Work Text:
There’s something about Minho that feels a lot like summer.
Maybe it’s the way he smells, fresh and sweet like white peaches. Maybe it’s the melon-flavored ice cream he always gets, along with Jisung’s usual chocolate and strawberry. Maybe it’s all the sunrises and sunsets that have etched themselves onto their skin as they waste their days watching anime and talking about nonsense in the quiet seclusion of their rooms.
Maybe it’s how his touch always feels august warm, or how being around him makes Jisung feel like he’s sitting in the shade on a hot day.
Jisung is fourteen when he first lays eyes on Minho, on a hot evening near the end of July. The sun casts an orange hue over the scenery, reflects in beautiful flickers off the steady stream of the river. It’s Jisung’s go-to place when he doesn’t wish for the presence of other people, when he doesn’t feel like doing anything.
A boy who was riding his bicycle on the road leading to the bridge makes eye contact for a second with him. Then stops. Gets off his bike and puts down the kickstand. He comes closer to Jisung. The setting sun frames his head with a bright halo that makes Jisung squint a little when he looks up at him.
“Are you here for the ladybugs?”
Jisung only blinks at the boy— though he’s not a boy, he seems older, bigger in the way he carries himself, in the way his shoulders don’t slump and his gaze doesn’t stray. Instead of explaining, he walks back towards his bike and kicks off the kickstand. Grabs the handlebars and starts walking. Stops to look again at Jisung who remains where he is. “Come.”
Then they’re squatting between the shrubs by the river. His name is Minho, he says as he keeps twisting his hand as a ladybug crawls its way between his fingers and up the back of his hand. The smile is as evident on his face as it is in his voice when he speaks. Beams of the sun seem to be trapped in his eyes, gleaming in the half-darkness. “They like the penthorum,” he says, “That’s the name of the plant. Though my grandfather calls it the Chinese herb. He makes a tea from it and forces the whole family to drink it once a week.” He stops to put the insect back on a leaf. Faces Jisung again with a half-smile-half-grimace. “Tastes like piss.”
A disgusted chuckle leaves Jisung. They watch in silence for a while. Everything is turning a darker shade, and the breeze carries the smell of greenery to fill Jisung’s lungs. Without turning to look, he asks, “How do you know what piss tastes like?”
A loud laugh echoes and makes Jisung smile. Minho’s laugh is pretty, his eyes thinning out and teeth peeking as he giggles. When he quiets down, he declares without a hint of hesitation to his voice, “I like you, you’re funny.”
They stay by the river until it’s dark. It’s not Jisung who realizes how late he is to return home, but Minho. He stands up and walks towards his bike, starts cycling until he’s on the bridge that goes over the river and Jisung is out of breath, running after him. “Wait for me, hyung!”
Minho stops. Waits until Jisung catches up with him. They agree to meet again the next day.
It’s strangely fascinating to watch Felix braid Hyunjin’s hair. Chan seems to agree, watches them with warm eyes and a smile. There are moments, Jisung thinks, where he looks at the people he calls his friends, and feels glad to know that some things in his life do work out- the important things, maybe.
Minho drops himself down on the sofa next to him with a woosh. It dips with his weight and bounces. Jisung reflexively extends his arm away, so that the drink in his hand wouldn’t spill all over him. “How many have you had?”
When the tiny waves in his cup subside, Jisung brings it back to his lips. “I don’t know,” he shrugs, “Do you ever count?”
Minho scoffs at that, maybe at how Jisung’s words are slurred. Jisung turns to face him then, and there’s red dusting his cheeks; the same color as the last glimpse of the sun before it disappears behind the ocean. Maybe Jisung should have counted, as he suddenly finds it harder to breathe.
“I’m usually the one in charge of getting your ass back home safely, so.”
“Hyung do you ever—” He pauses to consider if the question is born out of his drunk ramblings, continues before landing on an answer. “Do you ever wonder if something is so pretty it seems more like a painting than a real-life thing?”
Minho used to keep a copy of Jisung’s ID picture in his wallet. Used to joke about it, take it out of his wallet it to show it to their friends and say he’s waiting for him to come back from the war. Then, it was replaced by a 4-cut photo of them on a trip to the amusement park. That one, Minho didn’t joke about, didn’t even tell Jisung he kept until that one time his hands weren’t clean and he asked Jisung to pick up his wallet and pay for them, and Jisung froze a little bit when he saw the picture.
Now, an abstract drawing of Jisung sits in the back of Minho’s phone-case, drawn by Hyunjin on a drunk night. It’s colorful yet gloomy, you can hardly tell it’s Jisung. When he had asked him why he kept it, if he preferred the idea of Jisung over the real Jisung, Minho had simply said, ‘it reminds me of the pout you made when you first saw it’. Jisung had pouted again at that and Minho had laughed. Jisung checked to see if the drawing was still in his phone-case every time they met. It always was.
Minho looks at him now. His dark hair fans out the pale skin of his face, adorned by a blush on his cheeks that lift in a smile. It’s all very familiar, yet it still never fails to leave Jisung breathless.
Before he can answer, Felix appears between them, pulling at Minho’s hands. “Can I braid your hair next?” he asks. Minho laughs but doesn’t say no, and Felix claps his hands and sits behind him, pushing him a little closer on the sofa to Jisung who remains watching with a smile. Minho looks up as if trying to see Felix’s hands playing with his short hair. He blinks fast and the fluttering of his lashes mimics the beating of Jisung’s heart. When he’s done, Felix peeks his head and asks Jisung, “What do you think?”
Minho’s eyes are on him. His smile is so bright it’s blinding. After another beat, Jisung finds his voice again. “Pretty,” he answers.
Jisung takes things on with an explosive fire that burns him out too quickly, while Minho operates like a steady flame, unwavering and consistent.
Their friends are all out somewhere Jisung didn’t bother asking about; he’s not in the mood to leave the house, having just finished his exams and wanting to hole up in his room for a couple of days. He hasn’t slept since the day before, doom-scrolling on his phone until the sun peeked beneath the curtains and he found himself in Minho’s room, unknowing to how he got there, like he was sleepwalking, like it’s a subconscious thing to want to be close to him.
“Minho hyung,” he whispers, squatting down beside his bed. Minho grumbles in his sleep, poorly conceals a smile when Jisung laughs. “Get up, hyungie.”
Cheek smudged against the pillow, Minho opens one eye to shoot Jisung a half-glare. “Did you stay home to annoy me?”
Jisung pokes the dip of his bare shoulder. Laughs when he mumbles something about making him into catfood for the neighborhood strays. “It’s the longest day of the year, hyung!” he announces to a less than impressed Minho, who grumbles again. Jisung continues in a sing-song, giggling at the look of feigned annoyance on Minho’s face. “And I wanna spend it all with you.”
The plan is to binge-watch an entire season of One Piece. Minho makes them food, Jisung enthusiastically keeping him company and talking about them breaking world records for the number of anime episodes watched per day. They settle back in bed and start their marathon. But by the time it hits 3 PM, Jisung is drifting to sleep, scenes jumbling up in his foggy mind as his head keeps falling onto Minho’s shoulder.
“I thought you wanted to spend the longest day of the year with your hyung,” Minho teases, with no real bite behind his words. His hand brings Jisung’s head back on his shoulder when he whines and tries to wake himself up. “I’ll tell you what you miss. Get some sleep.”
When Jisung wakes up, his friends are back, their voices filling the earlier silence of the apartment like a distant echo. The laptop is shut and resting in Minho’s lap, Jisung’s arm extended to wrap around his waist as he scrolls through his phone. The window in Minho’s room faces the west, the sun painting the older’s figure in golden stripes as it fades behind the horizon.
“Morning, Jisungie,” Minho whispers. His voice is soft and sweet, Jisung feels it like cotton-candy in his chest.
“Is it?” he asks, even though he knows the answer. “Morning?”
“No.” Jisung is still not looking up to face him, content to lay where he is for a little longer. Minho shifts then, though, “I need to pee,” he says.
Jisung watches the finals rays of the sun float across the soft greens and whites of Minho’s bedsheets in the space he occupied just earlier, ebbing away like a tidal wave retreating back into the sea in the morning. He gets up and joins the chaos of his friends sharing hamburger take-out over a louder-than-necessary recount of their day outside. They make plans to go to the beach over the weekend.
“You’re afraid,” Chan had once told him. “Afraid of losing him.”
Chan wasn’t exactly right, but he wasn’t wrong either. Jisung doesn’t think he would ever lose Minho; time has proven that to be true. But he is afraid.
“You panic when you suspect he knows how you feel.”
Jisung wasn’t so sure about that part either. He himself didn’t fully know the extent of how he feels. Sometimes he thinks it runs deeper than his ability to grasp, weaved in with the fibers of his very being. He thinks his fingers are too wobbly to even begin to untangle it, then Minho gives him a small smile when their hands brush holding the straphangers on a packed train back home, and Jisung finds himself thinking it’s all very simple, and there’s no need to untangle any of it.
Maybe Minho knows. Maybe he’s always known. Contrary to Jisung’s constant attempts to fool himself, Minho is a very upfront guy. If he does know, then all that matters in the end, is that he still chooses to hold Jisung at night sometimes, still chooses to share with him his time.
They arrive back home, and it’s a mess of them all trying to pack for their weekend away. It doesn’t take Jisung too long to pack, maybe because he forgets some stuff that Minho will remind him about later. He sits in the living room and watches the laundry on the drying rack on the balcony, swinging with the slow afternoon breeze. Minho comes out of his room and stands opposite him, illuminated by soft yellows that make his eyes gleam. “Did you pack a towel?”
Jisung chuckles, embarrassed, and gets up again for his room. When he comes back out, the laundry is brought inside and folded on the sofa, separated into piles for each of them to grab.
They rent two cars: Chan driving one, Minho driving the other.
Sometimes Jisung thinks that just because he’s closest to Minho, it doesn’t mean he has to be constantly attached to him by the hip when they’re with their friends. But then he thinks of someone making Minho laugh and him missing it because he’s not close. He gets into the passenger seat in the car Minho is driving.
Changbin says he’s clingy, says it’s paradoxical with how he doesn’t rely on others. Jisung thinks maybe he’s like a daisy; although they survive through the night, they still face the east waiting for the sun’s return, unfaltering in their pursuit after it all throughout the day.
The drive isn’t long, and they waited until after the morning rush hour passed so they don’t have to sit in traffic. Jeongin continues his sleep in the backseat, leaning onto Seungmin who chooses songs to play over the speaker system. Minho hums along and taps on the wheel to the beat. He wears sunglasses but if Jisung tilts his head just right, he can still see his eyes behind them.
“Hyung,” His voice is hoarse from lack of use, sleepy and a little breathless. Minho gives him another hum and he wonders, if the sunshine falling onto Minho’s face travelled all the way from the sun knowing it would land on perfect cheeks and lips.
“You can’t swim.”
Minho scoffs. Keeps his eyes on the road. “Excellent observation, Jisung-ah. You can’t either.”
Jisung never learned, because all the summers he was supposed to spend doing activities like learning sports or how to swim, he spent indoors instead, traded them for the comfort of Minho’s presence for a longer time.
“Can you bury me in the sand?”
“Not the smartest choice,” comes Seungmin’s voice from the back, reminding Jisung that the world consists of more than just Minho’s soft words and smile and Jisung watching them from the passenger seat.
Jisung learns what that means when he wakes up from a nap on the beach with big sand boobs. Not that he minds, really, especially when it gets Minho to laugh like that. He lies next to him and their heads turn to face each other, and they both sputter out a laugh at the same time. There’s a drop of water falling from Minho’s hairline, trailing a path down across his face. If Jisung’s hands weren’t trapped beneath the sand, he might’ve reached out to touch it.
They lose the rock-paper-scissors game that is used to decide who has to go do the shopping. He complains about it a little bit, then Minho shoves two shopping bags in his face and reminds him of all his empty promises to be more active. Jisung pouts but he’s up before someone takes pity on him and volunteers to go in his place.
It’s a short walk to the supermarket. Jisung can’t stop singing disconnected verses of random songs; he’s filled to the brim with something intoxicatingly sweet. Minho smiles fondly the whole way, teases him to switch career paths since he can’t shut up anyway, mumbles more songs when Jisung goes quiet.
They finish adding the items on the list to the shopping cart in a few minutes, then Jisung spends another fifteen in the snacks section with Minho a few steps behind him reminding him of all the ones he’s already tried and decided he didn’t like before. Minho holds one shopping bag and forces Jisung to hold the bigger one since he’s at fault for most of the unnecessary stuff they ended up buying. When they notice a group of teens standing by a corner near a streetlight, Minho guides them both to cross to the other side before Jisung’s heart can start to pick up its pace.
When Jisung was twelve, he broke his arm jumping from his bed to his brother's while their parents were out. After the horrifying pain receded, Jisung was left with a strange sense of excitement; earlier that year, one of the boys from his class broke his arm and got everyone to sign their names on his cast. Jisung went to sleep and dreamt about his classmates signing his cast too.
Jisung had never spoken to that boy before, but he walked up with a cast around his arm and a smile on his face, because surely this kid would get it, surely he'd sign his cast and they'd become friends.
Reality turned out to be different from little Jisung's expectations, the kid laughed at him, teased him about how he could possibly break his bones when all he does is sit in a corner and doodle in his notebooks. Jisung went home with a clean white cast that day, told his mother he decided not to ask anyone to sign because he didn't want it dirtied.
If Jisung thinks about it —which he often does, despite hating to— this is where he traces it all back, the tingling strain in the back of his throat, the numbness in his limbs when he’s around people, the fear.
Minho links their free hands and sways them back and forth aggressively. He skips on his feet, then stops when Jisung whines between his giggles that he’ll trip and fall and he’ll have to carry him back on his shoulder like a five-kilo sac of rice. Minho scoffs and cracks his neck. “Hop on,” he says.
If Jisung thinks about it, really thinks about it, he falls short of remembering any moment when talking to Minho felt intimidating, he fails to come up with a single instance where his body felt anything but warmth.
Jeongin gives Minho an enthusiastic hug when he sees all the snacks they got, and Minho sticks his tongue out at Jisung when he’s denied the same privilege even though many of the snacks were his idea. When Jisung goes to the car to get a jacket from his bag in the trunk, Minho appears behind him, dropping all his weight on him until he groans. “What?” he says in an innocent voice, stretches out his words in a whine, “I’m tired.” His arms hang loosely on Jisung’s sides, not pulled enough around him for it to be considered a hug. When Jisung complains again, Minho pulls away. And Jisung doesn’t remember when this started happening, but his skin remembers Minho’s every touch like memory foam, a void in his being that can only be filled by him.
He smiles at Minho when he pulls the zipper of his jacket up for him, rolling his eyes at Jisung’s toothy grin. They go back to join their friends on the beach
One time, when they were lining up to get lunch at the school cafeteria, Hyunjin had told him, “You’re afraid of change.”
Jisung had squinted his eyes at him, looked at the bowl of ramen sitting on his tray after the cafeteria lady called for him to get his order, said, “I’m a broke university student!”
Hyunjin had only scoffed without dignifying it with a reply, and Jisung ended up thinking about it for an entire weekend spent under the covers of his bed.
Jisung isn’t exactly afraid of change, but he doesn’t like it. There’s a sort of comfort in familiarity, there’s ease in the way he expects some things to just…be. He wouldn’t claim he had control over most aspects of his life, but he cherishes the certainty he still found himself feeling towards some of them.
When he woke up in the middle of Sunday night of that weekend to find Minho trying to maneuver him on the bed to fit beside him, probably having just returned from his visit to his parents', Jisung didn’t tell him he missed him. He only hummed and scooted over, content to know he’ll wake up on Monday morning to his hyung’s face mellow with sleep and golden with early morning sunshine.
On the sand sitting in a circle, Seungmin takes out his guitar and plays soft tunes. Changbin sings along, his voice surprisingly sweet. Jisung sits between Chan’s legs who wraps his arms around him and rocks them left and right to the beat. When his eyes lock with Minho’s, he has a smile on his face.
They go quiet to watch the sun set, orange sphere quickly disappearing behind the line where the sea meets the sky. There’s a soft hue cast over the scenery now. And Jisung feels on the verge of tears. Minho finds his eyes again and tilts his head, mouths are you okay and Jisung gives him a smile and a nod. Seungmin and Changbin continue. Hyunjin’s head lays in Jeongin’s lap as they sing along.
He wishes he can go back in time to when a younger Jisung was scared and alone. He wishes he can tell him things will be okay, wishes he can reassure himself that happiness awaits.
It’s not perfect, still. But now he knows that moments of uncertainty will pass, too. Now he knows he has a group of people he calls his own.
As Jisung drifts in and out of sleep on the way back, he wonders if he can still be granted a moment like those in his childhood where he would fall asleep on the couch and wake up in bed the next morning. He opens his eyes to the warm tone of Minho’s voice in the darkness of the car. “We’re home,” he says.
The next time he wakes up, it’s almost noon. Some of them are still asleep. As he makes his way to the bathroom, he hears the faint sounds of Felix talking about his tan lines, groaning when Changbin uses the opportunity to flex his bicep next to Felix’s and compare their sizes.
Jisung comes out of the bathroom and finds Minho in the kitchen, washing fruits in the sink and adding them to a bowl; pears and berries and grapes. He watches him for a while, watches his delicate hands under the water. Sunshine trickles from the window and makes the sharp lines of his face soft when he turns to him with a smile. Jisung feels warm, fuzzy and blurred around the edges. And it’s not sudden, not new at all. He takes one step closer, not too close still. He stops there, and he says, “I love you.”
Minho shuts the water and turns to face him, lips slightly parted and eyes searching. “And I’m not scared of you not saying it back; this is not about that. I’m just—” Jisung inhales, lets it out slowly. “I’m afraid of never knowing how it feels to say it, of you never hearing me say it.”
Minho comes nearer and there’s a smile tugging the corners of his lips. His hands lift to the sides of Jisung’s face and they’re cold with the water still dripping from them. When Jisung’s lips part with a shiver, Minho’s slot right between them, saccharine like overripe peaches, sending warmth all through Jisung’s body. When they pull apart, Jisung watches a flicker of light dance in Minho’s dark pupils. It feels like the spark that created the universe, the moment that turned the infinity of nothingness into countless galaxies. Minho lets out a breath, and Jisung breathes it in. “I love you too,” it says.
The rest are scattered around the living room when they go back to join them, a bowl of fresh fruits in hand. When Seungmin asks Minho why his face is blushing, he blames the summer sun.