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“I became a trainee when I was in the last year of middle school,” Yujin tells Sung Hanbin. He’s decided that he rather likes the show’s center, especially since Zhang Hao is fairly head-over-heels for him, and Hanbin seems to take well to Yujin. He’d already met the older months ago, for the PR videos filming; but what is a shy fifteen-year-old supposed to say to befriend a self-assured twenty-one-year-old? Not a lot.
“And then COVID came,” he adds. Hanbin makes a sound of sympathy. That’s probably the moment when Yujin realizes that Hanbin has already gotten really very attached to him—not a new feeling to Yujin, the baby maknae of Yuehua, one Zhang Hao’s favorite ‘sons,’ but. Yujin has always been a very anxious person, desperate to be liked, to do his best and not disappoint.
So when Hanbin says that Yujin should get rid of his bangs because his eyes are pretty, Yujin does not know what to say. Yujin is no stranger to love, but the affection that he receives still makes him wonder why he likes it so much.
-
Yujin is not special when compared to the hundreds of other trainees who lost their childhood to training. Throughout the years, so many have sacrificed that essential part of their growth in order to chase a dream; Yujin’s specific batch is only special in the sense that their early years became a rinse-and-repeat routine of school and training due to one thing: the COVID pandemic.
“I worry about you, Yujin-ah,” his mother has said more than once when she picks up Yujin from school and practice. “You work too hard.”
Yujin never has a proper answer for that. When he had gone home before the last eliminations prior to the finale, she had never stopped worrying. Supportive and loving but so, so worried.
Truth be told, it still feels weird to be at school. He hardly remembers what it was like to be a normal school student. When the world descended into hell, he was practically twelve; online classes and training when it was safe is all he remembers. When the world regained some sense of peace, he was allowed to go to school again; but nothing was the same, and he spent more and more time training, anyway. And when he passed the Boys Planet audition, well, how could there be time for much else?
Going back to school in between participating on the show had been his first real taste of something that resembled fame. Of course, everyone knows him now; Han Yujin, the golden maknae of Boys Planet, basically Korea’s son. Scored the top rank of four on the first eliminations —if that didn’t get people’s attention before, that did. Korea has always loved their ambitious children working harder than they should be in the public eye. Bedazzled and dolled up for the cameras.
People stared. Girls giggled. Yujin remained just as shy as before, darting to hide behind his friends who do their best to keep him out of the curious eyes’ way.
And then—debut. Yujin is probably failing more than half his classes and has so many assignments to catch up on that his head spins just looking at them, and he’ll have to pull more than a few all-nighters if he wants to actually submit them anytime soon, but the crowd is cheering his name—a steady, uproarious chant of Han Yu-jin, Han Yu-jin —and the other chosen members are yelling right along with them and Yujin stumbles up the stairs after crying his way through a joke of a speech, folding into their arms at once.
He has achieved his dream and it’s all that he can think of the entire night, but the minute he gets an email from school saying his assignment is due in three days, he groans and flops face down onto his bunk, drawing a curious glance from Gunwook that he can’t be bothered to explain away.
-
Yujin is a master at procrastinating the schoolwork he has, but no such luck. Both Zhang Hao and Jiwoong team up to get him to do his homework. He groans but complies, knowing that even without their intervention, he doesn’t have much of a choice in the matter.
Unsurprisingly, Hao is the first candidate Yujin begs for help, but Hao takes one look at his homework and goes, “I have not touched this kind of material in years.”
Yujin enlists Ricky next, who did fairly well in school. Unfortunately, the blonde doesn’t know how to do algebra all that well, either.
After that, he tries to attack some of it himself, but he’s lost. He’s missed too many lessons, and he didn’t pay enough attention in class—either distracted or half-asleep from exhaustion—to do this. He has no idea how to solve 25a2 – 81b2 using factorization of grouping terms. He’s sure that if he actually paid attention, this would be fairly simple.
He caves and timidly goes to Gunwook. “Hyung, help me,” he says hesitantly, holding out the book. Gunwook, in the middle of a video on YouTube, pauses to look at it.
“Sure,” he says. “Wanna go sit at the table?”
That’s how Yujin finds himself sitting at the kitchen table with Gunwook. “I may not be the best,” he warns with a laugh, “it wasn’t my strongest subject.”
Regardless, within half an hour, almost all of the related algebra questions are solved and Yujin feels very much brain-dead, but proud of himself for finally understanding something.
“I don’t want to do this anymore,” he whines, head bonking the tabletop. “There’s still so much to do.”
Gunwook pats his shoulder. “You can make it through eventually,” he says. “I was class president while training, so I get it.”
“I hate school,” Yujin mutters.
“Don’t we all?” Gunwook snorts. Yujin is very glad to have found solidarity. “You seem cuter when you’re like this.”
“Not you too!” Yujin hits him in the arm.
“I’m sorry!” the older holds his hands up in defense. “You just seem so weirdly mature sometimes, but then I think about it and you’re really just a kid.”
“I’m not a kid!” he pouts.
“You’re sixteen and pouting.”
Yujin glares at him, but that only makes Gunwook laugh harder.
-
“A Pororo doll?” Hanbin looks surprised when Yujin tugs it free of his suitcase. “You have one of those?”
“My mother gave it to me,” Yujin explains absently, setting it aside to rifle through his clothes. Moving into the dorm has meant that there’s a lot to do and not enough time to properly unpack. Jiwoong and Hanbin are helping him with the task, just like they did after the final eliminations and Yujin cried hard enough that he had no energy left.
Ollie would laugh if he saw this, not that Yujin would have minded.
“When did she give it to you?” Jiwoong asks, picking it up. Yujin remembers that he rather likes Pororo.
“Eh, somewhere in between the second elimination and last,” he shrugs. “Ollie-hyung said it suited me so my mother decided to buy it on a whim.”
“Do you ever use it?”
“Not really,” he answers, handing a stack of shirts to Hanbin to put away in the closet. “I forgot to take it with me and I’d rather not be babied when we’re all. You know.”
“You sleep with it, don’t you?” Hanbin’s not even trying to hide his smile.
Yujin flushes. “What makes you say that?”
“Just because you brought it here,” the older man answers with a twinkle in his eye. Jiwoong snorts, and Yujin does his best not to dissolve into a puddle of embarrassment right there. “You do, right?”
“Only sometimes, ” Yujin snatches the doll from Jiwoong and hugs it to his chest. “Okay? It just reminds me of my parents.” He sees Jiwoong open his mouth and quickly says, “I just like having a reminder of them!”
Hanbin laughs and ruffles his hair. Yujin grumbles.
“You’re so cute, Yujinie,” Hanbin says affectionately. “You’re such a kid.”
“I’m sixteen, ” he protests. He’s already had to go through this conversation with Zhang Hao.
“You are mature for your age,” Jiwoong agrees. “You’re remarkably strong-willed, too.”
“But you really are just a kid,” Hanbin adds, picking more things out of Yujin’s suitcase. “You told me you were in middle school when you were training, and then COVID happened, right?”
“Yeah. It wasn’t a fun time.”
“You’ve had to sacrifice a lot,” the way Hanbin says it makes Yujin unable to refute it, because, well, it’s true. “You are a kid, Yujin-ah. You’re still painfully childish in some ways.”
It doesn’t come off as an insult. Yujin knows that what Hanbin says is true. By all standards, he is just a kid, a teenager, who had more than enough of his early teenage days stolen away from him. He also knows that by choosing to be an idol, he’s signing up to give away more of his youth.
“But don’t worry,” Jiwoong says, knocking his shoulder affectionately into Yujin’s. “You lost more than you should have, but we’re here to take care of you. You’ve found a home in us.” His voice is tinged with the slight hesitance, anxiety that he might be wrong.
“I know,” Yujin mumbles. He has lost a childhood that could have been normal, a happy one, even. But he has people to look out for him, now. He isn’t quite as alone as he thought, stumbling through life on legs that keep growing before he knows it. “I love you guys.”
“Love you too, Yujin-ah.”