90's LOVE | renhyuck ✔

.40

Donghyuck silhouetted against the window like an approaching storm. But he was here for the jacket, nothing more. Donghyuck didn't know Renjun knew. Renjun's life depended a great deal on him not knowing — appearing he did not know.

The doorknob jiggled and Renjun's hands furled into fists, resisting the nervous urge to reach for a weapon. The kitchen was not far from the entrance, and if Renjun were to sprint for a pointy knife, he'd have time to hide between the counters. 

Under the lingering disorientation, all Renjun accomplished to do was an uncertain step back.

The door opened with a silent whiff of air, as if it'd been left ajar overnight, and the absence of Renjun's parents had never felt so glaring. Apart from the chattering TV, Renjun was so utterly alone. However, even with their presence, what protection would Renjun have? Donghyuck's smear campaign had been successful, and he'd come to collect the fruits of it.

Donghyuck's dark figure slipped through the crack in the door and Renjun retreated some more, the wait excruciating. The lingering question, Is he here to kill me? hammered into his temples with each step Donghyuck took toward him. Renjun instinctively mirrored his steps: back, back, back, reaching the kitchen door.

Donghyuck raised both hands in a sign of peace. "I'm just here to retrieve my coat."

Head down, Renjun pointed at where it rested over the couch. At the prospect of Donghyuck marking the absence of the phone, his traitorous hand trembled in the air. Chenle's device and its manual weighed down the back pocket of his jeans, which hung from his hips, looser than ever.

Contrary to his claimed intentions, Donghyuck didn't reach for the coat. "There's talk around town," he said instead. His eyes were searching, his steps closer. "They're saying you punched Ryujin."

Renjun stepped back. "I slapped her." And back.

The sudden snort startled Renjun into a painful flinch. "Oh, sorry." Donghyuck smacked a palm to his forehead. "You slapped her."

"Why, are you mad?"

"Mad?"

"Mad that I hit her." Before he knew it, his back hit the wall.

"I'm not mad at anything. Or anyone," Donghyuck's voice seemed to soften. "I'm worried."

I worry about you, Renjun, Yeji's voice chimed in his head, a dead echo. The TV muffled with a crunch of static, the news anchors' voices crumbling into one another. She was dead, now. She was dead and Donghyuck was approaching, getting closer. They were opposite-sided magnets entering the kitchen, the room with knives.

"What are you worried about?" His possible self-defence weapon resided on the knife block across the counter, and it could only be reached by long strides and a lucky draw. There was no way to tell whether he'd grab a butter knife.

Donghyuck's grin was mocking. His eyes raked through Renjun's posture. Up and down. "What are you worried about, Renjun?"

Although Donghyuck stood slender, undressed in his coat, the lack of fabric padding his figure only accentuated the oddity of this situation. Donghyuck had never looked more like a stranger.

"I'm worried you did something to my cousin. I'm worried you killed all those people." Renjun's searching hands found the counter. "And I'm worried that I'm next."

"That's why you keep looking at those knives?" Donghyuck raised a lithe arm towards the knife block. There was a trace of laughter in his voice, slowly escaping with each word. "Because you think I'm, what, a murderer? You think I'm going to kill you?"

Whatever Donghyuck saw on Renjun's face, it broke the facade dam. It couldn't be helped — hearing the words that plagued his mind and made his hands wet with cold sweat, spoken with such snark and contempt, made Renjun act on his survival instincts.

Before Renjun could reach the knives, Donghyuck had leapt at him, restraining him in a tight embrace. The more Renjun struggled against it, the tighter Renjun was pulled in, leaving no room in between Donghyuck's chest and Renjun's balled fists. His teeth, locked and aching, confined the howl bubbling in his throat. This, he thought, is true anger.

"Stop, Renjun," Donghyuck said to his attempts to shove Donghyuck's torso away from his. He cupped Renjun's head and rested it on his shoulder. "Stop that."

With his fist still clenched tight into itself, the all-consuming wish of having a knife safe in his palm led his lips to wobble. It'd been too many times that Renjun cried in front of him. Was he the perfect victim? Did Donghyuck break him, or was he broken this whole time, too hopeful for the future to see? There was no future now, not with his money gone, not with familiar names being carved on tombstones one by one.

A sob muffled against Donghyuck's shirt brought back what cemented Renjun's betrayal. He had yet to get his coat. Renjun pushed him off, though the mission to detach their bodies remained unsuccessful. "Why do you have my cousin's phone?"

Donghyuck's embrace twisted tighter. "Whose phone."

Renjun extracted the device from his pocket like removing a bullet from an infected wound. His jeans rested lighter against his hips, but his hands burned hot where the edges dug into the skin.

"Did you come just for your coat?"

Donghyuck reached for it with a leap that startled Renjun into banging his tailbone against the counter. Not too far from them, the knives rattled in their block, handles swaying like a magic trick.

But Donghyuck didn't try to take the cell phone away from him. "Hide that," he urged.

Was it too late to shoot for a knife?

"Renjun." His name in Donghyuck's mouth tended to a sense of normalcy Renjun craved. It was all too easy to forget his life had not improved since Donghyuck moved into town. It had declined. Severely. "What are you doing?"

"What I'm doing!" Renjun clutched the phone and felt the metal press past the skin, grip getting wet from sweat or from blood.

In the living room, the news anchors were discernable again, but they drowned under Donghyuck's snarl: "Since I met you," he said, approaching even closer, "all I've seen is you creeping in dark alleys, picking fights with your friends. And then, all of them die?"

With a sharp pull, Donghyuck dragged Renjun back into the living room, where he whisked the coffee table in search of the remote control. Renjun's shoes screeched along the floor like an ill-timed brake stop — a car crashing on a quiet street.

"See?" Donghyuck turned the volume all the way up. It was loud enough that, if Chenle had been in his room upstairs, he'd been able to listen. "See what you did, Renjun?"

On the TV screen, a tamer version of the gruesome scene was displayed next to outdated school pictures of Yeji and Jisu. Running white letters on a red background inquired, MURDER-SUICIDE — OR JUST MURDER? FIVE 'SUICIDES' MAY INDICATE A TREND. The flashes of the pixelated bodies did no justice to the memory seared into Renjun's mind. Renjun averted his eyes, afraid to find his own face under a SUSPECT heading.

"Why did you do it?" Donghyuck's voice was less urgent, more sorrowful. "So close to our escape. Isn't it what you've been talking about, this whole time? To escape this town? Why would you do this to us?"

Looking at the TV, it was too easy to detach the people he'd once known from those whose 8th-grade pictures flashed on the screen. TV-Yeji had yet to discover shoulder pads.

"But I know a way out," he said. "Would you be willing to take it with me?"

Renjun couldn't imagine a worse fate. All was lost. The last thing he could lose... was his life.

A dry gulp. "What is it."

"You and I," Donghyuck drawled out, smile splitting his face into another Donghyuck. A Donghyuck Renjun only now got to know, really see. "We die together."