He falls asleep in one of Wonshik’s T-shirts, and his pillow pressed hard against his stomach, crying tears he thought he didn’t have anymore.

First, there were two hands on his cheeks, then a mouth on his.

Once you have nothing to worry about though, hope becomes an illusion, a drug that drags you into an alternate reality you can’t quit and it stays until your thoughts waste away and render you unable to move forward. 

“I’m so tired,” Jaehwan breathes and there’s not even the ghost of his roguish grin on his face; he seems so open and vulnerable, more so than he usually does whenever he asks Wonshik to go into his room.

Sometimes looking at Hakyeon was like looking at the sun. 

“I may be crazy,” Jaehwan whispered, lips stretching into a smile, “but I’m convinced you’re my everything.”

Jaehwan hasn’t fallen asleep with Wonshik next to him for weeks.

“We still have about sixty years to spend together, don’t we?”

Jaehwan was nothing but a subject of his, blessed with a beautiful body and an even more beautiful voice, and cursed with a sharp wit and charming personality that Sanghyuk hated at least as much as he loved.

Sanghyuk keeps staring ahead, into the small, narrowed black eyes that are glaring at him, trying to find out how he should proceed from here.

Wonshik thinks he’s probably smiling, because Jaehwan apparently smiles a lot and Wonshik, a brooding, always negative and anxious person, thinks it’s like a breath of fresh air seeing Jaehwan smile so easily at everything.

“You smell like—” Home. Jaehwan smells like home and Sanghyuk could doze off right then and there. “Like coffee and shampoo and shower gel and washing powder.”

As someone whose boyfriend appreciates the body aesthetics of both men and women, Taekwoon thinks he is righteously feeling upset about everything that’s going on in front of him.

It’s not that Jaehwan doesn’t like the puppy; puppies are cute and Badass is an extremely small one with huge eyes and even huger ears, but he’s also been getting most of Wonshik’s attention, and that hurts.

There was longing, warmth, something akin to happiness in there, all of them in his head and none of them in his heart where they should have been, where Hakyeon had said they would be if he ever loved someone. 

He was lying on the bed, tux getting all creased and messed up by lint under his back as he stared up at the ceiling, trying to guess when and where it all had gone wrong, but his head was too full and too empty at the same time.

Wonshik snorts, half a smile quirking the left corner of his mouth upwards, but a beat later it dies down and he looks up with sadness in his eyes. “Please, don’t hurt Jaehwan,” he says quietly. “He’s not the one at fault.”

Jaehwan’s smiles are the prettiest.

When Jaehwan is sad, he looks much like an unwatered, wilting flower.

“I’m rotting away anyway,” Hongbin replies desperately. “If I have to die, I want you to be the thing that kills me.”

He cups Sanghyuk’s cheeks and pulls him a bit closer, kissing him deeply, because Taekwoon has never been good at putting his thoughts and feelings into words, and because he doesn’t think he could say anything that would express how much he loves Sanghyuk better than kissing him breathless.

“The main reason why they’re encouraging people who ‘wish to see the most adorable way of blatant flirting in which both parties seem to be unaware of the other being head over heels in love with them’ to come here is you guys being openly gross."