Fanfiction [MASHIKYU]

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Mashiho 

It's two in the morning. We finished practice an hour ago, and now my dorm members sit together in Doyoung and Jihoon's room, eyes glued to our phones. To Twitter, YouTube, Genie, Melon... with a silence surrounding us so loud that it's hurting my ears.

"How did you know, Mashiho?" Doyoung mumbles, a welcome break from the deafening quiet.

Tears fill my eyes and blur the screen of my phone so that I can't see the YouTube views live count anymore. Not that it matters... the number hardly moves. At first, we thought the views were frozen. Until we realised they weren't. We checked our Twitter settings to make sure the worldwide trends showing were correct, and they were. We just weren't on them.

"I don't know," I intend to say the words normally but they come out in a wobbly whisper.

I turn off my phone and shrink into the corner of Jihoon's bed, against the wall, underneath Doyoung's top bunk, wanting to disappear because I don't feel solid anymore. But then Yoshi puts his hand on my knee to let me know that I haven't vanished into thin air.

"I can't believe you knew," Jihoon says from where he sits on his bed on the other side of Yoshi, thumbing through Twitter mentions with a vacant expression. "We've never had anything flop this badly before."

Asahi turns his phone off as well, leaning back in the chair he's in and closing his eyes. "Shouldn't we be getting more attention with every comeback? Don't we get more fans before each one? I don't even think our last one was more successful than the one before it. We just keep getting... worse."

"Our follower count isn't even going down, it's always rising slowly." I hear Haruto's voice from above, as he is on the top bunk with Doyoung. "It's just that the followers... don't really care like they used to."

"There's still lots of people who care," Yoshi says, his grip tightening on my knee and his voice a shade brighter than the others. "Maybe the problem is that only our fans care? And the general public don't pay any attention to us?"

I take a shaky breath and speak in a low voice. "Whatever the problem is, we've failed."

When no one argues with me, the tears start to trickle silently down my cheeks, and keep going slowly and steadily, like a tap has been turned on but only a little bit.

Jihoon groans. "I'm not looking forward to the meeting tomorrow."

By three a.m., we're all back in our own rooms. Before I get into bed, I take a peak out the window at the sleeping city. I can barely see the stars tonight. They're so ashamed that they can't even shine anymore.

I sleep for maybe a combined thirty minutes and I don't hear Asahi sleeping at all before the alarm sounds a few hours later.

I feel like a ghost on the drive to the agency. Transparent, unfeeling, bodiless. Everyone else in the car has bags under their eyes, and I'm sure I do as well. Jihoon, Yoshi and Doyoung all attempt to lighten the mood and talk casually with each other, but eventually they give into the overwhelming silence that threatens to break us.

Inside, we meet the other members outside the meeting room, and they all carry the same bleak expressions and heavy weights on their shoulders as us. Despite this, Hyunsuk gives us all a bright smile when we approach.

"Hey! How did you all sleep?" he asks, his voice croaking slightly in a way that suggests he didn't sleep a wink.

"Like shit," says Jihoon, then pulls Hyunsuk over to one side to talk to him before we're let in.

This initiates little conversations to break out around us. I watch as Jaehyuk opens his arms and Asahi moves faster than he's ever moved before right into them, and feel a twinge of something that might be jealousy in that I wish I could be held and shielded from everything today.