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When he walks into the dorms in the morning, to his great detriment it isn’t to a blissfully silent, empty living room, but to Gyuvin sitting on the sofa, dressed up in one of his big trendy hoodies, socks already pulled on. His knee is bouncing, like he’s been waiting for a while. Jiwoong saw this coming. It takes a bit longer than he expects, even, for Gyuvin to finally ask whatever question it is that’s been bothering him. And probably the rest of the kids too.
“Going out?” he says as a greeting, making his way into the kitchen.
“Hyung,” Gyuvin says, ignoring the question and sidling up next to him while Jiwoong fishes around the pantry drawer for what must be the last clean teaspoon in the dorm. “Just wondering-”
“It’s never just wondering with you,” Jiwoong automatically responds. It comes out just a little bit too mean, and he winces as he unscrews the plastic cap of the instant coffee jar.
“I was just wondering,” Gyuvin repeats, sing-song, “why Hao-hyung’s been hiding in your apartment since Saturday.”
The left side of Jiwoong’s head smarts, the telltale beginnings of a migraine.
“It’s too early for this,” Jiwoong sighs. He stares in despair at little brown chips for a moment, then before he can properly regret it, adds two extra heaping teaspoons of coffee into his mug — a pretty blue one with little butterflies painted onto it, a gift from Yujin when the kids had gone thrifting for the first time during their free time in LA — and then manoeuvres around Gyuvin’s lanky self to grab the kettle.
Gyuvin physically moves aside obediently, but his eyes follow his movement. “It’s a valid question!” he protests.
“P versus NP is also a valid question, and that doesn’t have an answer yet either,” Jiwoong grumbles.
“Hyung, I have no idea what that means,” Gyuvin says cheerfully, and Jiwoong bites back an irritable I know, that’s why I said it. Still, the kid isn’t giving up intent on pushing until Jiwoong finally cracks. He stirs his coffee, even more opaque brown than normal, while Gyuvin starts rambling.
“... what I don’t get is why you can’t just tell me why you’re keeping Hao-hyung in your apartment like he’s some kind of fugitive. I just think that it’s unfair, you know, to withhold information from me. I’m next-door roommates to Hanbin-hyung and I’ve had to deal with our precious leadernim being kind of pissy and slamming his door louder than normal for the past three days, did they fight, by the way? I think they did, but Gunwookie says there’s no way in heck they did. Anyways, you would be my favourite hyung for the next month at least if you just told me straight away instead of making obscure math jokes-”
Jiwoong takes a sip. Gyuvin’s punctuating his words with exaggerated hand gestures, and he’s having fun just watching the kid fondly, why they’re even having this conversation in the first place almost slipping his mind, until-
“Wait.” Gyuvin says, whole body freezing, and it’s like a cartoon light bulb goes off over his head.
Jiwoong wonders if he should be afraid.
“No way.” Gyuvin’s eyes widen. “That’s so Hao-hyung of you-”
Oh, he definitely should.
“No freaking way, hyung, are you and Hao-hyung, no way, what about Hanbin-hyung-”
Jiwoong sighs.
The P versus NP problem is this: if a problem can be verified quickly, can it be solved quickly too? Hao had mentioned something about polynomials — that’s the P part of the problem — and algorithms too, and timing? He’d been telling him something about questions you could win a million dollars by solving. Jiwoong doesn’t really remember. He had been a little more occupied with trying to rinse the shampoo out of Hao’s hair without getting it into his mouth.
The easier explanation-
“You know how you can check a sudoku puzzle pretty quickly?” Hao had said, leaning back onto Jiwoong’s chest. “If there are repeating numbers, then it’s a mistake, then it’s wrong. If there’s none, it’s correct. But there’s no fast way to solve a sudoku puzzle. There’s no formula, you just have to keep trying over and over again until you get there. As far as we know.”
“As far as we know, yes.”
“So the whole problem is basically. For an easy question, you can’t say that there’s an easy answer, but you can’t say that there definitely isn’t one either. So P versus NP, not equals, and not, what’s that equal sign with a slash called in Korean? It’s not that either.”
“I don’t know either, Hao-ya,” Jiwoong had said, gently tapping his forehead to get Hao to lean back to get the last soap suds off his bangs, “I haven’t really thought about math in a long time. And I was never very good at it.”
“It’s a compsci question, not a math one,” Hao had said, elbowing him lightly in the abdomen, laughing when Jiwoong feigned an exaggerated groan of pain. “And the next one is-”
Gyuvin’s rant about Hanbin’s newfound violence and door slamming habits aren’t exaggerations after all, Jiwoong learns. When their leader gets home and sees him there, he immediately turns his perfect little nose up at him, practically hurling his decently heavy-looking practice duffle bag into a corner of the living room with all the finesse of tired ground staff with fragile-marked suitcases.
He points straight at a spot on Jiwoong’s lower jaw, glowering. “Is that from Hao-hyung.”
“That’s a rhetorical question,” he replies. It’s not his fault if he doesn’t feel particularly threatened right now. Hanbin, even when pissed to the nines, is still Sung Hanbin, and an angry Hanbin is just about as threatening as an angry hamster.
“Is he here?”
“No,” Jiwoong tells him, but Hanbin’s eyes dart to the hallway anyway, like he’s expecting Hao to come tumbling out of a closet door, like how he’d surprised him when he got back from the company after his first birthday live.
Hanbin’s left eye twitches. “I fucking hate you,” he tries to spit, but it comes out more like a choked off sob, a kicked-puppy whine, and he looks incredibly guilty while he says it. Jiwoong tries not to laugh at how cute he is, ears already red and eyes somewhat glassy. He pats the space on the couch next to him and Hanbin sniffs, shuffling over zombie-style, collapsing into it. "I miss him."
"I made him promise to talk to you today-" Jiwoong tries to start.
"Please don't say 'I made him'," Hanbin actually whines this time, dropping his voice childishly in a way that sounds nothing like Jiwoong at all, “that sounds suggestive. And I don’t want to think about you and Hao-hyung like that. I should’ve been there.”
Jiwoong bites down on his cheek and tries not to coo at him. “I thought you would be angrier,” he says honestly, when Hanbin leans over to rest his head on his shoulder.
“I am.” His voice comes out muffled, as Hanbin practically nuzzles into his sleeve, rounded fluffy hair urging Jiwoong to touch. (It’s an action so remarkably Hao of him. Just yesterday Jiwoong had brought up what he'd done to Hanbin on the lift when they'd been filming for Here I Am, and Hao had tried to smother him with one of the cushions his mother had given him as a housewarming gift.) The urge wins, and Hanbin pushes himself even closer, raising his legs off the floor so he can curl himself into Jiwoong’s body.
“You’re not acting very angry right now.”
“Maybe I’m just getting closer now because I have a knife with me. Maybe this is an assassination attempt,” Hanbin sniffs again. “You smell like him. It’s nice.”
Jiwoong ruffles his hair. “That’s just my own body wash, Hanbin-ah.”
“Shut up.”
“Jiwoongie-hyung, do you think there’s something wrong with me?” Hao had asked him, once the credits started rolling. He’d been dressed entirely in Jiwoong’s clothes, his shorts, and the shirt from a silk pajama set that someone had given him ages ago, KJW embroidered on the breast pocket. Hao’s just slightly taller than him, but their difference in body frame meant that it had still looked loose on him, especially with the way he’d — deliberately, probably, knowing him — left the two top buttons unbuttoned. The collar had hung open to reveal the jut of his collarbones, on which Jiwoong could see red marks that he’d left a few hours ago.
“Is that something Hanbin said to you?” Jiwoong had asked, from the other end of the sofa.
Picking at his cuticles, Hao had instead of answering, posed the rhetorical question, “do you think he’s capable of being mean to me?”
“No.”
“Exactly,” Hao had scoffed.
“You say that like it’s a bad thing,” Jiwoong had paused, then, “is that why you rejected him? Was it an unfulfilled kink thing?”
Hao had kicked him in the shin. “Be serious for one second, I’m trying to have a heart-to-heart with you. You know, I used to think you were the serious broody type.”
“And I thought you were supposed to be the responsible teacher type, Hao-ya. But here you are, filling my fridge with fancy plastic bottles of tea. And running up my water bill.”
Hao had laughed first, still absentmindedly worrying at the skin around his fingernails, but then he’d trailed off and sighed. “I worry for him. I think he likes me a little too much.”
“That's a bit narcissistic,” Jiwoong had said, trying to keep the mood light. When Hao had squinted at him he’d amended himself to say instead — “It means obsessed with yourself.” — and Hao had nodded in understanding.
"Which is why I think there's something wrong with me," Hao had said. His speech had come out mumbled, the same way it does when he's tired after a long day, focused more on getting his point across instead of getting the pronunciation right. For a moment Jiwoong had thought, it's time I properly started learning Chinese like I said I would years ago. Hanbin has textbooks, maybe I should borrow them. "Who else has a gorgeous boy confess their feelings for him, and then decides to run away and hide in another man's apartment?"
"If it's any consolation, he probably won't be too mad if you just tell him why you freaked out. It’s like you said, he likes you a lot."
Tugging at his hair in frustration, "Is it wrong if I want him to get mad at me? He’s just- all the other half stuff."
"It’s sweet." Deep down Jiwoong’s always been a romantic.
"It makes me want to kill myself," Hao had grieved, talking into his hands, then straightened up and said, "I don't mean that. It just scares me sometimes, because what if I can’t live up to it? Don’t look at me like that, I'm way too important to you guys as a center to ever kill myself."
Jiwoong had laughed. “And Hanbin would be sad.”
“And Hanbinnie would be sad,” Hao had parroted, then hissed, “fuck!”
“You’re going to have to go back at some point, you know,” Jiwoong had told him.
“I know,” Hao had said, eyes boring a hole in the sofa. Without looking away, his arm had fished around the glass countertop for the remote, wordlessly hitting a button to play the next episode, then tossed it somewhere onto the carpet. “Kiss me again?”
Jiwoong had tried his best to sound authoritative, he swears. “You’re going back home tomorrow.”
Hao had only hummed, already climbing across the length of the couch to slot his legs in between his, skin to skin, direct contact. “Hyung.”
“Promise,” Jiwoong had whispered, hands coming up to touch his face.
Hao had leaned into his touch, pouting the way he’s managed to convince fans he does naturally, the way he knows best accentuates the fullness of his lower lip. “Sure.”
“That’s not a yes.” Had Jiwoong felt guilty? Sure, reusing Hao’s words. He couldn’t not have thought of Hanbin and the glass of daffodils sitting in their pantry — unconditional love, according to Naver — but in the moment, but with Zhang Hao’s fingers playing at the ends of hair at the base of his neck, smelling like his own favourite soap-
“Hao-”
“I’ll talk to him.” Hao had said, final, then leaned in.
Jiwoong’s never been much of an academics guy. Complex computer science problems don’t really interest him like that, even if he likes to think of himself as the group’s Capable Tech Dad. But left in the silence of the afternoon, atmosphere static except for the spinning of the ceiling fan and the rise and fall of Hanbin’s shoulders — he finds himself thinking about it again.
Suppose you have three-squared sudoku, except instead of different numbers you’re supposed to fill in matching ones — Jiwoong realises pretty quickly that his analogy isn’t working, but whatever. What they have now is: Hao probably lounging in his bed, Hanbin in his lap. There’s a mistake here, there’s something wrong, and it’s easy to check. Easily, what was it? Verifiable. And it’s himself. He supposes instead of the original problem, it’s now P equals NP, or something. Easy question, Sung Hanbin and Zhang Hao; easy answer, Sung Hanbin and Zhang Hao. You don’t even have to take an eraser to the whole sudoku sheet, erase everything, and start over. There’s even an easy fix.
Whoever’s in charge of this whole thing owes me a million dollars now, Jiwoong thinks, and then scoffs at his own joke, and take that, Dad, your son isn’t so bad at math after all.
He gives Hanbin the apartment key. He tries not to feel too sad about it.
Jiwoong isn’t sure to thank or blame the impulsive extra coffee for suddenly making him a light sleeper. Rudely awoken by the sound of his own bedsprings when two giggly grown men suddenly descend upon his bed in the middle of the night, he blearily blinks his eyes open. Not that there’s a real point to it. He can’t see shit in the dark.
“It’s way too early for this,” he mumbles, mouth still dry and sticky from sleep.
“Go back to sleep, hyung.” “Goodnight, Jiwoongie-hyung.” Two voices say at the same time.
Oh.
There’s a laugh that sounds like Hao. His hand finds its way into Jiwoong’s shirt — he knows it’s Hao because of the calluses on his left hand, and from behind him Hanbin buries his head into his neck again.
Oh.
Well. Looks like Jiwoong’s still bad at math.