Work Text:
Suho should have known, in retrospect, that bringing Yeon Sieun to the apartment this early was either a very good idea or a catastrophically stupid one.
There was rarely anything in between where Sieun was concerned.
The building itself looked like the sort of place people apologized for before they even unlocked the door. It stood at the end of a narrow side street lined with half-dead potted plants, cracked tiles, and old scooters parked so close together it looked as though they had been abandoned there to fossilize. The stairwell smelled faintly of dust, rust, and old rain, and the fluorescent tube on the second-floor landing buzzed with the kind of weak, stubborn menace that suggested it had been threatening to die for years but simply lacked the courtesy to finish the job.
Suho still took the stairs two at a time.
Not because he was trying to show off. There was nothing here worth showing off.
Mostly because he was nervous, and when Suho was nervous, his body betrayed him by becoming even more restless than usual, all careless movement and bright, overcompensating chatter. He had been talking since they stepped out of the taxi. About the neighborhood, about the old woman downstairs who seemed to know everyone’s business, about the convenience store at the corner that sold triangle kimbap suspiciously close to its expiration date, about how the place wasn’t that bad once you stopped expecting dignity from it.
“It’s not much,” he said, glancing back over his shoulder as Sieun followed at a calmer pace, one hand grazing the stair rail. “And honestly, my standards were already pretty low. This place just had to beat sleeping in a room with three other people and somebody’s mystery gym socks.”
Sieun lifted his eyes to him. “That sounds like an incredibly specific benchmark.”
“It is,” Suho said. “I’m a man of experience.”
That got him the smallest thing - barely there, more sensed than seen, the faint loosening at the corner of Sieun’s mouth that, on anyone else, would not have counted as a smile at all. On Sieun, it landed with the force of reward.
Suho kept climbing, trying not to feel too much about that.
By the time they reached the top floor, he already had the key in his hand, though his fingers slipped once against the metal. He hated that he was suddenly aware of everything at once: the sweat cooling at the back of his neck from the walk up, the chipped paint near the doorframe, the missing number plate on the apartment opposite his, the plastic
grocery bag he had forgotten to throw out hanging from his doorknob because he had taken the trash down in the morning and then somehow returned with more trash.
“It’s not the Ritz or something,” he said, because once he was anxious he apparently lost the ability to stop speaking. “But the electricity works. Usually. Which is already better than my last place, so. Progress.”
“Usually?” Sieun repeated.
Suho shoved the key in the lock. “That’s not the important part of the sentence.”
“What’s the water situation?”
“It runs.”
“That was not my question.”
Suho pushed the door open and grinned, half sheepish, half performative. “It runs eventually.”
He reached for the light switch.
For one awful second, nothing happened.
Then the bulb overhead flickered, shuddered, and came on in a thin, jaundiced wash that revealed the room exactly as it was: small, a little sad, unquestionably underfurnished. There was a secondhand couch pushed against one wall, a television on a low stand opposite it, a kitchenette with scratches across the counter like shallow old wounds, and a curtain over the window that was hanging slightly crooked, thin enough that the afternoon light pressed through it in pale, tired bands. A narrow hallway led to the bedroom and bathroom, both of which Suho had cleaned twice the day before and still did not trust.
He stayed near the door for a second too long, watching Sieun take it in.
Here was the dangerous part, he thought. Not the apartment itself, but what it meant to let someone see it. To let someone see how he lived, what he could afford, how unfinished everything still was. There were versions of intimacy Suho was very good at bluffing his way through - noise, charm, warmth, the easy carelessness of touching, joking, leaning in close enough to make people forget to ask serious questions. But this felt different. This felt perilously like offering up proof of himself with nothing to hide behind.
“It’s not much,” he said again, softer now. “I know.”
Sieun stepped inside without answering.
He slipped off his shoes neatly near the entrance, then crossed the apartment with unhurried steps, his gaze moving over the couch, the television, the stack of books Suho had not yet found a shelf for, the single mug left in the drying rack, the cheap standing fan in the corner. He looked at everything carefully, but not critically. That, more than anything, made Suho’s throat tighten.
Then Sieun sat down on the couch.
Not delicately. Not like a guest testing the edge of a seat. He sat as though the space had already made room for him.
Suho stared.
Sieun looked up. “What?”
“That,” Suho said, pointing uselessly. “You. Sitting there like you’ve lived here for years.”
A pause.
Then, so softly Suho nearly missed it, “Maybe the couch looked lonely.”
Suho barked out a laugh before he could stop himself. “You’re making fun of my furniture already?”
“It is objectively lonely,” Sieun said, resting one arm along the back of the couch. “I’m helping.”
The light above them flickered once.
Both of them looked up.
Suho squinted. “I think the bulb’s loose.”
“Or the wiring is bad.”
“Wow. Incredible. You come into my home and start slandering it.”
“It’s not slander if it’s visible.”
Suho was still laughing as he crossed the room and dropped onto the couch beside him, not too close, though he could feel the pull of that possibility immediately. The cushion dipped under his weight. Their shoulders did not touch, but they could have if either of them had moved an inch.
The apartment was small enough that there was nowhere for the silence to go. It settled around them, not awkward but close, full of the awareness that always seemed to gather when it was just the two of them. Suho had never fully understood how Sieun managed it.
How he could say so little and still make every shared pause feel occupied. There were people Suho could spend hours with and come away untouched, as if the conversation had glanced off him. With Sieun, even the air seemed to carry weight.
“I like it.” Sieun said at last.
Suho turned too quickly. “Really?”
Sieun glanced at him, then away, toward the curtain stirring faintly with the draft. “It’s yours.”
The answer should not have lodged itself where it did. It should not have felt so tender, or so much like being seen.
But it did.
And because Suho had never in his life learned the useful skill of leaving fragile things alone, he said, more softly than he meant to, “You make it sound like that matters.”
Sieun’s gaze came back to him then, calm and unreadable and far too direct. “It does.”
The light flickered again.
Suho looked away first.
Later, he would think that maybe that was the moment the apartment stopped feeling like a place he happened to rent and started feeling like something more dangerous - something capable of becoming important simply because Sieun had sat in it, looked at it, and not turned away.
At the time, though, he only reached for the remote and said, with exaggerated brightness, “Great. Since you approve, I can now fulfill my dream of making you watch terrible late-night television in legally questionable comfort.”
Sieun made a low sound that might have been amusement. “That sounds less like a dream and more like a threat.”
“Same thing, sometimes.”
And for a brief moment, it was easy.
Not because anything between them was ever truly simple, but because there were stretches when the wanting tucked itself into ordinary shapes and let them pretend. The apartment became one of those shapes. A shabby one, badly lit, with a kitchen too small for two people and windows that rattled when the buses went by outside, but still a shape they returned to.
But it felt like they had finally found a way around it. A space that was theirs, however temporary. A door that locked. A room that did not belong to anyone else, where silence was not something they had to defend, where time stretched just a little wider than it used to.
No more frantic glances at the clock, hearts pounding with thrill, as they tangled together on the worn couch in an empty family home, pants shoved down just enough to let Suho's cock slide deep into Sieun's eager heat, chasing release before the world intruded.
No more stifling gasps with trembling hands over parted lips, bodies slick and shuddering in the hush of midnight, when a moan slipped free from the exquisite friction of fingers curling inside, or the grind of hips that made stars burst behind closed eyes.
No more flashing innocent smiles at the other's parents and asking "How are you?" while the lingering flavor of each other's essence - salty, intimate - still coated their tongues, a secret spark igniting fresh desire with every casual word.
But life did not rearrange itself just because they had carved out a corner of it to breathe in.
It began with the sound of Sieun’s phone vibrating face-down on the coffee table.
They were on the couch. It was late. Rain tapped lightly against the window, and the bulb overhead had been threatening mutiny all evening, dimming every few minutes before jolting back to life. Suho was half reclined, one leg stretched out along the couch, while Sieun sat beside him with a document open on his laptop, frowning at something dense and joyless enough to be either a report or a personal attack.
His phone buzzed once.
Then again.
Then a third time.
Suho glanced over. “Persistent.”
Sieun didn’t look at it right away. That, more than the repeated vibration, made Suho straighten slightly.
When Sieun finally picked it up, his face changed so subtly most people would have missed it. The tension did not appear all at once; it drew tight in stages, muted and controlled, a barely perceptible stilling of the mouth, a sharpening around the eyes.
Suho watched him read the screen.
Then read the next one.
“What is it?” he asked.
Sieun set the phone down carefully. Too carefully.
“Nothing.”
“Sieun.”
A beat passed.
Then, without looking at him, Sieun said, “My mother.”
That was enough to change the air.
Suho sat up fully. “Did something happen?”
“No.” Another pause. “Not exactly.”
The answer was wrong in the way only technically correct answers could be. Suho could feel it instantly, that thin shift into dangerous territory - the part where Sieun would begin making himself smaller inside the conversation if Suho pushed too hard, smoothing everything into something manageable, deniable, neat.
“So what does ‘not exactly’ mean?” Suho asked, gentler now.
Sieun was silent long enough that the bulb dimmed overhead, brightened again, and still he had not answered.
Finally he said, “She asked where I’ve been.”
Suho let out a breath he hadn’t realized he was holding. “Okay.”
“She asked why I’m out so often.”
“Oh.”
“And whether there’s someone who could distract me and make my grades drop.”
The room seemed to pull inward around that sentence.
Suho did not move. “What did you say?”
“That there isn’t, and that my grades still top.”
Something in Suho’s chest twisted. Not because the answer was surprising. It wasn’t. They had no language for what they were, not with each other and certainly not with anyone else. Still, hearing it aloud - there isn’t - landed with an ugly, unexpected precision.
He looked away, toward the television screen reflecting them back in dark, blurred shapes. “Right.”
Sieun turned his head then, finally looking at him. “You know why.”
It was not a defensive question. It was worse. It was a statement of fact, low and tired and stripped of decoration, asking to be understood without having to beg for it.
And Suho did understand. He understood too well.
That did not stop it from hurting.
“I know,” he said.
The space between them remained small in a physical sense and impossible in every other one.
After that, things did not fall apart dramatically. They thinned.
That was almost worse.
Sieun still came by, but less often. He stayed, but never until morning. He answered Suho’s messages, but sometimes hours late, and always with the kind of precision that closed doors instead of opening them. When Suho asked if he wanted to come over, Sieun would say he was busy with assignment, labs and projects. When Suho asked if he’d eaten, Sieun would say yes. When Suho sent something stupid on purpose just to make him react - a blurry picture of a cat glaring at him from the stairwell, a complaint about his boss, a message that said “Heyyy I’m being persecuted by my own refrigerator, call the authorities” - Sieun still replied, but the replies felt careful now, as if every word had to cross a checkpoint before it reached him.
And one day, they were tired.
They were tired and they missed each other. Exhausted, aching with that giddy, insatiable pull toward one another, and Sieun's bed whispered temptation, so close, so inviting.
Half asleep mere seconds after Sieun settled against Suho's bare chest, he mumbled into Suho's hair, his voice thick with exhaustion, reminding him not to forget to set his alarm. The words were more breath than sound, his lips brushing against Suho's forehead with each syllable. Suho's hand fumbled for his phone in the dark, fingers grazing the cool screen as he tapped the time with clumsy precision, but the sheer weight of their exhaustion pulled them under deeper than planned.
Their bodies entwined naturally in the dim glow filtering through the curtains, skin warm and achingly familiar against skin. Suho's arm draped over Sieun's waist, drawing him flush against his chest, their legs tangling as their breathing gradually synchronized in the hushed night. For a while, there was only that—the simple, profound relief of being close without having to measure the distance to the door.
But the need simmered beneath the surface, unspoken but insistent, born from days of stolen glances and touches that had to end before they could become something visible. It rose slowly, like heat through water, until Suho became aware of it not as want but as something deeper—the recognition that this might be their only chance to stop pretending they could live on fragments.
Suho's lips found the curve of Sieun's neck in the darkness, pressing soft kisses that trailed downward, tasting the faint salt of his skin. The familiar flavor of him—warm, slightly sweet, indefinably his—made something in Suho's chest crack open with tenderness. Sieun sighed, a sound barely louder than breath, arching into the contact with a vulnerability he rarely allowed anywhere else. His hand slid up Suho's thigh, fingers curling into firm muscle, gripping with an urgency that said closer more plainly than words ever could.
Their mouths met in the space between heartbeats—slow at first, questioning, then deepening with the languid certainty of people who finally had time to mean it properly. Tongues glided together with a tenderness that belied the heat building between them, each kiss a conversation they had been trying to have for weeks without words.
Clothes were shed in whispers of fabric against sheets—Sieun's shirt lifted over his head with reverent care, Suho's pants eased down with hands that trembled slightly from want rather than haste. The cool air touched their skin for only a moment before warmth replaced it, the press of their bodies together immediate and grounding.
Suho's cock, already half-hard from the simple intimacy of closeness, thickened as Sieun's fingers wrapped around it. The touch was gentle but knowing, stroking with a rhythm that drew low, helpless sounds from Suho's throat. Pre-cum beaded at the tip, slicking the way as Sieun's thumb circled the head with devastating precision, teasing the sensitive underside until Suho's breath came in sharp, uneven gasps.
Suho mirrored the attention, his hand dipping between Sieun's legs to cup his balls, rolling them softly before sliding a finger along his cleft. He reached for the lube from the bedside drawer with practiced ease, slicking his digits before circling Sieun's entrance with feather-light pressure. When he eased one finger inside the tight heat, Sieun's breath caught, his body yielding beautifully as Suho worked him open with patient, measured thrusts.
"Suho," Sieun whispered, the name rough with need, and the sound of it sent heat racing down Suho's spine.
He added a second finger, curling them to find that spot that made Sieun's cock twitch and leak against his abdomen, made his back arch off the bed with a grace that was entirely unconscious. Every small sound Sieun made—the catch of breath, the soft whimpers he couldn't quite contain—felt like a gift Suho had done nothing to deserve.
They moved as one when Suho finally withdrew his fingers, fluid and unhurried, the world outside forgotten in this stolen sanctuary. Suho coated his length before guiding himself to Sieun's prepared entrance, pushing in slowly, inch by careful inch, savoring the velvet grip that enveloped him. The sensation was overwhelming—not just physical but emotional, the profound intimacy of being welcomed into Sieun's body, of being trusted with this vulnerability.
A shared gasp escaped them both as Suho bottomed out, and for a moment they simply breathed together, foreheads touching, adjusting to the exquisite fullness. Sieun's legs wrapped around Suho's waist, heels digging in to pull him deeper, and they found their rhythm—a seamless, rolling grind that spoke of bodies that knew each other's needs instinctively.
Suho rocked into him with smooth, deliberate thrusts, each one hitting deep and steady, the friction building like a slow-burning flame that threatened to consume them both. Sieun's hands roamed his back, nails tracing desperate patterns over sweat-dampened skin, while his cock slid between their pressed bodies, the pressure coiling tighter with every motion.
Their kisses grew messy and fervent, swallowing moans as pleasure built between them. There was nothing performed about it—only the raw honesty of two people who had been denying themselves this connection for too long, finally allowing themselves to fall completely into each other.
Sieun came first, his release spilling warm and sticky across their stomachs, his body clenching rhythmically around Suho in waves that pulled him helplessly over the edge. Suho buried his face in the curve of Sieun's neck, thrusting once more before pulsing inside him, filling him with heat that seemed to seal something between them—a promise, a claim, a recognition of what they meant to each other.
They stayed connected afterward, neither willing to break the spell of intimacy that surrounded them. Suho pressed lazy kisses to Sieun's shoulder while Sieun's fingers traced idle patterns on his back, both of them floating in the particular peace that came after being completely known by another person.
Sleep reclaimed them gradually, their bodies still entwined, breathing synchronized once more in the darkness. For a few precious hours, the world contracted to just this—the warmth between them, the steady beat of hearts pressed close together, the profound rightness of finally being exactly where they belonged.
Neither of them opened their eyes again until several hours later than they were supposed to, when the morning light was already bleeding harsh and unforgiving through the curtains. The peaceful sanctuary shattered completely when his mother's hand settled on Sieun's shoulder, shaking him gently but firmly awake.
She told him, in a voice that was terrifyingly calm, that Suho needed to leave.
---
Suho tried not to panic about it.
Which meant, naturally, that he panicked in a hundred small, private ways.
He stopped asking directly after a while because being refused politely felt somehow more unbearable than silence. He told himself Sieun was under pressure, that he needed time, that nothing had technically ended because nothing had ever been clearly begun. He told himself all kinds of reasonable things that sounded wise in theory and turned rotten the minute he was alone in the apartment at night, staring at the crooked curtain and the dead space beside him on the couch.
The light got worse.
Perhaps it had always been bad and he had simply been too occupied to care, but now he noticed every stutter in it. The hum overhead grew louder. Sometimes the bulb dimmed so low the room seemed submerged, all its edges softened into gray. Twice it snapped off completely for a few seconds before buzzing back to life. Suho bought a replacement bulb and left it in the plastic bag on the counter for six days without changing it.
He had the unpleasant suspicion that fixing the light would feel too much like admitting the room was his again.
One night, after closing at work, he came home tired enough to resent the act of unlocking the door. The apartment was dark except for the orange stripe of streetlight leaking through the curtain. He dropped his keys into the bowl by the door, kicked off his shoes, and stood for a moment in the silence, listening to the old refrigerator rattle in the kitchenette.
His phone vibrated.
For one stupid, instantaneous second, his entire body lit with hope.
Then he saw the name.
Not Sieun.
He swallowed the feeling down and opened the message anyway. It was from a coworker asking if he could cover a shift next week. He set the phone down on the counter harder than necessary and laughed once under his breath, humorless.
The apartment did not care.
He did not turn on the light. He crossed the room in the dark and dropped onto the couch, forearm over his eyes. The fabric smelled faintly of detergent and the citrusy shampoo Sieun used, or perhaps Suho had simply imagined that enough times for the memory to stick. Either possibility felt equally humiliating.
His phone vibrated again.
This time, when he lifted it, his throat tightened so abruptly it almost hurt.
They’re my family.
He stared at the screen.
That was all.
Not hello. Not I’m sorry. Not can we talk. Just that.
A sentence dropped between them like the continuation of an argument they had never actually allowed themselves to have.
Suho sat up slowly.
The next message came before he had decided whether to answer.
I’m not choosing them over you.
And then, almost immediately:
I’m not choosing anyone over anyone.
Suho closed his eyes.
He could see Sieun sending those messages with perfect clarity: sitting somewhere too still, phone in one hand, jaw set, face composed in that terrible way it became composed when he was forcing emotion into containment. He could hear the restraint in it. Not indifference. Never indifference. Something worse and much more like suffering.
He typed, erased, typed again.
I know.
He paused, thumb hovering over the screen. Then added:
I understand.
The reply took longer this time. Long enough for the old bulb overhead to buzz, dim, flare once.
I need time to fix this. Can you give me that?
Suho read it three times.
The cruelty of it was that he knew Sieun was not being cruel. He knew those words were probably the cleanest version of a much messier truth: that home had become unlivable in ways Suho could only imagine, that every hour spent out of the house was now noticed, catalogued, that the problem was not simply disapproval but the slow suffocation of being watched by the people who had built your first idea of safety.
Still, Suho’s hand tightened around the phone until his knuckles ached.
There were so many possible answers. Petty ones. Desperate ones. Honest ones. He wanted to type something unfair, something that would make visible the shape of the hurt sitting in him like broken glass. He wanted to ask what time meant. A week. A month. Long enough to teach himself how not to reach for Sieun’s absence like a bruise?
Instead he wrote the only thing dignity would allow.
Yeah.
The bulb overhead blinked once and went out.
After that, the silence became something else entirely.
They still saw each other, because the city was not large enough and their habits had too much overlap. Once at the café near campus, where Suho looked up from his drink and found Sieun already looking at him from two tables away, expression unreadable above a paper cup gone untouched. Neither of them waved. After a suspended second, Sieun looked down first, and Suho hated himself for how much that felt like being left.
Once at the crosswalk outside the bookstore, both of them arriving from opposite directions under the same umbrella-gray sky. They stopped, exchanged a subdued hello that sounded painfully civilized, then stood through the red light shoulder to shoulder and not touching while the traffic hissed by on wet asphalt. Suho could feel the heat of him. He did not turn his head.
Once at the small grocery where Suho worked evening shifts, standing behind the register in a uniform that never quite fit him right, sleeves rolled up, hands moving automatically through the motions. Sieun came in like it wasn’t intentional, like he hadn’t already known Suho would be there, and picked up the first thing within reach - a single onigiri, plain.
By the time he reached the counter, Suho had already seen enough.
He scanned it without comment, then reached beneath the counter and added a carton of milk and a boiled egg to the bag, quick and practiced, like it was nothing. Like it hadn’t always been something.
Sieun noticed. Of course he did. His gaze lingered for a second too long on the extra weight in the bag, then lifted, steady and unreadable.
He didn’t argue. Didn’t thank him, either. He just took the bag - carefully, precisely, without letting his fingers brush against Suho’s - and stepped away before anything else could happen.
The chime rang as the door slid shut behind him.
Suho stayed where he was, one hand resting on the counter, staring at the space Sieun had just occupied, and thinking, not for the first time, that distance chosen like this felt worse than anything that had ever been forced.
---
Months passed like that. Not many. Enough.
Enough for Suho to stop expecting his phone to light up with Sieun’s name - and then hate himself every time he checked anyway. Enough for the charger Sieun had left in the wall near the couch to become something Suho considered moving several times and never did. Enough for the apartment to feel both more settled and more hollow, as if habit had moved in and hope had fallen silent somewhere in the back room.
He worked more. Slept less. Let dishes sit in the sink longer than he should have. Bought another lamp instead of fixing the ceiling light properly, only for that one to start flickering too, because, as it turned out, the problem had never been the bulb.
One evening, after a shift that had stretched too long and required too much false brightness, Suho came home to find the apartment nearly dark again, the lamp beside the couch casting an unsteady pool of light that trembled whenever the current dipped. He dropped onto the sofa, head tipped back, and listened to the old building settle around him.
Then his phone buzzed. He almost didn’t look.
When he did, every muscle in his body went still.
Can we talk?
That was all. No explanation. No preamble.
Suho sat up so quickly the couch springs protested beneath him. He typed back before he could overthink it.
Yeah.
He stared at the screen, waiting.
Nothing.
A minute passed. Then another.
He was just beginning to wonder if that had been a mistake - if Sieun had sent it, lost his nerve, set the phone down - when someone knocked.
The sound was soft. Not tentative, exactly. Just controlled, as though whoever stood outside had too much pride to pound and too much urgency to leave.
Suho was already moving. He crossed the apartment in three long strides and pulled the door open.
Yeon Sieun stood on the other side with a duffel bag slung over one shoulder.
For one disorienting second, Suho couldn’t process the image properly. It was too immediate, too specific, too impossible in the way hope often was when it arrived in actual form instead of thought. Sieun looked tired - more than tired, really. His hair was slightly damp at the temples as if he had walked fast through the cold. There were shadows beneath his eyes. His mouth was set in that careful line Suho had come to recognize as the visible aftermath of hours spent holding himself together.
And yet -
he was here.
“Hey,” Sieun said.
Suho forgot every prepared version of himself at once. “Hey.”
Their eyes held. The hallway light above them buzzed faintly, a cousin to the failing bulb inside. Somewhere downstairs, a door shut. The whole building seemed to pause around the shape of that silence. Then Sieun glanced past him into the apartment, where the lamp flickered once in the corner.
“So,” he said, his voice drier than his expression, “did the electricity finally give up on you?”
It was such a familiar kind of sentence that Suho almost laughed from sheer relief.
“Depends,” he said, stepping back. “Are you here as an inspector or a squatter?”
A pause.
Then, “Can I come in first?”
Suho moved aside at once.
They sat on opposite ends of the couch, not quite far enough to call it distance, not close enough to pretend it wasn’t there, the space between them occupied by the low flicker of an old war movie that neither of them was truly watching. The volume had been turned down to almost nothing, leaving only the faint murmur of dialogue and the shifting wash of light across the room, silver-blue shadows brushing over Sieun’s face and catching, every so often, in his eyes - those deep, steady eyes that had always held more than they revealed, darker now, as if something inside them had been drawn too tight for too long.
Suho found himself glancing at him more often than he meant to. It wasn’t obvious - nothing about him was, not when it mattered - but his attention drifted back again and again, pulled by the gravity of Sieun’s presence, by the way he sat so still, one hand loosely wrapped around a bottle of water, posture composed to the point of effortlessness. To anyone else, he would have looked untouched, perfectly in control. Suho knew better. He could see it in the minute tension along Sieun’s jaw, in the way his fingers tightened briefly before easing again, in the careful neutrality of his expression that felt less like calm and more like something held in place through sheer discipline.
For a long time, neither of them spoke, and the silence settled into something familiar - not empty, never empty with them, but full of everything that had not yet been said, everything that had been waiting for this moment to surface.
“I thought it would settle down,” Sieun said eventually, his voice soft enough that it almost dissolved into the low hum of the television, though the steadiness of it remained intact, as it always did.
Suho turned his head slightly, his gaze sharpening as it settled fully on him. “After midterms?”
“After midterms. After I ranked first once again.” Sieun paused, his eyes still fixed somewhere ahead, though it was clear he wasn’t seeing the screen at all. “I thought that would be enough.”
There was no bitterness in the words, which somehow made them heavier.
“And?” Suho asked, though he already knew the answer, could feel it sitting there in the shape of Sieun’s stillness.
“It wasn’t.” The response came simply, precisely, leaving no room for interpretation, and Sieun exhaled slowly after, as if even that small admission required effort. “They didn’t stop. They just… changed the way they looked at things.”
The light from the screen shifted again, catching briefly in his eyes, and for a fleeting moment Suho thought he saw something there - something softer, more tired - before it settled back into that familiar, unreadable depth.
“If I stayed in my room, I was isolating myself. If I went out, I was wasting time.” Sieun’s mouth pressed into a faint line, not quite a frown, just the smallest acknowledgment of the absurdity of it. “If I wore decent clothes, they asked me who I was trying to impress. If I didn’t, they said I looked careless, like I wasn’t taking things seriously enough.”
Suho’s fingers curled slightly against his knee, the frustration building in him with every word.
“And when we went out to eat,” Sieun continued, in a lower voice now, though his composure never slipped, “if the waiter looked anywhere near my age, my father told me to ‘knock that shit off.’ Said I was being inappropriate. That I was embarrassing him.” A pause, almost imperceptible, but long enough for the weight of it to settle between them. “I was just ordering food.”
The understatement cut deeper than anything else.
“They wouldn’t even want me to have male lab partners,” he added, his gaze still fixed ahead. “Last time when one of them came to work with me on a project, my father said he was too distracting for me.”
Suho’s attention sharpened. “Distracting how?”
A brief pause.
“Too tall,” Sieun said. “And, apparently, too good-looking.”
For a moment, Suho just looked at him. Then something sharper slipped in.
“You’re serious.”
“I am.”
“That’s ridiculous.”
Sieun unscrewed the cap of his water bottle, movements precise as ever. “He wasn’t wrong,” he added, almost neutrally. “The guy was… noticeable.”
That did it.
“Not that noticeable,” Suho muttered, leaning back slightly, irritation surfacing now, edged with something more possessive than he would have admitted out loud.
Sieun turned just enough to look at him, something faintly amused flickering in his expression. “That’s Seongje. You’ve met him.”
“I’ve seen him,” Suho corrected. “Once. That was enough.”
The memory flickered - brief introduction, polite nods, and an immediate, irrational dislike that had never gone away.
“The guy smokes a lot,” Suho added. “Like a choo choo train.”
“That’s what my mother said too,” Sieun replied, and for a second, the faint curve of his lips lingered. It didn’t last.
“She knew,” Sieun said after a moment. “Even before that day.”
Suho turned fully toward him. “Knew what?”
Sieun didn’t look away.
“About us.”
The words settled, simple and final.
“She said it wasn’t anything we did. Just… ‘mother’s instinct.’ Said she ignored it, as long as I kept the good grades. For my father’s sake.”
Something in Suho tightened. “She couldn’t just keep ignoring it?”
A pause.
Then, without hesitation, “Apparently she couldn’t anymore. She found us in bed. Naked and tangled.”
The simplicity of it made it land harder.
Suho’s reaction is immediate and unfiltered, his hand coming up to drag roughly through his hair as the memory hits all at once - not cleanly, not in sequence, but in flashes that feel too vivid to ignore. The quiet of that afternoon, the rare, reckless ease of knowing they had time, the way Sieun had looked in that light - softer somehow, his usually composed expression loosened just enough to make him feel dangerously close, almost unguarded. Suho remembers the warmth of his skin beneath his hands, the steady rhythm of his breathing, the way his lips had felt - familiar and new at the same time, something he had known and yet could never quite get used to. It had been slow, unhurried, the kind of closeness that came from missing each other too much for too long, from wanting without needing to say it out loud. And then, the sudden, suffocating stillness that followed, cutting through everything, turning something that had felt entirely theirs into something exposed, interrupted, impossible to take back.
“…Yeah,” he said, the word rough, pulled from him rather than offered. “I remember.”
A pause followed.
Then Sieun said, softer but just as steady, “The point is, they don’t see me anymore.”
It wasn’t anger. Not even sadness.
Just certainty.
Suho felt something tighten in his chest, something wrong in a way that mattered more than anything else they had said.
“Sieun,” he said softly.
Sieun turned to meet his gaze, and for a moment, something real showed through.
“I gave it time,” he said. “Maybe not enough. But as much as I’m willing to give them.”
The room seemed to still.
“Finals are over,” he added. “There’s no reason for me to stay there all the time anymore.”
Suho held his gaze, something in him already leaning forward, already bracing for what came next.
And in the hush that followed, with the flicker of the screen reflecting faintly in Sieun’s eyes and the rest of the room fading into shadow, it felt like the moment had already shifted - like something had already been decided, even before it was spoken aloud.
“Can I stay here?”
Suho went still - not because he didn’t understand the question, but because he did, far too well, and the full weight of it landed all at once. For a split second, his entire body seemed to lock in place, as if that was the only way to stop himself from reacting too quickly, too obviously, from doing something reckless like closing the distance between them without thinking it through.
His mind, on the other hand, refused to cooperate.
It was already racing ahead, pulling up every reason this wouldn’t work - distance, schedules, the long commute between here and SNU, everything that should have made
him hesitate - but none of it managed to settle properly, because underneath it, something far stronger had already taken hold.
“…Ye - are you sure?” he managed, the word catching slightly before he corrected himself, his voice unable to hide the eagerness threading through it. “What about when your semester at SNU starts up again? It’s kind of a long commute from here.”
Sieun didn’t look away.
“I know how to take the bus,” he said, the dryness in his tone immediate, familiar, grounding in a way that made something in Suho’s chest loosen despite everything else.
A small pause followed, and then, more softly, but no less steady, “But if you don’t think it’s a good idea, I’ll figure something else out, seeing as I already told my dad to call me only when he gets his head out of his ass.”
Suho blinked.
“You what?”
There was something almost absurd about it - trying to picture Sieun, of all people, saying anything remotely close to that, the calm precision of his voice turning sharp enough to push back instead of yielding.
“It’s fine,” Sieun said, as if it were the most ordinary thing in the world. He shifted slightly, like he was about to stand, already moving on to the next step in his head. “I’ve already looked into a few part-time options near campus, and I can adjust my schedule if I need to. If I could just stay here for a bit while I sort things out - ”
That was as far as he got.
Suho moved before he could finish.
His arm slid around Sieun’s waist in one smooth motion, firm and instinctive, pulling him back down before he had the chance to stand, the movement carrying more urgency than anything he had allowed himself all evening. Sieun let out a soft breath of surprise, the rest of his sentence dissolving as he was guided - no, caught - and settled into Suho’s lap, the distance between them disappearing in an instant.
“Don’t you dare,” Suho murmured, his voice low, almost breathless, his hand tightening just slightly where it rested against Sieun’s side. “Don’t you dare start making backup plans like that.”
For a moment, Sieun stilled.
Then, slowly, he relaxed into the hold, the tension in his shoulders easing, his weight settling more fully, more comfortably, as if the space he had just been pulled into had always been meant for him.
“I wasn’t,” he said under his breath.
Suho let out a soft, disbelieving breath, something warm and almost giddy slipping through the edges of it now that the moment had actually landed. “You were.”
“I was being practical.”
“Stop being practical,” Suho muttered, the words brushing warm against his hair. “Just - stay.”
There was a pause. Not heavy. Not uncertain.
Just enough for the words to settle into something real.
“…Okay,” Sieun said.
And somehow, that was what did it.
Something in Suho gave way completely, the last of his restraint dissolving into something softer, something brighter than anything he had let himself feel in a long time. He shifted slightly, just enough to look at Sieun properly, taking in the steady calm of his expression, the faint softness that had slipped into it, the way his eyes - those deep, ocean-dark eyes - seemed a little warmer now, a little less guarded.
“Are you sure it’s okay?” Sieun asked after a moment, his voice lower now, closer.
Suho huffed softly, unable to help it, something fond threading through the sound. “I should be asking you that.”
A beat passed.
“It’s not easy for you,” he added more carefully. “Your family - ”
“You’re important to me too.”
There was no hesitation in it.
No buildup.
Just the truth, placed gently between them.
Suho felt it settle somewhere deep, something warm and steady unfurling in his chest in a way that made everything else feel… lighter.
“…Okay,” he repeated, softer this time, like the word had finally found its place.
Sieun shifted slightly in his lap, settling more comfortably, the movement unthinking, natural, as if this - being here, being close - was simply where he belonged.
They stayed like that for a while.
The television dimmed, then went dark, the room following until the only light left was the faint green glow of Sieun’s phone charging nearby, casting a soft wash across the edge of the couch.
“Tomorrow,” Sieun said after a moment, his voice low in the stillness, “we should fix the light.”
Suho let out a soft breath that might have been a laugh, his chin brushing lightly against Sieun’s hair. “You’ve been my roommie for five minutes and you’re already criticizing my apartment.”
“It’s a safety hazard.”
“This isn’t going to work,” Suho murmured, though there was no real complaint left in it, only something warm, something dangerously close to contentment.
Sieun’s lips found his in the dark.