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ajayinthedark
[december]
[deuteronomy]
The first thing Chenle registers after his mind snaps out of the sudden surge of black is that his hand hurts way more than he thought it would. [I really like this opener. That's all. heh]
Mark stares at him from the corner of his eye, too shocked to turn his head back to face forward. They blink at each other in silence, broken after a long pause by Mark’s laughter, full-bodied and relieved. [Mark's been waiting for that to happen all December. I'm prettys sure he went to sleep imagining all the ways Chenle could hit him, imagining which one would hurt the most because that's what he thought he deserved.] He laughs so hard, Chenle would be able to fool himself into believing it’s a reaction to some hilarious joke he’s pulled and not physical assault, if not for the way the bones in his hands are practically vibrating out of his skin from residual pain.
“I guess I deserved that, huh?” Mark says once he calms down, rubbing at the part of his face that Chenle struck.
Chenle forces his gaze away and snatches the second bottle out of Mark’s hand, scowling. The chilled glass lessens the sting, but doesn’t diminish it entirely. “I thought that would feel better.”
“But? There’s a ‘but’ statement in there somewhere.”
“But I just feel shitty.”
“That’s typically how you feel after you hit someone.” Quieter, he adds, “That’s how I felt, too. Real goddamn shitty.” [Yeah, out of all the fist fights I've gotten into, all of them have felt horrible, even if the person on the other end completely deserved it. And for them, neither of them deserved it. But I guess it felt right to include? I knew in this fic, at some point, I wanted there to be a physical altercation because it's a very masculine display of aggression, and these two are battling with their own masculinity underneath the story through this entire fic.]
Chenle sits on the edge of the Mark’s bed and wrestles with the soju cap, palms too clammy to get any proper grip. Mark extends a hand to help, but Chenle waves him off and manages to wrench the cap off once and for all, tossing it somewhere in the depths of Mark’s room. [I didn't intend to have this little soju moment, but I asked some friends what they drank at parties and they all said soju so I decided to do a reflection from the first party they run into each other at.] It bounces a few times and rolls to a stop between Mark’s desk, which has too much shit on it, and Mark’s chair, which also has too much shit on it. Looking around the inside of the bedroom, practically every surface has too much shit on it.
After his first sip, Chenle finds the strength to look back at Mark and watch him settle cross-legged next to him. “I thought that would remind me I’m still supposed to be mad at you,” Chenle grumbles, “but I forgave you in my head that same night. I’m pretty sure I can only get mad at you when it comes to your shit math.”
“Well, my New Years’ Resolution is to go to office hours more often, so hopefully you won’t get mad at me any more at all?”
Chenle doesn’t think he’ll ever be able to get mad at Mark again, not when he’s held grudges over customers that refuse to throw their straw wrappers out and yet has excused Mark in his head for everything under the sun. That would be humiliating to admit aloud though, so Chelne replies instead, “Don’t test your luck, Mark Lee.”
Mark laughs. “I’m trying to be a better person for the twenty-second year in a row. Less yelling, more gratitude, more hope.”
The examples are objectively hilarious. Mark measures his worth by his work, Mark doesn’t know how to ask for help, Mark ties his shoes really fucking slow, Chenle can itemise every single one of the problems with Mark Lee, all of the problems he spun around his head like a carousel projector every time he tried forcing himself to rationalise the whole conjecture [I also did a litlte bit of research on math while writing this, and I discovered the word conjecture in relation to math, and I liked it so much, I decided to use it three times lmao.] that was being in love with Mark Lee. Yelling, gratitude, and hope aren’t anywhere on the list, much less near the top three.
Learning to tie his shoes faster would probably be the easiest resolution, and it’s more relevant than yelling, gratitude, and hope.
“How about less girls?” Chenle snorts.
“I—yeah. Less girls,” Mark agrees. “More one-on-one time with you guys.”
“Less punching, too.”
Mark grimaces at the reminder. It’s cute. “No punching at all, if I can help it.” He takes a swig of his soju, all Mark Lee style [Straight from the bottle. Though, a lot more people do this than I realised after I wrote it.], and eyes Chenle curiously. “Do you have any?”
“I don’t believe in New Years’ resolutions,” Chenle answers honestly, “If you want to change, it’s stupid to hinge it on a singular date. No one should need an excuse to be a better person.”
“It’s not an excuse, it’s an extra motivator.” Chenle rolls his eyes and yelps when Mark nearly shoves him off the bed to make space to sit cross-legged. “Man, you’re such a hater. What are your normal day-to-day resolutions then, sir?”
“Drink eight cups of water a day. Incorporate stretching more into my routines. Smile even when I get a less than twenty-percent tip.”
“That’s it? No personality resolutions?”
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
“Hey, listen, I—okay, you’re a great guy. I love you, you know.” Mark isn’t even looking at Chenle when he drops that line. Chenle grits his teeth and takes his first swig from his own bottle. “But don’t you think everyone has places they can improve in? We as a human species are built on our capacity for growth.”
“You sound like you have ideas.”
“I—” Mark runs his tongue over his teeth, a motion that has Chenle’s mouth going dry. “I actually don’t, haha. You’re kind of my ideal man?” [This is a throwback to that one ChenMark moment in the dream movie, where Mark admits that Chenle is his ideal version of masculinity. It's my favourite ChenMark description ever, and I really banked hard on that while writing this. Chenle is the "ideal" version of Mark's everything: he's better at math, better at basketball, more patient, more secure in his sexuality, etc. etc. This entire fic, Mark is trying so hard to balance both "being" Chenle, and being someone Chenle could want.]
What the fuck.
Mark still isn’t looking at him, rattling on without any care for how Chenle’s heart is threatening to extricate itself out of his chest. It’s not fucking fair, how easily Mark is able to render Chenle speechless. “You’re headstrong when it comes to your problems, and you don’t second guess your solutions. You know how to rationalise your emotions but you aren’t overly stoic. I feel like I’ve never seen you struggle. You’re patient, reliable, you have this sweet side you only show me, that sort of thing.” Mark waves a hand. “You’d make a good dad, lowkey.” [I tried to subtly incorporate the old ChenMark father-son-isms into this fic. I think most people interpret it as daddy kink, but to me, it's a really interesting reflection of how they view each other's masculinity. (I keep saying masculinity but I don't have any better words lol) They both see each other as strong, capable, stoic, and somewhat unwilling to open up, and they both want in on each other's feelings. That manifests in Chenle acting somewhat fatherly towards Mark (because he craves that vulnerability from Mark, but he also wants to take care of Mark).]
Chenle wants more than anything to let himself latch on to Mark’s praise, soak it in and pretend Mark means it the way Chenle wants him to mean it, but his mind can’t help reminding him that half of those are Chenle faking it until he makes it, the other half a result of being so fucking gay for Mark, it’s on another level of humiliating. Mark falling for the act is supposed to be a good thing, and yet all Chenle feels is crushing disappointment in being Mark’s “ideal man” and still not being enough for him.
Telling Mark any of those insecurities would defeat the point of trying to be perfect for him [Two way street.], so Chenle instead fishes around his head for something surface level. He even sets aside his soju so he isn’t tempted to drink more and reveal something stupid. “Yizhuo says I tell her ‘no’ too much. Donghyuck says that too, actually.”
“You never say no to me,” Mark observes.
“That’s because—”
That’s because Chenle doesn’t know how to say no to him. [As mentioned, Chenle can't say no to Mark, Mark can only say no to Chenle.] He doesn’t say that thought aloud. “That’s because you don’t ask me stupid shit.”
“Really?” Mark finishes his soju and sets the bottle next to Chenle’s, glass touching glass. “I’m pretty sure all my math questions are stupid shit.”
“It’s not stupid to not understand something. It’s stupid to keep it to yourself, that’s all.”
“Then can I ask you another question?”
“Always.” Chenle thinks he would solve a Millenium Prize Problem for Mark if he so much as wondered aloud what it would be like to have a million dollars, even if the million dollars just went to bird food and Chinese takeout. “What’s up, hyung?”
Somewhere beyond the walls of Mark’s bedroom, heavy bass pulses, and amidst the cheering, Chenle thinks he hears the crowd begin to shout the last seconds of the New Years’ Eve countdown.
He can’t focus on any of that around him though, not when Mark is looking at his lips like he’s trying to piece together the correct rhetorical device, Korean idiom, or Bible verse to describe them.
And Chenle thinks now more than ever is the time to finally learn to tell Mark no, because if he doesn’t say no now, he’ll know for sure he’s never going to learn to say no to Mark Lee, not in a million fucking years. [Which...he never learns...]
Except, there’s a problem, a problem that goes by too quickly for Chenle to anticipate.
For the first time, Mark Lee doesn’t ask. [He kisses Chenle like he doesn't know if he has permission, because he never asks. The very opening scene alludes to this.]
Mark just closes his eyes because of course he closes his eyes, and Chenle doesn’t get to register anything other than the fact that Mark’s glasses are askew before he’s leaning forward, breathing in Chenle’s space, and kissing Chenle when the clock hits zero like he doesn’t know if he has permission to (he does).
And it’s…
Soft.
[I loved starting this fic in media res, because one of my favourite things to do is take words from the very beginning of the fic and reflect them in my final scene. It's corny, but I do it all the time. This whole New Year's Eve party is directly in the middle of Chenle and Mark's story, marking where Chenle's finished the brunt of his character growth and opening into the brunt of Mark's character growth, and I timed it for New Year's because it's quite literally the turn of the page into the next chapter. Also, more than all other holidays, New Year's feels the most contained; there's something about it that's so weirdly contained, probably because people don't usually celebrate it for more than a few hours. That transitional period was the perfect way to open the fic, and ending this fic with that weird sense of movement felt like the best conclusion.]
