Blue {DoTae} | complete

Thirty-seven: We can do this

Doyoung cracks opens his eyes only to close them again when the room is just as dark. The house is silent, save the whirring of an appliance downstairs, and the world outside is still. Rolling over to view his alarm clock, he's blinded by the harsh numbers 01:34. It's a pitiful hour to be awake, but his mind is already surfacing too quickly to fall back into a slumber any time soon so he reaches for his phone. Like the old days.

Except tonight, or this morning depending on how you look at it, his phone screen is flooded with notifications from his boyfriend. Missed calls, missed texts, missed twitter DMs, the entire lot is sitting on his lock screen waiting to be opened.

He sits up, rubs his eyes, then unlocks his phone to find his texts. The earliest ones are from nine o'clock last night, the most recent stretching to just ten minutes ago.

doie i'm sorry

i shouldn't have posted it

i deleted it but people are still going crazy and talking about it, and about you

your face isn't visible, but that's not the point i know.

i'm so so sorry

Doyoung grunts in confusion and turns down the brightness on his phone to squint at the messages Taeyong has been spamming him with. He only manages to read the first few again before an incoming video call pops up. The first thing he does is panic, because his parents are in the next room and it's late and he should be asleep, but then he finds his earphones, connects them to the device, and pads downstairs to talk to Taeyong in the living room. It also spares him some time to ponder over what Taeyong is even apologising for.

Bongshik appears at his feet and he nearly trips, cursing at the cat on his way to the sofa. She curls up next to him and begins to purr in the way she usually only does for Jeno. Doyoung cringes at the wet sounds when she starts to bathe herself. Taeyong calls him again, and he finally picks up.

"Bubu? Why aren't you asleep? You promised you'd look after yourself." Doyoung rubs at his eyes again and lays down, head against the cushion, careful to keep his voice low.

"I can't. I'm too stressed. I'm really sorry. Have you seen the posts?" The elder babbles down the phone with his bloodshot eyes barely open, skin as pale as the bedsheets he's tangled in.

"What posts? What are you on about?" Doyoung asks.

"The Instagram story. The fans could see you in the mirror." When Doyoung stays quiet, Taeyong continues. "You know, the one you filmed of the new song? I thought fans would be discussing the song, not you. Most people are convinced it's just a manager, but others have sussed it out. People are already making compilations of the crumbs they have of us interacting."

"They can see me?" Doyoung is pulled upright by a jolt of panic and his mind races to dig through memories of the video he recorded yesterday afternoon.

"Not your face. It's mostly covered by the phone and my body. No one knows who you are in the video, thank goodness. But I... I'm just angry at myself for being so careless. It was a close call. The second close call. This can't keep happening." Taeyong shudders, then whines in pity as he buries his face in his pillow, which muffles the phone's mic so Doyoung has to pull out his earphones to save his ears from the crackling.

"Then it's okay." Doyoung takes a deep breath and reassures his boyfriend. "I'm not mad at you. It's going to be impossible to hide ourselves forever, you know. I'd rather not let everyone know who I am, but it's bound to happen at some point. Surely. So don't stress over it. It's just as much my fault because I was literally the one that filmed it and I didn't think to choose a different angle." A car passes outside and his skin prickles, Bongshik moving to sit on the back of the sofa and stare at the curtains, willing them to open so she can have a nose outside.