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Wonwoo moved through the dorm like a ghost. His footsteps were swallowed by the heavy silence of a house full of twelve exhausted boys. But unlike his members, sleep seemed to be a luxury his mind couldn’t afford tonight.
The adrenaline from their first win earlier still pulsed through his veins, yet he knew that wasn’t the only thing keeping him restless.
With a sigh, he swung his legs over the side and climbed down from the double deck bed, careful not to wake up Vernon sleeping on the lower bunk. He expected the living area to be empty, but as he rounded the corner, he found him.
Mingyu.
The younger boy was slumped on the floor. He was sitting with his back against the sofa and his head tilted back while staring at nothing. Without his make-up on and his hair mussed, he looked less like an idol now and more like the boy Wonwoo had met when they were fifteen. He was the same boy Wonwoo had spent years trailing through the green-painted walls of their practice rooms. That boy who used to vibrate with an energy he didn’t know how to bottle was now, for the first time, completely still.
“You can’t sleep either, Min?” Wonwoo asked softly.
Mingyu jumped slightly, looking as if Wonwoo had disrupted a heavy train of thought. But when he realized who it was, he visibly relaxed. Wonwoo sat down beside him, leaving just a breath of space between them. Their knees were so close he could feel the heat radiating from Mingyu’s skin through the fabric of their joggers. It was a distance that shouldn’t have mattered, yet Wonwoo found himself holding his breath, hyper-aware of the few millimeters that kept them from actually colliding.
“Hyung...” Mingyu started, taking a deep breath before finally speaking his mind. “Everything is going to change after this, right?”
Wonwoo could feel the fear in Mingyu’s voice—the terror of a dream finally coming true and the vertigo that came with it. As the older of the two, that eldest-son instinct in him flared up in his chest. It was a weight he’d carried long before they were idols; the need to be the one who didn’t flinch. In his DNA, there was a code that forbade him from being the one who was afraid.
If Mingyu was the one falling, Wonwoo had to be the solid and unmoving ground, perfectly deceptively still even if everything around them was moving in a speed they weren’t expecting. A part of his soul always knew how to turn his own trembling into a steady hand for anyone to hold, including Mingyu. Especially Mingyu.
“The work will get harder,” Wonwoo finally said, his voice still sounding raspy from the live performance they did earlier. “But we’re still just us. That doesn’t change unless we let it.”
Mingyu shifted, his hand falling onto the floor between them. His fingers brushed against the back of Wonwoo’s palm and he instantaneously felt a jolt. Mingyu’s skin was warm—always too warm—and tonight, his hand carried an unfamiliar adrenaline-fueled tremor that spoke of nerves and triumph all at once.
“I just don’t want to lose this,” Mingyu whispered, his thumb ghosting over the side of Wonwoo’s hand. “This feeling. Being here with you guys.”
Wonwoo looked at their joined hands, then at Mingyu’s profile. It felt like a lifetime ago that they were just fifteen, two kids chasing a dream that felt as vast and unreachable as the stars. Now, at the start of their twenties, that dream was finally starting to breathe, turning into something they could touch.
Something in Wonwoo’s chest shifted—a quiet, tectonic movement of his own internal geography. It wasn’t a sudden change; it was the final and inevitable settling of a feeling he’d been trying to ignore since they were trainees.
For years, he had been able to shake it off. He had been able to tuck it away behind the safety net of being just friends or just teammates. But tonight, as the heat of Mingyu’s palm anchored him to the floor, the truth finally grew too large to hide. The attachment he tried to suppress had morphed into something deeper… something permanent. And with it came a dull, familiar ache—the quiet certainty that Mingyu mostly likely didn’t feel the same.
“You won’t,” Wonwoo promised, and for the first time, the dream felt real not because of a trophy, but because of the heat of the person beside him. “We have plenty of time.”
Ten, Wonwoo suddenly thought, the number suddenly surfacing in his mind as he felt the slightest sign of tremor in Mingyu’s palm.
Maybe he meant ten minutes until the sun started to peek over the small window of their dorm, signaling the start of their new reality. Or maybe, unknowingly, he was already starting the countdown for the next decade of his life–ten years of carrying this secret, ten years of staying by his side, even if his heart had to break a little more every day to do it.
And just like that, the world had gotten faster, louder, and infinitely more crowded.
The success of Al1 had pinned them to a map they were still learning to navigate. A world where silence was now a luxury they could no longer afford. There was no time to process the tectonic shifts in Wonwoo’s own heart either; they were already being shoved from one comeback after another.
In the blur of rehearsals and late-night recordings, Wonwoo found himself looking for that warm hand again, just to remind himself he was still grounded. But right now that hand was busy scribbling rhyming verses on a yellow legal pad.
Their agency’s studio wasn’t small, yet it felt cramped. Seungcheol and Vernon were hunched over the main console, their voices a rhythmic background noise for Wonwoo as they debated the cadence of a verse for a song about trauma. They were in their own world, leaving Wonwoo and Mingyu tucked into the corner of the leather sofa, the paper balanced between their knees
Writing with Mingyu was always a visceral experience. While Wonwoo treated lyrics like a map, plotting each syllable like a necessary landmark; Mingyu treated them like a brush, splashing emotion across the page in messy yet colorful strokes.
“I think the lyrics for this should feel... clear and unfiltered,” Mingyu murmured, his voice dropping an octave to stay beneath the music pulsing from the speakers. He pointed at a line Wonwoo wrote and eventually scratched out—a line that even he felt a little too guarded, a little too safe. For Wonwoo, unfiltered is terrifying. He needs the filter to survive.
“Not just ‘I know you,’” Mingyu continued, his eyes scanning the page. “But the idea that those feelings we used to hide—the ones that were always flickering in and out of sight—are finally easy to see now. Because now we know each other’s eyes.”
Wonwoo looked at the younger boy. Mingyu was scrunching his nose, his hair a mess from where he’d been running his fingers through it in frustration. He looked soft, earnest, and dangerously close.
“Now, we know each other’s eyes,” Wonwoo repeated, testing the weight of the words. He picked up the pen, but as he reached for the paper, his knuckles grazed Mingyu’s thigh.
“Is that too much?” Mingyu asked, misinterpreting Wonwoo’s silence for hesitation. He turned his head, and suddenly they were breathing the same air, the studio’s blue light catching the sharp angle of his jaw. “If it’s too cheesy, we can change it.”
“No,” Wonwoo said, his voice steadier than he felt. He forced himself to look back at the legal pad, though his skin was still tingling from the contact. “It’s not too much. It’s exactly how it feels.”
He wrote the line down, his handwriting slightly more jagged than usual. Out of the corner of his eye, he saw Mingyu smile—a small, private thing meant only for the few inches of space between them.
Wonwoo kept his eyes on the paper, counting the beats, counting the years, and praying that the studio lights were dim enough to hide the way his heart was racing.
Nine, Wonwoo thought. The number struck like a quiet bell against his ribs as he felt the solid, grounding heat of Mingyu through his jeans.
Maybe he was counting the bars left in the verse they were struggling to finish. Or maybe, he was acknowledging that he had nine years left to figure out how to stop his breath from hitching every time their personal bubbles overlapped.
Mingyu had a way of becoming a permanent fixture in any space he entered, anchoring himself so deeply into the room’s atmosphere that it was impossible to ignore him.
That’s why he was the first thing Wonwoo saw the moment he stepped out of the bathroom. The sudden sight of him sent a sharp, involuntary jolt straight to Wonwoo’s ribs but he didn’t freeze. Externally, he merely paused to adjust the hem of his shirt, his face a mask of a sleepy indifference.
Internally, however, the air in his lungs felt instantly thicker. He was hyper-aware of everything, from the dampness of his hair against his forehead to the flush on his cheeks that had nothing to do with the hot water he just took.
Mingyu wasn’t supposed to be here anyway. Wonwoo had fully expected to find Soonyoung and Jihoon bickering over the room service menu or already passed out face-down in their respective beds. Instead, he found Mingyu sprawled diagonally across Wonwoo’s white duvet, looking like an oversized machine that had simply run out of batteries mid-stride. He was still wearing his black tour merch shirt, his long limbs dangling carelessly off the edge of the mattress. He was supposed to be three doors down, packed into a room with Vernon and Seungkwan, but here he was—having bypassed his own floor entirely to seek out the one space that felt like a sanctuary.
Wonwoo quietly closed the bathroom door behind him, the click of the latch deliberate and steady, masking the way his pulse was currently racing against the quiet of the room.
“Mingyu?” Wonwoo called out softly, slipping on his eyeglasses as if he hadn’t recognized the broad silhouette the absolute second he stepped into the room.
Mingyu groaned into the pillow, a single, dark eye peeking out from the sheets.
“The others were too loud,” he mumbled, his voice thick with the bone-deep exhaustion that followed a three-hour set. “Jihoon-hyung let me in. Said you wouldn’t mind.”
Oh, he didn’t mind. Wonwoo didn’t mind. He never did when it came to Mingyu. And that was the problem.
Wonwoon stood perfectly still, watching the rhythmic rise and fall of Mingyu’s shoulders. He could feel the heavy humidity of Manila pressing uselessly against the glass of the window. The Ideal Cut tour was grueling. Their Asian Tour was a dizzying blur of airports, roaring crowds, and blinding stage lights. Somewhere in the middle of the chaos, the two of them had simply become each other’s quietest habit.
“Where are they though?” Wonwoo asked, keeping his tone light and conversational. He crossed the room to retrieve his phone from the nightstand, his hip accidentally brushing against the knuckles of Mingyu’s dangling arm. The contact sent a brief spark through his skin but he didn’t falter.
Mingyu didn’t seem to notice. He merely shifted, curling his large frame deeper into Wonwoo’s mattress as if the space had always belonged to him. “He and Soons went out to get food. I forgot what but they said to message them if you need anything.”
“I don’t need anything,” Wonwoo murmured. He carefully sat on the very edge of the mattress, leaving as much distance between them as the small hotel bed allowed. It was only then that he noticed the dark patches on the white fabric. “You’re getting my bed damp.”
There was no bite in his tone, just a defeated softness. Giving in to a sudden, reckless impulse, Wonwoo reached out. His hand hesitated for a fraction of a second in the cool air before his fingers brushed a few damp, stray locks away from Mingyu’s forehead.
Mingyu didn’t flinch. Instead, he leaned blindly into the warmth of Wonwoo’s palm. A long and content sigh escaped his lips.
“Just five minutes, hyung,” Mingyu whispered, his eyes closing again. “Let me stay here.”
And Wonwoo did. The small space between them practically vibrated with everything he hadn’t—he couldn’t—say since that chaotic night of their first win back in 2016.
He stayed. He always stayed. And as he watched Mingyu drift completely back to sleep, Wonwoo realized that the tour wasn’t actually about the massive world they were finally seeing; it was about the single person who made that world feel small enough to handle.
Eight, Wonwoo thought. The number echoed in the hollow of his chest, vibrating against his ribs as he felt the damp, salt-kissed warmth of Mingyu’s skin.
Maybe he was counting the hours of sleep they had left before the brutal morning flight to the next city. Or maybe, he was marking the eighth year of a countdown he was no longer sure he wanted to end.
Had the universe been even a fraction less persistent, Wonwoo might have actually believed in coincidence.
The move to the new luxury dorms was supposed to be a fresh start. It was a hard-earned chance for thirteen people to finally spread out into the comfort of a sprawling multi-level space. But their traditional, chaotic game of Rock-Paper-Scissors had felt less like a gamble and more like a cosmic inevitability.
When the final round ended, leaving Mingyu and Wonwoo standing side-by-side in the loud wreckage of the new living room, Wonwoo had felt a strange, quiet wave of relief wash over his chest.
Now, he stood dead center in their new and spacious bedroom. His brow was furrowed as he mentally mapped out the floor plan, calculating the placement of his heavy PC setup before belatedly deciding it would be better to banish the gaming rig to Seungcheol’s room entirely. He needed at least one boundary left intact.
Left with just the bare essentials, Wonwoo found himself measuring the distance between the mattress Mingyu had claimed and the harsh morning light spilling through the window.
He’s going to be woken up by the sun, Wonwoo realized.
He made a silent mental note to order a heavy set of blackout curtains before the week ended. As he stood there, cataloging the small ways he would have to fix the space to accommodate the younger boy’s habits, his face settled into that characteristic, unreadable scowl.
“Hyung? Are you... are you really that upset?”
Wonwoo blinked, his careful internal blueprints instantly dissolving as he turned to see Mingyu standing by a half-unpacked cardboard box. The taller boy looked uncharacteristically small, his broad shoulders hunched forward and a look of genuine, anxious worry clouding his face.
“Upset about what?” Wonwoo asked, his voice defaulting to its usual quiet neutrality, though his chest tightened at the sight of Mingyu’s slumped posture.
“The room,” Mingyu blurted out, his large hands nervously twisting a stray piece of popping bubble wrap. “I know you wanted a solo room. Or maybe a different roommate. I saw your face just now—you looked so frustrated.” He stepped a fraction closer, his voice dropping into that earnest, gentle tone he always reserved for when he thought he’d overstepped. “I’ll be good, hyung, I promise. I won’t leave my clothes on your side of the floor. I’ll use my headphones every time I watch videos, and I’ll give you all the space you need. You won’t even notice I’m here if you don’t want to.”
Wonwoo felt a sharp, agonizing pang strike straight through his chest. He stood entirely frozen under the weight of his own silence, looking at the frantic yet endearing worry in Mingyu’s eyes.
The irony was suffocating. He hadn’t been scowling because he wanted Mingyu to be invisible; he was scowling because after four years of fighting this losing battle against gravity, he still didn’t know how to tell the younger boy that his chaotic, overwhelming presence was the only thing that made the walls of their dorms feel like a home.
“You don’t have to be quiet, Min,” Wonwoo said, his voice dropping to a softer register than he had intended. He stepped forward to take a heavy plastic crate from Mingyu’s arms. His fingers lingered for a single reckless second over the bare skin of Mingyu’s forearms as the weight shifted between them. He pulled back with the box, setting it down before adding, “And don’t stay on your side. It’s a big room. There’s no point in being lonely in it.”
Mingyu’s face brightened instantly, the heavy tension draining from his frame as he flashed that familiar toothy grin. “Really? You’re not mad?”
“I’m not mad,” Wonwoo echoed, turning back to his own cardboard boxes to hide the way his heart was currently hammering against his ribs.
He didn’t even know what he wanted anymore. He just knew that a solo room would have been too quiet, and that the distance Mingyu had just promised felt like a death sentence.
Seven, Wonwoo thought. The number anchored him as he listened to the resonant vibration of Mingyu’s voice as he started humming a random melody and tearing enthusiastically into another box.
Maybe he was counting the days until they finally finished unpacking this new life. Or maybe, he was acknowledging that he had seven years left to admit that the freedom Mingyu was offering to give him was the last thing he actually wanted.
Loved was a word Wonwoo usually reserved for the safety of lyrics, sheltered behind metaphors and clever wordplay. But lately, in the stillness of their shared bedroom, it had become a terrifying constant.
The world outside had ground to a sudden and agonizing halt. Their Ode to You tour—the blinding lights, the roar of the crowds, the frantic energy of travelling from city after city—had been severed mid-stride, leaving them stranded in solitude none of them were prepared for.
Now, the sprawling luxury dorm felt simultaneously like a sanctuary and a cage. While a virus was rewriting the global rules of human contact outside, inside their walls, a different kind of claustrophobia was brewing. The early, whispered tremors of contract renewals had begun to ripple through the members, turning every late-night conversation into a minefield.
Everything was suspended in a state of fragile uncertainty. The future, the stage, the very air they breathed. And inside their shared room, the boundaries Wonwoo had spent four years meticulously building were beginning to erode under the sheer weight of their forced proximity.
Wonwoo sat motionless, his desk lamp turned off. He preferred the pitch dark lately; it made it easier to think, easier to process the suffocating stillness that followed their chaotic group dinners down the hall.
By now, he was entirely used to Mingyu invading his personal perimeter. He was used to the younger boy borrowing his oversized hoodies without asking, used to finding him sprawled across his mattress at random hours of the day.
In fact, Mingyu was doing it right now—lying flat on Wonwoo’s bed, staring blankly at the ceiling. The harsh, cold glow of his phone cast blue shadows across his face, highlighting the fabric of a worn-out shirt he had stolen from Wonwoo’s closet three days ago.
“Do you think things will ever go back?” Mingyu asked quietly, breaking the silence. “To how they were?”
Wonwoo shifted slightly in his gaming chair, his eyes tracking the blue light reflecting in the dark room.
“I don’t know,” he admitted, his deep voice slicing softly through the quiet. “But we’re still here.”
“Yeah,” Mingyu whispered, his voice cracking slightly with vulnerability. “But next year... the renewal. What if everything changes then, too? What if we don't—”
He didn’t finish the sentence. He didn’t have to. The terrifying ghost of the group splintering was a nightmare that haunted every shared meal, every VLive, and every quiet corner of their isolation.
Mingyu swung his legs over the edge of the mattress and sat up. His shadow stretched long and dark across the floorboards until it bled into the base of Wonwoo’s desk chair, touching his feet. Then, Mingyu extended his arm, reaching across the small gap that separated them. His large palm found the curve of Wonwoo’s knee in the dark, gripping it tightly—a desperate, instinctive anchor in a world that had completely lost its gravity.
“Hyung~”
Amidst the global chaos, a singular, terrifying clarity had taken root in Wonwoo’s chest. He looked at Mingyu—really looked at him in the suffocating quiet of their isolation—and realized that while the world was falling apart outside, his own heart had finally finished building its defenses.
Closing the distance that separated them, Wonwoo quietly stood up from his desk chair. He crossed the small gap until he was sitting on the edge of the mattress right beside the younger boy.
“I’m not going anywhere,” Wonwoo said. His deep voice cut through the room’s thick uncertainty with a sudden yet fierce sharpness that surprised even him.
Reaching down, he covered the large hand that was still trembling slightly against his knee, sliding his fingers between Mingyu’s until their palms were completely flush, locking them together. “And neither are you. We’ll sign. We’ll stay.”
Mingyu exhaled—a long, shuddering breath of profound relief that vibrated through his entire massive frame. Deflated by the sheer weight of Wonwoo’s certainty, he let his head drop forward, leaning his forehead heavily against Wonwoo’s shoulder.
In the middle of a pandemic, with the future a blurred unrecognizable horizon, Wonwoo realized he didn’t need a crowded stadium or a world tour to feel alive anymore. He just needed this—this heat, this shared breath, this absolute certainty.
Six, Wonwoo thought. The number felt less like a heavy toll against his ribs and more like a protective shield as he leaned his cheek slightly against the crown of Mingyu’s messy hair.
Maybe he was counting the months until they had to sign those papers and decide their fates. Or maybe, he was acknowledging the six years remaining of a decade he now knew, with absolute certainty, he wanted to spend by this man’s side.
Each take had felt less like a performance and more like a confession Wonwoo wasn’t entirely ready to make.
The interior of the company van was dim. The steady swish of the windshield wipers provided a hypnotic soundtrack to the heavy exhaustion settling over Wonwoo and Mingyu. The Seoul night outside was blurred by a persistent drizzle—a pale, quiet imitation of the cinematic downpour they had spent the last several hours standing under.
Wonwoo leaned his temple against the cool glass of the window but his mind remained entirely stuck back on their set. The reality of his unit project with Mingyu was starting to settle uncomfortably beneath his skin. He was becoming increasingly conscious of how the world saw them. The public had grown so vocal about their constant proximity and their unshakeable chemistry, that management had finally capitalized on it—packaging their closeness into an official unit, a digital single, a concept for the world to consume.
It was terrifying. At twenty-five, with their contract renewals freshly signed, Wonwoo was hyper-aware of the stakes. He was terrified of being too transparent. He was afraid that if he accidentally slipped the secret he had been harboring since they were a trainee, it would inevitably shatter the safe domestic life they had spent years building.
Yet, the song itself felt like a trap.
In the story they were telling the cameras, they were supposed to be pining for the same girl, their hearts breaking over a shared ghost. But every time the director had shouted cut, Wonwoo had felt like he was the one being haunted.
He kept seeing it in his mind’s eye: Mingyu’s face through the artificial rain, his dark eyes wide and glistening with a raw intensity that felt entirely too heavy and too real for a three-minute music video
“You’re quiet, hyung,” Mingyu murmured beside him. He smelled like cold rain, and the fruity-scented makeup wipes they’d used to scrub away the simulated sorrow of the shoot.
“Just thinking about how they would edit the music video,” Wonwoo lied smoothly, his deep voice a low rasp that perfectly mimicked simple exhaustion. “The rain looked good on the monitor. It captured the bittersweet element well.”
“Yeah,” Mingyu said, though his voice trailed off, sounding strangely distant. His arm brushed against Wonwoo’s as he reached down for a water bottle. He didn’t pull back after taking a sip; instead, he carelessly let his weight lean into Wonwoo’s side. His familiar and grounding warmth seeping through the layers of Wonwoo’s jacket.
Mingyu kept his gaze fixed on the passing Seoul streetlights as he said. “It felt a little too easy, didn’t it?”
Wonwoo didn’t move an inch. “What did?”
“The acting,” Mingyu whispered, his thumb idly tracing the plastic cap of his bottle. “The longing part. When the director told us to look at each other like there was this massive, unsaid thing between us... I didn’t really have to search for the feeling. It was just... there.”
Wonwoo’s heart did a slow, agonizing roll in his chest. But after years of hiding a big secret, Wonwoo had really been good at acting. His posture remained perfectly still while his face wore an unreadable mask. But internally, the air left already had his lungs. He desperately wanted to ask where exactly Mingyu had found that look—if he was just a genius at channeling the fictional girl in the script, or if Mingyu, too, was quietly drowning in the exact same reality.
But Wonwoo couldn’t risk the boundary. He couldn’t let himself analyze the ambiguity in Mingyu’s voice, because if he miscalculated, the ensuing awkwardness would ruin everything. He had to treat it strictly as art. He had to believe Mingyu was just a brilliant actor, and that the devastating look in his eyes under the rain was nothing more than a masterpiece of fiction.
He had to believe that to survive.
“That’s just because we’ve been working together for years, Min,” Wonwoo said, his tone perfectly measured, practical, and safe. He closed his eyes, leaning back against the headrest to end the discussion. “We know how to match each other’s energy. It’s just the theme of the song.”
Mingyu didn’t argue. He just let out an ambiguous sigh that was swallowed by the sound of the windshield wipers and the heavy rain outside. His shoulder though remained unmoving, a steady warmth against Wonwoo’s side.
Wonwoo didn’t move away either. They sat in the heavy, suffocating silence of the van, five years deep into a story that was becoming increasingly difficult to name. It was a silence Wonwoo had actively built, a fortress of his own making.
Five, Wonwoo thought. The number echoed like a dull yet steady ache against his ribs as he felt the familiar pressure of Mingyu’s shoulder anchoring his own.
Maybe he was counting the hours left until the morning alarm would force them awake for their next schedule. Or maybe, he was staring directly at the halfway point—acknowledging the five years of absolute silence he had already survived, and the five years that still stretched ahead of them like an endless, suffocating verse he wasn’t sure he had enough breath left to finish.
Other houses were just buildings but this one felt like a choice, a deliberate vow they had made to each other when the chaotic group dorms finally became a thing of the past. When given the freedom to finally live entirely alone, they had chosen each other instead.
Wonwoo pushed open the front door, the click of the lock echoing sharply in the foyer. The air inside was cool, smelling faintly of the lavender laundry detergent Mingyu always insisted on buying.
Usually, whenever he came back from a break, returning to Seoul would bring a familiar sense of transition; like a movie snapping back to normal speed after being watched entirely in slow motion.
But this time, Wonwoo felt like he was moving entirely underwater. His grief was a crushing physical weight, like an unwanted stone lodged deep in his ribs that hadn’t loosened since the funeral in Changwon.
With a heavy sigh, Wonwoo stepped into the living room that was already bathed in the soft purple light of the twilight sky outside. There, sprawled across the deep blue sofa they had picked out together after three grueling weekends of debating fabric swatches, was Mingyu. He was fast asleep with his long limbs tucked awkwardly onto the cushions. His awkward position made him looked like he had simply collapsed while waiting for his return.
Wonwoo didn’t turn on the lights. Aside from not wanting to wake up the younger boy, Wonwoo also couldn’t bear the brightness these days. He moved with slow leaden steps, sinking onto the very edge of the sofa near Mingyu’s feet. He expected the silence of the house to be empty but as he moved closer to Mingyu, the silence felt entirely full instead; full of the younger man’s presence—a steady, living warmth that seemed to radiate even in his sleep.
Looking at him, the unwanted stone in Wonwoo’s chest twisted painfully. April sixth. The worst day of his life had landed directly on the day the world was supposed to celebrate Mingyu’s birth. He had spent the last week drowning in sorrow, while Mingyu had quietly carried the weight of his own canceled celebrations, choosing instead to anchor Wonwoo through the dark.
As if sensing the shift in the room’s gravity, Mingyu stirred. His eyelashes fluttered against his cheeks before his dark eyes adjusted, landing directly on Wonwoo. He didn’t jump or act surprised; he just looked at Wonwoo with a gaze so heavy and soft it felt like a physical touch.
“Hyung~” Mingyu breathed, his voice thick and cracked with sleep.
“I’m back,” Wonwoo whispered. He felt the heavy unwanted stone in his chest begin to tremble dangerously. “And... I’m sorry, Min. I missed your birthday.”
It was an absurdly small thing to apologize for given the crushing magnitude of the week but it was the only piece of the grief Wonwoo could actually form into words. He expected Mingyu to wave it off, to offer a sleepy, comforting smile and tell him it didn’t matter.
Instead, Mingyu’s face completely crumpled.
In the dim light of the room, it wasn’t Wonwoo who broke first; it was Mingyu.
The younger man lunged forward, scrambling across the cushions to pull Wonwoo into an embrace so fierce and sudden it stole the remaining air from his lungs. Hot, heavy tears immediately dampened the fabric of Wonwoo’s shoulder as Mingyu began to sob—quietly at first, then deeply, weeping for the agonizing pain that Wonwoo was simply too exhausted to express himself.
Mingyu had always been like this. His heart was a porous, fragile thing, effortlessly absorbing the hurts of the people he loved until he was the one bleeding for them.
Defeated by the warmth, Wonwoo finally let his guard fall. He closed his eyes and buried his face in the warm crook of Mingyu’s neck, his fingers tightening until they were clutching the fabric of Mingyu’s shirt like a lifeline.
He’s just empathetic, Wonwoo tried to convince himself, his mind frantically scrambling to rebuild its defenses even as he leaned entirely into the crushing, protective strength of the hold. He’s just a good friend. He’s just Mingyu.
But Wonwoo knew he was lying to himself. He didn’t survive a crushing grief like this just because of his roommate’s empathy. He survived it because someone else was willing to swim underwater with him and carry the weight until he had the strength to breathe again.
Four, Wonwoo thought. The number surfaced heavily through the numbing fog of his mourning, vibrating against his chest as his fingers caressed Mingyu’s back. He held onto the younger man who continued to cry for him, the steady warmth of his embrace finally making him feel less lonely.
Maybe he was counting the agonizing days he’d just spent away in a childhood house that now permanently had one less person in it. Or maybe, he was acknowledging that with only four years left in the secret timeline he imposed on himself, he had finally accepted the truth: that the word home was no longer a place but the man holding him in the quiet of the night.
Since the world had decided to hand them everything at once, Wonwoo had found himself retreating more often into the quiet edges of the sidelines.
The historic record-breaking explosion of FML felt like a tidal wave—a relentless surge of global accolades and stadium demands that was both exhilarating and profoundly exhausting. Even here, nestled in the rolling hills of Tuscany for Nana Tour, the cameras were entirely omnipresent, tucked into the rustic corners of the stone villa like silent mechanical observers of their every waking moment.
It was only now, long after the production crew had finally called a wrap and the other members had drifted into a heavy wine-induced sleep, that Wonwoo found a true sliver of peace. He sat alone on a weathered stone bench at the edge of the property, his eyes tracing the sprawling vineyard stretching out beneath the moonlight.
Looking up at the open Italian sky, the unwanted stone of last year’s grief felt a little lighter, softened by the passage of time. He stared at the glowing crescent above and remembered a quiet promise to keep shining brightly on stage, no matter how daunting the lights became.
I’m doing it, he thought silently toward the sky, hoping with everything he had that she could somehow see him now. They were global headliners today. The stages had grown impossibly massive, terrifying, and loud, but Wonwoo wasn’t afraid anymore. He was surrounded by people who shielded him, people who actively turned those scary, roaring stadiums into a place of genuine joy.
The silence he was enjoying was suddenly interrupted by grass crunching behind him. Wonwoo didn’t need to turn around to know who owned the silhouette approaching.
“I thought I’d find you here, hyung” Mingyu said, sliding into the seat beside him. He smelled of the unfamiliar minty soap from the shared bathgel the whole group had been using since they arrived in Italy with only their phones and passports.
But the treacherous pull in Wonwoo’s chest as Mingyu’s elbow touched his was still familiar.
Over the past year, his feelings had morphed from a quiet hum into a deafening roar. The attachment had become bone-deep; it was no longer just about sharing a room or a house, but about the way he subconsciously tracked Mingyu’s breathing in a crowded room.
“It’s quiet,” Wonwoo murmured, staring hard at the horizon where the dark Tuscan hills met the moonlit sky.
“Too quiet even for you?”
The younger boy nudged Wonwoo’s shoulder with his own, offering a warm smile that carried none of the exhaustion Wonwoo was currently fighting. “I thought you loved the quiet, hyung.”
“I do,” Wonwoo said softly. “It’s just... strange. To go from a stadium of eighty thousand people straight into this. The contrast is dizzying lately.”
“It means we’re doing it right,” Mingyu said, his eyes sparkling with that characteristic, unshakeable optimism. He leaned back, looking up at the stars. “FML is breaking every record in the book. We’re headlining everywhere. Even this Nana Tour thing—it’s chaotic, sure, but the world is finally handing us everything we ever worked for.”
“Everything at once,” Wonwoo countered quietly, his innate anxiety anchoring his thoughts to the heavier reality. “Coups-hyung is hurt. Jeonghan and the older line... we’re already starting to shoot contents that won’t air for another year or two. We’re banking videos for a time when we won’t all be together in the same room. Doesn’t that scare you? How fast the clock is moving?”
Mingyu turned his head, his expression softening into something intensely earnest. “A little. But we’ve survived ten years of grinding to get here, Jeonnonu. We’re an unbreakable chain. When the enlistments start, we’ll adapt, we’ll release the contents we’ve been filming, and we’ll come back even bigger. We can even do another Bittersweet duo project—you and me. There’s nothing we can’t handle.”
To Mingyu, it was that simple. They were the unbreakable pair.
Wonwoo’s hand rested on the cold stone between them. As Mingyu turned back to look at the sky, his hand shifted, and his pinky finger casually, mindlessly brushed against Wonwoo’s. It was a completely accidental contact, but to Wonwoo, it felt like a sudden lightning strike in the dark.
The urge to speak became a physical pressure, a suffocating knot in his throat. He wanted to spill it all right there in the Italian night—the years of careful pining, the way Bittersweet had never been a fictional script, the way their shared house in Seoul already felt like a marriage they simply hadn’t named.
But the fear in him was vast, an ocean compared to Mingyu’s steady stream of hope. If he spoke the truth out loud, this villa would stop being a sanctuary. This vineyard would lose its silver light.
What would I even say? Wonwoo wondered, his eyes stinging behind his lenses. And even if he felt the exact same way, what on earth would we do with a truth that big while the world is watching us?
“You okay, hyung? You’re staring,” Mingyu asked, breaking the spell as he noticed the heavy silence.
“Just tired, I guess,” Wonwoo lied smoothly, pulling his hand away from the stone to adjust the bridge of his glasses.
He could control it. He had to. He could tuck the dangerous words back into the dark, familiar corners of his heart and pretend that his chest didn’t feel like it was housing a ticking bomb. But as he watched Mingyu look back out at the stars, completely untroubled by the gravity of the future, Wonwoo realized he wasn’t just counting down the years anymore. He was counting the fractions of a second until he finally broke.
Three, Wonwoo thought. The number settled cold, hollow, and impossibly heavy in the pit of his stomach.
Maybe he was counting the days left before the cameras forced them back into the good chaos of Italy. Or maybe, he was staring down the three remaining years of a secret timeline he had imposed upon his own heart, utterly terrified that his composure was finally beginning to fracture.
They had spent nearly a decade perfecting their synchronization on the global stage, but in the triumphant wake of their Glastonbury performance, they were finally, utterly out of sync.
The historic high of becoming the first K-pop group to grace the main stage should have been a celebration. Instead, it had been completely eclipsed by a freezing, impenetrable silence. Usually, Wonwoo was the one who required quiet borders, and Mingyu was the one who effortlessly breached them. But in the weeks leading up to their departure for Europe, the roles had violently flipped.
Frayed to the absolute bone by the looming shadow of his upcoming enlistment and the suffocating, decade-long weight of his unspoken love, Wonwoo had finally snapped. In a moment of sheer, defensive panic, he had told Mingyu to find someone else to cling to. He’d told him to stop being so damn dependent, to take his endless, exhausting energy and spend it elsewhere.
He had meant to be merciful. He had meant to push Mingyu toward a reality without him, preparing them both for a forced separation that was now only months away. Instead, he had simply broken the one person who never broke for anyone else.
During their set, the professional distance had been agonizing. Every time Wonwoo’s blocking brought him close, Mingyu had pivoted away, leaving a vast and unfamiliar expanse between them.
Now, long after the festival sweat had been washed off, Wonwoo was pacing the carpet of Mingyu’s solo hotel room. Wonwoo’s blood was boiling—a volatile, toxic mixture of suffocating guilt and defensive rage because he couldn’t stand the very boundary he had demanded.
When the card reader beeped and Mingyu finally walked into the room, the remaining air in the space vanished completely.
“Wonwoo-hyung,” Mingyu said. His voice was flat, utterly exhausted. He refused to look up from the floor. “Go to your room. We’re both too tired for this.”
“No,” Wonwoo countered, his years of meticulously kept patience finally snapping. “I’m trying to say I’m sorry. I was on edge before we left for Europe, I—”
“I know,” Mingyu cut him off, his head whipping up. His dark eyes weren’t angry; they were completely raw and rimmed with a devastating red. “You’re always sorry, hyung. And then you just do it again. You push and you pull, and you play with my head because you know damn well I can’t do anything about it when it’s you.”
Wonwoo froze, the accusation hitting him like a physical blow. “What do you mean, play with you?”
Mingyu’s sharp breath hitched, his unshakeable composure finally splintering into thousands of pieces. Heavy tears pooled in his eyes, shimmering fiercely under the harsh hotel lights. “Oh, you knew, hyung. I know you always knew!”
“Knew what?” Wonwoo’s voice dropped to a terrified whisper.
“That I like you! I always have!” Mingyu’s voice cracked, a desperate and violent outburst that had been ten agonizing years in the making. “That’s why, when you’re pushing me away—trying to force me to spend time away from you just because you’re enlisting next year—I hated it. I hated how easily you can just give me away like that. Like I don’t even matter to you."
Wonwoo’s entire world tilted violently on its axis. He stepped forward, his heart hammering so hard against his ribs it felt like it might fracture them. “How long?”
Mingyu looked at him through a blur of tears, a stray drop finally tracking down his flushed cheek.
“How long have you been…” Wonwoo couldn’t even force his throat to finish the sentence.
“How long have I been in love with you?” Mingyu finished for him, a bitter, beautiful honesty in his tone. He looked at Wonwoo as if he were replaying every frame of the last decade. “I don’t know, hyung. I don’t know when it started. Maybe it was the tours. Maybe it was when they kept partnering us up and I realized I didn’t want anyone else. Maybe it was writing those songs together. Maybe it was when you let me hold you when you were hurting. I don’t know. I just know I want to come home to you. Only you.”
Wonwoo reached out, his thumb catching the moisture on Mingyu’s cheeks. The countdown in his head was screaming.
“I’m sorry,” Wonwoo blurted out, his own eyes filling.
Mingyu offered a small, heartbreakingly quiet nod of acceptance. He closed his eyes against Wonwoo’s palms, bracing himself as if he fully expected this to be the end of it—the gentle, final rejection.
The sight of that compliance shattered Wonwoo’s heart.
“I’m sorry,” Wonwoo clarified, his deep voice shaking with a sudden, fierce desperation as he tilted Mingyu’s face up. “That I’ve contained my own feelings to the point where you actually believed I didn’t love you back.”
Mingyu’s entire body went rigid. His eyes widened, searching Wonwoo’s face for a joke that wasn’t there. “Hyung?”
Wonwoo let out a wet, breathless, utterly relieved laugh. He leaned forward, closing the final, agonizing distance until their foreheads rested heavily against each other, their shared breaths mingling in the small space. The heat was finally mutual; his ten-year secret was finally dead on the floor.
“We are such fools, aren’t we?” Wonwoo whispered against his lips.
Two, Wonwoo thought. The number no longer felt cold or hollow. It vibrated warmly through his chest as Mingyu’s large hands crashed against his waist, pulling him flush against his chest with a desperate, hungry, territorial strength.
Two years of mandatory enlistment lay directly ahead of them. Two years of physical distance and separate schedules. But as Mingyu buried his face into Wonwoo’s neck, breathing him in like a man saving himself from drowning, Wonwoo knew the countdown wasn’t a threat anymore.
It was a promise.
Were they ever truly anything but this?
They sat together on the blue sofa, enveloped by the bone-deep fanmeet exhaustion that had long since become the familiar rhythm of their lives. But tonight, the air inside their living room felt entirely different. It carried the thick, bittersweet scent of an ending and a beginning all folding into one. This year’s Caratland was officially over, and with its conclusion, Wonwoo’s last major public schedule before his mandatory enlistment would begin.
Wonwoo leaned his head back against the comforting fabric, his eyes naturally drifting to the man resting beside him. Mingyu was fast asleep, his head lolling heavily toward Wonwoo’s shoulder, his sharp features completely softened by fatigue.
Wonwoo’s mind quietly wandered back to the roar of the stadium hours earlier—to the exact moment the chaotic game segment had been announced and the members had scattered across the stage. Amidst the roaring crowd and the beautiful madness of twelve other brothers—twelve other completely logical options—Mingyu hadn’t paused for a fraction of a second. He had walked straight through the noise to Wonwoo, effortlessly hoisting him onto his back and carrying him across the stadium as if he were holding the only thing that mattered in the entire venue.
He chose me, Wonwoo had thought then, his hands wrapped tightly around Mingyu’s neck, feeling the unshakeable, steady strength in the younger man’s stride. Among everyone else in the world, he always chooses me.
It had been a full year since that raw, honest night in their Glastonbury hotel room. A year of secret, reassuring touches behind the scenes; of quiet, shared meals in a house that felt more sacred with each passing day; of a profound love that had finally, mercifully, been given a name. And yet, looking at Mingyu in the dim light of their home, Wonwoo still felt that exact same breathless wonder.
As if tracking the intensity of his gaze even through sleep, Mingyu’s eyelashes fluttered. His dark eyes cracked open. A slow, incredibly sleepy smirk spread across his face as he caught Wonwoo staring.
“Watching me sleep again, hyung?” Mingyu teased, his voice thick with sleep, full of a smug warmth that instantly made the tips of Wonwoo’s ears tint a familiar pink. “I must look really handsome tonight.”
Wonwoo huffed a soft laugh, gently shaking his head. He still wasn’t entirely used to this—the effortless ease with which Mingyu could read him, the way they could be so fundamentally opposite and yet fit together like a lock and a key. They had always been a study in absolute contrasts: silence and noise, sunset and sunrise. But no matter how many separate paths had opened up before them over the last decade, they always, inevitably, ended up walking the exact same one.
“Let’s go to bed,” Wonwoo said softly.
He shifted on the cushions, reaching out to catch Mingyu’s hand. His fingers anchored firmly into the very same palm that had trembled so nervously against his skin ten years ago in a cramped training room. “Come on. Let’s go to our room.”
Mingyu squeezed his hand back, the playful smugness instantly fading from his face, replaced by a look of profound, quiet devotion.
One, Wonwoo thought, the internal countdown finally reaching its penultimate beat as they stood up together in the quiet house. The number wasn’t a measurement of years anymore. It was the singular, undeniable reality of them.
Fifteen months was what it took for Wonwoo to finally get used to the quiet rhythm of his routine, only for the clock to reset all over again.
Wonwoo pushed open the door of their shared house, the familiar click of the lock sounding more like a welcome than it ever had before. He was still dressed in his office attire—simple, unassuming clothes that marked his time in public service—and his shoulders carried the lingering stiffness of a day spent behind a desk rather than under a spotlight. The house was warm, smelling of the rich scent of the coffee Mingyu must have brewed an hour ago.
He found Mingyu in the middle of the living room but the space wasn’t filled with the usual clutter of a comeback or a tour. Instead, a single, sturdy duffel bag lay open on the rug. Mingyu was hovering over it, meticulously folding a plain black t-shirt with the kind of focused intensity he usually reserved for a center-stage dance break.
“You’re home,” Mingyu said, looking up with a smile that reached his eyes, though there was a soft, bittersweet edge to it.
“I’m home,” Wonwoo echoed. He dropped his bag by the door and walked into the center of the room, into Mingyu’s space.
It was a strange, mirrored reality. Just as Wonwoo was almost hanging up his uniform, Mingyu was preparing to put his on. For the next two years, the house would feel too large again, the blue sofa a little too empty. But as Mingyu reached out, catching Wonwoo’s waist to pull him into a brief, grounding hug, the fear that had once defined Wonwoo’s decade was nowhere to be found.
They stood there for a moment in the quiet of their eleventh year—no cameras, no fans, no countdowns. Just the sound of two people breathing in sync. Wonwoo watched as Mingyu went back to his packing, his large hands moving with a newfound maturity. The boy from the green basement was gone, replaced by this man who handled the transition with a steady grace.
In 2016, Wonwoo thought love was a trophy they held together under a golden spotlight. In 2021, he thought it was a song they wrote in the middle of the night to keep the dark away. But standing here now, watching the man he loved pack a duffel bag for a place he had only just left, he realized love wasn’t a grand gesture at all. It was just the quiet audacity to keep showing up. Every single day.
They had survived a decade of being watched by the world. They would easily survive less than two years of being apart. After all, they weren’t coming home to a house anymore; he was just coming home to him.