「 Not only yours 」
Character(s): Ateez Yunho x (Y/n) insert.
Synopsis: A man desperate for normalcy and his wife.
Warning: None, Tis a bit sad tho.
Tags: @uzmacchiato
The kitchen light buzzed faintly overhead, the way it always did for the first minute or so before it settled into its usual hum, and Yunho stood under it with a bag of rice in one hand like it had personally done something to offend him.
"You're doing it wrong already," (Y/n) said. She was leaning against the doorframe between the kitchen and the hall, arms crossed, one hip cocked the way she always stood when she was fighting back a smile and losing.
"I haven't even started," Yunho said.
"Exactly. You're already holding the pot wrong." She laughed, that quick huff of air through her nose. "Rinse it first. God, how many times have I told you that."
"You've never told me that. You've never told me anything about rice in your life. You always just make it while I'm doing something else."
"That's not my fault. You could've watched."
"I was setting the table."
"You were on your phone."
"I was setting the table and on my phone. Multitasking. It's a skill."
"It's not a skill, it's a personality flaw darling.” She was smiling when she said it, and he could hear it in her voice even without turning around.
"Anyway, why am I doing this again? You're standing right there."
"Because you said, and I quote, 'I could make dinner tonight, you never have to lift a finger,' and I would like to see that promise through to its natural conclusion."
"I meant like— I don't know, ordering something. Heating something up. I didn't mean plain rice from scratch, that feels like a whole other tier of promise."
"Too late. You said it. I'm not letting you walk it back now. Can let you weaponise incompetence."
"Hey! I do other housework’s, I just can’t cook. This is a trap. I want it on record that this was a trap."
"Noted. Rinse the rice."
He turned on the tap and dumped the rice into the pot beneath it, watching the water hit the grains and go instantly, cheaply cloudy, a small white storm swirling against the steel, and he stirred it with two fingers, more out of instinct than any real knowledge of what he was doing. The water clouded and he poured it out. Refilled. Poured it out again.
"How many times do I do this?"
"Until it's clear."
"It is clear."
"It's not clear clear."
"(Y/n), it's water with rice in it. It's not going to turn into glass. There's a ceiling on how clear this stuff gets."
"Don't get smart with me, just rinse it again."
He rinsed it again, muttering something under his breath he didn't fully mean her to hear, something about how this was supposedly the easiest food on earth to make and somehow it had more rules than the fucking constitution of Korea, and she laughed, a real laugh this time, short and bright, the kind that used to carry down the hall and made him grin without knowing why until he found her and asked what was funny.
"You say that about everything the first time you do it," she said. "You said pasta had too many rules. You said toast had too many rules."
"Toast does have too many rules. Apparently you can't just put bread in the thing."
"You put it in on the wrong setting once—"
"I put it in on setting six because six seemed like a reasonable, moderate number—"
"It's a toaster, Yunho, not a wine glass, you don't need to be moderate about it—"
"I was being cautious! I didn't want burnt toast!"
"You got burnt toast anyway."
"I got burnt toast anyway, yes, thank you, that's the tragedy of the story, you don't need to keep bringing it up like it's some kind of character flaw—"
"It kind of is."
"You know what, I could just look this up. On my phone. Right now. Like a normal person who needs to know a ratio."
"Go ahead."
"I'm going to."
"I'm not stopping you."
He actually pulled his phone halfway out of his pocket before he stopped, looked at it, and put it back. "No. No, I don't want to look it up. I want you to tell me, that's the whole point, that's why I'm doing this the hard way."
"That's a very strange hill to die on."
"I have several strange hills. This is one of the smaller ones."
He set the pot on the burner, clicked the gas on, and watched the blue ring catch under it with a small huff of ignition. "Okay. Now what."
"Water to rice…..you know this one babe."
"I really don't, actually."
"Yunho."
"I'm serious. What's the ratio. Is it one to one? One to two? I feel like I've seen it written down somewhere, on a bag, at some point in my life."
A pause. "It's, uh, you just cover it. Like, this much over the rice." Her hand made a small vague gesture in the air over an invisible pot, hovering an inch, maybe two, above where the water line ought to be. "You'll feel it."
"I'll feel it? What does that mean? I don't have psychic fingers, I’m not a shaman! I need an actual number."
"It's not a number thing, it's an eyeballing thing. Everyone knows this."
"Everyone does not know this. I am a functioning adult male who has successfully never once in his life made a pot of plain rice, that's how well I know this."
"Well, maybe if you'd paid attention the first fifty thousand times I made it instead of being glued to your phone at the table—"
"Okay, that's not fair, I was working—"
"You were always working. That's not even the point. The point is you're a grown man standing here measuring water like it's a chemistry experiment, when you could've just—"
"I am not measuring, I am trying very hard to not fuck it up, which, forgive me, is extremely difficult when the instructions I'm getting are 'you'll feel it,' like I'm supposed to be divining this out of the ether—"
"Don't be dramatic."
"I'm not being dramatic, I'm being precise, there's a difference, and I would like some precision applied to my dinner, please—"
"You want precision, go buy a rice cooker with the little measuring cup, I'm not a machine, Yunho, I don't walk around with exact water ratios in my head—"
"Can you stop cutting me off mid sentence and you literally just told me you know this recipe by heart, that was the whole—"
"No I can’t and I know it by feel, that's a completely different thing than knowing it by number, God, why do I have to explain this so many—"
"Because the first explanation didn't have any actual information in it!"
"Fine. Fine! You want a number so badly? Two to one. Two cups water for every cup of rice. There. Happy?"
He blinked at her. "Wait, really?"
"I don't know, maybe. Something like that."
"Something like that? You just said it like it was gospel and now it's something like that?"
"It's in the ballpark, Yunho, I'm not going to get court-martialed over half a cup of water."
"This whole time you've been acting like I'm the idiot in this conversation!"
"You are the idiot in this conversation, that's not mutually exclusive with me also not remembering the exact—"
"Okay, so which is it. Is it a feeling thing or a two-to-one thing, because those are very different pieces of advice and you've now given me both—"
"It's both. It starts as a number and then it becomes a feeling, that's how cooking works, that's how basically every skill works, first you learn the rule and then eventually you stop needing it—"
"I don't want to stop needing it, I want to make it through tonight's dinner without needing a search party—"
"You are so— has anyone ever told you you're insufferable when you're hungry?"
"You. Regularly. It's basically your whole personality some nights."
"It is not my whole personality."
"It's a solid forty percent of it."
She laughed despite herself, he could hear it, that short surprised sound she made when he landed something and she hadn't seen it coming, and for a second the whole argument deflated into something warmer, something almost fond, the kind of bickering that was really just two people who liked each other finding an excuse to keep talking.
"Pour the water up to your first knuckle," she said, after a second, in a different tone now, softer. More certain, like she'd finally located the actual memory instead of guessing at its shape. "Flat hand on top of the rice, fingertip touching the surface. Water up to the first line on your finger. That's the trick. My mom taught me that, actually, not the cup measurements, the cup measurements are what you do when you don't trust yourself yet."
"That's insane. That's not a unit of measurement, that's a- like, that's a body part."
"It works."
"It works for you, your fingers are a specific size, what if I have giant weird alien fingers, the ratio's off before I even start—"
"Your fingers are normal, Yunho, oh my God— well…….who knows!"
"Ok now im just insecure about my fingers, why’d you say that and also I'm just saying, this is not a scalable system—"
"It has fed my entire family for two generations, it has fed your 6” ass too, it is extremely scalable, put your hand on the rice."
He did, mostly to make her stop talking, flattening his palm over the surface of the rinsed rice in the pot, and dribbled water in slowly with the other hand, watching it climb the side of his own finger like a tide coming in. It felt absurd. It also, disconcertingly, felt like something his body already half-remembered how to do, some old motion sitting dormant in his hand that only needed the excuse of her voice to wake back up.
"There," she said, when the water reached the first crease of his index finger. "That's it. That's the whole secret."
"That's not a secret, that's witchcraft."
"It's not witchcraft, it's just…..it's a thing you get shown once by somebody who loves you, and then you have it forever. That's all it ever is. Nobody figures this stuff out on their own babe, somebody always shows you."
He didn't say anything to that right away. Something in the sentence sat a little strangely in the air, a weight to it that didn't quite match the size of the conversation they were having, and he glanced up at her without meaning to, some instinct in him trying to read her face for whatever had put that particular note in her voice. She was still leaning against the wall the way she had been the whole time, arms crossed, watching him with an expression he couldn't quite name.
"Okay, well, don't get weird about it," he said, mostly to break whatever this was, going back to the water. "It's rice, not a life lesson."
"Everything's a life lesson if you're annoying enough about it."
"I'm not annoying, I'm thorough."
"You bullied a bag of long-grain rice for ten minutes. Insane, by the way."
"Because the instructions I was given were vibes, (Y/n), you gave me vibes as a cooking method—"
"And it worked, didn't it? Your hand's right there, water's at the line, you're basically done!"
"I don't trust it. I want the number back. Give me the two-to-one thing again, the actual number, im not fingering the thing anymore."
"Ew don’t say it like that, I gave you both, what more do you want from me?"
"I want consistency, I want to be able to do this again next week without needing a seance—"
"Oh, don't be so bothered, it's not that deep, just remember the trick—"
"I won't remember the trick! I don't remember tricks, I remember numbers, that's the whole problem, that's why I'm standing here asking you for the eleventh time Lord—"
"Then write it down instead of yelling at me about it!"
"I'm not yelling, I'm raising my voice slightly because I would like a straight answer just once tonight—"
"It's not—" He stopped himself. Something hot rose fast up the back of his throat, aimed at nothing in particular, and he hated how much he wanted to aim it somewhere anyway. He started again, quieter, jaw tight. "It's not just your kitchen."
She didn't answer that right away. For a second, just a second, something crossed her face that didn't match the argument at all, something older and stiller, and Yunho didn't have time to figure out what it meant before his mother's voice cut through the doorway behind him.
"Yunho? What in the world is all this shouting about?"
He turned around fast, rice water still dripping off his fingers onto the tile. His mother stood in the hall doorway in her cardigan, keys still in one hand like she hadn't decided whether she was staying.
"Mom— hey. Uh sorry." He wiped his hand on the dish towel over his shoulder. "I'm just making rice, and she" — he tipped his head toward the wall where (Y/n) had been leaning the entire time — "won't give me a straight answer on the water. Keeps telling me I'll just feel it. So if you want to yell at her for me, that'd be great, honestly, back me up here."
He was smiling when he said it. He wanted her to laugh.
His mother didn't laugh.
Her face did something slow, and it took him a second too long to understand what he was watching, the way her mouth opened like she meant to say something light and simply couldn't, the way her eyes went from him to the empty stretch of wall beside the doorframe and then stayed there. One hand came up and pressed flat against the doorframe, like she needed it to hold her weight.
"Yunho," she said. His name came out of her cracked clean down the middle.
"What?" He was still smiling. He could feel it starting to slip and he held onto it anyway. "Mom, what? What's wrong?"
She didn't answer him directly. Her gaze stayed fixed on that patch of empty wall, on nothing, on the space where her son's eyes kept flicking back and forth like there was someone standing in it, and slowly her own eyes filled.
"Let her go, honey," she said, so gently it was almost unbearable to hear. "Please. Holding onto this— it's only going to hurt you more. It already is. I can see it."
"I don't, What?— Mom, I don't know what you're talking about. I'm making dinner. I'm just—"
But she was already turning, already retreating back down the hall, one hand pressed briefly to her mouth, and he heard her stop somewhere just past the threshold, heard the small broken sound she didn't want him to hear.
The kitchen went very quiet. The rice water on the burner ticked and settled.
"She's right, you know," (Y/n) said, from the wall.
Her voice had changed too. All the teasing had gone out of it. "You should let me go, Darling."
He laughed. Short, dismissive, a single huff of breath, and shook his head like she'd said something absurd, not even worth the dignity of an answer. He turned back to the stove. Turned the burner up a notch, more out of needing something to do with his hands than any real urgency about the rice. Watched the thin skin of water at the pot's edge begin to shiver toward a boil.
His hand wasn't quite steady on the lid.
"I mean it," she said, quieter now. "I'm not trying to be cruel. I just—"
"Don't." The word came out rougher than he meant. He softened it, ashamed of the edge in it. "Don't do the thing where you agree with her. That's not what tonight is."
"Yunho."
"I said don't."
He kept his eyes on the pot, on the water, which had gone from trembling to a full, steady, indifferent boil, little bubbles cresting up through the rice and popping against the surface, ordinary and small and completely uninterested in the fact that his chest had turned to something hard and hot and difficult to breathe around. He didn't look up. He couldn't, not yet, not while his face was doing the thing it was doing, jaw locked so tight it ached at the hinge, breath coming in short, careful pulls through his nose because if he opened his mouth even a little he wasn't sure what would come out. He blinked hard, fast, twice, and told himself it was the steam.
He reached for the lid again, hand a little steadier this time out of sheer stubbornness, and set it over the pot at an angle to let a little steam escape.
"You always do this," he said, to the pot, to the steam, to whoever was still listening. "You get quiet like this and then you agree with whoever's trying to talk me out of something, like it's a two-against-one thing all of a sudden."
"It's not about being talked out of anything."
"Then what is it about."
She didn't answer right away, and the not-answering sat in the room heavier than anything she could have said.
"Ask me something else," she said finally. "About the rice. Ask me something else about the rice."
"I don't have anything else to ask about the rice, (Y/n), we've covered the rice, the rice is covered, I'm asking about—"
"Yunho."
Something in the way she said his name, flat, final, a door easing shut rather than slammed, made him stop.
He turned the burner down instead of arguing further, watched the boil settle back into something gentler, more patient, and reached up without quite deciding to and rubbed at his eyes with the heel of one hand, hard, the way you do when you're trying to physically press something back down where it came from.
When he finally lifted his eyes back toward the wall, meaning to say something, anything, meaning to ask her one more small pointless question about rice he didn't actually need answered, just to hear her voice keep going a little longer, just to keep the kitchen from going all the way silent.
there was nothing there.
Just the wall. Just the doorframe, pale and ordinary in the overhead light. And on the hook beside it, where it always hung, her apron, the yellow one, faded at the ties, with a small brown burn mark near the hem from the time she'd backed into the oven door laughing at something he'd said and hadn't noticed the singe until an hour later. It hung there the way it always did. Empty. Perfectly still, because there was no draft in the kitchen to move it, because there was no one standing near enough to disturb the air around it.
Yunho stood and looked at it for a long time.
He didn't cry, not really, not in any way that would have looked like crying if someone had walked in, no sound, no shaking shoulders, nothing dramatic enough to have a name. Just a wet, quiet stillness that sat behind his eyes and refused to either fall or go away, his jaw still locked, his breath still coming careful and shallow, like if he managed it precisely enough he could keep the whole thing contained. He reached up, at some point, without deciding to, and touched two fingers to the edge of the apron where it hung on its hook. The fabric was cool. It always was. He didn't know why that surprised him every time.
Behind him, the rice had started to catch faintly at the bottom of the pot, the smell of it just barely turning, that thin scorched-sugar edge that meant it had gone a minute too long, and it was that, more than anything, that finally moved him. He turned the burner off. Lifted the lid, checked it, found it slightly overdone at the bottom but salvageable, mostly fine, the way most things were mostly fine if you caught them close enough to the edge.
He got a bowl down from the cabinet. Spooned some rice into it, more out of habit than hunger, and stood at the counter eating it plain, without anything else on the plate, because he hadn't actually planned this meal beyond the rice itself, the rice had never really been about dinner in the first place, and some part of him had always known that, even while he stood here arguing about water ratios like the stakes were real.
The first bite was better than he expected. A little stuck together near the bottom, a little dry near the top where the lid had let too much steam escape, but underneath all of that, somehow, unmistakably, it tasted like rice was supposed to taste, plain and warm and faintly sweet in the way only plain things can be. He stood there chewing slowly, in no hurry to be anywhere else, and let the quiet of the kitchen settle around him the way it did most nights, once the noise of getting through dinner had died down.
He thought about calling his mother back. He should. He knew, even standing here, that she'd left the house with something sitting wrong in her chest, something she'd probably spend the whole drive home turning over, wondering if she should have said more, wondering if she should have stayed. He thought about picking up his phone right then, dialing her number, telling her he was fine, telling her whatever version of fine he could manage to sound like over the phone. He didn't do it yet. He told himself he'd do it in a minute, once he'd finished eating, once his face had settled back into something that wouldn't give him away the second he said hello.
He carried the bowl to the sink and ran water into it, watching the last few grains spiral toward the drain, and caught himself, for just a second, listening for something, for a comment about how he never scraped the bowl properly before rinsing it, for the particular teasing note her voice took whenever she caught him doing a chore halfway. It didn't come. He hadn't really expected it to. Some nights the kitchen gave him more, some nights less, and there was no telling ahead of time which kind of night he was going to get, only the standing there afterward to find out.
He dried his hands on the towel over his shoulder and stood for a moment with his palms flat on the edge of the counter, head down, the way you stand when you're not quite ready to move on to whatever comes next. The refrigerator hummed. Somewhere outside a car passed, headlights sweeping briefly across the ceiling through the gap in the blinds, and then the kitchen went back to being just the kitchen, quiet, ordinary, a little too well-lit for how late it had gotten.
He looked at the wall again. At the doorframe. At the hook, and the apron on it, hanging exactly where it always hung, not moving, not needing to.
"You didn't answer my question," he said quietly, to the empty kitchen. "About the ratio. I will keep asking you until you do."
Nothing answered him back. He finished the rice standing up, rinsed the bowl, set it in the rack to dry.
Before he turned off the light, he reached out, slowly, like he was asking permission from no one, and let his fingers rest against the apron one more time. Not to take it down. Just to feel it there. Cool, and still, and exactly where it should be.
Then he turned off the kitchen light, and somewhere in the dark hallway between the kitchen and the stairs, so quietly he almost didn't hear himself say it, he said goodnight, the way he did most nights, to no one that anyone else could see, and went up to bed alone.