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It had always been Leo and Sangwon.
From the moment they were first grouped together in that dim, echoing practice room—awkward hellos, tired smiles traded between water breaks—Sangwon had gravitated toward him. And Leo, ever the extroverted one, didn’t mind it.
Not even when it turned into more.
Not even when late-night ramen runs turned into weekends at each other’s homes. When they met each other’s families like it was just a natural next step. When they took that one trip to Busan together, just the two of them, half for fun, half to keep from burning out.
Somewhere along the way, it stopped being about surviving the trainee system. Somewhere, it became them.
Even after they parted ways for a while—different paths, different schedules, different cities—the string never really frayed.
And when they both showed up to Boys Planet, bright-eyed and trembling with nerves, it was still them. Together.
It was always Leo and Sangwon. Sangwon and Leo.
Leo was the one who’d told him to put himself out there more. To let people see the softness he always tried to tuck away. “You’re funny, you’re warm, you’re kind,” he’d said. “People will love you.”
He just didn’t realize how much it would sting when they did.
The first team challenge ends, the camera shutters fade for now, and something shifts.
Because now, Sangwon is blooming. Opening. Laughing louder, standing taller. He’s glowing, really. And Leo—Leo is proud. Of course he is.
That part isn’t hard.
What’s harder is learning what it means to step back. To watch someone you love become the kind of person everyone wants to know.
And not knowing if there’s still a place for you in that version of their world.
Anxin’s funny. Warm in a new way Leo isn’t. He ruffles Sangwon’s hair, hands him snacks and calls him ‘hyung’ in that way Leo knows Sangwon likes because it makes him feel relied on. Anxin draws him into laughter like they’ve been friends for years.
And Sangwon leans in easily. He giggles, clings to Anxin’s shoulder mid-laugh, promises they’ll team up again next time.
Leo says nothing.
Just sits two seats away at dinner. Picks at his side dishes. Stabs his rice.
Junseo notices. Of course he does.
“Bro,” he sighs, tossing a grape at Leo’s head. “You’re literally sulking.”
Leo glares, “I’m not.”
“You are. I’ve seen puppies get left out for five minutes with more chill than you.”
Leo says nothing. But his chopsticks clack harder than necessary.
Later that night, the dorm is hushed, breathing in long, slow exhales between its walls.
The hallway lights burn low, smudged gold spilling in shallow pools across the linoleum. Somewhere down the corridor, a shower hisses behind a closed door. Laughter, muffled by plaster, flares and fades like a match being struck and snuffed out. The air smells faintly of soap, damp towels, the ghost of someone’s shampoo.
The door to their room opens with a weary creak, hinges protesting as if roused from sleep.
Sangwon slips inside, still humming something under his breath—just a scrap of melody, light as lint. It clings to him the way the rest of the day does. That bright, post-practice static charge that hasn’t quite bled away.
His cheeks are warm, flushed from exertion or the night air. His eyes are lit from the inside, pupils wide, lashes casting soft shadows on his skin. The corners of his mouth tug upward in the lingering echo of a joke, the last laugh he and Anxin shared outside still alive somewhere in him.
Leo doesn’t look up.
He’s already in bed, one leg folded under the covers, head bent low over the trainee journal balanced on his knee. From a distance, it could look like he’s writing—lost in thought, pen poised mid-sentence. But the pen hasn’t moved in minutes.
Sangwon lets his bag drop with a muted thump against the floorboards. His shoulders rise and fall with a stretch, and he exhales a little sigh, soft and unguarded.
“Today was fun.”
From the bed—a noncommittal hum, low and without shape.
Sangwon blinks, the sound snagging his attention. “Hyung?”
No answer.
He tilts his head, takes a few steps closer, careful as if the room might shatter underfoot.
“Did something happen?”
Silence.
Then—flat, deliberate—Leo says, “nothing.”
It lands with weight, that word. A small stone in still water, sending ripples through the air between them.
Sangwon studies him. The journal. The curve of his shoulders. The stillness that isn’t quite peace.
He crouches by the bed, folding his arms along the mattress edge, chin resting on them. From here, he can look up, try to catch Leo’s gaze from beneath whatever barricade he’s built.
“Hyung,” he says again, gentler now, “are you mad at me?”
A long, quiet exhale escapes Leo before he sets the journal aside, as though the paper has grown too heavy to bear. His eyes lift at last, meeting Sangwon’s.
“No,” he says. “I’m not mad.”
Sangwon tilts his head, “then what is it?”
The question is soft, but it presses in like a fingertip on a bruise.
Leo hesitates. The words in his mouth feel foolish, petulant—too small to be voiced, and yet they gnaw at him.
But Sangwon waits. He always has.
There’s something steady in the way he does it—earnest, unflinching, as if the truth, however slight, is worth the patience. His eyes are open wide, ready to catch it.
Leo shifts, palms rubbing against the blanket like he could warm courage into them.
“You’ve been spending a lot of time with Anxin.”
Sangwon blinks, surprised. “Yeah… he’s nice.”
“I know,” Leo says, and there’s a tautness under the words. “You should. It’s good—you’re supposed to make friends. I just…” He falters. The thought snags on something he doesn’t know how to name.
“You just…?” Sangwon prompts quietly.
Leo swallows, eyes sliding away, “…that used to be my spot.”
A pause, heavy with confusion.
Sangwon tilts his head. “What?”
“Not literally,” Leo says quickly, ears tinged pink. “Just—before, you told me things first. You laughed with me first. And now…” His voice thins to silence. He exhales sharply, eyes closing. “Forget it. It’s dumb.”
But Sangwon doesn’t laugh. Doesn’t wave it off. Doesn’t step back.
Instead, he leans forward, his voice soft as dusk.
“You’re still my first.”
Leo’s eyes open, startled, something sharp and unguarded in the flicker of them.
Sangwon’s gaze is steady, “even if I laugh or plau with others. Or play with them. You’re the first person I look for when I’m nervous. Or when something good happens. Or when I’m too tired to be anyone but myself.”
His fingers find the edge of Leo’s pillow, brushing against it—a small, unassuming touch that feels like the core of something unspoken.
“I always come back here,” he says. “To you.”
For a heartbeat, Leo simply stares. A hundred flickering emotions chase one another across his face—too many to catch, too quick to name.
Then, slowly, he exhales the breath he hadn’t known he was holding.
And he smiles.
Soft around the edges. Quietly, almost stubbornly bright in a way it only ever is when Sangwon’s the reason.
Later, when the hallway lights click off one by one and the dorm sinks into that strange, held-breath silence between midnight and dreams, Leo speaks into the dark.
“…I wasn’t jealous.”
The words drift across the narrow space between their beds, thin as candle smoke, yet heavy enough to press against Sangwon’s ribs. He exhales through his nose, the sound somewhere between a scoff and a sigh.
“Okay.”
“I wasn’t,” Leo says again, firmer this time, though the quiet swallows it almost whole. “Just… reminding you.”
Sangwon rolls onto his back, the springs sighing beneath him. “Reminding me of what?”
There’s a pause long enough for him to think Leo’s given up answering—until the other boy shifts in his sheets, turning toward him. The mattress whispers under his weight. His voice comes low, deep enough to thread straight into Sangwon’s chest.
“That you’re mine first.”
The room is still. The world is still.
Somewhere outside, a branch brushes against the window with the lightest scrape, and Sangwon feels absurdly like it’s writing the words into him.
He doesn’t respond—not because he doesn’t want to, but because the moment feels too fragile, like speaking would shatter the air between them.
Much later, when Leo’s breathing has steadied into what sounds like sleep, Sangwon lets the smallest whisper slip into the dark.
“I know.”
It happens on a day the cameras go dark earlier than expected—interviews wrapped, official content in the bag, the stream of social media updates cut short for once. A rare pocket of unclaimed hours.
The dorm hallway is long and narrow, lit in that late-afternoon gold that makes even scuffed linoleum look soft. Sangwon and Anxin are walking ahead, their laughter low and easy, stitched together by some shared joke.
Then—without warning—Anxin hooks his arms around Sangwon from behind.
Not the stiff, polite kind of embrace—it's loose, carefree. A gravity-less touch that only happens between people who have spent enough time together to know where the other’s edges are. The sort of thing teammates do without thinking, without weight—just warmth.
And Leo sees it.
From the far end of the hall, framed by the distance, the moment hangs suspended in amber.
Sangwon, startled but not startled, his shoulders curling back into the hold. His laugh spills out—bright, unguarded, his head tipped back just enough to catch the light in his hair. His hands stay tucked inside his hoodie sleeves, as if the whole world is warm enough already. Anxin leans in, murmuring something that must be ridiculous, because Sangwon’s grin widens before they vanish around the corner.
Sangwon doesn’t notice.
But Leo does.
The door to his room closes with more force than it needs. His hoodie lands somewhere near the bed before he collapses after it. The blanket comes up over his head, a halfhearted shield against the ghost of what he’s just seen.
It replays anyway.
Anxin’s arms around Sangwon.
Sangwon laughing. So easily. So brightly.
Leo groans into the pillow, muffling the sound as if someone might overhear. He tells himself he’s being ridiculous—because he is.
Sangwon doesn’t belong to him. Not officially, not in the way that would make this… anything.
And Sangwon hasn’t done anything wrong. He’s just making friends. Building new constellations. Letting his world stretch outward the way it’s meant to. The way it should.
Leo knows all of this. He knows.
And still.
There’s the ache. That small, twisting ache that feels like wanting to be the only one in someone’s orbit. Or, if not the only one, then the first. Always the first.
Because for so long, Sangwon had been his. Not in declarations or titles, but in the quiet certainties that live between words.
In the glances that found each other across mirrored practice rooms. In encouragement whispered when the lights were low. In the soft collapse of sleepy mornings and the quiet clink of breakfast bowls. In secrets so small they could be folded into a palm and carried around all day.
Leo exhales, long and uneven, pressing deeper into the pillow until the fabric warms with his breath.
He knows it’s unfair. Selfish, even.
But the thing about light is this—it doesn’t stop shining just because you’ve stepped away from it. If anything, the distance only makes it burn sharper in the dark.
And Sangwon is brighter than ever.
Leo is proud of that, proud enough to feel it like a bruise under the ribs.
He just wishes he didn’t feel so far away from the glow.
Sangwon slips in a few minutes later, the echo of laughter still tangled in his breath, faint and fading, like the lingering taste of something sweet on the tongue.
The door clicks softly shut behind him, sealing away the chaos of the hallway—though it still hums faintly through the walls. The muffled chorus of trainees laughing, shouting, their voices spilling over in unrestrained youth.
He takes two steps in before his eyes adjust to the dark, and falters.
Leo is already in bed, curled inward as if the day itself has pressed him into shape. Hood pulled low, shadows swallowing half his face. Blanket dragged up without care, its edge crooked, crumpled, as though it was thrown over him in a hurry. The posture is unmistakable—a fortress without walls, a door shut without a sound.
His back is turned.
His sulk is loud.
Sangwon’s smile, still hanging faintly from whatever joke he’d been laughing at, ebbs away. “Hyung?”
Nothing.
He moves forward with the caution of someone approaching a wild thing—steps soft on the floorboards, aware that one wrong movement could send the moment scattering like startled wings, “are you sleeping?”
A slow rustle under the covers. A voice, low and flat, “trying.”
“You okay?”
“Fine.”
The word lands in the dim room like a stone in still water, its ripple deep and heavy.
Sangwon sinks to the floor beside Leo’s bed, folding himself into the quiet. He pulls his knees to his chest, chin resting lightly atop them.
The only light is the pale thread of the hallway bleeding through the narrow gap under the door, painting a faint silver line across the floor. The air smells faintly of detergent and the clean, damp cotton of laundry that hasn’t been fully put away.
Somewhere beyond these walls, someone is singing off-key; someone else is laughing so hard they cough.
Here, the silence between them is thicker.
“Hyung,” Sangwon says again, gentler now, testing the word like it might break. “Are you upset?”
A shift beneath the blanket, “no.”
“You’re lying.”
“No, I’m not.”
“You are.”
This time, not even the faintest answer.
Sangwon exhales, slow.
Then, with the unthinking instinct of someone who’s rehearsed this ritual more times than either of them will admit, he hooks his fingers into the edge of the blanket and slips inside.
The air between them changes—tighter, sharper, like the static before a storm. Both still in hoodies and sweatpants, socks soft against the sheets, but it doesn’t matter. The closeness is its own weather.
Leo stiffens under his touch—a breath, two—but doesn’t push him away.
Sangwon curls onto his side, close enough to feel the faint heat radiating through Leo’s layers. His voice drops to a murmur, almost a secret.
“I missed you today.”
No reply.
“You’ve barely looked at me since filming ended.”
Still nothing.
Sangwon’s gaze settles on the curve of Leo’s back, eyes tracing unseen patterns into the fabric of his hoodie—maps only he will ever know. The silence here is not absence but density; it fills the space between their breathing, thick enough to rest a hand on.
His fingers twitch once, hovering just short of closing the distance. Then still.
The dorm room was cloaked in night, the only light a pale wash spilling from the corridor through the half-closed door. Shadows pooled in the corners.
The air between the two of them was warm, threaded through with the faint scent of detergent from the sheets and the quiet, steady sound of breathing under the same blanket.
“Actually…” Sangwon began, his voice tentative, almost feeling its way forward in the dark. “I’ve been spending time with Anxin because of a secret.”
Beside him, Leo lay curled beneath the duvet, eyes half-hidden. At the word secret, his lashes lifted. His pout deepened, just barely.
“Something I didn’t know how to say out loud,” Sangwon went on, the syllables slow and deliberate, like he was peeling each one out of his chest. “So I practiced with someone who wasn’t you. Because if I said it wrong, it wouldn’t matter as much.”
That—of all things—was what made Leo move. He turned, lifting his head just enough for the dim light to skim the curve of his cheekbone.
“You have a secret you can’t tell me?”
Sangwon didn’t shift an inch. The space between them felt almost electric—just inches of air, a pulse, a breath.
A beat. Then another.
“…Because it’s about you.”
Leo’s brow furrowed, eyes narrowing in faint confusion. He still wasn’t catching up.
“It’s a secret I’ve had for a while,” Sangwon said, swallowing. “And I wasn’t sure if I should keep it or not. But honestly? More than the embarrassment, I just hated seeing you upset.”
“I’m not upset,” Leo muttered. But the heat rising faintly up his throat betrayed him. After a moment, softer, “the secret… do I get to know it?”
“If you still want to,” Sangwon said, heart skipping.
Leo nodded once, lips parted slightly, gaze fixed on him.
And that was when Sangwon’s resolve faltered.
He became aware—fully, dangerously—of how close they were. But instead of pulling back, he searched Leo’s face.
The tight line of his mouth, the guarded set of his shoulders. And then he said it, voice low enough to barely stir the air between them.
“I like you.”
The silence that followed was sharp enough to feel.
Leo blinked, “what?”
“I like you, hyung,” Sangwon repeated, steadier this time. “That’s the secret.”
Leo jolted upright, sheets rustling, “wait—me?”
Sangwon deadpanned. “No, the other trainee Leo in the show—yes, you.”
For a moment, Leo just stared, stunned into stillness. Then his expression collapsed into the softest, most betrayed pout Sangwon had ever seen.
“You told Anxin first?”
A laugh burst out of Sangwon before he could stop it, shy and startled all at once. He covered his face with both hands, “I had to practice!”
“You practiced liking me?”
“No! Practiced confessing—oh my god.”
Leo narrowed his eyes, “so while I was in here sulking, thinking you were gonna replace me—”
“You were sulking?”
“Privately!”
Sangwon wheezed, falling back onto the mattress with theatrical defeat, “hyung, you’re such a baby.”
“You’re such a traitor.”
The pause that stretched after was ridiculous and warm in equal measure.
Leo rolled back toward him, and when he spoke again, the humor had thinned into something quieter.
“You like me,” he said—not as a question this time.
Sangwon turned his head, “yeah.”
Leo nodded, slow and deliberate, “okay.”
Then, without warning, he leaned forward. A quick, warm motion, their foreheads meeting in a gentle bonk—noses brushing, breath mingling.
Sangwon froze, every nerve alight.
Leo’s grin flickered into place, bright even in the dark. “I like you, too. I mean, duh. I’ve liked you for years.”
That sentence seemed to short-circuit something in Sangwon. His face burned.
“Hyung—” he began, flustered, but Leo was already rolling away, tugging the blanket higher like a truce flag.
“Go to sleep,” he murmured. “My secret’s out now too.”
Sangwon huffed a laugh into his shoulder. “You’re ridiculous.”
“Yours, though.”
“Yeah,” Sangwon whispered, smiling so wide it hurt. “Mine.”
It’s well past lights-out.
The dorms are quiet, lights are off, and Leo and Sangwon are curled up together on Leo’s bed, tucked under a blanket like nothing else exists.
Leo’s got his arm around Sangwon’s waist, fingers absentmindedly tracing shapes over the hem of his hoodie. Sangwon’s nose is pressed to Leo’s collarbone, trying—failing—not to smile every time Leo shifts like he’s shy about how close they are.
“I can’t believe you actually like me,” Leo mumbles into his hair.
“I told you already,” Sangwon whispers, lips brushing Leo’s neck, “you’re the only secret I wanted to keep.”
Leo’s heart makes a weird noise. Probably explodes. He’s about to say something very stupid and very soft—
Bang.
The door swings open.
“Yah, snack time!” yells Junmin, barging in like it’s his own room. “You two up? We’re raiding the ramen stash—” he freezes. Right behind him, Seowon crashes to a halt.
Because Leo and Sangwon are still cuddled up in bed, blinking at the doorway like two deer caught mid-heartfelt whisper.
Leo’s hand is still on Sangwon’s waist. Sangwon’s head is still tucked against Leo’s hoodie.
Both of them go very still.
Junmin stares, blinks once, then slowly turns to Seowon and whispers, “…you think?”
Seowon squints, “finally?”
A third voice joins, it’s Donggyu, “oh my god, we were taking bets on this.”
The door creaks again—this time it’s Chingyu and Hyunjun, bursting in with a camera already rolling and a mic hot. “For our first behind-the-scenes segment, let’s check in on MVP trainees Leo and Sangwon’s room—“
Seowon shrieks as the camera turns. Junmin and Donggyu dives in front of the lens.
“Cut the camera!” Seowon yells. “Cut, cut! This is a private moment!”
Hyungjun panics with the camera, Chingyu looks in between wanting to laugh or looking apologetic.
It was full of chaos, the other trainees loudly exited the room and closed the door with their shouting still heard in the hallway.
Leo and Sangwon don’t move.
They're still curled up like one of those Valentine’s Day couple dolls, blinking in synchronized horror.
Then, Sangwon buries his entire face into Leo’s chest.
Leo is bright red. But also smug. Just a little.
“…MVP trainees, huh?” he mumbles into Sangwon’s hair.
Sangwon groans, “I’m never leaving this bed again.”
Leo laughs, pull him back closer, “fine by me.”
Outside the room, someone yells, “Junseo hyung, you owe me 10,000 won! I told you they’d get together before the next evals—”