Work Text:
Taki was perhaps the only person in the world to have a specific fear of losing the baby fat in his cheeks.
Most people would be only too happy, as they grew into adulthood, to look more adult. Especially men.
But no other man in the world had spent the last six years having his cheeks stroked and squeezed and cherished every single day they were able to spend together by someone like K. Even if they only had a moment, even if K only had one hand free, he always, always found a way, because the little ritual made them both happy.
If they did have time, they would settle in, and sometimes K would spend upwards of an hour thoughtlessly lost in it, like a cat in a grooming trance. He’d done it a lot in the dark months, the stretch of time between I-LAND and &AUDITION when nothing was certain and all the four of them had was ambition and each other. Then still, after liftoff, whenever he was particularly stressed.
Or whenever Taki was particularly stressed. Taki would go to him, get close in whatever way he could in the moment — his favourite was crawling into bed with K, because they could really shut out everything else there — and ask, wordlessly, to be cherished. K had never once refused.
He knew, rationally, that it was silly to fear that K would no longer want to do it if his cheeks diminished and flattened out as he aged, like any other man’s would. It had started because of how adorably squishy they had been when they’d first met, but it hadn’t really been about the cheeks themselves in a long time. Their squeezability was only a handy excuse. Anyone would want to, right? So it wasn’t strange that K loved to mess with them.
But the older Taki got, the older he looked, the stranger it would get. On camera, and also off.
When Taki was a kid, and K was his brother-father-mentor-guardian, it had been so innocent. Heartwarming shorthand for overwhelming adoration. People had noticed, people had commented, but only on how cute it was, how sweet, how touching.
But now Taki was in his twenties, a working adult in a profession where part of the job description was being attractive and wantable. K was still the same number of years older than him, but their categories had changed dramatically. They were peers, now. Still family, but also colleagues and friends and whatever other unnameable thing &TEAM members were to each other; pack, or some human equivalent. K was no longer his father, Taki no longer his darling baby.
So it was different, now, when Taki crawled in with him and lay facing him with his eyes closed, pillowed on one of K’s arms while the other hypnotically caressed his face over and over in the warm, intimate darkness. And the less cheek he had to offer, the stranger and less forgiveable it would get.
He wasn’t going to stop. He would fight anything and anyone that tried to make him. He needed it, and he knew K needed it, and he wasn’t ashamed or even particularly embarrassed. He was just… aware, as any idol always had to be aware, of how it was perceived and how that perception was changing.
He did have to do some thinking about what else might change, though, and what he might feel about those things, and what he should do about what he might feel.
It was already hard, sometimes, not to ask for just a little more. He couldn’t exactly articulate what “more” would look like, but he just… wanted, in some vague and restless way, to get closer still. Overlap a little further, somehow.
All these years, almost a third of his life, and he still felt like he loved K more every day. It shouldn’t be possible, he thought sometimes. That wasn’t how it was supposed to work. There were supposed to be limits, somewhere. At least some ups and downs. Bad days, where it was hard to feel it even if one knew it was there. He still hadn’t found any limits; he loved all seven of the others more every day, too. But he did at least have ups and downs with them, sometimes.
Still never with K. No matter how grumpy he was, how emotionally wrung out or raw, how exhausted. Feeling that love was still easier and more automatic even than breathing. It felt so foundational to who he was that he couldn’t quite imagine any version of himself without it who wouldn’t effectively be a stranger to him.
He was scared to lose his cheeks, but not because he thought K would stop touching them. It was the loss of the excuse he feared, and how that would force things to change in ways he couldn’t entirely predict and definitely couldn’t control. There would probably be uncomfortable conversations. Imposed restrictions on what they could and couldn’t do on camera. Expectations they would certainly flout, without remorse but not without consequence.
There were a few things in his life he simply would not consider giving up, no matter how hard he had to work or fight or scheme to keep them. His idol dream, always in the process of being achieved. The stage. His members-friends-family-pack.
K’s hands.
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