Archive of Our Own

The bar was loud in the way that crawled under your skin—bass from the speakers vibrating through the floorboards, voices stacked on top of each other until they became one indistinct roar. Every time the door opened, a rush of cold night air cut briefly through the heat before disappearing again beneath scents, perfume, sweat, and spilled beer.

It was the kind of place their friend group had been coming to for years. Familiar enough to be comfortable, crowded enough that nobody looked twice at an alpha gripping a beer bottle a little too tightly.

San was fine.

Mostly.

He had Yunho and Mingi on his left talking about something that required a lot of hand gestures, and Hongjoong on his right nursing a drink and pretending to listen while his eyes tracked everything in the room. The booth was warm with bodies, filled with noise, with the overlapping scents of people he trusted. San had laughed twice in the last ten minutes, eaten most of the fries. He was, by every measurable standard, having a good time.

He just couldn't stop looking at Wooyoung.

It wasn't unusual. Looking at Wooyoung was something San did the way other people breathed—automatically, without conscious decision.

Wooyoung was at the bar with Yeosang, perched sideways on a stool with one foot hooked around the metal rung beneath him. He was laughing at something, head tipped back, eyes nearly disappearing as his smile took over his whole face. He was wearing San's hoodie under his jacket, and he didn't even know he'd done it. Just grabbed it from the couch on their way out without thinking, distracted and talking, and that alone should've settled something in San's chest.

It didn't, and he knew why.

He'd been in a rush. They'd been running late because Wooyoung couldn't find his keys—they were in his left pocket, they were always in his left pocket, San had told him this four hundred times—San had grabbed his jacket, and they'd been out the door before he'd even registered the gap.

The gap where he should've pressed his mouth to the curve of Wooyoung's throat. Where he should've held him until the scent settled into his skin properly, until anyone with half-functional senses could read it from a meter away.

He hadn't. They'd been late.

San took a long sip of his beer and tried not to think about it. He managed that for approximately five minutes before his eyes cut back to the bar.

Wooyoung was still on the stool, while Yeosang had turned away to signal for another drink. There was someone San had never seen before leaning against the bar beside Wooyoung—leaning was generous, actually, crowding was the more accurate word—tilted in close, designed to look casual but wasn't. He was taller than Wooyoung, which wasn't exactly difficult, and he was smiling with too many teeth, his hand at the small of Wooyoung's back.

San went very still.

Wooyoung had his shoulders drawn up slightly, the tension in his posture that meant he was uncomfortable but was being polite about it, that he was calculating the least disruptive exit. He wasn't doing anything. Wasn't leaning away, wasn't putting his elbow into the guy's ribs the way San had seen him do to someone who deserved it far less at a different bar two years ago. He was just sitting there, chin tilted slightly down, and the stranger's hand was moving in a slow press at the base of his spine.

"Who the fuck is that?" San asked, almost whispering.

That was the part that should've concerned someone who knew him. The way it didn't spike into something loud but stayed low and flat, the words barely clearing the noise of the bar. Mingi and Yunho stopped mid-sentence, and Hongjoong looked up from his drink with careful attention, having learned to take San's quieter moments seriously.

"Where?" Mingi said.

San didn't answer. He was already setting down his bottle.

I should've scented him properly.

He should've taken the thirty seconds, the sixty seconds, however long it took, and pressed Wooyoung against the doorframe and made sure. He should've pressed him long enough to bury his scent into the skin beneath Wooyoung's jaw.

Long enough that no one would mistake him for available.

Wooyoung would've complained about being late even while he was tilting his head back to give San better access, and San would've ignored the complaining. They would've been ten minutes later than they already were, and none of this would be happening because that stranger would've taken one breath in Wooyoung's direction and understood immediately that there was nothing here for him.

Instead, San had been stupid. Careless. And now there was a hand on Wooyoung's back that wasn't his.

He slid out of the booth.

“San," Hongjoong's voice came measured. A warning dressed up as a name.

"I'm just going to get a drink," San replied.

Nobody at the table believed him, but he didn't particularly care.

He moved through the crowd with ease, taking the least crowded paths while the noise fell back around him. His eyes were fixed on Wooyoung's shoulders, on the hoodie that smelled like both of them but not enough, not the way it should, and on the stranger's hand still resting where it had no business being.

The stranger hadn't noticed him yet, and San came to a stop just behind Wooyoung's right shoulder.

He felt San before he heard him.

That was always how it worked—some frequency San operated on that Wooyoung's body had long since memorized, a warmth at his back that was distinct from the warmth of the bar. His shoulders dropped a fraction before his brain had caught up with why. Then the scent finally hit him, even muted as it was beneath the bar's cocktail of alcohol and strangers and stale air, and Wooyoung turned his head slightly.

San was right there. Close enough that turning fully would've put their faces centimeters apart, but he wasn't looking at Wooyoung.

Instead, he was glaring at the stranger.

"Who the fuck is this?" San repeated his question.

It was meant for Wooyoung. The low register of it, the way it barely moved the air between them—that was for Wooyoung alone. But his eyes hadn't moved, and the stranger—who had finally clocked San's presence—was getting the full weight of them whether he wanted it or not.

He was starting to look like he didn't want it.

Wooyoung turned back around. "I don't know," he said, shrugging. "He just came over."

"He just came over," San repeated.

The stranger, to his credit or his misfortune, chose this moment to speak.

"You know this guy?" He directed the question at Wooyoung, smiling in a way that was probably meant to seem unbothered. His hand was still at Wooyoung's back.

That was a mistake.

Wooyoung opened his mouth, but San's hand came to rest on his waist first, settling there with quiet authority as though it had always belonged, and the words died before Wooyoung could decide what he wanted to say.

"Yeah," San said. "He knows me."

There was a version of this where San would've been diplomatic. Where he would've smiled, said something easy, let the stranger save face, and back away without incident. Wooyoung had seen that version before, deployed on people who mattered and on situations that required it. San was good at smooth when smooth was useful.

This was not that version. This was San with his hand on Wooyoung's waist and his eyes flat like they got when something in him had already made a decision.

The stranger's hand dropped from Wooyoung's back.

Wooyoung noticed the exact moment it did. He noticed the way San noticed it too, the almost imperceptible shift in his jaw, the slight ease of pressure where his fingers sat at his waist. Something more territorial than relief—the acknowledgment of a correction.

"Right," the stranger said and picked up his drink. "Sorry, didn't realize."

He was gone before the sentence was fully finished.

Yeosang, who had turned back from the bar at some point during all of this with his fresh drink in hand, looked between the retreating figure and San with the expression that suggested he had witnessed this particular sequence of events many times before and had long since made peace with it.

San turned to Wooyoung. Up close like this, the absence was more obvious—San could smell himself on him, sure, but faintly, only the ghost of this morning's proximity. Worn down by hours, movement, the aggressive smell of this bar, and it wasn't enough, it wasn't close to enough. The part of San that had been quietly furious at himself since the moment they'd walked through the door without stopping felt that absence like something taken.

His own fault.

His own carelessness.

"You weren't going to say anything?" he asked, quieter than intended.

Wooyoung's eyes cut to him sideways.

"I was handling it."

"You were only sitting there."

"I was handling it," Wooyoung repeated, with all the dignity he could muster despite being fully aware that his position was growing increasingly difficult to defend. "Which is something you've never done in your life, so I understand why you don't recognize it."

San's mouth pressed flat. He turned Wooyoung on the stool by the waist, just slightly, until they were closer to facing each other than not. The younger man let him, as he always did, even while he was complaining about it.

"He had his hand on you," San said, stopping himself from growling at the thought.

"I know. I was there,” Wooyoung held his gaze, unflinching. There was no guilt in his expression—Wooyoung didn't do guilt without cause—only patience, the kind that told San he could say what he needed to say and leave it there. "I wasn't going to let it go any further."

"Is that so?"

Wooyoung blinked. "What?"

"You were handling it,” the words came back out of him flat, turned over just enough to mean something different on the return trip. His thumb had stopped moving at Wooyoung's hip. "By just sitting there."

Wooyoung's eyes sharpened. "Don't."

"I'm not doing anything."

"You're doing the thing," Wooyoung said, "where you make your voice lower and say words that sound normal but they fucking aren't."

He pulled back slightly on the stool, enough to look at San properly, and the patience he had disappeared. "I didn't invite him over, San."

"I didn't say you did."

"You implied—"

"I asked a question."

"You asked it like that," Wooyoung snapped, and the bar could've swallowed the sound whole for all he cared, "which isn't a question, it's an accusation."

His jaw had set, the last trace of politeness leaving his expression. Whatever came next would be honest and designed to cut.

"You want to be pissed at yourself for rushing us out the door, fine, be pissed at yourself. Don't put it on me because some guy you don't know thought he could—"

"You let it go on."

The words landed wrong the moment they left his mouth. San knew it immediately.

He saw it happen in real time—the way Wooyoung's expression emptied out, the way the irritation vanished and left something colder behind.

Shit.

"Excuse me," Wooyoung said, quiet and absolutely lethal, "what the fuck did you just say to me?"

San's jaw locked.

"No, say it again," Wooyoung demanded, sliding slowly off the stool, but he wasn't loud. He was never loud when he was really angry, that was the thing people didn't understand about him until it was too late, "because I want to make sure I heard you correctly before I—"

San took him by the wrist and moved.

Not rough, but there was no room for argument in it either—his grip was sure, his direction was decided. Wooyoung, who could've made this significantly more difficult and would at a time of his choosing, was pulled from the stool fully and into the crowd before he'd finished his sentence.

He finished it anyway, only now at San's back, turning the rest of it into a string of curses that would've made Yunho wince and made Seonghwa cover his mouth. San's jaw stayed locked, and he kept moving.

Behind them, Yeosang set down his drink, gathered his jacket from the stool, and followed at a distance that communicated both loyalty and plausible deniability. He looked like he'd learned by now that the couple required a weird kind of supervision: close enough to interfere if things went too far, but distant enough that neither of them thought to involve him in the first place.

The crowd opened ahead of them automatically. Next, the booth came into view.

Mingi saw them first—saw San's face, saw Wooyoung's face, saw their joined wrists—and nudged Hongjoong with his elbow.

San pulled Wooyoung into the booth ahead of him and sat down after, close enough that their thighs pressed together, close enough that no version of Wooyoung's posture wouldn't be oriented toward him. An arm came to rest along the back of the seat behind the younger's shoulders.

Wooyoung stared straight ahead, jaw tight.

The table was very quiet for a moment.

Yunho, who had been quiet up until now, lifted his head. His nose moved slightly, registering the unpleasant scents. He looked around the table, then at San, then at Wooyoung's rigid shoulders.

"What happened?" he asked, confused. "It smells awful."

"Nothing happened," San replied, voice flat.

"Nothing," Wooyoung repeated, turning to look at San for the first time since coming to the booth, and the word in his mouth was a different animal entirely, "is not the word I would use, actually, because what happened is that your alpha," he said it like people said words they were temporarily borrowing from someone else's vocabulary, "decided that me sitting on a bar stool, minding my own business when a random guy came over, was somehow my fault, so—"

San took him by the hip and lifted.

It was a single, unhurried motion—up and rearranged, settled across San's lap before he'd gotten to the end of his sentence. San's hand spread flat against his stomach to keep him there. Wooyoung made a noise of pure indignation.

"San—"

San pressed his mouth to the side of Wooyoung's throat.

The scent gland there was warm, the skin thin, and whatever Wooyoung was about to say dissolved into something that wasn't quite a sound as San mouthed at it—slow, making up for the doorframe they'd rushed past. Wooyoung's hand came up to grip San's forearm.

Then San pressed in properly, face tucked against Wooyoung's neck, and began to scent him with the patience he should've had two hours ago.

"Oh, come on," Mingi whined, dropping his head back.

"We're at a bar," Hongjoong said, frowning.

Yeosang only picked up his drink, and Yunho looked at the ceiling with a suffering expression, like someone who had asked a simple question earlier and now had to deal with the consequences.

"I shouldn't have said anything".

San ignored all of it. Wooyoung, still irritated, still holding his forearm, exhaled slowly through his nose, but said absolutely nothing, too.

San was still at his throat—methodical, almost, exactly like he got when he was correcting something that had been bothering him for hours and intended to do it properly this time.

Wooyoung had stopped arguing, which for him was a significant concession, though the line of his shoulders still held the last traces of indignation.

The group had gone back to their drinks with resignation, long since having accepted that this was sometimes their evening. Mingi was talking again, and Yunho had ordered another round. Yeosang was on his phone, not looking up, regardless of what happened next.

Then there was a shift in the air that came with new arrivals—Seonghwa's scent first, clean and warm, Jongho half a step behind him—and the booth received them in the form of two pairs of eyes taking in the current arrangement.

Seonghwa's brow lifted, slow and elegant. "What—"

Hongjoong was on his feet in the same moment, hand already at Seonghwa's elbow, steering him away from the booth with a smooth efficiency, before things could escalate.

"Don't," he almost begged.

"I haven't said anything yet."

"I know. Don't."

Jongho looked at Wooyoung on San's lap, at San's face buried against Wooyoung's throat, at the rest of the table. He made a quiet sound of understanding, turned around, and followed Hongjoong without being asked.

Seonghwa, being led away, glanced back once over his shoulder before the rest of the group followed too.

The booth settled around them again, quieter now, and somewhere between one breath and the next, the last of the tension in Wooyoung's shoulders finally came loose. His hand slipped gradually from its hold on San's forearm, his fingers relaxing. He leaned back, settling against San's chest, until there was barely any space left between them. San's arm tightened around his middle, pulling him even closer without comment.

Then, barely audible beneath the bar's noise, a low purr started up in Wooyoung's throat.

He felt San still against his neck. The satisfaction of it rolled off him in a wave that Wooyoung absolutely refused to acknowledge directly.

"This doesn't mean you were right," Wooyoung said. His voice had lost its edges, which undermined the statement considerably, but he made it anyway because he was who he was. "You were rude. You were accusatory. And you manhandled me in front of Yeosang."

"Yeosang has seen worse," San whispered, the words muffled against his skin.

"That's not— That's not the point—"

San scraped his teeth over the scent gland.

Wooyoung's breath caught. The purr stuttered, then resumed, deeper than before.

San lifted his mouth just enough to speak, his lips still brushing the spot. "You're mine," he said, quiet and even, the words carrying a certainty that left no room for doubt.

"Only mine."

The words reached him in the same way San's scent had, slipping past all the defenses. His fingers curled over San's forearm again, but softer this time.

He didn't say anything. The purr said it for him, low and continuous, tucked beneath the noise of the bar where only San could properly hear it—an answer in the oldest language either of them knew.

"I'm still mad,” Wooyoung reminded.

San pressed a slow, unhurried kiss to the scent gland he'd just marked, sealing it like punctuation.

"And you're still mine.”

⋆˖⁺‧₊☽◯☾₊‧⁺˖⋆

The bar was loud, as most bars were on a Friday—bodies packed close, conversations bleeding into each other until they became indistinct, with a crowd that swallowed you whole and didn't really care who you were. Wooyoung had his elbows on the counter and his drink in hand, with San attached to his back like something that had grown there.

He'd been there for the better part of twenty minutes.

Not doing anything really unreasonable—he was just present, arms loosely bracketing Wooyoung against the bar top, chin finding his shoulder with an ease that suggested it had always belonged there. To San, this was probably the most natural arrangement in the world. To the people around them, it read differently. Wooyoung knew, because he could feel the occasional glance even without looking for it. The weight of eyes that lingered a beat too long, trying to read the situation.

He shifted slightly, just a small adjustment, enough to feel San's arms pull tighter, completely automatic. 

He reached up and lifted San's arm from around him with two fingers, almost like an object being relocated. But San put it back without comment immediately, nose pressing into the side of his throat, and Wooyoung exhaled through his nose in a long, pointed line.

The performance was easy. It always had been—the set of his shoulders, the faint tension held in his jaw, the clear body language of someone tolerating a situation they hadn't agreed to. It required almost no effort to look genuinely uncomfortable, which was the funniest part of it, the private joke that lived entirely on his side of things. He looked irritated, convincing enough from a distance.

Up close, if anyone had been paying the right kind of attention, the tells were there. The way he didn't actually move away, the way his hand had drifted, without ceremony, to rest over San's forearm where it crossed his middle.

But nobody was paying that kind of attention.

A woman somewhere to his left leaned toward the bartender, pitching her voice under the noise. "Hey— Is that guy okay?"

She tilted her head in their direction, and the bartender looked over. He glanced at Wooyoung's expression, at San's chin on his shoulder, at the position they were in.

"Sorry?" he said.

"The smaller one. He looks— I don't know, kind of uncomfortable."

The bartender considered this for a moment with neutrality, the kind required for quick reads of ambiguous situations. He glanced at Wooyoung again—the stiff posture, the unchanging forward gaze—and then at San, entirely unbothered by the crowd around them.

"You want me to check?" he asked.

The woman nodded.

Wooyoung, who had heard all of this over the noise in the bar, felt something in him turn over with amusement he didn't let reach his face. He took a slow sip of his drink. San's nose moved against his throat, a small and idle thing, like a cat resettling.

The bartender made his way over. H stopped in front of them, splitting his attention evenly between the two of them. "Hey— Everything good here?"

San looked up.

"Fine," he said, and there was nothing hostile in it exactly, but the single word dropped like a door closing, eye contact held a beat past comfortable.

The bartender, to his credit, didn't take it. He shifted his gaze to Wooyoung instead, patient, waiting him out.

Wooyoung let a small pause exist first. Then he glanced up from his drink, and what he offered was just enough—a quiet voice, saying what was expected rather than what was felt.

"Yeah," he sighed. "It's fine."

The bartender looked at him for a moment longer, his attention lingering on the set of his shoulders and the way he kept his gaze lowered to his glass. Something behind his eyes said he wasn't entirely convinced, but the couple wasn't in distress, no one was raising a voice, and he had a full bar behind him, so he simply nodded once and moved back down the counter.

San watched him go. Then, his hand moved. Slow enough not to be sudden, but intentional—fingers finding the hem of Wooyoung's shirt, slipping underneath, palm settling flat against his stomach.

It was warm. Unbearably, distractingly warm, and Wooyoung kept his face entirely neutral through an act of will he felt in his back teeth. San's hand didn't wander. It stayed heavt against him, completely still except for the slow drag of his thumb just below Wooyoung's navel.

Like a claim. 

Wooyoung stared at the bottles behind the bar, took a sip of his drink and said absolutely nothing, because the alternative was losing, and he had no intention of doing that yet.

Even after a while, San's palm hadn't moved from his stomach.

That was the thing about San—he didn't escalate obviously, didn't make sudden moves that could be tracked and prepared for. He operated on a slower frequency, the kind of patience that was almost worse because it gave Wooyoung nothing to react to, nothing to push back against. Just the steady warmth of his hand under his shirt, thumb moving in that same idle line, and the solid weight of him at Wooyoung's back as he'd simply decided this was where he lived now and saw no reason to revisit the decision.

The bar moved around them—someone laughing too loudly to his left, a group shifting past behind them, the bartender busy with another order at the far end of the counter. None of it seemed to reach San. 

His hand finally moved, though.

Not much. His fingers spread slowly against Wooyoung's stomach, resting wider against the warmth of his skin. Wooyoung's breath caught for a second before settling into something shallower. He was fairly certain no one else would have noticed, but San probably had.

San's chin lifted from his shoulder, and his mouth found the side of his throat instead—not quite a kiss, just the warm press of lips against skin, and his other arm, the one that had been resting along the bar, came around to bracket him properly. Fully enclosed now, the hand under Wooyoung's shirt and the other at his side, Wooyoung was aware with acute precision of how this looked from the outside.

He shifted on the stool. "San."

San made a low sound that wasn't quite an acknowledgment.

"You're doing it on purpose."

Another sound. This one had the faint shape of agreement.

Wooyoung set his glass down with a small, pointed click. The hand under his shirt had traveled, barely, just a few inches up his side—following the line of his ribs with a patience that was frankly unreasonable, mapping him out like there was no particular destination, and that was entirely the point. Wooyoung's jaw tightened. He reached down and wrapped his fingers around San's wrist, holding it there.

It didn't stop. The movement was too small to fight without making a show out of it, which was—he knew—entirely intentional.

"Stop," he murmured.

San pressed a slow kiss to his jaw in response.

The fingers at his ribs spread even more. Wooyoung shifted again on the stool, a small involuntary thing, and he felt San's arm tighten across him in response—holding him in place without appearing to do so. From behind them, they probably looked like any couple in a bar. One leaned back, one leaned in. Unremarkable.

And now Wooyoung was going to lose this game, and he could feel it happening in real time.

San's nose traced up the line of his throat, unhurried, subtly scenting him. It wasn't a full deliberate press but something smaller—a check, or a reminder. His thumb had found the space below Wooyoung's ribs now, and was simply resting there, just a light pressure, and somehow that was worse than movement.

Wooyoung squirmed.

He caught himself half a second after, and felt San's exhale against his throat—warm, satisfied—so Wooyoung went very still again.

"I said stop," he reminded, but his voice came out with less authority than he'd intended.

"You did," San agreed happily, not intending to stop.

His hand moved further up his side, fingers pressing lightly into the spaces between his ribs like he was learning them by touch. Wooyoung's grip on his wrist tightened. His free hand found the bar top, and he focused on the cold solidity of it, the sticky give of the lacquered wood under his fingertips, and reminded himself that he had started this, that the point of the game was exactly this, that he had been the one to wind the mechanism and was now simply watching it run.

It was significantly less funny from the inside of it.

"San," he said, and it came out almost as a whine, which he reset immediately, cleared his throat, and tried again. "Seriously."

San lifted his mouth from his throat just enough to speak. "You told the bartender you were fine."

"I am fine."

"Then I'm fine too."

Wooyoung turned his head to look at him directly, which was a huge mistake because it put their faces close enough that San's expression was fully legible—warm, the full weight of his attention resting on Wooyoung in a way it never did with anyone else.

Wooyoung looked away first.

"You're unbearable," he said, and the word came out softer than intended, stripped of its armor somewhere between his chest and his mouth.

San's hand settled flat against his ribs again—still, warm—and his chin came back to Wooyoung's shoulder. Around them, the bar continued its indifferent noise—laughter, music, the clink of glasses, bodies moving through the warm and crowded air. No one was looking. No one had any idea.

Wooyoung picked his drink back up.

San's hand was still under his shirt when Wooyoung made his decision.

He finished what was left of his drink, set the glass down with finality, and peeled San's arm from around him. The older man made a low sound of protest, but Wooyoung just slid off the stool.

"Bathroom," he announced.

San's eyes tracked up to him immediately, that reflexive attention that never quite switched off.

"I'll be back, relax," Wooyoung said, rolling his eyes, before San could open his mouth. "I'm going ten meters away, not leaving the country."

San looked at him for a moment with a pout on his face. Then he settled back against the bar, hand curling around Wooyoung's abandoned glass. He answered with nothing, watching his boyfriend go.

Wooyoung turned before the look could do anything to him and moved into the crowd.

The bathroom was mercifully quiet—a single overhead light, the muffled bass of the bar bleeding through the walls like a slow pulse. Wooyoung leaned against the sink and looked at himself in the mirror, taking stock.

His shirt was a disaster. The hem had been pulled half out from where San had worked his hand under it, the fabric creased at the side from being held in a fist, and he spent a moment tugging everything back into order, as if reasserting control over a situation. The shirt settled, he smoothed it flat.

His hair was next—finger-combed back into something more intentional, the pieces that San's chin had repeatedly displaced over the course of the evening were convinced back into place. He looked at his reflection for a second, then away, because he recognized the color in his own face and didn't need the mirror's commentary on it. He ran cold water over his wrists, then he dried his hands, rolled his shoulders back, and pushed out through the door.

He almost walked into the crowd before he understood what he was looking at.

The far side of the bar had rearranged itself—bodies clustering, pressing inward in a configuration that had nothing to do with music or conversation. It was a wall of backs and craned necks, people rising on their toes to see over the shoulders of the person in front of them. The noise from the center of it cut through the sound of the bar differently, sharper, carrying edges that ordinary conversation didn't have.

A raised voice, then another overlapping it. Something that might've been a bottle, shifted or struck against a surface. Then more words, indistinct but carrying the unmistakable frequency of something escalating—the kind of sound that made the back of the neck prickle before the brain caught up with why.

Wooyoung stopped.

He scanned the room first—instinct before thought, looking for the one thing his eyes went to in any crowded room, regardless of what else was happening.

San wasn't at the bar.

His stool was empty. Wooyoung's glass still sat on the counter where San had been holding it, condensation pooling at its base, abandoned mid-motion.

Wooyoung's gaze cut back to the crowd, and he was already moving before he'd made the conscious decision to.

He pushed through the crowd with his elbows out, cutting through the press of bodies that had organized itself into a loose ring—the human instinct to witness something, to form walls around it. People shifted as he shoved through, some with irritation, some stepping aside when they caught his serious expression.

Then the ring opened up, and he saw them.

San stood with his back not quite against the wall, one hand raised slightly with restraint. He hadn't thrown anything yet and, judging by the tension in his arm, that was a choice he was making one second at a time. The other alpha was bigger across the shoulders, his face flushed, one fist bunched in the collar of San's shirt—twisting it, pulling him in close.

"—that's my boyfriend," San was explaining, measured, the same flat register from the bar earlier, but there was something underneath it now, something that sounded like annoyance.

"Boyfriend," the alpha sneered, and the word came out like he was spitting something out, "my ass— You think I don't know what I saw? Standing over that omega like—"

Wooyoung caught the shape of it then, fragments surfacing through the noise of the crowd behind him—what the fuck were you doing bothering that omega—and something slotted into place with a click he felt in his sternum. Someone had seen San hovering over him at the bar, had clocked Wooyoung's expression, the crumpled shirt, the squirming, and had drawn the most logical conclusion available to them.

He almost would've appreciated it under different circumstances.

The alpha's free hand came up.

Pulled back—

"What the fuck," Wooyoung yelled, loud and sharp, cutting across the noise of the room, "do you think you're doing?!”

Wooyoung was already through the gap, already between them—shoulder pressing back into San's chest, both hands coming up to plant flat against the other alpha's sternum before the swing had fully committed to its direction. The force of stepping into it stopped it short, and the alpha stumbled half a step back, more from surprise than anything, his grip on San's collar yanking before it released.

Wooyoung shoved him again.

"No, seriously! What the fuck," he repeated, and his voice held no performance now, nothing managed, "do you think you're doing?!”

The alpha caught his footing, hands coming up as he reassessed the situation. He stared at Wooyoung with a brief, visible uncertainty, as though he hadn't expected the omega to be capable of that. Up close, his face was flushed deep, and his eyes had the glaze of too much alcohol and too much adrenaline combined.

"Come on," he said, and the aggression had shifted slightly, defensive now at the edges. "I saw him bothering you— His hands were all over you, you looked—"

The crowd had gone quieter.

Wooyoung stood in the space between the two alphas and looked up at the stranger, his expression stripped of everything he'd put on at the bar—no studied irritation, no careful performance. What remained was simpler and far more dangerous—the part of him that had never learned to tolerate the space between a threat and a response.

Rage.

"He's my alpha," Wooyoung hissed, clearly, slowly enough that it could not be misheard. "And if you raise your hand toward him again, I promise you it will be the last interesting thing you do tonight."

The alpha stared at him, and then blinked. Something worked through his expression—doubt—and then it curdled. 

The alpha's pride won. 

“Yeah, right," he said, and the words came back ugly, conviction reassembling itself around the wrong conclusion. "You don't have to protect him, nobody's going to—"

"I'm not protecting him," Wooyoung growled.

"—just step aside—"

He tried to move past Wooyoung's shoulder.

The swing came from somewhere Wooyoung hadn't planned, hadn't calculated—just the motion, just the decision made somewhere below thought, his fist connecting across the alpha's face with the full rotation of his shoulder behind it.

"Don't you dare touch him!" he yelled, loud, cracking across the stunned silence of the ring of people around them.

The alpha went sideways into the edge of the crowd, hands catching him, and the room erupted. Noise everywhere, sudden and overlapping—people stepping back, someone calling for the bartender, voices stacking on top of each other trying to understand what had just happened.

Wooyoung's knuckles were burning.

He didn't look at his hand. He stood where he was, his breathing slightly uneven, and he looked at the alpha finding his feet at the edge of the crowd—watched him touch his jaw, watched his eyes come back up.

Behind Wooyoung, San had gone very still. Then Wooyoung heard a sharp exhale that sounded suspiciously like laughter.

The stranger made the right decision and didn't come back for more.

That should've been the end of it. Wooyoung's fist was still curled at his side, and the adrenaline was still running hot through his chest. The crowd was still making noise around them, and he looked at the alpha retreating into the ring of people, but felt absolutely none of the satisfaction that should've followed.

"You think you can just—" he started, loud, cutting across everything. "In what world do you put your hands on someone that isn't yours— What the fuck is wrong with you—"

"Wooyoung—"

"No one," he growled, "is going to touch what is mine— you hear me? Mine. So the next time you think about playing hero for someone who doesn't need you—"

San's arm came around him from behind.

"Okay," San whispered into his hair.

"I'm not done—"

"I know,” he nodded, and then he was moving, arm locked across Wooyoung's chest, pulling him back through the crowd with a steady force. Wooyoung went and didn't go at the same time—feet dragging, body twisting against the hold, head turning to get eyes back on the alpha over San's arm.

"You're lucky—"

"Wooyoung."

"—genuinely lucky that he's pulling me back—"

"Darling."

"—because I swear to god—"

The night air hit them both as San shouldered through the door, the bar's noise dropping behind them like something submerged. Wooyoung was still seething—could feel it in his hands, in the tight coil of his breathing, in the way his jaw kept finding something to clench against.

San turned him by the shoulders and walked him back against the wall of the building, gentle but without room for argument.

"Get off," Wooyoung hissed.

San pressed his mouth to his scent gland.

"I said—"

The word dissolved. He turned his face away on instinct and then back, because turning away only gave San better access, and they both knew it.

"You're an idiot. You know that? Standing there letting some stranger grab your collar like— What were you even— Why didn't you just—"

San's mouth moved, licking at his scent gland, and Wooyoung's next sentence didn't make it out intact.

He could feel his own pulse slowing against his will, the adrenaline losing ground to something older and quieter, the feeling of San against his throat doing what it always did regardless of whether he was ready for it to. His hands had found San's jacket.

"You're so stupid," he whispered. The edges of his words softened without his permission.

"I know," San murmured against his throat.

"I had to punch someone because of you."

"I know,” there was something dangerously pleased in the answer. 

He pulled back just enough to look at him, hands coming up to hold his face, thumbs tracing the line of his cheekbones with attention that had nowhere to be but here. His eyes moved over Wooyoung's face like they always did after something happened—checking, confirming everything was still in its right place.

"My perfect omega."

Wooyoung's expression did something very complicated.

"Don't," he warned.

"So protective," San said, like he hadn't heard, like the word was something he was turning over with great satisfaction. His thumbs hadn't stopped moving. “So possessive. Mine.”

"San—"

"Perfect," San said again, quieter, and kissed his forehead. "Completely mine."

Wooyoung stood against the wall with San's hands on his face and the sting still fading from his knuckles.

“And you belong to me, Sannie.”

⋆˖⁺‧₊☽◯☾₊‧⁺˖⋆

The apartment belonged to someone Wooyoung knew loosely through Hongjoong, which meant it was nice enough, full of people he mostly recognized, and could tolerate for an evening. Music from somewhere, the warm press of too many bodies, somebody had made cocktails. They were either very good or very strong, and possibly both.

San had his hand at the small of Wooyoung's back when they came in, possessive. Wooyoung had let it stay for exactly as long as it took to scan the room and find the people he was looking for—Yeosang, who was by the window, and Jongho beside him with a drink, talking to someone Wooyoung didn't know.

Before he went anywhere, he turned into San slightly, enough to reach up and take his jaw in his fingers. San looked down at him with the attention he reserved for Wooyoung alone, and Wooyoung pressed his mouth to the side of his throat, holding it there long enough, thoroughly enough. San's hand spread flat at his back, and Wooyoung felt him exhale slowly through his nose, felt the shift of him settling.

When he pulled back, San smelled even more like him—clearly, unmistakably.

"Drinks," Wooyoung announced.

"Drinks," San agreed, already glancing toward the kitchen.

Wooyoung went to find Yeosang.

The conversation with Jongho and Yeosang had started about something inconsequential and escalated just like the conversations with them always did—Jongho taking a position, Wooyoung taking the opposite one on instinct, Yeosang watching them both with some mild interest. Wooyoung was mid-sentence, making a point he felt strongly about, when his eyes moved across the room without his permission.

They found San immediately.

San had made it out of the kitchen. Both drinks in hand, standing near the far wall where the crowd thinned slightly. A girl was standing beside him. She was extremely pretty, easy in her posture—an omega, clearly, judging by her sweet scent—turned toward San, as if she had already decided on the direction of her evening.

Wooyoung kept talking. He was making a good point, after all. He kept his eyes on Jongho and made it, but his attention stayed divided.

"—haven't seen you at one of these before," the girl was saying, her voice carrying in a brief lull in the music.

"First time," San said. Friendly, the same way San was always friendly with strangers—open without it being an invitation to anything, warm without being a door left unlocked. He had both drinks still in hand, which should've communicated something, and either she hadn't noticed or had decided not to.

"How do you know Minjun?"

"Through Hongjoong. So he's a friend of a friend, basically."

She smiled and shifted her weight toward him a bit. "Those always end up being the most interesting people at these things."

San laughed—quiet, genuine enough. "Yeah, you're right."

"I'm Harin," she introduced herself, offering her hand.

“San," he couldn’t do the same, drinks still occupying both of his hands, but he gave a nod that was polite and landed well regardless. That was the thing about San—he could be completely unavailable and still make someone feel seen.

Wooyoung looked back at Jongho.

"You were saying," Jongho reminded him, noticing exactly what had just happened, but choosing not to address it.

"I was," Wooyoung nodded, and continued his point.

He lasted another minute or two.

"—so you came alone?" Harin was in the middle of asking when his eyes moved again.

"Uh, no," San said, and something in his register shifted—not colder nor unfriendly, but more measured, making the meaning unmistakable. "Here with my boyfriend."

There was a small pause.

"Ah."

“Yeah. He went to say hi to people. He'll find me eventually, he always does."

The fondness in his words was unguarded, the kind that slipped out without announcement, and it should've closed the conversation down entirely. Harin only tilted her head, though, studying him.

"He lets you wander?" she asked, and there was something playful, teasing at the edge of it.

Testing.

San smiled. 

"More like he trusts me to stay put," San paused for a second. "Mostly."

She laughed, and he did so too. They seemed like two normal people at a party, having a conversation that was fine, technically. 

But Wooyoung had stopped talking entirely.

Jongho followed his gaze across the room, and he took in the scene properly—the girl, San's posture, the drinks that still hadn't made their way back—and then looked at Wooyoung, his eyes fixed across the apartment, focused, unblinking, as if he had identified a threat and had no intention of looking away from it.

"You were making a point," Jongho offered a rescue again.

Wooyoung said nothing this time.

Yeosang glanced over. He looked across the room and took a quiet sip of his drink. The expression on his face was the one he used when he had a comment for a situation, but had decided, for reasons of personal safety, to keep it.

Wooyoung stood between Jongho and Yeosang, staring at San and the girl across the apartment, and he couldn’t look away.

His boyfriend had shifted at some point—put the drinks down on the small table behind him without breaking the conversation, and that small detail was the part that lodged in Wooyoung's chest like a splinter. Not intentional, probably. San didn't have an intentional bone in his body when it came to this particular blind spot of his—the inability to be rude to someone who hadn't been rude first, the way his attention operated like a light he couldn't dim on command.

It didn't make the splinter smaller.

The girl was still talking. San was listening with his arms crossed loosely over his chest, weight shifted back, giving her the version of himself that was relaxed and present, and entirely too easy to talk to. Wooyoung could read his posture from across the room—comfortable, not interested, but not actively communicating the not interested in any language she seemed willing to receive.

"—seriously, it's unfair," she was saying, and her eyes moved over San with appreciation. "You're—" a small gesture, vague and encompassing. The kind that meant everything above the neck down to the floor.

San laughed, ducking his head slightly. "Thanks."

"Do you work out, or—"

“Yeah," there was a pause, and something in his expression shifted into something fond before it was anything else. "My darling likes it. So...“

She blinked. Then she laughed—surprised, disarmed. “That's— Actually, that's kind of sweet."

"He'd hate that you said that," San laughed and glanced across the room.

Wooyoung looked away one second too late. When he looked back, San had returned to the conversation, and Harin had moved slightly closer. She tilted her head, something shifting in her approach—finding a new strategy, a new angle to test out.

"You smell—" she started, and leaned in slightly, "—really good. Is that your—"

"My boyfriend's," San explained without missing a beat. "It's mixed."

A beat of silence came.

"Oh," she said.

“Yeah," San's tone was even, neither apologetic nor pointed—simply informational.

Harin absorbed this and just looked at him. And then, because she was either very confident or very determined, or some combination of both, she smiled again. Her hand came up, and it landed flat on San's chest.

Across the room, something in Wooyoung's expression changed, a shadow settling over his features so quickly it might have gone unnoticed by anyone who wasn't watching. Jongho happened to glance at him in that exact moment and went slightly still.

"Wooyoung—" Yeosang warned.

But he was already moving.

He moved through the room with his jaw set and his eyes on San and Harin the entire time—on her hand on San's chest, specifically, on the place where her fingers pressed against fabric that belonged to San, who belonged to him.

San saw him coming. Something passed through his expression—recognition, and underneath it the attention that sharpened when Wooyoung moved like that, some frequency in him that responded to it even before he'd consciously processed what it meant. His posture shifted almost imperceptibly. 

Wooyoung came to a stop beside San and looked at Harin with a perfectly pleasant expression.

"Hello," he said, venom lacing his greeting.

Harin blinked. “Oh— Hi."

"Hi," Wooyoung repeated, and the word had no business being that sharp at two letters. His eyes dropped to her hand on San's chest, stayed there for a few seconds, then came back up to her face. "Do you need something?"

The question landed as a small, precise needle dropped from a great height.

"We were just talking," Harin said, and to her credit, her voice stayed even.

"I can see that,” Wooyoung's gaze moved over her in an unhurried assessment. "You can let go of him now."

Her hand dropped immediately.

“Wooyoung," San sighed.

“Don’t. I'm being perfectly polite," Wooyoung almost hissed, without looking at San. He wasn't actually polite, and he was perfectly aware, but he couldn’t stop. He kept his eyes on Harin.

"He told you he was here with his boyfriend," Wooyoung said, and his voice had settled into something almost conversational, which was somehow worse than if it had stayed sharp. "He told you the scent was his boyfriend's. He told you the scent was mine, because that's what it is, it's mine, and you put your hand on him anyway." 

A small pause. 

"Which means you either didn't believe him or you didn't care, and I've been standing across this room trying to decide which one of those options says something worse about you."

Harin's expression had gone through several emotions in quick succession. Finally, she opened her mouth.

"He's mine," Wooyoung said simply, before she could say anything. The way you stated a fact about geography, about weather, about the distance between two fixed points. "Has been for a long time, will be for a longer time, and that was true before you walked up to him. It was also true the entire time you were standing here, and it's going to continue being true after this conversation ends." 

The smile arrived then—brief and bright and scrubbed clean of anything warm.

”So I'd really appreciate it if you found somewhere else to be."

The silence lasted about a dozen seconds, which was a couple of seconds longer than comfortable for everyone involved except Wooyoung, who appeared comfortable with an unlimited duration of it.

Harin picked up her drink, looked at San as if she was filing a very specific memory under the lessons learned category, and left without another word. Wooyoung watched her go until she'd disappeared back into the crowd.

Then he turned to San.

And he was smiling.

Not the polite, easy one he'd been wearing for the past fifteen minutes while Wooyoung had been losing a war with his own composure across the room. This one was different—wider, warmer, completely unguarded. It was the expression that came over San when the world had just confirmed something he'd already known, and somehow the confirmation had still managed to exceed his expectations. He looked at Wooyoung without trying to hide any of it, giving him the same open, unbashed attention he usually reserved for when they were alone.

“What?"

"Nothing," San replied, still smiling.

"Stop it."

"I'm not doing anything."

Wooyoung glared at him. The smile hadn't moved. If anything, it had deepened, settled in around his eyes until it stopped being an expression and started being a problem for Wooyoung—something he'd been overtaken by but wasn't fighting particularly hard to reverse.

"You're being smug," Wooyoung murmured.

"I'm being happy," the answer came easily.

"You're being fucking insufferable, is what you're being." Wooyoung held his gaze, refusing to be distracted by the fact that San was smiling. “She had her hand on you."

"She did," San agreed.

"And you just— You just stood there!"

"I knew you were watching."

The words caught somewhere between a confession and a provocation, though Wooyoung couldn't tell which San had intended. He was never quite sure with him, never certain how much of what San said came without thought and how much had been chosen precisely because he knew what it would do. Either way, the words settled heavily in Wooyoung's chest.

"You knew I was watching," he repeated, flat.

"You're always watching," San said, and there was nothing teasing in it, nothing that poked at it—just that statement, warm and certain, like he was describing something obvious, something beautiful rather than funny. "I could feel it from across the room. You've been watching since the moment she walked up."

Wooyoung said nothing. It was true, and they both knew it, so he wasn't going to confirm it out loud.

San reached out and took him by the front of his shirt and pulled him in. Wooyoung offered no resistance, letting himself be drawn closer with the same ease that had long since become second nature between them. San knew he would. Somewhere in the early years of them, that knowledge had embarrassed Wooyoung. Now, it was simply part of how they worked.

He ended up close, looking up at San's face from the distance of a few inches, the party continuing its indifferent noise all around them.

"You said I was yours," San said.

"You are mine," Wooyoung replied. "That's what I said. Mine."

Something in San's expression did what it always did when Wooyoung said things like that—opened slightly. A thing that didn't show itself to anyone else. It was only a small shift, but Wooyoung knew every version of it.

"I know," San whispered. "I just like hearing you say it."

"Then you should've shut it down faster and I wouldn't have had to come over here and say it to a stranger."

"That's fair," San laughed, without any indication that he felt it was fair, given that his expression had not changed. 

He brought his hand up to the side of Wooyoung's face, palm warm, and Wooyoung allowed it somehow.

"You're impossible,” Wooyoung said, quieter now, the sharp edge worn down somewhere between crossing the room and ending up here. "I leave you alone for twenty minutes—"

"Fifteen."

"—and I have to come deal with someone who can't read a room."

"You didn't deal with anything," San laughed again, and the smile was back, even worse than before. "You staked a claim."

"Same thing."

"It really isn't."

Wooyoung's hand moved before he'd fully decided to—fingers finding the back of San's hair and curling in, not rough exactly, but certain. The way you held something you weren't planning on letting go of. 

San went still, attentive, if maybe a bit tense, his expression shifting into something that had more weight to it.

Wooyoung pulled him down by his hair. San came without resistance, bending until his throat was level with Wooyoung's mouth, and Wooyoung pressed his lips to the side of it—found the scent gland there, felt San's breath change against his temple. Then he nipped. Small and deliberate—the point of his teeth was enough to make a statement.

San exhaled through his mouth.

"You let someone put their hand on you," he hissed against San’s throat, still holding his hair. "In front of half our friends. In front of me.”

"Wooyoung—"

"I scented you before we left,” another press of his mouth to the same spot, not quite a kiss. "Apparently not well enough."

"That's not—"

"It's not up for discussion," Wooyoung pulled back enough to look at him, fingers still threaded through his hair, and San looked back at him from the shorter distance with an open, vulnerable expression—the one nobody else got. Up close, his throat was warm where Wooyoung's mouth had been. "You're mine. Everyone in this room is going to know it before we leave."

San searched his face for a moment.

"Okay," he whispered. Quiet, simple, the word carrying none of the argument it could've held.

Wooyoung held his gaze. The possessive thing in his chest hadn't fully stood down—it could still feel the ghost of Harin's hand on San's shirt from across the room, still feel the minutes of watching it happen from a distance—but it had found somewhere to settle. Here, this close, with San's hair in his fist and San's eyes on him, and nowhere else.

"Don't let it happen again.”

"I won't," San whispered again, and then in a voice quieter still, the one he used when something was simply true, and he saw no reason to dress it up, he added, "‘m yours."

Wooyoung's grip loosened in his hair.

"Good."

⋆˖⁺‧₊☽◯☾₊‧⁺˖⋆

The blanket was not heavy. San knew that the blanket was not heavy—it was a blanket, so it weighed almost nothing. What's more, it had been sitting in the linen closet for two years and had never once posed a threat to anyone. He knew all of this.

He still crossed the room and took it out of Wooyoung's arms before his husband had made it three steps toward the couch.

"San!"

"I've got it!" he said.

"It's a fucking blanket!"

"I know what it is!"

Wooyoung looked at him for a moment with the expression that had become increasingly common over the last two weeks—somewhere between exasperated and fond, and deeply unwilling to admit to the fond part. 

Then he turned around and went back toward the closet. San watched him go, still monitoring the situation.

He'd been like this for eleven days. Well, maybe two, three weeks. He'd lost track somewhere around the point where Wooyoung's scent had started to change more and more.

It was subtle, still. Most people wouldn't catch it—would smell Wooyoung and find what they'd always found, warm and familiar. 

But San was not most people, and he'd been breathing Wooyoung in for long enough that the shift registered like a wrong note in a song he had memorized. There was something underneath everything else now. Something soft and new and entirely devastating. Milky at the edges, sweeter than before, carrying something that hit San somewhere below rational thought and did things there that he couldn't fully articulate.

It meant pup. It meant his. It meant theirs.

It meant that Wooyoung was walking around with something precious inside him, the world didn't know yet, and San was the only one who did. The weight of that sat in his chest like something physical.

Wooyoung came back out of the hallway with a stack of pillows. San had them before he'd crossed the threshold.

"Oh, come on—!"

"Sit down," San almost begged.

"I'm not hurt, San, I'm just pregnant!”

"You're pregnant," he agreed, already moving toward the couch, "so sit down."

He heard Wooyoung exhale behind him—long, through the nose, the sound of someone trying very hard not to snap. San arranged the pillows with more focus than the task probably required and did not turn around.

"Barely anything's different," Wooyoung said, and the word anything landed with emphasis, like he was asking San to be reasonable. "There's barely even— There's nothing. There's nothing visible, I'm exactly the same—"

"You're not exactly the same," San scoffed.

“You can’t even see a bump, San."

"There will be."

"But there isn't one yet—"

“Wooyoung, please,” San begged, turning around. "You're carrying our pup."

Wooyoung stopped.

He had the look on his face that San had also managed to catalogue—the one that happened when something San said caught him off guard in a way he hadn't armored against, the one that moved through quickly and got replaced with something more neutral.

"That doesn't mean I can't carry pillows," Wooyoung grumbled.

"Sit," San said quietly, "down."

Wooyoung did that, but only after a pause.

He did it like someone not happy with the decision their body made, spine very straight, arms crossed, expression communicating that this should not be interpreted as agreement. San looked at him—the locked jaw, the studied neutrality—and felt warmth move through his chest that had no clean name.

Wooyoung—on their couch, with their pup, with a scent that was changing in a way that only San could read.

He turned back toward the kitchen before his face could do anything about it and make Wooyoung even more annoyed.

"I need to get the drinks," Wooyoung sighed, already starting to rise again.

"I'll get the drinks."

"Six people are coming over, San, there are a lot of drinks—" Wooyoung tried to reason with him.

"I'll get the drinks."

"You can't carry everything in one—"

"Watch me," San almost hissed, and disappeared into the kitchen.

He heard Wooyoung say something behind him that was probably unflattering, probably even cursing him out. He took the bowls out of the cabinet and lined them up on the counter and started on the popcorn, and tried—he really did— to talk himself down from whatever altitude he'd been operating at for the past dozen or so days with limited success.

He knew it wasn't rational. He'd known Wooyoung was capable of carrying things before the pregnancy, and that fundamental reality hadn't changed—he wasn't fragile, the doctor had said everything was exactly as it should be, and Wooyoung was healthy and strong. The pup was fine, too, and there was no clinical reason for San to take every object out of his husband's hands the moment he picked it up.

He knew all of that.

He still listened to where Wooyoung was in the apartment at all times.

He could hear him now—the soft movement from the living room, the sound of him rearranging something on the coffee table, and San tracked it without trying to, because his ears had simply decided this was their primary function now. Monitoring, accounting for Wooyoung's location and status at every moment.

The popcorn finished, and he poured it into bowls. He gathered the drinks—Wooyoung had been right, there were a lot of them, but he was not going to admit that to him—and made two trips without being asked. 

When he came back into the living room for the second time, Wooyoung was standing at the bookshelf, reaching up for something on the top shelf.

San crossed the room in three quick steps. His hand found the small of Wooyoung's back, and his other arm reached over him, retrieving whatever he'd been reaching for without looking at what it was.

"I had it!”

"You were stretching too much!"

"I'm allowed to stretch, San, it's not a medical—"

"You were stretching for something on a high shelf! "

"That is what stretching is, yes, you fucking idiot—“ Wooyoung growled.

“Wooyoung," San set the thing down on the shelf below and turned Wooyoung toward him by the shoulders, and the omega grumbled under his nose. San looked at him—at his face, at the familiar build of a person he knew better than anything—and for a moment didn't say anything.

Wooyoung looked back at him, frowning.

"You're being insane!” Wooyoung hissed.

"I know," San agreed.

"You can't take everything away from me for nine months!”

"Watch me," San announced, quieter, and pulled him in by the back of his neck until Wooyoung's forehead pressed against his collarbone.

Wooyoung let it happen. His hands came up and settled at San's sides, but—somehow—not pushing him away. San pressed his mouth to the top of his head and breathed him in, and there it was, the thing that had been doing this to him for all these days—the familiar warmth of him and underneath it the new thing, the soft and devastating thing, the scent that meant pup and his and theirs.

"Insane," Wooyoung repeated, into his shirt this time.

"Yeah," San agreed again, and held him tighter.

The doorbell pulled them apart.

Wooyoung straightened first, smoothing his shirt down, and San let him go with reluctance, as if something was being pried away from him. He kept a hand at the small of his back all the way to the door.

"You don't have to walk me," Wooyoung reminded him.

"I'm not walking you," San frowned. "I'm just walking to the door."

"The door is what? Ten steps away, maybe?”

"I know where the door is."

And so, Wooyoung gave up and simply opened it.

The group arrived all at once, loud, carrying things nobody had asked them to bring and talking over each other before they'd fully crossed the threshold. Mingi, with a bag of snacks, Yunho behind him, caught mid-sentence. Jongho, Yeosang, and Hongjoong in a loose cluster, and Seonghwa at the back, the only one who arrived at any of their parties completely put-together.

"Finally," Mingi whined, already moving past them toward the living room, knowing the apartment as well as his own.

“You do realize we’re ten minutes early, right?” Jongho noted.

"Finally," the taller repeated, nodding.

Seonghwa reached Wooyoung last, smiling easily, arms already opening for the greeting that was standard between them—the same hug it had been for years, unremarkable, the kind that happened automatically.

San's hand came off Wooyoung's back.

The sound that came out of him was low, landing in the small space between Seonghwa's arms and Wooyoung's shoulders like something physical. Worse than loud—quiet enough to be unmistakable. 

A growl.

Everyone stopped mid-motion.

Wooyoung turned and drove his elbow into San's ribs with surgical efficiency. San grunted, clutching at his side, and the growl cut off.

"Sorry," Wooyoung said to Seonghwa, having said this before and expecting to say it again. "Ignore him."

Seonghwa looked at San with the careful expression of an omega who had just been growled at by an alpha in his own friend's home, and was still deciding how to feel about that. Then he looked at Wooyoung, and something moved across his face.

"...hi," he said, a bit unsure.

"Hi," Wooyoung replied, and hugged him himself, brief and decisive. San made another sound beside them that wasn't quite another growl, but occupied the same space.

Wooyoung elbowed him again without looking.

The purr started somewhere around the second elbow—low, almost inaudible, rising in his chest completely against his will. It was extremely inconvenient, called up by the way San was being unreasonable on his behalf. He pressed his lips together, said nothing, and hoped the ambient noise covered it.

Twenty minutes later, the living room had rearranged itself into the comfortable chaos of eight people who had been doing this for years—Yeosang on an armchair, Mingi and Yunho on the floor with the largest bowl of popcorn between them, Jongho at one end of the couch, Hongjoong and Seonghwa at the other, the TV on and the lights dimmed.

Wooyoung sat between San’s legs, in the middle of the couch.

It had happened just like things like this always happened—not discussed, San simply settling back against the couch cushions, and Wooyoung fitting himself into the space created for him with the ease of long repetition. Wooyoung had a blanket pulled up to his waist and his own bowl of popcorn balanced on his knee. He was watching the opening of the movie with genuine interest.

San's hands had gone to his stomach within thirty seconds. One hand was resting across Wooyoung's middle, low, warm, and still. The other arm was around him, but loose enough to look like nothing. His chin was at the crown of Wooyoung’s head.

To anyone glancing over, it looked the way they always looked on evenings like this—San occupying whatever space Wooyoung was in, the typical arrangement.

The difference was where his hands were. The difference was the stillness in them, the way they weren't idle so much as present, pressed against fabric with a purpose to protect.

Wooyoung let them stay and reached into his popcorn bowl.

On the floor, Yunho shifted to say something to Mingi, and his shoulder turned toward the couch. San’s jaw tightened. Then Mingi leaned over to grab the remote from the coffee table, closer to Wooyoung's leg, and San's arm around Wooyoung's middle pulled fractionally tighter.

"Can you turn it up before the movie fully starts?" Hongjoong asked the taller, from the other end of the couch.

Mingi held it up and pointed it at the TV, shifting on the floor to get a better angle, which brought him closer to the couch again, and San made a sound low in his throat that didn't quite make it into the room, but Wooyoung felt it in his chest.

Wooyoung pressed his elbow back into San's side as a warning sign. 

San's hand spread flat against his stomach and stayed there.

Seonghwa had been quiet for the first few minutes of the movie.

That wasn't unusual—Seonghwa watched things with his full attention and very little commentary, and nobody thought anything of it. He had his own bowl and his legs crossed at the ankle on the coffee table, his eyes on the screen most of the time.

But he kept glancing at Wooyoung.

Not obviously. They were all just small redirections, the kind that came with trying to identify something without being caught looking for it. He was close enough—closest of anyone except San. He was an omega, and his nose was—as San was increasingly aware—significantly more functional than an alpha's or beta's for certain things.

San saw the exact moment it happened.

Seonghwa went still. His eyes came off the screen and landed on Wooyoung properly this time, not just glancing—staring. His nose moved almost unnoticeably.

San's arm tightened around Wooyoung's middle.

The growl came up again, before he'd decided to let it—low and immediate, cutting under the film’s audio, and Seonghwa's eyes snapped to him instead with an expression that was more startled than offended.

Wooyoung's elbow found San's ribs. Hard.

“San!"

"He was—"

"He was just sitting there," Wooyoung hissed. "Stop it."

At this point, everyone realized something was up, so Mingi paused the movie. Seonghwa was still looking at Wooyoung, and he could see the gears turning in his older friend's head. 

Hongjoong and Yeosang had straightened slightly, Yunho and Mingi had turned around from the floor, and Jongho was watching San instead with careful attention.

Wooyoung looked around the room. Then he smiled—wide and sudden and completely unguarded—the real smile, the one that took over his whole face before he could do anything about it. He couldn't keep the secret any longer.

"I'm pregnant!" he announced happily.

There was a beat of total silence.

Then the room erupted—Mingi's sound was something between a yell and a noise that had no classification, Yunho surged up from the floor, Hongjoong's composure fractured into something that looked genuinely stunned, Yeosang closed his eyes for a few seconds. Seonghwa made a soft sound beside him, something warm and immediate, leaning in—

San growled again.

Wooyoung elbowed him for, what it seemed like, a millionth time and grabbed Seonghwa's hand instead, letting him squeeze it, which San miraculously allowed.

"How far along—" Hongjoong started.

"Early," Wooyoung replied without waiting for the question to finish. "Very early. It basically only started."

"I knew something was different," Seonghwa said softly, looking at him. "Your scent has gotten milky."

"San's been losing his mind about it for two weeks," Wooyoung said pleasantly.

"Eleven days," San corrected. "I think."

"He's been counting," Wooyoung whispered to the room, as if he was telling them the biggest secret.

Jongho, who had been quiet through all of it—processing, or doing whatever Jongho did in moments that mattered—leaned forward from his end of the couch. His expression softened. 

He looked at Wooyoung for a moment, then at the hand San had pressed flat and still against Wooyoung's middle, then back up.

Then he reached over.

He got within a few inches of Wooyoung's stomach before San's hand shot out and shoved him back by the shoulder. The sound that came out of San was not a growl so much as something that had decided growl wasn't sufficient—a full, resonant warning deeper than a growl that filled the room and left no room for misinterpretation whatsoever.

Jongho leaned back, and he looked at San with a furrowed brow. Then, he looked at Wooyoung.

"Sorry," San murmured, but did not sound particularly sorry. "Instinct."

"San," Wooyoung hissed, turning to look at him. "He is one of our best friends."

San's jaw was set. His hand had returned to Wooyoung's stomach, both of them now, and he was looking at Jongho with an expression that communicated very clearly that proximity remained a subject he had strong opinions about.

"He reached for you," San hissed.

"He was going to touch my stomach, not hurt—"

"Our pup," San growled.

The room went quiet again.

Wooyoung looked at him—at his tense jaw, at the hands pressed carefully against him, at the expression that was unreasonable and genuine in equal measure, and that had been making Wooyoung's life difficult for eleven days. 

Jongho looked at San for a moment longer. Then, slowly, he settled back into his end of the couch, and picked up his drink, looking at the paused screen.

"Congratulations," he said with a smile to Wooyoung rather than San. "Both of you."

Wooyoung smiled again—smaller this time, private at the edges. "Thanks."

San said nothing. His thumbs moved, slow and careful, against Wooyoung's stomach.

⋆˖⁺‧₊☽◯☾₊‧⁺˖⋆

➕

San pressed his mouth to the mark at Wooyoung's throat, the one that had been there for years, and felt Wooyoung's breath catch against his temple.

"Mine," San said against the scar, and bit down—a renewal, a reminder, the oldest language between them restated.

Wooyoung's fingers tightened in his hair, his head falling back on the pillow for a second.

"Mine," he said back, and found the answering mark at San's throat without having to look for it, mouth pressing there, warm and certain. "Only mine."

San exhaled. Pulled him closer, his hips jerking unevenly.

"Only yours," he agreed.

Outside the window, the city continued its indifferent noise. Inside the room, there was just this—the two of them, their combined scents, and the marks they'd put on each other that said what words had always been insufficient to say.

Wooyoung tucked his face against San's throat afterward and stayed there, whimpering quietly, lapping at the reopened bite, and breathing him in. San held him with both arms, locking them together.

"Mine," Wooyoung said again, softer. 

Just to hear it again.

San pressed his mouth to his forehead.

"Always".