actually meant it, that half-hearted we'll see, and this was just the first quiet proof of it.
He didn't get long to sit with the thought.
"Hey," someone said, sliding onto the stool directly in front of him, elbows braced on the counter, chin tipped just so. A man, maybe mid-twenties, dressed like he'd come from somewhere expensive. "You've got a really nice smile, you know that?"
"I've been told," Donghyun mumbled.
"Bet you hear that a lot."
"Every night." He said louder this time, warmer, a little playful, the exact right amount of self-deprecating to make the man laugh instead of push harder.
Two seats down, a girl who'd clearly been building up the nerve for the last ten minutes finally leaned in. "Can I get your number after your shift?"
"Depends," Donghyun chuckled, flashing the smile that had gotten him free tips and terrible ideas in equal measure for the better part of a year, "on whether you're planning to actually use it or just collect it."
She laughed, delighted, and slid her drink order across the counter like that had somehow settled it.
By five, the crowd had thinned down to the stragglers—a table of office workers who'd clearly missed their last train and made peace with it, a couple in the corner too wrapped up in each other to notice anything else, the same two regulars nursing the same two whiskeys they always nursed until close. Donghyun wiped down glasses that were already clean just to have something to do with his hands, the adrenaline that usually carried him through a Friday shift finally starting to thin out at the edges.
"You look dead on your feet," Jiwoong said, appearing beside him with the register drawer under one arm. "Go home when we close. I've got the rest."
"I'm fine."
"You keep saying that." Jiwoong gave him a look—not quite suspicious, just tired in a way that had nothing to do with the hour. "It's Saturday tomorrow. Sleep in, Donhyun."
Hearing his real name out loud, here, in this room, sent a small, unpleasant jolt through him even though it was only Jiwoong, even though nobody else was close enough to hear. He supposed that was going to happen for a while now. His name didn't feel entirely safe here anymore, not after tonight, not with the memory of Dongmin saying it out loud in front of an audience still sitting sharp in his chest.
"Yeah," Donghyun said, untying his apron once the last of the regulars had cleared out. "Okay."
The walk to the subway felt longer than it usually did, the city gone quiet and blue at the edges the way it only did in the hour before actual morning, streetlights still on but losing their purpose, a handful of delivery trucks idling outside shuttered restaurants. No rush tonight—no alarm to set, no uniform waiting on the back of a chair, just the rare, strange luxury of a morning with absolutely nowhere he had to be. He caught his own reflection in a darkened shop window and, for a second, didn't fully recognize the face looking back—hollow-eyed, wrung out, something rawer than usual sitting behind his eyes.
The apartment was dark and silent when he let himself in, shoes off at the door out of habit even though there was no one there to care whether he tracked dirt across the floor. He didn't bother turning on the main light, just the one over the kitchen sink, enough to see by, enough to eat the rice ball he'd grabbed from a convenience store on the way home without really tasting it.
His phone buzzed once, a text from an unknown number he didn't recognize—probably the girl from the bar, the one who'd asked for it half-serious and gotten it anyway because saying no would have meant an extra five minutes of conversation he didn't have in him tonight. He didn't open it. He never did.
With no alarm to set. He lay down on top of his covers still half-dressed anyway, staring at the ceiling in the dark, too wired from the night to fall asleep as easily as the exhaustion should have allowed.
Every Friday, he thought, Jiwoong's voice looping back through his head uninvited. They'll be here every Friday.
He counted tonight among the worst things to happen to him lately. Lying there in the dark, finally letting himself slow down, he let the silence sit until sleep finally came.