Work Text:
When, after a couple of days, most of them were still nervously hesitating to set foot through the newly opened door, Maki suggested a game.
They all loved games, and were always interested to try new ones, even when they were intimidating or embarrassing, so putting it in that context immediately made it easier to approach.
And most of them had always kind of wanted to play spin the bottle.
They cleared the coffee table out of the way and arranged themselves in a loose circle, most of them on the couch and a few — Taki, Nicholas, and Harua — on floor cushions facing them.
“Ground rules!” Maki announced with a clap, grinning broadly and bouncing his heels on the floor. “No penalty for saying no! Nobody loses! Doesn’t have to be on the mouth! If you say no, you have the option to choose something else you’re more comfortable with. Or you can just pass entirely.”
“No cameras here today,” K reminded everyone. “This is just for us, so take it easy.”
“If you get yourself,” Fuma added with a mischievous quirk of his mouth, “it’s a wild card. You can choose your target, or give two others a challenge, do some aegyo, give a speech, whatever you want. Have fun with it.”
Everyone nodded, still a bit apprehensive but noticeably more comfortable with the familiarity of the nine of them just sitting around in the common room playing around together.
After a bit of somewhat goofy testing on the kitchen floor, they’d decided that the Ramune bottle spun the best. They grabbed a big serving platter to spin it on so it wouldn’t roll off across the floor, and they were set.
The bottle landed on Nicholas first.
“Eyyy,” he said, grinning. “Let’s go.”
Then, after a moment of excited tension, on Jo.
Jo’s mouth made a little o, and he looked down at Nico, on the floor across from him. His eyebrows climbed halfway up his forehead. He didn’t look unhappy at all. If anything, pleased.
“Oooohhh,” said the room, giggling and clapping nervously.
Nico spread his hands, palms up, cocking an eyebrow. “How about it, Jojo?”
Jo nodded without hesitation, sliding off the couch onto his knees to come meet Nico halfway.
None of them had quite gotten over how comfortable Jo had been kissing Harua after the big talk, and were still somewhat amazed by how willing and unafraid he was now. They couldn’t help but wonder what he’d been like in school, a beautiful giant among mortals, wanted and admired by all, an ambitious and driven creature unafraid of risk. How much kissing had he done, exactly? What had those first ones been like?
He hardly ever reached out to bestow physical affection himself, seemingly unable to shake the suspicion that it was secretly unwelcome, but somehow this was apparently different. Perhaps because it was specific, limited, more explicitly welcome or not.
Despite being undoubtedly more outgoing, flashy, and physically affectionate, not to mention older, Nico managed to give the impression of a teenaged girl awaiting her first with nervous excitement.
Jo met him from above, closing his eyes a moment before contact. Nico almost forgot to close his, then scrunched them shut at the last second, half-manic grin softening and fading into the kiss.
There were muted little squeals as everyone watched, a few hands over mouths, Yuma scrambling up to squat on his heels atop the couch cushions in wild open delight.
Jo smiled warmly as he pulled back and returned to his seat, leaving Nico a little dazed and rosy.
On the next pair of spins, EJ drew himself.
Everyone sat up a little straighter. They hadn’t expected a wild card so early, and were very curious to see what their esteemed leader would choose to do with it.
As usual, EJ took a minute to think properly. He didn’t tend to jump to spontaneous decisions, which was part of what made him a good leader, so they didn’t rush him.
At last, he clapped his hands together and smiled. “Fuma-kun, and Jojo. You two don’t do a lot of content together because you get too quiet. I know some fans wonder if you even get along. So take a selca together, please, to ease LUNÉ’s mind.”
Everyone clapped, very pleased. Their lovely observant leader, who always had an eye out for weak spots in the densely woven net of connections that formed their group dynamic.
Fuma and Jo both laughed, quietly; they were sitting beside each other on the couch already, so it was very easy for Fuma to lean over and wrap an arm around Jo’s shoulders. Jo tilted his head against Fuma’s and held out his phone to take the shot, both of them smiling and relaxed.
“Next!” Yuma crowed, and whooped when the bottle landed on him. “Heck yes, bring it!”
It landed on Harua, and Yuma got louder, radiating delight. They were very close to each other, Yuma at the right end of the couch and Harua on the floor a step away.
“At long last—” Yuma was saying, grinning, when Harua rose gracefully to his feet, pushed Yuma’s shoulders into the back of the couch, and kissed him without warning or hesitation from above.
A sound like “Mngh?!” came out of Yuma, but he was already reaching out to grab Harua’s hips. Harua wedged a knee between his thighs to brace himself and brought more of his weight to bear, free hand cupping the back of Yuma’s neck to hold him in place.
The team gaped.
The kiss at the end of the big talk had shown them that Harua was quite comfortable with it, which they could already have guessed from his efficient, relaxed pursuit of Fuma in the pepero game a while back. That hadn’t prepared them for this.
Their perceptions shifted subtly but permanently. Harua was the smallest of them, had the cutest face and mannerisms, but he was a wolf, too, and that was something they should really be remembering.
Harua, horrifically, licked his lips and smirked a little as he pulled off Yuma and flopped back down on the floor, leaving Yuma a dizzy and delighted smear on the couch cushions.
The ice, they realized almost as one, was now quite definitively broken, the opaque depths opening up below them.
The game had only just gotten started, though, and none of them really wanted to stop just yet. Taki, who was practically glowing with happiness as he watched them all, happily set the bottle spinning again.
EJ again, then Fuma.
“Leaderz!” Maki yelled, clapping. “Let’s go!”
Fuma and EJ, too, were sitting next to each other.
Starting from the left of the couch and going clockwise around it and then the floor, they were sitting like so: K at the left end, then EJ, Fuma, Jo and Yuma; on the floor next to Yuma, Harua, then Nico, and finally Taki at K’s knee. They never really bothered to think about who was going to sit where; they all just kind of piled in however they arrived, and were happy with whomever they ended up next to.
None of them were very far from each other, all told. No skip or jump required. But being right next to each other did make things both easier and more awkward, if awkwardness was going to happen.
Fuma and EJ turned to each other, Fuma as close to shy as he could get — which was to say not very — but EJ oddly calm, smiling very softly, eyes so deep and warm that the whole team wanted to fall into them for a few moments.
All those jokes about them being the team’s parents. Fuma, never much inclined to physical affection, willing to be proactive only when it came to EJ, K and Taki. All the times they’d thanked each other, and praised each other, and silently put in the work side by side to make the team what it was.
This connection was not weak or easy to miss. It was central and weight-bearing and profound.
So it was fitting that neither of them took the lead from the other, or surrendered it. They simply met in the middle, in unspoken accordance, and let the connection broaden further. It was so painfully tender that the team might almost have felt like they were intruding on something private, except that the leaders encompassed them in it and held them all together, as they always did.
Taki’s eyes were looking a little misty, watching. He loved all the flavours of love between the nine of them so much, they all knew. It made him feel deeply safe and joyful whenever any of them were demonstrated for him, and he’d said so openly more than once.
Nobody was uncomfortable. Nobody was regretting the open door.
For a moment afterwards, EJ rested his forehead against Fuma’s and closed his eyes, and Fuma took his hands between their laps and squeezed them.
Then it was over, for the moment, and the bottle was spinning again.
“Yesss,” Yuma said gleefully when it pointed to him again, then “heck yes,” when it stopped on K.
K turned very pink and drew his knees up, doing a passable imitation of being the youngest and smallest. “Are you sure?” he said at Yuma over his knees, uncertain. “You don’t have to—”
“Don’t even, K-hyung,” said Yuma, brushing past the knees of the three on the couch between them and bracing his hands on K’s knees to look down on him. “You can say no, if you want, but I said heck yes and I meant it. So your call.”
Looking up at him, K looked anxious and vulnerable, but also transparently yearning. How he loved to be touched. To be loved out loud with hands and warmth.
Quietly, most of them wished right then that they’d opened the door earlier, if only so that they could have spent the last couple of years kissing him at every opportunity, just to make him as happy as he made them.
“If it’s okay,” said K hesitantly, lowering one knee and then the other, putting his shield down.
Yuma promptly straddled him, chest to chest, and kissed him soundly before he could change his mind.
K melted into it, arms curling around Yuma’s waist, hands spreading on Yuma’s back. Yuma didn’t hold back at all, now that it was his turn in charge. He was the one who’d wanted this enough to say so out loud and push the boulder downhill, come what may, and he sure as hell wasn’t going to waste the chance, when the probationary period might be all he got. When tonight might be all he got.
What they understood, as did some but not all of their fans, was that when K was provocative onstage, he wasn’t fucking the camera, as outside commentators often assumed. He was begging those on the other side of it to fuck him, to want him and touch him and bear him down under their weight. Yuma was a little too small to do it as well as he wanted, but he gave it his best, all but smothering K with adoration.
This, too, made them all happy to watch. It was a little funny for Taki to watch K in particular get kissed, let alone kissed like that, but the happiness was so much greater than the subtle confusion that he didn’t bother to dredge it up and examine it further. K was his brother, almost his father, his family, his favourite person in the world. Taki wasn’t going to kiss him like that. It wasn’t the kind of closeness he wanted. But K did need it, and he was glad that it was the team answering that need now.
“Yumaaa,” K moaned a little when Yuma gave him space. “Take it easy on this old man, will you?”
“Pfft,” snorted Yuma. “You’ve never taken it easy on anyone in your life, serves you right.” He planted another quick smooch on the corner of K’s mouth, then the arch of his cheekbone, then returned to his seat red-lipped and satisfied.
They didn’t much feel like respecting bedtime tonight.
—