Chapter Text
There are things from being alive that Renjun misses, of course there are. Simple things like having a nice cup of tea or petting stray cats or taking a hot shower. Things like long car rides to nowhere, open windows in early autumn. Renjun would kill to have a bowl of shitty instant ramen at all points in time, except right, he’s the dead one.
There are other things too, things that are… heavier. His family, for one—even though Renjun’s sure they’re long gone. Or, just, the general physicality of the world. Renjun misses things having weight, palpability. Renjun misses the effort that went into movement, the exertion of carrying home groceries, the sweat of dancing around like an idiot. Renjun misses feeling alive, instead of the strange gray limbo that he’s stuck in.
He’s grateful for Donghyuck, in that sense. Donghyuck, who always tries his best to joke around, even when everything seems hopelessly bleak. Donghyuck, who’s so much more sensitive than Renjun had originally given him credit for. Donghyuck, who’s the closest thing to an anchor Renjun has at this point. Because sometimes it feels like if Donghyuck weren’t around to keep him tethered, Renjun would simply drift away, lose track of reality, disappear all the way into nothingness.
To say that Renjun is in love with Donghyuck is almost a grand understatement.
Renjun’s entire half-life is a constant, one long wash of stasis. Same apartment, same cycle of tenants, same pitiful existence. And the only thing out that Renjun really cares about sticking around is Donghyuck—everything else is supposed to be real and solid, but Donghyuck is the only one that keeps him grounded. It’s only ever been Donghyuck, for Renjun.
That’s the problem with Jaemin, Renjun thinks. Or, maybe not a problem, but—
Jaemin is new. Shiny and new and terrifying, the groundbreaking update to a game Renjun had long memorized the walk-through for. Donghyuck has been Renjun’s companion for so long that he’d almost thought they were irreversibly joined together, but Jaemin threatens all of that so, so easily.
Which is why Renjun says what he does after Jaemin surprises him with the succulents. Because Jaemin really is just too good, and it’s almost painful how much both he and Donghyuck have grown to like him.
His reaction feels justified to himself—after all, Jaemin uproots practically everything he’s ever known—but then the spirals of regret start creeping in at the look on Jaemin’s face. Something that starts out naively confused and slowly wilts into hurt vulnerability. And Jaemin is pretty, pretty even while crestfallen, but Renjun can’t quite stomach causing such a look to mar his features. He goes out on a limb, then, and tries to explain himself, why he’d been so callous for weeks, why he’d said what he said.
“I’m sorry—I didn’t mean—it’s just that.” Renjun trails off, trying to collect his thoughts. He rolls around a few words in his mouth, and then decides he doesn’t like any of them. “Thank you for the plants,” he tries instead. His voice sounds tiny even to his own ears, as tiny as he feels perhaps.
He doesn’t want to hurt Jaemin. Maybe he did, once upon a time. Before he’d gotten to know Jaemin and before Jaemin had wormed his way into Renjun’s heart, but now he can’t imagine even accidently making Jaemin upset, nevermind purposefully doing so.
“They’re lovely, I promise—I’m really happy you got them for me, and—no.” Renjun rubs at his face self-consciously. He’s usually better spoken than this, but something about Jaemin makes all of his coherency fly out the window. “No, I’m saying all of this in the wrong order.”
“There’s no rush,” Jaemin cuts in, voice quiet and gentle. He looks less taken aback now, the sharpness of rejection being dulled by Renjun’s fumbled apology. “You can take your time.”
Renjun presses his lips together and then sighs. There really is no good way to go about this, is there?
He lands on blurting out, “I’m in love with Donghyuck,” quick and to the point, ripping off the band-aid. He takes momentary satisfaction at how Jaemin’s eyes round out, before continuing, “And, so are you. Right?”
Jaemin’s eyes truly bug out this time, mouth rounding out into a proper ‘o’ shape. “I—Yeah. Yeah, I am. Maybe… maybe not love, not this soon, but something close. Is it really that obvious?”
“Kind of? I think… it’s easier for me to tell because, well. I’m in the same boat? Like, I certainly can’t blame you.”
“Oh. Oh, but, you do know that he loves you back?”
At this, Renjun blinks once, twice. Runs over the words again to make sure he hasn’t misheard, because that can’t be right. He must have something backwards here. “What? No, it’s you that he loves—likes—whatever. It’s you that he has feelings for.”
“Renjun. Have you considered that… it could be both? Donghyuck, he can—oh it feels so childish to word it this way—but he can like us both, you know. At the same time.”
“How do you even know that? How—how can that be possible?”
“I know, because it’s what I feel. For both of you—” Jaemin breaks off then, mulls over his words for a second, before plowing forward, “And, if it’s not too presumptuous of me to say so, it’s what you feel too.”
And oh. Jaemin’s hit far too close to home there.
Because Renjun, he’s run through the possibilities an endless amount of times, tried to piece together all the possible scenarios that their odd trio could turn out, but he’s never factored this in before.
All of his what-if’s end in heartbreak for at least one of the parties involved, at least someone getting cast out to the side in order to make way for the other two. And that’s at best—there’s also all of Renjun’s fear over just how incompatible Jaemin could be with the two of them. How they’re practically different species, one human and two ghosts, and how the two feel too alien to ever converge properly.
Jaemin makes it sound so simple though. Like they really could all just be together, all three of them, Renjun-and-Donghyuck-and-Jaemin. Easy as that. Nothing more, nothing less.
“Oh,” is what finally comes out of his mouth, once he gets over himself. Which he knows is a weak reply, but Jaemin has just completely shattered the foundation of what he’s been losing sleep over for months. And he needs time to recalculate everything.
Jaemin seems far more at peace now though, now that he’s figured Renjun out a bit more. “We should talk about this with Donghyuck too, but. Does that solve things for you?”
“How would it go, then? Would we just… all date each other?”
“Well—” Jaemin chuckles roughly— “Ideally, yes. We would all be dating.”
“And it would just. Work out like that?” Renjun asks. He doesn’t like doing this; he wants to believe Jaemin; he wants to hope for the best. But things just feel too good to be true, and that conversely makes Renjun feel so, so small. He doesn’t want anything to be ruined, and he’s been worried over this for so long that it seems hard to think that it could ever turn out alright.
“There’s only one way to find out, isn’t there?”
“I just—” Renjun huffs and crosses his arms, curling into himself— “What if it’s not enough? What if we’re not enough? You’re alive, Jaemin, you’re not—not limited in the same ways we are. You have an entire world of people, and we—the two of us—we can’t even leave this fucking apartment.” Renjun exhales, or whatever the ghostly equivalent of an exhale is, after he speaks, a weak, shuddery little thing.
He thinks that if he were still able to, he’d probably be crying. That’s no longer an option, however, which brings Renjun back to the problem at hand. “I don’t want to trap you in a relationship that’s already maxed out its potential, because you deserve so much more than that. So much more than anything Donghyuck and I could give you.”
The entire time he’s been ranting, Jaemin’s been staring at him with a strange sort of gleam in his eyes that Renjun can’t decipher. Now though, sensing that Renjun’s finished speaking, the look shifts into something more soft, tender. “Oh, Renjunnie. How long have you been thinking about this?”
“Since… since Donghyuck started falling in love with you. It was about keeping him safe at first. And then it was about keeping the both of you safe, and then—well. I got tangled up in everything too, and here we are.”
“Here we are indeed,” Jaemin muses with a small, breathy laugh. He does that a lot, Renjun’s noticed. Laughing in the middle of his speech, that is, this bumbling sort of laughter that permeates his words. It’s a bit like he’s trying, constantly trying, to tend to something else—the bloomings of it will be okay, of better days and better moments. The blossoms of hope, silly and splendid, all spurred on by that damn laugh.
It’s a very convincing laugh, too, and Renjun feels himself caving. Slowly.
Jaemin continues, “Thank you for caring about us, Renjun. You’re—you’re so good at that. Caring, I mean, but I think that all three of us can be happier if we just try?”
“What if you meet someone else though? What if you get tired of us, tired of all these constraints, and want something more?”
“Then we figure things out. We work out a nice, healthy polyamorous relationship with one more person, or we talk things through, or something. We can renegotiate when we get there, but we’ll never get there if we don’t give it a shot.”
Renjun squeezes his eyes shut. He’s exhausted, really—Jaemin’s instigated so many revelations today, and now all of them are crashing down upon him. “Fine. Fine, we can try. Just, give me a few days before we talk to Donghyuck, okay?”
And Jaemin, sensing that he’s pushed Renjun as far as he can go today, agrees. “Of course, whatever you need, Renjun. Whatever you need.”
—
It’s weird navigating the halls of the apartment after that. He can’t look Jaemin or Donghyuck in the eye for longer than a few minutes at a time, not with the whole ‘I may or may not be in love with one of you and strongly in like with the other’ thing floating around his head.
Yeah.
What’s even weirder, though, is examining all of his interactions with Donghyuck through the rose-tinted lens of oh-shit-he-likes-me-back.
(Jaemin was right, it does feel a bit childish to keep saying it like that: Renjun feels like he should be plucking the petals off flowers—he likes me, he likes me not—but, whatever. Donghyuck likes him.)
After Jaemin had dropped that bombshell on him, it seems so obvious now, how Donghyuck practically lays his heart out in plain sight for Renjun sometimes. Renjun won’t lie and say that he’s never had his suspicions about his feelings being mutual, but he’d always chalked it up to just him being hopeful. Conjuring up imaginary reciprocity from where there was none because that’s what he secretly wished for. Projecting his own emotions onto Donghyuck.
But, it’s hard to keep doubting himself these days. Renjun picks up on so much more now, and it’s almost absurd how oblivious he was before: how Donghyuck’s gaze softens when Renjun goes on one of his rambling tangents, how he always checks in with Renjun after making a particularly mad joke about him, how he stares at Renjun instead of the television sometimes during movie night.
As a bonus, it’s also a mind-melting sort of delightful to watch how Donghyuck and Jaemin interact without the painful spike of being left behind in the way. It’s been so long since both Renjun and Donghyuck have met anyone new (or, relatively new? Jaemin’s been living with them for almost a year at this point, but they’ve only really known each other for half that time, since, you know, the whole make-his-life-living-hell phase happened) that Donghyuck absolutely flourishes under Jaemin’s attention.
It doesn’t even seem to matter that Donghyuck doesn’t have physical form. He’s glowing—they’re both glowing, but Donghyuck is more alive than ever before, almost as if the person Renjun’s held onto for so long is flesh and bone again.
The two of them just click together so nicely, Jaemin’s general willingness to indulge Donghyuck working marvelously with Donghyuck’s eagerness to talk, Donghyuck’s infectious excitement pairing brilliantly with Jaemin’s. It makes Renjun feel silly for ever being resentful of their relationship—how could he have ever felt so bitter towards something so good?
It’s this restored faith in the world that makes Renjun braver, bolder. It’s this that makes Renjun nod at Jaemin one evening as the three of them are gathered at the sofa.
It’s this that makes Renjun finally close his eyes, take the leap-of-faith, and hope for the best.
—
“Donghyuck,” begins Jaemin, and Renjun is impressed at how steady his voice is despite how anxious he must be. After all, Jaemin’s showing all of his other nervous tics, from the slow rattle of his fingers drumming on the coffee table to the non-stop bouncing of his knee as he sits, but he seems to have his voice under control at the very least. “Can we… discuss something with you?”
“Oh,” Donghyuck says, blinking owlishly. “Sure, what’s up?”
“Well, Renjun and I were talking the other day and—you don’t have to say yes, of course, there’s no pressure, but—we were just thinking that—”
“We both like you,” Renjun interjects, feeling a strange sort of deja vu to when he’d had that talk with Jaemin all that time ago. “And… if it’s okay with you, we’d both like to date you. Like—all three of us. Together.”
“Oh,” repeats Donghyuck, and for one stretched out moment Renjun worried that everything won’t work out as nicely as he’d hoped. Except, then Donghyuck rushes forward and says, “Oh, yes, oh my god. Took you long enough—yes, I thought you’d never ask.”
“I—what?” says Jaemin, looking a little taken aback, but mostly pleased.
Donghyuck laughs, a high lilting thing of joy. “I overheard you two that day on the balcony. Not the whole thing, but enough, and I’ve been waiting for one of you to bring it up for days.” He fake-pouts, then, and adds, “Not cool leaving me hanging for all this time, by the way. Not cool at all.”
“Shut up, you try confessing to the guy you’ve been in love with for decades,” Renjun shoots back, but that’s in jest too. Jaemin’s already moved onto fully celebrating, flapping his arms around and prancing through the apartment with a sudden burst of energy.
And Donghyuck’s always kept him grounded, but this new floaty feeling? This giddiness, building from the base of his ribcage and rapidly expanding upwards? This sheer, unbounded experience of joy, pure and lovely?
Renjun didn’t think he’d ever be allowed to have this, not this much and not this strong, but he thinks he could get used to it. He thinks that he could really and truly get used to it.
—
The handle to their apartment door rattles around a few times before the door opens, revealing Jaemin—Renjun’s boyfriend, some extremely unhelpful part of him supplies, still riding off that high even though it's been months—in all his glory. A new addition, however, is the boy trailing a few paces behind him. He’s lugging around a backpack and holding a tray with two coffees, and oh. Right, this must be the classmate that Jaemin has said was coming over to work on a project.
Yangyang, was it? Hmm. Yeah, sounds about right.
Renjun drops his knitting needles as the two move into the living room and moves to join Donghyuck in hovering over their heads. Behave, Jaemin had told them when he first mentioned Yangyang, not don’t snoop around and stick your noses where they don’t belong.
And behave they do, as Yangyang and Jaemin proceed to do literally nothing interesting for the next hour. Well, Yangyang seems interesting enough, having a generally lighthearted disposition that Renjun can get behind, but that doesn’t change the fact that it’s really boring to watch two college students work on a project. Even if you do have amorous feelings for one of them.
Renjun would go back to knitting, except floating needles and yarn aren’t exactly the most inconspicuous things in the world, and Renjun is too lazy to move. He’s suddenly quite thankful for his mysterious ghostly powers of falling asleep in midair actually—ghost physics get a lot of things wrong, but being able to drift off whenever and wherever isn’t one of them.
His nap ends rather abruptly, though, when Jaemin calls for a break and their reshuffling around wakes up both Renjun and Donghyuck. Renjun stretches after the interruption, with full intention to go back to sleep, when Yangyang leans in towards Jaemin conspiratorially.
And he says, voice turning the most serious that Renjun’s ever heard it, “Jaemin, bro. Not to alarm you or anything, but your place kind of has a ghost infestation problem.”
Uh. What the fuck?
Fully awake now, Renjun exchanges wide-eyed glances with Donghyuck. From down below, Jaemin’s stiffened in his seat, back ram-rod straight and hands wringing themselves out in his lap.
“How—how do you know?”
“Oh, uh,” says Yangyang, now looking taken aback himself. “Sorry, people don’t really believe me that fast when I tell them that. Was expecting a lot more weird looks. Um, yeah, it’s kind of a family business?”
“A… family business?”
“We’re a little like the ghostbusters—you don’t need to worry about the details. But there are spells and shit that let you see ghosts? Ones that let you talk to them, make contact with them, and banish them too. All sorts of stuff really.”
“There are?” asks Jaemin, echoing Renjun’s thoughts. Because, holy shit, there might be some way that Jaemin could actually physically touch them. Holy fuck.
“Yeah, there are. Wow, you’re taking this surprisingly well? Please don’t, uh, report me or anything. I swear I’m not crazy.”
This finally seems to snap Jaemin out of the whatever incredulous trance he’d fallen into as he relaxes and laughs. “No I’m just—I can see them too. The ghosts, I mean, except I’ve never needed… any sort of spells, I don’t think.”
And this time it’s Yangyang who takes a moment to recover from shock, blinking rapidly for a few moments before commenting, “Shit. Oh my god, really?”
“Dude, yeah. Since I was little in fact.”
“Woah.”
“Yeah.”
Yangyang takes another pause to digest this new information—it’s nice to know that Renjun isn’t the only one getting his world rocked right now—before saying, “So… what’s the deal with those two then? Do you guys just peacefully coexist?”
“About that. Oh man, you’re gonna think I’m the crazy one now, but I’m sort of. Dating them?”
“Oh, uh. Damn. How did—how did that happen?”
“It’s kind of a long story? Oh, wait—Renjun, Donghyuck, meet Yangyang, he’s in my psych lecture. Yangyang, meet Renjun and Donghyuck, they’re my boyfriends.”
“It’s nice to meet you,” says Renjun, a little hesitantly because he’s not super fond of getting exorcised. Donghyuck, apparently feeling the same way, repeats the sentiment in a similar tone of voice.
“Nice to meet you guys too,” Yangyang replies, before turning back to Jaemin and saying, “No but really—this is super unprecedented—how did you get to the point of dating them? No one I know has ever been able to tame a ghost like that before, let alone two.”
Jaemin elects to ignore Donghyuck’s cry of protest at the thought of needing to be tamed, and instead says, “Well, they didn’t start out so friendly—” before launching into a complete retelling of how the three of them got together.
Renjun realizes that he’s never really heard Jaemin’s perspective of the first few months, back when they were mortal enemies, and it’s equal parts intriguing and mortifying to hear about how much Jaemin was actually aware of. At least he’s not alone though, Donghyuck seems just as, if not more, embarrassed as Jaemin explains all of their failed plans to scare him at the beginning.
It really is a shame that ghosts can’t blush.
Once the embarrassing bits pass, however, Renjun finds himself getting into the recount of their story. He and Donghyuck jump in occasionally to provide his own point of view where Jaemin’s stumbles, but mostly they’re content to let Jaemin do most of the talking. It really is quite amazing how far they’ve come, isn’t it?
Yeah. It is.
“Huh,” says Yangyang when Jaemin finishes speaking, sounding at least a fair bit impressed. “Have you ever considered a career as a professional medium?”
“No,” Jaemin replies with a laugh. “I think I’ve already got my hands full with these two.”
He glances up at Renjun and Donghyuck, makes eye contact, and grins, big and toothy. Donghyuck says, “Hey! We’re a delight to be around, you should be grateful for our presence,” in mock protest, but his accompanying smile gives away all pretense of being mad.
Renjun loves them. Both of them.