Joonmyun can't breathe.

Joonmyun can't breathe.

The walls are closing in on him and his mother's eyes, the eyes he's always having such a hard time reading, appear to have no trouble reading him right now. Like he's an open book full of dark secrets and all she has to do is pick a page. “I...” he manages to stutter out as dread churns in his gut, and that seems to be all he can say for fear of throwing up all over the meal his mother worked so hard to prepare. That would be a shame.

“Please don't lie to me, Joonmyun,” his mother repeats. She seems completely calm, and Joonmyun almost wants to laugh at the absurdity of the situation. How can she be so calm when everything is so tense? How? “Tell me the truth. Do you like men?”

Joonmyun folds his trembling hands in his lap. He his lips. “I... I don't... like men.” Strangely enough, this makes his mother sigh and lower her gaze. Is she disappointed with his response? Joonmyun swallows around the lump in his throat. “Not men,” he adds tentatively. “Just... one man. Just him, no one else. Only... only him.” With the way it's beating, Joonmyun's heart might just shake loose and crash right through the cage of his ribs. The pounding only gets worse when his mother nods slowly. She doesn't say anything, and she still isn't looking at him, but perhaps that's for the better. He's not sure his already damaged heart could bear the hurt and maybe even disgust he would inevitably see in her eyes. “I'm... I'm sorry.”

“I see.” Once more she nods slowly, but her voice doesn't give anything away. Joonmyun's insides coil like angry vipers. He is a twenty-seven year old man, yet he feels like a child all over again. His mother's cold tone makes him feel so small. “You say you liked this... this man?”

“Yes,” Joonmyun mutters. There's no point in trying to hide it anymore. “I like him a lot.”

“I see. And how long were you... involved with him?”

“Uhm, six... months?” he says hesitantly after thinking it over. “Probably closer to seven. I think.” He can't remember the exact number. How embarrassing.

This makes his mother sputter and she looks at him sharply. “Seven months?” she echoes. “You were dating someone for seven months and you never even decided to tell me?” This is the first crack in her stoney facade. She's back to sounding scandalized again, which, in Joonmyun's opinion is better than neutral. Scandalized is something he knows how to deal with.

“You weren't supposed to find out.”

The noise she lets out is part disbelief, part outrage. “Oh, so you were planning on secretly dating a man without telling me? Without telling your own mother? What on earth possessed you to do something like that, Kim Joonmyun?”

“I just didn't want you to be upset, mom,” Joonmyun defends himself. “I actually broke up with him because of you.”

She recoils. “What? Because of me?”

“Yes! I didn't want you to be unhappy when you found out that I'm gay.” This time the word comes to him surprisingly easily compared to the last time he had to use it, and that should probably be a revelation of sorts, but he's too busy trying to calm down the storm in his stomach to notice.

His mother seems to have relaxed a bit as she stares at him silently, pensively. “I'm definitely not happy about this,” she then says. The tiny spark of optimism in Joonmyun's chest is extinguished and replaced with a hard, cold lump of ice that settles in him and turns his insides frozen. He lowers his eyes. A part of him, albeit very small, had hoped she wouldn't be too upset when she found out, that she would accept him for what he is, who he is, but it doesn't seem like that's an option. “What would I tell the family? What would I tell my friends?”

Joonmyun scoffs. “Well, now that I ended it, you don't have to worry about that anymore, do you?” It sounds more bitter than he had aimed for. Surprisingly, she doesn't immediately jump in to tell him off for disrespecting his own mother like she normally would. She simply remains quiet.

The silence perseveres for a long time, and Joonmyun considers excusing himself from the table because the tension is becoming too much for him to handle, because he feels like he's about to drown in it with the way it's flooding his lungs, but at the same time he feels like it would be inappropriate for him to leave now when they still have unresolved matters to deal with.

So he doesn't say anything either, just sits there quietly and waits for his mother to speak first. He doesn't even have much of an appetite anymore, yet he keeps picking at his food just to have something to do to keep himself occupied with anything other than destructive thoughts. God. When did he become such a ing wreck? Or has he always been this way and just now stopped being blind to it? He really needs to stop being in denial about everything.

“Did he make you happy?” Joonmyun raises his head to look at his mother in surprise as she suddenly speaks again. “This... man,” she elaborates. “Were you happy with him?”

Joonmyun's response comes to him right away. He doesn't even have to think about it because he just knows. “I was happier than I have been in a long time,” he says, completely honest. The months he spent with Yixing had been the best time of his life. Being with Yixing was the best thing that ever happened to him. Suddenly, the idea of making his mother proud seems inferior to the blessing that is Yixing's touches, Yixing's affection, and Joonmyun almost wants to laugh because he feels like such an idiot for screwing it all up. Now he wishes he had taken these things into consideration before breaking up with Yixing. He usually overthinks things, but this time he clearly didn't think enough. “I was the happiest I've ever been.”

“Then you should be with him,” his mother says. She says it so flippantly, as if she didn't just imply that she's okay with Joonmyun being in a relationship with another man.

Joonmyun is at a loss for words. He had had a slight bit of what seemed like unrealistic hope, dreaming his mother would be tolerant, but he had thought of it as impossible. He had thought of it as nothing but a fantasy. He had never imagined that she would actually accept it. “You're... you're okay with this? You're not angry? You don't hate me?”

“I'm not thrilled,” his mother admits. “But, well... I can tell that you obviously like this person a lot. That should be more important than what a pedantic old woman has to say in the matter.”

“You're not that old,” Joonmyun objects.

His mother shakes her head, smiling a small smile. “You're missing the point, dear.”

Joonmyun is kind of missing the point, not on purpose, but because his pessimistic nature makes it difficult for him to trust that this is happening. Is his mother really telling him that she doesn't care what he does as long as he's happy? This can't be real. “But... but dad...?”

“I'm sure your father would have agreed with me on the matter had he been alive today,” his mother interjects before he can even think of a way to finish the sentence. She smiles. “I'm not completely unreasonable, Joonmyun. Of course I want you to be happy, even... even if it means making life choices I don't necessarily understand.”

Joonmyun almost wants to cry. He has grown up being taught the dos and don'ts of an upper class boy. Sit up straight, don't make a mess, don't bring shame to your family, fit in with the crowd, make people love you. He has lived his entire life under the assumption that he needed to follow in his father's footsteps in order to make his parents proud, that he had to find a nice wife and have children and live a conservative existence, that he had to be like everyone else. And now, after so many years, he learns that he didn't actually have to do that. It was all in his head. The only person, who has ever been holding him back, is himself. “God, I'm stupid,” he mutters. “So stupid. I ruined everything. It's all my fault.”

Gently, his mother pulls away the hands that have come up to cover his face so she can look him in the eye as she slowly says: “You're only stupid if you don't try to fix this.”

“I think it's beyond fixing at this point,” Joonmyun says with a mirthless laugh.

“Perhaps, but you're not going to lose anything by trying.” She pats his cheek. “Talk to him.”

“So I have your blessing?”

She sits back in her seat and studies him for a while. “On one condition.” The sound of those words make Joonmyun tense up, though he nods for her to go on nonetheless. “When you get back together, I demand to be formally introduced. No more dating in secret. I want to meet the person who makes you this happy. Even if he is a... a man.”

Joonmyun swallows the lump of emotions lodged in his throat. This seems so unreal. It's more than he could've ever hoped for, but he is not going to look a gift horse in the mouth, so he just smiles a slightly watery smile and says: “Deal.”

Despite the promise Joonmyun made to his mother, it still takes him several more days to gather the courage to actually call, and even then he hesitates. He has no idea what to say. What can he say to make Yixing feel better when he upset him so badly? What do you say to someone you care so much about? How is he ever going to make Yixing even consider forgiving him?

“Hyung, just call,” is what Jongdae suggests when Joonmyun calls him instead. It's past eleven at night, and usually Joonmyun would never call anyone this late, but he's kind of desperate. At least Jongdae had only sounded a little grumpy when he picked up the phone, and he was instantly appeased when Joonmyun told him the reason for his call. “There's not really anything you can say to make matters worse than they already are.”

Joonmyun winces at his brutal bluntness. He knows he's right, though. He ed up. “I just don't know what to say,” Joonmyun mutters. He's been sitting on his couch for the past hour and a half trying to think of how to word things, but no matter what he's been able to come up with, it just doesn't seem like it's good enough. It doesn't feel right.

“Well... tell him how you feel.”

“Wow, what a great idea, why didn't I think of that?” Joonmyun sneers, words heavily laced with sarcasm, and he regrets the bitter bite of said words as soon as they've left his lips. Jongdae has been nothing but kind and helpful throughout this entire ordeal. He doesn't deserve that.

“Nice,” Jongdae deadpans, and Joonmyun winces again.

“I'm sorry, I just...” His hand trembles as he rubs his tired eyes. “I ed up. It's my fault. Just because I'm a damn coward and I'm too scared of not fitting in, because I've lived my entire life doing what other people expected of me rather than what I wanted to do, and now it has come to this. This is probably the worst mistake I have ever made, and it's my fault that it happened, it's all my fault, and it ing because, I... I'm in love with him. I can't imagine spending the rest of my life with anyone other than Yixing. I'm so in love with him.”

The rant leaves Joonmyun gasping for air – for more reasons than one. For a long time after that, Jongdae remains quiet, and Joonmyun is beginning to think he has hung up on him at some point, but then he breaks the silence by saying: “That.”

Joonmyun frowns. “What?”

“That,” Jongdae repeats. “When you call Yixing, tell him exactly that.”

A brief bout of panic flares up in Joonmyun's chest. “But-but I don't remember what I just said, I just kind of winged it, oh God, I'm not going to be able to remember all of that when I call, maybe I should write down what I have to s–”

“Hyung!” Jongdae cuts him off, and Joonmyun goes quiet. “First of all, calm yourself. Breathe. Secondly, don't write it down, that makes it lose its genuineness.” Right. Joonmyun supposes he has a point. “Speak from your heart the way you just did, tell him how you feel and be you. That's who Yixing fell for in the first place. You.”

Joonmyun takes a deep breath, and it helps extinguish the tendrils of anxiety. He takes another one for good measure, and then he runs his hand through his hair, which is already messed up from how many times he has run his fingers through it already. “Okay,” he says, both in reply to Jongdae's words and to ground himself. “Okay. I can do it.”

There's laughter in Jongdae's voice when he says: “I know you can. You just needed someone to tell you to pull your head out of your .”

“Thank you, Jongdae,” Joonmyun says, and he means it.

“Hey, no worries. I already told you long ago that I'd be there for you any time you need that kind of help.” Joonmyun smiles to himself. He did say that. “Now if that's all you have to say, I'm going to have to excuse myself. I'm kind of at Liyin-noona's place right now.”

“God, I'm sorry,” Joonmyun immediately apologizes – he seems to be doing that a lot these days, though he still has the most important apology of them all left. Jongdae just makes a dismissing noise. He patiently waits for Joonmyun to search his mind for anything else he might need advice on. “Oh, do you think I should call him now or should I wait until tomorrow when it's not so la–”

“No, call him now,” Jongdae says before he has even listened to the rest of Joonmyun's sentence. “If you don't do it now, we both know you'll just end up talking yourself out of it again. Bye, hyung.” He hangs up without waiting for Joonmyun's reply. Joonmyun knows he's right about that too, though. He is kind of notorious for chickening out.

Feeling nervous, he flips through his phone. During his period of denial, he deleted all the messages he exchanged with Yixing, but he still has his number saved as 'Dimples <3'. Yixing had cooed at him when he found out about the pet name and coaxed Joonmyun into adding a heart to the end of it. Joonmyun smiles to himself at the recollection. It's a bittersweet memory, though, as it makes his own heart clench with both warm affection and painful longing.

It also serves as the final push that he needs. It's just shy of midnight on a regular Thursday night, and he knows it's late to be calling anyone, but he needs to do this, and he needs it to be now. So, after taking one last, long lungful of air, he fills himself with faux determination, and he presses the call button.

~*~

A/N: there you have it, folks. joonmyun's mother is not super happy about joonmyun being into guys (or, well, guy, singular), but she's not super against it either. maybe she can learn to live with the idea. his mom is a pretty okay lady. c: I know some of y'all were hoping for something different, but this is what you get. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

sooo much self-discovery and revelation in this chapter. it's a pretty important part of the story, really. at the age of twenty-seven (or is it twenty-eight by now?), kim joonmyun has finally come to realize that he has been living his life all wrong this entire time. he has been going off of what he expected other people to expect of him when he never even had to do that. silly joonmyun.

also, now that joonmyun has finally stopped being an idiot and opened his eyes to reality, jongdae is back in business, winning at life like the boss that he is. #kimjongdaewinsatlife. oh oh oh yeah.

I hope you enjoyed this chapter. next hurdle: trying to win back yixing. what's going to happen? will joonmyun succeed? is yixing ever going to forgive him? find out next time on "you exist in my song".

y'all are great.