Archive of Our Own

day 1

Nice Côte d'Azur Airport sits at the edge of the Mediterranean, sea visible from the tarmac on both sides, pale and flat in the early morning light. The French pronounce it Nice — one syllable, rhymes with niece — which initially Euijoo had been saying wrong in his head.

He had found this out not from the internet but from Maki, two months ago, when they were going through the production brief together on the dorm couch and Euijoo had said it the other way. Maki had leaned over briefly to look at his phone, said "It's niece," easy and certain, shoulder bumping Euijoo's once and then back, like he was handing over something small and uncomplicated.

Euijoo had looked at the word on his phone. "Niece," he'd echoed, voice small, lifting slightly at the end, the way it does when he’s testing a foreign sound in his mouth.

Maki had nodded and gone back to his own phone.

They land at 8:42 am. It is, technically, day one.

It is also the end of fourteen hours of travel that started at dawn yesterday in Seoul, when the crew showed up at the dorm with cameras already rolling and filmed Euijoo folding his clothes into his suitcase in neat columns, and filmed Maki on his bedroom floor surrounded by everything he owned, holding up two nearly identical grey hoodies and asking Euijoo which one. Euijoo said the left one. Maki packed both.

Ten crew members total. Producer, four camera operators, audio, a coordinator who has already proven indispensable, lighting, a stylist on standby, two staff whose specific roles Euijoo hasn't fully mapped yet. Half of the crew that flew with them from Seoul, moved through the airport in a loose formation, equipment cases stacked on trolleys, everyone operating on coffee and the determination of people who are passionate about making this show meaningful. Euijoo has his carry-on, regular-sized suitcase, and his neck pillow still around his neck.

Maki is already awake.

Alive and present, looking around, sunglasses pushed up into his jet-black hair, reading the airport signage as they walk through arrivals like he's taking inventory. He'd slept on the Paris leg, four hours solid with his head tipped back, and apparently that was enough because he's been talking nonstop since they landed.

"Hyung, look—"

Euijoo looks up from his phone, and a camera shutter goes off directly in his face.

Maki pulls the phone back, already looking at the result, shoulders shaking.

"I wasn't ready," Euijoo says, scratching the back of his head with a short laugh. "Yah—"

Maki just grins to himself. "For the group chat," he says, and types — juju and i landed in nice — and sends it before Euijoo has finished the sentence.

Euijoo clicks his tongue, mouth pulling up at the corner despite himself. Then a few seconds later, Maki's phone buzzes. Then again. Then three times in quick succession.

nicholas: ㅋㅋㅋ euijoo’s face

taki: have fun!!! ⸜(｡˃ ᵕ ˂ )⸝♡

harua: wow have fun ദ്ദി(˵ •̀ ᴗ - ˵ ) ✧

k: gwiyeowo

jo: stay safe.

yuma: oy euijoo-kun wwww

and a pokémon sticker from Fuma.

Maki is already typing back to the group chat, one-handed, the grin still on his face, and Euijoo watches him.

_____________________________________

The content opportunity, as their manager had called it, had come through a production company called KV Studio sometime in February. Euijoo had found out on a Tuesday, in one of the HYBE building lounges, twenty minutes after getting back from mcing at Inkigayo. His manager had sat down across from him and said KV Studio, travel show, one week, nice france, late May, and Euijoo had immediately started running the calendar — Japan dates, the Inkigayo Sundays, the comeback schedule — and the manager saw through him and reassured him that it wouldn’t overlap, except maybe for one Inkigayo Sunday, but said his co-mc can handle it.

"The members are going to love this," Euijoo had said. "K hyung and Nicholas’s been talking about Europe since—"

"It's not a group schedule," his manager corrected him gently. "They just wanted two members."

"Oh." Euijoo recalibrated. "Okay… then who am I going with?"

His manager looked at him. "Maki."

Euijoo had sat with the information on the drive home.

Maki.

Not that he minded. That was the first thing he clarified to himself, unprompted. He would have gone with any of them — would have been glad to, genuinely. But Maki specifically wasn't a problem. Maki was easy to be around the way four years of shared spaces make people easy. It wasn't that.

Why us?

Because if you were a production company building a travel show on chemistry and you had access to &TEAM — all nine of them, every combination available — and you were trying to maximize your audience, you had options. Better options, probably. Nicholas and Euijoo had a dynamic that had been named by the fandom, documented, gifted its own dedicated section of the fandom. Jo and Yuma. K and Fuma. Pairings with a shape to them, a visible architecture, something you could hand to a viewer in the first five minutes and have them immediately understand. Those already had an audience.

Choosing Maki and Euijoo was something closer to a gamble.

And then Euijoo stopped himself.

Who was he to question it? A content opportunity was exactly that — an opportunity. To show &TEAM, to show new sides, to give the fans something they hadn't seen yet. That was the job. That was always the job, and Euijoo knew how to do it, and he was going to do it well, and that was the end of the conversation.

Except.

A new question had moved in where the old one was.

What was their dynamic, exactly? Him and Maki. If someone pointed a camera at them for a week in the south of France and said show us — what was there to show? Euijoo was the leader. Maki was the maknae. That was structural and not really a dynamic. That was just the shape of the group, not the shape of them.

What did they actually have?

He hadn't found an answer by the time the van reached the dorm. He still doesn't have one now, standing in the nice French morning sun while Maki types into his phone.

_____________________________________

"Done?" Euijoo looks at him, the exasperation there but worn thin and fond.

"Yup," Maki says, pocketing his phone, still grinning.

They kept walking, and when they arrived at the arrivals, the other crew members who had flown ahead to Nice to set up were already waiting for them and assembled, ready to take over the filming from the tired, jetlagged crew. The producer gathers everyone briefly. Quick alignment meeting, shot list confirmed, a handoff between the Seoul crew and the Nice crew so the jetlagged half can rest before the evening shoot. This is how it works on productions like this — team A and team B, rotating so there's always a fresh set of hands on the camera.

Their first mission was to get to the hotel.

Jihye, the PD, had explained this on the flight over. Production wouldn't help them navigate. They had the hotel name, they had the information that the tram would get them there, the production’s credit card, and they had each other and their luggage and a city that didn't know them. They could take a taxi, technically.

"But that's boring," Maki had said, at thirty-five thousand feet.

"That's boring," Jihye had agreed.

So: the tram.

Euijoo pulls up Google Maps. tram line 2, direction Jean Médecin, four stops, twelve minutes. He checks it twice.

It is very straightforward. He is going to be excellent at this.

He sets the pace, and Maki falls into step beside him, one rolling suitcase each, carry-ons on their backs, and behind them the crew follows — cameras up, mics live, moving with them like a very large, very quiet shadow. Euijoo and Maki stopped registering them somewhere over the Pacific. They are furniture. expensive, dedicated furniture that gets lost with you if you get lost.

"I've got the route," he announces.

"Great," Maki says to Euijoo, with a grin that is doing a lot of work. "Lead the way, hyung."

Euijoo leads the way.

The tram runs along the Promenade des Anglais, the sea on one side and the buildings on the other, and Euijoo stands with one hand on the overhead rail and his phone in the other and watches the city move past the windows. The city is moving past in pieces — the buildings going from glass and modern to something older and sun-worn, terracotta and pale yellow, and the specific orange of shutters that have been that color for thirty years. The sea appears briefly between two buildings, pale and flat, and Maki makes a small sound, woah.

Euijoo watches the stop count, two more stops, and then puts his phone down and looks too.

The tram stop deposits them back onto the street with their luggage and their crew and the full afternoon sun. Euijoo sets the pace once again, and Maki falls into step beside him. The city moves around them — the avenue wide and tree-lined, the buildings older here. Euijoo has his suitcase rolling beside him, carry-on on his back, phone in his hand. Maki is beside him, doing the same, except Maki is also talking.

This is the thing about shooting content and traveling with someone who performs naturally — Maki makes it easy. Except he isn't performing, not really. He's been talking since the tram, a low continuous commentary that isn't really directed at Euijoo or the cameras but at the city itself, narrating things as they pass. It's effortless. Euijoo doesn't have to generate anything because Maki is already generating it, and all Euijoo has to do is react — a look here, a short response there, laugh, the occasional correction — and it comes genuinely, which is somehow always better than prepared.

They're maybe ten minutes from the tram stop when Maki slows down.

"Hyung, look — they're selling socca."

A street stall, small, a flat pan over heat, the vendor moving like someone who has done this ten thousand times. A small queue. The smell of something warm and savory.

"What's socca?" Euijoo asks.

"I don't know exactly. Like — bread? Flat bread? I heard Nice is known for it." Maki is already looking at the queue. "Let's buy some."

"Okay," Euijoo says, and reaches for his wallet.

And then doesn't find it.

He checks the front pocket of his carry-on. Not there. The side pocket. Not there. His jacket pocket. Not there. He goes back to the carry-on, methodically, front pocket again, main zip, the small interior slot he never uses —

"Hyung?"

"One second."

He checks his pants. Both pockets. Nothing. He takes the carry-on off his back and opens the main compartment fully, moving things aside. The crew has gone quiet. One of the camera operators has drifted slightly closer.

"Did you check—"

"I'm checking."

He checks again. The same compartments, more carefully, because sometimes things are there the second time. They aren't. Euijoo straightens up and looks at the crew, at the coordinator, with the very specific expression of a person trying to be calm. "Did anyone — did you see a wallet? Black, rectangular—"

The crew exchanges looks and shakes their heads.

Euijoo puts both hands on top of his head.

Maki steps closer. "You lost it?"

"I can't find my wallet." Euijoo looks frantic. "I had it. I had it at the airport, I bought — I had it."

"Did you drop it? Did someone—"

"I don't know." Euijoo is already running back through the morning. The airport, the carry-on open, the wallet taken out for — what? He'd bought something. Water, maybe. Or the coffee. And then he'd — "It might still be at the station. I think I left it at the counter."

Maki stares at him for a second. Then he puts his hand over his own face, fingers pressing into his forehead, and makes a pained, half-strangled laugh,.. "Hyung," he says, from behind his hand. "If you left it at the airport, it's been two hours."

Euijoo cursed under his breath.

"How—" Maki drops his hand, looks at Euijoo with the expression of someone who genuinely wants to understand the mechanics of what has happened. Not cruel about it. He’s visibly trying to be gentle with how it lands. Just. Bewildered, "you had it organized. on the plane. I saw you put it in the pocket."

“No, I know I had it… It must have fallen out on the tram,” Euijoo says, sounding more like he’s trying to convince himself than the others.

Maki opens his mouth. Closes it. Shakes his head once, slowly, in the manner of someone choosing to table a discussion for a later time. "Okay," he says. "We go back."

"No, wait—" Euijoo straightens, shifts into the voice he uses when he's already thought through the logistics. "You stay here. Watch the luggage, the stall is still — you can wait, there's no reason for everyone to come, I'll just go back and check the counter, and I'll be back in twenty minutes, it's fine—"

Maki is already turning his suitcase around.

"Maki—"

"I'm not waiting at a socca stall while you go handle a language barrier by yourself," Maki deadpans. He looks back over his shoulder at Euijoo. "Come on."

Euijoo opens his mouth. Closes it.

Right. The language barrier. He'd gotten so far as I'll go back without getting to and then what — standing alone in a French train station with his phone out, Google Translate open, trying to explain a lost wallet to someone who does not speak Korean or Japanese, while the cameras watch. He can picture it very clearly, and it is not a good picture. He winces at it a little, privately, and picks up his suitcase handle.

"Come on," Maki says again, already a few steps ahead.

The crew turns with them, the large expensive shadow reversing direction on Avenue Jean Médecin without complaint. Euijoo follows and does not say anything else, and laughs once, short and apologetic, at the nearest camera. The laugh that means I know, and I'm sorry, and please edit this kindly.

_____________________________________

Back at the station, Euijoo scans the platform. The tram has long gone. The counter where he'd bought the coffee is staffed by someone different now, and Euijoo is standing there trying to figure out how to explain I may have left a wallet here forty minutes ago in a language he does not have, when Maki is already beside him, turning to a man standing nearby.

"Excuse me, do you speak English?"

The man looks at them. Takes in the full picture — two asians, rolling luggage, a film crew behind them at a respectful distance. He seems to decide this is more interesting than whatever he was doing. "Yes," he says.

“Have you seen a black wallet left here?” 

The guy glances toward the cameras again. His expression shifts slightly, suspiciously intrigued. They’re filming. Did they really leave a wallet here? Is this one of those social experiments where they test whether strangers will return it and then reward them with money afterward?

He checks around his stall anyway before shaking his head.

“No, sorry. I just started my shift a few minutes ago.”

“How about a lost and found?” Maki asks. “Is there one here?”

The man clicks his tongue. 

"Oh, buddy," he says it with genuine sympathy, you know it comes with bad news. "You lost a wallet, you said? The chances of getting it back are pretty thin. The wallet, maybe, yeah, if it sucks, but usually they just take the whole thing,” he shrugs.

“So, where are you guys from?” the guy asks, suddenly a bit more interested.

“Japan,” Maki answers, not really interested in prolonging a conversation that will not help them.

Euijoo absorbs this in silence. 

They are not in Japan. This is a thing he knows and has apparently not fully applied to the current situation. In Japan, a wallet left on a train comes back. In Japan a wallet left anywhere comes back, sometimes with a note. Nice, France is many things — beautiful, warm, the Mediterranean genuinely that color — but it is not Japan.

"Ah, I see," the man nods, "you can still try the lost and found, over there," he points.

"Thanks man, merci beaucoup," Maki says.

Euijoo echoes him a second later, voice small, looking at the man with a strained little smile. “Merci beaucoup.”

"Good luck," the man says, but doesn’t really expect it to change anything.

_____________________________________

The lost and found is a small window at the end of a corridor, institutional lighting, and a woman behind a counter who looks at them expressionless, like they have handled many variations of this situation and stopped caring a long time ago.

Euijoo is standing slightly behind Maki's shoulder. He is aware of this. He is aware that he has been standing slightly behind Maki's shoulder for the last fifteen minutes while Maki handled a situation that Euijoo's own language gap made largely inaccessible to him. He probably looks like a child who has dropped something in a supermarket and is waiting for an adult to sort it out.

Maki steps forward. "Hi — sorry, do you speak English?"

"A little," she says.

"We lost a wallet on the tram. Black, rectangular. Is there any chance—"

She makes a face. The same face the man outside made, compressed into a single expression. She checks something on her screen anyway, scrolls, and looks up.

"Nothing returned," she says.

Maki deflates and nods. "Okay. merci."

Maki turns to him, already looking defeated. “You’re probably gonna have to cancel your cards,” he says quietly.

"Yeah." Euijoo looks at the floor. "Thank you for helping, Maki. I'm sorry, this is—"

"It's fine," Maki says. "It's just a wallet."

"It had our cash in it."

"It had cash in it and now it doesn't, and we'll figure it out. It's fine."

Euijoo opens his mouth.

Behind them, someone clears their throat.

They both turn. It's one of the crew — the coordinator, specifically, the one whose specific role Euijoo had not fully mapped. She is holding a black wallet. rectangular. Euijoo's.

The silence lasts about three seconds.

"Where—" Maki starts.

“You left it at the airport,” she says, already bracing for impact. “At the water kiosk before boarding the tram. A staff member flagged us down at arrivals and handed it in. We’ve had it since.”

Euijoo stares at her.

Maki stares at her.

"It was good content," she adds sheepishly.

Euijoo takes the wallet. Looks at it. Looks at the crew, several of whom are very focused on their equipment right now. Looks at the camera that has been running through all of this. Thinks, distantly: Ah. So that's how they make content.

Then his knees give out slightly, and he crouches down on the floor of the Nice train station with his hands over his face.

Maki is chuckling to himself now, also still in disbelief, hands on top of his head like he’s trying to physically process everything that just happened. Then he turns to the crew, instantly switching into defense for Euijoo.

“You watched him panic,” Maki says, incredulous. “That’s so evil,” he adds in English, half-scolding, half-laughing.

“I left my wallet at the airport,” Euijoo says flatly from the floor, a little traumatized.

“You did.” 

“Then who paid for my coffee?”

“Maki did,” she says.

Euijoo slowly tilts his head up from his crouched position to look at Maki. “And you didn’t remember?”

Maki blinks. Pauses. Then, like it’s arriving late to his brain—

“Oh yeah, it was me.”

He looks genuinely stunned for half a second, then immediately snaps back into offense, pointing at Euijoo. “Hey! You still lost your wallet at the airport. That part is on you.”

That’s what does it.

The crew breaks first. The quiet laughter spilling into the space like it can’t be held back anymore. And Euijoo, still on the floor, just stares for a second before he starts laughing too. shaky at first, then fully giving in.

Maki follows right after him, laughing now too, hands still on his head like he can’t believe any of this is real.

“Mianhe, mianhe,” Euijoo says between laughs, shaking his head, surrendering completely.

_____________________________________

Maki nags him the whole walk back to the socca stall.

"Hyung, your wallet."

"It’s here."

"How do you forget your wallet?"

Euijoo just lets out a sigh. 

"You had it out, you paid, and then you just—" Maki makes a gesture.

"I know, Maki. I won’t lose it again."

"I'm holding the cash," Maki clicks his tongue and shakes his head. "Give me the cash."

Euijoo, who at this point has no remaining arguments, takes the cash from his wallet and hands it over. Maki nods once, decisive, and slips it into his own wallet before tucking it deep into his pocket.

"Actually, I’ll keep the cards too," he adds.

"The cards I can manage."

"Can you though."

"Maki."

"I'm just saying—"

"Maki."

Maki stops. Looks at him. The grin is now there, warm and relentless, impossible to win against.

“Okay,” he says at last, like he’s granting mercy. “Fine. I’ll let you off for now. C’mon, let’s get socca.”

They walk back to the stall. Maki pays with Euijoo's cash, which is now Maki's cash, and hands Euijoo his portion, and they eat it standing on Avenue Jean Médecin with their suitcases beside them while the crew resets around them.

It's warm, simple, good.

"Well," Maki says, eating his own piece, looking up the street toward the hotel, expression calm. "Now we have content. Good job, Juju."

Euijoo thinks about the floor of the train station. About the coordinator's face. About the way Maki had just — turned around, no discussion, already solving it, and Euijoo had stood beside him through the whole thing with his phone in his hand and his language barrier and his completely outsourced crisis management.

"Is that what that was?" 

"Jihye is going to love it," Maki grins.

Euijoo considers this. Eats more socca. "Yeah," he sighs, resigned. "She is."

_____________________________________

They're in the hotel room now, arrived an hour ago. Their shared room is spacious, with two double beds, a small pantry, a fridge, a television, neither of them has turned on. The window looks out over the rooftops of Vieux-Nice, terracotta and pale yellow. Maki had claimed the bed by the window before Euijoo had fully registered that they were inside, dropping his carry-on and sitting on it. Euijoo, slower to settle back into himself, had taken the other bed near the exit and bathroom without thinking much about it.

The crew is gone for now. Back at six for the evening shoot.

Euijoo is lying on his bed, looking at the ceiling.

The adrenaline has fully left his body and taken most of his remaining energy with it. He thinks, distantly, that he does not actually need to go out for dinner tonight. They have the pastries they'd bought from a boulangerie after the socca, bought with Maki's newly appointed custody of the cash, and Euijoo could very genuinely eat a pastry in this bed and call it a night.

He thinks about the last two hours. 

A prank. It had been a prank.

Euijoo stares at the ceiling. The desperation is gone, and what's left in its place is, if he's being honest, a completely justified grudge. The crew had watched him spiral. Had watched him calculate the cost of cancelled cards and lost cash and the logistics of getting through a week in France without a wallet. Had watched Maki take over at the lost and found counter while Euijoo stood slightly behind his shoulder like a person waiting to be told what happened next.

They had filmed all of it.

He supposes, in the most charitable reading, that it was better than actually losing the wallet.

In a less charitable reading, he is going to remember this.

"Hyung," Maki says, from the other bed.

"Yeah?"

"Are you sulking?"

"I'm resting."

"You're sulking."

Euijoo turns his head to look at Maki, who is on his stomach facing Euijoo, chin propped on his folded arms, looking at him with the expression of someone who has diagnosed the situation accurately and is comfortable waiting.

"I'm not sulking," Euijoo says. "I'm reflecting."

"Yeah, you know what? As you should–"

Euijoo just looks at him, funny. Flat, unimpressed, and profoundly done.

Maki laughs, dropping his head slightly into his arms. “To be fair,” he says, still grinning, “it was really good content.”

Euijoo stares at him for a second longer, then turns back to the ceiling like he’s chosen peace over violence.

Maki makes that sound again — the one he does when he’s trying not to laugh properly and failing. Short, betrayed by his own amusement. Euijoo hears it and, against his will, feels something in his chest ease, the last of the afternoon's residue going quiet.

"Maki," Euijoo says.

"Mm."

"I'm keeping my own wallet."

"Okay," Maki says pleasantly.

"I just want that to be clear."

"Noted."

A pause.

"I'm still holding the cash, though," Maki says.

Euijoo opens his mouth, closes it, then looks at the ceiling.

"Fine," he says.

Maki hums like that’s the correct answer, then rolls onto his back, already scrolling through his phone. “Go nap. I’ll wake you up when it’s time to leave.”

Outside the window, Nice does its golden hour thing, slow and very orange. They have two hours before the crew comes back. Euijoo has a pastry in his bag and a bed that is, frankly, comfortable, and somewhere below them, the city is going about its very sunny evening. Euijoo looks at it through the window from his bed and thinks about dinner, about the Cours Saleya market, about six more days of this city, and whatever it's going to do with them. 

It's only day one.

Euijoo mutters a quiet, thank you, barely audible, and closes his eyes.

_____________________________________

day 2

The Promenade des Anglais has a beach. It also has pebbles the size of fists that absorb the Mediterranean sun all day and release it directly into the soles of your feet, and if you wanted to lie down on a mat, you would feel every single one of them through it, which is less a beach experience and more a question of how much you are willing to endure for a view. Maki had brought this up in the pre-production meeting with a photo on his phone and a solution already prepared — Cannes, twenty-seven minutes by train from Nice, actual sand. They were on the Mediterranean anyway. Why suffer with the pebbles?

The PD, thankfully, said yes.

In the morning, they take the train with four staff — the producer, two camera operators, and the audio person — while the rest of the crew takes the van ahead to set up. Maki sits across from Euijoo and is practically vibrating with excitement, a wide, unfiltered smile on his face that’s impossible not to mirror.

Euijoo's relationship with beaches is neutral at best. Sand gets everywhere, the sun is aggressive, and he cannot swim, which removes a significant portion of what beaches are supposedly for. In theory, he isn’t particularly stoked about today.

But Maki has been talking about this swimming trip since before the itinerary was confirmed — in the van, at breakfast, once briefly in an elevator — and somewhere between the third and fourth mention, and because Maki is an aggressively enthusiastic, infectious, golden retriever in human form, Euijoo had found himself actually looking forward to it as well.

Maki is already standing before the train stops.

_____________________________________

The crew has the setup done by the time they arrive — mats on the sand, cooler, cameras positioned with sight lines to the water. The beach is wide and sun-drenched. The Mediterranean is a deep, vibrant, and shimmering blue, the color Euijoo has been told to expect and is not prepared for.

Maki stops and looks at it. Euijoo gives him a moment.

"Okay!" Maki says enthusiastically. 

He sits on the mat, pulls his tank top off, and reaches for the sunscreen.

Euijoo has seen Maki shirtless countless times before. This is a fact of four years of shared spaces — dressing rooms, the dorm, practice rooms in summer when the air conditioning gives up. It barely registers at all. Euijoo takes the sunscreen when Maki holds it out and moves behind him.

Maki burns easily. He'd mentioned it on the train — I always forget, and then I pay for it — so Euijoo is thorough. Shoulders, between the shoulder blades, the back of the neck where the hair doesn't cover. Maki sits still and checks his phone, and Euijoo does the thing and hands the sunscreen back.

"Thanks," Maki says. “Time to go swimming!”

He gets up and jogs toward the water.

Euijoo sits on the mat.

And then, with nothing in his hands and nowhere to redirect his attention, he watches Maki walk toward the water — the width of his shoulders, the way he moves, entirely comfortable in his own body — and something in the back of his mind surfaces without permission.

It happened gradually.

Maki grew. Euijoo had filed this the way he filed everything else — members grow, bodies change, noted, moving on. He had updated the coordinates for everyone. For Maki, he had not updated the coordinates, and he had not examined why. 

What happened was, sometime in the third year, Euijoo looked up from a rehearsal, and Maki was there. It wasn’t the Maki he'd been filing, definitely not the maknae who'd debuted at sixteen with a face that hadn't quite finished arriving in its own features. Someone who had finished arriving. The jaw sharpened, the angles clarified, the softness redistributed. 

He was taller. Had been growing in increments, Euijoo had been noting and not noting, and then one day it became impossible not to note: Maki was looking down at him. Slightly. Just slightly. Enough.

He was broader. Training had done what training does when applied to a body genetically inclined toward it. Visibly, undeniably.

His face. Euijoo will not catalog Maki's face. The point is that it had arrived at a version of itself that had no business belonging to the maknae he'd filed it under, and Euijoo had looked at it once properly and then — filed it. Updated nothing. Closed the folder.

Kept using the old map.

Maki wades up to his waist. Turns back once, checks that Euijoo is there, and then goes under.

Euijoo looks at the Mediterranean.

He picks up his coffee. It's lukewarm. He drinks it anyway and does not think about it.

_____________________________________

Maki swims well. Euijoo watches him surface and dive and surface again, entirely at ease, and Maki waves from the water with the insistence of someone who believes the solution to Euijoo not being in the water is simply asking again. Euijoo shakes his head. Maki throws his hands up in the water — the exasperated gesture of someone dealing with an unreasonable person — and then goes back to swimming,

Euijoo watches this from the mat.

Maki comes out of the water.

He walks back up the beach pushing his wet hair back, and the sun at this hour in the south of France lays itself over everything, slow and golden and Euijoo's eyes make a decision before Euijoo does — tracking up from the waterline, the way the water runs off him, his chest, the tight line of his midsection — and then, abruptly, Euijoo looks out at the horizon like that was the plan all along.

The horizon is good. The horizon is very far away and asks nothing of him.

He stays interested in the horizon until Maki sits down beside him and reaches for his water bottle.

"Come swim," Maki says.

"I'm fine."

"You've been sitting there since we got here."

"I'm enjoying the view."

Maki looks at the view. Looks at Euijoo. "The view is the same in the water."

"I can't float."

"I know," Maki says. "I'll stay close."

Euijoo looks at the water. “I’ll come in later,” he says, because it’s what Maki wants to hear.

Maki accepts it the way he usually accepts Euijoo’s final answers, which is to say he lets it sit for exactly as long as it takes for a different approach to occur to him, and then he gets up.

Euijoo watches him walk down the beach toward two kids building something near the waterline. He watches him crouch down. The kids look up, assess him, and apparently decide he is acceptable because they respond. Euijoo can't hear what they're saying. Maki says something. He can see one of the kids point at a pink unicorn floatie propped against their bag. Maki looks back at Euijoo.

Euijoo has a feeling.

Maki turns back to the kids and says something else, and whatever it is, it involves gesturing at Euijoo with an expression that Euijoo, from this distance, can only describe as pitying. The kids look at Euijoo. Then at Maki. The smaller one puts her hand over her heart, saying something with what appears to be genuine sympathy. Maki nods gravely.

Euijoo has a very bad feeling.

Maki picks up the unicorn floatie, says something to the kids that makes them both laugh, and walks back up the beach toward Euijoo with the floatie under his arm, looking proud of himself.

"No," Euijoo says, flatly. 

"She said she wants you to borrow it."

"I'm not using a child's floatie."

"It's a unicorn floatie." Maki holds it out, like this is supposed to make less of his initial point.

"What did you say to them?"

"I told them," he says, "that my friend was very sad because he wanted to swim in the Mediterranean but he couldn't because he never learned how, and that it was his dream since he was very small, and that he had been looking at the water all morning with a heavy heart—"

"I have not been looking at the water with a heavy heart—"

"—and the older one said pauvre garçon and went and got the floatie herself." Maki pauses. "She's eight. She felt sorry for you."

Euijoo stares at him.

"You told two French children I was sad."

"You're always a little sad, hyung. It's part of your charm," Maki teases. 

Euijoo opens his mouth, then closes it.

Looks at the two kids, who are still watching him. The older one gives him a small, encouraging nod. Euijoo looks at the unicorn floatie. Looks at Maki, who is waiting with the patience of someone who already knows how this ends.

Euijoo takes the floatie.

"If this ends up on the show," Euijoo says.

"It's definitely ending up on the show," Maki says a little too overjoyed, already moving toward the water. "Come on!"

Euijoo gets up.

Maki is already waist-deep, turning back to wait, and Euijoo wades in with his tank top still on, holding the unicorn floatie with the last scraps of his dignity. The water is cold for a moment, and then it isn't, and Maki stays close to the way he said he would, pointing out the depth, saying here, you can stand here. Euijoo holds the floatie and finds his footing, and the Mediterranean turns out to be the same color from inside as it is from the shore, which he'd wondered about.

Maki floats on his back, looking at the sky.

Euijoo stands in the water holding a unicorn floatie and looks at the coast, the old buildings, the light on everything. 

"This is humiliating," Euijoo says.

"You're in the Mediterranean," Maki says to the sky.

Euijoo looks at the water. The sun on it. The kids waving from shore, and he raises one hand back without thinking about it, and one of them waves harder, delighted, and Euijoo laughs.

"There it is," Maki says, eyes gleaming at him. 

"Shut up," Euijoo says, and splashes him.

Maki takes this as the invitation it is. Euijoo gets a face full of Mediterranean salt water and retaliates, and then it's just that — the two of them splashing water at each other in the Mediterranean like idiots, Euijoo still holding the unicorn floatie with one hand, Maki laughing fully.

And above them, the drone makes a slow pass, capturing it all.

_____________________________________

day 4

At day 4, it would be a genuine failure of imagination, Euijoo thinks, to come all the way to the south of France and not drink wine by the Mediterranean.

He sits down at the table, looks at the water, and feels, for the first time since day two, completely fine. This is worth noting. Day three had been — not good, in the physical sense. The van ride back from Cannes had been the first sign, the specific nausea of a body that had spent too long in the sun and swallowed some amount of seawater and was now presenting its invoice. He'd told Maki it was car sickness. Maki had looked at him for a moment and then offered his shoulder, and Euijoo had thought about declining and then hadn't, and had spent the rest of the ride with his eyes closed and Maki very still beside him.

By the early morning of day three, Euijoo was pale, nauseous, and quietly calculating whether he could get through the day without anyone noticing. He’d decided he could.

At around ten am, he woke up to medicine on his bedside table. A water bottle beside it.

Euijoo stares at it blearily just as the bathroom door opens and Maki walks out fully dressed.

“You’re heading out?” Euijoo asks, voice weak and rough with sleep.

Maki pauses. “Oh, no. I already went. I just came back.”

Euijoo blinks again.

“The pharmacies here don’t open until nine-thirty,” Maki says, nodding toward the medicine. “So I could only get it now. How are you feeling?”

Oh.

Euijoo can’t quite bring himself to say it out loud, but he’s genuinely touched, not just by the medicine on the table, but by the way Maki handled everything so quietly, like it was never something that needed to become anyone else’s problem. No production alerts, no fuss, no turning it into a situation. Maki just took care of it himself, probably because he knows Euijoo hates the idea of being a burden more than he hates being sick.

“Take the medicine first,” Maki says. “Then we’ll see how you feel before the late afternoon schedule.”

Euijoo had taken the medicine, drunk half the water, and lain back down.

Drink all of it, Maki nagged, from somewhere near his own bed, not looking up from his phone.

Euijoo had drunk all of it.

And they had filmed the day's itinerary, and Euijoo had been fine, incrementally and then fully, and today, they had gone parasailing off the promenade in the afternoon, and now here they are, with wine and the sea and the sun going gold, and Euijoo is, by every available measure, having a good evening.

The crew is distributed around them. Jihye is at the table behind with her notebook. Jiho and the other operator are at angles that catch the railing and the view. The audio person clips the mic to Euijoo's collar and disappears.

Euijoo opens the menu, goes to the wine list, and finds what he's looking for.

"I'm getting a bottle," he says.

Maki looks up.

"Rosé. I'll finish most of it, so don't worry about it."

It isn’t bravado. Among &TEAM, and arguably among most people Euijoo has ever shared a table with, Euijoo has the tolerance of someone built for this. Soju, beer, wine —  his face stays the same, his eyes stay clear, he continues being Euijoo while everyone around him becomes a slightly warmer and more honest version of themselves. It is possibly genetic. It is definitely unfair, according to Nicholas.

Maki, on the other hand. The few times &TEAM had drunk together — the occasional celebratory dinner, one very memorable new year's — Maki had not stood a chance. Two drinks and the brightness in him turned up by fifty percent, and he started saying everything he was thinking in the order he was thinking it.

Euijoo orders the bottle.

"I can handle wine," Maki says, pleasantly.

"Let’s see,” Euijoo hums while looking at the menu. “Last time we drank, not even a whole soju bottle knocked you out.”

Maki exhales through his nose, but it is closer to a pout than anything wounded. “I just never get the chance to build my tolerance,” he says, as if this is a scheduling issue the company should address. “If we drank more regularly, I would improve. This is a skill you have to maintain.”

"We're not drinking more regularly just so you can build your tolerance."

"Just once a week. Like vitamins."

"That's not what vitamins are,” Euijoo makes a face.

Maki watches Euijoo, the smile on his mouth easy and slightly smug, pleased with himself for getting a rise out of him. “You’ll take care of me, though, yeah?” he says, light and almost teasing.

Euijoo does not look up. He snorts softly and turns a page of the menu.

“Of course. You’re the maknae. That’s my job.”

Maki feels himself flinch before he can stop it, something tightening just under his ribs. He looks at Euijoo, who is still absorbed in the menu, unaware that he once again has placed them neatly back into a shape that no longer fits. 

“Right,” he says. “Your job.”

A bottle of Château D’esclans arrives in an ice bucket, pale and sweating slightly in the warm air of the terrace. The waiter pours them each a glass and moves away.

Maki picks up his glass and drinks without saying anything about it, letting the earlier words sit where they landed and marinate in his chest. He swirls the glass lightly in his hand. The wine moves with it, slow and obedient, catching the light each time it turns. There is something strangely grounding about it, the weight of the glass against his fingers, the swirling motion, the way the surface of it keeps changing but never spills.

It is almost comforting, he realizes, absently. Maybe this is why people drink, he thinks, watching the wine turn again in the glass.

The thought, however, doesn’t really stay with the wine for long.

Here is the thing about Euijoo that Maki finds, depending on the day, either fascinating or a little bit funny.

Euijoo is one of the most perceptive people Maki has ever met. This is not a small claim. Maki has met a lot of people, in a lot of rooms, and Euijoo's specific quality of attention is unusual. Euijoo understands everyone so well. It is something Maki has always known about him, something the group relies on. He reads people cleanly, catches what is unspoken, adjusts before most people realize anything needs adjusting.

And then there is him with Maki.

Not in the sense that Euijoo does not know him—of course, he does. They have been in the same group for four years. They share a building, share stages and vans, and waiting rooms, and more convenience store runs at 2 am than Maki could count.

Euijoo knows Maki.

He just knows him through a version that has started to fall slightly out of sync with time, one Maki has been watching quietly drift off course for the better part of two years, a version with a specific expiration date that Euijoo keeps refusing to acknowledge. It's not a wrong version exactly. It's just not the whole picture anymore. It hasn't been the whole picture for a while.

Maki finds that interesting. He also finds it, if he's being honest, a little bit funny.

You understand everyone so well, he thinks, watching Euijoo study the menu with the focus and attention he brings to everything.

How have you not gotten to me yet?

_____________________________________

Euijoo notices the flush before he notices the bottle.

Maki is saying something about the parasailing, gesturing with his glass, and Euijoo is half-listening and half-watching the light on the water when he registers, somewhere peripheral, that Maki's ears are pink. He looks at Maki properly. Maki's ears are pink, and there is a specific brightness to his expression that is a degree or two past his normal brightness, and he is laughing at something he just said in the last thirty minutes.

Euijoo looks at the bottle.

He picks it up. Finds the label. Reads the percentage.

13.5% ABV.

He looks at Maki, who is pouring his third glass.

“Maki,” Euijoo says, amusement catching on the edge of concern, “are you drunk?”

“Mm?” Maki doesn’t look up right away. He finishes pouring, sets the bottle down carefully, like it is important business. “No.”

"That's your third glass," Euijoo says.

"It's rosé."

"It's thirteen percent."

Maki processes this. Looks at his glass. Looks at Euijoo. "That seems high."

"It is high."

"Huh." Maki takes another sip, thoughtful. "It doesn't taste thirteen percent."

"That's how it works."

"That's deceptive."

"Maki—"

Maki then suddenly giggles. small and private, like something has occurred to him that he finds genuinely funny, and he is not going to explain what it is. He puts his hand over his mouth. His ears are fully, comprehensively pink.

Euijoo stares at him, confused for a second, then briefly glances toward the nearest camera, as if it might offer guidance.

Maki meets his eyes and does it again, and Euijoo thinks, alright, that’s it, and reaches over without breaking eye contact, and quietly moves the rose bottle to his side of the table.

“Okay,” he says, “you’re done.”

"I'm fine," Maki says, still smiling at nothing.

"You're not fine."

“Hyung,” Maki turns toward him with absolute sincerity, the kind that would be convincing if he weren’t visibly pink from the ears down. “Hyung, I’m a grown man. I can handle rosé.”

Euijoo looks at the bottle, looks at Maki, looks at the remaining wine in Maki's glass.

He picks up his own glass and says nothing, which is the most dignified available option.

_____________________________________

The bill arrives, and Euijoo handles it and finishes what's left in the bottle while Maki watches him, impressed. 

"And you’re not drunk?" Maki exclaims in disbelief.

"I told you."

"That's not normal."

"Nicholas says the same thing." Euijoo sets the glass down. There is, if he is being precise about it, a very mild warmth somewhere behind his sternum that was not there an hour ago. This is the closest Euijoo gets to drunk, which is to say: he is fine. Completely fine. A fraction warmer than usual and entirely in possession of all his faculties.

Maki, across the table, is pink from the ears to the jaw and has been narrating his thoughts about the view for approximately ten minutes without being asked.

They get up to leave.

_____________________________________

The promenade at night is warm and loud and full of people who are also having a good evening, and Maki walks beside Euijoo, loose, carefree, like someone who has released all time pressure and finds everything around him genuinely interesting. Euijoo keeps pace and lets him talk, which Maki does, about the parasailing and the food and a theory he is developing about Nice specifically — something about the quality of the light, how it must affect the people who live here, whether they are measurably happier than people in cities without this light.

"That's a real study someone could do," Maki says.

"Sure," Euijoo says.

"I'm serious. The light here does something."

"It does something."

"You feel it too."

"I feel it."

Maki looks at him. "You're humoring me."

"I'm agreeing with you."

Then they pass a group coming the other direction — tourists, loud, a birthday situation based on the sash one of them is wearing, clearly several drinks into their own evening — and Maki, being his most extroverted self with the alcohol in his system, raises his arm before Euijoo can register what’s happening and works his way through all five of them, high-fives in a row, clean and enthusiastic. The group receives it immediately, matching his energy.

“Maki,” Euijoo calls out, still Euijoo and very aware of his introverted qualities, wanting to fold himself into a cocoon.

"They were celebrating," Maki says, already walking again, satisfied.

Half a block later, Maki slows in front of a shop window. It is a home goods store, closed, the display inside featuring a collection of ceramic pieces, linen, and some kind of ornamental olive branch arrangement. Maki stands in front of it with his hands in his pockets and looks inside.

Euijoo stops beside him.

"What are you looking at?" Euijoo says.

"That bowl," Maki says.

Euijoo looks at the display. There are several bowls. "Which one?"

"The blue one."

"There are three blue ones."

"The one on the left." Maki tilts his head slightly. "Who do you think buys that?"

"People who need a bowl?"

"No, like — specifically. What kind of person? Do you think they put things in it or just have it?"

Euijoo looks at the bowl, looks at Maki, looks back at the bowl.

"Come on," Euijoo sighs and takes him by the arm.

Maki goes, but slowly, still looking at the window as Euijoo steers him forward.

"I'm just saying it's an interesting object," Maki says.

"It's a bowl."

"It's a specific bowl. It means something to someone."

"It means nothing to anyone, Maki, it's in a shop window."

"Yet," Maki says.

Euijoo does not respond to this. Somewhere behind them, he hears the quiet shift of Jiho repositioning, the soft sound of the camera adjusting, and he does not look back, because looking back would be acknowledging the camera, and acknowledging the camera would mean acknowledging that all of this is going in, which he already knows, and does not need confirmed.

They walk the rest of the way back without incident, which Euijoo will count as a win.

_____________________________________

Jihye wraps up the filming at the hotel lobby, looking extremely satisfied with the footage acquired today. She says good night and means we're done, and Euijoo receives this with genuine gratitude.

They take the elevator up. Maki leans against the wall and looks at the floor numbers and says nothing, which is new — the quiet of someone whose energy has finally started to settle rather than run. Euijoo stands across from him and watches the numbers.

The floor arrives. They walk down the corridor. Euijoo gets the door.

Their hotel room is dark and warm. Euijoo turns on the lamp, drops his bag on the chair, and starts going through it — charger, face wash, the mechanical end-of-day accounting — and Maki comes in behind him and lets his own bag drop somewhere near his bed and stands in the middle of the room.

Euijoo is pulling his shirt over his head to change when Maki speaks.

"You still think I'm a kid."

Euijoo stops.

The shirt is half off. He pulls it the rest of the way and stands there holding it.

Euijoo looks at him and finds the drunk-bright thing is gone — the pink ears, the loose energy, the narrating everything in the order it arrives. What's left is just Maki, standing in the middle of the room, looking at him.

"I don't—" Euijoo starts.

"At the restaurant," Maki says. "With the wine." A pause. "You do it a lot. You don't notice."

Euijoo holds the shirt.

Maki crosses the room.

Just walks over. Close enough that the height registers.

Maki is almost exactly his height, which Euijoo knows, and which means nothing in any normal configuration of a room. But Maki is standing close, and the lamp is low, and it's enough — just enough — that Euijoo has to look up. A slight thing. A degree, maybe two. The difference that wouldn't register in daylight, in a full room, on a stage.

It registers now.

"I'm not a kid, hyung," Maki says, voice quiet and leveled. "I haven't been for a while."

Euijoo does not move.

The lamp. The city outside doing its thing. Maki standing close and looking at him.

Euijoo's brain, which is good at producing responses, produces nothing. No deflection, no redirect. The hyung-mode response that usually arrives automatically when he needs distance — not there. Just the room, and Maki, and the words sitting between them.

Maki holds it for one beat. Two.

Then the corner of his mouth moves.

"You want me to prove it?"

Euijoo stops breathing. This is simply what happens — the air goes and does not come back, and he is aware of the height and the proximity and the words still sitting in the room and his own heartbeat, which has become suddenly and inconveniently loud, and Maki is looking at him with complete steadiness.

Euijoo looks back.

Says nothing.

Has nothing.

Maki holds his gaze for one long moment.

Then he steps back. Reaches down, pulls his shirt over his head in one motion, drops it on the floor, turns, and falls face-first onto his bed like a man who has finished everything on his list for the evening and is now clocking out. One arm lands off the edge of the mattress. He doesn't adjust it.

He is asleep within a minute. Euijoo can tell by the breathing.

Euijoo stands in the middle of the room in the exact spot Maki left him, holding the shirt.

He stays there for longer than he will later account for.

Then he puts the shirt on, sits on the edge of his bed, and lies back.

The ceiling is the same ceiling it has been all week.

His heart takes a long time to quiet down.

He lets it take its time.

_____________________________________

day 5

The next morning, Euijoo wakes up to Maki already standing across the room, one hand on the phone table, slightly bent toward the receiver, waiting for room service to pick up. His hair is a disaster. It goes in three directions, and none of them are the right one, and he's wearing the grey tank top he sleeps in, hand on his hip, squinting at nothing in particular, the way people squint when they're awake but their eyes haven't agreed to it yet.

He notices Euijoo watching and doesn't move the phone from his ear.

"God, I really need to improve my tolerance." Maki says, "I can't believe two wine glasses took me out."

Euijoo looks at him.

Two glasses. Maki thinks it was two glasses. Euijoo watched him pour the third with his own eyes, read 13% ABV off the label, and watched Maki's ears go pink in real time. And then later — the hotel room, the dim light, Maki standing close and saying you want me to prove it with the expression that Euijoo has been turning over in his head since midnight.

Maki remembers two glasses.

"Two glasses," Euijoo says, carefully.

"Yeah, it’s humiliating," Maki shakes his head, and then someone picks up on the other end, and he orders soup and hangs up and goes to the bathroom without further comment, leaving Euijoo lying in the quiet room. 

The soup arrives before the filming crew does. Maki eats it at the small table by the window, both hands wrapped around the bowl, staring at the street below, treating his breakfast as medicine. Euijoo drinks his coffee across from him and says nothing, and Maki says nothing, and the morning does its thing outside — a delivery bike on cobblestone, someone's radio through an open window, the tram bell two streets over.

By the time the crew knocks, Maki has finished the soup and looks more like himself, which is to say: present, easy, ready to be somewhere. Euijoo has finished his coffee and looks, he suspects, more or less the same as usual, which is the advantage of being someone whose face does not report what is happening inside it.

They're out by ten.

_____________________________________

The Cours Saleya in the morning is the market at full volume. The flower stalls in columns of yellow and orange and pink, vegetable vendors with their colorful arrangements, the cheese table that Euijoo has walked past every day this week and not stopped at because stopping would be a problem at customs. Maki walks beside him with his hands in his pockets and his sunglasses on, actually looking at things as he passes them.

They pass a couple standing in the middle of the walkway with a paper map, clearly lost. The woman catches Maki's eye.

"Excuse me, do you speak English?"

"Yes," Maki says, and stops.

They’re looking for a museum, one Euijoo vaguely remembers from the itinerary on day three. Maki leans in, studies the map for a moment, then glances up and scans the street instead, orienting himself by landmarks rather than street names. He turns the map slightly so it matches the direction they’re facing.

“You’re here,” he says, tapping the corner. “You just need to stay on this road until the tram line, then turn left. There’s a big fountain in front of it. You can’t miss it.”

He gestures as he explains, tracing the route in the air, his voice warm and lightly amused. There is something effortlessly charming about him when he does this, Euijoo thinks to himself.  

The couple relax almost visibly. They thank him twice. Maki smiles, gives a small nod like it was nothing at all, and slips his hands back into his pockets before Euijoo has fully processed that he just took over the situation without hesitation.

Euijoo watches him do this.

He has been watching things like this happen all week and filing them individually — Maki's languages, Maki being helpful, that's just how he is — each label making the incident manageable, keepable at the right distance. But standing here, watching Maki put his hands back in his pockets and continue toward a spice stall, Euijoo feels the labels run out. There are too many incidents to file one by one. The week has accumulated into something the system cannot keep processing, and what's left when the filing stops is just the thing itself.

Maki exists in a register Euijoo cannot fully access. His English, which he uses the way other people use their first language, without the gap between wanting to say something and being able to say it. His frankness, the way he says what he thinks, without running it through the filters Euijoo runs everything through. His emotional openness, the complete absence of the restraint that Euijoo has built his entire interpersonal life around.

These are things Euijoo admires.

And somehow that same admiration keeps creating space instead of closing it. Euijoo sees how easily Maki moves through the world and decides it must be something separate from him, something he can appreciate but not step into. He has been doing it for so long he doesn’t notice anymore, turning Maki’s openness into proof of distance instead of something he could simply stand beside.

Except things had rearranged themselves over two years. And Euijoo had kept consulting the old blueprint.

And Nice, Euijoo thinks, watching Maki hold up a small paper bag — saffron, for Taki, he remembered before they left Seoul — does not care about his blueprint at all.

They find a bench near the edge of the market when Maki wants to check something on his phone, and Euijoo wants to finish his espresso.

Nice, it turns out, does not accept old blueprints.

He has been understanding this slowly since the moment they stepped off the plane, and the light hit them, and the whole framework wobbled slightly in the Mediterranean afternoon. Nice does not know he is the leader of &TEAM. The promenade doesn't care. The city has been here for a very long time and has received many people with many blueprints, and has been indifferent to all of them. What it offers instead is simply — the light, the water, the narrow streets, the orange trees. Here. Be in this.

And what is here, without the stage and the schedules and the nine-person context that usually surrounds them, is Maki. Just Maki. With no framework to put him in.

At some point in the week, Euijoo stopped navigating. He had simply let Maki take the front and fallen into step, and found, to his significant discomfort, that it was the most comfortable he'd been in a very long time.

The file is wrong. Has been wrong for longer than he wants to calculate.

The framework was not just a filing error. The distance had a function — it kept Maki in a register Euijoo could manage. Youngest, maknae, the one you look after. Which meant Euijoo always had a role, always had somewhere to stand, always had a reason for the gap that felt structural rather than chosen. Without the framework, there is no role. Without the role, there is just Euijoo, standing next to Maki, with nothing between them.

He looks at the water. The Mediterranean does not offer him a solution. It offers him the color, the light, the specific sensation of being somewhere that has no use for his blueprint.

Euijoo looks at the market. Maki is still on his phone across the bench, relaxed, one ankle crossed over his knee. He laughs at something on the screen — quietly, to himself — and Euijoo watches him and thinks: you're not a kid. Thinks: you haven't been a kid for a long time.

Maki pockets his phone. "Ready?" he says.

"Yeah," Euijoo says.

They get up and keep walking.

_____________________________________

The souvenir shop is cool and dim after the sun, has been selling Nice to people passing through for a long time. Ceramics along the back wall, lavender in every form, olive wood, prints of the promenade. Maki moves through it slowly, which means Euijoo moves through it slowly, and neither of them is looking for anything specific.

Then Maki picks up a bowl from the back shelf.

It's small. The glaze is layered — pale cream at the base, a band of terracotta, and then the blue on top, the specific blue that Euijoo has been living inside all week, the color that the Mediterranean actually is. It’s not perfectly even; the glaze thickened slightly at the rim, a small imperfection that makes it look handmade rather than manufactured. Someone made this thinking about the sea.

Maki holds it out without saying anything.

Euijoo takes it, turns it over, checks the base out of habit, holds it up, and the blue catches the light from the window. 

He looks at Maki. Looks at the bowl again. Puts it back on the shelf.

Then picks it back up.

The vendor is watching this with a patient expression of someone who has watched people decide whether to buy things their whole career. Maki waits. Euijoo turns the bowl over one more time 

"The bowl is going to break in my suitcase," Euijoo says.

"I'll wrap it in one of my hoodies," Maki says, immediately, as he'd already thought about it.

Euijoo looks at him.

Maki has hoodies. Euijoo has hoodies. Euijoo has his own perfectly functional suitcase and his own clothes, and Maki has just offered his hoodie like that's the obvious solution.

Maki shrugs. One shoulder. Moves to look at something else on the shelf.

Euijoo buys the bowl. The vendor wraps it in tissue paper, and he holds it carefully as they step back into the sun, and Maki doesn't say anything about the twenty minutes it took to decide about one small ceramic object.

_____________________________________

Dinner is at one of the restaurants on the edge of Place Masséna, an outdoor terrace with the square spread out in front of them, and the fountain lit, and the evening warm. The crew is there and also not — present in the corners, furniture, the way they always are.

They order. The food comes. Maki eats enthusiastically well and pays attention to his food while eating, which Euijoo has come to find quietly endearing about him over the course of the week. Euijoo is mid-sentence about something when he looks down and realizes a piece of his food is missing.

He looks at Maki.

Maki is chewing, looking at the square. The picture of innocence.

Euijoo huffs — not annoyed, something more fond than that, the involuntary exhalation of someone who has been robbed and cannot be fully bothered to mind — and looks back at his plate. Three seconds later, Maki cuts a piece of his own food, a good piece, the better piece probably, and sets it on Euijoo's plate without comment. A little guilty. Also clearly wanting Euijoo to have it.

Euijoo, mouth already full of something he'd tried a moment before, nods. Once, with a certain emphasis, because the food is very good and also because something about the whole exchange — the theft, the guilt, the offering — has him feeling something light and warm in his chest that he is not going to examine right now at a dinner table in a public square.

Maki looks at the square.

Euijoo eats the piece Maki gave him.

It was the better piece.

_____________________________________

The production team has set up in the corner of the square where the light is best — a mic stand, a microphone, and a speaker that is significantly better than anything Maki could have sourced himself. Euijoo doesn't know how the coordinator acquired these things. He's stopped asking how the coordinator acquires things.

Maki had mentioned wanting to busk early in the planning, had asked Euijoo back in Seoul which of their songs would carry stripped back, and Euijoo had thought about it and said Who am I and Jyuugoya, the melodies hold without the production. Maki had agreed, and that had been that.

Now Maki checks the mic, adjusts the stand slightly, then says something to the sound person. comes back and looks at Euijoo.

"Okay," he says, which is not a question.

"Okay," Euijoo says, which is the answer.

Maki nods and goes back.

Euijoo finds a spot across the square, at the edge of the crowd that is beginning to form — a few people who have noticed the setup and slowed down, curious, the early version of an audience. He stands at the edge of it with his hands in his pockets and watches Maki test the mic level, adjust something on his phone, look up once at the square to gauge the space.

Maki starts.

Something warm and mellow first — a Justin Bieber song, Be Alright, the melody carrying easily across the square in Maki's voice. It's the right song for the right hour, the tempo settled, and the chorus wide enough to land on people passing through. A few more stops. Then a few more. The gathering itself attracting attention.

Euijoo watches him.

Maki performing on a stage is one thing. Maki standing in Place Masséna with a mic and a production speaker and the square as his only backdrop, no choreography, no lighting, no eight members beside him — this is different. This is Maki's voice, having nowhere to hide and not needing anywhere to hide, clear and warm and doing what it does, which is work. Simply, consistently work.

Look at you, Euijoo thinks.

Euijoo feels the pride arrive in his chest before he's decided to feel it, the way it always comes with the members — automatic, genuine, the specific satisfaction of watching someone you know be seen by people who don't. These people in the square have no context for Maki except what they're hearing right now, and it's enough. It's more than enough.

But underneath the watching, familiar and entirely unwelcome, a voice that has been with him for a long time.

If I'd practiced more.

He'd started learning guitar last year. mentioned it once in a van, offhand, and Maki had immediately said Love Yourself, we can do it together, you play, I'll sing, like the plan was already obvious. Euijoo had said My level isn't there, and Maki had said So get it there, with the complete confidence of someone who sees no reason it shouldn't happen. and Euijoo had practiced — in the margins of schedules that weren't built to have margins, thirty minutes here, twenty minutes there — and had arrived at a level he privately called almost.

Almost isn't up there.

Almost is standing in the crowd watching.

If he'd pushed past almost, maybe Maki wouldn’t be singing over a thin instrumental from someone’s phone. Maybe it could’ve been real acoustics under his voice.

He files this under things to actually do when they get back. Not someday. When they get back.

Maki plays through Counting Stars next, the crowd now a proper one — thirty, maybe more now circled the corner of the square, a mix of tourists and locals and people who were just walking through and aren't anymore. Someone near Euijoo is filming on their phone. A child at the front is watching Maki busking, completely absorbed.

Then Maki pauses between songs.

Looks out at the crowd. Finds Euijoo.

"Thank you for stopping. My name is Maki, I'm from a group called &TEAM — we're a global boy group, we just had a comeback, would love it if you checked us out." A small smile. "And now I'm going to play a couple of our songs for you, if that's okay."

A few people in the crowd respond in various ways that indicate approval.

Maki smiles. looks down at his phone, pulls up the next track.

Who am I starts.

Euijoo knows this song in his sleep. Every part of it, the structure and the melody, and the particular swell before the chorus. But Maki's voice on it, stripped to just the vocal against the instrumental, does something the full production doesn't — makes it quieter and therefore somehow bigger, the melody carrying without anything to hide behind.

The chorus comes.

So baby, tell me — who, who am I to you—

Euijoo's breath stops somewhere in his chest.

Euijoo exhales.

The chorus comes around again. Maki looks up. Euijoo looks back, and this time does not look away.

The crowd applauds when the song ends. Genuine, warm, the applause of people who found something they weren't looking for. Maki thanks them.

"One more," he says. "And before I start—"

He looks out at the square. The look travels until it lands on Euijoo and stays there, and the smile that appears is the small private one.

“I also want to dedicate this last song to this guy over there,” Maki says, looking at him.

The crowd follows his line of sight and turns.

Euijoo freezes for a second, clearly caught off guard, awkward, and caught between smiling and protesting, shy and exasperated at the same time, as he realizes he’s been put on the spot.

Maki sees it and laughs, bright and unbothered. “Yeah, that one,” he adds. “The guy with the orange hair.”

A few people laugh, looking between them, trying to make sense of it.

“For putting up with me all week,” Maki continues, still looking at Euijoo. “I’m really glad I got to explore Nice with him.”

Two women near the front exchange a look, the quick, knowing kind, like they’ve figured something out and like what they see. A man nearby says something to his partner in French that Euijoo doesn't catch but can infer from the tone. There are smiles directed at him from strangers who have decided they understand what they're watching.

Maki winks.

Then looks down at his phone, starts the instrumental, and sings the first line of Jyuugoya:

Hoka no dareka jyana kute—

His hand comes up, briefly, pointing — at Euijoo, specifically, while he sings it — and Euijoo's brain translates before he can stop it:

It can't be anyone else but you.

Euijoo stands in Place Masséna with the fountain behind him and the crowd around him, and Maki singing Jyuugoya at him from across a square in Nice, France, and thinks:

I'm looking now. I'm looking.

The song continues. Maki sings. The evening holds all of it — the square and the crowd and the cameras— and Euijoo stands in it with his hands in his pockets, and the bowl wrapped in tissue paper in the bag on his shoulder, and watches Maki until the last note.

_____________________________________

day 6

They've been back at the hotel since seven.

The afternoon had been loose — a walk through a part of the city they hadn't seen yet, a coffee somewhere small that Maki had found by looking through a window and deciding. Jihye had wrapped the crew early, good instincts as always, and the evening had simply become theirs without announcement. Maki had ordered room service at some point because they’d both settled into the hotel room quite comfortably and ended up watching a K-drama they’d been putting off for weeks. Euijoo had gotten quietly absorbed in it, attention fixed in a way that makes Maki assume time has slipped a little. He figures they haven’t had dinner.

Now it's past ten, and the city is doing its night thing outside the window, and Maki is on his bed with his phone, and Euijoo is on his bed with his book, which he brought because he wants to lessen his screentime, and has been reading the same page for fifteen minutes. The room has that specific quality of a space that has been lived in for a week — worn in. Euijoo is aware of this. is aware that tomorrow is the last day, and then they go home, and this room stops being the room and becomes a thing they stayed in once, briefly, in Nice.

He turns the page, reads a sentence, turns back.

"Hyung," Maki says.

"Mm."

"Are you glad it was us? For this trip?"

Euijoo puts the book down.

The question sits in the room. Simple on the surface, it may not be as simple underneath, asked with the usual directness Maki is good at. Euijoo looks at him and thinks about the honest answer, which he has been thinking about for several days without looking at it directly.

"Yeah," he says. Actually yes.

Maki looks up from his phone. something in his expression settles. "Me too," he says, and looks back at his phone.

The room is quiet.

Euijoo looks at the ceiling.

The thing is — and this is the thing that has been sitting underneath everything all week — he doesn't know if he was good at this. He is not referring to the trip, the logistics, the content, nor the being-in-nice part, which he has been genuinely good at in ways that surprised him. The other thing. The thing that is him and Maki specifically, the reason a production company watched hours of content and decided to send them here.

He doesn't know if he was enough for it.

Maki has been, well, Maki. the multilingualism, the navigation, the pharmacy, the food, the way he is alive and has lived, even before Euijoo has finished registering everything about a moment. Maki has been doing everything that needed doing with the competence of someone who doesn't know how to be otherwise, and Euijoo has been — what? Walking beside him. Eating the food he ordered. Following the route he knew.

Here is the leader of &TEAM, Euijoo thinks. Here is what he contributed.

He's quiet for long enough that Maki looks up from his phone.

“What is it?" Maki looks back up again and is suddenly attentive to him. “You’re thinking. I can hear it.”

"Nothing," Euijoo says. Maki just looks at him. Euijoo thinks for a moment. 

"Do you think it worked?" he says finally. "The show. Us?" he pauses. "Do you think we were interesting enough? That the content is actually good?"

Maki is quiet for a moment.

"I mean," Euijoo continues, because once he starts, he cannot stop. After all, it is the last night, and the week is sitting in him, and the anxiety that has been running quietly in the background of the whole trip has decided now is when it surfaces. "We're not an obvious pairing. We both know that. Jihye took a risk, and I don't know if we gave her what she needed. I don't know if I gave her what she needed, you were—" He stops. "You were good. You're always good at this kind of thing. I just don't know what I—"

"Hyung," Maki says. 

"—contributed, exactly, I don't know what I—"

"Euijoo-hyung."

Why are you thinking of this? Maki thinks.

Euijoo stops.

Maki is looking at him, warm and somehow amused, but with his brows pulled together slightly, like what he's hearing is absurd and also worth every bit of his attention.

"If you're that worried about the ratings," Maki says, "we could always kiss at the top of Castle Hill tomorrow morning." he smirks, “You know, give them a spectacle.”

Euijoo stares at him.

Maki looks back at him, grinning now, the full grin, unguarded and mischievous and directed entirely at Euijoo, who is sitting on his bed looking like someone whose brain has briefly stopped loading. 

"You don't say things like that!" Euijoo snaps, and his face does the thing — the flush that starts at his ears and travels, the thing that almost never happens, the thing that Maki will absolutely remember — and Euijoo groans and grabs the pillow behind him and throws it at Maki and turns over, rolling to face the wall, pulling his blanket up like that settles it.

Maki catches the pillow, laughs, surprised and delighted, and Euijoo can hear it and is choosing to ignore it while staring at the wall and being extremely normal.

"I'm serious!" Maki says, with the defensive tone of someone who is absolutely not not-serious.

A moment of silence. 

"Oh come on, you're actually not going to sleep yet," Maki says, and Euijoo can hear him shifting, the sound of the pillow being set on his lap, adjusting his position on his bed. "Hyung."

Euijoo says nothing. The wall is a good wall. The wall has never said anything as absurd as we could always kiss at the top of Castle Hill.

"Euijoo-hyung." Maki's voice is different now, warm and quieter. The teasing has stepped back, and something else has stepped forward, the thing underneath Maki that is not the grin, the golden retriever, nor the easy, unbothered surface.

"Can I say something real for a second?"

Euijoo doesn't turn over. But he doesn't pull the blanket higher either.

Maki takes this as the yes, it is.

"You've been the leader ever since," he says, "and I don't think you know what it looks like from out here. like — you're always thinking. I can see it. The whole time, even when you're relaxed, there's a part of you that's accounting for everything. everyone. Making sure it all holds together." A pause. "I've been watching you do it for years."

Euijoo is very still.

"But this week," Maki continues, quieter now, "there were moments where you weren't doing that, where you were just — here. eating food and looking at the water and laughing at things and not managing anything." Another pause, shorter. "Do you know how good it was to see that? like — you're young, hyung. You're twenty-four. You're allowed to be young."

The city outside. The room. Euijoo's hand tight on the blanket.

"And I know you think it's your job to take care of me because I'm the youngest. And I know you're always going to feel that way, and honestly—" Maki's voice does something warm at the edges — "I don't even mind it. But it goes both ways. I want to take care of you too." He lets out a faint, wistful chuckle. "Just because i'm the youngest doesn't mean you're not someone worth taking care of. You're soft, hyung. Underneath all of it. The viewers are going to see it. I've been seeing it all week… all the time."

And then, because Maki cannot fully help himself even in his most sincere moments.

“And you know what? You’re really cute when you’re not being the leader.”

Euijoo turns over.

He doesn't plan to. His body just does it, rolls back over to face the room, because that last sentence has crossed some line that his self-preservation instincts cannot let pass without visual confirmation of the person who said it. Maki is sitting on his bed with Euijoo's pillow in his lap, looking at him, and he has the expression that is both things at once — the warmth, the sincerity, all of it real and meant — and also the slight upward pull of his mouth that means he knows exactly what he just said.

"You're terrible," Euijoo says, and he hates that he can feel the heat rising in his face.

“I mean, you’re cute as the leader too. I just don’t get to see this version as much,” Maki says.

And Euijoo means to say something sharp back, means to reach for the deflection that has been available to him for four years, the one that goes right here, maknae, back in your lane — and it isn't there. He looks at Maki sitting on his bed with the pillow in his lap, looking back at him, and the deflection just. Isn't there.

"You're the hardest person to be around," Euijoo says instead. "Do you know that?"

It's softer than he intended, stripped of any bite. Closer to a confession than anything else.

Maki doesn't say anything. Just watches him, the grin gone now, something attentive in its place.

"I always know where everyone goes," Euijoo says, quieter. "And then there's you."

He stops there. Looks at his own hand on the blanket. That's all he's going to give. That's everything.

Maki is quiet for a moment. He knows what Euijoo just did. He knows what it costs someone like Euijoo to let a sentence go unfinished on purpose — to hand something over half-wrapped and trust that the other person understands what's inside. And then there's you with nowhere to go after. It is not nothing. It's the opposite of nothing.

And there's a version of this moment where Maki says more. Closes the distance, names the thing, makes it easier. He's aware of it the way you're aware of a door. But Euijoo is someone who needs to arrive at things himself. And what Euijoo needs right now is not more. What he needs is for Maki to make it safe to have said it at all.

So Maki holds it carefully.

"I'm not a category," he says. "You don't have to figure out where I go."

He smiles when he says it, soft, easy, like he’s already forgiven something Euijoo hasn’t admitted to. 

"I'm just Maki. I've always just been Maki. You can let that be enough."

I know, Euijoo thinks. 

Because Maki is right. Maki has always just been Maki. The distance was never Maki's fault, never Maki's doing, never anything Maki needed to fix or adjust. Maki has just been standing there, unchanged, waiting to be looked at directly.

It was Euijoo. It has always been Euijoo.

The filing system. The blueprint. The coordinates he chose because they were safer than the alternative — maknae, youngest, the one i look after — all of it a structure he built around something he didn't want to examine. They were about Euijoo not knowing who he is when they're gone. He doesn't know who he is next to Maki because nothing holds, and when nothing holds, he doesn't know what he offers. And when he doesn't know what he offers, he doesn't know how to be near him at all.

It was always just this.

I don't know how to be near you.

That was always his. That was never Maki.

He doesn't say any of this. But he looks at the ceiling and for the first time all week — all these years — he knows what it is.

He turns his head.

Maki is already looking at him. Euijoo's expression has gone unguarded in a way he doesn't realize. His eyes a little glassy — too open. Breath caught somewhere between in and out.

Maki's mouth curves, but not into a grin. It's that smaller smile, the one that lives mostly in his eyes. They hold each other's gaze a beat too long.

Then Maki's expression shifts, light returning to it on purpose. Like he understands exactly what he's looking at and isn't going to make it harder.

It’s okay. You are safe with me. I will not let you drown.

“I mean,” he says, easy and joking again, like he didn’t just say something that rearranged the room, “we could still kiss on Castle Hill tomorrow. Just to give Jihye something to work with.”

Euijoo grabs the pillow; the tightness in his chest finally loosens just enough for him to immediately want to hit Maki with something. Maki catches it, already laughing, surprised and delighted, and Euijoo makes a sound that is not a laugh and also completely is, turning over to face the wall again, pulling the blanket up.

"Go to sleep," Euijoo says, muffled. Defeated.

"Okay, okay," Maki says, still smiling. Euijoo can hear it. The shift of weight, feet on the floor. And then Maki is crossing the small distance between the beds, and then he's sitting on the edge of Euijoo's bed. And then — with the complete confidence of a large dog who has identified a comfortable spot — he lies down beside him, pulling the pillow with him, and arranges himself against Euijoo's side.

Euijoo stares at the wall.

Maki is warm against his arm, solid and present. A hulk of a six-foot, gym-built man.

"Maki," Euijoo whispers. 

"Mm," Maki says, already sounding half-asleep.

"Your bed is right there."

"This one's better," Maki says.

"They're identical."

"Yours has you in it," Maki says, into the pillow, muffled, already mostly gone.

Euijoo is still staring at the wall.

The city below. The last night. Maki, warm and solid and completely asleep against his side, the golden retriever quality of him fully expressing itself in the way he's simply claimed this space and settled into it without asking and without apology.

Euijoo lies in the dark and does not move. Maki's breathing has evened out completely, slow and unbothered, and Euijoo is very aware of his own heartbeat.

Thinks about Castle Hill in the morning.

_____________________________________

day 7

The promenade on a Sunday belongs to everyone.

Euijoo registers this the moment they turn onto it — the crowd, fuller than any other day this week, the full Sunday volume of the Côte d'Azur in late May. Tourists with their rollers and their maps and their sunhats, families, couples, runners weaving through the gaps, a tour group moving in a slow wide block that Euijoo has to step around. The promenade is the full length of the bay and everyone has decided to walk it today.

They'd been up on Castle Hill this morning. It’s the highest point in Nice.

The view is everything. The whole bay opens out at once, the city spread below in terracotta and pale yellow, the promenade a thin line where buildings give way to water, and beyond it the Mediterranean stretching all the way out. From here, everything they’ve seen this week is visible at once—the market, the beach, the streets they got turned around in. All of it small and whole and held together by the sea. 

They stand there for a while. Euijoo doesn't say anything. Maki doesn't say anything. The cameras are somewhere behind them, furniture, and the wind comes off the water, and the city is below, and that's all.

No one kisses anyone.

They don't have to. Euijoo is not in his head — for the first time in he doesn't know how long, he is just standing somewhere, next to someone, looking at something beautiful. Maki is beside him. Just Maki. The sea does its thing. Euijoo breathes.

That's enough. That turns out to be completely enough.

He carries that down the hill with him. Carries it onto the promenade now, into the crowd, into the Sunday.

Somewhere behind them, the filming crew is working to keep up — cameramen navigating the gaps, the coordinator two steps ahead, doing what the coordinator always does. But the crowd has its own logic, and the crowd does not care about shot lists. Euijoo catches a brief glimpse of one of the camera operators — stopped, scanning, losing the angle as a tour group moves through the space between them. They'll find them again. They always do.

But right now the crowd has swallowed them whole.

On a Sunday at this hour, he would be at the SBS open hall. The lights, the stage, the script in his hand, his name called, and the smile that is genuine but also a performance of genuine, the two things layered over each other until he stops knowing where one ends. He would be mcing for Inkigayo. He would be the leader, the MC, the one who holds the thread, who makes sure it all moves forward.

Instead, he is here.

In the middle of a crowd that has no idea who he is, moving at the pace of people with nowhere specific to be, the sun on the water to his left and the buildings to his right, and a hundred strangers walking around him like weather.

It should feel suffocating. The bodies, the noise, the press of it.

It doesn't.

Because no one is looking at him. No one knows to look. He is just a person in a crowd on a Sunday on the Promenade des Anglais, and the crowd doesn't need anything from him and he doesn't owe the crowd anything, and it turns out that anonymity — real anonymity, the kind that comes from being genuinely unknown — feels like setting something down. Something he has been carrying for so long, he stopped noticing the weight.

Euijoo looks at Maki.

Maki is walking beside him, hands in his pockets, doing what he does in every city — actually looking at things. A fruit stall. A kid on a bicycle weaving through the tourists. A boat far out on the water.

He doesn't know he's being looked at.

Euijoo thinks, quietly — we've disappeared.

Both of them dissolved into the Sunday, just two more people on the promenade moving in the same direction toward the same light, indistinguishable from everyone else, no one looking, no one knowing to look. No stage. No cameras finding them. No function, no role, no shape that needs holding together.

He thinks about the crew somewhere behind them, losing them, losing the angle, the coordinator talking into her earpiece, the camera operator urgently scanning the crowd for two faces that have simply ー disappeared. Swallowed whole by the Sunday and the bodies and the noise, the same as everyone else here, the same as no one.

He hopes they stay lost a little longer.

It's a small thought. Selfish, maybe. The crowd and the anonymity, and Maki walking beside him, not performing anything, not aware of being watched, just existing on a Sunday as he belongs to it. Euijoo wants to keep it a little longer. Thirty more seconds of being no one. Of Maki being no one. Of this — whatever this is — belonging only to them.

He is still looking at Maki when Maki feels it and turns.

That look is there again. Warm, certain, completely unguarded. The one Maki doesn’t seem to realize he gives away so easily.

Maki smiles at him.

And then the crowd thickens ahead of them, a sudden press of bodies, a tour group merging from a side path, the promenade narrowing into something harder to move through. Euijoo feels the shift, the way the space between them becomes unreliable, the crowd pressing in from every side.

Maki reaches over and takes his hand.

Doesn't look at him to check. Doesn't make it a moment. Just — finds it, fingers settling between his, and turns forward and walks, leading them both through the gap, through the press of the crowd, through the only available space.

Euijoo follows.

_____________________________________

They stand on the pavement outside the hotel with their bags, checked out, the week behind them. The crew loads the last of the equipment into the van around them, cases stacked, cables coiled — seven days of Nice being packed away piece by piece. Their van hasn't arrived yet. Maki is on his phone. Euijoo stands beside him and looks at the street.

The orange trees are still there. They've been there since day one — lining the pavement outside the hotel, scattered through the streets of the city, fruit hanging heavy and unharvested, some of it already on the cobblestones. Euijoo has been walking past them all week without stopping to think about them.

The tram bell rings somewhere close.

"The oranges," he says. "Nobody picks them up. They're just — available."

Maki looks up from his phone. Looks at the trees, at the fruit on the cobblestones, golden and impractical. Then at Euijoo, who is already looking at him.

"For whoever wants them," Maki says.

"Yeah," Euijoo says. Quietly. "For whoever wants them."

The van turns onto the street. The driver waves. They pick up their bags, Maki's has a bowl wrapped in a hoodie in it, and it will not break, he's made sure of it, and they get in. Nice retreats through the back window, a city that has been left before and will be left again and will still be here, with its light and its oranges and its impossible water, when someone comes back to it.

Looking out the window, Euijoo no longer has his blueprint. It's been gone a while now, lost somewhere in the alleys of Vieux-Nice, or the market, or Place Masséna, somewhere between the socca and the sea.

What he has is simply this Maki, sitting beside him — bright and impossible and always just Maki — and that's enough.

_____________________________________

[Nice, to see you aired August 14th. By August 15th, the fandom had named the dynamic. By August 17th, there were 647 fics on AO3. Maki and Euijoo don’t know about this. The bowl made it to Seoul unbroken.]

Love U Like That by Lauv