respectful fear (ongoing series) chapter 1 | chapter 2 | chapter 3 | chapter 4 | chapter 5 | chapter 6 | chapter 7 | chapter 8 | chapter 9 | chapter 10 | chapter 11 | chapter 12 | chapter 13 :you weren’t supposed to become beomgyu’s unofficial handler but someone had to keep him in line. firm, steady and just a little bit sharp, you were the only one who could cut through his endless mischief. to everyone else, it looked like pure professionalism. to beomgyu… it felt like something more. from backstage chaos to interview confessions, the line between authority and affection keeps blurring. leaving beomgyu wondering if his “respectful fear” is really just a crush he can’t hide anymore.
5 more minutes : beomgyu has a habit of turning five more minutes into an hour. you have a habit of letting him.
this is my answer 🧸 : you don’t notice when you start disappearing—until someone finally makes you stop.
a tour for one : on a quiet saturday, beomgyu visits the one landmark everyone assumes he’s already seen. he doesn’t expect much. certainly not a guided tour meant for one, or a guide who loves the smaller parts of history. some things are easier to appreciate when someone takes the time to show them.
strangers, soulmates : you have a favorite cafe, a favorite table, and a favorite order. so does he. you’ve been sharing the same space, the same routine, the same taste, just not at the same time. until one quiet afternoon, coincidence finally decides to intervene.
12:21 a.m. : you promise you’ll stay awake for new year’s this time. beomgyu doesn’t believe you — and he’s right.
i’ll be here— : a quiet night, a borrowed hoodie, a soft promise. he’s there when she needs him, even if she doesn’t ask.
we built a home (and a terrible shelf) : boxes, chaos, and one terribly crooked shelf—home isn’t perfect, but it’s yours.
sketch of you : he always comes in for his usual coffee, tucked into the corner with his sketchbook, and you can’t help but watch him from behind the counter.
hah! you have been pranked 🧸 : beomgyu has made it his life mission to prank you. finally, you decide it’s time for revenge. with yeonjun as your co-conspirator, the ultimate trap is set… but getting even might be trickier than you imagined.
just you, him and the sound of his giggles : when an unexpected free evening leaves beomgyu home before you, he once again realises you make him do things he never would’ve expected of himself.
your tummy caught my attention : a sweet make out session turns into playful chaos when beomgyu gets distracted by your tummy.
a recipe for disaster (and noodles) : you and beomgyu decide to make homemade noodles. neither of you really knows what you’re doing, and the kitchen quickly turns into a mess of flour, veggies, and laughter.
the sound of you 🧸 : when beomgyu struggles to finish a track, he discovers that the perfect melody was never notes — it was you.
between the pages <3 🧸 : sticky notes tucked between your books turn into a quiet game and slowly, the boy behind the counter becomes the best part of your saturday routine.
paralel lines : you and beomgyu share the same library table every day, silently bound by routine. when he disappears, you realize how much he mattered.
❀𖤣𖥧𖡼⊱✿⊰𖡼𖥧𖤣❀ ❀𖤣𖥧𖡼⊱✿⊰𖡼𖥧𖤣❀ ❀𖤣𖥧𖡼⊱✿⊰𖡼𖥧𖤣❀
choi yeonjun:
our time does : when you drag a smiling yeonjun to the beach on a cloudy day, you find it blissfully empty — a day of gray air, warm tea from a thermos, and comfortable silence.
hey! can i borrow your heart? : late, dramatic, and constantly forgetting things—he’s your chaos, and maybe your heart too.
when we make it... : you promised to make it together. but dreams have deadlines — and love doesn’t always survive them.
keep it a little longer? : you were just supposed to return his jacket but somehow it turns into something else. something neither of you were ready to name.
love passport <3 🧸 : after a long, exhausting day a looming deadline threatens to consume you but you choose to spend the night with yeonjun, sacrificing sleep for a few stolen hours together. every moment feels worth it as his thoughtful surprises, playful gestures and warm presence turn the night into something unforgettable, making you feel unstoppable despite the work waiting for you.
the quiet between us 🧸 : rain falls softly, the world quiets and you find yourself tangled in yeonjun’s warmth. a night of gentle breaths, small smiles and the kind of closeness that almost hurts because it feels so easy.
i saw you out there : you wait backstage after his concert, surrounded by half empty water bottles and the lingering hum of the crowd. yeonjun walks in, glitter still on his skin, adrenaline fading. the world feels quieter now, like it only belongs to the two of you. he asks if you thought he did well. but it’s not really about the performance. it’s about being seen.
❀𖤣𖥧𖡼⊱✿⊰𖡼𖥧𖤣❀ ❀𖤣𖥧𖡼⊱✿⊰𖡼𖥧𖤣❀ ❀𖤣𖥧𖡼⊱✿⊰𖡼𖥧𖤣❀
choi soobin:
missing steps 🧸 : as pressure fractures her team and deadlines collapse inward, she finds herself watching someone who leads without force—someone who carries stress without letting it harden. in the space between exhaustion and failure, she begins to question everything she thought strength required, and what it might mean to let someone stand beside her.
❀𖤣𖥧𖡼⊱✿⊰𖡼𖥧𖤣❀ ❀𖤣𖥧𖡼⊱✿⊰𖡼𖥧𖤣❀ ❀𖤣𖥧𖡼⊱✿⊰𖡼𖥧𖤣❀
kang taehyun :
white heart ( ongoing series ) part 1 | part 2 | part 3 | part 4 : you cover a song. he covers the same one. a fan edits them together, and suddenly the internet notices.
❀𖤣𖥧𖡼⊱✿⊰𖡼𖥧𖤣❀ ❀𖤣𖥧𖡼⊱✿⊰𖡼𖥧𖤣❀ ❀𖤣𖥧𖡼⊱✿⊰𖡼𖥧𖤣❀
huening kamal kai :
an accidental kiss that wasn't so accidental : seven months in, and he still kisses first and thinks later.
❀𖤣𖥧𖡼⊱✿⊰𖡼𖥧𖤣❀ ❀𖤣𖥧𖡼⊱✿⊰𖡼𖥧𖤣❀ ❀𖤣𖥧𖡼⊱✿⊰𖡼𖥧𖤣❀
ot5 :
5 ways they stick with you : it's comeback season so they're everywhere and nowhere all at once. five ways they stick with you anyway.
5 ways they get you through finals : five different ways they take care of you when you’re exhausted, overwhelmed, and one step away from burnout. five times you almost fall apart. five times they’re there to catch you.
5 ways they protect you 🧸 : subtle, loud, gentle, fierce — five ways txt watch over you.
summary : you weren’t supposed to become beomgyu’s unofficial handler but someone had to keep him in line. firm, steady and just a little bit sharp, you were the only one who could cut through his endless mischief. to everyone else, it looked like pure professionalism. to beomgyu… it felt like something more. from backstage chaos to interview confessions, the line between authority and affection keeps blurring. leaving beomgyu wondering if his “respectful fear” is really just a crush he can’t hide anymore.
author's note : hello!! i literally spent a crazy amount of time writing this, so i really hope you'll enjoy it. i planned out an entire to do episode for you all and i have to admit.. it is so damn hard 😭 lol. i'll write the rest of it in the next chapter because it was getting crazy long. also, txt just said they haven't filmed any to dos recently so i hope this satisfies the craving in the meantime. <33 not proofread btw :)
· · ─── ꒰ঌ·✦·໒꒱ ─── · · ─── ꒰ঌ·✦·໒꒱ ─── · ·
the thing about hugs is that you don't really remember them while they're happening.
beomgyu had thought about this more than he'd like to admit over the past few days. how strange it was that in the actual moment — your arms around him, his around you, the quiet street, the cool air — his brain had more or less gone completely offline. it was only after, sitting in the parked car with his hands on the wheel and the engine off, that it had started to sink in. piece by piece. the way you had stepped forward first. the half second neither of you moved. the way pulling away had felt like a choice you both made rather than something that just happened.
you had done it first. he kept coming back to that. not because it meant you were in love with him or whatever — he wasn't getting ahead of himself, he wasn't — but because he knew you. he knew how carefully you moved through the world, how much every small thing cost you. and you had still stepped forward.
he was lying on his back staring at the ceiling when his phone buzzed on the nightstand.
[TO DO TEAM]: filming confirmed for thursday. call time 9am. all five members + assigned staff.
he put the phone face down.
assigned staff.
· · ─── ꒰ঌ·✦·໒꒱ ─── · · ─── ꒰ঌ·✦·໒꒱ ─── · ·
thursday arrived with the particular cruelty of days you've been dreading.
the filming location was one of the floors they occasionally used for content. it was rearranged, lit properly, cameras already positioned and waiting by the time txt arrived. beomgyu walked in with the others, taehyun and kai already bickering about something behind him, yeonjun holding a coffee with the expression of someone who had made peace with whatever was about to happen, and soobin doing the quiet early-morning leader thing where he just existed calmly near all of them.
beomgyu was fine. completely fine.
a crew member gave them the signal and they lined up in front of the main camera, the casual chatter cutting off as the recording light blinked on. the members straightened instinctively, energy shifting the way it always did — something brighter, more performative, the version of themselves that knew how to fill a frame.
"hello, we are tomorrow x together!" they said in unison, and the room came alive.
the host stepped forward once the intro settled. "welcome back to to do! today's episode is going to be a little different." she gestured around the floor. "we've set up a clue hunt across the entire building. each pair will follow their own unique route through the building. different rooms, different clues. at every station you'll find moa stones scattered around the room. collect as many as you can before moving on." she paused. "your clue card at each station will tell you where to go next. first pair to reach the final destination wins bonus stones. and whoever has the most stones total at the end takes the prize."
"what's the treasure?" kai asked immediately. "you'll find out when you win." "when i win," kai corrected pleasantly. "pair?" soobin asked. "pair," she confirmed, with the smile of someone who had been looking forward to this. "you won't be doing this alone. each of you will be partnered with someone who knows this building just as well as you do." she paused. "your personal managers."
the door opened. the managers filed in. beomgyu had known this was coming. he had known since the group chat notification four days ago, had spent an embarrassing portion of those four days thinking about exactly this moment. and still, when he found you among them something in his chest did the thing it had been doing a lot lately.
your eyes found him for exactly one second. then moved on. okay, he thought. professional. we're being professional. the managers spread across the room toward their respective members and the energy shifted immediately.
"yes," kai said, the moment his manager was within reach. he grabbed his arm with both hands. "okay. listen. you and i — we have a bond. an unspoken synergy. we are going to absolutely destroy these four."
"we are going to win," yeonjun told the camera, with the quiet certainty of someone reading from a script the universe had already confirmed.
"i think if we approach this systematically—" taehyun had already turned toward his manager with what appeared to be the beginning of an actual strategic briefing.
beomgyu said nothing. you had stepped up beside him while the room was still reshuffling, quiet and unhurried. his eyes went to you for just a second — mask covering the lower half of your face, a small name tag clipped neatly to your jacket, hair pulled back the way you wore it at work — and then back to the camera. "hi," you said. work voice. perfectly level. "hi," he managed.
one of the cameras drifted toward him. he smiled for it on instinct, but it came out smaller than usual. the host caught it and tilted her head. "beomgyu, you're very quiet today. not feeling competitive?"
what was he supposed to say? i am having a moderate internal crisis because the girl i've taken on two dates is standing next to me and i have to pretend she's just my manager for the next several hours and also i think she might actually be able to hear my heartbeat right now.
"we'll be fine," he said. beside him, barely audible, you made a small sound. not quite a laugh.
he didn't look at you. his ears went red anyway.
· · ─── ꒰ঌ·✦·໒꒱ ─── · · ─── ꒰ঌ·✦·໒꒱ ─── · ·
the to do staff split them up quickly after the opening segment. a coordinator handed each pair a sealed envelope — do not open until you reach your starting point printed across the front in bold — and then walked them to their respective locations separately, so no pair could clock where another was heading.
your coordinator was a cheerful woman with a clipboard who walked slightly too fast. beomgyu followed her with his hands in his pockets. you walked beside him.
the hallway was empty. no cameras. the crew would meet you at the starting room. it was the first time all morning you'd been next to each other without a lens pointed somewhere in your vicinity, and the quiet of it settled differently than the noise had. you glanced at him.
he was looking straight ahead, jaw set in a way that had nothing to do with confidence. you recognized it. you'd seen it before — on the mornings after he'd done something he wasn't sure about, when he came into the office and hovered near your desk without quite saying anything. he was recalibrating. trying to figure out which version of himself to be.
"beomgyu," you said, low enough that the coordinator ahead wouldn't catch it. he looked at you. "stop thinking so hard," you said. simply. like you were reminding him of a schedule detail. "you're going to pull something." he stared at you for a second. then something in his face shifted, not all the way, but enough. "i'm not thinking hard."
"you're doing the jaw thing." "i don't have a jaw thing." "you have a jaw thing." he looked away, and you caught the very beginning of a smile before he schooled it back. "i just don't know how to—" he started, quieter now.
"like you normally would," you said. before he could finish. "just.. be normal. okay? it's fine." he glanced at you sideways. "you sure?" you looked ahead. "i wouldn't say it if i wasn't." he was quiet for a moment. then, softer "okay."
the coordinator stopped in front of a door at the end of the hall and turned around with a bright smile. "here we are! your starting point. the camera team is already inside. you can open your envelope once you're in position." she gave a small bow and headed back the way she came.
beomgyu reached past you and held the door open. you walked through without commenting on it.
the company library was a room most people forgot existed. floor to ceiling shelves on every wall, document binders organized by year, a few potted plants that someone was clearly maintaining but never talking about. a long table ran down the center. the afternoon light came through a single window on the far wall and landed across the shelves in pale strips. the camera team was set up near the door. two of them. one on a shoulder rig, one stationary. they gave a thumbs up when you entered.
beomgyu looked around the room with an expression of genuine curiosity. "i didn't know this existed." "it's been here for six years," you said. "i've been here for more than six years," "i know."
he turned to look at you with something caught between offense and amusement, and you held out the envelope. he took it, turned it over once, then tore it open with considerably more enthusiasm than was probably necessary.
inside was a single card. on one side, a photograph — or what might have been a photograph if someone hadn't applied every distortion filter known to man to it. the image was blown out, contrast cranked to an extreme, the subject reduced to shapes and color. thick diagonal stripes, mostly warm tones. rust, orange, a strip of dusty pink.
on the other side, printed cleanly:
find as many as you can. they are small, round, and purple. some are hidden. some are simply waiting to be noticed. your next location is on the other side. but you'll only know where when you look closely enough.
beomgyu flipped the card back to the photo and squinted at it. "okay." he held it up. "okay so these are.. stripes? a wall? is this a wall?" "it's fabric," you said, studying it. "look at the texture. and the colors.. that's not paint."
he tilted it sideways. "a couch?" "possibly." after you guys give it some thought beomgyu said "there's a couch in the third floor lounge. with stripes like this. yeonjun hyung complains about it all the time, says it makes him feel like he's sitting inside a sunset."
you looked at him. "that's.. actually useful." "i contain multitudes," he said, already scanning the room. the camera caught that. you saw the operator's slight adjustment, the subtle zoom. beomgyu had slipped into it without deciding to — the ease of being watched, the performance that wasn't quite performance, just the version of himself that knew how to be present in a frame. it looked effortless from the outside. you knew from two years of scheduling that it cost him something, even when he made it look free.
"okay," he said, clapping his hands once. "moa stones. small, round, purple. let's go." "systematically," you said. "don't just run at the shelves." "i wasn't going to run at the shelves." you gave him a look.
"i was going to walk quickly at the shelves," he said. "start on the left side, i'll take the right. work inward." he pointed at you. "see, this is why we're going to win." "we haven't found anything yet." "but we will," he said, with a certainty that was either completely unfounded or completely genuine, and turned toward the left shelves.
you went right. the shelves were dense. years of archived documents, binders fat with schedules and contracts and production logs, the accumulated paper weight of a company that had been running a long time. you moved methodically. pulling binders out slightly, checking the gaps behind them. checking the tops of stacks. the stones were small, the card had said. small and round and purple.
you found the first one almost immediately, sitting in the soil of the potted plant near the window like it had grown there. you picked it up. it was smooth, the size of a large marble, a deep purple with a faint sheen.
"found one," you said. "already?" beomgyu's head appeared around the edge of a shelf. he looked genuinely startled. then his eyes narrowed. "okay. i see how this is going to go."
he disappeared back behind the shelf. thirty seconds later: "got one. it was behind the 2018 binders. who puts a stone behind the 2018 binders?" "production, apparently." "this is psychological warfare."
you moved along the right wall, checking low, checking the windowsill. nothing on the sill. but when you crouched to look at the base of the shelving unit — the small gap between the bottom shelf and the floor — there was a faint purple shape tucked against the back wall.
you lay almost flat to reach it. "y/n..?" beomgyu's voice came from somewhere behind you, oddly strangled. "what are you doing." "there's one under the shelf." a pause. "you're just.. lying on the floor." "i'm getting a stone." "right." another pause. "do you need—"
"i have it." you stood back up, brushing off your sleeve, stone in hand. three total now between you. you held them out and he dropped his one into your palm alongside them.
"you're keeping them?" he asked. "do you want to keep them?" he considered this with more gravity than the question deserved. "no, you're right. you're better at not losing things." you pocketed them and went back to searching.
he found two more in quick succession. one tucked into the spine gap of a document folder, one sitting openly on the surface of the center table, which he spotted immediately and then stared at for a moment with mild suspicion.
"this one feels like a trap." "it's not a trap. it's just there." "why would they just leave it there?" remember, the card said some are simply waiting to be noticed." you said. he picked it up slowly, watching it. nothing happened. "okay," he said. "okay, you're right."
the camera operator had drifted closer during this exchange. beomgyu noticed and played into it slightly. held the stone up to the light like he was examining evidence, turned to the camera with an expression of deep professional seriousness. "clue hunting," he said gravely, "requires sharp instincts. years of training. a keen eye."
you found the last one tucked behind a plant pot on the top shelf — required standing on your toes to reach. beomgyu materialized beside you immediately, taller by enough to matter. "i've got it," he said, reaching past you without being asked. his arm came over your shoulder. close. he grabbed the stone and stepped back and handed it to you like it was nothing. it was nothing. you told yourself it was nothing.
"six," you counted, turning them in your palm. "okay. that's probably most of them." "we should check the table legs," beomgyu said. you looked at him. "i'm serious. i would hide one on a table leg."
you checked the table legs. there was one on a table leg. "seven," beomgyu said, with tremendous satisfaction. you pocketed it. "okay. the photo."
he produced the card again and you both looked at the distorted image. striped couch, third floor lounge, yeonjun's sunset complaint. "we're confident?" you asked.
"i'm confident," he said. "the stripes match. and the color.. look at this orange. that couch is aggressively orange." "it is aggressively orange," you agreed.
"third floor lounge." he pocketed the card. looked at you. something in his posture had loosened over the past twenty minutes — the jaw thing was gone, the recalibrating stillness replaced by something that looked much more like him. "ready?" "ready," you said. he held the door open again on the way out. you didn't comment on it again either.
· · ─── ꒰ঌ·✦·໒꒱ ─── · · ─── ꒰ঌ·✦·໒꒱ ─── · ·
the third floor lounge was exactly as beomgyu had described it.
the couch ran along the far wall in broad diagonal stripes — rust, orange, dusty pink — aggressively warm, aggressively present, the kind of furniture that had strong opinions about the room it was in. the rest of the space was quieter. a low coffee table, a few chairs, a small shelf of various items that had accumulated over time the way things do in communal spaces. a dead plant someone had clearly given up on. a mug that had been there long enough to become part of the decor.
beomgyu walked in, saw the couch, and sat on it immediately. not like a person taking a seat. like a person claiming territory. "okay," he said, bouncing once to test it. "i understand why yeonjun-hyung hates this. it's like sitting inside someone's feelings."
"can we start looking?" you said. "i'm looking. i'm looking from here." he twisted to peer behind the cushions and produced a moa stone from between two of them with an expression of pure vindication. "see."
you started on the shelves along the left wall. the camera operator had positioned near the door, catching the room wide. another had followed beomgyu to the couch, which was — predictably — where the content was.
the stones were scattered differently here. less hidden, more placed. on surfaces, in corners, tucked under the edge of the coffee table. the room was smaller than the library, less dense. you found two quickly. beomgyu also found two more from his position on the couch, reaching under cushions and behind the armrest with the focused energy of someone who had decided this was his domain.
"there has to be an envelope in here somewhere," he said, standing finally and scanning the room. "shelf," you said, nodding toward the far right. "there's something sticking out."
he crossed the room and reached for it. a small envelope, same as the first, tucked between two books. he pulled it out. turned it over. froze.
the front had a distorted photo on it. same style as the real clue card — blown out, high contrast, heavily processed. beomgyu stared at it for a moment, tilting it slightly, genuinely trying to identify the location. something about the shapes felt familiar. the curve of it, the—
oh. "...that's me," he said.
below the image, in the same clean font as the real clue cards: not a clue. just handsome.
a beat of silence.
then beomgyu screamed. not the photograph version. the real, live, full-volume version. the one that had no business coming out of a person at this decibel in an enclosed space, the one that was less a sound and more a physical event. the camera operator took an involuntary step back. the second operator, stationed near the door, audibly startled. someone in the hallway — a passing staff member — let out a surprised noise in response.
beomgyu held the card to the camera with both hands, still making the face. "THEY USED THIS PHOTO," he said, with the energy of someone reporting a crime. "out of every photo they had access to... this one—" the camera operator was shaking. actually shaking.
"look at me," beomgyu continued, pointing at the photograph and then at his own face repeatedly. "look at this. is this what i look like? is this what you all see?"
you were looking at the card. you were also, quietly, smiling. not much. just the corners of your mouth, a small involuntary thing, there and then almost gone. you pressed your lips together but it had already happened and beomgyu, mid-monologue, caught it. he stopped.
not all the way. he kept the performance going for the camera, kept holding the card up, let the operator get the shot. but something in his attention shifted. a small recalibration, quiet and private. he tucked it away for later the way he was learning to tuck things about you away. carefully, without drawing attention to it.
he drifted toward you as you went back to checking the remaining shelf space, the card still in hand. close enough that the camera wouldn't necessarily pick up his voice underneath the general noise.
"you smiled," he said. not teasing. just.. noting it. the way you'd tell someone the window was open.
"i did not." "you did. i saw it." you didn't look at him. "the photo was objectively funny." "yeah but you smiled." a small pause. he looked down at the card briefly, then back at you. "you never.. i mean. you usually just look. i just thought.. i don't know. i noticed."
you found another stone behind a stack of magazines and added it to your pocket without responding. but you didn't tell him he was wrong either. he went back to searching.
the thing was, he wasn't wrong. a year ago — even six months ago — you would have watched that exact scene and felt the low familiar hum of irritation.
not at him specifically, or not only at him. just at the type of it. the loudness, the performance, the way some people could take up so much space in a room without seeming to notice the room had other people in it. you'd spent a long time around people who used noise as a substitute for presence, humor as a way of opting out, and you'd learned to read it quickly. to keep your distance accordingly.
you hadn't applied that to beomgyu consciously. you'd just.. done it. the same way you did it with everyone. but somewhere between a park bench and a meeting room and two dates you hadn't entirely planned on enjoying, something had shifted. not dramatically. it wasn't like a door opening. it was more like a window you'd forgotten was there, letting in a draft you didn't realize you'd been missing. his loudness didn't grate the way it used to.
his humor didn't read as deflection anymore. you'd started to see the difference — between people who joked because nothing mattered to them, and people who joked because they wanted to make the room lighter for everyone in it.
he was the second kind. you knew that now.
you weren't sure when you'd decided that. you also weren't sure it had been a decision exactly. more like a slow accumulation of small evidence, until the conclusion became unavoidable. you were grateful for it, in the quiet way you were grateful for things you didn't quite have words for yet.
"okay, real clue," beomgyu announced, producing the actual envelope from inside the fake one. he tore it open and pulled out the card. this one was a riddle. printed in the same clean font, no image:
i am a room where sound goes to be kept. voices enter me and do not leave the same way they arrived. i have a chair that faces glass, and glass that faces everything. find my door. your stones are already inside.
beomgyu read it twice. "recording studio," he said immediately. "yes." "that was fast." "the glass facing glass part," you said. "the booth window and the mirror on the back wall."
he looked at the card again. "huh. yeah." he flipped it over, nothing on the back. "okay. recording studio." he pocketed it and counted the stones you'd collected here, touching each one as you held them out. "five from here. twelve total."
"thirteen," you said. "you missed the one from under the table." he stared at you. "when did you—" "while you were having your moment with the photograph." he opened his mouth. closed it. turned toward the door. "let's go," he said, with great dignity.
you followed him out, and this time you held the door. he noticed. he didn't say anything either.
· · ─── ꒰ঌ·✦·໒꒱ ─── · · ─── ꒰ঌ·✦·໒꒱ ─── · ·
the hallway outside the lounge was empty in both directions. beomgyu checked left, then right, with the unnecessary vigilance of someone in a heist film. "clear," he announced. "it's a hallway," you said. "it's enemy territory," he corrected, and started walking.
you fell into step beside him. the camera crew trailed behind at a short distance, close enough to catch dialogue, far enough to feel like you had something approaching privacy. you'd gotten used to the rhythm of it over the past hour — the constant low awareness of being filmed, the way you'd learned to move through it without performing for it or against it. just existing alongside it. beomgyu was better at this than anyone you'd ever worked with. he could hold a genuine conversation and be completely present in a frame at the same time, as naturally as breathing.
you were thinking about this — the particular skill of it, how it had probably taken years to develop — when the door at the far end of the hall swung open.
huening kai came through it backwards, turned around mid-step to say something to his manager behind him, then rotated forward and spotted beomgyu. he stopped walking entirely. beomgyu stopped too. a beat of complete stillness, the kind that precedes something loud.
"how many?" kai said. "how many what?" beomgyu said. "you know what." you and kai's manager exchanged a brief glance. he gave a small polite bow. you returned it.
"fourteen," beomgyu said. "fifteen," kai said. the hallway was quiet for a moment. "you have fifteen," beomgyu repeated. "we have fifteen."
"that's.." beomgyu turned to you. "that's only one more." "it's still more," kai said pleasantly. "it's one." "one can still win it for us, hyung." beomgyu turned back to kai with the expression of someone reassessing a situation they had previously felt good about. the cameras had drifted closer — both crews now, kai's following behind him, yours catching beomgyu's face. good instincts. this was the shot.
"we still have three stations left," beomgyu said finally. with dignity. "so do we," kai said. "then this conversation is meaningless." "i just wanted to know the count." "sure you did."
kai smiled. it was a very specific kind of smile — the smile of someone who was younger than you but had somehow been born with an innate gift for getting under your skin. beomgyu had told you once, during a particularly long schedule, that huening kai was the only person on earth who could make him feel both deeply fond and mildly unhinged simultaneously. watching them now, you understood completely.
"good luck, hyung," kai said, already moving past him. "we don't need luck," beomgyu called after him. "we have strategy." "so do we," kai said pleasantly, and disappeared around the corner with his manager.
the hallway was quiet again. beomgyu stood very still for a moment. then he turned to you and kept walking without a word. you fell back into step beside him.
· · ─── ꒰ঌ·✦·໒꒱ ─── · · ─── ꒰ঌ·✦·໒꒱ ─── · ·
the recording studio was on the second floor, at the end of a corridor that got progressively quieter the further down it you walked, as if the building itself was preparing you for the kind of silence that lived inside that room. beomgyu had been in it hundreds of times. he still felt it every time — the specific hush of a space built to swallow sound, the way the air sat differently here.
he held the door and you both stepped inside. it was dim. the overhead lights were off. only the booth lamp and a soft secondary strip along the back wall were lit, casting everything in a warm low glow. the producer's chair sat in front of the main console, facing the booth window. beyond the glass, a single microphone stood in the center of the live room, its stand adjusted to standard height, a small pop filter in front of it.
the camera crew filed in behind you. someone flicked on a secondary light. the room came into slightly sharper focus.
"okay," beomgyu said, scanning the space. "stones first, then the clue." you nodded and split off toward the back wall. he took the console side.
the stones here were harder to find. tucked behind equipment, nestled in cable coils, balanced on the edge of the outboard rack in a way that suggested whoever had placed them had genuinely enjoyed themselves. beomgyu found two quickly. one on the floor under the console chair, one inside a headphone cup hanging on the wall hook. you found one on the back shelf between two hard drives.
you were reaching for a second one — just visible behind a small monitor speaker on the side table — when your hand caught the edge of something else. a small switch, recessed into the panel beside the speaker. you registered it a half second too late.
a low hum filled the room. the booth light blinked on. the microphone in the live room flickered to life — a faint red indicator on the stand, barely visible through the glass, but there.you stared at it.
"...did you just—" beomgyu started. "i don't know how to turn it off," you said immediately. he looked at the panel. then at the booth. then back at you, and you could see the exact moment he decided not to let this go.
but before he could say anything he had already turned to fully face the microphone through the glass, rolled his shoulders once with great ceremony, and cleared his throat.
and then, with the complete sincerity of a man performing at a sold-out stadium, he began to sing twinkle twinkle little star.
not quickly. not as a joke, exactly, or not only as a joke. he shaped every note like it meant something. his voice dropped on up above the world so high as if the line contained grief. he closed his eyes for like a diamond in the sky. he let the last note hang in the warm dim air of the studio, and the room, built specifically to do this, held it beautifully.
the camera operator didn't move for a full three seconds after he finished. beomgyu opened his eyes. looked at the operator. "your turn," he said with a poker face, as if he hadn't just given a nursery rhyme the performance of a lifetime
the operator shook their head slowly. "i just bared my soul in there," beomgyu said. "the least you can do—" another head shake. "not even a verse?" the operator took a deliberate step backward.
beomgyu turned to you. the mic was still on. the red indicator was still blinking. you looked at him with an expression that communicated, clearly and without words, that you were actively looking for the switch and would not be taking questions in the meantime.
"y/n noona?" he said. "no." "the mic is already—" "no." "just one—" "i am your scheduler," you said. "i will move your 6am schedule to 5am." a pause. "that's a threat," he said. "find the switch."
he found the switch. he also found it on his first try, immediately, without looking, which meant he had known where it was the entire time. the booth light clicked off. the hum faded. the red indicator died.
you looked at him. "i was going to tell you," he said. "when?" "soon."
you turned back to the monitor speaker and retrieved the stone you'd originally been reaching for, with more composure than the situation perhaps deserved. beomgyu had the grace to look only slightly amused rather than fully triumphant, which you decided to count as personal growth on his part.
you found the clue envelope wedged behind the speaker — a partial map, rough and hand-drawn, most of the building blacked out except for a single corridor on the fourth floor with a door marked at the end of it. no label. just a small arrow.
"storage," you said. "the corridor matches the fourth floor east wing layout." beomgyu looked over your shoulder at the map and nodded. "yeah. that tracks."
you folded it and pocketed it. counted the new stones — five, added to the fourteen from before. nineteen total.
beomgyu looked at the number. then at the booth window. then, apparently unable to help himself, back at the camera operator.
"for the record," he said, "i think it sounded good." the operator nodded once, slowly, in a way that was either sincere or deeply professional.
beomgyu looked satisfied either way. "okay," he said. "fourth floor. let's go."
you were already at the door. you were also, very carefully, not smiling. he saw it anyway.
· · ─── ꒰ঌ·✦·໒꒱ ─── · · ─── ꒰ঌ·✦·໒꒱ ─── · ·
the fourth floor east wing corridor was exactly as the map had described it — long, narrow, ending in a door. except when you got there, you realized the corridor had two doors. one at each end.
you both stopped. beomgyu looked at the map. then at the left door. then at the right door. "it just says end of corridor," he said.
"the arrow points right." "the drawing is not to scale." "it's still pointing right." he looked at the right door for a moment. then, with the energy of someone making a decision they were moderately confident in, he pushed open the left one.
the room was dim and dense. shelves packed floor to ceiling, boxes stacked in careful towers, equipment cases lined along the far wall. the smell of it was specific. old paper, plastic, the particular stillness of a room that was organized but rarely visited. a single overhead bulb flickered on via motion sensor when you entered, casting everything in a warm flat light.
beomgyu stood in the doorway and looked around. slowly. with the particular attention of someone who had spent years walking into rooms and immediately knowing exactly where the cameras were.
nothing. no crew. no shoulder rigs. no mounted equipment. not even a cable snaking under the door.
"wrong room," he said. you looked around. "how do you know?" "no cameras." he stepped inside anyway, letting the door fall shut behind him. "production would have planted cameras in the storage room in advance since the crew couldn't follow us in. this one has none." he glanced at you. "which means we're not supposed to be here."
"then we should go to the other one." "we should," he agreed, and didn't move. you looked at him. he was examining a shelf near the door with mild interest, hands in his pockets, in no apparent hurry. then he turned to you with the expression of someone who had been waiting for the right moment all day and had just recognized it.
"so," he said. "the third date."
the words landed quietly in the dim room. you felt your posture shift immediately — a reflex, the instinct to check the door, the walls, the ceiling. "beomgyu—" "no cameras," he reminded you. gently.
you looked around one more time. he was right. just shelves and boxes and the flat overhead light and the two of you. you exhaled slowly. "okay," you said. "fine. what about it?"
"we should set a day." he said it simply. like it was the most natural thing in the world. "before we lose the momentum." "before we lose the momentum," you repeated. "you're a scheduler. you understand momentum."
you looked at him for a moment. then you pulled out your phone. scheduler instinct, automatic. "you're free next saturday," you said. "no schedules, no calls." a small pause. "yeah," he said. "i know."
you looked up. "what about you?" he said. something about the way he asked it — not assuming, actually checking — made you look back down at your phone a half second longer than necessary. "i'm free," you said.
"next saturday then." "next saturday," you confirmed. you made a note of it without looking up. "location is your call again." "obviously."
"and this time give me more days notice." "i gave you four days last time." "you appeared at my desk and recited the details at lightning speed and left before i could respond." "that's a form of notice," he said.
you looked up at him. he was smiling, small and private, the version that wasn't for cameras. you looked back down at your phone. "next saturday," you said. "noted." he nodded once and turned back to the shelf.
the room settled into a quieter kind of quiet after that. no performance of normalcy required. just the two of you in a room no one knew you were in, moving through it at an unhurried pace. beomgyu drifted further inside, hands trailing lightly along the shelf edges, genuinely curious in the way he got when something caught his attention. you watched him for a moment before following.
the shelves were a particular kind of organized chaos — equipment and props from years of content, archived carefully but densely. cables coiled into neat circles. old lightstick prototypes in clear cases. photo book packaging samples, some still sealed. further back the shelves gave way to older things. boxes labeled by year, by project, stacked with the patient weight of a company that kept everything.
"look at this," beomgyu said, from somewhere deeper in the room. you rounded the corner of a tall shelf and found him crouching in front of a low shelf, pulling something out carefully.
a cd case, slightly dusty, the artwork immediately familiar even from a distance. he turned it over in his hands with an expression you didn't entirely have a word for. fond, and something quieter underneath it.
the star chapter: together.
"this ended up in storage already," he said, more to himself than to you. he opened the case. the cd was still inside. he looked around and found, pushed to the back of a high shelf, a portable cd player so old it had clearly been sitting there since before either of you had started working in this building. he pulled it down and examined it with genuine uncertainty. "does this even still work?"
you already knew what he was going to do regardless of the answer. he opened the case, slid the cd in, and pressed play. it worked.
beautiful strangers filled the small cluttered room, tinny through the old speaker but unmistakably itself. beomgyu stood up, brushing dust off his knee, and turned to you with an expression of complete innocence.
"no," you said. "i haven't said anything." "you have the face." "i just think," he said, "that since we're here anyway—" "i am not dancing in a storage room." "it's a very good song." "it's an excellent song and i'm still not dancing."
he tilted his head slightly. the music moved through the room quietly, unhurried, filling the spaces between the shelves. "you threatened my 6am schedule. the least you can do—"
"that is not equivalent—" "come on," he said. simply. the same two words he used for everything, and somehow they always worked differently depending on how he said them. this time they were soft. not a tease. just an invitation.
you looked at him for a moment. "my clothes are completely unsuitable for this," you said. "you look fine." "i'm wearing work trousers." "i've practiced in worse."
"i'm also," you said, with great dignity, "too old for this." he stared at you. "you're in your twenties." "late twenties." "that's still twenties." he set the cd player on the shelf and stepped forward, positioning himself beside you with the easy confidence of someone who had been doing this since he was a teenager. "okay. just the chorus. it's not complicated, i promise."
you looked at him sideways. "you're going to teach me." "i'm going to teach you." "you're a professional." "which means i'm qualified." you exhaled. looked at the ceiling briefly. "fine," you said. "the chorus."
his face did the thing again — that quick warm flash, controlled almost immediately. he turned to face forward and waited for the right moment in the track. "okay, it starts like this."
he moved through it slowly, breaking it down, and you followed with the focused attention you brought to everything, which unfortunately did not translate to your body doing what your brain understood perfectly well.
your movements were careful and deliberate and about two beats behind in a way that had nothing to do with not knowing the steps and everything to do with the particular self-consciousness of being watched by someone whose opinion you had started, quietly, to care about.
"you're thinking too much," beomgyu said. "i'm always thinking too much." "less thinking. just.." he demonstrated again, loose and unhurried, and you watched him for a moment before trying again.
it was better. not professional — not even close — but better. something loosened in you somewhere around the second attempt, the way it does when you stop trying to be good at something and just do it. beomgyu said nothing about the improvement, which you appreciated more than if he had. he just kept going, patient and easy, and you kept following, and the song moved through the small dim room around you both.
you were on the third attempt at the chorus when he laughed. not at you, or not unkindly. just a real, unguarded thing, the kind that came from somewhere genuine rather than performed. it was brief, warm, and it changed his whole face. you had heard him laugh hundreds of times over two years of schedules and van rides and early mornings.
you knew the catalog of it — the loud one for the cameras, the polite one for meetings, the helpless one he tried to smother when something caught him off guard. this one was different. quieter. like it had slipped out without his permission.
you looked at him. "what?" you said. "nothing," he said, still smiling. "you're doing well." "i am clearly not doing well." "you're doing well," he repeated, and turned back to the front, and you couldn't tell if it was a lie or not, and somehow that made it worse.
you were on the fourth attempt when you heard it. yeonjun's voice, somewhere in the corridor outside. loud and carrying, mid-sentence about something, his manager's quieter response underneath it.
you both froze. beomgyu's hand shot out and stopped the cd player. the room went silent. yeonjun's voice got slightly louder, then a door opened and closed, and then.. nothing. he'd moved on.
you looked at beomgyu. he looked at you. "we are going to be last," you said. "we are going to be last," he confirmed.
you were already moving toward the door. he grabbed the cd case, slid it back onto the shelf with surprising speed, tucked the cd player back into its case, and followed you out into the corridor.
the door clicked shut behind you. the hallway was empty. you looked at each other one more time.
the flight landed quietly, the way most things did when you were too nervous to notice the noise.
it was your first time in seoul. you had thought about that fact many times over the past week, mostly late at night. you had imagined arriving here under different circumstances, maybe for a small showcase someday, or a collaboration that came together slowly and naturally over time. not like this. not all at once, and not because of him.
you gathered your carry-on from the overhead compartment and followed the slow shuffle of passengers toward the exit. outside the gate, the airport hummed with its usual organized chaos. you followed the signs with your earphones in, one song on repeat — not for enjoyment, just to keep your thoughts from getting too loud. it didn't really work.
your manager had already handled the hotel arrangements. everything was sorted, everything was fine. you kept reminding yourself of that while you waited for your luggage, watching bags circle past you on the belt.
you weren't nervous about the performance. you had been performing your whole life, in rooms far less forgiving than a professional studio. you weren't nervous about the filming either, not really. you were nervous about him. which was ridiculous. you had already spoken on a zoom call. you had already exchanged polite, slightly awkward smiles through a screen. it wasn't as if you were meeting a stranger. and yet somehow that made it worse. because you already knew exactly how easily he could make your heart do something inconvenient, even from a distance.
the luggage belt delivered your bag. you pulled it off and stood there for a second, just breathing. seoul in the morning was pale and cold, the kind of cold that felt clean rather than harsh. you took a cab to the hotel, watching the city pass through the window. everything outside looked like something you had only ever seen in photos. familiar in that strange secondhand way, and yet entirely new. you checked in, dropped your bags, and sat on the edge of the bed.
you weren't sure why that surprised you. you had seen it in photos, in the background of several contents you had clicked on more times than you would ever admit. and yet standing in front of it with your manager beside you felt entirely different from any of that.
it felt very, very real. someone from the team came down to meet you within minutes, guiding you through the lobby with easy small talk that you tried your best to follow while your heart did something embarrassing in your chest.
the hallways were quieter than you expected. clean and wide, with a stillness that felt deliberate. they were shown to a lounge area to wait. your manager sat beside you, scrolling through something on his phone. you sat very straight and tried to look like a person who was completely fine.
you heard them before you saw them. voices in the hallway — two of them, one lower and unhurried, one that you recognized immediately even though you had only ever heard it through a screen or through earphones. your hands, resting on your knees, went very still. the door opened.
taehyun walked in with one of his managers just behind him. he was wearing a simple dark sweater, hair slightly pushed back, and he looked normal. that was the first thing you thought, which was perhaps the most useless thought you had ever had, because of course he looked normal, he was a person, but somehow you had half expected him to arrive already glowing or framed in soft light the way he always seemed to be in every video you had watched of him.
he spotted you the same moment you looked up. for exactly one second, neither of you said anything. then he smiled, not the wide practiced kind, but something smaller and slightly startled, like he hadn't quite prepared for this either. "hi." "hi," you said back, and stood up a little too quickly, and immediately wished you hadn't.
the handshake that followed was formal enough to be funny in retrospect, the kind two people exchanged when they were both pretending very hard to be professional. his hand was warm."it's good to finally — " he started. "yeah," you said, before he could finish, and then felt your face go warm because you had just interrupted him, which was not how you had planned to begin this. but he laughed and the tension in the room dropped by several degrees. the managers exchanged a look.
taehyun had told himself, very firmly, on the way over, that he was going to be normal about this. he had repeated it in the elevator. normal. professional. you have met people before, you are good at this, just be normal.
and then you had stood up too fast when he walked in, and said yeah before he could finish his sentence, and he had laughed before he could stop himself — and somehow that was the thing that undid all of his very firm preparation. because you were nervous too. you were sitting across from him trying just as hard as he was, and knowing that made everything simultaneously easier and significantly more difficult.
he focused on the managers as they ran through the basics. short performance video, one song, filmed today, posted across platforms. simple. clean. the kind of content that looked effortless and required a very specific kind of trust between two people who had never actually sung in the same room before. when the conversation turned to the arrangement, he was grateful to have something concrete to think about.
they ended up choosing the song that had started everything. the one a fan had once edited them together on, never knowing it would lead to this. "we were thinking you keep the original key," one of the managers said. "but we're open if you want to adjust." taehyun glanced at you. "i think it works. what do you think?" you considered it for a moment and said, "i think so too. maybe the bridge could go up a step. give it a little more weight." then, quieter: "only if that works for you." he turned it over in his head. heard it. yes. "yeah, that works." and just like that they were talking about music.
he had a sense of where your voice would sit naturally, where it would lift, where it would pull back — he had spent enough late nights listening to your covers to know. he didn't say that, obviously. what he said was, "i think the second verse works better if you take the lead and i come in underneath," and you tilted your head slightly and said, "yeah.. and then we flip it for the chorus?" "exactly." it was very easy to talk to you about music. dangerously easy, maybe.
at one point he pulled out his phone to play a reference clip and tilted the screen toward you, and you leaned in without thinking, close enough that he caught the faint scent of whatever you were wearing, and he made himself look at the phone. by the time the managers wrapped things up, something had loosened between you in the way it always did when music was the thing being talked about.
the conversation had slipped from formal to comfortable so gradually that neither of you had noticed it happening. taehyun noticed it now, though. he noticed it, and said nothing, and gathered his things, and told himself again — very firmly — to be normal.
the studio was small and warmly lit. a single microphone stand had been set up near the far wall. two chairs angled slightly toward each other, close enough to feel intentional. before anything else, you shrugged off your oversized hoodie and set it down with your bag against the side wall, out of frame — the camera operator had gestured vaguely at the corner and said something about keeping the shot clean. you didn't think much of it at the time. you were already thinking about other things. the camera operator introduced himself and explained briefly how it would work. a few run-throughs first, then they would roll. no pressure to get it perfect on the first take. just sing it like you mean it, he said, which was easy advice to give and considerably harder to follow when you were standing this close to someone whose voice you had been listening to through earphones for months.
you and taehyun stood side by side while the crew made small adjustments to the lighting. neither of you said much. the easy conversation from the planning session had quieted into something more concentrated, the way things did right before a performance. "ready?" he asked, not looking at you, eyes on the microphone. "yeah," you said. the run-through started quietly. no camera yet, just the two of you finding where the song sat between your voices. the first verse was yours alone, and you focused on that, on the familiar shape of the melody, on keeping your breathing even. behind you the room was still.
then his voice came in. you had heard it so many times. through earphones, through phone speakers, through an edit someone had made of the two of you that had set all of this in motion. you thought you knew what it would sound like standing next to it. you didn't. it was warmer than you expected. fuller. it settled beside your voice the way something did when it had always belonged there, like two parts of a harmony that had been written with this exact distance in mind. you felt it in your chest before you fully processed it in your head. you kept singing. you were a professional, you kept singing. but your voice lifted slightly on the next line, not by design, just a natural response to what was happening in the room and he caught it and matched it, and for a moment the song became something neither of you had rehearsed.
taehyun had anticipated this moment for weeks and still wasn't prepared for it. he had imagined what your voice would sound like in the same room. he had run through every version of it — too different, too similar, needing adjustment, needing work. he had prepared himself for the possibility that the edit had been flattering, that the reality of singing beside you would require effort and careful calibration. it required none of that. your voice was the kind that made the room feel smaller in the best possible way. it took up exactly the right amount of space. and when he came in underneath it, something clicked into place so cleanly that it almost startled him. not because it was unexpected, but because it felt like confirming something he had quietly known for a long time.
he kept his eyes forward during the run-through. professional. focused. he was not going to turn and look at you while you guys were singing, that would be — unnecessary. he looked. just for a second, at the bridge, when your voice lifted on a note you hadn't done in any of your covers. something unplanned and entirely your own. your eyes were closed, which meant you didn't catch him looking, and he turned back before you opened them. the run-through ended. a beat of silence. "okay," the camera operator said from behind them, and his voice sounded slightly softer than before, like even he had felt it.
"i think we're ready to film." you looked at taehyun. he looked at you. neither of you said anything about what had just happened, because there wasn't really anything to say, and because some things were better left in the space between two people rather than handed over to words. "ready?" you asked this time. "yeah," he said. the camera started rolling.
you did three takes. the first was good. clean, controlled, the kind of performance that looked polished on camera. the second was better. looser, more comfortable, the nerves having burned off somewhere in the middle of the first verse. the third was the one. nobody needed to say it. the camera operator stopped the recording and looked up from his monitor with an expression that said everything, and one of the managers actually laughed quietly under her breath. "that's it," she said simply.
you stood there for a moment after the camera stopped, the last note still faintly alive in the room the way sounds sometimes lingered in small spaces. your heart was doing something loud and inconvenient, and you were fairly certain it had nothing to do with the performance itself and everything to do with the person still standing beside you. you cleared your throat.
"that was — " "yeah," taehyun said. you both laughed, which was easier than finishing the sentence. the crew began tidying up around you, quiet and efficient. someone handed you both water. the ordinary logistics of wrapping up a shoot settled over the room, and you were grateful for it — for something to do with your hands, for somewhere to look that wasn't him. your manager was already by the door, chatting with someone from the team. taehyun walked you out to the lobby. it was a small thing, entirely unnecessary, and he did it without making a point of it, falling into step beside you in the hallway as if he had simply been heading that way anyway. at the lobby door you turned to say goodbye. he had his hands in his pockets, weight shifted slightly back, and he looked — again — very normal. very human. nothing like the version of him that lived inside a phone screen.
"thank you." you said. "for — all of this. it was really good." "it was." he agreed. a pause. "safe flight." "thank you," you said again, which was one too many thank yous, and you knew it, and you pushed through the door anyway before your face could betray anything else. outside, the cold hit you immediately. you walked toward the car your manager had called, and you did not look back, and you thought about his voice settling beside yours like it had always belonged there. you thought about it the whole way to the hotel.
taehyun was almost out the door when one of the staff called after him. "oh.. taehyun-ssi, you left this in the studio." he turned. she was holding out a hoodie. oversized, soft looking, the kind of thing you grabbed without thinking on a cold morning. he almost reached for it automatically. then he stopped. he didn't own this hoodie. he looked at it for a second. then back at the staff member, who was already moving on to something else, clearly having filed it away as his without a second thought. he took it from her anyway, not wanting to hold up the hallway with an explanation.
back in the practice room, he set it down on the table and looked at it. it was yours. it had to be, it had been sitting in the corner with your bag, he had registered it distantly at some point during the shoot without really noting it.
she must have forgotten it when she left, which had been — he checked his phone — about two hours ago, he thought. he picked it up. it was light. he folded it very neatly, then immediately felt strange about having folded it, and set it back down. you were still in seoul. your flight wasn't for another two days. he knew that because the managers had mentioned it in passing during the planning meeting, something about coordinating schedules. which meant you didn't need it urgently, but you would notice it was missing eventually, and then you would have no way of knowing where it was or who had it. he should let you know.
he picked up his phone. put it down. picked it up again. the professional thing — the normal, straightforward thing — was to have his manager contact your manager. that was how these things were handled. clean, simple, no room for anything to be misconstrued.
he opened instagram instead. your profile was right there, the way it had been for months now on his private account, and before he could talk himself out of it he typed:
hi, one of the staff found a hoodie in the studio after you left
i think it might be yours. just wanted to let you know so it doesn't get lost.
he read it back. it was perfectly normal. it was a completely normal message to send. he added:
hope you got back okay
then deleted that immediately, because that was not perfectly normal, that was unnecessary, and he was supposed to be normal about this. he sent the first message. and added:
i'm taehyun by the way
he put his phone face down on the table. stared at the ceiling.
his phone buzzed almost immediately — beomgyu, asking where he was for lunch — and taehyun's heart did something mortifying before he registered whose name was on the screen. he texted beomgyu back and then sat very still, waiting for a notification that may or may not come, telling himself he was not waiting for anything at all.
a dm. from an account you didn't recognize. a weird profile picture, a username that meant nothing to you. so you almost scrolled past it. but you didn't. you opened it, read it once, then sat up without meaning to and read it again.
then you looked at the corner of your room where you usually dropped your bag when you came in, as if expecting your hoodie to materialize there and prove him wrong. it did not. you typed back:
oh no..
yes that's mine, i'm so sorry. i can come pick it up tomorrow if that's okay?
his reply came faster than you expected.
of course
or i can bring it to you if that's easier, i don't want you to have to come all the way back.
you stared at that for a moment. the idea of him showing up at your hotel with your hoodie folded under his arm was not something your heart was currently equipped to handle. you typed:
no no, i'll come. i have nothing planned tomorrow anyway.
just let me know when works.
a pause. then:
i'm in the building all afternoon. come whenever.
you set your phone down on the mattress. then picked it up again to reread the exchange, which was a thing you were not going to examine too closely. you put it back down. outside the window, seoul was settling into evening, all lit up and entirely indifferent to the fact that you were going back tomorrow.
taehyun read your last message three times. i'll come. i have nothing planned tomorrow anyway. he put his phone in his pocket and went to find beomgyu for lunch, and he was quiet enough during the meal that beomgyu looked at him twice and then said, with great suspicion, "what happened to you?" "nothing." taehyun said. beomgyu looked at him for another long moment. then he pointed his chopsticks and said, "it's the girl, isn't it?" taehyun did not answer, which was an answer.
beomgyu leaned back with the expression of someone who had just won a bet with himself. "i knew it. i knew it the second you agreed to the collab without even pretending to think about it." he shook his head. "you're so obvious, man." "i'm not obvious," taehyun said. "i'm professional." "you folded her hoodie. you don't even fold your clean clothes that neatly." taehyun went very still. he looked at the hoodie next to him. beomgyu grinned. " a stranger's hoodie is sitting and eating with us." "she's not a stranger," taehyun said, which was the wrong thing to say, and he knew it the moment beomgyu's grin widened. he ate the rest of his lunch in silence.
the next afternoon, a staff member led you down a quieter corridor than the one you had walked yesterday, past a row of closed doors, stopping at one near the end. "he's just in here," she said, smiling, and knocked twice before leaving you to it. a muffled "come in" from the other side.
the room was small — a vocal booth with the glass partition open, a keyboard pushed against one wall, a couple of chairs and a music stand with some handwritten notes on it. taehyun was sitting on a stool with his phone in his hand, and he stood up when you came in with the particular quickness of someone who had been waiting and didn't want it to show. your hoodie was folded on the chair beside him.
"hi," you said. "hi," he said. a beat. "it's in good condition. i didn't — " he picked it up and held it out, then seemed to realize mid-gesture how strange that sentence had been and stopped. "here." you took it. "thank you for holding onto it." you hugged it to your chest without really thinking about it, mostly to have something to do with your hands. "and for messaging me. i would have realized at the airport and completely panicked." "of course." he sat back down, and you took the other chair, and for a moment it was just the two of you in a small warm room with the quiet hum of equipment around you and the whole day stretching out unhurried.
"how was this morning?" you asked. "vocal practice. then a meeting." he tilted his head slightly. "you?" "i walked around a little." you paused. "well. i tried to. i got lost within about ten minutes." he smiled at that. "first time in the city?" "is it that obvious." "a little." not unkindly. he leaned forward, elbows on his knees. "where did you end up?" "i genuinely have no idea. somewhere with a very large convenience store and a park." you considered. "it was nice actually. once i stopped trying to figure out where i was." he laughed — properly this time, not the quiet restrained kind — and it changed his whole face in a way you were not prepared for. you looked down at the hoodie in your lap.
you talked about the performance first, the way it was natural to how the third take had felt different from the inside, whether the bridge had worked the way you hoped, what the final cut might look like. it was easy conversation, the kind that didn't require effort, and taehyun found himself relaxing into it without meaning to. then you said, almost offhandedly, "i keep thinking about how strange it is. that a video someone else made is the reason any of this happened." "the edit," he said. "yeah." you turned your hoodie over in your hands. "i saw it and thought.. that's a nice thing to want. and then just. moved on. i didn't think it would actually — " you gestured vaguely at the room around you. "me neither," he said. a small silence settled, comfortable rather than awkward.
"can i ask you something?" you said. "yeah." "what is it like?" you said. "doing this.. the way you do it. the scale of it, i mean. i perform for.. a room. maybe a few hundred people on a good night. you perform for thousands. tens of thousands." you paused. "does it feel different? or does it just feel like the same thing, bigger?"
taehyun considered it genuinely. "it feels like the same thing," he said slowly, "until it doesn't. there's a point where the crowd gets big enough that you stop being able to see individual faces, and something shifts. it becomes.. more abstract. more like a feeling than a meeting." he looked at you. "what you have is different," he said. "you get to do it entirely on your own terms." you considered that. "you don't?"
"not always." a pause. "most of the time the song is mine, is ours. but everything around it — the stage, the setlist, the timing — that belongs to a lot of people." you were quiet for a moment. "does that bother you?"
"no," he said. then, more honestly: "sometimes." you nodded, like you understood without needing it explained further.
outside the room, somewhere down the corridor, a door opened and closed. the building continued around you, indifferent. in here it was still.
"what are you working on?" he asked, after a while. "you mentioned a new song, on the call." "oh." you looked slightly caught. "it's not finished yet." "that's okay." "it's not even.. it's just a sketch, really. the structure isn't fully there." "that's also okay," he said.
you looked at him for a moment, like you were deciding something. then you set your hoodie down on the chair beside you and said, "okay. but you have to not be weird about it." "i won't be weird about it."
you turned to face forward slightly, hands loose in your lap, and after one quiet breath you started to sing. it was nothing like the song you had filmed yesterday. it was smaller, more uncertain in the best possible way — the kind of song that was still figuring out what it wanted to be, all raw edges and instinct. your voice moved through it carefully, like you were feeling out the shape of it in real time. taehyun listened without moving.
it was good. not good in the way that was easy to articulate, not technically impressive or immediately striking, but good in the way that made you want to sit very still and not disturb whatever it was. it had the quality of something honest, something that hadn't been smoothed out yet.
when you reached a point where the melody seemed to trail into uncertainty, you slowed, then stopped. "that's as far as i have," you said, not looking at him. "the second part," he said quietly. "where it trails off. i think it wants to go up."
you frowned, not dismissively, just thinking. then you hummed the line again, let it rise the way he had suggested, and went still. "yeah," you said. barely audible. "can i — " he said, and you nodded before he finished asking.
he picked up the melody where you had left it, taking it up and then turning it somewhere new, not completing it so much as offering a direction. you came back in without discussion, finding the harmony the way you always seemed to — naturally, without searching for it — and for a few minutes you were inside something unfinished and entirely yours, two voices moving around a song that didn't have a name yet. it ended the way it had begun, quietly, without announcement.
taehyun reached for his phone on the stool beside him. "can i — from the second part, can we do it again? i want to remember it." you blinked. then smiled, small and a little surprised. "yeah, okay."
he opened the camera and propped the phone against the music stand, angled toward you. you ran through it again, just the second half, just the part that had come alive in the room between you. when it ended he reached over and stopped the recording. he looked at it briefly. it was rough and unlit and entirely unpolished and it was one of the best things he had filmed in a long time.
"i'll send it to you," he said. then looked up. "..what's your number?" you looked at him. he looked back, perfectly neutral, as if this were a completely routine question with no weight behind it at all.
you told him your number. he saved it, then opened a message thread and sent the video without comment. your phone buzzed in your pocket. you didn't take it out.
"thank you," you said. "for.. the song. and the hoodie." you stood, pulling it on. "and for not being weird about it." "i said i wouldn't be." "people say things," you said.
he smiled, and you picked up your bag, and neither of you made any move to extend the goodbye into something it wasn't — because you both knew, without saying it, that this was not a goodbye in the way goodbyes usually felt. your phone had his message in it. he had your number saved in his. it was, by any reasonable measure, just a formality.
Hii, your 'this is my answer' fic was everything i didn't know i needed to read. Someone else commented that it felt like a hug and i agree! It made me tear up a bit. Wow! I really liked it, the way you described the gradual loss of touch with situations and people and how sometimes finding a random person and connecting with them can change you a bit. This is getting long (sorry..) I'll surely read your other works! Cheers♡
hi!! i’m genuinely so glad you liked it. it was probably one of the hardest fics for me to write, especially trying to integrate the lyrics lol 😭
but mostly because it felt a bit more personal than what i usually write, so i was a little nervous about how it would come across. it really means a lot that you could resonate with it <3
genre : fluff | angst | established relationships.
word count : 4653. ( ~900 words for each member.)
warnings : performance anxiety (taehyun), mild jealousy (yeonjun), mentions of exhaustion and overworking.
summary : it's comeback season so they're everywhere and nowhere all at once. five ways they stick with you anyway.
author's note : i want to let you know that this fic wasn’t planned at all, and was written purely on impulse while listening to the album on repeat. it might be the longest thing i’ve written in a single day — guess this is what a txt comeback does to a human lol. i hope you’ll enjoy this!
ps. someone seriously needs to stop me from saying “is this a dream?” every five seconds 😭
also, me handwriting txt lyrics because i cannot find anything on pinterest is a never ending saga. it’s like the 3rd time
your calls with soobin have this strange rhythm during this time of year. they happen at absurd hours. sometimes so rushed it feels like you're teenagers hiding a relationship from strict parents, afraid of getting caught. sometimes completely unplanned, arriving out of nowhere. other times carefully scheduled, so structured it feels less like talking to your boyfriend and more like attending a meeting with a coworker.
he doesn't have much time these days. comeback preparations have taken over everything. practice rooms, recordings, meetings that always stretch longer than they should. even when he calls, it never feels like the world fully stops for him. but he still calls. that part never changes. and that alone makes you grateful enough that you don't really mind the time or how long it lasts.
—
he calls you after practice. you can hear it in his voice before he even says anything proper. the tiredness, the way his words come slightly slower, like he's still half somewhere else. "you're still awake?" he asks. "i think so," you reply. there's a pause, then a quiet exhale from him, like that answer is enough.
you don't remember when your eyes close. you were listening to him talk — something about today, or maybe nothing important at all. his voice just fills the space between you two, and then it starts to fade, not on purpose, just slowly slipping away like you're no longer holding onto it.
he notices before you do. "you're asleep," he says quietly. there's no surprise in his voice, only certainty. you don't answer. your breathing is already even. a small smile lingers on his lips.
when you wake up, it takes a moment to understand what's happening. voices, but not his. different. clearer now, structured, like a meeting. you sit up slowly, rubbing your eyes. you try to speak. "hello?" no response. you try again, more confused this time, but quickly realize he can't hear you. but not because the call dropped. the screen is still on. he's still there. except now he's sitting in a meeting room, slightly leaned forward, listening carefully. papers in front of him. someone speaks off-camera, and he responds.
it takes you a few seconds to fully process it. he muted you. and brought you into his meeting with him. not in a way that feels deliberate or dramatic. more like it was the most natural thing in the world.
you're just… there. quiet. unseen. unspoken for. like a presence he didn't think needed explaining.
you stay still for a moment, unsure what to do. there's a strange intimacy in it that doesn't announce itself. not romantic in a loud way, not even fully conscious at first. it's just him continuing his day while you exist somewhere at the edge of it.
he shifts slightly in his seat. his posture is the same as always when he's working — focused, attentive, a little distant in the way people get when they're trying to hold too many things at once. someone says something you don't fully catch. he nods. responds. his voice is steady, practiced. and still, the call stays open. still, you're there.
you think he hasn't noticed you're awake yet. you stay quite, keep watching. after some time his gaze shifts — not fully turning, just a small adjustment, like something in him has registered you again. his eyes find the phone. find you.
he doesn't react much. just pauses for half a second longer than necessary. then his expression changes, softly, almost imperceptibly. not a smile exactly. something gentler than that. acknowledgment.
you don't say anything. you're not sure you should. so you just watch him the way he watched you. the way he listens when others speak. the way he writes something down without breaking focus. the way he holds two places at once without seeming torn between them.
it comes to you slowly, without urgency: he didn't keep you there because he forgot to hang up. he kept you there because you were safe enough to stay without needing anything. because you didn't require interruption. because staying, for him, doesn't always have to look like presence in the way people usually define it.
the meeting continues. you stay quiet through all of it. after a while, his hand moves slightly toward the phone, not enough for anyone else to notice, just enough for you to understand. a small adjustment. a reminder that the connection is still there. still open. still you.
—
it becomes a thing, gradually, the way most things between you two do. without announcement.
calls that exist less as conversations and more as proof. proof that you're both still there, still moving through your separate days with the other somewhere nearby.
sometimes you're cooking when he calls, and he doesn't say much, just hums occasionally while reading something you can't see. sometimes he's on the way to practice, and all you hear is the sound of footsteps and occasional voices passing by. sometimes neither of you looks at the screen for long stretches — there's nothing to show, nothing urgent to say — but the call stays open anyway. like a window left slightly ajar.
there are nights you fall asleep first and mornings you wake up to a call still running, a dark and quiet screen on the other end, your battery about to die, him long gone to rehearsal but not yet having hung up.
you've stopped measuring it by words exchanged or time given. soobin doesn't love loudly during comeback season. but he calls. and when he does, he stays, in whatever way staying is available to him that day.
and somewhere along the way, that becomes enough. more than enough, actually. it becomes its own language. one that doesn't need translation.
you're there. he's there. the line is open.
that's how you stick with each other.
YEONJUN — yours, still.
the first teaser drops on a tuesday.
you find out the way everyone else does — a notification, a thumbnail, a carefully lit image of him staring at something just beyond the camera. you click on it without thinking, the way you always do, and then you stop. because he looks like that. like something the world decided to keep for itself.
you screenshot it anyway. you're not sure why. you could just call him. you know the person behind that face better than anyone. you don't call.
by the end of the week, he's everywhere. that's not unusual. you knew this was coming, had been bracing for it quietly in the way you always do around comeback season. but knowing doesn't make it easier to round a corner and find him on a billboard, larger than he has any right to be, looking down at the street like he belongs to it. his jaw, the line of his shoulder, the particular way he holds stillness when someone tells him to. all of it magnified and public and entirely out of reach. you stand there longer than you mean to.
a woman next to you says something to her friend — something about him, something admiring — and you feel it then, the strange and irrational grief of it. not jealousy exactly. something quieter and harder to name. like watching someone you love through glass and understanding, for a moment, that the glass is permanent. that this version of him — the one on the billboard, in the teasers, in every carefully crafted frame — belongs to everyone now. and that belonging leaves very little room for you.
your phone buzzes.
did you see?
three words. no context needed. you smile before you can stop yourself, still standing on the pavement with your neck craned upward.
i saw.
you type back.
you want to say something else too. something about how you're standing beneath him right now, how strange it felt, how there are a hundred people walking past who know his face but not the way he laughs when something catches him off guard, not the way he gets quiet when he's tired, not the specific way he says your name when he's not performing anything for anyone. you want to say: none of those versions of you are mine. you don't say any of it.
you look good
you send instead. his reply comes fast:
just good?
and there he is. just like that, behind the teaser and the billboard and all that careful distance — just him, being annoying about it, and you have to press your lips together to keep from laughing in the middle of the street.
—
you don't see him for another two weeks.
the concept photos keep coming. each one a different angle, a different mood, the same deliberate remove. you watch all of them. you save some of them. you read the comments occasionally and then immediately regret it, not because anything is cruel, but because the adoration is so enormous and so impersonal all at once. they love him loudly, the way fans do, with a kind of devotion that doesn't require knowing him. and he deserves that. he's always deserved that. it just sits strangely sometimes, is all.
he calls when he can. the calls are short, mostly. he sounds tired but wired, the way he gets when there's a lot happening and his body hasn't caught up yet. you talk about nothing important and you're glad for it — glad for the mundane, the easy, the version of him that doesn't have to be anything specific.
"you've gone quiet." he says one night. "i'm just listening." you tell him. a pause. "you're doing that thing." "what thing?" "where you're thinking something and deciding not to say it."
you hate that he knows that. you love that he knows that. "go to sleep, yeonjun." he laughs, soft and a little frayed at the edges. "okay.." he says. "i'll see you soon."
soon turns out to be a thursday afternoon. no preamble, no planned occasion — he just shows up, the way he sometimes does when his schedule opens unexpectedly and he'd rather spend the gap with you than anywhere else.
you open the door and he's just.. there. in a hoodie. looking tired in a real way, not the beautiful staged exhaustion from the teasers but the actual kind, the kind with slightly reddened eyes and a crease on his cheek from where he probably slept in the car.
he steps inside and you're about to say something, something light and easy, when he pulls you into a hug without warning. not romantic exactly. just immediate. like he needed somewhere to put himself down for a moment.
and then you smell it. whatever it is, his shampoo or his jacket or just him, something that hasn't changed, something that exists only in this register and nowhere else. not in the teasers. not on the billboard. not in any of the photographs. it almost hurts, how familiar it is.
"hi." he says into your shoulder. "hi." you say back. you stand like that for a while. outside, somewhere, there are billboards and previews and a million curated images of him. in here, there's just this. his weight slightly against you, his breathing slowing down, the quiet that doesn't belong to anyone but the two of you.
the world gets pieces of him. you know that. you've always known that, and mostly you've made your peace with it.
but this — the way he smells, the way he exhales when he finally stops moving, the way he's just a person when no one is asking him to be anything else — is the part comes home. this is the part that sticks with you.
BEOMGYU — hidden frequency.
beomgyu on a live is a specific kind of chaos.
you've learned to watch with the volume low when you're in public, because there's no predicting him. he'll be perfectly composed for thirty seconds and then say something that makes the comments section lose their minds, or start doing a bit that has no setup and no punchline and somehow lands anyway. he's funny in the way that feels accidental but isn't. everything he does is more considered than it looks. you know this better than most.
which is why, twelve minutes into the live, when he picks up the guitar and starts playing something that is technically background noise, technically nothing, you sit up straight.
four chords, slightly lazy, like he's just noodling. the members aren't paying attention. the comments are focused on something yeonjun just said. and beomgyu is looking at the ceiling, playing like he has no particular reason to be playing anything at all.
except it's your song. not a famous one. not something that would mean anything to anyone watching. a song you'd sent him once at an hour you're slightly embarrassed to remember, with a message that said something like this one got me and nothing else. he'd replied with a single voice memo — just him going hm in an evaluative way, and something sarcastic about the hour — and you'd assumed he'd forgotten about it immediately.
apparently, he hasn't forgotten about it. he plays it for maybe twenty seconds. then drops into something else entirely, seamless, like it never happened. taehyun says something beside him and he turns and grins and the moment is gone.
your phone is already open to your chat with him before you've made the conscious decision to pick it up.
was that— you stop. delete it. think for a second.
you're something else
you send instead.
the live is still going. he's mid sentence about something, laughing at himself, gesturing widely. and then his eyes flick down. the briefest glance. a smile that's different from the one he's been wearing for the camera, smaller and more private, there and gone so fast you'd miss it if you didn't know what to look for. he doesn't reply until after the live ends.
i have no idea what you're talking about
then, immediately after:
did you enjoy the live?
you stare at that for a long moment. the audacity of him. the complete, staggering audacity — to act like he didn't just hide something meant only for you inside a live watched by tens of thousands of people, to play innocent about it, and then in the same breath ask if you enjoyed it. no pretense. no commitment to the bit.
i liked it
you write back.
his response is a string of emojis that communicates nothing and everything at once. you're smiling so hard your face hurts.
—
it keeps happening.
you start to notice the pattern. or maybe you'd always noticed and only now have a name for it. the way he tilts his head in one of the concept photos. something he'd pointed out to you once, laughing, saying you always do this when you're listening, something you'd denied and he'd imitated badly on purpose just to make you laugh. and there it is, frozen in a shoot seen by thousands, deliberate and unhurried and entirely yours. a color he keeps wearing that he knows is your favorite, which he would also deny. none of it is confirmable. none of it is meant to be.
that's the thing about beomgyu — he's loudest when he's keeping something quiet. the performance is real and the feeling underneath it is also real and he sees no contradiction in both being true at once. the world gets the gesture. you get to know what it means.
—
one night he calls you after a schedule runs long, voice still carrying that slightly electric quality he gets after performing, like he hasn't fully come back down yet.
"did you watch today?" he asks. "i watched." "and?" "and you're so normal," you say. "incredibly normal. the most normal person i've ever met."
he laughs — that real one, not the camera one, though honestly the difference is smaller than people think. "you're the worst," he says warmly. like it's a compliment. like being your worst is something he's actively working toward.
"get some sleep, beomgyu." "yeah, yeah." a pause, comfortable and unhurried. "hey.." "what." "i'm glad you catch them," he says. quietly, without fanfare, the way he says the things he actually means. "the things i leave."
you don't say anything for a moment. "i always catch them," you tell him. and you hear him smile through the phone. you're sure of it.
this is what it looks like, you think, when beomgyu sticks with you. loudly, publicly, and somehow only ever for you.
TAEHYUN — chosen, always.
everything in taehyun's life has a place right now.
you know this without him having to say it, you can see it in the way he talks about his days, the careful sequencing of it. practice then recording then schedule then rest, each thing slotted in with the kind of intention that doesn't leave much room for accident.
he's always been like this. organized in a way that isn't cold, just considered. like he believes his time is worth something and wants to spend it accordingly.
which is why it still catches you, every time, that he spends so much of it on you. not in a sprawling, unstructured way. fifteen minutes on a tuesday. a call on the way between schedules. a window he finds at 10pm that he gives entirely to you without looking at his phone once. the amounts vary. the quality doesn't.
when taehyun is there, he's completely there. no half attention, no one foot out the door. you have learned to stop apologizing for taking up his time because he always says the same thing when you do: i'm here because i want to be.
not effortlessly. deliberately.
—
it's a facetime call, casual, the kind that happens in the gaps between things. he's somewhere that looks like a dressing room, half out of a jacket, and you're at your desk with your laptop open.
"what are you doing?" he asks. "just preparing a slide," you say. "for a presentation next wednesday. nothing important." you say it the way you always say things like this — lightly, moving on before he can stop on it. you minimize the window. switch to something that looks less like work. "how was practice?"
he lets you change the subject. tells you about practice, about something stupid that happened, about how he's tired in a specific way that's different from regular tired. you listen and laugh in the right places and by the end of the call it feels like a normal conversation, easy, unbothered.
you hang up feeling fine about it. he hangs up and opens his calendar.
the thing is, taehyun knows. he's known for a while — the way your voice goes slightly careful around deadlines, the way you default to it's fine and nothing important for exactly the things that aren't.
you don't do it to deceive him. you do it because you love him and his schedule is brutal right now and you have decided, quietly and without consulting him, that your nervous system is not his problem to manage.
he has never agreed with this decision. he just doesn't say so directly. instead he simply remembers. holds onto the small things you let slip without meaning to. shows up for them quietly, without ever making you feel watched.
so when his schedule opens up the morning of your presentation, it isn't really a coincidence.
—
you're outside the room at ten forty, notes open on your phone, reading the same bullet point for the eighth time. you're fine. you're completely fine. your hands are just a little cold, that's all.
your phone buzzes.
downstairs.
you look up from your notes and type back:
what?
i have an hour. come down for a second.
you take the stairs without fully deciding to. he's outside, in a jacket, looking like he's just come from somewhere and is about to go somewhere else, which is probably true. he has a coffee — yours, the specific order, which you have never had to tell him twice. he holds it out. you take it.
"you didn't have to..." you start. "i know," he says. not dismissive. just certain.
you stand there for a moment, on the pavement, the morning going on around you. he doesn't ask how you're feeling. he doesn't give you a speech. he just stays for the few minutes he has, talking about something easy, letting you exist next to him without it being about the presentation at all.
and somehow that's the thing that loosens something in your chest. not reassurance. just him, being there, making the next hour feel smaller.
when he has to leave he looks at you once, direct and calm. "you got this." he says simply. then he goes. you go back upstairs. you go in. you're fine — genuinely, solidly fine — in a way that feels different from how you were before he came.
it goes well. not perfectly, but well. you find your place when you lose it. you finish. you text him after:
it went well.
his reply comes between schedules, probably:
i know.
then:
told you.
you smile at your phone in the middle of the corridor, a little embarrassed by how much that costs him and how little he makes of it.
that's the thing about taehyun. he never makes you feel like a burden he's chosen to carry. he just shows up with the coffee and the calm and the five words that are somehow exactly enough, and leaves before you have time to thank him properly.
with him, staying was never going to be effortless. his life doesn't have space for effortless. everything costs something — time, energy, presence — and he knows that better than anyone.
he pays it anyway. without making you feel like a debt.
that's how he sticks with you. not because it's easy. because he keeps choosing to.
HUENINGKAI — never far.
you don't notice it at first.
that's the thing about comeback season — there's so much of him everywhere that you stop being able to look too closely at any one thing. the concept photos, the lives, the social media content that drops at random hours.
you watch what you can. you save what you can. you send him things occasionally, small things, and he replies when he's able, which is less often than usual and later than usual and you understand this, you do, you've made your peace with the particular loneliness of loving someone in the middle of their busiest season.
you just miss him. quietly, consistently, in a way you don't mention because what would be the point.
so you almost miss it.
the first time is a vlive — he's in what looks like a waiting room somewhere, talking about nothing in particular, and there in the corner of the frame, half tucked behind his bag, is a small white seal. round. squishy. very obviously well-loved in the way stuffed animals get when they've been carried everywhere. you sit up slightly. look at it for a second. you have the same one. yours is on your bed right now. he doesn't mention it. the live ends.
the second time is a photo one of the staff posts — kai asleep in the back of a car, head tilted, completely gone in that boneless way he sleeps. and there, in the seat beside him, buckled in with the actual seatbelt, is the seal. buckled in. you stare at this for a long time.
the comments are already going feral about it.
he seatbelted the plushie.
this man seatbelted a stuffed animal.
i need to know this plushie's skincare routine because it's being treated better than i am.
you read through them smiling in a way that feels slightly private, like you're laughing at something slightly different than everyone else is. you screenshot it. you don't send it to him. he knows you've seen it.
—
it keeps appearing.
in the background of a photo taehyun posts. on the table during a break in a behind the scenes clip, next to his water bottle like it belongs there. in a live where yeonjun spots it and picks it up and kai takes it back with an immediacy that is clearly meant to seem casual and doesn't.
fans start to notice. of course they do.
he takes it everywhere. it's been in three different locations this week.
the seal is working harder than i am during this comeback.
and then, during another live, he's tired, loose, the kind of unguarded that comes with exhaustion. he's holding the seal without seeming to notice he's holding it. someone in the comments asks its name.
he looks at it for a second. "mandu," he says, like it's obvious.the comments explode.
MANDU.
he named it mandu.
the mandu era is upon us.
you're watching from your couch, your own seal in your lap, and you have to put your phone face down on the cushion beside you and breathe for a second.
mandu. he named it mandu because of an afternoon that went completely wrong — the dough too thick, the filling spilling out, the whole thing a small disaster that ended with you both eating imperfect dumplings on the kitchen floor and laughing about it for longer than it deserved.
he'd looked at the seal afterward and said this one also looks like a failed mandu and you'd said that was mean and he'd said it was a compliment and somehow that had stuck.
fans are now calling it the mandu era.
they have no idea.
you pick your phone back up. open your camera. prop your own seal up against your knee and take a photo. just the two of you, you and your mandu, nothing that would mean anything to anyone else. you send it to him with no caption.
he's still on the live. you watch him glance at his phone once, briefly. his expression doesn't change exactly. but something in it does, something small and warm, a softening around the eyes that the camera catches and that the comments immediately notice.
he just smiled at his phone. whatever he just saw i want to be it.
he puts his phone down. keeps going. doesn't say anything. twenty minutes later, after the live ends, your phone buzzes.
a photo. his mandu, propped up on what looks like a dressing room counter, facing the camera. and his hand just visible at the edge of the frame, holding yours up beside it on his screen, your earlier photo, so they're next to each other.
no caption from him either. you don't need one.
this is what it looks like, you think, when kai misses you. not in a way he'd necessarily name. he just takes the small round seal that matches yours and brings it everywhere he goes. buckles it into cars. lets it appear in the background of a hundred things without ever drawing attention to it.
the world thinks it's a cute bit. the mandu era, they're calling it. they find it endearing in the way they find everything about him endearing, which is to say completely, which is to say they have no idea they're watching someone carry a person with them through every room he enters this month.
but you know. you know because you're doing the same thing. your mandu has been on your desk, your nightstand, your couch. wherever you've been sitting when you missed him, which is most places, which is most of the time.
you're both just walking around with the same feeling, held in the same shape.
that's how he sticks with you. that's how you know.
genre : fluff | established relationship | slice of life.
word count : 1129.
warnings : none.
summary : beomgyu has a habit of turning five more minutes into an hour. you have a habit of letting him.
‿︵‿୨♡୧‿︵‿︵‿୨♡୧‿︵‿︵‿୨♡୧‿︵‿
the first alarm goes off at 7:00.
it’s not even loud, just that soft, annoying melody you thought would be “gentle” when you set it the night before. now it just feels like a personal attack.
you don’t move. mostly because you can’t. beomgyu’s arm is loosely thrown over you, heavy with sleep, his hand resting somewhere near your waist like he forgot to let go sometime during the night.
next to you, beomgyu groans like the sound physically hurts him. “make it stop,” he mumbles, voice low and rough, his face half-buried in your shoulder. “you’re closer,” you mumble back, eyes still closed. the alarm keeps going. neither of you moves.
it takes a full ten seconds before you feel him shift barely, just enough to reach toward the nightstand. his arm drags slightly over you as he moves, warm and slow, like he’s not fully aware of it. he blindly pats around until he finds his phone. the sound cuts off abruptly.
silence.
he lets out a long breath, and instead of moving away, he just… settles again. his forehead ends up resting somewhere near your collarbone now, his arm still draped over you like it belongs there.
“that was violent,” he says. “it was a ringtone.” “it was aggressive.” you let out a small laugh, your hand instinctively coming up to rest lightly against his arm.
neither of you moves after that. you can feel his breathing. slow and even against you. the warmth of him is everywhere now, pressed close in that careless way that only happens when no one’s fully awake enough to overthink it.
then—
“5 more minutes,” he says. of course he does. you already know how this goes. you both know how this goes. you should say no. you should sit up, drag yourself out of bed, start the day like a responsible person.
instead, your fingers curl slightly into the fabric of his shirt.
“…okay.”
there’s a soft sound next to you—something like a satisfied hum. “good choice,” he murmurs. his arm tightens just a little. not fully, not enough to make a statement out of it, just enough to pull you a bit closer without thinking.
you don’t fight it. you don’t think about it. you just let your eyes close again.
‿︵‿୨♡୧‿︵‿︵‿୨♡୧‿︵‿︵‿୨♡୧‿︵‿
when you wake up the second time, it’s warmer. and brighter. and quieter. too quiet.
you blink slowly, disoriented, your cheek pressed against something solid. it takes you a second to realize that it’s him.
somehow, in those “five minutes,” you ended up half on top of him, your head resting against his chest, his arm now properly wrapped around you. like at some point, one of you moved closer, and the other didn’t stop it.
you can feel his heartbeat. slow. steady. for a moment, you just stay there.
then—
“…wait.”
your voice is soft, still caught in sleep. no response.
you tilt your head slightly, just enough to glance at the light coming through the window.
it’s way too bright. “…wait.” you frown, shifting just enough to reach your phone from where it’s trapped somewhere near the edge of the bed.
8:12.
you freeze. then you push yourself up just enough to look at him.
“beomgyu,” you mumble, nudging him lightly with your hand still resting on his chest. he makes a small sound, more of a complaint than a response, his arm tightening automatically like he’s trying to keep you there.
“we’re late,” you say. he doesn’t open his eyes. “five minutes,” he mumbles. you blink. “it’s been an hour.” that makes him frown.
slowly, reluctantly, his eyes open just a little. he looks up at you, clearly not processing anything properly. “…what?” “it’s 8:12.” he squints. you tilt your phone so he can see. he stares at it for a long second.
then, without warning, his head drops back into the pillow, and his arm pulls you down with him. you let out a small, surprised sound as you fall back against him, your head landing right where it was before.
“it’s fine,” he says, already closing his eyes again. you push yourself up slightly, resting your weight against him. “…it’s not fine.” “it is,” he insists, voice quieter now, softer. “if we don’t go, we can’t be late.”
you stare at him. “…that’s not how that works.” “it works for me.”
you let out a quiet laugh, shaking your head. “we had to be there at eight.” “and now it’s eight twelve,” he says, like this is perfectly logical, his hand absentmindedly tracing small, lazy patterns against your arm. “so we missed it. which means there’s no point in going.”
“…you’re unbelievable.” “thank you.” you hesitate. you’re still half lying on him, your hand resting lightly against his chest without thinking. his fingers are still there too, brushing against your sleeve in that slow, unfocused way.
you look at the time again. then back at him. “…we’re really just not going?” you ask. he opens one eye. “do you want to?”
you pause. you think about getting up. about pulling away, getting dressed, stepping out into a day that already feels rushed and off. then you shift slightly, your cheek pressing back against his chest, listening to the quiet rhythm there.
“…not really,” you admit. his expression softens instantly. “then don’t." it’s so simple it almost makes you laugh.
you exhale, sinking down properly this time, letting your weight settle against him. his arm adjusts around you again, more intentional now, holding you a little closer.
“…we’re going to regret this later,” you mumble. “probably.” “a lot.” “definitely.” a pause.
his hand comes up, resting lightly against the back of your head, not pushing—just there. “worth it,” he murmurs. you huff quietly. “…yeah.”
neither of you moves after that. the light keeps spilling into the room, but it feels softer now somehow. your fingers curl slightly into his shirt. his thumb brushes absentmindedly against your hair.
“this is your fault,” you mumble. “no,” he says immediately, voice barely above a whisper. “this was a joint decision.” “you said five minutes.” “you agreed.” “…you’re annoying.” “and you like me anyway.”
you don’t answer. you just shift a little closer instead. that’s enough.
there’s a quiet stretch of nothing. just breathing. warmth. the steady rise and fall under your cheek.
after a moment, he speaks again, softer now. sleepier. “you’re not getting up, right?” you tilt your head just enough to look at him. his eyes are barely open, something quiet and steady in them.
“no.” he hums, like that’s all he needed. his eyes slip closed again, his hand still resting where it was, warm and unmoving.
you stay like that for a moment. then a little longer.
genre: angst | introspective | hurt/comfort | can also be read as platonic.
word count: 3152.
warnings: themes of identity loss, social masking and people-pleasing, quiet loneliness within friendships, the pressure to become easier to be around, and emotional suppression.
ps. please read with care <3
summary: you don’t notice when you start disappearing—until someone finally makes you stop.
author’s note: i’ve wanted to write something for the first anniversary of panic for a while now. panic has always meant more to me than just a song by my bias, so even though i missed the date, i still wanted to write this. i hope there aren’t any issues with the korean lyrics.
❦ ⊱ 𖥧𖡼 ✿ 𖡼𖥧 ⊰ ❦ ⊱ 𖥧𖡼 ✿ 𖡼𖥧 ⊰ ❦ ⊱ 𖥧𖡼 ✿ 𖡼𖥧 ⊰ ❦
you have a very particular way of disappearing.
not the dramatic kind, no slamming doors, no tearful exits, no moment you can point to and say there, that's when it happened. just a slow, practiced erosion. a joke swallowed before it reaches your mouth. an opinion softened until it means nothing, until it's just air with a little shape to it. a laugh adjusted to the right volume, the right pitch, the right moment.
you've gotten so good at it that sometimes you don't even notice the disappearing. you just look up one day and there's a little less of you than there used to be, and you think huh, and then someone says something and you laugh at the right moment and forget to think about it again.
❦ ⊱ 𖥧𖡼 ✿ 𖡼𖥧 ⊰ ❦ ⊱ 𖥧𖡼 ✿ 𖡼𖥧 ⊰ ❦ ⊱ 𖥧𖡼 ✿ 𖡼𖥧 ⊰ ❦
your friends are not bad people. that's the thing that makes it so hard to name.
they're fun and warm and you've known them long enough that leaving feels like amputation, like you'd be cutting off something that grew with you, something that has your history threaded through it. soomin was there when your grandmother died. jiwon held your hand through your worst exam season. raeun knows the name of every person you've ever had a crush on. these are not small things. you don't throw away small things, and you definitely don't throw away people who know you the way they do.
it's just that somewhere along the way, they developed a frequency. something settled and specific, a particular register of humor and opinion and volume that became the group, the thing you all were together. and you were funny once — genuinely, specifically funny in a way that was yours — and then at some point your jokes started landing slightly wrong. a beat too slow. a reference too niche. a little too much, a little too strange. and you noticed. of course you noticed. you're good at noticing things, you've always been good at noticing things.
so you adjusted. you turned your dial down until the static cleared.
❦ ⊱ 𖥧𖡼 ✿ 𖡼𖥧 ⊰ ❦ ⊱ 𖥧𖡼 ✿ 𖡼𖥧 ⊰ ❦ ⊱ 𖥧𖡼 ✿ 𖡼𖥧 ⊰ ❦
it happens so gradually that by the time you're sitting in the cafeteria on a thursday with your rice going cold, you don't even register it as loss. it's just the shape of things. soomin is telling a story about her professor, and jiwon keeps interrupting with commentary, and raeun is on her phone but laughing at the right moments, and you are there. present. accounted for. performing the correct version of yourself with the kind of muscle memory that doesn't require thought anymore.
something crosses your mind — a connection, something absurd and specific and genuinely funny, the kind of joke that would have come out of you automatically two years ago. you can feel it sitting there, waiting. you open your mouth.
and then jiwon says something and soomin cracks up and the moment tips and you feel your mouth close again. you take a sip of water instead. push the rice around. smile when the laughter dies down.
덩그러니. hollow. surrounded by people who know you and completely, quietly, alone inside it.
❦ ⊱ 𖥧𖡼 ✿ 𖡼𖥧 ⊰ ❦ ⊱ 𖥧𖡼 ✿ 𖡼𖥧 ⊰ ❦ ⊱ 𖥧𖡼 ✿ 𖡼𖥧 ⊰ ❦
it starts with a voice memo.
you find it by accident, three weeks into the semester, looking for a recording of a lecture you'd saved in the wrong folder. it's from two years ago. you'd titled it nothing but a row of laughing emojis, which means you thought it was worth saving but couldn't explain why.
it's you, laughing so hard you can barely breathe, telling some story — something about a bus and a miscommunication and a very confused elderly man — and your voice is so much louder than you remember it being. bigger. fuller. the laugh especially, which keeps dissolving into wheezing that makes whoever was with you laugh harder, which makes you worse, this loop of genuine helpless laughter that lasts almost a full minute before you collect yourself enough to finish the story.
you listen to it once. then you listen to it again.
주워 담지 못할 흘러가 버린 그 아픔. the pain that's drifted away, scattered like pieces you can't gather back up.
you hadn't thought of it as pain before — hadn't thought of it as anything, really. just adjustment. just fitting. but hearing your own voice be that loud, that unguarded, that much — something sits heavily in your chest. not grief exactly. something quieter and more confusing. the feeling of standing in a room where furniture used to be.
you put your phone face down on your desk and sit there for a long time, doing nothing.
you don't cry. it's not a crying kind of feeling. it's more like a question you don't know how to finish asking.
❦ ⊱ 𖥧𖡼 ✿ 𖡼𖥧 ⊰ ❦ ⊱ 𖥧𖡼 ✿ 𖡼𖥧 ⊰ ❦ ⊱ 𖥧𖡼 ✿ 𖡼𖥧 ⊰ ❦
you meet beomgyu on a wednesday, which feels arbitrary until later when it doesn't.
he's in your history of cinema elective — a class you picked because it fit the gap in your schedule and because you used to love watching films, actually, in the way you used to love a lot of things before you got busy becoming a version of yourself that was easier to be around.
he sits two rows ahead and one seat to the left. he's the kind of person who takes up space without seeming to notice he's doing it, laugh too loud for the room size, gestures too big for his desk. you'd clocked him as someone who existed in a different atmosphere entirely and left it at that.
then the projector breaks.
it's midway through a screening — something french and slow-moving that you'd actually been enjoying — and the room goes from cinematic dark to horrible fluorescent in about four seconds and everyone blinks at each other, disoriented, while the professor goes to find someone from IT.
the silence is the awkward kind. people reach for their phones.
and you say, to no one in particular, not really meaning to say it out loud at all: "cinema is dead and we killed it."
beomgyu turns around in his seat. he laughs. not politely, not as a courtesy, but actually laughs, sharp and genuine, like you surprised it out of him. you blink, not expecting the reaction. "what?" "nothing," he says, still smiling. "just.. yeah."
he faces forward again but the smile doesn't quite leave. and there's something in that — in being looked at like you said something worth reacting to, in being the reason for it — that sits with you longer than it should.
the projector comes back on. you face forward. you don't know why a stranger laughing at your joke feels like something. you just know that it does.
❦ ⊱ 𖥧𖡼 ✿ 𖡼𖥧 ⊰ ❦ ⊱ 𖥧𖡼 ✿ 𖡼𖥧 ⊰ ❦ ⊱ 𖥧𖡼 ✿ 𖡼𖥧 ⊰ ❦
it becomes a thing, with beomgyu. not an intentional thing. just a series of small accidents that start feeling inevitable.
he falls into step beside you after class one week and talks about the film you just watched with the kind of earnest conviction that makes you feel like it's okay to have opinions, actually, like opinions are not something to be rationed. you disagree with him on something and say so and he doesn't make you feel strange for it — just argues back, animated, and asks you to explain your reasoning, and you do, and he listens to the whole thing before responding. you can't remember the last time someone asked you to explain your reasoning.
he ends up at the same campus café you go to on tuesdays. he lends you a pen in a lecture you share and doesn't make a thing of it. he reads over your shoulder once at a film annotation you're making and says "that interpretation is a stretch, by the way" and you tell him it's not and somehow that turns into twenty minutes of debate that you enjoy more than any conversation you've had in recent memory.
it's not romantic, not exactly. it's something adjacent to it — the specific electricity of feeling truly, actually seen. of being in a space where you don't have to manage yourself.
❦ ⊱ 𖥧𖡼 ✿ 𖡼𖥧 ⊰ ❦ ⊱ 𖥧𖡼 ✿ 𖡼𖥧 ⊰ ❦ ⊱ 𖥧𖡼 ✿ 𖡼𖥧 ⊰ ❦
you mention a film one afternoon, something niche and strange that you'd stopped bringing up around your friends — god, you're so pretentious about movies said with a laugh that was only half joking, and you'd laughed along and stopped mentioning it.
beomgyu pulls it up on his phone immediately, turning the screen toward you. "okay we're watching this together. when are you free?" "you don't have to.." "i want to." he says it simply. no performance. "when are you free?"
you realize, walking home that evening, that you said three things in that conversation that you would have swallowed six months ago. jokes that landed. references that didn't need explaining. thoughts that came out of your mouth before you could assess whether they were too much or not enough.
you realize you've stopped running the calculations around him. you don't know what to do with that. you file it away and try not to think about it.
❦ ⊱ 𖥧𖡼 ✿ 𖡼𖥧 ⊰ ❦ ⊱ 𖥧𖡼 ✿ 𖡼𖥧 ⊰ ❦ ⊱ 𖥧𖡼 ✿ 𖡼𖥧 ⊰ ❦
it's a saturday when something cracks.
your friends want to get lunch. a place near campus, the loud kind with menus that are too big and music that's slightly too much. you're sitting in the corner, soomin on your left, jiwon across from you, raeun on her phone. the conversation is moving fast, the way it always does, fluid and familiar, and you're laughing at the right moments and nodding at the right beats and somewhere inside you there is a version of you watching from a little distance, waiting.
soomin is telling a story about her date last night. it's meandering — she tells stories the long way, always has — and there's a detail she mentions, something small and specific, and you see it. the joke. it's right there, perfectly shaped, the kind that would make the whole table lose it, and for a second something lights up in your chest because god, it's a good one, and you take a breath..
"okay but then he said.." soomin keeps going. jiwon cuts in. "wait, he actually said that?" "he said it like it was normal!"
raeun looks up from her phone to react and the table shifts, laughter building, and the window closes. you sit back in your seat. the breath goes out of you quietly. you take a sip of your drink and you smile and you think it doesn't matter, it wasn't that funny, it's fine—
you don't notice beomgyu until you look up.
he's sitting a few tables away, alone, and from the stillness of his expression you can tell he's been there long enough to see it — not the joke, not the content, but the shape of it. the inhale before the sentence. the way you folded back. the specific geometry of making yourself smaller.
his eyes meet yours for just a second. he doesn't look away dramatically, doesn't make it a thing. just holds it for a moment, steady and quiet, and then glances back down at his coffee.
너였더라면 어땠을까? if it had been you, how would it have been?
the thought arrives fully formed and it isn't about beomgyu, not exactly. it's about the version of you that existed in that voice memo, laughing until she wheezed. it's about what it would feel like to be in this exact moment as her. to just say the thing. to take up the space. to not need the window to stay open because you would just.. open it yourself.
you don't know who that person is anymore. you're not sure you know how to get back to her. you excuse yourself to the bathroom.
you make it there and you stand at the sink with the cold water running and you look at your face in the mirror for a long moment. you look fine. that's what makes it so hard — you look completely, totally fine. you have perfected looking fine to such a degree that your own reflection gives you nothing.
무너지는 마음을 꽉 잡아. hold tight to this crumbling heart.
the thing is, you didn't notice it crumbling. that's the part you keep circling. you didn't notice because it didn't happen all at once. it happened in cafeteria moments, in swallowed jokes, in opinions softened into nothing, in a laugh turned down to the right volume so many times that now you can't remember what the original volume even was. it happened in the gap between who you were in that voice memo and who you are right now, standing in a restaurant bathroom running cold water over your hands.
i want to be myself but i don't know how. the thought lands in your chest like something finally admitted. you turn the tap off. you dry your hands. you go back to the table and you smile at the right moments for the rest of lunch and when you get home you sit on your bed for a long time in the dark, doing nothing, thinking about the girl in the voice memo and how far away she feels.
❦ ⊱ 𖥧𖡼 ✿ 𖡼𖥧 ⊰ ❦ ⊱ 𖥧𖡼 ✿ 𖡼𖥧 ⊰ ❦ ⊱ 𖥧𖡼 ✿ 𖡼𖥧 ⊰ ❦
beomgyu finds you on the steps outside.
you hadn't told him you were leaving early. but he's there anyway, sitting on the third step down, looking at his phone with the relaxed posture of someone who isn't in a hurry. you stop when you see him. he looks up.
"hey," he says. "hey." you sit beside him because there isn't really anything else to do. the air is cold — that specific late-winter cold that has teeth in it — and you pull your sleeves down over your hands and look at the street.
"you don't have to say anything," he says, after a moment. "i'm not waiting for an explanation." "i know." and somehow that makes it easier to talk.
"i think i forgot how to be myself," you say, eventually. it comes out simpler than you expected. quieter. "like i adjusted so many times to fit into spaces that i don't actually know what i sound like when i'm not adjusting."
beomgyu is quiet for a moment, the way he always is when he's actually thinking about something rather than just preparing a response.
"i did that once," he says. "different situation. but i know what it looks like from the inside. where you're not even sure what you're protecting anymore, you're just protecting it." "yeah." the word comes out soft. "exactly that."
"does it get easier?" you ask. you don't mean it as a question exactly, more like thinking out loud. "just. being yourself. taking up space. not running the calculations."
he turns to look at you then, and there's something in his expression that is both serious and very gentle.
"i think you stop waiting for permission," he says. "that's the only thing that actually changed for me. i kept waiting for someone to say okay, you can be yourself now, we've decided it's fine. and they never said it. and then at some point i realized they never would. so." he shrugs, like it's simple, like he knows it isn't. "you stop waiting," he says. "you just say it. loud and proud. and then it's out there and it's yours and no one can take it back."
빌어먹을 세상속에서 — 보란듯이 당당하게 말해줄테니. in this damn world, i'll say it boldly, proudly, so everyone can see.
you sit with that for a long moment. the street is quiet. somewhere a car passes. the cold settles around you both like something gentle.
i don't want to run away anymore.
the thought arrives without drama. no crack of lightning, no sudden clarity. just.. a settling. something going still inside you that's been restless for a long time.
you don't say it out loud. but something shifts in the way you're sitting. your shoulders come down slightly. you take a breath that goes all the way to the bottom.
❦ ⊱ 𖥧𖡼 ✿ 𖡼𖥧 ⊰ ❦ ⊱ 𖥧𖡼 ✿ 𖡼𖥧 ⊰ ❦ ⊱ 𖥧𖡼 ✿ 𖡼𖥧 ⊰ ❦
it's two days later when the group chat pings.
jiwon: guys are we going out saturday?
soomin: yes please i need it
raeun: always
and then, a minute later,
jiwon: y/n you in?
you look at the message for a long time. you look at their profile pictures lined up at the top of the chat, the history scrolling up — years of it, plans and memes and check-ins and the occasional 3am message when someone was having a hard night.
these are not bad people. you know that. you will always know that. but there are things you have given up to be in this space, and you have been calling it adjustment and it is not adjustment, it is loss, and the girl in the voice memo deserves better than to keep pretending otherwise.
you: i think i need some space for a while.
you watch the typing indicators appear, then disappear. appear again. and then
soomin: oh! is everything okay?
and you think about beomgyu on the steps. loud and proud, so everyone can see. you think about the joke you swallowed in the restaurant, and the one before that, and all the ones before that. you think about the voice memo, the laugh, the girl you've been reaching for.
you: i will be.
this is my answer.
and then you put your phone in your bag and you walk.
not running. that's the thing, it doesn't feel like running at all. it feels like walking toward something, even if you can't see it yet.
이 추운 겨울날도 지나갈테니까. this cold winter too shall pass.
you don't have everything figured out. you know that. the thread is loose and you'll have to pull at it eventually, sit down with them and have a conversation that will be harder than a text. you're not fixed. fixed isn't even the right word.
but you're here. outside. breathing. walking in a direction you chose.
you text beomgyu twenty minutes later. something completely stupid. a terrible pun about the film you watched together, the kind of joke that requires a specific and ridiculous sense of humor, the kind that is so completely, unambiguously you that there's no performing it, no calculating it, no adjusting the volume.
he responds in under a minute.
that's genuinely the worst thing anyone has ever sent me.
and then, three seconds later:
send more
you laugh. actually laugh. the loud kind, the big kind, the kind from the voice memo, the kind that startles the woman walking past you on the street and makes you cover your mouth and laugh harder at yourself for that. your eyes water slightly. your chest feels enormous.
it's not fixed. the winter hasn't passed yet. there are conversations still to have and pieces still scattered that you'll have to decide whether to gather or let go.
but you said the thing. you took up the space. and for the first time in longer than you can remember, the voice saying it sounds exactly like yours.
summary : you weren’t supposed to become beomgyu’s unofficial handler but someone had to keep him in line. firm, steady and just a little bit sharp, you were the only one who could cut through his endless mischief. to everyone else, it looked like pure professionalism. to beomgyu… it felt like something more. from backstage chaos to interview confessions, the line between authority and affection keeps blurring. leaving beomgyu wondering if his “respectful fear” is really just a crush he can’t hide anymore.
author’s note : hello!! this month’s been a bit rough for me, so i haven’t been very active :/ but i’m really glad i got to finish this chapter. i really enjoy writing the date chapters, and i hope you’ll enjoy reading this one too >3
· · ─── ꒰ঌ·✦·໒꒱ ─── · · ─── ꒰ঌ·✦·໒꒱ ─── · ·
it had been a little over a week since your arcade date, and the week that followed went better than you'd expected. beomgyu had been unexpectedly mature about the whole thing.
yes, the first morning after the date, his reddened cheeks were hard to miss and he was a bit shy around you. everyone assumed he had either done something he shouldn't have or failed to do something he should have, and was now paying for it.
"wow, so nice to know everyone has so much faith in me," beomgyu had even complained to you, and you responded with a laugh. but after that, he returned to his normal self quickly. no one suspected anything strange was going on between the two of you.
even his members didn't bother you too much. you could sometimes catch their teasing smiles. yeonjun and kai even said a few loaded things, but they were mostly directed at beomgyu, not you. you had a feeling it was because they were a little intimidated by you — you weren't exactly the warmest or most approachable staff member around. you were glad for it, because you weren't sure how you would've responded to them, and besides, watching beomgyu get all flustered was far too entertaining.
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beomgyu had appeared at your desk last wednesday with two tickets in hand. "outdoor cinema. 7 p.m. on saturday. i already picked the movie. you can wear something casual. i'll bring the popcorn and drinks, so you don't have to bring anything.. other than yourself, of course. hah. anyway, i'll pick you up around quarter past six. see you." he said it all in one breath, at lightning speed, and left your desk before you could get a word in.
you watched him disappear with a dumbfounded look, your mouth hanging open for a moment. he hadn't even given you a chance to respond. then your eyes dropped to the ticket sitting on your desk. you picked it up and examined it. wow, you thought. he really puts so much thought into these dates. who else would have thought of an outdoor cinema?
which was something you already knew, in a way — he had told you. he told you he would wait, he told you he had wanted this for a long time. but realizing it again and again in small details kept putting a warm smile on your lips, one you had no desire to erase. you looked at the ticket one last time before slipping it inside your notebook and getting back to work.
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you were right, he had given this a lot of thought. he had read every website that offered date ideas for couples or listed the best spots in seoul.
one night, after he came back from the bathroom, he found kai sitting in the chair he had just been sitting in, staring at his computer with an amused look on his face. beomgyu didn't even get a chance to say anything before kai was already calling for the others to come over. and when they did, it was over for beomgyu.
"wow, hyung. you literally have 13 tabs of high school date recommendations open," taehyun said, leaning in to read the screen with the most serious expression he could manage. "fourteen," yeonjun corrected, pointing. "there's another window open behind this one." "i was doing research," beomgyu said flatly. "for what, a thesis?" kai said, already losing it.
beomgyu reached over to close the laptop but yeonjun got there first, sliding it just out of reach with a grin. "'top 10 romantic outdoor activities that aren't too obvious,'" he read out loud, in a very deliberate voice. "'how to plan the perfect casual date without looking like you tried too hard.'" he looked up. "beomgyu. my friend." "i will actually end you." "you have a whole notes app list too, look—" kai started. "okay, that's enough—"
it took a few more minutes of chaos before soobin finally stepped in, sitting down next to beomgyu on the edge of the bed. the others were still snickering but at a safe distance now. "hey," soobin said, quieter. "all of this—" he nodded vaguely toward the laptop, "—it's actually really thoughtful. she's going to have a good time." beomgyu looked at him sideways. "you don't know that." "i do, actually." soobin shrugged. "just.. stop trying to make it perfect and it'll be perfect. you know her. that's enough." beomgyu didn't say anything to that. but he closed a few of the tabs anyway.
he still ended up spending a lot of time on the decision, just maybe a little less frantically. and in the end, he was content with his choice.
he had actually wanted it to be a surprise too, but he decided against it. he knew you'd prefer something planned over something spontaneous. it came from your job, probably. you liked things settled and certain. he remembered once joking that you probably planned your weekends like you planned his schedule, and you had dismissed him with a look. but you hadn't told him he was wrong, either. so this time he decided to give you a fair warning. he also intentionally picked a weekend day so you could wear something more comfortable, and so he wouldn't have to face you in the office the morning after.
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and before you knew it, saturday had arrived, and you were standing in front of your wardrobe with your arms crossed and a small frown on your face.
last time you had complained to him about not knowing where you were going and feeling out of place. this time he told you to wear something casual. but after going through every piece of clothing you owned, you came to a quiet, slightly embarrassing realization — him telling you what to wear hadn't made much of a difference. because you simply didn't have many options. almost your entire wardrobe was built around work. you had no real casual clothes, no dressy ones either. even your most relaxed outfits somehow still looked office-appropriate.
you had never minded being called a workaholic, but standing there staring at a rack of blazers and pressed trousers, you understood that you weren't just a workaholic. you were, quite literally, the physical embodiment of work itself.
after trying what felt like countless combinations and making eight solemn promises to yourself about buying new clothes, you finally settled on something. a t-shirt you had probably owned for over a decade, a cardigan, and a pair of jeans you had bought to wear during a TO DO episode filmed in the countryside. you looked casual — simple, maybe, but you were content with it. or at least that's what you told yourself.
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beomgyu didn't have any trouble figuring out what to wear, what was making him spiral right now was the drinks. he had never seen you with anything other than tea or coffee, so he had no idea what you actually liked beyond those. when taehyun found him standing in front of the drinks section for far too long, he wandered over.
"why don't you just text her and ask?" he said. he was right, and it was such a simple solution that beomgyu was genuinely startled he hadn't thought of it himself. taehyun let out a small laugh at his friend's expression. "you know what they say," he said, tapping beomgyu's shoulder twice. "love makes you foolish." normally beomgyu would have had something to say to that, but instead he pulled out his phone and texted you right away.
you replied not long after. "you can get me sour cherry juice too." beomgyu stared at the screen for a moment. sour cherry juice. too. a smile crept onto his lips. you knew what he drank. he knew it wasn't a big deal — you had seen him with it countless times — but somehow it still made his heart flutter.
he grabbed two cans of sour cherry juice and tucked them under his arm, feeling a little lighter than he had ten minutes ago. the popcorn he had already sorted — one salted, one sweet, just in case. he paid and headed back, and for the first time that day, the tight knot of anxiety in his chest loosened just a little.
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he texted you when he arrived on your street. he didn't have to, you had been watching from the window for the past fifteen minutes, telling yourself you simply had nothing else to do. when you saw his car you checked the time. 6:17 p.m. two minutes late. you smiled to yourself. then your phone buzzed. "i'm here." you grabbed your bag and headed for the door.
you got in quickly. beomgyu had actually planned to get out and open the door for you, but when he saw you he just froze. he had never seen you like this. you looked different, but still unmistakably you. he didn't even get the chance to look properly before you were already sliding into the passenger seat. you glanced at each other, and a short awkward silence settled between you before beomgyu shook himself out of it and said hello. a small exchange followed — how have you been, how was your week — the kind of easy, surface-level talk that filled the space while the air between you settled.
you remembered him coming late and decided to tease him a bit. "you were late," you said with a serious tone. his eyes went wide so fast you almost lost the act entirely. "oh.. i.." he stumbled over his words immediately. you considered keeping it going, but he looked genuinely distressed, so you let him off.
"relax. it was two minutes." "yeah, but i should've been here like five minutes early, not two minutes late," he said. you tilted your head slightly. "isn't being a little late kind of your thing? i remember you proudly telling everyone you had mastered the art of arriving to dance practice just late enough not to actually get in trouble." but even as you said it, he still looked bothered, and you felt a small pang for bringing it up at all. "this isn't dance practice," he said quietly, almost to himself.
you thought about the arcade. your out-of-place outfit, the way you had stood there feeling wrong, and how he had looked at you and said it was fine, that you looked like you. so you waited until he met your eyes, and then you smiled. "it's fine," you said. "it's actually just very you."
the corner of his mouth lifted slowly, understanding settling in his expression. you watched the tension leave his shoulders. he turned back to the wheel and started the engine.
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by the time you arrived, people had already started to gather — small groups spreading blankets across the grass, the low hum of conversation settling over everything. beomgyu grabbed the bags and the blanket from the trunk and you found a spot a little away from the crowd, close enough to see well but with enough space around you.
"so, what are we going to watch?" you asked. "oh, i chose a regular drama, nothing too intense." he said. "that's nice." you said. he opened his mouth to say something but your conversation got cut off by a call. you moved to stand up but he gestured for you to stay seated. it didn’t take him long to understand they were calling you from work. as he watched you talking, he realized he could even guess that without hearing you, just from your expressions. you looked super serious.
he watched you without meaning to. the way you shifted into it so seamlessly. back straightening, voice dropping, every word precise and measured. you weren't performing seriousness, you just were serious. it was like a switch, except it wasn't really a switch at all. it was just you.
he found it fascinating in a way he couldn't quite explain, which was strange because it was everything he wasn't. beomgyu had never been particularly devoted to schedules or structure. he showed up when he showed up, figured things out as he went, and somehow it always worked out. discipline wasn't something he chased. and yet watching you handle whatever was on the other end of that call with such quiet certainty — he couldn't look away.
maybe it was because you made it look so effortless. or maybe it was something else entirely. he hadn't decided yet.
you wrapped up the call and lowered your phone, and when you turned back you caught him looking. he didn't manage to glance away in time. for a second neither of you said anything. then the tips of his ears went pink and he turned abruptly toward the screen, suddenly very interested in the opening credits that hadn't even started yet.
you put your phone face down on the blanket and reached into the bag for the sour cherry juice. beomgyu was still pointedly staring at the screen. you cracked the can open and said nothing about it.
"sorry about that," you said after a moment, meaning the call. "don't be." he had recovered enough to look at you again. "was it anything serious?" "nothing that couldn't wait until monday." you paused. "but it couldn't wait until monday, apparently."
he let out a short laugh. "classic." he handed you the sweet popcorn and took the salted for himself. you noticed but didn't comment. you just switched them without a word, taking the salted one and setting the sweet in his lap. he looked down at it, then at you. "how did you—"
"you always pick the sweet one off the snack table," you said simply. "i've been your scheduler for two years." he stared at you for a second. then he shook his head slowly, like he wasn't sure whether to be impressed or embarrassed. "that's actually a little terrifying." "i know." you said, and took a handful of popcorn.
the movie started not long after. it opened quietly. a small apartment, morning light, someone making coffee alone. no dramatic score, no title card fanfare. just life, settling into itself. you found yourself relaxing without deciding to.
"good pick," you said, after the first ten minutes or so. "you sound surprised." "i'm withholding full judgment until the end." he smiled and looked back at the screen.
it was a comfortable kind of quiet after that. the sort that didn't ask anything of you. the story unfolded slowly — two people in the same city, kept apart by timing and small miscommunications and their own stubbornness. you watched without thinking too hard about it, which was rarer than you'd like to admit. usually your mind wandered during films, cataloguing things that needed doing, running through schedules. tonight it stayed where it was.
at one point the woman on screen said something cutting to the man she loved, and immediately looked like she regretted it. you made a small sound, not quite a laugh, not quite disapproval. somewhere in between.
"what?" beomgyu asked. "nothing. she just could have handled that better." "she's scared," he said simply, like it was obvious.
you looked at him. he was watching the screen, chin resting on his hand, expression relaxed. you looked back at the movie. "i know," you said, quieter than you intended.
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the night had gotten cooler by the time the credits rolled. around you people were folding blankets and gathering their things, talking in low voices. you stayed where you were for a moment, watching the screen go dark.
"well?" beomgyu said. "it was good," you said. "genuinely." he looked pleased in that way he had. not gloating, just quietly satisfied. "i knew you'd like it." "you got lucky." "i did research," he said, with great dignity. "sure," you said, and stood up to help him fold the blanket.
you were walking back to the car when he glanced at you sideways. "you know," he started, in that tone that meant he had been thinking about saying something for a while, "you should dress like this more often."
you looked down at yourself. the old t-shirt, the cardigan, the jeans. "this is literally just whatever i could find." "i know," he said. "that's kind of my point." you were quiet for a second. "my wardrobe is not that bad." he said nothing, which was somehow worse than if he had said something.
"it's not," you repeated. "i didn't say anything." "you did the silence thing." he pressed his lips together, clearly fighting a smile. "i just think that if someone looked at your wardrobe without knowing you, they would assume it belonged to a forty year old man who works too much and eats lunch alone at his desk."
you opened your mouth. closed it. "that is. incredibly specific." "am i wrong?" a beat. "i need to go shopping," you said flatly. he burst out laughing. genuinely, fully, the kind that made his eyes crinkle. "i'll come with you." "you absolutely will not." "i have great taste—" "you're not coming."
he was still grinning when he unlocked the car.
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the drive back was quieter than the drive there, but differently so. not the quiet of two people still figuring out how to be around each other, something softer than that. he drove and you watched the city again, and some low music played, and neither of you felt the need to fill the space. he pulled up outside your building and this time, he got out.
you gathered your things and stepped out to meet him on the pavement. it was quieter here, the street mostly empty. you looked at him for a moment. the easy way he stood there, hands in his pockets, watching you with that expression you had gotten slightly too familiar with.
and before you'd fully decided to, you stepped forward and hugged him. brief, you intended. just a second.
but his arms came around you and stayed, and somehow you didn't move either. it wasn't long, just a beat longer than you planned, long enough to notice the warmth of it, long enough that pulling away felt like a decision. you did anyway.
"thank you," you said. "for the date." he looked at you. his ears were pink again. "yeah," he said. "anytime."
you took a step back toward the entrance. "two down," you said. he smiled, slow and quiet. "two down." you turned and headed inside.
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he didn't drive away immediately.
he stood there for a moment after you disappeared through the entrance, looking at the door like it might open again. it didn't. he got back in the car, closed the door, and sat with his hands on the wheel without starting the engine.
you had hugged him.
he turned that over in his head a few times, the way you do with something you're not entirely sure was real. you had stepped forward, you had done it first, and then you hadn't let go right away either. he had felt that.
the half second where neither of them moved. he was almost certain he hadn't imagined it.
he exhaled slowly and leaned back in his seat. he had planned every detail of tonight. the movie, the snacks, the fourteen tabs, the notes app list that his members were never going to let him forget. and in the end none of that was what stayed with him. what stayed with him was the weight of your hand on his shoulder and the way pulling away had felt like a decision.
he thought about what soobin had said. you know her. that's enough.
he started the engine. two down, you had said. like it was simple. like it was just a count. but he knew you well enough by now to understand that for you, saying it at all was everything.
he pulled out onto the street, and for the first time in weeks, the knot in his chest was completely gone.
summary : five different ways they take care of you when you’re exhausted, overwhelmed, and one step away from burnout.
five times you almost fall apart.
five times they’re there to catch you.
author's note : hey! i really wanted to write something like this because last week i was on the verge of breaking down while studying for my exams. i hope this can help and comfort you if you’re going through something similar. lots of love <3
you don’t remember when your eyes started burning. at first it was just a dull ache behind them, the kind you can ignore if you blink a few times and keep reading. then it turned into heaviness, like your eyelids were made of stone. still, you kept going. one more page. one more formula. one more definition.
your desk is a mess of open books, half written notes, and empty cups. the lamp casts a tired yellow circle over everything, and outside the window the sky is already dark — you’re not sure when that happened either.
you tell yourself you’re fine.
you tell yourself you’ll rest after this chapter.
you tell yourself a lot of things.
your pen slips from your fingers at some point. you barely notice. your head dips forward, just for a second, and then—
when you wake up, the first thing you register is warmth. something soft is resting over your shoulders. a blanket. your second thought is panic. you jolt upright, heart racing, disoriented, eyes scanning your desk. the lamp is still on. your books are still open. your notes are still there. you fell asleep.
"oh— you’re awake.” the voice is quiet. gentle. you turn your head and see soobin sitting on the floor beside your desk, his back against the bed, knees pulled up slightly. he’s holding your pen. for a second, you just stare at him, confused. “soobin…?” he looks relieved when you’re fully awake. “you were out pretty deep. i tried not to wake you.”
your gaze drops to the blanket around your shoulders. then to the time on your phone. you’ve been asleep for almost an hour. “i—i didn’t mean to,” you say quickly, already reaching for your notebook. “i just closed my eyes for a second, i still have to—”
soobin stands up. he doesn’t raise his voice. he doesn’t rush. he just gently puts his hand on top of your notebook and closes it. “you don’t,” he says. you blink at him. “but i—” “you don’t,” he repeats, softer.
there’s something in his expression that makes your chest tighten. not anger. not disappointment. worry. “you were shaking in your sleep,” he says. “your hands.” you look down at them. they’re still a little unsteady. “i’m fine,” you lie automatically.
soobin doesn’t argue. he just looks at you for a long moment, like he’s choosing his words carefully. “you haven’t gone to bed before three all week,” he says quietly. “you skipped dinner. again. and you fell asleep sitting up.”
you open your mouth to defend yourself, but nothing convincing comes out. he sighs, not frustrated — just tired. “come on,” he says. “let’s go lie down.” “i can’t sleep,” you say. “i still have so much to do.” “you’re not sleeping,” he answers. “you’re resting.”
he holds out his hand. you hesitate. he doesn’t pull you. he just waits.
eventually, you take it. he guides you to the bed and sits you down gently, like you’re made of something fragile. you still feel restless, like you’re wasting time, like you should get back up.
soobin takes your glasses off for you. you hadn’t even realized you were still wearing them. he sets them on the bedside table, then pulls the blanket up properly around you. “you can stay,” you say quietly, the words leaving your mouth before you can think about them. he nods immediately. “i was planning to.”
he sits on the edge of the bed. for a while, neither of you says anything. the room is quiet in a way that feels heavy at first — your brain is still buzzing, still trying to run through formulas and lists and deadlines. your eyes sting.
“i’m scared,” you admit suddenly. soobin turns to look at you. “of what?” you swallow. “of failing. of not doing enough. of… wasting time.” your voice cracks a little at the last part, and you hate that it does. “i keep thinking that if i stop, even for a little, everything will fall apart.”
soobin’s hand comes up and gently rests on your head, his fingers lightly combing through your hair. “nothing is going to fall apart because you rested,” he says. “but what if—” he shakes his head.“you’re not a machine,” he says. “and even machines overheat.”
a weak, tired laugh leaves you despite yourself. he smiles a little. “you’ve been strong all week,” he continues. “you don’t have to prove anything right now.” your chest feels tight again, but in a different way. “i don’t want to disappoint anyone,” you whisper.
soobin’s hand stills for a moment. then he leans down slightly so he’s closer to your eye level. “you couldn’t,” he says. “not like this. not for trying so hard.” your eyes burn, and this time it’s not from the screen or the lamp.
he notices immediately. “hey,” he says softly. “it’s okay.” a tear slips out anyway. then another. you turn your face slightly, embarrassed, but soobin just moves closer and gently pulls you into a hug.
it’s not tight. it’s not rushed. it’s steady. you finally let yourself breathe. “i’m tired,” you admit, your voice muffled against his shoulder. “i know.”
you stay like that for a while. your thoughts slowly stop racing. your body slowly remembers how heavy it actually is. when he pulls back, he helps you lie down properly. “i’ll wake you up later,” he says. “we can study together. slowly.” you nod.
he turns off the desk lamp, leaving only the soft light from the bedside. as your eyes start to close again, you feel him gently brushing your hair away from your face. “you don’t have to carry everything alone,” he says. “i’m here.”
this time, when you fall asleep, it doesn’t feel like you’re collapsing. it feels like you’re being held.
YEONJUN :
you realize something is wrong when the room tilts. not dramatically. not enough to make you fall. just enough that you have to grab the edge of the desk and blink a few times to steady yourself. you tell yourself it’s nothing. you’ve been telling yourself that about everything lately.
your stomach feels hollow in a way that hurts, but you ignore it. your head aches, but you ignore it. your hands are a little shaky, but you ignore that too, because there’s still one more section to review and you’re already behind your own impossible schedule.
you flip the page. the words blur. you blink harder. still blurry. “okay,” you mutter to yourself. “just… just finish this one.”
you don’t notice yeonjun at first. he notices you. he notices the way you’ve been sitting in the same position for hours. the untouched water on your desk. the way you’re pressing your lips together like you’re trying to hold yourself upright by sheer will.
he says your name once. you don’t answer. he says it again, closer this time.
you look up, a little too fast, and the room tilts again. that’s when his expression changes. “hey,” he says, immediately more alert. “whoa—” “i’m fine,” you say automatically. you say it too quickly.
he’s already standing right in front of you. “you’re not,” he says flatly.“i am,” you insist, even as you feel another wave of dizziness roll through you. “i just stood up too fast. i’m okay. i still have to—”
you try to stand. your knees almost give out. yeonjun’s hands are on your arms instantly, steadying you. “okay, no,” he says, voice firm now. “nope. you’re done.” “i can’t be done,” you protest. “i don’t have time—” “you also don’t have blood sugar right now,” he says, looking you up and down. “when was the last time you ate?”
you open your mouth. close it. think. “…this morning?” he stares at you. it’s already evening. “you’re kidding,” he says. you look away.
he exhales sharply through his nose and lets go of your arms, but only to grab your wrist and pull you gently but decisively toward the kitchen.
“yeonjun, wait— i really need to—” “no,” he says. “you really need to sit down.” he pushes you into a chair and turns you around so you’re facing the table. “don’t move.”
he opens the fridge. starts pulling things out. bread. something quick, something easy. you watch him, feeling weirdly small. “i can eat later,” you try. “just let me finish this chapter first.”
he turns around slowly. “do you hear yourself?” “i’m just—” “you almost fainted,” he cuts in. his voice isn’t loud, but it’s sharp. controlled. “you’re not studying anymore. you’re just running yourself into the ground.”
you feel something twist in your chest. “i don’t have a choice,” you say quietly. “if i stop, i fall behind.” “that’s not how it works,” he says. “if you collapse, you fall behind even more.”
he puts a plate in front of you. “eat.” you don’t move. “i said eat.” there’s a pause. then, softer: “please.”
you pick up the fork. your hands are still a little shaky. he sits across from you, watching to make sure you actually do it. a few minutes pass in silence. then you whisper, “i’m not lazy.” he blinks. “what?” “i’m not,” you repeat, your voice tighter now. “i’m trying. i really am. i just— i feel like if i stop, it means i didn’t want it badly enough.
something in yeonjun’s face breaks a little. he leans back in his chair and runs a hand through his hair. “hey,” he says. “that’s not what rest means.” “then what does it mean?” you ask. “it means you’re human,” he says. “it means you’re not made to work until you fall apart.”
you laugh weakly. “tell that to my exams.” “i am,” he says. “because if you keep going like this, you’re not going to remember half of what you’re studying anyway.”
you stare at your plate. your eyes start to sting. “…i’m scared,” you admit. “what if i do all of this and it’s still not enough?” yeonjun doesn’t answer right away. then he says, very quietly, “then it won’t be because you didn’t try.” your chest tightens.
he leans forward, resting his elbows on the table. “i’m not angry at you,” he says. “i’m just… worried. you’ve been pushing yourself like you’re the only person in the world who has to hold everything together.”
you swallow. “i don’t want to be a burden.” his eyes soften immediately. “you’re not,” he says. “you never are.” you finally look up at him. “you don’t have to do this alone,” he continues. “you don’t have to destroy yourself to deserve a good result.”
your vision blurs. you blink rapidly, but it doesn’t really help. yeonjun notices. he stands up, walks around the table, and crouches in front of you. “hey,” he says gently. “look at me.” you do. “you’re already doing enough,” he says. “more than enough.” your shoulders start to shake before you can stop them. “i’m so tired,” you whisper. “i know,” he says, and pulls you into a hug.
you let yourself cry.
not quietly. not neatly.
he doesn’t tell you to stop.
when you calm down a little, he pulls back and looks at you seriously “here’s what’s going to happen,” he says. “you’re going to drink some water. then you’re going to lie down for a bit.” “but—” “no buts.” you hesitate. “…will you stay?” he nods immediately. “yeah. i’ll stay.”
he walks you back to your room and makes you sit on the bed. “you don’t have to sleep,” he says. “just close your eyes. let your brain breathe.” he sits next to you, one hand resting on your arm. “you don’t need to be strong every second,” he says quietly. “i’ve got you.”
for the first time in days, you let yourself stop.
and the world doesn’t end.
BEOMGYU :
you’re staring at the same problem for the fourth time. you know you’ve seen it before. you know you studied this. you know the answer is somewhere in your head. but your brain feels like it’s full of fog. you tap your pen against the paper. once. twice. too many times. “okay,” you mutter. “okay. i can do this.”
you write something. it’s wrong. you erase it. you try again. wrong. your chest feels tight.
you laugh quietly to yourself. a tired, almost hysterical sound. “wow,” you whisper. “i’m actually stupid.” the word sits there, ugly and heavy.
your vision blurs. “no, no, no—” you mumble, rubbing at your eyes. “not now. don’t do this now.” a tear falls onto the page. then another.
that’s when the door opens. beomgyu’s voice comes in first. “breaking news: local genius defeats notebook in intense staring contest—” he stops when he sees you. “…oh.”
you try to wipe your face quickly, embarrassed. “i’m fine.” he walks in anyway and plops down on the floor next to your chair. “hmm,” he says, squinting at you like a detective. “interesting. because my professional opinion says you look like you’re about to fight god.”
that makes a laugh slip out of you before you can stop it. it turns into a sob. “…great,” you say, covering your face. “now i’m crying." beomgyu immediately looks alarmed.
“okay, okay, abort joke mission,” he says, holding up his hands. “wait— no— i mean—” he scoots closer.
“hey,” he says more softly. “what happened?” you shake your head. “i can’t do this. i studied. i really did. but i can’t remember anything and everything feels wrong and i’m so tired and—” your voice breaks completely.
he sits up and, without hesitating, pulls you into a hug. it’s a little clumsy. a little too tight. very beomgyu. “there, there,” he says, patting your back awkwardly. “it’s okay. the math can’t hurt you anymore. i’ll fight it.” that makes you laugh through your tears.
“i’m serious,” you sniffle. “i feel so stupid.” he pulls back and looks at you like you just said something outrageous. “excuse me?” he says. “you? stupid? you literally explain things to me like i’m a lost child in a supermarket.” “that’s because you are,” you mumble. “exactly. and you still have the patience to do that. that’s intelligence and kindness. two-for-one deal.”
you laugh weakly again. then your face crumples. “but what if i fail?” you whisper. “what if i tried this hard and it’s still not enough?" beomgyu goes quiet for a moment. then he says, “then we’ll be sad. and then we’ll get snacks. and then we’ll survive.”
you look at him. “that’s it?” “yep,” he nods. “tragedy arc, recovery arc, snack arc.”
a real laugh comes out this time. he smiles, relieved. then he gently takes your notebook and closes it. “you’re not broken,” he says. “you’re just exhausted.” you wipe your face with your sleeve. “i hate that i’m like this.” “i love that you care,” he says. “but you don’t have to bleed for it.”
that hits harder than you expect. your eyes start watering again. “oh no,” beomgyu says. “round two? okay, wait.” he suddenly stands up and starts doing the worst, most dramatic stretch you’ve ever seen.
“ladies and gentlemen,” he announces, “welcome to beomgyu’s emergency anti-burnout performance.” he puts one foot on your chair and strikes a heroic pose. “i will now perform… interpretive dance of your brain cells returning.”
he starts flailing around dramatically. you stare at him. “…what are you doing?” “saving your academic career,” he says seriously, while absolutely not dancing seriously.
you laugh. you really laugh.
your stomach hurts a little from it.
he bows. “thank you, thank you. i’ll be here all week.”
he sits back down next to you, a little quieter now. “see?” he says. “you can still laugh. that means you’re not hopeless.” you sniff. “you’re so stupid.” “professionally,” he agrees. then he leans his head against your shoulder.
“you don’t have to be perfect,” he says. “you just have to be you. and you’re already doing your best.” you rest your head against his.
for a few minutes, neither of you says anything. your breathing slows. your thoughts stop spiraling. eventually, he says, “want to take a break? we can watch something dumb. or stare at the ceiling. or both.” “…both sounds nice.” he grins. “excellent choice.”
he stands up and holds out his hand. “come on,” he says. “let’s not let the exams steal you from me.” you take it.
and for the first time that day, you don’t feel like you’re failing.
you just feel… human.
TAEHYUN :
you’re not panicking.
that’s the problem.
you’re sitting at your desk, staring at a very long, very full list of topics, and your brain feels… empty. not racing. not spiraling.
just blank.
your eyes move from one line to the next.
chapter 5. chapter 6. review notes. practice problems. revise summaries. redo mistakes.
you don’t know where to start.
your chest feels tight in a quiet, uncomfortable way. like something heavy is pressing down, but you can still breathe—so you tell yourself it’s fine.
you pick one at random. ten minutes later, you realize you haven’t actually processed a single sentence.
you drop your pen and lean back in your chair, staring at the ceiling “…i’m so tired.” the words don’t even sound emotional. just factual.
there’s a knock at your door. before you can answer, taehyun opens it slightly and peeks in. “hey,” he says. “can i come in?” you nod.
he walks in and immediately notices your desk. not in a judgmental way. in a… analytical way. your posture. your unfocused eyes. the untouched water. the list.
he pulls a chair and sits next to you. “you’ve been stuck like this for a while, haven’t you?” he asks. “…how can you tell?” “you’re not writing,” he says. “you’re just staring.” you let out a weak breath. “i don’t know what to do anymore.”
he looks at the list. “is this everything you’re trying to study?” “…yes.” he stares at it for a second. then he reaches for a pen. and crosses out almost half of it.
you sit up instantly. “hey—! what are you doing?” “reducing damage,” he says calmly. “i need those.” “no,” he says. “you want those. there’s a difference.” you frown. “but if i don’t cover everything—” “you won’t remember any of it,” he says simply. he turns the paper toward you.
“look at you,” he says. “you’re exhausted. your brain isn’t absorbing anything anymore. at this point, more hours won’t help.” that hits a little too close.
“…so what,” you ask quietly. “i just give up?” he shakes his head. “no. we do this properly.”
he takes another piece of paper. “tell me,” he says. “which topics are most likely to be on the exam?” you hesitate, then point to a few. he circles them. “which ones are you already decent at?” you point to two more. he underlines them. “and which ones are completely hopeless?” you almost laugh. “…these three.” he looks at them, then draws a small star next to one.
“we ignore two,” he says. “we focus on this one. it’s the highest return for the lowest energy.” you stare at the paper. the list looks… manageable. smaller.
your chest feels a little less tight. “…is that really enough?” “it’s realistic,” he says. “and right now, realistic beats perfect.” you’re quiet for a moment. then you whisper, “i feel like i should be doing more.”
he looks at you. “you feel that because you’re tired,” he says. “not because you’re lazy.” that sentence lands very gently and very hard.
he pushes the water toward you. “drink.” you do. “now,” he says, “stand up.” “…why?” “because you’ve been sitting here for too long.”
you stand. the room spins a little. taehyun immediately steadies you by the arm. “see?” he says. “that’s not a ‘study more’ signal. that’s a ‘rest’ signal.”
you sit back down on the bed instead. he sits next to you. for a few seconds, neither of you talks. then you say, very quietly, “what if i still fail?” he doesn’t answer immediately. then, “then it won’t be because you didn’t try.” you swallow.
“i hate that my best doesn’t always feel like enough.” he nods. “that’s normal. but your best doesn’t have to destroy you to count.” he looks at you more seriously.
“listen,” he says. “your brain is a physical organ. when you don’t sleep, don’t eat, don’t rest—it stops working properly. that’s not weakness. that’s biology.”
you huff a small, tired laugh. “only you would explain my breakdown scientifically.” “it helps,” he says. “because it means this isn’t a personal failure. it’s a solvable problem.”
you look at the new plan in your hands. “…will you stay and study with me? just this part?” he nods immediately. “of course.” he pauses. “but first—twenty minutes of rest.” “taehyun—” “no negotiating,” he says gently. “set a timer. close your eyes.”
you hesitate. then you lie back. he stays sitting next to you, not touching, but close enough that you’re aware he’s there.
“you don’t have to sleep,” he says. “just don’t think.” “…that’s the hard part.” “i know.” you close your eyes anyway. your thoughts try to keep running at first. then, slowly, they don’t. when you open your eyes again, he’s still there.
“you ready?” he asks. you take a breath. “…yeah. i think so.” he smiles a little. “good. let’s do this in a way that doesn’t hurt you.”
and for the first time in days, studying doesn’t feel like a punishment.
it feels like something you can actually survive.
HUENINGKAI :
it’s the night before the exam.
which means your room is quiet in the worst way.
your bag is packed. your notes are stacked. your alarm is set. there’s nothing left to do. and somehow, that makes everything feel heavier. you’re lying in bed, staring at the ceiling, your brain replaying every mistake you’ve ever made in your life like it’s a greatest hits album.
what if you forget everything? what if your mind goes blank? what if all of this work still isn’t enough?
you turn to your side. then to the other. you check the time. too late. you sigh and pull the blanket up to your chin. “…i hate this.”
there’s a soft knock at your door. you don’t answer fast enough, so it opens a little. kai’s face appears. “hey,” he whispers. “are you awake?” “…unfortunately.” he smiles a little and comes in, holding a small pile of snacks and two juice boxes like he’s on a very important mission.
“i had a feeling,” he says. “pre-exam insomnia is scary.” he sits on the floor next to your bed. “do you want company?” “…yes.” he looks relieved and scoots closer, leaning his arms on the mattress.
for a moment, neither of you says anything. then he offers you a snack. “you should eat a little,” he says. “your brain needs energy.” you take it, even though you don’t really feel hungry.
“…what if i mess up?” you ask quietly. he blinks. “tomorrow?” “…yeah.” he thinks for a second. “then,” he says, “we’ll still wake up the next day.”
you turn your head to look at him. “that’s it?” “that’s it,” he nods seriously. “the sun is very reliable like that.” you laugh weakly.
“but what if i fail?” you whisper. “what if all this stress was for nothing?” kai shifts and sits up so he’s closer to you. “hey,” he says gently. “come here.” you sit up a little, and he immediately wraps you in a hug. it’s warm. soft. safe.
“you’re not defined by one exam,” he says into your hair. “or ten. or a hundred.” you sniff. “it doesn’t feel like that.” “i know,” he says. “but feelings aren’t always good at math.” that makes you smile a little.
he pulls back just enough to look at you. “you worked really hard,” he says. “i saw you. even when you thought nobody did.”
your chest tightens. “…i’m scared i’ll disappoint everyone.” he frowns. “you couldn’t,” he says immediately. “not like this. not for trying.” he reaches out and takes your hand, holding it with both of his. “listen,” he says. “even if tomorrow goes badly—even if everything goes wrong—I’m still proud of you.”
you stare at him. “really?” “really,” he nods. “and i’ll still be here. we all will.” your eyes start to burn. “…you’re going to make me cry." “then i’ll get tissues,” he says seriously. “and snacks.”
you laugh, but your voice wobbles. “i don’t know how to turn my brain off,” you admit. “it just keeps… going.” he thinks for a moment. “okay,” he says. “then don’t turn it off. let’s distract it.”
he reaches for his phone. “do you want to watch something really dumb?” “…yes.” he climbs onto the bed and sits next to you, careful and a little awkward, and starts playing a random, lighthearted video.
for a while, you just watch together. you don’t think about formulas. you don’t think about answers. you just listen to him laugh next to you. eventually, your head starts to feel heavy. you lean a little closer without realizing it.
kai notices. he gently puts an arm around your shoulders. “you’re falling asleep,” he whispers. “…good.” he smiles. “good.” he carefully adjusts the blanket around you.
“hey,” he says softly. “promise me something?” “…what?” “no matter what happens tomorrow,” he says, “don’t be cruel to yourself.”
you nod a little. “i’ll try.” he squeezes your hand. “that’s enough.”
your eyes close.
the last thing you hear before sleep finally takes you is his quiet voice: “you did well. i’m proud of you.”
if anything, it grew. within days, it spread further than the first one ever had. new edits appeared constantly, fans combining clips, translating lyrics, and analyzing harmonies as if the two of you had planned everything together from the start. your name and taehyun’s began appearing side by side so often that seeing them together slowly stopped feeling strange.
you tried not to think too much about it. you kept practicing, kept working on your song, kept pretending your life hadn’t quietly shifted overnight.
still, every time you opened your phone, the numbers reminded you otherwise. more followers, more messages, more people asking the same question when were you going to sing together for real? you always laughed it off whenever your friend mentioned it, shaking your head and saying that was never happening, and you genuinely believed it.
which was why the email almost went unnoticed.
you were sitting at the kitchen table, absentmindedly scrolling through comments while waiting for your coffee to cool when a new notification appeared at the top of your screen: artist collaboration inquiry. you nearly ignored it. strange emails had become normal lately — small brands, unknown producers, random invitations that rarely led anywhere — so you opened it without much expectation.
your eyes skimmed the first line, then stopped. you reread it once, then twice, then a third time more carefully as your heartbeat picked up. bighit music. you straightened in your chair, whispering a quiet “…no way,” to no one in particular as you continued reading.
the message was polite and professional, introducing the company and referencing the recent online attention surrounding you and taehyun. they mentioned audience response, mutual interest from fans, and then the proposal appeared.
a short collaboration content. a filmed performance. together with txt’s taehyun.
you stared at the screen, unable to process it. for a moment, you genuinely wondered if someone had created a fake email as a joke. you checked the sender address. official domain. you checked again just to be sure. still official.
your chair scraped loudly against the floor as you stood up. “y/f/n!” you called out, your voice already betraying your panic. when no answer came, you walked quickly toward the living room and called her name again. she looked up from the couch, startled, immediately asking what happened and why you looked like that.
you tried to speak but nothing came out, so instead you handed her your phone. she read silently, her expression shifting from confusion to realization to complete disbelief before she suddenly screamed, asking if it was real. you laughed nervously, admitting you didn’t know and begging her to check if it looked legitimate.
she examined every detail like a detective, pointing out that the email address was real and the formatting looked official, repeating your name in shock as excitement took over. you covered your face with both hands, the thought finally settling in — they wanted to work with you. they wanted to work with both of you.
your friend pulled you into an excited hug, jumping in place while repeating that you were actually going to meet him. hearing it out loud made the reality hit differently. meeting him. not through a screen, not through edits, but in real life. you dropped onto the couch, overwhelmed, staring ahead while your mind tried to catch up.
after a moment, she suddenly reminded you that you needed to reply. you blinked, realizing she was right, and grabbed your phone again. opening the email, you hovered over the keyboard before freezing. quietly, you asked what you were even supposed to say. she leaned over your shoulder and told you to say yes immediately before they changed their mind. you laughed, insisting they wouldn’t change their mind, but still found yourself rereading the proposal again and again, smiling wider each time instead of typing.
minutes passed before she asked if you had replied yet. when you admitted you hadn’t, she groaned, accusing you of celebrating before even answering them. you stared at the screen, half convinced the email might disappear if you moved too quickly.
finally, you began typing: hello, thank you for reaching out—
and then stopped again, heart racing. because this wasn’t just an opportunity anymore. this was the moment everything imaginary threatened to become real. and you were suddenly, terrifyingly happy about it.
the idea had started quietly in the office, with the managers huddled together and soobin leaning back in his chair, fingers steepled. “what if we did a short collab with y/n and taehyun?” one of them suggested. the room was quiet for a second, everyone weighing logistics, when soobin’s expression shifted into a smirk that didn’t reach his eyes, like he was suppressing a laugh.
“i think that’s a good idea,” he said, casually enough that no one outside would notice. not because of the fans, not because of the hype, not because it would be smart content — no, soobin said it because he already knew exactly how taehyun would react.
he could see it clearly. taehyun had been failing spectacularly at being subtle the past few days, the way he fidgeted every time someone mentioned about him and y/n still trending, the way his eyes lingered just a second too long, the little blush creeping up his neck without him realizing it. soobin didn’t need any data or viral numbers; he just knew. taehyun would absolutely love this idea, and there was no way he could hide it. the thought of seeing him try.. flustered, excited, panicked all at once, made soobin suppress a chuckle. he could already imagine taehyun pacing, pretending to act professional while internally melting.
“so…we were thinking about a short collaboration with y/n. we want to see what you think,” one of the managers said casually, smiling, though they clearly noticed the way taehyun’s hands twitched at the mention of her name.
“yeah…sounds…good,” he said way too quickly, leaning forward a fraction of a second too much before snapping back into a chair, trying desperately to act composed. inside, though, he was already picturing her face, her voice, the way she might smile while they rehearsed together. every thought about the project instantly became about her.
he was trying too hard to look calm, straightening his shoulders and forcing a neutral expression, like they were discussing stage lighting instead of y/n. but his brain immediately started racing. harmonies, key, tempo, arrangement, what to wear, how to not look like a complete mess in front of her.. all at once.
one of the managers laughed softly and said, “hey, slow down, kid, we haven’t even proposed it to y/n yet.”
taehyun froze, eyes wide, a blush spreading up his neck. his brain kept running faster than his mouth could form words, imagining all the possibilities — what song would fit both of them, what key would be perfect, how to make the harmonies flawless — and at the same time he was painfully aware of how obvious his excitement must be.
soobin’s quiet amusement from earlier replayed in his head: he really was going to explode once this went live.
even while trying to act normal, taehyun’s thoughts kept spiraling. he imagined their voices together, the little moments in the filming, the chance to finally sing with her properly. he caught himself smiling too widely at the idea, shaking his head at his own obviousness, and muttered under his breath, “stay professional…stay professional…” but even as he said it, he knew he was failing spectacularly.
because nothing about this was normal, nothing about this was professional, and everything about it was entirely, terrifyingly perfect.
the day came faster than you expected. the email had been replied to, your excitement had barely simmered, and now it was time for the first meeting — a zoom call to figure out dates, locations, what to sing, and the other details that would make the collab possible. you sat on the edge of your bed, staring at your laptop, fiddling with a necklace you always wore when you wanted to feel confident. your fingers twisted the chain nervously as you glanced at your reflection in the camera, brushing your hair behind your ears more times than necessary. your manager sat nearby, giving quiet reassurance, reminding you to relax and just be yourself.
on the other side, taehyun paced in his room, earbuds in, staring at his reflection in the small vanity mirror. he fixed a stray lock of hair, checked that his favorite subtle ring was on his finger, adjusted the collar of his shirt, and then stepped back to see if he looked “normal.” every part of him was screaming that he wanted to look effortless, casual, cool — all while internally panicking.
when the call finally connected, the screen filled with rectangles of faces. you could see your own nervous smile mirrored across the top corner, but when you spotted taehyun’s frame pop up, your stomach flipped. he was trying to look relaxed, leaning slightly back in his chair, but his fingers tapped on the desk, a subtle but telltale giveaway of his nerves.
“hi, everyone,” he said, voice calm, too calm, with a faint twitch in his jaw.
“hi!” you replied, waving a little too enthusiastically, quickly hoping it looked casual.
the managers introduced themselves, someone from the pr team spoke briefly, and your manager added a few notes before the actual planning began. the conversation was technical at first — locations, time slots, what equipment would be needed.
soobin chimed in at one point, pretending to adjust a detail about scheduling but really watching taehyun, whose leg was bouncing rapidly under the desk. “so we could film in the studio next week,” he said, smirking faintly, “what do you think?”
taehyun nodded quickly, then added, “yeah, that works…sounds good,” his voice a touch higher than usual. inside, he was thinking about key choices, whether your voice would pair with his in the right harmonies, and how to make everything sound perfect without looking like he was overthinking. just stay normal, act normal…
you cleared your throat, fidgeting with your necklace again, and said, “that works for me too. i…i think we can make it work.” you noticed his tiny, almost imperceptible smile when you spoke, and felt your heart skip.
the meeting continued with a mix of logistics and small conversation — favorite songs, ideas for arrangements, even joking about backup plans if one of you got sick or ran late. every once in a while, one of the managers would glance at the two of you, smirking knowingly at the subtle tension, the tiny signs of nervous excitement that neither of you could hide.
as the call wrapped up, you both smiled and nodded at each other, waving goodbye with hands that lingered on the edge of the screen just a second too long. the practical details were sorted, but neither of you could ignore the little flutter that had accompanied every glance, every word, every smile during the meeting.
and even after the screens went dark, you were both sitting there for a moment longer, quietly trying to calm down while replaying the call in your heads — him thinking about your voice, your smile, the way your hands fiddled with your necklace, and you thinking about how easily he had made your heart race, even through a screen.
summary : you weren’t supposed to become beomgyu’s unofficial handler but someone had to keep him in line. firm, steady and just a little bit sharp, you were the only one who could cut through his endless mischief. to everyone else, it looked like pure professionalism. to beomgyu… it felt like something more. from backstage chaos to interview confessions, the line between authority and affection keeps blurring. leaving beomgyu wondering if his “respectful fear” is really just a crush he can’t hide anymore.
author’s note : hello!! this is one of the longer chapters, and i literally had to rewrite it… anyways, i hope you’ll like it. i realized i’ve written mostly from beomgyu’s pov in the last chapters, so i wanted to focus on the reader in this one.
· · ─── ꒰ঌ·✦·໒꒱ ─── · · ─── ꒰ঌ·✦·໒꒱ ─── · ·
"just give me three chances."
"let me take you out three times. you can see them as dates or not. that’s up to you."
"what i want is a chance."
you bury your head in the pillow as the conversation plays in your head again and again like a broken record. this feels like the first time you don’t have any idea what to do. you were not expecting this. no — you were definitely not expecting this. not expecting to open up this much, not expecting to be okay with someone else’s company not because of necessity but genuinely, not expecting to decline an offer you normally would accept without thinking.
and not expecting him to be so direct about what he wants. not jokingly, not implying, but seriously and maturely. all this time, since your conversation at the park, some part of you thought he would eventually step back. even though he told you he would wait. you thought that if you showed no interest, he would let go. that he would be content with how much you had changed over time.
this is the part of you malfunctioning now — the part that was not ready for his offer. because this part spent a great deal of time convincing itself that this was what you truly wanted. but the other part — the one screaming things you are not ready to name — is relieved and excited at the same time. relieved because he finally took a step, not just toward your high walls but toward a possibility that makes your stomach feel strange. because you have wanted that for a long time. excited because it has been a long time since you allowed yourself to feel freely, without prejudice, without caution — just feelings.
you don’t know if you will have an answer tomorrow. but tonight, these two parts are fighting to gain the upper hand.
· · ─── ꒰ঌ·✦·໒꒱ ─── · · ─── ꒰ঌ·✦·໒꒱ ─── · ·
a week later.
you almost decide to drop everything and go back home five times on your way to work — which is extremely unlike you, because you always go to work if you physically can.
today, that isn’t the issue. physically, you’re perfectly fine, but mentally… well, not in the best condition.
why did i say yes? i shouldn’t have even said “i’ll think about it.” i should have said no the moment he asked and continued with my life as if nothing had happened.
should i… should i ask him if we can reschedule the date? preferably to a couple of years later. even a week would be fine. ugh.
but no. he had already been pouty all week because you couldn’t find a time that worked for both of you and had to wait seven days. he probably would have taken you out the moment you told him you’d give him a chance — even if it had been eight in the morning. honestly, he would probably kidnap you just to have that date if you asked him to wait another week.
you smile to yourself at the thought. you’re still nervous. you haven’t been on a proper date in a long time, and you really don’t want to do something awkward and embarrass yourself. especially considering the possibility of him teasing you about it forever.
besides, as a young, handsome, easygoing idol, he must be popular with girls. girls who aren’t grumpy managers scolding him like a mother every twenty minutes. girls who are younger, prettier, easier to talk to. girls who would make him happier…
you push the thought away quickly — or rather, you have to. because the moment you step into the building, responsibility settles back onto your shoulders, along with schedules, expectations, and work.
“hey, y/n! when was beomgyu coming for his hair?” someone asks before you even reach your floor.
“1 p.m., but there can be delays or early finishes, so expect him anywhere between fifteen minutes early or late,” you answer automatically. your brain works like a calendar. last minute changes, surprise brand events, schedules planned months ahead.. nothing is difficult for you. hear it once, remember it forever. taehyun’s manager often jokes that you don’t even need an agenda to track beomgyu’s schedule.
you reach the briefing room expecting to see him. instead, the moment you enter, kai and taehyun practically jump in front of you, both smiling like absolute idiots. you freeze.
do they know? did he tell them about the date? there isn’t really a reason he wouldn’t. he spends almost all his time with them, and you never asked him to keep it secret. still, you hadn’t thought about other people knowing. somehow, the idea makes everything feel more real.
they don’t get the chance to say anything. more staff members rush in, and the briefing starts shortly after. normally, you would listen carefully even if the information repeats things you already know. today, the words barely register. because a new thought settles into your mind — one you hadn’t considered before. what if it didn’t go well?
the question refuses to leave. it sits somewhere behind your ribs, heavy and unfamiliar. you had thought about awkward silence. about embarrassment. about feelings not matching. those were normal risks. things people accepted when they agreed to dates. but this isn’t just a date.
you sit still in your chair while voices continue around you, slides changing on the screen, schedules being discussed. the words blur together. because suddenly you realize something you hadn’t allowed yourself to think about before.
you don’t just know him. you work with him. you manage pieces of his day people never see. you are involved in decisions that affect his image, his time, his rest, his career. you are trusted to remain steady, objective, professional no matter what.
what happens if the date goes badly? do you return to discussing schedules like nothing changed? do you stand next to him during briefings pretending you don’t remember how nervous you felt waiting for him?
and what if it doesn’t go badly? the thought unsettles you even more. what if it works? what if feelings grow? what if you let yourself want something real and someday it ends?
idols don’t disappear after breakups. managers don’t transfer emotions out of contracts. work continues. cameras continue. schedules continue. you would still have to look at him every day. still organize his time. still remind him to eat, to rest, to arrive on time. could you do it after loving him? could you do it after losing him?
your chest tightens slightly. until now, you had only thought about what it meant to open up to someone again. about allowing yourself to feel something you had carefully avoided for years. you had been so focused on emotions — on vulnerability, on trust, on whether you were ready to let someone closer. you never stopped to consider the reality surrounding those feelings. this isn’t a relationship that exists separately from your life. it would live inside your work, your routine, your responsibilities. there is no clean line between personal and professional here.
and for the first time since agreeing to give him a chance, fear settles somewhere deeper than nervousness.
not fear of him. fear of consequences.
you were so caught up in your thoughts that you didn’t even register the briefing had ended until someone lightly tapped your shoulder. you snapped back to reality, and when you turned your head, you saw beomgyu looking at you with slight concern.
“are you… okay? i mean, you looked really focused on something. is it about the schedule? or… or something else?” he asked hesitantly, silently hoping it was just about work.
you looked at him properly for the first time that morning. you had been so lost in your thoughts that you didn’t even remember when he entered the room or when he sat beside you. you didn’t speak. you just kept looking at him. not intensely, not searchingly. just looking, as if staring long enough might slow time itself.
he seemed more worried now, unsettled by your silence. still, he didn’t gather the courage to ask again, afraid of what the answer might be. you finally spoke.
“uhm… yeah. i was just thinking about work. nothing important, don’t worry,” you said with a small, forced smile.
he looked relieved. almost too relieved. you weren’t sure whether it was because you were a good actress or because he simply wanted to believe you. he nodded warmly. “okay, then. i’m heading to dance practice. i’ll see you later.”
you remained seated after he left. you didn’t want to postpone your thoughts, knowing they would follow you for the rest of the day anyway.
well… yes. giving him a chance like this is risky, considering your jobs, you thought. but he already asked. and i already said yes.
even if you had rejected him from the start, things would have become awkward at work anyway. accepting first and then backing out would probably be worse. maybe not as bad as dating and breaking up, but still… you had already crossed a line. there was no returning to how things were before.
so maybe the only thing left to do was choose something you actually wanted. you slowly stood up. work was waiting, after all.
· · ─── ꒰ঌ·✦·໒꒱ ─── · · ─── ꒰ঌ·✦·໒꒱ ─── · ·
as the time continues to clock towards the end of the work, your nervousness increased. you were feeling like a silly teenager going on a date for the first time.
on top of all the things that have been worrying you, beomgyu also had told you absolutely nothing about the date. you asked him where he is going to take you, whether you need to bring anything with you, how you will reach there…
but he just shrugged with his huge, silly grin that you cannot decide if you hate or love and said nothing. he didn't even answer when you asked him what should you wear.
well, yes you obviously couldn't wear anything you like since you were going right after work, and you need to wear properly for work. but you could take some clothes with you. but he said nothing, so you were just in your shirt, pants, and blazer.
the workday ended quietly. or at least, it should have. for everyone else, chairs scraped against the floor, staff gathered their belongings, and conversations shifted from schedules to dinner plans and complaints about traffic. the familiar rhythm of ending a long day filled the building.
but for you, every passing minute felt louder than usual. you kept your eyes on your tablet, your fingers moved automatically, scrolling through notes you weren’t reading. you didn’t want to look up. because you knew he was here.
you saw him only from the corner of your eye — leaning against the wall near the exit, talking to one of the stylists. casual. relaxed. as if he wasn’t waiting for something important. as if he wasn’t waiting for you. your stomach tightened. right. the date.
before your thoughts could spiral again, you stood abruptly and headed toward the restroom. you barely registered the hallway around you. the door closed behind you with a soft click, finally muting the noise outside. you stared at your reflection.
“okay,” you murmured under your breath. enough thinking. enough imagining future disasters, awkward mornings, hypothetical breakups that didn’t even exist yet. it was just a date. one evening. one chance. you exhaled slowly, smoothing down your hair, adjusting your collar. not perfect — just… presentable. real. you met your own eyes in the mirror and gave yourself a small nod. leave the rest behind.
when you stepped back into the hallway, the world felt clearer somehow. and then you saw him. beomgyu was already walking toward you, a bright grin spreading across his face the moment your eyes met.
but the grin didn’t fool you. he slipped his hands into his jacket pockets. pulled them out. shoved them back in again. ah. there it was. you almost laughed, he was nervous. the realization softened something inside you instantly.
all day you had been drowning in your own worries, convinced you were the only one struggling with this moment. but he looked just as uncertain.
you slowed your steps and offered him a calm, gentle smile. steady, reassuring. not dramatic. not teasing. just there. his shoulders visibly relaxed. the tension left his posture almost immediately, like someone had released a breath he didn’t realize he was holding.
“ready?” he asked, trying to sound casual. you nodded. “yeah.” he studied your face for half a second longer, as if checking whether you meant it. when you didn’t look away, his smile returned, softer this time.
“good,” he said. “let’s go.”
he still didn’t tell you anything. not when you walked out of the building together. not when he opened the car door for you with exaggerated politeness that made you raise an eyebrow. not even after he slid into the driver’s seat and started the engine. you buckled your seatbelt and turned toward him.
“so… are you finally going to tell me where we’re going?” he glanced at you, eyes sparkling with mischief. “nope.” you sighed. “you’re unbelievable.” “i worked very hard on this,” he replied proudly, pulling the car into traffic. “you’re not ruining the surprise.”
you leaned back against the seat despite yourself, watching the city lights pass outside the window. strangely, the nervousness from earlier didn’t feel as overwhelming anymore.
maybe because you had stopped trying to predict everything. maybe because of the way his hands briefly tightened around the steering wheel — another tiny sign that he cared more than he let on. or maybe because, for once, you decided not to think about consequences. just tonight. just this drive. just the two of you, heading somewhere unknown.
· · ─── ꒰ঌ·✦·໒꒱ ─── · · ─── ꒰ঌ·✦·໒꒱ ─── · ·
“an arcade?” you ask, a little surprised. not completely shocked, though. because, if you’re being honest, this is exactly the kind of place he would choose. colorful lights spill out from the entrance, neon signs flickering softly against the darkening sky. the muffled sounds of game music and distant laughter drift through the open door.
beomgyu rubs the back of his neck. “it’s not very crowded at this hour,” he says quickly. “i come here sometimes. it’s… quiet enough.” quiet enough. for him, that probably means manageable. comfortable. a place where he can breathe without too many eyes on him.
you look at him again, really look at him. this wasn’t random. this wasn’t careless. this was thoughtful — in a very him way. a corner of your lips lifts. “it suits you.”
he blinks. “what does that mean?” “i mean,” you shrug lightly, stepping closer to the entrance, “i can’t imagine you taking me somewhere overly fancy. you’d get bored in ten minutes.”
he gasps dramatically. “excuse me? i can be sophisticated.” “sure,” you reply flatly. he narrows his eyes at you, but the grin returns almost instantly. he reaches for the door and holds it open with an exaggerated bow. “after you.”
inside, the space is washed in soft neon blues and pinks. rows of machines blink and hum. there are only a few people scattered around — a couple near the racing games, two teenagers at the claw machine. it feels oddly private despite being public. you step in slowly, taking it in.
“so,” you say, turning to him, “what’s the plan?” he slips his hands into his jacket pockets again. pulls them out. shoves them back in. your eyes soften. “don’t tell me you brought me here without a plan.” “i have a plan,” he insists. “i just… didn’t think this far.”
you laugh quietly, the sound easing the last bit of tension between you. for the first time today, the nervousness doesn’t feel heavy. it feels light. like possibility. you don’t realize how tense your shoulders are until beomgyu drops a handful of coins into a machine with dramatic determination.
“okay,” he says, cracking his knuckles like he’s about to enter battle. “first rule.” you fold your arms. “there are rules?” “of course there are rules. this is serious.”
you raise an eyebrow. he points at you. “no one is judging each other's skills.” “…that already sounds suspicious.”
“second rule,” he continues, holding up two fingers, “loser buys drinks." you blink at him. “you brought me here and i still have to pay?”
his confidence collapses instantly. “wait.. no. no! that’s not— i mean, i was joking. obviously i’m paying. i invited you, why would i make you pay? that would be terrible date etiquette. i’m not that kind of guy—”
you stare at him. he stops mid ramble. “…wow,” you say slowly. “you sounded really confident a second ago.” he pauses. then realization hits. his shoulders relax, and that familiar mischievous grin slides back onto his face like he just put on armor again.
“i am confident,” he says, leaning slightly closer. “i just wanted to make sure you knew i’m a gentleman.” “is that what that was?” “absolutely.”
you almost roll your eyes, but the smile threatening at the corner of your lips betrays you. he notices immediately. and looks relieved.
you glance around again while he selects a game. the arcade lights reflect off polished floors, coloring everything in soft neon. laughter echoes somewhere behind you. it’s casual. relaxed. and then you notice him properly.
hoodie. faded jeans. sneakers that look worn in the comfortable way, not careless. a simple cap pulled low enough to hide part of his face. he looks… normal. not idol beomgyu. just beomgyu.
standing next to him in your structured blazer, pressed trousers, and work shoes suddenly makes you painfully aware of yourself. you look like you accidentally wandered here after a meeting. he notices your stare.
“…what?” “nothing,” you say quickly. his eyes narrow. “you’re thinking something.” you sigh. “i look extremely out of place.” he pauses. really looks at you. and then smiles, softer this time.
“no,” he says. “you look like someone important who got kidnapped into having fun.”
you let out a quiet laugh despite yourself. he visibly relaxes at the sound. like he’d been waiting for that reaction. he turns back to the machine quickly, maybe to hide it.
“come here,” he says. “this one’s easy.” you step beside him. the game lights up: racing game. of course. “you chose competition,” you say. “bold decision.” “i needed a fair chance to impress you.” “so you picked something you’re good at?” “…yes.” honesty. unexpected.
you sit down at the second console. the seat is slightly too low for your work clothes, and you awkwardly adjust your blazer. he notices immediately. “wait—do you want my jacket? or.. no, that would make it weirder—”
“beomgyu.” he freezes. “relax.” he exhales dramatically. “i am relaxed.”
you start the game. he is not relaxed. he leans forward too much, grips the wheel too tightly, reacts half a second too fast to everything. you watch him from the corner of your eye instead of the screen. he wants this to go well. that realization settles quietly in your chest. not playful wanting. not casual wanting. serious wanting.
the race starts. within ten seconds he crashes into a wall. “…you said you were good at this.” “that was performance anxiety,” he mutters. you laugh, fully this time. he immediately lights up. “you laughed again,” he says, pointing accusingly. “focus on driving.” “i am focusing.” he crashes again. you win without trying very hard. he throws his hands up. “this machine is broken.” “of course.”
he turns toward you, eyes bright despite losing. there’s something almost disbelieving in his expression, like he keeps checking that you’re really here, that you didn’t change your mind.
“your turn to choose,” he says quickly. “anything. except shooting games. i panic under pressure.” “you panic under arcade pressure?” “i panic under you pressure.” the words slip out before he can stop them. silence hangs for half a second.
his ears turn red. “…i meant— not like— i mean—” you pretend to study the machines to save him, but warmth creeps into your chest anyway.
you stop in front of a claw machine. he groans. “those are scams.” “are you scared?” his competitive instinct activates instantly. “move.” he feeds coins into the machine with exaggerated confidence.
first attempt: miss.
second attempt: miss worse. you cross your arms. “impressive.” “i’m calculating.”
third attempt. the claw grabs a small plush character and actually lifts it. both of you lean forward instinctively. it drops at the last second. he stares at the machine like it personally betrayed him. “…okay this is war.”
you laugh again, softer now, watching him argue with an inanimate machine, watching how animated he becomes, how alive. somewhere between the neon lights and his ridiculous determination, you realize something unsettling.
you’re not analyzing the situation anymore. you’re just… enjoying it. you don’t say that out loud, but he notices the change anyway. when he finally wins the plush on his sixth attempt, he turns immediately to you instead of celebrating. holds it out. a little awkwardly. a little shyly. “for you.”
you hesitate. accepting it feels strangely meaningful. “you didn’t even ask if i wanted it.” he smiles, softer now. “i wanted to give you something.” your fingers close around the plush.
you don’t realize how much time has passed until the arcade music starts blending into background noise instead of overwhelming you. somewhere between racing games, failed basketball shots, and beomgyu dramatically accusing machines of cheating, the tension in your shoulders disappears. he notices before you do.
“you’re having fun,” he says suddenly. you glance at him. “i never said that.” “you laughed five times.” “…you were counting?” “of course i was counting.” he says it like it’s obvious, like your reactions matter enough to keep track.
you look away first. he clears his throat and gestures toward another machine. “okay. this one’s important.” “they’ve all been important.” “no, this decides our entire future.” you sigh. “that sounds concerning.”
air hockey. he grabs one paddle and slides the other toward you with exaggerated seriousness. “ready?” “for what?” he leans forward slightly. “psychological warfare.” the game starts. within seconds he’s fully invested — moving too dramatically, reacting to every goal like it’s a championship match. “that didn’t count,” he protests after missing. “it very much counted.” “the table is uneven.” “beomgyu.” “i’m just saying.” you score again. he gasps like you personally betrayed him. “you were pretending to be bad earlier!” “maybe you’re just not good.” he freezes, narrowing his eyes. “…okay. now it’s personal.”
he focuses harder, tongue pressed lightly against his cheek in concentration. you notice the way his hair falls into his eyes when he leans forward, the way he laughs at himself when he almost misses again. he wins the next round by pure luck. he throws both arms up. “redemption!” you clap slowly. “congratulations.” he bows dramatically, then stops, stares at you. you tilt your head. “what?” he looks away quickly. “nothing.” but his smile lingers longer than the joke deserves.
you realize he’s not really celebrating winning. he’s celebrating this. standing across from you, laughing with you, existing in a moment that isn’t rushed or scheduled or monitored.
you suddenly become aware again of how different you look next to him. he blends into the arcade easily — hoodie sleeves pushed up, relaxed posture, movements loose and natural. you still look like you belong in a meeting room. you tug lightly at your blazer sleeve. he notices immediately.
“are you uncomfortable?” he asks. “no.” a pause. “…maybe a little overdressed.” he looks at you carefully. not teasing. not joking. just looking.
“i like it,” he says simply. you blink. “you look…” he hesitates, searching for the word. “…like you.” the answer is so sincere it catches you off guard.
he immediately grows shy after saying it, scratching the back of his neck before gesturing toward the prize counter. “come on. break time. i promised drinks.” you follow him. the arcade café area is quieter, dimmer. he orders for both of you before you can protest. “how did you know what i wanted?” you ask. he freezes for half a second. “…i pay attention,” he says casually. too casually. you suspect he memorized it long ago.
you sit across from each other with plastic cups between you. for the first time since arriving, there’s no game demanding attention, just conversation. he taps the cup nervously.
he speaks first. “…were you really nervous today?” you consider lying, but something about tonight makes dishonesty feel unnecessary. “…yes.” he nods immediately, relief washing over his face. “me too,” he admits. you raise an eyebrow. “you planned this.” “exactly,” he says. “i had more time to panic.” you laugh quietly. his shoulders drop again. another invisible point scored. he leans back slightly, watching you with softer eyes now. not evaluating. not persuading. just… happy you’re still there.
“i wanted the first place we went together to be somewhere easy,” he says after a moment. “somewhere you wouldn’t feel pressured.” you study him. this wasn’t random. he thought about this carefully. for a long time. “…you really wanted this,” you say. he smiles, small and almost embarrassed. “…for an embarrassingly long time.”
the honesty settles between you. not heavy. just real. for the first time tonight, you don’t feel the urge to protect yourself from the moment. you simply sit there, listening to arcade sounds in the distance, holding your drink, and letting yourself stay.
the arcade is quieter when you finally step outside. night air greets you immediately. cooler, calmer after the noise and lights inside. the sudden silence feels almost strange after hours of sound and movement. for a moment, neither of you speaks. he glances at you like he’s trying to read something written on your face, waiting, probably overthinking every second of the evening. you almost feel bad for letting him suffer like this.
“so…” he starts, then stops. clears his throat. “…did you survive?” you hum thoughtfully, pretending to consider it seriously. “barely.” his face drops instantly. “ah.” you let the silence stretch one second longer before adding, “…it wasn’t bad.” he blinks. “not bad?” he repeats carefully. “yes.” you look at him properly. “i had fun.” the words come out simpler than expected. honest. his reaction is immediate but subtle — shoulders relaxing, posture loosening, relief washing over him so obviously that it almost makes you smile, like he had been holding his breath all night.
“that’s… good,” he says, trying very hard to sound normal. he fails. his grin gives him away. you start walking toward the car together. he opens the passenger door before you can reach it, pretending it’s casual even though the gesture feels deliberate. you sit down. he circles to the driver’s side, still quieter than before. the engine starts. for a while, only soft music fills the car. streetlights pass across his face in intervals — light, shadow, light again. you watch the road, then speak before you overthink it.
“…thank you.” he glances at you quickly. “for what?” “for today.” he smiles faintly, eyes returning to the road. “i told you,” he says. “i just wanted a chance.”
a pause settles between you. comfortable this time. not heavy like before. not uncertain. just… unfinished. you rest your head lightly against the seat. you still don’t know what this will become. you’re still careful. still aware of work, consequences, boundaries. but tonight proved something important. being with him doesn’t feel complicated. it feels easy. and that realization is more dangerous than anything else.
the car slows near your place. he parks but doesn’t immediately turn off the engine. another small hesitation. another nervous moment. his hands slip into his pockets again before he seems to remember he’s sitting down and awkwardly pulls them back out. you hide a smile.
“do i get feedback?” he asks finally. “after date evaluation?” you pretend to think. “…you didn’t reveal the location beforehand.” he nods seriously. “mysterious charm.” “you lost most of the games.” “strategic humility.” “…and you argued with a claw machine.” he sighs. “that machine started it.” you laugh quietly. he watches you again — softer now, less anxious, more hopeful.
you open the door, then pause. turn back slightly. “one date down,” you say. his eyes widen just a little. hope flickers there before he can hide it. “…yeah,” he says carefully. “one date down.” you step out of the car. close the door. as you walk toward the entrance, you can feel his gaze lingering for a moment before the car finally pulls away. and for the first time since agreeing to this, you don’t wonder if saying yes was a mistake.
hey there! i’m gonna ramble a little because i’m very pissed at myself. i’d been planning to post chapter 11 of respectful fear last thursday or something, BUT my smart self didn’t realize my wi-fi was off and tumblr wasn’t saving my writing… so i lost the entire chapter when it was about 90% finished 🫠
normally i always keep backups both in my phone’s notes app and in tumblr drafts, but of course this was the one time i forgot. i was so annoyed that i literally haven’t written a single word since it happened.
anyway, i’ve finally cooled down a bit, so i’m going to rewrite the chapter and hopefully post it tomorrow or the day after. thank you for being patient with me and for still being here even when technology decides to betray me 😭
summary: sticky notes tucked between your books turn into a quiet game and slowly, the boy behind the counter becomes the best part of your saturday routine.
❀𖤣𖥧𖡼⊱✿⊰𖡼𖥧𖤣❀ ❀𖤣𖥧𖡼⊱✿⊰𖡼𖥧𖤣❀ ❀𖤣𖥧𖡼⊱✿⊰𖡼𖥧𖤣❀
the secondhand bookstore sits quietly between a laundromat and a café, like it’s been there forever. its windows are always a little fogged and the faint smell of paper and dust follows you in every time you push open the door. it’s small, narrow aisles, stacks of books that reach higher than they should, sunlight leaking through faded curtains. you go there often. sometimes for the books, sometimes just for the calm. there’s something steady about the place. the low hum of the air conditioner, the soft creak of wooden floors, the way the bell above the door always rings the same way.
the boy behind the counter — beomgyu, his silver name tag reads — has been here since your very first visit. he’s always in the same spot, slouched behind the register, headphones hanging around his neck, sorting through stacks of new donations. sometimes, he glances up when you walk in, offers a quiet “hey!” and goes back to what he’s doing. other times, he doesn’t notice at all, lost somewhere between the pages of a book. he isn’t exactly friendly but not distant either. just comfortably there, part of the scenery, like the faint ring of the doorbell or the smell of old pages.
you settle into a kind of routine. every saturday afternoon, you walk in, take a slow lap around the shelves and leave with one or two paperbacks. he bags them carefully, always with the same small smile. you talk sometimes. about how the weather seems to match the books people buy or how mr. wood, the old owner, still refuses to switch to digital records. he teases you once about buying too many tragic romances and you tell him he’s just jealous of emotional depth. he laughs quietly and it echoes in your mind the whole way home.
you don’t really know when it starts. one evening, you pick up a thin book whose title caught your attention. when you get home, you decide to start it right away since it’s short. as you flip one of the pages, something slips out. a yellow sticky note, tucked neatly between the lines. this author clearly didn’t know how commas work. (just like the very author of this fic <3) you blink, then laugh. it feels oddly personal, like an inside joke you didn’t know you had. you tuck it back into the page, smiling. maybe someone left it years ago. maybe it’s from the shop itself, a forgotten remnant. either way, it makes you like the book a little more. this is one of the reasons you love secondhand stores, the way books carry traces of other people. folded corners, coffee stains, the faint shadow of someone’s handwriting. every mark feels like proof that a story once lived twice.
but the next week, it happens again. this time, you pick up a short story collection. beomgyu bags it as usual and as you step toward the door, a small yellow sticky note slips out and flutters to the floor. you bend to pick it up, laughing softly. another tragic romance? brave of you. the handwriting is the same. messy, looping, unmistakably his. you glance back at him and he’s busy arranging a shelf, pretending not to notice. then another week, another book catches your eye. this time, when you hand it over at the counter, he pauses a moment longer than usual, scribbling something quickly on a sticky note. he slips it into the pages before handing the bag back to you, a small, secretive smile tugging at his lips. you notice his pause but don’t see the note at first, because he was drawing your attention to the new books that had arrived earlier that day. later, at home, you find the note inside page 123 reminded me of mr. wood. sometimes there are tiny doodles. a sleepy cat, the sun, a pair of glasses with hearts instead of lenses. each note feels deliberate, a quiet conversation without words and you realize it’s become a little ritual. a way of connecting through the margins of your books.
soon, you start noticing a strange anticipation every time you hand your books to him at the counter. will there be a note this time? what will it say? it becomes a small, thrilling part of the ritual. the walk to the register, the brief brush of his fingers as he hands you the bag, the quiet promise of yellow paper waiting at home. days drift by. summer starts to cool just a little. one afternoon, you find him sketching in the back, pencil in hand, half a doodle of a cat with glasses on the paper. you hide a smile. when he looks up, you just wave and he waves back.
then, one saturday, the shop is quieter than usual. rain taps softly against the window. you wander through the aisles, fingertips brushing over the spines of old novels, until you pick up one from the front table. beomgyu’s there, sleeves pushed up, rearranging the display. he looks up briefly, catches your eye, then looks away with that faint grin you’ve grown used to. when you bring the book to the counter, he takes it without a word, scanning the barcode. your fingers brush his for half a second as he hands it back. later at home, you flip through the pages. there it is, another sticky note. if you find this one, i’m off work at 6.
you stare at it, the words blurring a little as your heart stumbles over itself. you glance at the clock. 5:45. you grab your jacket again. the rain has quieted to a drizzle when you reach the store. through the window, you see him turning the “open” sign to “closed.” the bell jingles softly when you push the door open anyway. he looks up, startled, then smiles. slow, like he’s been waiting but didn’t want to hope. “you found it.” “you left it.” you say. he rubs the back of his neck, a little sheepish. “i thought… maybe we could talk without paper this time.” you laugh, warmth blooming in your chest. “you’re lucky i read that note fast.” he grins and something about it feels like sunlight finally breaking through rain. you walk together to the café down the street, where the lights glow soft and golden against the damp pavement. he buys you tea, you tease him about his handwriting and he tells you the stories behind the doodles. it feels easy, natural, like you’ve been doing this forever. two people who just happened to meet in the margins. later, at home, you open the book again. the sticky note is still there, edges curled. you smooth it gently and slip it back between the pages.
Please could you write for Kai, we are in a drought. 🙏
I feel like he is defo one to let his emotions get the better of him and then get all shy after 🙈 like he interrupts your rambling with a kiss cause he found it cute then is embarrsed by his sudden act of affection ✨️🫰
hello!! i’m very well, and i hope you are too <33
first of all, thank you so much—this was my first official request :) and also my first time writing for kai.
you can find the fic here. i genuinely hope you like it <3
