Junhong is worried.

“Hyung, am I doing this right?” he asks, bouncing slightly in the driver’s seat of his parents’ Kia and burrowing his face deeper into the mask on his face.

“You haven’t even pulled out of the driveway yet,” his brother says, half resigned and half fond. “Try putting the car in reverse.”

Junhong pulls the lever down, watching the R light up in response.

“Press on the gas, softly. You don’t want to go to fast and end up hitting something.”

He follows, foot inching millimeter by excruciating millimeter down, and idly wonders if this is why Yongguk has yet to pass his driving test. It all seems so hard.

“Maybe a little harder, Junhong-ah?”

Junhong rolls his eyes. “Hyung, I’ve never done this before!”

“I know, I know.”

Slowly, he manages to back out of the parking spot and ease the car onto the road, shoulders tense. His brother, too, has his muscles locked up, ready to shoot his hands out and grab the wheel if need be, but seems to relax as they hit the open road.

“So, Junhong,” his brother says, coughing a bit. “How-how’ve you been?”

It’s so awkward (it seems the small-talk genes haven’t been developed well in the Choi family), and if Jongup were here, Junhong figures they’d be having a good laugh about it, but he’s not here and for the first time in a long Junhong’s with his actual hyung, instead of the five others foisted upon him by TS.

It hits him, not for the first time, how much of his youth was spent with them – almost so much that his blood brother seems nearly a stranger to him now.

He wonders if it was worth it.

“I’m… okay, hyung.”

He’s not okay, not really. He’s been dead tired for years, and he may lose his second family.

Lawsuit. Contract termination.

The words are unfamiliar at the tip of his tongue, a heavy weight in the back of his mind. They’re words that no one his age should have to be familiar with (eighteen years too young), and yet he is.

Perhaps he should have read the thing more carefully when he first got it, when he was fourteen years old and couldn’t understand anything worth a damn, pleaded his mom and dad to sign it so he could live out his dreams. Perhaps he should have read it again when he was fifteen and a little more knowledgeable but no less naïve, when he thought being famous would be the only thing in the world that would make him happy and he’d be able to buy his parents a house and all the things he’d ever wanted.

Perhaps he should have thought about it before the dark circles on the pale skin under his eyes became permanently etched, before his once-proud shoulders became hunched, before his body ached like it’d been pulled in every direction and stomped on by children who’d eaten too much sugar.

His brother makes a soft humming noise, and turns on the radio. It’s a generic song, one that Junhong thinks he might have heard before but might not have.

It serves its purpose just fine, though, as they drive along in silence.

*

Jongup is pensive.

He lies on his bed, staring up at the ceiling. The bed next to his, pushed together so the mattresses touch, is empty. Himchan had left the dorm last week, but even though Jongup’s had his things packed away for days, he hasn’t been able to leave.

He still remembers when it was just him and Yongguk all those years ago, in a dorm that couldn’t really even be called a dorm, thin walls and insulation with a space heater in the winter and a portable fan in the summer, but at least there was one bathroom for only two people instead of six.

It’s only been four years since then, but it feels like so much longer.

He supposes he’s lucky, that he’d had a relatively quick debut, not like some of his high school friends (if he could even call them friends, seeing as he was lucky to see them once a month, really) who’d spent seemingly endless years in training.

Was it really worth it, he wonders?

The mattress beneath him is decently soft, but it does nothing to ease the aches he’s learned to push to the back of mind, because there’s no room to think about anything else when all you can thing about is sing dance car sing talk eat dance sleep.

Now that he has too much time on his hands and too little on his mind, it’s starting to come back, from the dull throbbing in the soles of his feet to the headache he seems to always have but that no amount of painkillers could ever be rid of.

Every day, he’s amazed that he’s managed to stick it out this long – as much as he plays up the “smiling angel” trope in public, he’s never had the best of tempers, although he’s managed to iron out the kinks a bit as he’s grown older.

(Who could stay angry for long, really, when Bang Yongguk was at your side nearly all of your waking hours?)

He closes his eyes, reaches for his iPod on his bedside table, and sticks his earbuds in.

The first song up is a Chris Brown song, but he skips it – the first time he’s ever done so.

It’s “Turn Up the Music,” and that makes him think too much of the hours he’d spent in the practice rooms dancing to it, choreographing and freestyling and just listening, makes him think too much of performing onstage at their fanmeet in Malaysia, makes him think too much about everything he’s giving up.

He laughs at the next one, a dry, humorless chuckle, but keeps it on, letting Idina Menzel’s voice drown out everything else.

Let it go, let it go.

(He hopes he can.)

*

Youngjae is bitter.

He acts like he’s not, lying on the sofa and tossing chips in his mouth without a care in the world.

It’s all a façade, because he knows full well what’s going on, but if he can pretend, just for a little while, he’ll let it be.

He’s halfway through the bag before the thought crosses his mind that maybe he should stop – think about his image, maybe – but he squashes the thought in his head.

There’s no more image to keep up. Not for a while, at least.

It makes him a little angry to think about it, to think about everything he’s thrown aside for this.

He’d thrown away a sure chance at being a big shot at JYP, just because he couldn’t stand to wait to debut any longer (when GOT7 had come out three years after he’d left, he’d almost screamed, because that could have been him, his picture and his name, “Choi” scratched out in favor of “Yoo.”)

He’d thrown away his privacy, his childhood photos plastered all over the internet overnight, his KakaoTalk hacked more than once, his once simple jaunts to the convenience store now accompanied by whispering girls with cameras and cell phones.

He’d thrown away himself, dropping weight fast, too fast, his mind exhausted with counting calories and exercise plans, molding himself into the company’s perfect image of a young man with sparkling eyes and a jawline to kill.

He folds the top of the bag over, the chip reside off his fingers, and reaches for the remote control.

There’s nothing on in the middle of the day, but he welcomes it nonetheless, because he hasn’t had the luxury of having this free time in so long.

Shows pass by in the blink of an eye, finger pressing down on the channel up button, almost as fast as his life seems to have gone.

There’s a photo of him and his brother on the wall, taken just months before he debuted, but that person seems like a long forgotten memory, round cheeks and all.

At least, he thinks, settling on an American movie that he doesn’t know the name of and reaching for the chips again, if I get a little chubby again, no one will give a damn.

*

Daehyun is lost.

A bowl of instant ramyeon sits in front of him, the familiar scent of spicy broth enticing, but he can’t do much more than push the noodles around a bit with his chopsticks.

It’s lonely, knowing that there aren’t five others sitting around him, chattering about everything and nothing, eating Yongguk’s terrible ramyeon (Himchan’s is much better, really, but they all let the leader make it sometimes when they’re feeling a bit sentimental) and taking up all the space at their kitchen table.

Instead, he’s got an entire kitchen to himself, his parents out for the day, and he’s the only one sitting at the table.

He takes a bite, going through the motions of chewing and swallowing, but it doesn’t seem to make him as full as it does when he’s surrounded by his groupmates.

It all seems so complicated, especially to him – the gawky country boy who didn’t want to do anything else but sing, confused by legalese and suits and too many pieces of paper.

All he knows for sure is they’re done, at least for the foreseeable future.

No more concerts, no more recordings, no more late-night practices after which they all managed to wheedle Himchan into buying them a bag of chips or ice cream.

“This ,” he says out loud, but immediately feels stupid, chin instinctively tucking into a phantom mask.

He’s only finished half the ramyeon, but it’s gone cold and soggy and he dumps it into the trash, feeling a little twinge of sorrow at the loss, but he’s got no desire to suffer through a bowl of sub-par noodles that weren’t even that good to start with.

He walks into his room aimlessly, staring out the window.

He’s been spending time with one of his friends lately, one who liked taking photographs and caking BB cream on Daehyun’s skin and asking him to do stupid things like pose with cereal boxes, and even though it’s so much less stressful than anything else he’s done in a while, he can’t help but be reminded at the whirlwind of album jacket shootings and news reporters and fan cameras, lenses unforgiving to his acne-scarred skin (but at least Photoshop is.)

“Wow, when did you get so good at this?” his friend had asked one day, snapping a photo of Daehyun leaning back and staring up at the camera. “You look so cool, y, almost.”

“Ey, are you falling for me?” Daehyun had teased, but he knew exactly where it came from, and it frightened him.

This wasn’t him, the Jung Daehyun from the seaside who liked shouting and eating too much.

This was the Jung Daehyun that had been trained and tweaked and taught to do what the company wanted him to do.

Where had he gone?

He’s not sure he wants to know the answer.

*

Himchan is resigned.

Lips circled around straw, he , the familiar taste of Americano coating his taste buds.

It’s a miracle he could taste anymore, really, since he’d had nothing else to consume besides that for the past few days, but he had a strange way of lasting through things that would have destroyed others.

He catches a glimpse of his reflection in the store window, cheeks emaciated and eyes hollow, and he sighs.

He supposes he should feel relieved, but all he can feel is stress.

He’s not the leader, but he may as well be half – Yongguk’s never been good at dealing with stress or people, and the latter had fallen to Himchan the majority of the time, telling the kids they’ve done well or working the hosts of television shows to paint them all in a better light.

He’d spent countless nights with Yongguk poring over compositions and lyrics and now contracts and lawsuits, their routine no different than it had been before, with Yongguk presenting the base material and Himchan pointing out small details that should be fixed.

Between the two of them, there was nothing Himchan thought they couldn’t do.

But they couldn’t protect the kids, couldn’t stop the company from wearing them too thin, couldn’t stop each other from burning out.

Himchan’s amazed that they’d all managed to keep it together in one way or another, but he knows full well they’re all broken inside.

He is, at least, but there’s nothing he can do about that now.

He tries to smile, but the action feels heavy, forced, and he lets the corners of his mouth fall. There are lines around his eyes and lips that he hadn’t noticed before, aging him in an odd way – he looks simultaneously twenty and forty.

Running a hand through his hair, he flips through the papers in front of him again, reading them one last time to make sure they were all in order. He wishes Yongguk were with him right now, checking it with him, but this is something left to him alone, and he’s accepted that.

He’ll be submitting the papers to their lawyer tomorrow, and they’ll be officially filed soon after.

It all feels so final, and it leaves chills down Himchan’s spine.

But it’s done.

He can’t let all their hard work go to waste for the last time, can he?

*

Yongguk is numb.

He folds his shirts and places them in his suitcase with the practiced movements of someone who’s done this many times before.

Far too many times, in his opinion.

His boarding pass and passport lie on his pillow, his destination written in neat capital letters – PRAGUE.

The lawsuit will be filed tomorrow.

It’s a heavy feeling, knowing that he’s leaving the other five behind when he knows they’ll probably need him most, but he can’t.

He needs to get away.

He needs to get away, because he cannot deal with the backlash, at least not at once.

It’s cowardly, and he knows this full well, but it’s out of his hands, now.

He’s never wanted this – hell, everyone probably knew by now – but when life had decided to hand him the sweetest lemon he’d ever seen, he’d thought it was the best choice.

He’d been promised everything and given nothing, the empty words taunting him in his mind. His failures hang over him like clouds, shrouding the sun until he’s no longer sure if it’s day or night.

Shoving the final pair of pants in, he shuts his suitcase, zipping it shut before he decides to change his mind and spill everything out onto the floor. He rolls it next to the door of his room, where it taunts him, almost, reminding him how much he’s lacking and how much he’ll never have.

He sits on his bed, worn Tigger plush in a loose embrace. It’s not one of the hundreds his fans have given him, but his first, given to him by his grandfather.

He misses him.

The night sky outside is barely dark, fluorescent lights making it seem brighter than it actually is.

It’s kind of like lightsticks, Yongguk thinks darkly, lying down and tucking Tigger under his arm, because they light up the darkness of the audience, but it’s still an unknown, something that he never knows if it’s an ally or an enemy.

Or something. His mind never makes sense when he’s tired.

(Maybe that’s why nothing he does seems to make sense these days, because the tiredness has seeped into every fiber of his being, and his lyrics are “too deep” at best and incomprehensible at worst, and all his tracks have turned into acoustic guitar and trap messes.)

“This is the end,” he whispers to himself, eyelids heavy, hoping that saying them out loud will make them true. “The end, and we’ll find a new beginning.”

this is not a good day.