Work Text:
Me
What would you do if I turned into a muffin?
My 가수 (11:54)
I don’t know
What situation would it be
Like are you still sentient?
Is it your consciousness inside the physical vehicle of a muffin?
If you were still sentient I’d carry you around
Maybe try and find a way to turn you back
But what if you went moldy. I assume you’d still be bound by the physical constraints of an actual muffin…
Oh no that's making me sad
I hope you aren’t sentient, if you turn into a muffin
But if you lose your sentience, does that mean you die?
I don’t think I’d eat you, either way
My 가수 (11:57)
Wait, would you want me to eat you?
Are those your wishes, for if you turn into a muffin?
My 가수 (00:05)
It has just occurred to me this is probably the set-up to a joke.
Sorry.
Do you still want to tell it?
Hyunjin stared at his phone, unblinking, unseeing. There were emotions, certainly. Lots of them. Lots and lots of emotions, swirling and building and no way to get them out, except:
“Oh dear.”
He sat up abruptly, and swung his feet off the bed. He caught half a glance of himself in the mirror and he looked… unfortunate. Hair a mess. Pyjama pants, a t-shirt with a toothpaste stain, a cardigan hanging off one shoulder. He walked, entranced and uncaring out the door of his bedroom and out into the apartment and towards the front door.
“Where are you going? It's late.”
Hyunjin ignored Changbin’s voice, throwing his socked feet into a pair of weather inappropriate flip-flops and grabbing someone’s jacket from the coat rack.
“Wait, Hyunjin, you- you’re in your pyjamas! Hey! That’s my coat!”
Ah, so it was. Explained why it was so short. Never mind.
"Yah, Hyunjinnie, don't- hey! You shit, get back here!"
Changbin jogged out along the hallway behind him and caught his arm, as the door opened, but he shook him off.
"Sorry, I have to go and bite Seungmin."
"You what? Eh? Yah, Hwang Hyunjin! You'll catch cold!"
Changbin's cries died as he kept walking along the corridor, to the lift and down, out into the street.
The other building wasn't far. Midwinter meant his feet were frozen and ears unfeeling by the time he got there all the same.
His pace never slowed, the single minded determination of a man finally cracked powered him forward through the slush, through the sudden assault of the heating in the lobby, past the bewildered looking night- doorman and up the stairs to the second dorm.
It took two attempts to get the code right with frozen fingertips- Changbin's coat, too short on the arms, had provided no refuge for his hands from the biting winter air.
He strode in, kicking off the useless shoes and squelching his wet socks over the hardwood, past the first door (Jeongin), through the kitchen, past the door with the gaming noises (Felix) and on to the furthest.
There.
Inside, Seungmin startled when the door pushed open. He blinked at the disturbance in his pyjamas and his hoodie and his glasses, and the sleeves fell over his hands as he stood and there was no mercy, there was no respite, and Hyunjin couldn't even pause.
He rushed him, pushing him back on the bed with a garbled, strangled noise that barely qualified as speech.
It didn't matter. He wasn't human. He was a swirling pulsing ball of rage and the only way to dispel it was to grab an arm, shove his face in it and bite.
"OW! HYUNJIN! WHAT THE FUCK?"
Seungmin struggled, pushed him off and stared incredulously, but that was even worse, the wide eyes behind round glasses. He dropped his whole weight on top of him, pressing him down into the mattress and squashing his face in his hands.
"You."
He panted, the walk and the adrenaline and the fight finally catching up, and Seungmin wriggled in place staring at him as though he had taken leave of his senses. Maybe he had.
"Are your trousers wet? Wait, are you in pyjamas? Have you lost your mind?"
"Yes."
In his weakened state Seungmin managed to push him off and pin him down, ripping the cold hands from his cheeks and sitting squarely on Hyunjin’s stomach.
“You are going to explain,” he said firmly, holding tight onto Hyunjin’s wrists. His glasses had slipped down his nose, and he actually used the knuckle of one of Hyunjin’s hands to push them back up again. He was going to expire.
“I just- you’re- you’re just so cute!” Hyunjin wailed, thrashing his head back against the mattress.
It was true. Seungmin was lots of things - he was clever, mature, sensible, talented, silly, kind, stubborn, sexy, breathtaking, witty, annoying, cutting. He contained multitudes. But most of all he was heart-stoppingly, overwhelmingly adorable and it drove Hyunjin completely insane.
“I’m cute?” Seungmin choked out incredulously. “That’s what this is about? You walked here in your pyjamas at half past midnight to tell me I’m cute? You haven’t even seen me! We weren’t even in the-”
He cut off and sighed, fixing Hyunjin with a look that sent a shiver up his spine.
“Hwang Hyunjin. Is this about the fucking muffin thing?”
Hyunjin was pinned under his gaze, mouth working without words, when the sound of someone clearing their throat came from the doorway.
“He’s alive, hyung,” Jisung was saying icily into a phone. “For now.”
His shirt was on inside out, seams to the outside, label at the front of his neck. At least he had bothered with a shirt- Minho hadn’t, leaned against the doorjamb wearing nothing but a loose pair of yoga pants and a terrifyingly blank expression. There was a hickey darkening at the base of his throat.
Jisung hung up the phone and pointed it at Hyunjin, glaring.
“You’ve got fucking problems, man,” he said, before storming away from the door.
To an outsider, the gaze Minho levelled at Hyunjin might look expressionless, disinterested, free of any strong emotion. To those who knew him well it was a sign you should probably start running.
“Changbin was worried about you running off with no shoes in the middle of winter. So he called,” Minho told them, with no intonation whatsoever. “He changed his ringtone on my phone to annoy me. Do you have any idea how horrible it is to hear Changbin’s aegyo just as someone puts their finger in your ass?”
He shifted his weight and Hyunjin flinched, certain of his own imminent doom. But it seemed, for now, that getting back to what had been interrupted was more important for the older man.
“Count your heartbeats, Hwang. They’re numbered.”
It wasn’t until his footsteps had faded and a door slammed on the other side of the dorm that Hyunjin dared breathe again. He sunk into the mattress as he exhaled, and Seungmin dropped his arms so that his captured hands lay on his lap instead of suspended in the air.
“Minnie?” he whined. “You’ll protect me, won’t you?”
“Not a cat’s chance in hell.”
Seungmin let go of his hands, and the crazy part of Hyunjin’s brain must have been entirely in control that night because he found himself missing the tight warm press around his wrist. And then he climbed off him and walked to shut the open door and fetch a towel from the hook on the inside, and Hyunjin’s tummy felt cold where he had been sat. Mind you, a lot of him felt cold. There was an annoying noise which it took a while to realise was his own teeth chattering.
“Legs up,” Seungmin instructed, taking one of his feet and pulling the sodden sock off it, before repeating the motion with the other. “The sooner you’re out of your wet clothes, the sooner you’ll be warm again. You’re an absolute liability, how have we managed to keep you alive this long? Now legs up!”
Hyunjin obeyed the repeated order, and Seungmin took hold of his pyjama bottoms and pulled. It took a bit of yanking, and a smack to Hyunjin’s thigh to get him to lift his hips, but soon they were off and in the hamper with the socks, so Seungmin picked up the towel and started drying one of his feet.
“OW!”
The rough flannelling felt like knives on his cold-sensitive skin, and he noticed most of his legs felt uncomfortable and prickly.
“It’s your own fault,” Seungmin scolded, rubbing vigorously at his left calf. “I mean really, who the fuck walks through snow in socks, at midnight, just to tell someone they’re cute. You could’ve texted me. We were already communicating.”
“I needed to bite you.”
It was difficult to explain the frustration, the need to grab and squeeze every time Seungmin did something particularly endearing. It was like the red mist people talk about, except he wasn’t angry, not really, it’s just there was no outlet. Not an appropriate one.
“I get… I don’t know. You drive me crazy. I kind of want to eat you, not like actually but, spiritually. I think.”
There had been a blush staining Seungmin’s cheeks for a while, and Hyunjin wasn’t sure if it was due to his own admission or leftover from the unwanted details of their friends’ sex life. He must have been satisfied with the dryness of his legs, because he threw the towel into the laundry basket and rummaged around in his draws for a pair of long thick socks.
“Here,” he said, throwing them at Hyunjin who, with difficulty, moved to sit up and pull them on. As an apparent afterthought, he pulled the hoodie over his head and threw that at Hyunjin as well. It was deliciously soft, and warmed through with his body heat when Hyunjin put it on. The idea of going back out into the winter night made him want to cry.
“Can I stay here?” He asked, and if he was pouting a little, that was nobody else’s business.
Seungmin rolled his eyes.
“No, Hyunjin, I’m going to make you walk back through the snow so you actually catch your death. Of course you can. Get off the covers. Have you brushed your teeth?”
He nodded around a yawn as Seungmin fussed with the blankets, climbing into bed and picking up his previously discarded phone from the side table. As soon as he was lying down Hyunjin curled himself around him, rolling half on top of the other boy with an arm slung over his stomach and face tucked into his chest, wriggling to get one leg under his so he could clamp his thigh between his own.
“Are you done?” Seungmin sighed, sounding annoyed, but only lowered his arm when Hyunjin nodded against his chest.
It was quiet and peaceful, the kind of cosy that lulled you into sleep before you even realised your eyes were fully closed. Hyunjin drifted on the edge of sleep, nose pressed into the soft cotton of Seungmin’s t-shirt as the other scrolled through something on his phone, brightness dimmed into a soft edge of light that comforted rather than disturbed on the occasion his eyes blinked open again. After a little while, Seungmin clicked his tongue in the way that meant he was about to talk, and you were supposed to listen.
“It’s kind of rude to bite people, you know,” he said softly, any censure betrayed by the way his hand stroked gently through the hair at Hyunjin’s temples.
“You can bite me back if you want,” Hyunjin mumbled, sleepy and loose tongued.
If he hadn’t been pressed against Seungmin’s chest, he probably wouldn’t have noticed the tiny hitch in his breath at that. But he did, and something about it pulled him back from the brink of sleep more firmly. Slowly, Seungmin extracted himself, lowering Hyunjin fully onto the bed and leaning over him, noses almost touching.
“Can I?”
Hyunjin blinked up at him, but nodded. Why would he offer if not?
Seungmin breathed in again, and in the dim, his eyes shone round and dark. He leaned down slowly, into Hyunjin’s neck, and it was like instinct for him to tip his head back and offer it up. He closed his teeth round the flesh so lightly at first, and then the pressure increased gradually until it stung, until Hyunjin could feel the sharp brush of his braces, until he gasped with it. All too soon he pulled away to hover over his face again, and Hyunjin forced open the eyes he hadn’t realised he had closed.
“Oh,” he breathed. “That makes sense.”
Abstract shuddered into concrete, the final part of the jigsaw of their relationship clicking into place. It took a little effort to retrieve his arm from under the weight of the duvet and Seungmin atop it, but he managed and fit it along Seungmin’s jaw to drag him down.
The kiss was firm, and Hyunjin swore he could feel Seungmin smiling through it, but that was forgotten as his mouth moved, coaxing him along with him. He dragged his other hand out and up under Seungmin’s t-shirt, up the smooth skin of his back and felt the shiver it produced.
“You drive me crazy,” he whispered, words lost in the press of their mouths together, in Seungmin’s tongue brushing at his lip.
He pulled back, lips starting to shine, and sighed at him.
“You really are an idiot, you know,” he said flatly, but he must have had a thing for those, because it didn’t stop him leaning back down to kiss Hyunjin even stupider.
---
The linoleum in the kitchen chilled the soles of Seungmin’s feet as he wandered in, Hyunjin still sleeping in his bed. There were pastries in the top cupboard, and he opened it quietly to pull one out, but cursed his luck as the fridge shut and Minho appeared from behind the door. He was shirtless, half a piece of toast gripped in his teeth, and although there weren’t actually that many marks on him he still gave the distinct impression of someone who had been mauled. Seungmin knew from unwanted experience that Jisung probably looked worse.
He blinked impassively at Seungmin, and by some feat of magic pulled the remainder of his toast into his mouth without using his hands. Neither spoke while he chewed, gathering another plate of toast and two mugs to balance in his hands.
“So,” Minho said, his breakfast finally swallowed. “Did you fuck him?”
“Um, no?”
“Hmm.”
The older boy nodded thoughtfully, and tipped his head to the side for a little.
“OK then. I’ll let him live until you do. Don’t say I never give you anything.”
Seungmin leaned back against the counter and considered- he was kind of touched, to be honest. And then he jumped when he noticed Jeongin standing by the couch, looking with distaste between himself and Minho’s retreating figure.
“Fuck this shit,” the youngest declared, snatching the uneaten pastry from Seungmin’s hand. “I’m going back to bed.”