Chapter Text
The room smelled like fresh laundry and something faintly herbal—medicated shampoo maybe, the kind you only use when you’re recovering from something bigger than a cold. Suho’s things were still in boxes. A couple were left open, half-unpacked. His duffel bag slumped near the desk like it had given up halfway.
Sieun didn’t say much when Suho arrived. Just a nod. A shift of his weight on the bed as he sat up straighter, watching with those sharp eyes like he was cataloguing Suho’s gait, his expression, his silence. Maybe he was.
“You don’t have to help,” Suho had said, setting down a stack of textbooks that the school had loaned him. “I’ll figure out the rest.”
Sieun tilted his head slightly. “Didn’t say I would.”
But two hours later, Suho’s books were organized alphabetically on the shelf. His uniform hung pressed in the shared closet, and a steaming bowl of ramen sat on the desk beside a cold pack and two acetaminophen tablets.
The first week felt like an adjustment for both of them. Suho had to navigate the odd sensation of walking back into the world after being gone. It had only been a year, but it felt like the whole city had shifted under his feet. Everyone had moved one desk forward in life. He was still stuck at the back.
Sieun, on the other hand, had gotten sharper. Not colder—he’d never really been cold, just distant in a way that made people think he was. But now he spoke with more weight. His silences were less empty, more considered.
“You can borrow my notes,” he said on their third night as roommates, sliding a neatly labeled binder across the table without meeting Suho’s eyes.
Suho stared at it. “You kept notes?”
Sieun gave a noncommittal shrug. “Didn’t plan to. Just happened.”
He didn’t say it, but Suho wondered if Sieun had been keeping those notes for someone who couldn’t be there.
Later that night, Suho sat on his mattress, cross-legged, flipping through the pages. Sieun’s handwriting was exacting. Small, blocky Korean characters, underlined terms, margin annotations. The whole thing smelled faintly of lead pencil and something Suho couldn’t quite name.
It smelled like someone had cared.
They didn’t talk much at first, not about anything that mattered. Just things like:
“Are you using the shower first or should I?”
“You left your charger in the outlet.”
“You snore. Kind of.”
But it was in the way Sieun pushed a bowl toward him without asking. The way he folded Suho’s laundry when he left it in the machine too long. The way Suho found a post-it stuck to his textbook: You missed this part in class. Pg. 214.
The others showed up a few times too. Go Hyun-Tak and Park Hu-min mostly, and occasionally Seo Jun-Tae, with snacks and energy drinks and the kind of laughter that felt just a little too loud for the tiny room. Suho would sit at the edge of his bed, watching as Sieun leaned into the banter with a quiet smile playing at his lips. It wasn’t the full grin Suho remembered from their old days—back when fights were constant and friendship was forged in bruises—but it was softer. Lived-in.
And it made something tight pull in Suho’s chest.
Park Hu-min sat a little too close to Sieun sometimes. Or maybe Suho was just seeing it wrong. But there was a moment—barely two seconds—when Park Hu-min leaned over to grab something, and their shoulders touched, and Sieun didn’t move away.
Suho looked down. His fist clenched just slightly on the blanket.
After they left, Sieun asked, “You okay?”
Suho didn’t look up. “Why wouldn’t I be?”
Sieun paused, as if he was weighing whether or not to push.
He didn’t.
The thing about unsaid things is that they grow. They take root in silences. They stretch themselves over gestures and glances and the space between two beds. Suho started dreaming again—fragments of old memories, the sound of fists hitting pavement, the rush of adrenaline, Sieun’s voice calling his name in the dark.
Sometimes he woke up breathless, heart racing, hands curled into fists. And every time, he’d see Sieun lying there, back turned, but awake. The slight shift of his shoulder gave it away. Neither of them said anything.
One night, they were working through calculus together—more accurately, Sieun was explaining something and Suho was trying not to get distracted by the way his voice dipped when he got focused.
“You need to isolate the variable,” Sieun murmured, tapping a pencil against the notebook. “Here. You’re overcomplicating it.”
“Maybe I just like making things harder than they need to be,” Suho muttered under his breath.
Sieun looked up. His gaze flicked to Suho’s face and lingered a beat too long.
The air felt heavier suddenly. Not charged exactly, but thick with something unspoken.
Sieun looked away first. “Don’t we all.”
Suho noticed the way his shoulder would brush Sieun’s in the narrow space between the beds when they both knelt to grab something. The way Sieun’s voice softened when he said his name in the middle of the night, like it wasn’t supposed to be said out loud. He noticed it all. And he said nothing. Because what if saying something broke it?
This—whatever this fragile, almost-thing between them was—felt like balancing on glass. One wrong step, one word too honest, and the whole thing might crack.
But the feelings didn’t ask permission.
Sometimes, Suho would find himself watching Sieun study, headphones in, head tilted slightly. And he’d wonder what it would feel like to just reach over. To touch his wrist. To tilt his chin up and kiss him without warning.
Then he’d blink, shake it off, and bury himself back in his book.
He didn’t want to ruin it.
He didn’t want to lose him.
He didn’t want to hope.
But hope had already crept in.
Like breathing.