Ships Passing In The Night ｜Markhyuck (OT21 AU)

Chapter 19

Donghyuck's last class that Friday afternoon seemed, at least from his perspective, to last for an eternity. Every five or so minutes, he surreptitiously checked his phone under the table, staring down at his newest message from Jaehyun as if to check that it hadn't vanished since the last time he'd checked. The few lines of text on screen were nothing special, just the address of his brother's dorm on the university campus one town over, but they stirred up an overwhelming cocktail of emotions inside him that made concentrating on foreign languages almost impossible.

For the remainder of the hour, having quickly resigned himself to not getting any productive work done, he watched the clock, cursing how slowly the second hand seemed to move when it was being observed. Finally, however, the bell rang to signal the end of class and the student body surged towards the classroom door en masse, Donghyuck at its helm. He managed to get ahead of the majority of the crowd in the hallway by brute force, quickly making his way out into the parking lot and over to the well-situated parking space he'd scoped out early that morning for a quick getaway.

His overnight bag was already on the passenger seat as he climbed in, and he'd said his goodbyes to his friends at lunch, so there was nothing left to do but plug the address into his phone's maps app and crank the volume on the radio. He pulled out onto the main road a few minutes later, the line of cars behind him already starting to tailback around the building, and settled back into his seat to get comfortable. It wasn't a long drive, but he hoped that the hour or so predicted by the satnav would be enough to help calm his nerves.

He'd almost gotten cold feet in the class immediately after lunch, texting Renjun from a locked stall in the nearby bathroom to ask if he maybe ought to call Jaehyun and tell him he wasn't coming after all. The older boy had come and found him, trekking from a classroom across the opposite side of the building just to reassure him that he had nothing to be worried about.

"What if they don't like me, Injunie?" he'd asked, voicing for the first time the fears that had been bubbling up inside him since he'd spoken to Jaehyun and Yuta on Wednesday. He hadn't been able to fully make sense of his fear, knowing it was irrational to be more nervous about meeting his hyungs than he had been about meeting the members that were in school with him, but logic hadn't done much to dissipate his worry over the past two days.

"What's not to like?" Renjun had said stoically, staring him down when he'd begun to protest. "Donghyuck, they're your family. You've said it yourself; they all adore you where you're from." He'd tried to protest again, but Renjun had simply folded his arms and glower in a way that made him swallow his words. "They might not know you here yet but, when they do, they will love you all over again. They'd be idiots not to."

That had been the end of that debate, without another word from either of them. Donghyuck had returned to his class, waiting out the rest of the day with a slightly smaller knot of anxiety in his gut, and Renjun had disappeared off to whatever elective he'd been in when he'd dropped everything to reprise his role as the wisest person Donghyuck knew--yet again.

Over two hours later, Donghyuck pulled up on the side of the street, squinting down at the phone on the dashboard in front of him as he tried to make sense of the coloured squiggles on the map on the screen. He hated to admit it, but he was pretty sure he was hopelessly lost. The address Jaehyun had given him was correctly inputted, he'd checked that three times already as he'd driven slowly around campus in circles, but the location marker didn't make any sense.

He'd spotted a sign for the main campus quickly, after leaving the main road that connected this town to the one he'd just left. Half a mile later, there had been another sign, this one indicating that he was getting close to the university dorms, but the navigation guidance had taken him straight past that exit and into a far more residential area. It wasn't exactly like the neighbourhood where his own house was situated, there were far too many college-age people populating the sidewalks for that, but there definitely wasn't a single dorm in sight by the time the disembodied voice on his phone announced he'd arrived at his destination.