Mydei, to the person he likes.
(continue the series yapping about my favs, my moon, my man, my baby-
unpacking—the *small ripples*. The accidental tells. The things that betray affection before a confession ever could.)
Mydei is a man who already knows how to be gentle. that's not something he learned reluctantly or performs carefully — it's sewn into him, stitched in by his mother's hands and her words and the way she taught him to see the world. he cooks. he likes pink. he's tender with children and women without making a ceremony of it. he doesn't look at softness and think that's weakness — he looks at it and thinks that's what my mother gave me and I'm keeping it.
so when he likes someone — it's not softness breaking through armor. it's softness concentrating. focusing. finding a place to pour itself that feels safe enough to fill.
the tells aren't him becoming someone new. they're him becoming more of who he already is, directed at one specific person, with an intensity he hasn't quite figured out what to do with yet.
Mydei looks at people with assessment. it's not coldness — it's just how he takes in the world. he registers, files, moves on. but with the person he likes, the moving on part gets delayed. not dramatically. just a beat. just long enough that if they happen to turn and catch him, he doesn't flinch away — he holds it for one more second, like he's deciding something, and then he looks at whatever is in front of him and acts as if nothing happened.
he would never call it staring. it isn't, really. it's just — attention that forgets to be brief.
he doesn't crowd people. Mydei has a natural sense of space and he respects it as a rule. but with them — he drifts. and it reads almost like a battlefield habit, the way he repositions without conscious thought so that he's just slightly between them and anything uncertain. a doorway. a stranger he hasn't assessed. the edge of a cliff-path.
he's not hovering. he'd be offended if you called it hovering. he just happens to always be within arm's reach. always. and he doesn't notice he does it until someone points it out, and even then he'd probably say something like —
"it's practical. I can respond faster from this distance."
which is true. and also completely beside the point.
this is one of the clearest tells because Mydei is not a man who asks things out of social habit. he doesn't do small talk, not genuinely. so when he asks — he means it.
and the questions he asks the person he likes are specific. not "are you alright" but "that cut on your arm, did someone look at it." not "how are you" but "you haven't eaten since this morning, have you." not "do you need anything" but "you're holding your shoulder differently than yesterday."
he noticed. he was watching. he catalogued it and then he brought it back up because it was still on his mind.
the person might not immediately clock what this means. they might just think he's thorough, observant, a little intense. but over time the pattern reveals itself — he doesn't ask these things about anyone else with this frequency. with this specificity. this is what caring looks like when it comes out of a man who expresses himself through action more than language.
"You've been quieter than usual."
a pause, like he's considering whether to continue. then —
"Did something happen, or are you just tired?"
it's direct. a little blunt. but there's no judgment in it — he genuinely wants to know, and he's asking because he noticed, and he noticed because he was paying attention, and he was paying attention because he can't quite seem to stop.
this one is enormous for him. Mydei cooks. it isn't a hobby he's casual about — it's something he do for people, for soldier, something he carries with intention. and food, for him, is care made literal. it's the most practical expression of I was thinking about what you needed and I did something about it.
with the person he likes, the food becomes tailored. he learns what they like without making a project of it — just absorbs it the way he absorbs everything, quietly and permanently. and then one day there's just something set in front of them, and it's exactly right, and he's already looking somewhere else like it doesn't require acknowledgment.
"You said last week the broth at the camp was too salted."
he says this not as a preamble to a compliment-seeking gesture, but as a plain explanation for why this bowl exists and why it tastes the way it does. he solved a problem. that's all. it just happens to be a problem he was still thinking about a week later.
if they thank him too warmly he gets slightly awkward about it — not in a way he'd ever admit, just a brief stillness, a glance away —
"It's not difficult to adjust seasoning."
he means: you don't have to make this a moment. and he also means: please do not make this a moment because I will not know what to do with myself.
this is the biggest tell. the one he has the least control over.
Mydei is measured. he picks his battles. he doesn't flare at things that don't warrant it. but the moment something threatens this person — dismisses them, disrespects them, puts them in danger — his reaction comes before thought. a full second ahead of the version of himself that would assess and calibrate.
it's not explosive, necessarily. it might just be a very sudden stillness. a tone shift. a look that makes the offending party abruptly aware that they have miscalculated something.
"Say that again," — quiet, almost gentle, and somehow the most alarming thing he could have said.
or he steps forward — just one step, barely anything — and the entire temperature of the room changes.
afterward, if the person he likes looks at him, he schools it back. levels out. acts as if the moment was simply about principle, about justice, about what was right.
it was about what was right. it was also about them specifically and he knows it and he's not going to say it.
he says it differently. this is almost impossible to explain and yet anyone who listened closely enough would hear it — he says their name with more weight. not softness exactly, not a murmur. just deliberate. like he chose it out of everything he could have said.
with other people, names are just identifiers. with them, it lands like something he decided on.
Mydei's silences are not always comfortable. with strangers, with people he doesn't trust, his quiet has a quality of wall-ness to it — you feel that you're not getting in and that he's not particularly interested in opening a door.
with the person he likes, the silence is different. shared. he doesn't feel the urge to fill it or leave it. he just stays inside it with them like it's a room they're both allowed to be in.
if they're sitting somewhere and he goes quiet, he might glance over after a while — not checking on them, more like just confirming they're still there. and then he looks away again, satisfied.
that glance. that small, quiet glance. that's the whole thing.
same man. same softness. but now he has to navigate things like group chats and coffee orders and the particular agony of composing a text to someone you like and not wanting to sound like either a robot or like you're trying too hard.
he is not a man who is attached to his phone. he responds to messages when it's convenient and he doesn't particularly worry about it otherwise. but their contact is different. he reads their messages the second they come in — not because he's waiting, obviously, he wasn't waiting — and then he puts the phone down and picks it back up again within the minute because he's still thinking about what to say.
he hates this about himself a little. he's decisive. he makes fast choices in high-pressure situations. why is it so unreasonably difficult to figure out how to respond to "what are you doing later"?
what he sends is usually short. direct. but occasionally — occasionally — he'll draft something, delete half of it, and send something that is just barely warmer than his usual register, in a way that he hopes reads as normal and probably doesn't.
"I'll be around. Let me know if you need anything."
that "let me know if you need anything" is doing a lot of unacknowledged work.
he just — offers, every time. doesn't ask. "I'll drive." said like it's already decided, like it's logistical, like it has nothing to do with wanting an extra thirty minutes in the same enclosed space as this specific person.
and he shows up a little early. not early enough to be weird about it, just — early. because being late to something that involves them feels wrong in a way that he hasn't examined closely.
if they comment on it — "you're always early" — he says something like:
which is true of him in general. and is somehow also specifically about them in a way he's not going to unpack right now.
the food, modern version.
he still cooks. and at some point he learns their order at their usual coffee place, their preferred heat level, that one dish they always say they'll try and then never do, what they can't eat and what they pretend they can't eat versus what they genuinely can't eat.
he doesn't announce any of this. one day he just sets the right coffee in front of them without asking and goes back to whatever he was doing.
"You said you didn't like it too sweet."
a pause. he looks very focused on something across the room.
in a group setting, Mydei is contained. present but not performing — he laughs when something is genuinely funny, he talks when he has something to say, he doesn't fill space for the sake of it. arms crossed sometimes, easy stillness.
but if the person he likes is in the room, something in him orients. like a compass that has located north and now doesn't quite stop knowing where it is. he doesn't stare — he already established he doesn't do that — but if you watched him across an evening you'd notice that he always knows where they are. always.
and if they're talking and someone interrupts them or talks over them, Mydei does this thing — so smooth, so quiet — where he redirects. just says something that continues their thread, gives the floor back to them, acts like the interruption didn't happen.
he doesn't think of this as a gesture. it's just correcting something that was wrong.
genuine, rare, and criminally short. Mydei doesn't perform amusement. but with them — it comes easier. not louder, not more frequent in any dramatic way, but the barrier before it is just slightly lower. sometimes something they say catches him genuinely off guard and the laugh that comes out is unguarded in a way that surprises even him, and then he looks at them with this expression that is almost — almost — soft in a way he can't school away fast enough.
they might not catch it. they might. if they do, he clears his throat and looks elsewhere. which does not help his case at all.
what modern AU Mydei would never do:
say it first. not until he was absolutely certain. and even then it wouldn't be graceful — it would be abrupt, a little too direct, possibly said at a mildly inconvenient time because he'd been sitting on it and then one day it just came out. not a speech. not a setup.
"I think about you. More than I should, probably. I don't know what you want to do with that."
and then he waits. very still. like he's in a fight and he's already committed to the move and now it's up to the world to decide what happens next.
in both — in every version of him — what gives Mydei away isn't that he suddenly becomes something he isn't. it's that he becomes more present. more deliberate. the things he already does for people he cares about — the attentiveness, the food, the protection, the space-making — they just concentrate. they get quieter and more specific and more frequent and more impossible to explain away as general decency.
he is already a soft man. he was always a soft man. he just found someone his softness wanted to stay near.
and that, for Mydei, is the whole confession. not the words. the staying.
