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jooheon wakes up slowly with minhyuk’s weight on his back and breath on his neck. it’s a dream until he opens his eyes and sees the camera pointing at them.
*
minhyuk kisses his hand and he loses his breath for a second, forever caught on camera. he does it back and watches minhyuk’s face, wonders if his mask will break the same way jooheon’s did, but their hands fall apart and minhyuk walks away and there’s no indication that anything even happened.
minhyuk calls him pretty, and hugs him even when he protests, and says he loves jooheon most.
minhyuk holds his hand, brushes his hair, calls him “honey”, sits on his lap, kisses his fucking snacks for him-
he gets so close to jooheon, sometimes, that it feels like suffocating. and jooheon loves it, loves to be hugged by minhyuk, but it’s bittersweet when he knows it’s being recorded on at least three different screens.
minhyuk hugs him when they’re at home, too - the same way he hugs all of them - except they’re never home for long, and when they are they’re tired, and when he’s tired jooheon shies away from minhyuk even though it feels awful to. when he’s tired, he feels weak, and he knows he’d let minhyuk do whatever he wanted.
jooheon could never handle doing anything as dramatic as ignoring minhyuk entirely. it would be too obvious, minhyuk would be upset and, really, jooheon doesn’t want to avoid him. even with the confusion, he loves minhyuk, loves him as a part of the team, loves being around him.
he loves minhyuk’s smile, and laugh, and his hair when he wakes up in the morning and he hasn’t washed it yet.
he loves when they have a day off and minhyuk doesn’t shower until late and he stays looking dishevelled and sleepy and barefaced for hours on end. he loves when, on days like that, minhyuk sneaks into jooheon’s studio and curls up on the spare chair (even though he’s far too tall to fit the way he seems to be trying to) and leans his head on jooheon’s shoulder.
*
calling yourself the “search king” means very little when google will present you with whatever you want in under a second. jooheon doesn’t like to think about how many times he’s opened up a private window on his phone, late at night tucked under his duvet, and searched for combinations of his and minhyuk’s names.
there are lots of gifs. the jerky cut from the end to the beginning of them when you watch them for the second third fourth (fifth) time feels just like the breath pulled from jooheon’s lungs whenever minhyuk does these things. calling them “these things” even feels like too much, because they aren’t anything. they’re just minhyuk. and it’s just jooheon who reads into them like this.
*
“it’s fanservice,” is the excuse jooheon has used so many times now that the word has lost all meaning.
minhyuk leans in, leaving almost no space between their faces, the cameras are still rolling, jooheon doesn’t pull back, just stares, and he knows exactly what it is that he wants and he knows that minhyuk doesn’t want it and minhyuk pulls away to sit back down before jooheon can make the worst mistake of his life.
only a few minutes later, minhyuk hugs jooheon tight and kisses him on the cheek. jooheon doesn’t stop thinking about it. he blushes later when he hears the sound that was edited over the footage, because it didn’t make a sound. it was a quiet kiss. it wasn’t even recorded properly, not really, because minhyuk kissed him on the side facing away. if he didn’t know better jooheon might have convinced himself that it meant something.
*
“i... like him,” jooheon mumbles, sat on the floor in a too-big jacket, and he thinks about how absolutely smitten he might sound.
and then minhyuk grins at him; jooheon forgets to regret it.
changkyun shoots with minhyuk after that, leaning on each other with the sun streaming across their faces. minhyuk is wearing a blue turtleneck, and his hair is black for this promotion, and jooheon wants so badly.
*
his studio is the only place he has that’s his. the dorm is theirs, the bedroom is shared, the van never holds less than two of them and their manager. jooheon’s studio room, as cramped and bland as it feels after days spent in there, is the one place he can go and stay alone.
except the door doesn’t lock, and minhyuk comes in as he usually does, and the clock says it’s well past midnight.
“hyung, go to bed,” jooheon says as soon as minhyuk sits down, not looking at him at all because he knows he’ll look for too long.
“i was,” minhyuk says, and jooheon can tell from his voice that he had been asleep for at least a few hours. “but my jooheonie is still working.”
minhyuk rolls his chair closer as he whines the last part in a fake-cute voice, reaching out and hugging one of jooheon’s arms to his chest.
usually jooheon would pull his arm away and insist that he needs to do just a little bit more before giving up, but he doesn’t. he stays silent and lets minhyuk rest his head on jooheon’s shoulder the way jooheon secretly likes.
“why, honey?” minhyuk asks, his breath warm on jooheon’s collarbone.
jooheon doesn’t tell him it’s because he hasn’t been able to work recently, because he hasn’t been able to stop thinking about the looks minhyuk gives him, because all of the tracks he has don’t sound quite right, because he wants nothing more than to go back home and get into minhyuk’s bunk with him.
he tells him, “i don’t know, hyung.”
“well, then come to bed.”
choking a little on the domesticity of it all (they live together, minhyuk says these things, it doesn’t mean what jooheon wishes it did-), jooheon stammers, “i- i can’t sleep at the moment, so-”
the hugs minhyuk gives are so nice that it’s difficult to pretend they’re irritating. jooheon wonders if maybe this is a hidden camera, that minhyuk is messing with him so that everyone can see how useless jooheon is around him and laugh about it and and and.
he relaxes into minhyuk’s hold, though, because minhyuk wouldn’t do that to him. not when he’s so tired and barefaced and minhyuk is the same.
“we can share tonight,” minhyuk says, still speaking into jooheon’s neck, still wrapped around him as best he can be when they’re in separate chairs.
jooheon protests until they’re outside their bedroom. his hand is held in minhyuk’s, and they don’t need to wash up because they have no makeup on, and jooheon is finding it hard to keep coming up with excuses when minhyuk is being like this, so he lets it happen.
they’ve all shared beds before, and they still share showers when the hot water is running out and they’re late for their schedule. this shouldn’t be so different, yet it is.
he’s taller, but minhyuk is curled up so that his head is tucked under jooheon’s chin. neither of them are wearing trousers, and minhyuk has tangled their legs together in a way that makes jooheon’s breath stutter. he’d worry that it would get uncomfortable if minhyuk hadn’t just said that he never wanted to move again. jooheon silently agrees, and allows himself to run his fingers through minhyuk’s hair like minhyuk often does to him.
somehow curling even closer into him, minhyuk hums, and says, “i like you.”
jooheon has to wonder again if this is a hidden camera.
“me, too,” he whispers back, the same way he always does, and minhyuk smiles.