Chapter Text
“Next time Samsung wins words, it will be Blue.”
“What on Earth are you saying?” Sehyung turned to him, a sudden frown behind his thick framed glasses.
Seungbin opened his mouth, and only a sigh came out. Only Sehyung had heard him; even he himself didn’t really know what he meant.
He turned away, looking for something to do with his hands. Sehyung, finals MVP, support, still glaring at him.
Even on top, the world was still heavy.
“Where’s Hyukkyu?” Seungbin found himself asking. He hadn’t seen him in the crowd, and now backstage, as all the members of Blue joined them one by one, their AD Carry was still missing. Even Eojin was here, though looking rather sullen.
Sehyung shrugged. “Alive, most likely.”
“He left early,” Cheonju chimed in, appearing from fuck knows where. He was in his casual clothes, hadn’t donned his Samsung jacket to spectate as their sister team took it all. He looked genuinely happy for them all.
It took a while for Seungbin to process the words. “Left?”
Compassion was the last thing he wanted to see on Cheonju’s face, but there it was anyway. “I think he went back to the house.”
“Fuck,” Seungbin cursed, the win suddenly turning sour in his mouth.
“Hey, what are you cursing for?” Sehyung barked, always easy to anger.
“Leave him,” Inkyu broke the silence he’d been stewing in for the last ten minutes—not unusual for the jungle. He liked savoring things on his own. “I’m sure Hyukkyu is fine, yeah? Don’t stress.”
Seungbin grit his teeth. He wasn’t stressing, stress was a motivator, what kept him awake at four in the morning after ten straight hours of solo queue for just one more game, what kept his teeth sharp when they were about to face SKT for a worlds spot, it was what kept the punches heavy and the pain nullified.
What Seungbin was feeling right now was the furthest thing from stress he had ever experienced. He just wanted to sit down in a corner and cry while he cradled the trophy that made him world champion—but he wouldn’t even get to keep that, would he? Samsung would keep it, and hopefully he would stay there for the rest of his life, but if he didn’t, then all Seungbin would have left…
Grief. It was grief.
Eojin strode his way into their little circle of conversation, solemn as ever. Seungbin had never felt very close to Eojin, when he was on white he was strange and bossy and Seugbin was frankly a bit scared of him, but there was something written on his face that he understood now, a kind of pain that were magic real, could curse generations to come to eternal despair.
“He obviously isn’t fine.” Eojin’s words threw him a punch to the gut, and Seungbin took it. He deserved that. “He is angry with himself, and he won’t stop feeling that way until next year, or the next, or maybe never. Depends if he ever wins.”
Eojin always spoke like that, like he was the main lead in a historical drama and it was his climactic moment to make a speech. Seungbin right now didn’t have it in him to poke fun at it.
It’s me he should be angry at, was all he could think.
Inkyu glared at the SSB midlaner. Their fallen general, taking his stand for a fallen soldier. “Stop doomsdaying, fuck’s sake. You’re pissing on the mood.”
Eojin shrugged. “I’m just saying it how it is.” Hyungseok swept in from behind, loping a soothing arm around Eojin’s shoulders. Eojin softened. “But Inkyu’s right, he’ll be fine on his own. That’s just Hyukkyu.”
It was Cheonju’s arm he felt around his waist next. “Seungbin-ah, come on. You just won a world championship, let’s all go out and celebrate, yeah? Shots are on me.”
Seungbin tried to smile. There was nothing he loved more than getting drunk with the team—both teams—after winning something. But he knew Hyukkyu wouldn’t be there. Hyukkyu had left. He hadn’t seen Seungbin lift the trophy, he was back at the house, already queuing a game, feeling like a damn fraud—when the fraud had been Seungbin all along.
“Thanks, Hyung.” He rested his head on Cheonju’s shoulder. It was the perfect height for him to reach. “I’m ordering the most expensive ones, by the way.”
Cheonju didn’t say anything about him just having gotten world champion money, he just laughed, squeezing Seungbin’s waist lightly. “You little pest. Let’s go.”
There had to be a place for so much grief to go, surely it could not all fit inside a single person, surely one body, Seungbin’s, was way too small for such magnitude of emotion, a hundred and sixty centimetres of soft, still-growing bones, and muscles running on sleep deprivation, hot6 and cigarettes.
The only way, perhaps, was up.
Or to be torn apart, until nothing was left to remember.
Eojin didn’t drink, so it was his shoulders he ended up slung on all the way home, and for once, Eojin was nice to him.
“Don’t think it will be so easy next year,” he said wistfully, maybe the happiest he’d heard him since the day of those semifinals. “I have been studying your VODs.”
Seungbin laughed.
It was such a nice idea that for the rest of time, Samsung White and Samsung Blue would fight each other for the title of world champions, maybe they could do it like that: one year White, one year Blue. He hoped the world would end on an even number.
“Suck it, Hyung,” Seungbin said instead of all of that.
But maybe Eojin understood what he meant anyway, because he ruffled Seungbin’s hair, and simply laughed.
A week later, they were packing their things.
A month later, China was their new home—yet not really, it wasn’t really home when they weren’t all of them together, the makeshift family they’d built scattered into pieces across a foreign place where every sign and every label was written in a foreign language, even the damn cigarettes were foreign, no imports.
There would be no Samsung Blue winning worlds because there was no Samsung Blue anymore.
“What are you thinking about?” Cheonju tapped him on the shoulder.
He and Cheonju were roommates at least. Cheonju was familiar, he spoke his language, he was a piece of home.
“Hyukkyu.” It slipped through Seungbin’s lips without much struggle. He’d never known when and how to shut his mouth.
But Cheonju didn’t call him an idiot, even though he should. He jumped on Seungbin’s bed, letting him, kindly, rest his head on his lap. “I’m nervous for him too, you know?”
Tomorrow, EDG were playing SKT in MSI finals. Hyukkyu was out there, suitcase packed in his hotel room, getting ready to face the world, and Seungbin was here, in this team that did not quite feel like home yet, terrified to know what’d happen next. SKT were unbeatable. “I’m not. They’ll fuck SKT up big time. That Faker guy doesn’t have shit on our Wonseokie.”
Cheonju laughed, eyes crinkling into thin lines. His hand was tangled in Seungbin’s hair, which was pleasant. “Such an optimist, huh? So why were you thinking about Hyukkyu then?” he prodded more, trying to wring it out of Seungbin, the thing that’d been eating him from the inside out ever since he’d packed his meagre suitcase all those months ago and stopped calling Seoul home.
But Seungbin couldn’t let him. If he let that monster out, it would destroy everything he cared about.
“Guess I just miss him.” That was part of the truth, at least.
“Oh, Seungbin, we all do.” Not like I do, Seungbin wanted to scream, to punch the air, to sink his teeth into something. Nobody had ever missed something as much as he missed Hyukkyu all the time, as much as he felt that hollow in his chest grow every morning when he opened his eyes and instead of Hyukkyu next to him on the top bunk, he was alone in his bed and the only thing cracking through the bone-deep ice of the room was the soft sound of Cheonju’s breathing, still asleep by the time Seungbin was fully dressed and ready to play enough games of solo queue to pulverize his wrists into molecular dust, to leave his brain so fried with static that no thought, no feeling could seep through.
Samsung should’ve won worlds in Blue. Then maybe, just maybe, everything would have been fine.
“It should’ve been him,” Seungbin whispered, realizing with dismay that he had chosen this moment to start crying.
He got up too fast, seeing stars, wiping his face as he tried not to wobble to the ground. Whatever Cheonju said next, he didn’t hear it.
By the time the tears stopped falling, Seungbin was out of the building, looking for the nearest bar.