Masters of the Hot Megaverse

Chris. They. Ancient. Should know better but here I am.

[skzstoryvault]

Story Masterlist

Some of the stories are linked to my AO3 account, which is under the user Kissa. Others are tumblr exclusives. I have an embarrassing majority of fluff and non-explicit things. I would love to write more spice/smut but it hasn't enjoyed much popularity in the past so my mojo in that department has dwindled somewhat. Maybe the urge to write smut will return if I ever feel safe about it again. divider from Cute Internet

🍓｡･♡･｡🍒｡･♡･｡🍓｡･♡･｡🍒 From oldest to newest

If I Was your vampire (Hyunjin, spice) Shattered Illusion (Hyunjin, spice and fluff)

Pastel Crimes (Chan, fluff)

All out of NyQuil (Hyunjin, spice)

Yuzu and Salt (Hyunjin, featuring all of SKZ, fluff and later spice. LONG!) Dans le noir (Hyunjin, dark and gloomy)

Bitter Lemon (Chan, spice and angst)

Pretty princess (Chan, spice)

Erase and Rewind (Hyunjin, fluff, angst, spice) - this fic has 4 parts, connected at the ends of the chapters

Worked up (Hyunjin, spice) Petty (Hyunjin, crack)

The Obvious Choice (Minho, Minsung elements, spice) Two Princes(ses) (Changbin, bit of spice) Relax! Take It Easy (Hyunjin, bit of spice) Let Me Love You (Felix, angst and spice)

Poison Drop (Hyunjin, angst and spice) Impromptu (Hyunjin, spice) Adore You (Chan, fluff) Different (Hyunjin, fluff and minimal spice) Sunshine with a side of Biscoff (Felix, fluff) A Cloud with Legs (Hyunjin, advanced fluff) Eepy Princess Man (Chan, fluff) Escape - After Hours (Chan & Hyunjin, implied spice, no reader insert)

Good Wives' Club (Hyunjin and Changbin, silliness) Monsters in the Moonlight (Chan, fantasy AU, mild)

Desensitization (Hyunjin, ft. Changbin, soft)

From this close (Chan, soft) Into the Earth (Hyunjin, eat pray love vibes, bit of spice) - longer read

Full Moon (Felix/Chan/OFC, poly relationship) - longer read

Cold Platinum (Chan, soft)

Bare Faced Beauty (Chan, mild) Grave Dirt (Felix, mild, supersoft)

My guts loved you first (Hyunjin, mild, crack-y)

Love Angel Music Dead Boy (Chan, spooky, angst and fluff) Halloween Fic Slow Render (Hyunjin, interior designer AU, mild) Wingmen (Felix, ft. his thirst for muscles, a bit cheeky)

Together (Seungmin, drama-style plot, mild) Bang Chan's Adult Fun Times (Chan, ft. all of SKZ, innuendos, mild) The Quiet After (Chan, angsty but supersoft) LSD: Llama socks devotion (Hyunjin, fluff)

A Well-Knit Family (Hyunjin ft. all of SKZ, mild)

Christmas Cookie heist (all of SKZ, mild, funny)

On/Off (Chan, fluffy but weird) Princess Man (Chan, supersoft)

Cracked Biscuit (Hyunjin, bit of angst) Dark and fluffy (Chan, supersoft)

Little Snail On A Fern (Hyunjin, silly and mild) with butt stuff and non-sexual intimacy Matching Set (Hyunjin, mild)

The Delightful and Disturbing Intricacies of Being Seen (Chan, angsty, soft)

Artistic Nudes (Hyunjin, mild) this would have been explicit but he was tipsy your honour

What did they Doooooo (Han, mild)

In A New Light (Chan, mild) The Three Genders (Hyunjin ft. SKZ ensemble, fluff) New Length (Chan, mild)

Someday Soon (Hyunjin, hint of spice)

Soft Landing (Chan, soft and a bit angsty)

[namtan]

FELIX & CHAN 'THIS & THAT' ENCORE ⟡ MUSIC BANK (260814)

[skzstoryvault]

Soft Landing (Chan, soft and a bit angsty)

Starring: Chan Summary: You express worry at his al work no rest MO. Warnings: mention of people who die of heart attacks Rating: teen and older ***

Soft Landing You hear him before you see him - the particular rhythm of his footsteps on the stairwell, too fast, too light, like his body hasn't gotten the message yet that the show is over. By the time he's at your door you already know what kind of night this is going to be, and it's not the kind he thinks he's arrived for.

He's grinning when you open the door, still humming with it - the stage, the crowd, and then, because apparently that wasn't enough, a gym session on top of it, like his nervous system filed a complaint and he decided the solution was more input. His eyes are too bright. His hands don't stay still. He kisses you like he's trying to pour the whole night into you, and for a second you let yourself enjoy it, because he's warm and alive and here.

Then you feel it-the way he holds his shoulder a half-inch wrong, the stiff hitch in his stride he's trying to walk through like it isn't there.

"Hi," he says, "I missed you," and reaches for you like something's about to happen, but you're already stepping back to look at him properly, and whatever he sees in your face makes his grin falter just slightly.

"Bath," you say.

"I'm fine."

"I know you're fine. Bath anyway."

He argues for exactly as long as it takes you to start running the water, which is to say, not very long at all, because some part of him, the part underneath the buzzing, is relieved to be told what to do instead of having to decide it himself. You add the muscle-relaxing foam you keep for exactly this kind of night, and when the tub is full you peel his clothes off him piece by piece, cataloguing the damage as you go: the reddened stretch of muscle along his shoulder blade, the way his calves have gone hard and locked, the bruise blooming somewhere he clearly hasn't noticed yet.

"You're not going easy on the encores anymore, huh," you say, keeping your voice light because if you let it go heavy he'll hear the worry in it and get defensive.

"Encores are easy," he says. "It's the choreo change they added Tuesday that's trying to kill me."

You get in after him, guide him back against your chest, and for a while he just breathes. The water and the heat start doing what they do-the room goes quiet, his shoulders drop half an inch, then another half inch, the buzzing underneath his skin slowly losing its charge. You work your fingers into his scalp, slow circles, no destination, and feel him go looser everywhere at once, like his whole body was waiting for someone else to say it was allowed to stop.

"You always know," he mumbles, eyes closed, head heavy against you.

"I've had practice."

"Mm. Lucky me."

You don't answer that one, because the honest answer is complicated; you're not sure luck is the word for a boyfriend who treats his own pain like background noise, who came here tonight thinking his body had one more thing left to give when really it had been asking, for hours, to be allowed to stop.

By the time you're both out and dry, most of the frantic energy has drained out of him, replaced by the particular heaviness that means he's about to feel every mile his body ran today. You sit him on the edge of the bed and get the kinesio tape, and he watches you tear the strips with the mild, drowsy interest of someone watching a familiar ritual.

"Shoulder first," you say, and he rolls it forward obediently, wincing when it clicks.

You work in silence for a few minutes, smoothing each strip along the muscle, anchoring the parts of him that have been carrying too much for too long. He's quiet in a way that isn't quite sleep yet, watching your hands.

"Doesn't it bother you?" He says eventually.

"Does what bother me."

"This." He gestures faintly at himself, at the tape, at the whole tableau. "Patching me up instead of - " he makes a vague gesture, "- benefiting. From having a boyfriend who's actually built for something."

You almost laugh, except it isn't funny, it's just very him - the idea that his worth to you is measured in what his body can produce rather than the fact that it's attached to him.

"Can I tell you the truth?"

"Always."

"It doesn't turn me off." You press the last strip down and smooth it flat with your thumb. "It scares me."

He goes still under your hands. "Scares you how?"

"I don't want to be one of those people," you say, and it comes out steadier than you expected, like you'd already rehearsed it somewhere in the back of your mind. "The ones whose partner dies on them. In them. At the worst possible moment, because he decided rest was for other people."

"That's - " He shifts to look at you properly, half-alarmed, half like he wants to argue you out of it. "That's not-you wouldn't say that to Hyunjin."

"No," you agree. "I wouldn't."

"Why not?"

"Because Hyunjin doesn't run himself into the ground on zero sleep and pure vibes as a lifestyle choice." You keep your hands moving over his shoulder even though the tape's already done, because you're not ready to stop touching him yet. "Hyunjin shows up, does his part, goes home, and eats an obscene amount of food on his sofa with his feet up until his body forgives him. That's recovery. You don't have a sofa phase. You have a phase where you come here still vibrating and call it fine."

He doesn't say anything to that, which is how you know it landed.

"And the only reason Hyunjin gets to have his sofa phase," you add, quieter now, "is because people like you decide the hard parts have to get done by someone. I know that. I'm not asking you to stop being who you are. I'm asking you to let the stopping happen somewhere. Sometimes. On purpose, instead of only when your body finally forces it."

He's quiet for a long moment, turning that over with the particular slowness of someone whose adrenaline has finally, finally burned all the way down.

"I don't get it," he says finally, voice going soft and unguarded in the way it only does this late, this tired. "How you can look at me like this-wrapped in tape, half-dead, absolutely useless - and still want to be here."

"I'm not with you for what you can lift."

"I know. I know that. I just don't - " He stops, frustrated with himself, the words not quite arriving. "I don't know how to feel that the way you mean it. About myself, I mean."

"You don't have to tonight." You guide him down, get him settled against your chest, his bad shoulder carefully arranged so the tape doesn't pull. "That's what I'm here for. I'll hold the part you can't hold yet."

He goes quiet again, and you card your fingers slowly through his hair, the same unhurried rhythm as before, no destination, nowhere to be. You can feel the exact moment his breathing changes, gets longer, deeper, less like a body still bracing for one more rep and more like a body that has finally, finally been given permission.

"Thank you," he mumbles, already halfway gone.

"Sleep," you tell him, and he does - not because he decided to, not because some part of him gave itself the order, but because you're there, warm and solid and not going anywhere, holding the stillness for him until his body trusts it enough to stop fighting it.

You stay awake a little longer than he does, the way you always do, watching the tension finally leave his face in his sleep. Somewhere under all that armor is someone who has never once been taught that rest is something he's allowed to have without earning it first. You can't fix that in one night. But you can hold the door open a little, again and again, until maybe someday he walks through it on his own.

For tonight, this is enough. He's warm, he's breathing easy, and he's finally, finally still.

~end~

[skzstoryvault]

Someday Soon (Hyunjin, hint of spice)

Starring: Hyunjin

Summary: The visible traces of a three week holiday in Turkey, where no one knows who he is, reveal a facet of Hyunjin the people around him are not used to seeing, but grow to love nonetheless.

Warnings: sex is mentioned in passing, but nothing outrageous happens. The challenges of being an idol make a brief appearance.

Rating: teen and up

Song pairing:

Someday Soon

The sun in this part of Turkey doesn't ask permission. It just arrives, early, loud, gold, pouring through the gap in the shutters you never quite manage to close all the way. And before the sun, there's the rooster. An absolute menace of a bird that Hyunjin has named Beyoncé for reasons he refuses to explain, and that he loves with his whole, ridiculous heart. Hyunjin will deadass carry the rooster in his arms, bring him to you in the kitchen and say, “look at my big beautiful cock, don’t you just want to pet him?” And you do, because how could you not? The bird is watching you like he’s in on the joke. 

"He's calling us," Hyunjin mumbles into your shoulder, not moving an inch.

"He's calling you. You're the one who feeds him."

"We have an arrangement."

You both lie there a minute longer, tangled in a sheet that smells like salt and lavender detergent, in a house with peeling blue shutters and a fig tree pressing its branches against the window like it wants to come inside too. This is week two of three. No itinerary. No one's name on a list. Just this small house at the edge of a small town the Google Earth car never made it to, that you found through a friend of a friend who swore nobody would recognize him here, and nobody has. The locals are all over eighty, but spry like twenty year olds and never stopping their outdoor activities enough to sit in front of a screen and find out what the world at large is coveting these days. 

Hyunjin gets up first, finally, grumbling, in a tank top so old the collar has given up entirely, and shorts that have seen better decades. His hair is a disaster. He goes out to deal with Beyoncé and the three hens, and you watch from the doorway as he crouches down, scattering feed, murmuring nonsense to them in Korean like they understand every word.

"You look like a farmer," you call out.

"I look like a man," he corrects, grinning over his shoulder, and the morning light catches the new tan line at his collarbone, the place where a stylist's careful neckline usually sits, now just sun and skin and nothing engineered about it at all.

Market days are your favorite. He insists on carrying everything himself, refuses every offer of help, and ends up overloaded with tomatoes threatening to roll out of a paper sack, a slab of feta wrapped in wax paper, bread still warm enough to fog the bag. He haggles badly and happily. He has befriended the old man who sells lemons, mostly through gesture and goodwill, and now receives what you suspect are family-rate lemons, possibly free lemons, you've honestly lost track.

"I got extra mint," he announces, triumphant, like he's just closed a business deal. "For the lemonade. Also he gave me an extra lemon. I think he likes me."

"Everyone likes you, Hyunjin."

In the garden behind the house there's an orange tree he's decided is his personal property, and a few scraggly tomato vines the previous tenant left behind, and he checks them every single day like a man checking on his stocks. He climbs the orange tree badly and with great enthusiasm, comes down with two oranges and a new scratch along his forearm, presents the fruit to you like he's just conquered something.

"Not like this," he says, and gestures at himself, at the sweat at his temple and the dirt on his knee from where he tripped over a curb laughing at something you said three days ago and never quite healed the scrape, hasn't even tried to. "This is new."

Yes it is, you think. But only to him, because he forgot that somewhere underneath the idol, and deep under the fabricated non-idol layer of public Hyunjin, there’s still a perfectly loveable soul. 

"For my queen," he says, with a flourish, a rivulet of blood from the scratch running down his wrist. He doesn’t notice.

You eat them sitting on the warm stone step, and he kisses the sticky corner of your mouth after, unbothered, unposed, just a boy who climbed a tree for you.

Nights are different when you stay up too. The sticky heat of summer brings you together and Hyunjin loves burrowing closer and closer to you, until there’s nothing separating you. Being naked, bodies pressed together and joined in the night air, in a house with all the doors and windows wide open, feels different, slower, compared to the muted, stolen moments in Seoul. There’s no ever-present fear that someone, somewhere, is watching through a high-tech telephoto lens or a wildly miniaturised camera that picks up video and audio; there’s also not the consideration for Changbin’s ears in the other bedroom and managing the awkwardness of the next morning.

Hyunjin is a whole new beast without his idol persona on top of him like a second skin. He begs, cries, moans, pleads, makes promises, curses and nuts with the despair of someone who knows they’ll lose this freedom sooner than they’d like. His hands are always on you, pulling you closer, kneading, squeezing, caressing, holding - extracting that much more pleasure from your body, wanting you to know this version of him better than his cautious, stressed one and prefer it even long after your holiday ends.

Mornings are his favourite time to let you take him apart until his soul leaves his body through his dick and he lays on the sheets, trembling, overstimulated, whining, with tearstreaks down his cheeks, leading to the sweaty, crumpled sheets underneath. You feel dizzy too, places in you that usually never make themselves known now pulsing and giving off pleasant heat. Hyunjin will cry and complain he’s dehydrated and you’ll pry yourself off of him to get him water, and then he’ll scream that you broke him and ripped away the one part of himself he likes the most (you). You’ll go to the bathroom to put a new towel on the hook, feeling the sticky evidence of the morning’s antics dripping slowly down your thighs. Before you can even register how yucky that feels, Hyunjin will have caught up to you, his fingers trailing through the mess before he maneuvers you into the shower and fucks you into the wall before he finally uses his shower gel to make you both smell like the same version of clean. 

The food is simple and it undoes you both a little, every time. Tomatoes still warm from the sun, sliced thick, with too much olive oil and a sprinkle of salt flakes he's weirdly particular about. Bread torn by hand. Eggs from Beyoncé's hens, which Hyunjin treats with the reverence of a man receiving communion. He's taught himself to make a simple lentil soup from a video he found, gets the spices wrong every time in some new and interesting way, and you eat it anyway, sitting outside as the light goes orange, his foot hooked around your ankle under the table.

"This is the worst soup I've ever made," he says proudly.

"It's incredible."

"It's terrible. I'm so proud of it."

Nights, sometimes, you walk down to the little beachside bar, the kind with string lights and a sound system that's seen better years, and he dances like nobody is filming, because nobody is. No formation, no count, no mirror. Just his hips and his bad rhythm to music that isn't his, his head thrown back laughing, your hand in his. Later you end up on the sand, the two of you, not even drunk, just loose-limbed and warm, watching the sky, falling asleep there more than once and waking up at dawn with sand in your hair and his arm dead asleep under your neck and neither of you minding even slightly.

His skin gets dark, properly dark, golden brown with a stark white line where his watch used to sit before he stopped wearing it altogether. A thin almost-moustache appears because he's stopped shaving, declares it gives him "main character energy," and you tell him it gives him gas station attendant energy, and he laughs so hard he nearly falls off the porch step.

By the last week, his knees are scraped from the fig tree and from a spectacular tumble off a paddleboard, his flip-flops have a visible Hyunjin-shaped groove worn into them, and he smiles all the time. Not the practiced one. The one that crinkles his eyes too much to be flattering on camera, the one his stylists have gently tried to angle away from in photos for years.

Seoul comes back fast.

You watch it happen at the airport already, the slight straightening of his spine, the phone lighting up the second it leaves airplane mode, three group chats and a manager's voice note in the first ten seconds. By the time you reach the dorm, he is visibly, audibly, a man walking into a small disaster.

Chan opens the door and just stops. He slowly brings a hand to his mouth, closes the door in your faces, then screams. He opens the door again, eyes wide and huge with shock. 

"Hyunjin." A pause. "Hyunjin, what IS that? Oh my God, WHAT IS THAT?!” 

"Don't," Hyunjin warns, already laughing.

"What happened to your knee?"

"It's a battle scar."

"From what battle, you were on vacation—"

The stylist actually puts a hand over her mouth and yelps into it. The manager, when he arrives twenty minutes later for an unrelated reason, takes one look and has to leave the room to compose himself. You hear him in the hallway making a phone call that starts with "we have a situation, no, not that kind."

Felix circles him like he's inspecting livestock, equal parts horrified and undeniably jealous. "You have a tan line. A real one. From a watch. Hyunjinnie, I haven't had actual sun on my actual skin in I don't even know- fuck, how did you scuff your knees?!"

"It's so unfair," Lee Know says, flatly, arms crossed, looking Hyunjin up and down with the wounded expression of a man being shown a forbidden fruit. "You look like a person. I look like I sleep in a drawer at the morgue."

Han, predictably, makes a beeline straight for him, grabs his face in both hands to inspect the almost-moustache up close with delighted horror, and declares, "I have to kiss this disaster immediately," which he does, loudly, on the cheek but trying to aim for the lips, while Hyunjin shoves him off laughing. Changbin isn't far behind, pulls him into a hug that lifts him half off the ground, says something about missing his stupid face into his shoulder before letting him go to make fun of the moustache some more. I.N. watches from the side, knowing that Hyunjin will go to him and resume kneading him like a stress toy in due time, but until that happens, he stews in envy at the realisation of why his hyung looks so beatific. You laugh privately, hiding your face for a bit, because the maknae may be able to hide behind his cute features, but he can’t switch off his face subtitles even if he tries. 

It takes the better part of two days, a great deal of skincare, careful shaving, color correction, and the quiet returning architecture of routine before Hyunjin looks, on the outside, like Hyunjin again. Polished. Composed. Camera ready in the way the job requires.

That night, after the schedules and the cameras and the version of him the world is allowed to see, he lies next to you in the dark of his own room, in his own bed, in Seoul again, and he's quiet for a long moment before he finds your hand under the blanket.

"Thank you," he says.

"For what?"

"For that." His thumb moves slowly over your knuckles. "For three weeks where nobody looked at me. Where I wasn't anything to anyone except the guy who feeds the chickens badly and makes terrible soup."

You turn to look at him. Even in the dark you can still see, faintly, the ghost of the line at his collarbone, fading now, going the way of all souvenirs.

"You were never anything less than that to me," you tell him. "Just easier to see."

He doesn't say anything for a while. Just holds your hand a little tighter, in the dark, the city outside humming with all the noise that will be his again tomorrow.

"I want to go back," he whispers, eventually. "Not yet. But someday soon. Same chickens. Same lemon guy."

"He'll give you free lemons forever."

"He really will," Hyunjin says, smiling, and you can hear it even though you can't see it, the real one, the one with too many crinkles, the one nobody gets to angle away from tonight.

END

If you read this and enjoyed it, please consider letting me know in a comment or reply!

[skzstoryvault]

Should I make a masterlist for this blog?

Yes! I'd read more of your fics if I could find them more easily.

No. IDGAF!

I was expecting that anyway. Why don't you have one?

Voting ended onJun 29

[skzstoryvault]

New Length (Channie & SKZ, supersoft)

Starring: Bang Chan Featuring: all of SKZ Summary: you get a short haircut and for one terrifying moment, you worry your boyfriend will hate it. Warnings: some language; unhinged stans assuming things Rating: mild Tumblr exclusive

New Length

You almost chicken out in the salon chair. Your stylist has the scissors open, the first long wavy chunk of light blond hair already gathered in her fist, and you catch your own eyes in the mirror looking a little panicked. It's been down to your waist since you were nineteen. It's the hair Chan has wrapped around his hand more times than either of you could count.

"You sure?" the stylist asks, German efficient, scissors steady.

You think about the months of wanting this. The Pinterest board you never showed anyone. You nod before you can talk yourself out of it again.

The first cut sounds louder than it should.

An hour later you're staring at someone who looks like you but lighter, somehow, your jaw and cheekbones suddenly the main event instead of something hair used to soften. A pixie cut, short at the sides, a little messy on top. You touch the back of your neck where there used to be nothing to touch.

You don't immediately know how you feel about it. You know exactly how you think Chan will feel about it, though, because you've absorbed sixty thousand comment sections' worth of men online mourning their girlfriends' long hair like it died. You spend the drive home rehearsing how you'll explain it if he's disappointed, how you'll tell him it grows back.

He's in the kitchen of the dorm when you walk in, hood half-up like he forgot he put it there, and he turns around with a piece of toast still in his hand. The toast does not make it to his mouth.

"Oh," he says. Just that. He sets it down without looking at it.

"It's a lot, I know," you start, already bracing. "I can show you photos of how it looked before if you need a minute to grieve the loss of the long hair experience, I have read the comment sections, I know how this normally goes for guys—"

"Can I touch it." Not really a question by the time it leaves him.

You tip your head a little, giving him permission you didn't realize he was waiting for, and his hand comes up slow, like he's not sure it's real. His fingers slide through what's left of your hair and his whole face changes, something private and a little wrecked moving across it.

"It's so soft," he says, sounding almost offended by how good it feels. "Why is it so soft. You cut all the weight out and now it's just-"

"Just?"

"Soft." He says it again like the word is doing something to him. His hand drifts to the back of your head, fingers curling against your scalp, and he presses lightly there in a slow circle and your knees decide to withdraw their support for a beat. “Fuck me, I’m gone.” This comes out as a whisper, over an exhale. 

"You like it," you say, because you need to hear him confirm what his face is already confirming.

"I like it so much I'm a little embarrassed," he admits, laughing under his breath, still petting you like you're something he's allowed to keep. "You look like you could fight someone and also like I want to put my hands on your head for the rest of the night, both things, at the same time. And, uh… other things too."

"That's emotionally complicated of you."

"I'm a complicated man." He tugs you in by the back of the neck, mouth against your temple, and you feel him breathe out slow, like something in him finally snapped into place. "I get to mess this up now and it'll just look good with a new geometry. I don't have to think about three hours of styling before I touch you. I can just-" He drags his palm over the short hair again, scratching gently behind your ear like you're something small and contented. "Do this. Whenever I want. I can have my hands on you an amount closer to what I want."

"You sound like you've been waiting for this specifically."

"I didn't know I was waiting for it until your hair was suddenly an inch long," he says, completely unbothered by how that sounds. "I'm not going to apologize for it."

You end up on the couch later, his fingers still finding their way back to your scalp every few minutes like he can't quite believe he's allowed, and you ask if he wants to try your hair wax sometime since the texture is apparently similar enough now.

He looks delighted in a way that's slightly unsettling. "We can share everything. Get ready together in the morning."

"That's the bar for you? Shared skincare and now shared hair wax?"

"I'm a simple man with a small number of dreams and you're fulfilling several of them in one haircut." He pulls his own beanie off and puts it on your head instead, tugging it down, grinning at the fact that it actually fits the way it's supposed to now. "Look. We match."

"This is deeply unserious behavior from you."

"I contain multitudes," he says, and goes back to petting your head like it's the only thing on his agenda for the evening.

The fan reaction, when it comes, comes fast and ugly in the replies under a blurry fan-taken photo of you both leaving a cafe. You only look good with short hair because you basically have a man's face now. Bet Chan's actually into men, this confirms it, look how comfortable he is, no straight man pets his girlfriend's head like that in public. You read three of them before you put your phone down on the table, face carefully blank, the kind of blank you've gotten good at.

Chan, who has clearly already seen them, doesn't say anything performative about it. He just reaches over and laces his fingers through yours on the table, thumb moving slow over your knuckles.

"They've decided I'm gay because I like touching my girlfriend's head," he says eventually, dry. "I've been called worse for less interesting reasons."

"Does it bother you?"

"That strangers online have a theory about my sexuality based on a haircut? No." He shrugs, easy. "What would bother me is you thinking for one second that any of that is true. So. Is it working?"

"No," you say, and mean it, even though some small stubborn part of you had been quietly absorbing it anyway, the way you always do. “I mean… fellas, is it gay to be affectionate to your girl? Andrew Tate thinks so.” 

Chan makes a retching sound. He seems to hear the small stubborn part anyway, because that night at the dorm he doesn't let it go. 

Felix is the one who actually brings it up properly, flopping onto the couch beside you with his own hair freshly redone, peering at your pixie cut with open delight.

"I love it. You look like you could be in the group," he says, completely serious, already reaching out to mess with it like it's communal property now.

"He's not wrong," Seungmin says from the kitchen, not even looking up from his phone. "Short hair widely improves a person. This is just fact."

It's Hyunjin who says the thing that actually gets you, later, when it's quieter and it's just the two of you and Changbin in the practice room while the others run lines. He studies you for a second, head tilted the exact way he does when he's looking at choreography, and says, "It suits your face. Genuinely. You have the bone structure for it, which a lot of people don't." He says it the way he'd say something about technique, no flattery in it, just an assessment, which somehow makes it land harder than if he'd been gentle about it.

"Length doesn't change anything," Changbin adds, not looking up from the lyrics he's scribbling. "You'd still be terrifying to us with a buzz cut. It's not about the hair." He glances up then, briefly, something steady and certain in it. "We didn't start liking you because of long hair. We're not going to stop liking you because it's gone."

You don't expect that to be the thing that gets you, out of everything, but it is, a little.

Chan has been quiet through most of this, sitting on the floor with his back against the mirror, but when you glance over he's watching you with that same private, wrecked expression from the kitchen, like the conversation has just been an excuse for him to look at you for an extended period.

"What," you say.

"Nothing." He gets up, crosses the room, and settles himself behind you on the bench, knees bracketing your hips, chin dropping to rest against the top of your head like he's checking it's still there. His hands find their way into your hair again, slow, methodical, scratching gently at your scalp in a way that makes you go a little soft against him despite the audience.

"You're doing the head thing again," you say.

"I'm always going to be doing the head thing now," he says, completely unrepentant, voice low against your ear. "You ruined me. I hope you're satisfied."

"I am, actually."

"Good," he murmurs, knuckles dragging gently over the back of your neck where there's nothing left to catch or tangle or worry about ruining, just you, easy to reach now in a way you weren't before. "Me too."

END

[skzstoryvault]

The Three Genders (Hyunjin featuring OT8, soft af)

Starring: Hyunjin Featuring: OT8 (they are all in it) Summary: Hyunjin falls in love with the new SKZ choreographer and things aren't as clean-cut as they seem. Warnings: assumptions, systemic misogyny (the industry, not SKZ members), catching feelings at work. Rating: Teen and up, mild. ***

The Three Genders

The company emails you on a Tuesday. Three paragraphs, standard Korean corporate formality: a six-month renewable contract, a start date, choreography oversight for one of their top acts. The name in the subject line means nothing to you at first (you are not a K-pop person, or at least you weren't) but when you run a search you understand the scale of what they're offering and you sit very still for a moment in your apartment in Berlin.

You sign.

Your name is Angel.

It is, in every sense, doing its job.

You did not choose it for that purpose; your grandmother chose it, three decades ago, in a hospital room in Eastern Europe, and whatever she was thinking of in that moment, it was not the choreography industry. But you have watched it land in inboxes and meeting rooms and practice space introductions for long enough to understand what it does. People hear Angel and they build something out of it. The building materials vary: some version of a man, usually, because you are in rooms that expect men, because your portfolio speaks a language those rooms recognise, because nothing about the way you present yourself announces anything in particular.

You have never corrected anyone.

You have never had to.

This is different from hiding. Hiding implies a self that needs protection. What you have is simply an accurate understanding of how assumptions work, and the patience to let them.

The first day you walk into the practice room, eight young men stop what they are doing and look at you.

You are used to this.

You introduce yourself. Angel. Western choreographer. Here to work. You shake hands with each of them and you do not flinch when the energy in the room is that particular male group energy - the slight performance of it, the sidelong glances to see how each other is reacting to you. You have been in enough practice rooms in enough countries to read this like weather. It will pass.

Chan, the leader, is professional and warm in a way that feels genuine rather than performed. He has the slightly exhausted attentiveness of someone who holds too many people together and has stopped expecting gratitude for it. You like him immediately.

The one who watches you the longest, right from the beginning, is Hyunjin.

You had done your research. Twenty-six years old, dancer, visual centre of the group. There is a painting of his on their company's social pages and it is actually good, which surprises you, and then you feel bad for being surprised.

In person he is prettier than his photographs, which is not something you had thought was possible. He has the face of someone a Renaissance master would have used as a reference and then probably fallen in love with, which has clearly caused him no shortage of existential drama. You can tell, from the slight vacancy of his expressions when he thinks no one is watching, that he keeps most of himself somewhere the cameras do not reach.

This does not concern you. You are here to work.

The first month is straightforward. You are known for a specific approach: you learn what the group can already do, you find the edge of it, and then you pull them gently past it. Not breaking, just stretching. It requires watching people very carefully and understanding what fear looks like in a body.

Stray Kids, you discover, are technically accomplished in ways that mask the fact that they have never been pushed toward the specific kind of vulnerability you are interested in. They have been trained to be precise. You want them to be dangerous.

Chan catches on first. Then Minho, who has a dancer's instinct that he hides under a layer of sardonic remove. Then the others, in various orders.

Hyunjin catches on somewhere in the second week and then leaps so far past the others that you have to set separate challenges for him just to keep him occupied.

"He always does this," Changbin tells you, with the mild resignation of someone who shares a living space with a golden retriever. "He gets interested in something and then there's no furniture left in the brain."

The apartment arrangements surface gradually, in the easy way that information comes up when you spend enough hours in a room with people. Chan with IN, whose quiet is different from Chan's quiet in ways that seem to make them work well together. Felix and Seungmin, who apparently have strong opinions about the organisation of a kitchen and have reached some kind of peace treaty. Minho and Han, whose shared space you imagine must be either perfect or genuinely hazardous. And Hyunjin and Changbin, who refer to themselves as wives with the absolute sincerity of two people who mean it and also find it extremely funny.

"You and Changbin call yourselves wives?" you say, the day this comes up.

"Obviously," Hyunjin says, without a trace of irony. "He is very supportive."

Changbin, passing with a water bottle, points at Hyunjin and says, "He leaves wet towels on every surface. I am supportive because I choose to be, not because the universe has rewarded me."

Hyunjin looks at you with the open, slightly baffled expression of someone who has just been accused of a crime they only vaguely remember committing.

You go home that evening and realise you are smiling.

It begins, as these things do, without announcement.

You are three weeks in, near the end of a long Thursday session, when the room crosses the invisible threshold from professional space into something looser. It happens around eight in the evening, when the energy drops from performance-ready into what people actually are. The mirrors are still running with condensation. Eight men sprawl across the floor in various configurations.

Han is lying flat on his back, one arm over his face, producing sounds of theatrical suffering.

"I cannot feel my calves," he announces. "They have left. They have gone somewhere without me."

"They went with my knees," Felix says, from somewhere near the speaker dock.

You are making notes on your tablet, seated against the mirror, half-listening. This is the hour you have come to think of as the real practice room, when the performance drops and they are just themselves. You have learned more about how to work with them in these thirty-minute windows than in entire morning sessions.

"Okay," Minho says, sitting up with the sharp efficiency of someone whose body does not understand fatigue the way normal people do. He pulls off one sock with the focused intention of a man who has had a thought and intends to follow it to its conclusion. "Stink check."

A sound of immediate interest goes around the room.

"Oh that's not fair," Han says, still horizontal. "You do actual extra practice before we even arrive."

"That means more hours," Minho says. "More hours means more data."

"I am not doing this," Seungmin says.

"You are already reaching for your shoe," Felix points out.

"I am stretching."

The ritual, it turns out, is not new. Within ninety seconds, seven men are holding their own socks and the negotiations around judging criteria are extensive and deeply felt. Chan has appointed himself to a mediating role that no one formally offered him and he seems mildly burdened by. His socks both still notably on. 

"Same number of practice hours," Jisung is saying. "Has to be same hours or the comparison means nothing. This is basic science."

"You study music production," Changbin says.

"Science is science."

You become aware, at some point in this exchange, that Minho is looking at you.

"Angel," he says. "You have been here since nine. That's eleven hours."

Eight faces turn toward you with the collective expectation of a panel that has just remembered a key witness.

You look up from your tablet.

"I used foot spray this morning," you say.

A pause.

"You used foot spray," Minho repeats.

"Cedar and eucalyptus."

The silence has a specific quality. It is the silence of a group of people revising an assumption.

"That's," Felix starts.

"Very," Seungmin continues.

"Premeditated," Han finishes, propping himself up on one elbow.

Changbin squints at you. "You knew. You knew this would happen."

"I did not know this would happen," you say honestly. "I use it every day. I have been using it every day since I was nineteen. It is a habit."

"That's worse," Jisung says. "That means you just naturally thought about it and we didn't."

You remove one sock with the composure of someone who has nothing to fear. Eight people lean slightly forward.

Your sock smells of cedar and eucalyptus and the faint clean note of athletic fabric washed properly. It smells, by any reasonable measure, fine.

The sound that goes around the room is part accusation and part genuine admiration.

"Not even a little," Chan confirms, having leaned in for the official ruling with the expression of a man who both accepts the result and is personally affronted by it.

"Not even a little," you agree.

Minho holds his own sock at arm's length and looks at it. Then at you. "You have defeated us," he says, "without trying."

"I tried a little," you say. "I tried at nine this morning when I applied the foot spray."

Han puts his face back in his arm and makes a noise that might be laughter.

The lifting situation happens on a Wednesday, which seems in retrospect like exactly the kind of day that would host it.

Changbin is in a mood that you have come to recognise - the particular frequency of energy he runs on when the session has gone well and his body is feeling good and the testosterone of a productive morning needs somewhere to go. He has been doing extra sets of everything for an hour. He has the focused, cheerful menace of a man who is not looking for trouble but has left the door open.

You are sitting on the equipment bench reviewing counts with Chan when Changbin wanders over, regards you with a considering expression, and says: "Angel. Bench press."

Chan looks up from your shared tablet.

"A contest," Changbin clarifies, helpfully.

You look at him. He is two-thirds your height and built like something that was constructed with a specific structural purpose and then left to develop a personality. You are lean in the way that movement training makes people lean - capable, functional, nothing extra - and you do not bench press, specifically, as a discipline.

"Changbin," Chan says.

"I'm just saying-"

"We each have our strengths," Chan says, with the decisive tone of a man who has made a decision on behalf of the room and is not entertaining appeals. He has the subtle watchfulness of someone who is protecting you from an outcome he thinks will be bad for you, which is genuinely kind and also slightly incorrect in a direction you decide not to correct right now.

"My strength," you say, "is that I know seventeen ways to make you feel a new kind of tired in your hip flexors."

Changbin considers this.

"That's fair," he says.

"Also," you say, "I am not competing with you. You would win. You are built for it. I am built for different things. These are not the same as better and worse."

He looks at you for a moment with something that is not quite surprise and not quite respect but lives in the neighbourhood of both. "Fair," he says, and wanders off, apparently satisfied.

Chan is still watching you with the careful attention of someone recalibrating slightly.

"You didn't need me to do that," he says.

"I didn't," you agree. "But it was kind of you to try."

He looks briefly embarrassed in the way people do when they've been caught being thoughtful. He goes back to the tablet.

Later, you see him doing his own bench sets, and the number he works with is, you note with quiet interest, the highest in the room. He shows no awareness of having demonstrated anything.

Chan, you have concluded, is a man who carries things without announcing them.

The members like you. This is clear and uncomplicated. You are invited into their group chats for coordination purposes and somehow never leave them. They tag you in videos of other choreographers. Han sends you voice memos of melody ideas at eleven at night with a message that says "this is for nothing specific I just thought maybe energy" and you send back a reference clip that makes him reply thirteen heart emojis. Felix, who is from Australia and has a specific cultural directness that you appreciate, tells you at the end of week three that you are their favourite choreographer they have ever had, and then gets embarrassed and says he was not supposed to say that out loud.

What is less straightforward is the painting.

It appears on your desk in the practice room on a Thursday morning. A small canvas, maybe twenty centimetres across, in a brown paper sleeve. No note.

You open it carefully.

Two figures, rendered in the loose gestural style you recognise from Hyunjin's other work — you have done the research, this is clearly him — pressed close together, foreheads touching. The colour palette is rose and grey and a particular deep blue. It is, unmistakably, a painting of two men in a moment of extraordinary tenderness.

You sit with it for a long time.

You put it in your bag and do not say anything.

The second painting appears the following Tuesday. This one is slightly larger. Two men again, holding hands across a table, the light falling on them warm and soft and full of intention.

You sit with that one for a long time too.

The invitations to eat begin around the same time.

"There is a place," Hyunjin says one afternoon, while you are reviewing footage together, "in Ikseon-dong. Very old building. Very quiet. Nobody goes there except people who know it is there. The dubu jjigae is wrong in the right way." He pauses. "I could take you."

You look at him. He is looking at the footage, not at you.

"Wrong in the right way," you say.

"Too much sweetness, not enough fire. But the texture is perfect so you forgive it. Like," he pauses again, tilting his head, "like a choreography that makes a mistake so beautifully you have to keep it."

You think: this is a very good thing to say.

You say: "Okay."

The restaurant is exactly as described. Small, tucked into a courtyard that requires knowing which alley to turn down. The owner seems to recognise Hyunjin without reacting to him, which is rare enough in Seoul that it feels like arriving somewhere safe. You sit across from each other in a low-lit corner and eat dubu jjigae that is, yes, slightly too sweet, and he is right that you forgive it immediately.

He talks about painting the way most people talk about breathing; as if the idea that it might require explanation has never occurred to him. He asks about your training. How you ended up in this industry. What you are trying to make when you make a piece of choreography.

You tell him the truth: you are trying to find the place in a body where something real lives, and then you are trying to build a room around it that an audience can see into. He listens with the full attention of someone who has turned off everything else, which is both very flattering and slightly alarming.

On the walk back to the train, he matches his stride to yours.

This becomes a thing that happens.

Different restaurants, different corners of the city. He has a gift for finding places where the air is different - older, or quieter, or lit in a way that takes photographs of nothing and makes them feel like memories. He has opinions about everything, shared with the guileless confidence of someone who has spent very little time worrying about whether his opinions are welcome. He is also genuinely quite silly in a way that coexists with the romantic gravity without any apparent contradiction. He once spends twenty minutes explaining to you why a specific type of potato chip is structurally superior to all other potato chips, with the exact same intensity he uses to talk about Klimt. You watch him, in the middle of a supermarket, stroking seven different courgettes and holding them close to his face, one after the other, whispering to them like they are newborn puppies, before he picks one for his dinner. 

You are in significant trouble and you are aware of it.

The leaving is harder each time.

You have a pattern by now: you get to a certain point in the evening - when it is late, and warm, and the city is making that particular sound it makes when the foot traffic thins out, and Hyunjin is looking at you the way he looks at you, which is like you are a painting he is still deciding how to title - and then you find a reason to go.

A message to send. An early start. A small, clean exit before anything resolves.

He never pushes. This is somehow the worst part. He just watches you go with the patient, slightly puzzled expression of someone who has set a table very carefully and is waiting for a guest who keeps checking the time.

You know what the problem is. You have known it since the second painting.

You have been in this industry long enough to hear what men say when they think there are no women in the room. Not these men specifically - they are better than average, genuinely - but the culture that surrounds them, the system they move inside. The casual taxonomies. The particular way that women are discussed in terms of distraction, of risk, of the company's interest in keeping the money undiluted by personal complication.

And there is this: he thinks you are a man. Everyone thinks you are a man. The paintings are of two men. He is laying down very beautiful groundwork for a specific kind of love story and you are not, technically, who that story casts.

You have let things run longer than you should have. Not because you were hiding - your name is Angel, you corrected nothing, you performed nothing - but because the assumption was already there when you arrived, and every day that passed made the distance between assumption and fact feel wider.

What happens when he finds out?

You have run this calculation many times. The humiliation. The anger. The very understandable sense of having been deceived by someone he trusted. You have run it so many times it has worn grooves in the floor of your mind.

It is a Thursday again when it happens.

You are in the practice room, late, just the two of you running through something he wanted to clean up before the weekend. The others have gone home. The fluorescent lights are doing their end-of-day flicker. You are sitting on the floor looking at the mirror and he is lying on his back next to you, legs crossed, staring at the ceiling.

He says: "Can I ask you something strange?"

"Yes," you say.

"Would you still love me," he says, "if I was a worm?"

There is a pause.

"Like a garden worm?" you say.

"Any worm."

You think about this seriously, because he deserves serious engagement. "I think," you say, "if you were a worm, the specific quality of your presence would translate. You would be a worm with a great deal of personality."

"I would be the most annoying worm," he agrees.

"You would make the other worms feel something."

"What about," he says, "a perfectly stuffed, very chubby mandu?"

"A mandu."

"Soft. Round. Full of pork and cabbage. Sitting there."

"Hyunjin."

"Very chubby."

"I would love a chubby mandu," you say, "that had your energy. I would love it very much and I would not eat it."

He turns his head to look at you. He is smiling that particular smile, the one that has no performance in it. "Okay," he says. "Your turn. Ask me."

Your heart does something complex.

You look at the ceiling. The fluorescent light is flickering.

"Would you still love me," you say, and your voice is steady, you are a professional, "if I was a girl?"

Silence.

Not a long silence. Three seconds, maybe. But you count each one.

"Bro," Hyunjin says.

You wait.

"You can be whatever you want," he says, "as long as you're you."

You turn to look at him.

He is looking at the ceiling. His expression is the one you have been trying to read for months - the one he saves for things he is not yet sure how to title.

"I've been painting two people," he says. "I didn't specify."

"The paintings," you say.

"I painted what I felt," he says. "I feel what I feel. The rest is," he moves one hand in a vague gesture, "stuff."

You lie down next to him. The ceiling is very plain. The light flickers once more and settles.

"I've been leaving," you say. "Every time."

"I noticed."

"I was afraid you'd hate me when you found out."

He thinks about this for a moment. "That's an interesting theory," he says. "Would you like to know if it's correct?"

"Yes," you say.

He turns on his side to face you, and you turn on your side to face him, and the distance between you is no longer a distance at all.

The kiss is very quiet. The fluorescent light does not flicker. The city continues making its sounds outside the window.

After a while he says, against your hair: "The jjigae place. Next week. Properly."

"Properly," you agree.

You do not announce anything. You do not need to. Seven people who spend twelve hours a day reading each other's bodies for a living are not going to miss a change in atmospheric pressure.

Chan notices first. You catch him watching the two of you during a run-through with the careful, non-intrusive attention of someone filing information away. He says nothing, which is a quality you respect deeply in a person.

It is Felix who finally says something, three weeks later, while you are reviewing a section with Seungmin and he wanders over with a banana and sits down next to you and says: "Hey, are you and Hyunjin -" and then makes a gesture.

"Yes," you say.

He points the banana at you. "Cool," he says, and wanders back.

Seungmin, without looking up from the monitor, says: "We were not entirely sure, just so you know. About. You know." He pauses. "The whole thing."

"I'm aware," you say.

"It was rude to ask," he says, in the tone of someone reciting a principle they hold genuinely. "You're our choreographer. That's what matters."

You look at him. He has the earnest quality of a person who has thought about something carefully and arrived at a considered position.

"Thank you," you say.

"Also you have been busting our butts and making us surpass ourselves every time," he adds. "That is not nothing."

The formal telling - if you can call it that - happens on a Saturday, when the whole group is at Chan and IN's apartment for what is apparently a biweekly ritual involving takeout and competitive card games and a level of noise that makes you understand why the building has thick walls.

Hyunjin walks in holding your hand.

Seven people look at you.

Changbin, who has been sharing a living space with Hyunjin through the entire arc of this, puts down his card and says: "Finally."

Han says: "Wait, so - I'm sorry, I need to ask, are you - " and then stops.

"I'm a girl," you say. "Also a choreographer. There's some overlap."

There is a brief pause.

"Your name is Angel," Jisung says, slowly, like a man watching a magic trick reassemble itself after the reveal.

"Yes."

"And we all just -"

"Yes."

He sits with this for a moment. Then he holds up three fingers and ticks them off with the calm of a person making a genuine taxonomic observation: "Ah. The three genders. Man. Woman. Choreographer."

Chan, from the kitchen, calls out: "That one's going in the group chat."

"It's already in the group chat," IN says.

Minho, who has been watching you since you walked in with the analytical attention of a man who has seen everything and trusts nothing, picks up his card and says: "We didn't ask before because it wasn't our business." He looks at you. "Welcome, I suppose. Now you're not getting out."

Felix leans over and says, very sincerely: "We really do think you're the best choreographer we've ever had. This changes nothing about that."

"Except now we can tease Hyunjin about it," Changbin says.

"You already tease me about everything," Hyunjin says.

"This is a new category."

"He is my wife," Hyunjin says, with absolute dignity, gesturing at Changbin. "And yet."

"Being a wife does not mean silence," Changbin says.

Hyunjin looks at you with the expression of a man who has made several choices and is at peace with all of them.

You sit down in the circle of them - all eight, loud and overlapping and genuinely glad you are there - and you stay.

You don't leave early.

You stay.

END

[skzstoryvault]

In A New Light (Channie, supersoft)

Starring: Bang Chan Summary: Bang Chan likes rings, but thinks he has ugly hands because of a cruel remark someone made once. You have something to say about it. Warnings: past envious and cruel comments, angst with a happy end Rating: teen and up Tumblr exclusive fic :)

In A New Light

He has a thing about his hands.

You notice it early, the way he tucks them out of frame when you take pictures, the way he curls his fingers inward when he is thinking too hard, like he is trying to make them smaller. The way his hoodies are always huge and convenient for him to his his hands in the sleeves. You notice the way he glances at other people's rings on social media and keeps scrolling, never stopping to imagine them on himself, even when you catch him looking.

You do not say anything. Not yet.

But you think about it.

It starts with a ring you find at a market in Hongdae, silver and a little oxidized at the joints, shaped like a branch with tiny hammered leaves. You buy it because it makes you think of him. You do not say that when you give it to him. You just hold it out in your palm and say, "I saw this and thought you might like it."

He picks it up, turns it over, smiles the way he does when something genuinely surprises him, and sets it on the coffee table.

It sits there for three days.

You do not ask.

The second time, you are sitting cross-legged on the studio couch while he wraps up a session, and one of the boys is wearing a chunky gold band and Chan says, offhand, "That looks good," and you see it on his face, that specific wistfulness, and it is gone in a second. Replaced by something more careful.

Later, in the car, you say, "You could wear rings, you know."

He makes a small, hard to label sound.

"I mean it. Your hands would look great."

And there it is. Something shifts in his face, quick, and he says, "They really wouldn't," and changes the subject.

You let him. For now.

You are a patient person. This is something Chan himself has noted, usually with a kind of reverence, because he is not a particularly patient person and he finds patience in others both baffling and deeply comforting.

So you wait. You watch. And gradually you begin to understand that this is not modesty. It is not the performed deflection of someone fishing for a compliment. It is something older than that, something that has been sitting in him long enough to petrify.

He genuinely does not think his hands are pretty.

Which is, objectively, insane.

Chan's hands are the kind that painters would have used for reference. Long fingers, expressive knuckles, the kind of soft skin that makes you want to hold them for no reason at all. You have watched them on stage, the way they move when he performs, full of intention. You have watched them in the kitchen, careful and focused. You have held them in the dark plenty of times and thought, privately, that you could not imagine better hands attached to a person you loved. You have felt them hold and caress you innumerable times and it still hasn't been enough. He has always had the power to undo you and knit you back together with his fingers alone, but that's a superpower he deploys only in the dark, turning red and going mute if you mention it in daylight.

Whatever crept into his head to tell him otherwise, you resent it.

The watercolour idea comes to you on a slow Sunday.

He is asleep, face pressed into the pillow, and you are awake because you woke up at seven and could not get back under. You are sitting with your sketchbook and your little travel palette and your cup of tea, and you look at his hand resting palm-up at the edge of the mattress, fingers slightly curled, completely relaxed.

You have an idea.

You do not do it while he is sleeping because that feels like a betrayal of something. Instead you wait until he surfaces, slow and grumbling, and you make him coffee and sit him on the couch and say, "Can I paint on your hands?"

He blinks. "With what."

"Watercolour. Just small designs. Botanicals, maybe. I want to practice on skin."

This is not entirely a lie. You have been curious about it. But it is also tactical, and you are aware of that, and you make peace with the small manipulation because your intentions are kind.

He holds out his hand.

You work slowly. The paper-thin skin over his knuckles takes pigment differently than you expect, softer, more diffuse, and you have to dilute more than you would on cold press. You do tiny climbing vines up the side of his index finger. A moth on the back of his hand, wings spread, the body in deep teal. Small five-petalled flowers at each knuckle, pale yellow, because he likes yellow, and he never lets himself like things that are soft.

He is quiet while you work. He watches, occasionally, but mostly he has his head tipped back and his eyes half-closed, and you think this is what it looks like when Chan is genuinely still.

When you are done you say, "Don't move them too much, let them set a little," and you take out your phone.

"I'm just documenting," you say, which is true.

He makes a vague noise. He trusts you.

You post the photos without him in frame from mid-forearm down. Just the hands, the painted designs, soft natural light from the window. You have a small secondary account, nothing connected to your name, that you use sometimes for creative things. You write only: practiced botanical watercolour on skin. first attempt.

You put your phone down and forget about it.

Except you do not forget about it. You check it that evening. Seventy messages. You check it the next morning. Several hundred.

You read a few.

whose hands are these i am not okay

the hands... the HANDS... someone tell me who this is

I cannot explain to you the effect this image is having on me

these fingers are everything. the proportions. I am normal about this bro, I have a mighty need to be lawfully wedded to these hands!!!1!!!111!!!

You sit with this for a moment.

Then you take your phone to where Chan is eating breakfast and reading something on his tablet, and you set the phone screen-up next to his bowl.

He glances down. Reads. Looks up at you.

"That's my hand," he says.

"I know."

He picks up the phone. Scrolls. You watch his face do something complicated.

"These people," he says slowly, "are losing their minds about my hand."

"Specifically," you say, "about how pretty your hands are. There's one in there about the proportions. There's another one that says, and I quote, I am normal about this, which means they are not normal about this."

He puts the phone down.

He is quiet for a long moment. Long enough that you start to wonder if this was overstepping, if the reveal was too much, if you should have simply planted the seed and let it grow instead of doing this.

Then he says, very quietly, "Someone told me I had ugly hands."

You wait.

"Years ago. I don't even know why I." He stops. Picks up his coffee. "It just stuck."

"Who," you say.

"It doesn't matter."

"It matters to me."

He smiles a little, that sideways thing, and shakes his head. "Just someone. Nobody important. I don't know why I let it in."

You reach across the table and take one of his hands in yours. Turn it over. Trace the line of his index finger from base to tip.

"Because someone said it with enough certainty that it sounded like a fact," you say. "That's all. It's not because it was true."

He looks at your joined hands.

"The internet," he says, "is losing its mind about my knuckles."

"Yes it is."

"Because of a moth."

"The moth helped. The hands did the work."

He makes a sound that might be the beginning of a laugh. Then he turns his hand over so his palm is up, holding yours properly, and he squeezes once, the way he does when he has something to say and has decided not to say it yet.

You give him time.

Eventually he says, "Do you have more of those leaf colours. The tiny ones."

You look at him.

"From the design," he says, carefully not looking at you. "I was thinking. If you did something on the other hand. I might want to look at it."

You get up and get your palette without another word. You understand this, the sideways approach to wanting things, the small door left open. You have practised patience. You know what it looks like when someone is beginning, tentatively, to let a belief go.

You take his other hand and you start with a tiny branch at the base of his thumb. He watches, and he is quiet, and outside the morning light is doing something gold across the floorboards, and you think, privately, that you could sit here for a long time.

The ring on the coffee table is still there. You do not mention it.

He picks it up on his way out that afternoon. You see him slide it onto his finger and glance at his hand once, quick, like he is checking something.

He does not take it off.

END

[skzstoryvault]

What Did They Dooooo (Han, soft and mild)

Starring: Han Warnings: some strong wording Summary: Your stylist botched your haircut and you don't feel like seeing anyone. But your boyfriend very much wants to see you. Rating: all audiences

What Did They Dooooo

The mirror has been your enemy for three days.

You've tried everything, pulling it forward, pushing it back, clips that don't clip anything, a headband that only makes it worse. The hairdresser had seemed so confident.

"This will suit you," she'd said, and snipped away at the kind of blind faith you now know you should never extend to another human being. What arrived on the other side of those scissors was a shape that has no business existing on a head. Too short in the back. Blunt and strange in the front. It sits wrong. It frames nothing correctly. Every time you catch your reflection you make a small involuntary noise, somewhere between a gasp and a sigh.

The crying had been dramatic on day one. By day two it was quieter. By day three it's just a sort of hollow resignation. You've been avoiding Han's video calls, texting only, keeping the camera off, which he has definitely noticed because Han notices everything and says most of it which is one of the most exhausting and wonderful things about him.

"why is ur camera off"

"bad lighting"

"ur lying but ok"

"come over later tho. i made rice and there's also snacks"

Of course there are snacks. There are always snacks. You have never visited Han Jisung and found him without some variety of food somewhere within arm's reach, which is a personality trait that you personally find very endearing and the members apparently find exasperating because Changbin has texted you no fewer than three times in the past year saying "please talk to him about the snacks in the studio. i found a packet of something UNDER THE MIXING BOARD".

You wear a hat.

He opens the door in a big hoodie, one sock on, one sock presumably lost to the void, a half-eaten rice cracker already in his hand. He looks at you. He looks at the hat. His mouth does that specific thing it does when he is processing something at approximately the speed of light and trying to decide how to deploy his findings.

"Why are you wearing a hat inside," he says.

"I'm cold."

"It's warm in here."

"I run cold."

"You've never once in your life-" he stops himself. He steps back and holds the door wider. "Okay, come in, eat something."

You edge past him. The apartment smells like food and something warm and familiar, and there is indeed a quantity of snacks arranged on the coffee table with the kind of unstudied abundance that suggests he hadn't planned it but also couldn't help himself. You sit down. He sits next to you, very close, and tilts his head at you in that way he has — one of those slow, considering looks that feels like being read.

"Hat," he says.

"It's fine."

"You've had your camera off for three days."

"It's been a whole thing."

"Is this a hair thing."

You look at him. He looks back, patient and waiting, his expression somewhere between warmth and the specific smugness of a person who has already figured it out. You take the hat off.

The silence that follows lasts exactly two seconds.

And then Han Jisung says, with enormous sincerity: "Oh. Wow."

"I know."

"They really- " he makes a gesture with the rice cracker. "They committed, huh."

"Han."

"No, no, okay, look." He uncurls himself from the couch and kneels in front of you on the carpet, which is an extremely dramatic and unhinged choice but also business as usual for your Sungie. He reaches up and moves the hair with both hands, trying different positions with the kind of focused intensity he usually reserves for fixing a melody that isn't sitting right. His tongue is slightly between his teeth. This is his concentrating face. You've seen it in countless live streams and it is terrifying when it's directed at your head.

"It's bad," you say. "You don't have to..."

"It's not bad." He turns your chin slightly to the left. "It's just... the wrong framing. Like the idea is right but the execution had some notes."

"Three days of notes. I've been crying."

He looks up at you immediately, all the joking gone. His eyes are very direct when they want to be. "Hey. Three days?"

"It's my face. I have to live with my face."

"You have a great face. I am personally a huge fan of your face, which is a thing I say to you consistently and with evidence." He sits back on his heels. "But okay. Let's look at this properly."

What follows is approximately twenty minutes of Han Jisung treating your hair like a production problem. He moves it this way and that, frowning at you from various angles with the energy of someone remixing a track that hasn't found its groove yet. He mutters to himself. He goes away and comes back with a couple of clips and a small round brush he apparently owns because (and this is a direct quote)"sometimes you want volume, you know?" which you file away as information about him.

"Okay," he says finally, and he sounds like he does when something has clicked into place. "I have a theory."

"Your theories make me nervous."

"This one is good. The problem is you've been fighting it." He sits beside you, angling you both toward the mirror on the opposite wall. "You keep trying to make it look like what it was before. But it's not that anymore, so it looks lost. You have to let it be what it is."

He takes the sections of it and with a patient, deliberate certainty that is almost offensive - he demonstrates. A slight tuck behind one ear, asymmetric. The front pushed just a little to the side rather than straight. The blunt edge, which you have been despising, tilted deliberately rather than apologized for. Something strange happens.

You look less like a person who had a haircut accident. You look like a person who made a choice.

"See?" He sets the brush down. He is looking at you in the mirror with an expression you recognise — the one that comes out when he's genuinely pleased about something he made. "It's cool. It's actually kind of cool."

"You're biased."

"I'm extremely biased, I'm completely biased, that doesn't mean I'm wrong." He bumps his shoulder against yours. "Also I'm showing Hyunjin tomorrow and he's going to agree with me, and you know how Hyunjin is about aesthetics."

"Hyunjin is going to see my hair disaster?"

"Hyunjin is going to see your look. There's a difference." He picks up his rice cracker again, because he has been at least thirty percent distracted from snacks this entire time and that is not sustainable for him. "Felix will try to find a product for it. Seungmin will say something technically accurate that comes out wrong. Jeongin will just say it looks fine and mean it genuinely because he doesn't do performance."

"What about Chan?"

Han considers this. "Hyung will say it suits you and then immediately want to know if you're okay. In that order." He pauses. "Changbin won't notice until someone points at it and then he'll nod like he was going to say that."

You look at yourself in the mirror. The hair is the same hair it has been for three days. Nothing has grown back. Nothing has been fixed in any permanent way. But it looks, for the first time, like it belongs to you on purpose.

"I still don't love it," you say.

"You don't have to love it yet," Han says, easy as anything. "You just have to stop fighting it. It'll grow. And while it's growing it can look like this, which is — I'm telling you — actually pretty interesting." He tilts his head, studying you again with that unsettling exactness. "You look like someone who knows something. I don't know. Like a vibe."

"A vibe."

"A real one."

You look at him in the mirror instead of yourself. He's already migrated his attention approximately forty percent back to the snacks on the table and forty percent to his phone, which has lit up with something from the group chat - "Jisung why is there a photo of a mixing board on the schedule app" from Chan, apparently — and he is drafting a response with the specific chaotic energy of a man who did something in the studio and is entirely unbothered about being found out.

But when you glance at him, he glances back. And he grins, bright and a little derpy, full of the kind of warmth he doesn't always know how to say in words and so just sort of radiates instead, hoping you'll catch it.

"You're really okay," he says. Not a question. A statement, offered like a promise. "And you look good. I would tell you if you didn't."

"Would you?"

He considers this with genuine thoughtfulness for about three full seconds. "I would tell you in a kind way. But yes. I would tell you."

You take a handful of snacks from the bowl. Somewhere across the city, the group chat continues. Your hair sits the way he arranged it — not perfect, not what you had before, but deliberate. Owned.

You think maybe you can live with that.

"Ji?" You ask. "Hm?" Comes the reply. "I liked it when your hands were in my hair. But that was pre-snack dust." And Jisung, being him, shoves an entire fistful of crackers into his mouth, going to wash his hands at once.

[skzstoryvault]

Artistic Nudes (Hyunjin, soft)

Starring: Hyunjin

Summary: Your relationship with Hyunjin is still new. Yet, he decides to send you nudes. Results… hmmmm… vary. Warnings: Hyunjin has had a bit to drink. Nothing bad happens. Notes:

Recently Hyunjin said in a live that he needs to cling to Stay to get home after one beer. And around the same time he sent some vibes, because those could only loosely be called portraits, that were so blurry and somehow still so unmistakably HIM. Every time I think I'm ok I'm healed, Hyunjin pulls me back into his snare. But-

- it's not a bad place to be. Song to read this fic to:

Artistic Nudes

The message arrives at 11:47 on a Friday night, formatted with the confidence of a man who has never in his life doubted himself and probably isn't about to start now.

I've been thinking.

You put down your wine. When Hyunjin starts a message with that, it means he's either been staring at a canvas for six hours and has discovered the secret to human suffering, or he's three drinks in - and you already know by now he can only take one before he’s somewhere between tipsy and totalled. Given that it's Friday and the boys have the weekend off, you're placing your bets accordingly.

I'm going to send you something.

Not like that. Well. Actually like that. But also more than that. Read on here:

An Archive of Our Own, a project of the Organization for Transformative Works

[skzstoryvault]

The Delightful and Disturbing Intricacies of Being Seen (Chan, supersoft and thirsty)

Summary: A tale in four chapters about the way a long time friendship tips into something else. Warnings: some spicy imagery, but nothing explicit. mild explicit language.

Note: My hope is that you enjoy this story and end up loving Channie at the end at least as much as I do if not more. *** The Delightful and Disturbing Intricacies of Being Seen

Chapter 1. The Architecture of Unsaid Things

You have been doing this job long enough to know that you are not supposed to have favorites.

You have known Chan since he was seventeen and terrifyingly talented and still had the particular quality of softness that very young men have before the industry either polishes it out of them or weaponizes it. You were twenty then, maybe twenty-one, working a junior position you were probably too inexperienced for, and your first assignment had been to sit in on a trainee evaluation session and take notes. He had walked out and performed with the kind of focus that made the air in the room change, and when it was over he had looked immediately at the floor, like he could not bear anyone seeing him want to know if it had been good enough.

You had written in your notes: remarkable instincts, probably knows it, definitely afraid of knowing it.

That had been the beginning.

Now you are thirty, or thirty-one depending on when you are counting, and you have a small apartment in Seoul with too many plants and a specific mug that you use for tea and no one else is allowed to touch, and Chan has a key because he comes over often enough that it seemed absurd not to give him one. He texts before he uses it. Always. Even though you have told him he does not have to.

That is the kind of person he is.

---

You hear the key in the lock at around nine in the evening on a Tuesday, which is not unusual. What is unusual is the silence after the door opens. Normally there is some kind of sound, a greeting, a question about whether you have eaten, a comment about something he heard on the drive over. Normally Chan takes up sound the way good music takes up a room.

Tonight there is nothing.

You come out of the kitchen with your hands still a little damp and find him sitting on your couch with his elbows on his knees and his face tilted slightly down, and he is looking at his phone with an expression you do not like.

"Hey," you say.

"Hey." He puts the phone face-down on his thigh.

You dry your hands on the nearest dish towel and sit down next to him. Not too close. You have learned over the years to read the particular geometry of his distress, and right now he needs someone in his orbit but not in his space.

"You look terrible," you say.

"Thanks." A beat. "You look nice." Read more here:

An Archive of Our Own, a project of the Organization for Transformative Works

[thatsmistertoyou]

hey so when ao3 is back you’re all gonna leave lots of kudos and nice comments on the fics you read right. even if you’re rereading. because you recognize the contributions of writers to fan communities. you understand fanfiction as one of the pillars of fandom and you feel lost without it right? so you’re gonna feed the writers? good job ❤️

[skzstoryvault]

Matching Set (Hyunjin, mild)

Starring: Hyunjin Summary: you noticed when he went from flower boy to buff guy and it made you panic because you heard the whispers behind and around you. Instead of being offended, Hyunjin is just concerned. This is mostly fluff with an undercurrent of angst. Warnings: body image struggles, envy, insecurity, the angst of dating someone this famous and wanted. A/N: You’re tall and lean in this story, and have an androgynous fashion style, so obviously the haters focus on that. Matching Set

The shower is still warm on your skin when you pad into the bedroom, towel around you, and find him sitting up against the headboard with his sketchbook closed on his lap. That's how you know. When Hyunjin closes his sketchbook with a loud flap, something is on his mind.

"Hey," you say, like nothing.

"Hey," he says back, watching you in that way he has, the way that made you uncomfortable for years before you understood what it was. Not scrutiny. Care. The difference took you embarrassingly long to figure out for the same reason it took you ages to admit to yourself that you know very well why he watches you in that way that’s 100% Hyunjin, that would feel violating if any other man did it because you feel it like a physical touch, slow and measured across your skin. 

You reach up to unwrap the towel and his expression does something complicated. You catch it because you have been reading his face since before either of you had the vocabulary for any of this. He is looking at you the way he looks at something that genuinely impresses him, that focused, slightly parted attention he gets in front of art that earns it, but underneath the admiration there is something else working. Something closer to worry. His eyes move across your shoulders, your waist, the lines of you that the lamp is catching in a way the lamp didn't use to catch, and you can see the exact moment the thought crosses his face: a slight narrowing, almost competitive, almost involuntary, like he is making a comparison he did not plan to make and the result is making him feel some kind of way. He looks down at his own stomach briefly. Looks back at you. Something in his jaw shifts.

You pretend not to notice and pull one of his shirts over your head. It falls exactly the way it falls on him. You've always loved that. He watches that too, and the complicated expression doesn't fully resolve. It just folds itself into something quieter and more careful.

"Sit with me," he says.

You sit. He doesn't launch into it immediately, because he never does. He'll draw out the silence until you either fill it or look at him, and when you look at him you are always slightly undone by the fact that this person, this ridiculous, beautiful, achingly sincere person, has been your best friend since you were small enough to think the world was also small. You look at him.

"You've been going to the gym alone," he says.

"I go because I must," you say, paraphrasing a line from Lord of the Rings, hearing it in King Theoden’s voice in your head. 

"You hate going alone. You always say the music they play makes you want to do crimes, plural."

You laugh despite yourself. "It does. It's always obscure, mediocre dated EDM, remix of the remix stuff."

He doesn't laugh with you this time. He just waits. And because it's Hyunjin, because it has always been Hyunjin, you feel the specific exhaustion of trying to hold something back from him dissolve out of your chest before you've even decided to let it go.

So you tell him.

You tell him about the shift you noticed, not in him, never in him, but in the way the world reorganized itself around him when he stopped being the boy the stylists dressed in ribbons and flower crowns, sweet and strange and otherworldly, and became something that made magazine editors lose their composure. The Versace era. The jaw, the shoulders, the precise and devastating masculinity he grew into like it had always been waiting for him inside his own bones. You watched it happen in real time and you were proud of him, you are proud of him, you need him to understand that.

But.

"You became this," you say, and you gesture at him, and he looks briefly, genuinely confused, and the confusion is so Hyunjin that you almost lose the thread. "And I'm standing next to you in photographs sometimes, and people who don't know us started talking. And people who do know us started talking."

"What kind of talking," he says, and his voice has gone very even, which is the Hyunjin version of something heating up.

You tell him about that too. The particular flavor of it. The way certain people around him have made it their quiet project to explain to you, with great patience and false kindness, that you are a placeholder. A compromise. That the reason he is with a woman who wears her hair under caps and moves through the world the way you do is not because he loves you but because the alternative is a kind of honesty he hasn't found yet.

Hyunjin is quiet for a long moment.

"And you believed them," he says. Not accusatory. Just trying to understand the shape of it.

"I believed that I could do something about it," you say, which is not quite the same thing and you both know it. "If I'm lean enough, defined enough, if I take up space the right way, then at least the optics make sense. We make sense. Two tall, angular people. A matching set."

"We are a matching set," he says, immediately and with a firmness that startles you.

"Hyunjin."

"No, listen. We have been a matching set since you told my mom I scuffed my knees because you were chasing me and you caught me, since that night I got kisses and hugs and an extra dessert instead of a talking to. That's when we matched. Not because of anything else."

You look down at your hands. They are man hands, you always say. The kind that look good with tools in them, and bad with all the expensive jewels Hyunjin has you try in the hopes you’ll like at least some. Sometimes you wonder how creation betrayed you so much - you have the same ring size as Hyunjin, but on him it looks good and expensive, on you any ring looks stolen and out of place.

"The gym thing," you say, because you want to be honest with him, all the way honest, not just honest about the hard parts. "The best part isn't even how I look. It's that I can wear your clothes and they fit. It's that last month in Paris, I put on your cap and your mask and your coat and I walked through a hotel lobby and three people thought I was you." You smile at your hands. "I was on the other side of the world from you and for five minutes I was also somehow you. It sounds insane when I say it out loud."

When you look up, he is not looking at you like it sounds insane.

He is looking at you like you have just handed him something he will keep forever.

"It doesn't sound insane," he says quietly. “I miss you so much when we’re apart. If I focus too much on the feeling, I get so sad and want to hurl. Even in the middle of a stage or runway.”

"You're just saying that."

"I have a painting," he says, "that I started three years ago and never finished because it kept becoming your face when I was trying to paint something else. I called it a study. It's seven versions of you. Does that sound sane? Or at least, the approved level of insane?"

You laugh, sudden and real, and it breaks something open in the room, lets the air back in.

But he reaches over and takes your hand and he is still serious underneath the laughter, which is the specific way Hyunjin operates, layered all the way down.

"I need you to be careful," he says. "Not for the optics. For your hormones, for your sleep, for the parts of your health that I can't see and that you will push past because you are the most stubborn person I have ever loved. Which is saying something because I grew up with Jisung."

You raise an eyebrow. "Are you actually worried, or did you just want to say that about Jisung."

"Both," he says, without hesitation. "But mostly worried. What you were showing just now," he pauses, and you see him decide to be direct about it, the way he does when he's made up his mind to be honest even if it costs him something, "that level of definition is hard on a woman's body in a way it isn't hard on mine. Hormonally. Long term. I know you know that. I'm asking if you're actually accounting for it or if you're just pushing through it because you're you."

There is a beat of silence.

"Okay," you say, "you did research."

"I did research," he confirms, a little sheepishly. Then, quieter: "I also may have stood in front of the bathroom mirror for an unreasonable amount of time trying to figure out if your obliques are more defined than mine and genuinely not knowing how to feel about the answer."

You stare at him.

He stares back, completely sincere, the expression on his face hovering somewhere between sheepish and oddly proud on your behalf.

"They are," you say.

"They are," he agrees. "It's impressive. It's also slightly alarming. Those two things are both true at the same time."

"Hyunjin."

"I'm just saying. The alarming part is not aesthetic. The alarming part is the physiological cost of getting there, for you specifically, and I looked it up because I wanted to understand what you were actually doing to yourself before I said anything about it."

You look at him for a long moment. This is the thing about him that people who only know the public version of him tend to miss. The goofy sincerity runs all the way through. There is no layer underneath it that is cooler or more detached. He looked up female athletic hormonal health at some point this week because he was worried about you and wanted to earn the right to say so. He measured his own obliques against yours and then sat with the result in genuine admiration and genuine concern simultaneously and saw no contradiction in that.

"I'm being careful," you say.

"Be more careful."

"Okay."

"And those people," he says. He pauses. You can see him choosing words, the way he always does, with a specificity that is almost sculptural. "I want you to understand something about what they're actually saying. They're saying I am not capable of knowing what I want. They're saying that what we have, seventeen years of it, everything we are to each other, is a symptom of my confusion." He tilts his head. "Do I seem confused to you?"

"Never once," you say honestly.

"Okay. So." He shifts, resettles, pulls you into the particular geometry of how you two sleep, your back to his chest, his arm across you, two people the same height arranged like a parenthesis around something private and warm. "I am also, for the record, dating someone who is my other self, who fits my shoes, who walked through a Paris hotel lobby as me, who has been my best friend since I was old enough to have one." He pauses. "Fellas, is it gay to be in love with your girlfriend? Asking for a friend. Asking because I genuinely cannot follow the logic."

You're giggling now, both of you, in the stupid helpless way that only happens when it's very late and you're very tired and you are with the one person in the world with whom you have never once had to be a different version of yourself.

Outside the window, the darkness is doing that subtle thing, the shift from black to a blue so deep you could miss it if you weren't looking. The first bird says something tentative into the silence. Then another.

"It's almost morning," you say.

"Mm." He pulls you slightly closer. "We should sleep."

"We should have slept three hours ago."

"Whose fault is that."

"You closed your sketchbook at me. Aggressively."

"I did not aggressively close my sketchbook."

"Very pointed closure. Intentional. You wanted me to ask."

He laughs into your hair. "Maybe."

The birds are getting bolder now, one and then many, the sound of the world restarting itself just outside the glass. You are wearing his shirt. You fit in it exactly right. Somewhere in Paris there is a hotel lobby where you walked through as him, and here you are, the original, the person who took the fall for him in front of his very intimidating Korean mom back when you were both five, the person whose face kept appearing in a painting meant to be something else.

A matching set, all the way down.

You close your eyes, and the morning comes in soft around the edges, and the last thing you hear before you fall asleep is him saying something very quiet and very silly about the bird outside, something that makes no sense, and you don't even answer because you are already almost gone, smiling, held. 

END

[skzstoryvault]

Little Snail on a Fern (Hyunjin, supersoft)

Starring: Hyunjin Warnings: butt stuff, extreme non-sexual intimacy Summary: This whole relationship thing is very new and very casual. But you forgot that nothing Hyunjin does is casual. *** Little Snail on a Fern You’re drying your hair off after a shower when your doorbell rings. You look at the camera and see Hyunjin standing awkwardly outside your door. The car that dropped him off lingers outside your gate, the driver and security detail most likely watching to make sure he is safely inside. In moments, you are downstairs and let him in, seeing the car start and leave. Hyunjin looks like he hasn’t slept. Stressed, tired and… extremely worried? That’s not how you know him. Also, he looks like he’s been crying, his eyes puffy and red-rimmed. “What’s wrong?” You ask, when he collapses into your offered hug. “Something at the company?” “N-no,” he says. “Look, it’s really bad. But there was no one else I could come to with this.” Your relationship is brand new. More of an agreement at this point than more. Hyunjin asked you to be his girlfriend a couple of weeks back and you figured, hell, he’s known you since forever and he’s probably being ridden by the company people to “pick a lane”. They like their artists “parked and sorted” as in, they like knowing what everyone is up to, if there’s fires they need to put out from idols being gay on the down low or extra freaky or with a tendency to get girls pregnant left and right. Anything that young people can get up to in their free time and that can endanger their spotless public image is closely managed. You thought, ok, whatever Hyunjin has going on is his business, and his asking you to be his girlfriend was just… awfully convenient. No extra NDAs to sign, no other paperwork and you’re known to his management and not perceived as a threat. You’ve so far just done regular friend stuff like getting cozy and close while watching movies, holding hands, falling asleep at each other’s place and cooking together. Oh and there were the kisses - more like a series of increasingly bold pecks and while Hyunjin is really into them, he has respected your wish to skip the PDA, even when it’s just the other members. But right now he is in your arms, in clear distress and you want to help. “What’s that sound?!” You ask, meaning the low hum accompanying Hyunjin now that the door to your place closed behind him and there’s silence again.

Read on here:

An Archive of Our Own, a project of the Organization for Transformative Works

[skzstoryvault]

Dark and Fluffy (Chan, supersoft)

Starring: Channie Summary: You pull up at Chan’s for a bit of catching up and you find him a right mess and neglecting himself. This time, you can’t just watch and say nothing. AN: 1. The easy intimacy of longtime friends. 2. 4F- Funny familiar forgotten feelings. 3. Australians call flip-flops thongs. Warnings: none. It’s pure fluff.  

*** Dark and Fluffy

You knock three times before using the code he texted you, letting yourself into the dorm. The lights are dim, and there's a staleness in the air that tells you nobody's been opening windows.

"Chan?"

"Kitchen," comes his voice, rough and small.

You find him sitting at the counter, laptop open, three empty coffee cups within arm's reach. When he looks up, you have to work hard to keep your expression neutral. There are bruises blooming purple along his forearms, the kind you recognize from throwing yourself too hard into choreography. His face is drawn, shadows pooling beneath his eyes, and when he runs a hand through his hair in that familiar anxious gesture, you notice the angry red patches along his scalp where the bleach has burned.

"You look like shit," you say, setting down your overnight bag.

He laughs, but it catches in his throat. "Wow. Thanks for that."

"I'm serious." You move closer, studying him. "When's the last time you slept?"

"I sleep." He closes the laptop too quickly, defensive. "I'm fine. Just busy."

You've known him long enough to recognize the lie. Long enough to see the tremor in his hands, the way his leg bounces beneath the counter. You're not good at soft comfort, never have been. You deal in truths, even when they're ugly, even when people don't want to hear them.

But right now, looking at him, something in your chest pulls tight.

"Come here," you say.

He blinks. "What?"

"Your hair. Let me see your scalp."

Read on here:

An Archive of Our Own, a project of the Organization for Transformative Works

[skzstoryvault]

Cracked Biscuit (Hyunjin, bit of angst)

Starring: Hyunjin Summary: The casual way Hyunjin is flawless on the daily, in your shared home, starts getting to you in a way you can't explain. He tries to help you make sense of what you're feeling. Warnings: body image issues, insecurity, body envy. Notes: you and Hyunjin call each other Dumpling and Biscuit *** Cracked Biscuit

You're standing in front of the hallway mirror again, frozen in place. You didn't mean to stop here. You were just passing through on your way to get water, but then you caught your reflection and now you can't look away.

Five minutes ago, Hyunjin had stretched to reach something from the top shelf in the kitchen, his tank top riding up to expose the carved lines of his obliques. You'd watched the way his shoulder muscles moved under his skin like they were performing their own choreography, effortless and perfect. Then he'd turned and caught you staring, flashing that soft smile that always makes your heart skip.

Now you're here, pulling up your own shirt, turning to the side. Your abs are there. You can see them. You teach Pilates three days a week. You dance. You're objectively fit by any reasonable standard, but all you can think about is how different your stomach looks from his. Softer. Less defined. The muscles are there but they're hidden under a layer that his body doesn't seem to have.

You press your fingers against your abdomen, disappointment settling heavy in your chest.

Read more here:

An Archive of Our Own, a project of the Organization for Transformative Works

[skzstoryvault]

Princess Man (Chan, supersoft)

Starring: Channie Warnings: some self-doubt Summary: Chan finds a creative way to hate on himself even after reaching new heights of physical fitness and having Stay drooling at the mere sight of him. Luckily he has someone who can get through to him, through the cloud of self-deprecation and self-doubt. ***

Princess Man You're curled up on the couch with a book when you hear the apartment door open. Chan's home from the gym, and you can tell immediately that something's off. His footsteps are quieter than usual, almost hesitant.

"Hey," he says softly, dropping his gym bag by the door.

You look up and smile. He's still in his workout clothes, hair damp with sweat, and he looks absolutely beautiful. Strong shoulders, defined arms, the kind of body that comes from years of dancing and training. But his expression doesn't match. There's something uncertain in his eyes.

"Come here," you say, setting your book aside.

He crosses the room and pulls you into a hug. You breathe in the familiar scent of him, that mix of his cologne and honest sweat, and wrap your arms around his waist. That's when you feel him tense. Read on here:

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