It really wasn’t meant to be anything at all. 

He didn't remember when it started but 

Gongchan was fifteen when they first met, mind filled with nothing but PC gaming and long school hours, SNSD on the radio and late night sunday dramas. 

But the call of fame and fortune, even if was only a whisper, was hard to ignore. So he went to live in the bright-lighted city, so crowded it was suffocating upon itself, in a tiny grey building on the corner of a busy road. Made of dark basements and concrete pillars, narrow laneways and opaque windows, dustbins and criss-crossed telephone wires.

He didn't have the best reputation amongst the other trainees at first. Sometimes he could hear the whispers down the corridors: 'who does he think he is?' But he was far from home, with a lot of strange people who were all older than him, and still unsure how to control the movement in his growing body, how to keep his voice from cracking mid-conversation. He wasn't in a hurry to introduce himself and become the life of the party. So that cold, stoic image followed him wherever he went. No one tried to talk to him. 

Except Jinyoung.

Perhaps it was because he was not afraid of people as Gongchan was. Because Jinyoung was used to hearing the words ‘I love you.’ Used to being adored by girls with blunt cut fringes and checked skirts, who hid their faces in photos and whispered amongst themselves when they saw him on the school bus. By old women who pinched his cheeks at family gatherings, said isn’t he lovely, and why isn’t my grandson like you.

Perhaps Gongchan had always felt Jinyoung was destined for greater things. He had an aura about him, even as a scrawny seventeen year old. Quietly confident, without having to act out like Sandeul did, or put on a gregarious façade like Baro.

"I have something to show you," he’d said one day, eyes bright with the kind of excitement that was almost too powerful for his skinny frame.

He would never know how Gongchan’s heart-rated quickened as he lead him back to his room. Anxious and maybe a little confused with anticipation, before Jinyoung sat him down on his tiny single bed and placed headphones over his ears.

“Do you think it’s album worthy?”

It was a horrible little thing, full of generic beats and uninspired chord progressions, choked and gagged with autotune. 

But Gongchan took off his clunky headphones, and said: 

“Yes, hyung, it’s very good.” He hesitated. “But are you sure I’m really… I’m the right person to ask?”

Jinyoung gave him a confused look.

“Why wouldn’t you be?”

Though these were words Jinyoung quickly forgot, they lingered with Gongchan for a long time.

They danced all night by the flickering street lights, chemical white and blurred over the sidewalk. In that grey concert jungle, still foreign to them. The air stale with car exhaust, traffic churning in the distance, endless, infinite. Until they forgot, forgot their own names and themselves. A bunch of country kids trying to make it big. What a joke, he thought sometimes. But not often.

Gongchan stuck by Jinyoung's side as they dragged their worn, sweat-drenched bodies back to the dorm. After all that time, he'd become rather attached.

"Hyung," he whined softly, leaning on Jinyoung’s shoulder. Making sure his fingers brushed against the boy’s arm. He didn't know when it had begun, but lately he liked to touch Jinyoung. Sometimes it was just like a game, seeing how far he could go without getting told off.  

He had his hair up apple-style above his head, so Jinyoung laughed and told him he looked like a puppy. Gongchan barked and tried to bite him.

“You look cute,” Jinyoung said, patting his hair. “Maybe I should make you run errands for me.’

"If it’s you, that kind of life isn’t so bad," Gongchan replied, voice lilting with suggestion. He felt an internal swell of pride when the older boy flushed very slightly.

Jinyoung was so pretty that night. Even with his face red and sweat sticking to his skin, brow furrowed in fatigue. Even then. Gongchan wasn't sure at that stage; he had little experience and almost no knowledge of the world, but he knew there was something about how he felt for their leader, something different from the way he felt towards the others. He admired him. Everyone did. But he also felt this fluttering kind of breathlessness is his chest whenever they were together, when Jinyoung smiled like that, eyes like crescents and dimpled cheeks. A desire to hold him, to lean on him, to seek him out if he ever needed to be held, to be comforted.

But it didn't mean anything at all. Like the moon, it would gone by daybreak.