Chapter Text
Keeping careful track of time has always been important to Yuto. He finds comfort in progression, collects anniversaries like his mental calendar is a bingo card. His mind is filled with Important Dates, while his camera roll, video folder, and the top drawer in his room are filled with records of Important Moments from those Important Dates. He holds on to ticket stubs, boarding passes, copies of schedules and itineraries—all documents in his personal archives, all precisely labeled with dates and times.
For Yuto, it’s fitting that ONF’s official lightstick features a clock. Or sort of fitting. If he’s being honest, he’s never been able to keep up with the concepts behind his own group’s music videos, all of that mind-bending nonsense about alternate dimensions and time travel and spin-off universes. It’s not that he’s stupid; the fans often refer to him as the “brains” of ONF, even though his formal education ended after middle school (...but that might say more about his hyungs than it does about him). It’s just that he would much rather conceptualize time in most straightforward way. Literally. He’s a big fan of linearity. And he likes when things have a clear starting point and a clear end.
Like military enlistment periods, for example.
December 21, 2021 is an officially designated Important Date in Yuto’s mental calendar, for two reasons. First, it’s the day Park Minkyun began his military service as the first member of ONF to enlist. That’s the obvious reason. Second, looking back on it now…it might have been another starting point. December 21, 2021 might be the day the shift began to be almost noticeable.
On that day, Yuto had felt the first stirrings of something, watching Minkyun walk off towards the training center—watching him slowly but surely metamorphose into a distant shape beyond his grasp. A premonition of loneliness, he’d thought at the time. He hadn’t been wrong about that. The loneliness would come with time, sometimes dripping into his heart like water from a leaky ceiling pipe, sometimes overwhelming him like a roaring flood.
But the thing is, he hadn’t been completely right, either.
—
“Yuto! What’s new?”
Minkyun’s bright voice flows out of the phone’s speaker, bringing an easy smile to Yuto’s lips. The volume’s at max and Yuto doesn’t bother to turn it down, the way he might have done before. Before the hyungs left, before the dorm emptied out, before the loneliness. He likes the way Minkyun’s voice fills the room from floor to ceiling, corner to corner. It makes him feel like Minkyun’s here with him, just for a few minutes.
“Nothing much,” Yuto answers. “Still kind of readjusting.” He’d returned from his first trip home to Osaka a week ago, but he’d spent that week in quaratine. “I said arigato to the food delivery guy today.”
Minkyun chuckles. “Was he at least delivering Japanese food?”
“No.”
“Let me guess…You ordered some bread from Paris Baguette.”
Yuto refuses to either confirm or deny it, which pretty much just confirms it.
“There’s one on almost every street! If you’re going to pay for delivery, you should at least get some fancy bread from some fancy bakery.”
“I like Paris Baguette,” Yuto mumbles.
“When I come to visit on vacation, we’ll go out to a real bakery together. It’s killing me knowing there’s nobody there to treat you to the good stuff.”
“I have friends, you know. And other hyungs and noonas who’ve been looking after—”
Minkyun cuts him off with a theatrical groan. “Stop, please, I can’t bear to hear about anyone else spoiling my Yuto.”
“But you just said it was killing you knowing there was nobody—!”
“It’s so cruel of you to make me jealous when I’m in the military and can’t do anything about it,” Minkyun continues in an exaggerated whine. “Tell me, how can you be like this? I call you to have my spirits lifted after a hard day of service, and you’re telling me about all these special friends of yours taking you out on cafe dates—”
“Nobody mentioned cafe dates!” Yuto insists between bursts of laughter.
Minkyun lets out a low crackle of a laugh himself, then goes back to speaking in a more normal tone of voice. “It does make me a little jealous when I think about someone else taking care of you…”
“You’re jealous that you’re stuck eating military food,” Yuto returns.
“It’s not as bad as you’d expect. But you know what I’ve been craving the most since this started?”
Yuto waits for him to say “you” in the most obnoxious voice possible.
“Kimchi fried rice.” Minkyun’s answer catches Yuto by surprise. “Apparently they serve it sometimes, but I haven’t had any yet. Oh! And you.”
Yuto rolls his eyes. He knows Minkyun too well.
“Hey, I’ve gotta get going now, Yuto. Lights out soon. I’ll call you tomorrow, same time.”
“Okay.”
“I miss you,” Minkyun says, as he always does, before they hang up.
“I miss you, too, hyung,” Yuto replies.
“I love you.” Minkyun always tells him that, too.
This time—he isn’t sure why—Yuto hesitates a second before his typical response. “Take care of yourself.”
—
Yuto had known ahead of time that he would miss his hyungs, and that it would be hard. But having to actually deal with the reality is…Well, Yuto doesn’t think there’s any way he could have prepared himself for it. It wasn’t until he returned to the empty dorm after sending off Changyun that he’d fully understood that he’d be living alone for the first time.
There’s suddenly so much silence in his life, and so much space. Neither are bad things, and sometimes Yuto does enjoy it, but when he’s alone in the dorm he can’t shake the feeling that he’s in the early stages of an 18-month quarantine period. All he can do is try to get out as much as he can, keep himself busy, and count down the days until the group is together again.
Yuto keeps track of the days on a magnetic whiteboard stuck on the fridge, alongside a list of appointments, reminders, and things he needs to buy. Every morning he updates the countdown, a comforting ritual: D-488, D-487, D-486…
Except, he realizes one morning, it’s actually the number of days Minkyun has left to serve. He’s been counting down the days until Minkyun gets back, not until all six of them are reunited. At first Yuto tells himself that it’s a simple error and that it doesn’t mean anything. But as he replaces it with the correct number, the days left in Hyojin and Changyun’s service, he can’t help but feel vaguely guilty about his mistake anyway. Like he’d betrayed the other members somehow.
Yuto truly does miss all of them. Of course he does.
He misses Seungjun, his most vocal supporter, his team leader. The hyung he can always go to for advice, reassurance, or (just as important for a perfectionist like Yuto) some honest constructive criticism. He misses Hyojin, who’s always so careful and considerate with him, who always has a kind word and a soft smile ready for him. He misses Changyun, misses his jokes and observations and the sudden heartfelt comments he might spring on Yuto at any moment. And he misses Jaeyoung. Steady, supportive Jaeyoung, who brings Yuto snacks and little gifts just because he knows it will brighten Yuto’s day, without ever expecting anything in return.
But Minkyun—It’s not that he misses Minkyun more than the others. Minkyun contacts him the most regularly, almost every day. Yuto figures he just misses Minkyun…differently. And if someone were to ask him what that meant, Yuto wouldn’t be able to explain. All he knows is that Minkyun has a way of stealing into his thoughts constantly, whether Yuto wants him there or not.
When he buys something new to decorate the dorm with, he sometimes catches himself thinking Minkyun would like this. When he tries cooking a new dish, Minkyun’s preferences come to mind all too readily. This would be too salty for him, Yuto will say to himself. Or, he’d probably want this to be spicier. These days, it seems like everything reminds him of Minkyun somehow. He is simultaneously everywhere Yuto looks and far beyond his reach. It’s almost like being haunted, without the fear or the grief. Without the regret.
Because what does Yuto have to regret about his relationship with Minkyun?
Nothing, except when he finally watches the military enlistment video the staff had uploaded and remembers that when they’d shaved Minkyun’s hair, he had just stood there silently the whole time.
I should have said something, Yuto thinks now. But in the moment he hadn’t known what to say, what to do. Even when it looked like Minkyun was getting choked up, Yuto hadn’t been able to find the words to help put him at ease or lighten the mood. The others had encouraged him, telling him that his new haircut looked good.
It looks like you’re really leaving, Yuto had thought.
And then when they’d dropped Minkyun off…Yuto can’t help but cringe a little at how he comes off in the video. Clingy is the first word that springs to mind. Offering to carry Minkyun’s bag for him, pawing at him, hovering around him, pressing himself to Minkyun’s side for the first group photo, picking stray hairs off the back of his hoodie? What had gotten into him that day?
Yuto frowns and shuts his laptop, as if he can shut off the strange feelings stirring inside him just as easily. As much as he believes in capturing important moments, he finds himself wishing that the cameras hadn’t been there that day. Now his weirdness is forever preserved as part of the group’s history, right there on YouTube for anybody to watch.
Nobody’s going to notice or care, he tries to assure himself. Except…if anyone was going to notice or care, it would almost certainly be Minkyun, the worst possible person. For half a second he almost considers logging in to the official account and—whoops, slip of the finger—deleting it. Except their content manager would obviously have another copy on her computer and why is Yuto even thinking about this? The video isn’t a big deal and his behavior isn’t even that strange. He’s allowed to be mildly affectionate towards Minkyun for once, especially given the extraordinary circumstances. It’s not like he’d begged him to stay or stared longingly into his eyes or kissed him or anything.
Yuto shoves his closed laptop further away from him like it’s cursed, like somehow his fucking macbook is responsible for the way none of his thoughts are making sense anymore. Kissing Minkyun. Why would he even think about kissing Minkyun? It’s always the other way around. It’s always Minkyun popping fish-lips in Yuto’s direction, leaning in close while Yuto practically breaks his back angling his entire upper body out of the way. It’s a favorite game of Minkyun’s, and he’s relentless, especially when there’s a camera around. That’s why Yuto can’t let his guard down for an instant when Minkyun is anywhere near smooching distance, why he’s always got one hand ready to cover his lips, and why he occasionally needs to use an umbrella as an improvised shield.
But now, thankfully, Yuto’s on reprieve from all that foolishness.
And it’s great.
He can finally relax.
He doesn’t miss it a bit.
So yeah. Yuto has no idea why that thought, kissing Minkyun, had come into his head.
Today must just be a weird day.
—
(“You never shut up about him, do you?” Yuto’s little brother had asked last month, back home in Osaka.
Yuto had cut himself off mid-sentence, in the middle of a story about the recording of their last album. “What? Who?”
His brother had stuck out his front teeth in what he clearly believed was an imitation of him and fluttered his eyelashes. “MK hyung,” he’d warbled idiotically.)
—
Six hours later and Yuto’s mind keeps returning to the idea like it’s going back to the scene of a crime. Kissing Minkyun. Kissing Minkyun goodbye. Yuto can’t decide if the thought is horrifying, fascinating, or fascinating because it’s horrifying. Or horrifying because it’s fascinating?
Whatever it is, it’s weird. But not because Minkyun’s a man.
Yuto had figured out that he’s gay around the same time he’d figured out that he truly wanted to be a dancer. He liked dancing when he was younger, sure, but he fell in love with dancing as a teenager. And tangled up with falling in love with dancing was falling in love with men moving, men sweating, men competing, men showing off, men’s bodies, men’s muscles. Men. He’d been a male fan of boy groups even before becoming an idol, which had also been good for sorting out his sexuality.
No, the issue here is that it’s one of his hyungs he’s thinking about this way. And that hyung, that particular one, out of all of them. Park Minkyun, who knows exactly how to push every last one of Yuto’s buttons. Park Minkyun, who can make Yuto collapse in on himself laughing with a single noise. Park Minkyun, who is simultaneously the coolest and the cringiest person Yuto has ever met.
(Park Minkyun…who is pansexual as hell and technically romantically compatible with Yuto. Not that that’s relevant.)
Obviously, kissing any of his hyungs would be weird. But kissing Park Minkyun would be weird and dangerous. There’s no telling where it might lead or how it might end. Minkyun could run wild with it, build it up into something even weirder. Yuto gives Minkyun all the power in this scenario, elevating him almost to a force of nature, something that could just sweep Yuto along with him.
Yuto keeps telling himself that it’s Minkyun whose reaction would be unpredictable, that it’s Minkyun who couldn’t be trusted not to complicate things afterwards. He refuses to entertain the thought that it might be the other way around.
Yuto’s phone screen lights up with a call from Minkyun, as bright and accusing as a police floodlight. The sound of it vibrating against the tabletop hits him like a jumpscare. From the moment he answers, the tip of his finger smudging perspiration across the bottom of the screen, he feels certain that Minkyun will be able to read his mind somehow. He’s sure that at any moment, Minkyun will scream out that he knows Yuto was thinking about kissing him earlier.
But Minkyun sounds worn out, too tired to pay close attention to the conversation. The training exercise his unit had done today sounds exhausting, and Yuto wishes he could do something for him through the phone. Make him some food or wrap a blanket around him, something like that.
“I’ll hang up and let you get some rest now, hyung,” Yuto says when he hears Minkyun stifle a yawn.
“No—Not yet. Talk to me a little longer, Yuto. Your voice helps me relax.”
“What should I talk about?”
“What else did you do today? Besides work on that puzzle and cook pasta?”
So Minkyun had been paying attention to what Yuto told him. His wordless grunts and “mmm”s had made him sound distracted, so Yuto had assumed that the details of his day had gone in one ear and out the other.
"What else? I watched uh—a video.”
“A video…?” Minkyun’s laugh sounds sleepy, and Yuto can’t help but find it cute. “Why do you sound so awkward about it? It wasn’t something naughty, was it?”
“No! No, it wasn’t like that,” Yuto refutes at once. Now the only thing he wants to do for Minkyun through the phone is strangle him. “And even if it was, why would I tell you about it?”
“I thought maybe you picked something up on your trip back home,” Minkyun suggests innocently.
Certain other members have always liked to half-joke that Yuto has a secret collection of adult manga and DVDs hidden in the dorm, smuggled over from his home country. This is blatantly untrue. Yuto keeps his stash in a password-protected folder on his computer labeled “personal document scans” like a modern, civilized human being.
“Get your mind out of the gutter already,” he scolds Minkyun. “It was just the enlistment video.”
Yuto bites his tongue, but it’s too late. He feels shame simmer deep in his gut, as strong as if he’d actually dropped the name of some shockingly explicit video. In his mind the enlistment video is already irrevocably linked with the Dangerous Thought, the Forbidden Idea.
“Oh yeah?” Minkyun’s relaxed, drowsy voice is completely at odds with the alarms going off in Yuto’s brain. “I haven’t even watched it yet. I probably should. I want to see everyone else have their heads shaved.”
That makes the alarms blare louder, although Yuto knows it’s stupid. There’s nothing incriminating about his behavior in that video, he reminds himself. Nothing.
“Your part is first,” Yuto babbles despite himself. “And you’ve already lived through it so you should probably just skip that part. Give me a second and I can find the timestamp for the leaders and Changyun hyung…”
“It’s fine, I can skip to that part myself. I’ve got to get going now anyway.”
“It’s the three minute and fifty-two second mark,” says Yuto, with more than a little desperation. Forget there being nothing incriminating—all he knows is that Minkyun can’t see him the way he’d been that day, not through the unbiased eye of the camera. The video makes it seem so obvious…so obvious…Yuto can’t bring himself to finish that thought.
“Cool,” Minkyun says, and Yuto just knows that he hasn’t even tried to memorize the timestamp. “I’ll watch it later.”
“Cool,” echoes Yuto flatly.
“I’ll call again soon, Yuto. I miss you. I love you.”
“Yeah. Take care of yourself, hyung.”
Swallowing down his aversion, Yuto watches the rest of the enlistment video that night in an attempt to prove something to himself. He sees himself hug Seungjun and Jaeyoung goodbye. He watches as he takes photos with Changyun, allowing him to cling and rest his head on Yuto’s shoulder. He sees himself give Changyun a hug and shake him back and forth. But none of it makes him want to shut his laptop or cover his eyes with his hands. Nothing about his interactions with Seungjun, Jaeyoung, or Changyun makes him feel exposed or embarrassed, and he certainly doesn’t think about kissing any of them.
It’s just the part with Minkyun that has him all mixed up and confused. For some reason lately, it’s always just Minkyun. Yuto doesn’t understand why. He might be able to understand if he chose to dig deeper into that something feeling that had pulled at him as he watched Minkyun walk away that day in December. Or if he took a moment to consider why he’d felt compelled to snap a blurry picture of Minkyun waving goodbye and then draw a heart around him (before hastily adding “ONF” above the heart and “FUSE” below it).
But that would be an awful lot like staring directly into the sun.
—
When Minkyun calls again a few nights later, he starts off by talking about the enlistment video.
The bad news is that he had watched his own part. The good news is that he doesn’t say anything about Yuto’s behavior in the video—and since Minkyun never passes up an opportunity to tease him, that means it must not have been weird after all.
For the first time in days, Yuto feels relieved. He had gotten worked up over nothing after all. That’s what happens when people get bored and lonely: they start making up problems that don’t exist. Two rounds of quarantine in the span of a month, traveling home and back again, the empty dorm—it all scrambled Yuto’s brain, drove him to a state of temporary insanity. That’s where the Forbidden Idea had come in, too.
“I can’t believe it’s almost March already,” Minkyun is saying to him now, having moved on from his discussion of the others getting their hair buzzed off. “Your birthday’s coming up soon.”
“In a few weeks, yeah.” For once Yuto isn’t really looking forward to it.
“You’ll be twenty-three, right?” says Minkyun wistfully. “I wish I could take some leave and come see you then.”
“Really? You’d want to take leave for that?”
“Of course. I hate the idea of you celebrating your birthday alone.”
“The staff—” Yuto begins.
“You know what I mean,” Minkyun interrupts.
“I’ll be okay,” Yuto assures him.
“I know. I know… But I want to see you.”
All of a sudden the phone feels way too close to Yuto’s ear. He’s reminded of the way Minkyun would lean in to whisper something to him, something sure to make him blush and jerk away. The comment might be something as innocent as “you’re cute” or as bizarre as “I want to bite your cheeks,” but the effect on Yuto would always be the same.
Yuto puts the phone on speaker and sets it down on the table. The phone is—No, Minkyun is—He just can’t have Minkyun’s voice in his ear right now. It’s too loud. It’s annoying. Shouldn’t the military have taught him some decorum by now?
Minkyun lets out a low sigh. When he speaks up again, his voice is neither loud nor annoying. It’s calm, quiet, almost solemn. “I really want to see you. Do you want to see me?”
Yuto’s eyes find the framed picture hanging on the living room wall, the “family photo” of all of them from Weekly Idol. He looks from Minkyun’s smiling face to his hand on Yuto’s shoulder. Then he looks at the leaders in the foreground, Jaeyoung and Changyun over to the right.
“Of course,” Yuto tells him. He swallows. “I want to see all of you.”
—
One of the benefits of the hyungs enlisting is that the dorm is Yuto’s personal apartment for the next year and a half. He can keep it as clean as he likes and decorate it however he wants—which means lots of Studio Ghibli and Mario items, plus a slowly growing army of stuffed animals taking over the back of the living room couch.
Yuto feels proud of how his changes are coming along, and he likes to try to picture each of his hyungs’ reactions when they see what he’s done to redecorate. He also likes to imagine hanging out with them here when they visit on vacation, visualizing each of them beside him on the couch: Hyojin clutching a controller in his hands while they play Mario Kart, Changyun swiping at his eyes while crying over a movie, Seungjun squeezing one of Yuto’s plushies in his arms and giggling at one of his own jokes, Jaeyoung bobbing his head to the music spilling out from Yuto's speakers as the two of them chat.
But Minkyun… (It’s always Minkyun these days.)
Yuto can imagine him sitting still one moment, having a normal discussion about what he’s been up to in the military. Then an impulse for mischief would take hold and he’d turn to Yuto with a grin and do something crazy, like grab him or tickle him or try to kiss him. It’s always try, because Yuto doesn’t allow him to get much further than that. But this time he imagines Minkyun succeeding, Minkyun finding his lips, Minkyun kissing him, kissing Minkyun.
Just like that, he’s back to the Forbidden Thought. Only this time Yuto lingers on it long enough for a rush of heat to spread through his body. Obviously, it must be shame he’s feeling. It should be shame he’s feeling. …But he’s allowed to be curious, isn’t he? And it’s not his fault this temporary insanity or cabin fever or whatever it is keeps taking hold of him. Maybe instead of pushing away the Dangerous Idea, Yuto should allow it to run its course and burn out naturally.
So he lets himself imagine Minkyun’s mouth pressed hard to his, not gentle but not forceful, either—just assertive, confident in going for what he wants. He imagines Minkyun’s calloused hands cupping his face firmly, the heat of their bodies close together, Minkyun catching Yuto’s bottom lip between his teeth for just a second before he pulls back. It makes Yuto’s heart stutter like it’s laughing, and he places a hand on his chest as if to stifle it.
Minkyun kissing him here in the dorm Yuto has made his own, knowing that it’s just the two of them, knowing that there’s no chance of anyone walking in on them… It would be completely different from Minkyun’s half-crazed displays of affection towards him during a live or a behind the scenes video.
Yuto has always had mixed feelings about those. On the one hand, he usually can’t help but smile, though he tries to hide it. There’s a part of him that thinks that literally everything Minkyun does is peak comedy, especially when he’s toying with the concept of fanservice, using it to hide in plain sight. At the same time, Yuto kind of hates it. He doesn’t have the same level of confidence that Minkyun has, doesn’t believe that he could make fanservice work the same way for him. Deep down Yuto has always been afraid that it will backfire, blow up in his face—that it will reveal, rather than conceal, the truth about him.
His other issue with fanservice is that (as the name implies) it’s for the fans. It’s not for them, the people participating in it. It’s something meant to titillate, and Yuto has never been able to fully get on board with that. Call him a hopeless romantic, but when he chooses to flirt with someone, he wants it to be for them and nobody else. He wants it to be serious, not part of a gag or a game. He wants it to be real, not an act put on for strangers.
All at once the flush of warmth dissipates, leaving Yuto cold, and any curiosity about kissing Minkyun here in the dorm fades away. Honestly…it’s just so hard to imagine Minkyun being serious or real with him. That isn’t to say that Minkyun is always chaotic, or that the two of them don’t have their heart-to-heart discussions. But as far as all the questionable stuff goes—the declarations of love and the attempts at staking a claim on him and the sultry whispers in his ear—Yuto feels like that could never be serious or real. It’s all the same as Seungjun and Changyun’s exaggerated obsession with him, just ratcheted up to a thousand because it’s Minkyun and he always has to take things to extremes.
Sure, there were times in the past when it was just the two of them, and Minkyun might cuddle up with him or brush his fingers through Yuto’s hair. (For the record, Yuto had never minded that.) But more often Minkyun's off-camera attention towards him was clearly meant for a different audience: the other members, especially Seungjun and Changyun, his “rivals” for Yuto’s affection.
Thinking of it now sends a sudden pulse of genuine anger through him. Yuto never realized it until this very moment, but he hates it when Minkyun treats him like a prop in his comedy routine. It’s not funny. In fact, it was never funny. The more Yuto thinks about it, the more it upsets him. It can be a little annoying when Seungjun or Changyun act like that, but Minkyun is always the worst. Always. What’s wrong with him, anyway? Why can’t Minkyun just—? Why can’t he just be—?
Yuto jumps off the couch and goes to grab his Switch controller. He needs to distract himself. Specifically, he needs to shunt people off the track and chuck shells at random online players in Mario Kart. So that’s exactly what he does for the next hour or so, and it feels good. He knows he’s probably destroying young children half the time, but whatever. He’s teaching these kids a valuable lesson: sometimes life is frustrating and you don’t get what you want. Especially on Rainbow Road.
—
(His anger is forgotten by the next day, when he reads Minkyun’s latest message in the group chat. That’s all it takes for Minkyun to go back to being the funniest person Yuto’s ever met, when just last night he was the most annoying. Some people might call it emotional whiplash…but Yuto doesn’t dwell on it.)
—
The hyungs shower Yuto with affectionate messages and stickers in the group chat on his birthday, and the staff gives him a set of notes from each member, all glued to a piece of decorated poster board. Yuto reads them out to the fans during his birthday live, laughing when he reads what Minkyun calls him in his letter: my love Yuto. And Yuto can laugh at it right now, because he’s feeling good after reading all his hyungs’ kind words to him and the messages from Fuses.
It’s the least alone he’s felt since his return from Japan.
He takes the letters home with him afterwards—they definitely qualify as important documents worth keeping—and reads them again after dinner. Once Yuto gets to Minkyun’s letter, though, he finds himself rereading it again. And again. And again. It must be more of that temporary madness, because Yuto keeps fixating on certain words and phrases, even though they really aren’t so different from what his other hyungs wrote in their letters.
You know that I think of you a lot and that I like you, right?
Looking at how you’ve already grown so much, I feel proud.
I love you so much.
No, the sentiments are hardly different at all. So why does Yuto feel different when he reads Minkyun’s letter? Why does he feel a spark of irritation when Minkyun says he sees him as a cute maknae, and why does he grin like an idiot when he reads my love Yuto?
More than anything else in the note, Yuto’s eyes keep returning to those words. My love Yuto. He can’t believe Minkyun was bold enough to put that endearment down in a note for him. But then, a heartbeat later, he can. This boldness is just Minkyun being his usual over-the-top self, isn’t it? It’s just Minkyun trying to get a reaction from him—a laugh, a roll of the eyes, a shake of the head paired with an exasperated admonishment. Yuto can already hear the mirth in Minkyun’s voice during their next phone call.
“What did you think of my letter? I really put my heart into it, just for you.”
Minkyun will say something like that, and no matter what Yuto’s reaction is, he’ll laugh. Because it isn’t serious and it isn’t real and those three words aren’t actually for him. Not really. It’s something for the fans to snicker at and then forget about. There goes Minkyun teasing one of his bandmates again. He hasn’t changed a bit in the military.
Yuto’s chest feels tight for a moment; he’s overtaken by a strong urge to tear the note off the poster board, crumple it up, and throw it in the trash. But then he takes a deep breath and holds it, and then another, and he knows he could never do that. Besides, it’s irrational to be upset, isn’t it? Minkyun is joking and teasing because that’s what friends do. That’s the sort of relationship they have, the sort of relationship they’ll always have…and that’s just fine with Yuto. Really.
Even so, he brushes his fingers over the words and lets himself imagine—just for a second, just for curiosity’s sake—that they’re genuine. To imagine that he really is Minkyun’s love. What would that be like?
At times like this, he’s grateful that he lives alone.
—
Minkyun starts off the next phone conversation by apologizing, yet again, for not being there to celebrate Yuto’s birthday with him.
“It’s all right,” Yuto assures him for the hundredth time. “I had a good time celebrating it with the fans. And I liked the letter you wrote for me.” He doesn’t bring up the cycle of emotions he’d experienced rereading it later, the latest episode of Minkyun-Related Sudden Onset Irrationality that he’s trying to forget.
“Oh, that? You really liked it?” Minkyun sounds awkward, almost bashful, which is not the reaction Yuto was expecting.
“Yeah. Thank you, hyung. It made me laugh when I read it out to Fuses.”
“What about it was funny?” Minkyun asks it like it’s a genuine question.
“You know,” says Yuto. It isn’t a genuine answer. He’s worried that Minkyun is going to demand specifics, that he’s going to force Yuto to repeat those three words. My love Yuto. So Yuto makes a little detour, quickly changing the focus. “You didn’t have to apologize for calling so much at the end. It’s fine.”
Thankfully, Minkyun accepts the detour. “It’s not annoying?”
“No, not at all.” Yuto almost adds more, almost tells Minkyun that he likes talking to him regularly, but he balks, second-guessing himself. Would it be strange to admit that?
Before Yuto can puzzle it out, Minkyun cheerfully moves on to talking about the vacation time he has coming up and his plans to visit him. Yuto scurries over to his whiteboard and jots down the date. Then he decorates it with some stars and exclamation points, because he can.
“Oh, and I can spend a night there with you, right?” Minkyun adds, almost as an afterthought.
Blindsided, Yuto drops his dry erase marker and watches helplessly as it rolls under the fridge. “With me? You mean at the dorm?”
“Yeah,” Minkyun confirms. “Will that be okay?”
Yuto’s already looking in the general direction of the entryway, as if he thinks Minkyun is standing out in the corridor right now, moments away from ringing the bell. His heart starts beating faster and there’s a sudden wiggly sensation in his stomach. Even though they’ve lived here together for years, Minkyun spending a night with him still seems like something different to Yuto, something new.
It’s going to be just the two of them. Alone. In the dorm that has become Yuto’s space.
“That—That’s fine, yeah,” Yuto manages at last. He’s glad they’re not doing a video call.
“Really? You sound nervous.” Obviously Yuto can’t see the shit-eating grin Minkyun is probably wearing, but he can imagine it perfectly. “What are you hiding, Yuto-yah?”
“Nothing.” It comes out sounding too defensive and Yuto cringes, reminding himself to play it cool. He leans into the joke. “Except…maybe I cleared out your room and turned it into a dance studio.”
Minkyun fake-gasps. “I knew it! Then where am I supposed to sleep, huh?”
Ever vigilant, Yuto sees exactly where Minkyun plans to take this conversation. “In one of the four other beds,” he replies, pre-emptively shutting him down. “Or out in the hall if you try anything weird.”
Minkyun laughs, full and bright and loud, like a firework blooming in the night sky. Suddenly, Yuto’s throat constricts; that something feeling is back again. And that something feeling has a name, and Yuto thinks he knows it, but he can’t—
“I’ve gotta get going now, but I’ll call you again tomorrow,” Minkyun says. Thankfully, it brings Yuto back out of his mind before he can find himself in too deep. “Enjoy your cake, and I’m sending you some money. Buy yourself something nice, okay?”
“Thank you, hyung.”
“You’re welcome, my lovely Yuto. And happy birthday, again.”
Yuto swallows. It doesn’t feel like it’s his phone he’s grasping in his sweaty hand anymore. It feels like he’s holding Minkyun’s hand somehow. When, he wonders, are his thoughts going to start making sense again?
“Bye, Minkyun hyung.”
“Bye. I miss you. I love you.”
“Take care of yourself.”
The screen is hot against the tip of his finger when he ends the call. His face feels even hotter.