Lullaby

Posted originally on the Archive of Our Own at http://archiveofourown.org/works/39574929.

Rating: Mature
Archive Warning: No Archive Warnings Apply
Category: M/M
Fandom: NCT (Band)
Relationship: Jeong Yuno | Jaehyun/Lee Taeyong
Character: Jeong Yuno | Jaehyun, Lee Taeyong
Additional Tags: Age Difference, Power Imbalance, lawyer taeyong, High School Student
Jaehyun, Minor Character Death, Denial of Feelings, Daddy issues?,
Very brief Taeyong x OC, Past Child Abuse, Sexual Assault, Suicidal
Thoughts
Language: English
Stats: Published: 2022-06-11 Completed: 2022-07-03 Chapters: 8/8 Words:
45276

Lullaby
by heenimlee

Summary

“You can call me if he gives you any trouble,” he said. “Or if you’re ever - if you’re ever in
trouble.”

“You’re a really good person,” he said, looking at the business card in his hand, and then
straight up at Taeyong.

Like a kitten, those eyes, that smile. Like a little stray kitten he had picked up off the
streets.

It occurred to Taeyong then why he did it. It occurred to him that the night he went home
after speaking to Jaehyun's boss, after speaking for Jaehyun, he slept like a baby. He hadn’t
slept like that in years.

Notes

See the end of the work for notes

 Chapter One

Though the world is fast asleep

Though your pillow soft and deep

You’re not as sleepy as you seem

Stay awake, don’t nod and dream.

“He said he made other arrangements,” Secretary Park says, placing a key fob down on his desk.
“He’s going to live with his friend, Nam Kyungsoo. He has a rooftop room in his old
neighborhood.”

Taeyong finds his gaze fixed on the small square of black plastic sitting on his gleaming desk. He
wants to ask why he’d turn down that neat two bedroom, fully furnished office-tel that he wouldn’t
have to pay for and choose to sleep on the floor in his friend’s cramped rooftop one-room. He
doesn’t ask, because he knows the answer to that.

“He didn’t take the clothes or the toiletries,” he says. “And he didn’t want to hear about the job
interview, either.”

Taeyong runs a hand through his hair, sits back in his seat and sighs. He had a feeling things would
turn out this way. The past five years have changed them both. He imagines he’s no longer that
sweet natured boy from that day they first met, too trusting, too innocent for his own good. Help to
him was just help back then, always welcome, and always accepted with dimpling cheeks and and
starry eyes, his own Alyosha Karamazov.

“How did he look?” He asks.

“Sir?”
“Healthy? Is he alright?”

He can tell Secretary Park didn’t expect him to ask that, because he pauses for a beat before he
answers.

“He seemed alright,” he says. “Healthy.”

“Thank you, Park biseo,” he says. “I appreciate your help.”

“What should I do with all his things?” He asks.

“Leave them be for a little while. He might change his mind.”

“Sure, Lee byeonhosa-nim,” Secretary Park says, and then bows to indicate his exit.

By the door, he hesitates.

“Was he an old case of yours?” He asks.

He’s not sure how to answer that without giving himself away entirely.

“I owe him,” he says, finally.

He can see the question forming in Secretary Park’s eyes. What would a man like Lee Taeyong
owe a man like Jeong Jaehyun? He doesn’t ask it. He bows again and leaves.

The world, Taeyong thinks. That’s the answer to the question he didn’t ask. Jeong Jaehyun
deserves the world. He deserves a roof over his head, and three hot meals, and safety and security
in the pursuit of his own happiness, and damn it, does that boy deserve happiness.

Taeyong once thought he could be the one to give it to him, but now he’s not so sure.
He remembers that day, six years ago, back when Taeyong could still get away with a teenager
calling him hyung. Or maybe he couldn’t, and he just let the boy sweet-talk him into believing
that. Either way, he was six years younger than forty.

He was working late. Min, the new clerk, had given him copies of three months of texts exchanged
between his client and the woman who accused him of domestic violence, with specific texts
highlighted as potentially useful. Every time he closed his eyes to ease the burning and grittiness
that came from being awake too long, he saw lines of yellow highlighter flickering behind his
eyelids.

He was desperate for some kind of breakthrough. He was desperate, because Kim Jungwon was
desperate, because Kim Jungwon was up for partner and there were eyes on his outcomes.

The door to his office opened, and the man himself walked in. He could smell his cologne coming
off his skin in waves, every time he moved. He laid it on thick that night. Hermes, his signature
scent, no doubt to charm opposing counsel into cooperating with him.

“The bitch just won’t settle out of court,” he said, collapsing into the sofa in Taeyong’s office with
the heels of his palms pressed to his eyes.

“I told you,” Taeyong said. “She’d rather die than settle. She wants to take him to trial. I would,
too, if I were her.”

“You think he hit her?” Jungwon said, dropping his hands into his lap.

“You think he didn’t?” Taeyong asked.

“I didn’t say that,” Jungwon said, with the faintest smile.

He didn’t respond to that, just sighed and closed the folder he was looking through and leaned back
in his chair with his hands interlinked behind his head. The chair groaned, and he groaned, because
his back needed that stretch.

“You’ve been working too hard,” Jungwon noted.

For your ass, he wanted to say, but the words stayed in his mind. He didn’t say anything. He just
rolled his neck and shoulders and sat up straight again to look at his material one more time. He
heard him move, then. He smelt that cologne again when he rounded his desk and his chair and
leaned over. His hands settled over his shoulders and his thumbs pressed into his back and another
involuntary groan slipped from Taeyong’s lips.

His eyes fluttered shut, and he didn’t resist when he slid his hand up his throat to tip his head back.
The kiss was welcome. Uncharacteristically loving for Jungwon, and certainly for who they were
to each other. He wasn’t questioning it. He knew it was comfort and gratitude more than anything
else.

Jungwon was just sliding one hand down Taeyong’s chest, the other loosening his tie, when they
heard a frantic knock ringing loud and clear through his office. They sprung apart in shock, and his
eyes shot to the the glass door and walls of his office to see if they had been caught. To his relief,
the blinds were closed, but behind him, Jungwon cursed under his breath, and he spun around in
his chair to see his gaze fixed to the glass door that led to Taeyong’s balcony.

There, illuminated only by the light that spilled out from Taeyong’s office, was a man. The janitor,
by the looks of it.

Taeyong turned his panicked gaze to Jungwon’s face, but he could see his distress in the red of his
ears and neck, and his heart sank.
He remembers how he sat in Taeyong’s office that night. He seemed calm, but his nervousness was
betrayed by that one thumbnail picking at the skin around the other.

“I won’t say anything,” he said, before either of them had addressed the issue. “About the two of
you. I’m just - I was just doing my job. I was just - the cigarette butts and stuff out there - there was
nobody in the office when I got here and the view was pretty so I sat down and then I got up to
leave and I saw the two of you - and I didn’t want. I didn’t want to be there for the rest of it. Not
that you shouldn’t - just that I wouldn’t like it if there were somebody outside my window when I -

Taeyong wanted to laugh. It was the way he spoke, his words running together and stumbling on
some syllables. It made his own panic melt away. He had an unfounded feeling, even then, that this
kid was too sweet to deliberately hurt anyone.

“Then you won’t mind signing something saying you won’t ever speak about what you saw?”
Jungwon said.

“I don’t mind at all,” he said.

As he said it, he looked up for the first time since he sat down. Straight at Taeyong, despite the
fact that it was Jungwon who asked him that. A glance at Taeyong, and then back down at his lap.
Even in that brief moment, even with his badly cut bangs resting halfway down his forehead, even
in that coverall that fit him badly, Taeyong caught himself thinking the kid was a looker.

“What’s your name?” Jungwon asked.

“Jeong Jae- Jeong Jaesuk,” he said, another glance up at Taeyong’s face, and then back down at
his lap.

“No, it’s not,” Taeyong said. He knew Jeong Jaesuk. In the four years he had been working at this
firm, he had worked enough late nights to know the janitor by name, and he knew that Jeong
Jaesuk was a fifty year old man with a pot belly and grey hair at his temples.

“I’m sorry, I wasn’t thinking - I’m really sorry,” the kid said, looking straight up at Taeyong this
time, holding his gaze for a moment. He looked like a kitten.
“You’re not in trouble, and that’s not an answer,” Taeyong said. “What’s your name?”

“Jeong Jaehyun,” he said. “Jeong Jaesuk is my father. He’s sick. I’m covering for him.”

“It’s nice to meet you Jeong Jaehyun,” he said. “I’m Lee Taeyong.”

He bowed, and bowed again when Jungwon told him his name. And then he sat quiet and still
while Taeyong typed up a document that sounded vaguely like an NDA. It was a page long, and it
threatened all sorts of punishment for breaking its terms.

He didn’t really think they needed it, but Jungwon was being cautious. He didn’t want any loose
ends threatening his career, and Taeyong didn’t see the harm. It wasn’t strictly legally binding. It
was just to scare him into keeping his mouth shut.

It was cute, really, the way Jaehyun signed it without hesitation. It wasn’t really a signature, either.
He just wrote his name neatly on the dotted line, and had to be prompted to date it. The stupid kid,
he didn’t even ask for a copy.

That’s where it started, with Jeong Jaehyun throwing him one shy glance over his shoulder before
he left his office.

The second time he saw him was the week after that. He wouldn’t have seen him again, or his
father, if it were up to Jungwon. He wanted to have him fired the day after it happened, but
Taeyong couldn’t in good conscience let that happen to that kid. He laid out his arguments - it’ll be
worse if you fire him, he’ll be a disgruntled employee, he’ll sue us for wrongful termination, he’ll
hold a grudge and tell Park byeon what he saw and then it’s all over for you. That’s what got
Jungwon to agree that keeping Jeong Jaesuk on their payroll was better for everyone. Taeyong
knew appealing to his conscience wouldn’t help. That just wasn’t who he was anymore.

It was six in the morning that day, and Taeyong was coming in to work. He hadn’t slept very much
the night before, and he thought if he had waking hours to spare, he might as well spend them
working. He worked like a madman those days. He didn’t sleep very well, either.

Just as he flashed his ID to the scanner and walked through the sliding glass doors with the words
Choi & Kim written in black serif font, he caught a glimpse of school uniform behind that giant
monstera that sat by the receptionist’s desk.

“Haksaeng?” He called out, and he saw Jaehyun craning his neck to look at him from behind the
plant, cheeks stuffed full and still chewing, a roll of half eaten convenience store kimbap in his
hand.

It was a kid thing to do, sit in the lobby with the orchids and the leather sofas and gleaming marble
floors to eat 10000 won kimbap. He found it endearing. He couldn’t imagine his father doing
something like that. Somewhere in living life, people learn to be ashamed of their standing, learn
that cheap kimbap isn’t food worthy of those leather sofas. He was glad that those leather sofas
were just somewhere for Jaehyun to sit comfortably while he ate his breakfast.

“Lee byeonhosa-nim,” he mumbled, stepping forward to greet him.

He bowed deeply to him, and with what seemed to be genuine happiness. His ears were red, and
his tie was lopsided, and his hair looked shorter than before. He didn’t think it was possible, but his
haircut was worse than it was the first time he saw him.

“Your dad’s sick again?” He asked.

He shrugged and nodded, and there was a certain indifference in his gesture that made him think
his dad wasn’t really sick. Probably drunk, he thought, if that whiff of soju he smelt on his Jeong
Jaesuk’s breath some nights was anything to go by.

“Right. Heading to school?”

He nodded again.

“Don’t be late,” he said, and sent him on his way.

He’d catch a glimpse of Jaehyun now and then after that, mopping the floor, vacuuming, emptying
out trash cans with his earphones in. He’d seem utterly consumed in his work, or in the song he
was listening to, or in some strange inner world that nothing and nobody from this Jongno office
building could touch. But when he saw Taeyong, heard his footsteps in the hallway or saw his
reflection in the glass walls or windows, he’d turn to him with the brightest smile, bow, and greet
him.

Taeyong liked that. He liked running into him in those late hours, in those early hours, when his
bed seemed hostile and sleep a frightened woodland creature, and the office was quiet and
welcoming and easy. It was his smile that Taeyong liked most. Perfectly unassuming and genuine.
He liked that somebody liked seeing him enough to light up like that.

Or if he’s being honest, he liked that that his smile made him look a lot like a boy with a crush.

He supposes it stroked his ego, some, that he was thirty four and still got that reaction out of an
eighteen year old. Sometimes it seemed silly and delusional. Sometimes he was so fucking sure of
it. One thing that was unchanged was that it was harmless, and it tickled him, so he let it be.

It was sometime in October of that year that things began to change. To this day, he doesn’t know
what it was that prompted him to do it. Maybe it was the fact that he saw him three nights in a row.
Maybe that Jaehyun was vacuuming the hallway with his workbook clutched in one hand. Maybe it
occurred to him then, after three months of seeing Jaehyun off and on in the office, that a high
school student shouldn’t be working three nights in a row and going to school and preparing for his
year end exams all at the same time.

He was about to order dinner, but the moment he opened the pedal app on his phone, the image of
Jaehyun popped into his head, cheeks stuffed with expired convenience store kimbap.

He opened his office door and went looking for him, down the hall, to the break room, the lobby,
the partners’ offices, everywhere. He found him wiping down the bathroom mirrors and reading
aloud from his Korean language workbook resting on the counter. Taeyong stood at the door for a
few moments, watching him wipe that same spot unseeingly until it started squeaking.

He knocked on the open bathroom door, then, to announce his presence, and the kid damn near
jumped out of his skin. He gathered himself quickly, and smiled that same pretty smile.

“Lee byeonhosa-nim, you’re working late again,” he said.

“I’m always working late. I was about to order dinner, do you want any?”

He saw how tongue-tied he got, and he saw the slow bloom of red over his cheeks and ears.

“Chicken,” Taeyong said. “Yangnyeom? Just fried?”

“Um,” Jaehyun said, setting the rag down on the counter.

“You can’t study on an empty stomach,” he said.

Jaehyun grinned then, and hesitantly said, “Ban-ban?”

“Ban-ban it is. I’ll leave it in the break room. Eat it when it’s still hot,” Taeyong said, and left him
to his devices.

That night, before he left, Jaehyun saw him from the far end of the hallway, bowed a little deeper
and smiled a little sweeter and said “Thank you, Lee byeonhosa-nim!”

And the next morning, there was a post-it note on his desk that said “Lee byeon for president!! ^-
^”

It made him laugh out loud.

He did it often, after that. He’d buy him dinner and something to drink and leave it in the break
room for him. It was nearly everyday. He was worried, because the kid was at work every night,
and doing a good job, too. It was hard work by itself, but knowing that he’d finish his work and
then nap in the janitor’s room for an hour or two before changing into his school uniform and
going to school, it made his heart ache for him. He didn’t know what the situation was like at
home for Jaehyun. He didn’t know how many meals he ate in a day, but he could make sure he ate
one good meal a day and he did.

He supposes he shouldn’t have gone any further than that, but he couldn’t help himself. He
couldn’t force objectivity when he saw him doubled over on the floor in the hallway pinching his
nose and cupping his other hand below it so he wouldn’t bleed all over the floor.

He couldn’t keep his distance that day. He grabbed him by the elbow and pulled him up and into
the bathroom, and he took a wad of paper towels and held it to his nose to soak up the blood.

“Ab fide, Lee byeod, just gotta pidch and loog ub,” Jaehyun said. “Thagks.”

“Don’t look up, you idiot, lean forward,” Taeyong said.

He laughed, and leaned over the sink, dabbing away the last trickles of blood.

“You can’t keep doing this,” he said, then. “You can’t keep this up. You’ll kill yourself.”

It was like something switched in Jaehyun. In just a moment, his smile hardened, the set of his
shoulders tensed. He took a few more paper towels, wet them, and wiped the dried blood from
around his nostrils.

“Well, if I don’t,” he said. “And my dad gets black-out drunk and misses work, and he loses his job
- we’re fucked. They’ll kill us. We’re dead either way.”
It didn’t shock Taeyong, but it still hurt to hear. He had suspected it for a long time. It all sort of
went together. Poverty, alcoholism, debt. Why else would the kid be working himself to the bone?

“How much do you owe?” He asked.

“I, um,” Jaehyun said. “It’s not even that much. I can pay it off, you know? If my fucking part time
job would pay me, and with the money from this job - if I keep my dad’s hands off it for just one
year, I could pay it off.”

Of course, cleaning this office wasn’t Jaehyun’s only job. Of course. Why else would he have
those shadows under his eyes? Why else would he be so pale, why else would he have bled all over
the counter?

Silence fell between them, broken by the sound of Jaehyun wiping spots of blood off the sink and
counter. The tension left his shoulders, and his sweetness returned slowly.

He should have left then, when he knew the kid was alright. He meant to leave. He patted him on
the shoulder and walked to the bathroom door, but his conscience wouldn’t let him turn his back on
Jaehyun.

He paused there, and turned around.

“Where do you work?” He said.

“Sorry?”

“Your other job, where is it?”

“It’s at a convenience store. Doosik In & Out out -

“Right off the intersection?”

“Yeah,” Jaehyun said, all hesitation and confusion.

“And what are your hours like?”

“Four thirty to midnight.”

“Everyday?”

“Well, no, on Saturday, it’s one to midnight and on Sunday it’s six thirty to midnight.”

“He pays your part time for that?” Taeyong said.

“Yeah. But he didn’t pay me at all last month - and when I asked him he said it’s been a tough
month for him and if I - if I keep asking, he’ll fire me and I need - I need the work.”

He knew it before he said it. He knew nobody told this stupid kid that forty hours is a part time job
and anything more than that deserves a full time salary. He was earning less than he should have
been and working more than he should have been. He knew, but it made him so fucking angry to
hear it.

He considered telling him to demand his pay, the right amount, and at the right time, but he knew
that his sack of shit boss would scare him into backing down. He knew the type.

It was two days after that when Jaehyun knocked on his office door just after midnight, and stepped
inside timidly.

“He paid me,” he told him.

“Good,” Taeyong said.

“You spoke to him.”

“What he was doing was illegal,” Taeyong said.

Taeyong thought he saw his eyes shine with one swell of tears, for just a second, but he looked
down, and kept his gaze down for the longest moment. Taeyong wasn’t sure what to do. He wasn’t
even sure what he did was worthy of tears. It was just one stop and a five minute conversation on
his way home, and it was regarding a grand total of 900,000 won but Jaehyun was standing there
blinking back tears like he had given him his fortune.

“Thank you, Lee byeon,” he said.

“You don’t have to thank me,” he said.

He fished a business card out of the stack in his desk drawer and held it out to him. Jaehyun took it
with both hands.

“You can call me if he gives you any trouble,” he said. “Or if you’re ever - if you’re ever in
trouble.”

“You’re a really good person,” he said, looking at the card in his hand, and then straight up at
Taeyong.

Like a kitten, those eyes, that smile. Like a little stray kitten he had picked up off the streets.

It occurred to Taeyong then why he did it. It occurred to him that the night he went home after
speaking to that store owner, after speaking for Jaehyun, he slept like a baby. He hadn’t slept like
that in years.
 Chapter Two
Chapter Notes

See the end of the chapter for notes

I wish I may, I wish I might

Have the wish I wish tonight

Jaehyun sits cross legged on the floor, with a pot of steaming hot ramyun set on a small folding
table in front of him. He’s somewhat cramped in a corner because Kyungsoo’s bedding takes up
half the space in the room.

The ramyun is warming him nicely, he thinks. Kyungsoo’s room is fucking frigid, and the cold is
making his fatigued muscles cramp painfully, but the warmth and spice from the ramyun he’s
eating is warming him from the inside.

He surveys the room once again, the way he’s been doing every night for the past month. He takes
it in, the dirty dishes in the sink, the jackets hanging on a wall by the door, green floral wallpaper,
the bright blue nylon and plastic wardrobe where Kyungsoo keeps his clothes, and the paint
chipping on the bathroom door. He’s thankful for it. Kyungsoo’s a good friend for letting him stay
with him.

Jaehyun’s traveling gaze comes to rest on the glossy black hard-side suitcase beside him. It holds
all his things from his old house. It seems incongruent with this small space and its cheapness. It
belongs in that Seodaemun apartment with its gleaming floor and countertops and grey tone walls
and weird driftwood-looking light fixtures. It belongs to Lee Taeyong.

He swallows hard when he thinks of him, again, harder, when he thinks of his apartment and his
plush pillows and off white sheets. That sofa. The look on his face when Jaehyun knelt by his feet
to take his shoes off for him. The look on his face when Jaehyun climbed into his lap. He
remembers it so clearly, every bit of it down to the color of the cup on his coffee table and the little
wine stain on the carpet.

I’ll look after you, Jeong Jaehyun, he said that night, into his hair, and then against the shell of his
ear. I’ll always take care of you.

He shakes the image away before it takes control of him again. He doesn’t want to lie awake in bed
wondering if all he meant by that was the promise of a roof over his head and money in his bank
account. Being kept, in a sense. Kept well, but kept, nonetheless.

He doesn’t blame him for not being here, not after what Jaehyun did. He didn’t think it would hurt,
either, not after all this time, but he was crushed. He had to tighten his jaw and breathe deep and
slow to keep from crying when he realized he had sent his fucking secretary to show him to his
new house and tell him about his upcoming job interview and and give him his new clothes. He
didn’t mean to scoff, because it made him seem ungrateful and he was grateful that Taeyong
wanted him to live well, but he scoffed. He didn’t think that’s what Taeyong meant when he said
he’d take care of him.

He slurps up the last of the noodles from the pan, and drinks some of the broth before he gets to his
feet to rinse the pan and put it away. He moves slowly, so he doesn’t bump into anything and wake
Kyungsoo. He runs the water quietly, too.

He sets the pan down quietly on the drying rack when he’s rinsed off the soap, and before he goes
to bed, he lifts a hand to part the curtain on the window behind the sink.

He can’t see too much. That yellow fluorescent streetlight, houses all crowded together. It’s not
like the view he saw from Taeyong’s apartment that night. Not like the view he sat down for on the
balcony at Choi & Kim that first night he spoke to Taeyong. That sprawling, shimmering blanket of
Seoul city’s business districts. Bright lights, lending their glow to the lower reaches of the night
sky, too, like the sun. Like heaven. And the dull yellow glow of the poorer residential districts.
Like fire. Like hell.

Which one’s which, Taeyong asked him when he said that. That question makes him laugh, now.

He’s about to drop his hand and go to bed when he sees it. The hood of a car parked on the street, a
three pointed star on the grille that says it belongs in heaven. His breath hitches, and his body goes
tight and his heart races, pounds deafeningly in his ears.

It’s him, he thinks. He’s here. He’ll knock on his door any moment now and he’ll say he’s sorry for
not coming earlier -

The headlights come on. He hears the engine come to life in the quiet night. The bump of the
wheels sinking into that pothole, that sleek body of his car slinking past the front gate and
disappearing down the street.
He remains there for long, long moments after. It takes him a few more moments to calm his
racing heart. But that feeling, that sinking, the way his stomach plummeted like the ground he was
standing on gave under him, that doesn’t seem to disappear.

“Liar,” he breathes. “You’re such a fucking liar.”

That sinking feeling, that was how Taeyong made him feel. It wasn’t pretty. It wasn’t delicate little
butterflies flitting around inside him. It was that stomach-plunge like the kind when the elevator
starts to move: fwoop - that’s the sound he imagined it would make - and he was free falling.

It took one glimpse of him to do that to Jaehyun. One glimpse of him, black hair slicked back, tie
loosened, watch glinting on his wrist, to send him spinning out. He didn’t fall in love with him
then. He just thought he was handsome. Pretty, sometimes. So fucking pretty, and so fucking
expensive. He made him nervous.

The night he saw him being handled like that by Kim Jungwon seared itself into his memory and
tormented him for damn near half a year. It wasn’t much. Just snippets of muted conversation, and
Kim byeonhosa’s form leaning over him, his sleek suit jacket that seemed to fit him like a glove
and that small gold lapel pin glinting at him, his hands on Taeyong, their lips coming together like
that. He was fucking jealous. He wanted to be the one to kiss Taeyong. He pictured it sometimes,
that flashy watch on his wrist, that beautiful black suit on him, boasting a gold lapel pin, his hands
on Taeyong’s body, his lips claiming Taeyong’s. It never worked right. It just got him riled up and
bitter.

Despite the bitter taste it left in his mouth, that was the night Taeyong learned his name. It seemed
too good to be true. He kept his head down, kept working and making a living, but Taeyong took
an interest in him. He didn’t know why. He was certain it was kindness but Kyungsoo told him he
was just a project for Taeyong. A real fixer-upper. Rich people like that, when they can save
someone poor. He’ll tell his friends - look at this poor thing, I fed him, I put him through school, I
saved him from the streets and a life of crime and destitution.

He didn’t believe him. It didn’t matter to him, really. He was fucking hungry all the time, tired of
convenience store kimbap, and Taeyong bought him food. He was exhausted and frightened and he
needed money and Taeyong made sure he was paid for the work he did. He thought Taeyong was
the prettiest thing he’d even seen and even if saving Jaehyun was a project he talked about with his
friends, if it meant Jaehyun got to see him more, he was alright with it.

That wasn’t when he fell in love. It got started then, his fall, but he hadn’t fallen all the way yet
when the harsh fluorescent lighting of Doosik In & Out sharpened the shadows on his boss’ face
and crisped the notes he handed to him.

“Who was that?” his boss asked.

“Who?” Jaehyun mumbled, focused on counting his money.

“The lawyer, how do you know him?”

He looked up at him, and it sank in then that Taeyong had spoken for him. It made his head spin
and his heart race. It made him turn stupidly to the front door as if to imagine that man driving up
to the store in his fancy car and walking in here in his expensive clothes and speaking for him. It
wasn’t that he thought himself special to Taeyong. He didn’t. He thought he was just some kid that
Taeyong had thought to help out, and project or not, he hadn’t ever known anyone to stick up for
him like that.

He was too good to be true, he thought. Some kind of angel.

It started his fall. There was no doubt about that.

It had been a cold week. The roads were icy. He slipped twice getting down the stairs from his
house to the street. His knees were bruised. The evenings were miserable. Cold and dreary.

Maybe it was the gloom of the cold snap over the city, but Taeyong wasn’t really feeling himself.
Jaehyun could sense that. Two nights in a row he saw him from afar, getting a bottle of scotch and
a glass out of the bottom drawer of his desk. He drank while he worked, and he left late, his lids
heavy and his feet heavier.

Both nights he saw him get into the elevator, and he saw on the screen above the closed doors that
he took it down to the parking levels. He drove home like that.

It worried him sick to think of his exhaustion and inebriation and the icy roads coming together
with the way people drive through Seoul at two in the morning. It furrowed his brow and gave him
a headache, because despite having his business card tucked safely inside his wallet and his phone
number memorized, he couldn’t possibly text him to make sure he got home safe.

He didn’t know where the fuck Kim Jungwon was, but he wasn’t there making sure Taeyong got
home safe. He wasn’t there asking him if he was alright. He wasn’t there for Taeyong at all. He
just let him work himself to the bone so their team could have better outcomes and he could get his
fucking promotion.

The third night, he intervened. He couldn’t help it. He stuck his hand through the gap between the
closing elevator doors, and when the doors slid open again, he returned Taeyong’s curious gaze
with a second of tongue-tied silence.

Soft piano music played in the elevator. The yellow lights made his eyes look a clear, light shade
of brown, but they also made the dark under his eyes seem somewhat green. Taeyong’s eyebrows
lifted ever so slightly, and it reminded him that he needed to say something.

“Byeonhosa-nim,” he said. “Can I call a cab for you? Or a driver? Or I could - I could drive you
home.”

“What?” Taeyong said.

“You’ve been drinking."

“I didn’t have much,” he said, somewhat embarrassed.

“And you’re tired and there’s ice on the roads.”

Taeyong’s brow creased, and he looked down at his feet like he was figuring out how to say
Jaehyun was way out of line. But his expression eased instead.

“I guess you’re right,” he said.

He moved past him, getting his phone out of his pocket to call a driver, probably intending to wait
in his office for him. He took a few steps down the hallway, and Jaehyun found that not having his
pretty eyes staring him down made it a lot easier to speak.

“Are you alright?” He asked, addressing the question to Taeyong’s back.

“Hmm?” He said, half turning to face him.

“Are you okay? You seem,” he said, and then shrugged. “You seem not okay.”

Another silence. Taeyong’s lips parted and closed and for a moment he just stood in the hallway
regarding him quietly. He thought he’d be angry with him for overstepping. He probably was
angry, and Jaehyun was overstepping.

“I’m alright,” he said. “Just tired.”

“You don’t sleep much,” Jaehyun said.

He laughed then. It seemed to be more surprise than anything else, and it didn’t sound like Jaehyun
thought it would. There was clumsiness about it. A youthfulness about it. He liked it. He thought it
was precious.

“Well,” Taeyong said. “You know how they look at bad men and say how does he sleep at night?
This is how they sleep.”

He didn’t know what he meant for a second, and then he remembered those snippets of
conversation he had heard exchanged between Taeyong and his colleagues. All conversations that
strengthened his belief that Taeyong was an angel on earth, but viewed through a different lens,
were empty little outlets for a guilty conscience.
You think he hit her/you think he didn’t?/I’d want to take him to court too, if I were her/God I hope
we lose this case/His father’s a senator so he thinks he owns the country.

He thought all of that meant Taeyong only ever did the right thing, but it meant nothing. The
wrong thing happened anyway. He did the wrong thing anyway.

“You’re not a bad man,” Jaehyun said slowly. “Bad men don’t punish themselves for doing the
wrong thing.”

That time, when Taeyong laughed, it was affection. It was quieter, and it was sweeter, and he liked
that even more.

“I might need you to tell me that again,” he said.

He looked him in the eye when he said it. He looked earnest and imploring and it made Jaehyun’s
heart skip a beat.

“I’ll tell you everyday,” Jaehyun said.

January, he found the name scrapped from Kim Jungwon’s office door. He could still see the
outlines of the letters where that sticky residue from the vinyl was still left behind. He thought
maybe that meant he made partner and moved to the fancy offices. He thought if that were true,
Taeyong deserved to be congratulated for the work he put in, too.
He knew what he was feeling when that thought emerged in his mind. Jealousy. Of his success. Of
their partnership. Of the fact that they were equals who worked with and for each other.

The thought that they’d kiss like that in those spaces that he was forced to be in, quiet and
invisible, tore him up sometimes. He had worked hard in those months since he saw them, to keep
the memory of Kim Jungwon’s hands on Taeyong out of his head. It still showed up sometimes,
when he saw Taeyong go to his office and shut the door. When he caught a glimpse of Taeyong
poring over his work and loosening his tie, and he’d think of that night, that image, of Jungwon
leaning over Taeyong in that office chair, of him tilting his head up to kiss him.

He didn’t like him. He didn’t like how he spoke to him that night that he saw them. He didn’t like
the fact that Taeyong worked as hard as he did to help push Kim byeon further along the partner
track. He didn’t like that he didn’t acknowledge how much it hurt Taeyong to be working like that,
to be making the decisions they made. The man barely slept. The work he was doing was hurting
his body and soul and all Kim byeon wanted to do about it was pour him a drink and kiss him and
sleep with him.

He knew it was a useless thing to be feeling. Whether or not Kim byeonhosa was with Taeyong
wouldn’t change the fact that Taeyong was untouchable. Far, far out of his reach. His only role in
Taeyong’s life was to accept his kindness and pay off his debt and make something of his life that
Taeyong could be proud of.

It was only out of love and respect that he knocked on Taeyong’s door that night. He meant to
congratulate him. It was his win, too, if his boyfriend made partner, and if Jaehyun could swing by
just to greet him and thank him for dinner, he could just as well go and tell him he’s happy for
him.

He knocked, and Taeyong looked up at him with that same tired smile, sweet and simple goodwill
written all over his face.

“Byeonhosa-nim,” he said. “Did Kim byeonhosa-nim make partner?”

Taeyong’s smile slipped a little bit before he answered.

“No,” he said. “They didn’t choose him, and he found a good offer somewhere else, so he left the
firm.”
Jaehyun stood at the doorway with his hands hanging by his sides, teeth worrying his lip,
wondering if he’d gone and put his foot in his mouth. And then he really did go and put his foot in
his mouth.

“I’m glad,” he said, without thinking about what the hell he was saying.

Taeyong laughed lightly.

“Why?” He said, picking up the pen that he had set down when Jaehyun came by. Maybe he meant
he was getting ready to end this conversation.

“I don’t know why I said that,” Jaehyun said, ducking his head, all those gestures to show that he’s
ready to leave, too.

“Did he scare you?” Taeyong asked. “I know he comes off as kind of icy but he’s actually nice.”

He was tapping his pen on the scratchpad on his desk. A dense cluster of black dots and dashes
took form on the upper right hand corner of the page. It looked like Taeyong did that night Jaehyun
pushed him not to drive home. Tangled up and frustrated and formless.

“Is he really?” He said. “I didn’t think he was nice to you. He didn’t seem to care very much about
your feelings.”

The pleasantness left Taeyong’s face without much of a change in his expression. His pen stopped
tapping, and his gaze slid heavily up Jaehyun’s form. He knew immediately that he had said the
wrong thing. Or the right thing at the wrong time.

“Shut the door,” Taeyong said.

“Sorry?” Jaehyun said.

“Shut the door and come sit down.”

He did as he was told. He closed the door and took two hesitant steps forward, sat down in that
chair across from Taeyong with his heart in his throat.

“You can’t talk about him like that, do you understand? You don’t know him, and you don’t know
me, and you certainly don’t know our relationship,” Taeyong said.

It sounded a lot like getting told off by a grown up. A teacher, or the principal, or his dad. It made
his ears burn and his gaze drop to his feet.

“I’m sorry,” he said. “I shouldn’t have - I didn’t mean to overstep.”

Taeyong was unsmiling when he sent him out of his office that night. He just jerked his chin
toward the door.

It hurt him terribly. He didn’t know what he thought he was going to accomplish. Was he going to
tell him he could treat him better? Was he going to make him forget all that kept him awake at
night? Sing him a lullaby and make him sleep?

That’s what he wanted to do. That’s what he meant to do.

It was his nineteenth birthday, and he was miserable. Taeyong hadn’t spoken to him once in the
weeks since he slipped up and halfway told him about his feelings and jealousies. There was
always dinner in the break room, but Taeyong’s office door stayed firmly shut, and the message
was clear. He was reminding him that their relationship only worked with that much distance
between them.

Kyungsoo wouldn’t tolerate his moping anymore. It was a weekend, and he didn’t have to go in to
Choi & Kim, and he convinced him to skip one day of work at the convenience store so they could
go out and get shitfaced. He was finally old enough to drink, and Kyungsoo wanted to take full
advantage of that.
He didn’t really want to drink. He didn’t like the smell of it. It smelt like his dad. But Kyungsoo
poured drink after drink and made him knock it back despite him gagging and coughing through
it.

Taeyong seemed to like drinking, and he wanted to be able to drink with him, so he sucked it up
and knocked it back until his world was spinning and he couldn’t take three steps in a straight line.

He wasn’t dead drunk. He still managed to stumble his way to his street with his arm slung over
Kyungsoo’s shoulder.

“Can you get home from here, dumbass?” Kyungsoo asked, shrugging his arm off his shoulder and
leaning him up against the back wall of that BBQ restaurant at the end of his street.

“Course I can,” Jaehyun mumbled back, but the smell of grilled pork skin was making him sick.

“Well, happy birthday, Jeong Jaehyun,” Kyungsoo said.

“Thank you very much Nam Kyungsoo,” he said, waving him off.

He stood there and watched his retreating figure for a long time, until he was swallowed up in the
street. He hoped his head would clear in that time, but the world kept spinning around him, and he
kept spinning around the world, and his stomach lurched.

He took two tottering steps into his alley and vomited up half his dinner. That seemed to clear his
head, some, but he was still drunk enough to wipe the rest of the spit and vomit off his lips with his
jacket sleeve. He spat one last time for good measure, took a few more tottering steps to a spot
where he couldn’t smell his own vomit anymore and sat down.

A strange melancholy took hold of him then, and he sat with his spinning head in his hands for a
long time. All he knew was that he felt an implacable need to be far away. Not back in those two
rooms he called home. Not in this neighborhood. Not in this life. He wanted, so desperately, to hear
Taeyong’s voice.

He knew it was a mistake when he was doing it. He knew he would be angry with himself when
his head cleared, but he fished his phone out of his jacket pocket, and before he knew it, Taeyong’s
voice was in his ear.

“Hello?” Taeyong said. He sounded very awake. Tired and distracted, but awake.

“Byeonhosa-nim. Don’t be angry with me anymore,” he said.

“Who is this?”

“It’s Jaehyun. Jeong Jaehyun, from the office.”

There was something of a confused silence for a second, and Jaehyun found himself wondering if
he even remembered his name. It was a stupid thought. He called him by name nearly everyday
before he stopped speaking to him. He just seemed like the kind of presence in Taeyong’s life that
could be forgotten in a week.

“Jaehyun, what - what’s going on? Are you okay?”

He sounded a lot clearer then. His distractedness was gone. He imagined him sitting up straighter,
lifting his gaze from his papers and fixing it to the far wall of his office, like he did when he was
on important phone calls. It sobered Jaehyun some, but not nearly enough to stop talking.

“I, um,” he said. “I’m a little drunk.”

Another silence.

“Hang up before you say something you’ll regret,” Taeyong said. He sounded kind. He always
sounded kind and gentle.

“I might regret this. I’ll probably regret this,” Jaehyun mumbled, pressing the heel of his palm to
his eye, carding his hand through his hair to push it off his forehead next.

“I don’t think I’ve ever met someone as beautiful as you, hyung. Can I call you hyung?” He said.
“Hyung?” Taeyong said. There was a hint of laughter in that. A hint of discomfort.

"I’m sorry. I’m so sorry. Byeonhosa-nim. I didn’t mean to - I’m sorry, alright? I’m - You’re really
a good person. I like talking to you. I like - You’re the only person who’s rooting for me, hyung -
byeonhosa-nim,” Jaehyun said, all muddled up, just like that. “Just don’t be angry with me, please.
I won’t run my mouth again, I promise. You’re just so fucking beautiful, hyung.”

He could hear that shaky breath that left Taeyong’s lips. He could picture his brow creasing. It
made him want to press his lips to both.

“You know, I laminated your business card. I was scared I’d touch it and ruin it,” he said. “I didn’t
mean to call, I just. Wanted to hear your voice.”

“Hang up,” Taeyong said.

“I just - I want to hold your hand. I want to kiss you. I want to sleep with you.”

“Jaehyun, you need to stop.”

“I just want to hold your hand.”

“Jeong Jaehyun,” Taeyong said.

He sounded stern. He sounded like he was telling him off again. That felt like someone had
plunged his head in cold water and an awful clarity came over him. That he had called an associate
at a law firm where he emptied trash cans for a living, that he told him he wanted to kiss him and
sleep with him -

“Fuck,” he breathed. “I - I’m sorry.”

“Hang up.”
 He did, quickly, and without a goodbye or a goodnight or a see you tomorrow. He hung up and
stared at his phone for a long moment. He felt distinctly like he had made a terrible mistake, but he
didn’t know what he could do to fix it. He was tired. He was drunk. He went home and went to
bed.

It didn’t occur to him then, but it did occur to him the next morning, that Taeyong could have hung
up. He could have stopped him. He didn’t have to hear anything he said, but he listened, and he left
the responsibility of maintaining the boundaries of their relationship to a drunk teenager. It
occurred to him that he wanted to hear him say all the things he said. He didn't know what to do
with that.

Chapter End Notes

Thank you so much for your kudos and comments <333

 Chapter Three
Chapter Notes

See the end of the chapter for notes

가 가

The baby’s left home alone,

And to the lullaby sung by the sea,

He falls asleep slowly.

Taeyong looks out of his car window at the aging building Jaehyun has been living in for the past
month. There’s a long horizontal crack in the facade of the building, where the ground floor meets
the first. There’s water damage, and long blackened streaks running down the side from years of
rain, the paint peeling in large flakes, and two grimy satellite dishes on the roof.

He doesn’t know what he meant to do here. He’s waited one whole month for Jaehyun to change
his mind, for him to give some indication that he wants him in his life. Maybe he hoped he’d find
that indication here, or maybe he just wanted to see for himself that he’s alright, and that he’s
living well without him.

Both, he thinks.

He wanted to see him, hear his voice, and hold him. He wanted to tell him he’s still on his mind,
and to ask him if he still wanted to see him or if he hated the sight of him and the thought of what
their relationship did to his life. He’s almost certain that Jaehyun would have said he still thinks of
him, and that he’d always want to see him. He used to look at him with such adoration. He can’t
imagine that nothing of that survived these past years.

If he’s being honest with himself, he knows he isn’t allowed it, not after all that happened. The
streets themselves tell him that. They dig their claws into him and won’t let him take another step
towards the front gate of Jaehyun’s building.
He sighs, looks up at the building one last time. There, in the window of that rooftop room, he sees
a shift in the dim light. He sees a silhouette that he knows like the back of his hand. His heart drops
into his belly and his throat goes dry, and he stays frozen, looking up at him for a long moment.

His hand lifts by itself to start the car, and then he shifts the gear, and his foot hits the accelerator.
He drives away from that image, of the boy he has ached to see for so long, even as his breath
quickens, even as his heart races, even as that silhouette lingers like an afterimage right before his
eyes.

He’s shocked by his own reaction. He knows he fears Jaehyun’s expectations and disappointments
as much as he aches to see him, but the grown up thing for him to do would have been to step out
of the car, go upstairs, and talk to him. He knows that, too, but his own expectations and his own
disappointments trip him up. He can’t face the boy. He can’t look him in the eye anymore.

His panic eases with every street he puts between himself and Jaehyun. Driving away from Nam
Kyungsoo’s rooftop room, through Jaehyun’s old neighborhood, through those streets that frequent
his nightmares even today, it makes Taeyong’s breath come thick.

He can’t shake the memory of Jaehyun’s trembling lips and his red eyes when he looked at
Taeyong that day and told him to leave. He couldn’t shake the memory of his own burning breaths
and heavy footfalls and his own guilt. He shouldn’t have left. In that moment, with that decision, he
ruined Jaehyun’s life and these streets witnessed it.

He wonders if things would have gone differently if he knew himself better back then. If he hadn’t
spent months denying his attraction to Jaehyun, and months more denying his feelings for him. He
wonders, if he hadn’t tried to be some kind of father figure to him and fill shoes that were too big
for him would things be different now? If he hadn’t tried so hard to put distance between them
when it was in their destiny to collide, if he had told Jaehyun he was falling in love with him,
would Jaehyun have had an easier time asking for his help?

He knows how Jaehyun ached to hear it from him. If he had told him that he loved him, would
things have come to this?
He remembers that night that Jaehyun first called him like it happened yesterday.

In the month leading up to it, he had tried putting some distance between the two of them. It
became necessary since Jaehyun stood at his office door like a jealous boyfriend, asking about
Jungwon, and then telling him how little he thought of him.

It wasn’t that the kid was wrong. Jungwon had a tendency to be a little narcissistic and a little
selfish, but he didn’t really owe Taeyong anything more than sex, and some days, friendship.
That’s what their relationship was. But it occurred to him that day that Jaehyun’s harmless crush
had gone a little too far.

He wanted to be there for him, and he wanted to ease his troubles in some way, but he couldn’t
afford to let Jaehyun misunderstand what he was trying to do, and he didn’t want him to get hurt.
However deep his affection for Taeyong was, he couldn’t do a damned thing about it. He couldn’t
act on it and take advantage of him in that way. He was just a kid who was so starved of kindness
and stability that he mistook gratitude for love. He was just a kid.

That part of his reasoning was true then, and remained true for the rest of their time together, but in
those early days, he used to tell himself something more. An arrogant, prejudiced, unkind lie. A
flimsy lie. He told himself Jaehyun was just some poor kid from the basement apartments of Seoul
city, and a man like Taeyong couldn’t possibly harbor any feelings for him. It didn’t take very long
for him to realize how full of shit that was.

It was just going on a month of keeping his office door shut when he was working late and he
knew Jaehyun would be working, too.

He was home. He didn’t want to be the kind of man who worked on valentines day. He was
lounging on his couch, reading a book, when his phone rang. He didn’t recognize the number, but
in his profession, he had to make it a point to answer phone calls from unknown numbers at all
times of day and night.

He remembers recognizing his voice right away. It was a welcome sound. He hadn’t heard it for so
long before that night. Still, he made it a point to ask who it was. He didn’t know why. Saving
face, he supposed. Keep his distance.
He remembers recognizing the drunkenness in his voice right away, too. It was a baffling
experience after that. In the span of a few minutes he must have experienced the entire spectrum of
human emotion.

He was concerned - where was Jaehyun? Was he safe? Was he too drunk to get home? Would he
pass out on some street corner in the middle of February and freeze to death or get run over?

He was shocked, because that concern of his made him sit up straight and reach for his car keys on
instinct. If he had asked, Taeyong would have driven over to wherever he was to get him home
safe. That was a revelation for him. He knew he cared about the kid. He was honey sweet and had
a backbone on him, and he worked his ass off to overcome the hand he was dealt. He knew he
liked him, and he cared for him. He just hadn’t realized how much.

He was charmed. Foolishly, childishly charmed when he slipped up and called him hyung. It made
him smile, and then double back into concern when he told him he was the only one rooting for
him, and then back into shock when he told him what he wanted to do to him.

Something new, then, titillation. With his phone pressed to his ear, and his breath thick in his
throat, he thought of Jaehyun’s hand, and his pillowy lips, and his height, and the timbre of his
voice. He thought of all those things juxtaposed with his own hand, his own lips, his own frame
and his own voice. It made him breathless. It made him embarrassed to have even thought it. It
made guilt spread like an oil drop over what he thought was clear water.

He told him to hang up, firmly, and it was an assertion to both himself and Jaehyun.

Monday night, Jaehyun knocked on his closed office door. He came in before Taeyong even gave
him permission. He stood there, then, still in his god damned school uniform, thumbs tucked under
the straps of his backpack, gaze lowered, ears burning.

“So, what was that all about?” Taeyong asked him.

“I’m so sorry,” Jaehyun said. “It was my birthday, and I had a little too much to drink and it’ll
never happen again.”

“Can you promise me it won’t? It was completely unacceptable,” he said, as firmly as he could. It
was difficult. He was as embarrassed as Jaehyun was.

Jaehyun nodded, and Taeyong thought the conversation was over. He thought he had laid down his
boundaries. He thought they had both been embarrassed enough, and he expected Jaehyun to go
running from his office the moment he had finished speaking. But he lingered.

“I just need you to know that, um,” he said, keeping his gaze lowered. “That I didn’t mean it
cheaply.”

He hadn’t expected that. He thought he might apologize one more time. He thought he might be
worried for his job, but he didn’t think he’d stop to tell him his intentions.

“What?” He said, without any measure of dignity.

“I like you,” Jaehyun said, and he finally managed to look up at him.

He couldn’t maintain that eye contact for very long, and he dropped his gaze again. He didn’t need
to. Those few seconds told Taeyong everything he wanted to say. He was being honest. He was
being serious. He was scared shitless.

“You like me?” Taeyong repeated.

He nodded.

“What the fuck do you know about me?” Taeyong said.

There was no anger in his tone when he said it. There was just a kind of wonderment. Just a sort of
awe of this high school kid standing in his office and confessing to him, when all the odds in the
world were against him. There was something distinctly thug-like about it, and it made him want to
laugh. He bit it back.
“You’re kind,” Jaehyun said. “And pretty. And kind.”

“That’s all you need to like someone?”

“What else do you need?”

He didn’t really have an answer for that. What do you need to like someone? He tried to think of
something, anything at all, but it dawned on him, very slowly, and very secretly, that it took less
than for him like Jaehyun.

Jaehyun won, there. He seemed to know he won. He took a step closer, and Taeyong sat back in
his chair to put some more distance between them.

“Is it okay if I call you again, byeonhosa-nim?,” Jaehyun said. “I promise I won’t ever talk like that
again.”

Taeyong seemed at a loss for words. He was an attorney. He had been an attorney for six years,
and had written up thousands of legal documents with impenetrable wording, tried cases, and won,
but Jaehyun had him at a loss for words.

“Sometimes I just want to hear your voice.”

“No,” Taeyong said.

“Byeonhosa-nim -

“I won’t answer,” he told him.

He saw his disappointment and hurt written all over his face. He felt terrible about it, but he
couldn’t help it.
From the start, he wanted Jaehyun to have a taste of stability, of success, of shining his brightest.
He wanted him, in some way, to see all of that, and still want Taeyong. He couldn’t want
somebody who knew nothing but him.

His phone rang again in the middle of the night, a month after that. It was on a weekend, again, but
this time, Taeyong was at work. He looked down at it distractedly, and he saw that name he had
saved on a whim.

calling.

He stared at this screen, frozen, for the thirty seconds or so of his phone ringing. It stopped, and he
half expected it to start up again, but it stayed silent.

He let out a long breath, and turned his attention back to work. It got him a little jumbled up for the
next ten minutes. He couldn’t focus. He kept reading the same words over and over and not
registering a thing. It seemed that single phone call wouldn’t leave him be until he gave it the time
and consideration it demanded.

He closed his laptop, and sat back in his chair for a moment, like he was being held hostage by
Jaehyun, like that day when he confessed.

It was spring, he thought. The weather was nice. The flowers were blooming. He must be out with
his friends again. Drunk again. Confused again.

It didn’t matter, he decided. Jaehyun had understood what he said. The past month was testimony
to the fact. No more hyung, no more I like you. It had gone back to thanks for dinner Lee byeon,
have a good night Lee byeon, see you tomorrow Lee byeon. He understood. He made a mistake.
That was all.

He shook the call off, and went back to work.

He saw the kid the following night on his way out. Through the half open blinds of the conference
room, a flash of navy blue cover-alls. He stopped and leaned against the door frame, hands in
pockets, the picture of nonchalance. Jaehyun had his back to him. He seemed to be emptying out
the trash.

“Had a little too much last night?” Taeyong teased.

The kid startled, dropped the trash bag, and turned to him. It made the smile slip off Taeyong’s
face in a fraction of a moment. It made him wish he hadn’t let that call drop.

Black eye, bruised jaw, busted up lip, ring and little fingers of his left hand taped together with
what seemed to be scotch tape. Then he saw his self consciousness. He saw the way he shrank
from him and half turned away like he could hide it from him.

Taeyong moved to him without thinking.

“What happened?” He breathed.

He shrugged. He was always shrugging before answering difficult questions.

“He spent my money,” he said. “They came to collect and he didn’t have it, and I was home.”

“Jaehyun this - this isn’t legal, you can file a report with the police -

“They’ll kill me before anything comes of it,” he said.

It hit him like a fucking tidal wave, then. He couldn’t dip his toes in this kid’s life. He couldn’t
keep his distance and stop with making sure he was fed and paid. He couldn’t not be involved
when seeing him like that made him feel like he couldn’t breathe.
He lifted one hesitant hand to his face and caressed his cheek gently. He seemed to be stacked like
a house of cards, because that gentle touch made him crumble. He blinked furiously, until his tears
clung to his lashes like morning dew, and his nose reddened.

“Don’t know why I’m being dramatic today,” he mumbled.

He kept going, caressing his cheek, catching those tears that escaped all his furious blinking, and
then brushing his hair away from his eyes, tucking flyaways down, and petting his hair.

It was a strange feeling. He didn’t think he’d ever touch him like that. He didn’t think he’d ever
know the warmth of his skin beyond a handshake, maybe, and that single point of contact tore
down any hope he had of keeping a reasonable distance from him. He looked at him, teary eyed,
hurt, and vulnerable, and Taeyong swore to himself he wouldn’t let anything hurt him ever again.

“How much money was it?” He asked.

“Six hundred thousand won for this month,” he said.

Taeyong had to clench his jaw when he heard that. That was a little more than he spent on the
shoes he was wearing then, and they hurt him like that for it.

He dropped his hand to his side. He didn’t have to think very much about it. He got his phone out
of his pocket, and he hesitated for just one second before he made his offer. He didn’t know if it
was okay to do this. He didn’t know if it would offend the kid. He decided he’d do it anyway.

“Do you know your account number?” He said. “Or KakaoPay or whatever.”

He saw the look on Jaehyun’s face change. His lips parted in surprise, and trembled, and he
swallowed hard and took two steps away from him only to come right back. He was crying by then,
but he took Taeyong’s phone out of his hands and slipped it back in his pocket.

“Thank you,” he said. “Thank you for offering, but you don’t have to do that.”
“I want to,” he said. “Take the money, please.”

He shook his head.

“Look at me,” Taeyong said. “If they come back. If you can’t - if you’re in trouble. Just ask,
Jaehyun. I can do this for you. I will do this for you. I’m, um, I’m really sorry I didn’t answer this
time.”

Jaehyun’s jaw was ticking, and when it relaxed it was only for his teeth to start worrying his lower
lip.

“Fuck,” he breathed. “Ah, fuck. I didn’t call you to ask for money. Just - I just wanted to hear your
voice. Things have been easier since I met you. Maybe because I know you’re rooting for me. I
know you’ve got my back, in a way, I guess.”

It made him feel awful. It made him want to hold the kid for a long, long time, but his hands stayed
by his sides.

“I’m sorry I didn’t answer,” he said again.

“Make it up to me, then,” Jaehyun said, lip corners lifting even through his tears. “Take me to
dinner this weekend.”

Taeyong laughed.

“You’re such a bother,” he said, with nothing short of fondness.

He was. He really lived up to his name on Taeyong’s phone, , a troublemaker, a damned brat. He
came by his office every day until Friday to ask him about their weekend dinner date. I’ve never
been to a nice restaurant, he said. Should I wear a tie? I only have my school tie. Can you show me
how to eat with a knife and fork - like without looking dumb. I don’t want to embarrass you, but I
also want steak.

On Friday, he sucked it up and told him he couldn’t do it. Jaehyun seemed crestfallen for only a
moment. He smiled and nodded. It seemed he was expecting that.

“Can I call you tomorrow, then?” He asked. “I want to talk to you about something.”

“About what?”

He shrugged.

“You’ll find out,” he said.

“Sure,” Taeyong said, because he felt so terrible about letting the kid down.

It took him an hour to realize he might just have been played. The old street urchin marketing
tactic: I really need to make this sale, but if you can’t buy the big thing, what about this little thing,
instead?

It made him laugh quietly to himself on his drive home from work.

He woke up on Saturday morning with the beginnings of a head cold. His body ached, his head
throbbed, his nose was stuffy, and he felt hot all over. He groaned the minute he opened his eyes.
They felt gritty. They felt hot. He got out of bed and schlepped his way to the bathroom. He
brushed his teeth with his eyes closed. He peed, with his eyes closed, hoping to god his aim was
good that morning. He got a tylenol, a Claritin, and an ambien, and popped them into his mouth on
the way out of the bathroom. There were three sips of water in the cup on his nightstand. He
washed them down with that, and climbed back into bed.

That was that. He woke up around midday feeling worse. His stomach hurt, and his nose was
stuffier than before. He lay in bed for a long time, willing himself to get up and make some food
for himself. He was just so tired.

His phone buzzed then, somewhere in the tangle of his blankets. It buzzed incessantly, and when
he found it cradled in a fold of his comforter, he saw the name on his screen and paused mid-
groan to curse under his breath. He had halfway forgotten about it. Not entirely, because he was
fretting about what the kid wanted to talk to him about. What they could talk about that wouldn’t
be weird. It was all weird, he reminded himself. The whole thing was fucking weird.

He sighed and answered the phone.

“Hello?” He said.

“Byeonhosa-nim, is this - are you busy?”

His voice, it made him think of that night, of his runaway mouth and his awful confession. It made
him smile despite himself, but he cleared his throat and his mind and answered.

“No,” he said. “What did you want to talk about?”

“You sound like shit,” Jaehyun said. “Are you sick?”

“Just a cold,” he said, lying back down.

“Do you have medicine? And food?”

“I - yeah, I took some,” he said. “And, um - yeah. I can make some food.”

“You haven’t eaten, have you?” He asked.

“I’m fine, though,” Taeyong said, snuggling further down into his blanket. He was hot, but also
shivering, and he couldn’t figure out how to balance those two things out.

“Should I come over with some porridge later? Or wait, that’s probably going to be very late. Um,
let me see if I can have some delivered to your place -

Taeyong smiled. There was some rustling sound on the line, and he wondered what the kid was
doing. Lifting something, it sounded like. Then the sound of a scanner beeping. He was at work, he
realized. He was working and worrying about some guy who was sixteen years older than him and
whinging about a cold.

“It’s fine, I’m fine,” he said. “I’m getting up now. Going to the kitchen.”

“That’s good, I’m glad.”

He held his phone to his ear, shoved his feet into his slippers, and walked to the kitchen. He
opened his fridge. In it, there was an empty carton of eggs, a bottle of milk that was a week over
the expiration date, ten different kinds of sauces and condiments, and some mushy salad mix from
god knows when. He closed it.

“What are you eating?”

“Ketchup with a side of mustard, by the looks of it,” he said, continuing his foraging.

Jaehyun laughed, light and easy.

“I’m sending stuff over,” he said. “Where do you live?”

He didn’t want to say. It didn’t feel right. He opened and closed a few cabinets that hadn’t been
opened for weeks, looking for anything he could eat that weren’t month old biscuits. He caught
himself thinking about what the pantry used to look like at his parents’ house, how it was always
stocked, always had something he could eat, and he found himself wondering why he lived like
this. Maybe he’d been slipping up for a little while. Maybe he’d been working a little too hard.
Finally, he found a box of instant oats sitting in a corner of a cabinet, and he got it down to check
the expiration date. He had a few months to go before it went bad, and he rejoiced internally. His
stomach growled, too.

“Aha!” Taeyong said. “I’m eating oats.”

“Isn’t that like - like horse food?”

He grinned, found a bowl, emptied the oats into it, and poured in a reasonable amount of water
because he didn’t want to risk the old milk.

“Well, you’re not wrong. But mine has, uh, fruit and cinnamon in it,” Taeyong said.

“Gourmet horse food,” Jaehyun said.

It made him burst into laughter as he was putting his bowl of oats in the microwave. It made water
and three grains of oats slosh out of the bowl and land on his t shirt. He stuck the bowl in and hit
the two minute express cook button, and then pawed at that wet patch on his t shirt.

“I guess so,” he said. “Now what did you want to talk about?”

“You’ll find out.”

“When?”

“When I hang up, think about all the stuff we talked about, and that’s what I wanted to talk to you
about.”

He slapped a hand over his face when he heard that. The microwave hummed, his air-con
hummed, and his stupid tired heart hummed.
“You wanted to chat?” Taeyong asked.

“Mhmm.”

He bit back his smile. He was just a kid, he reminded himself. He couldn’t afford to let himself be
endeared by his romanticism and his lovelorn smile.

“Do you not have any friends?”

“Well, yes, but I already know them and they already know me, and you’re the one who said I
need more than pretty and kind to like someone, so - I’m. I’m getting to know you. I want to know
you.”

The microwave, the air-con, his stupid tired heart. He had never had that said to him before. He
had heard I like you, I love you, I want to fuck you, but this was new. I want to know you. It was
sweeter than anything else he could have said.

Taeyong leaned back against the kitchen counter. He needed a moment to let that sink in.

The microwave beeped loudly, three times, and it shook him out of that train of thought. The kid
was relentless. A god damned thug about it all, but Taeyong couldn’t let himself be strong-armed
into this. He couldn’t. He shouldn’t.

“Listen to me,” he said. “This is not appropriate. We can’t - we. We can’t.”

“Why not?”

“I’m old enough to be your father.”

“That’s so full of shit,” Jaehyun said, and in his excitement, dropped the honorific. “Teen dad?”

“You know what I mean,” he said. “Look, I - I think you’re a good kid in bad circumstances and I
want to do what I can to help you, alright? Let it be just that. I can’t - you’re vulnerable, right now,
do you understand? I can’t take advantage of that. Go to college and meet a bunch of other people
your own age and figure out where your life is going. If you still feel the same way then, we’ll talk
about it, okay?”

He went quiet for a bit after Taeyong said that. He waited for him patiently.

“I’m not hearing you say you don’t like me,” Jaehyun said.

Fucking thug, Taeyong thought. He almost yelled it out loud, but he bit down on his lower lip and
worried it with his teeth instead.

“Byeonhosa-nim,” he said. “Why didn’t you hang up that night?”

It took him by surprise. He didn’t have an answer for that. He wasn’t sure, either, why he let
Jaehyun talk for as long as he did that night. He just liked feeling wanted, he told himself. It was
just vanity. He was letting him stroke his ego.

“Byeonhosa-nim?” He said again. He sounded nervous. Had he sounded sure of himself, Taeyong
would have been done for.

“We can’t do this, Jaehyun,” he said. “I mean that. I’m not going to accept your feelings, and we
are not going to talk about this again, alright?”

He was quiet again. Taeyong didn’t like that. It meant his stupid young head was thinking, and it
would come up with stupid young ideas.

“What do you think will happen if you and I get together?” Jaehyun asked.

“Ruin,” he said. “Yours or mine.”

He heard him swallow, and he heard him sniff once.

“If you can’t do both. If you can’t let me like you and take your help - if that. If that makes you
 feel like you’re taking advantage of me. Don’t help me anymore.”

He had him at a loss for words again. Held hostage. Tongue-tied.

“Don’t be kind to me,” Jaehyun said. “Just let me like you.”

Chapter End Notes

Taeyong saved Jaehyun’s contact as akdong which basically means brat/ troublesome
kid

Hope you enjoyed this chapter! Thank you so much for your lovely comments and
kudos <333
They're slowly moving towards each other and Jaehyun's dad is proving to be a pain in
the ass. He's going to Fuck Shit Up pretty soon lol
 Chapter Four
Chapter Notes

See the end of the chapter for notes

It’s sunny when Jaehyun gets off the bus in Goyang-si. Still, the wind makes him shiver, and he
wraps his arms around himself and walks against the wind towards Chungah Memorial Park. He
loses his way twice, once on his way to the building, and once inside the building, but finally, he
finds the hallway he was looking for.

He hasn’t been here since the day Park Biseo showed him his father’s final resting place. He knew
going in that day that Taeyong had paid for everything. The funeral arrangements, the cremation,
the fee at the columbarium. He had asked him to, after all.

I won’t ask you for anything else. Just this. Give him a decent funeral hyung, please. Do what I
can’t do for him.

He didn’t know what to feel about it then, and he doesn’t know now. His father’s greed and the
habits he couldn’t kick were to blame for everything going to shit between him and Taeyong. Still,
he couldn’t be angry with a dead man. He was a bad father and bad man, but Jaehyun wasn’t a
good son either. He wasn’t a saint, either.

He walks up to that glass wall to pay his respects to his father on the fifth anniversary of his death.
He isn’t sorry he missed the first four. He isn’t sorry, because it marks the death of his own
innocence, of that dumb fucking teenager who thought love was enough.

He’s about to bow to his father’s ashes when he sees it. There are fresh flowers in the holder by the
glass cube that holds Jeong Jaesuk’s ashes.

He came by, he thinks.

He doesn’t know what to feel.

The wind has picked up. It billows his jacket all around him and makes him shiver. His whole body
aches from the cold, but he walks on. His vision blurs with unshed tears and he blinks hard so he
can see the numbers he’s dialing. He doesn’t hesitate before calling him.

He knows he’ll pick up. He knows he always answers, even numbers he doesn’t recognize. He
knows his number hasn’t changed in six years, too. He saw it on that business card Park Biseo left
him along with his own.

It rings six times, and then he answers.

“Hello?” He says.

His voice makes another quiet sob slip from his lips. He hasn’t heard it in so long. He has to
swallow hard and take a deep breath to make sure his voice sounds stable when he speaks.

“Byeonhosa-nim,” he says.

He hears that sharp intake of breath clear as day. He recognizes Jaehyun’s voice.

“Jaehyun?” He says, all disbelief and joy.

“Yeah.”

“I’m - uh, fuck. Fuck, it’s so good to hear your voice.”

That makes Jaehyun stop dead in his tracks. It makes his brows draw together. It makes his throat
burn and his heart pound, but it all feels sick. It feels all wrong.

“Really?” He says. “Then why the fuck didn’t you come - why did you send fucking Park biseo
that day?’
“Jaehyun -

“You’re so full of shit, hyung,” he says, quiet, shattering. “You’re just - I fucking get it, okay? I got
your message loud and clear that day. You hadn’t seen me in almost five years and you sent your
secretary to come pick me up. I understand. You want nothing to do with me - then why do you
keep showing up in my life? Do you feel bad for me? I’m just trying to live. Just let me live.”

“Slow down,” he says. “I don’t understand what - where are you?”

“Why? What are you going to do? Come pick me up and take me home and not fuck me, hyung?
You’ll patch me up and make me think we’re in love and send me on my way?”

An awful silence stretches between them. Jaehyun has to bite his lip hard to keep from sobbing out
loud. The wind gets under his jacket. The cars and buses zip by. He stands still.

“What’s going on?” Taeyong says.

“I’ve lost everything,” he says. “That’s what’s going on. I’ve lost my father. And I - I did this. It’s
my own fucking fault. I can’t go to college, hyung, I can’t meet all those people you wanted me to
meet and my life is going fucking nowhere. This is it, and I get it, that means I’ve lost you, too.
Just please. If you don’t want me in your life, stop being kind to me. I can’t keep - I can’t go on
like this. It’s my loss. I’ve lost. Let me live with that, just please stop showing up and trying to
make it all better for me.”

Taeyong raises his voice for the first time in all the time he’s known him, then.

“What the fuck are you talking about?” He says. “What do you mean you’ve lost me? I’ve been -
I’ve been waiting for you to come back, all this time, I - I got you a place to live. I found you a job.
I-

“You didn’t want to see me,” Jaehyun says wretchedly. “You didn’t want me.”

He laughs, then. It’s disbelief, again. It’s indignation, and pain, and disbelief.
“I came to see you, Jaehyun. A week in, I came to see you. You’re the one that said you didn’t
want me to see you like that. You’re the one who said don’t visit and don’t write -

“It was over, wasn’t it, hyung? Was I wrong?”

“You were. You were fucking wrong. It wasn’t over for me.”

“Why didn’t you come back, then?”

“Because that’s what grown-ups do, Jaehyun. When someone you love says they need space, you
listen.”

This time, he can’t bite back that small sob, and he can’t quiet the sound of the breath he draws in
through his narrowed throat.

“Bullshit,” he says. “Fucking bullshit, don’t tell me that. You didn’t come back because you didn’t
want anything to do with this kid who went and fucked up his entire life. Please, hyung. If you
want to move on, if you want me to move on, just stop everything. Stop showing outside my
fucking house. Stop leaving flowers for my father. Don’t send me money. Don’t look for me. Stop
everything, or - or show up and take responsibility for me. Show up and do what you promised to
do.”

“Jaehyun -

He sobs again, and takes another shuddering breath in. His legs feel weak, so he squats on the
pavement and presses a hand over his face to muffle the sounds and he cries. Every time he thinks
it’ll stop, another sob takes its place. He cries till his throat hurts, head hurts, ribs hurt. Taeyong
listens wordlessly.

He gathers himself halfway after long, long moments pass.

“I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to lose it like that,” he says. “I - I’m tired, hyung. Just, please, don’t get
me all mixed up like this.”
He hangs up, then, and turns his phone off. He doesn’t want to hear his voice anymore. He doesn’t
want to hear him melting just because Jaehyun cried. He doesn’t want his pity.

All those years had passed but that remained unchanged. Back then, too, he told him he’d trade in
his pity and his kindness for the freedom to love him. It seemed he didn’t care very much for
Jaehyun’s ultimatum. At first, he seemed to have chosen kindness. Every time he saw dinner left
for him in the break room at Choi & Kim, he thought he was cementing his rejection into place. It
wasn’t unexpected, but it did hurt.

The hurt only lasted a few days, because he answered when Jaehyun called. He didn’t protest when
he told him it was just because he wanted to hear his voice. He wasn’t angry with him. He didn’t
try to convince him not to call again. Jaehyun didn’t talk about kisses and feelings again, either. He
had decided to take what Taeyong was willing to give him.

The first couple of times, Taeyong didn’t talk half as much as Jaehyun did on those phone calls. He
listening, and he worked, or ate, or watched TV, or cleaned his apartment, and he listened to
Jaehyun talking about his day, and working, and eating, and cleaning.

It didn’t last very long the first time. Ten minutes, and he told him he had to go. Slowly, ten
became fifteen, became thirty, and forty five, and an hour.

Slowly, he began to talk to him. He learnt things about him. That he didn’t believe in God and
never went to church. That he came from money. His father a judge, his mother a corporate
executive. That he liked eating scrambled eggs and toast on the days he ate breakfast, and he liked
his eggs runny.

He was learning him. His little sounds of frustration, of focus, of confusion, surprise, fatigue,
excitement. The shifts in the tone of his voice depending on the time of day and his mood and how
much he had talked that day.
There were all these little clues, all these little things about him that he’d learn, even if he didn’t
know how to put them together. He memorized him. He didn’t really understand him then.

It didn’t matter. That summer, he fell in love anyway.

He had been going home less and less those days. He worked like a dog through the week, and
every hour of the day was accounted for. He spent it at school, and then the convenience store, and
the law firm, where he’d finish his work and sleep until morning. Weekends were the problem.
He’d come home late at night from the convenience store to his father being drunk and belligerent.
Or to a house that smelt like shit and vomit. Or to those loans sharks paying his father a visit.

That night was no different. It was Saturday, just past midnight. His father’s shouts were still
ringing in his ears. He tried to sit it out, to wait an hour, maybe, until his father fell asleep and he
could sneak into the house quietly and rest his heavy head until morning.

He sat where he usually sat, in that swing in his neighborhood park, with his hood pulled over his
head to keep the drizzle off his face. The chains groaned and squealed each time he pushed himself
back, and he found himself feeling terribly, terribly tired.

He wanted to talk to Taeyong. He had a feeling he’d be up, and that he’d fill this shitty hour with
something nice and warm. He texted him first, because he didn’t want to call and wake a man who
slept so little.

Hyung are you awake? He said.

The reply came quick.

Yeah…

Just that made his heart soar.

Can I call? He said.

Sure.

He called him then, eagerly, and the first thing he said made Taeyong laugh.

“Why do you text like such an old man?” He asked.

“I am an old man, but what do you mean?” Taeyong asked. “I sent you two words.”

“Yeah, but you put all these periods after, like - you know that makes you sound angry as hell,
right?”

He laughed again.

“I’m not angry,” he said. “Where are you? I heard a car and - is that a swing?”

“Outside,” he said, kicking the ground and pushing his swing a tiny bit faster. “And yeah.”

“Why?”

“My dad was being noisy and I couldn’t sleep.”

That seemed to bother him. He could picture him thinking, all ellipses and periods.
“Are you going to stay out all night?”

Jaehyun shrugged before answering, like Taeyong could see.

“I don’t know, if it had happened a little earlier I could have gone to Kyungsoo’s house but now
it’s too late. I’d be waking his mom up and making a mess.”

“So where are you?”

“There’s a park in my neighborhood. I’m just hanging out,” he said. He yawned and stretched as he
said it, and he heard Taeyong release a long breath, too.

“Jaehyun, your father, is he good to you?” He said.

He should have guessed he would ask him that. He hadn’t asked him until then. There was no
question that he was a bad father, but Taeyong was asking if he was a bad man, too.

“I don’t really know anymore, hyung - byeonhosa-nim,” he said. “I’ve been avoiding him for a
long time, you know? I’m just at work. Or at school. I don’t like being around him. Is that awful?”

“Has he ever hurt you?” Taeyong asked, making it more difficult for him to avoid the question.

“No, I - he’s. He gets a little - when he’s really drunk, you know? Or when I won’t give him
money to drink or gamble or - he gets upset. So I don’t spend any time at home. And nothing’s
happened, at least recently, you know? He’s just off somewhere doing his own thing, mostly.”

He chewed on his lip and adjusted his hood. The rain had picked up. He sighed and stood up,
decided to move to that spot under the slide to protect himself from the rain. At least while he had
his phone out.

“Where is this park?” Taeyong asked him.

When he told him where the park was, and when Taeyong told him to find a dry spot and wait, he
didn’t really believe he’d show up. It didn’t make sense. He didn’t believe it even when he saw his
car pull up on the road, headlights illuminating all those raindrops, haloes and glares all around
them.

He got out from under the slide and ran through the rain towards his car. His heart was racing. He
wasn’t sure if sleep deprivation had finally driven him crazy. Taeyong leaned over and opened the
front passenger door for him, and he caught a glimpse of him under that rear view mirror light, all
soft and comfy looking in his pjs. He caught a glimpse of his leather seats, too, and those nice,
clean interiors.

He didn’t want to get in and fuck it all up.

“What are you doing? Get in,” Taeyong said.

“I’m going to get your seats all wet,” he said. “And my shoes are muddy.”

“That’s fine, get in,” he said.

He did, gingerly, trying to shake off the water and the mud before he closed the door.

He wished he hadn’t closed it. There was silence, all of a sudden. The rain was still roaring, but
muted, over the roof of the car and the windshield and the hood. The air-con was too cold for him.
He was dripping wet. He was shivering, covered in goosebumps, and he couldn’t breathe at all
because the air felt thick.

Taeyong reached into the back seat, and that stretch brought his chest and neck closer to Jaehyun
than he was prepared for. He held his breath. He bit down on his lip. He sat with his hands clasped
tight in his lap.

He tossed a towel into his lap, then, and Jaehyun jumped.

“Dry off, you’ll catch a cold,” he said, turning his attention to the air-con controls.

He turned the heat on, and then pushed another button, and before long, warm air filled that small
space, and Jaehyun’s butt and lower back started getting warm, too. He loosened up, then. He was
able to breathe a little better.

“Byeonhosa-nim?” he said. “My seat is getting hot.”

“I turned the seat warmer on,” he said. “Is it uncomfortable?”

“You can get your car to warm your butt for you?”

“I can,” he said, smiling.

“That’s nice. This is a nice car,” he said, finally letting his gaze wander around and take in the
gleaming surfaces and the traces of Taeyong in that car. His scent, mainly.

“Thank you,” he said.

Jaehyun expected him to drive, then, but he sat with his hands in his lap not too different from how
Jaehyun had sat when he first got in.

“Aren’t we going to your house?” He asked.

“You’re okay with that, right? You looked really uncomfortable for a second there.”

“I’m not,” he said. “I’m not uncomfortable, I’m just nervous.”

“Why?”

“You can’t be serious,” he said. “I have a fat, fat crush on you, and I’m going to your place in the
middle of the night -

“To sleep, you crazy person, to sleep on my couch!”

“Still,” he said, smiling. “I’ve never even seen you in pjs before this.”

Taeyong flushed then. That was the first time he had seen his cheeks color like that. It seemed the
thought was in his head, too. Sex. Maybe kisses and hand holding, but then, sex.

He couldn’t stop picturing it. He couldn’t stop thinking about what his house would look like, as
those shitty streets passed them by, and they drove into Seodaemun, his thoughts tumbled and spun
in murky eddies. He had pictured it before, but never like this. Never with him so close, never with
the possibility so close.

He almost asked him what he liked. The question was on the tip of tongue - do you like giving or
taking - but he bit down on it so he wouldn’t ask. He wasn’t too sure about himself, either. He
didn’t know what he’d like because he’d never done anything. He supposed he’d go along with
whatever Taeyong wanted.

“What are you thinking about?” Taeyong said, and it sounded like he was warning him not to cross
any lines even in his head.

“Mm?” He said.

“You’re all flushed.”

“Let’s just say I’ve never had my butt warmed before,” he said.

Taeyong laughed, but he also reached over and slapped the back of his head.
His house was nothing like he imagined. He thought it was a house, first of all, but it was an
apartment. The lobby was nice, all shining floors and neat, black mailboxes lining a wall to one
side. The elevator smelled nice, and ran smooth, and fast.

He lived on the seventeenth floor, and as the numbers on the screen climbed higher, so did his
heart rate. He looked at Taeyong’s face in the insanely reflective walls of the elevator, and it
embarrassed him how relaxed he looked.

He could have kissed him there, to satisfy an idle fantasy from months ago. He would have, too, if
were any less used to fighting his own desires. Nothing happened, and they exited the elevators and
walked down the hall. He unlocked the door and let him in first, and then followed after.

He looked like a dumbass in that house. He looked like a wart. The place was beautiful - grey walls
and furniture that looked like things he had seen in catalogues, in those decor shops in Gangnam. It
all looked expensive, and he stood there in the entryway in his muddy, wet shoes, and his blue rain
jacket from the night market, feeling like a fucking dumbass.

He toed his shoes off and followed Taeyong in, ruffling his hair and trying not to stare at
everything.

“I’ll get you some clothes,” he said. “Bathroom’s through that door if you need it.”

He stood by the couch, waiting for Taeyong. He had just washed up and dressed in Taeyong’s pjs.
He felt like he was having a spa day of some sort, because his bathroom smelled like roses and his
shower shot water at him from above his head and at his chest. He almost yelped when it did.
There was no mildew anywhere. It didn’t smell like boozy vomit or sewage. He had never been
impressed with a bathroom before that.
Taeyong emerged from his bedroom with a fat comforter and a pillow tucked under his arm, and he
dropped it on the couch.

“That’s yours,” he said. “If you get hungry, just take anything you want from the kitchen. I’ve
restocked. I have ramyun, too.”

Jaehyun smiled at the memory of their first phone call and his struggle to find something to eat in
his house.

“Are you going to bed, byeonhosa-nim?”

“Mhmm,” Taeyong said, returning his smile with his own, soft and sleepy.

“Goodnight, then,” he said. “And thank you.”

“Goodnight, Jaehyun,” he said, his smile softening some more, feathery at the edges.

He was out of the rain. Clean, dry, warm, and fed. But he couldn’t sleep for shit. He kept thinking
about him, over and over, about his kindness, his car, his scent, this house, and that bed behind his
closed door.

He knew Taeyong was awake, too. That’s what drove him nuts. It was three in the morning, but he
heard him tossing and turning, and then he saw dim light in that chink between his door and the
floor.

He couldn’t help himself. He pushed his blanket off, walked to his bedroom door and knocked
lightly. His blood was pounding in his ears for that long, long moment between him knocking and
Taeyong answering. He looked surprised, beautiful in that half light, and Jaehyun felt lightheaded.
He felt short of breath. He felt very stupid and unprepared.
“Can’t sleep?” Taeyong asked.

“I guess,” he said. “I heard you and I thought maybe you could keep me company? If you’re not
sleeping either.”

Taeyong took just long enough to reply for Jaehyun’s neck and ears to start burning up.

“I suppose I could,” he said, finally.

They sat on opposite ends of the couch Jaehyun was sleeping on. Taeyong had made some tea for
them and turned the TV on, but late night programming was terrible. They just turned the sound
low and left it on, only to fill the silence.

“What do you want to be, Jaehyun?” Taeyong asked.

“Hmm?”

“What do you want to do with your life?”

“Everything excites me, hyung,” he said. “But these days, when I listen to you talk about your
cases, it makes me think being a lawyer might be nice.”

“Like me? Criminal defense?” He said. He sounded surprised.

“Mhmm.”

“Wouldn’t you rather be a prosecutor?” He said. “You could go after people like those loan sharks
who hurt you.”

“I don’t know. Why didn’t you?”

“Money,” he said, enunciating each syllable. “I make twice as much doing this than I would as a
prosecutor. Would’ve made more in corporate law, but I thought it was boring.”

Jaehyun laughed, but he didn’t know enough about anything to speak without sounding stupid. He
stayed silent and sipped his tea.

“But you know, sometimes, they’re really innocent? Sometimes. And the ruling aligns with the
truth. And that feels really good,” Taeyong continued.

“Not good enough to make you sleep?"

“You’re awfully concerned about my sleep,” Taeyong said. “And you sleep, what, three? Four
hours a day?”

He smiled sheepishly down at his cup.

“Because if I could, like if I had more hours in the day, I’d sleep,” he said. “I’m fucking tired. And
I know you are, too. It’s about the same thing isn’t it? You want to, and you can’t. My life keeps
me up, and so does yours.”

Taeyong looked at him carefully, for a long moment, like he was trying to understand why he
wouldn’t just take this opportunity to sleep instead of spending time talking to him about a future in
law.

Jaehyun met his gaze unflinchingly, not sure how to tell him he’d stay up all night just to see him
like that, in his home, with his guard down, so close. He seemed to understand what he was trying
to say. He seemed to understand that Jaehyun was fighting the fatigue of months of back breaking
work just to stay up and talk to him. He saw it in his eyes, the way his lips parted as if to say
something, and then closed. His expression changed. Closed off. Darkened. He got up, and
Jaehyun’s heart sank, and he stood up to follow him, to apologize or backpedal or something.

He trailed after him pathetically. He watched him put his cup in the sink and then turn around. He
leaned back against the counter, his fingers curling around the edge of it. He looked down at his
feet, and something crossed his face, a fleeting expression, eyebrows drawing together
imperceptibly.

“Come here,” he said.

He went to him wordlessly, like a puppy, and he stood there waiting for punishment or reward as
Taeyong saw fit. He didn’t say anything, but he dropped one hand to his side, swallowed thickly,
and then his hand found Jaehyun’s.

It knocked the breath out of his chest. He didn’t know what hit him. Taeyong’s hand curled around
his, warm, sure.

“Oh,” Jaehyun said. “Fuck.”

He didn’t know what that was. He didn’t know if it was an invitation. He held his hand delicately
and took one hesitant step closer only for Taeyong to shake his head and stop him in his tracks.

“Don’t move,” he said. “Don’t come any closer.”

So he stayed there. It was all so surreal. That he was there, in Taeyong’s kitchen, holding his hand.
He slapped a hand over his mouth to muffle that dumb sound of disbelief and elation he just let
slip, and he kind of just sank to the ground in a squat, still holding Taeyong’s hand.

“Thank you,” he said, and flushed furiously the moment he said it. It didn’t help that it made
Taeyong laugh.

“I need you to do a few things for me, Jaehyun, will you do it? Three things,” Taeyong said.
“Anything, hyung,” he said, slowly getting to his feet. He shifted his grip on Taeyong’s hand,
interlinked their fingers, got as much out of it as he could before Taeyong decided to withdraw his
touch and never offer it again.

“If you’re going to continue working at Choi & Kim, quit your job at the convenience store.”

He blinked at him stupidly, trying to find the words he needed to say he couldn’t do that after
promising him he’d do anything.

“Hyung, I need the money,” he said.

“That’s the second thing. I’ll give you the money, just take it.”

“Hyung.”

“You need the money, and you need to sleep. Quit that job, and take the money.”

He swallowed hard, and he held on to Taeyong’s hand with both of his.

“You won’t talk to me anymore, then?”

“I will, but you need to do all of these things for me,” he said.

“What’s the third?”

“Make some friends, and go out on weekends. You’ll never be nineteen again. Don’t waste all your
free time on me.”

He wasn’t sure what to do. He just knew that he felt tingly all inside his stomach. He just felt very
warm, and he wanted Taeyong to know, so he wrapped his arms around Taeyong’s shoulders and
hugged him hard.
It was the strangest feeling. He was a man he thought was untouchable. For a year, from August of
the year before to July of that one, he hoped, and fantasized, and dreamt, and drunkenly
propositioned. To have him in his harms was dizzying. It was the most comforting thing, his soft
cotton shirt and his bony shoulder against his cheek, his hand patting Jaehyun’s back, his hair,
smelling like somebody else’s cigarette smoke and some expensive shampoo. His hair was coarser
than he thought it would be. He felt broader than he thought he would feel. Warmer, too.

More willing.

He did what Taeyong asked him to do. He had all this free time, now, in the evenings, on the
weekends, and he’d spend that time mostly at Kyungsoo’s place. Kyungsoo asked him if he didn’t
have to work anymore, if had paid off his loan. He told him he hadn’t, yet, but he had met an
angel.

It was madness, to him. He didn’t know what to do with himself for the first few days. Homework,
he realized, in a quiet room, with a friend. And then sleep. For hours. Wake up, groggy, walk to the
bus shelter, and go to Jongno.

He didn’t really believe that was his reality for all of that week. He’d fall asleep, only to wake up
with his heart pounding, scrambling to look for his phone and check the time and see if he had slept
through an alarm and missed work. He’d feel a pang of uncertainty when he spent more than
fifteen minutes doing nothing.

The first Saturday after he quit working at the convenience store, he left school in the afternoon,
and he had nowhere to be. He didn’t have to go jogging to his part time job. He didn’t have to
change into regular clothes in the back room and pull on his dumb neon vest. He had all these
hours that he could do whatever he wanted with.

It made him look up at the bright blue summer sky and laugh out loud.
He and Kyungsoo played games at the PC cafe until sundown, and then they walked down the
street market sampling cheap eomuk and tteokbokki. It felt surreal, but by Sunday night, it had
finally sunk in.

He called Taeyong that night, walking on the street outside Kyungsoo’s house.

“Byeonhosa-nim,” he said.

“Mm?”

“I’m going to bed,” he said. “I wanted to tell you about everything I did today.”

“What did you do today?” Taeyong asked.

“I um. I had fun, I guess,” he said, and laughed at how dumb that sounded. He shrugged, and
repeated it better. “I had fun today.”

“I’m glad,” Taeyong said. He could tell he was smiling. He didn’t know how, but he was sure of it.

The night was sweltering hot, and he was all sweaty and uncomfortable, and tiny little bugs kept
getting in his face. He couldn’t remember a more beautiful night.

“Thank you, hyung. Byeonhosa-nim.”

“Pick one thing,” Taeyong said, laughing lightly.

That sound made him smile. He was feeling too much. He was falling so fucking hard.

“Then hyung. Thank you. Goodnight.”

“Goodnight, Jaehyun.”
“Sleep well, hyung.”

“You, too.”

“Goodnight. Thank you.”

Taeyong laughed again.

“Go to sleep,” he said, and he didn’t know what to make of the tone of his voice. He sounded fond,
like a boyfriend, like a husband, and it made him flush from scalp to chest.

“Okay,” he said. “Goodni - I mean bye.”

Things changed so beautifully for him over the following month. He felt like he was coming back
from a terrible illness. His grades improved. His school attendance wasn’t at the minimum
requirement anymore. He spent time with Kyungsoo, fucking around at arcades like he used to
when he was sixteen.

His waking hours felt less like an unkindness, less like punishment, less like fighting for survival
and more like living. Waking up still meant reluctance to leave the comfort of a bed, but waking up
meant he had slept, and slept well, for hours at a stretch. He’d smile and yawn and smile some
more, and he’d think of the man who made that happen for him.

That changed too, beautifully. He had hour long phone calls with Taeyong on days he didn’t get to
see him. He sent him pictures of his scores, on games and on tests. He sent him pictures of his
ramyun and kimchi, of his kimbap and danmuji, of his convenience store coffee and everything he
did with all that time Taeyong bought for him.

On the last weekend of that month, he went to church and met his pastor after maybe a year of
having to work through Sunday mass. Father Kim fretted and fussed about how much weight he
had lost and how long it had been since he had seen Jaehyun’s father. They had a program for
alcoholics, he said. They’d convene every Friday night at the church, and he could bring his father
if that was something he might be interested in.

He said he didn’t know. The truth was that he didn’t want to ask him, because every time he
brought up his drinking, things just got worse. He’d get angry. He’d call him ungrateful. He’d use
his fists, and Jaehyun always lost that fight because that was a fight between a boy and a monster
and boys don’t win those fights. Boys love their fathers. Boys know that bruises and broken bones
hurt like hell and they loosen their fists and and soften their blows so they don’t bruise and break
bones, even if they are fighting monsters.

The next Saturday, Kyungsoo’s mother had family over and there was no room for another lanky
teenager in their house, so he went home for the night. He knew something was wrong going in.
He hadn’t been home in forever except those brief visits to make sure his father hadn’t choked on
his vomit and died in his sleep. He just knew in his bones that that night was going to be bad.

He didn’t know what happened for sure, but he guessed Father Kim bumped into his dad
somewhere on the street that week and told him he met his son at church last Sunday. Maybe even
told him about that program. Maybe he said Jaesuk, why don’t you come to church with Jaehyun
next Sunday? That must have been what started it.

It was nearing midnight when he got home, and he found his father waiting for him on the steps
outside their building. He was sitting there, propped up against the railing, limbs all askew, body
reeking of alcohol, and Jaehyun’s feet turned leaden on the third step.

He watched him, brow creased, eyes glinting.

“You don’t work at the convenience store anymore,” he said.

“I quit. 'Bout a month ago,” he said, his hands tightening on the straps of his backpack.

“But you paid the bastards last night.”

“I’ve been working somewhere else,” he said.

His father got to his feet and walked to him, staggering, stumbling, clumsy.

“Where?”

“How does it matter?”

“Matters,” he said. “Because you’re lying to me.”

He didn’t say anything. He just clenched his jaw and stood his ground. He didn’t think he had to
tell him shit.

“Where’s the money coming from, Jaehyun?” He said.

“Not from you,” Jaehyun said. “So what the fuck do you care?”

He struck him, then. The sound was sharp and reverberated in that narrow, quiet stairway. His
cheek throbbed and his eyes burned.
He had a sinking feeling then that it would all go to shit soon. His father, he had magic in his
hands. Everything he touched turned to shit.

He didn’t stay to hear what he had to say. He turned around and walked away, even with his
father’s voice echoing down that stairway, slurred shouts, answer me, where is the money coming
from, answer me you bastard, what are you doing, how much are you making -

The TV was on in Taeyong’s living room, a quiet drone in the background, flickering dim light
over Taeyong’s face. They sat on his couch, facing each other, so Taeyong could apply ointment to
the cut in his lip.

He was exquisitely gentle with it, his own lips pressed into a thin line, his eyes dark. Some disgust,
some anger, some form of disapproval written all over his face. Jaehyun wondered how much
violence a man like him could have witnessed in person. As a criminal defense lawyer, he had
probably seen pictures of people beaten black and blue, but he wondered how many times in his
quiet life he had seen a fresh cut, smelt the blood, and pressed his fingers to something that could
hurt.

He couldn’t look at him for too long, but he couldn’t look away, either. He let his gaze linger on
different parts of him, the crease in his brow, the swell of his lower lip, the folds of his shirt.

Taeyong tutted, and Jaehyun felt the touch against his lip change from the cool, focused press of
the Q tip he was using to apply the ointment, to the soft, warm caress of his fingertips.

“It hasn’t been that long since the last one healed up,” Taeyong said, but Jaehyun wasn’t really
paying attention.

Just that touch erased everything on his mind. He didn’t think of his drunkard father. He didn’t
worry about what would happen if he found out about Taeyong. He didn’t think too much about
anything that wasn’t Taeyong touching him.

It made his stomach plunge low. It made his heart beat a little faster and his breath turn shallower.
It made him brave enough to fix his gaze on Taeyong’s lips.

“Can I kiss you, hyung?” He asked.

Taeyong sucked in a sharp breath and withdrew his hand, but Jaehyun caught his sleeve.

“I’ll kick you out if you ask me that again,” he said.

There was nothing stern about his expression. Nothing severe. And he didn’t answer his question.

“Why did you take me in in the first place?” Jaehyun said.

“Because you asked me to.”

“Now, I’m asking if I can kiss you,” he said. “Are you saying no?”

He looked tortured for a second. Jaehyun didn’t know what that expression said, but in his mind it
meant he wanted to, and he was holding back.

“Shut up,” he said, after a long moment. “You need somewhere to sleep, and I’m giving you
somewhere to sleep. Keep talking and you’ll be sleeping on the streets tonight.”

But Jaehyun was stubborn. He always liked to poke his own bruises and pick at his hangnails and
scabs.

“When you look at me, hyung,” he asked quietly. “Do you feel anything? Something that isn’t
pity?”
“What?” Taeyong said.

“You bring me here when you feel sorry for me, right? When I have nowhere to go? So I was just
wondering. When you talk to me, when you see me, is there anything you feel aside from pity?”

“Stop talking and sleep,” he said.

He took Jaehyun’s face in a loose grip as he said it, cheeks pressed between his thumb and fingers,
his lips smushed against his palm. He squeezed his face once, then he shoved his face back before
releasing his grip. There was a playfulness to it, like he was trying his best to lift that heavy air that
had settled all around them.

He smiled, but he didn’t like this. He didn’t like that Taeyong didn’t answer any of his questions.
He didn’t like that he picked him up off the streets when he was at his worst, tidied him up,
patched him up, made him a little stronger and sent him back out like he was a lost kitten in a
thunderstorm. He pitied him, and he hated that.

He didn’t want his pity. He didn’t want to be patted on the back and tucked into bed like an upset
kid. He wanted his love. He wanted to be worth something, to bring something to Taeyong’s life
that would make him worth something.

That was the thought that took over him the following night. They were sitting side by side on a
bench on that balcony that Taeyong’s office shared with the one beside his, looking out at the
shimmering city sprawl.

“You didn’t sleep a wink last night. I heard you in there,” he said.

“I was busy worrying,” Taeyong said. “About you.”

 He raised his hand to Taeyong’s hair, to caress his cheek with his knuckles, to brush his hair away
from his face like Taeyong always did to him. He had never touched him like that, not even in the
privacy of Taeyong’s home, let alone in the office.

“Well, don’t do that tonight,” he said. “Just put your head on my shoulder and sleep.”

He didn’t know what possessed him to ask. Maybe he was sure he would say no. He had said no or
said nothing to everything else he asked him, after all. Taeyong didn’t answer him. He wouldn’t
look at him. He kept his gaze fixed somewhere on the Seoul skyline, and he shifted closer, leaned
into him.

The silence between them was awfully thick, his shoulder, his arm, his thigh, all pressed against
Jaehyun’s. All that rustling fabric sounded fucking electric. He laid his head on Jaehyun’s
shoulder, and Jaehyun’s world spun out of control.

He thought of nothing but his cologne, of the notion that his clothes would smell like Taeyong in a
few moments, of the scent of his shampoo and that barely-there smell of cigarettes. He couldn’t
help it. He turned his face against his hair, and brushed his lips against it. It wasn’t a kiss. Not to
anybody but him.

He hummed, because he couldn’t think of what else to do, a lullaby his mother used to sing for him
long ago.

가 (A baby more beautiful than the moon)

가 (A baby brighter than the stars )

가 (Hush hush our baby).

Chapter End Notes

Sooo Jaehyun went away somewhere for five years. Where did he go and why? I'd
love to hear your theories <333
Also, how are we feeling about Taeyong's character after this chapter?
 Chapter Five
Chapter Notes

See the end of the chapter for notes

Merrily, merrily, merrily, merrily,

Life is but a dream

Taeyong huffs a breath through trembling lips and grips his steering wheel hard. He’s looked
everywhere for him. He’s called him maybe a hundred times, but his phone is still stubbornly
switched off. The sun is setting over those cursed streets, and a certain helplessness takes over him.
His world tilts off its axis and he spins out. He doesn’t know where Jaehyun is. He doesn’t know if
he’s okay.

He was driving back to Seoul, some fifteen minutes out from the memorial park, when Jaehyun’s
call came. He knew the day would be difficult for him, but he didn’t anticipate that. He didn’t
expect him to call. He didn’t expect him to say half the things he said and he didn’t expect him to
break down the way he did.

He had never heard him cry like that, not even the day his father passed. Great gasping breaths in
between long, muffled sobs. He had to pull over, because his eyes went blurry and his mind went
blank, and his who body ached with the need to hold him. He heard the traffic zipping past
Jaehyun, over the phone. He heard the beeping of the crosswalk somewhere in the distance. He
asked him where he was, he asked him if he was safe, he begged him to talk to him, but Jaehyun
heard nothing. He just cried.

He let him be, then. He let him get it all out, and he listened. Maybe he should have kept talking,
because the moment he pulled himself together, he apologized and hung up. Taeyong couldn’t get
a word in. He called him back seconds after he hung up, but he couldn’t get through to him. He
turned back, drove back to Chungah but he couldn’t find him. He drove slowly through the
surrounding streets, drove past the bus shelter, looking for him and finding nothing.

He was still calm, then. Shaken, in a way, trembly, blank, hurt, but not helpless. Not panicking.

He drove back to Seoul. He had a couple of meetings he couldn’t cancel. He called Jaehyun in
every spare moment, from ten thirty to one fifteen, and found his phone switched off. That was
when the panic set in.
He cleared his afternoon, then. He got into his car and drove to Jaehyun’s place. He got out, this
time. He opened that gate and went up that narrow staircase and knocked on the door of that
rooftop room. Nam Kyungsoo opened it. He told him Jaehyun wasn’t back from the memorial
park. He gave him a list of places, and Taeyong has exhausted them all.

He’s checked everywhere, and he doesn’t know what to do, now.

He parks his car outside his house and waits. He’ll come back, he thinks. He always runs when his
life gets noisy. He always walks out when he gets hurt, but he always, always comes back.

Darkness falls on that narrow street. Silence falls over it. In the darkness and the silence, he goes
back to that phone call, over and over again.

You want nothing to do with me, you feel bad for me, you didn’t want to see me, I’ve lost you,
I’ve lost everything.

Stupid fucking kid, he thinks. Awful kid, he got all these stupid ideas in his head all on his own. He
never worked in a way Taeyong understood, and he still doesn’t. He thinks up a storm in silence,
and Taeyong never knows what’s going to come out of his mouth when he breaks that silence and
speaks.

He didn’t know that was what was going on in his head when he told Taeyong never to visit him
again. Across that glass divide, in his khaki coveralls, numbered on the chest, he sat there
unsmiling and said don’t come back here, hyung.

He thought it was because Jaehyun held him in some way responsible for what had happened. That
he blamed him for leaving him alone, covered in blood, and letting him make a decision in that
state of shock that changed the trajectory of his life. He thought maybe, maybe, he regretted that
decision, was resentful of the sacrifice he had made for his naive love.

Now he knows the truth. Now he knows that he turned away his pity. He turned him away because
he thought pity and indebtedness would keep Taeyong tied to him, and he set him free. Stupid
fucking kid, he’d been rejected, so often, by his own father, the man who was meant to protect him
and love him through hell and back. By Taeyong, too. Abandonment and neglect and pity are the
only things he understands now. He can’t see love if he isn’t told it’s love.
He looks at the digital clock on the dash. It’s six. Almost eight hours have passed since he heard
his voice, and he still doesn’t know where he is.

He didn’t sound entirely stable. He sounded devastated, and defeated, and he can’t shake the
feeling that if he doesn’t find him soon, he’ll never find him again. He never told him he loved
him, and he can’t shake that terrible, sinking feeling that he’ll never be able to.

He thought he was giving him everything he needed. He thought that money and attention and time
would fix everything for him. Like one of those weathered and mistreated bonsais he would pick
up from friends who had bought them on a whim, he would give carve an hour out of his day in
service of this weathered and mistreated kid. Money, and attention, and time. A firm hand.

He bloomed. He did. His test scores got better and better each week. He didn’t look quite so pallid
anymore. Those deep, deep shadows under his eyes faded slowly. He gained weight, too. It
rounded out his cheeks nicely, and it made his smile that much lovelier. It came readily as always,
especially for Taeyong, and it was intensely gratifying to watch him growing into who he was
meant to be.

Those few months, of talking late into the night, of hearing his ever deepening baritone sleepily
telling him things that were on his mind, asking Taeyong what was on his mind, they ate into
resolve to keep things platonic between them. He didn’t know it was happening while it was
happening. He thought himself a better person than that. A stronger person. But all it took was
Jaehyun taking all those brittle, jaded parts of him, huffing a gentle breath on them to blow away
the city’s dust and smoke, and telling him they were all so beautiful for him to go stumbling.

He wasn’t a normal school kid, not by any stretch of imagination. Normal kids, well adjusted kids,
they would worry about the Suneung at that age. Jaehyun, he’d worry about gangsters. Where
they’d save up for a gift for a friend or for themselves, he’d save up to pay off his father’s loans.
None of that was normal.

He’d worry about his father, too, sometimes. He hated him, there was no doubt about that, and he
resented him deeply, but sometimes, late at night, he’d speak of him with a sort of tenderness and a
sort of regret, like he wondered if things could ever be alright between them again. Like he hoped
it would.

He didn’t know how to tell him that that men who drink like that know only their own thirst. He
didn’t know how to tell him he’d bleed him dry to quench it.

What he should have known was that Jaehyun wasn’t some ailing old Juniper he brought back to
life. He was a boy with a crush, a sweet, stubborn boy who would see through all his empty threats,
look up at him, split lip and shining eyes, call him byeonhosa-nim, and ask if he could kiss him.

He remembers what he felt that day, like it was yesterday. The way his heart skipped a beat and his
stomach knotted. They way he toyed with saying yes, for just a second, the way he wondered if
he’d taste blood. Just for a second, he said to himself, he likes you, and you like him, and you know
you won’t be unkind to him, you know you’ll take care of him.

But he shook the thought away and he said he’d throw him out if he asked him again. It wasn’t the
hardest thing he had ever had to do, but it certainly wasn’t easy with him looking at Taeyong like
that. It hurt Jaehyun, too, because for the first time since they started their strange relationship, he
asked him what he felt about him.

He didn’t answer. He couldn’t, really. He couldn’t say out loud that he wanted to be all his firsts
and all his middles and all his lasts, because it was an ugly, selfish desire. It was that oil slick
iridescence on asphalt in the wake of a car crash. It was one spark or an ember away from going up
in flames. It was easy to see in himself. It was easy to understand. It was easy to keep his distance
from what he could see and understand.

Vanity, he told himself. He was not a good man, and what he felt for Jaehyun would do him no
good.

There was something else then, that didn’t catch his eye as readily, something he didn’t know was
moving in him. He didn’t realize that on most days, he wanted to drive to his place, put him and all
his things in his car, and move him into his house. That he wanted to take responsibility for him in
every way, to support him through his last year of high school and college and wait for him
through his military service, to hold his hand through his first job, and to see him grow and be the
man he could be.

That sort of feeling, it was quiet, and subdued, and easily mistaken for a thousand other things.
That sort of unconditional hope of seeing someone else happy, that was love. He didn’t see it, so he
didn’t hide from it.

The fact that he said no, and that Jaehyun took it without argument that night, gave Taeyong a sort
of courage. A belief that he could prevail over his own desire and do right by Jaehyun, that sense of
self-denial, it made him feel like he was good and honest.

He gave himself a few allowances, then. A few things that felt harmless, that he knew were
innocent.

He laid his head on Jaehyun’s shoulder. He let him sing to him. He let him press his lips to his hair
in a whisper of a kiss. He had heard him hum absentmindedly a few times over the phone, or
through glass walls and closed doors when he was doing something that bored him at work. He
knew he could hold a tune. But he had never heard him like that, right by his ear, his chest
rumbling with the sound, right up against him. His voice was lovely, resonant, far too soulful for
someone so young, for someone singing a lullaby.

It made him smile. It made him think of nothing but that sound and that rumble. He fell asleep that
night, like that. Jaehyun stayed unmoving there for the hour or so until he stirred and blinked
sleepily up at him. The way he smiled at his dumb groggy face seared itself into his mind. Sweet,
delicate, unsure. Just his lip corners lifting enough to make his dimples show. Just his gaze, soft
and bright, like moonlight through a film of cloud.

“Figured out what makes you sleep,” he mumbled, a little nervous, a little triumphant.

He didn’t know how to tell him it was the warmth of another human body pressed against his side
that did it. That it was his warmth. He would have climbed into his bed without a second thought if
he had said that. The way he was looking at him, it said ask me to get into bed with you and I will,
but Taeyong just smiled and left him to finish his work.
After that night, Jaehyun managed to convince Taeyong to take him out, and Taeyong allowed
himself to be convinced. He took him bowling, partly because he didn’t expect to meet any of his
colleagues there, and partly because Jaehyun told him he’d never been bowling.

It was a hustle, he realized, when bowled a strike, and then another, and another.

“Sure you’ve never done this before?” He asked him.

“I lied,” Jaehyun said, smiling, cheeky. “I wanted to impress you.”

Taeyong couldn’t find it in him to be angry with him. He just let him out-bowl him, and then
watched him preen with a sort of hummingbird thrum in his chest.

He took him out again, this time to get him a decent haircut, after learning that Jaehyun let his
friend, an apprentice barber, practice on his head.

Free haircuts, he said, shrugging.

He introduced him as his nephew to his hair stylist. It earned him a dirty look from Jaehyun, but he
couldn’t think of any other explanation that didn’t paint him as a cradle-snatcher. His ears burned,
and he squeezed Jaehyun’s shoulder in some form of apology. It didn’t seem to make a difference.
He sat sullenly through the entire twenty or so minutes of his haircut. It amused him, right up until
it didn’t.

When his hair was cut and styled with pomade, he turned to him, dark hair framing his handsome
face in a way that suited him perfectly, and said, “How does it look? Samchon?”

He almost choked when he heard it.

“Looks great,” he mumbled, ears still burning.

He remained a cheeky bastard, from that moment on. What are we doing for lunch, Samchon? Can
we go watch a movie, Samchon? Samchon this, samchon that, sitting beside him in his car, until
Taeyong’s hands tightened on the steering wheel.

“Will you stop that?” He said.

“Why? Am I not your nephew? Why can’t I call you my uncle?” Jaehyun said, evenly, cheekily.

“Are you angry with me?” Taeyong asked, somewhat annoyed, somewhat sheepish about the
whole thing.

Jaehyun seemed to falter, then, like he had never been asked that question in earnest. It seemed like
he didn’t know what the right answer was. It made Taeyong soften, and look at him, and ask him
again to make sure he knew he could say yes.

“Yes,” Jaehyun said, hesitantly.

“I’m sorry,” he said. “I won’t say that again.”

His smile could have lit up Namsan tower, the stupid kid, all crinkled eyes and dimpled cheeks and
booming laugh. It made him laugh, too.

That day was pizza and wine. Well, wine for him, cola for Jaehyun. He didn’t really like the taste
of alcohol.

He took him shopping for a pair of shoes, some time in October, because he had worn holes over
the big toes of his. He meant to stop there, but he needed a winter jacket, too. It was getting colder,
and all this kid had was a cheap parka from god knows when. He bought him a decent pair of
pants, two shirts to go with the pants. A sweater, to layer up. He had just taken a t shirt off the rack
when Jaehyun took it out of his hands and put it back in its place.
“I don’t need anything more,” he said.

“What about boots? For when it snows?”

“I don’t need it,” he said. “Mine work just fine.”

He hovered around him anxiously while the cashier scanned all his things, muttered a small holy
shit when the total on the till crossed five hundred thousand won. He shot him a look, then, to shut
him up. A good winter jacket by itself would cost that much.

“Are you sure?” Jaehyun hissed.

“Do I look unsure?”

“I don’t know, your face always looks the same!”

“I’m sure, now shut up,” he said.

Things were fine when he took him to that Japanese restaurant, perfectly lovely at that steakhouse.
He never touched him. He never got too close, but he listened to him. He liked listening to him.
Jaehyun’s stories amused him, and his voice and his laugh had become his favorite sounds in his
day.

Everything changed the day he finally caved and took him to that bar Jaehyun had been begging to
be taken to.

He looked good, and Taeyong could tell he felt good. His new sweater fit him well, and his pants
made his legs look like they went on forever. That day, he carried himself with the confidence of
an attractive man who knows he’s attractive.
He caught Taeyong’s eyes on him too many times to ignore.

Jaehyun was drinking, too. Flushed, a little handsy. Taeyong tried his best to keep out of his reach,
but when they moved to the pool table, he was done for. It seemed Jaehyun played a lot of pool
when he was younger, too, with older kids in the upstairs rooms of seedy arcades.

“Perks of growing up wild,” he said, smiling, leaning over the edge rail, cue resting between index
and thumb of one lovely hand. He sank three solids in a row.

“You’re a god damn hustler,” Taeyong said, laughing. “Did you go to school at all or just hustle
people all day?”

It made Jaehyun laugh and miss his next shot.

He took his turn when Jaehyun broke his streak. He positioned himself to shoot his shot, but his
whole body froze up on him. He couldn’t focus, then, because he felt the air move around Jaehyun
when he came to stand behind him. It was far too thick for him be able to breathe properly. The
lightest brush of Jaehyun’s palm against his shoulder, then, his waist, the small of his back. He
stiffened, and held his breath.

Jaehyun lingered there, and his other hand loosened Taeyong’s grip on the cue. He took the shot
for him. A clatter. His shallow, unsteady breath, Jaehyun’s deep, forced calm. He straightened up,
cue in hand. Jaehyun’s hands, both, on his hips now.

“You sank mine,” he said, trying to shift the focus away from whatever the fuck was happening
between them.

“I know,” Jaehyun said. Close to the shell of his ear.

It made goosebumps rise down his neck and arms. He didn’t know what Jaehyun wanted. He
didn’t know where he meant to take this. He tucked his chin over Taeyong’s shoulder, wrapped his
arms, slow and hesitant, around him.

His heart almost hammered out his chest. His throat was too tight to breathe through.
“Jaehyun,” Taeyong warned.

“Count to ten,” he said. “I’ll let go.”

Things got out of his control sometime in November. The kid was studying like crazy for the
Suneung. He couldn’t really talk much, between his job and study sessions at his school. Taeyong
hadn’t realized just how much time in his day was filled by Jaehyun until it was left empty.

That night, he had gone out with Jungwon. It wasn’t anything much, just friends getting drinks and
catching up. He was hammered when he got home that night, because Jungwon never knew how
much was too much. He let himself into his apartment, and as he was about to take his shoes off in
the entryway, he stopped dead.

Jaehyun’s school shoes, lined up neatly next to his house slippers. Baffled, he walked into his
apartment, jacket slung over the crook of his arm, shoes still on. He saw him standing there in his
living room like he had just shot up off the sofa. Nervous, somewhat distressed, chewing on his lip
and looking at him, past him, back at him.

He had made the mistake of telling Jaehyun where he was going and with whom. He should have
expected he’d be jealous. He should have known, just from his curt reply, if not for that day long
ago when he stood in his office and told him what he thought of Jungwon.

“What are you doing here?” He said, superfluous, because he knew the answer.

“I wanted me to be the last person you saw before you went to bed,” he said.

He didn’t want to be caught smiling at that, but he was caught.

“You wanted to make sure I didn’t go home with him?” He said. “Make sure I didn’t bring him
home?”

He wouldn’t have said it if he weren’t so drunk. He wouldn’t have done half the things he did that
night if he weren’t so drunk.

“Maybe,” Jaehyun mumbled.

Taeyong didn’t say anything to that. He just threw his jacket over the arm of the sofa and sank
down on it. He leaned down, attempted to untie his shoelaces, but they were something of a tangle,
and his clumsy fingers weren’t having it.

He didn’t expect Jaehyun to laugh and kneel down at his feet, to undo his laces for him and slip his
shoes off his feet. He thought he’d stand, then. He thought that would be that, but he stayed where
he was.

His dumb, drunken gaze shifted, from his hands tangling and untangling restlessly in his lap, to his
school uniform tie hanging loose around his neck. His teeth worrying his lip. His dark eyed gaze.
He should have expected it.

His hands were on Taeyong’s thighs before he knew what was happening. He leaned up on his
knees, straightened his spine, his lids fluttered and dipped and he pressed his lips to Taeyong’s.
Somewhere along the way, Taeyong’s hands flew to cup his cheeks. Somewhere along the way he
told him he wanted it, too.

He kissed him gentle and deep. His lips felt lovely, plump, smooth, warm. It made his stomach
plunge. It made a flutter of something burst into life inside his chest. He was a little hesitant, his
inexperience showing in the fact that he hadn’t taken a single breath since they came together.

Taeyong didn’t think. He just slid his hand to the back of Jaehyun’s neck and pulled him in closer.
Slipped his hand into his soft, thick hair, palm resting against the curve of his skull, he kissed him
senseless. It wasn’t enough for Jaehyun. His clutched at Taeyong’s shoulders. He climbed into his
lap and straddled him, and God, the way he fit against him was something else.

He kissed him deeper, resting delicate fingertips against his jaw, entirely incongruent with the way
he kissed. He ground down on him, too. He rolled his hips against Taeyong’s arousal, and that
drove him mad.
Taeyong’s hands trailed down his back and grabbed fistfuls of his ass before he knew what he was
doing. He couldn’t breathe. He couldn’t make sense of anything. He held him close and laid him
down on his back and the world slipped away. There was only Jaehyun. Only his shuddering breath
and his kisses. His hard length pressed against his thigh. His legs wrapping around Taeyong’s waist
and his back arching when he pressed his hips down on him. His quiet moan, swallowed up in
more kisses.

He wanted him so badly in that moment, and had wanted him so badly for so long. It was difficult
to think why he hadn’t acted on it when it felt like that to kiss him. He slipped his hand under his
shirt, smooth, burning skin under his palm, and Jaehyun keened again.

“Hyung,” he said quietly, right up against his mouth. “Hyung, do it, please.”

It made a pang of arousal ripple through his body, and then a pang of deep, deep discomfort.

He stopped kissing him. Haltingly, reluctantly, he stopped kissing him.

“No,” Jaehyun breathed. “No, please, don’t stop. Hyung. Hyung, don’t stop.”

But he pulled away, pushed himself up onto his hands and looked down at him, his pleading eyes,
his swollen mouth, his burning flush, his heaving chest.

“Fuck,” he breathed.

“I want you to do it,” Jaehyun said quietly, clutching at his shoulders again. “I’m ready, I swear.”

“No, we can’t - shit. M’sorry,” he said. “I’m really sorry -

He grabbed his wrists and drew them away from him, and sat back, clumsy and dizzy and
disorient, on his knees. Jaehyun followed, slowly. He sat up. He fixed his shirt. He ran his hand
through his hair and pushed it off his face.
Taeyong couldn’t really look at him, and couldn’t stand to be so close to him after what he had just
done. He got to his feet, scrubbed his hands over his face like he meant to erase everything that had
just happened.

“You don’t like me, do you?” Jaehyun mumbled.

He looked at him, then, his lanky frame sitting small on his sofa, staring at his own socked feet
curling into his carpet, the picture of rejection.

“I don’t feel right about this,” he said.

“When will you feel right about it?” Jaehyun asked. “I’ll wait. I’ll - stick to dinner and holding
hands and whatever until you feel alright about fucking me -

“Jesus, Jaehyun -

“What?” He said, finally looking up at him.

“I don’t want you to wait,” he said. “I want. I want you to date someone your own age.”

He hated that look of utter betrayal that spread over his face, darkening eyes, lips parting ever so
slightly. He should have expected it. The question written all over it was fair, and obvious. What
the fuck have we been doing all this time, then? Where the fuck was it going?

“I can’t,” Jaehyun said. “I love you.”

It felt like a blow to the chest. He actually stepped back, actually held his hands up as if to say
wait, I wasn’t ready, and then he did what he always did when he was too shocked to speak. He
laughed, incredulous.

It upset him. He could see it, and it made his laughter catch in his throat and his stomach lurch.
Jaehyun’s eyes welled with tears, and he looked down and curled his toes hard into the carpet.
“I really meant it,” he mumbled. “I really feel that way about you.”

He softened, immediately. He lowered his stupidly defensive hands. He stood there like a fool for a
second.

“I’m sorry,” he said. “It just took me by surprise.”

“Why was it a surprise?”

“Jaehyun -

“What do you feel?” He asked. “About me. Do you have any feelings for me at all?”

He couldn’t say it out loud. None of those things he felt for him, not the want, not the
protectiveness, not that all consuming need to see him happy above all else. The silence seemed to
whisper its own answer in Jaehyun’s ear, because his eyes darkened. He swallowed. He lowered
his gaze again.

“Fuck,” Jaehyun said. “Fuck, I feel stupid.”

He got to his feet, picked his book bag up from where it sat slouching on the floor, and slung it
over his shoulder. He walked past him to the entryway. He didn’t spare him another glance, just
shoved his feet into his shoes and grabbed his jacket off the hook.

“Where are you going?” Taeyong asked.

“Home, hyung.”

“Let me call you a cab -

“I’ll be fine. I’m a big boy,” he said.

“Jaehyun!” He called out, but the door shut behind him, and Taeyong was left standing alone in his
apartment.

He went after him. To this day, he doesn’t know if that was the right thing or the wrong thing for
him to have done.

Five minutes after he left, in the crushing silence of his apartment, he realized how much he had
hurt the kid. It was entirely his fault, and it was entirely avoidable. He allowed all these things that
read like dates, like love, and then he went and told him he wanted him to date other people.

He laughed, he thought, utterly mortified. He laughed when he said he loved him.

He couldn’t let him go like that. He couldn’t let him walk out into the night with nowhere to go,
and have the one man who said he’d protect him be the one to hurt him.

He went after him, and he found him standing on his street corner, scrubbing at his face with the
back of one hand and desperately trying to hail a taxi with another.

Jaehyun saw him walking towards him out of the corner of his eye. He saw the recognition in his
face in that split second before he turned away. He walked up to him anyway.

“Jaehyun,” he said. “Come inside.”

“The fuck I will,” Jaehyun said. Fresh tears welled up in his eyes and he scrubbed them away
angrily.

“Jesus, Jaehyun, don’t cry, please,” he said.

“I’m not - fucking shit, you know I’m not like this, I just - it just happens around you,” Jaehyun
said. “I just want to know one thing, hyung. Do you like me or not?”

“Look,” Taeyong said, but Jaehyun cut him off before he could even begin his justification for that
kiss.

“It’s not a difficult question, hyung,” he said. “What is it? Are you still feeling guilty about the
money? I’ll give all the stuff back, I don’t need it, I haven’t even worn -

“Stop,” Taeyong said. “It’s not that.”

“Then it’s that you don’t like me, isn’t it?” He said. “Am I not - I can learn. I can be better.”

A taxi slowed down on the near empty street, but Taeyong waved it away. It sped up again, and
Jaehyun threw up his hands like he was asking him what the fuck that was. He didn’t know. He
just looked at his red nose and his flushed cheeks and his kitten eyes and he knew he couldn’t let
him walk away hurt.

“It’s that you’re young,” he said. “You’re just a kid, and I don’t want you wasting your - your
youth, and all these new experiences on me. Is that so terrible?”

“Yeah,” Jaehyun said.

“Yeah?”

“Well, yeah, because - because it’s not a waste to me.”

“I know it feels like that now -

“Don’t even -
“Do you trust me?” He said, somewhat forcefully.

It silenced him for a second. He wasn’t so combative when he spoke next, but he sounded very
suspicious of where he was going with that.

“Yeah,” he said. “Yeah, I trust you.”

“Then listen to me. This relationship won’t do you any good. Us, together, it’ll only hurt you.”

“How do you know that?” He said, shoving his hands in his pockets, squaring his shoulders,
looking him right in the eye.

“I know because I’m older,” he said. “If you trust me to always do the right thing for you, just
listen to me on this.”

He saw his jaw ticking. He saw the tension in his shoulders rising, and for a second he wondered if
the kid was angry enough to hit him. But it dissipated slowly. Something kind of defeated took its
place.

“Okay,” he said, finally. “Okay. But you don’t get to tell me not to wait.”

“How long will you wait?” He asked him, before he could bite it back.

“Until you feel alright about us,” he said.

“Finish college,” he said. “And then we’ll talk about it.”

“Four more years?” Jaehyun said, scuffing his shoe against the pavement.

“Mm.”
“I can do that. I can do four years.”

The image made him smile. It made that hummingbird thrum come alive once again. It made him,
most ironically, want to take a picture of him, just like that.

“Come inside, now. It’s cold,” he said.

But Jaehyun looked at him like there was something else he wanted to say. Kitten eyes and honey
sweet smile playing lightly on his lips. It was welcome, after those humiliated tears.

“What?” Taeyong said.

“Can you kiss me? One last time.”

He smiled, too. He thought about saying no, but he looked around, and the street was empty, just
pretty landscaping and empty sidewalks. The night sky was pretty. Jaehyun’s smile was so, so
welcome.

He curled his fists into his jacket collar, and he pulled him closer, until his smile split into a quiet
laugh, until his forehead was pressed to his. Until the tips of their noses were just brushing. Their
foggy breaths mingling.

“Make it good, hyung, it has to last me four years,” he said, sweet and nervous, and Taeyong
laughed.

“Brat,” he mumbled, but he took him by the cheeks and kissed him sweet and long.
 It came like it was retribution for putting his hands on that boy. A week had gone by since their
kiss, and things had gone back to some version of the way they were before. They’d talk, they’d
laugh, Jaehyun would badger him to take him here and there, but they both knew nothing like that
night’s events would ever happen again. Still, he supposed what did happen warranted some sort of
punishment.

Taeyong was sitting at his desk, opening a letter that was delivered to him by pedal. A manila
envelope, with no return address, nothing on it except his name. He was so fucking lucky that Min,
the clerk, wasn’t at the desk across from his when he opened it, because the contents spilled out all
over his desk.

Photographs. He didn’t know what the hell it was for a second, until it clicked in his head that he
was looking at pictures of his car. Of Jaehyun opening the front passenger door and getting in. Of
Jaehyun leaving his apartment early in the morning, in his school uniform. Of him holding Jaehyun
that night on the street outside his place, so tenderly, and so close. Kissing him.

It felt like the floor caved from under his feet. An unmistakable sense of free-falling, grappling for
purchase and finding nothing. There was nothing else. No note, no demands, just pictures of what
looked nothing like the relationship between him and Jaehyun. He shoved the pictures back into
the envelope and put them in a locked drawer in his desk, under a few heavy folders.

He didn’t know how long he sat there, elbows on his table, fingers interlinked like he was praying,
trying to make sense of that sinking feeling in his stomach.

It was betrayal. He couldn’t help but wonder if those pretty kitten eyes and that honey sweet smile,
if everything he said about being in love with him, if all of it was just some bullshit leading up to
that moment.

He hadn’t known the depth of what he felt for the kid until then. Betrayal wouldn’t bore bone deep
without a love that ran bone deep, too.

Chapter End Notes

I am SAWRY about this chapter TTTT

Hope you're enjoying the ride so far! You'll find out what Jaehyun did in the next
chapter <333
 Chapter Six
Chapter Notes

See the end of the chapter for notes

When the bough breaks, the cradle will fall

Jaehyun remembers the month leading up to the Suneung as vague snapshots. Endless hours at his
desk at school, on a new seat cushion courtesy of Taeyong to make his butt hurt less. It still hurt,
and so did his back. He wasn’t used to that kind of inactivity.

He had stopped covering for his dad at Choi & Kim, by then. He told him it would just be this
month, and that he really needed the time to focus on something that would change their futures.
He yelled. He threw things. Jaehyun left. He had a place to go, those days. Not like now, not like
today.

He kept all his clothes at Kyungsoo’s place, in two trash bags. Dirty clothes in one, clean clothes in
the other, and one pair each of clean underwear and socks in his book bag because he never knew
where he’d be sleeping.

He used to text Taeyong to ask if he could go to his place sometime in the last hour of self study,
three or four times a week. Some days he’d say he couldn’t, because he had other commitments,
but he almost always said yes. He’d pick him up, too, on the next street over, so his classmates
wouldn’t see and ask questions.

Those nights felt kind of mad, to him. That plush fucking sofa. His books and notes spread out on
Taeyong’s coffee table. That soft floor cushion under his bony ass. And snacks, brought to him
quietly and unobtrusively and left on a corner of the coffee table. Fruit or sandwiches or energy
bars, and a cup of coffee that he hated at first. He was used to instant, not that fancy coffee
machine stuff. He drank it anyway, and gratefully at that.

Some nights, when he was visibly frustrated with his progress, Taeyong would pet his hair, and
only once, when he was exhausted beyond belief, he pressed a kiss to the top of his head.

The mocks went well. He certainly wouldn’t be going to the SKY universities, but he was sure
he’d get in somewhere in the country. Taeyong beamed, promised to help him out with
applications, with student loans, with anything he needed.
He thought he was witnessing his own rebirth, at the time. He couldn’t believe that was his life.
He’d have moments, where he’d feel this incredible surge of disbelief, and joy, and gratitude, and
he’d have to sit down for a bit. Slap himself out of it.

In those final days before the test, something changed. He didn’t know what it was but he could see
there was something on Taeyong’s mind that he wasn’t telling him. It would have driven Jaehyun
mad trying to figure it out if it weren’t for the fact that he had his entire future hanging on that one
exam.

The day of the test, Taeyong dropped him off at his testing center. The hours went by glacier slow.
He came out, drained, relieved, with his arm around Kyungsoo, hooting and howling that it was
over. He was looking down at his phone, about to text Taeyong telling him all about how it went.
He was certain he’d still be at work and he didn’t want to bother him with a call. But he heard his
name being called, and he recognized it as Taeyong’s voice, and it made him jerk his head up
sharply.

He scanned the crowd, and he saw him standing there, waving him over, flowers in hand. He
smiled so big, his cheeks hurt, then.

“Who’s that?” Kyungsoo said.

“My angel,” Jaehyun told him, and cringed the moment the words left his mouth. Kyungsoo, too,
groaned and slapped the side of his head.

He went up to him, all smiles and relief and disbelief, took the flowers and a half hug, introduced
Kyungsoo to him, and then told him all about the test. Kyungsoo left to find his mom, and
Taeyong handed him his credit card.

“Go have fun, tonight,” he said. “Eat and drink well. Take Kyungsoo. You both deserve it.”

He took his card with both hands. The newness of that experience made him dizzy. That hadn’t
happened since he was eight years old, maybe, his father taking a few notes out of his wallet and
sending him out to go buy as much candy as he wanted. It wasn’t exactly a pleasant memory. He
knew where that money had come from. For a second he wondered if this was the same thing, and
he had to shake the thought out of his head.
It did strike him as strange, though, that he was standing there in plain view and talking to him. He
used to be somewhat discreet about it. He wondered what had changed, but he thought maybe the
end of the Suneung changed something about their dynamic. He was basically done with high
school. Maybe that was it, he thought. That he was a little bit less of a high school kid.

The next morning, he understood what had changed. He woke up at around six in the morning,
thirsty, with a throbbing head. He sat up on the sofa with his head in his hands and a big dumb grin
on his face for a few minutes.

He had slept at Taeyong’s place, he realized. The memory was choppy and hazy, his arm draped
over Taeyong’s shoulder, staggering through the lobby, swaying in the elevator, giggling when
Taeyong dropped his dead weight on this sofa with a sigh. That lovestruck smile on Jaehyun’s face
when he looked up at Taeyong.

I can’t believe this is my life, hyung, he had said. Thank you. I love you. Thank you.

He got to his feet and folded his bedding groggily. His stomach was still turning, and his head still
spun if he moved too quickly, but he was smiling. He really couldn’t believe it. The exam was
over, and he was sure he did fairly well, and it was all thanks to Taeyong.

He wanted to do something for him, but the only things he could offer him - a kiss, a confession of
love, his virginity - Taeyong wasn’t willing to take. He decided he’d make him breakfast instead.
Toast, runny scrambled eggs, and coffee.

He cooked quietly, and he managed to make it just fine, but the coffee machine took two wasted
spoonfuls of ground coffee to figure out. He worked it out, though. He was going to knock on
Taeyong’s bedroom door, then, to invite him out for his little breakfast, but Taeyong’s door opened
like clockwork.

“Something smells good,” he said, coming around to the table where Jaehyun had laid everything
out lovingly.

Jaehyun stuck his hand out like he was presenting some kind of four course meal and not cold
eggs.

“For you,” he said.

Taeyong smiled and sat down at the table, took the cup of coffee Jaehyun offered him and sipped
on it. His eyebrows went up a tiny bit and came back down. There was something strange about
the way he was acting. That same forced calm. That inexplicable distance.

“Strong,” he said.

“Is that bad?” Jaehyun asked, deflating a little.

“No, I need it today,” he said, setting his cup back down. “Sit down, I wanted to talk to you about
something.”

That was when he paid attention to the envelopes Taeyong had laid on the table.

He sat down, a little awkwardly. He was starting to get the feeling that he had done something
wrong. He sat there picking at the hangnails around his thumb, wondering what that distance was,
what that undercurrent was. Taeyong slid one envelope over to him.

“What’s that?” He asked.

“Open it,” he said.

He did. It was a bit clumsy. His hands were a little shaky the entire time. He pulled out a thin stack
of photographs. They were upside down, and he tilted his head while he was turning them around
and halfway through the action, he recognized what he was looking at.

His nausea came barreling back and his stomach lurched. He had to swallow very hard to keep
from retching at the table. His hands were visibly shaking, then, and he had to put the pictures
down.

“That was delivered to my office last week,” Taeyong said quietly.

He opened the other envelope for him, a kindness for his shaking hands, and withdrew a note from
inside. He laid that on the table for him.

“And this came two days ago,” he said.

50 million won to locker 147A at Yongsan station by the end of the week or these pictures will be
sent to all the partners, it read.

“I had a friend look into who had rented out the locker,” Taeyong continued.

Jaehyun didn’t have to hear him say it to know what the answer would be. It was a dumb,
amateurish plan. It was awful. It turned everything to shit.

“It’s your father,” Taeyong said.

He sat wordless and trembling for a long moment. He could tell Taeyong wanted to ask him
something else. He could tell what it was, too. He waited for him to ask it, but he never did.

“Just ask me,” he said. “If I knew about this. If I did this.”

“You didn’t,” Taeyong said, lowering his gaze, dismissive.

He thought he saw a little seed of doubt in that. It was fair. It was warranted, but he didn’t know
why that made him angry. He wasn’t angry with him, really. He was angry with himself for
believing this could be his life. It was a violent reminder that this was the filth he came from. He
was ashamed of his roots. He was ashamed that he had his father’s name.

“You know I’m a good liar when I want to be,” he said, needling him, without cause. Maybe just to
force him to admit he didn’t trust him.“You know I’m a god damn hustler.”

Taeyong was too taken aback to speak for a second. He saw that flicker of doubt crossing his face
like a shadow, and that made him angrier.

He didn’t trust him after all, he thought.

It didn’t matter that Jaehyun was the one who put that doubt there. He didn’t know why he was
looking for it in the first place. Poking at his own bruises, he supposed.

“Did you know about this?” Taeyong asked.

“Would you believe me if I said no?” He said, defiant, and he just didn’t know why.

“Yeah,” Taeyong said, easily, firmly. He looked him in the eye when he said that, like he really
meant it.

That was all it took. That was all he was looking for, for him to choose to have faith in him. He
shed his defiance then, and his anger, and underneath it there was shame, and hurt, and fear.

“I didn’t know,” he said, foolishly.

“Okay. That’s good enough for me,” Taeyong said.

They sat in silence fraught with uncertainty, unable to look at each other, waiting for the other to
say something. The silence was unkind to Jaehyun’s nerves, and he picked hard at a hangnail,
pulled deep into the delicate skin around his nail. It bled, and he pressed down on it viciously. That
pain that he felt then, he could pin it all to that bleeding thumb. He couldn’t give it form before
that. It was buzzing all about his head and crawling all over his skin, unlocalized, until his thumb
bled and it hurt, and it made him cry.

“I’m so fucking sorry,” he said. “I’m so fucking. So fucking ashamed of him.”

Taeyong looked unsure what to do, until he reached over, brushed his hair away from his forehead,
caught his dumb tears on his knuckles the way he had done every single time before.

“I’ll talk to him, hyung,” he said. “I’ll make him stop.”

“I don’t need you to do that,” Taeyong said kindly. “I’m not sending you into this. I can handle it, I
will handle it. You just go to school. Just focus on school and think about your college applications
and that’s enough. Don’t do anything more.”

“What are you going to do, hyung?”

“I’ll figure it out.”

Jaehyun thought it would shake their newfound stability, but it just strengthened them.

It wouldn’t make a difference, Taeyong said. The damage was done. The photographs painted an
unambiguous picture of what was going on between them and no amount of cutting contact after
the fact would change how it all panned out.

That was when he understood why he stood with all the parents waiting for their kids after the
Suneung. In plain view, in broad daylight. He was saying he had nothing to hide. He was saying to
his blackmailer that he was not ashamed of what he was doing, and that he was not afraid of the
consequences if their relationship was found out.

He wanted to believe that he stood by that statement, that it wasn’t just some show he had put on to
tell his father he had no leverage over him.
He realized, too, how much kindness Taeyong had given him. He kept quiet about it all in those
days leading up to Jaehyun’s test. He let him have the day, the night, of celebration.

He trusted him, he said to himself. Or he chose to trust him, despite that little flicker of doubt.

That was enough for him.

There were a few days of torment over what they would do about it. What his father was doing was
a felony offense. A year in jail, if Taeyong felt like it. All that saved him was that he couldn’t really
report him. The police, the prosecution, those were the circles he worked in. If it looked to them
like he was fucking a high school kid, his career was over.

That was Taeyong’s answer. He wouldn’t pay, but if Jaehyun’s father took him down, if he leaked
those pictures to his colleagues, then he would have expended the only leverage he had. There
would be nothing stopping Taeyong, then, from raining the full force of the prosecution and the
police down on him over each of his missteps over the past five years. Between him and his
parents, he had the connections to make it happen. Blackmail - one year in jail. Illegal gambling -
three. Assault - five.

He’d be in detention until the prosecution had built their case, and he’d be in jail for the next ten
years, and then he’d get out with nothing. And Taeyong would be living life just fine, his fall
cushioned by his parents’ money.

Taeyong went alone to see his father. He laid all of that down in front of him, and told him to be
smart and take what he was offering and stay quiet.

His father took the offer. Taeyong paid off his debts, even the new ones he had incurred since
Jaehyun stopped giving him money, and promised him an allowance until he found a job. He came
back triumphant.
Jaehyun couldn’t look him in the eye when he told him all of that, let alone celebrate. He couldn’t
relax, either.

He was constantly on edge in the days that followed. He’d go to school, he’d go to Kyungsoo’s,
and Taeyong would pick him up sometimes and take him out. He couldn’t relax. He was always
looking over his shoulder, like he felt his father’s rancid breath on the back of his neck. Always,
even at Taeyong’s house.

He hated him for it. It was the one place he had found that he felt nothing bad could happen, but
his old life came crawling into that apartment, too.

That evening, Taeyong was drinking hot chocolate on his apartment balcony. He had made him
some, too, but it had about one spoonful of sugar less than he would have liked. Taeyong loved
sweet things, but he told him, ever since he turned thirty, he’d been paranoid about old man things
like diabetes, clogged arteries, things like that, and he’d started eating healthy. His fridge had the
yogurt version of his favorite desserts. His pantry had oats and millets and things that weren’t
meant for human consumption. He drank his hot chocolate almost bitter.

It was a sweet gesture. He knew it was because Taeyong could tell he wasn’t feeling good. Like
clockwork, Taeyong spoke.

“What are you thinking about? You’ve got that look on your face. That face you make right before
you say something stupid.”

Jaehyun laughed, but Taeyong kept him pinned with his gaze.

“I think he’s going to do something,” he said. “He’s not going to take this.”

“Your father?”
He nodded.

“He did take it,” Taeyong said.

“You don’t know him like I do,” he told Taeyong. “It’s - when he’s cornered. When he doesn’t
have a lot of options, hyung, he. He takes it out on me. He’ll hurt me, somehow. Or he’ll hurt you.
To hurt me. He -

Taeyong got this faraway look in his eye for a second. Like he was thinking about things Jaehyun
didn’t understand. He put his cup down, and then he took Jaehyun’s cup out of his hands and set
that down, too.

He held his hands then. One was warm from the cup, one freezing cold. Jaehyun kept his eyes on
their joined hands because he didn’t think he could look at Taeyong.

“Breathe,” he said. “Everything’s okay. We’re okay.”

“Just promise me you’ll be careful?”

“I will. I promise,” Taeyong said sweetly.

“And hyung?”

“Mm?”

“Thank you,” he said. “For meeting my father. For fixing that. And I’m sorry. I’ll go to college and
do all the things you want me to do and I’ll pay you back. Everything he took.”

He smiled, and he pet his hair, sseudam-sseudam, like his mum would do. Like he was telling him
to stop worrying his great dumb head.

“Go wash up and go to sleep,” Taeyong said.

Jaehyun exhaled long and quivering, and he looked over his shoulder. Inside the sliding glass doors
of the balcony, he saw that sofa and that fat comforter, and all his books all over that coffee table.
A dim reflection, too, of him and Taeyong, standing together. Of all that sky and all of Seoul city
glittering.

“It doesn’t feel like - like my life,” he said. “It’s so quiet.”

“It is, Jaehyun,” Taeyong said. “Get used to it.”

Jaehyun would have given anything to be wrong about his father that time, but he was right. It
wasn’t over. The last week of December was when his father came crawling back.

He found Jaehyun outside his school, and asked to talk to him for five minutes. Jaehyun agreed,
because he was still his father, after all. Maybe that sentiment should have been dead and gone by
then, but in those days, he still used to have moments of fondness and familial feelings towards his
father.

He told him he had lost the money that Taeyong had given him toward his loans. He said he
needed more or he’d be in trouble.

“Ask him,” his father said. “It’s not a lot of money for him, Jaehyun, you know his parents are
rich. He’ll do it if you ask him.”

“I can’t, please,” Jaehyun said.

His father went quiet for a bit, teary-eyed with frustration and desperation. Jaehyun felt awful. Like
a bad son. Like he was letting him down. His father voiced those very thoughts, put them into
words that ate into those tender feelings.
He reached over and fixed the collar of that down jacket that Taeyong had bought for him. His
fingernails, always dirty, because he was always too drunk to give a shit about personal hygiene,
looked wrong against that expensive thing.

“You’re living like this and you’ve left me to rot in that shithole, Jaehyun,” he said. “I raised you. I
worked till my hands bled so you could be fed and clothed.”

That made his fist curl up and his body go tense, but he wasn’t about to have a fistfight with his
father right outside his fucking school.

“You had me,” he said bitterly. “You had a son and it was your fucking job to keep me fed and
clothed, and you didn’t even do that right. And when you did, you weren’t doing anybody a favor.”

“I’ve slipped up. I’ve fucked up, I’m - I’m not well. I’m trying to stop drinking so much. But what
am I even asking for, Jaehyun?” He said. “How much money am I asking for? Why can’t you do
this for your father?”

Jaehyun walked out on him that day, but he’d always come back to his school. He started jumping
the back wall and walking down those alleys to avoid him, and then the phone calls started. Ten
times a day, fifteen. Forty missed calls in a row. He tried blocking him, but he’d call from different
numbers.

He’d text him, begging sometimes, cursing him out sometimes. It would hurt him, but he would
read all of them. He didn’t tell Taeyong about it. He didn’t want to make it his problem. Dealing
with his father once was more than enough.

It frightened him. That he couldn’t do anything to help his father. It scared him, because his whole
life, if his father was in trouble, he was in trouble. If he was frustrated, he took it out on him, beat
him black and blue. If they were out of money, he’d have to work to keep the roof over their heads
and the wolf from the door. He couldn’t wrap his head around the idea that it didn’t have to be his
problem.

His fears came to a point when his father sent him a picture of himself, of cuts and bruises on his
face, knees, ribs.
They came by today. They beat me, he said.

He didn’t know what to do. He was scared, but he couldn’t ask Taeyong for more money. The
memory of his dirty fingernails on his jacket collar lingered in his head, like a quiet suggestion.

That night, he sold his jacket online and sent the money to his father. Handing it over to the buyer
on the street outside Kyungsoo’s place, checking and rechecking his account balance to make sure
he got the money, it felt like the dirtiest thing he had ever willingly done for money. It felt like a
terrible insult to everything Taeyong had done for him, like a reminder, too, that there was nothing
too precious to sell.

He couldn’t hide it from Taeyong for too long. He picked him up from school a few days after that,
and Jaehyun was wearing his old parka. He had an explanation prepared in his mind, ready to use
when Taeyong asked.

“What happened to the new one?” He asked.

“I spilled soup on it,” he said. “I had to clean it. It’s drying off at Kyungsoo’s place.”

Taeyong looked over at him, little sideward glances, as he drove them out to the restaurant he had
picked for dinner.

“Why do I feel like that’s not the truth?” He said, cautiously, kindly.

Jaehyun considered elaborating on the lie. Telling him what kind of soup it was. How it fell. Where
he was when it happened. Or changing his story, telling him he didn’t like the thing at all, that he
thought it was ugly. Telling him something that wasn’t the truth.
He couldn’t do it.

“I sold it,” he said. “My dad needed the money. I’m sorry, I know I shouldn’t have. I know it was
wrong, it was yours, I just panicked because he said they beat him -

“It was yours,” Taeyong said. “You get to decide what to do with your things. I just want to know
why - he acts like a child, Jaehyun. I gave him the money to clear his debt. If he lost it, or if he
borrowed again, he has to take responsibility for it. I don’t understand why you keep helping him
act like a fucking child.”

“Because I get hurt if I don’t,” he said. “You don’t understand it, I’ve always pulled him out of
those situations because when he has a hard time, I have a hard time.”

“I understand that he’s your father and it’s difficult to watch him suffer -

“No. No, not like that, like - like I pay. Like he gets angry and, and I pay. Or I work, and I pay.
Either fucking way, I pay, and I want to choose how I pay. It’s always been like that.”

Taeyong was quiet for a bit, white-knuckled grip on his steering wheel, tight set jaw.

“I’m sorry,” Jaehyun said. “I’m really fucking sorry about the jacket - don’t be mad at me, hyung,
please -

“I’m not mad about the jacket, Jaehyun,” he said.

“But you are mad at me,” he said.

“Jaehyun,” Taeyong said, like a tired sigh.

Jaehyun couldn’t stand it. He didn’t like that he had disappointed him. He couldn’t shake the
shame of it all. It reached far, far inside him into places he never wanted to revisit. Selling
something, too precious to be sold, just because his father asked him to. Trying to pretend like it
wasn’t a big deal, trying to shake off shame, disappointment, anger, hurt. He couldn’t get his head
on straight.

“It’s just a fucking jacket,” he said. “It’s just - nothing. It’s nothing. If I don’t do it, if I don’t -

“What happens?” Taeyong challenged. “What happens if you don’t?”

“He’ll sell me,” he said.

Silence. Tires on asphalt. The alarm at the pedestrian crossing. The red traffic light and Taeyong’s
sideward glances. He couldn’t believe he let that slip.

“What do you mean?” Taeyong said.

“Nothing,” he said, but he was trembling.

“Jaehyun,” Taeyong said. “What did that mean?”

“It’s not like - not like that. It’s not what you’re thinking. He just took pictures,” he said.

“What kind of pictures?”

“Nothing, just - just - I’m sorry, I - he said I’d be helping him. And I guess I was, he sold the
pictures for good money.”

“What the fuck,” Taeyong breathed.

“No, hyung, he - he cried a lot that day. We were helpless and we didn’t have any other options
and I never wanted him to feel helpless again because I didn’t want to do that again, I just -

“How old were you?” Taeyong asked.

“I don’t know. Just don’t be angry with me, please.”

“I’m not angry with you, baby,” Taeyong said quietly. “Can you tell me how old you were?
Please?”

“Maybe eight,” he said.

The light turned green, but Taeyong didn’t notice. The cars behind him honked, and he moved
then, sluggish, disoriented, like he couldn’t make his brain work.

Taeyong drove past the intersection, pulled over into an empty parking spot, and turned back to
him. His eyes were wet. His jaw was tight. His breath was ragged and his entire demeanor had
changed. Jaehyun couldn’t shake the feeling that he had fucked up. He shouldn’t have told him
about that. He couldn’t imagine what he thought of him.

He took his hand off the stick and reached for Jaehyun’s hand. Jaehyun offered it up gladly.
Taeyong held it gently, caressed his knuckles with his thumb.

“Thank you for telling me,” he said.

“It’s not a big deal,” he said.

“It is a big fucking deal,” Taeyong said. “You don’t do that to a child. You don’t. Fucking. Do
that, to a child.”

“I’m sorry,” he mumbled.

“I’m not - it’s not your fault. I’m not angry with you,” he said. “Jaehyun, did he ever touch you?
Hurt you, like -

“No! No way, hyung, it wasn’t like that.”

He nodded, and he looked away, out at the flowing traffic like he was trying to figure out what to
say.

“You don’t have to keep saving him,” he said. “You don’t have to be afraid that that’ll happen to
you again. You’re never going back there. You - you get your things from Kyungsoo’s place, and
come live with me. You’re never going back to that fucking neighborhood.”

Jaehyun just sat there, holding his hand tight, looking at his thumb sweeping over his knuckles.

His pastor once told him that people lose sight of who they are without other people beside them.
That they saw themselves in how other people see them. He told Taeyong that once, that he only
thought he was a bad man because he didn’t have anyone to tell him how far that was from the
truth. There was nobody beside him to witness his kindness and remind him of it when he forgot.

It was that very thing that fucked him up in that moment. He felt so fucking sick. All his ugliest
bits all out in the open, all those things he’d do to push through living, all seen through. He
couldn’t rationalize it away when Taeyong was sitting there looking at him like that. He couldn’t
forgive and he couldn’t forget because he had put it into words and Taeyong had heard, and it hurt
him like that just to hear it.

It was a strange, conflicted feeling. See through, brittle, one push away from shattering. That was
how he felt. And he hated that. He hated that Taeyong could see how fragile he was right then.

He felt like he was spinning out of control, but Taeyong’s hand kept him grounded. He held on
tight. Strange. Conflicted. Falling, always falling for him, always falling into his open arms when
he had nowhere to go, and never knowing if it was love or pity that held him.

Taeyong seemed determined to pick him up and drop him off from school everyday. He didn’t
want his father to have the opportunity to reach him. He got him a new number, too. It went on that
way for about a week.

Kyungsoo thought the whole thing was insane. He was glad for Taeyong’s intervention, because
he had seen firsthand the damage his father could do. Still, he liked to tease him about it. Audi
daddy, he called him. Brother in Law. He thought that one in particular was hysterical.

Everything was going alright, but Jaehyun was still on edge. Still looking over his shoulder.

It all came crashing down that January night. The twenty third, at nine PM. His teacher took him
out of self study saying his father had called the school and demanded to speak with his son. He
looked somewhat concerned, but mostly annoyed.

Jaehyun didn’t know what the bastard had said to his teacher, and he didn’t want him to show up
and make a scene, so he jogged to the office and took the call.

“What the fuck?” He said into the receiver, the minute his teacher left the room.

“I’m going to die, Jaehyun,” his father said. “I can’t pay them back.”

“You can’t call here,” he hissed. “I’ve been begging hyung not to call the cops on you but if you
keep acting like this -

“Your boyfriend came to talk to me,” he slurred. “He said a lot of things, Jaehyun. He said I was a
bad father to you, do you really think that? Then I’m - I’m going to kill myself. I don’t have
anything. I don’t have a job. I don’t have any money. I don’t have a son, I’m going -

He didn’t know what to say. He didn’t know Taeyong had gone to talk to him again, and he didn’t
know what he said to him. It made his heart pound, and his hands tremble, just from revisiting the
memory of telling Taeyong about the pictures.

He was never too worried about his threats. He was drunk. He was rambling. He had said these
things before and he never meant them, but nobody had told him he was a bad father before today,
either. Jaehyun had, but he didn’t count.

“Appa stop, you’re just drunk. You just need to lie down,” he said.

“Fuck you, bastard,” he said. “Fuck you and fuck him. I’m releasing those pictures tonight if you
don’t get me that money. I’ll release them, and then I’ll fucking kill myself - what the fuck is your
boyfriend going to do to me if I’m dead?”

He hung up, just like that. Some awful feeling crawled up Jaehyun’s back and neck. As his words
sank in, his heart really started to slam against his ribs, all inside his skull, in his fingertips,
everywhere.

He told his teacher there was a family emergency and he had to go home. His teacher believed him,
because he had some idea of his circumstances, and because Jaehyun looked the way he felt and he
felt like he was going to vomit.

He texted Taeyong that his father called the school and sounded crazy and he was going to home to
stop him, and then he left school.

The entire way home from school, down that street and around the back of that restaurant, up the
stairs in that alley, he heard Taeyong’s voice in his head. He saw the look on his face when he said
you’re never going back to that fucking neighborhood, but there he was.

When he entered his building and went down the staircase into that basement apartment, he was
deeply unsettled. He got it in his head that that night would be the end of a chapter in his life. It
was that smell, mold, booze, vomit, sewage. It was that dim light. That grime. Taeyong’s voice in
his head saying you don’t do that to a child, you don’t fucking do that to a child.

He was resentful and he was fearful, but more than that, he was angry. He was going to stop his
father from fucking everything up for him and Taeyong. He had let him fuck him up. He had let
him turn his life to shit for so fucking long, and he was determined to show Taeyong that he
wouldn’t let it happen anymore. He wouldn’t let him hurt Taeyong.

He opened the door to that old apartment. The house was a fucking mess. His father was crumpled
up in a corner, passed out against the table, empty green bottles all around him. He went to him,
tapped him on the back, and when that didn’t work, he grabbed him by the elbow and yanked him
upright.

His father grimaced, groaned and blinked at him. Slowly, he registered who it was.
“Get your fucking hands off me,” he said, wrenching his hand out of Jaehyun’s grip. “Ungrateful
bastard, look at what they did to me -

He bristled at that. And what of the times he took a beating for his father? What of everything he
did these past three years? How he worked? What of all the things he did to Jaehyun?

“You can’t release those pictures,” he said, watching him staggering to his feet.

“Are you going to stop me? Think you’re all that? Fucking hotshot. Fucking rich boy, now, is that
it? You’re nothing more than a prostitute -

His fist tightened, and his stomach turned when he heard that. That memory, of that look in
Taeyong’s eyes when he said you don’t fucking do that to a child. That memory of him shrugging
his t shirt off, climbing out of his shorts, and his dad’s camera. His dad’s bullshit tears. The
money.

“Don’t fucking talk to me like that,” he breathed.

“I should have known. This is what you were born to do. Remember those picture I took of you?
Brought in good money. Should’ve let them have a taste of you. You like that, right?”

He thought he could talk to him. He thought he could hit him back, just once, and it would set
everything straight. He wasn’t sure what he thought coming in, but standing there, he knew he had
made a mistake. He knew he wanted to go, and leave this mess for Taeyong to sort out.

His phone rang, just then, the words Lee byeonhosa-nim on his screen. It made him remember why
he came. He didn’t want to feel like that. Brittle, fragile, damaged. He just wanted to hit back. Just
once. He put his phone back in his pocket.

“Appa,” he said. “I won’t let you hurt him.”

“What the fuck are you going to do?” He said, laughing and rounding on him like he always did.
He wasn’t much bigger than Jaehyun. He was strong, but so was Jaehyun. He just had to remind
himself, that he was taller now, that he had strength in his fists that he was allowed to use, that his
father didn’t deserve to be called his father. Jaehyun shoved him, and he fell back against the wall.

“I won’t let you hurt him,” he said again.

Everything happened like a blur after that. His father finding his footing again and lunging at him,
Jaehyun’s fists, one gripping his collar, one pummeling into his side. His father struck him with a
bottle of soju. It shattered over the side of his head, and his eyebrow split open. Blood poured into
his eye, and his ears rang, shards of glass falling out of his hair when he staggered back. He
released his grip on him, lifted a clumsy hand to that cut in his eyebrow,

The man grabbed him by the hair, then, and pulled him back. His phone clattered to the ground. He
wrenched his grip off, but he lost his balance and fell heavily to his knees. His father kicked him in
the ribs, then. All the breath left his chest. He was too winded to get to his feet, and in those
moments, his father grabbed his hair again and struck him across the face.

“I’ll fucking kill you,” his father said, pressing that broken bottle to the side of his head. “I’ll
fucking kill you, bastard, and I’ll kill him. I’ll put those pictures up everywhere so they all know
the whore you are -

Over and over, he struck him, despite all of Jaehyun’s efforts to push him off, and then he pushed
his pants down and shoved Jaehyun’s face against his genitals. His skin was damp with sweat and
piss, and it was all he could smell for long moments after he shoved him off. His face burned with
humiliation. Blood clouded his vision. His stomach lurched, and his heart was pounding.

He couldn’t think. He couldn’t breathe. He remembered now, after months of being treated so
gently, he remembered the kind of man his father was.

His phone rang again, face up on the floor. Taeyong, again.

“Pick up,” his father said. “Tell him I’ve found people who’ll pay good money to fuck you. You’ll
do it every night. Tell him if he doesn’t pay, that’s what I’ll do to you.”

He didn’t know what came over him, then. He used to just take it. He used to know how to tune his
drunken rambling out. But all he could smell was piss and sweat and all he could taste was blood,
and all he saw before his eyes were all the times his father slapped him and punched him and
 stomped on his chest while he just laid there and took all that anger that was never meant for him.
All he could see were those pictures.

“Why do you fuck everything up?” He whispered.“Why does everything you touch turn to shit?”

Chapter End Notes

I'm sorry again!! One more chapter with some pain, and then I promise there's relief
TTTT
 Chapter Seven
Chapter Notes

See the end of the chapter for notes

And down will come baby, cradle and all

Taeyong’s phone buzzed three times in a row on the table that night. He remembers leaning
forward, lifting it toward himself to see if it was worth interrupting his dinner meeting for, and
deciding it wasn’t. He had been considering leaving Choi & Kim for a while, because Jungwon
had slowly and successfully sold him on the idea, and he was discussing an open position at
Yulchon Legal with their representative.

He still remembers that, seeing Jaehyun’s name on his screen, turning his phone over and laying it
screen down on the table, returning to his conversation with Jeon byeonhosa. Every detail, down to
the music that was playing at Mugunghwa that night, the speckled glaze on his plate, the pink of
the beef on it.

He didn’t check his texts until he was safely inside his car in the parking lot at Lotte Hotel. It was
nine thirty three then. Dinner had wrapped up early because Jeon byeonhosa had young children
she had to go home to.

Received at five past nine, three texts from Jaehyun.

Hyung, he called the school and told me he’s going to release the pictures tonight

I’m going there now to talk him out of it. I think he’s just drunk and being crazy

Call me

He blinked away the haze from the drinks he had with dinner, sat up a little straighter in his seat
and read it over. His heart sank. He didn’t know what scared him more, the thought of those
pictures reaching the partners, or the thought of Jaehyun going alone to see his abusive father.
He called him immediately. The phone rang for nearly a minute, and he didn’t answer. He texted
him a reply, then, on the off chance that Jaehyun decided against going and stayed back at school.

Where are you? Did you go already?

A minute passed, and there was no reply. He still remembers the way that unease spread through
him, little by little, even as he shifted the gear and stepped on the gas and pulled out of the parking
lot to go to Jaehyun’s old apartment.

He couldn’t believe the bastard had the nerve to call Jaehyun again and threaten him, after
everything Taeyong said to him. He couldn’t believe Jaehyun was brave enough or stupid enough
to go back there after Taeyong told him not to.

He gave him five more minutes before calling him again. No answer. Right then, hearing that pre-
recorded message on his car speakers telling him the person he had called hadn’t answered,
somewhere near Korea University, he knew something was wrong. Memories of his split lip, of his
nosebleeds, of that awful thing he said his father did, they all swirled together in his head, murky
and ugly.

He drove faster, he ran a red light.

Nine forty six, he parked in the alley behind that BBQ restaurant. He had to walk from there,
because the path to Jaehyun’s apartment was a steep slope with a few uneven steps.

He jogged up that alley, taking the stairs two at a time. His heart was pounding, one glance at his
watch saying it was nine forty nine when he went inside the building, and down that narrow
staircase that led to the basement. He had to duck his head on the last few steps. There was a beam
that projected down from the ceiling that he hit the last time he was there.

He couldn’t hear anything. No yelling, no beating, nothing.

The door was open a crack. Dim yellow light spilled from that gap onto the bottom step and the
wall. He heard it then, a quiet gurgling sound, Jaehyun’s ragged breathing and his quiet sobs.

He pushed the door open, and his mind went blank. He thought it was Jaehyun on the floor for a
second. He thought it was his father leaning over him, over all that blood. His stomach dropped,
knees threatened to buckle, but he gripped the doorframe and forced himself to focus and the scene
made sense then.

“Jaehyun,” he breathed. “What happened?”

The kid looked up, blood and tears all running together on his face. In front of him, Jeong Jaesuk
was lying sprawled across the floor, unconscious. Jaehyun had his hands pressed against a wound
in his father’s neck, blood oozing from the gaps between his fingers.

Taeyong’s heart was galloping, pounding in his ears.

“Hyung,” Jaehyun said, quiet, muddled, blank. “Hyung, I didn’t mean to -

Something made him move, then. It wasn’t his own volition. Like something blown by the wind,
Taeyong took two unsteady steps forward and closed the door behind him.

“Are you okay? Can you tell me you’re okay?” He said, crouching beside them and checking the
man for a pulse against his wrist. He found it, faint and thready.

“Is he - is he?” Jaehyun breathed.

“Still alive,” Taeyong said. “How bad are you hurt, baby?”

“M’okay,” he said, still out of it, trembling hands pressed against that bleeding wound. Jaehyun
was bleeding, too, from the mouth, from a split eyebrow, blood in his left eye and eyelashes. His
hair, too, dotted with spatter. There was this blankness about him, like he didn’t know where he
was or what had happened.

“Jaehyun,” he said again. “We have to get him to a hospital. Did you call an ambulance already?”

Jaehyun’s face crumpled, then, and his body folded, knees to his chest, arms drawn over his head
like he was defending himself from somebody raining blows down on him. The pressure was lifted
from the gash in his father’s neck. Blood flowed, a constant ooze with an intermittent pulse.
“I didn’t mean to, hyung, he said he’d - I didn’t mean to -

Taeyong didn’t know what needed his attention first. His distress hurt him, and he wanted to hold
him and comfort him, but calling an ambulance took precedence in that moment.

“I know, Jaehyun. I know you didn’t mean to hurt him,” he said, pulling his phone out of his
pocket to call an ambulance. He knew his car was only three minutes away but he’d rather have an
ambulance with trained paramedics show up in the next five minutes than have to haul him to his
car and search for a hospital.

“He said he’d hurt you,” Jaehyun said. “He put his cock in my mouth, he said I was a whore -

It didn’t register for a second, and when it did, he stopped. 119 on his screen, his thumb hovering
over the little green button.

“Christ,” he breathed. He reached out on instinct to cup Jaehyun’s face, to draw him close and hug
him, but he pulled back in the last second because he wasn’t sure Jaehyun wanted to be touched.

His heart broke for the kid.

The brutality of that feeling, it cleared his hazy head in an instant. He looked at the scene around
him once again. Maybe two minutes had passed since he came in, and things finally clicked into
place.

Jeong Jaesuk wouldn’t make it through this. There was too much blood. That gurgle, that awful
sound, it sounded and looked like his windpipe was severed. He didn’t know how long he had been
lying there before he even got there.

And if he died, Jaehyun would be a murderer. If he didn’t make it, there would be an investigation
and they’d find Jaehyun’s blood all over the scene. They’d see the blood on that broken bottle of
soju. They’d see his split knuckles and lip and eyebrow. His father’s autopsy would show that he
bled to death from that neck wound. The neighbors would say they heard them fighting, and
Jaehyun’s school would say his father called, and he went home, and they’ve had arguments
before, just outside the school gates.
It was damning.

He couldn’t care less if the bastard bled out and died, right there or in a hospital bed, but he
couldn’t let him make Jaehyun a murderer. He pressed his own hand to that wound to slow the
bleeding. His Junghans ticked relentlessly on that wrist, nine fifty two, going into fifty three. Three
minutes had passed since he came in.

“Can I touch you, Jaehyun? Is that okay?” He asked.

He nodded. Taeyong put his phone down, lifted his free hand and pushed his hair off his forehead.
His hand came away bloody. He reached into his pocket, pulled out his handkerchief and wiped his
face clean. The handkerchief soaked through. It wouldn’t clean anything anymore. He dropped it.

“You’re safe now,” he said, caressing his brow. “You’re safe, you did good, you’re safe.”

He couldn’t possibly drive the kid out. He was sure there were CCTV cameras at that restaurant, at
a lot of the shops lining that narrow street. He couldn’t take him there. If he got out through some
back alleys that weren’t monitored, if Jaehyun kept his hood down and hid his face from the
neighbors, if he could just get out of there unwitnessed, he could have somebody come pick the kid
up and drive him out of the city. The police wouldn’t know which direction to look. He could have
this place cleaned up, the neighbors paid off, the CCTV footage cleared -

“Listen to me carefully, okay?” He said, holding him by the nape of his neck. “You need to leave
now. You have to go away for a bit, okay? There’s a number on my phone, I’ll show you - you
need to call him from a pay phone. You need to get out of here, but - but you can’t go by the
restaurant. You have to - ”

“What do you mean, hyung?” He said.

“I’ll stay here, I’ll get your dad to a hospital, but you need to go,” he said.

“What happens to you?”

“Nothing,” he said. “I’ll go home."

It was a lie. If they didn’t have Jaehyun, they’d start looking. His phone records. His bank records.
One clear line from the kid to Taeyong. They might still find those pictures of him and Jaehyun
somewhere, somebody Jaesuk had spoken to about his plan to blackmail him. They’d say he did it.
Or that they did it, together. They’d have motive. They’d have no alibi.

Whether or not he took him to a hospital, whether he stayed there or went home, this would be an
open and shut conviction.

He was fucked, but he could make sure the kid was safely tucked away in some quiet seaside town.
He could give him a new name. It was just a few phone calls away.

He couldn’t let them arrest Jaehyun. Killing an ascendant, in this fucking country, it was one step
higher than murder. They’d give him the death penalty, maybe, for the brutality of it. No sixty year
old judge would sit there, sympathetic to two gay men who murdered to keep their secrets.

“Can’t you come with me?” Jaehyun said.

He shook his head. He knew how these things worked. They almost always made an arrest, and if
they believed it was a judge’s son who murdered a working class man and fled, there would be
outrage. Endless media play. Their faces all over every TV in the country, and there wouldn’t be
one town they could hide in. He knew that if they made one arrest, the heat would be off Jaehyun’s
back. He’d figure it out from there. He’d work through it from there.

It was like Jaehyun knew what he was thinking. Even in that state of shock, even with fresh blood
and tears running down his face, he knew.

“I’m staying right fucking here,” Jaehyun said.

“Jaehyun, please,” he breathed.

“I won’t run,” Jaehyun said.

“Listen to me,” he begged, but Jaehyun just shook his head.

He didn’t know what to do. His watch kept ticking, seven minutes of inaction, blood seeping
through the gaps between his fingers. He had to do something, anything, to make this go
differently.

“Okay. Okay, baby,” he said. “Pick up your phone and call an ambulance. If you stay, if this goes
to court, they’ll ask why you didn’t call an ambulance. Call. Use your phone. And say your father’s
hurt, and he’s lost a lot of blood, and they need to get here as soon as they can, okay?”

He nodded. He crawled, on hands and knees With trembling hands, he picked up his phone, dialed
119. He was out of it. He repeated himself, over and over, spoke in circles, but he got the message
across. The whole thing seemed to clear his head, because that unseeing blankness slipped away,
and he came back, little by little. His eyes welled up again, and his cheeks got wet.

“Will he live, do you think?” He breathed, after the call ended.

“No, Jaehyun,” he said. “I don’t think he’ll make it.”

“Fuck,” he choked out. “I killed him, I - hyung, I didn’t mean to -

“I know. I know you didn’t mean to. You’re a sweet kid, my sweet boy, you were just defending
yourself. You were just protecting me. I know, and I’ll tell anyone who asks that you didn’t mean
to,” he said. “We’ll go to the hospital with him, and we’ll have all your injuries documented.
Photographed. The police will be informed, and they’ll interrogate us, maybe tonight or
tomorrow.”

“What do I say, hyung?” he said, lip trembling.

Taeyong lifted his hand from the wound. Nothing would change the outcome now. He couldn’t
feel his pulse anymore. He held Jaehyun’s face in both hands. His own eyes were stinging. He
could hear his watch ticking, always ticking. Nine minutes.

“Tell them the truth, baby boy, it’s okay,” he said. “Tell them exactly what happened.”

“But if I do that, hyung,” he said, his gaze sliding back to his father’s body. “They’re going to
know about us. They’re going to know you were here and you’re going to get hurt.”
Taeyong turned Jaehyun back to him, gentle, loving, and leaned their foreheads together.

“They’re going to find out about us anyway, Jaehyun,” he said. “It’ll all come out, anyway. I’m
doing this with you. You can’t do this alone -

Jaehyun shook his head frantically.

“You need to go, hyung. You need to leave.”

“Jaehyun, please.”

“You need to go -

“They’ll get to me anyway,” he said, as calmly as he could, trying his best to be strong and level
headed for Jaehyun.

“Not if I confess,” he said, clutching at Taeyong’s back. “I’ll fucking tell them I did it, I’ll leave
you out of it -

“No, you won’t. I don’t care. I can testify. I can tell them it was self defense and I saw it with my
own eyes,” he said. He sounded like he knew what he was talking about. He didn’t. He didn’t
know which way this would go. He didn’t know how they got here. He was just at a dinner
meeting at one of the most expensive restaurants in Seoul city, and now he was staring down arrest
and conviction. Inside his head, in his chest, all the way to the tips of his toes, was a constant sense
of almost falling, being on the absolute fucking brink.

“I’ll never forgive you. I’ll never forgive myself if I bring you into this. Please,” Jaehyun begged.
“Please. Just go. Call - call Kim byeon. Ask him how to get you out of this, he’s good at that.”

He didn’t know what to say. He didn’t know what to do. It made sense. In that moment, it made
sense. With his watch ticking in his ear, ten minutes, four more until the ambulance arrived. It
made sense. If Jaehyun confessed, they’d augment their case with what was found at the crime
scene. It would be enough for a conviction, but there would be goodwill, too. Trust. Sympathy for
an abused son, a good, Christian boy who had learned right and wrong, who knew the value of
confession and contrition. It made sense.

“It’ll kill me,” Jaehyun said, then, small and desperate. “If I fuck it all up for you. If I turn your life
to fucking nothing. It’ll kill me. Please, hyung, it’s the last thing I’ll ever ask you to do for me.”

If he got out of there, he’d have some semblance of control over the situation. If he stayed, he’d be
useless.

They were split second decisions taken in the five minutes between Jaehyun calling the ambulance,
and the siren sounds reverberating in that narrow stairway. Decisions soaked through with blood
and tears and the smell of vomit and booze and mildew.

“Listen to me,” he said. “Look at me, listen to what I’m saying. Go to the hospital, and the the
police come, don’t say a fucking word. Say you want a lawyer, and you won’t say anything until
then. And then you call me. Now say it back to me, what did I say?”

“Go to the hospital - go to the hospital and tell the cops I want my lawyer,” Jaehyun said.

“Don’t say another word,” he said. “Not one word beyond that, you hear? I’ll come, I’ll do the
talking for you. Just. Just call me.”

Jaehyun cried, lips pressed together and still trembling. He cried, but he nodded.

“I love you, hyung,” he mumbled.

His footsteps echoing in that stairway, his own ragged breath as he walked away from Jaehyun that
night, it frequented his nightmares for years.

He got into his car in that alley, wiped his hands clean quickly and frantically, and drove straight to
Jungwon’s house. He played those ten minutes he spent at Jaehyun’s place over and over in his
mind, second by second. He was trembling all over by the time he parked outside his gate.

Almost falling, right on the brink, he put his head in his hands and took deep, shuddering breaths.
When he felt more in control of himself, he got out. There was a bloody handprint on his door
handle that he hadn’t even noticed. He wiped it down with his shirt sleeve, and then walked
quickly to the gate.

He typed the code into the lock on his gate and let himself in, because he couldn’t afford to stay
standing outside with bloodstained cuffs.

He rang the doorbell, then. He knew the code to that, too, but he didn’t want to barge in like that.
He didn't want to take blood and murder into his home. Jungwon opened the door after two more
rings. He looked groggy and disgruntled, but the minute he saw him standing there, scared, close to
tears, he understood something terrible had happened.

“I need your help,” Taeyong said.

Over the next hour, he told him exactly what had happened. About him, and the kid, and their
relationship. About his father. The blackmail. The money. The events of the night. He was
shocked. He didn’t know what he felt about it, but the one thing he knew about Jungwon was that
his morals had long disappeared, but his loyalty remained deep and true.

He helped. He washed his clothes and wiped his car down for him while he showered. He gave
him fresh clothes to wear. He poured him a whiskey and sat with him, waiting for Jaehyun to call.

Two hours after that, the call came.

Taeyong thought he’d vomit, or that his knees would buckle when he saw Jaehyun sitting in the
interrogation room staring at a spot on the table. He looked so shaken. He was white as a sheet.
There were stitches in his eyebrow, the yellow stain of betadine over his knuckles, over all the little
cuts in his face they had pulled broken glass from at the hospital.

He sat up straighter when he saw them come in.

“Hyu - Byeonhosa-nim,” he said.

He nodded, quietly reassuring him, telling him he’d take care of him, telling him everything would
be okay, all in that one look.

The police let them sit in on his interrogation. Jaehyun told them what happened, constantly
looking to him for reassurance that it would all be okay. He gave it, with imperceptible nods, and
looks that lingered for a moment too long.

He cried once, with his face in his hands, when he told them about those moments leading up that
fatal blow. It made Taeyong’s throat tighten and burn and his stomach tie itself into knots. He
could have cried. He would have cried, but Jungwon distracted him with a quiet murmur about
some technicality that didn’t register in his mind and that he gave no coherent response to. He sent
him out on the pretext of checking something for him, but in truth, it was just an opportunity for
him to take a breather. It was just to keep him from fucking everything up.

The confession read almost exactly the way it happened, but Taeyong wasn’t in it. He had erased
him completely from his father’s death.

My father called the school. I was in self study. My teacher, Mr Kim Kihwan, told me I had a
phone call in the office. That was around nine PM. I took the call.

He sounded drunk. He said he would kill himself. I had been supporting him financially for several
months, but I quit about a month ago to focus on the Suneung. He didn’t have money for alcohol
and gambling. He was in debt and he couldn’t pay it off. He was frustrated. I was concerned about
his state of mind so I told my teacher I had to go home.

I reached home at nine twenty five. He was angry and started getting violent. I tried to reason with
him but he beat me. He slapped me several times. He kicked me in the chest.

He had taken pornographic pictures of me when I was eight years old and sold them when we had
money trouble once before. He reminded me of that and said that was all I was good for and he
would make me work as a prostitute to bring in money.

When I was down on the ground, he broke a bottle over the side of my head and threatened to kill
me. He shoved his genitals into my mouth.

I hit him back then. He tried to stab me with the broken bottle. I took it out of his hand and swung
blindly. It hit him in the neck. He fell down. He was bleeding profusely. I tried to stop the bleeding
by putting pressure on the wound.

I was scared. I hadn’t meant to hurt him like that. He bled a lot. I called the ambulance at around
ten. By the time they came, they said he had no pulse.

Taeyong was nauseous through it. Something bitter and rancid was on his tongue. He couldn’t get
rid of it. He looked at that sheet of paper, at his handwriting that he had seen pages and pages of all
over his coffee table, at his name signed neat and small at the very bottom.

A sort of numbness had taken over him by the time it was over. A sort of dull ache where it was
excruciating before. He didn’t feel so much like he was falling anymore. He wanted to hold him.
He wanted to pet his hair. He wanted to take him home and keep him safe.

He was taken back into holding after that. He threw him one last look over his shoulder as they
escorted him away. Jaehyun’s kitten eyes, all red and swollen, his honey sweet smile nowhere to be
found. He looked straight at him, like there was nobody else in the room. Just like the day he met
him.

It was six in the morning by the time the whole thing ended. He was in the parking lot with
Jungwon. The sun was just coming up over the buildings across from them. The night that seemed
like an endless bad dream had finally ended.

There were standing between their parked cars, and he was mid-sentence, something about
thanking him for his help. Every time he blinked, he’d see Jaehyun being escorted away and
looking at him over his shoulder. He blinked, and he saw him, and he blinked, and he saw him.
He wet his lips, and he swallowed, and he clenched his jaw, but his eyes stung. He let out one
shuddering breath, pressed his hand to his eyes, and he cried. For the first time in years, he cried.

Jungwon took him in his arms that morning, held him and comforted him until all his tears had run
dry.

It was a violent crime, and it warranted pretrial detention. They kept him three months at Seoul
Detention Center until the case went to court. Taeyong went to see him every week through it.

The first month was rough. Jaehyun was scared. He was traumatized and grieving and all alone,
and he’d cry, invariably, then visitation ended and Taeyong had to leave. He’d grip the phone tight
and he’d chew on his lip and lower his gaze to hide his tears. Don’t go, hyung, was always on the
tip of his tongue. He’d gather himself, look up, manage a smile and say goodbye.

Taeyong’s chest would clench, then. He’d be unable to think of anything else on the long drive
back to work.

Jaehyun turned twenty in the detention center. They sat on either side of reinforced glass, and they
remembered the night he turned nineteen, that drunken phone call, and everything he said. They
didn’t know if they were closer that day or farther away.

“I want to hold your hand, hyung,” he said. “I want to kiss you.”

Taeyong smiled, laid his hand against the glass, and Jaehyun mirrored him on the other side. His
hand was half an inch bigger than Taeyong’s. He hadn’t noticed that before. Jaehyun smiled, too. It
might have been his first real smile since he was taken there.

He thought he was getting better, but then he learned he was having nightmares.The shadows under
his eyes deepened each time he saw him. The kid had nothing to do, and the guards wouldn’t let
him sleep during the day, and in all those waking hours he’d revisit every moment of that night.
Taeyong tried getting him some form of psychiatric help, but they just put him in a biweekly
support group that didn’t help all that much.

Eventually, he relaxed. He found his footing with his cellmates. He toughened up. He always
smiled when he saw Taeyong. Tired, but bright eyed and honey sweet. He’d sit on the other side of
the reinforced glass, gripping the phone, hyung, I missed you, hyung, I’m really scared, hyung,
hyung, hyung -

Taeyong worried about him endlessly through those months. His own sleep was terribly
fragmented. He’d lie awake, thinking about every decision he made from the day they met until
that day, how each of those decisions was underlined with the hope that Jaehyun’s life would be
better for having met him. He’d think of where he was, how he was doing before he met Taeyong.
Then he’d think of where he ended up. Constantly, cyclically, he’d remind himself that he made his
life worse.

He didn’t believe in God, and he had nobody to blame for how things turned out but himself. If
there were a God, he thought, it would have been Taeyong in Jaehyun’s place. If there were
anything holy and sacred, he should have been the one to be punished for falling in love with that
kid and fucking up his life.

He couldn’t separate those two things in his head. Him allowing their relationship to get as
complicated as it did, and Jaehyun losing that bright future he fought tooth and nail for. Him going
to Jaehyun’s father’s house that day, caught up in his emotions and his need to protect Jaehyun,
telling him he knew about those pictures he took when Jaehyun was just a kid. Threatening him.
Making him angry.

Jaehyun, going there for his sake. To stop him from hurting Taeyong’s career out of spite.

Him, making bad decisions, and Jaehyun paying for them.

Things got bad enough for Jungwon to put his foot down and tell him to get some help. He did, and
he was grateful for his intervention because without it, he’s not sure he would have made it
through Jaehyun’s trial and conviction, and those five years of his incarceration. The guilt alone
would have killed him, if not the anxiety and the sorrow.
The day before the trial, he went to see him. He wanted to be strong for Jaehyun. He wanted to
give him hope, that the trial would go well. He was a mess himself, propped up like a sock puppet
by benzos and antidepressants. He wasn’t really in charge of himself. When he opened his mouth,
it felt like somebody else was speaking.

“How are you?” He said.

“M’okay,” Jaehyun said, lips twitching up in an unconvincing smile.

“Are you nervous about tomorrow?”

“Yeah,” he said. “I’m really scared but - but whatever happens, I deserve it. I did the wrong thing.
I’ll pay the price. And I’m - I’m really grateful for your help, and Kim byeon’s.”

“My father spoke to your judge again,” he said. “It looks like it’s going to be five at the very least.
All things considered.”

“Okay,” Jaehyun said. “Thank you for helping me, hyung.”

He sat there for a bit, chewing on his lip. Taeyong saw him swallow. There was something on his
mind that he wasn’t telling him. Some dumb thought he was toying with, and he’d spring it on
Taeyong out of the blue, and Taeyong wouldn’t know what to do with it.

“Are you really okay?” Taeyong asked again.

“I am. Are you?” He asked, looking him right in the eye. Maybe he saw the shadows under his
eyes, too. Maybe he was as worried for him as Taeyong was for Jaehyun.

“I don’t know,” he said. “I don’t know if I get to say that, either.”

“I love you, hyung,” he said, quiet and sweet. He meant it as comfort, but all it did was hurt
Taeyong.

“Stop saying that, please,” he said. “I - I made you all these promises and -

Jaehyun took a deep breath and looked down. He could see him chewing on his lip. When he
looked back up, something had changed in his face.

“I’ll go, hyung,” Jaehyun said. “I’m tired.”

The trial lasted three days. Jungwon was lead counsel, and Taeyong his second chair and
essentially the entirety of his team. It was his home ground, the only place he felt he had some
semblance of control.

They knew the prosecutor. They told him over drinks that he was a good kid and they had both
seen him work nights at Choi & Kim. That Taeyong had given him his business card out of pity
and concern for a vulnerable teenager like him. They laughed and joked about never having
expected that he’d really call. The prosecutor thought it was kind of them to take on that case pro
bono. Janitor kid with world class legal representation, he said, laughing.

Jungwon had the prosecution’s witnesses in his pocket. Or rather, Jaehyun did. They adored the
kid. Their testimony established the time he went home, the time they began to argue, the sound of
a bottle breaking and Jeong Jaesuk’s drunken belligerence filtered through the thin walls and
ceiling of the apartment. Cross examining them made them sound like character witnesses for the
defense, offering up ready praise for the sweet, honest, hardworking boy from the downstairs
apartment who was dealt a bad hand in life.

Taeyong had wanted to testify as a character witness, too. Nobody knew him like Taeyong did.
Jungwon dissuaded him. If the prosecution decided to dig, even a little bit, into his relationship
with Jaehyun, everything would have gone up in flames, he said. It made sense.

Jaehyun, too, was stellar on the stand. He didn’t try to be anything he wasn’t. He was just himself,
with a little coaching. He wasn’t combative. He wasn’t disingenuous. He told his version of the
truth and answered their questions to the best of his ability. He teared up once when they grilled
him about the pictures his father had taken of him as a kid. Jungwon shot Taeyong a worried
glance, then, as if to warn him to keep it together. He did, for Jaehyun.

Jaehyun returned to the table after, and Taeyong allowed himself to squeeze his shoulder once.
That was enough to make the tears go away. It was strange, to sit next to him through something
that would no doubt traumatize him, and do next to nothing to comfort him. To watch his bouncing
knee and not lay his hand on it. To see him picking at his hangnails and not hiss at him to stop
before he hurt himself.

They worked with the confession, told his story, of years of neglect, of the hours he put in working
to pay off his father’s loans, all the bruises and bloody noses his teacher saw. Taeyong did all the
leg work for it, tracked down his pastor, a middle school teacher Jaehyun had said was his favorite,
a grandma from the house next-door he used to help with taking out her trash and sorting it for her.
They all testified that he was a good boy in a bad situation.

The fact that he pled guilty, and all the history of his father’s abuse, coupled with Jungwon’s
involvement and Taeyong’s father’s influence, all worked together to get him that reduced sentence
after three days of back and forth and Jungwon’s trademark closing argument charm.

When the sentence was delivered, Jungwon smiled and clapped Jaehyun on the shoulder, and
Taeyong covered his face with his hands and curled into himself. The relief, that things had panned
out the way they had hoped, the way they had been planning, it make him feel like he had taken
his first real breath in three months.

Jaehyun’s eyes were wet through the whole thing, the handshakes all around, the hugs, the bows to
the prosecutor and the judge. The whole thing. Taeyong hugged him. Jaehyun stood there like a
tree and turned his face imperceptibly against the side of his neck.

“I’ll miss you, hyung,” he said.

Taeyong wished time would stand still for a bit. That he could have that low rumble of his voice
against his him, the warmth of him in his arms for a little longer than those few stolen seconds.

“I’ll come see you often,” Taeyong promised him, pulling away and squeezing his shoulder again.

Jaehyun’s eyes were red rimmed and his lashes all clumped together. Taeyong wasn’t sure if it was
relief that he got the lightest possible sentence, or if it was the finality of it all. He was going away,
for the next five years. He was saying goodbye.

That night, after the trial, Taeyong sat on Jungwon’s patio, nursing a whiskey sour and talking
about the case the way they always did after a taxing day in court.

“It’s over,” Taeyong mumbled.

Jungwon hummed, and Taeyong smiled at him. He had been a rock through the whole thing. They
sat in tired silence for a bit, and then Jungwon spoke.

“Did you love him?” He asked.

“I guess I did,” he replied. “I do.”

Jungwon laughed then. It had been a long three months. He stood by him through hell, and the fact
that it was over, with the best possible outcome, made them both a little hysterical. Maybe it was
just the insanity of it all catching up to them.

“Always knew you’d get in trouble,” he said. “You’re just the type of sentimental bastard this
would happen to.”

Taeyong laughed, too. Leaning back in that deck chair, his drink on his chest, somewhere between
medicated and drunk, he laughed with Jungwon. He was too tired for tears. The boy he loved had
lost his future.
When Taeyong went to see him after his conviction, he asked him the same things again.

How are you? Sleeping okay? Eating okay? Your cellmates treating you okay?

He answered everything, and then he sat in silence. It was like he was waiting for Taeyong to say
something. Maybe an apology, for the way things turned out. With every passing moment,
Taeyong saw his eyes darkening, and whatever was stirring in his mind finally reared its head at
him.

“Hyung,” he said. “I don’t think I want to see you again.”

“What?” Taeyong said, unsure if he misunderstood.

“Don’t come back here next week,” he said. “Stop coming to see me. Please.”

His brain kicked back into action then. He scrambled for the words he thought Jaehyun wanted to
hear. I’m sorry I got involved in things between you and your father. I’m sorry I made him angry.
I’m sorry I didn’t check my phone in time. Sorry you had to go alone. Sorry I wasn’t a responsible
adult sorry I fucked up sorry I let this happen to you -

“Jaehyun - I know you’re angry with me, and I feel terrible about it. I’ll never forgive myself for
how things turned out. I’m - I’m here. I’ll always be here. I’ll help you, after you get out, I’ll help
you get a job, I’ll help you get your life back on track. It doesn’t have to -

“I’m going to go, now,” Jaehyun said. “Thank you for everything you did for me. I’ll always be
grateful. I’ll never forget. Take care, Byeonhosa-nim.”

They sat there wordlessly for a few more moments before he hung up and requested the guard to
escort him back to his cell. He didn’t recognize it for what it was, then. His own guilt had blinded
him. He was giving him a chance to tell him he loved him. He was trying to figure out, one last
time, what he felt for him. He didn’t know it then.
 Months went by like that. He’d write, asking for forgiveness, and Jaehyun wouldn’t write back.
Every week at first, and then every two, and then further and further apart hoping a few more
weeks and a little more space would make Jaehyun forgive him. He knew he was getting the
letters. Nam Kyungsoo was getting replies. Jaehyun just didn’t want to talk to him.

He gave up, one year in.

Chapter End Notes

Almost through! One more chapter and we're done. Thank you so much for making it
this far <333
 Chapter Eight
Chapter Notes

See the end of the chapter for notes

Fate is kind

She brings to those who love

The sweet fulfillment of their longing

As a last resort, Taeyong drives to that old park Jaehyun used to go to when his home and his head
were noisy. He had picked him from there maybe twice in that year and a half that they spent in
each other’s lives. Five years had passed since then, and he couldn’t remember where it was. He
finds it, after two dead ends, after turning around in God knows how many circles.

He finds himself hoping and praying Jaehyun is in there. He’ll drive himself mad if he isn’t.

He parks on the street and gets out. It’s dark, that same yellow streetlight on the corner valiantly
lighting his path. He enters the park, and he sees him, that silhouette he knows like the back of his
hand, on the swing.

He almost crumples to the ground under the wave of relief that washes over him. He loses his
bearings for a second, doesn’t know which way is up, which way is forward, what is past and what
is present. He moves towards him, and it takes all the restraint of his entire adult life to keep an
even keel in that moment.

Hours have gone by and Jaehyun has replayed that conversation with Taeyong in his mind
endlessly. All those hours, wandering through Seoul city, looking for a place that felt like home.
He went everywhere, staring up from a street corner at the glittering building on Jongno that Choi
& Kim is located in, that street corner outside Taeyong’s apartment building where he kissed him
that night. The convenience store he used to work at. The arcades he used to frequent. His school.
Kyungsoo’s parents’ house. His old apartment, too. And now he’s here, at that park that used to
shelter him when he had nowhere to go.
It looked so different when he came in. That merry-go-round is all rusted and has fallen off its
pivot now. The bushes by the fence are winter-bare, but he can see that they had grown wildly in
the years he was away. The hours have made the place feel less foreign.

Endlessly, he thinks of Taeyong.

I waited for you, all this time. You’re the one who said don’t visit. That’s what grown-ups do,
when someone you love says they need space, you fucking listen.

He’s caught in that.

When someone you love.

Stuck there.

I waited for you.

He doesn’t know what that means. He was stuck once, guessing at Taeyong’s intentions, and he
thought he freed himself from it. It took years of silence and solitude, hurt, and then anger, to
figure him out.

Taeyong was lonely. He was a coward. He didn’t sleep because he hated his job, but he stayed
because he wasn’t brave enough to leave. He thought he was a bad person, because he didn’t have
anyone to tell him he was good. He wasted his time fucking around with Kim Jungwon because he
knew Taeyong when he still liked himself. He understood that maybe that was all he was to
Taeyong. Somebody who reminded him what it meant to be good, to do good, somebody who
made him a little less lonely.

He thought there was freedom in understanding that, but maybe he hasn’t quite forgiven him for
not being brave enough to love him. To come back. To stay. He thought he understood why he
didn’t love him, and why he couldn’t now, but he guesses understanding did little to make it hurt
less.

He thought he freed Taeyong, too, from his guilt and his ties to Jaehyun. Maybe he was wrong.
It wasn’t over for me -

Is it over now?

The swing creaks and sways on a small amplitude with each of his movements. He just wants his
head to quiet down. He just wants to sleep, but sleep has long evaded him. He’s stuck, swinging
back and forth between being terribly hurt, and being resigned to his fate.

He’s stuck, scraping by, barely surviving. There was a time he had a future to survive for, but now,
he has nothing. There was a time when he felt like he was living life, and now he’s certain he’ll
never feel like that again, and he doesn’t know if he can go back to breaking his back to fill his
stomach just to wake up and break his back again.

He feels foolish, the way he often used to around Taeyong. He feels sick.

The sound of a car coming to a stop on the road draws his attention, and he looks up. He can’t
quite see it through the overgrown bushes and the dim light. He hears the door open and close,
footsteps on the paved path.

He sees him, then. He recognizes him. It takes his breath away. He tightens his grip on the chains
and gets to his feet. He’s here. He came looking for him, he’s here - suit and tie and gleaming
leather shoes - his frame, his painfully handsome face, his pretty eyes - he’s here.

He takes two steps towards him. They stop, awkwardly, two feet from one another.

“What - what are you doing here?” He says.

Taeyong doesn’t expect to find himself so emotional. Hearing Jaehyun’s voice expends the last
shred of restraint left in his body. Hearing how it deepened. Seeing how his face changed, ever so
slightly. Just hearing him, and seeing him, after all the years he spent waiting. It makes him bite
down on his cheek. His relief is like a father’s after finding a child who had let go of his hand and
run off into a crowd. Hours of worry and frantic searching bubble over into anger in seconds.

“Are you fucking kidding me?” Taeyong chokes out. “You called me and said all those things and
cried like - like that - I’ve been looking everywhere for you. I’ve been calling, all fucking day.”

“Hyung,” Jaehyun says. “Hyung, what - I’m sorry, I - I’m sorry I blew up like that. I’ve been
thinking about it. I’ve been - I’m grateful, I really am, that you still want to take care of me. I
should have said thank you first, I was just - emotional. I’m sorry."

“You should be sorry,” he says, and the breath he takes after sounds painful even to him. “What
the fuck was that? What the fuck did you say to me? Why did I send Park Biseo to see you? You
got my message loud and clear, I don’t want anything to do with you? Show up and take
responsibility, is that what you said?”

“Hyung -

“I wrote you so many times. I - how many letters? Seventeen? Eighteen? And you never wrote
back. You’re asking me why I didn’t come back to see you? After you told me not to, after I
reached out to you so many fucking times - is that what you were asking me?”

Jaehyun falls silent. Taeyong thinks he’ll say something stupid, something half baked and
impractical and crazy, like he always did when they argued before. Stupid fucking teenage brain -

“You know what you said? In all those letters?” Jaehyun says.

“I said I was sorry.”

“Yeah. Over and over,” he says, like he’s angry about it. Taeyong doesn’t know if he gets to be.

“I thought you blamed me,” Taeyong says. “I thought you held me responsible for what happened.
If I hadn’t talked to him. If I hadn’t made him angry. If I hadn’t left - maybe something might have
been different.”
He seems to be caught up in a thought for a second. Brow creased. Pretty kitten eyes all dark and -
he wants to hold him. He wants to wrap his arms around him and kiss him. Get him out of the cold.
Hold him, until morning. He just wants to look at him.

“I confessed, hyung. I fucked up and I had to pay the price for it. I didn’t - I don’t blame you. I
never blamed you. You blamed yourself.”

He knew he blamed himself. He talked about it through hours of therapy. He knows he blamed
himself and it took him three years before he finally learned how to cope with it. He just hadn’t
ever heard Jaehyun say he didn’t hold what happened against him. He had never said that before, I
don’t blame you. It makes him feel strange and lightheaded.

He lets out a shuddering breath. It fogs between them, leaves his lips in a wisp like an entity he had
held down inside him for years, like something that had been clawing its way out of him all this
time. He takes a few unsteady steps to the park bench to his right, and sinks down into it. Another
shuddering breath, another wisp, and it takes all his anger with it.

“Yeah, I did,” he says. “I guess you’re right. I did. That - what does that have to do with anything?”

“I saw it,” Jaehyun says. “You looked like shit. One of the times Kim byeon came to see me, I
asked him about you, because you never told me the truth. He told me you weren’t sleeping great.
That you were on all these pills. You weren’t okay.”

Taeyong leans forward, elbows on his thighs, mouth pressed to his hands. Jaehyun stands there
watching him, hands stuffed in his pockets, half turned away like he couldn’t stand to look at him.

“You knew?” Taeyong breathes.

Jaehyun takes a deep breath and comes to sit beside him. Taeyong aches to lay his head on his
shoulder, or to lay Jaehyun’s head on his. To hold his hand, to draw him close, to have his warmth
in his arms again, but he doesn’t know how much distance he has to cross before he can reach
him.

“How bad men sleep at night, that’s what you said, right? How you sleep knowing you’ve done
something wrong. Like punishment,” he says. “You’d show up every week and sit there, like - like
you owed it to me. You’re a good person. You’re a kind person. And I didn’t want you to keep
coming back like you were punishing yourself. Like you felt sorry for me. I didn’t want that.”

Taeyong listens to the storm he thought up all alone these past years. The answers to all the
questions he didn’t know to ask. He speaks without looking at Taeyong, and Taeyong listens
without looking at him. It makes it easier, somehow.

“I thought about it, you know?” Jaehyun says. “You gave me money so I could quit working and
study. You took me in because you didn’t want my father to hurt me again. I was so fucking in
love with you, and you were telling me the whole time that I was just some kid to you. Some kid
you fixed up. That I couldn’t be more. I should have been grateful, but I got greedy. I wanted you
to love me, and you didn’t. I don’t know. I thought I could fix myself up, you know? Go to college
and shit. Start fucking wearing suits and smoking those skinny cigarettes. Drinking whiskey,
whatever. I thought it might change then. Like you’d start smelling like my cigarettes and my
cologne, you know? I fucked up, though. Fucked it all up for me. Us.”

It sinks in slowly, the thought that had been formlessly growing in his mind all day. Where he went
wrong. What Jaehyun needed from him that he never gave him. Love, explicitly stated, in words, in
writing, without loopholes and prerequisites. For a kid who knew nothing but rejection and neglect,
for a kid who had been to hell and back, to be told that he was and is worthy of love.

“You thought I didn’t love you. And you thought, because of everything that happened. Because
your future changed. That I wouldn’t ever love you. Is that right?”

“Yeah.”

He gets to his feet, scrubs his hands over his face, and he wants to scream. He wants to pull his hair
out by the fistfuls. He’s feeling an emotion he can’t identify and he doesn’t know how to let it out.

“I - I thought it might be that,” he says. “When you said all those things this morning, I thought it
might be that, but I - it didn’t make sense. It’s just so fucking - so fucking stupid, Jaehyun.”

“What is?”

He turns to him. Looks at him, finally, at his tired eyes and his unsmiling mouth. At the boy who
was often in his dreams. At the boy he had been waiting for, stupidly, childishly, fearfully.
“That apartment, it wasn’t my parents’ money, I worked my ass off to save, for you, for that place,
for - for you. I’ve been waiting - for you to forgive me, for you to call - look at me, right now, I’ve
been driving around the city all fucking day looking for you. Does this look like I feel nothing for
you? Does it look like I give a fuck about anything that isn’t you? How did you think that?”

Not a lot changes in Jaehyun’s face. His eyes stay tired. His mouth stays unsmiling. He chews on
his lower lip. He wrings his hands in his lap. But when he speaks, his voice betrays how much hurt
he had been holding on to.

“How could you think I blamed you, hyung?” He says.

The things they never said, the things they didn’t know the other needed, I love you, and I don’t
blame you, they settle between them. Long moments pass, and they let them. They remain where
they are, reaching blindly across the distance between them, reaching blindly back in time to
somebody five years younger, as if to say listen, listen to this, it’s what you need to hear.

“Hyung,” Jaehyun says, just as quiet and unsure as everything else he said. “Is there anyone in your
life?”

“No,” Taeyong says.

“Did you really wait for me?”

“Yeah.”

“Did you love me, then? Is that what that means?”

Taeyong reaches out and curls his hand at the nape of Jaehyun’s neck. He holds him like that, to
make him look at him. He does. Dark-eyed, unsure.

“Yeah,” he says. “It means I fucking love you.”

Jaehyun’s lip trembles before he tucks it between his teeth. His eyes get wet, all along his lashes.
He releases his lip, wets it once and takes a deep breath before he speaks again.

“Do you still?” He asks.

“I showed up, Jaehyun,” he says.

He closes his eyes, then, lowers his gaze, but Taeyong won’t let him. He cups his face, and makes
him look up at him, wet eyes and runny nose and quivering lip and everything.

“I missed you, hyung,” he says. “I fucking - I missed you, so much. I thought about you every day,
I was waiting, I thought about you. Every day.”

He holds him. Wraps an arm around his shoulders and slips a hand into his hair, and holds him,
cradles his head against his stomach.

He damn near cries when Jaehyun wraps his arms around his middle. He pets his hair when he
presses his face against his shirt. He holds him, and lets him stay like that for as long as he wants,
petting his hair, and patting his back. Only when he seems ready to let go does he finally pull
away.

It gives him the time he needs to think about what he wants to say to him. All those things he’s
learnt about himself and his needs, and Jaehyun, and his needs. All the places they went wrong. All
the ways it could have been different.

“Come home with me,” he says.

The rice cooker beeps and breaks Taeyong out of his reverie. He told Jaehyun to wash up while the
rice cooked, and he meant to wash up, too, but the minute Jaehyun closed the guest bedroom door
behind him, Taeyong sat down at the kitchen island, and he hasn’t moved since.
The whole day drained him. The whole thing happened like a dream. Hearing from him after all
these years, searching for him, finding him, baring his soul to this kid. It hasn’t quite sunk in that it
happened, and if it weren’t for the sound of the shower running, in the guest bath, he wouldn’t
believe it was happening.

As he gets up to set the table for dinner, the same images run through his head. Jaehyun, fatigued,
quiet, in his front passenger seat, the lights of Seoul city on his skin and in his eyes. Jaehyun’s
shoes lined up beside his in the entryway. Jaehyun staring at everything, the way he did when he
first came to Taeyong’s old apartment. This, his new place, is bigger, and different from the other.
Brighter, airier. Two bedrooms. Jaehyun wouldn’t have had to sleep on the couch if Taeyong had
this place back then.

He puts the soup and the side dishes down on the table, and then he goes to the rice cooker to pack
two bowls with rice.

He thinks of all the work there is to do, now. Tomorrow, they have to go to Jaehyun’s place and
bring all his things. He’ll have to find him a job, eventually. Or maybe Jaehyun wants to study
something. He knows there are university programs for convicts, although he knows it probably
won’t do him any good. No company would hire someone with a criminal conviction. Maybe
vocational school. Jaehyun must have learnt something, carpentry or welding or something. He’s
sure they could build on that, get him to learn from a good craftsman and find a new path forward.

He thinks of how his future changed again, over the course of one day. How this empty house will
now have Jaehyun in it. He’d have to tell his parents, soon, that he’s planning on living with that
boy from five years ago. His colleagues might find out, too. Maybe it’ll throw him off the partner
track. Maybe it’ll fuck up his life, but he’ll come home to Jaehyun. He’ll love him like he couldn’t
fathom before, and that’s all that matters.

Taeyong hears the bedroom door open, and he looks over his shoulder at Jaehyun. He’s dressed in
Taeyong’s clothes. That sight was one he saw twice in his life, five years ago. He’s grown taller,
since. The hems of his pajama pants hang an inch above his ankles now. The shirt fits him about
the same, though. Soft beige, long sleeves hanging down almost to the tips of his fingers.

“Hey,” Taeyong says, bringing the rice to the kitchen island. “How are you feeling?”

“Good,” he says.
“Come, sit,” he says.

Whatever he wanted to say next melts on his tongue like sugar candy, slow and sticky sweet,
because he feels Jaehyun’s hands settle on his hips. His breath hitches, and he sets the bowls down
with a clumsy clatter. Jaehyun’s chest fits against his back, and his chin settles sharp on his
shoulder. That touch, that warmth that he craved.

“You okay?” He asks.

“Can I kiss you, hyung?” Jaehyun mumbles.

The rumble of his voice through his back makes his head reel. He’s allowed this, now, isn’t he? It’s
alright to want this, now, isn’t it? He lays his hands flat on the counter and takes a deep breath
before he turns around.

There’s a moment’s pause, then, of him halfway turned, Jaehyun’s hands guiding him, their faces
close and breaths mingling. Jaehyun’s eyes are dark, inquisitive, gaze flitting from his eyes to lips
to somewhere on his chest. One uncertain moment before he lifts his hands to cup Jaehyun’s face
and presses a kiss to his lips.

It leaves him breathless. His soft cheeks under his hands, his soft, plump lips pressed against his
gently, with just enough restraint to leave him aching, thrumming from head to toe with the need to
slide his tongue against Jaehyun’s. His mouth feels like he remembers it, but his kisses are surer
now than they were in drunken memory. Five years of longing claws up his body, takes hold of his
hands and slides them into Jaehyun’s soft, thick hair.

He’s wanted this for so long. His beautiful boy in his arms. This sweet, loving kiss. He doesn’t
know up from down, present from past.

Jaehyun breaks the kiss. He presses their faces together, and he releases one unsteady breath.
Taeyong thinks it’ll be just that. He thinks it’ll stop there, until they talk some more. Until they
learn each other once again. Until they’re certain it isn’t old pain and longing and the memory of
the other that they’re kissing.

But Jaehyun drags his fingertips from his hips to his belt, and unbuckles it.
“Wait,” he breathes.

“What for?” Jaehyun says.

He kisses him again, just as gentle as before, with a breath more impatience. He undoes the button,
and slides his zipper down.

“Jaehyun,” he murmurs, curling his fingers around Jaehyun’s wrists and trying to stop him. It’s just
intent. He’s just communicating his intent. There isn’t any real effort in it.

“You’re a year late, you know?” Jaehyun says. “You said four years, it’s been five. Or do you only
kiss boys with college degrees?”

It stings. He meant for that to hurt him. That habit hasn’t changed, Taeyong thinks. Cornering him
like that. Pushing all his buttons.

He doesn’t have time to process the thought, because Jaehyun’s mouth is so fucking warm and so
eager, and this time his teeth nibble lightly on his lower lip and pull. He doesn’t know where he
learnt that. His stomach drops, and he twitches in his pants, hands curled now around Jaehyun’s
arms.

Jaehyun slips his hand in, then, palms him over his briefs. His hand, that half inch bigger than
Taeyong’s, it covers his hardening length entirely. That gentle squeeze, it makes him burn. He
strokes him like that, over his briefs, and he presses their faces together again.

“I won’t wait anymore. I didn’t wait, hyung,” he whispers wretchedly. “I was angry with you. I let
somebody fuck me. He gave me money for it, too, you know?”

Taeyong lets out a shuddering breath, and he grips Jaehyun hard by the nape of his neck. His jaw
goes tight at the thought. He doesn’t deserve to be upset by it. Not being his first was what he
wanted. That was what he said he wanted for Jaehyun when he rejected his confession that night.
But not like this.

“I thought about you,” Jaehyun says, quieter. “I imagined it was you."

Taeyong kisses him then. He grips his face in one hand like he did the very first time Jaehyun
asked him to kiss him, and he swallows Jaehyun’s quiet moan. It feels cathartic. It feels
bittersweet.

He takes Taeyong’s hand and slips it under his shirt. He’s all hard, lean muscle, like all he did for
the past five years was learn how to make his body drive Taeyong mad. He drags it hard over his
abdomen. The muscles all tighten deliciously under his touch. His fingers catch on his navel. He
didn’t know it stuck out like that. It makes him smile.

He slides his hand up, but stops short of the cut of his pectoral. Jaehyun urges him up with a hand
curled hard around his wrist. He feels the swell of muscle there. That hard little nipple. His stomach
jolts, and he slips away, tries to put some distance between them.

It’s too early. They need more time, he knows it.

Jaehyun just uses the distance to slip the t shirt over his head and let it fall.

Taeyong’s mouth goes dry.

Ears burning red, elbows and knuckles and nipples a soft baby pink. His skin, smooth and
unblemished. He should have looked sweet with all that, but his body, it’s all sharp cuts of muscle.
Strong arms, sharp, defined muscle. Soft dark hair trails a path down from his navel disappears
behind the waistline of his pajamas.

He had thought about what he’d look like before, but nothing came close to that. It all feels terribly
undeserved. It all feels like it shouldn’t be happening.

He comes back to him, gentler, those fingertips resting delicately against Taeyong’s jaw. He kisses
him like that. Taeyong doesn’t resist.

“Byeonhosa-nim,” he breathes. “Hyung. I missed you.”

He kisses him again, and again, and again.

“Hyung, please,” he says. “I love you.”

He doesn’t say it, but Taeyong hears it loud and clear. Don’t you love me?

“Oh, baby,” he says.

He kisses him better, then. Fingers sinking behind his waistband, pulling down. His head feels like
static. He wants to look at him. He wants to see what he looks like when Taeyong’s kissing him
like that, but all he gets are glimpses of his kitten eyes and swollen lips when he opens his eyes in
between kisses.

He doesn’t know how they manage to move at all from where they were standing, but they make it
to the bedroom.

Just closing the bedroom door behind them makes Taeyong’s stomach drop, but Jaehyun takes it
further. He pushes him back onto his bed and crawls over him. He was always so impatient, always
wanting him, to hold his hand and kiss him and sleep with him. It made him feel some kind of
silly, looking up at that boy kneeling between his legs.

Almost twenty five. If he were at a bar somewhere in downtown Seoul, he could get anyone to go
home with him. Anyone. Such a pretty face and such a beautiful body. But he’s here, asking him to
fuck him. It isn’t lost on him that he hasn’t really seen life, hasn’t really tasted how good it could
be to him. It isn’t lost on him that if he did, he might not want him anymore.

If he thinks about that for a second longer, he’ll ask him to stop, but Jaehyun doesn’t give him a
second. He leans over him, his hand dipping the pillows beside Taeyong’s head. All he knows is
Jaehyun, now. All he sees are those pretty eyes, fluttering shut when Taeyong slides his hand into
his hair and draws him down for a kiss, and then his warm mouth, and those sweet kisses, and the
press of his body down on his.

He kisses Taeyong’s neck, then. Down the angle of his jaw, down his neck, like kitten licks. It
makes goosebumps rise down his arms. He rolls his hips down on Taeyong, and Taeyong’s hands
slide heavily down his back, down to slip under his waistband and squeeze that soft flesh. It fits
perfectly in his hand.

Jaehyun responds by taking his skin between his teeth. His neck is sensitive. The bite hurts, but it
makes him twitch and swell and squeeze Jaehyun again. It’s all happening too fast, but he’s so
caught up in him. So caught up in how much he wants him and for how long he’s wanted him.. His
hand reaches lower, blindly, sinks into his cleft. He’s so tall that Taeyong has to push himself up on
his elbow to reach where he wants to reach.

He feels that ring of muscle against the pad of his middle finger and presses down on it gently. It
feels surreal. It feels so fucking good, but he’s not sure he’s allowed to do it. He knows Jaehyun
likes it, because every light caress against his entrance has him keening. He turns his face against
the side of Taeyong’s neck, pushes back against his finger. His entrance opens up the tiniest bit,
takes in the tip and no more. He needs lube, or spit, or something.

“Fuck,” Jaehyun breathes. “Fuck, hyung, I want to feel you.”

He’s allowed, then? This is okay?

He slips his hand out then. Holds him by the hips and pushes him off. His head is just static. Just a
quiet buzz. The situation is less than ideal. He doesn’t know if he has condoms and lube. The last
time he had anyone in this bed was a year ago, maybe.

He leans over, pulls open the drawer on his nightstand, and feels inside blindly. He finds the
condoms first, but not the lube. It’s hard to focus knowing that Jaehyun is undressing just beside
him. He finds it, finally, at the very back.

He turns back to Jaehyun, then. The sight makes him stop and stare. When he moves next, it’s
sluggish and disoriented, stuck looking at him. He’s so fucking beautiful. His length lies heavy and
flushed against abdomen. He’s pretty there, too. Big, and pretty. That trail of soft hair pooling dark
at the base, strong thighs, legs with a dusting of hair over his calves.

“What’s wrong?” Jaehyun says.

“You’re so fucking beautiful,” Taeyong replies.

Jaehyun smiles, cheeks dimpling, flush deepening.

“Yeah?” He says, honey sweet, propping himself up on his elbows, parting his legs like he’s
inviting him in.
He goes to him helplessly. On his knees, between Jaehyun’s legs, he leans over him, takes his face
in his hands and kisses him.

“Yeah,” he breathes.

He drags his fingers down his body. His skin is so warm, so flushed, it blanches under his touch.
He wants to taste him. He wants to kiss down his body, so he does. He kisses his collarbones. He
kisses his chest, and all those dips and swells of muscle down his abdomen. That cute little belly
button. Jaehyun’s legs jerk at that, a little laugh spilling from his lips.

He wants to taste him so terribly. He opens his mouth and takes his tip in. He’s so fucking big.
He’s never had something that size in his mouth before. It makes his jaw ache, but Jaehyun’s brow
creases, and he lets out another quiet moan in that deep, melodic voice, and slides his hand into
Taeyong’s hair, and that’s enough to keep him going. Bitter precum, all on his tongue. The clean
scent of his soap on his skin. His thick, hot length sliding to the back of his throat.

He does his best. It’s sloppy, and probably not very good, but Jaehyun’s back arches and his grip
tightens on his hair, soft little moans and whispers of hyung, and please, and hyung again. His
body begins to tighten deliciously, and Taeyong is okay with that. He’s okay if he comes like this.
His pretty baby, if he gets him feeling good, if he gets him to stop thinking so fucking much, he’s
okay with that. But Jaehyun stops him halfway up that crescendo, pulls him off, grabs him by the
shirt collar and drags him up into a wet kiss.

“Don’t wanna wait anymore, hyung,” he says.

He drapes his thighs over Taeyong’s hips, scrabbling for that bottle of lube blindly. He finds it, and
thrusts it into Taeyong’s hands.

“Fuck, Jaehyun,” Taeyong murmurs, mouthing wet kisses to his lips, chin, jaw. He spreads lube
over his finger, finds his entrance all clumsy and eager and pushes his finger in.

He takes him beautifully, lips parting just a little, clutching his arms, then gripping the back of his
neck and holding him close, keeping his forehead pressed against his.

“One more,” he mumbles, kissing him after.

He pushes in a second. He’s so tight around him. He’s so warm and the slide is so slick, and the
whole thing is driving him insane.

“Put it in, hyung,” he says.

“Take it slow,” Taeyong whispers.

He doesn’t argue with him. Instead, he pushes Taeyong’s pants and briefs down just enough to free
his length, and he grabs Taeyong’s wrist and draws his hand away from his entrance. His fingers
slip out.

“Baby boy,” Taeyong says into a laugh, but Jaehyun just kisses him silent, curls his hand around
his length and guides it to his entrance.

“I’m clean,” he mumbles. “I got tested, I’m - fuck -

Just the press of that soft, slick pucker against his head makes them both curl into each other.
Makes them hold each other. It’s too much all at once. One kiss from forever ago, that’s all they
know. There are all these things he wants to know about Jaehyun’s body, where he likes to be
touched, how he likes to be unraveled. He wants to learn them all, but things are happening so fast.
It’s all too much, all at once.

He takes over, then. Pushes in slow and easy so he wouldn’t hurt Jaehyun.

He swallows him up, inch by inch. He grips Taeyong’s shirt collar again, kisses him again, but his
mouth falls open in the middle of a kiss and he moans agains Taeyong’s mouth. It’s maddening. He
holds him close in an inescapable embrace with one hand curled into his shirt over his back,
keeping their foreheads pressed together, keeping their noses brushing, lips brushing, but he
touches him so gently, resting his fingertips against Taeyong’s jaw all delicate and sweet. That’s
what he is to him, inescapable, but so delicate, so sweet.

Taeyong takes it slow. He makes him wait. He won’t let this hurt.

When he’s buried to the hilt, slowly, he rocks into him. Jaehyun’s body takes him so well. So
easily. He grips his thigh and pushes it up and out, opening him up a little more. He takes him
deeper. A quiet sigh that sounds like relief slips from his lips.

“Hyung,” he whispers, like he meant to say nothing more.

It feels incredible. So many years of waiting. So many years of wanting him, all given respite. He
can’t think about anything but him, about the gentle swell of pressure building between them,
about that dense, warm bubble around them, that beautiful, untouchable intimacy in that small
distance between their lips. Finally, they’re breathing the same air. Finally.

It lasts until he does that thing again, kisses him deep, teeth catching Taeyong’s lower lip and
pulling. A drop of bitterness spreads on his tongue, then.

He was always brazen about wanting him, but he was still inexperienced back then. Not hesitant so
much as clueless, and if he was hesitant it was because he was afraid Taeyong would say no, not
because he was afraid of what he wanted. But this, these little things come from the men he’s
kissed before. From learning what he likes. He wanted that for him, but he wanted it to be different.
For him to date some boy from his class and maybe fall in love again, maybe have his heart
broken, maybe find the love of his life. Not this, not like this.

“Was he good to you?” He asks.

“Who?” Jaehyun breathes.

“The man you slept with,” he says.

Jaehyun’s grip on his shirt loosens. Taeyong pulls back a little, and he sees that look of utter
disbelief coming over Jaehyun’s face.

“He didn’t fuck me like he loved me, if that’s what you’re asking,” Jaehyun says.

He doesn’t say it, but Taeyong hears it loud and clear. Fuck you for asking, byeonhosa-nim.

His hips still. He shouldn’t have asked, at least not now. He knows he fucked up, and he knew it
was a fucked up question to ask when he was asking it, but he couldn’t help himself. He just just
hoped he’d hear that Jaehyun was happy, that he was treated gently.

Mortified, he tries to lift himself off Jaehyun. He wants to stop all of this and say he’s sorry again,
but Jaehyun hooks his leg over his hip and draws him in again.

Don’t feel sorry, he’s saying. Stop feeling sorry for me and fuck me like you love me.

That sweetness is turning bitter, all through, and that intimacy is broken. He kisses him in an
attempt to turn it back, lips, chin, jaw. The scar in his eyebrow. The faint silver lines all over his
temple from those old shards of glass.

“Don’t do that, hyung,” Jaehyun says quietly.

“I’m sorry,” Taeyong says.

“Don’t say that,” Jaehyun says.

It’s all bitter now, and it’s all shattering. Taeyong presses their faces together, and Jaehyun hugs
him. They’ve gone back five years to that night and it’s like his kisses are meant to wipe the blood
away. Like his embrace is meant to protect him from all the things that went wrong in his life.

They’ve gone back, and he doesn’t know how to bring them back from there.

“I loved you so fucking much,” Taeyong says. “I love you, loved you for years, baby.”

“Fuck,” Jaehyun breathes.

It comes all at once. He’s fine until he isn’t. His jaw goes tight, and his fists tighten in Taeyong’s
shirt, his eyes fill up with tears that slip out and run into his hairline, pool at the inner corners, right
by the bridge of his nose.

“Fuck,” he says again, drawing him closer.

Taeyong is too taken aback to act for a second, and then his heart breaks for him, like it has every
day of the past five years. He doesn’t know what these tears are. Not relief. Not happiness.
Nothing good. He catches his tears with his knuckles, and he caresses his cheek.

“Let’s stop,” he says.

“No, hyung,” Jaehyun says, but he doesn’t stop crying.

It happened too fast, he knew it going in. They needed time, to figure each other out again. They
needed to let themselves hurt, first, and then heal.

“Baby,” he breathes. “I’m going to be right here tomorrow. I’m going to be right here. Let’s stop,
okay?”

He pulls out, and he tries to sit up, but Jaehyun won’t let go. He clings to him, arms around his
shoulders, face pressed to the side of his neck. He manages to maneuver them onto their sides, to
hold his naked body close and card his fingers through his hair. He presses kisses to it, and he
soothes him, lets him cry with his face pressed to his chest.

“Can you tell me what’s wrong?” He says. “Slow down, baby, tell me what’s wrong.”

He clings to him, and he cries, and he’s not ready to speak.

“What’s wrong?” He tries again, rubbing his back, kissing his hair.

It takes a long time for him to answer that. Long moments of that impenetrable sorrow before he
gathers himself. His breathing slows. His hiccups stop. He shifts, he moves up to lay his head on
Taeyong’s pillow. His eyes are swollen. Wet strands of hair are clinging to his face. Taeyong
brushes them away and kisses his forehead.

“Talk to me, Jaehyun,” he breathes.

“You’re here - I’m here with you, but,” Jaehyun says. "But nothing’s different.”

“What do you mean?”

“I can’t take anything back. Everything I did, it’s still the same, and - he’s still gone and he’s still
in my head and you still weren’t with me for all these years, and I still - I’m not happy. I thought
I’d - I thought everything would be different. Thought I’d be different.”

He understands, then. He understands what he needs. What their future looks like. More tears,
more sorrow he can’t touch. Hours and hours of tending to him. Of getting him out of that
basement apartment.

“Tomorrow,” Taeyong says. “Tomorrow, everything will be a little better. I’ll be here tomorrow.
And the day after that will be a little better. I’ll still be here. Every day will be just a tiny bit better,
and I’ll be here everyday, okay? I’ll take care of you, hmm? I’ll love you. I love you.”

Jaehyun’s pretty kitten eyes look back at him, and he understands. He’s pinned all his hopes and
dreams on Taeyong. Taeyong holds him, and he understands, that he’s the only thing holding him
here. That he can never let go. That he’s so fucking fragile, like butterfly wings, a breath of air
would turn him to dust. He’s so fucking tired, and he needs to sleep.

“I love you, Jaehyun. Close your eyes now, go to sleep. It’s been a long day.”

A few new tears, but he leans into Taeyong’s touch.

“Close your eyes, baby boy,” he says. “Go to sleep. I’ll be right here when you wake up. I’ll be
holding you just like this. Close your eyes.”

Jaehyun’s eyes flutter shut. He pets his hair. He caresses his cheek. He kisses his hair and his
forehead and his nose. He remembers that lullaby Jaehyun sang for him years ago. He hasn’t used
his voice like that in years, and he doesn’t really remember the lyrics, but he sings it for him, and
when he can’t remember the words, he hums.

가 (A baby more beautiful than the moon)

 가 (A baby brighter than the stars )

가 (Hush hush our baby)

가 (Our baby sleeps so well)

Chapter End Notes

That's all, folks! Thank you so much for reading!

End Notes

Thank you so much for reading! Let me know what you think <33

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