Let Me Hold It For A While

The practice room clock read 3:17 a.m., and Hyunjin was still dancing.

He had lost count of how many times the same eight bars had played through the speakers. The song had looped so many times that the melody no longer sounded like music; it sounded like a demand. Again. Again. Again. His reflection in the mirrored wall flickered with the strobe of his own movement—a long arm, a sharp turn, a body that used to obey him and now lagged half a beat behind every thought.

He stopped. The music kept going without him.

Hyunjin stood in the center of the room with his hands on his knees, breathing hard, and watched his own reflection breathe back at him. Sweat had soaked through the collar of his shirt and darkened it to a deeper gray. His hair was plastered to his forehead. Under the fluorescent lights, the dark circles beneath his eyes looked like bruises someone had pressed into him with their thumbs.

You're not good enough.

He didn't know whose voice it was anymore. His own, probably. It had been his own for weeks now—ever since the teaser dropped and the comments started rolling in like water through a cracked window. He's lost his edge. He looks tired. Why is he always the one who gets the center part? He'd read them at two in the morning with the screen brightness turned all the way down, as if that made it less real. It didn't. It just made his eyes ache on top of everything else.

He started the count again. One, two, three—

His knee buckled.

It wasn't dramatic. There was no dramatic fall. His leg simply decided it was finished, and Hyunjin went down onto the floor in a graceless heap, catching himself on one palm. The music thudded on above him, cheerful and indifferent.

He sat there. The cold of the floor seeped up through his sweatpants. He thought about getting up. He thought about it for a long time.

Then he put his forehead against his knees and cried, quietly, the way he'd learned to—no sound, just the shake of his shoulders and the hot wet press of his face against fabric, because if he made noise someone would hear, and if someone heard they would ask, and if they asked he would have to admit that he didn't know how to be a person anymore, let alone an idol.

He didn't hear the door open.

---

Felix had been awake anyway.

He'd woken at two with that strange, tight feeling in his chest—the one that showed up sometimes when something was off with one of the others, like a rope tugging gently somewhere in the dark. He'd lain still for twenty minutes, listening to the dorm breathe, and then he'd gotten up and walked the hallway barefoot, checking doors. Jeongin's was closed and dark. Seungmin's had the faint blue glow of a laptop under it. Chan's was empty, which meant Chan was in the studio, which meant nothing, because Chan was always in the studio.

Hyunjin's room was empty too. But his coat was still on the hook by the door.

Felix found him on the floor of practice room three.

For a moment he just stood in the doorway, hand still on the handle, and looked. The music was playing—some demo track, looping endlessly—and Hyunjin was folded over himself in the middle of the floor like something that had been dropped and not picked up.

The ache in Felix's chest sharpened into something with teeth.

He crossed the room and turned off the music first. The silence that fell was so sudden and so total that it felt like a physical thing, like stepping out of a windstorm into still air. Then he crouched down in front of Hyunjin, close enough that their knees almost touched.

"Hyunjin-ah."

Hyunjin didn't lift his head. His shoulders were trembling. He said, muffled into his own knees, "Go back to bed, Felix."

His voice was wrecked. It sounded like he'd been swallowing glass.

Felix didn't move.

"I'm not going anywhere," he said, quietly. Not a challenge. Just a fact, the way he'd state the time or the weather. "I'm right here."

Hyunjin made a small, horrible sound—half a laugh, half something breaking—and pressed his face harder into his knees. "Don't. Don't look at me. I don't—I can't do this right now, I can't—"

"Okay." Felix sat down on the floor, cross-legged, palms flat on his thighs. "Then you don't have to. You don't have to do anything."

"I have to." The words came out cracked and raw. "I have to, Felix, that's the whole—that's the entire point. I have to be better. I have to be—" His breath hitched, stuttered, gave out. "I'm not good enough. I'm not, I know I'm not, I can feel it every time I look at myself in that mirror, and everyone else can see it too, and they're right, they're all right, and I don't know how to fix it, I don't know what's wrong with me—"

"Hey. Hey." Felix leaned forward, and this time he did touch him—one hand on Hyunjin's shoulder, warm and solid and careful. "Stop. Breathe with me. Come on."

"I can't—"

"You can. In." Felix took an exaggerated breath, loud enough to hear. "Hold it. Out. Again."

Hyunjin shook his head, but his body obeyed anyway, because his body had always been better at listening than his mind. He breathed in. He held it. He let it out. His shoulders dropped an inch, then another. Felix kept his hand where it was, thumb moving in slow circles against the damp fabric of Hyunjin's shirt, and waited.

After a long time, Hyunjin lifted his head.

His face was a mess—eyes swollen and bloodshot, cheeks blotchy, nose red. He looked like a painting left out in the rain. He wouldn't meet Felix's eyes. He stared at a spot on the floor somewhere past his shoulder and said, very quietly, "I'm so tired."

"I know."

"I'm so tired and I can't stop."

"I know," Felix said again, and then, gently, "Hyunjinnie. Look at me."

It took a moment. Hyunjin's gaze dragged itself up, reluctant, bracing for the pity he was sure he'd find there.

What he found instead was Felix looking at him like he was something worth looking at. No pity. No fixing. Just Felix, sitting on a cold practice room floor at half past three in the morning, entirely unbothered by the fact that Hyunjin was falling apart in front of him.

"You're not broken," Felix said. "You're exhausted. There's a difference. And I know it doesn't feel like a difference right now, but there is one, and I'm going to keep saying it until you believe me."

Hyunjin's mouth twisted. "You don't have to—"

"I know I don't have to." Felix's voice was steady, and warm, and carried that particular softness it only ever got when he was being completely, unshakably sincere. "I want to. That's different too."

Something in Hyunjin's chest gave way.

He didn't decide to do it. His body simply moved, folding forward into Felix's space, and Felix caught him without hesitation—arms coming up around Hyunjin's back, one hand settling at the nape of his neck, holding him there as Hyunjin collapsed against his shoulder and cried properly this time, the way he'd been holding back for weeks.

It came out of him in waves. All of it—the late nights, the cruel comments, the mirror, the ache in his knee, the fear that he was watching himself become someone he didn't recognize, someone slower, someone lesser, someone the world would eventually stop waiting for.

Felix held on through all of it. He didn't shush him. He didn't tell him it was fine. He just held him, and let the shoulder of his sweatshirt get soaked, and murmured small things against Hyunjin's hair—I've got you. You're okay. Take your time. I'm right here—in a low Australian-tinted murmur that had always sounded to Hyunjin like a place you could put your weight down.

When the crying finally eased into shaky, hiccupping breaths, Felix pulled back just far enough to look at him. He reached up and wiped Hyunjin's cheek with the side of his thumb, smearing the tears rather than clearing them.

"There you are," he said, and smiled—the real one, the one that crinkled the corners of his eyes into crescents. "Hi."

Hyunjin's laugh came out wet and small. "Hi."

"How long have you been in here?"

A pause. "...Since eleven."

"Hyunjin."

"I know."

"You know, and yet." Felix shook his head, but there was no anger in it, only a bone-deep fondness that made Hyunjin's throat ache all over again. "Okay. New rule. From now on, when the mirror starts talking to you like that, you come find me. Any hour. Any time. Even if it's the middle of the night and you think it's stupid."

"It is stupid."

"Then come find me and be stupid with me." Felix's thumb traced a slow line along his jaw. "You don't have to carry it by yourself. That's not what we are. That's not what we've ever been."

Hyunjin closed his eyes. He was so tired that his bones felt hollow, and his face still stung from crying, and somewhere in the pit of him that relentless voice was still whispering its litany of not-enough. But it was quieter now. Fainter. Like a radio left on in another room.

"Okay," he whispered.

"Okay?"

"Okay."

Felix stood first, then reached down and pulled Hyunjin up, steadying him when his knee threatened to give again. He didn't let go of his hand. He toed off his own slippers and nudged them toward Hyunjin's bare feet—Hyunjin's own shoes were somewhere across the room, kicked under a bench hours ago.

"Come on," Felix said. "We're going home. You're going to drink water, and you're going to shower, and you're going to sleep, and tomorrow we'll figure out the rest. But not tonight. Tonight, you're done."

Hyunjin let himself be led. Out of the practice room, down the corridor, past the doors with their faint strip of light beneath them. The building was quiet and empty and enormous around them, and his hand was warm inside Felix's, and for the first time in days he believed, just a little, that the morning might actually come.

At the elevator, he squeezed Felix's fingers.

"Felix-ah."

"Mm?"

"Thank you." His voice cracked on it. "I don't—I don't know what I would have—"

"Don't," Felix said softy, and leaned his head briefly against Hyunjin's shoulder as the doors slid open. "You'd do the same for me. You have. That's the whole thing, Jinnie. That's all it is."

The elevator doors closed behind them, and the building hummed, and somewhere far below the city kept going without either of them—but up here, for tonight, it was enough to just be held, and hold on, and wait for the light.