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The first time he met Hyunjin, nine years and a lifetime ago, there had been a moment. Just a second. Hyunjin had stepped into the room—younger, softer, already too beautiful—and something in Minho's gut had twinged. A strange pull; a recognition he couldn't explain. It was the most bizarre sensation, this absolute certainty that they would have crossed paths in any version of the universe, somewhere, somehow, even if Minho had never auditioned for JYP, even if he had instead ended up at some obscure rural community club teaching dance to kids still struggling to tell their right foot from their left. We would have met anyway, he'd thought. Even if none of this happened, we would have found each other.
It made no sense. They were strangers. Minho was—and remains—irreligious, and divine callings had never been a part of his vocabulary. So he dismissed it immediately, burying it under the thousand other things that demanded his attention.
He really should have listened to it, should have paid attention to the way the cosmos was anything but subtle in its signalling towards this boy with the incredibly clear eyes and incredibly delicate wrists and incredibly innocent laugh that sounded like wind chimes. But Minho was nineteen, then twenty, then twenty-one, and there was always something more pressing than examining the peculiar gravity that seemed to pull him towards Hyunjin whether he wanted it to or not.
Nine years is a long time to be loved by someone. Nine years is also a long time to love someone and never say it; and Minho understands now, walking down the chilly streets of Milan with his hands shoved deep into the pockets of a freshly sponsored coat that probably costs more than his family’s first car, that he has been the recipient of something extraordinary. And he has handled it with all the fumbling delicacy of someone trying to dispose of a gift they never asked for and didn’t quite know what to do with.
It wasn't malicious, what he had done. It was just unfortunate, the way most tragedies are unfortunate: a series of small decisions of trajectory that added up to something vast and irrevocable. Hyunjin had loved him for nine years, and Minho, ever so observant, had known it for all of them. Had done almost nothing about it except pretend not to notice, retreat further into the safe harbour of friendship where he could have Hyunjin without really having him, without the terrifying vulnerability of actually being possessed in return.
And now Hyunjin is in Iceland with a producer with whom he's friendly, watching the northern lights that he and Minho had promised to see together on one of those long-ago nights when they'd lain on the roof of the old dorm and stared up at a sky smothered by Seoul's light pollution, pointing at the few brave stars that dared to show themselves and pretending it was the galaxy. Minho has his own theories about this producer friend; theories that the other members assure him are completely unfounded, merely the products of a guilty conscience projecting its anxieties onto innocent bystanders. Changbin actually laughed when Minho brought it up, that particular laugh that means you're being ridiculous and everyone knows it but you. But Minho isn't so sure. He's not sure of anything anymore, except that he is in Milan, and Hyunjin is not, and the streets here seem to hold memories of Hyunjin in a way Minho never allowed himself to.
The streets of Milan in winter are a study in contrasts Minho has never bothered to notice before. Warm light spilling from centuries-old windows onto slick cobblestones. The aggressive modernity of designer storefronts tucked into Baroque buildings. He notices now because he is looking for something he can't name, walking the route Hyunjin once described over breakfast, voice soft with wonder.
There's this street, hyung, where the buildings lean towards each other like they're sharing secrets. The light falls in this specific way around four in the afternoon—
Minho nodded along, distracted by his phone, by the schedule, by the millions of small urgencies that always seemed more dire than whatever Hyunjin was trying to show him.
He finds that street now. The light is specific. Golden and heavy, pooling in the spaces between stones. He pulls out his phone to photograph it, the way Hyunjin used to photograph everything, but the image is flat, meaningless. Just a picture of a street. He isn’t sure what settings to use, doesn't understand why this moment matters enough to capture.
Hyunjin tried to teach him once, showed him how to adjust aperture, how to find the story in a frame as they lazily lounged in a hotel room in Paris after a long schedule. Minho laughed and said just take the picture for me, you're better at it. Hyunjin took the picture. Minho still has it somewhere. A shot of the Seine at dusk from his hotel window.
He keeps walking.
The reality of being appointed Gucci ambassador is that it requires you to be in places like Milan in February, places that are beautiful and cold and full of art that Minho has spent his entire adult life pretending to appreciate more than he actually does. The Pinacoteca di Brera is on his list because it was on Hyunjin's list; the one he made for their first time in Milan as a group, which Minho politely turned down. Too many museums, Hyunjinnie. I'll be bored. So Hyunjin went alone and returned animated, going on and on about Mantegna's foreshortening and Caravaggio's chiaroscuro until Chan gently steered the subject to something more inclusive for the rest of them.
Minho stays in Brera for what feels like an entire day, staring at Caravaggio’s Supper at Emmaus and tries to understand what Hyunjin might see in it. He doesn’t understand, not surprisingly, but he tries. He looks at the way the light falls across the figures and wonders about the religious significance of the pieces of torn bread on the table before God. Hyunjin would surely have something to say about that.
Hyunjin once tried to explain to him the difference between Renaissance and Baroque, the way light moved differently in each period, the theological implications of artistic choices that Minho had never even recognised as such. He nodded along that day, making appropriate sounds of interest while internally counting down the minutes until he could escape back to the hotel and order room service and watch something mindless on television. Hyunjin’s discourse was a touch too highbrow for his modestly sophisticated mind to navigate; besides, how could he be expected to focus on the nuances of Baroque theory when the ever-distracting Hyunjin was fine art on legs himself?
Hyunjin had picked up on how out of his depth Minho was, of course. Hyunjin always noticed. But he just smiled that patient smile he'd learnt to wear over the years and changed the subject to something more mundane, something Minho might actually want to talk about.
Minho felt relief at the time. Now he stands in this museum and feels the weight of every single one of those moments, each small dismissal layered on top of the others until they form something heavy enough to crush him.
Hyunjin giving up on his seemingly fruitless quest for Minho’s affection, Minho is learning, doesn't look like giving up at all. Hyunjin is still kind and warm and welcoming, still sends photographs of beautiful things and asks about Minho's day and laughs at his jokes in that singular way that always made Minho feel like the funniest person alive. There is no dramatic withdrawal, nor is there any obvious sign that anything has changed. It's just that something is missing, some specific quality of attention that Minho never consciously noticed until it wasn't there anymore. Hyunjin looks at him now the way he looks at everyone else—fond, fond, fond—but not the way he used to look at Minho, which was entirely different, like the difference between looking at the sun and looking at a photograph of the sun.
Minho took that gaze for granted for so long, accepted it as his due without ever really acknowledging it, and now it's gone and he doesn't know how to get it back or even if he deserves to try. The other members tell him he's imagining things, that Hyunjin is the same as always and Minho's guilt is just making him see problems where none exist again. But Minho knows what he knows, and what he knows is that something precious has slipped away from his half-hearted, uncertain grasp.
He has taken up photography. It is a new development, born of desperation and the vague hope that if he can learn to see the world through Hyunjin's lens, he might finally be able to catch up with him. His impulsively acquired film camera is expensive—he is Stray Kids member and Gucci global ambassador Lee Know, after all, he can afford expensive things now—but his photographs are terrible, all wrong angles and bad lighting and compositions that don't really come together. He can’t quite capture what Hyunjin would capture: the small moments of grace that Hyunjin seemed to find everywhere, in everything, in everyone except perhaps in Minho himself.
The thought lands sharp and persistent in his chest. Because it’s not true: Hyunjin did find grace in Minho, for nine years, and Minho was simply too wary of being consumed by that grace to accept it. He was too afraid of drowning in Hyunjin's enormous capacity for love to let himself be loved, afraid of losing himself entirely in Hyunjin's world, disappearing into the overwhelming force of Hyunjin's affection and never finding his way back out. Hyunjin loved so completely, so fearlessly, with such total abandonment, and Minho watched this from a careful distance for years, both desperate for it and terrified of it.
When Hyunjin had been on hiatus, struggling through something Minho still doesn't fully understand and probably never will, the dependency between them had shifted in a manner Minho could never have prepared for. Hyunjin had needed him then, truly needed him, and Minho had been there in ways he hadn't been before or since, had let himself be pulled into that intimate orbit without resistance—revelled in it, even, fully aware it was dangerous. For a few years, they had existed in a space that wasn't quite friendship and wasn't quite anything else, a private emotional world that Minho had inhabited with an almost sick thrill until the fear of the inevitable materialisation of something substantial finally caught up with him and he started pulling away.
He had thought he was protecting himself. He had thought that slowly extracting himself from the intimate world he and Hyunjin had built during the hiatus and the years after was self-preservation, a necessary retreat from feelings that had no future and no resolution yet threatened to overwhelm him. He had thought a lot of things, and most of them were wrong—as is unfortunately often the case for anything of importance between them, it turns out; and now he is walking through Milan with a camera he doesn't know how to use, wandering, seeking, trying to photograph a ghost.
The ghost wears Versace. Or it did, for all those years that Hyunjin came here as the face of the house, walking these same streets in clothes that had been designed specifically for his impossible body and his ridiculous face, moving through the world like he belonged everywhere and nowhere simultaneously.
The guilt arrives in waves, unpredictable and poorly timed. It hits him in the middle of a Gucci fitting, surrounded by beautiful clothes, just how often he had refused to come with Hyunjin on those trips. There had always been convenient excuses: schedules, fatigue, the comfortable camaraderie of the other members. The truth, though, had been simpler and more shameful: Minho had been deathly afraid that in the quiet of a foreign city with nothing to distract them, he might finally have to confront what he felt and his own cowardice in failing to do anything about it. So he had stayed in Seoul, or gone to Osaka with friends who didn't make his chest hurt, and Hyunjin had walked these streets alone or with managers, but most of the time alone.
Minho had walked them with the others, once. They were outside, everyone laughing and snapping photos and videos for a group vlog. Hyunjin was there too, quietly asking if Minho wanted to break away, just the two of them, catch the Brera at sunset. The light, he said, like it was an offering.
Maybe later, Minho said. The others are waiting.
Later never came. And now Hyunjin is with Dior, not Versace, and he doesn't come to Milan for fashion week anymore. Minho is here instead, chasing nostalgia that was never his to hold onto.
The winter air has that unique sharpness that only Italian cities seem to manage, cold enough to bite but not quite cold enough to discourage the endless stream of pedestrians flowing past him. Minho finds himself in the Galleria Vittorio Emanuele II without quite meaning to, standing under the glass dome, watching the light shift across the mosaic floor, and he thinks about how Hyunjin had sent him a photograph from this exact spot two years ago, a selca with the dome behind him and that smile on his face that meant he was happy. Wish you were here, the message had read, and Minho had typed back something noncommittal about schedules and next time, and Hyunjin had sent a string of heart emojis and then nothing, because what else was there to say.
Minho pulls out his phone and starts scrolling back through their conversation, years of it, thousands upon thousands of messages that he has never deleted even when he was deliberately not replying for hours or days to prove something to himself that he still can't quite articulate. The messages are mostly Hyunjin's: questions about Minho's day, pictures of things he thought Minho would like, small observations about the world that Hyunjin seemed to collect the way other people collect stamps or coins. Minho's replies had gradually grown shorter, less frequent, precisely calibrated to be warm enough not to hurt but cool enough not to encourage. He had believed he was being kind. He had figured he was managing expectations, protecting Hyunjin from the disappointment of hoping for something that would never happen.
He sees now that he had really just been protecting himself, and that the disappointment Hyunjin must have felt was not prevented but merely delayed, allowed to accumulate in silence until it reached some critical mass Minho hadn't noticed forming.
There is a café close to the Brera that Hyunjin once told him he loved, and Minho finds it more or less by accident on his aimless wander through the city. It's quaint and charming, albeit slightly shabby, with a signora behind the counter who looks like she's been there since before Minho was born and will be there long after he's gone. He orders an espresso and stands at the counter like the locals do, and tries to imagine Hyunjin here, in this exact spot, ordering something complicated and milky that the signora would have pretended to disapprove of while secretly enjoying the spectacle of this beautiful Korean boy in her café.
The espresso is bitter and perfect and Minho drinks it too fast, burning his tongue, and the pain is almost welcome because it's something he can actually feel instead of this endless drifting through memories that belong to someone else.
He takes out his camera and photographs the espresso machine, the signora's weathered hands, the late afternoon light falling across the counter that Hyunjin would have known how to capture. The photographs are still terrible. But, Minho thinks, he's trying his best. Even if it's too late, even if Hyunjin is in Iceland looking at the northern lights with someone who isn't him and probably never looking back.
The hotel room is too large and empty when he finally returns, all velvet and marble and the particular loneliness of luxury accommodation when you're the only one in it. Minho sits on the edge of the bed and scrolls through his photographs, deleting most of them, then opens his messages and stares at Hyunjin's name for a long time. The last text from Hyunjin is from three hours ago, a photograph of the northern lights—actual northern lights, the real thing, blue and green and purple swirling across a dark sky—with an accompanying message that simply says you would love this. Minho replied with a heart emoji, which is what he always replies with when he doesn't know what to say, and Hyunjin sent another string of hearts and then nothing. It was fine. It was normal. This is what their communication has been for months now, even a year maybe: cautious and warm, yet completely empty. Minho types and deletes and types again and finally sends nothing, because what else is there to say that he hasn't already failed to say for nine years?
He dreams that night of Hyunjin in Iceland, standing beneath the northern lights with that producer friend whose name he’s pointedly tried not to learn, and in the dream Hyunjin is laughing in that way he does only when he's truly happy, head thrown back, entire body engaged in the act of being delighted. Minho is watching from somewhere far away, invisible, and he wants to call out but his voice won't work, and then the dream shifts and he's in Milan alone, staggering through streets that are suddenly empty of everyone except him. He wakes up disoriented, the hotel room dark and closing in around him, and for a moment he doesn't know where he is or why he's here or what time it is or any of the other small certainties that usually ground him. Then it comes back: Milan, February, that ghost in Versace, the nine years of love he accepted without ever properly returning. He lies in the dark for a long time, staring at the ceiling, trying to remember exactly when he became someone capable of this particular kind of cruelty.
He goes back to the Brera, standing in front of the Caravaggio for another hour, watching the torn bread that never gets eaten. A guard starts watching him, probably thinking he’s odd. Maybe he is.
His phone buzzes. Hyunjin's name. Minho's heart does something stupid and painful as he answers.
"Hyung." Hyunjin's voice is distant, faint, crackling over the poor connection from Iceland. "Are you still in Milan?"
"I am."
A pause. Minho can hear wind, the vast empty spaces of wherever Hyunjin is standing.
"Are you... are you seeing the things? The ones I told you about?"
Minho closes his eyes. "Yeah. I'm seeing them."
Another pause. Longer.
"I used to imagine showing you," Hyunjin says quietly. "When we still hung out. I used to imagine you letting me."
I'm here now, Minho wants to say. I'm finally here. Come show me.
But he'd used up all his laters. There is nothing left to promise.
"I'm sorry," he says instead.
Hyunjin is quiet for so long Minho starts to think the call has dropped. Then: "I know. Me too."
The line goes dead.
Minho stands in front of the painting for a while longer.
He walks out into the Milan afternoon. The light is exactly as Hyunjin described it: golden, heavy, falling in specific ways at specific times. Minho takes a picture with his stupid film camera.
Somewhere in Iceland, Hyunjin is probably doing the same thing. Taking pictures of light no one will really see. Moving on. Living his life.
Minho walks through the streets Hyunjin had walked alone, finally taking in what Hyunjin had tried to show him.
The light doesn’t care. The city doesn’t care. Hyunjin probably doesn’t care anymore either.
Minho cares. He eventually, desperately, too late, cares.
He keeps walking.
On his last day in Milan, Minho goes to the Navigli district and strolls along the canals as the sun sets, watching the light turn the water gold and then rose and then a deep bruised purple. He takes photographs obsessively, hundreds or perhaps even thousands of them, knowing that most will be deleted and the few that remain will probably never be good enough to show anyone. A group of university students passes him, laughing about something, and one of them has a laugh that sounds a little like Hyunjin's, and Minho has to stop walking for a moment because something has lodged itself in his throat and won't move. He thinks about all the invitations he had declined, all the moments he had missed, all the times Hyunjin had asked him to come along to something and he said no because he was afraid of what might happen if he said yes. He thinks about the stargazing nights, the promises to see the northern lights together, the way Hyunjin had looked to him for approval and leant on him during film nights and brushed his hand against Minho’s in the dark sometimes, and how he had always pretended not to notice. He thinks about the hiatus, the way Hyunjin had needed him and he had been there, truly there, in ways he hadn't been before or since. He thinks about the past year or maybe even two, how he had convinced himself that slowly and carefully withdrawing from Hyunjin’s world was kind when it was really just cowardice dressed up in good intentions.
His phone buzzes in his pocket. He pulls it out, expecting nothing in particular, and finds another message from Hyunjin. Just a photograph of the northern lights again, this time from a different angle, with vibrant patches of blue and green and purple stretching across the endless sky. It’s a little funny, or sad, how Minho had been the one to propose a trip to the galaxy, yet this objectively spectacular sight—probably the closest to it one can witness while anchored to Earth—arouses nothing in his now too vast and hollow heart.
The message that follows once again says wish you were here, and Minho stares at it for so long that the screen dims and then goes dark. He types back, slowly, carefully, words he never would have had the courage to send a year ago or even a month ago. Milan in February is beautiful. Wish you were here too.
The response comes quickly, three dots appearing and disappearing and finally resolving into a message that makes Minho's chest ache with something that might be hope or might be regret or might be both.
Did you get a chance to try the local coffee? You didn’t have any the last time we were there.
Minho, standing by the canal as the last light fades from the water, types back: I actually stumbled upon that café you said you liked. Completely by chance, by the way. The owner made me espresso and pretended not to understand when I tried to order something complicated.
The three dots appear again, and Minho waits. When the response finally arrives, it's just a string of heart emojis.