tay tay

“He hasn’t spoken since the funeral, and you’re talking about what avenues we’re going to take. Enough of the faux-sympathy bullshit, Jinhwa–”

“Jisung, please,” Kiwoo whispers, a feeble attempt to keep the peace. He hasn’t felt like playing peacemaker these days. Even now, he rests his forehead on his palm like he has a headache with his round eyes shut. Jisung is relentless. He always is. Always fighting until he’s out of breath or the other person has finally decided to give up. Jinhwa seemed never to give up. It makes Aiden’s shoulders tense, looking at Reid to share a silent word, but Reid is only watching Jisung.

“No. No. This is bullshit. Finn hasn’t been in the ground for a week and he wants to ask when we’re ready for a fucking comeback.”

“That’s not what I’m–”

“Then what is this? A sudden mental health check? Because the timing isn’t suspicious at all. Are you going to check our noses next?”

“Jisung!” Kiwoo snaps, looking over his shoulder at the man with a disgusted look. Jisung raises his brows, putting a hand on his chest in bewilderment. Jinhwa sighs, leaning back in his chair as he taps his desk.

“What? Like I’m wrong? He didn’t give a fuck about our wellbeing before one of us overdosed–No, no, sorry, until he died, because he overdosed twice and he didn’t do anything about it. Remember that?” Every word is an accusation with fire and venom behind it. Woobin sucks air through his teeth.

“We all knew what Finn was doing,” Woobin speaks, causing heads to turn towards him, most stunned he’s speaking since he’s been the most nonchalant about this whole thing since it happened. “And we all did nothing to help him so–”

“That’s not true–” Reid tries, but Woobin scoffs, cutting him off.

“It is. It is true. We stopped giving a fuck that Finn was sniffing up half his body weight in coke after, like, what? 2021? 2022? Just because you made a half-assed attempt to get him to rehab doesn’t mean you cared more, Reid.” Then the room is silent with Reid turning his head away, upper lip curled in, while Blue almost looks smug because he knows he’s right. Blue, despite his glaring flaws, is usually always right. He always says the truth in the most indigestible fashion to watch others choke on what he already knows.

“Should you really have much of a say on this?” Jisung chimes in, baritone voice hard. Blue turns his head towards the elder dramatic, tilting it with a condescending hum. Jisung sucks air through his perfect teeth, locking eyes with Blue. “You liked Finn unconscious more than you did awake.”

Blue scoffs, rolling his head as if to get a crick out of his neck.

“Everybody liked Finn unconscious.”

Just as Aiden opens his mouth to tell Blue to shut up, Jihan steps out from his corner, smacking Blue in the mouth with the back of his hand. The impact stuns him, sending him snapping back and colliding with the back of the couch before his hands jerk up to cover his now bleeding lower lip. Aiden shuts his mouth, his eyes wide as mothballs as they stare forward.

Kiwoo drops his head in his hands while Jisung bites back a laugh, wearing the same smug expression Blue once wore.

“Stop talking.” Is all Jihan tells his son, stepping back behind Jinhwa’s desk, arms crossed and eyes glaring daggers into Blue. Blue stares ahead of him, keeping his mouth covered with one hand as he adjusts his posture, as if it makes much of a difference.

Jinhwa rubs his lips together, uncomfortable yet bored. When he shakes his head slowly, some of his dark brown hair falls into his face. He drums his slender fingers on his desk, hoping maybe to get Noah’s attention, but Noah still stares ahead, wordless.

“We could bring up the possibility of…” Jinhwa hesitates, sighing with a shrug. “Disbandment, if that’s what you boys would like to discuss.”

The only boy in the room is dead, but even Finn was nearing 26. He was no boy. These are men all nearing thirty or just touching it, all living through more than they should’ve at their ages. Reid is the eldest, turning thirty just three months ago. He’s spent a third of his life in DeepDive, even longer under Jinhwa’s cold and hard direction, and he wants to imagine what life would be like as something simpler than this. He’s thought of being a painter before, but he’s useless with a paintbrush. Sometimes, Reid wishes to be a simple taxi driver and remain anonymous. He knows life wouldn’t be easier if he were one, but he also believes it would be much simpler.

Jisung is next, being twenty-eight but swearing he feels forty-eight. A part of Jisung knows he’s never been a boy. Before he became a trainee, he helped his mom make rent by selling fruit on the side of the road or tricking people into giving him their spare change. He started training later than the rest of the boys, joining at sixteen and managing to debut at eighteen because of his charm and vocals. He’s always been praised for his maturity, but now he feels it's wearing on him or showing in his skin. He smokes two packs of cigarettes on a normal day, three if he’s stressed, but recently he’s been nearing four. He feels ancient.

Noah feels as if he’s aged backwards. When he was fifteen, he felt twenty-five, but now, at twenty-six, he feels fifteen. He swears he’s felt fifteen for lifetimes now. He can’t escape those numbers. At fifteen, Noah was the tallest trainee, told by the head trainee evaluator he was too handsome to be fifteen, and he needed to embrace that more. He had no idea what that meant, but by the time he was sixteen, they were officially dating. She was thirty-two. He only began to feel like a boy when they broke up once Noah turned twenty-five. Ever since then, he’s been going backwards, and this loss only seemed to make it worse.

Woobin has always been a man. Ever since his mom left in the middle of the night, he had been treated as a grown man, not a five-year-old boy. With every cruel word from his father’s tongue, every bruise from his balled up fist, and every exit from a step-mother that promised to stay, Woobin aged. He feels older than his father, who looms in the corner like a shadowy ghost waiting to spook whoever dares to pass him. Woobin has never been a boy. At this point, he finds being a boy pointless, wishing he were a man straight from the womb.

Kiwoo didn’t care to be a man, but that’s what he’s been since his sister died. He marks that as the loss of his innocence if he had any left at that point. The sadness in him often clawed at what made him a child, seeping in and souring every good memory he had. Since he was seven, he’s been sad. He’s always been miserable. There are just days when he’s less sad than others. Now, his days consist of rotting in his bed until his husband is begging him to get up to eat something. Oddly, Kiwoo hasn’t felt this childish since he was a child. He relies on others to take care of him. Drew even brushed his hair this morning before this meeting. It’s dreadful to be a child in a man’s body, Kiwoo thinks, but it's always been this way.

And Aiden. Aiden seemed to be the only one in the room who wasn’t forced to accept manhood at an early age. Some say his mother coddled him too much. He still believed in Santa when he was thirteen and refused to do basic tasks without her supervision. It’s never been known whether this is how Aiden is or how his mother is, but either way, he stayed a boy the longest out of all of them. Time and men have changed that. Aiden doesn’t think he became a man the night he can’t remember, but he still feels in his spirit. He thinks something was taken from him, and nothing was gained. He assumes he’s a man now, but he doesn’t care about that. He never has and probably never will.

“I don’t want to do this without Finn,” Noah finally speaks, low and hushed. Jinhwa nods slowly. He reaches for his son’s hand, but Noah doesn’t move, keeping his dark brown eyes ahead, fingers lying limply on his thighs. “We won’t even sound the same.” That sentence sounds forced out as if Noah doesn’t want to say it because it means nothing in the grand scheme of things. 

Kiwoo keenly eyes Jinhwa’s hand slowly retracting, glancing at Noah, then back at the ground as a silence settles. The only thing he can hear is Aiden’s teeth clipping against his nails. Kiwoo reaches over, shoving them from the elder’s mouth with a hard blink. Aiden balls his fists up by his sides instead, nodding.

“I don’t want to either,” Aiden concludes. Reid looks up when his best friend speaks, inhaling through his nose.

“Me either.” If Aiden goes, Reid goes. It’s always been that way. It will always be that way. They both know that and accepted that long ago.

“There’s no reason to keep going without Finn,” Blue chimes in, “I’m out.”

Jisung gives the man a glare that could cut glass, knowing this was a business decision for him. He opens his mouth to say that, but he catches Kiwoo’s tired eyes, and the air gets caught in his throat. He shuts his mouth, lips forming a line, then he nods, crossing his arms.

“It’s all of us or none of us,” Jisung finally says, voice gruff, but it carries a sadness that has Noah glancing up the slightest bit.

Slowly, eyes drift over to Kiwoo, waiting for his conclusion. The silence is waiting to be filled, Kiwoo staring at the ground, unaware of the eyes on him, waiting for the usual voice to fill the room. He’s met with silence. It oddly hits him that he’ll never hear the seventh voice that would boisterously fill the room with laughter or a stupid comment ever again. Kiwoo’s brow knitted, and his bottom lip shook, his small hand lifting to cover his eyes that filled with tears quicker than he could comprehend. A sob he tries to repress shakes out of his throat, making him drop his head down.

No one moves, no one says a word. 

Noah lifts his arm, placing a hand on Kiwoo’s shoulder and rubbing it in an attempt to comfort him. Noah moves his hand from his shoulder to the back of his neck, rubbing there and down his spine robotically, mimicking how he remembers his mother would comfort him when he cried as a child. He’s silent, but he’s there.

Jinhwa nods, taking that as an answer enough, pushing the box of tissues towards Kiwoo, who doesn’t move to take them. He sits behind his desk like a judge delivering the final verdict, his posture perfect and a cold look on his face, as he tries to mask it with sincerity.

No one knows if Son Jinhwa really cared that Finn Lee died, or if he was just sad his prized pig finally went to the slaughter. 

“We can discuss this more after the funeral.” The thought of the funeral is absolutely dreadful to all of them. Jisung feels his throat tighten, looking down at the ground as his arms tighten around his chest. 

“I respect–”

“Can we leave?” Jisung interjects, looking up to stare squarely at Jinhwa, who stares holes into the other man’s skull. Both of their stares are relentless, waiting for the other to back down, but neither of them does. Jisung raises his thick brows, urging Jinhwa to say something or dismiss him. They only stop looking at each other when Noah stands from his chair, helping Kiwoo up with an arm around his shoulders. 

They leave without a word, Kiwoo holding onto Noah’s shirt at his waist with his head down, light brown hair covering his face in a curly curtain. 

Reid lingers as the first wave leaves, watching Noah guide Kiwoo out of the room. If not for the ripple in the carpet, Reid might believe the entire encounter is a bad TV drama. He lets his hands rest at his sides, short nails digging into the seams of his trousers, and stares at the curve of the office chair at Woobin’s unmoving blue-black silhouette on the couch.

Aiden is still beside him, holding his breath in that way he does when he wants to say something but doesn’t trust himself not to cry. Reid nudges him hard with an elbow, and Aiden startles, blinking.

“Come on,” Reid says. The sound of his voice feels like sand in his mouth. “Let’s get some air.”

Aiden nods and stands. He looks back at Woobin, who presses his tongue to his raw lip and offers a half-shrug. Reid thinks if he looks closer, he’ll see the beginnings of a bruise where Jihan struck him, a bruised purple blooming under the skin, but Woobin’s expression is so flat, so bored, almost, that it’s easier to look away.

Jisung is already at the door, jiggling the handle too hard, like maybe he can wrench his way out of this room and everything it stands for. He doesn’t wait for anyone, just tears into the hall, two steps ahead of his own shadow. Reid follows, and when he passes Jinhwa, he catches the man’s profile: the pinched mouth, the wide pupils.

Out in the hallway, the air is a few degrees cooler, and it feels like a slap. Jisung is already half a corridor away, shoulders hunched and strides long enough to make it clear he doesn’t want company. Reid doubts even a bear trap could stop him now. He doesn’t blame him.

Woobin is the last to leave. He wipes his mouth with the cuff of his sleeve, eyes Aiden for a second, then trails after the rest of them. Aiden watches him go, then follows, keeping three paces behind like he’s afraid the air might snap if he gets too close.

Nobody speaks in the elevator. It creaks and groans, and smells like something smokey. Jisung keeps his eyes locked on the red numbers as they tick down, and Woobin stares at his own reflection in the metal wall, as if he’s waiting for it to talk back. Aiden tucks himself into the corner and presses his fists to his thighs. Reid closes his eyes and counts the seconds.

At the ground floor, Jisung bolts before the doors finish opening, disappearing into the parking lot. Woobin goes next, hands in his pockets, head down, the solid thump of his boots leaving a trail. Reid hears him spit on the cement as he passes the curb. Aiden lingers, waiting for Reid to move.

There was a distant sound of hurried footsteps and hushed voices. Finn turned his head towards them, but they were merely shadows moving in the periphery of his vision. The voice calling out to him grew muffled and distant, as though he was plunging into the murky water.

The faint glow of medical monitors cast haunting shadows on the sterile white walls, flickering and thrumming in sync with Finn's heartbeat. They were a cruel mimicry of life, these machines watching over him with unfeeling eyes.

Finn's heavy eyelids fluttered shut as another wave of pain washed over him, snatching away his consciousness. The room echoed with a hollow beep-beep-beep... 

And then there was silence. The stark reality of Finn's suffering was swallowed by darkness, a momentary relief from the relentless assault on his senses. His world dipped into oblivion for now, providing a meager respite from his torment.

But the respite was fleeting, a hollow promise in the face of his pain. Consciousness clawed its way back, pulling him up from the comfort of oblivion into the harsh glare of reality. The beep-beep-beep resumed its cruelly rhythmic toll, and Finn forced his eyes open, the effort an invisible weight on his chest.

The room swam into view, sterile white walls seeming almost blinding after the comforting dark. He blinked heavily, straining to focus on the silhouettes moving at the edge of his vision. They resolved into figures, and one stepped forward into his line of sight.

“Where the fuck am I?” Finn groans out, curling his knees up to be in the fetal position on the unforgiving hospital bed mattress. He knows he’s in the hospital, that’s the only place he could be, but he doesn’t believe it for some reason. His head aches, his thighs ache, his jaw aches, his spine aches, everything just aches, and Finn doesn’t know why.

“You’re in the hospital, Finn.” It’s Jinhwa’s voice. Finn knows the sound of it anywhere. He can sense a tone of pity in the older man’s voice, a tiredness that Finn hasn’t heard before. Still, Finn doesn’t lift his head. It feels too heavy to do so right now. He just groans in response, eyes shutting with a deep breath to hopefully help with the aching.

It doesn’t, but Finn tells himself it does. He hears Jinhwa inhale through his nose.

“Finn,” Jinhwa starts, “Do you…Do you remember what happened?”

Finn doesn’t even remember if he ate breakfast this morning at this point, but he knows something bad had to have happened to him. He’s using his context clues. The hospital, the aching, the sense of dread in his gut, despite being safe. Something happened to him and he can’t remember it. 

Finn shakes his head, his dark hair falling over his shut eyes. He can feel Jinhwa brush it out of his face and behind his ear, his hand trailing down to rub his back soothingly like he would to an infant. Finn takes a deep breath, finding comfort in the repetitive sensation. It reminds him of his mother. He misses his mother.

“Does Mama know I’m here?” Finn asks quickly. He always hated worrying his mother, so a lot of his life remains a secret to her. She’s far away anyway; it doesn’t matter. Finn tells himself that every time he texts his mom, he’s going to sleep, but actually leaves to go to a club and do as many lines as his nose can handle before it starts bleeding.

Coke. He left the house to get coke.

Fuck.

“No,” Jinhwa replies as he pulls his hand back. “I don’t plan on telling her unless you want me to.”

A silence.

“Did I overdose?” It’s the question that’s been burning on his tongue. For a moment, there’s no answer. Finn can feel his heart throbbing in his throat at the silence, but he figures the silence is a good enough answer. Jinhwa sighed, and Finn could hear him shift in his chair, his shoes skidding across the aluminum floor.

“Yeah.”

Finn doesn’t reply. He keeps his eyes shut and his back towards his boss as his cheeks get hot. Overdosing is so embarrassing.

“Am I going to prison?” Finn asks in a small whisper. Jinhwa lets out a strained yet airy chuckle.

“You know I would never let that happen, Jungwoo.”

He’s the only one who calls Finn by his Korean name. It makes him feel special. It makes him actually like the name, but only when Jinhwa says it. Finn finally turns over on his other side, winching when his backside is against the mattress for a moment. When he’s face to face with Jinhwa, he takes in how detached he looks. He looks tired and sad, the sadness in his brown eyes only growing the longer he looks at Finn. 

Finn only blinks at him, his face still slightly contorted in discomfort. Jinhwa curls his lips in, looking away from the younger with a deep breath.

“You don’t remember anything?” Jinhwa asks, bringing a nail to his mouth, a habit Finn rarely ever saw him return to. Stress starts to bubble inside of him again. Why was Jinhwa so tense? Why didn’t he remember anything? Does he want to know? His body knows, but Finn’s mind doesn’t. It won’t let him.

Finn shakes his head.

Jinhwa is silent for a moment, contemplating before clearing his throat and turning his gaze back to Finn.

“They found you in a bathroom with, uh, with your pants down.”

Finn doesn’t say anything. Jinhwa looks at the floor. The silence only lasts momentarily, but the machine's beeping feels louder than ever.

“You got some pretty rough injuries.”

Finn’s body knows, but his brain won’t let him remember. A tug-of-war of wanting to remember and wanting never to recall starts in his mind, causing Finn to take a shaky breath. His eyes are hot all of a sudden. He blinks quickly, looking anywhere but at Jinhwa, nearly making himself dizzy with how quickly his gaze is darting every which way. There’s glue forming in his throat that he tries to swallow down, but is unsuccessful. A sob leaves Finn’s trembling lips.

“Am I-”

“You’ll be fine,” Jinhwa assures with a nod, voice hushed as he moves to his knees to be closer to Finn’s hospital bed. Without a second thought, Finn reaches out for him like an infant to his mother, another sob leaving his lips, but this one sends fat tears running down his cheeks. Jinhwa moves up onto the bed, letting Finn move his head into his lap. He rests his hands on his back again, rubbing soothingly like before. Finn rests his cheek against Jinhwa’s thigh, feeling the roughness of his jeans against his cheek. He finds comfort in it, making him press harder into the muscle to feel the fabric more.

“The doctors wanted you to be conscious before they do a full examination, but they said you’ll just be uncomfortable physically for a week or so,” Jinhwa tells him as his hands card through Finn’s hair that needs to be washed. “You should gett discharged tomorrow afternoon.”

Finn nods through his tears, hearing Jinhwa soothingly hush him as if he were an infant. Finn can feel the bile in his throat as he cries harder, pressing his face harder into the man’s leg, desperate to be unseen and unheard. Jinhwa lets him, gnawing on the inside of his cheek as he blindly rubs at Finn’s back, staring ahead at the sterile white walls.

He’s hated hospitals for years now.

Beep-beep-beep.

“Do you have any idea who might’ve done this to you, Finn?” The question feels strange, but Finn knows it’s basic. He knows the answer as well, but nothing leaves his lips. He doesn’t want this to be real, and if he doesn’t say the man’s name, it won’t be real. None of it will be real. It’s already embarrassing that Jinhwa is here and that he knows he’s been torn up from the inside out. Finn doesn’t want to imagine what it would be like if he knew who’s the one who did this to him.

Beep-beep-beep.

“No,” Finn lies through his tears, sniffling into the older man’s leg, feeling his hand on his head. “I don’t remember anything.”

Beep-beep-beep.

Jinhwa doesn’t say anything, but he stiffens. Finn can feel an icy pang of fear in his body, letting his sobs quiet into sniffles and whimpers, awaiting Jinhwa’s response.

Beep-beep-beep.

“Are you sure?” Finn knows what the question really means. Finn swallows, nodding again, this time with more gusto and shut eyes.

Beep-beep-beep.

“I don’t remember. I don’t want to.”

A silence settles into his room.