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Here’s the thing.
Renjun knows he’s a functional human being. He knows he’s independent and self sufficient. He knows he’s able to stand properly on his two feet. Alone. Without anyone else.
Here’s another thing.
Renjun isn't sure he knows how to be independent, self sufficient human being anymore.
Here’s one last thing.
Renjun hates himself for it.
Everyone always thought Donghyuck was a nice boy. It stood to reason, after all. Donghyuck was the lead in every theatre play back home, was the boy with red hair that he impulsively dyed after failing his biology final, was the boy with the big grin and the bright eyes and soft cheeks that never seemed to stop curving up in joy.
Donghyuck didn’t get in fights or have tattoos or do anything wrong ever.
Renjun used to believe that too.
Everyone always thought Renjun was a nice boy too. This was less reasonable to Renjun, given that he was very well aware of himself and his faults. He knew how he came off to everyone else, how the hand-me down sweaters from Sicheng made him look smaller, and how the paint covering his hands made him look softer and creative, and how the way he never said a word in class unless when he was called on a teacher to answer a question - he answered them correctly every time - made him look weaker.
Renjun knew all of that. But there’s a different piece, another side of the coin, to everyone.
Throughout the four years of highschool, Donghyuck and Renjun only talk three times when they’re in school.
The first is an accident and it goes like this:
Sicheng comes home from college with a bruise decorating his left eye and cheek and bloody nose dripping onto his new shirt that his boyfriend had bought for him. Renjun knows this because he’d been there, at the small party held in their tiny apartment, with Renjun’s mom and Sicheng and Ten crowded around the table from Ikea and Renjun had watched in quiet fondness as Sicheng had peeled back the paper to find a designer shirt laying there on the table. He remembers the feeling of relief, of satisfaction, of happiness at seeing the shy smile broke out on Sicheng’s face, at seeing the way Ten didn’t seem to be able to take his eyes off of him the whole night, at seeing the simple joy that surrounded them.
It’s an ugly bruise and doesn’t fade overnight and Renjun leans against the doorjamb to the bathroom and watches Sicheng wince as he tries to cover it up, clumsy with the concealer as he pokes at his cheek.
“Don’t tell Ten,” Sicheng warns quietly, not looking away from his reflection. There’s no way to hide bruised nose and so he just pulls on a turtleneck, rolling the top up to his chin.
“Why not?” Renjun challenges. “Those assholes deserve everything he’ll do to them, and more.”
It’s not spoken about in their household, how Ten gets his money. Sicheng knows and Renjun knows and their mother almost certainly knows, but none of them acknowledge it. Sicheng is already in enough danger by dating the son of one of the most dangerous gang leaders in their city. They don’t need to draw more attention to themselves.
“He’s already in trouble with his father this month.” Sicheng brushes past him and grabs his bag and keys. He glances behind at Renjun, still standing in the living room, arms crossed across his chest. “Not a word, Jun.”
Renjun doesn’t say a word as Sicheng shuts the door behind himself. If he says nothing, it’ll be easier to explain why he disobeys.
There’s a bus that goes straight to Sicheng’s college and Renjun, instead of taking the left turn at the crosswalk to go to school, goes straight and gets on the bus. The college is twenty minutes away, plenty of time to get angry, and there he sits, glaring down at his sweater covered knuckles, stewing. Waiting.
Then someone sits next to him and Renjun looks up, startled.
Donghyuck Lee stares impassively back. “What are you doing?”
None of your fucking business. That’s what Renjun would have normally said. But he doesn’t say that. He doesn’t know why, just that at that moment it occurs to him that this is the first words Donghyuck’s ever said to him since they entered high school and they’d lived in the same town, had gone to the same school since first grade. So instead of his usual response, he says, “I’m going to beat up some homophobic pieces of shit at my brother’s college.” A pause. “You?”
A smirk quirks across Donghyuck’s lips. “I was going to get some bubble tea but this seems far more interesting. Why are you beating them up?”
Renjun raises an eyebrow. “Being homophobic isn’t enough?” Without waiting for Donghyuck’s answer, he carries on. “They hit my brother.”
Donghyuck hums, sitting back in his seat and facing forwards. “Want some help?”
Renjun frowns at him but Donghyuck doesn’t look at him. There are moles on the side of his face. “I thought you wanted bubble tea.” He doesn’t question why the silver boy - there was only one golden boy of the school after all and no one would ever usurp that title from Mark Lee - of their high school is skipping class in the first place.
The bus screeches to a stop. Opposite the road is the tea shop.
Donghyuck doesn’t move.
The bus pulls away from the curb.
A smile flashes at no one. “This sounds more fun.”
Renjun collapses on the bench in the courtyard panting. His knuckles have split open, having been caught one set of ugly, yellowed teeth and he’s bleeding all over his hands. Donghyuck sinks down on the bench next to him. He looks no better than Renjun feels, a bruise starting to flower on his cheek, his jeans torn at the knees where he’d been thrown into the ground.
“You’re going to stain your sweater like that,” Donghyuck grunts and Renjun doesn’t understand what he means at first. Then Donghyuck reaches over and folds his sweater sleeves back, up to his forearm, so the blood doesn’t stain the fabric.
“Thanks,” Renjun says tonelessly. His jaw hurts and he’s pretty sure he’s cracked a rib because even the simple act of breathing hurts.
Donghyuck arches up from the seat and pulls out his phone, groaning. His shirt rides up with the movement, a flash of burnt caramel skin winking out at him. Renjun looks away. “There’s a bus in ten minutes,” Donghyuck says, wincing as he thumbs at his phone.
They both sit in silence for another three minutes, breathing heavily, trying to calm down and then simultaneously, as if somehow in the course of their fight they had gained the ability to communicate telepathically, get up at the same time and start making their way to the bus stand.
“You need to ice that,” Renjun comments once they’re on the bus. Donghyuck’s thumb is starting to swell an ugly colour.
“Thanks,” Donghyuck says and they sit in silence as the bus pulls away from the curb.
They don’t talk for the rest of the school year.
The second time they speak is an accident. Or so Donghyuck swears when Renjun always asks him about it and it goes something like this:
Renjun gets the art room to himself after school on Tuesdays and Fridays. Tuesdays because the teacher, Ms. Rose, has to head the meeting of the student council and Fridays because no one, not even the teachers, want to be at school on Friday afternoons.
It’s his time to paint and let go and do what his mind wants him to do.
Today, his mind wants him to be angry and he lets it.
Anger is a familiar emotion for Renjun, it rises up in him, swells until it threatens to choke him unless he lets it out and he welcomes it.
Today it comes out in the form of this.
Angry red splashes cover the painting. Below it is a beautiful scene from a movie Renjun had seen last weekend. Swans on lake that was dipped in gold from the sunset. Anger told Renjun to destroy it and so he did.
The X-Acto knife slashes diagonal lines across the swans’ heads and black fingerprints cover the sun.
“Now that look like something out of Silence of the Lambs,” a voice comments behind him. Renjun’s only heard that voice once in the last year and yet, it is not something that easily leaves his memory.
He closes his eyes and lets his fingers rest against the canvas, black smearing everywhere. “What do you want?”
“I wanted somewhere quiet to rehearse.” Footsteps get closer and then hot air is hitting his neck as Donghyuck leans closer to look at the painting. “All the theatre rooms were taken.”
“I’m painting,” Renjun points out.
“Is that what you call this.” Amusement paints Donghyuck’s tone.
Renjun doesn’t look at him. He won’t allow himself to. Besides, it’s not like he doesn’t know what Donghyuck looks like. He has blue hair these days, silver earrings that dangle down the curve of his jaw, the same stupidly bright laugh.
Renjun knows exactly what he looks like. He hasn’t been able to tear his eyes away.
“You can rehearse here if you want.” Renjun picks up a bottle of orange paint and tilts it sideways, aiming directly at the canvas and spurts it everywhere. Donghyuck doesn’t flinch as orange paint splatters everywhere and Renjun smiles. “Just don’t disturb me.”
“With pleasure,” Donghyuck says easily and then before Renjun even realises what’s happening, he dips a finger in a blob of red paint on the canvas and swipes it across Renjun’s jaw before walking over to the other side of the room and plugging in his speaker.
“What was that for?”
Renjun doesn’t look up but he can see in his peripheral vision, the way Donghyuck flashes a grin at him.
“You look prettier covered in red.”
The third time isn’t an accident and it goes something like this:
The day they graduate is a rainy one. Renjun is almost inclined to feel sad about it because outside the heavens are cracking down on them, pouring and flooding the earth below and there’s no way to take a picture in front of the school. No commemoration of I finally made it and none of you bastards ever knew me. No final fuck you to the universe.
Instead he’s here, huddled under the bleachers because he’d been stupid enough to volunteer to bring the car around while his mother and Sicheng and Ten waited in the school.
“You know you might get struck by lightning like this,” Donghyuck laughs as he steps under the bleachers with Renjun. The rain has soaked his hair to his forehead, silver turning dark gray under the water.
“What a welcome change that would be,” Renjun yells back as thunder cracks over them.
Donghyuck laughs and then steps closer, close enough that Renjun can feel the heat pouring off his body. “You know, I used to think you were a nice boy.”
“I knew you were never one,” Renjun responds and a flash of a grin is all he sees before Donghyuck kisses him.
It’s an oddly poetic thing, kissing someone in the rain. It’s less poetic, more odd when that someone is someone you’ve spoken to a grand total of three times in the last four years. It’s more poetic and less odd when that someone smiles against your lips and draws you closer and kisses you harder, pressing deeper and deeper until you can’t taste anything but them, can’t feel anything but them, don’t know anything but them.
Things exist in threes.
Donghyuck and Renjun spoke three times in high school before they kissed.
They went out three times before they started dating.
Renjun has three tattoos that have to do with Donghyuck (and several more that don’t relate to him).
They last for three years before things implode.
They have three big fights in the months leading up to the break up.
They go like this:
The first fight starts out as a silly one. Because all fights start out that way, with one simple reason, one tiny flaw in the smooth machine that is a relationship, one tiny kink in the string.
This silly reason is because of Renjun’s tenth tattoo.
He asks Donghyuck to come with him, not because it’s a big one, no. Renjun believes in the power of threes and no other number holds much significance to him but he asks Donghyuck to come with because they’re at lunch together when Renjun gets the idea.
Kun is Renjun’s favourite, and only, tattoo artists. An old friend of Ten’s, he had given Renjun his first tattoo at the tender age of sixteen, against the painful line of his ribs where Renjun was certain Sicheng would never see. Kun is undeniably one of Renjun’s favourite people ever but standing there, in his dad sweater and a pleasant smile on his face, the flash of a tattoo creeping up over his collar, he doesn’t seem to click that well with Donghyuck.
Renjun doesn’t pay it any attention, too lost in the excitement of getting another tattoo, this one a pirate ship, upside down underwater on his forearm. But when they get back to university, to Donghyuck’s apartment because Renjun still lives with his family and there’s no way he can go home like this, the fight breaks out.
Renjun doesn’t consider jealousy to be an attractive trait and that night, Donghyuck absolutely explodes with it.
“You look at him like you want to fuck him,” Donghyuck spits from across the room, arms thrown apart, always too open, always too forward. Opposite him, Renjun stands, arms tightly crossed over his chest.
“Kun is just a friend,” he snaps back. “A friend I’ve known for years, a friend I trust.” The silent and you know how little of those I have left in the world goes spinning between them, like a pinball racketing across it’s confined machine, lights flickering in and out, making them dizzy.
“You know that would be a little more believable if you didn’t spend the whole session looking like you wanted to suck his dick right then and there,” Donghyuck bites out and Renjun uncrosses his arms, strides forward, slams Donghyuck into the wall hard enough for the painting - something Renjun had painted over the summer, black streaks covering the cathedral, ugly and beautiful in its own way - to tremble at the impact.
The kiss is painful. Biting. Bloody.
Renjun doesn’t consider jealousy to be an attractive trait but on Donghyuck it is absolutely stunning.
The second fight is the ugliest and it happens a little something like this:
Renjun doesn’t remember much about it, if he’s honest. He remembers a lot of yelling, remembers glass breaking, remembers throwing his painting, the blunt edge of the cavas catching Donghyuck on the cheek. Remember the fight they had - an actual physical fight, with punches being thrown and curses so bloody they would have painted their mouths red if they weren’t already dripping with blood, spit at each from their respective corners where they curled up like snakes, healing only to pounce again later.
Renjun goes back home for a month and doesn’t speak to Donghyuck, doesn’t even see him. They avoid each other because if they see each other, someone will end up dead. And neither of the know how to fix whatever’s broken.
The only reason Renjun remembers the fight at all, because most of it had passed in a haze of white fury, of exhaustion, of wanting and wanting and wanting and then hating when thought about what he wanted, is because of what happened at the end.
The worst things always seem to happen in the rain and so when Renjun bumps into Donghyuck, leaving the library at one in the morning, the slow roll of thunder threatening a storm, he knows.
Donghyuck glances up at him, through newly black bangs and Renjun doesn’t remember much else.
He remembers the way they’d slammed into each other, bags going flying down the steps, remembers the tight way Donghyuck had gripped him, fingers bruising his hips, his waist, his ribs. Remembers the way he’d wrenched his fingers in Donghyuck’s hair, pulling so tight Donghyuck had bit down on his lip in retaliation.
He doesn’t remember how they got home.
He remembers the way they fucked on the couch, fast and dirty and messy, Renjun fucking into Donghyuck so hard they’d both came in a matter of minutes, a yell escaping Donghyuck’s mouth as Renjun pushed his head roughly down against the fabric, hips slamming a bruise so deep and so permanent it could be mistaken as a tattoo against Donghyuck’s backside.
He remembers the second time they fucked that night, on the bed, Donghyuck this time, pressing into Renjun with all the force of a wrecking ball. He remembers thinking that Donghyuck didn’t play nice. Because while Renjun fucks like a bull when he’s angry, Donghyuck does so like a snake. All slow and smooth, easy poison slipping into your veins so subtly, you don’t even realise it’s there until it’s too late.
The third time is in the bath, exhaustion crawling over both of them, claws digging to far in to resist.
Here’s what Renjun remembers about that time:
Donghyuck kisses the curve of Renjun’s jaw, lingering and soft, pressing over the bruises he’d left there.
Renjun tangles their fingers together, pruny from how long they’ve been sitting in the water and leans his head in against Donghyuck’s shoulder.
Neither of them apologise.
The third fight they have should be the loudest, angriest one yet. It isn’t. Here’s how it goes:
It’s a small argument. Small enough that it shouldn’t really matter. Small enough that it shouldn’t break them up.
But you know what they say about a straw and a camel’s back.
During the fight, Donghyuck kisses Renjun in a broom closet on the third floor of the art building. His hand holds Renjun’s above his head, the other curling about his waist and his fingers press back into the bruises he’d created weeks ago, renewing them, refreshing them.
Renjun doesn’t cry.
A tear leaks out.
Donghyuck doesn’t cry either.
“I love you,” Donghyuck says into the curve of Renjun’s throat, lips pressing against the spot where his blood pumps, hard and pounding. Aching to be let out.
“I trust you,” Renjun says back softly, closing his eyes.
Neither of them are telling the truth.
Three months after they break up, Renjun looks up to see Donghyuck crossing the courtyard. His hair is orange and his jeans are ripped at the thighs and he has that same, stupidly large smile he always did.
Renjun swallows around nothing and looks back down at his sketchbook.
The sun shines down on him and no one notices when a single drop falls on the paper.
It evaporates quickly anyway.