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“Hyung,” Mingyu says, sounding a little breathless, the tips of his ears and cheeks tinged high with pink. “This is. Really — hard.”

“Hm?”

“I — ” Mingyu chokes, fingers curling and uncurling by his sides. “Oh my god.”

Wonwoo cocks his head, lifting his eyes to see Mingyu staring at him wide-eyed, a look of agony and adoration on his face. The kitten in Wonwoo’s arms gives a little meow and noses deeper into the inside of his arm. Her brother is sitting in front of Mingyu, Mingyu with his impossibly long legs bent in a diamond shape around the kitten’s tiny form. 

Mingyu makes a wounded noise, dragging a hand down his face. “Not to be dramatic but how am I supposed to go on with my life knowing that baby cats are this cute and tiny?”

“You mean kittens?” Wonwoo chuckles, stroking a finger over his kitten’s forehead. “And don’t let Byeol hear you say that, he’ll be heartbroken.”

Mingyu looks a little afraid to touch his one, as if he’s too big to be holding something so small and fragile.

“It’s okay, Mingyu, you can pick up Haku if you want to. Just be gentle.” 

They’re at Nabiya Cat Shelter where Wonwoo volunteers every other week when he has time to spare on the weekends. Miya, one of the older cats that’s been at Nabiya for a while now had kittens a month ago. Two of the litter have already been adopted and the other four will most likely be given to new homes soon, too. It’s selfish of him to hope it won’t be too soon but Miya seems happy being surrounded by her babies and Wonwoo’s always had a soft spot for the older cats who’ve made Nabiya their home. 

“He’s just so… tiny. I don’t want to accidentally hurt him or anything.” 

Wonwoo’s fairly sure that Mingyu cancelled whatever plans he had for this afternoon the moment Wonwoo told him he was going to a cat shelter to play with kittens.

Haku mewls, padding tentatively closer to Mingyu. Mingyu gazes down at the very small creature like he’s the most precious thing he’s ever laid eyes on. Wonwoo swallows, glancing away and focusing on his own lapful of kittens so as not to feel his entire body attempt to dissolve out of sheer softness.

Mingyu reaches out very, very slowly, letting Haku sniff at his hand just as Wonwoo had shown him earlier. Haku blinks his little amber eyes and bends his head slightly to allow Mingyu to pet him. Mingyu, holding his breath, brushes the back of his finger over Haku’s head. Haku meows, leaning forwards to nuzzle into Mingyu’s hand. 

“Oh my god, I think I’m in love,” Mingyu breathes. 

Wonwoo’s incapable of tearing his eyes away even if he tried, so all he can do is stare, transfixed as Mingyu picks Haku up gently with one hand, the other stroking gently at Haku’s head and ears.

God. Mood, Wonwoo thinks, dazed by the overwhelming swell of warmth in his chest, the stutter of his heartbeat that feels like falling.

-----

As a rule, Halloween is the one night of the year when it’s socially acceptable for grown men and women to play dress-up, so naturally it’s their imperative to go all out.

Yonsei University Severance Hospital’s Annual Halloween Fundraiser is the event of the year for Seoul’s finest. It’s become something of an extravaganza, an event eagerly-anticipated by the SMPA, SMFS, and all of Severance’s residents, hospital staff, and associated emergency services personnel. The money raised goes to Yonsei’s pediatric wing and the University’s sponsored orphanages and womens’ shelters. It’s a night for celebration and escapist thrill, an excuse to let loose and momentarily forget the duty and grave responsibilities they have in the real world. And it’s all for a good cause.

Last year they raised nearly one billion won with 550 attendees. This year, they’re hoping to make one and a half billion.

There’s also a competition for Best Dressed of the night. The glory and prestige of winning first place initiates a ruthless, hard-fought battle for the title every year.

Last year, Wonwoo went as a vampire with a borrowed cape and some smeared lip tint as fake blood, which goes to show how much he cares about the competitive aspect of the event. This year however, he’s stepping up his game in a plain black suit, black overcoat and bat mask. Obviously, the mask is there to indicate he’s going as Bruce Wayne.

Just because Wonwoo isn’t the best at dressing up for Halloween doesn’t mean he doesn’t enjoy a little irony.

“And what in the heck are you supposed to be?” Jihoon says, squinting at him as he gives him a slow and very judgemental glance up and down. Jihoon’s dressed as the Mad Hatter, Tim Burton edition, complete with fire engine red wig and technicolour clown makeup. 

“Zorro? You’re Zorro, right? That’s what the mask is for.” Soonyoung pipes up from beside him as Howl, from the Studio Ghibli movie, harlequin cape fluttering as he gestures at Wonwoo’s bat-shaped mask. 

“My darling uncultured fools, he’s clearly a furry.” Jun, in a bespoke striped Beetlejuice suit, says, his ghoulish makeup carving out his cheekbones as he smirks. “A very well-dressed one.” 

Wonwoo stifles the urge to ball his mask up in his fist and abandon the costume altogether. “I’m Batman.” Wonwoo says, with more patience than they necessarily deserve. “World’s Greatest Detective?”

“Ohhhh.” Soonyoung says, eyes widening. “I mean, we wouldn’t have judged you if you were dressed up as a furry, just so you – ”

“Soonyoung, please.”

“There’s nothing to be ashamed of,” Jun says. “Furries have rights, too.”

“Do they?” Jihoon asks, brow arched skeptically. “Let’s discuss.”

“No, let’s not.” Wonwoo all but begs. “Anyway, I think I see Seungcheol, I’m going to go say hi. Please feel free to kill me if anyone else accuses me of dressing up as a furry.”

Seungcheol, disguised as Frankenstein’s monster, is chatting away with two intimidatingly attractive strangers dressed as the Devil and Tuxedo Mask respectively when Wonwoo comes over to say hello. 

“Wonwoo, hey!” Seungcheol says, breaking out into a grin. “This is Jeonghan and Joshua. They work in the ER together.”

Wonwoo tips his head respectfully. Jeonghan, the one with the scarlet devil horns curving out of his tousled blond hair and scarlet winged eyeliner, smiles and dips his head in greeting.

“Great minds think alike.” Joshua says with a laugh, gesturing between their all-black costumes and masks. “Jeonghan did tell me I’d make more of an impact as Usagi but I already had the cape, so.”

“Actually, I’m Batman.”

Being a) a grown man, and b) forced to say this out loud in the span of a few minutes, only makes the entire thing sound stupider. Wonwoo suddenly has many regrets about his costume. 

“Oh!” Joshua murmurs apologetically, pressing his hand to his mouth as Seungcheol laughs outright. “Right – the ears! Of course.”

Jeonghan, for his part, purses his lips, a dark gleam in his eyes. “So this is the notorious Jeon Wonwoo. I can’t help but feel like we’ve already met from everything I’ve heard about you.”

“From hyung?” Wonwoo’s brow wrinkles in curiosity, he wasn’t aware he was such a topic of interest between Seungcheol and his boyfriend.

“Sure,” Jeonghan answers, coy smile curling around his lips. “But mostly from Mingyu.”

Ah. They work together at Severance sometimes. Wonwoo bites at his lip, swallowing the inquisitive urge to ask: Mingyu talks about him?

Jeonghan must be able to read minds because he chuckles a little. “If he doesn’t mention your name at least a dozen times a day we joke that he’s off his game.” 

“I’m sure he’s like that with everyone,” Wonwoo says, mentally waving off the comment. Mingyu talks a lot, about everyone. That doesn’t mean anything.

“It’s different with you, Wonwoo-ssi. I assure you. And I’m never wrong about these things.” Jeonghan flicks his gaze up and down the length of Wonwoo’s costume before levelling his gaze on Wonwoo’s. “You two certainly make quite the pair.” 

Wonwoo blinks in puzzlement. “What do you mean?” 

Jeonghan doesn’t reply, just winks at him, mischievous, knowing. 

“Hyung!” All of a sudden Mingyu’s voice comes sailing over the crowd, loud and sharp, with an undercurrent of alarm.

“Speak of the devil.” Jeonghan quips, looking every bit like the Morningstar himself.

“Hyung, hi!” Mingyu comes to an abrupt stop in front of Wonwoo, cheeks lightly flushed from hurrying over from wherever he’d been moments earlier. He catches Wonwoo’s eye with a smile, big and toothy and bright even as he’s catching his breath and very nearly steals Wonwoo’s in the process. 

It takes Wonwoo a few seconds to notice the rest of Mingyu’s costume: the little cowlick of dark hair curling over his forehead, the royal blue of a skintight costume stretched over his shoulders and biceps, the cape sweeping from his shoulders, and the big red ‘S’ emblazoned across his chest.

“Nice to see you, too, Mingyu.” Jeonghan says. There’s a catlike amusement glittering in his eyes, provocative but harmless.

It snaps Mingyu’s attention away from Wonwoo right away. Mingyu freezes like there’s a miniature lightning bolt sparking up his spine, embarrassment tingeing his face as he bows his head bashfully, belatedly, at the other three.

“Hey, hyungs. Jeonghanie-hyung.” Mingyu glances at Wonwoo and then back at Jeonghan, a wordless anxiousness flickering across his face. “I see you’ve met Wonwoo-hyung.”

“It feels like I knew him already from how much you— ”

“Anyway!” Mingyu interrupts, face flushed. Wonwoo hates that his mind takes a moment to think: cute. “Wonwoo-hyung and I have to go — talk about something. About – important Byeol stuff. Right now. We’ll, uh, see you later? Yep! See you later, hyungs.”

He’s so very, very bad at this.

“Oh, it’s alright, we’ll find you.” A half-smirk appears on Jeonghan’s face as he gives a flutter of his hand in dismissal, and there’s something leonine about the way his gaze lingers on Mingyu.

But Wonwoo lets Mingyu tug him away nevertheless, his palm warm and fingers lacing tight around Wonwoo’s as they hurry away leaving their friends staring after their backs with varying expressions of amusement and knowing.

When Mingyu’s dragged them somewhere he deems far away enough to call it a successful escape, he seems to realise suddenly that he’s still holding Wonwoo’s hand. His brows shoot up, mouth parting as he catches himself, dropping Wonwoo’s hand. The abrupt lack of contact sends a spark of static through Wonwoo. It ripples through his hand, the joints of his fingers, settling in the outline of his palm with an involuntary tension as it curls around empty air. He suffocates the irrational urge to seek out that warmth again, snuffs it out into non-existence on the outskirts of his mind.

All this, simply because Mingyu held his hand. Wonwoo genuinely might be losing it. 

“Sorry about that,” Mingyu breathes. His eyes are lined, Wonwoo realises, the angled brushstroke of ink making them seem bigger and brighter. He’s Clark Kent’s South Korean doppelganger if he’d just stepped off a runway rather than out of a phonebooth. 

“I love Jeonghan but the devil costume isn’t just for show, he’s highkey evil and being his dongsaeng is kind of like accidentally selling your soul to him except you’d also do anything for him anyway because he’s actually really sweet and amazing? So. Um. Yeah.”

Mingyu bites his lip, presses them together, and then settles on a sort of half-smile as he gives Wonwoo a little onceover – half only in the sense that he’s trying so very hard to keep it from spilling out onto his face like open daylight. 

“We match,” he says, his voice small and delighted. Wonwoo can feel his own smile tugging at his face, a helpless instinct.

And they must make quite the pair: Wonwoo, dressed as Bruce Wayne, AKA Batman, and Mingyu in his Superman costume with the signature cowlick curving handsomely over his forehead.

“People are going to think we planned this.” 

“They’re just jealous we have the best costumes of the night.” Mingyu shrugs, his confidence, despite being dressed as a superhero that traditionally wears his underwear on the outside, so self-assured it’s endearing. 

“It suits you.” 

Mingyu’s expression flickers, like a physical stutter. He ducks his head, gaze slanting somewhere to the left of Wonwoo. 

“Thanks, hyung.” He curls in on himself, hesitating for a few moments before speaking up again: “You, um. You make a really good Batman, too.” 

“Well, I’m glad someone thinks so. My friends accused me of dressing up as a furry.” 

Mingyu lets out a surprised laugh, small and high-pitched. “Maybe they’re on to something there.”

“Stop.” Wonwoo huffs, voice straining with exasperation. “Don’t you start, too.” 

“The Dark Furry does have a certain ring to it.”

“Oh my god.”

Mingyu giggles, his face scrunching up happy and amused and delighted at Wonwoo’s expense.

Wonwoo wants to make him do that again. Which is why he says: “I can’t believe you had the perfect opportunity to say The Dark Furry Rises and you didn’t take it.”

Mingyu bursts into more giggles that shake his breath so hard he has to clutch at Wonwoo for support. Wonwoo tries not to think about how big and warm his hands are on his arm, draped around his shoulders, the softness radiating from Mingyu despite his excessively toned physique. Tries not to think about how close he is, how good he smells. (God, Mingyu always smells good, it’s that cursed Man Scent of his cologne – thick and masculine and alluring.) 

Mingyu straightens back up, his laughter dying but not the smile on his face. For someone whose face could be so intimidatingly handsome, his cheeks are impossibly soft and bright. If Wonwoo were a clichéd, trashy romance author, he’d liken him to the sun. Or the stars. Lit from within. 

“You really do look good, though,” Mingyu says, eyes crinkling like he means every word of it. “I think this is the first time I’ve ever seen you in a suit.” 

Wonwoo snorts. “Don’t enjoy it too much because it only happens at funerals and weddings and neither are any cause for celebration.”

“You’re so unromantic, Wonwoo-hyung.”

“I prefer pragmatic.”

“Oh, okay, Mr. Batman. Guess I’ll leave you here to brood in your Dungeon of Isolation. Your Gargoyle Tower of Darkness.”

“You’re saying that as if Superman doesn’t literally have a Fortress of Solitude where he goes to be alone.”

Mingyu wrinkles his nose. “Fortress of what now?” 

“Solitude.” Wonwoo rolls his eyes playfully. “Fake comic fan.”

“This is massive nerd energy, I hope you know that.”

“You don’t even like DC,” Wonwoo snipes. “This is completely for show.”

“And what about it?” Mingyu arches a challenging eyebrow, propping a hand on his hip.

“I’m just saying. You’re a casual MCU fan at best, I bet you couldn’t even name more than three members of the Justice League.” 

“Maybe not.” Mingyu says, the syllables bouncing on his tongue. He blows out a puff of air, his cowlick fluffing up as he does so. “But I make a hot Superman.”

Wonwoo splutters, caught off-guard by the pleased smirk Mingyu has plastered to his face now. 

“And maybe if you didn’t spend so much time indoors playing video games in your free time, you’d have the Batfleck body to sell your costume.” 

Wonwoo’s jaw drops.

“You little brat. Video games are educational. They make you smarter because it actually involves using different parts of your brain. Something you’re clearly lacking!” 

“Sure, hyung.” Mingyu says, sing-song and mocking. “Whatever you say.”

“Just because you’re a – sports person who spends all their time bulking up in the gym and drinking protein shakes and flexing your big, dumb muscles in front of the mirror or whatever.” 

“You think my muscles are big?”

Fuck. Wonwoo didn’t mean to say that part out loud.

Mingyu makes a pleased sound. “I’m glad all my hard work’s paying off.”

“That’s a shame because I take it back. They’re adequately average-sized. Perfectly regular.”

“Perfect?” Mingyu echoes, smile growing on his face.

“New topic of conversation: I think Byeol’s finally chewed the whale toy you got him beyond repair.” 

Mingyu slips immediately into a pout. “Aw. That one was expensive –” He seems to catch himself at the last second, a little too late. “I mean –” 

Wonwoo gives him a look suspended between disbelief and resignation. “Anyway. It’s his punishment for constantly biting on it. No more whale toy.”

“He’s a dog, hyung, it’s not his fault he’s bitey.”

“Still. He should know better than to treat the things you get him like that.”

Mingyu huffs a laugh, eyes glittering with fondness, and Wonwoo feels his heart leap. “It’s fine. There’ll be plenty of other toys anyway.”

Mingyu, Wonwoo wants to say. Please don’t buy my dog anymore expensive chew toys. And while you’re at it, please stop looking at me like that and talking like that and making me feel like a middle schooler trying to talk to his first real crush. Please. 

“You free this Friday? We should watch the new Spider-man movie that’s just come out.” 

“See? You’re a Marvel fan cosplaying as Superman, I called it.” 

“Mingyu!” A voice comes sailing out from the crowd as a small group of people make their way over to them. The voice that calls out belongs to a girl dressed as O-Ren-Ishi from Kill Bill, her jet-black hair pulled up into a sleek, flawless knot at the back of her neck.

“You ran off without saying anything, we’ve been looking for you everywhere.”

“Sorry, Jennie.” Mingyu says, bashful. “I, um. Saw someone I knew. This is Wonwoo.”

“Oh.” Jennie says, blinking fast. And then a gleam alights in her eyes, one that makes her soft features sharpen like the blade of the fake sword she’s carrying. “Well. That explains a lot.”

“C’mon, let him live.” The girl beside her with long red curls in the bloodied nurse costume and eyepatch of Elle Driver, AKA California Mountain Snake. “It’s Halloween.” 

“Besides, Mingyu, you lost the bet, remember?” The blond in the Bride’s bright yellow suit grins, dazzling and devious. “Loser buys the first and second rounds.”

The only other girl that hasn’t spoken yet, dressed as Gogo Yubari, of course, chimes in, mischievous smile curving at her red lips. “You’re free to invite Wonwoo-ssi to join us, though.”

Mingyu visibly swallows, and then shakes his head. “Uh. No, that’s okay. Hyung, I’ll, uh. Be right back, I guess? Sorry, I do owe them.”

“Don’t worry,” says California Mountain Snake. “We’ll get him back to you in one piece.” She winks. “Mostly.”

And then they’re whisking Mingyu off in search of drinks and bad decisions, and Wonwoo’s left alone to his own devices. He manages to find Soonyoung and Jun and Jihoon again, lets them rope him into a couple shots of soju and a few more of vodka.

It’s by sheer chance that he manages to find Mingyu again. Then again, calling it chance when he’s the only six-foot-two man dressed as Superman in the room is probably a bit of a stretch. As is the minor detail that he’s dancing with a girl in a sleek, black skintight catsuit. They seem to be in some kind of dance-off – if the goal of the competition was to out-seduce each other – their moves growing increasingly sultry and provocative in a deliberately coy, theatrical way. It’s performative. For the purpose of entertainment. The crowd around them is howling and shrieking, cheering on their antics as Mingyu and Catwoman sway their hips to the beat.

At one point as Mingyu’s in the midst of sliding his hands up his intimidatingly well-muscled chest, he locks eyes with the crowd and sends them a risqué wink.

Wonwoo has to remind himself to exhale. Then inhale.

Mingyu’s reached the level of drunk that compels him to break into his neighbour’s house to play with his dog, or accidentally punch strangers in the face. It’s completely unpredictable. Mesmerising.

He tosses his head back with a laugh as someone jokingly waves a thousand won bill in his face and slinks forward to let them slip it into the neckline of his costume.

He isn’t a professional dancer like Soonyoung, there’s no craft or precision to the way Mingyu moves to the beat, but it’s the carelessness, the confidence, the sheer thrill of watching him in the moment, enjoying himself, laughing at himself, that’s so utterly magnetic. 

When the song ends and Mingyu sweeps into a thespian’s bow, it’s to raucous applause, the crowd chanting his name as he bursts into laughter and waves off their standing ovation, his face illuminated under the lights, gleaming despite the sheen of sweat at his brow.

This is him in his element, Wonwoo realises. The center of everything. Someone made to be watched and adored, someone who moves through the world with confidence, self-assured in everything he does. Someone who commands attention with a single look, a devil-may-care smile. It’s one thing to know Mingyu’s attractive and fatally charming, and another thing entirely to watch him wield that charisma and energy as effortlessly as he breathes.

It’s a far cry from the soft, clumsy, blushing Mingyu Wonwoo’s grown so used to seeing. 

Mingyu spots him first, waving excitedly when he catches Wonwoo’s eye. He comes sauntering over to Wonwoo, his hair in disarray, teeth flashing in the dark. 

“Wonwoo-hyung! Did you see me dance?” 

“I did.” Wonwoo replies, his throat feeling tight. “I… didn’t know you could dance like that.”

“Only after the fifth drink,” Mingyu quips. And then his voice dips into a lower register, something flirtatious in his voice that Wonwoo’s never heard this serious before. “But I do perform sometimes on special request.” 

He’s leaning in, as if to mimic whispering in Wonwoo’s ear but his centre of gravity must be off because he’s tilting dangerously towards being off-balance. 

“That’s nice, Gyu,” Wonwoo says. “Can I request that you drink some water?”

Mingyu frowns. “What’m I gonna do with water?”

“Consume it, hopefully.” Wonwoo holds out his hand expectantly. “Come on.”

Mingyu’s eyes light up when he sees Wonwoo’s outstretched palm, the big, easily pleased puppy Wonwoo knows him as brightening on his face. He takes Wonwoo’s hand, swinging it between them with a little giggle. 

“Hyung, your hand is so cold,” Mingyu mumbles.

“Bad circulation, sorry.” 

“Nn,” Mingyu hums. “Don’t be. ‘s kinda’ nice. I’ve always been told m’ hands are hot. It’s a balance.” He lifts their hands up to eye-level and shakes them once. “See?”

Wonwoo doesn’t tell him that this is something he’s noticed in the past.

“Okay. We’re going to go to the bar and get you some water.” 

Mingyu lets their hands drop back to where they were between them, stills, and then pulls out the most dangerous weapon in his arsenal: a wide-eyed pout.

“Hyung, you don’t wanna dance?” 

“I didn’t say that,” Wonwoo says evenly. “But water first.”

“I wanna dance with hyung,” Mingyu whines, sounding minutes short of stomping his foot, a note of brattiness tingeing his voice.

“Maybe later.” Wonwoo squeezes his hand to see if it’ll convince him. “If you’re good, maybe.”

Of all the persuasive tactics that Wonwoo could’ve used, this is the one that seems to do the trick. Mingyu perks up. 

“If I’m good?”

“Mmhm.” Wonwoo nods encouragingly, squashing the illict flicker of knowing. Of knowing and arousal. “If you’re very good.”

“Okay.” Mingyu says, his big eyes going sparkly and round. “I’ll be good.”

And that’s that. Wonwoo leads him across the dancefloor to the bar and gets him a plastic cup of water and makes Mingyu drink it all. 

“Hyung. Hyung,” Mingyu says when he’s done with the water; he smells like liquor and recklessness and all Wonwoo wants to do is drown in it. “Are we gonna dance now?” 

“Mingyu…” 

“Hyung.” Mingyu echoes, and then his eyes go a little distant as his nose scrunches up. “My face feels funny.”   

“I think you should go home.” 

Mingyu sniffs, head drooping. It sends some stray locks of hair, loosened from their slicked back gel, flopping over his forehead like one of those puppies with droopy ears. Wonwoo moves, driven by some unconscious instinct, to brush it out of his eyes. 

“Hyung.” Mingyu’s hand shoots out to grab his wrist, faster than a man this heavily intoxicated should be able to move. His fingers feel like they’re searing outlines into Wonwoo’s skin, his fingerprints burning tiny constellations into the back of his hand. Mingyu’s staring at him with this singular intensity, desperation veined with urgency, as if Wonwoo is the only person in the whole world to him in this moment.  

When he speaks, it’s with a whisper of crushed velvet, like the smoke and burn of good whiskey going down. 

“Can I tell you a secret?” 

Mingyu doesn’t look like he’s in any state to be spilling secrets; an instinctive urge to protect, to press his hand to Mingyu’s lips and shush him lashes right through Wonwoo’s chest, loud and insistent and impossible to ignore. 

“Mingyu,” Wonwoo begins, voice low and careful.

Mingyu gives a jerky shake of his head, loosening his grip to smooth his palm over Wonwoo’s, lining their fingers up so he can curl his through the spaces between Wonwoo’s fingers. He dips down, close enough that Wonwoo can feel his breath grazing his ear, warm and too close. 

“Not here.” 

Mingyu turns, their hands still locked together, and begins leading him from the static lights and music and thundering bass of the party. They wind through the crowd, through the darkness and neon and swirls of spotlight and shadow, until they’re pushing through a back entrance and out into an empty corridor. The cold cuts in between the layers of Wonwoo’s clothes, pulling in against his skin where the heat of drunken adrenaline been keeping him warm. 

They’re two feet across the threshold when Mingyu seems to trip over seemingly nothing and is sent sprawling to his feet, taking Wonwoo plunging down with him. 

Wonwoo flails his hand out for leverage, searching for something, anything to slow their descent but gets only a vicious pinprick of pain slashing across his hand for it.

“Sorry, sorry, sorry,” Mingyu splutters, letting go of Wonwoo’s hand so he can stumble haphazardly to his feet. He holds out his hand for Wonwoo to take and Wonwoo grabs it, getting to his feet with a grimace. “Hyung, ‘m so sorry. I’m such an idiot. Fuck.”

“It’s okay, Mingyu. It’s okay.” 

“Did I hurt you? Oh, shit, I’m such a clumsy, stupid — ” 

“Mingyu,” Wonwoo says, raising his voice a little. “I’m fine.”

“You’re bleeding,” Mingyu replies, eyes going big and distressed. 

There’s a small cut on Wonwoo’s hand from where he’d tried to stabilise them but it’s barely large enough to qualify as an actual injury. 

“I’m fine, Mingyu. It’s not your fault.” 

“Fuck.” Mingyu presses his hand to his forehead, blinking fast. “Yes, it is. Just. Wait here for a second, okay?” 

“What?”

“I’ll be right back, I promise.” Mingyu’s already hurrying back into the hall, scarlet cape fluttering behind him as he runs off in search of something to save Wonwoo from his perfectly manageable scrape. 

Wonwoo loses track of time a little, between the alcohol he’s consumed and the cocktail of feelings swirling in his head that he doesn’t know how to begin to pick apart, it’s distracting enough being alone without Mingyu’s presence to complicate things even more.

Mingyu comes back a few minutes later with a small pile of napkins and a box of bandaids, a determined puppy look on his face – puppyish because he hasn’t abandoned the wide-eyed apologetic expression, but now it’s been paired with some furrowed brows of resolve.

“I’m sorry,” Mingyu murmurs, biting on his lip as he takes Wonwoo’s hand gently. One of the napkins has been dipped in bit of liquor, presumably, because it stings a little when he dabs it softly at the cut. Wonwoo lets out a light hiss and Mingyu makes a small, sympathetic noise in the back of his throat, his thumb stroking gently across the skin near the cut.

“It’s my fault. ‘m so clumsy sometimes I feel like gravity’s out to get me.”

“It’s the world’s smallest cut,” Wonwoo says. “Stop beating yourself up about it.”

Mingyu says nothing, staying silent as he works, as he takes out a bandaid from the box and peels it out of its wrapper. Wonwoo doesn’t realise there’s a little design on the back of it until Mingyu’s sticking it down and smoothing his finger over it. 

“Hello Kitty?”

“Mm.” Mingyu gives a small shrug that curls his shoulders in on himself. “They’re cute. And the younger patients like them. Keeps them distracted and takes their minds off of any smaller injuries while I’m working.” 

You’re cute, Wonwoo thinks. You’re so, so cute. 

Mingyu’s still holding onto his hand, longer than would be considered necessary for administering first aid, and then longer still. He has Wonwoo’s hand cradled in his palms like he doesn’t know quite how to let go. Mingyu’s palms are so much larger than his that the warmth of them engulfs Wonwoo’s fingers, keeping the cold at bay if only for this moment.

“There.” Mingyu says in a voice that’s only meant to be heard by him. “All better.”

And then Wonwoo does something that he’s never done before, something he hasn’t done in a very, very long time: he acts without thinking.

“Aren’t you supposed to kiss it before you say that?” 

It’s spontaneous, and recklessly stupid, and the moment the words leave his mouth Wonwoo wants to take them back, wants to rewind time or disintegrate into nothing or vanish into thin fucking air. This is why he thinks over everything he says, and then thinks and rethinks. Thinks until he might drive himself mad with it, but anything is better than letting his brain go off-script and winding up with this fucking disaster of an improvisation.

Mingyu, for his part, looks startled. Not with shock or embarrassment, but with a small, softly-tinged wonder. Awe, even.

His lips part, his lashes fluttering as he glances down at Wonwoo’s hand clutched in his. He might as well have Wonwoo’s beating heart in his hands for all that it feels like Wonwoo’s carved it out of his chest and placed it there. 

Wonwoo watches — his heart in his throat, heart in Mingyu’s hands — as Mingyu lifts Wonwoo’s hand to his lips and kisses it. Right over the Hello Kitty bandaid. The heat of his breath curling over Wonwoo’s skin. His big, moonlit eyes gazing up at Wonwoo from between his dark lashes, impossibly bright for the dimness of the hallway they’re in. His cologne mingling with the sweat and body heat of being so near.

It’s agony. It’s euphoria. It’s complete and utter torture.

With his hand anchored around Wonwoo’s, Mingyu uses the leverage to tug Wonwoo closer, and then he’s drawing even closer still and Wonwoo can’t tell anymore if it’s Mingyu or him that moves first all he knows is that Mingyu’s face is angled towards his and he’s gazing into Wonwoo’s eyes like he’s searching for something, for permission, for an answer. And whatever he sees, it sends a visible shiver through him, and then Mingyu’s leaning in, his warmth and smell and closeness bleeding into Wonwoo’s consciousness, filling it with nothing but him. 

All that separates them is a heartbeat, a flicker of a nanosecond, and then –

And then — 

There’s a deafening bang as someone bursts out through the doors behind them, sound and noise and laughter flooding into the empty hallway, and the tension of the moment snaps, plummeting to the ground in free fall with no parachute. Just like that.

They fly apart like the air has been ripped from between them.

Wonwoo’s pulse is a thunderstorm in his ears, his ribs crackling with lightning and static electricity as he struggles to even his breath. 

And Mingyu, Mingyu is staring at him with this awful expression on his face. Fear, and horror, and underlying panic, as if he’s done something he can’t take back and doesn’t know how to begin to fix. 

“I’m sorry.”

It’s so soft that Wonwoo almost misses it. His voice hovers in the air, small and transparent like a ball of blown glass. 

“I didn’t — ” 

Mingyu’s face crumples, and for a terrifying, heart-rending second there Wonwoo thinks he’s going to cry. He pulls himself together at the last moment, eyes wide and shiny, jaw clenched tight, fists knotted at his sides, but with this last-ditch resilience to his expression like he’s refusing to break down and lose it right here in front of Wonwoo. And then he turns on his heel, shoves the door open and disappears through it.

I’m sorry.

A light breeze whispers down the corridor, coils around Wonwoo’s throat, seeps down the ridges of his spine like a shudder. He didn’t realise how cold it was out here without Mingyu until he was gone.

-----

The thing is, Mingyu is the master of compartmentalisation. He has to be, doing what he does every day without reprieve or complaint. Running into a burning building so he can save the family on the seventh floor, calming someone who’s gone into shock in the midst of a highway accident, or giving someone their last moments of peace when they’re too far gone to save.

It’s the opposite of what Wonwoo does, which is catastrophise and obsess.

He’s never had the freedom of squaring things away in neat, faraway boxes so he can focus on the matter at hand. But then, that isn’t fair, is it? Freedom isn’t the right word for it. 

They simply have different ways of ticking. The mechanics of their minds answer to different laws.

Not to mention: Mingyu has the perfect defence for everything that happened last night. They both do.

It might come in the form of a raging, crushing headache but Wonwoo would take this punishment any day of being stone cold sober in the light of day. He curls around his pillow, and then his toilet bowl, and finds himself unusually grateful for being a pile of limbs and a burning migraine in the aftermath of a night out.

He falls asleep for two hours — passes out, really — on the floor of his living room as Byeol licks at his feet and his hands and makes a big fuss out of acting like Wonwoo might be dying. (Wonwoo doesn’t correct him.)

When he wakes up later feeling a little less near death, it’s four o’clock in the afternoon.

He fishes out his phone from the carpet and squints blearily at the screen to confirm that he has, indeed, wasted away the better part of the day being a shell of a human being. 

Maybe it’s the hangover giving him a new appreciation for his previously non-intoxicated existence and a desire to impart upon the world an impression of him that isn’t drunken reprobate in case he’s found dead in the morning (Jeon Wonwoo, 1st November 2018 Aged 27 years. Occasionally beloved son and brother. He is survived only by his dog). But the part of his brain that isn’t trying to revolt against the rest of his body can’t stop thinking about the possibility that Mingyu might be thinking about him.

If he’s even awake.

wonwoo  >>>  mingoo
hey

mingoo
dsLKfdlf m l

wonwoo
how are you feeling?

mingoo
like ive been run ovr by a bullett train

wonwoo
as the kids would say
big mood

mingoo
u f nfjn nerd
an wat abt u hyugn

wonwoo
like i was there beside you when you were run over by the bullet train

mingoo
nice
i wanna dei
DEI
DIAE
fck

wonwoo
drink some water

mingoo
ok i did
still wanna dei
DI E

wonwoo
take some painkillers
eat some food

mingoo
head hurts :(((((((((

There’s that protective feeling again, rising in his chest alongside the nausea, thick and sharp, like he’s trying to swallow smoke.

He can imagine Mingyu, ruffled and exhausted and looking like he’d been chewed up and spat out by a hurricane. It makes Wonwoo want to reach out and stroke the hair of his imaginary Hungover Mingyu. Hungover Mingyu and Drunk Mingyu both look overwhelmingly like puppies to Wonwoo’s hangover-addled brain.

wonwoo
big baby

mingoo
dont mak efun of me when im alredy at m y wrost
when i die my sprit will avnege you from the aftrliefe
u will nevre know a momants peace

wonwoo
oh I’m terrified

mingoo
you Shold be >:(
id makke a very scary ghist

wonwoo
ok Ghist
want me to bring some food over later?

mingoo
hyung yiou dont hav to do taht

wonwoo
i want to

You’re always the one taking care of me, Wonwoo almost types. 

Keyword being almost.

Because Jeon Wonwoo is a fucking coward when it comes to being emotionally honest and vulnerable with the people he cares most about.

Especially the people he cares most about.

mingoo
ok t hne
txt me wehn yoru outsfie

wonwoo
will do

mingoo
luvdv u hyng

-----

Wonwoo watches Mingyu carefully, as much as he can in his current condition without giving himself a secondary headache.

He seems… fine. As fine as a hungover person can be expected to be the morning after excessive amounts of alcohol and poor decision-making.

There’s no mention of what happened between them or even any indication that Mingyu remembers.

Mingyu has what they call in the business a perfect alibi.

His testimony can’t hold up in court because he was under the influence. And even if it could, Wonwoo have to admit that he remembers what happened to get to the truth.

Mingyu looks too soft and comfortable hugging Byeol to his chest where he’s tucked into the couch cushions for Wonwoo to bear the thought of disturbing his peace just for something as pointless as a hypothetical. 

Why ruin everything just to be sure? Why ruin this just so he can have the certainty of knowing?

Wonwoo orders Chinese food to Mingyu’s house and Mingyu doesn’t speak for a good, solid ten minutes as he inhales what looks like an entire bowl of noodles in about three mouthfuls.

As the colour settles back into Mingyu’s face and he’s looking slightly more himself, Wonwoo does catch him glancing at the side of his head when he thinks he isn’t looking. But apart from these few moments of suspicion, Wonwoo has no other leads, no other evidence to go off of.

They sprawl out on Mingyu’s Architectural Digest centrefold couch and eat their takeout from the boxes and watch Boku no Hero Academia because apparently Jihoon and Mingyu have been “casually messaging back and forth it’s totally chill don’t worry hyung you’re still my favourite” (which, okay.. cool good to know not that Wonwoo even asked) ever since that day they met in Wonwoo’s apartment and Jihoon recommended it in his Top 5 Must-Watch Animes of 2018. 

It’s all so underwhelmingly normal.

Wonwoo can live with normal. Normal means safe, means that whatever lapse of judgement, whatever slip of self-restraint that happened that night on Halloween, doesn’t have to exist. 

It’s gone, just like the masks and costumes they were dressed up in. The two people that almost kissed on Halloween don’t have to be them. 

Wonwoo settles back into the couch, watching Mingyu card his fingers through Byeol’s fur, the LED light of the screen reflecting off his silhouette, the slope of his nose and his small absent-minded smile.

It’s enough, he thinks to himself. This has to be enough.

-----

Soonyoung’s already halfway through his tub of strawberry ice cream – their favourite for all quarter-life crisis related emergencies – when Wonwoo arrives at his place. He’s got 10 Things I Hate About You playing on the screen which is a classic Soonyoung rom-com for bad days. On the scale of Soonyoung Movies to Get In His Feelings To, 10 Things is about a Defcon 2 level crisis, with Clueless being Defcon 1.

“I hate him.” Soonyoung announces from his blanket fort, or rather the makeshift pile of every blanket in his house arranged in a kind of nest around him. 

Wonwoo grabs the spoon Soonyoung’s left out for him on the coffee table and clambers into the blanket heap. 

“Why?” He says simply, digging into the ice cream as Soonyoung tilts it towards him. 

“Because,” Soonyoung sniffs. “He’s a confusing asshole who says one thing one minute and another thing the next. And he’s so frustrating and pretty and I just want to punch his stupid face.”

“Or kiss him,” he mumbles around his spoon.

“You’re good at multitasking.” Wonwoo slumps back against the pillow that’s conveniently smushed behind his head next to Soonyoung.

“I know and that’s the problem. I don’t know what he wants anymore. He says he doesn’t want to be a capital T Thing, but then he gets offended when I don’t call him my boyfriend and don’t acknowledge that we’ve apparently been dating for nearly four months. I mean who even counts going to a jjimjilbang as a first fucking date? I was exhausted from practice and invited him along because he seemed like he wanted to hang out, like, just because we made out doesn’t make it a date!”

“Is that even allowed in a bathhouse?”

Soonyoung rolls his head to slant him an impatient look. “We’ve done so much worse in other places.”

“Okay,” Wonwoo says. “I’m going to regret I asked that, please stop.”

“And what about you? Are you going to make me work for it, too?”

Wonwoo sighs. “There’s nothing to tell. Things are… good. They’re fine.”

“Sounds like they’re not fine or else you’d be telling me you and Mingyu are disgustingly happy and moving in together and adopting adorable stray fur babies.”

“That’s never going to happen.” Wonwoo stares pointedly down into the ice cream so he doesn’t have to look at Soonyoung and his soul-piercing gaze.

“Oh, so something did happen.”

“No. I told you, literally nothing happened. We almost kissed but then we didn’t.”

“God,” Soonyoung murmurs, stuffing another spoonful of ice cream into his mouth. “So, my problem is that I’m stuck in the middle part of When Harry Met Sally and you two want to be Marley & Me but instead you’re all the Pride & Prejudice scenes when Mr. Darcy lusts longingly after Elizabeth with this constipated look on his face because he’s trying to repress his true feelings for her.”

“I hate this.” Wonwoo says after several beats of silence. The ice cream, which he doesn’t hate, drips sadly from his spoon which has just been hovering mid-air as he contemplates Soonyoung’s words and tries not to have an existential crisis over them. 

It’s not that anything Soonyoung has said is even news to him. It’s not. Wonwoo has enough self-awareness to acknowledge it.

Wonwoo sticks out his hand, waves it in front of Soonyoung’s face.

“Look.”

“At what, bro?” 

Wonwoo carefully lifts at the corner of the Hello Kitty bandaid, delicately peels it back to reveal the completely healed over skin with only the shiny light pink mark of a small scar to indicate that there was ever a cut there. 

“Oh my god, did he give that to you?” 

Wonwoo says nothing, just slowly smooths the bandaid back in place. Because Mingyu gave it to him.

Mingyu gave him this Hello Kitty bandaid. 

Soonyoung flops his head back into the blanket mound. “Jesus Christ. How do you begin to unfuck something that is so completely and beyond fucked.” 

Wonwoo sighs, the strawberry ice-cream freezing on his tongue as he swallows. For once, he has no answers.

-----

Here’s the thing: Wonwoo’s content with being alone. He’s self-reliant. He’s at home with solitude.

It’s something he and cats have in common and apart from the plethora of other superficial and more complex reasons why he identifies as a cat person.

Wonwoo’s always pictured himself someday owning a cat.

Growing old with a cat or two had always seemed more realistic, more pragmatic than chasing after the idea of a soulmate, a perfect other half waiting out there in the world for him to stumble into their lives and complete them.

Wonwoo isn’t incomplete, and maybe that’s the problem.

How can you know? He can imagine people saying to him, expressions morphed in variations of disbelief. Skepticism. Pity. How do you know you’ll never fall in love with the right person and everything will be different because you’re in love and suddenly you’re realising you want to spend the rest of your life with that person? 

Because, Wonwoo thinks, because love is a means to an end and we’ve built a society around this idea of falling in and out of love and we use it to convince ourselves that this indefinite, mercurial feeling is the key to everlasting happiness. We spend our whole lives being told that The One is out there, and that once we find them everything is to meant to make sense – love songs and poetry and the secret to self-fulfilment – that some people can live their entire existences believing that being loved is the only thing that can make you truly whole.

So, no. Wonwoo doesn’t believe in soulmates. Or love, really. But he does believe in cats.

He’d spent months looking up different cat shelters and consistently updating a folder of bookmarks of cats up for adoption, a folder that he’d periodically browse through and feel his heartstrings being tugged at, before Soojin brought up the idea of rescuing a dog. All it took was one look at her face, and the happiness the idea of raising a dog together brought her, and Wonwoo had capitulated without a single mention of his weeks of researching, and dreaming, longing.

All because it made her happy, and for the three and a half years that they were together, her happiness had been his. It was as simple as that.

Byeol had adored Soojin upon sight, had looked at her like she hung the sun, the stars, and the moon. Once upon a time, Wonwoo had looked at her like that, too. Sometimes, he can’t help but think that Byeol acts the way he does with him because he blames him for how their relationship ended. Subconsciously, there’s always been part of Wonwoo that agreed with him. 

Soojin had wanted more from life than Wonwoo, or Seoul, or living in Korea could offer her. That was never something Wonwoo was going to change. Her dreams had always burned meteoric with ambition, fierce independence – the same traits that’d made him fall in love with her in the first place.

At least, he’d assumed it was love until they were standing in the aftermath of their relationship, the smoke clearing and leaving him with a mouthful of ashen regrets and the realisation that what he felt for her, what he’d been led to believe was love, and commitment, and trust, was just a very lifelike imitation of the real thing. 

It doesn’t quite feel real to Wonwoo, the concept of finding someone, falling for them, choosing to be with them for the rest of your life, the rest of forever, till death do you part.

It’s as if the rest of the world is in on this secret, this grand conspiracy that Wonwoo has the map and cypher and splintered puzzle pieces to figure out but can’t crack the code for. On good days, it’s the tingling static sensation of ASMR, a slight crackling just beneath his skin, uncomfortable enough to be noticeable, but bearable. On the bad days, it’s purgatory, a suspension between dreaming and awake. It’s the cloying numbness of sleep paralysis flooding his lungs with ice, and a chokehold tangling around his teeth.

In his cruellest moments, the times when he’s resigned himself to self-pity – not drowning but lying face down in a shallow pool of his own misery – he feels like a fraud, a liar playacting at intimacy and affection, and worst of all, love.

According to Greek Mythology, humans were originally created with four arms, four legs and a head with two faces.

In his Symposium, Plato claimed that these four-armed, four-legged humans were split into two separate beings, condemned to spend their lives in search of their other halves. When people find these miraculous other halves, they pass their whole lives together, desiring that they be melted into one, to spend their lives as one person instead of two.

Wonwoo first came across The Symposium in his last year of high school. It was the same year his father began a secret affair with his secretary. Wonwoo wouldn’t discover this until two years later, in the second year of his forensic criminology degree at one of the most prestigious SKY universities in the country. In the ethics and philosophy course he’d taken as an elective, they studied Plato, and his theory of love, for two consecutive weeks.

And the reason for this, Plato wrote, is that human nature was originally one and we were a whole, and the desire and pursuit of the whole is called Love. 

This, Wonwoo decided, was the most terrifying thing he’d ever read in his life. 

Coming home late one night after an evening spent holed up in a library, Wonwoo caught his father in the middle of a phone call with his mistress. But there’d been signs before that. As an aspiring detective armed with a deductive brilliance that had earned him the good graces of all his professors, Wonwoo couldn’t help but notice. 

The urge to confront his father and put him on trial for his betrayal of their family and everything they were lived and died on that single night. He could write five-thousand-word thesis papers on the implications of Massively Parallel DNA Sequencing for forensic biology, or the innovative developments in facial recognition algorithms in biometric security systems, but he didn’t have the words to anatomise the breakdown of twenty years of marriage. His mother never even had a clue. Not until the tell-tale lipstick stain and scent of another woman’s perfume on one of his shirts turned up in the laundry. 

(And maybe the hollow space in his chest is genetic, something he inherited from a man who was careful, discreet, subtle to a fault until he decided he didn’t want to keep it a secret anymore and slipped.) 

What broke his heart wasn’t the revelation that his father was a lying, cheating asshole. 

No, it was the fact that after everything was said and done, his mother stayed with him.

Their family has always been one that keeps their feelings close to the chest, their truths in closed fists. Wonwoo buried his anger in his studies, burning through academic achievement after achievement as he retreated from his friends and their suffocating concern. When winter break came months later, and Wonwoo went home for the first time all year during Chuseok, they sat together as a family at the dinner table. His father at the head like nothing had transpired. Like everything was just fucking fine.

Wonwoo has always run cold – poor circulation rendering his fingers and toes perpetually cold to the touch — but that night, it was Arctic ice cracking, the oldest and thickest parts breaking up beneath heat and atmospheric pressure until he finally shattered.

How can you sit there and act like nothing’s changed how can you pretend you didn’t break her heart how could you do that to her how could you —

How do you fucking sleep at night knowing the hell you put her through, the scandal, the rumour-mongering, the victim blaming from our fucked up society that puts the responsibility on women to apologise when their husbands are screwing their secretaries. 

How do you look at yourself in the mirror and not want to throw up? 

And his father had taken it all, face expressionless, unmoved, in silence. Wonwoo stormed out of the house into the night, resolving right then and there never to come back, not as long as that man lived under its roof.

Only, his mother had come after him. Had caught his hand in hers and tugged him into the garden beneath the moonlight, the dark blanched in its glow. 

Why, he’d gasped out, the word tearing itself open on his ribs. Why didn’t you leave him. 

His mother had taken his face in her hands, her soft, slender fingers pressed against his cheekbones as she thumbed the tears spilling down his cheeks away, the pads of her thumbs kissing them dry.

I don’t expect you to understand.

And it was as if the last piece of resistance in him had broken, his eyes welling with tears and spilling over as he cried like he hadn’t in years and years as he begged her, then, to explain.

Because, his mother had said. The look on her face as she stroked her thumb up the bridge of his nose, and across the centre of his brow – a soothing motion she used to make when he was young, when he was sick, when he needed someone to remind him that things weren’t so bad and hopeless in the world – is one he’ll never forget.

Because I love him. And when you love someone, you forgive them. You forgive them. That’s what it means to give someone everything of yourself and expect nothing in return. 

That’s what love is. 

How horrifiying, he’d thought, trembling like he might come apart if not for her hands holding him together.

How terrible, to love someone you’d set yourself on fire just to keep them warm.

-----

“Hyung, stop worrying, I swear we’ll be fine. You’ve given me like five different numbers to contact in case of an emergency and I’ve got the V-E-T-erinarian on speed dial.”

Because Byeol’s sitting right there, wagging his tail with his big, watchful eyes trained on them, Mingyu has to spell the words out, just in case.

“C’mon, how many times have I babysat for you by now?” Mingyu frowns a little, expression verging on a pout. “Don’t you trust me?”

“Of course I do,” Wonwoo reassures. “That’s not what I’m worried about.” 

“Then what are you worrying about?” Mingyu demands, tone slipping into a childish lilt, one that’s ready to object, to argue. He’s swaddled in this enormous coat that seems to envelop all six foot plus of him in white fluff. Wonwoo had to physically restrain himself from reaching out to pet him when he opened the door a few mintues ago and saw him standing there pouting in soft distress. 

Wonwoo is self-aware enough to admit to himself in the privacy of his mind that it isn’t Mingyu he’s worried about. All of the reminders and lists he’s meticulously documented for Mingyu as part of Byeol’s care instructions are part of the machinery of a bigger self-defence mechanism. Projection. Diversion. Overthinking things and unravelling them and putting them back together ad nauseam in his head is Wonwoo’s favourite past time after all, willingly or not.

The unspoken truth is that he doesn’t want to go home to Changwon. 

“It’s… about your trip, right?”

There Mingyu goes again with his uncanny awareness of what Wonwoo’s thinking at any given time. It must be Mingyu’s natural thoughtfulness, the way he’s always paying attention, his memory for the little things and passing minutiae that other people would overlook.

Mingyu’s brow furrows, concern creasing his handsome face. “I knew there had to be a reason why you haven’t really talked about it.”

And that’s so like Mingyu. To ask, but not to pry, to bring attention to his worry, his concern, while giving Wonwoo the safety of an out.

Wonwoo never talks about his father. With anyone. It’s an unspoken territory with him, unchartered. Everything to do with his father is lost here in this place inside of him that he’s willingly let become wild and overgrown with tangled thorns and weeds and untameable rage.

He doesn’t know how to speak the shame and humiliation of being tied by something as involuntary as blood to this man. This stranger who he grew up idolising, lionising, a man who he once thought he’d grow up to become. The person responsible for so much hurt and suffering, so much unnecessary pain, and anger, and heartache.

Now, the very thought of becoming anything like his father strikes a cord of fear in him that’s so tangible he can feel it beating in him, solid and visceral, like a second pulse. 

“It’s okay.” Mingyu pauses, hesitating, and he looks anguished that he might have unintentionally forced Wonwoo into a position of having to respond. “It’s okay if you don’t want to talk about it.” 

“I don’t.” Wonwoo says without missing a beat. Not unkindly, but Mingyu retreats nonetheless. No, no, don’t do that, he wants to breathe. You haven’t done anything wrong, it’s me. It’s me. 

It’s me and my decade of emotional baggage and childhood trauma resurfacing at the idea of a homecoming. Of having to see him.

“It’s… been a while since I last spent time with my family. I’m just… anxious, I guess. About what things will be like when I’m home again.”

Mingyu’s eyes flicker with sympathy. Sadness. And to someone who calls his mother every week for long phonecalls and always has his baby sister teasing him in his Instagram comments or chattering away on his Kakao, he must seem especially pitiful.

Wonwo doesn’t want to be pitied. That’s why he doesn’t talk about his father. 

“I’m sure it’s not as bad as you’re thinking it’ll be,” Mingyu says slowly, like he’s turning the words around in his head, considering the best way to soothe and comfort. “If it’s really been that long, they’ll probably be too busy being happy about having you home again.”

His mother and his little brother, maybe. But his father? The last time they were in each other’s company, his father had called him a disgrace, an embarrassment to the Jeon name, because he was in love with a man. As if he hadn’t personally dragged their family’s honour through the mud and abandoned them in the middle of it, ashamed and degraded, when they needed him most. As if he wasn’t a testament to why Wonwoo had condemned trust and commitment as the façades of the great conspiracy of enduring love.

“They’re your family, hyung.” Mingyu says, when the silence has lingered too long between them to be comfortable. “Whatever’s happened in the past, what matters is that you’ll be together again. You’ll be home.” 

Wonwoo doesn’t say anything, doesn’t know how or where to even begin, and Mingyu looks downright crestfallen as Wonwoo goes to put on his coat and winds his scarf around his neck. When he glances back up at Mingyu, he’s shrunken in on himself in his uncertainty, like it’s his fault that he hasn’t been able to relieve Wonwoo of the burdens that he’s been shouldering for half of his existence. 

“Mingyu.” 

Mingyu toes at the ground, fingers twitching as he fidgets with his sleeves. He doesn’t look up.

“Come here.” 

Mingyu looks up slowly, warily, as if he’s still waiting for Wonwoo to dismiss him, to shut him out. Wonwoo doesn’t say anything, simply holds out his hand.

Mingyu inhales, it’s barely noticeable except Wonwoo’s watching him, Wonwoo’s always watching him, and his entire body tenses for a moment, muscles locking and freezing in place as he gazes at Wonwoo with this expression that’s so thickly woven with a dozen different emotions that it’s like staring too long into the sun and feeling the blue-black fuzziness of the sun’s ray creeping around the edges of your vision. There’s a blur of fluffy white coat and then Mingyu’s surging towards him, wrapping his arms around Wonwoo’s chest, his face pressed into Wonwoo’s shoulder.

Wonwoo circles his arms around him slowly, and then tightly, as he holds him close, breathes in his scent of sandalwood and honey cologne, his fabric softener.

Mingyu’s warm, the heat he radiates sinking into Wonwoo’s skin through the layers of his coat and clothes, warming him right down to the skin. 

“Hyung, I’m gonna miss you.” Mingyu mumbles, words muffled by Wonwoo’s shoulder, his hair tickling against Wonwoo’s chin. 

Wonwoo brushes his fingers through the back of Mingyu’s hair lightly, an absentminded gesture, achingly intimate in its lack of conscious purpose. Mingyu shifts, chasing his touch out of a similar instinct and leaning into his hand.

“I know.” Wonwoo says. And it’s okay, this is okay. Because even if Mingyu doesn’t know why he’s hurting and doesn’t know how to fix this particular sadness like he does with everything else that’s broken in Wonwoo’s life from household appliances to electronics, it’s going to be okay.

Mingyu’s right, in a way. 

Whatever happens, at least he’ll get to come home. He’ll get to come back here to the home he’s made for himself, to Byeol, to the friends that are more than family. 

He’ll get to come home to Mingyu. 

"I’ll miss you, too.”

-----

The trip down to Changwon takes two hours and thirty-seven minutes by train if there are no delays and no traffic. Wonwoo spends these two hours and thirty-seven minutes suspended in utter misery, tormented by a growing number of what if scenarios that grow increasingly more terrible and traumatic with each new nightmare his mind can conjure up. 

(What if his mom is angry, resentful, and has been secretly holding a grudge all these months because he hasn’t been home for so long? What if, after all this time, she sides with his father? 

What if she hates him for not wanting to pretend they’re still one big happy family?) 

He knows he hasn’t been the best son or older brother. He hasn’t called as often as he should. He hasn’t been home in two years. Last time his mom came up from Changwon to visit him in Seoul was eight months ago. Bohyuk had stayed at his apartment for a couple weeks after graduation while sorting out the paperwork for his new apartment but even with him living in Seoul, they don’t speak as often as they should.

It was always Soojin reminding him to call home, Soojin sending gifts to his parents, arranging dinner dates with Bohyuk and his somes and girlfriends. Soojin, the perfect future daughter-in-law that he was no longer with. 

And now his little brother is getting engaged and Wonwoo is the single, significant other-less eldest son with nothing to show for himself. 

He’s prepared for the countless offers to be set up with daughters and cousins and family friends he’ll no doubt receive now that he’s unattached to a girlfriend or clandestine boyfriend (The Bachelor: Changwon’s very own homecoming episodes). The invitations to blind dates with prospective girlfriends made with overly cheerful smiles and shallow intentions. 

Wonwoo’s family didn’t come from money, but his father was industrious, and brilliant. He’d taken the family business and made it successful and unforseeably prosperous. He’d made the kind of money that was unheard of in Changwon for a man with no name, Changwon with its port city ambitions and thriving industrial complex. It was one of the reasons why Wonwoo had admired him so much. 

A self-made man. One who’d built himself from nothing.

The same man who’d protected his own reputation and ego over his wife and family when the scandal of his infidelities broke.

His mother doesn’t understand bisexuality but she wants the best for him, and Wonwoo gets it. As with most sensitive, unmentionable things, they don’t talk about it. The topic of Wonwoo’s sexuality is like the fine china and silverware kept on display in the family home – better left untouched. Too fragile to be handled out in the open.

Now that Bohyuk is engaged he isn’t sure where she stands on the ‘My firstborn son is occasionally interested in dating and being with men’ front. 

When he arrives outside the new apartment (they’d moved a couple years ago, during the years of Wonwoo and his father’s impasse), he has to ask for directions at the front gate for which building he’s looking for.

The entire complex is lavish and elegantly constructed. Of course, the Jeons live in the penthouse of the largest building. What with his father being the CEO of the architecture firm responsible for constructing the luxury neighbourhood complex and all. He calls his mother when he’s in the elevator, just in case she isn’t home and expecting him.

She doesn’t pick up, but when he arrives on the twentieth floor, she’s there, standing in the doorway, eyes looking misty as she braces herself with a sharp intake of breath.

“Wonwoo-yah.”

He’s a terrible son. An awful son. He should’ve visited sooner, should’ve called more often, should’ve spent more time with her regardless of the man she shared this home with –

She darts forwards, arms opening to gather him up in a hug and he meets her halfway, burying his face into her neck and breathing in the smell of her perfume, vanilla and jasmine, her perfectly coiffed hair tickling his cheeks.

“It’s so good to finally have you home, I missed you, I missed you so much.”

This is what he came to Changwon for. Fuck his father.

Wonwoo wraps his arms tightly around his mom, the warmth and gentleness of her embrace the only homecoming he’s ever needed.

-----

Bohyuk shows up an hour or so later with his fiancé. Wonwoo has never been more thankful to have a younger brother because at the hour mark of conversation and catching his mother up with the past few months of his life, she’d started dancing around the topic of Ha Sooyoung. The daughter of one of his mother’s old college friends from Busan, young and pretty and the talk of the town as a professional model and dancer .

As much as he loves his mom, the thought of sitting through yet another disastrous blind date set up by well-meaning mothers with ulterior motives sounds like Wonwoo’s own personal version of hell.

Bohyuk’s fiancé, Chaeyoung, is delightful. Charming. Funny. Sweet. In other words: the complete opposite of Wonwoo’s baby brother. He has no idea how Bohyuk managed to convince this girl to marry him. 

Wonwoo’s mother insists that they all have dinner together with a homecooked meal, and Chaeyoung immediately volunteers to help in the kitchen. Wonwoo follows, out of sheer instinct, he’s so accustomed to being Mingyu’s sous chef it doesn’t occur to him that he’s not needed in the kitchen until his mother glances up at him from the ricecooker with a soft laugh.

“When did you suddenly become so interested in cooking?”

Wonwoo does not blush, he doesn’t. He murmurs something vague and noncommittal about learning a few recipes here and there in his spare time.

His mom keeps an eye on him as he chops radishes and carrots, and he can feel her scrutinising gaze on him the entire time he has a knife in his hand. 

You don’t have to worry about me, he wants to say. Mingyu showed me how to use a knife properly, I know: fingers tucked in, knuckles always facing the blade.

But that would raise the question of who Mingyu is and that’s not a conversation Wonwoo wants to have right now. Not when things are going so well and he has to spend another four days here.

It’s Bohyuk who brings up the topic of their father, his question about whether or not he’ll make it in time for dinner harmlessly casual.

Wonwoo’s mom waves him off, turning back to stirring her famous gamjatang, Wonwoo’s favourite. There’s bulgogi and galbi and spicy braised chicken – it seems everything being served tonight is Wonwoo’s favourite. Wonwoo doesn’t know how to feel about the fact that his mother’s been preparing all day for a feast for his arrival while he’s been anticipating the absolute worst of her. Guilty, mostly. 

He helps Bohyuk and Chaeyoung set the table, watches them tease and banter back and forth with the humour of schoolchildren but the familiarity and playfulness of an old married couple. Bohyuk had been chased out of the kitchen for being more of a disturbance than a help, exiled into the living room to wait. 

Dinner passes without any mention of Wonwoo’s father, his seat at the head of the table left empty. Chaeyoung starts telling a funny story about a unfortunate workplace misunderstanding with her boss. Midway through, Wonwoo gets a Kakao notification. He slides his phone out of his pocket surreptitiously to glance at the screen. It’s Mingyu.

mingyu  >>>  wonwoo-hyung
hey hyung! how’s changwon going? how’s the weather? have you eaten yet?
byeol and i just had dinner
[Image attachment]

There’s a picture of Mingyu seated at the table in his apartment with a candlelit dinner laid out before him, wine glass and bottle in the frame, everything filtered through the red-gold of glowing embers. Byeol is in the chair opposite with a large restaurant napkin tied around his neck like a bib and what looks like very expensive steak cut into puppy-size pieces on the plate before him. 

Wonwoo has to physically fight the urge to smile, but it’s a battle lost before it can even be fought, the touch of sun-warm heat spreading through his chest to the curves of his ribs, reaching on tip-toe to skim the corners of his lips.

wonwoo
it’s going well. i’m having dinner right now with my mom, bohyuk and his fiancé

mingyu
oooh nice
what’s she like? i bet she’s really awesome

wonwoo
she’s sweet and nice and very funny. they seem perfect for each other
what makes you say that though? you’ve never even met her

mingyu
idk seems like you jeons have good taste
byeol was raised so well (perfect amazing 11 out of all possible 10s) i’m guessing soojin-ssi was pretty awesome

wonwoo
speaking of, how’s the little devil?

mingyu
good! excellent
he misses you A Lot

wonwoo
Liar

mingyu
well i miss you enough for the both of us, how’s that?

“Anyway, if Wonwoo could stop sneaking secret smiles at his phone long enough to join in on the conversation, he’d definitely agree with me.” 

Wonwoo’s head snaps up, sheepish look darting across his face. “Sorry, what was that?” 

“Chaeyoung and I were disagreeing about whether or not we should invite our exes to the wedding,” Bohyuk says.

“To the engagement party, maybe,” Chaeyoung counters. “But the wedding? Isn’t that going to be weird?”

“You’d invite Soojin-noona to your wedding, right, hyung?” 

“What?” Wonwoo echoes, lost in the midst of the conversation.

“You still talk to her, don’t you?” Bohyuk reasons. “You said you ended on good terms and everything.”

“That’s different.” Chaeyoung cuts in. “I know you’re still friends with Moonbin but it’s going to be awkward enough having to deal with seeing Hyejin at the party.”

“Besides,” Wonwoo’s mom says. “Wonwoo has different reasons for staying in touch with Soojin. Isn’t that right, Wonwoo?”

Everyone at the table turns at once to face Wonwoo. His mother and Bohyuk have matching smiles, sly and knowing and apparently in on some joke Wonwoo isn’t aware of. 

“Soojin and I are just friends,” he says mechanically, voice stiff. He’s usually better at lying than this. “And Jeonbok, I think if your fiancé isn’t comfortable with having your exes at the engagement party you should listen to her. She’s clearly got all the brains in your relationship.” 

“Thank you.” Chaeyoung gloats triumphantly.

“Hyung, how could you say that? You’ve known Chaeyoung-ah for like two minutes, you’re my blood.”

“She’s basically family already. And two minutes is long enough to for me to decide she’s officially my favourite dongsaeng.”

Bohyuk huffs, making a show of being wounded as Chaeyoung giggles and slaps at his arm. It’s agonisingly cute.

Wonwoo puts his phone back into his pocket, ignoring the way he can hear the words reverberating in his head in Mingyu’s voice.

well i miss you enough for the both of us, how’s that? 

-----

The engagement party is on the third day of Wonwoo’s trip back home. And he manages to prolong seeing his father until the night of the actual engagement party. Which is impressive on both his, and his father’s, part.

Wonwoo’s inherited more than just his father’s features and jawline, he’s also inherited his serial workaholic tendencies and poor work-life balance. It’s only because it’s for his favourite son’s engagement party that the great Jeon Jaeeun would take the weekend off.

On the second day he’s home, while whirlwind preparations are going around him and Chaeyoung and his mother are gathered in the living area like it’s a war room and they’re preparing for battle and not the engagement party of the century (at least as far as the city of Changwon is concerned), Wonwoo entertains the idea of going to his father’s office to see him. 

It’s only very briefly, and he dismisses it the second it happens. 

What would he even say? Hey, dad. It’s me. Your disgraced eldest son. 

Home from Seoul and here to remind you what a giant failure I am in your eyes even though I have every right to fucking hate you and never want to see you again. 

The truth is that he and his father and never going to reconcile. Wonwoo knows enough about human nature, about his father, to understand that much. The idea that he’s going to sit down with his father and lay everything out on the table and somehow have a heart-to-heart that’s been a decade in the making and miraculously set everything right with him is absurd. Foolish.

It’s the kind of fantasy that Wonwoo has no use for indulging in. In his father’s eyes, he’s a filthy, unfilial homosexual who tarnished the family name by daring to love men. 

In his eyes, his father is a lying, cheating scumbag king asshole who came crawling home and was forgiven by his family, his wife, but not by Wonwoo.

Wonwoo can’t apologise for wanting to be with a man any more than his father is going to apologise for the years of grief and suffering he put their family through, for making him feel shame and humiliation for something he couldn’t control, for teaching him how to hate himself.

So, no. Wonwoo’s never going to make the first move to fix things. And neither is his father. Some things can’t be fixed, and perhaps there’s a part of him, the prodigious architect, who already knows that.

On the night of the engagement party, the weather is perfect, warm with a light breeze coming in from the harbour, but Wonwoo feels like he’s about to sweat right through his finely tailored suit. He’s here to celebrate his little brother and his lovely fiancé, but the idea of seeing his father again after all the bad blood and grief between them makes him want to shove all his things back into his suitcase and get on an express train back to Seoul.

It’s somehow worse that everyone who’s been invited to Bohyuk and Chaeyoung’s engagement party knows Wonwoo.

Old school friends, family friends, distant relatives. Wonwoo does the rounds, fitting perfectly back into the role of model son, the ideal brother and hyung. Some of his old schoolmates are married, a few have already settled down with kids. Their tiny faces beam up at him from the pictures they slide out of their wallets, miniature badges of pride and love. 

Wonwoo smiles, sipping at his second glass of champagne. He asks all the right questions, says all the right things. Jokes and teases with the people that used to make up his whole life once upon a time, and fields the enquiring, prying intentions of cousins and aunties and uncles. 

A twenty-seven year old bachelor with a stable professional career in the city, a well-off family, handsome, unmarried with no children at this age? Wonwoo should’ve realised that he’d be the talk of the party.

The prodigal son returned home. Everyone loves a good story, after all, a story that comes wrapped in salacious gossip laced with intrigue and possibility. 

There are rumours, Wonwoo knows – old ones, but still – about why he left Changwon and never returned save for once or twice during Chuseok.

He answers every question thrown at him with the same genial, easy-going smile and tries to mean it, but the alcohol can only do so much.

“Big hotshot detective home from the city! How’s Seoul? The girls must be really gorgeous, huh? I hear they’re all so tall and beautiful they could be models.”

“How about that girlfriend that you brought home a couple years ago? We haven’t seen her around in ages. You should bring her back here again!”  

“Hey what happened to Soojin-ssi? I figured you would’ve married her by now!”  

“Ah, you’re single? Have you met my niece?”  

“Maybe a nice Gyeongsangnam-do girl will catch your eye and you’ll move back home. Wouldn’t that be great?”  

“No girlfriend? A shame for such a handsome young man.”

“What’s so good about Seoul anyway? You name me one thing Seoul has that Changwon couldn’t do better!”

By the fifth glass of champagne, Wonwoo’s tired and feeling homesick in a city that used to be the only home he ever knew. It’s disorienting, being surrounded by all these people that used to be someone to him but are nothing more than strangers now. Stranger that feel entitled to him and the pieces of his life they don’t really care to know the truth of as long as they have all the thrilling, sensationalised details. 

He checks his phone and answers some messages from Soonyoung and the group chat, pretends to look very serious and engaged in his texts in the hopes that no one else will approach him to no avail.

Mingyu’s sent him two more pictures. One is another selfie, this time a post-workout picture, utterly demonic and flashing a boyish V-sign in the mirror of the changing rooms, sweat slicking his forehead as he grins into his reflection. His arms, shoulders and collarbones are all exposed in an unholy trinity of glistening clarity.

The second is a picture of him and Byeol, Byeol perched in Mingyu’s lap and peering at the screen with his big puppy eyes. Mingyu’s lips are pursed as if the picture had been taken mid-kiss.

mingoo
i know you’re not gonna send me a postcard
because you’ll complain that you’re only gone for 5 days and ‘what’s the point, i’ll be home before you know it’ so i won’t even ask
instead i’m sending you a picture of me so you’ll feel obliged to send me one of you in changwon

[Image attachment]

hope you’re having fun ♥
p.s. byeol says hi

[Image attachment]

and look at his lil face ofc he misses you
remember to stay warm
♥ ♥ ♥

Chaeyoung catches his eye from across the dancefloor when he’s about to be hounded by an especially persistent auntie and saves him from another round of “Have you met my daughter/niece/second cousin/distant relative of eligible age?” 

“Thank you.” Wonwoo gasps breathlessly from the corner of the large floral decoration they’ve hidden behind. “I don’t know what I would’ve done if I had to spend another second trying to explain why I’m not going to go down on one knee and propose to her niece on the first date no matter how attractive and accomplished she is.” 

“It’s alright.” Chaeyoung grins, her cheeks flushing prettily and the crown of flowers woven into her curled hair tilted charmingly off-center. “We’re family now, and family means no one gets left behind. Or forgotten.”

“A girl who quotes Disney at me in my time of need.” Wonwoo smiles, the first real smile all night. “Maybe you married the wrong Jeon.”

Chaeyoung laughs, nudging him in the shoulder. She doesn’t seem to care, or notice, that her dress is being crushed where they’re crouched on the ground. “That’s sweet of you to say. But even if Bohyuk or your mom can’t tell, I know your heart is elsewhere.” 

Wonwoo blinks, surprise flickering through him like a spark of static. “You do?” 

“Sure.” Chaeyoung gazes serenely back at him. “Judging by the number of times you’ve glanced at your phone when you thought no one was looking, there’s definitely someone waiting for you back in Seoul.”

Wonwoo’s face goes carefully blank as he considers how to word his defence. “It’s a friend. That’s all. I – we’re very close.”

“Uhuh,” Chaeyoung says. “A friend that’s been texting you non-stop and telling you how much they missed you when you’ve only been gone for three days?”

Wonwoo freezes. How did she see that? Did he accidentally leave his phone unlocked on Mingyu’s messages? What did she see –

Chaeyoung lets out a chuckle, petting him on the shoulder reassuringly. “Relax. It was just a lucky guess. But I’m right, aren’t I?” 

Wonwoo tries very hard not to gape at his future sister-in-law. “You should come work for the SMPA. We could use eyes as sharp as yours in the city.” 

“I'm flattered,” Chaeyoung answers, lips curling into a smile. “But I’m happy here.”

Right, Wonwoo remembers, a wave of chagrin washing over him, suddenly embarrassed for raising something that might be a touchy subject for her. Chaeyoung and Bohyuk had met in Seoul, while he was studying at a SKY university. They’d both had their whole lives ahead of them there before Bohyuk had decided to come home to become the heir of his father’s company and take up the mantle of the family business. 

“You don’t… feel like you’re giving something up?” Wonwoo says before he can stop himself. He holds back a wince. The alcohol is making him too honest, his usual adroitness with words blunted. “Sorry. I don’t mean to pry. You don’t have to answer that.”

Chaeyoung’s quiet for a moment, and if she’s taken aback by Wonwoo’s candour it doesn’t show. 

“It’s alright, I mean, I get it. I’m a young, twenty-something woman who’s got her whole life ahead of her. I had a career in Seoul. All of my friends are still there.” The corner of her mouth lifts, bittersweet. “I was raised by a single mother. Growing up, I swore to myself I’d never be one of those people who dropped everything for their significant other and let their whole lives revolve around their marriage.”

Wonwoo thinks of his mother, married to his father at twenty-two with half a medical degree. She had him a year later and never returned to study at the best medical school in the country. What would her life be like now if she’d never met him? If she’d never chosen love over the rest of her life? 

“Moving to Changwon and uprooting my whole life to be with your brother might not be what I would’ve chosen for myself but he… he makes me glad that I did. And even though I might regret certain things I’ve sacrificed to be here, I’ll never regret choosing him.” Chaeyoung smiles, her cheeks lightly flushed and her eyes curving into little half-moons. “Whatever else happens in the future, good or bad, I know I’m going to keep choosing him for the rest of my life. Bohyuk… he makes he happy. He makes me feel like the whole world – like I finally get why I’m here.”

And she really, truly looks it. Happy. The softness in her eyes glows with affection – the same sweetness that Soojin used to look at him with when they talked about their future. 

There’s a thick, suffocating feeling lodging in his throat, keeping him from drawing a steady breath. And Wonwoo doesn’t know why it wants to call itself regret because he doesn’t, he’s not regretful about the choices he’s made in life. He let Soojin go. He let her leave. It’s not her fault he’s here, alone, being forced to act the part of someone he’s never been, never wanted to be. He’s fine with being alone. He chose this. 

“I’m glad.” Wonwoo says, blinking rapidly against the tide of selfish, ugly misery sinking fast in the middle of his gut like an anchor, a shipwreck. “I’m — really happy for you. The both of you. I really. I hope you two will always have that happiness.” 

“Thanks, Wonwoo.” Chaeyoung beams, her face lit up with the kind of joy that only the certainty of love, of knowing exactly where you want to be tonight and every night for the rest of your future, can bring. “That means a lot coming from you.” 

Thanks, hyung. That means a lot.

Wonwoo staggers to his feet, the world swaying dangerously around him as he attempts to steady himself. The millions of lights draped like a canopy across the ceiling of the harbourfront venue spin and whirl like a carousel. 

(Why does he keep hearing his voice when he isn’t even thinking about him?)

“Are you okay?” Chaeyoung asks, brow furrowed in worry.

“I’ll be fine.” Wonwoo waves her off, the liquor seeping sluggishly into his veins making him feel heavy and light-headed all at once. “Don’t let me keep you from your night.”

“Okay, if you’re sure.” Chaeyoung bows her head softly. “And Wonwoo… I hope you find your happiness, too. Even if it’s not here.” 

“Thank you.” There’s a half-hearted attempt at a smile on his face. “Now, you’d better go find Bohyuk before he lets our uncles drink him under the table.”

-----

Wonwoo gets drunk. Drunker than he should be at a celebration that is technically still a formal family event.

He’s half-slumped over at the bar, staring into an empty champagne glass wondering why he’s done this to himself when someone clears their throat beside him. 

It’s a man. Someone from high school’s friend or plus one that he greeted in passing but promptly forgot the name of. He’s attractive, tall, but not really Wonwoo’s type. Wonwoo’s type is – big, cute eyes, a smile that feels like the sun on your face, tall tall a couple inches taller than him at least, broad shoulders and big arms but so soft–

“Hey. Wonwoo, right?”

The man smells like citrus and sea salt and its all wrong in an infinite number of ways. 

Wonwoo doesn’t need to hear anything else. But he plays along with the set-up, the game, the prelude to the main event; he says the right things and smiles at the right places and it’s all very standard, a textbook drunken rendezvous. 

They end up back at Wonwoo’s place, the man’s hands skimming the edge of his shirt and tugging it loose from his pants so he can splay his fingers against his bare stomach. The touch of skin against skin sends a shudder down his spine. The ripple effect of desire setting off a chain reaction through his body, his mind lulled into quiet by the pulse of want in his chest.

Make me stop thinking, he begs with fingers tangling in soft hair. Help me forget help me forget everything just for a night, his hands say (god, please), cupping the stranger’s jaw so he can lick into his mouth, the kiss turning wet and desperate.

The man presses him down onto the couch, stroking softly across the skin of Wonwoo’s hips, his hand broad and warm with long, slender fingers. Each touch makes Wonwoo want to disappear inside of himself, ashamed for doing this and electrified by the disastrous cocktail of mortification and longing and wrongness. It’s been so long for him his body doesn’t know how to go slow. It’s all sharp, frantic hunger in his head and this is — this is all wrong.

It’s the way that the man looks at him that makes him stop, mid-breath, his chest panting around the knot growing and twisting in his ribs.

“Are you okay?” The stranger asks him in the quietness and the dark. His hands linger at Wonwoo’s hips, gentle and light enough for Wonwoo to jerk right out of his grip if he wanted to. Even in the shadows, the man’s concern is palpable; it cuts right through the wave of lust and heat coiling in Wonwoo’s stomach like ice. It’s the look in his eyes, the kindness— the gentleness that Wonwoo finds there when he hasn’t asked for it— that stops him.

“Are you sure you want to do this?”

I don’t deserve this. I don’t want it. Why couldn’t you just — 

The man is still staring at him, eyes wide and vulnerable, worry and puppyish fear that he’s done something wrong, that he’s hurt Wonwoo somehow or crossed some kind of line and it looks – it looks exactly like – 

“I have to — I have to get out of here — ” 

Wonwoo shoves the man’s hands away and he goes, willingly. Flinching back like he’s been burned and Wonwoo’s fingertips are still singed with ash. 

“Hey, I’m sorry. I’m sorry. Are you okay? I didn’t meant to scare you off like that — ”

Wonwoo stumbles to his feet, his shirt hanging open and his jacket forgotten somewhere, and starts for the door before he can even look back. His head is pounding, his chest feels like it’s going to split right open down his sternum and he has no idea anymore, what the fuck he’s doing or thinking, he just knows he needs to get the fuck out of here. 

And then, because this is Wonwoo’s life and it’s one cruel joke the universe is gambling on at his expense, the door to the apartment swings open to reveal his father.

He knows what this must look like. And for once he doesn’t disagree with the disgust and horror and revulsion that must twist at his father’s face. He doesn’t wait to see what it looks like, doesn’t wait to see his father glancing first at the stranger in their house and then at his degenerate, depraved wreck of a son, and simply walks past his father and out the door.

-----

He goes where people go when they think no one wants to find them: the sealine and the shore. It’s the beginning of Autumn and the cold is unforgiving this close to the ocean but Wonwoo doesn’t care.

He’s always run cold, he’s always been cold. Tonight is no different from any other. And maybe, maybe this is how things should be. 

He walks down to the sand, and sits just beyond the highest point of the tide, curling his arms around his knees. The sound of the sea should be soothing but the quiet only makes his thoughts louder, and his head is always full of reasons to hate himself.

All his life, he’s been fine. Not great – with certain brief flashes of happiness here and there – but fine. Content. He’s done his part, done everything expected of him, fulfilled the Role of the person he’s supposed to be.

And sometimes it feels like he’s just here, temporarily, doing his best to fill in the parts of this life that are his and people around him are going about their lives, falling in love, real love, getting married, settling down, finding what happiness means to them and chasing it, breathing it, and he’s just – he’s here. Not miserable or unhappy just… here. Existing. Living because he’s it’s the only thing he’s ever known.

And it’s fine because this is his armour, this is how he never has to lose something. He lets people go (because they would’ve stayed if they loved him enough, and it’s not enough, he isn’t –) and then he’s alone and it’s exactly how he wants it. This is the life he’s made for himself and no one but him will ever know the loneliest parts of it.

This is how he keeps himself safe, he thinks to himself.

It’s the biggest lie he’s ever told. 

The moon gleams, full and bright in the night sky, the shadow its casting into the waves casting everything in a silken silver glow.

There is a man out there looking at the same moon and the same stars in the sky who thinks he loves him. And Wonwoo doesn’t know how to not break his heart when he tells him that he’s wrong. 

That Wonwoo doesn’t deserve the love he thinks he feels.

And eventually, he’ll realise Wonwoo’s right. Because Wonwoo has made a science of pretending to live, he has made an art out of doing all the right things and saying all the right things and keeping himself alone. Fine.

The reality is he’s hollow, and all the interesting quirks and so-called personality traits he’s gathered around himself so he can act like he’s a person, like he’s someone real, are just distractions from the truth. This person he is, isn’t complete, and perhaps that’s not all on him. 

Maybe it’s something flawed in his makeup. Everything just not enough. 

His skin feels like the universe leaking starlight into the void, his ribs and bones like crushed meteorites and fragments of dark matter. Everything too much and too hollow, and this terrible urge to pick himself apart, to set alight to everything he’s done and said and scatter the ashes to the wind and sea. He is so undeserving, so hollow, he wonders how people don’t see it when they look at him. He wonders how they don’t see the hairline fractures running along his veins, a map of all the things in him that are inadequate.

Love is meant to be patient, love is kind. Unconditional. But what if – and Wonwoo’s life rests on the fine, precarious balance between interminable chaos and all the what if’s; what if this is all wrong, what if I’m doing everything wrong what if this isn’t supposed to be who I am what if I never stop fucking feeling like this – what if love is meant to be unconditional but you don’t even have the patience or kindness to stand being you.

He’s gotten so good at faking what it means to be a whole person that he’d forgotten that there are things you can’t pretend. 

He thinks of the woman he thought he was going to marry sometimes. He thinks of the people he’s dated and loved and left. He thinks about how he had the chance to ask them to stay but let them go because he didn’t want to hear the answer in their silence.

He thinks about how sick he gets of himself, and can’t imagine ever wanting someone to make the choice between him and eternity.

Out here in the quiet of the sea and the night, with nobody but the stars listening to him, he can admit it:

he got so used to being alone that the idea of someone loving him enough to stay makes him want to run

but he’s tired of being alone, tired of having his loneliness be the single constant in his life

he’s tired

he’s so tired of being alone.

-----

The moon is slowly slipping into the blue of early twilight when he arrives home. The stars have been quieter, and perhaps they pity him, too, Wonwoo thinks. He still has the smell of sea salt curling in his lungs.

He pads soundlessly barefoot into the house, places his shoes in the cupboard and goes to head to his room (his room is technically just another guest room but his mom, being sentimental and holding out for her firstborn to come home eventually when he was done being a terrible son, had arranged it exactly the way he’d left it back at their old house) when he hears a rustle from the living room. 

His heart nearly vaults out of his chest. His mom is sitting in the dark, a cup of tea gone cold on the coffee table, waiting for him.

“Mom.”

It’s worse than feeling like a teenager being caught sneaking out. He feels like every one of his twenty-seven years of life. An adult, a grown man, crawling home in red-handed shame.

“Mom,” Wonwoo says again when she doesn’t reply. The worry thickening in his throat as he comes to a stop by the outskirts of their living room. The space is so large and excessively extravagant that he can stand nearly thirty feet away from her and still be in the same room.

His mom is still staring straight ahead, gaze fixed and unwavering. She looks tired, still beautiful and elegant but worn, exhausted.

Wonwoo draws closer to the lounge she’s sitting on, fearful of what this is and what’s happening right now but pressing forwards nonetheless because that’s his mom.

The only sound, the only movement, is the small, slow inhale she draws from her chest. 

“I should have protected you.” 

In the dark, it’s an awful, secret whisper of a confession.

No matter how old Wonwoo gets, nothing will ever prepare him for the swiftness and suddenness his mother can render him helpless with a single sentence.

“What are you talking about?”

“I should have protected you,” she echoes, her hands clasped delicately in her lap begin to tremble. “From everything. Your father. The scandal. His reaction when you — when you came to us.”

It’s funny how you can spend you whole life – your formative years, the rough, complicated growing pains of adolescenece and young adulthood, and finally the years of becoming your own whole person – longing to have these kinds of conversations with your parents then when you finally do, your mind goes blank. All the things you’ve never been allowed to say suddenly wiped like a clean slate.  

“I feel like I’ve failed you somehow, Wonwoo-yah.” She whispers. “I’m so sorry. I’m sorry.” 

His mom looks at him, at last, and her eyes are red-rimmed, glassy. 

And what is he supposed to say? It’s not her fault. It’s not her responsibility to shoulder the blame for how his life ended up, her human failings as a person don’t translate to her capabilities as a parent, he gets it now, he gets it because the moment you stop being a child is when you realise your parents are just people, like you, like anyone else who fucks up and makes mistakes sometimes. His own private dysfunctions and anxieties and constant struggle with being a person aren’t her fault and it’d be beyond childish to lay his own failures at her feet.

How does he explain that he feels unstuck out of time, that he’s been watching his own life go by in front of his eyes as he other people live their lives and find happiness and comfort with each other but he feel like he’s still that kid watching his whole idea of love and trust and family destroyed with one night of stupid, human recklessness. 

How does he tell her that he’s not sad or miserable or angry anymore because it’s a struggle to feel anything at all.

He’s been fleetingly miserable and heartbroken while he was here in Changwon but those are temporary feelings and soon he’ll be back to baseline, with no one and nothing in his life because that’s the way he’s always told himself he wanted it.

He was an adult when he came out to his parents. He was old enough to understand that his father’s ignorance and his mother’s silence weren’t an invalidation of who he is. It hurt, it hurt to know the two people who raised him couldn’t stand by him, couldn’t be proud of him for finding the courage and self-worth to be honest about this part of himself with them. But he understood them for their flaws and imperfections, and some part of him has always loved them anyway.

He’s learned by now that forgiveness isn’t a weakness. Sometimes it’s a mercy.

Wonwoo crosses the distance between them and kneels on the couch beside his mother, wraps his arms around her and lets her bury her face in his shoulder. Her frame shakes as he holds her, her tears staining his shirt like saltwater.

He brushes the tear tracks from her cheeks with the pad of his thumb, the way she’s done for him so many times when he was a child.

“You’ve always loved me.” Wonwoo says, levelling his gaze on hers. Seeing his own eyes staring back at him, like a looking-glass shimmering with veiled tears. “Even when I felt… let down. Or disappointed. I always knew you loved me.” 

“I should’ve fought for you harder,” she breathes, voice trembling and unsteady. “I should’ve said something – ” 

“It wasn’t your fight to fight. His mistakes are not yours.” 

You’ve suffered enough because of him, Wonwoo thinks as he watches his mother cry. You’ve done enough.

“I’m sorry I couldn’t be the person you needed me to be,” she says softly. It’s almost like a dream, he might even still be dreaming somewhere fast asleep on the shore. “But you’ve always been so capable of being your own person, of living the way you knew you wanted to.” 

Wonwoo can feel his own eyes growing warm, his vision going fuzzy at the edges. She lifts a hand to stroke at his cheekbone.

In the moonlight, his mother’s face is shadowed half in a blue-tinged dark, her silhouette carved out in a soft glow. She looks like she might cry again, her jaw tightening like she’s holding it back. And then she draws in a small, firm breath.

“I’m proud of you, Wonwoo-yah. I should’ve said that sooner.” 

It breaks something in him, splintering right through the miles of cold and the walls fortified around him that he’s been building higher and higher for so long with nothing but sheer resilience and a need, a desperation to be unbreakable. He’s lost so much time wondering what his life would be like if he wasn’t.

-----

In the end, his departure from Changwon is as uneventful as his arrival. He leaves early the next morning. Kisses his mother’s cheek and promises to be back next year for Chuseok. Leaves a note for Bohyuck and Chaeyoung wishing them all the best and all the happiness in the world, always.

He doesn’t see or speak to his father again.

Wonwoo sleeps the entire train ride home, deeper and sounder than he had back in his own makeshift room in his family’s shiny new penthouse.

Through the window, Changwon grows smaller and smaller until its just a dot of blue on the horizon.

-----

A week after Wonwoo’s back from Changwon, Mingyu takes him to a fancy restaurant in Gangnam. He’s wearing a black jacket and black jeans and he’s done his hair in this artless, ruffled style but Wonwoo can’t focus on anything other than the tiny, dainty silver necklace dangling from his neck. He feels underdressed, but then he always feels underdressed around Mingyu.

Mingyu compliments him nonetheless, as is routine. He’s as fond of giving praise as he is of receiving it.

You’re good at this, hyung, when he peers over Wonwoo’s shoulder at the FPS game Wonwoo’s been in entrenched in for over an hour. You could even go pro, hyung, like Faker.

Hey, hyung, you have a really nice voice, did you know that? After Mingyu catches him humming to himself absent-mindedly.

Wonwoo-hyung, you look very handsome tonight. 

It shouldn’t affect Wonwoo the way it does. He’s confident in his appearance, his interests and abilities, even his quirks. He doesn’t need the spoken or physical validation of others to know that. But the way Mingyu gives compliments, so easily and endlessly, it makes him feel like he’s standing beneath a spotlight. And the way Mingyu looks at him… it’s like he’s been standing in the shade his entire life watching other people be alive, watching them live, and he’s feeling the sun on his face for the first time.

Mingyu spends an inordinate amount of time taking pictures for his Instagram or filming for his story update. 

Tonight, however, he doesn’t make any move to take his phone out for selfies or ask Wonwoo to photograph him even though he’s dressed impeccably in a coat that looks like it cost a couple hundred thousand won and makes him seem taller than ever. 

He pays attention to all of Wonwoo’s anecdotes from home without reaching for his phone. It’d be almost unnevering, having Mingyu’s sole focus and attention on him for such a length of time if Wonwoo didn’t know it was simply because Mingyu missed him. He’s said as much in his texts and out loud, greeting Wonwoo with a tight hug when he’d swung by after dropping his things off in his apartment.

Wonwoo doesn’t mention what happened on the night of Bohyuck and Chaeyoung’s engagement, or the morning after.

Maybe because he doesn’t want to ruin the mood and the warm contentment on Mingyu’s face that has yet to dim the entire time they’ve been at dinner. Maybe because, if he’s being honest with himself, that night could so easily have been avoided if he wasn’t such a coward, if he could just tell the man sitting across from him the things he needed to say.

Mingyu says goodbye to Wonwoo outside his apartment with a promise to text him about dinner next week at his house.

An hour later, as Wonwoo’s getting ready for bed, his phone chimes with a notification. It’s an Instagram notification, specifically a notification for Mingyu’s Instagram. Only because Wonwoo doesn’t actually use the app in the first place and there’s no point being active on it when he’s only keeping up to date with one person. 

The notifications are practical, that’s all.

He flicks open his screen to see Mingyu’s update. It’s a picture of himself taken in Wonwoo’s house, he’s wearing the clothes he’d been wearing the day after Wonwoo got back from Changwon when they’d had takeout because Wonwoo didn’t want Mingyu to cook after he’d been out all evening on a late-night call.

Mingyu’s smiling at the screen, serving his usual amount of face and attractiveness, but it’s the background that catches at his breath and tangles in his throat making it suddenly hard to breathe. In the background, Wonwoo is asleep on his couch with Byeol cradled in his arms also fast asleep.

Mingyu’s caption is short and finished off by a puppy and crescent moon emoji at the end:

min9yu_k  just catching up with my two favourite people in the world. i missed you to the moon and back

-----

“So, aren’t you going to tell me how much you missed me?” The sound of a light, velveteen laugh, like music, bright and bell-like even through the speaker.

“Who says I missed you?” Wonwoo teases, hitching his shoulder up so he can anchor his phone while he marks the page of his book. 

“Come on, don’t tell me you’re going to act all cool on me now.” Soojin says, her tone playful and scolding. “It’s only been eight months, Wonwoo. Barely even a year.”

“A lot can change in a year,” Wonwoo muses. “Maybe I’m still broken-hearted and resentful about you leaving and being aloof and nonchalant about everything is my way of distancing myself from the pain.”

“Okay, Mr. Byronic Edgelord Fitzwilliam Heathcliffe. As if a break-up could ever stop you from being the indomitable Jeon Wonwoo. Did you forget I can see right through you? You couldn’t be nonchalant or aloof about anything if you tried.” 

“We dated for too long; you know too much about me. I don’t know if I feel comfortable knowing that there’s someone out there with this much power over me.”

Soojin laughs again, and it’s still one of Wonwoo’s favourite sounds in the world. That much hasn’t changed. 

“It’s good to hear your voice,” Soojin says. 

“I’m sorry I don’t call more often.” A pause, a flicker of bittersweet remorse lingering on his expression that he knows she can still read in his silence even if she can’t see his face. “I’d say you know how I am but that’s no excuse.”

“It’s alright. I mean, that’s my excuse anyway. There’s always so much going on in both of our lives, I’m just glad we promised to stay in touch.” 

It might have been easier, in the beginning, to have hated each other. To have ended on messy, irreversibly broken terms. It might have made missing her hurt less. But Wonwoo’s grateful now, in retrospect, for how they handled it. The maturity, and the foresight, the fondness that’s still there between them, keeping them connected even across continent, a whole world apart.

“So. Tell me, how has everything been these past few months?” Soojin asks, and Wonwoo can picture her leaning forward subconsciously, her eyes dark and curious, forever making you feel like you were the centre of her attention, her sole focus.

Before he can even help himself, the image of Mingyu gazing at him, lashes lowered and a small smile tugging at his face, comes to mind.

“Nothing much.”

“I don’t believe you,” Soojin says. “It’s been months since our last phonecall and you’re trying to tell me nothing or no one’s happened since?” 

“Well, I did buy a new couch.” Wonwoo drawls. “And I’ve read a few new books since we last spoke. Took up jogging occasionally, like once a month. Byeol’s bigger, too.”

Soojin makes a scoffing noise of disbelief. “Jeon Wonwoo, you know what I mean, don’t be a jerk. Do you know how expensive long-distance calls from New York to Seoul are?” 

Wonwoo chuckles under his breath. “Maybe you could be more specific.” 

“What about that guy?” Soojin pauses. “Mingguk? Minhyun? Last time we talked you said he cooked you dinner. That sounded promising.” 

“His name’s Mingyu. And no, I’m not elaborating.”

“I’m using my ex-girlfriend privileges and pulling rank on you.”

“What’s that supposed to mean?”

“It means I know you better than anyone else.” She goes quiet for a moment, her silence filling the air with all the things they left unsaid, things that they never had to say out loud. “Or at least for a very long time, I did. And there’s no use lying to me, let alone to yourself, that that man means nothing more to you than a friend.” 

Wonwoo exhales, the fight in him going out when he hears the unrelenting honesty in her voice. She’s always known how to see through him, to get through to him in spite of all the masks and defences and bullshit he puts up between him and the world. 

“It doesn’t matter if he means more than to me than a friend,” is what he says, at last.

“Why doesn’t it matter?” He can hear the frown in her voice now. 

“Because. We’re friends and that’s all we’re ever going to be. Wanting more than that would be – selfish. It’d be wrong. And when you care about someone as more than a friend, you’re supposed to want the best for them.”

“How do you even know what he wants? What if there’s a possibility that he wants the same thing you do?”

Wonwoo’s quick to shut that one down. “It doesn’t matter even if he feels the same way.”

“And there you go again,” Soojin snaps, impatience flickering to the forefront of her sympathy and concern. “Running away from all the reasons that you could be happy when they’re smacking you in the face.” 

That hurts. It hurts like she’s standing right here in front of him. 

It hurts being reminded of why they didn’t work out, and the dark, ugly voice in his head that always manages to find its foothold in his thoughts when he’s at his lowest whispers you deserve this. You deserve to feel like this, for pushing people away, for running, for finding a way to ruin every good thing that happens to you. 

“Is that…” Wonwoo swallows. “Is that how you felt? About us?” 

“Wonwoo,” Soojin cries, a plea of defeat and exasperation and surrender in the same breath. She doesn’t say anything for a long moment and when she speaks again, her voice is soft and thick with emotion.

“All I ever wanted was for you to be happy.”

And she made him happy. For a very, very long and wondrous time in his life, she made him happier than he thought he had any right to feel.

But they weren’t right for each other, they didn’t fit together in the way of forever. That’s not something love can magically make happen.

“Let me ask you this: if you ignored everything about what’s right and what you think you owe him and what he deserves, when you’re with him… 

“Does he make you happy?”

As if it’s as simple as that. As if it could be as easy as thinking of happiness and seeing only him in his head, scrawled in the footnotes of all his stray thoughts and daydreams.

It doesn’t work like that.

Life doesn’t work like that; it’s not meant to be this simple and easy and uncomplicated. 

But none of these things are the answer to her question. And if Wonwoo were to let himself stop running, if he were to stand still, afraid and out of breath, with the sound of his heartbeat pounding in his ears, in his bloodstream, he can find the shred of adrenaline-charged courage it takes to admit this out loud: 

“Yes.”

-----

On the day that Wonwoo goes to pick Soojin up from the airport, it doesn’t occur to him even once in the planning that he’d find Mingyu at his place when they arrived home. 

And that’s the beginning and the end of it all — Mingyu becoming such an easy constant in his life, making the spaces Wonwoo leaves behind entirely his, that Wonwoo forgets what it’s like without him around. 

Soojin’s flight is delayed by half an hour, and Wonwoo spends the entire half hour fighting his own mind every time his thoughts stray listlessly to Mingyu.

What is Mingyu doing right now? Has he eaten yet? Is he home already? 

More importantly, Does he think about Wonwoo when he’s not around like this, too? 

When he finally sees Soojin coming out through the departure exit, he waves from where he’s standing and she rushes over, grinning, darting forwards to gather him up in a hug.

“I was all ready to complain about how you’ve gotten skinnier and demand that you eat more but you look… good.” Soojin huffs with mock dismay, fists propped on her hips.

“It’s good to see you, too, Soojin.” 

“No, I’m serious.” Soojin says. “You look really good. Well-fed, even.”

“You could’ve just said you look handsomer than ever, and left it at that, you know.”

“You don’t need me to tell you that now that you’ve got your hot, younger man to do that for you.” 

Wonwoo groans, sinking his face into his hands. “Please don’t start.”

“Oh, I’ve barely begun.” Soojin says, gleefully. Wonwoo steers the trolley for her as they head to the parking lot, and he manages to divert the conversation to Soojin and her girlfriend.

It’s a new relationship, still in the honeymoon stage of first everythings, and she seems genuinely thrilled. Happy. 

“Okay,” Soojin says, on the motorway leading from the airport to the city. “Enough distractions. You’ve changed the subject for long enough.”

“Subject? What subject?” Wonwoo snarks, just because he can.

“You know what I mean. The Kim Mingyu of it all. I did some thorough Instagram-stalking and he’s very... Let’s just say I have no idea how you managed to get him wrapped around your little finger.”

“You what?”

“— Honestly, he looks like he should be on magazine covers or billboards or something.”

“He might have done some casual modelling in his university years.” 

“And why haven’t you agreed to have this man’s extremely cute and large babies already?” 

“Because it’s not like that. We’re not – I don’t have to explain this to you.”

“Actually,” Soojin says. “You do. Remember our pact?”

“For the last time, it wasn’t a pact, Soo.”

“Yes, it was,” Soojin insists, an urgency in her eyes. “We promised each other that we were going to do our best not to let this break-up ruin our year. That we were going to try for ‘okay’ at the very least.” 

“And I’m okay. At the very least, I can say that.”

“But he makes you more than okay, doesn’t he?” Soojin’s always been better than him at saying the things he’s thinking but too afraid to say out loud. “You said as much that time on the phone.” 

Wonwoo goes very still. “Oh, shit.” 

“Please tell me you’re not having your big I’m Devastatingly, Hopelessly In Love With Him epiphany right now in the middle of the highway. I love you and I want you to be happy but I, personally, am not ready to die for Kim Mingyu like – ”

“No, it’s not that,” Wonwoo mutters, eyes widening as he shoves his hand into his pocket and fishes his phone out before tossing it quickly to Soojin so he can keep his hands on the steering wheel. Road safety first, last-minute, dawning realisations second. “I forgot to tell him I was picking you up from the airport.”

“…And that I’d be staying at your place for the next couple of weeks until my old roommate has space for me in her apartment...?”

Wonwoo doesn’t say anything. As he said before, Soojin knows him too damn well.

“Wonwoo… Jeon Wonwoo, you tall, useless linguini noodle. How could you forget? You know how this is going to look to him, right?” 

“That’s why I need you to help me and call him right now so I can tell him!” Wonwoo hisses. 

Soojin sighs, but does as he asks, putting the phone on speaker. The phone rings once, twice, and then Mingyu’s picking up.

“Hey, hyung.”

God, it’s game fucking over when just the sound of his voice makes heat bloom in Wonwoo’s chest, right?

“Hey, Mingyu, are you… are you in my apartment right now?” Wonwoo asks, suppressing the urge to wince at his own awkwardness. 

“Yeah, I’m just chilling with Byeol. We’re watching Up.” Of course he is. Of course he’s in Wonwoo’s apartment, watching a Pixar movie with Wonwoo’s dog. Because he loves that little one-headed hellhound from Seoul to the depths of Tartarus and would spend every waking moment with him if he could. 

“Right. Well, I just wanted to let you know that I’m driving a friend home from the airport and they’re actually going to be staying over for a couple days.”

“Oh, okay. That’s cool.” Mingyu says. And then the briefest pause. His voice sounds softer, more reserved when he speaks again. “I won’t be in your hair for much longer, the movie’s almost over, I think I’ll –” 

“No, that’s okay,” Wonwoo cuts in to reassure him. “I’m not chasing you out or anything. Just… letting you know.” 

“Alright. Um, see you soon, then? Drive safely, hyung.”

“See you soon, Gyu.”

Mingyu hangs up. Soojin arches a single, silent, judgemental eyebrow at Wonwoo.

“I know, okay? I know, I’m an idiot, I forgot. He makes me forget things when I’m around him, my brain gets all – fixated. Like I forget how to multitask.”

The look Soojin sends him is everything that needs to be said on that.

-----

When Wonwoo knocks at the door, Mingyu opens the door with Byeol cuddled in his arms, and looking for all intents and purposes like he – well, like he belongs here.

He’s in an old, loose T-shirt and pyjama pants, a hoodie thrown over all of it. He looks very soft and very at home, and the complete opposite of what he’s been trying to convince Soojin of for the past thiry minutes. ‘Just friends’ is going to be an impossible defence after Soojin’s seen Mingyu standing on his doorstep like he’s opening the door to his own apartment.

“Hey hyung. We were just gonna — ”

Mingyu’s eyes widen as he spots Soojin behind Wonwoo, and he takes a step back from the door way, stumbling a little.

“H - hi! I’m Mingyu. Sorry, hyung mentioned you were coming, I didn’t have time — ” Mingyu glances down at his pyjamas, grimacing.

“It’s alright,” Soojin says, smiling warmly at him as Wonwoo wheels her suitcases into the living room. “I’m Soojin, it’s a pleasure to finally meet you.”

“Y - you’re Byeol’s owner,” Mingyu stutters, his jaw dropping open. Byeol barks then, and Mingyu freezes, torn between letting Byeol down or just giving him straight to Soojin. 

Soojin chooses for him, striding over to greet Byeol by cupping his little face in her hands. “My baby, my little star. I missed you so, so much.”

Byeol wriggles, reaching for Soojin and Mingyu hands him over in wordless shock. Byeol nuzzles at Soojin’s cheek, barking his excitement and happiness at seeing her again. Soojin shushes him, stroking her hands over his head, scratching underneath his chin just where he likes it.

“Wonwoo’s told me a lot about you. About what you’ve done for Byeol. And for him.” Soojin says, turning to Mingyu, eyes brimming with sparkling delight. “Thank you for taking such good care of them all these months.” 

There’s a flicker of sharpness that darts across Mingyu’s face, too quick to catch, and then it’s like a curtain falling over his face, masking all his real emotions beneath this superficial screen. Wonwoo didn’t even know he could do that. Mingyu smiles, and it’s suspiciously shiny, too bright, like fool’s gold glittering in distraction.

“It’s – I wouldn’t have had it any other way.” Mingyu says lightly, his voice tight and controlled. To anyone else, it sounds like sentimentality caught in his throat, sweet and honeyed thick.

To Wonwoo, it looks like he’s completely shut himself out, the lights turned off. Total blackout.

“Wonwoo’s lucky he had you,” Soojin says. “I know Byeol can be a handful sometimes.” She pauses, smile winding across her lips. “Most of the time.”

And Mingyu smiles back, the edges of his lips tug upwards in half-hearted resolve – no, not half-hearted because Mingyu doesn’t do anything in halves or with anything less than all of his heart – and it makes Wonwoo ache, physically ache to see him smiling like an open wound, haemorrhaging honesty and surprise and heartbreak right where he’s standing. Mingyu has never been good at hiding things from himself, let alone the rest of the world. Wonwoo can read each tiny shift in his expression – because even if he wasn’t a detective, even if he wasn’t an expert in the study of body language and human behaviour, he knows Kim Mingyu.

“I’m – I’m the lucky one. To have met them.”

Mingyu fiddles with his sleeves, glancing over at Wonwoo just the once before looking away just as swiftly, each emotion that flickers across his face, there and then gone again like quicksilver. Wonwoo catches relief and remorse, shame, guilt, and strangely enough, acceptance. 

“Well, it’s… um, it’s late. I think I’m going to head back to my own apartment. It was really great meeting you, Soojin-ssi. Byeol’s gonna be so happy that you’re finally home.” 

“Night, Mingyu.” Wonwoo manages to say evenly, casually.

“Goodnight, Mingyu. It’s been really, really lovely to meet you. I’ll make sure Wonwoo organises a time for all four of us to hang out.”

Mingyu reaches out to pet Byeol one last time time. And just for a brief few seconds, his fingers lingering in Byeol’s fur, the walls drop and he looks at Byeol with an expression that bleeds sheer fondness and affection.

“Goodnight, Byeol. Sweet dreams.”

Mingyu draws his hand back, slipping it into the pockets of his hoodie, and gives Soojin and Wonwoo a small (heart-rending) smile before leaving.

Soojin waves back, beaming sweetly in his direction, and then Mingyu’s gone and she’s whirling on her heel, a thunderstorm of fury and retribution descending upon her face. 

“Jeon Wonwoo, I’ve only known Mingyu for a minute and a half but if anything happens to him I will kill everyone in this room, except Byeol, and that means you.”

Soojin points an accusing finger at the door that Mingyu’s just walked out of. 

“Whatever that just was, you need to fix it.”

-----

Mingyu knows what this look like. He knows it looks bad, and that it’s getting worse, and eventually it’ll be inevitably screwed beyond repair. He knows himself and how this goes.

He’s loud and clumsy and painfully obvious. About everything. His whole entire life he’s been too big for his own body, too wholehearted and eager. There’s nothing he’s ever been able to do or say that could change that about himself.

It’s like this: you know the colouring in books you used to love drawing in as a kid? The thick black lines demarcating the outlines of trees and stars and giraffes and mermaids just waiting for your imagination to come along to fill them with colour?

Mingyu always hated colouring inside the lines. 

He wanted his skies to be purple, his giraffes to be green and spotted blue. His free-drawn stars were bright balls of rainbow chaos and no amount of positive encouragement or insistence on realism would sway him. 

It’s like abstract art, his favourite teacher in the whole, wide world would say. There’s an infinite amount of ways to look at it, and everyone has their own version of what it means.

Being Mingyu is a little like that. 

Kandinsky’s improvised chaos. Delaunay’s kaleidoscope of shapes and avante-garde. De Kooning’s blind, visceral emotion. Brilliant, bold ribbons of colour spilling over the lines of a colouring in page, sketched a little too loud, too roughly. Too everything.

The thing about abstract art is that not everyone knows how to find beauty in its contradictions.

Mingyu goes through life incapable of being anything other than bold and bright and loud, wearing his feelings on his sleeve, his tenacious heart beating with earnest, wide-open vulnerability. He feels a little too much, and loves too easily, and he never knew how many ways there were to apologise simply for being until he had his heart shipwrecked by his first real encounter with love.

You’re so clingy, Mingyu. You’re so needy. And he is; he’s also great at making excuses for other people. I don’t have time to reply to all your texts. No, I can’t call right now, God, just give me some space. And that’s okay, it’s okay because Mingyu talks too much anyway. He’s always talking, forever loud and annoying and distracting. No, I’m busy this weekend, we see each other all the time, can’t you live for one day without seeing me? He just needs to give them space. And he needs to be less him.

God, Mingyu can’t you just do this one thing right?

So Mingyu made himself useful rather than needy. He made himself valuable. Wanted. Because who doesn’t need a man who can cook and clean and charm with no complaint? In the eyes of the world the social capital of a handsome, likeable young man who can do everything he does is near priceless.

And being necessary is the closest thing to being loved. Sometimes he can close his eyes and pretend it’s just as good as.

Mingyu knows it the first, second, third time he meets Jeon Wonwoo: it’s been a long time since he last fell this hard. Each time he meets him it’s a disaster, and maybe that’s the universe’s way of grounding him with realistic expectations. But what is he supposed to do when the man lives in the same building as him and has a dog that Mingyu would willingly give the moon and stars and entire solar system to see happy?

At first, being just friends is enough. Mingyu is a great friend to have. He’s useful. Selfless. Generous. Available at all times of the day when catastrophe strikes, or when you just need someone to hold your hand. Jeon Wonwoo needs more taking care of than most people, but he doesn’t seem to mind the way Mingyu makes himself at home in his life and swiftly becomes his dog’s best friend. 

It’s nice, doing things for other people. For Wonwoo. For the little smile that lifts at the corners of his mouth and the soft gratitude that gleams in his eyes. The thank you, you didn’t have to, that Mingyu can always tell he genuinely means. It’s the little things too, like making Wonwoo laugh. The way his nose scrunches in the moment, shoulders shaking and his whole face lit up with easy delight. 

But somewhere along the way, Mingyu screwed up.

Somehow, Mingyu started realising how much he wanted this, always. How he wanted to hold Wonwoo’s hand, not just in the secret moments in between the heartbeats of real life, but simply because he could. How much he wanted to make Wonwoo laugh, low and pleased and nose scrunched, so he could kiss the smile from his lips and taste it lingering on his tongue. How much Wonwoo’s happiness means to him that there’s a whole section of his mind dedicated to a comprehensive archive of Wonwoo’s favourite things, his habits, routines, miscellaneous Wonwoo Facts™. 

It aches in him like a shadow of his pulse, how much he wants to hold Wonwoo. To touch him. To be laid bare by him.

He didn’t know how badly he wanted all of these things until the possibility of having them had slammed shut in his face before he ever had the chance to try.

After he leaves Wonwoo’s apartment that night, the early hours of the morning slip by in a state of tortured sleeplessness. It’s almost like he dreamed the entire incident; he wishes he did. If he had, maybe he could wake up and the bad dream of meeting Kang Soojin, Wonwoo’s ex-girlfriend, Byeol’s mom, beautiful, elegant, perfect Kang Soojin with the long, dark hair and moonlight smile, would fade the way dreams, good or bad, tend to do.

But Wonwoo hadn’t said anything about getting back together with her. And surely, surely with something this momentous and life-changing and important to him, he would have. He and Mingyu aren’t just neighbours anymore they’re… they’re friends, if nothing else. If there was something more going on between them Wonwoo would have mentioned it. 

Mingyu bites back the urge to leap and tumble and fall to wild conclusions, his chest tightening and constricting with undercurrents of doubt humming around the lightning rod of heartbreak and misery. Guilt.

Wonwoo will have an explanation for all of this. He will. If Wonwoo was getting back together with his ex, he would’ve said something.

It’s nine when Mingyu scrapes himself out of bed after hours of sleeplessly scrolling through his Instagram feed and feeling small and pathetic lying here marinating in his worst fears and trying not to drown amidst the crushing awareness that he has no right to be feeling like this.

Wonwoo is his friend. Someday they could’ve even been on their way to being best friends.

It’s Mingyu’s fault for falling in love with him.

It’s Mingyu’s fault for daring to want more than Wonwoo was willing to sign up for. All this time, he’s been terrified that Wonwoo would find out, that Wonwoo already knows and is trying to act like he doesn’t so  that things won’t be awkward between them. Maybe it’s finally time to face the reality that they can’t go on the way they were regardless because Mingyu can’t keep this up. 

He can’t keep imagining himself as Wonwoo’s person when Wonwoo doesn’t see him as anything more than just a friend. He’s in so deep that it feels like each step closer to Wonwoo that he takes is another inch farther from dry land, from the shore where safety has long abandoned hope for him. From the chance of letting Wonwoo go without tearing out a part of himself in the process.

Mingyu makes the trip to Wonwoo’s apartment in a daze, his brain slow and fuzzy from the lack of sleep but his senses hyper-aware and on a razor trip-wire threatening to blow everything apart at the slightest hint of danger.  

He comes to a stop in front of Wonwoo’s door wanting nothing more than to turn around and go back home and forget this ever happened.

He could pretend, for another day, another week, that this is all going to be fine.

Mingyu’s very good at making excuses for other people without them asking him to. He could come up with half a dozen reasons that Wonwoo hasn’t told him about her.

In the end, it’s the thought of not seeing Byeol’s little face for a whole week that drives him to do it. He knocks, sharp and fast, like ripping off a bandaid. 

There’s no answer. 

Mingyu knocks again, panic sinking harder in his stomach, a burning sensation in his throat rising like embers.

The door opens a few minutes later, and it hits him so swiftly he forgets to brace for impact and breathe. The swooping, dizzying, lightheaded feeling sends him reeling, pitching into the vertigo of standing at the edge of somewhere too high up and only just now realising he’s about to fall. It’s an ache that has him questioning everything his mind his chest his hands are trying to tell him. And all of it swallowed up in this terrible weightlessness. Like motion sickness on dry land. 

Kang Soojin is wearing Wonwoo’s shirt.

He can tell because it fits her in the loose, effortless way of someone who’s been stealing his shirts for a lifetime because they’re big and comfortable on her, and because she knows they smell faintly of Wonwoo’s cologne and more importantly his vanilla-scented shampoo, and she must know exactly how the sleeves drape charmingly low over her wrists and how they skim the middle of her thighs. 

Byeol scampers up behind her, barking happily as she turns to sweep him up into her arms, kissing his ears with the all the open, shameless adoration of a weeklong homecoming.

And then Wonwoo saunters out of the bedroom, rubbing sleepily at his eyes behind his glasses, his black hair a dishevelled mess, sticking up in odd places where it’d been pressed haphazardly into his pillow. He’s unguarded and vulnerable, soft in a way that Mingyu’s never seen him before around anyone. 

Byeol whines softly as he nuzzles into Soojin’s chest and her throat, scattering puppy kisses all over her cheeks and neck and anywhere that he can reach and Wonwoo’s smile breaks across his face like dawn as Soojin tips her head back laughing and — 

Oh. Oh.

This is the way it was always meant to be, Mingyu thinks.

The vertigo feeling falling to a whisper in his ear, an echo of trembling heartbeat, tells him there’s no place for him here.

What he thought he’d built in this house, as a guest, as a friend, as a sometimes dogsitter, was just a placeholder. Something to keep the empty space in Wonwoo’s life warm and sunlit, just for a moment (a while, an eternity) until everything was not so cold again.

It makes Mingyu ache, makes his entire body ache, weightless and hollow and unbearably bittersweet, with the realisation that this is what Wonwoo looks like when he’s happy. 

“Sorry, I — this was a mistake.”

Because the little place for himself he’s carved out here in Wonwoo’s life can be just as easily turned to kindling and he can feel his heart in his chest in his throat moving faster than his brain and his mouth and he’s so stupid. Playing house with Wonwoo as if it was ever going to lead anywhere, coming and going at his beck and call, dropping everything in his life at the first hint of being needed, insinuating himself into Wonwoo’s life trying to make himself indispensable so maybe, maybe maybe just maybe, Wonwoo would want him.

Stupid. Stupid Mingyu. So damn stupid.

He feels clumsy all of a sudden — big and clumsy and graceless, embarrassment burning on the surface of his cheeks, messy and sweat-stained with a battered, rumpled uniform still sticking to his skin as he stands here clutching his heart in his fist and his stupid, desperate hope in another. 

“I — I have to go.”

Wonwoo’s happy. He’s — soft, smiling, disarmed by the careless warmth glimpsing through the curve of his lips.

He’s happy. Isn’t that enough? (why can’t that be fucking enough?)

“Wait, what? Who is it? Wait, Mingyu —”

Mingyu doesn’t look back. He turns the corner and races up the staircase, pulse pounding in his ears the entire way home, deafening but not loud enough to drown out his heart plummeting, hurtling to the ground in free fall. 

(how, how could he ever let himself think wanting to be needed was the same as being loved)

-----

After that morning, Mingyu stops coming by.

His absence in Wonwoo’s life leaves an inexplicable hollowness behind that can’t be defined. It’s like a missing step in a staircase; his foot keeps wanting to sink right through into empty space.

Byeol is in full-blown mourning. He nudges miserably at his food in the mornings and stares accusingly at Wonwoo when there’s no sign of Mingyu at the door in the evenings.

Wonwoo doesn’t know what to say. As much as she tries, even Soojin can’t seem to brighten his mood. In fact, Soojin’s pissed him at, too. Seeing as this is the current mood of his apartment building, it’s a valid feeling.

Wonwoo kind of hates himself, too.

He catches Mingyu at the wall of post boxes one day, a serendipitous meeting if not for the terrible look that crosses Mingyu’s face when he turns and sees Wonwoo standing there. 

“H-Hey, hyung!” He stutters, recovering smoothly, or as best he can when they both know Wonwoo’s seen his expression before he can plaster a transparent smile on top of it. 

“Hi, Mingyu.”

“How’ve… how’ve you been? How’s Byeol?” Mingyu asks, forging on with the conversation nevertheless. 

“He’s good. I’m good. We’ve both been, uh, doing really well.” 

God. Wonwoo hates this. He hates it. They sound like strangers. Like acquaintances that barely know each other trying to catch up on a week’s worth of missed smalltalk.

This isn’t who they fucking are.

“That’s good! I’m glad.” The smile on his face flickers, just for a beat, slipping and turning brittle. “I miss him,” Mingyu says softly.

“He misses you, too. He’s been in a shitty mood because you haven’t been coming around as much.”

“Sorry.” Mingyu glances quickly at Wonwoo and then away again. His gaze has been straying to a distant point beside Wonwoo’s face this entire time. “I’m, uh. I’ve been busy. I’ve been really busy.” 

He doesn’t offer up a better excuse. Partially, Wonwoo thinks, because they both know he’s an awful liar.

“Understandable,” Wonwoo says. “Don’t be a stranger,” he says, wanting to die on the spot, hating himself for saying it. But he doesn’t know any other way to fix this. He isn’t like Mingyu, who always knows how to salvage a dead conversation. Always knows how to comfort someone and how to care for them when they need it most. 

He doesn’t know what to say because the reason why Mingyu’s hurting is him. It’s him. 

“I’ll see you around, hyung.”

Mingyu gives him one last, fleeting smile and its so fragile, so breakable, it hurts to see it. He turns, mail tucked under his elbow and leaves before Wonwoo can say anything else.

----- 

In the absolute dead of night, a loud, crashing noise erupts down the hallway of Wonwoo’s living room. Wonwoo sleeps lightly to begin with but his first instinct is to assume it’s Byeol, up to his usual mischief, oblivious to insignificantly human constructs like time and waking Wonwoo up at three o’clock in the morning. 

And then the crashing intensifies, and he recognises the sound of footsteps echoing clumsily across his floorboards. Wonwoo surges up from his bed, shoves his glasses on and grabs the closest thing that qualifies as a weapon — a thick, non-fiction hardcover book about the history of the Romance of the Three Kingdoms — and stalks soundlessly out of his room. 

He’s about to strategise a plan of attack when he sees Mingyu, who’s apparently given up on his war against gravity, sprawled on the ground. Byeol is nosing at his fingers and making small, sad whimpering noises.

At least he’s fully clothed this time, Wonwoo thinks to himself in a moment of half-asleep deliriousness. 

He straightens his shoulders, the wave of déjà vu hitting him as he breathes in the smell of soju, sickly sweet and cloying. The single source of light in the room is Mingyu’s phone, the LED screen garishly bright in the darkness, and it’s unclear whether Mingyu actually turned it on or dropped it. He’s about to walk over there and help Mingyu up when Mingyu hiccups and peels himself off the ground into a sitting position.

“Byeol,” he wails, high and loud in a voice that would certainly have woken Wonwoo up if the banging and crashing noises hadn’t. “Byeol, I missed you so much.”

Mingyu opens his arms and Byeol goes willingly, nuzzling at Mingyu’s neck as Mingyu buries his face in Byeol’s fur. 

“I know I promis’d hyung I wouldn’t break into his apartment any… anymore but technically it’s not...” Mingyu trails off, voice muffled by Byeol, and then he jolts abruptly, cut off mid-sentence by another hiccup. “Not if I h’ve the key, right?”

He deflates a little, pulling back so he can hang his head with a sniffle. 

“Guess I gotta give that back, too.”

Mingyu starts to pet Byeol, and despite being so drunk he’s resorted to breaking-and-entering into Wonwoo’s apartment again (just like the beginning of how they met all those months ago), he’s achingly gentle with Byeol. 

Byeol whines, pushing into Mingyu’s hand, as if he can sense the sadness clinging to his skin and his clothes like the liquor.  

“Soojin-noona’s so pretty.” Mingyu mumbles, syllables slurring together, his little lisp even stronger in his drunken state. “Why didn’ you tell me how pretty she was, huh? Maybe I woulda’… been less stupid if I knew what I was up against.”

This is where Wonwoo’s heart starts to clench.

He exhales and it’s like accidentally straining a pulled muscle. One wrong move and it could set off a ripple effect of pain echoing through him.

“Probably wouldn’t have stopped me from liking hyung anyway.” Mingyu sniffles, and from where Wonwoo’s standing, he can see how suspiciously shiny his eyes are.

This feels wrong. Invasive. Wonwoo shouldn’t be listening to this.

“He’s so. So cute. So handsome. ‘N smart. The smartest person in the world, probably. An’ I don’t care what anyone says, his tiny ass is really – cute.” 

He shouldn’t be listening to this when Mingyu isn’t aware he’s standing right here. He knows this, he knows, and yet he can’t seem to bring himself to move, the pull in his chest keeping him from moving even an inch. 

“Kaeun-noona says I need to — to stop being so pathetic. And that there’re plenty a’ fish in the sea. But I don’t want any other fish and Wonwoo-hyung doesn’t even like fish, so.”

Mingyu sounds so small. So small. It’s a little childish with his lips pushed out in a pout, but the sincerity bleeding through his words is so painfully honest. So bluntly earnest.

He cups Byeol’s face in his hands, lowering his own towards Byeol so they’re eye-to-eye. He takes one long, deep breath, like he’s steeling himself.

“I wanted to say… t’ tell you I’m not gonna come by as much anymore.”

Byeol squirms in his hands, but Wonwoo can’t see his face, can’t see what there is in his eyes that makes Mingyu make a soft, wounded noise. 

“Don’t look at me like that, I’m — ’s not like I want to ‘cause I don’t.”

Oh, Wonwoo realises. Oh. He’s saying goodbye. To Byeol. 

Wonwoo’s chest tightens, an unbearable weight anchoring itself around his ribs, crushingly heavy. Mingyu came by, drunk out of his mind just like the first time they almost met, to say goodbye.

“Now that Soojin-noona’s home you don’t really need me anymore. Both of you. And Wonwoo-hyung doesn’t — ” Mingyu’s voice wavers and breaks, the crack in his voice echoing in Wonwoo’s ribcage.

“I’m — I’m so happy for hyung I just —”

And then Mingyu begins to cry.

“I’m tired, Byeol. And sad. ‘M tired and sad and I—” Mingyu chokes, and his face disappears into his hands and it hurts. It hurts to watch him make himself so small, as if it’ll somehow lessen the pain of making himself — his heart — so open and vulnerable and big the rest of the time. He’s so big-hearted, and brave, and bright, it feels wrong, unforgivably wrong to see him like this, to see him collapse in on himself the way stars do in the black of space.

“Being with you ‘nd Wonwoo-hyung makes me really...”

Tear tracks glistening on his cheeks, face flushed red from crying and drinking and pouring his heart out into his hands, Mingyu lets a smile rend across his lips. 

“It made me really happy.”

Mingyu wipes at his face, dragging his sleeves across his eyes and cheeks. Wonwoo should be the one doing that for him. Wonwoo should be the one drying his tears, picking him up off the floor, brushing a kiss against his forehead, holding him telling him you’re wrong, you’re wrong, I do need you you make me happy, too – 

Mingyu picks himself back up, puts himself together, the shaky smile on his lips heartbreakingly tender. He strokes Byeol’s head, fingers lingering in his fur, soft, gentle.

“Don’t miss me too much, okay? Take care of hyung. Don’t fight with him so much. You know, he loves you more th’n anything even ‘f you don’t — even if you can’t tell.”

Mingyu’s face twists and it looks like heartbreak — his, or Wonwoo’s, it’s impossible to distinguish between them anymore.

Wonwoo does need him, he does need him. He needs Kim Mingyu. His big, open heart and endless capacity for kindess, his way of making everything seem brighter, better, warmer just by existing here, at Wonwoo’s side. 

You make me happy, too. 

“I’ll miss you,” Mingyu breathes into the darkness, his forehead tipped against Byeol’s. He’s stroking softly at Byeol’s fur, brushing his hands over his forehead and ears like he isn’t going to be able to for a very, very long time.

Byeol whines, distressed without knowing how or why, reacting instinctively to the aching sadness seeping from Mingyu like a shadow.

“Love you.” Mingyu whispers, and then he brushes a kiss on Byeol’s head. He gives him one last, lingering pet and then turns, hand rising to press against his mouth, chest rising and heaving with an urgency that sounds like he’s choking back tears, as he stumbles out of Wonwoo’s apartment. 

Wonwoo stares at the place on the ground where he’d been curled up on moments earlier.

It’s like he’s looking at negative film, the before and the after of it all with Mingyu carved right out of it. His living room is still lit by the screen of Mingyu’s phone, abandoned in his hurry to leave, but everything is quieter, and hollow. 

Byeol pads over to him and makes a small, miserable noise in the back of his throat.

I know, Wonwoo thinks. I know.

-----

According to official city of Seoul government evidence, the fatality rate of police officers dying in the line of duty has 0.01% every year in the past decade.

Out of approximately 100,000 officers working for the Seoul Metropolitan Police Agency, just 10 died from job-related injuries. Their names are honoured on a plaque in the central headquarters in Migeun-dong, and every year they pay tribute to fallen officers with a memorial service.

In Wonwoo’s six years of working for the SMPA, he’s never been caught in a situation that might warrant worrying about becoming one of those ten dead officers a year until today. 

The case he’d been assigned was for a series of recent disappearances. College students, young women whose parents hadn’t heard back from them for a week or so now. There was no geographical connection and no visible commonality between the cases until Wonwoo identified an unknown number that had been texting back and forth with all of them about a study group. 

A week and a half later he’d found himself tracking a local branch of a human trafficking ring with possible ties to organised transnational crime syndicates.

He’d traced the owner of the unknown number to the warehouse district of Incheon. Records for a packaging facility in Incheon revealed that there had been a recent spike of activity coming and going from Unit 451. 

It should’ve been the perfect operation: him and two other officers with armed back-up following up in the rear staging an ambush.

Except he hadn’t accounted for the chaos and the magnitude of the trafficking ring’s activities and by the time there was time to regret not planning for the unpredictability of criminals with nothing to lose, he was ducking to dodge bullets flying past his head and sinking sharp into steel walls. 

Gunfire always occurs in its own vacuum of time and space. You act and move on pure instinct, adrenaline surging from one moment to the next carrying you through the eye of the maelstrom and out the other side. He takes out one of the traffickers with a bullet in the gut and knicks another in the lower part of his knee before he disappears out of sight. There’s an officer beside him, hiding behind the wall of a container taking aim at the man on the far side of this corridor. He’s about to pull the trigger when Wonwoo yells, the sound catching his attention and sending him to his feet as a bullet slams into the metal where his head had been moments earlier. 

Wonwoo lurches, his hand coiling tight around his revolver and fires back, bullets ricocheting.

It happens too fast for him to react. One second he’s standing, shooting, and the next there’s an explosion of pain in his right shoulder, a numbing fire blooming out from his chest and into the rest of his body. 

He hits the ground hard. There’s no strength or conscious self-presevation instinct alive in his body to steady his fall because all he can think about is how if he dies here, he’s never going to go home again. 

He’s thinking about how if this is it, if this his last moment alive on earth, he’s never going to open his door to see Mingyu running to twirl Byeol in his arms. 

There’s shouting and yelling and more gunfire and then someone is touching his other, unwounded shoulder and screaming words like ‘ambulance’ and ‘shots fired’ that he can’t seem to string together in coherent sentences in his head. 

He thinks he can hear sirens, maybe.

He thinks there’s someone tugging at him, moving him somewhere because there’s air beneath him now amidst all the gaping numbness swallowing him whole.

There’s someone pressing their fingers to his wrist, and they seem to be shaking – or maybe Wonwoo’s shaking? He doesn’t know which way is up or down anymore – trembling against where they’re touching him.

He thinks about how he never got to tell Mingyu that he has cute teeth.

-----

The first thing he notices when he wakes up is the smell of hospital grade disinfectant. His head feels like its full of cotton wool. Every thought takes a minute to think through and connect to the next, like trying to solve a Rubik’s cube with one hand. 

Also, he can’t move his arm.

He blinks, staring hard at his arm as if he can somehow will it to respond. Nothing happens. There’s an itchy sensation in the back of his other hand, he tries to slowly clench it into a fist so he can make the itch go away with sheer force of will. When that doesn’t work, he starts to turn his hand over so he can itch it against the bed.

“Hey.” Says a voice from somewhere near him. Beside him. “Don’t do that. That’s your IV.” 

It’s Mingyu.

A light goes on in his head, and it’s bright and warm and makes him feel like he’s wrapped in fresh blankets still warm from the dryer.

“Mingyu.” The syllables stick together on his tongue, glazed with burned sugar. 

Mingyu looks… different. Tired. Dimmer. He has these indigo smudges beneath his eyes; his hair a ruffled mess and not the deliberate kind; he’s still in his paramedic uniform, the crisp navy fabric creased and rumpled like he’s been sitting in it for a while now. 

“Wonwoo.”

Mingyu’s expression is a watercolour painting, swirls of emotion bleeding into each other, all flowing into the one beautiful, impressionist blur of colour and shape and feeling. There’s an endless ocean of exhaustion, blue-black with midnight, fear hazy with tinges of violet and streaks of a sad, deep blue clinging to the horizon, worry in the orange and gold of dusk, relief in the wash of rose that spills across his face like the light of dawn greeting day.

He’s so beautiful, Wonwoo can’t help himself from fixating on it. He’s always so beautiful. His face is Wonwoo’s favourite face. 

“You’re pretty.” Wonwoo says with the heart-rending awe of a middle schooler trying to talk to his crush in between stuttered heartbeats, the confession at the back of his mind forever tied to his tongue, clumsy and thick with boyish awkwardness. 

Mingyu, very unexpectedly, blushes. His cheeks heat with a soft, sweet shade of caramelised pink, pretty with muffled surprise.

“Thanks.” 

“You’re the prettiest person I’ve ever seen. Did the doctor send you?” 

Mingyu opens and then closes his mouth like he’s searching Wonwoo’s face for the words he’s meant to say here. He settles on something hesitant and unsure and it seems wrong, his whole expression seems wrong when it’s accompanied by the distinct unease tainting his quiet demeanour.

“I came here with you in the ambulance.” 

“Ambulance?” Wonwoo parrots, mildly perplexed.

“Yeah, hyung. Ambulance.” Mingyu’s mouth twists, a grief wrenching through him, tearing across his expression, swift and brutal in its totality. Wonwoo hates it, hates the way it’s keeping the smile that should always be there from its skyline. “You were shot.”

“Bullets?” 

“One. It managed to miss any bones or major arteries but you – ” He cuts himself off, pressing his hand over his mouth as he blinks rapidly, every muscle in him tensing like he’s trying to stop himself, like he’s trying to hold himself together even though he’s teetering at the brink of falling apart.

“Th — there was so much blood. And I know what blood looks like when it’s a fatal wound, if it had — … if it had severed your artery— ”

His voice has been shaking, creaking on rusted, unsteady foundations. And then, at last, it breaks. 

“It looked like you were dead.” 

Mingyu lets out a shuddering gasp, and he’s crying, trembling as he curls his hands to try to keep himself from crumbling. Somewhere in the back of his head, amidst the morphine and anaesthesia seeping into his subconscious, Wonwoo becomes distantly aware that this is the third time he’s made Mingyu cry.

Why does he always seem to do that? 

Mingyu lifts a hand to wipe at his eyes, dragging the back of his hand wretchedly across his face, the gesture so small and childlike it makes Wonwoo want to kick himself for making him look like that. 

Mingyu tilts his face up to look at the ceiling, his cheeks flushed pink and his eyes wet with fresh tears, and seems to force himself to take one, then two deep breaths.

When he looks at Wonwoo again, it’s with so much sadness and loss that Wonwoo almost has to break his gaze.  

“I thought I’d lost you.”

Wonwoo doesn’t know how, exactly, he knows this, but he knows Mingyu isn’t just talking about him being shot.

But I’m here, he’d say, if he could, if he knew how to. I’m right here. You have me. You’ve always had me.

With great effort and concentration on the part of his brain that’s still capable of handling active consciousness, Wonwoo stretches out his unbandaged hand, the one with the IV passing through the center of it.

Mingyu looks at his hand like he doesn’t quite understand what’s happening, like he’s afraid if he moves Wonwoo will disappear like time in a sandglass, like a mirage. Like something too good to be true.

“Mingyu.”

Mingyu stares, and stares, too scared to move. Wonwoo begins to open his mouth to say something, to tell him, to tell him he can’t lose something that he’s always had will always have as long as Mingyu wants him when Mingyu’s pager goes off.

The sharp, shrill sound cuts through the room, severing the moment in half between a before shooting and after missed opportunity and Wonwoo doesn’t get to say anything at all. 

Mingyu stumbles back, clutching at his pager like it’s a lifeline. 

He starts for the door, strides quick and panicked like he wants to get out of this room before he says or does something he can’t take back. At the threshold of the door, he pauses, mid-step, and goes motionless. In Wonwoo’s mind, it looks like he’s fighting every instinct in him not to turn around but maybe that’s just the drugs and the dreaming and the wanting Mingyu to stay that conjures the image so clearly and so sharply before him. 

Mingyu tenses, very briefly, and then he straightens, and walks out the door.

-----

The aftermath of Wonwoo’s shooting turns out to be very dull and anticlimactic, and involves an excessive amount of paperwork.

Apparently, being injured in the line of duty is something of a bureaucratic nightmare. Wonwoo spends a lot of time practicing to sign his name with his left hand, and delights in watching Seungcheol squint at him skeptically when he draws it free-handed in a single unending line of scribble beneath every ‘sign on the dotted line’.

Soojin shows up teary-eyed having rushed to the hospital due to the emergency contact he’d never bothered to change. She spends the first four days sleeping by his side and keeping him company despite Wonwoo’s objections.

Soonyoung, Jihoon and Jun visit him the morning after, bringing with them an absurd amount of flowers and stuffed bears and cards and get well gifts.

Jeonghan checks in on him at least three times a day despite Wonwoo being moved out of the ICU after his second day. He and Joshua conspire together to smuggle him edible non-hospital approved snacks, including Love & Letter’s glorious baked goods. Vernon shows up with a whole cake one day, decorated in psychedelic vaporwave-inspired icing.

The one person he wants to see, the one person whose voice he wants to hear when the pain and boredom and inertia of being stuck in a hospital bed for two weeks straight doesn’t call or text or show up again. Wonwoo’s starting to become convinced that seeing him when he first woke up from his surgery was a hallucination. 

Wonwoo signs himself out of the hospital on his sixteenth day of being stuck in his hospital room with nothing to do but read and game on his Nintendo Switch and catch up on a month’s worth of updates from his favourite gaming channels, and think about Kim Mingyu. Soonyoung and Jihoon end up driving him from the hospital because Soojin is in Ilsan for the weekend for some family thing she couldn’t get out of.

(“I swear to god, Wonwoo, I told them you were in hospital after being shot and they still wouldn’t take no for an answer. What kind of monsters are they?”

“Monsters that love you and miss you and haven’t seen you for nearly a year because you were off pursuing your dreams and far-flung ambitions on the other side of the world. They just want you home, Soo. Before you have to leave again.” 

“Have I ever told you that I hate it when you’re right?” 

“All the time. It’s why you loved me.”

“Ugh, that’s insufferable. I really did.”)

Even though neither Soonyoung nor Jihoon seems to want to admit it when everyone’s collective focus is still on Wonwoo and his recovery process, there’s an easiness to the way they talk, the way they touch, the way they keep sneaking glances at each other when they think Wonwoo isn’t looking, that speaks an untold story.

They’d brought Byeol to visit him in Severance’s garden in his second week of hospitalisation once he’d been deemed stable enough to get up and walk around. He’s not ashamed to admit that he’d teared up when he saw Byeol bouncing up and down, struggling to tear himself from his leash in his eagerness to run to Wonwoo.

It’s good to have Byeol by his side again. It’s good to be home again.

Wonwoo’s getting ready for bed in his own pyjamas after taking a shower in his own bathroom and wearing his own favourite socks when a Kakao message sounds from his kitchen table. His own phone is in his pocket. He furrows his brow, bewildered and curious, as he pads over to the kitchen.

Mingyu’s phone is still sitting there where he’d left it, forgotten in the passing of days and weeks after Mingyu’s drunken farewell to Byeol in his apartment.

Wonwoo swallows, his throat suddenly gone parchment dry as he picks it up. 

The screen illuminates with notifications dating back to a week ago.

minghao
what the FUCK kim mingyu stop being a coward and answer me god fucking dammit
ok im sorry i called you a coward
you're not a coward you're the farthest thing possible from it. you’re a brave, wonderful, kind, compassionate man and i’m fucking worried about you
are you really planning on drinking yourself to death just because he doesn’t love you back
look i know it hurts. i know you love him but just
mingyu please
text me back

fuck

seungkwan
hyung where are you rn???
CALL ME
KIM MINGYU WHERE ARE YOU IM COMING TO PICK YOU UP

Unknown Number
Hi, Mingyu. I’m sorry to message you like this out of nowhere but it’s Kang Soojin.

Wonwoo drops the phone. It shatters on the floor, the screen splintering on impact. 

His first three thoughts, not necessarily in chronological order, vying for the attention he’d torn away from his fine motor control and leading to him dropping the phone were these: 

1. Mingyu hasn’t gotten a new phone since he left his old one here. It’s possible he doesn’t even remember how he lost it, if he remembers that night at all.

2. Mingyu has been drinking. He’s been drinking a lot if the messages from Minghao and Seungkwan, two of his closest friends, are any indication.

3. Mingyu is in love with him.

“Fuck.” He hisses, bending to pick it up to examine the damage. The screen’s gone black, and no amount of jabbing at the buttons makes the phone want to cooperate. 

None of three thoughts that seared through Wonwoo’s brain the moment he dropped Mingyu’s phone are new revelations to him.

He doesn’t know why it’s taken seeing it written on a screen that’s now cracked and shattered beyond repair in his hand to be able to face it. 

Mingyu is in love with him.

Mingyu is —

He’s standing in his doorway, key still in his hand, the other holding a plate of what smells like freshly cooked steak.

“I — ”

“Mingyu — ”

Mingyu’s frozen to the spot, frozen between fight or flight, his eyes round and panicked and Wonwoo’s immediate concern isn’t that he’s going to drop the plate but that he’s going to turn and run and Wonwoo might never have the chance to speak to him like this again.

“Sorry — ” Mingyu fumbles, nearly faltering over his own feet before he catches himself and tightens his grip on the plate, his fingers gone bone-knuckled white. “I — I didn’t know you’d be home.”

On closer inspection, he looks like an absolute mess.

He has soot smudged on the bridge of his nose and the smoke-singed look of someone who’s stepped out of a recent fire. He smells like wildfire. 

And he still had time to cook a meal of premium cut steak for Wonwoo’s dog and feed him when he thought Wonwoo wasn’t home.

“I didn’t — I thought you were still in the hospital, I’m sorry!” Mingyu blurts out before Wonwoo can say anything, the words slamming into each other in their hurry to leave his mouth. He looks like he’s about to work himself up into a marathon sprint, his breath coming in starts and stops. “I haven’t — I’m sorry, hyung, sorry, I should’ve — ”

“Mingyu, it’s alright.” 

Mingyu lets out a deflated breath. Retreats inside himself. 

He pads over quietly to Byeol’s bowl and sets the plate down before moving soundlessly back to the entrance. Byeol, with his uncanny canine sense of the atmosphere, doesn’t move from where he’s sitting at the entrance, right by Mingyu’s side. 

Mingyu stands in his doorway as if this isn’t a place he’s allowed anymore. As if he’s trespassing by being here, a stranger in Wonwoo’s home.

“I’m sorry. I wanted to visit you.”

He doesn’t offer up any explanations for his absence and Wonwoo’s chest aches. His heart is a Gordian knot in his chest.

Mingyu looks small and sad and unsure of what he’s even doing here.

“I wanted to bring you flowers.”

I don’t want flowers. I don’t need flowers. I needed you.

The snarled, tangled knot in his chest feels like a fist tightening, clenching around his heart. This chokehold grip keeping him from speaking. 

“I’m really happy you’re better, hyung.” A wisp of a smile flickers across Mingyu’s face. “Byeol missed you so much.”

“I… it’s good to see you, too, Mingyu.” Wonwoo’s jaw feel likes it going to bend and cave beneath all the pressure he’s putting it under, the weight of everything he’s never said finally coming to bear on his mouth. “There’s actually something I wanted to –”

“Hyung – ” Mingyu cuts in, and then bites down on his lip, his every movement bleeding agitation and fear. “Sorry. Sorry. I just – I need to say this. I had… I was going to come visit you but I didn’t know you’d be out so early. Please, please let me just. I have to say this before I lose the guts to.”

Wonwoo stills, and then he gives Mingyu a small nod.

He watches as Mingyu steels himself, drawing himself up to his full height and then some, straightening his spine and pulling his shoulders back like he’s about to march into a burning building or the scene of a highway accident.

“Wonwoo-hyung. Jeon Wonwoo.” 

Wonwoo loves him just for the way he says his name.

Mingyu sucks in a deep breath, terror and dread fighting to sink its claws into him, a tremble starting in his hands that Wonwoo doesn’t think he even notices, but he forges on nevertheless. He lifts his chin up, locking his eyes on Wonwoo despite every sign and warning from his body screaming that he wants to run.

Wonwoo loves him.

“I’m just. I’m gonna say it. I’m — I am in love with you. I have been for a really long time. Since the first moment we met and — and all the times I.. — fucked up after that. But I — when I saw you that day bleeding out on the ground and I thought I’d lost you, all I could think was how I’d never have the chance to tell you that I love you.”

How does he do that? How does he open himself up like that, bleeding and raw and vulnerable and not be terrified that Wonwoo will hurt him because of it? 

It’s breathtaking, how openly he loves. How much Wonwoo loves him.

If this was rehearsed, if Mingyu has practiced this over and over, and memorised all the important lines and cues by heart before he’d meant to do this right here right now, it’s all coming out in a torrent of words and feelings and bare defencelessness. 

“I know this will probably ruin things between us and that’s why I put off telling you for so long, I didn’t want to… I didn’t want to make things awkward for you. Or weird. But I am—I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to screw things up like this, I really — …I love being your friend. So much. And I love hanging out with Byeol so just. Just give me a while to get over this, ‘cause I can. I promise. We can pretend this never happened.” 

Mingyu’s face visibly cracks, incapable of hiding how the thought of pretending that hurts him.

“I just. I thought I owed it to the both of us to be honest with myself. And with – with you.”

Mingyu’s chest is rising and falling like he’s been running, his breath coming in shaky exhales. He glances away from Wonwoo like he can’t bear to keep his eyes on him, afraid of what he’ll see staring back at him, fearful of the repercussions of what he’s said. And the idea that he’s hurting, he’s already hurting and has been hurting for so long because he loves Wonwoo makes Wonwoo want to build a time machine just to take them back so he can tell him he doesn’t have to be this brave.

“Mingyu, look at me.” Wonwoo says, a command cutting through the softness of his voice.

“Look at me.”

“No.” Mingyu’s lip trembles, but there’s no other indication of him giving in. 

“Why not?” 

“Because!” Mingyu gasps, sounding winded. “I know what you’re gonna say and I need. — I need a moment.”

God, it sounds like Mingyu’s begging him, his voice broken and pleading, stripped bare to its smallest element.

“Please.”

Wonwoo breathes in slowly through his mouth, resisting the urge to reach out for Mingyu. To touch him. To quiet the mind that he knows is deafeningly loud right now with worst case scenarios and unfounded miseries. 

“What exactly do you think I’m going to say?”

“That you’re sorry, too, that we can’t be friends anymore because it’s weird and a little fucked-up that I’m in love with you and have been using your dog partly as an excuse to be with you all the time. I’m sorry about that. I’m sorry I had to go and ruin a good thing by – by falling in love.” 

“Mingyu..”

“And I still wanna be your dongsaeng, I don’t want things to change, I’m sorry. I can — I can still fix this, I’ll get over it, you don’t have to — ”

Mingyu’s working himself up into an incoherent ramble again, his heart outracing his mouth, his mind. His heart forever ten, twenty steps ahead of him.

“I know.”

“We can pretend this never happened, and I’ll stop, I swear. Just. Please still let me see Byeol — ”

“Mingyu.” Mingyu stops, looking ashamed of himself and wretched and miserable. Wonwoo should never have made him wait like this.

“I’ve known for a long time that you have feelings for me.”

Mingyu’s face crumbles, the tears beginning to break over the dam.

“I’ve known. I knew.” The past tense sounds like a confession of guilt. “And I should’ve… it’s not all your fault, I could’ve said something.” 

Mingyu makes a quiet, choking sound. “To let me down easy? I must’ve looked so—so stupid and needy and — ” 

“Mingyu, please.” Wonwoo says, softly. “You said your part. Now, let me.” 

Mingyu closes his mouth, curling tight on himself, bracing for what Wonwoo’s about to say. The explanation for all this heartbreak and sorrow about to be laid before him, finally. 

Wonwoo owes him that much. He owes him everything. 

“I knew. And that terrified me. Because I know you, but also because it terrified me how much power I had to hurt you without even realising it.”

And all Wonwoo’s done since then is hurt him. Wonwoo was right, and being right has never felt worse. It’s never felt more like a curse, a burden to bear that he never asked for. Because loving someone is like giving them a knife to hold to your heart — your throat — and having to trust them every day not to do it. 

Mingyu placed his knife in Wonwoo’s hand and Wonwoo’s been making him bleed a little every day ever since. 

“I ignored your feelings for so long because I thought that if I did that, they’d go away. And that wasn’t fair to you. I thought I knew your own heart better than you did. I thought that eventually, you’d find out the truth and you’d see there isn’t really that much about me to love.” 

“Wonwoo.” Mingyu looks stricken.

“I have… I’ve had a hard time coming to terms with the fact that you’re not going anywhere any time soon. You’re my friend, my next door neighbour, Byeol’s favourite person in the world, and I care about you so much. And no matter how hard I try to outrun the truth, I can’t stop thinking about you. I think about what you’re doing or thinking when you’re not around. I think about what makes you laugh. I keep all my funniest stories for you. My house is just… a place that I sleep in sometimes without you in it. I can’t imagine what my life would be like without you anymore, that’s how… that’s how important you are to me.”

Do you get it? He wonders, gazing at Mingyu, peering into the depths of him through those wide, sad eyes. Do you get it now? How much you mean to me? How much I need you, always, to be in my life?

And why I couldn’t risk it?

“So I convinced myself that ignoring your feelings would keep us both safe, that it would keep me from ever hurting you or ever being hurt. But that was selfish, and cowardly. And the truth is I want you in my life for as long as possible. I want you in every way, in all the ways. Because I love you. I love you.”

This is Wonwoo holding his heart in his hand out to him, asking him to take it. Trusting him to protect it. To keep it safe.

Wonwoo moves, he moves first and they draw towards each other like they’re being eclipsed by the pull of the earth aligning between them.

“And I guess it took me being shot to realise that life is precious, and short, and I don’t want to waste another second being in my head, worrying about what ifs and trying not to hurt you more by hurting you less for now when I could be with you, loving you and making you as happy as you make me happy.”

Mingyu lets out a shaky breath, his cheeks wet and shining with tears.

“Wonwoo.”

Wonwoo takes Mingyu’s face in his one good hand, gently, like moonlight kissing the surface of the ocean beneath a full moon. He thumbs the tear trickling down Mingyu’s cheek away, there and gone again like the blink of a shooting star.

“You make me so happy.” 

Mingyu melts into a smile, and its blinding, brilliant.

“I love you,” Wonwoo breathes, the words filling his lungs and the air around them with the dizzying, wondrous freedom of truth.

“Wonwoo,” Mingyu says, laughter in his voice glistening amidst the tears, “I love you, too. I love you, now please can I kiss you?”

Wonwoo doesn’t need to answer. He curls his hand around Mingyu’s face and kisses him, slow and warm and like the first dawn of the sun on the entirety of the world. It’s the kiss that’s taken a thousand days, has taken what feels like an eternity, a whole world of impossibilities suddenly made new and wondrous and within their grasp. They kiss like they’ve been practicing for it with every other part of their body until now, with the barest touches of skin, their fingers grazing, their hands locked together.

The kisses melt sweet and achingly soft, their lips brushing like they’ve been slow-dancing all along and this is the only way they know how.

The sweetness lasts, for a while it does, and then Mingyu slides his fingers into Wonwoo’s hair and the graze of his tongue across Wonwoo’s lips sends a spark of hunger through him, a flash of starlight blazing in the night sky. It sets him alight, growing and spreading through him, burning through every repressed thought and dream and stray observation. When Mingyu breaks for air, Wonwoo kisses him again with barely a heartbeat in between. He can’t help himself. He wants to taste the breathlessness on his lips, the want, the longing. He wants every part of Mingyu, wants him like sunflowers need sunlight. 

Mingyu’s entire body radiates heat, his chest warm and broad where it’s pressed against Wonwoo’s. He’s so solid against him, but soft where it matters with his gentleness and the way he kisses Wonwoo like he’s basking in him, drinking him in to savour. To last. There’s a part of Mingyu that touches him so carefully, like he’s afraid to be careless after so long spent going without this. Like he’s trying to convince himself this is real, and if it’s not, he’s treasuring each second as it comes. Wonwoo has to lean in and up to kiss those thoughts quiet because they’re so loud, and right now, the only thing he wants Mingyu to be thinking about is him and this kiss and how long they’ve waited to be able to do this.

Wonwoo kisses him, open-mouthed, kisses him like he’s trying to put everything he still has yet to find words for into the feeling of how wonderfully they fit together. Mingyu seems to get the idea. He has his huge hands cupping his face like he’s the most precious thing he’s ever held in them, and it’s so, so good. It’s perfect.

Which, of course, is when the universe decides they’ve had enough of that.

Mingyu nips at Wonwoo’s lip and Wonwoo breathes him in, pressing blindly into Mingyu without thinking of his injured arm in its cast. He lets out a low, agonised hiss against Mingyu’s mouth as the pain lances through his shoulder and chest. Mingyu stops immediately, eyes flying wide open in momentary panic before he realises what’s causing Wonwoo to hiss like that.

“Hyung, your shoulder.” 

“It’s a flesh wound, just kiss me.” 

“Hyung,” Mingyu gasps, voice airy from lack of steady breathing and the laugh hovering on his lips. “You were shot. Let’s just slow down a little.”

“No, let’s not do that. Do you know how long I’ve waited to kiss you?”

Mingyu giggles, eyes crinkling as his face lights up, soft and delighted. “Not as long as I’ve waited to kiss you.”

Wonwoo grunts, waving his other hand in the air. “I’ve still got one good hand.”

“That’s nice, hyung.” Mingyu says, indulgently. 

“No, I’m serious.” Wonwoo furrows his brow, unaccustomed to not getting what he wants from Mingyu, especially when their interests are so perfectly aligned as they are in this moment. “Look, I can wiggle my fingers and everything.”

He wiggles them, just to prove his point.

“Cute.” Mingyu concedes, he brushes his thumbs across Wonwoo’s cheekbones. “But still not happening.”

Wonwoo makes an affronted sound, torn between pulling out of his grip and lingering there for a minute longer to soak in it like the sun on a cloudless day. If he leans in to Mingyu’s touch, just a little. Well. Who could blame him?

“I hate this,” Wonwoo mutters. “We finally get our shit together and I have a hole in my shoulder. What the fuck.”

Mingyu leans in, and for a moment Wonwoo thinks he’s going to continue the kissing again, possibly as a way to effectively stall his complaints, but instead he simply kisses the tip of his nose. It’s so soft, and sweet, and disgustingly cute.

“Don’t pout.” Mingyu kisses him on the bridge of his nose. And then his forehead. Wonwoo wants to die, or melt into a puddle on the ground. “As much as I’m enjoying this side of you, it would be irresponsible of me as a professional medical officer.”

“Well, you can forget about ever using handcuffs or sexy cop uniforms in the bedroom, then.”

Mingyu quirks an eyebrow at him. Their faces are still so close together that he can feel Mingyu’s breath brushing his mouth and it’s making him weak. It’s making his mind and resolve weak.

“Was that ever on the table?”

Wonwoo tilts his chin up defiantly. “You’ll never know.”

Byeol barks, choosing to interrupt their moment by snuffling at their heels until Mingyu laughs, bright and joyful. He steps away from Wonwoo to swing Byeol up into his arms and shower him with forehead kisses, too. 

“God, I missed you.” Mingyu coos, hugging Byeol like he’s trying to make up for weeks and weeks of missed head pets and scratches. “Maybe even more than Wonwoo-hyung.” 

“Hey,” Wonwoo says, an indignant look flashing playfully across his face.

“Just kidding.” Mingyu replies, catching Wonwoo’s eye, his expression going warm and googly-eyed in a way that Wonwoo’s always consciously and subconsciously associated with puppies and Byeol. “I always miss you the most.” 

Wonwoo doesn’t know what to say to that, so he blushes and has to look away before he does something stupid like ask Mingyu to move in with him and never leave him again. 

Later, when they’re lying in bed, Byeol curled in a ball by their feet on top of the covers, and Wonwoo is gazing at Mingyu, looking at this big, tall, handsome, attractive man he has in his bed and can’t do anything with but kiss, it occurs to him that he’s going to be stuck in this exact position for another two months or so at least.

He doesn’t know if this is hell, or heaven, but god, if it’s either one at least he’s with Kim Mingyu.

“You’re giving me that look again,” Mingyu murmurs.

“Hm?” Wonwoo hums, blinking at Mingyu, doe-eyed, like he hasn’t been plotting wicked and nefarious ways to seduce Mingyu into wilful submission.

“The look where you’re trying to convince me to do…” Mingyu pauses, making this cute, bashful noise. “…Naked stuff with you when you’re still recovering from a bullet wound.”

“Naked stuff?” Wonwoo teases. “If you can’t call it fucking maybe I don’t want to do that with you.”

“Weird flex, but okay. I was going to say make beautiful, romantic love to you.”

And what, exactly, is a normal, human reaction when someone as beautiful and big-hearted as Mingyu is says that to you?

Because Wonwoo does the exact opposite of that and promptly chokes on his own breath.

“Kim Mingyu,” he wheezes. “Don’t do that.” 

“Do what?” Mingyu peers at him, and it’s his turn now to gaze innocently at Wonwoo. “Tell you things like I love you and I want to make you feel happier than you’ve ever been, and blow your mind with the best sex you’ve ever had in your life, but only once you’re completely healed?”

Wonwoo feels his heart skip, stutter, and then jump about a foot into the air out of his chest. 

He exhales, slowly, counting down from seven in case he really is in danger of spontaneously losing his mind.

“How am I supposed to not want you even more when you say things like that?” 

Mingyu smiles, and holds out his hand, laid palm up between them. He wiggles his fingers. Wonwoo sighs, and laces his fingers through Mingyu’s, warmth igniting where their hands touch like miniature sparks flying and catching light.

“Because.” Mingyu says, thumb stroking the back of Wonwoo’s hand, the gesture sweet and sure and so full of love. 

“We have all the time in the world.”

And that, Wonwoo supposes, he can’t argue with. He doesn’t even try.

They fall asleep as the moon rises high and full over the city, harlequin stars blooming in the dark as the night sky comes to life.