Archive of Our Own

The thing about freshman orientation was that it was slightly overwhelming.

The sensation of it, the vertigo of being somewhere new but somehow finding the same face in the crowd over and over, like the universe had a joke it kept trying to tell him. Sieun noticed Suho at the start of the campus tour, it was hard not to. He was tall and handsome, laughing at something the person beside him said. Sieun caught himself looking for longer than he meant to before he looked away.

The auditorium had been too loud. The welcome speech had gone twenty minutes over. By the time the tour group dispersed into the afternoon heat, Sieun had a mild headache and Baku was already dialing Gotak, practically vibrating with the need to gossip with his boyfriend.

“Go ahead,” Sieun told him, and Baku shot him a grateful, slightly manic grin before wandering off with the phone pressed to his ear, voice already rising.

Sieun found a quiet stretch of corridor by some old vending machines. He fed coins into the machine, punched the button for a chilsung cider and watched it spiral down, get halfway, and stop.

He stared at it, tapped the glass with two fingers. The can did not move.

“Yah. You’re too polite.”

The voice came from right beside him, close enough that Sieun felt the air shift. He turned his head, already mildly annoyed — he’d been getting that his whole life, variations of the same observation, always delivered like it was a flaw that needed correcting. He braced for the rest of the sentence.

But the guy just nodded at the machine. “You need to be more aggressive with these things.”

It was him, from the tour. Up close he had dark eyes and a very nice jaw line, he was looking at the vending machine with a calm authority. Like he fully believed he could fix this.

“Thanks,” Sieun said flatly, looking back at the glass. He heard an amused sound. Then the guy stepped forward and knocked on the machine. Not randomly, but in a sequence, knuckles against specific corners of the frame, it all looked very deliberate. The can dropped.

Sieun looked at him.

The guy looked back, and his smile was — a lot. Wide and slightly crooked and directed entirely at Sieun. 

“I can’t believe that actually worked.”

Sieun blinked. “You weren’t sure?”

“Nah.” He said it easily. “I’ve got about half my shit figured out, if I’m being honest.”

It was such a strange thing to say to a stranger. Not self-deprecating exactly, no embarrassment behind it, no fishing for reassurance. Sieun found, to his own surprise, that he liked it.

He reached into the machine for the can. “Yeon Sieun,” he said, by way of introduction.

“Ahn Suho.” He put out his hand. 

Sieun shook it he might as well start making friends he thought. 

“Do you want a drink? Consider it thanks.” He asked.

 “Well, if a pretty guy like you is offering, who am I to say no.” Suho’s smile lifted slightly at the corners.

Sieun looked at him for a moment. Then turned back to the machine.

He wasn’t sure what to do with that, so he decided to do nothing with it, fed in the coins, and watched suho pick a drink that didn’t get stuck.

They found a bench outside, in the shade of a building Sieun didn’t know the name of yet. The afternoon had softened from its peak heat. Suho cracked his drink open and Sieun did the same and there was a strange ease to it, sitting beside someone he’d properly met only eleven minutes ago, the sounds of the campus continuing around them.

They talked. Well Sieun talked, mostly, which wasn’t really like him. He was someone who asked questions as a deflection, who gave short answers and waited to see what the other person did with the space. But Suho kept asking and they were the right questions. It felt genuine, and Sieun found himself answering before he’d realized.

“What are you studying?”

“Engineering.” A pause. “Probably.”

Suho tilted his head. “You don’t sound sure.”

“It’s a small rebellion,” Sieun said, which was more than he’d meant to say. “My parents would prefer something with better job prospects. Medicine. Law. Engineering is my compromise.”

“Okay but what do you want to do.”

It wasn’t a question, exactly. More like something he set down in front of Sieun and waited. Something Sieun was far too familiar with doing.

No one had asked him that yet. His parents spoke around it. His high school teachers guided around it. Everyone had opinions about what he was capable of, what his options were — but the direct question, what do you actually want, said simply and without agenda, settled in his chest with an unfamiliar sense.

“I —”

His phone buzzed. Baku’s name on the screen.

“I have to take this,” Sieun said, standing. He glanced back once. “See you around.”

Suho raised his can in a small salute, watching him go.

He did see him around. He kept seeing him. At the cafeteria that evening, Suho was at another table, head bent toward a blonde girl and a tall guy, mid-conversation, easy in the way that meant he was probably the kind of person who was easy with everyone. Sieun watched for two seconds and looked away.

He sat with Baku. Baku had already adopted approximately ten people, including Juntae, who had the energy of someone who’d been caught in a current and couldn’t find an exit, and whom Sieun immediately felt a kind of kinship with. He got absorbed into the group and it wasn’t bad. He even laughed at some joke said. The evening moved. He did not think about Suho. Not at all.

The bar that night was exactly what Sieun had expected and participated in anyway because declining Baku required more energy than attending. The music was too loud and the lights were too hot and it smelled like beer and Sieun had been having a decent enough time for the first hour before Baku had comprehensively overdone it. Gotak wasn't here to carry his overgrown drunk puppy boyfriend home. Leaving Sieun with the honor. 

Getting him out was a whole issue. Baku was very attached to the idea of staying. Sieun had one hand fisted in his jacket, attempting to steer, when he heard it.

“Need help?”

He knew the voice before he saw the face. Suho was already moving toward them, evaluating the situation with a kind of calm readiness that Sieun would, later, come to recognize as just a feature of him. 

“Please,” Sieun said, and meant it more than the one word carried.

They got Baku into a ride share between them. Suho did most of the work of holding him upright. The car smelled like pine air freshener and they drove back in near silence, Baku singing something quietly and unintelligibly to himself.

Suho helped carry him inside to their shared apartment. Stayed while Sieun unlocked the door, navigated the dark, got Baku’s shoes off. They closed the bedroom door behind them and stood in the small kitchen and exhaled.

“You saved me twice today,” Sieun said.

Suho shrugged, leaning against the kitchen counter. “I like being useful.”

It was said lightly. But there was something below the lightness that Sieun noticed, filed away without knowing why.

“Do you want to stay a while? I have coffee.”

“Yeah,” Suho said. “I’d like that.”

They stayed up until morning. Sieun made coffee and then made it again around two a.m. when the first pot ran out, and they moved from the kitchen to the couch to the floor at some point, backs against the foot of the couch, and talked about everything and nothing in particular — Suho’s sport scholarship, Sieun’s estranged parents who still seemed to have a hold on him, a movie they’d both seen as kids that Suho misremembered entirely and was stubborn about. 

Outside, the world settled into silence and came back to life and they barely noticed.

When Suho finally left, early light coming through the window, he paused at the door and looked back.

“See you around, Yeon Sieun.”

Something in the way he said the full name.

“Yeah,” Sieun said. “See you.”

It took exactly a week for them to start dating. 

Five months later, Sieun was on the living room couch, something was bothering him and he hadn’t decided how to handle it yet.

Outside, it was late afternoon the gold light cutting through the gap in the curtains and laying itself across the floor. Suho had baseball practice  longer today, a big game coming up next week — and had dropped his weekend bag by the door this morning before he left, the gesture so casual and domestic that Sieun hadn’t known what to do with it at the time and was apparently still processing it now.

He really liked Suho.

That was the problem, or not the problem exactly, just the fact that made everything else feel more weighted. 

He really, genuinely, embarrassingly liked him, in ways that had nothing to do with how handsome he was or how everyone on campus apparently knew that wherever Sieun was, Suho wasn’t far behind, or how he carried Sieun’s heavy textbooks without being asked and held his hand when they walked and seemed to have some internal sense of when Sieun was going quiet in the concerning way versus the normal way.

Five months wasn’t very long. Sieun knew that. He wasn’t delusional.

But here was the thing about Sieun: he was calculating, pragmatic, someone who moved through decisions carefully and didn’t use words like certain lightly. Those were not the words Suho made him feel. Suho made him feel butterflies in his stomach, the absolute conviction that he’d found his person practically the second he’d set foot on campus, and he knew it the way he knew very few things, completely, without needing to reason his way there.

Which would be fine, would be simple, if he just knew Suho was in the same boat.

Five months to forever could seem like a lot to ask. He wasn’t going to pretend otherwise. And Sieun was sure — had been sure for a while now, long enough that carrying it around alone was starting to make him feel slightly insane — but this was also his first relationship. He didn’t have a baseline. He didn’t know what was normal and what was just him.

He would have asked Baku but Baku and Gotak had been each other’s since they were fourteen, high school sweethearts with a decade of certainty behind them — outliers, useless as a reference point. Sieun could only hope his and suho’s road would be half as smooth.

He’d asked Juntae once, quietly, over coffee.

“Does it seem like I’m moving too fast?”

Juntae had looked at him over his mug, “I think you’re the most certain of anything person I’ve ever met and you’re terrifying yourself with it.”  

Which was kind but not exactly helpful. 

Suho had told him early on, a handful of dates and three weeks with someone doesn’t make me an expert, I promise. And Sieun believed him. But still, it was something more than Sieun had. Enough to make him wonder whether what felt enormous to him registered the same way on Suho’s side of things.

“What’s up?”

Baku emerged from the hallway, startling him out of his thoughts, duffle over one shoulder. He was going home for the weekend. The timing was not lost on Sieun. He was leaving him alone. With Suho. In the apartment for two days.

Sieun looked at him for a moment.

“Do you think,” he started, and stopped.

Baku set down his bag.

He didn’t say anything, just turned to give Sieun his full attention, because he’d known Sieun long enough to know that the next sentence would come out slower if he pushed.

“Do you think Suho is serious about us,” Sieun said finally. “Actually serious.”

Baku stared at him for a beat. Then: “Are you kidding me.”

“Baku —”

“That guy,” Baku said, pointing in the direction of nowhere in particular, somewhere that presumably meant the broader universe containing Ahn Suho, “would be happy if an asteroid hit the earth and it was just the two of you left. He’d build you a house. He’d learn to farm.”

“That’s —”

“With his hands, Sieun.”

Sieun looked down at the coffee table. Something loosened, slightly, in his chest. “Okay but —”

“But?” Baku groaned. “You cannot ‘but’ that.”

“I want to know how he actually feels. Like if we’re —” he stopped. The sentence finished itself in his head, if we’re heading somewhere, or if I’m the only one who can already see exactly where I want to end up. He didn’t say that part.

“Then just ask him,” Baku said.

Sieun looked at him.

“Okay yeah, I should have known that’s not an option with you,” Baku admitted, dragging a hand through his hair. He thought for a moment. Then something shifted in his face, that expression he got when he had an idea that he thought was brilliant and Sieun was going to think was insane.

“Okay so, one time — and this goes to the grave — I made a tiktok with Gogo where I called him my current boyfriend. Just to get his reaction. Never posted it, obviously, I would have been single within the hour. He nearly took my head off. He said never call me that again, I’m the love of your life.” He pointed at Sieun. “That. Get that reaction. Just… call Suho your friend, or your current boyfriend, something that undersells it. See what he does.”

Sieun thought about it. It was, an idiotic idea really. It was also better than sitting on this couch for two more months while the feeling in his chest built pressure like a sealed container.

“Okay,” he said.

“Yeah?” Baku looked surprised.

“I’m not filming it.”

“Obviously.” He picked up his bag again, satisfaction apparent. “Text me what happens. I mean it. I want a full report.”

“Weren’t you leaving?.”

Baku laughed all the way to the door.

After it closed, the apartment went quiet. Suho’s bag sat by the door where he’d left it this morning — worn canvas, a small patch on the side strap that was fraying at one corner. Sieun looked at it for a moment.

Okay, he thought.

Sieun didn’t deploy the idea that night. Suho came back from practice moving like someone who’d been wrung out and hung to dry, still damp from the locker room shower, his hair leaving small dark marks on the collar of his shirt. He sat down on the edge of the bed with a controlled exhale that meant he was trying not to groan out loud.

“Coach tried to kill us today,” he said, wincing as he reached back to press his fingers against his own shoulder and came up short.

Sieun set aside what he was reading and moved behind him without being asked. Found the knot. Worked at it steadily, Suho going quiet and loose under his hands in the way he only went when he trusted something completely. When Sieun was satisfied, he pressed a small kiss to the spot where his thumb had been.

Suho let out a long breath. “Okay. I take it back. Coach didn’t kill us. You’re fixing it.”

They had dinner late. Fell asleep earlier than either of them usually did, Suho’s arm heavy across Sieun’s waist, his breathing going slow within minutes.

Sieun lay there in the dark for a while, trying to think about nothing in particular.

Saturday was easy and unhurried. Coffee from the place two blocks over that had good sandwiches and was always slightly too crowded. They sat across from each other and stole each other’s food in complete comfort.

Suho somehow talked him into the gym. This was a recurring occurrence that Sieun participated in against his better judgment, and Suho spotted him with the focused intensity,  he took this responsibility very seriously and was also, if Sieun was reading his expression correctly, finding the whole thing a little bit endearing.

“You’re doing great,” Suho told him.

“Don’t,” Sieun said, through his teeth.

Suho was smiling. Sieun chose not to look directly at it.

Back home in the afternoon, freshly showered and slow-moving, Suho took over the kitchen with the energy he got when Baku wasn’t around to object to the reorganization of his groceries. He moved through the space like it was already his, which — Sieun had heard the argument enough times to have it memorized Suho would say it’s a quarter mine because it’s half Sieun’s . Baku’s counterargument was less coherent and louder.

Sieun sat at the table with his notes spread out, homework technically in progress, a pencil in his hand that he hadn’t done anything useful with in twenty minutes. He was thinking about the plan. Feeling the low level nervousness of it, just the persistent background hum of something he’d committed to and was now too close to back out of.

Baku would call at seven. Sieun would say his line. Suho would react.

And if the reaction was nothing, if Suho just laughed it off… well. Then Sieun would know. He could file it away. The sentence was already sitting in his chest, I’ll chalk it up to a Baku prank. Baku’s fingerprints were all over it anyway.

“Hey dinner’s ready.”

Suho materialized from the kitchen, leaned down, pressed a kiss to the top of Sieun’s head on his way past.

Sieun closed his notes.

They talked through dinner about the game. Suho’s coach had ramped up practice to a pace that honestly constituted workplace endangerment, and Suho described a specific drill with the resigned fondness of someone who hated it and would run it perfectly anyway. Sieun listened, asked one or two questions, felt the warmth of it, of being the person someone tells their day to.

Suho's grandmother was coming. Sieun would be in the stands. There would be a celebratory dinner after, at a place Suho had mentioned once with a soft kind of anticipation, and Sieun had already looked it up and decided he’d dress nicely.

He was very serious about them. That was the part that kept circling back.

The couch. The TV. Suho on his phone, glancing up occasionally. Sieun had positioned himself at the far end — not far, the couch wasn’t large, but far enough to be noticeable as a deviation. He usually ended up migrating into Suho’s side within the first twenty minutes of any given evening, pulled there without deciding to be.

Tonight he sat at his end and looked at the screen and waited.

His phone rang at seven, exactly as arranged.

Suho glanced over. Made a gesture at the remote — volume? 

Sieun shook his head. Picked up on the third ring.

“Hi Sieunnahhhh,” Baku said, already luminous with the pleasure of this situation.

Sieun was immediately annoyed at him, which was not unusual and not a problem. He schooled his voice. Tried to make it come out neutral. It came out soft instead, a register he didn’t consciously deploy but apparently reached without him when it came to certain people. He moved on.

“Hi.”

“So Sieun, I wonder what you’re up to on this fine wonderful afternoon.” Baku was enjoying himself far too much. Sieun could tell.

“Nothing.”

“Yeah and who are you doing nothing with,” Baku said, indignant, which made Sieun snort before he could stop it. Suho looked over immediately, that slight tilt of the head. 

Sieun looked at the TV.

“I’m just hanging out with my friend,” he said.

The thing was, to someone who didn’t know Suho, what happened next would have registered as almost nothing. A small shift. A centimeter of movement along the cushion. A going still that meant nothing  but in reality it was attention collected onto a single point.

Sieun felt it in his peripheral vision like a change in air pressure.

Baku was saying some nonsense, trying to get him to talk. Sieun made a noise.

“No, I already ate, my friend made us dinner.”

“Yah, who are you talking to?” Suho’s voice was low and very controlled. He moved closer. He was frowning in a way that he clearly believed was subtle. “Who is it?”

Sieun shook his head, pointed at the phone. A clear give me a minute.

Suho stared at him. His jaw moved. He sat back and then apparently reconsidered this decision approximately three seconds later, because he was sliding across the cushion and then there was no space left and Suho was a full-body presence beside him, then partially on him, then he’d gone full squid, somehow, all long limbs and determined energy, face appearing very close to Sieun’s.

“Who is it? Baby what do you mean your friend? Yah.” He made an aborted reach toward the phone. “I’ll tell them myself, I’m your boyfriend, not your —” He stopped. The look on his face changed, went from indignant to something more careful. “Wait. Shit — are you not out to whoever this is? I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I didn’t think —”

He looked genuinely distressed. The hand he’d been reaching with dropped. He started to pull back.

“Baku, I’m hanging up.” Sieun said.

That lands. Suho goes “Baku?!” not exactly loud, just sharp, the single word doing a lot of work.

Sieun ends the call.

The room settles back into quiet. The TV is still going. Suho has sat back against the couch cushions, and Sieun doesn’t need to look directly at him to feel the tension in his shoulders. Suho is almost never upset. It’s one of the things sieun has catalogued about him over five months, the way he moves through most things with an easiness that doesn’t feel performed. When he does get upset it’s specific. It’s always something to do with Sieun.

He thinks about the senior on the bike. The one who’d cut Sieun off on the path between buildings — genuinely an accident, Sieun had said so multiple times — and Suho had spent a full week with a particular pissed off look on his face that meant he was still thinking about it.

Now here he was. Tense and waiting and looking at Sieun.

“What’s going on?” Suho asked. Voice quiet and constrained. 

Sieun hated this. He hated that he’d made suho look like that, and he hated the embarrassment climbing up the back of his neck, and he made a decision to rip it off. All at once. Minimize the damage.

“I’m sorry,” he said immediately. “I just… I wanted to know how serious you were. About our relationship. Baku had this idea and I don’t know why I agreed to it, it was stupid.”

A beat. Something of the tension shifted in Suho’s shoulders relaxed, not gone entirely.

“So it was a prank,” Suho said slowly.

“Yes.”

“You thought — what? That I’d just laugh it off? Go along with it?”

“No,” Sieun said, petulant, and looked away, because he could feel his face doing something he didn’t want Suho to see clearly. He stared at the middle distance for approximately three seconds. Then he made a decision that five months ago would have been completely inconceivable to him, and moved across the couch, and dropped himself directly into Suho’s lap.

He’d never thought of himself as someone who did things like this. Then Suho had happened, and apparently he was. He turned his face into suho’s neck and stayed there.

He could feel Suho’s surprise in the half-second before he adjusted. 

Suho’s arms came around him. One settled at his waist. The other moved up and down his back in a slow pass, not speaking, just present.

“Yah,” Suho said, quietly, to the top of his head. “You really thought I wasn’t serious about us?”

Sieun pulled back, looked at him. This was the part that mattered. And Sieun wasn’t someone who said the important things easily — he knew that about himself, had always known it, the way he held things close until they became too heavy to keep holding. But Suho had this quality of making Sieun feel like the thing he was saying would land somewhere it was meant to go.

“I really love you, Suho-yah.”

He watched Suho’s face.

Suho had told him he loved him many times. Early mornings with his voice still rough from sleep. Across campus, too loud, the kind of thing that made people glance over. In small moments throughout the day that accumulated like light. Sieun had received it each time with something between gratitude and panic, had thought — more than once — that it was just the way Suho was, abundant and easy with affection, that maybe it was just how he moved through the world.

But Sieun hadn’t said it back. Not once. Not because it wasn’t true. Because it was so true that the words felt like the heaviest thing he owned, and he needed to be sure he was putting them out there at exactly the right time.

“I love you so much,” he said. “I want us to be together for years. A long time. I want — all of it. I’m not going anywhere. I’m very serious about us.”

The room was quiet. Suho’s hand had gone still on his back.

“You love me,” Suho said. It wasn’t a question. It was the face of someone doing an accounting of something, reconfiguring and arriving somewhere new.

His grin came up like something breaking the surface. Brilliant and slightly undone and aimed entirely at Sieun.

Sieun felt his throat close with all the feeling running through him. 

He nodded.

“And you decided,” Suho said, starting to laugh, “to give me a heart attack about it first by making me think I was just your friend.”

“It wasn’t my idea,” Sieun said, and hit him in the chest because he could be aggrieved about this too, actually.

Suho caught his hand. Threaded their fingers together in one smooth movement, shifted Sieun’s weight on his lap, brought them closer together. He raised their joined hands and pressed his mouth to Sieun’s knuckles, slowly, looking up at him over the line of them.

“I think sometimes,” Suho said, “that we must have been made for each other.” He said it simply. The same way he’d said he had half his life figured out, that first day. “I don’t want to be with anyone else. It has to be you.”

Sieun felt like he could hardly breathe. He leaned in.

The kiss started slow. Suho’s hand came up to his jaw, tilting him, and Sieun felt the warmth of it spread down his throat, into his chest, that heat of being held by someone who knew exactly how to use their hands. He settled deeper into Suho’s lap and Suho made a low sound against his mouth that Sieun felt more than heard.

Suho loved touching him. Had from the beginning, a hand at the small of his back, fingers finding his wrist, the unconscious reach across any available surface. 

But this was always different, unhurried, Suho’s palms moving like he was relearning something. Up Sieun’s sides, thumbs pressing in slightly at his ribs, and Sieun exhaled into the kiss and tightened his arms around Suho’s neck and stopped thinking about anything at all.

Their breathing had changed. The room was warm, the lamplight amber and close, the TV long forgotten. Sieun was aware of the weight of suho’s hands, the faint salt-clean smell of his skin, the way his own heartbeat had relocated somewhere it didn’t usually live.

He pulled back just enough to breathe. Suho’s eyes were dark, his mouth curved at the corner, that look, the one he got that meant sieun had his full and complete attention and nothing else existed.

“Let’s go to bed,” Sieun said. It came out quieter than he intended. Suho heard it loud and clear.

“Yeah,” he said, and his voice had dropped too.

He stood with Sieun still attached to him, easy, one arm hooked under Sieun to take his weight — which Sieun would never entirely get used to, the casual strength of it. Sieun wrapped his legs around Suho’s waist and his arms stayed looped around his neck and they moved through the living room toward the dark of the hallway, and the TV kept going quietly behind them.

Years later, Suho has still not let it go.

They’re at a party, warm, crowded, the kind with someone’s awful playlist and drinks that taste better than they should. Suho moves through the room the way he always has, easy in a crowd, and Sieun follows in his orbit the way they both always were. 

“Have you met my ex-boyfriend?” Suho says to a woman by the window, pleasant as anything, gesturing at Sieun. “Baby, come here.”

She looks between them, politely uncertain.

“I’m his fiancée,” Sieun says. He’s used to this now. Settled into it with the same acceptance he’s settled into most things Suho related. 

The first time it happened he’d told Suho it wasn’t funny. Suho had tilted his head and said “Would you rather I introduced you as my friend?” With an expression of absolute innocence, and Sieun had looked at him for a long moment and walked away, which Suho had correctly interpreted as you’ve won this one.

The woman laughs and they move on. Suho glances at Sieun, bright-eyed, unbothered, Sieun looks back at him.

He loves him very much. That’s never been the complicated part.