Chapter Text
Minseok likes to think he’s decent enough at solving his problems on his own.
He’s a quick thinker, someone who’s fully capable of keeping a cool head when things go south, someone who can come up with solutions without causing a magnitude nine crashout to uproot the lives of everyone around him. Like the time he basically saved his elementary school graduation play by fixing the lead actor’s broken shoe with superglue and duct tape ten minutes before the show began, all while trying not to cringe at the feeling of the poor guy’s tears on his arm. Or the time he fixed the coffee machine at five in the morning in total darkness so that Hyeokgyu wouldn’t be without his morning coffee. On a Monday morning. He basically saved the world that day.
Though, none of those problem-solving skills seem to be with him in the present, and maybe that’s why he’s throwing his bag and wallet into a corner like a 2010s delinquent and flopping onto the couch all wet market fish-style. The impact has him bouncing once on the black leather of the cushions, and by the time he falls back down again, he’s gone completely boneless, a groan escaping from somewhere deep within his chest as his right arm bends to cover his eyes. He can feel Kwanghee and Hyeokgyu’s stares cutting into him from their place at the dining table—where Kwanghee’s probably drinking from his stupid Roblox man face mug and Hyeokgyu’s using his laptop (that everybody knows Sanghyeok bought him) to play Run 3—and he’d feel a bit more shame for looking so pathetic in front of his brothers if he wasn’t so distraught by his new conundrum.
“Hyung,” Minseok half-wails, half-groans, “I think I’m in love with him.”
He doesn’t need to specify which brother when he says hyung, because him calling on one of them is basically the same as calling on the other. He waits for his brothers’ confused prying, but nothing of the sort graces him with the chance to go on a tangent. Instead, he’s forced to sit through at least thirty seconds of painful silence as Kwanghee and Hyeokgyu have their silent conversation in the language of expressions and (possible) pantomime. Minseok doesn’t really want to lift his arm off of his eyes and blind himself, so he deals with not being able to see whatever expression the two useless hyungs are mirroring—
“…Minhyung?”
Pause. Reset. Cut. Minseok wants to scoop out the remnants of his treacherous brain and get a refund from god. If he exists. Looking at Minseok’s current situation, he probably doesn’t. He sits up from his place on the couch, eyes blinking blearily under the lamplight as he faces Kwanghee’s direction to shoot what’s hopefully a venomous glare. Hyeokgyu’s looking up from his laptop screen, Run 3 conquest abandoned, and while he looks like he wants to say something, his lips remain pursed. The twinkle in his eye makes Minseok want to scream, though.
“First off, how the hell did you know it was Minhyung? I never mentioned anyone.” Minseok grits, because this is going very differently from the scenario he imagined.
Okay, he hadn’t actually thought that far. He just really wanted to spill all his troubles to somebody. Looking at the fact that he went to his brothers for that, part of him was probably hoping for some genius, brotherly advice. But all that aside, he’s still miffed that Kwanghee hit the bullseye on his first try. Where is the interrogation? The drama? The chance to stall until he actually figures out what he wants from this conversation?
“Well,” Kwanghee answers, expression bemused, “who else could it have been? And we all just assumed you already knew.”
“I don’t know, anyone. You make me sound obvious. Easy.”
More of that damned silence. Did someone give out freebies?
Minseok scrunches his face into something that must look terrible—if Kwanghee’s broadening grin is any indication—his left hand finding its way to one of the hideous couch pillows Hyeokgyu bought at a school fair. The neon green stripes warp into something abstract under his fingers as he contemplates which one of his brothers gets a cushion to the face first.
Kwanghee’s trying-not-to-laugh expression answers his question, and Minseok doesn’t try to hide his satisfaction when a shriek Mariah Carey would approve of escapes from his second brother.
Said satisfaction doesn’t last long, though, because Hyeokgyu finally speaks up.
“When will you tell him?”
Minseok throws the second pillow.
Hyeokgyu bats it away.
“I won’t,” Minseok says.
Kwanghee opens his mouth, and he looks like he’s about to give one of his 500 WPM rants. Hyeokgyu stops him with a look that says let him finish his dramatic monologue before he self-implodes and never tells us anything again.
Minseok takes that cue.
“He doesn’t like me that way.”
That kills whatever they were about to say. Hyeokgyu’s brows furrow, and Kwanghee’s grin turns into a look of concern.
“Are you sure?” Hyeokgyu prods, and he’s looking at Minseok with something akin to pity. The kind of look you give someone when they ask what the difference between differentiation and integration is, ten minutes before a chemistry exam. “It wouldn’t be out of line to say he does,” he adds carefully, “You two are really close.”
Kwanghee makes a face at that.
“You don’t get it, hyung,” Minseok mutters. “He just sees me as a friend.”
That’s what Minseok had been telling himself all this time. He’d thought that logical thinking would’ve eased the feeling, that it’d help him bide his time until the burdensome feelings reduced themselves to ashes.
It should’ve worked by now. It was supposed to work by now.
“I think he’s gone for you, though,” Kwanghee says, voice quieter now, “I’ve seen the way he acts around you, people don’t look at their friends like that.”
“He isn’t, hyung,” Minseok mutters, “I don’t want to give myself false hope.”
False hope. False hope that would’ve gambled their friendship away.
He gets off the couch, a low squeak from the broken spring in the left cushion—the one that gives it its weird indent—follows his trudge to his room. The door shuts behind him with that quiet coming-of-age movie finality he absolutely did not intend.
Kwanghee matches the stare Hyeokgyu sends from above his laptop screen, mouthing a denial before taking a sip from his mug. Hyeokgyu shuts his laptop and sighs before shifting his gaze to Minseok’s door. Kwanghee turns in his chair to look at the same spot. Neither of them says anything.
They wait five seconds. Ten.
The door clicks open.
Minseok pokes his head out slowly, looking like something akin to a meerkat. When he notices both his brothers staring at him, and it dawns on him that they had predicted this exact scenario, he visibly deflates.
“…What’s for dinner?” he mumbles, eyes on the floor.
Minseok lasts about one day before seeking out someone else to vent his troubles to.
Look, despite having made up his mind about not telling Minhyung anything regarding his crush, Minseok still wants some form of release that doesn’t involve his useless brothers giving him romantic delusions.
Maybe age is catching up to them. Minseok hopes not, because he’s too young to take both brothers to the hospital for checkups and sob at CT scans. He doesn’t have the money to send one of them to the nursing home, much less two. The author isn’t even kind enough to give any indication that they have parental figures to rely on.
…spiralled thoughts aside, he seeks advice from people who might catch his drift a little better.
“Hyunjoon,” he wails, throwing himself across his best friend’s lap, “I think I’m in love with him.”
Hyunjoon stills, before a face-splitting grin plasters itself across his face. He pauses the trashy Taiwanese soap opera on the TV and looks at Minseok, excitement flashing in his eyes. “Fucking finally,” he says. “I’ve been waiting for the two of you to confess longer than this damn drama’s been around. And it has six hundred episodes.” His glee seems to translate into energy, because his hands are quick to action, ruffling Minseok’s hair in every direction possible.
Minseok really doesn’t know what he was expecting. He doesn’t even question how Hyunjoon, too, seems to know who the ‘he’ in question is in an instant.
He sits up, lifting his head off of Hyunjoon’s lap and turning to face him from the other end of the bed, arms crossed. “Not happening,” he mumbles, “why does everyone think I’m going to confess?”
“Because both of you have been inseparable since, I don’t know, third grade?”
“Lots of people have been best friends since third grade. Lots of people have been best friends since kindergarten.”
“Yeah, but he looks at you like you created League, or something. Like he’s a professional ADC and you’re the best support in the entire world. Don’t even get me started on how you look at him. It’s cute, but it makes me a little sick sometimes.”
“You’re delusional,” Minseok protests, “he looks at everyone that way. He’s nice to everyone, okay? Too much love for the world, or whatever.”
“He told me to eat shit and die because I let Wooje cut in front of him during lunch.”
“I’d do the same.”
“He lends you his jackets.”
“So do you.”
Hyunjoon rolls his eyes. “Yeah, when you ask. He’s got some weird radar when it comes to you, always knowing when you’re cold and giving you whatever jacket he’s got on before you even say anything. Hell, last week, he helped you put it on.”
“My hands were full!”
“He walks you home when you leave school together. Isn’t his house in the opposite direction?”
“The route from my house to his is pretty at night.” Minseok protests weakly.
Hyunjoon’s right eye twitches.
“It can’t be would walk after a twelve-hour school day pretty.”
“...maybe it is.”
The way Hyunjoon’s staring at him now looks an awful lot like the looks Kwanghee and Hyeokgyu were giving him. The deja vu is kinda gross. “Is it the nerves? I can help with that,” he gestures to a blue duffel bag at the corner of his room, squished between his desk and the wall.
Minseok blinks. “You’ve been hiding crack in your room?” he whisper-shouts.
“What? No, it’s beer. Liquid courage, or whatever. Don’t change the subject.”
“I’m not confessing because he doesn’t like me that way.”
“Bullshit. You spout a lot of bullshit, but this actually takes the cake.” Hyunjoon hisses, yanking part of the blanket from where Minseok’s been hoarding it and throwing it over his knees.
“Don’t give me that.” Minseok sighs, “If I tell him how I feel, he’ll feel bad because he can’t return my feelings. And then he’ll try to apologize even though it’s my fault for throwing my feelings onto him, because he’s too nice. And then he’ll try to keep the friendship afloat, but deep inside he feels awkward because I confessed to him and burdened him with my stupid feelings. In the end, our conversations’ll start to thin out because I made things awkward, and I’ll be the one to start ghosting him because Minhyung’s too nice to do it himself, even though he should. And then we’ll become strangers, and then I’ll be boyfriendless and bestfriendless.”
It’s not like Minseok vehemently wants to believe that Minhyung feels nothing from him besides platonic affection. He’s always been an anything is possible kinda guy. It’s just, he’s thought about it long enough—in the quiet of his room when doomscrolling wasn’t enough to drown out his thoughts—to know that you can’t entertain the possibility of a scenario without developing some kind of expectation that it might come true. In this case, believing that Minhyung could like him back would make him hope. Making him hope would set him up for disappointment, because if Minhyung reciprocating was a possibility, the same could very much be said for the opposite. To Minseok, at least, the chances of Minhyung not returning his feelings are too large for him to take the risk.
If he doesn’t entertain the possibility that Minhyung might like him back, he won’t be disappointed when that doesn’t turn out to be the case. Simple as that.
His rant must make Hyunjoon realize something, because his best friend’s expression softens as he sighs. He doesn’t say anything else—in fact, he doesn’t even make a comment about the ‘bestfriendless’ bit—but he does scoot over to Minseok’s side of the bed to lean against him, handing him the remote.
Minseok settles on House.
They watch in silence as Cuddy explains the newest case; it’s nice.
Hyunjoon doesn’t shift, but he seems to hesitate before breaking the bubble.
“…you miss all the shots you don’t take.”
“Maybe I just don’t want to risk shooting myself in the foot,” Minseok mutters.
“He’d be good for you. He is good for you. You’d be happy.” Hyunjoon’s gaze still remains fixed on the TV, and Minseok doesn’t turn to look at him, either.
Hyunjoon isn’t wrong—Minseok knows that much. Still, he doesn’t want to set anything in stone, so he settles with a noncommittal hum in lieu of a proper response.
The topic sort of dies there, but the silence isn’t uncomfortable—Minseok and Hyunjoon know each other too well for that. They watch as House tears into Foreman, and Minseok tries to discern the few English words he knows, tries to let the noise fill his ears.
For now, at least, he lets himself breathe.