Proustian Moment

Posted originally on the Archive of Our Own at http://archiveofourown.org/works/36859390.

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: Alpha/Beta/Omega Dynamics, Alternate Universe - Hospital, Bipolar
Disorder, Depression, Suicidal Thoughts, Implied/Referenced Cheating,
Mentions of miscarriage, mentions of mpreg
Language: English
Stats: Published: 2022-02-03 Completed: 2022-06-02 Chapters: 15/15 Words:
79701

Proustian Moment
by heenimlee

Summary

Proustian moment, or involuntary memory, is when something like a taste or a smell or

another small, seemingly insignificant cue evokes a cherished memory, an essence of the
past, in a sense.
 Pin Tumbler Lock
Chapter Notes

See the end of the chapter for notes

Jaehyun rubs his eyes, bleary, sandy. His skin feels itchy the way it does after a night spent in the
hospital. He suspects it’s more psycho than somatic, because despite all his dubious inspection
before he gingerly covers himself with the baby blue hospital sheets, he supposes the sheets in the
call room are cleaner than his own back home.

His day began at 6 am the previous day, and it is now 7:30 am today, and the day hasn’t ended yet.
At least he caught half an hour of sleep, he thinks miserably, trailing one step behind his midlevel
as he gallops his way through rounds.

“Fifty eight year old male, newly diagnosed HIV, cerebral toxoplasmosis, known case of
Parkinson’s and type 2 diabetes mellitus,” he mumbles. “Day 3 of HAART and bactrim. Early this
morning he was somewhat drowsy and now his level of consciousness is whack.”

“Whack,” Dr Min repeats.

Dr Min, his midlevel, his babysitter, the man who’s teaching him how to wipe his medical ass
through the shitstorm of his intern year, is a man with no sense of humor. Still, Jaehyun prefers
him to Dr Jang, who spends more energy avoiding work than she does actually working.

“Sorry, he’s drowsy.”

“GCS?”

“I… uh,” he glances at his notes, and he clearly forgot to write it down. He’s trying to approximate
the GCS from what he can remember of his examination.

“GCS whack on fifteen?”

He bows his head, the back of his neck coloring. “He’s drowsy but rousable. Sometimes responsive
to verbal command, sometimes only responsive to pain. Fluctuating. GCS is fluctuating.”
“Between what and what?” He says. “Why do I have to ask you so many questions?”

“Sorry. Sorry,” he says. He’s just so fucking tired. “GCS fluctuating between 11 and 13. Vitals are
stable. He’s not oriented enough to assess most things, but there seem to be no discernible focal
neurological deficits.”

“So you’ve somewhat established that he hasn’t silently had a stroke, very cool, but I didn’t think
he had a stroke in the first place. What did I think he had?” Dr Min says, coming to a stop outside
the call room with his hand on the doorknob. "Why even bother - why don’t you just tell me he’s
sick? What’s wrong with him, Dr Jeong? Oh, he’s sick, Dr Min.”

The harsh lighting of the hallway makes Dr Min look more like the Eraserhead baby than the
actual Eraserhead baby and it inspires in Jaehyun the urge to stick him with a pair of scissors. He
swallows the urge and takes a deep, steadying breath to pull himself together.

“Sorry,” he says. “Differentials were cerebral edema and SIADH.”

“Yes, and what else?” He says.

He doesn’t really want to answer, because Dr Min isn’t really teaching him anything. He’s just
tearing him a new asshole, because he is an asshole, and he’s made it his life’s mission to rip into
the world around him until it, like him, is just a giant asshole.

“I don’t know,” he replies.

“Missing the most obvious one, Dr Jeong.”

“I don’t know.”

“It’s slapping you in the face, Dr Jeong.”

“I… don’t know?”

It doesn’t matter whether he knows or not. If he knows, he would have looked into it already. If he
doesn’t, or if it slipped his mind, Dr Min will fill in the gaps to make sure the patient doesn’t suffer
for Jaehyun’s incomplete knowledge. And if Dr Min doesn’t know, their attending will fill in his
gaps when she rounds later, and if she doesn't know, the patient's fucked.

“He’s diabetic?” Dr Min says, as though he had uncovered some great truth. “Did you check his
sugars?”

“Yes. Yes, actually, I did," he says, fighting the urge to swing at Dr Min. "GRBS was 94 at 6 am.”

“Fantastic, so we’re not overmedicating him and he’s not hypoglycemic,” he says. “Now tell me
about his salts.”

“Normal range.”

“Beautiful, now what do you want to do with him?”

“CT brain for cerebral edema,” he says.

Dr Min is railing him for no reason, really, he’s already put down the requisition for a CT
appointment. It’s just that his brain is so tired, he couldn’t say what two plus two is.

“Say his brain is boggy, now what?”

My brain is boggy, he thinks miserably.

“Bump up the steroid, add in a diuretic, monitor his blood sugars?”

“Great. Do that. I’m going to get some more sleep before rounds.”

“Okay,” he says.
Min enters the call room and slams the door in his face. Jaehyun stands there for a moment,
looking at the closed door, wistful, aching for his intern year to conclude already, so he could be in
Dr Min’s place. This is premature, it’s only his third month of residency, and he’s already fatigued.
He sighs, and he stretches long and hard. He doesn’t even care that he’s in public.

It’s 11:45 am. Not bad. Rounds finished up early today. Dr Nam spent forty minutes chatting about
politics with only one patient today. That’s why he’s free to go home. He ambles down the stairs to
the ground floor of his block. He hates to be the kind of man who ambles. Cavort, he wouldn’t
mind. Skip, he’d take. But amble. Sounds old. Decrepit.

He’s turning the corner, thumbs tucked under the straps of his backpack because he stuck them
there two whole minutes ago to adjust the way the straps sat on his shoulders and now, honestly,
he’s too tired to bring his hands back down to his sides. He thinks about that. He’s too tired. To
give in to gravity. He’s not sure how much sense that makes.

He dodges a wheelchair. A patient, in a wheelchair. But the orderly pushing the wheelchair doesn’t
seem to give a fuck that he nearly hit Dr Jeong, Internal Medicine resident, with a whole person on
wheels. He doesn’t take it personally. He knows what the tail end of a shift feels like.

He sucks in a deep breath and lets it out slow, as if to dispel the strange feeling that’s begun to take
root in his chest. He’s no stranger to strange melancholies and nostalgias for a youth lost to a career
in medicine, especially at the end of a shift, but today’s strange feeling digs its heels in and refuses
to budge. It grows stronger with every step he takes, and he begins to realize that it’s not sadness,
it’s happiness. It’s a weird, weird sense of being home, and he comes to a stuttering stop near HR
trying to figure out what the heck is happening to him.

It’s exquisite, this feeling, with no herald and no thought or experience to tie it to, he’s terribly
moved and he can’t quite figure out what it is until it hits him like a ton of bricks. He’s smelling
something, something sweet, something faint in the air, and he unsticks his feet from the ground
and moves forward in a trance, chasing after it.

It’s not perfume. It’s too organic, too complex to be perfume. There’s nothing about it he can
identify. It’s not like the citrus of his car freshener or the synthetic smell of strawberry syrup. He
can’t figure it out, just that it smells faintly sweet, and it wrenches him out of his fatigue and
plunges him into old memories of running around in the yard at his grandma’s place, of soft,
steaming mandu and the crisp countryside air and bright sunshine.

It startles him. It’s normal for smells to evoke memories, he knows, olfactory stimuli go hurtling
into the limbic system and mesh together with memory and emotion. But never before has a smell
made him feel held.

This is a person, he thinks. This is someone’s scent-signature, left in the wake of them. Someone
who could make him feel like he’s home. He’s found his mate.

Elation and incredulity and fatigue blur together into something unrecognizable and he follows the
scent, bumping shoulders with people and stubbing his toe on unexpected corners on his way but
he can’t be bothered. He goes after it, faster and faster, until he’s bursting through a side exit into
the alley between the hospital building and the parking lot.

Shit, he thinks, shit, fuck, fuck -

The last of it, diluted in the outside air, at an empty parking spot. He swallows thickly,
disappointed, and he walks around in a few circles, each wider than the last, hoping to pick the
scent back up somewhere until he finally realizes a few things.

One, this is really fucking weird. He’s chasing down a person like he’s a scent hound and to any
sane human, this behavior would come off as insanely creepy. He’d like to cut himself some slack
because this is a once in a lifetime opportunity, and he can’t possibly let them slip away.

Two, that this is the staff parking lot, and that means he’d probably see them again, and so all is not
lost. A new hire, maybe, because there's no way they've been here the entire time since Jaehyun
started working here and never crossed paths with him.

Three, that one of the general surgery residents is standing by the exit smoking a cigarette and
eyeing him with mounting concern.

“Bro, you good?” He calls out. “Can’t remember where you parked?”

But Jaehyun’s still too wrapped up in the insanity of what’s happening to him to really register
what he’s saying and come up with an appropriate response. He sees him stub out his cigarette and
make his way over.

“Maybe get a nap in before heading out? You look a little out of it,” the resident says. Youngho, he
remembers. He’s met him on consults a couple of times. He got mad at him for sending him a
consult for compartment syndrome when it was just an infiltrated IV. He told him it wasn’t his
fault, his attending made him do it, and then they sat and commiserated over shitty attendings for
five minutes before they had to get back to work.

“Bro,” Jaehyun says.

“Yeah bro?” Youngho replies.

“I think I just found my mate.”

“Bro,” Youngho says, fist lifting to his mouth, eyebrows lost behind his bangs.

“Yeah, bro,” he replies.

He always orders lunch before leaving the hospital. The delivery man from the Chinese restaurant
down the street from his apartment leaves his order outside his door before Jaehyun even gets
home. The food is always piping hot, and always in a white plastic bag with a big yellow smiley
and the words THANK YOU printed on the side seven times over, each repetition slightly offset
from the last and fainter. He always goes THANK YOU THANK YOU THANK YOU THANK
YOU THANK YOU THANK YOU THANK YOU in his head before he picks it up and opens his
door.

He sits it down on his dining table, drops his things off on one of its four chairs, none of which he
uses, and then showers. On good days, it’s a long, long shower or even a bath, although it’s usually
more Big Lebowski than it is Pillow Talk, because his phone invariably rings like a fucking rodent
with some query or other about some patient or other halfway through his bath. On bad days, he
remembers the wise words of an old fuck, cleans armpits-asshole-crotch-and-teeth in any order, and
calls it a day.

Shower done, he dries himself off, goes back to his food, which, by then would have cooled to
edible temperatures. He settles down on his couch with his food, puts on a drama and wolfs down
his lunch before the ten minute mark, and then he drops the bowl off outside his door and goes to
sleep.

He doesn’t wake up until it’s dark out, and every single time, he’s as disoriented, as
discombobulated, as what-fucking-day-is-it as always.

Today, his routine has turned on its head. He’s forgotten to order lunch, he realizes, as he crouches
on reflex outside his apartment door. No THANK YOU THANK YOU THANK YOU THANK
YOU THANK YOU THANK YOU THANK YOU anywhere in sight.

He sighs and opens the door, toes off his shoes and drops off his stuff, and then he strips, shoots
his clothes in the general direction of his laundry basket like he’s Lee Hyunjung. He misses,
because he’s not Lee Hyunjung, but he doesn’t really care to fix it.

He runs the shower and steps under the water when it’s on the tail end of cold, and his outlines
slowly blur as his bathroom begins to fill with steam, and the shock of what he just experienced
spirals down the drain with the MRSA he no doubt brought home with him.

That was his mate, he thinks stupidly. Within reach. Out of the nearly eight billion people in this
world, he found one that fits him, one that he fits, jigsaw puzzle, lock and key. The thought is
dizzying.

He hasn’t seen his mate, hasn’t spoken to them, but the traces of their scent left behind in a hospital
hallway hit him like a fucking freight train when to him, his own parents’ scents are mild at best in
the home they’ve lived in for years.

It feels like magic, although he knows there’s nothing magic about it. Nothing divine, nothing like
the myths of origin, of being half a person at birth only to be completed by another. It’s biology.
It’s signaling - the alpha cluster of signal molecules show a positive, linear correlation with
personality dimensions like openness and extraversion, the beta cluster with conscientiousness, the
omega cluster is associated with agreeableness and in some studies neuroticism. There are so many
more clusters and sub-clusters of signal molecules that form a scent-signature, an olfactory
reconstruction of who a person is at the very core of them.
 This particular scent, it had some combination of all those signal molecules, mapped and
unmapped, that meant that the person it belongs to is compatible with him in ways that no one else
he knows is. Some measure of each of those personality dimensions come together and create
something that complements him perfectly. Like a key to a pin tumbler lock of his own design,
those molecules in those proportions fit perfectly against his waiting receptors and bam, he was
able to perceive it.

It’s something few people really experience. Most are afraid of ending up alone, and they find
someone they can tolerate, file down each others’ bumps and carve out bits of themselves to make
sure they fit together. In a few years, they’re in love in some sense of the word. It’s not a key to a
lock, it’s more like lock-picking, but when they begin to be able to make out their partner’s scent,
that’s affirmation enough that they fit together.

Some brave out their lives alone, either because they’ve never felt the need for a mate, or because
they’ve felt the need too strongly to settle for anything less than that jigsaw puzzle, perfect fit, the
key to their pin tumbler lock.

He doesn’t know which of those people he is. He supposes he hasn’t really had the time to think
about it in all these years that most people spend thinking about dating and sex - oh my god, the
sex. The sex? He has a mate now, fuck, he can’t remember the last time he had sex -

He giggles stupidly, aware of the fact that he’s getting ahead of himself and too giddy to do
anything about it. If he were less tired, maybe he’d think about the fact that he doesn’t know if his
mate waited for him, or if they were ever waiting, if he’s even something they want.

But he is tired, and all he thinks about is the fact that he’ll probably find them soon, and that
thought makes him giggle just as stupidly through shampooing his hair.

Today is definitely more Pillow Talk than Lebowski, he decides, and he tries to put one soapy leg
up on the wall like Rock Hudson but he wobbles on his single tired leg and sees a concussion
waiting to happen.

“No THANK YOU THANK YOU THANK YOU THANK YOU THANK YOU THANK YOU
THANK YOU,” he says, and he puts his leg down tamely. He’ll save the soapy leg for bathtub
conversations with his Doris Day.

Chapter End Notes

Hello, here’s my attempt at a/b/o TT
If anyone is interested in knowing what the medical jargon is, here’s a list:
GCS - Glasgow coma scale, used to measure the level of consciousness
HAART - highly active antiretroviral therapy, the drugs used to treat HIV
GRBS - general random blood sugar
Let me know if there’s anything else you’re curious about/ that I missed!
 A Tree Falls in the Forest
Chapter Notes

See the end of the chapter for notes

Taeyong looks up at the old CMC building, the biggest block of concrete in Seogu, and he crinkles
his nose at it. The first time he walked through these doors, it inspired a paralyzing sort of awe in
him, the lights and the glossy floor and the bustle and the overhead announcements. Now, he’s
been in this field for twelve years, six of which he’s spent at the new CMC campus in Junggu, and
this building looks like nothing more than a grey lego.

He readjusts the shoulder strap of his bag and goes over his talking points in his head on his way to
HR. He’s already been through it once with administration at Junggu, and now he just has to say
the same things in the same order for the higher ups at Seogu.

Patient satisfaction is not the same as patient outcomes, and the dialysis centre’s patient outcomes
have been just fine even if their satisfaction rating hasn’t. They’ve taken on a new nurse who’s a
little hesitant and unsure about her job, and that may be one of the reasons for the skewed
satisfaction rating, and they’ve already put her on a performance improvement plan. They’ve got it
covered.

He knows none of those talking points touch on the real reason for the recent dip in their patient
satisfaction ratings, and that reason is one grumpy old bastard named Song Beomsoo. Song -
Where’s my blanket - Where’s my second blanket - Why is it so cold here - Where’s the pretty one
with the tits - Wasn’t it better when nurses wore skirts - Why are you crying, come in with a smile
and I’ll get better - Beomsoo. The eighty seven year old man who comes in for his twice weekly
dialysis and declines the magazines and books and the LED TV kept in his room for his
entertainment, in favor of a few hours of terrorizing nurses young enough to be his granddaughters.
He does it with impunity, because he knows the hospital director, and with glee, because he’s a
terrible old man. Taeyong would honestly give him his own kidney if it meant he’d stop coming in
for dialysis.

The automatic doors slide open and he walks briskly inside. He’s still in his scrubs from last night’s
shift. The shift was unkind, and his current task isn’t going to be very kind to him either, and so he
walks with a fairly murderous aura that cleaves an easy path for him through the crowd in the
lobby.

His feet carry him without conscious effort to the coffee shop near speech and audiology, his
favorite place for a peaceful coffee in CMC Seogu back when he was here getting his BSN. He
picks up the tallest mocha they have and shoots off a text to his nurse manager from CMC Junggu
before heading back out.
- I’m here, heading to to HR now, he says.

- I’m in the parking lot. See you there in five, she replies.

He pockets his phone and takes a swig of his mocha and turns into a hallway leading past the
chapel to HR. Something about the way his hand is warming around that cup and the taste of sweet
chocolate syrup brings an involuntary smile to his face. His coffee order hasn’t changed in thirteen
years, but this particular cup feels like the best cup of cafe mocha he’s had in his life.

He rolls his shoulders and readjusts his bag and takes another sip and his spirit seems to be lifting
with every step he takes. It’s pleasant, like - like a summer breeze through a rolled down car
window. Like it’s ruffling his hair and his teenage mutant ninja turtles T-shirt and Song Changsik’s
Tobacco Shop Lady is on the radio and he’s singing along and sipping on his chocolate milk and
there’s that smell of a decade of cigarette smoke in fabric of the seat -

He’s smiling, he realizes, somewhat baffled. That memory hasn’t made him smile in so fucking
long. It strikes him as strange, the fact that this memory crept up out of nowhere, and stranger still
that it made him smile, until he takes a deep, steadying breath and is plunged back into the
memory, back through twenty five years to that moment.

What the fuck, he thinks, beginning to feel weird, ill at ease over this apparent loss of volition, ill at
ease in the wake of the secondary, conscious emotions that surround that memory. The reason
behind it seems within reach, like if he could just tune out the noise, the bustle, the fluorescent
lights, that smell -

That smell? He’s just beginning to recognize that earthiness in the air, that smell like petrichor that
has no business being inside a hospital. The smile slips off his face and his lips part, and he knows
he looks the most dumbstruck he’s looked since he learned where a suppository goes.

He stops dead in the middle of the hallway and someone rams straight into his back. It shocks him,
and he squeezes his coffee cup so hard, the lid pops off and hot coffee jolts out of his cup and onto
his scrubs and the burn and the embarrassment and the grumbling person behind him ensure that
he gathers himself quickly.

He holds the cup away from his body and flaps his dripping shirt tamely, mumbling an apology at
the person who bumped into him, rounded him, and began walking away without a care to give for
his apology or his chagrin. He watches her walk away from him, flapping his shirt, catching his
breath, but his internal voice is screaming one single thought at him and he’s not hearing or
thinking anything else.
His mate is here.

Or was here. Walked by here. His mate - an alpha, judging by that earthy smell - walked by here.
He takes two involuntary steps forward, driven by the dumb, unthinking urge to find the man who
fits him like a fucking jigsaw puzzle, and then he stops. Then he tries to think something other than
mate-mate-mate, and his head feels like white noise.

No biggie, he thinks. No big deal. No big deal at all, just turn around and leave.

He turns around and takes eight steps back down the way he came before he remembers he has a
fucking job to do and he can’t just leave.

No big deal, he reminds himself. He just has to make sense of what he wants to do - no big - not a
fucking big fucking deal.

“Fuck,” he breathes, and then he takes two decisive steps forward, tossing his coffee into the
shining metal trashcan and then taking two more decisive steps towards the seats outside the
chapel. He collapses into a chair, pops the lid off the little bottle of strawberry scented hand
sanitizer clipped to his bag and squeezes a generous dollop into his palms, rubs them together, and
then cups them around his nose and mouth.

One chestful of synthetic strawberry, then another, then another, and the scent of earth and that
summer breeze and that song begin to fade away.

Just get up and go do your job, he tells himself. Then leave.

An hour and forty five minutes after his mini mental breakdown, he emerges from his meeting with
HR. His nice lilac scrubs have a faint yellow-brown hue where he half-assedly washed off the
coffee he had spilt, and he’s walking around smelling like sweet coffee but he doesn’t mind. It
could be worse.

“That went well! You’re a fantastic bullshitter,” Kim Hyesoo, his nurse manager says.

“Thanks, I’ve had practice,” Taeyong replies.

He does a quick, discreet sniff of the hallway to see if his mate is anywhere close. He isn’t. The
scent has faded to nearly nothing. He lets out a relieved breath and follows his manager down the
hallway.

“You seemed a little shaky there in the beginning, I thought maybe you were sick or something,”
she says, looking for her car keys in her tote. “Had me worried for a second.”

“I’m so sorry, I just had a bad shift,” he says, trying his best to play it off so she wouldn’t guess
that his mate’s scent had been rattling around in his brain for the first thirty minutes of that
meeting.

He gets his phone out to book an uber home, but she interrupts him.

“Don’t bother, I’ll drop you off,” she says.

He opens his mouth to protest, but she waves him off.

“I have to head to the hospital anyway and you live five minutes from there. I’ll drive you home
and then go to work,” she says.

“If you’re sure,” he says, but he’s glad he won’t have to wait around for a cab in this place filled to
the brim with the scent of his mate.

“I’m sure,” she says. “Plus, I wanted to talk to you about a couple of things.”
“What things?” He says, trailing after her, out of a side exit and into the bright summer sun in the
parking lot. He breathes in nice and deep, fresh air, finally relieved.

She unlocks her car and gets into the drivers seat and he slides into the passenger seat, shifting
uncomfortably because the leather under his ass is burning hot already. He busies himself with
buckling his seatbelt to take his mind off the burn.

“I heard you’re doing an online MSN?” She says.

“I - yes,” he says stupidly. “It’s not affecting my work hours in any way, I promise. I just thought it
might be good for - I thought it might help -

“One year course?”

“Thirteen months,” he says. “Eight more, now.”

“Great,” she says, rolling down the windows to let some of the hot air out. “Nurse Jo told me she’s
planning to move to Busan to be with her daughter in December next year, and I was thinking
about who would be a good replacement for her. Now I know you’ll have your Masters by then I
can happily recommend you.”

“Nurse Jo as in our head nurse?”

She nods.

“Oh,” he says, stupider than before.

He’s home. He’s showered and exchanged his mocha-smelling scrubs for soft old pjs, he’s watered
his plants, he’s had his eggs and toast. Now, he sits at his dining table with his empty plate in front
of him, his cup of chamomile tea cooling beside it, his fingers drumming a rhythm on the
manufactured wood, and it takes him long moments to realize that the rhythm is set to a tune he’s
humming in his head, and the song is Tobacco Shop Lady.

God damn it, he thinks, and he stills his hand and quiets his mind.

The song goes away, but the unease of the morning’s events doesn’t. He’s found his mate, he
thinks. Someone who works at CMC Seogu, because his scent was all over the place. Faint in
some, strong in some, depending on how long it had been since he passed by there.

He’s not a nurse, no, nurses don’t move like that. Nurses go to their floors and stay there until their
shifts end. This is a doctor maybe, with patients all over the hospital, consults, ER admissions,
rounds and pre-rounds and afternoon rounds and more rounds and whatever else they gallop
around the hospital doing. Or an orderly, hospital transporter or cleaner. Or something. But an
alpha, a male alpha something.

He sighs. How he feels about mates, much like his coffee order, hasn’t really changed in over a
decade. He panicked today, stumbled around a little before he figured out what he wanted to do,
because despite knowing how he feels about it, he never imagined he’d actually find his mate.

He doesn’t want to meet the person this scent belongs to. He doesn’t need that in his life, an
unnecessary complication. He just wants to go to work, take care of some people, make money,
and be free to be the dilf at the bar down the street, or home watering his plants or doing his
coursework or out shopping with his mom or whatever the fuck.

He drops his plate in the sink and then goes to the hutch by the door to retrieve the box of
chocolate he knows is at the bottom of his bag. He gets it out, a purple and gold box of assorted
Belgian chocolate, opens it, and slips one in his mouth. It melts slowly on his tongue, and his
mouth turns sweet, and he leans against the hutch and rolls the taste around a bit.

He wants to eat more, because it’s a gift from his favorite patient, and he wants to save it forever,
because it’s a gift from his favorite patient. Lee Seonhyeong, a high school teacher, a middle aged
beta woman whose scent clung faintly to the blankets he threw into the soiled linen bin early this
morning. He won’t be seeing her again because Dr Bae decided to discharge her to hospice. Her
husband gave him this box of chocolate before Taeyong got off work, thanked him, and then cried
buckets out in the hallway with him before going back to his wife’s side.
The memory of his slumped shoulders and the way his glasses slid crookedly up his forehead when
he pushed his hand under the frames to scrub at his eyes makes his throat tighten again. The
memory of patting his shoulder while the sun rose and the cormorants began their clamor by the
pond. It makes his nose tingle. He clears his throat and closes the box.

He goes to his room, lays it on his desk, and slides into bed, thinking of her, of her kids, of her
utterly devoted husband. He sees how that might be something worth wanting. A husband like
that.

A beta, the ones who do the work, the ones who stick around until the end, the ones who’ll feed
you dinner and clean up the vomit when it comes back up, the ones who won’t forget to thank the
nurses who cared for you, the ones who’ll cry for you, the ones built for forever.

Or even an omega like himself, someone kind and empathetic and easy to be with, someone who’d
make his eggs and toast for him, someone who’d ask him if he had a bad night because he can see
it written all over his face, someone he could cuddle in bed until all this unease is kissed away.

Not an alpha.

Ziploc boxes filled with three choices of protein and veggies take up the entire kitchen counter, lids
piled up on top of the microwave. This is the result of half a day of cooking, after half a day of
trying to sleep and failing.

Taeyong touches the side of a box to check the temperature of the food, deciding it’s still too warm
to put in the freezer. He hears the beeping of the code being punched in, the door swinging open,
shoes coming off, bag dropped roughly on the hutch, thump-thump-thump into the kitchen.

“Wow.”

He looks up, and Haechan is looking at his display with his mouth open.
“Hey, how was your shift?” Taeyong says.

“Good!”

“Really?”

“No,” Haechan says.

He takes a coke out of the fridge, and Taeyong settles his hip against the counter and watches him
take a few aggressive gulps, waiting for him to elaborate.

“This kid,” Haechan says. “I was doing my assessment in the morning, and it’s a neuro case so I
was checking if he’s oriented, right? I said do you know where you are? And he said home. And I
was like no you’re fucking not - in my head, of course. So then I said do you know who I am? And
he says yeah, I know you from school, and I was like do I fucking look fifteen to you - which, I
don’t know, maybe I do, but then I asked him what time is it? His bed was next to a window, like
the sun was up, birds were chirping, and he said eight pm. I panicked, figured he was disoriented in
every single way - I told my midlevel, and she said let’s step him up to PICU so he’s better
monitored until we figure out what’s wrong with him. So I did that, stepped him up.”

“That seems a little extreme for a disoriented kid -

“I’m not done,” Haechan says. “Everyone’s panicking right, because we can’t figure out what
happened to him. His mom and dad are freaking out, Dr Ok is freaking out, and then Dr Ok asked
him the same questions on rounds, and the kid said new things, weirder things, but then he giggled
- he fucking giggled - and then we realized that he got bored saying the same things to the same
doctors every morning and decided to switch it up. For kicks.”

“No way,” Taeyong says.

“Yeah,” Haechan replies, taking a swig of coke and looking ruefully out of the kitchen window.
“Yeah, a fifteen year old outsmarted me today. Played me like a fiddle.”

“No,” Taeyong says into an incredulous laugh. “What a monster.”

“He’s going to grow up and go to jail. Embezzlement or tax fraud or something, I just know it.
Maybe even murder, the fucking sociopath,” Haechan says, and then he jerks his chin toward
Taeyong’s mental breakdown. “What’s all this about?”

“Meal prep, we’ve been eating unhealthy for the past couple of weeks,” he says, like he didn’t
climb out of bed after three hours of trying to sleep and failing, like he didn’t cook twice as much
as he usually would just to give himself something to do.

“You have a bad night?” He asks, capping his bottle and setting it down on the counter.

“No, why?”

“You’re acting weird.”

“I’m being totally normal,” Taeyong says, watching him get a fork out of the drawer and
approaching the array of food, wielding it like a weapon.

“Did you sleep at all?” He says, settling on salmon and asparagus.

“Yes,” Taeyong says, and he knows it’s utterly unconvincing.

Haechan raises his eyebrow at him, and forks a huge bite of salmon into his mouth. He hums
appreciatively, and goes back for asparagus.

“What’s your deal?” He asks through half-chewed asparagus.

Taeyong opens his mouth to launch a defense of his surrendered sleep and the mountain of food
he’s cooked and nothing comes out except a prolonged Uhhh.

“My mate was in CMC Seogu,” he says hesitantly.

“What?”
“My mate was in CMC Seogu.”

“Your m-

“My mate,” he says.

“Was,” he says, and he swirls his fork around in the air. “In CMC.”

“In CMC.”

Haechan sets down his fork and braces his weight on his hands on top of the kitchen counter. He
seems to need a minute to let that sink in, and Taeyong understands.

“What’s he like? Is he awful? Is that why you’re in a mood?” Haechan asks, and when he’s done
speaking, his lips stay slightly parted because it seems his jaw hasn’t recovered from the shock.

“I don’t know what he’s like, because I didn’t meet him. Just found his scent all over the place,” he
says, and then, “I’m not in a mood.”

“Oh my god, you’re serious, you’re not fucking with me? You’re sure?”

“Yep. Not fucking with you. Very sure.”

“And you didn’t meet him? You don’t want to meet him? I mean I know you don’t really believe in
this, but aren’t you at least a little curious? The odds are insane -

He shrugs and shakes his head.

“Not even a little?”

“I’m a little curious, but it doesn’t matter,” he says. “If I meet him, if he meets me, he’s going to
have expectations, and I don’t want to deal with them. It doesn’t make sense to meet him just to tell
him to fuck off.”

He checks the temperature of the food again, to distract from the intensity of the conversation. He
finds that it has cooled considerably, and he begins putting the lids on the boxes.

“What if he’s waiting for you? What if he’s saving his virginity for his mate?”

“Who does that in this day and age?” Taeyong says, and then pauses his lidding and looks out of
his window. “I guess some people might.”

“Yeah.”

“But. But if he is waiting, he’s not waiting for me, he’s waiting for a mate.”

“…you’re his mate?”

He looks at Haechan’s confused eyes for a moment, and he curls and uncurls his toes, trying to
figure out how to say this.

“He’s waiting for someone who wants him, and I’m not that person. Wouldn’t it be nicer for him to
keep the idea of his mate sacred and beautiful instead of meeting me and getting his dream blown
up?” He says. “You know, like if a tree falls in the forest and nobody's around to hear it, does it
make a sound? If your mate doesn’t want you and you never find out, would you get hurt?”

There’s a pause in the conversation, and Taeyong uses it to carry his boxes stacked in a precarious
tower to the fridge.

“Yeah, maybe, I guess that makes sense,” Haechan says somewhere behind him. “I didn’t think
you felt so strongly about it. I just thought you were indifferent to the idea of mates, not that you’d
actively avoid yours.”

He sounds so baffled by it, like he couldn’t possibly comprehend why anyone would run from their
 mate when so many people live their whole lives waiting to find theirs.

He stays quiet for a moment, putting away the food as though it demanded his entire focus to put
six boxes in a freezer. He closes the freezer door and turns around, and it doesn't surprise him to
find Haechan still looking at him for some kind of explanation.

“I don’t know,” he says. “I just - I’ve seen this too many times. You put two plants in one pot and
it’s not, it’s never two equals growing together. The stronger grows, the weaker gets stunted or
dies. It feels parasitic to me, at least from what I’ve seen, one sacrifices, shrinks, gets flattened and
erased and the other grows. I don’t want that for me. I’m growing, I’m flourishing on my own and
I don’t want something like this to complicate things.”

“You’re sure, right? Just say the word and I’ll drive us there right now.”

“I’m sure,” he says. “I don’t want him.”

Chapter End Notes

Hahaha I'm sorry, I promise there won't be any heavy angst. It'll be a fairly smooth
ride, just a few bumps.

Also that kid who got bored of answering the same questions everyday and decided to
pretend like he didn’t know where he was? True story. Number 2 on the list of reasons
I didn’t go into pediatrics
 Plato is Dead
Chapter Notes

See the end of the chapter for notes

The hospital is at its most post apocalyptic at six in the morning. Only half the fluorescent lights
are on in the hallways, the rest scheduled to come on in another hour, before the first of the
patients come filtering into the lobby and the clinic waiting rooms. It’s empty, save for the
occasional resident passing Jaehyun by.

On most days, he’s bordering on running late, and he keeps his head down and walks straight
through to the call room to drop his stuff off before jogging off to pre-round. Some days, he has
time to spare and he amuses himself by pretending he just woke up in 28 Days Later or something.

Now, his routine has changed. He’s here early, like he has been every day since he found his
mate’s scent. He’s walking down the hallway, discreetly sniffing around for that sweet scent that
rattled his brain ten days ago. He can remember it, the way one remembers intangible things, he
remembers it as a sort of feeling.

He couldn’t smell it when he came back to work the day after he first found the scent, and he can’t
smell it now. The scent had dispersed, settled, the very air that carried it had changed. It seems
when the KDCA dictated minimum air changes per hour for hospital hallways, they didn’t take
into consideration Jaehyun’s attempts at finding his mate.

His discreet sniffing does nothing but give him an absolutely jacked diaphragm, maybe. He takes
in a deep breath, this time with the sole intent of releasing it as a disappointed sigh.

It’s okay, he tells himself. Maybe they’re on leave. On vacation in Hawaii or something. Or maybe
they’re related to a hospital employee - someone’s kid, someone’s sibling. Or someone’s spouse, he
thinks quietly. Someone else’s.

He can’t stop thinking about the fact that he had his mate within his reach and they slipped away
just like that. What do they look like, he wonders. How do they dress, how do they walk, what do
they like to eat? Are they a coffee snob? Do they dance or sing or paint or like movies? Adventure
sports? Dirt bikes and ATVs and wake boarding and beer?

In his mind, he paints them in an old Hollywood sunset, five hundred thousand kilowatts of
stardust, in shimmering lilac clothes ruffled by a summer breeze, angel-sent and meant for him,
and he looks into the eyes of his lover and he promises to find them.
He stabs his fork into his salad viciously and tries once again not to think of the look on his
patient’s face when he turned around in the middle of his per rectal and asked if Jaehyun was
digging for gold. In his defense, he was. He was doing a fecal disimpaction, since general surgery’s
last tantrum about being consulted for stupid shit meant that all the reasons he didn’t want to do
general surgery have come back to bite him in the ass. Getting his finger up someone’s butt in
ways he does not enjoy, for example. Doody duty.

He shivers and shakes the image out of his head. The sun is shining down on his bench in the
garden outside the cafeteria, the day is slow, he has time to eat, and he doesn’t want to think about
fingering fossilized poop out of someone’s butt.

“My man!” Someone yells behind him.

Jaehyun knows the voice, and somehow knows that was meant for him. He turns around, thankful
for the distraction. Youngho the surgery resident is walking towards him with all the swagger of
Fred Astaire dancing Puttin’ on the Ritz.

“Hey,” he says.

“Did you find her? Is she hot? Is she everything you ever dreamed of?”

“I don’t know,” he replies, watching him take a seat on his bench uninvited. “They disappeared. I
guess they don’t work here after all.”

“Aww sucks you lost ‘em,” he says.

Jaehyun swallows thickly and shrugs, turning his attention back to his salad. He doesn’t want to
talk about it, because it’s been eating away at him that he missed them by a hair that day and they
may have slipped away forever. Youngho seems to catch on that his mood has been dampened by
this, and claps his hand over his shoulder.

“Let’s go over it again,” Youngho says. “You found their scent at HR, and you chased it all the
way to the staff parking lot.”

He nods and shovels his salad into his mouth in an attempt at seeming unperturbed. It doesn’t
work. His throat is unprepared for this plan of action and he needs to take a giant swig of his
lukewarm coffee to force iceberg lettuce down his unyielding throat.

“They must be employed by the hospital or they wouldn’t have their car parked in the staff parking
lot. The see-saw doesn’t open if you don’t have a permit, right?”

“The what?” He rasps.

“The stripy stick,” Youngho says, swinging his forearm up and down to mimic what Jaehyun
guesses is a boom barrier. “Here’s what I think. If they’re just swinging by once in a while, going
to HR and leaving, they must be a pretty big deal, right? Like whose job lets them come to work
just whenever. Like, like the hospital director or something.”

“The director of CMC is an eighty year old man,” he says.

Youngho shrugs.

“I’m just saying, he’s rich as fuck, it might not be so bad.”

“Maybe I could be his Eliza Doolittle,” he says, grinning against the lid of his coffee.

“Bro, you talk to animals?”

Jaehyun doesn’t mean to, but he laughs into his cup of coffee.
“Better, better,” he says, clapping him on the shoulder again. “Here’s what I think, I think you
should post it on your social.”

“What would I say?” He asks. “If you were in CMC Seogu on September seventeenth, you might
be my mate.”

“Yeah, that, and please dm with your asl, I’ll come get a whiff.”

“That sounds like a plan,” Jaehyun says.

“You going to do it?”

“No,” he says. “It’s a terrible plan. I don’t want my colleagues to see -

“I didn’t say put it on LinkedIn -

“It’s a terrible plan,” Jaehyun says, laughing, and he’s thankful for the laugh. He hasn’t really told
anyone else about this, and so he’s thankful for being able to talk about it with someone, too. Even
if it’s Youngho.

“Chin up bro,” Youngho says, grinning. “I gotta go now. I have like three minutes before someone
gives me a stupid consult. I can just feel it. Gotta use these minutes to drain the main vein. Make it
rain in Spain or whatever.”
Taeyong startles awake and his muddled brain interprets the rhythmic thumping he can hear as
someone have a seizure. He mumbles something about recovery position before it sinks in that
someone’s pounding on his bedroom door. Haechan, who else could it be but Haechan.

“Fuck off, I’m sleeping!” He yells, rolling over and burying his head under his pillow.

“You’re awake now, I’m coming in,” Haechan says, and it draws a miserable groan from
Taeyong.

The door opens and the bed dips and Taeyong comes to terms with the fact that he can’t avoid this
and go back to sleep. He sits up groggily and looks at Haechan sitting cross legged on his bed.

“Yo, okay, you have to hear this,” he says. “So I have a friend in Obgyn, an intern, so he’s at CMC
Seogu, right. We went to med school together and I hate him, he’s a real obnoxious fuck -

Taeyong blinks and begins to sink back down into bed, deciding this conversation isn’t worth
being awake for.

“Wait, wait I’ll get to the point,” Haechan says, and manages to keep him upright.

Only temporarily, Taeyong says in his head. Conditional uprightness, withdrawn when he feels
like it.

“So this obgyn intern, he told me that he was just having lunch the other day, as people do, and he
overheard two guys talking in the garden - about how this one guy thought he found his mate’s
scent and followed it to the parking lot but then couldn’t find his mate. And I was like, it might not
be your guy but let’s just see what the deal is because it’s a cool story anyway, and -

Taeyong barely registers his projectile word vomit and he scrubs his hands over his face to clear
the sleep haze, because he’s getting the feeling he needs to pay attention.

“I asked him if he knew when this dude went around sniffing the hospital - which objectively
seems like a bad idea, I mean breathing normally in a hospital seems like a bad idea, imagine using
your entire inspiratory reserve in the hallway -

“Haechan,” he says, reminding him that he should get to the point.

“Right. Sorry. It was the day you went to CMC Seogu.”

“It could be someone else?” He tries.

“What are the odds? I know there’s a fuck ton of people in the hospital at any given time but what
are the odds of two sets of mates being found in the same place at the same time on the same day?”

“I don’t know -

“Slim is what they are. He’s your mate,” he says.

He thrusts his phone into Taeyong’s hands, and he has someone’s instagram pulled up on his
screen. Taeyong blinks blearily down at it.

“That’s him. Jeong Jaehyun, in his first year of internal medicine residency at CMC.”

Taeyong looks at the picture on the screen, of a smiling man with black hair that looks fluffy and
soft, deep dimples carved into his cheeks, sleepy, feline eyes and a little kitten nose and a very
pretty mouth. Everything about his face is soft and delicate, but it comes together into something
very masculine. He’s handsome as hell, but that doesn’t matter.

“An intern, that’s what I get?” He mumbles, unimpressed.

“What do you have against interns? Scroll down,” Haechan says. “He has abs, too. He’s six feet
tall. He dresses nice.”

Taeyong shrugs and attempts to hand his phone back, but Haechan forces it back into his hands and
scrolls for him.
“You’re telling me you don’t want a smart, hot man with an alpha dick?” He says.

“I can get smart, hot alpha dick any time I want.”

“I know that, but I’m saying you should probably want it now. It’s been so long since you last had
sex you should get some kind of trophy. Disuse atrophy.”

“Shut up,” he says, but it was a funny joke and it makes him grin.

“Look at this one, it’s him with a puppy,” he says. “Look at the caption.”

“He peed a little in my lap,” Taeyong reads out.

“That could be you,” Haechan says. “You could be the one peeing a little in his lap -

Taeyong throws the phone into Haechan’s lap like it burned him.

“Get out,” he says, and sinks back into bed, burrowing under his pillow for good measure.

“Think about it!”

“Get out!”

He hears Haechan’s cackles and his footsteps receding, and the door closing quietly, and he wills
himself to go back to sleep. But it seems the image of Dr Jeong Jaehyun is burned into his mind
now and the image only gets brighter in the darkness of his pillow cave, flickering like an OHP
slide.

He’s cute, that’s for sure. Really cute, and he seems like a sweetheart, but who doesn’t on social
media? Everyone on the internet is a philanthropist, and everyone loves the elderly, and is all about
saving the bees and trees and puppies - damn it. God damn it. He shouldn’t even be thinking about
this. It doesn’t matter.

Park Sangmi has her gold rimmed glasses on and her silver hair swept very neatly into a bun. She’s
as old as Jaehyun’s grandma, but Jaehyun’s grandma isn’t half as cool as Park Sangmi. She’s a
Seoul city grandma, dressed in nice pants and a nice blouse, grey Skechers on her feet, ready to be
discharged from the hospital after a bout of pneumonia.

She’s squinting at her copy of her discharge summary, printed in 18 pt so she can read it and make
notes in the margins.

“This one is for your blood pressure, morning and night,” Jaehyun explains. Usually, for patients
this age, he’d be drawing little suns and moons on the medication boxes so they wouldn’t get them
mixed up, but he has a feeling Mrs Park would beat him with her walking stick if she felt like he
was insulting her intelligence.

“This one’s for your diabetes, one in the morning, this one for your neuropathy - the burning, take
that after dinner. It might make you a little sleepy -

He’s interrupted by a sharp rap on the door, and he turns to see Youngho’s head peering around the
door jamb. His eyebrows shoot up to his hairline. He’s been accosted by Youngho at the most
unexpected of times with questions and suggestions about finding his mate - at a urinal in the
men’s room, at 3 am in the call room, on an 11pm consult - but this is new. He’s never come
looking for him before.

“Dr Jeong,” he says. “A word?”

“I’m in the middle of something,” Jaehyun says, gesturing to his patient sitting on the edge of her
bed and squinting now at Youngho instead of the discharge summary in her hand.

“Evening ma’am,” Youngho says to Mrs Park, and then turns back to Jaehyun. “It’s an
emergency.”

“What emergency?”

“Plato is dead.”

Jaehyun blinks at him, wondering for a second if there’s anyone he knows named Plato - a patient?
Someone’s cousin? Someone’s dog? No, just the philosopher.

“He’s - he’s been dead a while, Dr Suh.”

“No, I mean, the dead hand of Plato,” Youngho says, slipping into the room. He stands with his
hands on his hips, triumphant, despite bringing news of Plato’s death.

“Can we do this another time?”

“Maybe you should talk to him, Dr Jeong, he doesn’t seem all there,” Mrs Park says.

“Ma’am, you’re hurting my feelings,” Youngho says. “Look, listen, I have like ten minutes before
my MVA comes in so I’m in a rush, but I think I’ve found your mate."

“For the last time, my mate isn’t Director Oh, now will you let me discharge my patient in peace?”
Jaehyun says, pointing him to the door.

“No, I think I want to hear this,” Mrs Park says, setting her papers down beside her on the bed and
looking expectantly at Youngho.

Jaehyun should have guessed she’d be all ears at the mention of a mate. She’s been needling him
about when he’s getting married since he admitted her ten days ago. He has a feeling she wants to
set him up with her granddaughter, and somehow, it’s more for his sake than it is for hers.

“Thank you,” Youngho says, with a hand on his heart. “Basically, I was listening to a podcast
today, and they talked about biases and blindspots in medicine, right? The dead hand of Plato, that
means the human tendency to think in categories, like that’s a plant, it’s the plantiest plant, and
that’s a pen, the penniest pen, but things aren’t perfect, right? So when you have an imperfect
image of something, you smooth out the wrinkles and make it perfect, and that’s how you miss
imperfections and transitional forms. They extended that to the practice of medicine, how we miss
incipient illness by smoothing out wrinkles and seeing the patient as either totally fine or totally
fuc- totally sick. And that got me thinking.”

“You really want to hear this?” Jaehyun says to Mrs Park, his patience worn thin.

“You have to tell a story the right way,” she says. “From the beginning.”

“Hey, you know what, you’re a lovely woman,” Youngho says, and he continues. “So your mate,
they were at the staff parking lot, so they’re CMC staff, but the thing is CMC Seogu isn’t the only
CMC -

It hits him like a freight train then, and all the exhilaration and trepidation and palpitation he
experienced when he first found that scent comes alive in him all at once, all over again. The
languishing hope of finding his mate rears its head, rejuvenated.

“Oh shit,” he says. “The Junggu campus.”

“Exactly.”

“Why didn’t I think of that?” He says, leaning against the bedside table because his knees are
going weak.

“The dead hand of Plato,” Youngho says. “Also, you’re a tired intern, these things happen. One
time I -

But Jaehyun stops listening, and he grips the IV stand to steady himself, because he’s gone
lightheaded at the thought of finding his mate - or at least finding a way to find his mate.

“Are you alright Dr Jeong?” Mrs Park says, patting his arm sweetly, and he grins, stupidly elated.
“I’m great,” he says.

It’s six thirty pm and all the clinics and department offices are closed, but Jaehyun’s been through
the floors of every single specialty in the main building, to the centers for cancer and geriatric care,
and he still hasn’t even seen the outside of the six other specialized centers under CMC Junggu.

He’s so fucking tired. His legs are on the brink of giving out, because he worked out this morning,
and then walked 14k steps through his work day, and then 6k more walking through yet another
hospital on the other side of town looking for his mate.

He looks up at the dialysis center looming ahead of him. Fuck this hospital, he thinks. Fuck them
and their entrepreneurial spirit for having so many specialized centers.

He’s still wearing his scrubs and his coat, so when he slips in behind the nurses going in for the
night shift, nobody stops him like they did at the geriatric center. He walks in and stands in the
lobby stupidly for a second, sniffing in four directions, and finding nothing at all.

He’s so tired, he briefly considers going home and coming back after work tomorrow, but
something urges him to take a quick look around the place since he’s here, now. He pushes the
door to the stairs open and takes four leaden steps up when he hears another door open a couple of
floors up, two voices chatting.

Faintly, he smells it. Faintly sweet, a man and a woman talking, laughing, two pairs of footsteps
walking down. He’s frozen in place on the fourth step, registering that scent getting stronger and
stronger with every passing moment until it washes over him with the force of a tidal wave. He
grips the railing hard to keep himself standing and he wills himself to take another step forward,
but he’s stuck, magnetically stuck to this step and he’s trembling.
Ahead of him, at the landing, is a window, and in it he sees a violet sky and a blazing Hollywood
sunset, and he keeps his eyes on it until the forms of a man and woman come to a stuttering halt on
the landing. He doesn’t know which one of them it is.

“What’s wrong?” The woman says.

“Nothing, I just - you go ahead, I have something to do,” the man says.

It’s him. Angel-sent, patterned by nature, his own Debbie Reynolds in lilac scrubs. He’s stuck
staring at him, dumbstruck, floating. Even utterly confused, he’s fucking stunning, although the
cut of his jaw and cheekbones and the sweep of his shoulders is more Gene Kelly than it is Debbie
Reynolds. And his eyes. They’re so big, twinkling, almost. Goddamn. He’s beautiful.

Some more conversation ensues between the two of them, but Jaehyun hasn’t the slightest fucking
idea what they’re saying, because he can’t take his eyes off his mate, he can’t pull himself out of
the haze of his sweet scent and this warmth spreading through his veins, from his chest to the tips
of his fingers and toes.

He vaguely registers the woman leaving and the door falling shut behind her, and it gives him the
push he needs to start moving. He walks up to him in a daze, and he can see it, the sunset and
stardust and the summer breeze, and he can hear the sweeping violins of You Were Meant for Me.
He sees how his breathing quickens, how his eyes go even wider and his delicate lips part.

“Fuck,” his mate says.

“Fuck?” Jaehyun repeats.

“No, I mean, shit -

“Shit,” Jaehyun says.

“No, sorry, I’m,” he takes a deep breath, and his brows knit.

He scrubs his hands over his face, and Jaehyun can’t quite decide if they’re pretty hands or not.
Bitten nails and skinny fingers and bumpy knuckles and veins like a nurse’s dream - pretty. Very
pretty.

His mate then sighs - sighs? - and offers his hand for him to shake, and all his sweeping violins
fade away anticlimactically.

All of him is reacting to his mate’s scent. Everything about this stranger feels like coming home
and he has this implacable need to crumple into him, press his face to his neck and breathe in his
scent. Like falling into bed after a long day and nuzzling against his pillow and breathing in the
scent of fresh laundry. He supposes in the civilized world, you can’t rub your nose against a
stranger’s neck, even if they are your mate. He takes his hand hesitantly, and the feeling knocks the
breath out of him, of his warm skin, the kind of slip that comes from recently and carelessly
slathered on hand cream.

This is already very, very different from how he imagined it going, but he accepts the formal
greeting and looks back up at his mate’s face. In the vacuum left by his own production of You
Were Meant for Me, he registers the conflicted, displeased expression on his face. The faraway
beeping of dialysis machines, the glare of the fluorescent lights, a world away from his Hollywood
sunset. Jaehyun comes to the uncomfortable realization that this will continue to be very, very
different from how he imagined it.

“I’m Lee Taeyong,” his mate says.

“And you’re not - you’re not happy to see me,” Jaehyun notes, the exhilaration of moments before
corrupted by a twinge of disappointment.

“And you are?”

“Jeong Jaehyun,” he says.

“I meant are you happy to see me?”

He didn’t think anything else was an option. He didn’t think very much at all, he realizes, and the
disappointment mounts with every passing moment. A flush climbs his neck and spreads over the
bridge of his nose to his cheeks and his ears and he lifts his hands stupidly to press against his ears
in the hope of cooling them. Or at least hiding them so he doesn’t accidentally bring ships ashore.
“I should be, but now I’m not so sure, I guess,” he says.

There’s an uncomfortable silence for a second, and he spends it looking at the floor and clearing
his throat and figuring out how to say he’s fucking mortified and humiliated - as if his flush isn’t
already screaming it at Lee Taeyong. He wants to lay down in fetal position, or run, or maybe roll
down the stairs, in fetal position -

“I think this is where I say I’m not looking to date anyone,” Taeyong says hesitantly. “Let alone be
someone’s mate.”

He’s rejecting him, and the rejection is crushing, shocking, and it feels like this door opened for a
moment only to taunt him and slam in his face. But that’s stupid. It’s nobody’s fault. He knows it’s
nobody’s fault and he can’t hold this against him but none of that changes the fact that he feels
crushed.

He looks at his mate, at his stance - the way he’s clutching the strap of his bag, white knuckled.
He’s nervous, he was unprepared - as unprepared for this as Jaehyun was - and maybe even scared.
He’s turning a strange alpha down, one who tracked him down at his workplace to ask him out. All
by himself in an empty space with someone whose temper he doesn’t know. His mate is somewhat
scared of this turning bad, he realizes, and that jolts him out of whatever self pity he was feeling
and forces him two steps back.

“Right. Right, that’s totally cool,” he says, and his voice sounds weird so he swallows before he
speaks again. “I’m so sorry, I spent all this time looking for you and I never thought about whether
or not you were looking for me - I’m really sorry.”

“You don’t have to apologize. I’m sorry, I know this must be difficult -

“No, I mean yeah, it is, but you don’t owe me an apology either,” he says, and then, “I should get
going.”

He waves stupidly, and the wave is awkward, like he’s wiping glass, and he groans internally and
shoves his hand in his pocket before he can make this worse for himself. He’s two steps down
when he hears his mate calling out to him, and he stops and turns back.

“Let me buy you a coffee?” He says, picking at the nylon strap of his satchel. “I just - I want to
explain.”
 “You don’t have to explain,” Jaehyun says.

“I know.”

Jaehyun swallows, looks down at his feet. Coffee would mean fetal position is further out of reach,
but coffee would also mean closure. He can keep it together for another hour, he thinks, if it means
he won’t have to beat himself up trying to figure out why he was lucky enough to find his mate and
unlucky enough to be unwanted.

“Okay,” he says. “Yeah, okay."

Chapter End Notes

Okay, I'm really enjoying this, because I've never written anything this light before! I
hope you're enjoying it too.
Fecal disimpaction is pretty self explanatory, you stick a gloved finger up a butt to
manually remove hardened poop. I'm sorry for dwelling on poop so much in this
chapter, it is unfortunately a big part of medicine TT
Disuse atrophy, like the name suggests, is when muscles shrivel up because you're not
using them
MVA is motor vehicle accident

You were meant for me is a song from the musical Singin' in the Rain. You can check
it out here

Thank you so much for reading! Let me know how you feel about this <33
 Cheeseburger
Chapter Notes

See the end of the chapter for notes

Taeyong’s ice-cream cup is cool and pleasant on his uncomfortably warm hands. They decided on
ice-cream instead of coffee, because the moment they stepped out of the air conditioned comfort of
the dialysis center, an uncharacteristically stifling October evening settled over them.

He’s still reeling from the shock of meeting his mate out of nowhere, when all he was prepared for
tonight was a hot shower, dinner, and maybe an episode of the drama he’s watching. Chocolate ice
cream is helping, and the sounds and smells of the street are helping, too. He’s stopped trembling,
at least. He’s finally getting desensitized to his mate’s scent, and Tobacco Shop Lady has just
stopped playing in his head.

He glances at him, at Jeong Jaehyun, walking a respectful distance from him along the fairly busy
street, his focus pinned to his pistachio ice cream. It bothers Taeyong that he likes pistachio as an
ice cream flavor. It’s weird. He doesn’t know anyone who likes nut flavored ice cream, and
frankly, he thinks it might be an axe murderer trait.

It’s a little too noisy here for the kind of conversation they’re going to have. He doesn’t want
anyone to hear what they’ll be talking about. There’s always someone from the hospital at all the
coffee shops and restaurants around the hospital and so they can’t talk there, but he’s not about to
take a leisurely stroll along the Daejeoncheon with a man who likes pistachio ice cream. He leads
them from the ice-cream place to the back streets around the hospital. There’s no cars, not so much
noise, and not so many idle eavesdroppers, but there’s enough foot traffic to be safe.

He rejected him already and Dr Jeong took it surprisingly well. He turned beet red with
embarrassment and did a shit job of hiding his disappointment, but he didn’t yell or throw a
tantrum like he expected him to. And if he’s being honest, even if he did, Taeyong’s been a nurse
for a decade and that means he could take him in a fight without breaking a sweat. He’s just being
careful. Because who likes pistachio -

“Hey, could we maybe sit down? I’m super tired -

“You know what, me too,” Taeyong says.

He spots a bench at the little triangular “park” between the emergency center and the cancer center
and he gestures to it. Jaehyun nods and follows him, and they sit gingerly, as far from each other as
they could manage on a park bench. A moment crawls by in uncomfortable silence while Taeyong
tries to figure out how best to say what he wants to say.

“So you’re a nurse,” Jaehyun says, breaking the ice.

“Yep,” Taeyong replies.

He needs to start talking, he thinks. He was the one who wanted to talk, and honestly, he wishes he
had just let him go. It’s just that he seemed sweet, and so hurt by his rejection that he wanted to
make sure he knew it wasn’t his fault.

“How do you like nursing?”

“It’s - it has good days and bad days,” he says. “How are you feeling about residency?”

“Good days and bad days,” he says, shrugging.

“Are you from Daejeon?” He asks.

“No, no, I’m from Seoul,” he explains. “And you?”

“Me? I’m from here,” he says.

Another awkward silence stretches between them. Jaehyun clears his throat and takes a big bite of
his ice-cream. Taeyong follows suit, just to give himself something to do.

“You know, you really don’t have to explain yourself,” Jaehyun says.

It makes Taeyong smile. Jaehyun seems to have gathered himself already. That burning red flush
has left his cheeks and ears, and he’s sitting somewhat comfortably in his presence. He’s glad for
it. He could let him go home now, confident that he hasn’t destroyed him with his rejection, happy
with the thought that he bought him some ice-cream, at least.
“I just wanted you to know that it’s not that I dislike you, or that there’s anything wrong with you,”
he says. “This is entirely a me thing.”

“Thank you,” Jaehyun says. “That’s the nicest thing anyone has ever said to me.”

“Really?”

“No, actually, yesterday, my attending looked at a note I wrote and said congratulations, you didn’t
fuck anything up for once. But this is a close second.”

Taeyong laughs, and Jaehyun laughs, and some of the tension between them dissipates.

“Was it Song Jihun?” Taeyong asks.

“It was. Have you worked with him before?”

“Mhmm, I did my bachelors at CMC. He called my supervisor a space occupying lesion, once.”

“Oof, now I don’t feel so bad about the things he’s said to me,” he says, crossing his legs and
readjusting, sitting more comfortably. “How long have you been at CMC?”

It sounds normal, conversational, and it gladdens Taeyong’s heart some more. Something about the
way he looks, like a sweet little rice cake, and the way he reacted to being turned down makes
Taeyong feel for him. Pity, but that’s a feeling too.

“A while,” he says. “I graduated nine years ago, and it took me - it took me a year before I realized
I wanted to go into dialysis nursing. And then I worked for a couple of years under supervision at
CMC Seogu, and they needed nurses at the new branch so I moved here as a dialysis nurse. Been
here since. I’m - I’m actually doing my masters now. If everything goes well, I’ll be head nurse
soon. And then maybe management - I don’t - sorry, you didn’t ask -

“That’s fine! That’s amazing, actually, good luck, you know. I hope you get everything you want,”
he says, and he sounds genuinely excited for him.

“Me, too,” he says. “It’s important to me. Really, really important to me, like nothing else comes
close. I like the work I do. I like standing on my own two feet. I don’t need a mate, I don’t need to
be taken care of, I haven’t been waiting on an alpha all my life, I guess.”

He’s finally arrived at what he’s trying to say, and he wasn’t planning on saying it, because no
alpha in the world would respond well to I think it’s in your blood to be a selfish fucking parasite.

“I’m not saying it’s a bad thing to want a mate. It’s - whatever, if that’s what some omegas want,
then that’s what they want, I’m just saying it’s not what I want,” Taeyong says. “I’ve worked
really, really hard to get to where I am now and I don’t want to put myself in a position that’ll
compromise everything, you know?”

There’s a short silence, and Jaehyun puts his empty cup down beside him on the bench and settles
an unfocused gaze on the passersby. If Taeyong had to guess, he’d say Jaehyun doesn’t know.

He runs his hand through his hair and it falls, silky and light back onto his forehead, and Taeyong
wants to touch it. It looks somehow softer in person than it did in his pictures.

“Is there - wanting a career, and wanting independence doesn’t - it doesn’t preclude wanting a
mate, does it? Why can’t you have both? Why would having a mate compromise your work?”
Jaehyun says.

“How do I explain this,” he says. “You know, when you take a bunch of unrelated wolves and put
them in captivity, they organize themselves in a hierarchy - for food, for sex, basically everything a
wolf could want. Alphas get to eat whatever they want, and betas eat what the alphas don’t want,
and omegas get to eat after everyone else is done. It’s a dominance hierarchy, an organized society,
so the unit functions smoothly together.”

“I know that. I’ve read the research as a model for type behavior in humans, and I know that it’s
from the 1970s. I also know that there’s been research after that studying wolf packs in the wild,
and there’s no dominance hierarchy between mates. There’s no alpha wolf and no omega wolf,
there’s only parents and kids and the kids get their asses whooped if they act up. That’s all it is.
And there’s been other research, too, saying applying a wolf model to human behavior is an
oversimplification -
“Okay, you’ve done your research.”

“i really have. I presented a paper on this in an inclusion medicine conference in Seoul -

“I know, I know what the type activists say, I know we’re meant to look at it as a spectrum of equal
and different types, not a sliding scale of superiority. But that’s the dream, that’s the future, it’s not
our real, lived experiences,” he says. He’s getting heated, and he wonders if he should have let it
be. Still, he soldiers on because he’s come this far anyway.

“Experience tells me that I will always be marginalized, that I’ll always be sexualized, that my
career will always be some kind of punchline, that if I, as an omega nurse, am sleeping with a
resident, I have no hope of being taken seriously again,” he says.

Another short silence, but this one is somewhat tense. He sees Jaehyun wet his lips, sees the flicker
of frustration on his face. Taeyong feels a little flutter of anxiety in his chest, sweat beginning to
bead beneath his collar. He hates this about the way he’s wired. Always so afraid of displeasing
someone.

“You didn’t ask me how I see it,” Jaehyun says. “A spectrum or a sliding scale, you don’t know
how I see it.”

“It doesn’t matter how you see it,” Taeyong says. “It’s how everybody else sees it and has always
seen it, and it might just be how it is. It shouldn’t be, and I wish it were different, but that’s how it
is.”

“I don’t mean - I understand where you’re coming from, but -

“If it’s not wolves, it’s chimpanzees, if it’s not chimps, it’s lobsters. Dominance is in the nature of
living things. If you put you and me in a relationship, your wants and needs will take precedence
over mine. You flourish, and I suffocate, that’s how it is.”

He takes a breath, because that came out in a jumbled rush. His face is hot, his heart starting to
pound. He’s sure how he feels, but the way he’s built, he’s wired to think speaking his mind is
speaking too much. He fucking hates it.

“Lobsters?” Jaehyun says. “Lobsters have a dominance hierarchy?”

“Yeah,” he says. “They don’t even have organized brains, but they have a dominance hierarchy.”

“That’s - that’s really weird that you know that, actually,” he says.

Taeyong laughs, grateful for Jaehyun’s attempt at making sure he knows that they’re still on
amicable terms. He presses his hand to his neck. Its the only part of him that’s cool, now, from
holding his ice-cream cup. He doesn’t know if it’s the weather or if it’s the nature of the discussion
but his head has gone very hot.

“I get it,” Jaehyun says. “I understand. Not truly, not completely, and I don’t think we agree on this
entirely. But your experience is your experience and I can’t say it’s wrong. I understand where
you’re coming from and I respect it.”

They sit in silence for a bit, looking at the street and the people and the trees and the
rhododendrons. He spoke clearly, calmly, with measure and maturity, and Taeyong is so fucking
grateful for it. For the fact that of all the people in the world, this mild mannered, intelligent,
empathetic man is his mate.

The corners of Taeyong’s lips pull up into a smile despite his burning skin and his pounding heart,
and he ventures a glance at Jaehyun. At his rice cake skin and his pretty mouth and silky black
hair. At the strong build of his shoulders and thighs.

“You know what, Dr Jeong,” Taeyong says. “You seem very sweet. And you have dimples, and
abs -

“How do you know I have abs?”

“Educated guess,” Taeyong says. “That’s not important. What I’m saying is, you’re going to find
someone -

“Don’t say that, please, it sounds awfully patronizing,” he says, laughing.

“I mean it,” he says. “You seem like a good person.”

“Thank you,” he says. “You do, too. You seem like a wonderful person and I really do hope you
get everything you want. And if we’re - you’re - yep.”

“What?” Taeyong says.

“You’re very attractive,” he says, and then he smiles, awkward. “I should really leave now, before
I say something stupid - I can feel it coming, I’m just going to leave on a high.”

Taeyong laughs, and it sounds like a giggle. He doesn’t like the sound of it at all, but he can’t
dwell on that too long because Jaehyun’s dimples look so sweet, his cheeks look so soft, Taeyong
has to fight the urge to pinch them.

“Should we call it a night, then?” He asks, and Jaehyun nods.

His throat has gone dry, probably from having gone on that tirade, and the lingering sweetness of
the ice cream is turning his stomach. He gets his water bottle out of his bag and offers it to Jaehyun
first.

“I’m good,” Jaehyun says, stacking their two empty ice cream cups together and getting up to to
throw them away.

“I’ve got it,” Taeyong says, Jaehyun waves him off.

“That’s fine,” he says.

So Taeyong sits and drinks, and watches him walk to the trashcan fifteen feet from their bench. He
really is very tall, he thinks. Maybe three inches taller than him, but his shoulders are a little
narrower than Taeyong’s and that makes him look even taller. Or maybe it’s the fact that his legs
seem to go on forever. Even in scrubs he’s attractive. Or maybe the scrubs are making him extra
attractive.

Jaehyun drops the cups off and turns around to make his way back, so he averts his eyes, gulps
down the last of his water and shoves the bottle into his bag. His heart has sort of calmed, he
thinks. Believing that Jaehyun understands, that he wouldn’t take this to heart and stalk him or
murder him in the hospital parking lot is helping.

He stands, and it must be the heat and the dehydration, but his head spins and his heart races to
compensate for a fall in blood pressure and he lifts his hand to his head like that would change
anything.

“You okay?” Jaehyun asks.

“I’m fine, I’m good,” he says.

Jaehyun is peeling off his lab coat, and he thinks he must be hot, too, and the additional layer isn’t
helping.

He is hot, he thinks stupidly when the coat comes off. Very solid, lots of muscle, and he wonders
how he still has that body in residency.

“It was nice meeting you,” Jaehyun says, and he’s stuck his hand out for him to shake.

He takes his hand, and the warmth of his skin makes his stomach turn again. He’s gripping his
hand firmly, and his hands are beautiful. Hard hands, smooth skin, firm grip - he blinks, and he
pictures that hand gripping his wrist, gripping his - his thigh -

A trickle of slick drips down inside him, and the realization comes as slow as the drop trickles.
He’s going into heat, he thinks, quietly, like he’s scared Jaehyun’s will hear. His stupid fucking
body has found its mate and decided to prime itself for a good dicking down and he’s mortified -

“You alright?” Jaehyun says, awfully concerned, very sweet, very gentle, turning his grip from
handshake to handrail.

Taeyong clutches at him for support, because his head is really reeling, and his heart is racing, and
another trickle comes when the image of Jaehyun’s neat fingers pressing inside him forces its way
to the forefront of his thoughts.

“Motherfucker,” he breathes.
“What? Oh - oh my god.”

He knows, he thinks. He knows, he can smell it on him. Jeong Jaehyun, his mate, a stranger, an
alpha he just turned down, knows he’s in heat and he doesn’t know what that means for him. The
memory of his first heat flickers in his head, sixteen, high school, one gross wet kiss from one
gross horny schoolboy before his homeroom teacher pulled him off and sent Taeyong home.

He’s starting to panic. He releases Jaehyun’s hand and he staggers back two steps to the bench and
his calves hit the edge and his knees buckle and he lands hard on his ass. The uncomfortable
wetness in his underwear is pressed right against his skin like this and he groans and covers his
face with trembling hands.

“Hey,” Jaehyun says. “Hey, look, it’s okay, it’s fine - I know this probably came out of nowhere
for you but - but this happens to some people when they meet their mate, okay? It’s totally
normal.”

“I just - I need to get home,” he says.

“Okay, do you want to call someone? Should I call someone for you?” He says, and he sounds
calm, he sounds comforting, and that’s enough to get his brain working again.

“It’s just ten minutes away,” he says. “I can walk.”

“Is that - is that safe?”

“I don’t know,” he says. “I just need to get home.”

He’s sure he’s putting out enough breed me pheromones to attract a weirdo or two, but he can’t be
here any more. He doesn’t know if Jaehyun is one of them. He’s keeping his distance right now,
but that might just be because there’s enough people near the emergency center to keep him from
trying anything.

“Cab?” He asks.
“No, I don’t want to get into a car with somebody I don’t know.”

“I could walk you back to the dialysis centre, one of your colleagues could drive you home, right?”

He shakes his head. His colleagues are mostly women, mostly omegas, and they’re all lovely
people, but his experience is different from theirs. He’s still some kind of outsider, something
mildly exotic to them, and he doesn’t want to be seen like this. He doesn’t want to be looked at like
he’s some kind of spectacle, or talked about tomorrow.

“How bad does it get for you?” Jaehyun asks.

“Not too bad,” he says. “I can usually keep it together the whole way through.”

He’s never been begging-for-dick needy, not like the movies, not like the books. It’s just a sort of
hollowness, like hunger, and it’s mostly bearable. He can think and work and everything, but the
hunger grows meaner and takes up more and more of his thoughts until it’s all he’s thinking about.
Having an alpha around when he’s like that is like sitting with that hunger in front of a
cheeseburger and trying not to eat. He can do it, but not without constantly, agonizingly imagining
what it would feel like to just have a taste.

“Let me walk you home,” Jaehyun says.

Something that sounds like a distant car alarm goes off in his head. Home? Down that empty street
where the fucking streetlight doesn’t work? With some guy he doesn’t know? He blinks, an image,
his hands clutching at strong shoulders, Jaehyun’s pretty mouth pressed to his, hips pressed
together, his back against the rough brick of his neighbor’s boundary wall -

“No fucking way,” he breathes.

Something cold and cylindrical is being forced into his hand and he shudders and looks down. He
blinks down at it, a black spray can with a bright red flaming chili pepper printed on the label. It’s
mace.

“You can use it if you’re feeling unsafe,” he says. “On me or on anyone you want. Let’s just get
you home.”

He looks at him, crouched on the ground to be at his eye level, far enough to give him the space he
needs. His eyes are honest and his voice is calm and deep and he isn’t wavering, he doesn’t seem
like he’s having a hard time keeping his hands off Taeyong and that gives him comfort.

There’s a small part of him that says this is fucking insane and reckless but most of him is fine with
it, he realizes. An alpha by his side would keep the weirdos at bay for sure. And Taeyong trusts
that he can easily keep himself together long enough to make it home. He’s his best shot at making
it home unbothered.

He clutches the mace and nods.

The walk home is agonizing, because Jaehyun is too close? Too far? He can’t decide. He’s
hyperaware of the way his scrubs fit his shoulders and thighs, hyperaware of the way his scent is
getting stronger, the way he’s clutching at his backpack. He wonders if he’s beginning to waver
and he can’t decide if he’s terrified by that or if he wants him to hold him the way he’s holding the
straps of his backpack. That white knuckled gip on his arms, bruises in the morning -

“No,” Jaehyun says.

Taeyong blinks. No? No what? He turns to where Jaehyun’s looking, and he realizes he was so
focused on Jaehyun’s jawline and the little freckle on his cheek that he didn’t even notice that he
was being propositioned by some guy to his right.

“I was talking to him,” the guy says.

“He’s not interested,” Jaehyun says.

“I thought I said I was talking to him,” the guy repeats, coming closer. “What do you say baby?
You want me to make you feel good, don’t you?”

There was a certain drunkenness to his thoughts before, to his movements, like he was just barely
in control of them, but this guy’s words plunge his head into cold water. He looks no more than
sixteen or seventeen, probably just beginning to react to pheromones, not old enough to understand
that his brain is telling him Taeyong wants to be fucked by him in response to chemical
messengers Taeyong’s body is pushing out.

“No,” Taeyong says. “No, I don’t, go away.”

“Let’s go, the light’s green,” Jaehyun says.

“The light?” Taeyong says, and he realizes they’re at a pedestrian crossing. He doesn’t know why
he’s so disoriented. It usually takes him hours to get this cloudy.

“Are you sure, baby?” The guy says.

“I’m fucking sure,” he mumbles.

“I could take you back to -

“Dude, back the fuck off,” Jaehyun says, and he sounds like he’s going to start shoving. That shove
that dickhead alphas do. The guy seems to retreat like he’s doing Jaehyun a favor by not fighting
him.

Taeyong’s as relieved as he is humiliated. He’s the fucking tobacco shop lady, being pursued and
harassed and "playing hard to get" and some dickhead alpha is going to tell his bros about this
omega who wanted him so bad - and Jaehyun’s going to tell his bros how he saved this helpless
omega and -

His head spins.

Everything is progressing so much faster than he anticipated, hitting him so much harder than it
ever has before, Taeyong realizes. He thought he had the time to make it home comfortably but
he’s sinking far quicker and far deeper than he thought, and maybe it's because his mate is around.

This was a mistake, he thinks. This was a terrible miscalculation.

The thought brings a fresh wave of panic with it. His feet are stuck in place, scared of crossing the
road and taking the next left turn into that empty street to his apartment. Scared, he thinks. He’s
terrifed. He doesn’t want to wake up tomorrow and learn that he did something he didn’t really
want to do, but he can’t stay here either.

“What’s wrong?” Jaehyun says, all worry and sweetness.

The light turns red again, but there aren’t too many cars on the road. They could still dart across
quickly, but Taeyong doesn’t think quickness is something he’s capable of right now.

He clutches the can of pepper spray in his right hand but he still can’t really move. He’s beginning
to feel a sense of paralyzing helplessness and he’s mortified to find his eyes stinging and his nose
tickling.

“Guess what? Remember that mace in your hand? I’m not mace-proof. Hell, I’m not even fist
proof. And you know, I think you might be stronger than me. You could kick my ass if you
wanted,” Jaehyun says, his voice low and comforting. “Don’t be scared, alright? You have nothing
to be scared of. You’re almost home.”

But that’s not the problem. He’s not worried that Jaehyun would do something to him against his
will. He’s fucking terrified he’ll beg him to do something. His body will beg for something his
mind doesn’t want.

“i need you to say no,” He breathes.

“What?” Jaehyun says.

“Say no for me,” he says. “I don’t want to fuck a cheeseburger.”

“What?” He says again, after a beat of confused silence.

“I don’t want to eat you,” he tries again. He thinks he said it right, but he’s not sure. He must have
said it right, because the confusion on Jaehyun’s face fades to comprehension.

“I’m scared that I won’t remember that I don’t want this,” he says. “I’m telling you now, I don’t - I
don’t want this -

“I know. I know, I’ll remind you, I’ll say no for you, okay? I promise,” Jaehyun says softly,
holding his hand out hesitantly. “I promise. Don’t be afraid, you’re almost home. I’ll get you
home, you’ll be safe, okay? I promise.”

He takes his hand, and his head clears a little. He’s so warm, and his hand is only a little bigger
than his own but it’s very comforting. Safe, secure, that’s what his scent and his touch make him
feel. Like having solid ground to stand on.

“One step at a time, come on,” Jaehyun says, and he takes a trembling step forward.

It works. He gets him across the road, and Taeyong grips his hand tighter. His head clears a little
more with every new inch of his skin that touches Jaehyun’s - his wrist brushing against Jaehyun’s,
his forearm, his arm. The does nothing to ease the hunger. It’s the difference between licking a bun
and actually getting to eat, but it gives him a little taste. Something to focus on, like a point of
reference when his world is spinning.

They take the turn into his street, and he’s feeling faint, like he might pass out in a moment or two.
His apartment building comes into view ahead of him, at the centre of his tunneling vision, and
relief washes over him.

“It’s this building,” he says, but his knees buckle on the last few steps.

Jaehyun wraps his arm around his waist and hauls him back upright and it brings him flush against
his side. It brings a little gasp from his mouth, too, and he’s mildly embarrassed by it but he’s also
very, very pleased with how he feels against him. He feels that trickle, thick and uncomfortable,
heart pounding, head pounding, reeling -

“Which floor?” Jaehyun says.

He realizes he’s in the elevator and he doesn’t know how he got here. All he knows is the heat of
Jaehyun’s skin, his scent, his grip.

“Four,” he says, but he reaches out with a clumsy hand and presses the button himself.

The small space, Jaehyun’s lean, strong body against his side, it’s dizzying, his mind is clouding,
and he knows how to make it better.

He wraps his arms around Jaehyun’s shoulders, and the can of mace falls out of his loose grip. He
doesn’t care. it brings them chest to chest. He can feel Jaehyun’s heart slamming against his ribs
like this. He can feel the heat of his body, and it feels like they’ll melt together, like their cores
could weld together like this.

He hears the elevator ding and the doors open but Jaehyun’s stuttering breath on his neck and his
strong hands taking him by the waist are all he can pay attention to. It just feels good. It feels right,
and easy, and good, and he curls into him, presses his nose and mouth to his neck.

“Apartment?” Jaehyun chokes out.

“What?” He breathes, clutching harder at his shoulders and nuzzling against his neck.

It’s a nice neck. The scent of him, earthy and strong beneath the angle of his jaw. He’s sweating,
and for some reason, Taeyong finds that maddening. He parts his lips against his skin and then
closes them, catching that bead of sweat on his lip. He hums softly, tucks his lip between his teeth
to get the taste of him on his tongue, and it makes his head swim.

Jaehyun maneuvers him roughly out of the elevator, and he likes that feeling so much. Being
manhandled like that, he wants it, he wants it rougher, he wants to be pinned down and fucked, he
wants his face pressed to the floor -

“Which door?” He mumbles into his hair, and it seems he’s as muddled now as Taeyong is.

Taeyong closes his eyes, and he’s not thinking a single thought that isn’t get on your knees. Get
him in your mouth. Get him in you -
“Taeyong,” he says firmly. “Which door?”

“Four oh four,” he mumbles.

Jaehyun moves him clumsily, with a little less conviction, a little more reluctant to let him leave his
arms. He walks him back against his apartment door, until he’s pinned against it, and it soothes the
hunger to have him like this. He shudders at the feeling. He’s very wet, soaked through his
underwear now, and he can feel it dripping down his inner thigh and he just wants - he wants his
hand - his mouth - his knot -

Jaehyun noses along his jaw, his hands kneading his waist, making him squirm, but his body goes
lax when Jaehyun’s lips find this scent and brush lightly against it the way he did to Jaehyun only a
moment ago. His bag slips off his shoulder and clatters to the ground, and the sound barely
registers in his head but it seems to snap Jaehyun out of it.

The hands on his waist still, and he pulls away haltingly from his neck. He presses his forehead
against Taeyong’s, taking deep, ragged breaths to calm himself. He can feel his warm breath
shuddering against his lips and he tries to close the distance between their mouths but Jaehyun’s
hands cup his jaw and hold him where he is. He nearly whines. He wants to feel his pretty mouth
on his, he wants to feel his tongue sliding against his -

“You don’t - you don’t want this,” Jaehyun says. “Go inside.”

“Jaehyun,” he breathes, pleading, begging him not to turn him away.

“No,” he says, drawing his arms away from his shoulders firmly. “Go. Now.”

There’s a prickling, burning moment of rejection, of loss, when Jaehyun steps back from him and
leaves him sagging against the door, but in the wake of that rejection comes a moment of clarity.
He lets out a shuddering breath and blinks away tears he didn’t know were clinging to the margins
of his lids.

He’s horrified.

“Thank you,” he whispers. He picks his bag up and punches his code in, in one hurried, clumsy,
continuous movement. He opens the door just enough for him to slip inside and closes it behind
 him, locking it.

Fuck, he thinks, crumpling into a heap next to his house slippers. His heart is still racing, and he’s
begun to tremble, his eyes filling with new, angry, humiliated tears. The realization that he almost
begged his mate to fuck him after telling him he doesn’t want him sinks in slowly, and he doesn’t
think he’s ever hated how he’s wired as much as he does today.

More than that, more than any of that, he’s so fucking grateful that Jeong Jaehyun is his mate.

Chapter End Notes

Hello and welcome to this totally original plot point! I'm really enjoying writing these
tropes hahaha
 Blue Skies
Chapter Notes

See the end of the chapter for notes

Jaehyun’s sitting with his head in his hands on the stone retaining wall of the little garden outside
Taeyong’s apartment building. He feels like someone put him in a washing machine, left him in the
dryer too long. Like the life has been sucked out of him by the experiences of the past hour or so
and his body is shriveling up.

The only part of him that he wishes would shrivel up is stubbornly resisting. He can’t get up and
walk to the bus stop with a raging boner so he’s sitting here thinking about decubitus ulcers, hoping
that would make his erection go away.

It seems his brain isn’t convinced that it should be thinking about anything that isn’t Taeyong.
Every time he tries to picture something that would deflate his dick, Taeyong shows up in his head
like a pop up window, like a dialogue box saying are you sure you want to leave this page? And
each time, he says yes, I’m fucking sure, but he goes right back to remembering what he looked
like pressed against his front door, delirious with want, flushed pink and smelling sweeter and more
enticing than anything he has ever smelt. The way he kissed his neck, the way he clutched at his
shoulders.

“Come on, man, get it together,” he mumbles, pressing his hands to his eyes. “Byun’s bunions,
Hae’s hemorrhoids, Park’s pyoderma, Song’s syphilitic dick - come on.”

He sees a car turning into the apartment parking lot to his right. Whoever it is seems to be in a
rush, because they park diagonally across two spots and tumble out of the driver’s seat. Someone
he’s seen at the hospital, someone dressed in scrubs. In the moments the guy spends gathering his
things, Jaehyun demurely puts his backpack in his lap to cover himself.

The guy comes over in a power walk/jog to the entryway, scowling down at his phone, and
Jaehyun tries his best to go very still, to blend into the bushes behind him. Unfortunately, the
powder blue of his scrubs isn’t exactly prevalent in nature, and so he sticks out like a sore erection.

The guy - a Peds intern, if he’s not wrong - glances up at him, back down at his phone, and then
back up at him with the most dumbfounded expression he’s ever seen on a person. He stops two
feet from him, and Jaehyun hugs his backpack closer and nods at him in what he hopes is a casual
greeting.
“Where’s Taeyong?” The guy says.

“Sorry?”

“He said you came to the dialysis center to see him, but he didn’t reply to any of my texts after
that.”

“He’s in his apartment,” Jaehyun says. “You are?”

“His roommate. Did you guys - you know?” He says his eyebrows shooting up to his hairline.

“What?” Jaehyun says.

“Fuck,” the pediatrics intern says, pumping his right index finger in and out of his left fist
helpfully.

“No.”

“Then what are you doing here?”

“He um, he had an emergency so I dropped him off at home,” Jaehyun explains.

“What emergency? Is he okay?” Peds guy says, taking a minute but vaguely threatening step
closer.

“I’m sure he is,” he says. “He just wasn’t feeling too well.”

“And you’re still here.”

“I am.”
The intern regards him carefully for a second, his eyes raking over the his flushed cheeks, the
slightly desperate way he’s clutching his backpack in his lap, the can of mace that he picked up
from the elevator on his way down from Taeyong’s apartment, lying beside him.

“Is that mace?”

“Yeah.”

“Why do you have mace?”

“I got mugged once,” Jaehyun says stupidly.

“You thought what, that Taeyong might mug you?” he says dubiously.

His grip tightens on his phone nervously, and he sees him shift his weight to one leg, like he’s
ready to run. It occurs to him then that it’s pretty weird to be camped out outside the apartment of
an omega in heat with a can of mace, especially one who’s just turned him down, and he anxiously,
desperately, stutters out his defense.

“No - I gave it to him, he’s - he went into heat and I wanted him to feel safe -

“Look I’m going to go upstairs and check on him and if he’s anything less than okay I’m calling
the cops, you hear? I know who you are, I know where you work,” he says.

He raises a placating hand to explain himself, but the guy takes one defensive step back from him.
Jaehyun doesn’t know why. He seems pretty strong, and only a couple of inches shorter than him.
They’d be fairly evenly matched in a fight, not that he’s thinking of fighting him. He’s just trying
to understand why he’s so jumpy. Maybe because he isn’t mace proof either, he thinks.

“Don’t move, I’ll scream like a fucking banshee,” the guy threatens.

Jaehyun drops his hand without any further protest, because he can’t really say anything that’ll
convince the guy that he’s not a weirdo. This is a very John Cusack in America’s Sweethearts
situation, and the more he tries to explain himself, the worse he’ll make it.

“Sure, I’ll wait here,” he says dejectedly.

On the bright side, the awkwardness of the encounter did wonders to deflate his dick, he thinks,
pushing his backpack aside and peering gratefully down at his lap.

Taeyong’s head is much clearer now that that alpha scent is gone and the sweat and haze has been
washed off in a scalding shower. He isn’t rock fucking hard anymore, either, thanks to the quick
and dirty jerk-off he got out of the way before even stepping under the water. He’s just stepping out
of the bathroom when he hears the front door opening, and he stands like a startled raccoon in the
hallway while Haechan barrels into the house.

“Oh my god, Taeyong, are you okay?” Haechan says. “I just ran into Jaehyun downstairs and he
told me you guys met and you went into heat.”

“He hasn’t left?” Taeyong says.

“No, he’s downstairs trying to flatten his boner with a backpack. Did he do anything weird? Should
I call the cops?”

“Nothing happened, he just walked me home and left,” he says. “I did more than he did, but he
stopped me and sent me home.”

“What happened?”
“I licked the sweat off his neck,” he says, very seriously. “And then I moaned.”

Haechan stands with his arms by his sides, unmoving, also like a startled raccoon. They stare at
each other, two rodents.

“You licked him.”

“And then I moaned.”

“Then you moaned.”

“And then I begged him not to go,” he says, still as serious, but he can feel the flush burning his
skin and the haze beginning to accumulate all around his head. Something about knowing he’s still
here, within reach - he’d could probably see him from his patio if he’s sitting in the garden. He
could probably wave him over and invite him up and he could fuck him just this once and make the
ache go away and leave -

“No fucking wonder he’s armed himself,” Haechan says.

“What?”

“He’s sitting with a can of mace.”

“Oh my god,” Taeyong says, mortified all over again, somewhat afraid that his thoughts were very
loud and Haechan heard all his fantasies. “I should apologize, right?”

“Apologize tomorrow, now go hydrate and do what you need to do. I’ll send him home.”
Taeyong closes his bedroom door behind him, catching a snippet of Haechan yelling from the patio
- Jaehyun! Yeah, you’re good, go home! - before the sound is cut off.

He gets his pjs out of his closet and then sits on the edge of his bed, with all the best intentions of
getting dressed and making himself a cup of tea and doing some coursework before going to bed.
They’re all things he usually does when he’s in heat. He can usually force focus for a few hours
after jerking off and quieting his need for release but he forgot that this heat is different. This heat
is coming in waves, and the thought of Jaehyun sitting in the garden downstairs is becoming
maddening.

He closes his eyes, and he sees him, his plush pink mouth and his smooth skin and his silky black
hair. He can see him leaning down, taking his face in his hands - in his safe, secure hold - and
pressing their mouths together. He hasn’t been kissed in so long, and he wouldn’t mind tasting
Jaehyun’s mouth. He’d kiss him tenderly, and then he’d kiss him hungrily, he’d lick into his mouth
and make him shiver.

He can see him kissing down his neck, sucking on the skin till it purples under his mouth, down
his bare chest - he’d sink to his knees for him. Hands splaying over his chest and grazing over his
hardening nipples, he’d kiss down his stomach and press his face to his hardening length and -

He jerks forward, his eyes shooting open, a miserable groan slipping from his lips.

“Get it together,” he mumbles, and he goes to unwrap the towel from around his hips but the way
the fabric grazes over his sensitive skin makes him shudder and sink a little deeper again.

He’d caress him like that, wouldn’t he? He thinks he’d be gentle about it, teasing, in a way, patient.
Too patient, he’d touch him with his lovely hands, so lightly it would hurt him to stay still and wait
for more. He’d toy with him, he thinks, sweetly, he’d take his time, and then he’d palm him.

Taeyong’s eyes flutter shut again, and his palm presses down on his hardening length, a gentle
pressure, and it makes his breath stutter. He moves his hips lightly against his palm - against
Jaehyun’s palm - little movements, making his stomach drop low.

He sinks back against his mattress, grinding against his palm until it’s not enough and he takes it in
a loose fist and strokes himself, and the pleasure is dizzying. The pleasure is more important than
his feeble attempts at getting the image of Jaehyun’s mouth swallowing down his length out of his
head.
“Baby,” he breathes. “Come on.”

He shuffles back on his elbows until he can plant his feet on his mattress, and then he runs his hand
down over his inner thigh to his entrance, and he finds it wet against the pads of his fingers. He
presses down against it gently, and that ring of muscle gives a little, flutters, begging for something
thick to force past it. A thick wetness drips from his entrance down his cleft and he shudders,
pushes his index inside himself to the knuckle.

His head spins - paints Jaehyun between his legs, his thick finger pressing inside him. Would he
bend down and lap that trickle up? He would, he would, he’d take care of him. He’d take his time
with him, he’d relish him, every part of him. He’d pull his fingers out and suck his slick off them.
He’d finger fuck him until he’s writhing - not just one, come on, baby, one more, two more, please,
please -

He strokes himself harder, and he pumps his fingers in and out of his stretched entrance, but his
release feels painfully out of reach. His skin prickling, an emptiness inside him that’s distracting
him from the pleasure he’s chasing.

Taeyong shudders, and the ache that was eased begins to grow again. His fingers aren’t enough.
His body’s ready for a knot, ready to stretch for him, to be filled by him. He slips his fingers out
and reaches clumsily over the side of his bed for the bottom drawer of his nightstand. He yanks it
open, feels blindly inside it for the silicone knot he keeps there. His fingers make contact, and his
stomach flutters with anticipation.

The toy is dry, but he’s dripping wet and he can take it. He presses it into the wetness dripping
down his cleft and tries to gather up as much as he can, and then he pushes it slowly inside him.

He’d be sweet about this, wouldn’t he? He thinks he’s the kind of man to be patient and slow and
sweet about it - can you take it? Does it hurt, baby? Need me to slow down?

His rim stretches slow and delicious, with the faintest sting, and his body swallows up the widest
bit of the toy. The rest slips in easy. The swell inside him is so, so hot, he thinks he might melt into
a sweet, sticky mess, like sugar on a stovetop. That knot inside him, Jaehyun’s knot, it’s the best
he’s felt in years. He rolls over onto his front and he reaches behind him to move that knot inside
him, tiny little thrusts, that’s all he can take but they’re fucking good. They’re making him dumb
with pleasure, mouth parting against his pillow, mouthing wetly against the silk pillow case.
He pictures Jaehyun behind him. Pictures his thighs pressing against his, his hipbones against his
ass. His tight, muscled torso draped over his back and the weight of him pressing down on him, in
him, all around him. What would it feel like to reach over his shoulder grab his hair? Curl it into
his soft black hair while he fucks him into the bed, his sweat dripping off his body and onto
Taeyong’s skin. Fuck - if he pulled him up against his chest? If he gripped his wrists hard if he
gripped his face if he slipped his fingers into his mouth -

That’s it, that’s the feeling he was chasing. Stretched, filled, he strokes himself and bobs the toy
lightly and minutely inside him. His toes curl, his back arches, his whole body goes deliciously
tight and he spills into his hand and onto his sheets, shuddering. He’s too lost in pleasure to even
make a sound.

It leaves him slowly, his calves cramping from how violently he came. Slowly, his body relaxes,
but his rim is still clamped vise tight around the toy, and it’ll be a minute before he can slip it out.
His chest heaves with the exertion of his orgasm and he sags against the mattress, eyes fluttering
shut, teetering on the brink of passing out.

He’d kiss down his hair, he thinks. After fucking him slow and deep and sentimental, he’s the kind
of man to kiss his hair, his shoulder, pet him till he falls asleep. He can almost feel it, that gentle
touch on his hair, those full lips on his shoulder.

You’re home, he’d say, gentle and comforting. You’re home safe.

He smiles, slow and sleepy, until his head begins to clear again, and the the smile slips.

“Really did that,” he mumbles. “I really did that.”

Eleven different monitors connected to eleven different patients in the step down ICU beep at their
own rhythms, and Jaehyun finds the overall effect somewhat soothing. He likes ICUs. He likes
how cold they are and he likes the sound of them and the smell of them and he likes the idea of
being the person keeping these eleven people alive. Not that he is, but he can imagine himself
being that person and he likes the idea of it.

There’s supposed to be a nurse here helping him out with this ascitic tap but the nurse here is busy
with escalating a patient to ICU 1. Good luck to him, Jaehyun thinks, as he hears the wheels of the
patient’s bed rolling past.

He’s painted and draped Mr Min’s swollen belly already, and anesthetized the skin. He pushes the
needle in, stabilizes it, and withdraws amber colored fluid into his syringe. He turns the knob on
the three way connecter to a different outlet and flushes the fluid out into a bottle to be sent for
culture.

“This is going to the lab, Mr Min, they’ll see if there’s an infection in there, alright?” He says.
“I’m not going to drain any more fluid today, we’re going to hold off till your salts are looking a
little better.”

Mr Min nods his understanding, and Jaehyun places a square of gauze over the entry site and
withdraws his needle. He presses the gauze down and clumsily gets an adhesive crepe bandage
down over it. He doesn’t get his glove stuck between the bandage and Mr Min’s skin this time, and
he silently rejoices for it.

“Dr Jeong, you’re looking a bit, um,” the Mr Min says. “Morose.”

Jaehyun pauses with his foot on the pedal of the yellow waste bin, his hand halfway raised in the
process of throwing away the soiled drape, and he looks up at him. Mr Min is looking at him
suspiciously.

“Sorry, I just - I was thinking about something,” he says, tossing the drape into the bin and taking
his foot off the pedal. The lid falls shut, rustling the plastic liner, and the sound is somewhat
morose, too.

“Bad day at work?” He asks.

“No, no it’s not that.”

“Well, did you get dumped, then?”

“No - well, maybe,” he says, clearing up the treatment cart and doing a quick sweep for sharps.
Nothing anywhere, so he snaps his gloves off and tosses them too.

“You can tell me about it if you want. I won’t be telling anyone. Between you and me, I don’t
think I’m making it out of here.”

“Why do you think that?” He asks carefully.

“Oh drop your pokes protocol, son, we both know the truth,” he says.

It makes him smile. Mr Min has been here two weeks already, and he’s just about had it with
doctors and nurses handling him carefully. He was nearly discharged today when they realized he
had spiked a fever overnight and decided to keep him, and now he’s just about had it with
everyone.

Jaehyun likes him. He likes everyone, but he has a soft spot for Mr Min for reasons he can’t
explain. He likes him and his stories about the agricultural magazine he works for, he likes his wife
and he likes his son.

“SPIKES protocol, and the truth is that you’re going to see Jungwon graduate,” he says. “I’ll make
sure of it.”

“Are you allowed to make promises like that?” Mr Min says.

“No,” he says. “I’m really not, but I’m making it.”

“You’re a sweet kid,” he says. “Who would break your heart?”

Jaehyun rolls his chair back and turns his attention to getting the patient label on the bottle. He
presses it down, it’s lopsided, and it bothers him. He slaps it lightly as if to reprimand it for
misbehaving, but really, he’s just throwing a little bit of a tantrum because he’s feeling sorry for
himself.

“My mate, actually,” he says. “Says he doesn’t want to be with me. He wants a career, and for
whatever reason, that means he doesn’t want me. I mean, I don’t know him so I’m not really
heartbroken, it just feels like - like that feeling you get when you miss a flight, or like when you
thought there was one more step at the bottom of the stairs but there isn’t. Just a little stupid and
disoriented and cheated.”

It’s been three days since the Taeyong situation and he has yet to get it out of his head. Something
in him changed that night. Every time he closes his eyes he’s back there at the bottom of the stairs
looking up at his mate for the first time. Every time, he smiles for him, instead of looking like
someone pulled the rug out from under his feet, and Jaehyun walks up to him, takes him in his arms
and kisses him. Swooping violins and all.

He can’t get that out of his head, that thought, what if it went differently? What would his lips feel
like? Would he be giggling down at his phone at this time instead of being so miserable a really,
really sick man took pity on him.

“He?” Mr Min says.

“He.”

“See, now, that’s your problem.”

“Sorry?” He says.

“Men are generally stupid. Stubborn,” he says.

Jaehyun gestures stupidly between them, the two of them, men.

“No, my balls have shriveled up and I have boobs now, so I know. It’s given me wisdom,” Min
says.
“What kind of wisdom?” Jaehyun says, amused. Min does have testicular atrophy and
gynecomastia because of his liver disease, but the only thing that comes hand in hand with that is
encephalopathy, not wisdom.

“Let me tell you, sometimes, you’re lucky and sometimes you’re shit out of luck and there’s no one
to thank and no one to blame.”

He knows what he means. Mr Mn lost money in his first business venture and had to sell his farm,
his most prized possession, his retirement plan, his major assets to pay off his debts. He then had to
work his ass off for two decades to put food on the table, but he drowned himself in self pity and
booze, tanked his liver, and now he’s barely fifty and lying in a hospital bed.

Sometimes you’re shit out of luck and there’s no one to blame for it, not even yourself, so don’t
abuse your body, don’t abuse your family, be kind to yourself and let things happen as they do.
He’s told him that before, but he doesn’t want him to think about any of that now. He doesn’t want
him to think about what he’s gone and done to himself, so he grins and teases him.

“Mr Min, if you think you’re on your deathbed at least say something like rosebud, or all these
moments will be lost in time, like tears in the rain. What kind of advice is this?” he says.
“Sometimes you have to take a dump, sometimes you don’t. Sometimes the sky is blue, sometimes
it’s nighttime.”

Mr Min guffaws, and it makes him smile.

“You’ll understand when your balls are gone,” he says.

That sounds vaguely threatening, so Jaehyun closes his thighs and crosses his legs.

“You have a picture of him? Your mate? We used to walk around with passport sized pictures of
our girlfriends in our wallets. I still have my wife’s in mine.”

Jaehyun pulls his phone out of his pocket to show him the result of one evening spent in the depths
of self pity and creepy stalking. He pulls up Taeyong’s instagram and gives the phone to Mr Min.

“That’s him,” he says.

Mr Min inspects his picture for a long moment.

“Handsome fella,” he concludes.

“Isn’t he?” Jaehyun says, and he’s only mildly embarrassed of the fact that he sounds like a middle
schooler with a crush.

He doesn’t want to call it a crush because he’s a grown man and that doesn’t feel right, but that’s
essentially what it is. He thinks Taeyong might be the most beautiful person he’s ever met, and he
finds himself thinking endlessly of the timbre of his voice and the shape of his eyes and his passion
for the work he does. This afternoon, he even did the grown man equivalent of doodling his name
in his notebook. He accidentally put Lee Taeyong as the nurse’s name in the procedure note he
wrote for a lumbar puncture. The nurse’s name was Lim Yoojin.

“Something happened, I think I pressed something wrong,” Mr Min says, offering his phone back
to him.

He takes it back hurriedly, worried that Mr Min accidentally liked a post and made him look like a
stalker. But it’s not that. Mr Min is in his dms, and there’s a message request from three hours ago.
From Taeyong.

He beeping of the monitors and the smell of spirit and glove powder fades away, and he’s left in a
vacuum, alone with the word ALLOW. His thumb hovers over it for far too long, and it starts to
tremble, but he just kind of leans his body weight forward until his thumb makes contact with his
screen and then he recoils, thinking whoops look what my thumb did all on its own.

The message shows up on his screen, and he skims over it once, then again.

Hey! It’s Taeyong. I hope you don’t mind me reaching out to you like this. I just wanted to say I’m
really sorry about how everything panned out the other day. I'm so sorry about the things I did. The
fact that I was in heat doesn’t excuse any of it, I’m really, really sorry. Tell me how to make it up to
you, please, I feel awful.

Make it up to him? How? Does he want to meet him again? But he doesn’t have to make it up to
him. And he doesn’t want to look at this like it’s an opportunity to start chasing after him. He
doesn’t want to take advantage of his kindness, but he does, desperately, pathetically, just want to
 see him again.

“Everything okay?” Mr Min says.

“Looks like the sky is blue,” he replies.

Chapter End Notes

Ascitic tap is a procedure done to remove fluid collected in the abdomen

SPIKES protocol is what you do when you’re delivering bad news
Testicular atrophy is when your testicles shrivel up, can happen with chronic liver
disease
Gynecomastia is when breast tissue enlarges in men, also can happen with chronic
liver disease

The movies!
America’s sweethearts - Eddie is outside Gwen’s hotel room, falls onto a cactus, tries
to get the thorns out of his sweatpants and is caught on camera looking suspiciously
like he’s rubbing one out
Rosebud is from Citizen Kane, and the tears in the rain quote is from Blade Runner

Thank you for reading! Hope this chapter didn't give you whiplash going from
Taeyong fantasizing about Jaehyun to Mr Min in step down TT
 It's Like That
Chapter Notes

See the end of the chapter for notes

“’Tis the fucking season, boys, Merry Christmas,” Youngho says, resting his elbows on the
nursing station and leaning over into Jaehyun’s space.

Well, if you ask the nurses, it’s their space, and Jaehyun’s borrowing it for a while, but that doesn’t
change the fact that Youngho’s hovering about his head.

“It’s still November,” Jaehyun says, scrolling through the last of his patients’ labs. 212’s potassium
is through the roof, he notes miserably, and he puts in an order for dextrose and insulin and a
bedside ECG.

“It’s the first of December, you fool,” Haechan points out, spinning in slow circles in the chair
beside Jaehyun. “It is the season, you’re just sore because you’re lonely and sad.”

“It’s not his fault his mate doesn’t want him, come on,” Youngho says sagely. “But you’re right, he
is sore, and lonely, and sad.”

It’s been over a month since the DM of his dreams. That fateful day, after hours of agonizing over
how to respond to Taeyong’s apology, after several tasty tidbits of dating advice from the 1980s
courtesy of Mr Min, he made a decision that stamped out the glowing ember of his love life like an
angry rhino.

You don’t have to apologize, and you don’t have to make it up to me, he said. I don’t hold it against
you at all. And I know that what happened doesn’t take away from what you said before the heat
got your wires crossed.

Thank you, Jaehyun. Good luck with residency, take care, Taeyong replied.

Good luck with your masters. Go get that promotion! Jaehyun then said, and regretted that
exclamation point for the next three days.

But that was that. No more Taeyong in his life. What he did get out of that encounter was a parasite
named Lee Haechan who decided he was a worthy host, and he hasn’t left his side since, despite
being friends with literally half the hospital. He also gained an Ent named Youngho.

“Can you guys shut the fuck up, I’m trying to work,” he says. “Don’t you also have work to do?”

“Me? No, we’ve finished rounds already.” Youngho says.

“Why are you still here, then?”

“I have to do an I&D on a patient - not yours, don’t panic - but they don’t have sterile gloves my
size here. Waiting on someone to get me a pair. Apparently the people in the medicine suite have
tiny little baby hands, and you know what they say about people with little hands.”

“They don’t turn everything into a phallic metaphor?” He suggests, printing off the old records
from 218’s previous stay at a smaller hospital in Daejeon.

“Hey, I didn’t say anything about my dick, you did.”

“Look, Youngho, it’s nobody’s fault you’re built like a tree,” Haechan interjects.

“Just like it’s nobody’s fault Dr Jeong’s mate doesn’t want him.”

“Exactly.”

Jaehyun gathers up the printed pages in his hand - they duplexed successfully on this printer from
the Paleozoic era, much to his delight - and shoots Haechan a look.

“Why are you here?” He says.

“I like the Fengshui of this suite. My feng really shuis here.”

Nurse Choi, a new staff nurse, walks in on the conversation and interprets his answer for Jaehyun.

“He likes the lumbar support on my chair and the fact that there are no crying babies and no
cartoon lions painted on the wall here,” she says, leaning over the counter to reach the phone.

“Those lions freak me out, okay, and I’m pretty sure they’ve given some of the kids nightmares,”
Haechan says quietly, so he doesn’t bother Nurse Choi who’s asking to be put through to radiology
in a tone that suggests the girls are about to fight.

It makes Jaehyun grin. He works faster, because the nursing station is getting a little crowded, and
he doesn’t want another memo to go from nursing to his department office about the considerate
use of shared spaces.

“All done,” Jaehyun says, getting to his feet to free up the space, so Nurse Choi can be comfortably
seated when she shoves her Danskos up radiology’s ass.

“Awesome, now you can sing carols with me,” Youngho says.

“No,” he replies.

“Come on, come one, where is your Christmas spirit?” He says, and then, to the tune of jingle
bells, “I got blood in my crocs, blood in my socks, blood on my favorite tie! Oh what fun it is to be
where happiness goes to die!”

“Are you guys okay?” Haechan asks, sounding genuinely concerned for his well being. “Blink
twice if you need help.”

“What’s the IM carol? I know you have one.”

He clears his throat, looks down at his shoes, and delivers the carol like he’s presenting a case.

“I have forty IP, no time to pee, an attending I want to punch. How can I hope to keep it juicy if I
don’t have time for lunch.”
“Sick!” Youngho says. “Take it away Peds!”

“Jingle bells -

“Jingle bells? What the fuck is that?”

“We sing regular Christmas carols. We actually like our jobs,” Haechan says.

Jaehyun and Youngho and Nurse Choi groan in unison, and Haechan grins diabolically at them.

He thinks the only thing that stopped the other two from smacking him is the fact that Nurse Choi
got called over by a patient, and whoever went to find size nine sterile gloves for Youngho finally
returned.

With their exits, he’s left alone with Haechan, and a comfortable silence settles between them,
interrupted only by sound of him flipping the pages of his patient’s chart and the slow groan of
Haechan spinning in circles.

“I’m going to say something totally out of line,” Haechan says. “And I hope you accept it because
out of line is who I am. Like, it’s a personality trait.”

“Alright, proceed,” Jaehyun says.

“I think you’d be really good for Taeyong,” he says.

“Taeyong thinks I’d be really good for him, too, that’s why I’m his mate,” he says.

“Shut up, juicy, I’m not done,” Haechan says. “Taeyong had kind of a rough childhood, okay?
That’s totally his story to tell, so I’m not going to tell you about that, I’m not that bad. But because
of that, he doesn’t trust people very easily. Even me, like, my mum and his mum were friends back
in Naju so I know everything about him, he stayed at my house for a while, too - I know him. And
he still never asks me for help, and he never tells me when he’s having a hard time. He’s a very
closed off person. And I think you’re the kind of guy who’d stick around and help him without
needing to be asked.

“You’re mates, you fit together, you both know that, but neither of you know how you fit together.
I think that’s how. I think he’s stuck, and you’ll unstick him.”

He had an inkling. He’s met people who prefer being single, and he’s met people who fear
commitment, and he had a feeling, because he often has baseless feelings when he meets new
people, that Taeyong was the latter.

“That may be true, but he’s not the lid on a jam jar, Haechan, he doesn’t want to be unstuck,”
Jaehyun points out.

“That’s the advice I’m giving you,” Haechan says, pointing a knee hammer at him. “He does. He
wants it. He wants companionship and he wants to be supported, he just doesn’t want to say it
because then people can say no.”

“Sorry, I’m hearing a lot of no means yes here and I’m mildly alarmed.”

“That’s not what I’m saying damn it,” Haechan says, slamming the knee hammer down like a
gavel. “I’m saying, if you want it, if you haven’t written him off, I’ll try to talk to him about it,
about dating you. As his friend. As someone who knows him.”

“You’ll vouch for me?” Jaehyun says.

“Yeah man, you’re alright.

“Let me think about that,” he says, slowly.

Taeyong zips up his jacket and slings his bag over his shoulder, settles his AirPods into his ears
and hits shuffle on the walking home from work playlist on his phone, which, of course, is different
from his walking to work from home playlist. Run-DMC’s It’s Like That begins to play, and he
walks downstairs to the rhythm of the song. He emerges from the exit and is pleased to note that
for the first time in over a month, he isn’t nauseous and dizzy at the end of the work day.

Maybe it’s the crisp December air that perks him up, or maybe it’s the fact that his body has found
a new equilibrium and has finally stopped fighting the cascade inhibitors he’s been taking. It’s
been a weird few weeks of a weird spectrum of side effects, including and not limited to
unprompted nausea, vertigo, migraines, and having to pee every twenty minutes.

It’s worth it, he thinks, if it means he won’t accidentally go into heat at a Baskin Robbins just
because he and Jaehyun both decided they wanted ice cream on the same day. It’s only a couple of
more years of this, anyway. Jaehyun will probably leave Daejeon after his residency, and that’s just
two and half more years.

He stops at the crosswalk closest to his apartment, waiting for the light to turn, and he remembers
the state he was in the day he met Jaehyun. The panic and the lack of control. He shivers when he
thinks of how much could have gone wrong.

He’s jolted out of his train of thought when his phone begins to ring in his pocket, and he gets it
out, along with a disposable measuring tape, a pen, and an ampule of heparin.

He blinks down at the screen while shoving the rest of the stuff back into his pocket. The contact
name on his screen reads Building Manager, Woodlands, and the single second before he answers
the call swells with so many emotions in such quick succession that he finds himself dizzy again.

“Hello?” He says.

“Hi, Taeyong, it’s Mr Jeon, is this a good time?”

“Yeah, hi, Mr Jeon, is everything okay?” He says.

Of course it’s not, it’s not okay, it’s never okay when Mr Jeon calls. The first time was to tell him
his mother was trying to get the tenants to invest in some pyramid scheme, the second was to tell
him she was hoarding milk cartons from the trash, the third to say she hadn’t paid her rent in three
months. His head spins and he looks up to see that the light has turned green, but something like
panic roots him to the spot.

“It’s about your mother, I think she’s not feeling well again,” he says. “She hasn’t left her
apartment in a while. I swung by and knocked and she told me to go away and said she’s fine, but
her mail is piling up, and all those flyers outside her door, too.”

“Right,” Taeyong says. “Right, thank you for telling me, and for checking on her. I’ll handle it.”

“Sure, let me know if you need anything from me. I’m not in my office right now, but just give me
a call and I’ll come down.”

“Thank you so much,” he says.

He hangs up, and immediately dials his mom’s number. All he gets is a message saying she’s
unreachable. He tries again stupidly, and it’s still the same beep and the same message, and he
ends the call, slips his phone back into his pocket and stands there, utterly blank, for a moment.

She was fine when he last checked on her, right? When was the last time he called her? Last week
she called when he had just come back from a night shift and he was too tired and nauseous and
irritable to talk, so he turned his ringer off and went to sleep. He forgot to call her back. Ten days
ago? They spoke briefly, for maybe a minute, but he had some material to review before his test
and he was in a rush so he didn’t talk long. He can’t remember, he realizes. He can’t remember
when they spoke.

He needs to get moving, he needs to go home, get his car, and drive down to his mom’s apartment.

His hands have gone cold and trembly and his heart is pounding away in his ears. He’s terrified. He
doesn’t know what he’ll find when he gets there. His head swims when he thinks of keying in the
code to his mom’s apartment and pushing the door open, and he shakes the thought away.

Just cross the road, he tells himself. Just move, just cross the road first, then a left turn, then the
parking lot of his apartment, then drive. It helps calm the panic to have a list of things he needs to
do, but it’s still not quite enough. He closes his eyes and takes a deep breath, then another, and he
smells the chocolate of some kid’s ice-cream beside him, and he curls his hand into his scrubs and
he feels the slip of that antibacterial fabric, and he sees earnest eyes looking back at him, an
outstretched hand, and a gentle comforting voice tells him it’s okay, don’t be afraid, there’s nothing
to be afraid of -
He opens his eyes to the crowd around him moving, the second group that gathered that since he
came to a stop here, and he moves with them.

He’s beginning to develop a very strong distaste for that particular intersection, he thinks, but he
gets across the road and jogs the rest of the way to his apartment.

It’s simultaneously worse than he thought and not as bad as he feared. The air is thick with the
smell of rotting food and unwashed clothes, and his mom is sitting on the couch staring at him. Her
hair’s a mess, and her clothes are stained with food and toothpaste from god knows when, but she’s
here, she’s looking at him.

“You didn’t say you were coming,” she says, and she’s speaking the way she does sometimes in
his nightmares, the way she did that day twenty years ago. Quiet and slowed, gaze fixed
somewhere through him, like she’s slipped far away, and his words take time to reach her, and hers
take time to reach him.

“Just thought I’d check on you,” he says, closing the door behind him. Just seeing her, hearing her
voice, has calmed him right down. He settles down next to her on the filthy couch and takes her
hand in his. “Have you had dinner, ma? Should I fix you something to eat?”

“I ate,” she says.

“When did you eat?”

“I ate already,” she says. “I’m not hungry.”

“Are you sleeping okay?” He asks.

She shrugs dismissively, and then just sits. She doesn’t ask him anything. Doesn’t say anything
more.

“How are we doing with meds?” He tries.

“Fine,” she says.

“You’ve been taking them?”

She nods.

“Alright, I’m going to make myself something to eat, and I’d like it if you ate a little with me,” he
says.

She doesn’t say anything, and she doesn’t move, so he gets up and goes to the kitchen. Trash bags
from weeks ago cover half the kitchen floor. Dirty dishes growing mold in the sink, spilling over
onto the kitchen counter, fruit flies swarming around them. He opens her fridge and looks inside,
and there’s nothing there. Empty kimchi containers and shriveled up vegetables.

Alright, he thinks. Alright, he has to take the trash out, wash the dishes, restock her fridge.

He closes the fridge, turns around to look for her medicine bottle. He finds it where it’s always
kept, next to the rice cooker, so she wouldn’t forget to take them.

He picks it up and looks at it, Sodium valproate, 750 mg, 60 tablets, refilled on November 3rd. He
pours them out on the countertop and counts them, and if she had been taking them the way she
was supposed to, there would be fourteen less than there are.

Alright, he thinks, gathering them up into his cupped palm and pouring them back into the bottle.
It’s fine, she missed a few doses, and if he stays with her for a while, maybe a month, and gets her
back on track with her medication, she should get better. She should be alright.
But even as he’s screwing the cap back on the bottle, his hands tremble, and the smell of decay and
dust and stagnation settles over him, and he knows. This isn’t going to get better like that. This
won’t be as easy as cleaning up her house and making sure she’s taking her medication, this is
twenty years ago, this is the neglect, the darkness, the stench of his childhood.

He puts the bottle down, braces his hands on the kitchen counter, and takes a deep, steadying
breath.

Alright, he thinks. She’s still here, and that means there’s still hope.

He straightens up to his full height, straightens the slouch out of his spine and broadens his
shoulders, like an animal pretending to be bigger than it is to scare away the things that threaten to
prey on it. He walks back to living room and sits beside his mother.

“I’m going to ask you something,” he says. “And I need you to be honest with me.”

She nods, in that slowed, terrible way.

“Have you thought about hurting yourself?”

She shakes her head.

“No,” she says.

“Tell me the truth,” he says. “Please.”

She looks at him and her mouth opens but her lips tremble and close and move like she’s rolling
her answer around in her mouth. She doesn’t need to get it out for him to know it’s bitter.

Alright, he thinks, sitting beside her in her filthy apartment. He let this happen, and he has to fix it.
He has to help her get better.
His mother’s quiet sobbing is getting under his skin, but he tunes it out and gets her settled

into the wheelchair he bought for her when she fell in the bath and broke her femur. She’s far too
slowed and unwilling to walk out the door on her own.

He can’t help this. Dr Kim Hyojoo, her psychiatrist, told him over the phone to bring her to the
hospital so she could be admitted, put on suicide watch, and restarted on her medication. They
might reconsider ECT depending on how bad it is, she said.

It’s no secret his mother hates being hospitalized. The memory of that first time she was
hospitalized is burned in both their minds, Taeyong squatting on the ground by the social worker’s
feet, crying, hands clapped over his ears, and his mother screaming and screaming until they
sedated her.

“You’ll be okay, mom,” he says. “You know this will help you. We’ve been here before, we’ve
done this before, and you’ve always come out of it better.”

“I don’t want to go,” she says. “I don’t like it there.”

“This house isn’t going anywhere,” he tells her, crouching down and slipping her feet into her
shoes. “I’m not going anywhere. You’ll come right back in a couple of weeks and everything will
be alright.”

He knows how much she hates it, how much being torn away from her home and her son once
traumatized her, but he can’t help it. He thought about taking time off from work, but the most
they’ll give him is a week, maybe two. He doesn’t know how long this will take to get better. And
what about when he has to go back? He has to, eventually, to keep a roof over his head. What if she
hurts herself then, or runs away, or something. The thought terrifies him.

He wheels her out into the hallway and shuts the door behind them, and by the time he’s gripped
the handles of the wheelchair and moved a few paces down the hallway, his mother has begun to
wail.
“Mom, please,” he says. “Please, don’t cry, you like Dr Kim, right? She’s going to help you get
better.”

But she keeps crying, and her distress is compounding his helplessness and his guilt. His eyes are
stinging, and he’s far too aware of the fact that one of the tenants in the neighboring apartments is
peering at them from their window.

He let it come to this, he thinks. It had been so long since her last episode that he forgot how bad it
could get. He forgot how important it is for him to check on her every few days, for him to take her
out and spend time with her. He’s been absent. He’s been neglectful. This is his fault, and there’s
nothing more to it.

He pulls the brake lever on the wheelchair and rounds it to crouch in front of her once again. He
can’t just ignore this. He can’t just wheel her into the elevator and stuff her into his car and drop
her off there like she’s unwanted. It would be easier than bargaining with her and trying to make
her understand what he’s doing, but he can’t do that to her. Once was one too many.

“I love you,” he says. “I love you so much, you know that right? I need you safe, mom. That’s the
only thing I need in the world, so please, please do this for me.”

“I’ll be good, I’ll take the pills, let me stay at home,” she says, and the wretchedness of it makes
him want to cry.

“I’m sorry, I’m so sorry, this is my fault. I should have checked on you. I shouldn’t have let it get
so bad. I should have been here making it better,” he says. “Please, let’s get you to the hospital,
okay?”

He blinks away his tears and takes a deep, steadying breath. He looks at her stooped frame sitting
small and defeated in the wheelchair, and he thinks longingly of the last time things were alright.
Truly alright, without the threat of another episode, without the fear that he’d wake up alone in the
world.

He closes his eyes and takes another breath. It’s helping. It’s calming him. He’s in the front
passenger seat of a car, drinking chocolate milk and the summer wind is ruffling his hair. He’s
singing loudly, off pitch, all the wrong lyrics. The smell of cigarettes in the fabric of the seat and
fresh cut grass outside.
He opens his eyes when he hears someone on the stairs behind him. It doesn’t bother him to know
there’s another spectator, but he doesn’t want this to become a scene, either. He wills them to just
go to another floor, or walk past them quietly to their apartment.

“I love you. Please?” He says again. “Don’t cry.”

Luck doesn’t seem to be on his side, because he hears the rhythm of the spectator’s footsteps
faltering, and then coming to a stop.

“Taeyong?”

He looks over his shoulder in surprise at the voice that called his name, and he knows who it is
before he sees his tall frame in blue scrubs and his dark hair.

“What are you doing here?” He says, getting to his feet clumsily and turning to face him. He’s too
tired and emotionally drained to really be shaken by the fact that Jaehyun’s standing in front of
him.

“I live here,” Jaehyun says.

Taeyong lets a shuddering breath out slowly. He doesn’t know why it’s in his fate to cross paths
with him like this. He doesn’t know why he of all people had to live on this floor of this apartment
building, but he finds that he can’t bring himself to care, anyway.

His mother’s sobs have quieted some, but she’s still whimpering, muted and tired, and Jaehyun’s
eyes take in her distress with no small measure of shock.

“Is everything okay? Can I help?” He asks.

“We’re fine,” Taeyong says.

“Are you sure?”

“She’s sick. I have to get her to the hospital, that’s all,” he says, going back around the wheelchair
and releasing the brakes.

“Do you need a ride?”

“I brought my car. We’re really fine, thank you,” he says.

He wants to be bothered by it, because he’s always been bothered by it, the look on Jaehyun’s face
and the body language of strangers witnessing a car crash. Horror and pity and maybe even relief
that they’re alright, their lives are better than the mangling they’re seeing. He wants to be angry
with him, but he’s not.

Maybe it’s the fact that he’s Taeyong’s mate, maybe it’s his scent. Maybe it’s the affection he’s
underlined Jaehyun’s name with, since the events of that night, since he respected his feelings and
kept his distance. Maybe because he believes him to be better than that.

“I’ll see you,” he says, and he begins to push the wheelchair down the hallway, past Jaehyun to the
elevator.

Jaehyun gets to the elevator first and presses the call button for him. He nods his thanks. He
supposes it comes from working in a hospital, the unthinking instinct to clear a path for
wheelchairs and beds. The elevator comes quickly, and the doors open with a female voice
announcing the floor. Taeyong takes his mother into the elevator, with Jaehyun holding the door
open for them.

“Thanks,” he says, when he’s positioned the wheelchair in the elevator.

He’s about to wave goodbye, but his hand stops awkwardly mid wave because Jaehyun has
followed him in.

“I’ll just help you get her settled in the car,” he says, hitting the button for the ground floor.

“I’m a nurse,” Taeyong says. “You want to help a nurse with a wheelchair?”
“I want to help a friend get his mum to the hospital,” he says easily.

There’s nothing he can really say to that, because his thoughts sound mean. Don’t you know what
no means? And who said we’re friends? He keeps them quiet. He’s learned never to spite goodwill,
even if it does make him feel helpless, and his helplessness turns to anger, he keeps his anger quiet.

They move in silence after that, broken only by his mother’s sniffles and his murmured assurances
that she’ll be okay, that he loves her, that there’s nothing to be afraid of. They move through the
elevator doors on the ground floor, and he’s lucky that Jaehyun’s here with him, because the
wheelchair ramp has been dug up in some landscaping efforts around the building entry. He has to
get her down four steps to the driveway, and having Jaehyun supporting half the weight makes it
much easier than it would have been if he were alone.

Wordlessly, they get her into the car, and Taeyong makes her comfortable and buckles her seatbelt
for her while Jaehyun collapses the wheelchair and puts it in the trunk of the car.

Taeyong walks around back to thank him once again and say goodbye for real this time, but
Jaehyun’s tearing a page out of a tiny spiral bound notebook and handing it out to him. On it is a
phone number.

“In case you need any help,” Jaehyun says. “Don’t think twice, just call.”

“Right,” he says, taking the scrap of paper from him. “Thank you.”

He’s exhausted. Dehydrated from the twenty minutes he spent crying in the parking lot of the
hospital after he got his mom admitted. The whole ordeal took hours, and now it’s just past eleven
pm and his body is protesting every moment he spends awake. He needs to lie down, but he
couldn’t drive forty five minutes to his apartment, so he’s back at his mom’s place.

He can spend the night here, he thinks. Clear up some space for himself and sleep. He has to be at
work by six thirty tomorrow, and he’ll have to wake up earlier than his usual five thirty to get to
work on time.
He stands in front of his mom’s apartment door with his hand hovering over the keypad. He can
kind of smell it from here, the trash, the dishes, the clothes, the rotting food. He’ll have to clean it
up. He can’t sleep there, that stench will seep into his clothes, and into his skin, and into his brain,
and he’ll be sucked into that state of mind that he clawed his way out of. Helplessness. Stagnation.
Decay.

Before he knows it, his feet have carried him down the hall to stand in front of another door, one
with a smell faintly like wet earth behind it. He raises his hand to the wood and knocks timidly,
because it’s late and he doesn’t want to wake him if he’s asleep, because he’s not sure if he really
wants him to open the door.

He does open the door, and when Taeyong sees him standing in the doorway in his plaid pajamas
and black t shirt, with black framed glasses sitting on his nose, hair damp and fluffy from a shower,
Taeyong’s sure. He wanted him to be awake, and he wanted him to open the door for him.

“Hey,” Jaehyun says. “Everything okay?”

“Yeah, I dropped her off,” he says. “I wanted to thank you. And to apologize. You seem to have a
way of catching me at my fucking worst.”

Jaehyun stares at him as if he’s not sure what to say for a second.

“Do you want to come in?” He says, after a long pause. “You look like you could use a drink.”

It’s Taeyong’s turn to stare now, unsure again what he really wants.

“I do,” he says, learning a lesson from his uncertainty when he knocked. “I could.”
Jaehyun’s apartment is empty. Very slightly messy, mostly empty.

From his vantage point on the couch, he surveys what he can see of the apartment. The living room
has the couch he’s sitting on, a TV balanced on top of a pile of textbooks from med school. His
dining room has a table covered with opened and unopened mail, articles printed off, probably for
his research. His stethoscope, his copy of Pocket Medicine. A record player. His backpack hunched
over itself on one of the chairs and his white coat hanging from its back. There’s a crate holding
maybe fifty or sixty records.

Despite being so bare, there’s a certain coziness to it. He can’t say for sure that it would still seem
cozy to him without his scent all over it, but it’s a pleasant break from the mess of his mom’s
apartment regardless.

“Is Heineken okay?” Jaehyun says, holding out a can for him to take.

He nods. He hates beer, really. He likes his drinks sugary and fruity, but right now he’ll take
anything with alcohol in it, frankly, even mouthwash would do. He takes it from Jaehyun, and he
wonders briefly if he’s made a mistake coming here when Jaehyun sits down on the far end of the
three seater sofa and cracks open his own drink in silence.

“Do you want to talk about it?” He asks.

Taeyong’s not sure, so he opens his can of beer, holds his breath, and takes a big swig. He feels a
little surer after that cold, gross fizz slides into his stomach.

It’s entirely out of character for him to tell a stranger what’s eating away at his peace, but he
remembers distinctly that just today Jaehyun unknowingly gave him two moments of peace when
he was on the brink of panic. At that crosswalk, when Mr Jeon told him about his mother. In the
hallway outside their apartments, when his mother cried and said she wouldn’t go to the hospital.

For some reason, that makes him feel like he should tell him the truth.

“Bipolar,” he says. “She stopped taking her meds. I didn’t know. It’s been a weird couple of weeks
for me, meeting you and the heat, the meds I’m taking for it, work, coursework. It’s been a lot and
I got lazy and I wasn’t checking on her the way I used to. I was distracted. And she got worse all by
herself.”
“I’m sorry,” Jaehyun says.

He doesn’t really look at him. The way people approach mean dogs they want to make friends
with, eyes averted, hand outstretched in a gesture of peace, maybe even a tasty treat in their palm. It
amuses him, somewhat, to think Jaehyun might find him intimidating in a way. A mean dog, lots of
bark, maybe even bite.

He takes another big gulp, and then another.

“I know what you’re thinking,” he says. “Why wouldn’t I just get her to live with me? But she
doesn’t want to leave this place. She’s been here twenty years and she refuses to move. And I can’t
be here, because honestly, I fucking hate this place.”

Another swig. And silence. Jaehyun nods slowly. The house is quiet and clean, and he’s safe, and
secure.

“And also it becomes too much, sometimes,” he says, small and vulnerable, and he dislikes that, so
he sits up straighter and finds his voice again and says, “Isn’t that awful?”

“You and I both know what caregiver burnout is,” Jaehyun says, in that deep, even voice that
makes him think of Nat King Cole, or JK Kim Dongwook, or his dad. Voices born from decades of
cigarette smoke.

“Neither you nor I have ever held that against a caregiver, have we?” Jaehyun asks. “How do you
hold fatigue against someone?”

It makes his eyes sting again, and he blinks furiously and drinks some more. There’s more silence.
He might even call it peace. He’s comfortable. He doesn’t break it.

“Your dad isn’t? He’s not in the picture?” Jaehyun asks, after long moments.

“He’s - he - well, he died,” Taeyong says, and the moment the words leave his mouth, he knows he
shouldn’t have said that.
He sees the shift in Jaehyun’s posture, and he sees him turn towards him, and he hears the gears
turning in his head and churning out an art film about a deprived, neglected childhood.

“I’m sorry. It must have been hard,” he says, and Taeyong’s hackles rise.

“Stop feeling sorry for me,” he says, looking him square in the eyes.

“I’m not feeling sorry for you,” Jaehyun replies, but his ears are starting to color.

“Yes, you are, of course you are, I just told you I grew up without a father and with a mentally
unwell mother and of course, now you’re thinking who made the money and how did you get
through nursing school and well, let me tell you, things were mostly fine, my mom worked and put
me through high school, and my aunts took care of me when things got bad, and then there were
student loans, so I want you to stop feeling sorry for me,” he says, all in one breath.

Jaehyun’s eyebrows have disappeared behind his bangs, and an incredulous laugh slips from his
lips.

“Slow down Leeminem, I’m not feeling sorry for you!” He says.

Taeyong stares at him for a second.

“Why the fuck not? Are you some kind of sociopath?” He says.

Jaehyun laughs again, and Taeyong doesn’t know what it is, maybe his scent, maybe his kindness,
maybe his own vulnerability or those stupid fucking dimples, but he finds himself furious. Like he
wants to punch him, or kiss him. Or both.

“No, because you’re fine,” Jaehyun says. “You have a great job, and you’re a lovely person, a
good son to your mom, and I don’t know if that’s because of the kind of mom she was to you or
despite it, but you’re fine. You’re okay. You don’t need me feeling sorry for you.”
He wants to kiss him.

“No, I don’t.”

“I know.”

He really, really wants to kiss him.

He looks down at his beer, and he drains the last of it.

“I go by Run CMC, actually,” he says. “Not Leeminem.”

Jaehyun’s rumbling laugh makes him smile, this time.

“Have you eaten?” Jaehyun asks.

He shakes his head.

“I have some leftovers from my dinner, if that’s okay,” he says.

“The omega eats what the alpha doesn’t want?” Taeyong teases, and he gets a cushion thrown in
his face for it. He doesn’t mind, he deserved it.

“The omega better stop or I’ll cook for him, and he’ll wish he was eating leftover takeout then,”
Jaehyun says. “I’ll go heat it up. We have wang mandu and jjamppong, and if you’d like, another
beer.”

He’s about to protest, saying that’s too much work and he’s already imposing. The protest dies on
his lips because his stomach, reminded of food, reminds him right back that he needs to eat or it’ll
start screaming.
 “Thank you,” he says instead.

“All in the spirit of Christmas,” Jaehyun says.

“Christmas? It’s barely even December.”

“See, this is why you're my mate.”

Chapter End Notes

I hope all of you are safe and sound, take care <33
 Two Peas in a Tide Pod
Chapter Notes

See the end of the chapter for notes

Jaehyun is as tired as he always is at this time, and his bed is the same against his back, and his
room is the same dark space and the same four walls, and the yellow light coming through the
chink in his curtains and painting a golden stripe across his covers is the same.

Everything is the same, and nothing is really the same.

The scent in the air is different. The sounds in his apartment are different. The shower’s running,
and Taeyong is standing under it, one wall away from him. Naked, he thinks, and he silences the
thought viciously, but it comes back quieter, either way. Naked, like seriously naked, like he’s
standing butt naked maybe fifteen feet from where Jaehyun’s lying down -

He sighs and rolls over, like that’ll change the fact that he’s standing naked in the tub -

He freezes. The tub, he thinks. Did he clean it properly after he groomed his privates in the shower
today? Or will Taeyong find a stray pube in there? And what about the toothpaste he dribbled on
the counter when he was brushing his teeth in the morning? Did he wipe it down or is does it still
look like a Jackson Pollock? And what about - what about his shampoo?

Steam billows out from behind the shower curtain, and Taeyong puts his hand under the water
experimentally. It’s perfect. He empties his pockets onto the counter and undoes the knot on his
scrub pants. He lets them fall to the ground along with his underwear, and then he shrugs off his
top and underscrubs.

Gold glints at him from the countertop and he stops and looks at it for a second. His mother’s
earrings, beside his measuring tape and his pens and his ampule of heparin and his shears. He had
kept the thought of her at bay for hours, but it comes back with a vengeance.

He closes his eyes, and all he sees is the look on his mother’s face when he unscrewed her earrings
in the examination room of the Jeon Mi-Young psychiatry wing and put them in his pocket. No
personal effects were allowed in the ward, and he knew she’d prefer it if he took them home safely
rather than surrender them to the locker in the hospital. It was final then, and she knew it. The
paperwork was done and she’d be wheeled away and locked up in a room with no company,
nothing familiar, nothing in it she could use to hurt herself, not even a hook on the wall.

He nodded at her, as if to assure her that everything would be okay, but she averted her eyes and
pursed her lips, bitter, unforgiving. He knows she’ll get better, and when she does, she’ll
understand why he did what he did, but for now, all he has to think about is her contempt. Her
misery. Her suffering.

He takes a deep breath and turns away, steps under the water and lowers his head into the stream.
He’s too drained to be weirded out by this, by the fact that he’s staying the night at Jaehyun’s
place, the fact that he’s showering here, that he’s going to wear his clothes and go to sleep on his
sofa.

Alright, maybe he’s a little weirded out by it, but he’s certainly too drained to do anything about it.
He’s embarrassed by the fact that he rejected Jaehyun as coldly as he did and he still found himself
needing his kindness. His disbelief and embarrassment comes in waves, and each time the wave is
a little tamer, and a little easier to ignore.

His kindness was just easy to accept. Maybe it was how easily he gave it out, like he could trust
Jaehyun not to demand something in return, not even gratitude. Maybe it was how vulnerable he
was. Logic and inhibition were nowhere in sight when he dried his tears and came upstairs, and the
scent of him immersed him gently into that same memory. Of a time when stability and comfort
and safety were things he took for granted, things that didn’t need to be desired.

It doesn’t matter, he thinks. He’ll never have to see him again. It’s like the first time he went out
with a few friends from nursing school and drank a little too much and threw up on some woman’s
shoes. Never saw her again. Doesn’t matter.

Or not. He’ll run into him a few times after this, like tomorrow, when he comes back here after
work to clean up his mom’s apartment. Maybe that’ll take more than one visit. And then when his
mom gets back, he’ll have to come stay here a while and he’ll bump into him now and then. But
after that he’ll never have to see him again.

He sighs again and looks up at the shower caddy for some shampoo. He sees a giant bottle of old
spice body wash, and tucked behind it, a tiny little bottle of Johnson’s baby shampoo.

He laughs quietly once, and then again, and then all the way through shampooing his hair.
The rhythmic sound of Taeyong’s scrubs going through the washing machine falls silent. Jaehyun
checks his phone. It’s about one thirty, and sleep is still evading him. Fortunately, his thoughts are
no longer about Taeyong being naked, or about what he saw in Jaehyun’s bathroom, but his
thoughts are still keeping him awake.

Every time he closes his eyes, he sees Taeyong kneeling by his mom’s feet and speaking to her,
choked up, trying his best to sound comforting - I love you, you know that, right? I need you safe. I
should have checked on you, I shouldn’t have let it get so bad, please, let’s get you to the hospital.

He sees that, he hears the anguish in his voice, and he feels his pain as though it were his own. He
sees the way he prickles at the thought of accepting his help, he hears him come back from the
hospital, he hears the hesitant footsteps leading to Jaehyun’s door, he feels his uncertainty, he feels
his humiliation, he feels his helplessness and his smallness and his distrust and his fatigue. And he
opens his door and sees Taeyong looking back at him, vulnerable, and trying not to be.

Haechan told him he had a rough childhood, but he never imagined this. He doesn’t know why
anyone with that sort of past would turn down a mate, a companion who would stand by him for
life and face his troubles with him, but he guesses someone with two loving parents in stable jobs
could never really understand the choices of someone who has had to live like Taeyong has.

He rolls over again, uncomfortably aware of the silence after forty minutes of having the washing
machine’s drone to keep him company. Shouldn’t the dryer be on, he thinks. Is he even awake to
take the clothes out of the washer?

He listens carefully, and he can hear faint snores coming from the living room. Taeyong’s fallen
asleep, he realizes. His scrubs are sitting wet and sad in the washing machine, and he’s going to
wake up in the morning without clothes to wear.

He sighs, and it’s accompanied by a smile, not exhaustion or exasperation. He finds himself
content that Taeyong has fallen asleep, because he knows he needs rest after the day he’s had, and
he knows that for as long as he’s asleep, he’s not worrying or blaming himself or hurting, and he
knows that sleep makes most things better.
He pushes his covers off and gets out of bed, walking quietly to the door and opening it quietly,
and it doesn’t occur to him that all of that quietness will be utterly superfluous once he gets the
dryer going. He tiptoes (quietly) to the washing machine, pulls the door open (quietly), and loads
his wet clothes into the dryer.

He sets the timer and hits the start button and the unholy racket that fills his house makes him
freeze with his hands outstretched as if placating the dryer, unsure what to do to keep it from
waking Taeyong up. Slowly (quietly), he creeps down the hall and peers into the living room to see
if he’s still asleep, and to his relief, he’s knocked out.

He sighs (quietly) and goes back to his bedroom, and despite the hour and his fatigue and his
sleeplessness and the unexpectedness of everything that led to his mate being asleep on his couch,
he’s happy when he slides under his covers.

He likes how this feels, he thinks. He likes the fact that he could help Taeyong through a difficult
day. He likes that he came to him.

Maybe it all ties in to the reason he wanted to be a doctor, the reason he wants a critical care
fellowship after residency, the reason he’s choosing this lifestyle for this pay out of all the things
he could be doing. He wants to get people through terrible days and see them smile on the other
side.

Maybe this is his role in Taeyong’s life. Maybe he fits as a friend who’d stand by him through
anything, and they’re meant to love each other as friends.

Taeyong wakes up to the sound of sirens ringing inside his brain. It takes him a few seconds longer
than it usually does to comprehend that it’s his alarm blaring from the phone pressed between his
cheek and the sofa he’s sleeping on.

He sits up, disoriented and stiff all over, and swipes clumsily at the screen to turn it off.
Bits of his surroundings come into focus through his squinted eyes - the red glow of the little light
on the tv illuminating the Elsevier logo on the textbook it’s sitting on. The couch he was sleeping
on. The dining chair with the white coat hanging off it like a tired ghost.

The embarrassment of the night before comes back with a vengeance when he orients himself to
the fact that he’s in Jaehyun’s house, and he’s no longer too tired to address it. Fortunately for him,
he doesn’t dwell much longer on that, because his brain goes from coat to scrubs to his scrubs
sitting in the washing machine because he didn’t stay up to put them in the dryer.

He groans and gets to his feet, walking quietly down the hall to where his washer and dryer are,
thinking maybe if he puts them in now, for twenty minutes, they’d get somewhat dry.

He pulls open the door on the washer as quietly as he can, but he can’t see his clothes in there. He
reaches in and feels around and it’s empty. He checks the dryer, wondering if he sleepwalked his
way through laundry, and he’s surprised to find his scrubs toasty and dry inside it.

Just as he’s pulling them out and patting them to make sure they’re really dry, he hears Jaehyun’s
alarm go off in his bedroom, and the sound makes him nearly jump out of his skin.

He panics, contemplating running back to the living room and pretending to be asleep so he could
avoid having any kind of conversation with Jaehyun about his mother, or worse, about his feelings.
He’s shit out of luck, though, because the alarm shuts off and he hears his feet hit the ground and
then the bedroom door opens.

He finds it aggravating. Who doesn’t snooze their alarm at least once? What kind of monster just
jumps out of bed like that?

Jaehyun steps out of his bedroom, looks up distractedly, and visibly flinches when he sees his
silhouette in the dark hall.

“Fuck - hi, hey,” Jaehyun says. “I didn’t realize you were up.”

“I have work at 6:30,” he says stupidly.

“I have work at six,” Jaehyun replies, just as stupidly, fumbling for the light switch and flicking it
on.

Taeyong’s blinded, and so is Jaehyun, because they’re both squinting at each other for a second
after light floods the space.

“Did you sleep okay? Do you need the bathroom?” He says.

“I slept fine, thank you. I can wait, you go ahead,” he says, and then, as a half-thought afterthought,
“Did you put these in the dryer?”

Jaehyun’s eyebrows shoot up and he looks down at the lilac scrubs in his hands.

“Yeah, I hope that’s okay. I couldn’t sleep and the washing machine went quiet but I didn’t hear
the dryer and then I checked and you were asleep and I figured you wouldn’t want wet clothes in
the morning. Is that okay? I hope that’s okay -

Taeyong bites back a smile, because his groggy head is just beginning to clear, and is just
beginning to take note of the way Jaehyun’s thick black hair seems to defy gravity in the early
hours of morning, and that he seems to be as unprepared for conversation and as out of it as
Taeyong is.

It’s endearing, really. Just like the fact that he uses baby shampoo, and the fact that he’s as
thoughtful as he is, that he sees the act of helping as something that needs permission and not
gratitude. It warms him.

“It is, of course it is,” he says. “Thank you. Um, for everything. You helped more than you’ll ever
know.”

Jaehyun relaxes, and he smiles, and Taeyong’s groggy brain notes that he likes his smile very
much.

“I’m glad,” he says.

It’s a gorgeous six pm today, Jaehyun thinks, walking down the street with two coffees in hand.
It’s a chilly, cloudy, sun-less six pm, but his spirits are high and he’s pleased with everything, even
the puddle in the pothole on his street.

He pushes through the little turnstile next to the boom barrier leading into the driveway of his
apartment and walks briskly into his building. The stairs seem welcoming today, instead of the
unpleasant task he’s forced on himself in the name of being healthy, since he hasn’t really had the
time to work out as much as he used to.

He emerges on the third floor, and the scent of Taeyong in the hallway lifts his spirits even higher.
He said he’d be back around six, after work, to clean up his mom’s place. He must have just
arrived.

He approaches Taeyong’s mom’s apartment and knocks lightly on the open door.

“Taeyong?” he says, peering in.

It’s safe to say the place is a mess. He can hear the washing machine running, and he’s not sure
Taeyong heard him over rumble of it, so he knocks again and calls out louder.

Taeyong emerges from the kitchen holding three - four? - trash bags, looking quizzically at the
door.

“Hey?” He says when he sees him, with the faintest hint of what the fuck do you want in his tone.
It’s fainter than Jaehyun imagined it would be, so he’s pleased regardless.
“I got you coffee,” he says. “Figured you might need it.”

“Thank you, that’s really sweet, but you didn’t have to,” Taeyong says.

“Just paying you back for coffee this morning.”

“That coffee was me paying you back for last night,” Taeyong says pointedly.

Jaehyun shrugs.

“It’ll go to waste if you don’t take it,” he says. “God knows I’m not drinking that.”

Taeyong laughs. They had a mix-up in the morning when they stopped to get coffee before
Taeyong dropped him off at work. Their cups weren’t labeled and got switched around, and their
first sips of coffee were followed by their hands flying to their mouths, and two gags leaving their
throats at exactly the same time. It was safe to say neither appreciated the other’s coffee order.

Taeyong looks down at the trash, then up at Jaehyun as if deciding what he’d rather be doing.

“I guess I should drink it while it’s still hot,” he mumbles, settling the bags down against a wall.
He darts to his bag lying on the sofa and squeezes a dollop of strawberry scented sanitizer into his
hands, out of a sanitizer case that looks like a strawberry, and rubs it into his hands before walking
to the door.

It’s understood that they’ll be drinking their coffees outside, because the apartment is far too messy
to really sit down anywhere.

“Your mocha with two sugars,” Jaehyun says, handing him the cup.

“Thank you,” Taeyong says, taking it from him hesitantly. “And that’s your Americano, extra shot
of espresso, no sugar?”

He smiles and nods.

“You know, you could try taking your coffee with some sugar,” Taeyong says, taking a sip of his
coffee and licking his lips. “I’ll bet it’ll change your life.”

“Or you could try taking your sugar with some actual coffee,” Jaehyun replies, and is happy to hear
Taeyong laugh.

The trash has been segregated and taken out, the dishes washed, and one load of laundry taken out
of the dryer. The two of them are currently sitting on the sofa folding their way through a mountain
of freshly laundered clothes and sheets.

“You know, you really don’t have to do this,” Taeyong says.

“You said that, about eight times already,” Jaehyun says, pulling socks out of the depths of a fitted
sheet. “I heard you all eight times.”

“Nine, now,” Taeyong says.

“All nine times."

They fall silent, and he focuses his attention on finding the “corners” of the fitted sheet. He’s not
surprised when he doesn’t, and he does what he always does to fitted sheets - folds it over an
imagined axis over and over until it’s the size he wants it to be.

He hears Taeyong laugh quietly, and he looks up to find him watching his struggle with a grin on
his face.

“What?” He says. “Is that not how you fold it?”

“That’s - that’s not folding, that’s rolling,” Taeyong says.

“Rolling is a kind of folding.”

“No it’s not. It’s they see me rollin’, they hatin’. Nobody hates you when you’re folding,” he says.

It makes him laugh. So hip hop, that’s Taeyong’s thing. And chocolate. He likes chocolate and hip
hop and strawberries, and the smell of fresh laundry if the way he stuck his face into a pillow case
as he was getting it out of the dryer is anything to go by.

“Fine, stop hating and show me how to do it,” he says, handing it to Taeyong.

He shakes it open, and to Jaehyun’s shock, finds the four corners. He holds two out for Jaehyun to
take, and he does, and follows Taeyong’s movements.

“So I was thinking,” he says, and he sees Taeyong stiffen ever so slightly.

The last fold of the sheet has him surrendering his corners to Taeyong, and somewhere in the
transfer, his fingers brush Taeyong’s and that moment’s contact gets his heart racing. He’s
somewhat shocked by it, by how little it needs to go a mile a minute, and he wonders if he has
some kind of arrhythmia. PSVT, maybe? He just had a coffee -

It also raises a lot of questions about whether or not he should say what he’s about to say, but he
guesses it’s just a crush and it won’t be hard to shut down over the coming days.

“Yeah?” Taeyong says, putting the sheet down into the laundry basket and picking up something
new to fold.

“I was thinking, the Greeks, they say that there are different kinds of love,” Jaehyun explains.
“Maybe you and I are meant to love each other like friends do. Maybe we’re meant to be friends.”

Taeyong peers up at him, like he’s waiting for the punchline, but it doesn’t come, so he looks back
down at the blouse he’s folding. He fiddles with it, then he absentmindedly rolls it into a ball and
sets it down in the laundry basket.

“Maybe,” he says, finally. “I was also thinking -

“Yeah?”

“I wanted to thank you. Like really. For yesterday, and today, and I thought maybe I could get you
something,” he says. “But I didn’t want to get you something you didn’t like. And I saw that you
need stuff for your house so maybe we could go shopping together one of these days. Pick
something out, I’ll buy it. But not like a massage chair or something - what’s wrong?

Jaehyun realizes a little too late that his jaw has dropped, and he lifts it off the ground
incredulously. Firstly, because he didn’t think it would be this easy to convince Taeyong that
they’re meant to be in each other’s lives, even if their roles are different from what he imagined
they’d be. Secondly, because he thought he was done furnishing his house, but maybe he’s wrong.

“Nothing’s wrong,” he says. “Sure! Sure, we could go shopping for some house stuff.”

“Tomorrow?” He says. “I have the day off.”

“I have only morning rounds,” he says. “I should be free by eleven. Twelve tops.”

He’s a little stupid, Taeyong thinks, walking beside Jaehyun through the aisles of Home Therapy.
It’s the first time he’s seen Jaehyun in something that isn’t scrubs or pajamas, and he has to admit,
he’s really fucking handsome. His sweater and his jeans fit him beautifully, to picture the
washboard abs he saw on his Instagram under that sweater is as easy as breathing. In fact, when he
saw him walking up to him on the pavement with a big, adorable smile plastered on his face, he
had the inexplicable urge to paw at his abs, and maybe bite down on a cheek. Face cheek. But also
ass cheek. Mostly face cheek.
He’s attractive, that’s not debatable, but in the twenty minutes since they came in, Jaehyun’s
attacked himself with a snake plushie, sat down for tea at a children’s tea party set up, in one of
those tiny little kiddie chairs, and now, he’s introducing himself to a chair - a different chair, a
grown up chair.

“What are you doing?” He asks.

“All the furniture is named,” he says. “Isobel Loveseat, Hera Vanity. If they’re telling me their
names, it’s only right that I tell -

He looks at the tag on a grey velvet accent chair -

- Gillian Accent Chair, that my name is Jeong Jaehyun and it’s a pleasure to meet her.”

Taeyong blinks slowly. He’s a little stupid, but endearingly stupid, not infuriatingly stupid, so
Taeyong lets it slide.

“Hi, Gillian, I’m Taeyong,” he says, and he catches himself hoping ardently that nobody saw that.

“I’m taking Gillian home tonight,” Jaehyun says, petting the velvet and watching it turn silvery in
the wake of his hand.

Taeyong’s eyes go wide, because when he said he wanted to get him something, he meant like a set
of wine glasses or a vase or something, not a two hundred thousand won grey velvet chair. He
lowers his eyebrows and forces a smile, because he was the one who said he’d get him something,
and he can’t back out now.

“I’m not asking you to pay for it!” Jaehyun says quickly. “We’ll find something else, I’m buying
this for myself.”

“Right, no, I mean I can pay for it -

“No way. Just - no way, I just thought because I’m here I could buy something for myself, too.”

They stand there in awkward silence for a second, and then Taeyong speaks.

“I could help you pick stuff out,” Taeyong says. “I love decorating houses. It’s my favorite thing.
After my job, of course.”

“Your job is your favorite thing to do?” Jaehyun asks, the hand that was patting Gillian going still.
“Never mind that. Sure, let’s buy stuff.”

Taeyong lets his eyes roam the displays all around them, settling on a few pieces he thinks would
fit wonderfully in Jaehyun’s house. It’s essentially a blank canvas because there’s so little in it, but
he thinks the place could look very polished, like Jaehyun looks right now.

“So your couch is beige, and Gillian is grey,” he says. “You could probably do like a Japandi
thing?”

“Japandi?”

“Japanese and Scandinavian,” he explains. “Some midcentury furniture, a jute rug like that one?”

Jaehyun looks at it for a second, and doesn’t need to think too long before he answers.

“It looks prickly.”

“You want something plush instead?”

“I just don’t want my rug to feel like an acupressure mat.”

He smiles without meaning to. He looks polished, and he seems to love simplicity, in the way he
dresses and the way he thinks - no nonsense, no embellishment - perfect for Japandi. But he’s a
fucking goofball and Japandi doesn’t really go with that.
Jaehyun’s apartment is pleasantly warm, and the day’s shopping is piled up in a corner of the
living room. They’ve begun assembling the bookshelf, so the the books have a place to go when
the TV stand takes its place. The instructions are lying open on the floor between them, and
Taeyong’s rooting through the little baggies of screws to find the type A screw, whatever that is.

It was supposed to be a quick trip, but it turned into half a day of shopping. His gift to Jaehyun was
a twenty thousand won scented candle that took twenty minutes of sniffing to zero in on the perfect
scent for him and Jaehyun spent about fifty times that on the rest of his purchases. A TV stand
(much needed), two side tables (also needed), the posters (a lovely, personal touch), a bookshelf
for his newly displaced books (Lippincott’s Review of Biochemistry is no longer responsible for
holding up the TV), and Gillian.

“I have a question,” Jaehyun says.

“Shoot,” Taeyong says, picking the only unlabeled bag and assuming that’s type A.

“What does my scent make you think of? Like how does it make you feel?” He says tentatively,
screwing two metal rods together on his part of the bookshelf.

Taeyong is taken aback by the question. He’s not sure how much he wants to reveal, but he
supposes since they decided to try being friends, he could tell him the truth. He hopes Jaehyun
means it when he said he wants to be friends. He hopes he isn’t just waiting for him to change his
mind.

“You don’t have to tell me. Was that a weird question?” Jaehyun says, looking down at the
instructions to avoid eye contact. “What your mate’s scent makes you think of kind of tells you
what you want out of them, right? Like if it makes you think of a sexy memory then you want
passion and sex from them and if it makes you think of like, I don’t know, being comforted by
your mom, then that’s what you’re looking for - comfort. I kind of want to know what you were
looking for that you found in me. Just because I’m curious. You really don’t have to tell me.”
“It’s not a weird question,” Taeyong says. “It makes me think of my dad. Of being a kid, sitting in
his car - I think it was summer vacation - with the window rolled down. I was drinking chocolate
milk and we had the music up loud and I was singing along. That’s the memory, or feeling, or both,
that I associate with your scent.”

Jaehyun’s quiet for a moment, contemplative.

“That’s what you wanted out of your mate, then? To make you feel free and childlike?”

“Maybe,” he says, shrugging. “What did mine remind you of?”

He answers readily.

“Of my grandma’s house in Busan - could you pass me that Allen wrench if you’re not using it?
Thanks - my cousins and I dug up a patch in her back yard and planted tomatoes and eggplants,
weeded the garden and - yeah, we were starving, sweaty, absolutely dead tired but so, so happy -
and then my grandma gave us all these fat, steaming mandu and cold sikhye,” he says, tightening
all his screws, one by one. “That’s what I think of. Sunshine and great food in my grandma’s back
yard. Best memory ever.”

Taeyong smiles. He has a tendency to pout when he’s focused on something, he notes. And his
pout is displaced by the little smile that came from recalling that memory.

He didn’t expect his memory to be so sweet, so benign, and he certainly didn’t think anyone could
associate him with that feeling. He wants a home, he thinks. Something to build and tend to with
his own hands, somewhere to return when he’s dead tired, someone who’ll welcome him, feed him
and love him.

He settles a gleaming plank of MDF over the metal frame they’ve just built between the two of
them and picks up a screwdriver to screw it into place firmly. He fits the head of the screwdriver
into the groove in the screw and the most obvious realization slaps him across the face.

He’s building his home with him, he realizes. He’s known who he is for just over three months,
met him thrice, and he’s so comfortable with him. So at ease in this role, he helped him pick out a
rug. Just being who he is, is being everything Jaehyun wants.
 “Are you sure you’re okay with us being just friends?” He asks.

“I think so,” Jaehyun says.

And he’s everything Taeyong wants. He’s light, and he’s air, and he’s movement. He’s ease.
Attentiveness. He’s everything that made it easy to clean the filth out of his mother’s apartment.
He’s everything that made it easy for him to laugh today. He’s everything he wants, and he does
want to keep him in his life, he thinks.

“Let’s do it then,” he says. "Let’s be friends, let's stay in each other's lives."

Chapter End Notes

Thank you so much for reading! Hope you enjoyed them being domestic and fluffy!
 The Fourth Musketeer
Chapter Notes

See the end of the chapter for notes

Getting home after dark on a Sunday, tired from a day of shopping and assembling furniture with a
mate he thought he’d never see again only five days ago feels surreal. He’ll have to have a serious
think about the events of the past couple of days because he’s not entirely sure they aren’t some
fever dream he’s just waking up from.

Taeyong’s apartment door falls shut behind him, and he toes his shoes off with a quiet sigh.He
hears Haechan’s bedroom door open and his fuzzy house slippers swishing towards him, and then
he emerges into the living room.

“Hey,” Haechan says, and it’s the hey he uses when he’s bursting with the need to comfort him.

“I brought doughnuts,” he says, heading the kitchen to put one on a plate for him.

He would also like to sit down for this conversation. He really is tired, and he’s certain this will be
a long conversation. The day he found out his mum was sick, Haechan was stuck in an emergency
at work - two little girls, sisters, decided to drink floor cleaner out of solo cups and kept the entire
Peds department busy. Yesterday, he was on call. He came home at eleven am this morning, but
Taeyong was heading out to meet Jaehyun.

In all this, they managed to exchange text updates and quick phone calls about Taeyong’s mom,
but they haven’t had the chance to really talk.

“How’s your mom? I tried talking to one of the psych fellows at the hospital but they didn’t tell me
anything,” Haechan says, hovering around him while Taeyong puts one custard cream doughnut on
a plate and puts the rest away in the fridge.

“Thank you, kid,” he says, pulling a chair from the dining table and sitting heavily. “I spoke to her
doctor today, she’s doing alright. They didn’t need the ECT after all, it’s just menopause and
fluctuating hormones that precipitated this episode. She just needs her dose to be adjusted.”

“That’s good. And you?” Haechan says, sitting down across from him.
He doesn’t know when Haechan piled two more doughnuts on his plate, but he sits down with
three and eats one half in a single bite.

“I’m fine,” he says. “Is that the first thing you’ve eaten today?"

“Maybe. Is there anything I can do? You said you had to clean her apartment, I could swing by
after work tomorrow.”

“No, really, I’m fine. I ran into Jaehyun and he helped me clean her apartment.”

Haechan looks up at him with his mouth full of doughnut and his eyes wide as the plate he's eating
off, and it takes him a second to chew and swallow, and a second longer to be able to speak.

“Jaehyun? Your mate Jaehyun?” He says.

“Yeah, he lives in the same building as my mum,” he explains. “Isn’t that crazy? I must have
picked her up from there like ten times since he moved there and I never went upstairs, never even
got out of the car - and I totally missed him.”

Haechan reaches for the jug of water sitting on the table, ignores the cup beside it, and drinks
straight from the jug. Taeyong sighs, but as long as he’s pouring the water into his mouth and
skipping the cup, and not putting his mouth on the jug, he’s fine.

“I think I’m confused, Jaehyun lives in the same building as your mum, and he helped you clean
her apartment,” Haechan says.

“Yeah, and I wanted to pay him back so I took him shopping.”

“You took him shopping -

“Yeah, that’s where I was today.”

“You went out at lunchtime!”

“There was a lot of furniture and stuff he had to buy and he needed help setting everything up,” he
says.

He knew Haechan would have trouble making sense of it. Heck, if he’s being honest, he’s having
trouble making sense of it, too. He’s still not entirely sure what possessed him to let Jaehyun in so
easily, so far in, but he’s decided to stop thinking about it now that Jaehyun’s here anyway.

“Taeyong, I think I’m having a stroke. I literally have no idea what you’re saying. You hung out
with Jaehyun and picked out hand towels for his house together, that’s what you’re telling me?”

He shrugs.

“We’ve decided to be friends.”

“Friends?”

“Friends.”

“Friends?” Haechan says.

“Yes, friend?” Jaehyun replies, not looking up from his lunch. Brunch? Well, his protein bar and
his coffee.

“No, I mean you and Taeyong decided to be friends?” Haechan says, sitting down beside him on
what’s quickly becoming their bench outside the cafeteria. It’s far enough from the tables outside
the cafeteria for Youngho to stand at his spot and smoke his cigarette while staying within earshot
of Haechan and Jaehyun’s enthralling conversations.
“Yes,” he replies, and takes another bite of his protein bar.

“Hold on, did I hear that right? You want to be friends with a man you’re meant to fall in love
with?” Youngho says from his spot.

“I thought maybe I’m meant to love him as a friend,” he says.

“What?” Youngho says.

“I thought maybe I’m meant to love him as a friend,” he repeats louder.

“I heard you, it was like a disbelief what, not like a please repeat yourself what.”

“You?” Haechan says, pointing at him. “You think the two of you can be friends.”

“Me,” Jaehyun confirms, pointing at himself.

“Weren’t you moping and writing a musical in your head for the two of you?”

“That was then.”

“You mean last week?”

“And this is now.”

“Does he have no other friends?” Youngho asks.

“I mean he’s nice to a lot of people. A lot of people are nice to him. But if you mean like a real
friend, then I guess there’s me,” Haechan tells him. “And I guess Jaehyun could do everything I
imagined him doing for Taeyong as a friend. But I don’t know. I just feel like this is going to
implode. Or explode. Combust. Go up in flames, basically.”

“Look, the greeks said there are different kinds of love -

“Yeah, yeah, ethos, logos, pathos, whatever," Haechan says.

“No, dude, those are the three musketeers," Youngho tells him.

Jaehyun looks between the two of them, and doesn’t know which one of them to correct or where
to begin, so he sighs.

“We’re keeping it Platonic,” he says. “We’ll see how it goes. If it sucks, we’ll stop.”

“So Plato’s not dead?” Youngho asks. stubbing his cigarette and dropping the butt into a trashcan.

“Plato lives,” he says, watching Youngho fit his too big frame between him and Haechan.

“So if we are the three musketeers, Taeyong’s going to be the fourth,” he says, and Jaehyun nods.

There’s a little bit of a silence, and it’s mostly Haechan trying to digest this information, and
Jaehyun wondering if he’s making a terrible mistake, and Youngho staring at the days’ wordle on
his phone.

“Hey, why are they called the three musketeers if there were four?” Youngho says after a long
moment.

“Who’s the fourth?” Haechan asks.

“Fuck if I know. Maybe Plato,” Youngho mumbles.

Jaehyun sighs again.

The bench in the courtyard between the psych wing and the prosthetics centre is very cold, but
Taeyong’s miserable, and it’s suiting his mood quite well. He baked cookies for the staff who’d be
taking care of his mum through Christmas, made dinner and packed it painstakingly to share with
his mother so she wouldn’t be alone on Christmas, but she didn’t want to see him.

Now he’s sitting with the food he brought for Haechan - who was also working through Christmas
- and the food he brought for his mother and him, hugging it close because the warmth is sort of
dulling the sharp sting of rejection he’s feeling.

He gets his phone out of his jacket pocket and texts Haechan to let him know he’s here with the
food, and then, just as he’s exiting his chat, Jeong Jaehyun’s chat catches his eye.

He guesses he could tell him he’s here, and that there’s Christmas dinner up for grabs if he’d like.
He’s pretty sure he said he’s working today, too. And things have been pretty easy between them
these past few days. He sent him a meme about the world being made of beans or something that
he didn’t get and had to suffer through a thirty minute explanation from Haechan on the origin of
said meme, only to then reply to Jaehyun with a cerebral and poignant lol.

Haechan’s reply pulls him out of his contemplation.

Awesome, I’ll be down in five, he says.

I have extra. Bring your friends, too, Taeyong says, deciding that Christmas dinner might be a little
too much for him and Jaehyun right now.

Haechan’s reply renders his entire train of through useless.

Bumped into Jaehyun, bringing him with, he says.

He stares at his text for a second, and then he laughs. There seems to be no escaping him.

Haechan looks at him like he wants to ask how it went with his mom, but there’s a very tall man
with him who introduced himself as Youngho, general surgery PGY3, and he communicates his
question through several pointed looks at the food and the psychiatry wing behind him. Taeyong
responds with a small shake of his head as if to say don’t ask, and he drops the subject and digs
into his food without another word.

Jaehyun’s here, too, but he’s standing a few feet away from them, wrapping up his Christmas
family FaceTime. From what he can hear, he’s mad that they made his favorite this year and made
him look at it when he can’t even have a single bite. It’s fine that you made it, why couldn’t you be
quiet about it? Stop it, put it away, I don’t want to look at it. No, I’m not hangry, but yes, I do
regret teaching you what that means.

Taeyong looks over at him, over the sounds of Youngho and Haechan stuffing their faces, rapt and
wordless, punctuated only with small hums of appreciation and jabbing the air with their
chopsticks to say this is it, this is the shit.

He catches his eye and jerks his head towards the food.

“They’re going to finish it,” he mouths, and Jaehyun’s eyebrows shoot up into his bangs.

“Okay, I have to go,” Jaehyun says. “I’m just sitting down to eat with some friends - you want to
say hi? Wait - yo, it’s my parents, wave.”
He turns his phone to the three of them and their impromptu dinner party in the CMC courtyard. It
takes him by surprise, and he gets up and does a small bow, and then flushes furiously when he
realizes Haechan and Youngho just bowed their heads and mumbled their greetings between
mouthfuls of food.

“Merry Christmas, thank you all for working so hard!” Jaehyun’s mother says. She’s a small
woman, standing at a height somewhere near her husband’s shoulder. She wears her hair short,
straight, colored brown, and it makes her complexion seem clear and translucent. Taeyong thinks
she’s adorable.

“Thank you for taking care of our Jaehyun, Merry Christmas to you all,” Jaehyun’s father says, and
Taeyong sees Jaehyun in his father. His voice, his height, his lovely hair, and when he smiles, he
sees where Jaehyun got his dimples from, too.

“Merry Christmas,” he says warmly, tucked into the chorus of greetings from the other two.

Jaehyun flips the phone back around.

“Alright, I’m hanging up,” he says. “No, you can’t eat with us. Go away. Goodnight, I love you. I
already said Merry Christmas! To the dog? Sorry, hi Buttercup, Merry Christmas. Goodnight.”

Taeyong smiles and sits back down, fondly, and to his disappointment, somewhat bitterly,
committing to memory what a loving, healthy family looks like.

“You’re a really good cook,” Jaehyun says, and Taeyong looks up to see him squatting on the
ground with his cheeks full of food. He’s jabbing the air with his chopsticks, too.

“I told you,” Haechan says.

“Damn, that’s good,” Youngho adds.

“Thank you,” Taeyong says.

He’s glad all the food he spent so much time and effort making isn’t going to waste. And he’s glad
he fed three miserable residents who are working on Christmas. And he’s glad he’s not alone.

“Aren’t you going to eat?” Jaehyun asks.

“I’m not very hungry,” he replies.

“Thank you for this, Taeyong. You’re a godsend,” Youngho says.

“Yeah, I was going to order Chinese food for dinner,” Jaehyun reports.

“I was going to eat cafeteria food,” Haechan says, reaching for the galbi.

He stops mid-reach because his pager goes off, and he looks conflicted for a second. Taeyong can
almost hear his thought process - answer the page or finish dinner and answer the page?

“I’ll just look at it, real quick,” he says to no one in particular, looks at the pager, and then says,
“I’d better call them real quick.”

He sits in a miserable hunch with his phone to his ear, and Jaehyun puts the piece of galbi he was
reaching for onto his plate. He gets Haechan’s radiant smile in return, but his smile is cut short,
too, because someone answers his call.

“Hey! I’m Haechan with peds, I’m returning a page?” He says. “Okay. Mhmm. He ate it? Don’t
you usually snort it? No, I don’t know if that makes a difference. A fistful? The granddad’s fist or
the kid’s fist? Yes, I’m pretty sure that makes a difference. Okay. Sure. I’ll be there in five. Buh-
bye.”

“Oh no, Haechan,” Taeyong says. “Can you finish dinner first?”

“That depends. What the fuck is snuff?” Haechan says.

“Tobacco, right? Powdered tobacco,” Youngho says.

“So a six year old ate a bunch of his granddad’s tobacco and I’m not even sure where to begin.”

Taeyong sees the colors of the uptodate app flash on Haechan’s phone screen, but even before the
app has loaded, Jaehyun makes a strangled sound and jabs the air with his chopsticks. But this isn’t
an appreciation jab, it’s an alarm jab.

“Dude, pump that little thug’s stomach ASAP and hit him with some activated charcoal,” he says.
“I had a college kid who took like twenty nicotine lozenges on a dare, had an arrhythmia and
nearly died.”

“Holy shit. Yeah, I gotta go.”

“There’s more food at home,” Taeyong tells him.

“Thanks, bye,” he says, and jumps out of his seat.

He hasn’t taken two steps away when Youngho’s phone rings. He answers it and jams it between
his ear and shoulder to keep his hands free for eating.

“Yeah?” He says. “Sorry, could you repeat that? A Christmas ornament? That’s - wow. Festive.
What kind? I’m glad he thinks it’s pretty, I meant is it pointy? Breakable? Oh, it’s made of glass?
That’s just great. Did you do a per rectal? You can feel the tip? Not peritonitic - alright get him set
up. Don’t try it on your own. I’m coming. And alert Dr Min, too. If it breaks, we might have to
open him up.”

He hangs up and looks apologetically up at the two of them, ready to explain what they’ve
gathered from his conversation. Someone has stuck a Christmas ornament up their ass.

“Don’t want to know,” Jaehyun tells him.

“Yeah - okay, that’s fair. I’ll get going. Thank you for dinner, Taeyong, it was lovely. Merry
Christmas.”
“Merry Christmas to you,” he says. “And to your patient.”

And with that, he’s left alone with Jaehyun and his failed Christmas dinner. Failed? Succeeded
differently, maybe. Not quite failed.

Jaehyun gets up off the ground and sits where Haechan was sitting, and puts some saucy pieces of
chicken on a plastic plate.

“Eat something,” Jaehyun says, handing it to Taeyong. “Let’s go get baesuk after this, and go see
the lights at the Gapcheon.”

Taeyong eats a bite of the chicken, because hanging out with the three of them has lifted some of
that horrible weight in his stomach and cleared up some room for hunger. He hears a little giggle
and looks up to see Jaehyun laughing with his chopsticks in his mouth.

“What?” He says.

“The Christmas spirit was inside him all along.”

Taeyong groans, and laughs, and groans again.

The lights around the Gapcheon are twinkling, shimmering gold and silver and red and green, and
the surface of the river looks like holographic glitter. It’s beautiful, it’s everything Christmas is
supposed to be. It’s not waiting rooms in the psychiatry wing, it’s not the hollow, awful feeling he
felt when he sat down on that bench knowing his mother hasn’t forgiven him yet.

His poached pear is sweet and syrupy, and the lights are beautiful, and Jaehyun’s presence is
making this moment sweet, not like a commentary on urban ennui - a young man, alone on
Christmas, eats dessert and cries in his car while the capitalist bastardization of Christmas is lit up
in neon and paraded all around him.

No, this is just two friends, sitting in a car, eating poached pears and looking at pretty lights (a few
feet apart because they’re not mated, Haechan showed him this video as a part of his daily
mandatory meme education).

“This Christmas doesn’t suck as bad as I thought it would,” he says.

“I’m glad,” Jaehyun says.

Taeyong hasn’t known him that long, but he’s good at picking up on little shifts in people’s moods.
He had to be good at it, or he’d miss those signs that would tell him when his mother’s getting
worse. Right now, he can tell that Jaehyun’s mood is the slightest bit sour.

“Is something on your mind?” He asks.

It seems to startle Jaehyun. He shakes his head at first, then he shrugs, then he grimaces, and then
he speaks.

“I fucked up a little at work today,” he says. “I had to put in a central line and I back walled it.”

“But that could happen to anyone.”

“Second time,” he says, holding up two fingers to further drive his point home.

“You just need practice. What kind were you doing?” He says.

“Subclavian.”

“Those are hard!” He says.

He knows, because he fucked up a few of those before he started getting them right. Still, it doesn’t
seem to change Jaehyun’s disappointment, and Taeyong can see it in the way his lashes dip and he
pokes his poached pear with a weaponized spoon.

“What electives are you doing this year?” Taeyong asks.

“Pulm, nephro, and ID.”

“Gross, why infectious diseases?"

“It’s a lighter rotation and I’ll have it in January so i’ll have time to study for the ITE,” he explains.

“What if you get like TB or something?” Taeyong teases, nibbling on his poached pear stuffing.

“Stop that, you’re scaring me,” Jaehyun says, but it comes out like an adorable whine.

Taeyong has to fight the urge to bite his cheek. It’s a very strange feeling, to look at a grown man,
an alpha, and find himself battling cuteness aggression, of all things. He smiles, takes a big bite of
his dessert instead.

“What I wanted to say was, ask your nephro nurses to teach you how to do central lines. The
nephro fellows are good, too, but they talk too much. The nurses are your best bet, and they’ll let
you do a lot,” he says. “One month at the dialysis centre and you’ll be the central line king. Oh, but
don’t go to Kim Seonwoo. Ask Mijeong to teach you.”

Jaehyun grins and looks up at him, syrup making his lips look fuller and shinier than they usually
are, and Taeyong just wants to bite -

“Can I say Lee Taeyong sent me? Will I get special treatment?” Jaehyun asks.

“You might.”

His grin becomes a gentler smile and he pokes his pear again. Taeyong’s starting to feel a little
sorry for it.

“What are you doing on New Year’s?” Jaehyun asks, and for whatever reason, he doesn’t make
eye contact when he asks it. It makes the question seem shy, almost. Maybe he’s just hesitant
because he’s still worried about making Taeyong uncomfortable, but Taeyong prefers to think he’s
just shy.

“I’m working,” he says.

“That really sucks. I thought we could hang out. The three of us - Haechan, Youngho, and me -
have New Year’s off because we’re working Christmas.”

“Oh, I had Christmas off because my mom and I take a trip somewhere, every year. This year was
supposed to be Sokcho,” he says. “I thought I could have dinner with her, at least, but she didn’t
want to see me.”

Jaehyun finally looks up at him, and it’s all puppy eyes and shiny lips. Taeyong chest does
something funny when he looks at him, something fluttery when he sees how his hair and his lips
and the high points of his cheekbones are catching all that Christmas light.

“She’s still upset about -

“Yeah,” he says.

“She’ll understand when she’s better,” Jaehyun says kindly.

There - his chest, his stomach, fluttering. When Taeyong focuses on the funny feeling in his chest,
he realizes what it’s made of but there’s no sense to the feeling. He can’t quite figure out how a
man that handsome, with that build and that voice could inspire such a protectiveness in him, such
a need to care for him, or to just nibble on him like he’s nibbling on his poached pear.

Something about the light over Jaehyun’s face changes, and he notices movement outside his
windows and windshield and he turns to look at what’s causing it.
“It’s snowing,” he says happily.

“Oooh, a white Daejeon Christmas?” Jaehyun says, sitting forward to look up at the sky through
the windshield.

“I don’t think it’ll stick,” Taeyong says, looking at the snow melting the moment it hits the
ground.

There’s a short silence, with the two of them looking out of their windows at the falling snow, and
Taeyong feels how the mood shifts. He feels all their ugly disappointments being obscured by a
gentle dusting of white, the noise in their minds quieting, the way things do when it snows.

“Is this our first snow?” Jaehyun says.

He knows he means is it Daejeon’s first snow this winter. Taeyong just wants to indulge himself
and think he meant it’s their first snow together - like it’s some kind of promise that there will be
more, like he’s saying neither of them would ever have to be alone again. And that, he realizes, is
the root of that strange feeling. Not alone. That’s what he’s so protective of.

“I think so,” he says, haltingly, and a little late.

“Aren’t we supposed to make a wish or something?” Jaehyun says.

“Are we?”

“It’s a thing.”

“No, it’s not.”

“I’m making it a thing,” he says. “I’ll start. May we never lose the things we stick up our butts.”

Taeyong laughs, and it’s an unattractive puhahaha sound that he’s mildly embarrassed by, but it
brings the most radiant smile to Jaehyun’s face and he can’t dwell on his own unattractive laugh
for much longer.

“That’s a good wish,” Taeyong says. “I wish - let us never have tobacco eating thugs for children.”

Jaehyun’s smile becomes a laugh, now, a deep rumble, and his laughter is a very self assured UH-
HA-HA that Taeyong things is how grown ups should laugh.

“Let Jeong Jaehyun place one good central line, please,” Jaehyun says, with joined hands pressed to
his lips like he’s actually praying.

Taeyong doesn’t know why, but he thinks of Jaehyun’s adorable family, his mom and dad and his
dog named Buttercup sitting down for Christmas dinner together, and Jaehyun’s all the way out in
Daejeon when he should be saying grace at the table with them. He must miss them terribly, he
thinks. Taeyong would, if he had a family like that.

When Jaehyun’s hands drop back into his lap, he has to fight the urge to reach out and tangle their
fingers together. He wants him to know that he’s been with him through moments of terrible
aloneness, and Taeyong’s more than willing to return the favor. He tightens his grip on the wheel,
instead, and makes another wish.

“Let us never be alone on Christmas,” he says.

He doesn’t look at Jaehyun, but he knows he’s smiling.

“Let us be forgiven by the ones we love,” Jaehyun says.

It makes Taeyong’s eyes sting. He blinks and looks out of his window at the falling snow and the
glittering lights until he’s gathered himself.

“You know, Taeyong, when she gets back - I can check on her sometimes. I can help her clean up
and I can get her groceries. Whatever she needs. Whatever you need,” he says.

It terrifies him to hear him say that. It makes the skin on the back of his neck prickle and he
pictures him helping his mother, for a year, maybe two, then going back to Seoul for his
fellowship, his career, his family, the rest of his life - and Taeyong? Taeyong would have a year or
two to learn how to rely on other people and let them into his life, only for the other people to pack
up and leave. He’d be stuck here, in Daejeon, in his mother’s apartment, in the courtyard outside
the psychiatry wing - all these places that have their claws sunk into him.

"I don’t need your help,” he says. “I don’t need you.”

“I didn’t say you did,” Jaehyun says. “I said I can help. I want to help. You said we could be
friends, right? What does that even mean if we’re not making each other’s lives a little kinder?”

“My life is fine,” he says.

“Mine is, too, but I’m all alone in a new city, doing a difficult job, not knowing how to decorate an
apartment and ordering Chinese food for Christmas dinner, and you’re making it better. You’re
making the shitty parts suck less, and I want to do the same for you,” he says. “I’m here, and so is
Haechan, and hell, Youngho, too. I saw how he looked at that galbi. I think he might take a bullet
for you at this point.”

Taeyong smiles despite himself. He doesn’t really want to say yes right now. He doesn’t really
want to let him help take care of his mother, so he doesn’t say anything.

But he does think about it. He kneads his steering wheel and looks stubbornly out the window and
thinks about it. About making three people happy on Christmas, about that funny feeling, that
protectiveness that he’s always felt for Haechan burgeoning out a little further to reach Jaehyun.
And maybe if he meets Youngho enough times, he’ll feel it for him too. Like his own family -
parents, kid, and Buttercup the dog.

He doesn’t know which one’s which, but he has a feeling Youngho’s Buttercup. He can’t say why.
Buttercup sounded like a little dog, like a Maltese or a Pomeranian or something.

“Why is your dog’s name Buttercup?” He asks. “Like the flower?”

“Like the Powerpuff Girl,” Jaehyun says.

It gets him laughing again - puhahaha all over again, and he wonders for a moment if that’s all
there is to it. Having someone to laugh with on bad days, and having someone to be with on bad
 days, and having someone.

Chapter End Notes

Sorry for the delay! Hope you enjoyed this! Please excuse any mistakes, I'm very tired
TT
 Singin' in the Rain
Chapter Notes

See the end of the chapter for notes

It’s five fifty three, and if Jaehyun doesn’t leave in the next two minutes, he’s going to be late for
sign out. If he’s late for sign out, then he won’t have time to orient himself to his new patients
before morning report. And if he’s five minutes late to morning report, Dr Song might just call him
a space occupying lesion, but it’s a risk he’s willing to take.

He stands in his apartment with his hand on the doorknob, blinking sleepily down at his phone and
listening for the sound of Taeyong leaving for work from his mother’s apartment. He’s usually out
by five forty five or so, and Jaehyun only has to stand with his hand on the doorknob and his ear
pressed to his door for about a minute or two. On those days, it’s easy to ignore the inherent
creepiness of his behavior, but today, he’s been standing here for ten whole minutes. It’s starting to
get weird.

He sighs. Maybe Taeyong’s running late today, he thinks. Maybe he doesn’t have to go in to work
until later. He doesn’t know. Either way, if Jaehyun doesn’t leave now, he’s going to be in trouble.

He opens his door and steps out, and just as he’s pulling it shut behind him, he hears Taeyong’s
door open. He looks up, feeling a little bit like a puppy who’s been waiting all day to see his
human, and he all but wags his tail at Taeyong stepping out into the hallway.

“Hey,” he says.

“Hi,” Taeyong says, pulling the door closed. “You’re running late.”

“I - yeah,” Jaehyun says. “So are you.”

“I guess I am,” Taeyong says.

They walk - or hurry - down the hall, together, and take the stairs down, together. It’s quiet and it’s
brief, but it’s Jaehyun’s favorite part of the day.

He’s not very superstitious, but he is sentimental, and he likes to add meaning to meaningless
things. He believes in things like making his bed before leaving home would make his head clearer
and his thoughts more organized. Like humming a happy song first thing in the morning would
brighten his day.

Like seeing his favorite people before starting his day would keep the bad things at bay - the
picture on his nightstand of his mom and dad at their wedding reception, Gene Kelly twirling off a
lamppost in that poster in his living room, Taeyong standing in the hallway and yawning into his
palm at five forty five in the morning. His favorite glimpses of his favorite people.

He looks over at him, walking beside him in his lilac scrubs and his grey cardigan and his spring
jacket. He’s late, and he should hurry up, but he’s walking beside Jaehyun deliberately slow.
Jaehyun has learnt that it’s deliberate. He slows himself down on purpose when he’s late, just a
little bit, so he doesn’t make mistakes in a great big rush to get something done.

He knows that about him now, like he knows a great many other things - like how he folds his
boxer briefs, and how he likes his ramyun, like the fact that he paints his toenails sometimes when
he’s feeling down because he finds the process meditative, just like watering his plants, just like
cooking, just like walking down the aisles of Home Therapy and finding a new throw pillow for
his bed.

He’s been around, in some way or other, for the four months since the day Taeyong’s mother was
hospitalized. Jaehyun would run into him when he’d visit her at the hospital, and then when he’d
visit her at the Psychiatric Rehabilitation Center ten minutes from the hospital and find himself too
tired to drive back to his apartment.

He was with Jaehyun for Christmas. He cooked for his mom and brought extra for Youngho and
him over the Korean New Year and Haechan complained about missing out even though he was
home eating his mom’s cooking and getting his clothes laundered for him. Taeyong was there for
his birthday, when Jaehyun was on call in the ICU, with cake and inflated gloves for balloons
because Haechan said they couldn’t have a party without balloons.

He only moved here two weeks ago, when his mother was discharged from the rehab center, but
they’ve already built a comfortable routine - walk downstairs together, part ways at the parking lot.
Taeyong drives to work, Jaehyun walks to work. Then, they meet again in the evening when they
get home. Jaehyun accompanies Taeyong and his mother on their evening walk around the
building, sometimes joins them for dinner, sometimes studies or works in their living room while
Taeyong does his coursework or housework for his mom or watches his mom’s favorite drama
with her. That might be the second favorite part of his day.

Jaehyun likes him, likes having him living down the hall from him, likes him being the first person
he sees before work and the last person he sees before bed. He likes his mom, too, and how much
better she looks today than she did on that day in December.

“Have a fantastic day,” Taeyong says, and Jaehyun realizes they’ve already reached the parking
lot.

“You, too,” he replies.

It’s safe to say he isn’t having a fantastic day, he thinks, looking at the ICU patient list on his
computer. The second name on his screen, bed 3, Min Yoonseok, 56M, abdominal wall hematoma,
decompensated CLD, SBP, MELD - 32, Child-Pugh - C.

Mr Min. He’s sick again, very, very sick. He’s not shocked by it. It was to be expected if he didn’t
have a liver transplant, but he is shocked by the new addition to the little box next to his name for
drug allergies and other specifications - DNR.

“Should I start? You ready?” Dr Oh says, settling down in the chair next to him.

“Yeah, sorry, I was just - how bad is bed 3?”

“Do you know him?” She asks.

“Kind of. I just know him from his last admission.”

“He’s fucked,” she says. “He was admitted to the floor and it was probably SBP or whatever, he
just needed some Rocephin and he’d have been good to go, but you know your chief, Jang? Yeah, I
heard she left a student unattended to do the paracentesis, and then she didn’t monitor him after the
procedure, and he bled into the muscle overnight - like crazy, like the hematoma was this big.”

She holds her hands ten inches apart with her eyebrows raised almost all the way to her scrub cap.
Jaehyun’s stomach drops, and he scrolls down to his AM labs - his H/H is abysmal, his renal
function has begun to dip even further, his clotting parameters are way up.

“Did we drain it? How is he?” He asks.

“General surgery drained it last night,” she says. “We gave him six units and he’s just about
hanging on, but I don’t think he’ll last. Jang’s getting disciplinary action for sure, and I heard she
and the med student are claiming Jang was in the room, but the patient’s son says the student was
alone -

An alarm goes off to Jaehyun’s left, interrupting Dr Oh, and one of the other critical care fellows
moves towards it to check. Jaehyun stands and walks to the office door to see if he can be useful,
but the alarm shuts off and the fellow emerges from Mr Min’s room.

“Arrest rhythm,” he says.

“Fuck, there he goes,” Dr Oh says, but she doesn’t move. She just tuts sympathetically and stays
put with her elbows propped on the office table.

For a second, Jaehyun’s shocked by her inaction, and then he remembers the new addition to Mr
Min’s orders. DNR. His stomach twists, and he moves forward unthinkingly until he’s standing at
the door to Mr Min’s room and looking in. A nurse and a fellow are at his bedside, but Jaehyun
doesn’t dare enter. He just stands at the doorway and watches the monitor display V Tach, until the
rhythm becomes disorganized, and eventually displays a flatline.

The critical care fellow follows the protocol for announcing death, and the nurse begins her job of
preparing him for the family viewing, and Jaehyun’s stomach lurches again. It happened so
quickly, and so easily for everyone, and it should be easy for him, too, but it’s not. It’s not the first
time he’s seen a patient die, but it’s the first time he’s been shaken by it so badly.

His throat gets tight, but he swallows, burning hot, and he feels ill, like he’s on the verge of a
vasovagal. All he can think about is the way he laughed and the way he spoke and the finality of
what’s happened to him.

Jungwon has a girlfriend. He thinks I don’t know, but I heard him saying oh, you’re prettier than
any rose - I think he was talking to his girlfriend. I don’t know, now, maybe it was a boyfriend.
Ah, yes, that’s what you should do. You should go to the hospital where your mate works everyday
and give him a rose. He’ll like that - I think. I don’t know how to woo men.

“Jeong, could you do his paperwork?” someone says. “And finish quickly, I need your help with
bed 8’s chest tube.”

He nods, but he can’t seem to take his eyes off how inanimate Mr Min looks, lying in his bed with
his swollen belly and his half closed eyes. How utterly still he looks.

“Dr Jeong, you good?” Dr Oh says.

He nods again.

He feels like a fresh bruise when he steps out of the ICU at six fifteen in the evening. He was with
the fellow who broke the news of Mr Min’s death to Min Jungwon. He was the one who filled out
Mr Min’s death certificate. He was the one Jungwon’s mom held on to when she said where were
you when they did that to him? Why did you let them do that to him?

He’s exhausted, if he had to say the least, and devastated, if he had to be honest. The thought of
going home and waking up at five in the morning and coming back to another day of this is turning
his legs to lead and he takes several wobbly steps down the stairs until he loses all strength in his
legs and lands heavily on his ass on the steps.

He sits there, staring straight ahead at a dust bunny at one corner of the landing, and he can’t think
of anything except how much he wants to go home. Not his apartment, but his parents’ house in
Seoul.

The thought of his bedroom with its huge Blade Runner poster and his Star Wars sheets and hot
chocolate when he can’t sleep and his parents down the hall to run to when the world gets scary or
mean or unwelcoming - it makes him reach blindly for his phone and call his dad.
It rings three times before he answers, slightly out of breath and impatient.

“Hey kiddo,” His dad says.

Faintly, in the background, Jaehyun hears his mom yelling about something - how many times are
we going to go over this? How many times do you want me to apologize for this?

“Bad time?” Jaehyun asks.

“Can we talk tomorrow?” His dad asks.

“Mhmm,” he says.

Is that Jaehyun? Hang up, please, I don’t want him to hear this.

You don’t want him to hear you victimizing yourself for something you did wrong? Good thinking,
Seungwan -

“I’ll call you guys tomorrow, dad,” he says.

“Everything’s okay, right?”

“All good,” he says.

“Alright, take care, you worm,” his dad says.

“You too, dad,” he says, and hangs up before he has to hear anything more.

They’re fighting about The Thing, again. For whatever reason, it’s been brought up again, and
they’re talking about it, and he doesn’t want to hear a word of it. Not today. Today he just wants a
hug and a drink and he doesn’t want to deal with his parents fighting.

Taeyong holds his umbrella lower and tries to angle it better against the rain, but the wind is
whipping the rain almost horizontally against his chest, and he can’t seem to figure out what to do
about it.

The rain was just a light drizzle when he stepped out, but like most things today, the weather isn’t
working for him either. It’s just one of those days. It started wrong first thing in the morning, when
he decided at the last moment to wait at the door until he heard Jaehyun leaving, so he could see
him before work. He saw him, but he ended up ten minutes late to work, and when the day starts
wrong, it stays wrong.

His umbrella quivers in the wind, and he decides it’s best for his hands to switch jobs. Umbrella to
the right and his little plastic bag full of beer for Jaehyun and Swiss rolls for him to his left.

He wonders briefly if buying beer for Jaehyun was worth risking his life for, and he’s not entirely
sure of his answer. It’s just that Jaehyun has been so helpful and so present in his life this past
month that Taeyong keeps wanting to get him stuff - little things, like a couple of beers, or the fruit
jelly cups he likes to eat, or even just a box of side dishes. Jaehyun insists he doesn’t have to, but he
doesn’t like feeling indebted, and little things like that make it easier for him to accept Jaehyun’s
kindness.

A particularly strong gust of wind whips his umbrella back, and he pulls it closer miserably. So
much for spring, he thinks, looking up at the weatherbeaten cherry tree beside the bus shelter and
all the petals shaken loose and hammered into the pavement by the rain.

He catches a glimpse of a figure standing huddled under the bus shelter and tuts sympathetically,
but as he nears the figure, it begins to look more familiar. Powder blue scrubs, wet from the hems
up to his knees and clinging to his calves. Dark hair drenched and slicked back, black quilted jacket
shining with rain.
“Jaehyun?” He calls out, but the figure doesn’t budge. He just stays hunched over with his
backpack hugged to his front, unseeingly looking at the rain.

“Jaehyun!” He says again, but he still seems distracted.

Maybe he can’t hear him over the rain, he thinks, and he crosses the street, waving at him to try
and catch his attention. The beer cans clink together, and his hand gets wet, but Jaehyun doesn’t
see him. He wonders how zoned out a man has to be to miss someone waving at him from from
three feet away.

“Jeong Jaehyun!” He says, ducking under the bus shelter.

Jaehyun starts and looks at him, his eyes red rimmed and the tip of his nose dusted pink. His lips
part in shock and he hurriedly scrubs a hand over his face, but it’s too late. Taeyong saw.

“Hey, sorry,” Jaehyun says. “Didn’t see you.”

He’s dripping wet and on the verge of tears, and he looks the image of pathos, and Taeyong finds
himself at a loss for a moment. Jaehyun, too, seems to be caught unprepared, and there’s a beat of
silence where neither of them knows what to do.

He closes his umbrella and moves a little closer. Another beat of uncertain silence.

“Bad day?” He asks.

Jaehyun shrugs. He looks out at the rain, then back at Taeyong, his ears colored red with
embarrassment at having been seen in a moment of vulnerability. It floods Taeyong’s chest with a
kind of anxiety, with a kind of tightness that he can’t make sense of. It’s sympathy, he thinks. But
it’s not quite that. It’s protectiveness, a need to shield him and keep him warm and safe and cared
for.

“You look like you could use a hug,” he says.

Jaehyun shakes his head - left to right and left again, and that’s exactly how long it takes for him to
change his mind. He stops.

“Maybe I could,” he says.

Taeyong leans his umbrella against the side wall of the bus stop, and then he takes a step closer to
Jaehyun. He tries to picture how this’ll go. Should he open his arms and let Jaehyun step in?
Should he pat him on the shoulder and pull him into a side hug?

The options are still brewing in his head when he feels Jaehyun all around him - his sneakers by
Taeyong’s slides, the stack of IDs and access cards at his hip clacking together, the pens in his
chest pocket digging into Taeyong’s chest, his arms wrapping around his waist. He settles his chin
on Taeyong’s shoulder like a puppy, and Taeyong doesn’t have to think when he wraps his arms
around his shoulders and holds him.

The rain comes down loud on the roof of the bus shelter, but he can still hear Jaehyun’s little
sniffles, and he can feel his breath fan over the side of his neck. The spray rises cold and fine a foot
off the pavement, but all he can feel is the warmth of Jaehyun’s body and the way his chest draws
in and out with his ragged breaths.

He holds him until the sniffles disappear, and then holds him some more, until the rain gets
quieter.

“The espresso machine broke at the cafeteria,” Jaehyun says, leaning back on the bench at the bus
shelter and stretching his legs out.

That seems to be his explanation for being close to tears at an empty bus shelter, or at least where
his explanation begins. Taeyong shoots him an amused look, and it makes Jaehyun grin.

“And then, this nurse was horrible to me, she said my mom must have had a C section because
there’s just no way a head as big as mine could have come out of her otherwise -
Taeyong doesn’t mean to, but he laughs, and the beer he was sipping on travels halfway out of his
nose with the air he exhaled, and now beer is all he can smell. He coughs and grimaces, and then
laughs some more.

“You deserved that,” Jaehyun says.

“I’m so sorry, that’s not funny, that’s mean,” he says. “Creative, but mean. And probably untrue,
because I’ve heard only good things about you from the nurses you’ve worked with.”

“Thank you,” Jaehyun says pointedly, takes a very big gulp of beer, and then says, “The nurses talk
about me?”

Taeyong takes a sip of his drink and finds that all he can taste is the foot he just put in his mouth.

Of course the nurses talk about him. There are only two reasons nurses talk about residents. One,
the residents are terrible - rude or arrogant and or stupid. Jaehyun is reason number two. He’s
attractive and polite and very, very smart. Taeyong has a group chat with some of the people he
worked with when he was in CMC Seogu and they’ve talked on more than one occasion about the
tall, handsome IM intern with a voice like dark chocolate and a smile like white chocolate and
guess what, he’s polite. He says please and thank you and the other day he asked me what I
thought of his treatment plan -

Taeyong shrugs dismissively. Jaehyun doesn’t need to know how much pleasure it gave him to
read those texts from his thirsty colleagues and look up to find that tall, handsome intern putting
groceries away in his mother’s kitchen.

“And then?” Taeyong says. “That’s not all that happened today.”

“Mm, and then,” Jaehyun says. “One of my patients tried to demonstrate the extent of her gluteal
abscess, on my ass.”

“Was there contact?” He asks.

“There was contact,” Jaehyun says.

“I’m sorry that happened to you,” he says, blinking the image of a patient’s hand on Jaehyun’s ass
out of his mind.

“It was whatever,” Jaehyun says. “She copped a feel, it’s fine. I’m glad to have been of service.”

“And then?” Taeyong asks.

“And then, Dr Jang got mad at me. She said I was giving her attitude but I thought I was being
polite. As polite as she deserved, anyway. She - she doesn’t fucking deserve polite, but I gave her
polite -

Taeyong stays quiet, because Jaehyun seems to be on the brink of telling him what’s on his mind.
His brow has creased and he’s got that faraway look in his eye again, and Taeyong wants him to
take Taeyong where his mind has taken him. He wants to sit with him, bang in the middle of the
worst part of his day, so he wouldn’t have to sit with it alone. He wants to do for him what he does
for Taeyong.

“She’s not even the problem,” Jaehyun says. “The problem is that Mr Min died today. I - that’s a
HIPAA violation, but - well, he died. I promised him he’d be at his son’s graduation but he won’t
be. I had to tell his son that. And his wife.”

And there it is. Jaehyun’s eyes get a little watery again, and he blinks, and the wetness clings to his
lashes and pools in the inner corners of his eyes and Taeyong wants to gather it all up with gentle
fingertips until his eyes are dry and the wetness is drained from inside him.

“And then it rained,” Taeyong says, gently.

Jaehyun nods.

The rain has slowed to a drizzle, and water runs in a little stream along the side of the road into the
drain down the street. The cherry tree is bare and beaten down. Taeyong reaches out blindly and
tangles his fingers with Jaehyun’s.

“And then?” He says.

He doesn’t look at Jaehyun, but he can see his reflection in the glass side walls of the bus shelter.
He can see his gaze trained on their linked hands.

“And then you saw me on the street, and you had an umbrella,” he says.

Empty beer cans and Swiss roll wrappers clank and rustle in the plastic bag dangling from
Taeyong’s left hand. The drizzle wets his left shoulder, but he doesn’t really care. Jaehyun holds
his umbrella - a little thing meant for one person - angled above them such that it covers him more
than it covers Jaehyun, and that’s good enough for him. His right hand is warm in Jaehyun’s grip,
and his right shoulder bumps against Jaehyun’s with every step they take, and that’s warm enough
for him.

He hears him hum a light tune, faint and melodic, in his deep voice, and he turns to look at him, at
the faint smile on his lips.

“You know this song?” Jaehyun asks.

“No,” Taeyong says.

“You haven’t seen the movie? Singin’ in the Rain?”

He shakes his head. Jaehyun stops dead in his tracks with a comically exaggerated expression of
outrage on his face. He releases his hand, presses the handle of the umbrella into his palm, and
then jumps into a puddle on the road. Murky water splashes up all around him and makes his
scrubs even wetter than before.

“You haven’t seen this?” He asks, splashing around in the puddle like a kid with new wellies.

He laughs and shakes his head again.

“You’re telling me you haven’t seen this?” He asks again, leaping back up onto the sidewalk and
twirling off a lamppost.

“That’s what I’m telling you,” Taeyong says.

“Not even this,” Jaehyun says, holding his hand out for Taeyong to take.

He does, and is immediately pulled into a spin and a dip. It knocks the wind out of him, and he
drops his umbrella and his plastic bag in favor of clinging to Jaehyun’s scrubs for dear life. He
looks up at Jaehyun, giggling - mortified that he’s giggling, but giggling regardless - and
breathless, and faintly aware of his umbrella getting blown away by the wind and the empty beer
cans rolling away down the pavement.

He sweeps him back up, but Taeyong keeps his grip on Jaehyun’s scrubs for a moment longer than
he needs to. It makes him feel a little giddy to have his hands on his waist, and to have him look at
him with half lidded eyes and a barely-there smile. It’s been so long since Taeyong had any hands
on his waist, or had anybody look at him like that, that he clings to the feeling for a little while
longer.

“Come over,” Jaehyun says. “We can watch it tonight.”

There’s a sort of breathlessness that’s taken hold of him that he’d gladly attribute to the cold, but if
he’s being honest with himself, it’s the thought of kissing Jaehyun that feels like a sucker punch to
the chest. Kissing him now, or kissing him in the middle of the night, after they’ve changed into
freshly laundered pjs and eaten microwave popcorn and watched half a musical, with the lights
dim, with the sound low so they wouldn’t wake the neighbors. Kissing him, being kissed by him,
until his lips go numb and kissing him doesn’t feel like enough.

“Okay,” he says breathlessly, and the smile that lights up Jaehyun’s face makes him flutter from
head to toe, like he’s nothing more than a cluster of butterflies. Maybe moths, because he’d bet
there’s nothing elegant or beautiful about him right now, in sweatpants and slides, with the rain
plastering his hair to his forehead, with every fibre of his consciousness zeroed in on Jaehyun’s
brilliant smile, like a moth to a flame.

Jaehyun’s smile flickers and starts, and Taeyong thinks, stupidly, that moths wouldn’t fly into open
flames if they didn’t think there was warmth to be found in them. He leans in, looking for it, for
that warmth, but when the tip of his nose brushes Jaehyun’s, it feels like he’s jolted back to his
 senses.

He dips his chin, and he rests their foreheads together for a moment.

He’s vulnerable and lonely and he’s had a terrible day, Taeyong thinks. That’s all this is, a sweet
boy who’s been there for him these past few months needs him to be there for him now. That’s all
this is.

“What’s the movie about?” He asks, pulling away from Jaehyun.

“This,” Jaehyun says, and jumps down into the puddle again. He stomps and kicks and splashes
the water everywhere.

“This?” Taeyong says, jumping down beside him, stomping, kicking, splashing the water
everywhere.

“Exactly! I walk down the lane, with a happy refrain,” Jaehyun sings, stomping the water.
“Singin’, just singin’ in the rain!”

Chapter End Notes

If you're still here, thank you so much for your support! Your kudos and comments
mean the world to me!
 In the Mood for Love
Chapter Notes

See the end of the chapter for notes

Taeyong’s mother stands in the doorway of her apartment with a happy smile on her face, and the
sight makes Jaehyun’s heart warm.

“Congratulations on your first day back at work,” he says, holding out the bouquet of lilies he
picked up for her on his way home from work.

“Thank you, sweetheart,” she says, taking them from him. She smells them from a distance,
because she’s a wise woman, unlike Jaehyun who stuck his face in and took such a strong whiff of
them that he’s sure even the farthest alveoli in his lungs are lightly dusted with pollen.

“Come in,” she says. “Are you hungry? I made some bokkumbap, if you want to eat.”

“I could eat that bouquet, honestly, I’m starving,” he says.

She laughs, and he’s happy to hear it. He shuts the door behind them and follows her into the
kitchen. Somehow, she manages to tuck the bouquet under her arm and serve him a giant portion of
bokkumbap. He takes the bowl from her gratefully and watches her unwrap the flowers and start
cutting the stems to put them in a vase.

Taeyong’s not home yet, but he’s here to see her, not him.

She’s fine, now, he thinks, leaning against the kitchen counter and spooning fried rice into his
mouth. She’s back to work, she’s up and about, and she doesn’t need him to check on her. But
she’s become a sort of mother to him, too, and right now, seeing her is more about how it makes
him feel than it is about what he can do for her.

“Sit at the table and eat, you hooligan,” she says.

He ignores it and stays put.

“Have you eaten?” He asks.

“I have,” she says, snipping the stems with her kitchen scissors patiently.

“How was your day?” He asks.

“It was great, sweetheart, how was yours? Did you find time to go to your patient’s funeral?”

“I went for a bit,” he says.

“Poor man. What’s happening to that doctor?”

He shrugs, chews the food in his mouth and swallows.

“There’s an investigation going on, but I’m not sure what’s going to come of it,” he says.

“That’s terrible,” she says. “Good, honest, hardworking doctors look bad because of people like
her, you know? People like you suffer because of people like her.”

He smiles at her. He doesn’t really want to talk about everything that happened with Mr Min
anymore. He got most of it out of his system when he cried into Taeyong’s shoulder that night, and
revisiting it isn’t going to help anyone.

“You think I’m good and honest and hardworking?” He says, instead.

She laughs, gathering the flowers and lowering them into the vase she prepared for them.

“Of course, I do,” she tells him, adjusting the stems so the flower sit better in the vase. “And I
think you’ve been a good friend to Taeyong, you’ve really kept him strong through a difficult time.
He doesn’t say it, but you’re important to him, and he cares about you.”
“You think so?” He says, prodding his food with his spoon like a shy little girl.

“I do, and it makes me so happy to see that. He spends so much time taking care of me that I worry
sometimes, what he’ll do with himself when I’m gone. Who he’ll have.”

She fusses with the flowers some more, moves them this way and that and settles them back the
way they were before.

“He’ll have me,” he says. “But I think you’ll outlive us both.”

“That’s ambitious,” she says, laughing, but there’s something a little heavy in her voice and her
demeanor.

“You know,” he says. “I don’t know if you realize this, but he takes care of you because he loves
you. Because you’re the most important person in his life, and nobody holds a candle to that. He’s
still angry with himself for having let you get as sick as you did, for having to hospitalize you.
Because what he did hurt you.”

Finally, she looks up at him with a faint crease in her brow.

“Does he think I’m upset with him?” She asks. “Because I had to stay at the hospital?”

For a second, he doesn’t know if he said too much. He doesn’t know what Taeyong tells his
mother. He hasn’t told her that Jaehyun is his mate, he knows that much, but he’s not sure if his
feelings about everything are classified information, too.

“You didn’t want to speak to him for a while,” he says, carefully.

She settles her palms on the countertop and braces her weight on them.

“I’m sorry, ignore me, I’m just hungry and I don’t know what I’m saying -

“Do you know how I feel, Jaehyun?” She asks, cutting him off. “I’ve been this way for years, you
know that? Since he was six or seven. I’ve been sick, and he’s had to pay for it. He’s had to grow
up too quickly and put his life on hold and take care of me, he’s had to work and study and work
and study so he could be sure we wouldn’t have to rely on his father’s money any longer, so we’d
always be secure. So he could afford to take care of himself and me. Through his teens, through his
twenties, and I’m still here, and still the same through his thirties. So when we find ourselves in the
same place again, I’m ashamed. Too ashamed to face him.”

He swallows thickly, and then he sets his bowl down on the countertop. He reaches for her hand
and covers it with his own.

“Tell him that,” he says. “Tell him that, and see what he says.”

Taeyong yawns long and loud and walks from the bathroom to the dining room, toweling his hair
dry with one hand and scrolling through his phone with the other. They kept him for a department
meeting after his shift, and he doesn’t know what it accomplished apart from boosting his fatigue
and hunger by 300% at least.

He drapes his towel over the back of a chair and drops his phone on the table, and he’s about to go
to the kitchen to get himself some food when he catches sight of the pink lilies in a vase on the
dining table.

“Ooh, what’s this?” He says.

“Jaehyun came by with those,” his mom says from the kitchen. “To congratulate me on returning
to work.”

It brings a smile to his lips, and he lifts a gentle fingertip to the lovely pink petals and pets them.

“Sweet,” he says.
She emerges from the kitchen with a bowl of steaming hot soup and rice, and he feels like he might
burst with affection for her in that moment.

“He is,” she says, setting his dinner on the table. “Haechan sent me a message, too. To wish me
luck.”

He grins, about to sit down to eat, but she holds his sleeve and turns him to face her. She
straightens his collar and fixes his hair, and it’s something she’s fond of doing after he showers
because his hair acts out when it gets wet. It’s been like that since he was a kid. The gesture makes
him feel a little like marshmallowy in his chest, because this gesture has always meant more to him
than a mom fixing her son’s ugly hair. It’s a mom who’s well enough to care about her son’s ugly
hair.

She doesn’t release him immediately, and instead looks straight up at him with an unreadable
expression on her face.

“What?” He says.

She purses her lips as if debating whether or not she should say this, and then decides to forge
ahead anyway.

“Thank you,” she says, hesitantly. “For getting me through this.”

He’s so taken aback by that, he doesn’t know up from down and left from right for a moment.
She’s never thanked him before. She’s only ever apologized for her depressive episodes, tearfully,
miserably, like she’s a stain in his life she’d rather wipe out. He doesn’t know what he feels when
he hears her say thank you, for once, but he has a feeling it’s something warm and gooey.

“Of course, mom,” he says, quietly. “What brought this on?”

“Nothing, just, thank you. I’m grateful for the things you do for me.”

He stands there staring at her for a moment. There’s a strange sensation in his shoulders and chest
that he can only describe as the feeling of setting down a weight he’s been carrying for a long
time.
“You’re not angry with me?” He asks.

“Never,” she replies, cupping his cheeks. “I was just ashamed that my son needs to drop everything
to come take care of me. I was ashamed of myself, Taeyong, I wasn’t angry with you.”

His eyes go blurry, and he blinks back his tears.

“Why are you ashamed of this?” He says. “I’ll always take care of you and I’ll never be resentful
of that, mom, because - because it means you’re still here with me. Because I love you. I’ll always
take care of you. Always.”

She smiles and pats his cheeks like he’s a small toddler and not a good foot taller than her.

“You grew up so well,” she says. “Sometime I wonder how. I couldn’t hope for a better son,
Taeyong. You’re always so strong for me, and you don’t have to be, alright? You don’t always
have to be so strong, you know?”

He clenches his teeth and presses his lips into a thin line and blinks some more, but he feels his
tears trickling warm and tickling down his cheeks and he can’t hide it from her.

“Oh, sweetheart,” she says, wrapping her arms around him and patting his back.

“I got really scared,” he says, clinging to her and burying his face into her shoulder. “I got really
scared, this time.”

“I know, baby, I’m sorry.”

He shakes his head.

“I’m just glad you’re better, mom,” he says.

“I am, too,” she says, pulling back only to fix his hair again. “And I’m glad you had someone you
can count on.”

He swallows thickly and wets his lips in an effort to calm himself, and he doesn’t quite register
what she’s said until a moment later.

“Did - did Jaehyun say something about this?” He asks.

“He spoke up for you,” she says. “Because you were hurting, and you wouldn’t tell me yourself. I
think he’ll always take care of you, the way you take care of me. He’ll make sure you’re not hurt,
and he’ll speak up for you when you won’t, and he’ll help you do what’s too much for you to do
alone, and I think he’ll stay. I’m glad for that.”

As always, it’s still dark out when Taeyong opens his front door and steps out into the hallway. He
takes his time patting down his pockets to make sure he has everything he needs. Partly because his
conversation with his mom last night left him too worked up to fall asleep and he’s still feeling a
little dopey. Partly because he’s waiting for Jaehyun.

His thoughts spun in circles around him, began with him, ended with him, and had him at their
centre, and he thinks if he just sees him, he’ll be able to get him out of his mind. Like a song that’s
stuck in his head, if he just hears it, it’ll leave.

He tried his best to think of other things - like his patients, but he’d end up thinking about
Jaehyun’s patient, the funeral, the disciplinary action against his colleague, the way he held
Taeyong and cried the other night. He tried to think about his exam next month, but he ended up
thinking about Jaehyun’s ITE results and how he placed in the 94th percentile in his year and how
proud that made Taeyong. Then he tried to think about his plants must be suffering in Haechan’s
hands back at his apartment, but he thought of the flowers Jaehyun gave his mother instead and
then it was game over, thanks for trying.

It was a mess, and he’s not proud of it, but he’s not entirely embarrassed by it, either. Jaehyun is
the kind of person who deserves to be thought about.
The sound of Jaehyun’s door opening makes him go still with his hand shoved in his pocket. He
looks up, and Jaehyun’s just pulling his door shut. He’s dressed nicely today, white shirt, black tie,
black pants that make his butt look extra bitable. He shakes the thought out of his head violently.

“Good morning,” Jaehyun says.

“Morning,” Taeyong replies. “You look nice.”

“Thank you, I have M&M today,” he says.

“You presenting?” He says, walking comfortably beside him until they reach the narrow stairs, and
then he follows behind him.

“I am,” Jaehyun says.

“Nervous?”

“Shitting bricks,” he says.

Taeyong laughs lightly. They walk in silence to the parking lot, and now it’s time for them to part
ways. One of them will say have a great day, and the other will say thanks, you too! And that’ll be
that. Except, that doesn’t feel like nearly enough, so when Jaehyun turns to him with have a great
day on the tip of his tongue, Taeyong stumbles forward and engulfs him in a clumsy embrace.

“What -

Jaehyun’s cologne mixes with the scent of him, that earthy scent of him that settles richly on his
skin overnight and doesn’t get washed off in the morning because Jaehyun prefers to shower before
bed. That scent, of earth and good cologne, and his shampoo, and his aftershave, and the detergent
he uses, they make him strangely nostalgic. They make him think of his sweetness, like the scent
of lilies, of his warmth, like clothes taken fresh out of the dryer, of his softness, like Swiss rolls on
a rainy day, his familiarity, like baesuk on Christmas.
He does the unthinkable - the often-thought-of, especially last night - but unthinkable, nonetheless.
He presses his lips to Jaehyun’s soft cheek.

When he pulls away, his face is burning with embarrassment. He doesn’t look him in the eye,
choosing instead to look at his shoes.

“Thanks,” he says.

“I told you,” Jaehyun says. “First snow wishes are a real thing.”

He’s been forgiven by the person he loves the most, he thinks. And if one wish came true, then
maybe another would. Maybe he’d be looking at the lights over the Gapcheon with Jaehyun for all
his Christmases to come.

“You were right,” Taeyong says. “I should never have doubted you.”

He ventures a look up at him. He’s burning, too, his ears painfully red. Jaehyun smiles, and he
holds his gaze for a moment, but it’s a little too much for Taeyong to take right now. It’s a little too
handsome, a little too early in the morning.

“You’re going to be late,” he says.

“Fuck, right,” Jaehyun mumbles. “I should get going.”

“Good luck.”

“Thank you, hope you have a great day today.”

“You, too,” Taeyong says, and he thinks he could get used to this. He could be okay with having
someone with him in these mundane moments. Having someone to wish him the best before he
begins his day, and having someone to wish the best for. Having someone, on the good days and
the bad.
“Taeyong! You’re home!”

The sound of Haechan’s voice yelling from the living room of their apartment makes him smile,
and he stuffs the last of his things into his bag and makes his way out of his bedroom.

He sees Haechan standing in the middle of the room with his arms outstretched for a hug, and he
obliges him, only to get the life squeezed out of him for the next thirty seconds. Mid-morning
sunshine streams in through the patio door and warms him, and he’s tempted to water his plants
and stretch his legs out in his own house for a bit, but he has work to do.

“I should get going, I just came by to pick up some papers,” he says. “It’s tax filing season.”

“Sit your ass down, Taeyong,” Haechan says, collapsing into the sofa.

“You disrespectful little shit -

“Sorry, I meant sit down, please, I miss you,” he whines.

“What are you so dramatic for, you’re always texting me!”

“If you don’t want to spend time with me, just say so -

“My God, Haechan,” he says, sitting down on the couch. “If you want me to cook for you, just say
so.”

“I do,” he says. “But I wanted to catch up. How are you? How’s your mom?”
“We’re good,” he says. “We’re really good. Jaehyun’s been helping out a lot and - yeah, we’re
okay.”

Haechan’s quiet for a bit, and there’s only the sights and sounds of Sunday morning in his
apartment. Taeyong misses it. He misses Haechan, too, if he’s being honest, but he’d never tell
him that. His head is big enough as it is.

“Jaehyun, huh?” Haechan says, slipping his feet out of his slippers and tucking them under his butt
on the sofa.

“Yeah,” he says.

He tries to sound nonchalant about it, but he can’t seem to help the smile that lifts the corners of
his lips when he thinks of him. It’s like his brain has made a little home movie, a rapid succession
of their best memories that plays in his head at the slightest mention of Jaehyun.

It flickers to life, showing him snippets of a hand supporting his waist, dipped over Jaehyun’s arm
in the pouring rain, dancing to their own music. It shows him the big bowl of popcorn they
polished off between the two of them when they watched (when he fell asleep watching) Funny
Face. It shows him pink lilies in a vase, and a soft, dimpled cheek, against his lips.

“The fuck is that?” Haechan says, snapping him out of yet another montage of Jeong Jaehyun.

“What?”

“That look on your fucking face - did you two fuck?”

“No!” He splutters.

“Don’t lie to me. That’s the face you make when you’re thinking about dick -

“I’m not thinking about his dick.”

“Taeyong,” Haechan says, and it sounds an awful lot like a warning.

Haechan has a way of zeroing in on his thoughts and feelings before he’s even made sense of them,
sometimes. Attentive little omega shit, always perfectly attuned to everybody’s emotional state.
And today, he’s zeroed in on the thought process that’s been unfolding in Taeyong’s head over the
past few days.

“Fine,” he says. “I’m thinking about his dick.”

“Elaborate?” Haechan says, swishing a limp wrist at him.

He wonders if he should. He knows what Haechan will say, and he doesn’t really want to hear it. If
he tells him what to do, and Taeyong doesn’t do it, it’ll be Taeyong’s own fault if things go wrong.
If Taeyong never heard his opinion, however, it’s still Taeyong’s fault if things go wrong, but it
would seem less bad. He shakes his head. He should listen to him. That’s what friends are for.

“I’ll have to withdraw the inhibitors for a week, for a scheduled heat,” he begins.

“Uhuh,” Haechan says dubiously.

“And Jaehyun’s - well he’s a really close friend now.”

“Oh my god.”

“I was thinking - just considering - asking him to help.”

Haechan stares at him open mouthed for a long moment. It’s honestly overkill, because he has
effectively communicated his disbelief and displeasure already.

“You want your mate, who you turned down, who is a good friend now, to fuck you through your
heat.”

“If you say it like that -

“Do you want to fuck him, and this heat thing is just lining up in time?”

He splutters again, his neck and cheeks coloring.

“No, I don’t, I just thought it would be easy. And if we have sex once then I’ll probably stop
reacting so strongly to his scent and I can probably go off the meds altogether. Plus, our
personalities are obviously compatible. We’re probably sexually compatible, too -

“You want to fuck him.”

“I’m a little curious -

“You want to fuck him.”

He glares at Haechan, and then admits it reluctantly.

“A little bit,” he says.

“You’d better get that shit under control, Taeyong,” Haechan tells him pointedly. “I saw what he
was like when you turned him down, and I can tell you that that man thought he was about to have
La la land ending one but got ending two instead and I saw how that broke his stupid heart. I think
he’s just come to terms with you guys being just friends. This will definitely fuck everything up. If
you’re sure about wanting to stay friends, don’t sleep with him.”

He glares at Haechan some more, but he knows he’s right. What he’s feeling is a little crush.
Attraction to an attractive man. It’s just normal. He’ll get over it. The prospect of getting a good
dicking down isn’t worth risking their friendship over. He sighs.

“You’re right,” he says.

The noise of the crowds cheering and the music playing at Jamsil stadium filters weakly through
Jaehyun’s TV. The Bears are playing the Eagles, and if the sound of Haechan cheering beside him
is anything to go by, the Eagles are doing okay.

The cheering stops and the ad break starts, but Jaehyun has yet to look up from his phone.

Taeyong’s just sent him a picture of his new shoes, but he can see the Spongebob print on his
compression socks and it makes him snuggle into his couch cushions and smile down at his
phone.

“Who are you texting?” Haechan says.

“Taeyong,” he replies.

“Right, did you hear what I said?”

He looks up at Haechan, and he has his eyebrows raised and his eyes narrowed and his lips pursed.
He’s been mean to him since the game started. It’s not Jaehyun’s fault he doesn’t care about the
Eagles. He’s Seoul born and raised. Youngho, beside Haechan, is more or less passive, because he
doesn’t give a shit about either team. He’s all about the Tigers, and he’s just here for the beer.

“Yes?” He says, and when Haechan’s eyes get narrower, he says, “Alright fine, no."

“There’s a girl in peds who asked if you’re single,” he says.

“I am, but why does she want to know?”

“For the census,” Haechan says. “What do you think? She wants to date you, dumbass.”
“Oh,” he says, dropping the hand carrying the phone into his lap. “I don’t want to date her
though.”

“Right, because you’re dating Taeyong,” Haechan says, matter-of-factly.

“You know we’re not -

“Who made you that fried chicken?” He says, pointing at the plate on his side table.

“Taeyong.”

“And who picked out this cushion?” He says, pulling a cushion out from under his ass.

“Taeyong.”

“Whose credit card is that?” He says, pointing at the card Taeyong left on his coffee table after
ordering his new shoes over dinner.

“Taeyong’s,” he says, sheepishly.

“And who are you texting?”

“Look, we’re close, now, but we’re not like - we’re not doing anything,” he says.

Haechan should know that. He knows what he decided to do, and he knows Taeyong, and he
should know that they’re just friends.

"And you’re okay with that?” Haechan asks. “You’re okay with the answer to all those questions
being Taeyong except who’s your boyfriend?”

“Yeah, I am. We decided to keep it platonic and we’re keeping it platonic. It’s going fine. I like
him and I like his mom and I can talk to him about work and - and anything. He’s just like you
guys. He’s a friend,” he says, looking to Youngho for support.

Youngho, on the other hand, takes a big swig of beer, breaks out into a blinding smile, and says,
“That’s a relief, because I think he’s hot.”

There’s a veritable Mexican stand-off of confused looks, with the jingle for the LG washing
machine playing in the background.

“What?” Jaehyun says, after a long moment.

“Yeah, I was just being a bro and keeping my distance because I thought you were into him. Now
that that’s clear, is it cool if I ask him out?” Youngho asks, getting up and walking to the kitchen to
get himself another beer.

Jaehyun watches him go with his eyebrows drawn into one single line and his mouth hanging open,
and then he watches him come back.

“Sure,” he says. “Yeah, sure, that’s cool, why wouldn’t it be cool?“

“You tell me,” Youngho says, twisting off the cap, swirling his bottle and taking a whiff like he’s
drinking a glass of wine.

“It’s just - he said he didn’t want to date anyone,” Jaehyun points out.

“Yeah, but he might have just said that to you because he didn’t want to date you.”

First, Jaehyun scoffs, and then, he considers it, and then, he looks to Haechan for support but
Haechan looks utterly baffled by this turn of events.

“Right. Yeah, maybe,” he says.

“Cool, then I’m asking him out. "

“Cool,” he says. “Cool cool cool.”

He gets to his feet in a kind of confused haze, and he walks to the kitchen to get himself another
beer, too. The game starts up again, and he hears it, muted, in the kitchen. He opens the fridge
door, shakes a bottle of beer out of the cardboard case, and then kind of stops. Bent over, with one
hand in the fridge, he kind of freezes, until he reminds himself to move.

He straightens up with the beer in his hand, closes the fridge door, twists off the cap, and then kind
of stops again. He blinks at his reflection in the glossy chrome surface of his refrigerator. Takes a
sip of his beer. Blinks. Frowns. Blinks. And he gets the distinct sensation of something being very
fucking uncool.

He walks back to the living room, and he looks at Youngho still standing where he left him, and he
finds himself weirdly aggravated by how handsome he looks, how tall he is, how great his hair
looks, and how bright his smile is.

“It’s not cool,” he says to him. “It’s very not cool. He’s - he’s my mate, dude. My mate.”

Youngho looks confused, and he has all the right in the world, too, but Jaehyun finds himself mad
at that, too.

“You said you were just friends. You love him platonically and all that, right? You’re not
together?”

“I - no, I - we’re not together,” he says, but he can’t quite figure out what to say after that. That’s a
problem, he realizes. That’s a very big problem, that he doesn’t want anyone to date Taeyong, and
he can’t say why.

He sits down in his spot on the sofa, and sips his beer for a bit. Youngho sits, too, and long
moments pass in silence.

“We’re not together,” he says again, and that hits him like a ton of bricks.

It feels like falling, like tripping, stumbling, like seeing the world from six feet off the ground one
moment and then eating dirt in the next.

He understands what Haechan was getting at. Taeyong, his mate, his perfect fucking jigsaw puzzle
fit, is snug against his side and together, they paint Jaehyun’s big picture. What is, what has been,
and what will always be his big picture - love, togetherness, marriage, forever - and he knows
that’s not Taeyong’s big picture. He knows that’s not what Taeyong wants, and it’s not what he’s
going to give him, and for as long as Taeyong’s there fitting against his side, no one else can give
him that, either.

“Shit,” he breathes.

“What?” Haechan says.

“I’m falling in love with him,” he says.

“You’re welcome,” Youngho says.

He hears them talking, their words mingling with the sounds of the baseball game, with the groan
of the air conditioning, with the sound of his heart pounding in his ears.

“What did I just witness?”

“Alphas communicating.”

“Why did I ever think alphas were desirable. Why does anyone. I don’t get it -

Jaehyun sits, and he sips his beer, and he tries to make sense of what he can do with this situation.

He could tell him. He could say look, this is a bad fucking idea because I want something you
don’t want and never wanted and never will want and I know you warned me but I didn’t listen and
I know you tried to walk away but I dragged you back -

No. No, he wants to be in Taeyong’s life. He wants to make him smile and he wants to lift some of
the weight from his shoulders - and if that’s because he loves him, who cares? Who really cares as
long as Taeyong’s happy?

That’s stupid. That’s so stupid. Unhealthy. Not good. But he could try - he could try teaching
himself not to love him. He could try telling himself they’re not together and they’re never going to
be together, he should try, because he’s not ready to walk out of Taeyong’s life yet -

“Bro, you okay?” Youngho says.

“I’m good,” he says.

He’s not.

Jaehyun’s laptop is getting hot and whirring noisily in his lap. It must be the nine thousand seven
hundred and thirty one things he’s doing simultaneously on it. It’s a little too much for his poor
2015 MacBook to handle.

He’s lying on Taeyong’s living room sofa with his back against the armrest and his legs stretched
out, and his body’s getting stiff but he doesn’t want to move. His feet are in Taeyong’s lap, and his
toenails are being painted painstakingly because Taeyong wanted to paint toenails and ran out of
toenails to paint. Apparently ten aren’t nearly enough.

He yawns and stretches, and like his stretches often do, it ripples down to his toes and makes them
curl. He hears a disgruntled hiss from the far end of the sofa and he grins.

“Did I fuck it up?” He says.

“You made me flood your cuticle,” Taeyong says.

“Oh my God, not the cuticle!” He says, with an exaggerated gasp.

“Shut up,” Taeyong says. “I have pointy tools and your toes in my hands.”

Jaehyun laughs lightly, but he shuts up anyway. He looks over the top of his laptop screen at
Taeyong. Hunched over with his bangs hanging in a soft black curtain, and utterly focused on
painting his nails a baby pink, delicately and precisely applying the color to one big hairy toe.

The anxiety with which he walked into Taeyong’s apartment earlier has somewhat diminished. He
kept himself busy and closed off for conversation, tying up loose ends of a case report he was
working on, teeing off his application for student liaison, and buying himself a new and
unnecessary smartwatch.

He wasn’t so sure he could manage a single decent conversation with Taeyong in the wake of his
discovery, but as the minutes passed, it became evident that he could. He could talk to him the way
they usually do, he could make him laugh and he could laugh easily with him, and that allays his
fears. That gives him hope, that he could nip his unnecessary feelings in the bud, that he could
remain by Taeyong’s side as the friend he wants.

Taeyong looks up at him, like he sensed he was being watched. His eyes are big and brown and
twinkling, his lashes long and lace-like, and Jaehyun’s heart skips a beat. His head gets loud, and
there’s a rushing sound in his ears that sounds an awful lot like FEELINGS. Feelings. So many
feelings. Big, loud, feelings and small, quiet feelings. Affection, and tenderness.

His doe eyes are looking at him so sweetly - Jaehyun’s smile slips, because he’s opened doors that
were very firmly shut. Now he knows that what comes after the tenderness he’s feeling right now
is the need to press their lips gently together. What comes after that is the need to undress him and
hold him close. What comes after that is a ring on his finger and sixty more years of this, and what
this is, is being in love.

"What’s wrong?” Taeyong asks.

“Hmm?”

“You have a funny look on your face,” he says. “You don’t like the color? I could take it off -
“It’s not that,” he says. “I just - I had kind of a big revelation the other day. About myself. I was
just thinking about that.”

“What revelation?”

“Nothing, I just. Think. Maybe? I’m not being a good friend to you.”

Taeyong’s confusion is evident on his face. Everything he feels is evident on his face. He’s not a
good liar. The eyes, Chico, they never lie, and by God, does Taeyong have big eyes.

“What do you mean?” He says.

“It’s a big conversation,” Jaehyun says. “We can have it later.”

“I want to have it now.”

Jaehyun feels something unfurling in his chest that he’s not very familiar with. Tight and tremulous
and dark. He’s anxious. He’s scared of this conversation, and he was putting it off, because he was
scared of it. Maybe this is better. Maybe being unprepared for it would make it easier.

“I, um. I don’t want to be dishonest with you. And I want you to know that I’ll always be there for
you,” he says, and then stops, because he’s not entirely sure what to say.

“Okay,” Taeyong says. “Okay, but?”

“But nothing. And. And I caught feelings,” he says. “I have feelings for you. Yeah. And I might
just need some time to sort those feelings out, but I swear to God, I’ll always be there for you. I
meant it when I said I wanted to be your friend.”

He stops talking again. He searches for what he wants to say next, and he searches for Taeyong’s
reaction in his big doe eyes and the set of his delicate mouth. He’s not sure what he’s seeing, and
he wonders if that means Taeyong’s not sure what he’s feeling.
He’s so fucking stressed out, he doesn’t know what to do with himself, so he closes his laptop and
puts it on the coffee table. And then he pulls his legs back and crosses them, lays his hands in his
lap and begins to knead them.

Taeyong, too, seems to be at a loss for words. There’s still something like confusion on his face. A
kind of vacancy, too. He caps the bottle of nail polish and puts it on the coffee table, and then he
sits back and stares blankly at Jaehyun’s hands.

Then he moves. A hesitant uncrossing of his legs, then he gets on his knees and leans forward. His
hands settle warm and trembling on Jaehyun’s cheeks, and there’s a deliberate pause - one that
makes it seem like the world is in suspended animation, like every living thing has drawn in a
breath and stopped on an inhale, waiting for him to make his next move.

He does. He falls into him delicately, and Jaehyun’s eyes fall shut as Taeyong’s do, and his lips
part slightly as Taeyong’s do. He feels his breath on his upper lip, and then he feels his lips. The
whole world lets go of a breath of shock and awe and relief and so does Jaehyun. Disbelief and
relief.

There were many things he hoped would come from this conversation - understanding, the least,
and a kiss, the most. He’s still not quite sure this is happening. He’s not quite sure he didn’t get run
over by a car on his way home from work and imagined this whole interaction in his dying
moments like that one Ryan Gosling movie he can’t remember the name of.

Taeyong moves closer on his knees - Jaehyun feels it - and the movement shocks him out of
inaction. He lifts his hands to Taeyong’s arms and grips him tight, pulls him a little closer and
kisses him a little deeper and Taeyong keens quietly against his lips.

Taeyong breaks the kiss, but keeps his eyes closed and leans his forehead against Jaehyun’s, links
his hands over the nape of Jaehyun’s neck and makes him take some of his weight. Like he’s
feeling light headed. Like he needs a moment to catch his breath.

“For real, right?” Jaehyun says, stupidly. “This is for real?”

He doesn’t answer, he just kisses him again, and that’s all Jaehyun needs to pull him closer by the
waist. Taeyong comes willingly, easily, he settles in his lap and doesn’t stop kissing him for a
single second. The weight of him on his thighs is maddening, the warmth of his body, his hands -
one on his chest and one loosely resting on his jaw - his lips, supple and gentle and - his tongue?
His tongue licks into his mouth and Jaehyun squeezes his waist - kneads his sides - pulls him closer
until his back arches and he smiles. Right up against his mouth, he smiles, and then Jaehyun
smiles.

Taeyong puts a few inches between them and looks up at him, still breathless, the evidence of it in
the way his chest lifts and falls like he just ran a mile.

He laughs, and then Jaehyun laughs. Jaehyun feels dizzy, breathless, filled with the sweet scent of
Taeyong. There are goosebumps all along his arms, and he, too, can’t quite seem to catch his
breath.

Where do they go from here? He was prepared for his anger and his disappointment. He was
prepared to have to walk away from him, and he hoped for understanding and he hoped for a kiss,
but he wasn’t prepared for it at all.

“Do you want to have dinner with me this weekend?” He asks hesitantly. “Somewhere nice?”

“Nice?” Taeyong says, thumbing at Jaehyun’s lower lip.

“Mhmm, fifty thousand won for a glass of wine, the word deconstructed somewhere on the menu.
Does that sound good?”

He pets his lower back, strokes his thumb over his bumpy spine and presses a gently, lingering kiss
to the corner of his mouth. His lips are always attractive, but today, they’re irresistible. His little lip
dot or whatever it’s called that’s not nevus, looks like a little X on an official document - initial
here, sign here, seal here. He seals, and he seals again. His statement? This is mine, and always
will be.

“I’ll go wherever you take me,” Taeyong says. “But not this weekend. I’m working nights. How’s
Monday?”

“I’m on call,” Jaehyun muses.

“Tuesday?”
 “Journal club.”

“Wednesday.”

“Call again. Thursday?”

“Thursday, I have a meeting,” Taeyong says.

“Friday,” Jaehyun says, nodding.

“Friday. It’s a date, then.”

“It’s a - fuck. It’s a fucking date,” he says, the disbelief crawling back. “I can’t - I can’t believe
you. Were you just not going to say anything? If I hadn’t brought it up, would you have told me
you wanted to date me?”

Taeyong shrugs, leans in and kisses him deeply.

“Guess you’ll never know,” he says.

Chapter End Notes

Thank you so much for your comments and kudos! Hope you enjoyed this chapter!
 Stay
Chapter Notes

See the end of the chapter for notes

Taeyong wriggles around in his bed, trying to find a comfortable position to fall asleep, but nothing
feels right.

It’s hot, he thinks, sticking his foot out from under his blanket.

He snuggles against his pillow, but something is just off. The scent on his skin is earthy and heavy,
and foreign in this room. An hour has passed since Jaehyun went back to his apartment but his
scent still lingers on Taeyong’s clothes and on his skin. Everywhere he touched him, everywhere
he kissed him.

He’s a good kisser, he thinks, fighting a smile. Jaehyun’s lips are so plump that his kiss feels like
more of a kiss than any other kiss he’s ever had. Maybe it’s that, or maybe it’s the fact that he
hasn’t kissed anyone in so long, or maybe it has something to do with the fact that they’re mates.
The fact that his scent could be so perceivable, so heavy, that it sat on his skin like a touch of its
own, sat inside him, in his chest, an extension of him.

It was the strangest experience, the loveliest. He could sense what Jaehyun was feeling. He always
could, he’s never difficult to read, but he wasn’t reading him, today. He was feeling him. It’s
happened before, a pang of something unexpected and foreign flooding his chest, a feeling that
doesn’t belong to him - and when he inspects it, he finds that it’s Jaehyun’s. A flutter of joy in his
belly on a crappy day, with no precedent, no explanation, and he looks up and finds Jaehyun
laughing at something, or eating something his mum cooked. Or just sitting with Taeyong and
working. It was always evasive, transient, but today - he felt it.

Taeyong’s own feelings were familiar, and they were logical - he was nervous, when Jaehyun
started talking, terrified that he was going to say he wanted to stop being friends, but he didn’t. He
said he had feelings for him, and he’d stay, as a friend, forever, regardless. His own feelings were
easy to make sense of when he heard that. Fluttering, like he had no form, like he was just a cluster
of butterflies or a murmuration, because he knew how he felt about Jaehyun. He knew that he
thought, and thinks, that Jaehyun is the kindest, most reliable, sweetest, handsomest man he’s ever
known, and he has very warm, very fluttery feelings for him. A crush at the least, and the deepest
of affections at the most.

He felt it then, a little plunge in his stomach, of sadness, of worry, and it wasn’t his. It didn’t
belong to him, because his heart heard that Jaehyun liked him, and began to hammer out a song.
That little blue feeling belonged to Jaehyun.
He thinks that might have been what prompted him to kiss him, but when their lips met - God, that
feeling changed so beautifully. His own pleasure, mingling with Jaehyun’s disbelief, blossoming
into joy, blossoming into affection and more pleasure, and a sort of desperation - and he felt it all.
He felt it so clearly, and it’s still shaking his brain hard. Bullying it, taking its lunch money, and
shoving it in a locker.

He sighs, then he rolls over and huffs. He wants to sleep, but he’s working nights starting
tomorrow, so he has the day off, and it’s perfectly fine if he doesn’t fall asleep right now. It’s just
that it’s strange, considering how tired he is.

It’s not his head, it’s not his heart, because both of those are floating, both of those are thinking of
what to wear on his date next Friday, both of those are trying to remember when he last went on a
date.

It’s his body. He’s sweaty and uncomfortable and his skin feels somewhat tender. Maybe the
weather’s getting hotter.

He throws his blanket off and lies spread eagled on his bed, but even that doesn’t help. He sits up,
and his head spins, and he’s not quite sure what’s going on. He’s parched, though, that might be it.
He reaches for the glass of water on his nightstand and gulps it down. It doesn’t feel like enough,
so he swings his feet over the side of his bed and tries to stand, but he’s woozy, his legs kind of
rubbery.

He steadies himself against the wall, and takes two steps towards the door. There’s a familiar
emptiness growing low in his abdomen, like hunger, but stretching far lower. It doesn’t make any
sense, he thinks. It can’t be. He hasn’t stopped his inhibitors yet.

He’s still dismissing the thought when he feels wetness drip thickly down to his rim, and then,
there’s no doubt about what’s happening to him. He’s in heat.
Jaehyun’s doorbell echoes an unimpressive ding-dong through his home at a little past eleven pm.
He frowns and looks up at the door. He can faintly smell Taeyong, from all the way in the living
room, and he finds himself wondering if kissing him and holding him made him more attuned to
his scent, because he’s never been able to smell him from so far away before.

He puts the book he was reading down on his coffee table and walks to the door. That sweet scent
hits him like a ton of bricks before he’s even near it. He stops dead in his tracks, like he’s just
walked straight into a glass door, and he swallows thickly.

Taeyong’s scent is so strong in the air, so thick, and what he’s picking up on is need. Just need.
Starved and desperate. His heart is racing, out of his control, he’s reacting to what Taeyong’s
feeling, what he’s signaling with or without his knowledge.

He’s in heat, he thinks. Taeyong is standing outside his door, and he’s in heat.

He takes a deep, steadying breath, out of habit, but it just floods him with so much of Taeyong that
he has to curl his hands into fists and clench his teeth before he lets himself move again.

When he opens the door, he’s nearly floored again, his hand tight on the doorknob.

Taeyong’s standing there, his hands flushed a dusty pink, his cheeks pink, his ears pink, his neck
pink. He smiles, and it seems perfectly neutral, the upturned corners of his mouth and the rounding
of his cheeks.

“Hi,” Taeyong says. His voice, too, nearly neutral. Just a tiny bit tighter than usual. All of it is
incongruent with that near suffocating need he can still feel radiating off of him. The thickening of
his scent, the rounding of it, the way warm water tastes rounder than cold, and the smell of that
wet little heat between his legs.

He breathes out steadily, knuckles white from how tight he’s holding the doorknob.

“Hi,” he says. He smiles, too. Neutral, he thinks. “You okay?”

“Mhmm,” he says. “Can I come in?”

Jaehyun doesn’t mean to look so surprised by that but he can feel his bangs tickling his eyebrows
and that means they’ve shot right up and that, most definitely, is not neutral. But he’s not an
animal. If Taeyong wants to come into his home at this time, an unmated omega in heat in an
unmated alpha’s home, compatible in ways that their bodies have decided for them, then it means
he trusts him, and Jaehyun will always be careful with that trust.

“Sure,” he says, and he steps aside to let him in.

When he moves, brushes past him, Jaehyun feels that thick air move with him, and he hesitates to
close the door because he thinks he won’t breathe again if he shuts them up in one room right now.
But he’s not an animal, so he closes the door and looks at Taeyong helplessly.

“How, um - I thought you were -

Taeyong’s worn his house slippers over, he notes without aim. They look like fuzzy sharks. He’s
lifting the back of his hand to his neck, to his cheek, there’s a faint sheen of sweat on his skin.

“Um, I think when we kissed - I think maybe that was too much of a - a stimulus?” He says.

“What does that mean?”

“Even Hodor couldn’t hold the door forever,” Taeyong says.

“Right. Uh,” he says, and the sound quivers so he sounds like a bleating goat. He clears his throat
and tries again. “Do you want to sit? Can I get you some water?”

Taeyong swallows thickly. The sound of it gets his head spinning.

“You think,” Taeyong says meekly. Meek is weird on him. “You think I could maybe hold you for
a bit?”

Jaehyun stares at him. “Uh,” he says. “Sure?”

His chest feels awfully hot when Taeyong begins to move. He nearly flinches when his cheek
come to rest against his shoulder, when his arms circle Jaehyun’s waist. Without his knowledge,
his eyes have fallen shut. Arms hanging limply at his sides. Taeyong’s making tiny movements
against him, like a kitten, and his body is so warm against him, fevered, and the need recedes and
mounts higher all at once. No longer immediately suffocating, but promising to wash over them
soon, promising to hit harder, rearing its head on the horizon.

“You - should I hold you?”

“Yeah,” Taeyong breathes, and the word has barely left his lips before he’s taking in a quivering
breath, nose brushing against the column of Jaehyun’s neck. He’s taken in a chestful of Jaehyun’s
scent, and his arms curl around his body.

Jaehyun tells himself he shouldn’t but he turns against Taeyong’s neck and that rounded, warm
need is flooding his body again, and he can feel himself getting hard. He’s embarrassed. He wants
to be careful with Taeyong’s trust.

“Jaehyun,” Taeyong says. “I want more.”

“What do you want me to do?”

“Anything, just give me more,” he says. As if to drive his point home, his lips brush up along the
cord of muscle running up his neck, settling uncertain and inquisitive against his pulse. He’s
vulnerable like this, and it should be fight or flight that sets his heart racing and his muscles tensing
but it’s neither. It’s a third autonomic F that he wants to do to Taeyong.

His hand curls into a loose fist in Taeyong’s hair, nails against his scalp.

Taeyong’s mouthing along his jaw now, and he’s sensing Taeyong’s apprehension, scent shifting,
weaker. He lets his palm slide down the back of Taeyong’s neck, grips him like that, draws him
away as gently as he can with all his senses fogged.

Taeyong wants to whine, he can see it, in those big eyes and the way his head is cocked to one side
and his lip is caught between his teeth. Jaehyun exhales, consciously loosens his tense body and
takes Taeyong’s face in his hands. He’s barely said said his name before Taeyong is speaking.
“Help me through this,” he says. The scent of him, the heat radiating off his body, all of it is
painting him pink and ripe and his for the taking. “Is that… is that okay with you? Can you
please?”

Jaehyun’s stomach plunges with pleasure when he hears that, but he tempers himself, lets his
thumbs brush over his cheeks, and that prompts Taeyong to reach for him again, clutching his
arms, eyes fluttering closed.

“You sure?” Jaehyun says. Quiet and intimate in the small space between them.

Taeyong nods.

“Can you look at me?” Jaehyun says. “And tell me you’re sure about this?”

Taeyong opens his eyes, unwavering when he looks at him.

“I’m sure.”

Jaehyun leans in, and Taeyong strains closer.

“One more time,” Jaehyun says. “Tell me clearly.”

“Will you help me -

“How?”

“Jesus, I would have slept with you, on that date I would have let you - not that I usually do that on
the first date, but I would have for you,” Taeyong says.

“I’m going to kiss you, then, is that okay?” He says, and Taeyong says nothing, but his mouth
meets Jaehyun’s.
Hot and wet and eager, and Taeyong’s pulling him in by the hair, and Jaehyun thinks there’s no
need for self restraint anymore. He surges forward and pulls him close and they end up with
Taeyong’s back against the door and Jaehyun’s knuckles bruised between the back of Taeyong’s
head and his front door. Taeyong’s clinging to him, fistfuls of t-shirt and fingertips digging into his
back. Soft lips against his, his hips tugged against Taeyong’s, and he can feel how hard he is, how
hot his body is, his shirt warm and the slightest bit damp.

The scent of him has hit him head on again, thick and intoxicating when he nuzzles against his
neck. Taeyong groans and his head lolls to one side, and it sends Jaehyun’s insides plunging, cock
twitching, mouth watering at the sight of it, he’s making an offering of his body.

He mouths at the delicate skin there. He’s shocked to encounter this need in him, the urge to sink
his teeth into his neck and mark him as his alone. Nobody marks their mates like that anymore. It’s
primitive, but he sees the appeal. Claiming and being claimed, owning and being owned. He laps
at it tamely. Taeyong shudders either way.

“Jaehyun,” Taeyong breathes. “I - I want -

“Bedroom,” Jaehyun manages. “Lube - wait, fuck, I don’t have condoms -

Taeyong releases his grip on Jaehyun’s t shirt, and he reaches down, out of his sight, and he can
feel him reaching into his pocket, he can hear the sound of the serrated edge of foil catching on
cloth and then one small square of foil is being pressed to his chest. He thinks that’s enough to
make his knees buckle, but then Taeyong speaks.

“I don’t need lube,” he says quietly, flushed, so pink.

Jaehyun leaves that foil pressed between Taeyong’s hand and his chest, but he moves closer, like a
madman, like he’s hypnotized, he hooks his thumbs into the waistband of Taeyong’s underwear, a
smooth ridge of material above the waistband of his pants, and he tugs them both down. Smooth
skin slips against his knuckles. He tugs till where his hips dip in, and then he slips his whole hand
in. He feels him, satiny skin stretched taut over hard flesh, and then he has to reach lower, further
back. He lets out a noisy breath, swallows hard because it’s so wet, so hot, and the scent of his slick
is musky and overwhelming.

He wets his lips, and Taeyong watches him, hungry. Unmoving, one hand pressed to his chest and
the other clutching at his arm and drawing him in a little closer. He’s found it now, the pads of his
fingers pressed against that soft spot, and it flutters against him. He’s so sensitive. It’s so slippery.
He rubs his fingers against it, one little push and his middle finger slips inside.
Taeyong’s lips part in a soundless moan and Jaehyun mirrors him without meaning to, pressing his
mouth to Taeyong’s. Their kiss is messy and short because Jaehyun needs to pull away to see if this
is still okay.

“Go on,” Taeyong breathes.

He pushes another finger in, and of course it slips right in. Taeyong’s body has primed him for this
already. Wet and supple, his body has taught itself to yield to him. His fingers are pumping in and
out of Taeyong and the slide is so easy even if this position is testing the flexibility of his wrist.
The sounds Taeyong’s burying against his shoulder are quiet whimpers and groans and he’s getting
impatient. He can feel it.

He’s tugging Jaehyun’s pjs down his thighs and Jaehyun is unprepared for the hand that squeezes
around his length. Taeyong’s palm is clamping down over him, rougher than he thought Taeyong
could be. He’s not sure what happens in the moments that follow, but somehow, the condom is on
him, and Taeyong’s bare from the waist down. He has no idea how he ended up with both hands on
Taeyong’s ass, the curve of it sitting comfortable in his palms. He kneads the flesh hard.

Taeyong makes a sound like discomfort. He stops and pulls away. He hopes he hasn’t hurt him.
Was that too much?

“You okay?” He breathes.

His lids have dipped low, and he’s biting down hard on his lower lip, any harder and he’ll draw
blood.

“Making a mess,” he mumbles.

That’s when Jaehyun lets his gaze drip down Taeyong’s form. His length flushed a dusky rose
color, thighs trembling faintly, one gleaming track of slick dripping down the inside of his right
thigh, and another drop follows in the same line when he squeezes his flesh again, haltingly,
beautiful and slow. Helpless, he reaches for it, catches it on the pads of his index and middle
fingers, smears it back up his thigh along the path it took down, till he reaches Taeyong’s little hole
and pushes his fingers in without warning. Taeyong keens, and tries to cling to him and tug him
closer and hide his face in embarrassment and arousal but Jaehyun slips his fingers out again.
He grabs him by his waist, and he thinks he’s saying something sickeningly sweet like you’re so
fucking beautiful or something like that, and he’s maneuvering him so his elbows are braced on top
of the credenza in the entryway.

He leans over him, and Taeyong’s back, damp with sweat, is pressed against his chest like this. His
cock catches on the cleft between his cheeks and he slides against it.

“Is this okay?” He manages to say. “Can I? Can I go in?”

“Yeah,” Taeyong breathes. “Yes. Please.”

His head is hanging low. The back of his neck is burning, ears burning. He looks at him, standing
with his legs spread and his entrance swollen and red, gleaming slick smeared all over his ass and
dripping down his inner thighs. And the scent of him, god, the scent of him is making the air
heavy. Jaehyun wraps an arm around his middle because he’s not sure if Taeyong’s going to stay
standing much longer and he pulls his hips against his own. He’s gripping the base of his cock,
guiding it to press the head against his entrance and they’ve both let out the same low, needy
sound. He’s pushing in now, slow, even if the slide is easy, till he’s buried in him. Taeyong’s
breathing is sharp and quick and unsteady the whole time, and so is his.

He can’t put into words what it makes him feel. It’s surreal. It’s happening too fast and not fast
enough. He feels like a stretched rubber band, close to snapping, but he waits. Presses his palm in a
gentle pressure against Taeyong’s lower abdomen, leaves kisses on his shoulder, the back of his
neck, the shell of his ear.

“I’m okay,” Taeyong says quietly.

“Let me kiss you?”

Taeyong turns his head slightly, and that’s enough for him to catch his lips in a slow kiss. Gentle
and careful, and then Jaehyun starts moving. Face tucked against Taeyong’s shoulder, burying his
groans there because he can feel the shift in Taeyong’s lower abdomen every time he buries
himself inside him.

The pleasure is dizzying, knee-buckling, toe-curling. He’s never had heat sex before. His only
serious boyfriend was on inhibitors through the year they were together and had a very mild
withdrawal heat that was nothing very different from his baseline. This? This is insane. He’s
feeling everything Taeyong’s feeling. His need, his pleasure, every time he drives deep inside him,
that little spike of pleasure, that plunging in his stomach.

He’s never felt wanted like that before, and it’s a fucking rush.

Something begins to change. Taeyong’s smothered sounds become small whimpers. He reaches
behind him, grips Jaehyun’s shoulder and turns his face against him again and kisses him clumsy
and wet.

His knot is swelling, he realizes. Already, his knot is swelling. And Taeyong’s knees are buckling.
He’s feeling things he’s never felt before, urges, instincts forcing his hand to the back of Taeyong’s
neck. He pushes him down with one hand on his neck, and one hand gripping his hair, and
Taeyong keens. He doesn’t have to worry about what it means because he feels him clamping
down on his length the moment he pins him down. His cheek is smushed against the surface of the
wood, his eyes screwed shut, and his shuddering breath fogs against the varnish.

“Fuck,” Jaehyun breathes. His knot is getting bigger, and the slide is getting tighter. “Can you take
it? Do you want to take it?”

“Please,” Taeyong mumbles. “Please, yeah.”

He pulls out, and Taeyong makes a small sound of protest, but Jaehyun doesn’t give him another
moment before he takes him by the hips and turns him around. He hoists him up onto the credenza,
and Taeyong parts his legs on his own, leans back against the wall and draws Jaehyun back to him
with his heels hooked over Jaehyun’s hips.

He’s flushed from head to toe, trembling with want and all spread out for him. His chest is heaving,
his lips parted and eyes half lidded. He’ll beg, if he denies him this a moment longer, but Jaehyun
isn’t a cruel man.

He grips his thigh in one hand one and pushes it further out, and his skin is hot, his muscles tense
but his entire body pliant. Taeyong’s tugging at his hair, pulling them back into a bruising kiss, and
then when Jaehyun presses the head of his cock to Taeyong’s entrance and pushes, he’s clutching
at Jaehyun’s shoulders.

It’s so much harder this time because he’s already swelling, and he didn’t stretch him enough for
this.
“Keep going,” Taeyong tells him.

And Jaehyun does. Till he’s halfway buried inside, both of Taeyong’s thighs clamped around
Jaehyun’s waist. Instinct, that need to pin him down, it makes him grab his face in a tight grip and
push him against the wall. They’re not even kissing anymore, just breathing into each others’
mouths, and he’s rutting up into Taeyong.

He’s close, now. His length so swollen he’s scared to move. He doesn’t want to hurt Taeyong.

“I’m okay, keep going,” Taeyong mumbles.

He grinds up against him, and Taeyong’s slick is smeared all over his pubic bone. He’s curious
what that soft, slick pucker looks like now, stretched around him.

Jaehyun’s back tightens, his thighs tighten, and he buries his nose against Taeyong’s neck and digs
his fingertips into his thigh and he’s spilling into the condom. He’s still rutting up against him, and
Taeyong’s fisting his own length, hesitant, like he’s just shy of overstimulation. A few more tugs
and another muted whimper and he comes all over his hand, all over their shirts, shaking so bad,
clinging to him so tight.

It feels like heaven. It feels like - he can’t put it into words. He just pulls back a little, trying to
catch his breath, and he looks at Taeyong’s face, he looks into his eyes and he’s aware of the way
his feelings are tumbling, from desire, to possessiveness, to pleasure, and warmth, and affection -
and then he feels it, a rush of something sudden and foreign. Something that’s not his. Searing
through his chest and settling burning hot in his belly.

It’s what Taeyong feels for him, he realizes. It’s the full force of Taeyong’s feelings for him in that
moment, and it’s maddening. His heart swells with fondness, so soft it’s incongruent with what
they just did. He cups his cheeks, gentle, and he kisses him, and Taeyong’s lashes flutter, ticklish
against his cheeks.

“You okay?” He breathes.

“Mhmm,” Taeyong replies, and an embarrassed, tired smile begins to form on his lips, but he bites
down on his lip and keeps it at bay. He’s sleepy, all fucked out, his lids dipping, and he’s lazily
curling his fingers into Jaehyun’s t shirt.
Jaehyun laughs. He looks like he’ll fall asleep before Jaehyun’s knot goes down and he’s able to
pull out.

“Stay awake till I get you to bed,” he says, and Taeyong nods, but it doesn’t look very convincing.

“Taeyong,” he murmurs, kissing his lips and cheeks and chin. “Baby, stay awake.”

It doesn’t help. Taeyong nods, the amplitude of it getting smaller and smaller until his eyes fall
shut and his body goes lax. Jaehyun grins, and he presses kisses everywhere, his knuckles, his face,
his hair, his neck, but Taeyong stays stubbornly asleep.

Taeyong blinks and looks up at the ceiling. It’s a familiar ceiling, like the one in his bedroom in
his mom’s apartment, but different. The scent around him is foreign, too. Not unfamiliar, just out of
place in his room - except, this isn’t his room.

He blinks again, trying to focus, and he remembers the night. He remembers going into heat and
trying his best to stay put in his room, and succeeding for exactly one hour before the want drove
him up the wall and he marched across the hall and rang Jaehyun’s doorbell.

He’s just beginning to realize that he’s in Jaehyun’s bed, after having sex with him like a fucking
crazy person in the entryway, furniture that’s not meant to see anyone’s bare ass, and then passing
out on his knot. He says that again in his head, slowly, and he’s mortified.

He rolls over in bed, slowly, because Jaehyun’s in bed with him, he can feel him, he can smell him,
he can hear his quiet breathing, and when he rolls over, he sees him. His handsome face, peacefully
asleep, and the thing about the way his lips are shaped is that when he’s asleep, they rest together
in what looks like a pout. His heat-addled, sleep-hazy brain says touch them, so he does. He
reaches out and touches them, the pillowy lips that kissed him silly not long ago.
Jaehyun stirs, and Taeyong withdraws his hand quickly, but Jaehyun’s already blinking sleepily at
him.

“You’re awake,” he mumbles.

“Yeah,” he says quietly. “Go back to sleep.”

“Why are you awake?” Jaehyun says, rolling onto his side to face him.

“I don’t know,” he says.

He’s suddenly conscious of how close they are, and conscious of the fact that he didn’t shower
after they had sex, and he didn’t even brush his teeth before bed. He doesn’t know how sweaty and
gross he is, and he raises a hand to cover his mouth.

Jaehyun smiles, his dimple cast in deep shadow.

“What’s that for?”

“I’m stinky,” he says, and it makes Jaehyun chuckle.

“C’mere,” he says, groggily laying his hand on Taeyong’s waist and pulling him closer.

He leans in and kisses his forehead, then his eyelids, and his cheeks, and by the time he gets to his
lips, Taeyong’s smiling and curling a hand into his t shirt to pull him closer. He feels good. Warm,
but his warmth isn’t burning him like his blanket was hours ago. His warmth is making the
tenderness of his skin go away.

He kisses him long and chaste, and then he looks at him and says, “M’sorry.”

“For what?”
“For jumping you.”

“You can jump me whenever you want,” Jaehyun says, rubbing slow circles into his hip.

He smiles, kisses him sweetly, and buries his face against Jaehyun’s chest.

“Go to sleep,” he says. “You have work in the morning.”

“I asked a friend to take my shift,” Jaehyun says, yawning. He lifts a hand to tilt Taeyong’s face
back up to face him, and then he thumbs at Taeyong’s lips, watching his own ministrations with
sleepy eyes.

His face is illuminated by a small, decorative lamp that he bought that day in Home Therapy, a
lamp that’s been sitting in his dining room for months now, because its purpose was to light up
Jaheyun’s path to the kitchen early in the morning, so he doesn’t trip on the carpet every day.

It’s sitting on the nightstand now. His books and papers pushed aside, those glasses that he’s
supposed to wear everyday teetering off the edge of the nightstand to make room for this lamp, and
he can’t think of a single reason why he brought that here, except for Taeyong.

He told him he likes having a little nightlight in his bedroom. He told Jaehyun, in passing, in casual
conversation when they bought that lamp, that he’s one of those people who doesn’t like waking
up in the dark. He remembered. He paid attention, and remembered.

“What?” Jaehyun says, and Taeyong shakes his head.

“You don’t have to take care of me,” Taeyong says, quietly.

“I’m not going to leave you alone like this,” he says, just as quiet.

There’s something about the way he said that. Something about the tenderness of it. He’s feeling
what Jaehyun’s feeling, and it’s not desire right now. He doesn’t mean he’s happy to have the
opportunity to fuck him through his heat. He means it exactly the way he said it. He’s not going to
leave him alone.

It makes Taeyong shift closer, unthinkingly, and closer still, until they’ve pressed their lips together
again. Jaehyun kisses him for a long moment, and then breaks the kiss to look at him inquisitively,
like he’s asking where he’s going with this. Taeyong just closes his eyes and kisses him again, with
intent, and again, deeper, and again, until he feels his stomach plunge with pleasure, his own, and
Jaehyun’s.

He slips his hand down under the covers to Jaehyun’s pajamas, and there’s a clumsy, giggling
moment of the two of them kicking off their pants, and when they’ve got them off, they come
together again. For what? For a kiss. For tangling their legs together, and sighing when skin slides
against skin, for getting greedy - for what? For more skin. For peeling off their t shirts and bringing
their chests together, for wrapping their arms around each other and kissing, and sighing, and
giggling and being tugged closer and closer until he ends up straddling Jaehyun’s hips.

There’s a whispered exchange, hurried and embarrassed, about the fact that they don’t have
another condom, and it ends with Taeyong sinking down on Jaehyun’s length anyway.

He shudders, and he’s too overwhelmed to move for a moment. Jaehyun strokes his thighs, he rubs
his back and holds him close.

Taeyong looks down at him, fond, and Jaehyun looks up at him, just as fond. Taeyong’s burning
again, from head to toe, he’s burning up, he’s faint, he’s - he’s in love. With him. With his god
damn lamp and his dimples, with his gentle hands stroking Taeyong’s thighs. He’s in love.

He leans down and kisses him, and he prays that Jaehyun can feel that. He prays that he knows
what he’s feeling for him right now. He does, he thinks, because he cups his cheeks gently, and
looks at him, pensive and vulnerable, and there’s a flutter of joy in Taeyong’s belly that’s both his
and Jaehyun’s.

He gets overwhelmed. He gets warm and hazy. He gets soft inside, and he gets hurt.

“Baby,” Jaehyun breathes against his lips. “What’s wrong?”

“You won’t leave me alone,” He says stupidly.

“I won’t,” Jaehyun says.

It makes his eyes blur with tears, but he blinks them away and grinds down on Jaehyun.

“Taeyong,” Jaehyun says, sweet and worried, stroking his hair.

“You’ll stay,” Taeyong whispers.

“I’ll stay,” Jaehyun says. “I’m not going anywhere.”

The second time Taeyong wakes up in Jaehyun’s bed, the sun is streaming through the space
between the curtains on Jaehyun’s bedroom window. He blinks groggily and looks around. He’s
feeling a lot clearer than he did last night, and twice as mortified as the last time he woke up here.

He sits up and looks around, and Jaehyun’s not in bed. Taeyong gets out of bed carefully, wary of
his woozy head, and he walks to the bedroom door. He opens it a crack and peers out into the
hallway. He can hear Jaehyun in the kitchen, talking quietly on the phone with someone, and he
can smell something delicious cooking.

He walks quietly to the bathroom, checks his reflection in the bathroom mirror, and is horrified to
find the folds in the sheet imprinted into his cheek. He washes his face and rinses his mouth with
Jaehyun’s mouthwash, and then he tries to tame his hair with a wet hand. It kind of works. He
looks more presentable, but his face is still a photo negative of the wrinkled bedsheet.

He gives up and goes down the hall, still quiet, like every sound he makes would impose on
Jaehyun. He can hear Jaehyun talking clearer now.
“Yeah. There’s still time, though,” he’s saying. “Yes, I will try my best for Seoul, but let’s see if I
can maintain my scores next year. If I do, I definitely want to move back to Seoul - yeah no, I do, I
just don’t want you to get your hopes up. I’m not being horrible, I’m just being realistic, it’s
competitive. And you know, what? I like Daejeon - no, there’s no girl, can you stop? It’s a nice city
-

Taeyong rounds the corner and enters the kitchen, smiling at the conversation, and Jaehyun looks
up sharply. A thousand watt smile lights up his face when he sees him and Taeyong gets dizzy all
over again.

“Yeah, dad, I have to go,” he says. “No, go away. I’m hanging up.”

He ends the call hurriedly and turns back to him.

“Hey,” Taeyong says.

“Hey, you’re up,” Jaehyun says.

He comes closer, wraps an arm around his shoulders and kisses his cheek. He smells nice, like that
old spice body wash in his bathroom, and the Johnson’s baby shampoo, and chocolate pancakes.

“That smells good,” Taeyong says, surveying the bowl of chocolate pancake batter and the carton
of milk and the box of kodiak protein pancake mix sitting on the kitchen counter. A strange feeling
has begun to take root in his chest and he can’t quite figure out what it is.

“Thank you, I bought the mix from scratch,” he says, and Taeyong laughs.

“How are you feeling?” Jaehyun asks, busying himself with flipping his pancake.

“M’okay,” Taeyong says. “How are you feeling?”

“Good,” Jaehyun says. “Great. Like pancakes. You want coffee?”

“Sure,” he says.

He turns away from the stovetop to get his coffee machine set up, but his pancake is already
borderline burning. Taeyong picks up the spatula he left and takes the pancake off the heat and
places it on the plate beside the stove. He picks up the bowl of batter and ladles some more onto
the pan, and that weird feeling from before grows stronger.

“Your dad wants to you to apply in Seoul for your fellowship?” He says.

“Yeah,” Jaehyun says.

The coffee machine hums and huffs and coffee drips into the pot noisily.

“We’ll see how it goes,” Jaehyun says, rinsing out a cup for him. “I’d have to perform on a Seoul
level for the next two years. It’s hard to place fellowship in Seoul.”

“Mm,” he says.

“And there’s also you and me,” Jaehyun says. “There’s us. I want to think about that when I make
my decision.”

Taeyong nods absently. That feeling in his chest is mounting into panic, and he can’t figure it out.
It’s making his chest tight and his hands tremble, and he curls them into fists on the countertop and
tries to breathe deeply.

It’s the fucking pancakes. It’s Jaehyun’s scent, and the smell of pancakes, and it’s him, feeling like
a six year old, standing in the kitchen making pancakes with his dad. A kitchen that looked almost
exactly like this, down the hall. He laughed a lot, and he ate a lot of pancakes. He drank orange
juice and his dad drank his coffee, black, with no sugar. He didn’t think anything bad could ever
happen to him, not as long as his father was there to make pancakes for him.

Nothing bad happened to him for as long as his father was around, and then he wasn’t. And he was
alone with his sick mother. He was alone when she tried the first time, he was alone when she tried
again.
“Taeyong that’s - it’s burning -

He starts and looks down, and hurriedly takes the pan off the heat.

“You okay?” Jaehyun says, handing him his cup of freshly brewed coffee.

“Yeah,” he says, but he’s starting to feel sick. He swallows thickly.

“Hey,” Jaehyun says. “Where’d you go?”

He shakes his head and smiles. He’s so fucking scared, he thinks. Because the last time he was this
happy, his world shattered. He tries to calm himself, tries to slow his breathing, but his chest feels
tight - and he can’t quite breathe.

“Taeyong,” Jaehyun says softly. He’s worried. He can probably feel what he’s feeling right now,
and he probably can’t make head or tail of it, but -

He sets his coffee down on the counter. He can’t look at Jaehyun. He just can’t -

“I have to go,” he breathes.

“What?”

“I, um, I’m sorry,” he says.

Jaehyun settles his hands on Taeyong’s shoulders, and then cups his jaw and tilts his face up. His
worried gaze travels over Taeyong’s face, and his thumbs stroke his cheekbones.

“What happened?” He says, as patient and open as he is confused. “What’s wrong?”

He shakes his head, and Jaehyun gives him another moment, then opens and closes his mouth
once, like he wants to say something, but doesn’t know what. He definitely knows what Taeyong’s
feeling. He drops his hands to his sides and puts a little more distance between them.

“I - didn’t mean to scare you,” he says, “I know you didn’t promise me anything but a date, I just
didn’t want you to hear that conversation and think I wasn’t serious about you. It's only a date, but
we - you're my mate. And my friend. And you mean a lot to me. That’s why I said we need to think
about us when I make my decision about -

“I’m not scared,” Taeyong says.

“Yes, you are,” Jaehyun replies.

There’s a short silence, and Taeyong uses it to regain control of his breathing. This was a fucking
mistake, he thinks. He got caught up in a ditzy kiss and the excitement of being wanted and going
on dates and having great sex and he forgot, for a little bit, about the claws dug into him. He
forgot, for a little bit, that he’s never been allowed free, unthinking, unburdened happiness. He
forgot that people leave, because Jaehyun made him believe he wouldn’t.

This isn’t about him leaving for Seoul. This is about him planning for a future with Taeyong in it.
This is about moving forward together, this is about Jaehyun asking Taeyong to fall in love with
him, wholeheartedly, to trust him, to be his companion - he can’t. He won’t. He’ll never let
himself believe in that again.

“I made a mistake, Jaehyun,” he says. “I’m sorry. I’m really - I didn’t mean it.”

“Didn’t mean what?” Jaehyun says slowly.

“Any of it,” he says.

Jaehyun’s brows come together, and his breath gets sharp and ragged.

“Are you saying you didn’t want - what we did, you didn’t want that?” He says, and he sounds
horrified.
 That’s not what he meant. He wanted him. He wanted last night, and he wanted the kiss, and he
wanted to go on that date with him, he just didn’t want - he’s not sure. A future. He didn’t want
him to stay - or he wanted it a little too much for his own good. Or. Or something. He’s just scared.

“No, I. Please, I don’t want you to feel bad about what happened, but I - I’m not,” he says, and then
he takes a deep breath and presses his hands to his face. He needs another deep breath before he
speaks again. “I was just confused. I thought I was clear headed when I kissed you, so I don’t
blame you for thinking the same thing, but I think I was just confused. It was just the heat.”

It’s a lie. He was thinking just fucking fine when he kissed him. He got caught up in him, is all. He
got a little caught up in his fairytale.

Jaehyun looks at him for a long moment, and Taeyong feels him inside his chest, blue and cold,
then red, burning. He’s feeling betrayed, and that means he knows Taeyong’s lying.

“Can we just - can we pretend like it never happened?” Taeyong says.

Jaehyun laughs incredulously.

“No, Taeyong, I don’t think I can,” he says.

Taeyong’s eyes sting at that. He doesn’t deserve to be hurt, he knows, because he’s the one who
hurt Jaehyun. But he can’t help it. He feels him inside his chest. He feels him with every breath he
takes. They’re mated. They’re a perfect fucking jigsaw puzzle fit. Hurting Jaehyun, is hurting
himself.

“Where does that leave us, then?” He asks.

“I don’t know.”

Chapter End Notes

Thank you so much for all your comments and kudos I love you so much TTTTT
Don't be mad at Taeyong yet, okay? He's had a rough time of it TT
 Home
Chapter Notes

See the end of the chapter for notes

Taeyong’s looks with welcome fatigue at the mountains of food covering his kitchen counter.
Some easy stuff, like eggplant stir-fry and potato stew, and some things that took all day, like that
giant pot of seolleongtang sitting on the stovetop.

Daylight is fading outside, and he’ll soon have to start turning on the lights in his apartment,
because all its windows face east and his house gets plunged into darkness by 5pm even in the
summer. Usually, he finds that hour somewhat thrilling, the strange melancholy of twilight
enjoyable, but today there’s a grimness to it all that he can’t stand.

It’s strange, because he’s finally home, but nothing feels the same. It doesn’t feel as welcoming as
it used to.

He’s ladling the soup into a big kimchi box because it’s the only container that’ll take all of it, and
that just about fits in his fridge.

He hears the front door open, and he hears Haechan following the smell of food straight into the
kitchen. He doesn’t bother looking. Haechan drapes himself over his back and tucks his chin over
his shoulder.

“You okay?” He asks.

“Mhmm,” he says.

"You moved back so suddenly.”

“Mom’s better,” he explains, but he finds that he can’t say anything else, because he can smell
Jaehyun’s scent.

Light, evasive, like a butterfly. It’s on Haechan’s clothes. On his skin. Like he draped himself over
Jaehyun the way he’s draped all over him now.
It makes him shiver, and it makes him the faintest bit breathless, tender all over, on his skin and in
his throat and in his chest.

He thought all those months he spent in Jaehyun’s company would desensitize him to his scent,
and they did while they were close. His scent stopped being so obvious to him, in his apartment, on
his clothes. The way people get so used to their own scents that it stops registering as a scent at all,
like building up a tolerance to a drug.

But it seems now he’s gone crashing back to square one. He’s hyperaware of him, and there it
goes. All the work he did to keep Jaehyun’s name out of his head goes to shit, and he misses him
terribly, his arms and his voice and his company. It’s like he’s withdrawing, and the only thing
that’ll make it better is a taste of him.

He swallows painfully, and he shrugs Haechan off him.

“Did something happen with Jaehyun?” Haechan asks carefully.

“Did he say something happened?” Taeyong asks, just as careful, but his frustration comes out in
the way he ladles soup into the kimchi container. A little viciously, so some of the soup splatters
over the granite countertop.

“No, he’s just been pissy as fuck and so have you.”

“I’m not pissy,” he says, pissily, while he tears a square of kitchen towel and wipes down the
counter, pissily.

“Right,” Haechan says.

There’s a long moment, or several moments, of Taeyong wiping down the kitchen counter, and
Haechan’s eyes boring holes into his back. In that moment, or several moments, Taeyong thinks of
his giggles and Jaehyun’s, under Jaehyun’s blanket. He thinks of that moment when what he was
feeling for Jaehyun sat stripped down, bare, molten at the very center of him. That moment in his
arms when he realized he loves Jaehyun, and then that moment in the morning when he realized
that means Jaehyun can hurt him.
He thinks of him, an impossible number of times, and the thought makes his hands still and his
body sag and his tongue loose.

“I slept with him,” he says.

Haechan lets out a sound like he’s choking, but he gathers himself quickly. By the time Taeyong
turns around to look at him, he’s fixed his expression from what was probably shock to mild
surprise.

“Was it bad?” Haechan says.

“No.”

“Was it small?” He tries, holding up an index and thumb, exactly one inch apart.

Taeyong smiles.

“No,” he says.

“Did it look funny? Did he have herpes? Does he have a foot fetish?”

“No,” he says, laughing, and then he shrugs and his laughter fades and he tries to smile but his lips
tremble. “It was really good.”

There’s another moment, when he thinks of how wretched he sounded when he said that. It seems
Haechan, too, pities his wretchedness, because he moves forward and wraps his arms around him.
He rubs his back vigorously, and he squeezes him hard, because Haechan loves him to bits and
clings to him like a koala and is ferociously protective of him, but he is incapable of displaying
tenderness without cringing.

“You just won’t let yourself be happy,” he mumbles.

“Fuck you. I’m happy,” Taeyong mumbles back, pressing his face to his shoulder and taking in a
shuddering breath of Jaehyun.

A cool breeze stirs the bushes and the treetops in the garden at Jaehyun’s parents’ house. The
summer night stretches above his head, nearly cloudless, dotted with a few stars struggling to be
seen through the yellow dust and over Seoul city’s lights.

When he was a kid, his mom would set up a little tent in the garden over the summer so he could
pretend to be out camping. He’d lie in the grass in a sleeping bag and look up at the sky and think,
damn, that’s a lot of stars. But now he knows. The sky over Seoul doesn’t hold a candle to the
Daejeon sky.

“So he hurt you,” his dad says. “And you came home to mope.”

“That about sums it up,” Jaehyun says, plumping up the cushion on the garden chair and settling
back against it. Buttercup shifts on his lap and side-eyes him. He’s moving too much for her liking,
so he pets her to say he’s sorry.

“Here’s my advice,” his dad says, pouring him another drink. “Stop moping.”

“Earth-shattering stuff, dad,” he says, taking the glass from him. “Wish mom was home, I’d get a
hug, at least.”

His dad laughs, leans over the table between them, and ruffles his hair fondly. It makes Jaehyun
grin. He takes a sip of his drink, and then goes back to sipping his drink and looking up at the sky.

He tries his best not to think about him, but he does it anyway. From the Seoul sky, to Daejeon’s,
to the lights over the Gapcheon, and night-rain over the glass walls of a bus shelter, to the strip of
streetlight that came through the curtains in his bedroom and painted a golden stripe over
Taeyong’s shoulders and cheekbone and hair that night. Nights in Daejeon have shown him what
beauty means.

A kind of bitterness takes root in his chest, and he hates this feeling. Hurt is something he can deal
with, but he hates bitterness, he hates feeling wronged, because with it comes a sort of victimhood,
the need to lash back out and hurt the one who hurt him.

If Taeyong had turned him down one more time, if he said I fucking told you this would happen
and I fucking told you I didn’t want it and I’m telling you again I don’t fucking want this - he
would have been hurt, but not bitter. He wishes he had just said that, that he had sent him on his
way to sort out his feelings and come back when he had shivered and sweated and vomited and
cried out his feelings, like a Taeyong detox.

But this? This is impossible. He doesn’t know how he’ll ever be free of him now.

“What’s the point?” He says. “Why do birds do it, and bees do it and why in the world would
educated fleas do it?”

“Mm. This is why he dumped you,” his dad says. “Because you talk like an old man.”

Jaehyun glares at him, and his dad laughs again.

“If I really had to give you an answer,” he says. “There’s me and your mom.”

Jaehyun doesn’t mean to, but he chokes on his drink.

“Are you sure that’s the example you want to give me?” He rasps, thumping a fist over his chest so
he doesn’t micro-aspirate Glenlivet.
“Yes,” his dad says easily.

Jaehyun forces out one final cough and then sits quietly for a moment, trying to figure out if he’s
missing something.

“She cheated on you,” he says indelicately. He’s never said it before. He’s known since he was
ten, and they know that he knows. It’s something they addressed tactfully and indirectly with one
serious conversation about how much they love each other and how much they love him, and it
was never brought up again.

“She did,” his dad says.

“So what’s the fucking point? Do we just love people so we can get hurt? That seems stupid,” he
says.

“Are you calling me stupid?”

"I’m not not calling you stupid.”

He gets a peanut tossed at him toothlessly. It bounces off his chest and lands in his lap, and he
picks it up and eats it.

“How many years have your mom and I been together?” His dad says pointedly.

“I don’t know, fifty?”

Another peanut flies at him, and he tries to catch this one in his mouth. It bounces off his face and
rolls off into the grass.

“Thirty,” his dad says. “There were circumstances, nuances, enough blame to go around. But the
simple truth is that she hurt me. Gutted me, if I’m being honest. And the hurt stayed for a long
time. For five years at least, I wanted her to hurt the way she hurt me. But we figured it out, and
I’ve had twenty five happy years with her after that, Jaehyun. Twenty five good years and five
bad.”
He stays silent. His father has never talked about those years of his life with him before this. He’s a
sweet, temperate man, and for him to say something gutted him - he can’t imagine the hurt he must
have felt. He can’t imagine having stayed after something like that.

“Do you think I love her?” His dad says.

“Yeah,” he says, quietly. Of course. He stayed.

“Do you think she loves me?”

“Yeah,” he replies. She stayed. Not that staying was all they did. They stayed together, and they
stayed happy. They made each other happy. They built a warm, welcoming home, of shared
dinners and Sunday morning movies and being present in each other’s lives. They built a happy
home for each other and for him.

“When you do things, when you get up and move and really do things, you can get hurt. You can
break things or things can break you, you know? Sometimes you fuck up and sometimes other
people fuck up but if the thing is worth doing, if the thing is worth saving, you fucking do it
anyway,” he says.

Jaehyun swallows thickly, and he finds that his throat has gone very sore, very hot and very painful.
He scrubs a hand over his burning eyes and nods.

“She put in the work. She made it better. Because she loves me, and I love her, and what we have
is worth saving,” he says. “If he loves you half as much as you love him, he’ll come back. He’ll
put in the work and make it better. It’s up to you then, what you want to make of it.”

What if he doesn’t love me, he wants to ask, but it’s a stupid question. Taeyong loves him. He
knows. He felt it. He knows what he felt. Something shifted when they came together like that -
with Taeyong’s arms around his shoulders and his legs wrapped around his hips, coming down
from a high unlike anything he’s ever felt, he felt what Taeyong never put into words - desperate
and afraid, but it was love. It sat in his chest and his belly all night. Like fire, frightening,
beautiful.

He sniffs and blinks back tears, and his dad reaches over across the table and squeezes his
shoulder.
“Sorry I called you stupid,” he says, and his dad smiles.

Jaehyun climbs the stairs to his apartment, tired and grumpy. It’s been six weeks since everything
went south with Taeyong, since they fucked things up so monumentally that Taeyong moved out of
his mom’s apartment in a record-breaking three hours after leaving Jaehyun’s place that morning.
For all the crap his dad told him about true love coming back to make it all better, he hasn’t heard
a peep from Taeyong since that day.

On the bright side, these days, the thought of him doesn’t make him feel like he’s about to keel
over. It does sometimes, like when he went grocery shopping last week and was missing him so
fucking bad that when he went to checkout and saw Swiss rolls and cheap nail polish lined up next
to each other, he teared up in public. He bought them both, got home, ate the Swiss rolls, and tried
to paint his toenails. Then he cried.

There’s also this morning, when he saw some nurse who looked vaguely like Taeyong, except not
really. He was just a guy in the CMC nursing uniform. But that fucked him up for a good couple of
hours.

Also literally every time he meets Haechan at the hospital and finds Taeyong’s scent all over his
clothes and hanging all around him like some portable cloud of depression kickstarter. That hurts,
too. Haechan knows. He treats him like he’s an upset child, employing all the tools he acquired in
his year of pediatrics residency to keep him happy - distraction, bribery, comforting hugs and
cooing praise about what a brave boy he’s being.

He sighs, schleps his way to Taeyong’s mom’s apartment and rings the bell. The door swings open
and Mrs Lee stands in the doorway with a warm smile.

“Hey, hey,” he says. “Got you those samples you wanted, for your knees.”

“Oh, thank you,” she says. “Come on in, I made fresh side dishes yesterday.”
He’s about to say no, that’s fine, I have some bread in my pantry/I’ve ordered dinner/I don’t eat
anymore, I only mope. But there’s an ulcer burning its way through his stomach lining as they
speak, fueled by coffee and spite, and he thinks it might not be a bad idea to eat a decent meal.
Besides, her apartment is no different from his apartment in terms of how much it reminds him of
Taeyong.

He sits at Mrs Lee’s dining table, eating his dinner like her son didn’t break his heart and disappear
on him six weeks ago. Things haven’t really changed with her. He’s come to care for her deeply,
and she didn’t break his heart, so he doesn’t mind running a few errands for her and checking on
her now and then.

“Take this with you,” she says, setting a box of pickled quail eggs down on the table and sitting
down across him.

“Thank you,” he says. He doesn’t bother with polite protests. She doesn’t listen anyway. Plus those
quail eggs look really good, and his fridge is painfully empty at the moment. All the side dishes he
brought back from Seoul were decimated in two weeks.

“Jaehyun, can you be honest with me?” She says.

He freezes. She can only be talking about one thing, and this conversation was long overdue. He’s
surprised she didn’t bring it up sooner, but that doesn’t mean he’s prepared for it, either. He
swallows thickly, but he doesn’t nod.

“What happened? With you and Taeyong?”

He clears his throat, takes a sip of water, and lays his spoon down deliberately.

“Nothing,” he says, anticlimactically.

“Nothing?” She repeats.

He shrugs.

“Did he do something stupid?”

He shakes his head.

“Because he is stupid,” she says. “He’s really stupid. He’s been hurt, too many times, and many of
those things that hurt him are my fault. So I want to talk to him. I want to tell him to stop being
stupid but I have no ground to stand on when the way he acts is because of my failure to protect
him.”

He looks down at his food. He knows. He knows that Taeyong’s had a difficult life and he had
nobody to rely on but himself through some truly terrifying experiences, and he knows that he’s
afraid. He felt his fear, when Taeyong looked him in the eye and lied about how he felt about him.
When he pretended he never really wanted to give them a shot. Hell, he felt it underlining even his
affection, even his love.

He knows, but Taeyong’s an adult, and Jaehyun’s not his mother. He’s not his therapist. He’s not
going to coach him out of his commitment issues and he’s not going to tell him what’s best for him.
He’s not going to beg him for another chance or tie him down to a relationship he doesn’t want to
be in. That’s not his job and not his place and it’s not his way.

“Be patient with him, Jaehyun,” she says. “Please.”

“I’m trying,” he replies.

When Taeyong walks up to his mother’s house, it’s late, he’s tired, and he’s irritable to begin with
because he was supposed to pick his mom up and take her out to dinner but she insisted he come
up and eat in her house instead. He has no doubt this is going to be another conversation about
Jaehyun. Another attempt at making him stay and making him talk to Jaehyun. He knows this, and
it pisses him off, and when he stands outside her apartment and Jaehyun’s scent hits him like a slap
across the face, it dials his irritation up to a hundred.

He’s been reacting like this to his scent. Irrationally. Emotionally. Viscerally. The scent of him on
Haechan’s clothes, hours after Haechan met him briefly for coffee in the hospital cafeteria is
enough to drive him mad. It leaves him winded. It leaves him trembling and on the brink of tears
and the only thing that makes it better is curling into the scent. Slipping on Jaehyun’s hoodie that
he accidentally brought home with him. Hugging Haechan long and hard.

To put it lightly, he misses him. To tell the truth, he’s heartbroken. He’s mad at himself for
allowing things to go so far with him, and for not allowing things to go any further, but every day
he tells himself it’s better like this. It’s better that they stop now.

He huffs out a breath and throws a look toward Jaehyun’s apartment. To his relief, he doesn’t seem
to be home. Maybe he’s on call.

He keys in the passcode to his mom’s apartment, goes in, and kicks the door shut behind him. His
scent billows up all around him, plunges him into the memory of his gentle hands on his body - on
his cheeks - inside him - his lips on him - his sweet nothings in his deep voice -

“Taeyong?” His mother says peering out from the kitchen.

“Why couldn’t you come down?” He says.

“My knees hurt.”

“The elevator doesn’t work?”

She stares at him, no doubt trying to understand what he’s so upset about. He can’t explain it. He’s
not very sure.

“You’re avoiding this house again,” she says, finally, standing in the kitchen doorway. “You don’t
want to come upstairs, you don’t want to spend time here.”

“I’m not avoiding anything,” he says. “This is not my house, why would I spend time here?”

“Talk to him, Taeyong,” she says, gently. She comes closer, and lifts her hand to fix his hair but he
flinches away. It hurts her, but he’s pissed off. She’s being manipulative, she’s being awful.

“We talked, we’re done,” he says. “It was nice while it lasted, but now he’s out of our lives. I need
you to stop having him over, stop talking about him, just stop - please.”

“Why should I? He’s been kind to me and I want to be kind to him.”

It sends his temper flaring up, warming his neck, making his hands tremble. He’s never asked
anything of her. He’s always bent over backwards to accommodate her feelings, her problems, her
wants. Even when they were unreasonable. Even when it hurt him to do it. He never pushed her to
move out of this fucking house even when it meant he’d have to drive 45 minutes to work before
the sun had even risen just so he could stay here and take care of her. Even when it meant
remembering the days his father was still here, and the days he wasn’t, the day he found her on the
floor and went crying to Mr Jeon for help and all the days that followed.

“Jesus, mom,” he breathes. “Can you please, for once, make my life a little easier? You won’t
move where I can take care of you, that’s fine. But all I’m saying is that when I come here, I don’t
want to have his scent all over the goddamn house, I - I feel like I can’t even breathe -

He stops talking abruptly. He gave it away. He’s gone and said he can smell him so easily, so
strongly, in a house he doesn’t live in, and that’s the same as saying -

“He’s your mate,” she says, quiet and shocked.

He stares at her, and his throat goes dry, because he’s not ready for this conversation.

“He’s your mate,” she says again, louder. “Isn’t he?”

“Yeah,” he says.
There’s a moment of terrible silence where she pieces together what he’s gone and done to himself,
to Jaehyun, to the promise of an unbreakable bond. Her lips tremble and her eyes go glassy with
unshed tears.

“Taeyong, you - don’t do this to yourself,” she says.

“Don’t do what?”

“Don’t make this about your father and me!”

“How? How do I do that?” He says. “It’s all I fucking know how to do. Every single decision I’ve
ever made has been about you, for you, because of you.”

“I never asked you to do that for me,” she says, miserable.

He’s hurting her, but he’s hurting so much more and for her to say she never asked to be taken care
of might just be the most insensitive thing she has ever said to him. What the fuck was he supposed
to do then? Leave her to rot and wither away and hurt herself? Walk away from his own mother?

He didn’t, he couldn’t, and staying fucked him up. He knows that. He’s not an idiot, he knows the
damage she did to him, and he knows the lessons he learnt from what happened to her. Everything
he gets accused of - never trusting, never loving, never letting anyone in and never letting himself
out - it’s because he stayed and saw with his own eyes what happens when you love and let people
in and put your faith in them.

“No, but I did it, mom,” he says. “Because somebody had to make you a priority. Because I love
you. And I did it all on my own because I couldn’t count on anything and anyone else. Not once,
you know that? And you’re - I’ve had to deal with everything on my own, do you understand
that?”

“Taeyong -

“No, I’m asking you if you understand what that was like. I couldn’t count on my own parents, not
once in my entire life, and you’re telling me to trust him. Dad left you,” he says. “He was your
mate. He fucking left you, all alone, when you were sick. He left me. And he never looked back.
Fitting together doesn’t mean you’ll stay together, mom, I learnt that lesson every single day of the
past twenty five years, and you want me to trust this man because he’s my mate? What good did
that do you?”

She reaches up and cups his cheeks, thumbs stroking his cheekbones gently.

“I’m asking you to trust him because you love him,” she says. “I know you love him.”

“I don’t want to end up like this.”

“What’s wrong with this?” She says. “What’s wrong with how I live?”

“I’m sorry,” he says. “I didn’t mean it like that. I just mean - let me make my decision on this.”

“Nobody sabotages you like you do. Nobody does it better than you,” she says, quietly.

“I didn’t sabotage me,” he says. “It wasn’t me that did it.”

He’s driving, and crying, and he knows it’s not the best idea in the world but he wants to get as far
away from that fucking house as possible, as quickly as possible, and the further he goes, the more
he feels like he can finally breathe.

He stops at a red light, and he takes those few moments to get a Kleenex out of his glove
compartment and dry his eyes and blow his nose. He’s fucking uncomfortable. He’s nauseous, and
his head is spinning and throbbing from crying and from the way the muscles in his jaw and neck
have gone tight.

The light turns green and he stows the Kleenex away in the cupholder and drives forward, and he
just about crosses the intersection when a gnawing pain begins somewhere in his back and his
abdomen. He takes a deep breath, thinking it might be a cramp given how much salt he lost from
all the crying he did.

He tries to keep going but the pain just gets worse and worse and he groans. It’s a familiar pain. An
awful, cramping pain that shoots down from his back to his groin and makes him want to vomit
and pass out. He’s felt it before, when he passed a kidney stone.

Not fucking now, he thinks. Not now.

But it’s so painful, and he does everything he usually does when it hurts like this, pinches the skin
over his abdomen, presses a fist down against it, but nothing helps. He has to pull over and wait for
it to pass, and it recedes a little, but it comes again. And again.

At this rate he’ll either have to go back to his mom’s place or go to the emergency room for some
very strong opioids to tide him over until he pees it out. He curses his luck. Then he curses his dad
for his shitty genes. Then he curses him some more for different reasons, but he gets out of the car.

His head spins, and vomit comes clawing its way up his throat. He stumbles to a trashcan and
throws up into it, clutching his side and his lower abdomen and mentally apologizing to the
municipal workers who’d have to clean that trashcan tomorrow.

Miserably, he scrubs at his mouth with another Kleenex, locks his car, and hobbles his way to the
CMC Emergency Center.

Taeyong opens his eyes, groggy from the opioids and the fatigue that comes after excruciating
pain. He’s alone, because he couldn’t possibly call his mom over after the conversation they had.
Besides, this isn’t the first time this has happened to him, and he knows he’ll be fine in a few
hours.

He blinks and looks around. An off-white nylon curtain cuts off the rest of the ED from him, but he
can hear the chaos all around. He really needs to pee, he thinks, but he doesn’t want to bother a
nurse for this. Clumsily, he reaches over to his hand, stops his IV drip and disconnects it. He
pushes his blanket off and swings his feet onto the ground.

He doesn’t know if it’s the pain medication or the fact that his body is still reeling from the pain,
but the moment he tries to stand, his legs buckle and he lands heavily on his hands and knees,
clutching at the curtain for support but managing only to yank part of it off the rod.

There’s a few gasps and a few shouts and a flurry of movement At least three people rush to his
side, the orderly, the nurse, the ED physician - and it’s a mess of are you okay? Are you hurt?

A wave of nausea floods his system and he heaves without meaning to. Nothing comes up because
he already threw up everything he ate earlier, and he’s grateful for that.

“I’m okay,” he mumbles, more embarrassed than anything else.

“How long has this been happening?” The doctor says.

“What?” He asks, even as he’s being pulled up by the orderly and the nurse.

“When did that start?”

“What?” He says again, and he follows the doctor’s gaze to his legs and the dark stain blooming
down his thigh.

He spends a confused moment staring down at it before he realizes that he’s bleeding. He has just
the one opening, and he’s bleeding from it, and he has no idea what that means for him. Another
wave of nausea hits him, even as he’s being handled into a chair so someone can check his blood
pressure and someone else is thumping their way over with an accucheck machine and he doesn’t
know what that’s going to do but he offers his arm and his fingers unthinkingly.

His shock and panic must be apparent, because the nurse lands a comforting hand on his back and
the doctor softens, too.

“You sure there isn’t someone we can call for you, sweetheart?” She says.
He lies in his bed, in fresh sheets and a hospital gown, an uncomfortable wad of cotton and gauze
between his legs and a Macintosh and absorbent pad spread out under him. He’s not freaking the
fuck out. He’s not.

The monitor tells him that his blood pressure is stable, and the nurse has checked his orthostatic
vitals and they’re okay, too. He’s not bleeding out and he’s not dying.

But he doesn’t know exactly what his body’s doing, either. He’s looked it up. He has his
differentials. It’s not a bleeding hemorrhoid, that’s for sure. It’s not a fissure. It’s probably not a
tumor, he’s nowhere near old enough. Not an abscess, he has no fever, and he had no pain before
that sudden excruciating thing he felt not long ago. Some kind of ulcer? A polyp? But why would it
hurt like that? That’s - that kind of pain, cramping, like passing a kidney stone -

He stops there and closes his eyes tight. No further. Don’t, he tells himself. Don’t think it.

He rolls over, eyes still shut tight, and the monitor starts blaring, because he’s panicking so hard
his heart rate has gone through the roof. He reaches up and silences the alarm before the nurse has
to come over and check on him again, and he tries to slow his hammering heart with slow, deep
breaths, but his breaths start stuttering he feels hot tears trickling into his hair and pooling at the
inner corner of his eye.

“Come on,” he mumbles, scrubbing them away.

It’s not that, he thinks. It’s so fucking rare, it’s worthy of a god damn case report. His luck isn’t that
bad. It’s not that. It can’t be. He doesn’t have the fucking parts for it, they’re all vestigial, blind
sacs and non-functional tubes. It’s not -
But he can’t get it out of his head, the way they slid against each other under the covers, the way
he felt against him, inside him, bare - the way he rocked into him gently and lovingly, the way he
filled him up -

His breath stutters again, and the monitor blares again, and he pulls the pulse ox off his finger and
reaches up and turns the fucking thing off. Blindly, he reaches for his phone, and blindly, vision
blurred with unshed tears and reason clouded by the lack of oxygen that comes from the way he’s
breathing too fast, he calls him.

He doesn’t have a single thought, except he’s scared, he’s fucking terrified and he could call
anyone, his mom, Haechan, the nurses from the nephrology floor, Youngho - anyone. But if this is
what he’s afraid it is, then there’s one person who deserves to know. There’s one person who
deserves to be here with him. There’s one person he wants here with him, more than anyone else,
he wants him here taking care of him the way he took care of him before.

It’s answered too quickly. Two rings and he hears a rustle, and his deep voice, somewhat surprised,
somewhat confused.

“Hey,” he says.

“Hey,” Taeyong manages.

“Everything okay?” Jaehyun asks.

“I, um. Jaehyun - I think - there’s blood.”

“What?”

“I, uh - I think, we - when we -

He can’t manage another word, because he sees the nurse directing a woman in burgundy scrubs to
him, and he realizes that’s the OBGYN resident. His heart begins to hammer anew and his hands
are trembling, and he gets the distinct feeling that he’d rather not know. He doesn’t want to know if
he’s having - or losing - Jaehyun’s baby.
“Taeyong?” Jaehyun says.

“Can you take me home?” He says.

“What do you mean? Where are you?”

“I’m at the ED, at CMC - your CMC - I wanna go home, Jaehyun -

But he doesn’t get to finish that thought because the resident comes over with a big smile on her
face.

“Hi, are you Mr, uh, Lee Taeyong?” She says, in the way doctors do when they want patients to
hang the fuck up or put their food away or stop crying so they can do their jobs and leave.

He looks up at her, and his heart is hammering, really hammering, so hard that he feels like his
whole body jolts every time his heart beats.

“I’m Dr Park, I’m the OBGYN resident. I want to ask you a few questions and then get started on
your ultrasound, is that okay?”

“Taeyong?” Jaehyun says, and he sounds alarmed, but Taeyong just drops his hand into his lap
because hearing his voice is making this worse.

“Sorry,” Taeyong says to her. “Sorry, I didn’t mean to waste your time, but uh - I don’t wanna
know.”

“Don’t want to know what?” She says.

“I’d rather go home. I’m okay, I’m stable. I’m not dying - I don’t want the scan, I don’t want
anything. I’d rather not know -
“Taeyong! What’s going on?” Jaehyun’s voice, muted, from the phone in his lap.

He hangs up, looks up at the resident’s baffled face again.

“I understand you’re scared,” she says.

“I don’t think you do,” he says. It comes out choked. “I don’t think you understand at all. I’ll sign
the AMA papers, you have no liability here, I just want - I just want to go home, please.”

“Let’s start over,” she says, gently. “What are you scared of?”

“I’m not scared,” he says. “I’m really fucking not - I -

It breaks into a sob, and he’s not sure what to do with himself then, so he pushes his blankets aside
and gets out of bed, much to her alarm.

“Mr Lee, I really need you to sit down -

He takes two tottering steps forward, but his head reels and he careens into the side of the bed. She
catches his fall - kind of by the elbow and kind of by his gown, and slows him down, redirects him
so his hip hits the bed and he sort of plops down on it clumsily. He sits there, with the cold ED air
raising gooseflesh on his back through the gaping gown, and he’s breathing too fast, his eyes
stinging and his vision blurring with tears.

“I just want to go home,” he says, and he means he wants to be taken care of, because he’s scared,
and because he’s hurting so badly and he doesn’t know how to fix it on his own and isn’t that what
home is? Isn’t that where you go when you’re scared and hurting? He wants that. He wants to go
there. He wants a shower, he wants to lie down on sheets he picked out in freshly laundered pjs and
snuggle into the scent of old spice and Johnson’s baby shampoo and earth and he just wants some
fucking pancakes.

“I can give you something to calm you down, a little bit, okay?” She says, but he barely registers it.

He can’t make sense of anything, he just flits from thought to thought and lingers on everything
and nothing. He thinks of that first time he saw Jaehyun, looking up at him from the bottom of the
stairs, awe and joy and something starstruck about his smile - and then he thinks of the lilies in a
vase on his mom’s dining table, and he thinks of everything, his warmth, his steady presence, his
lingering scent in his mom’s apartment, even now. His voice. Like Nat King Cole, or JK Kim
Dongwook, or his dad.

His dad, and his stupid pancakes, and his car, and his absence - and Jaehyun would never do that to
him. He’d never leave him alone in anything. He wouldn’t leave him, and he wouldn’t leave their
baby, never, he’d always take care of him - he’d put his clothes in the dryer. He’d - he’d stand there
with anti-gravity hair early in the morning and make him breakfast, everyday, forever. He’d kiss
him gently. He’d make him sit through musicals, he’d let him paint his nails. He’d stay -

He feels gentle hands on his cheeks and he doesn’t need to look up to know it’s Jaehyun. He
squeezes his eyes shut, and he tries to stifle a sob but it slips from his lips anyway, and there’s so
much relief in it that he lets another sob slip, and another, until his cheeks are entirely wet, and his
nose is runny.

“It’s okay,” Jaehyun says gently, breathlessly, somewhat taken aback. “It’s okay, baby, let it out.”

Taeyong reaches out for him, wraps his arms blindly around him, presses his face to his chest and
breathes him in, cries, and cries some more, and Jaehyun scratches lightly at his scalp, mumbles
affirmations into his hair.

“I’m really scared,” he breathes.

“I know, but we’ll figure this out. Whatever it is, we’ll figure it out together,” he says. “Can you do
me a favor? Can you breathe with me?”

He nods against his scrubs.

“Breathe in,” he says. “That’s great, count to seven - five, six, seven, let it out - there you go, one
more time -

He holds him, and he breathes with him, counts for him, until his breathing slows down, and his
throat stops burning, and his eyes dry. The scent of his detergent, and the warmth of his body, the
sound of his voice, they feel like home. Jaehyun feels like home.
Chapter End Notes

Thank you so much for reading! Sorry for making Taeyong suffer but he'll be alright,
promise <3
 Winning Zebra
Chapter Notes

See the end of the chapter for notes

There’s a white orchid in a pastel pink pot on the windowsill in Dr Kim Hyojoo’s office. Its leaves
are sort of glowing from the light coming in through the window. Taeyong finds it much more
pleasant to look at than the expectant expression on Dr Kim Hyojoo’s face.

“What prompted you to come in today?” She says.

He frowns. He doesn’t know how this works. For all the years of experience he has dealing with
mental illness, he was never really in the room for any of his mother’s therapy sessions and he
doesn’t know the first thing about what he should be saying. Should he lay out his symptoms?
Should he say what he thinks his problem is? Demonstrate insight or whatever?

“I went through something a little stressful recently,” he says.

He gets stuck there, because he’s not sure how the words “a little stressful” reconcile with the
image of him sitting on a hospital bed, unable to breathe because he was so scared. He doesn’t
know why just that first sentence makes his throat get hot, but it does. He’s been out of the hospital
a whole week, but that time hasn’t done jack shit to make the experience any less awful to revisit.

“Just tell me what happened,” she says kindly. “Where were you, what was happening around you,
what thoughts were in your head when it happened.”

“About a week ago, I thought I was having a miscarriage, I - I was bleeding. I was in a lot of pain.
There was a history of, you know - I was on inhibitors but I went into heat and Jaehyun was just
next-door - and um. Things happened. Unexpectedly. Unprotectedly. So I thought I was having a
miscarriage,” he says. “And I kind of flipped out. Couldn’t breathe. Chest pain, palpitations. The
ED got all blurry. That kind of thing.”

He pauses and blinks down at his knees for a bit, pressing his palms together and sliding them into
the space between his thighs. He doesn’t think he made any kind of sense, and he’s just planning a
revision or an addendum or something in his head when she speaks.

“So you were on inhibitors, went into heat, had unexpected, unprotected intercourse with someone,
and about a week ago you started bleeding and went to the ED, and experienced some anxiety
there?” She says.

He nods. His mother always swore by Dr Kim Hyojoo, and in the twenty odd years she’s been
taking care of his mom, he’s seen her work wonders, but nothing is as much of a wonder as her
making sense of the jumble he just laid out in front of her.

“Let’s start at the beginning of that. Could you tell me why you were on inhibitors?” She says.

He clears his throat and crosses his legs.

“I met my mate, and I was very sensitive to his scent. I didn’t - didn’t want to be with him, and I
wanted to make sure I didn’t go into heat every time I bumped into him somewhere.”

She raises her eyebrows minutely, and he shifts uncomfortably in his seat and turns his gaze to the
walls of her office. Her certificates and awards are framed and mounted on the wall to his right,
and he reads MD, MRCP, PhD - and she speaks again.

“Right, go on,” she says.

“It was so unexpected. Like I woke up with an extra leg or something - it was. Stressful. It would
have been stressful for anyone but I - I really lost my shit there. And then I was talking to one of
my friends about the whole thing and he thought the experience must have well and truly
traumatized me so um, here I am,” he says. “To get un-traumatized. And to - to make sure I don’t
flip out like that again, I guess.”

“Mhmm,” she says. “I can imagine how frightening that must have been. Could you tell me what
happened after that? You went to the ED with these symptoms, and you felt scared, and then?”

“Well, I um. I called Jaehyun. Because,” he says. He uncrosses his legs and crosses them the other
way. “Because I thought he was the father and he’d like to know. And I was also freaking out and I
wanted to go home and he was close by and - and he’s - he’s been there at difficult times before.
So I think maybe it was also habit. Reaching out to him.”

He stops, because he finds that he’s rambling on about things she didn’t ask about.
“Mm,” she says, scratching something down in a file on her lap.

He finds it somewhat aggravating. It’s the exact picture he’s seen in movies, and he’s sure she’s
just writing down what he said for future reference but every time her pen goes scribbling across
her page he pictures the words whiny baby materializing on the paper.

“So this Jaehyun,” she says. “Is he the reason you didn’t want to be with your mate?”

He looks at her stupidly.

“What?” He says.

“I’m just trying to get an idea of the relationships in your life right now,” she says. “You know,
your support systems, any sources of dissatisfaction or distress - because so many little things can
wear your reserves down -

“They’re the same person,” he says.

“Hmm?”

“The almost father - Jaehyun - and my mate. They’re the same person.”

She looks down at her file. Her brows knit. Then she looks up at him.

“Just to be sure I understand. You were on inhibitors because you didn’t want to be with him.”

“Yes.”

“But you thought you were having his baby.”

“Yes.”
“Okay,” she says. To her credit, there’s not a shred of judgement detectable in her expression or
tone. Either she’s been working in this field for three decades and nothing really surprises her
anymore, or it’s that special British brand of stoicism.

“Could you tell me a little more about him?” She asks.

“Like what?”

“What’s he like? What’s your relationship with him like?”

“Um,” he says, somewhere at the tail end of a big inhale. He decides to answer the easier part of
that question first. “He’s, um. Very kind. Very funny, nice to hang out with. Likes musicals. He’s a
resident, IM.”

“At CMC?”

“At CMC.”

“Go on.”

“Go on?”

“Tell me more.”

“He - well,” he says. He contemplates uncrossing his legs again, but he’s pretty sure she’d have
him treated for restless leg if he moves again. He doesn’t know what else to say, and he settles on
telling her what happened with him. That’s easier than trying to tell her how he feels about him,
anyway.

“When I met him I told him I didn’t want to be with him just because we’re mates. I don’t - I don’t
really believe in that. We decided to be friends. But then he developed feelings. And I - I also, um.
I developed feelings. But it got a little complicated.”
“Complicated how?”

“We. Um. Acted. On those feelings. And then the unscheduled heat and the unprotected activities
and I - well, maybe it moved too fast. Maybe there is such a thing as putting out too early,” he says
with an awkward laugh. She doesn’t seem to find it amusing, and if he’s being honest, he doesn’t
think that’s funny, either. He clears his throat again.

“I kind of felt like I made a mistake, afterwards. Screwed up our friendship and - just. And then we
didn’t talk for over a month. And then I thought I was pregnant with his baby and I, uh,” he says,
and then shrugs. “Full circle.”

She nods, and busies herself with writing that down.

“Wow, when I say it out loud it sounds - I’m usually - I have my shit together. It’s just these past
few months they - they’ve been messy,” he says apologetically.

“That’s why you’re here, to unmess the mess and untrauma the trauma,” she says. “What happened
then? You called Jaehyun, did he show up?”

“He did,” he says. “He calmed me down a little, but they still had to give me the Ativan.”

“So Jaehyun showed up and calmed you down and then you got the Ativan and then what
happened?”

A sleepy, strained silence hangs all about Taeyong’s bed. He feels a little out of it, a little floaty
with all the benzos zipping through his system, but he can still make out the awkwardness of the
situation. These people know Jeong Jaehyun. They’ve worked with him before, and he’s made
enough of an impression for them to remember his name. The fact that he’s here tending to a
possibly pregnant omega has made the air in the ED positively gossipy.
The orderly has been mopping the same spot for too long and the nurse on the next bed over is
somehow checking the patient’s blood pressure without inflating the BP cuff, and the ortho bro is
standing at the door to the ED office staring at the home screen on his phone. They’re listening.

“Jeong Jaehyun, right? So you’re the dad?” The ED physician says.

“The dad? He’s pregnant for sure?” Jaehyun says, gripping the side rails on his bed tightly.

He can hear the stress in his voice. He can feel the worry growing like a soap bubble in Jaehyun’s
chest. He’s as scared as Taeyong is, but he’s being very strong, very solid, very present and it
makes him want to cry again, but he tangles his hands into his blanket and tries to focus on what
they’re talking about.

“No, we’re not sure,” the OBGYN resident says. “He slipped up, because the patient was thinking
that, and everyone’s thinking that, but that doesn’t mean it is that.”

“Can you be straight with me? He’s a nurse, I’m a doctor, just tell us what’s going on.”

“You know how it is, I can’t say anything without evidence - but if I were to speak candidly.
pregnancy is - rare. It’s still a possibility, but it’s rare.”

“So no?” Taeyong ventures, hopeful.

“I can’t say that. You’ve given me a history of unprotected intercourse during a heat, and it’s a
symptomatic fit for a first trimester loss in a fertile omega. It’s not unheard of.”

“So yes,” Jaehyun says.

“Not exactly.”

He feels a flare of irritation that doesn’t belong to him inside his chest and he looks at Jaehyun.
“So what - what’s the plan? What are we doing? No pregnancy test, no scan, he’s just bleeding and
in pain with no answers and - and - schrodinger’s uterus -

Taeyong reaches up and lays a hand on Jaehyun’s back to tell him he’s feeing better so he doesn’t
need to worry so much, doesn’t need to give them a hard time - but it’s a little woozy and ill
calibrated and lands more like a slap on his hip than a gentle reassurance. Unthinkingly, Jaehyun
releases his grip on the rail and holds the hand that settled on his hip, gentle, the way Taeyong
wanted to be.

“Alright, look, I’m gonna be honest with the two of you,” the OBGYN resident says. “I don’t think
I have the experience to handle this case. We can’t do a UPT, because anyone taking cascade
inhibitors will have an elevated HCG, right? It’s not going to give us any answers. And the
ultrasound they did showed us two little kidney stones sitting comfortably in the left kidney and
nothing else - but they didn’t have a good window into the pelvic organs, and weren’t really
looking at them because there was no bleeding then - so that scan doesn’t give us any answers
either. I want to see the pelvis, and I think a transvestibular scan would be good place to start but
I’m not as familiar with male omegas as I am with females. If I don’t read it right, you’ll have to go
through it again with a senior and I don’t want you to have the scan twice.”

Taeyong nods. He doesn’t think anything was explained to him that clearly before this. Or if it was,
he was too out of it to make sense of it.

“So you called a senior? An attending?” Jaehyun asks.

“I called my attending. She’s in the OR right now, but she’ll be down in a bit,” she says. “Fifteen
minutes, maybe.”

“Okay,” Jaehyun says. “That’s - yeah. Okay.”

“Don’t worry,” she says. “We’ll have some answers soon.”

“He seems very supportive,” Dr Kim says.

“He is,” Taeyong says, and he can’t help the way his lips curl into a smile.

The feeling of Jaehyun’s hands on his cheeks, his gentle embrace and his comforting voice and his
presence in that single moment of crushing panic and sorrow and aloneness, it lingered. The image
of his back while he spoke to his doctors with him, his white knuckled grip on the rails, his gentle
fingers carding through Taeyong’s hair, or holding his hand, or his long legs stretched out and
crossed at the ankles while he nodded off in a chair beside his bed. All of it lingered, burning,
somewhere in his chest. All of it is why he’s sitting here today.

“I can’t imagine what that night would’ve been like without him.”

“Mm,” she says, and makes a note in her file. “What happened after that?”

“The resident left us for a bit and we got talking,” Taeyong says. “We hadn’t really talked after that
day when I told him it was all a mistake. And I was feeling a little calmer so I - I felt terrible about
the whole thing. About how messed up everything was.”

Jaehyun’s sitting beside his bed in a plastic chair he pulled up from the ED office. There’s kind of
an awkward silence between them now that Taeyong isn’t hyperventilating and the reality of the
situation has somewhat sunk in for both of them.

“How are you feeling?” He says.

“Better. Calmer,” Taeyong says.

“Good. Pain?”
“Manageable.”

Jaehyun nods, and he falls silent again. Taeyong wants to look at anything, the curtain, the
monitors behind him, the NIBP cuff hissing as it deflates around his arm - anything. But he can’t.
He looks at the fabric of Jaehyun’s scrubs, and his lovely hands interlinked and lying in his lap. He
blinks, and he’s immersed for a fraction of a moment in that night, in his hands and his embrace
and his scent. In pleasure and a haze so thick he remembers only fragments of him, brief glimpses
of him - like his hands on his thighs or his mouth on his neck.

“I’m sorry,” Jaehyun says, and his voice shakes Taeyong out of his thoughts. “I should have been
more careful that night.”

Taeyong shakes his head. He doesn’t want someone to blame for this. He doesn’t want this to be
discussed in terms of whose fault it is, because what he remembers of that moment - that whispered
exchange, the warmth of that voice, those kisses, those hands, that bed, that quiet intimacy before
he lost himself again - it’s something he wants to cherish. And if this is a baby, their baby, made of
that moment, he won’t reduce it to someone’s fault.

“I’m sorry,” he says. “This whole thing is - I’m the one who said okay, and then I came to you, I
asked you to - and I hurt you, and I - and the first time I call you after all of that and it’s just more -
it’s just more messiness and -

“Hey -

“I’m sorry,” Taeyong says again. “About everything.”

Jaehyun leans forward and takes his hand, hesitant, but he does it. His hand is warm, and just that
smidge bigger than his own, but Jaehyun’s hand holds so much more comfort than he thinks his
hand could ever offer.

“We need to talk about a lot of things, but not tonight,” he says. “Let’s just see this through
together, and when you’re better, when you’re not in a literal hospital bed, we can talk.”

“Thank you,” Taeyong says, because he’s feeling too much, and the only feeling he can pin a name
to is gratitude.
“I like that a lot better than I’m sorry,” Jaehyun says, and there’s a small smile lifting the corners of
his lips.

The words tumble out of Taeyong’s mouth then, as vulnerable and raw as the feeling in his chest.

“Do you think we made a baby?” He asks.

“I don’t know,” Jaehyun says.

His face and tone don’t betray an awful lot, but he doesn’t need that to know what he’s feeling.
Protectiveness, fear, so much blue tinged fear and so much protectiveness.

“Do you want your mom with you?” Jaehyun asks.

He shakes his head.

“Should I call Haechan?”

“I’m okay,” he says. “I’ll just let him know I’m not coming home tonight.”

“And your paperwork? Registration, insurance, everything sorted?”

He nods again.

“Thank you for being here, Jaehyun,” he says again. “i mean it.”

“Of course,” he says quietly.

“You didn’t want your mom there?” Dr Kim says.

“No,” he says.

“Can I ask why?”

“We were fighting,” he says.

“About?”

“Jaehyun,” he says. “She wanted me to talk to him. Work it out. I thought she didn’t understand -
well, it’s not even that we were fighting. It’s just never - it’s never been something I’ve needed. To
call her when something scary is happening to me. I’ve never really done that. I think I’ve always
tried to protect her from stressful things and - she can’t really take them. I don’t think. So I didn’t
call her. It wasn’t an active omission.”

“Mm,” she says. “How were you feeling then? What were your thoughts?”

“I felt, um. I think I felt,” he says. “Cared for.”

“Mhmm. Go on.”

The curtain is drawn all around his bed and there’s an ultrasound machine and three people
squeezed into that small space. It’s safe to say Taeyong’s feeling a bit suffocated. He’s on one of
those labor room beds, the ones that can be cut about a third of the way from the foot end for ease
of access. His legs are spread, and his heels are perched precariously on the free edge of the bed.
Cold air raises goosebumps on his ass, but he’s too stressed out to give a shit.
He holds Jaehyun’s hand tight. He’s thinking a lot clearer now. With Jaehyun’s scent and his
reassuring presence and his promise of we’ll figure it out together, whatever it is.

His newfound clarity hasn’t saved him from spinning in circles of when you hear hooves, think
horses, not zebras, but he’s bleeding, too profusely and with too much cramping pain to be
anything but zebras and the only zebra he can think of is pregnant.

His body, as far as he knows, is male, and omega, and that means personality traits, but it also
means a self lubricating vestibule with a tiny little vestigial womb. A thumb sized useless sac, the
reproductive equivalent of a fucking appendix, left behind after thousands of years of evolutionary
biology showed that fertile male omegas wouldn’t make it alive through childbirth and the
selection pressure gave him his body - sterile.

Or so he thought. He’s read the literature, case reports and one multi centric study from the 1960s
about male omega pregnancies - atavism, like some people are born with tails, some male omegas
are born with functional wombs. Or disordered sexual differentiation, from hydroxylase
deficiencies and roadblocks in hormone pathways that rendered bodies phenotypically male, when
they’re genetically female. For him to be pregnant, he’d have to be a caveman or genetically
female, in other words, a goddamn zebra.

The lidocaine jelly squelches and the condom pulled over the ultrasound probe crinkles every time
the attending maneuvers the probe inside him, and it fucking hurts despite the jelly’s feeble
attempts at numbing him. He tries his best not to wince every time she surges in deeper, but a few
groans slip through anyway.

He looks away from the screen. He can’t make sense of it anyway. It’s just a fucking black and
grey bean.

Stupidly, he thinks of that meme that Jaehyun sent him when they first started texting. When he
hadn’t fucked it up for both of them. It’s all bean - always has bean - so fucking stupid, but it
makes tears spring to his eyes. He looks at Jaehyun’s face in the dim light, and he feels a tear slip
from his eye and into his hairline and another chases after it, but it’s caught by Jaehyun’s gentle
knuckles.

“You’re okay,” he breathes.

Taeyong nods.
“You’re on inhibitors, you said?” The attending says.

“Yeah,” he says.

“I think it may just be the lining that’s hypertrophied. Yeah, there, look at that stripe - you see it?”
She says, pointing to a bright white stripe down the middle of the bean. “It happens sometimes,
with people taking inhibitors. I’ve seen it in a couple of women before. It kind of mimics
pregnancy. You see that? Kind of snowstorm looking? Just clots and tissue. Nothing else in the
uterine cavity.”

“It can’t be ectopic?” The resident says.

“It sure can, so I’m trying to take a look everywhere,” she says pushing the probe a little deeper.

He winces, and she looks up apologetically.

“Sorry if that hurts - that’s probe tenderness right there,” she says to the resident.

“I’m fine,” he says, gripping Jaehyun’s hand tighter.

““I don’t see a fetal pole anywhere. It looks clear,” she says, withdrawing the probe.

Taeyong nods breathlessly.

“No baby?” Jaehyun says.

“No.”

“No miscarriage,” Jaehyun breathes, and he’s gripping Taeyong’s hand as tight as Taeyong’s
gripping his.
“Here’s what we’re going to do. I’m going to give you some tranexamic acid and watch you for a
couple of hours. If you’re still bleeding, it might be best to just go in and get it.”

“Go where and get what?” Taeyong says.

“We might need a hysterectomy. Nothing’s for sure now, but I just want you to be prepared for all
possibilities. We’ll do it laparoscopically, take a good look around, see if there’s anything weird
going on - and we’ll get this little thing outta there,” she says, jabbing at the image of the grey bean
on the screen.

“Right,” Taeyong says. “Okay, that makes sense.”

“Alright, we’ll get you to an observation room for now.”

“Okay,” he says.

As they’re wrapping up, as the nurse and Jaehyun are helping him sit up, it sinks in. It’s not a baby.
It’s not a miscarriage. The thought hurt him so fucking much for reasons he couldn’t even
comprehend, so fucking much he couldn’t even breathe, and it’s not that.

He shifts to the edge of the bed, and Jaehyun helps him hop off. He steadies him, because he
knows now that Taeyong fell once trying to get out of bed, and he saw the faint red of just-forming
bruises on his knees and he touched them gently like he was apologizing for not being here earlier.
His scent and his reassuring grip on Taeyong’s waist and elbow - it brings a such a rush of relief
and love to his chest that he throws his arms around Jaehyun’s shoulders and hugs him hard.
Jaehyun hugs him, too, rubs his back and squeezes him, gentle and loving.

“It wasn’t a miscarriage?” Dr Kim says.

“It wasn’t,” he says. “Right after we figured that out, Haechan called. My roommate. And friend. I
don’t know, I think my mom told him we had fought and he was worried because I wasn’t
answering the phone. He kept calling, and I answered and told him what was going on - and he
drove down and stayed the night with me.”

“That’s wonderful, how did you feel about that?”

“Good,” he says. “Supported. Guilty, a little bit, because he had to work the next day and his
whole night was shit. He’s the one who said I need help. Well I said I need help, but he agreed.”

“He sounds like a good friend.”

He remembers the way he walked through the doors of the observation room, uncharacteristically
uncertain, like a lost little doe. The way he sat down and looked at him with his round, worried
eyes, but still smiled and joked and pet his hair and kept his spirits high all while he kept bleeding
and his hemoglobin dropped three grams and the cramps made him curl into a ball.

“He is,” he says. “He’s the best.”

“And Jaehyun?”

“Hmm?”

“Did he stay?”

The humidifier in Dr Kim’s office hisses faintly, and the air conditioning rumbles, and the leaves
of the orchid tremble under the flow of air from the vent. It makes him think of his plants in his
apartment. It makes him think of how nice his snake plant would look in that corner of Jaehyun’s
bedroom. It makes him think of how Jaehyun has always stayed.

“He - he stayed,” he says.

Taeyong opens his eyes, and a wave of nausea hits him so hard he goes light headed. He’s
shivering, too. He’s not exactly cold, but he can’t stop his hands shaking. Clumsily, the walls and
machines and the faces of the anesthetist and the PACU nurse tumble into focus.

They’re asking him questions, and he’s not sure what he says in response.

“Hey, Taeyong.”

The rumble of Jaehyun’s voice, and he seeks him out. He feels him before he sees him. He feels
his worry before he sees his worried face looking down at him, before he sees his white knuckled
grip on the side rails of his bed.

“You doing okay?” He asks.

“Fucking hurts,” he mumbles.

“Hey anesthesia, give the man some morphine -

Haechan’s voice.

“Stop telling me how to do my job -

“Taeyong, are you okay?” Haechan asks.

He looks for him, and he sees his messy hair and his round eyes watching him carefully.
“Wanna vomit,” he mumbles.

“Anesthesia? Zofran?” Haechan says.

“Dude, seriously -

It makes Taeyong laugh.

“I’m - we’re right here,” Jaehyun says, fixing his hair. “I can’t stay with you in the PACU but I’ll
be with you in your room okay?”

“You - promise?” He says, before he can help himself.

“Promise,” Jaehyun says.

Dr Kim watches him carefully, waiting for him to say something more after telling her the first
person he saw when he opened his eyes after surgery was Jaehyun. That he was the first person he
looked for. That he promised to stay.

“He was on call that night but he got his senior to cover for him and he stayed with me. Through
everything. The whole night.”

“And how did that make you feel?”

He thinks of him, his gentle hands, his sweet smile, the scent of him, and the blue tinge to
everything he felt that night.
“Terrible,” he says. “Loved. Terribly loved.”

It’s three in the morning when he’s shifted from the PACU to his room. Jaehyun and Haechan are
there, walking beside his bed as it’s rolled out of the PACU, standing on either side of him in the
elevator, and then in his room.

It’s a little bit of a blur, and he woken up every half hour for blood pressure checks and AM labs
and he loses track. All he knows is that every time he opens his eyes, Haechan and Jaehyun are
there. In the dim light of his room, Haechan, stretched out on the other patient bed in the room,
looking at his phone. And Jaehyun, nodding off in a chair.

Only once, he opens his eyes, and he finds that chair empty. He tries to look around the room for
that familiar frame, tries to sit up, but Haechan comes to his side and makes him lie back down
with a gentle hand on his shoulder.

“The floor got busy,” Haechan says. “He’ll be back soon.”

He nods, and smiles when Haechan sits down gingerly on his bed, carefully holding IV lines out of
the way. He’s such a fucking doctor, Taeyong thinks. So scared of IV lines.

“You doing okay?” Haechan asks.

“Mhmm,” he says.

“I’m glad,” Haechan says.

He sounds so serious, so uncharacteristically serious, that Taeyong grips his hand to comfort him.
He knows he must have scared him shitless.

“Thanks for coming, Haechan,” he says.

“You’ve got to be kidding,” he says. “Thank you for letting me be here.”

“You missed the best part, though. I really lost my shit for a bit there.”

“Yeah, I heard you got PRNed. Ativaned the crazy away.”

Taeyong laughs.

“It must have been really fucking scary,” Haechan says quietly, miserably, tenderly, and Taeyong’s
heart swells.

“I was terrified,” he confesses, just as quietly, just as miserably, and just as tenderly.

“You can talk to me about it,” Haechan says.

“I don’t think you want to hear this,” Taeyong says.

Haechan leans over him and flicks him on the forehead. It’s a toothless little assault, but he knows
he’s annoyed.

“Talk to me, asshole,” he says. “I’ve been waiting for you to talk to me for years now.”

He would, but he doesn’t even know where he should begin. It’s all such a fucking mess. He’s
made such a fucking mess of everything, and he doesn’t know how to iron it out.

“You don’t have to talk to me now,” he says. “Some day. Whenever you want. Just want you to
know I’m here. I - I can’t imagine how traumatic the whole thing must have been.”

That makes him go quiet for a second. It’s a word he’s avoided like the plague all his life, and it’s
caught up with him despite all his best efforts. It makes him gag.

“You think I’m traumatized?” Taeyong says.

“Do I think zebras have stripes? Yes. Yes, I fucking think you’re traumatized.”

Taeyong laughs, and it’s only funny for a second before it stops being funny, or becomes much
funnier, he’s not sure which, and he’s tearing up. Still laughing, cry-laughing, or laugh-crying.

Haechan stiffens, and he looks appalled at having caused this.

“I’m sorry -

“I don’t wanna be traumatized,” he says.

“I know -

“I want to be happy,” he says.

“I know.”

“I want Jaehyun,” he says.

“I know, Taeyong,” Haechan says, and he hugs him.

“Ugh, God,” Taeyong mumbles against his shoulder. “I need therapy.”

“Yeah, you do, baby,” Haechan says. “Go back to sleep, now. We can talk about it in the
morning.”

The next time Taeyong wakes up is to the sound of knocking on his door. He blinks the sleep out
of his eyes, and a new OBGYN resident is smiling down at him.

“Good morning, how are you feeling today?” The resident says.

“Good,” he says.

“Pain? Nausea? Headache? SOB?”

“Pain, yeah, maybe a 5. Nothing else, really,” he reports, trying to sit up.

“Have you gone to the bathroom yet? Pee? Poop?”

“No, not yet,” he says.

“But you have passed gas?”

“He has.”

Jaehyun’s voice rumbles out the answer from that chair in the corner of the room, and Taeyong’s
head whips around to look at him. He didn’t realize he was there.

“That’s great,” the resident says. “I’ll just do a quick physical.”

Taeyong nods, and as he watches the resident glove up and perform a cursory physical exam, it
sinks in, that Jaehyun just said he heard him fart. It also sinks in that Jaehyun’s still here, but the
fact that he heard him fart sinks a little faster and a little deeper and makes his ears burn.

“Alright, everything’s looking good,” the resident says. “Let’s see if you manage to eat and to go
to the bathroom today, and if everything holds up we’ll think about sending you home tomorrow
morning.”

He nods and smiles.

“Any questions?”

“No, not really.”

“That’s great, just let your nurse know if you need anything,” he says, and the moment he’s left the
room and the door closes, Taeyong turns to Jaehyun, mortified.

“You heard me fart?” He says.

“Yep,” Jaehyun says, a dumb, sleepy grin on his face.

There’s a slightly strained look about him, but his hair isn’t anti-gravity today, and Taeyong finds
that disappointing.

“That’s just great,” he mumbles.

“What’s the big deal? It’s a good thing. You know what they say, better out than in,” Jaehyun says.
“I’ll fart now if that’ll make you feel better.”
It makes him burst into laughter - puhahaha - and Jaehyun joins in with an UH-HA-HA, and it’s
like nothing every changed between them. Nothing ever happened. Tonight, he’ll be sprawled out
on Jaehyun’s couch, watching The Sound of Music or whatever, and Jaehyun’ll hum along, and
he’ll hum those songs for the rest of the week, until they watch something new.

He looks up at Jaehyun, and he swallows thickly.

“How are you?” He asks hesitantly.

Jaehyun’s taken aback for a second, maybe because he didn’t expect to be asked that. He isn’t the
one in a hospital bed, but if they’re talking about trauma, last night was almost as bad for Jaehyun
as it was for Taeyong. He felt it. His constant worry, his fatigue, the strain of having to be in two
places at once and of prioritizing Taeyong’s health and safety over his own hurt, but he stayed
strong for him, and he stayed calm for him, and he stayed, for him.

“I’m fine,” he says, but he moves closer helplessly, takes his hand between both palms, sits on the
edge of the bed and presses his face to their clasped hands. It’s all clumsy and complicated, but it
just means he wants to be close to him, in whatever way that works.

“We’re okay,” Jaehyun says. “We got through it okay.”

“Thank you,” Taeyong says quietly. “For staying. For being so good to me. And I - I’m sorry. I’m
sorry I hurt you. I wish I’d done it differently, I - um. I’m really sorry.”

Jaehyun nods, and he’s got this look on his face, one dimple carved deeply into his cheek from the
crooked thing his mouth is doing to keep himself from crying.

“I want to ask you where the fuck we’re going from here, but I - I think it’s best if we just focus on
you getting better for now.”

He wants to tell him, about everything that happened with his dad, him marrying his mate and
starting a family he couldn’t commit to, and then abandoning them. He wants to tell him that after
seeing that, growing with that, he thought he’d be freaking the fuck out about being pregnant at all.
And he was, and it had a lot to do with how he feels about his dad and his family, but the really
fucking weird thing was that he couldn’t stop thinking about having a baby with Jaehyun. He
thought about what that baby would look like. How incredible it would be if it had his dimples, the
way he has his dad’s, and his great hair, and he thought about how much they’d love it. He. How
much he’d love the baby, and how much he’d love Taeyong.

He couldn’t stop thinking Jaehyun would never leave. He doesn’t know why he thought it, but he
knows he thought it. And once that thought got inside his head, the thought of losing that - it made
him feel so fucking bad. It felt like a grand metaphor for everything about them. There’s something
beautiful they could make, and they nearly did, and it died, and all it did was show him how much
he wants it to live. How much he wants him.

“I’d answer, Jaehyun,” he says. “I want to tell you that I want us to be together and I’d never hurt
you like that again. But I’m still the same person as I was that day. I’m just as scared, and if you
ask Haechan I’m more traumatized now than ever before. And that’s not. I don’t want us to start
there. I don’t want us to build a relationship on that.”

Blue, hot, blue, angry, hurt.

“So that’s it for us, then?” He says.

“That’s not what I’m saying.”

“Then what?”

“I have feelings for you, Jaehyun, I do. More feelings than I know what to do with, but something’s
clearly not going right in my life and I need to fix it,” Taeyong says miserably. “I don’t want to ask
you to wait - because that’s not fair -

“I’ll wait,” he says. “Ask me to wait, I’ll wait. I want to.”

Taeyong thinks he might cry but he’s cried too much already. He’s emptied it all out and he doesn’t
think he has a fucking sniffle to spare. He just hugs him instead. Clumsily, his hand splays over
Jaehyun’s shoulder, and Jaehyun settles over him like a warm, heavy blanket. He keeps him there,
until the blue fades and the heat eases into warmth.

“Did you quote Shrek just then?” He asks.

“Yeah,” Jaehyun says.

He laughs - puhahaha - UH-HA-HA -

Dr Kim looks at him, patient and open, because he’s stopped now. He’s stumbled over everything
that happened that night, and he doesn’t know where to go from there.

“I - I hurt him,” he says. “I really did, and I’d feel it sometimes, when things got quiet. When I
wasn’t so caught up in my own head, I’d feel how much I hurt him. And he still stayed because he
um. He cares for me. I felt that, too. How would I feel cared for if he didn’t care for me?”

His eyes sting, and he sniffles. She leans over and offers him a box of tissues. He takes a few, dries
his face and his nose, and takes those moments to gather himself.

“I’m not dumb, okay. And I’m not insensitive. Not an asshole, I don’t think. I knew I was hurting
him when I hurt him, but I just got scared.”

“Of what?” She says.

“Of - of him leaving,” he explains. “Of trusting him, and learning what it feels like to have that
trust broken. Being by myself never seemed like a problem before. I’m perfectly happy alone, so it
always seemed like the logical thing to do - if a dog bites you once, you don’t go back and stick
your hand in its mouth again, right? It just seemed logical. If - if my father left my mother to suffer
the way she did, if she trusted him, and had nothing to show for it. Why would I make the same
mistakes she made? I - that’s logical. But I - there’s something wrong with that. I don’t know what.
Or I do know what. It’s hurting him. And me. It’s hurting us, so it can’t be all that smart and all
that logical, right?”

“Mm,” she says, and writes something down. “You know, something funny happens to people
when they bet on horses. Right up until the bet is placed, it’s all up in the air, but once the money’s
on the table, they become convinced that their horse is the winning horse. Nobody can convince
them otherwise.”
He blinks stupidly. He doesn’t know if the blood loss made his brain slightly ischemic, but he has
no idea what the fuck she’s talking about.

“What?” He says stupidly.

“If you’ve always thought you’d be better off on your own, and you’ve lived your life that way for
a really long time, that’s the horse you bet on, so you were convinced it’d win. To look at a
decision that you’ve invested years of your life in, a decision that served you well for so long, and
say hey, that’s time wasted - or hey, this horse won’t win, that’s half your battle won. The fact that
you’re here today, is half your battle won.”

He nods, but he has to look down at his knees again because he can’t quite meet her gaze.

“I’m going to ask you a few difficult questions now, okay?” She asks.

“What, like math?”

“No, like feelings.”

“Can I do math instead?”

“No, you can’t,” she says, laughing.

“Fine, go ahead.”

“What are your goals?” She says. “What do you hope to accomplish here? If we don’t have
something we’re working towards, you’ll never know when you get there.”

He takes a deep breath, seven counts in, seven counts out, and he clasps one hand in another and he
says what’s been whispered on every breath he’s taken and released in Jaehyun’s presence.
“I want to be with him,” he says. “I want to be happy with him.”

“And why do you think you’d be unhappy with him right now?”

“Because I’m - I’m always afraid he’ll leave,” he says, mildly irritated because it feels like they
went over this already.

“And what happens if he leaves.”

“I’m alone. Again.”

“And why is that a bad thing?”

“What?” He says again, just as stupid as before.

“If you’re alone now, and you’re happy, why is it all that terrible for him to leave?”

That fucking question feels like calculus, and for a second, numbers and equations and conic
sections float around his head like that meme Haechan loves using when he asks him
straightforward questions like did you remember to buy eggs today.

“I um. I don’t know,” he says.

“Are you happy?”

“Yes,” he says.

“Mm,” she says, and it feels like that was the wrong answer.

“Maybe?” He tries again.

“Mm.”

Warmer?

“I - uh,” he stutters.

“Take your time.”

He shifts uncomfortably in his seat.

“See the thing is, I - when you come from a broken home, people expect you to be fucked up -
alcoholic, or unemployed or, or, like a string of ugly relationships. I hate that. I worked really hard,
really, very hard - it was - yeah, I mean. It was hard. To get here. And I’m proud. And grateful. For
where I am now. The job I have, my apartment. There’s nothing broken, nothing messy.”

It doesn't really answer her question, and that isn't lost on her.

“How do you feel when you’re alone?” She says. “When your mum’s sick, or you’re having a bad
day at work, you come home, sit down by yourself, how do you feel?”

“Bad, but who feels good at the end of a bad day?”

“And at the end of a good day?”

He blinks at her. There was a feeling he used to get sometimes. Kind of empty and unwanted.
Unseen, in a way, buckling. Like an old house nobody gives a shit about. Like a garden someone
forgot about, but Jaehyun, he told him his scent makes him think of a warm, loving home. Not a
crumbling building. He makes him think of a flourishing garden that he can tend to, attentively,
lovingly. He kind of just. Sees him. Sits with him. Makes the bad parts suck less and the good parts
better.

“Can I addend that goal of yours?” She says. “Can we say we’ll work on making aloneness less
 painful?”

“Damn,” he says. “That was slick.”

Chapter End Notes

Thank you so much for reading and leaving such lovely comments!!
 Something Freudian
Chapter Notes

See the end of the chapter for notes

He’s on the phone with a Mrs. Cho’s primary care provider down in Busan, trying to get her
medical records faxed to CMC so he knows what medications she’s taking and why. Mrs Cho only
carried with her a giant jar of multicolored pills and said “this is what I take - one brown one in the
morning, the little pink pill and the big pink pill, and that green capsule and that - ”

It was truly the most frustrating med rec he’s ever had to do.

“Could you hold for a sec? I’m new here, so I don’t know exactly how to - oh wait, I see it. Cho
Beomgyu?” The guy on the phone says.

“That’s - that’s a man. I’m calling about Cho Boram. DOB is the sixteenth of august, 1949.”

“Right, um. Could you call back in ten minutes? The nurses will be in then, maybe they’ll know -
oh, there she is.”

“Right,” Jaehyun says, leaning back in his chair.

“Hello? What’s this about?” A new voice says.

“Morning, I’m Dr Jeong Jaehyun from CMC in Daejeon. I’m calling about patient records, could
you help me out?”

“Oh, I don’t have the authority to release that. You’ll have to wait for a doctor to get in.”

“When’s the doctor in?”

“Next week.”
“Next - what? Sorry, she’s been admitted here and I kind of need to know what meds she’s taking
because we’re starting her on some other meds with pretty serious interactions -

“I’m so sorry, I can’t release this information,” she says.

She sounds genuinely apologetic but she hangs up just the same, and leaves Jaehyun staring at the
boxy Internal Medicine call phone, mildly aggravated and wondering what the fuck he’s supposed
to do now.

He’s pretty sure one of those multicolored meds in her pill jar is sertraline, if he remembers that
blue pill from Taeyong’s mum’s pillbox right, and sertraline might just set her on fire with the
linezolid they’re planning to start for the staph pneumonia she’s developed. He sighs and sets the
phone down.

The two neurology interns on their month of internal medicine burst through the call room door
noisily, and it aggravates him further. It’s not the fact that they’re neurology interns. It’s not the
fact that they’re noisy. It’s that everyday for the past month, they’ve found a way to piss him off
and he gets pissed off in anticipation of their antics.

“Trust me, man, in med school I shadowed some of the specialists at the other branch. I’m not
even kidding. Superior quality of nursing there,” one guy says. “You can put in an order and expect
it to be done without calling the fucking nurse in person and saying hey, I really meant it when I
said strict ins and outs for this patient so could you please make sure you record how much piss
this man generated -

“That’s so fucking true, but you know what else? Superior quality of nurses, too, bro - these nurses
here are like fifty years old, like - have you seen the ones over there? They’re like. Actually
fuckable.”

“Can’t argue with that, bro -

“Dr Jeong knows, doesn’t he?”

Jaehyun’s jaw goes tight the moment the words leave his lips, but he stops it at that. Clenched jaw
and gaze fixed to his computer screen while he types out attempted to contact PCP on Mrs. Cho’s
note.
Somehow every doctor and every nurse knows that he had a pregnancy scare and doesn’t hesitate
to talk about it. Haechan and Youngho have both heard versions of it, a one night stand with a
nurse from the other branch gone wrong, a deliberate ploy by a desperate omega to entrap a decent
alpha, for money and stability, or out of spite because their relationship ended.

Most of it paints Taeyong in the ugliest of colors, and very little of it has anything to do with the
fact that Jaehyun’s dick and willingness to put it in Taeyong would be an essential requirement for
making a baby. Nobody seems to care too much about that, and some even want to go so far as
cooing over how responsible and attentive he was with Taeyong that night in the hospital.

It drove him mad to hear that Taeyong was being talked about like that, but he hasn’t said
anything, because he doesn’t want to give them more to talk about. He just types out his note and
doesn’t even look up at them.

“Dr Jeong got burned though, almost became a baby daddy -

“How fucked is that, like you pick a male omega and think for once you can skip the condom and
then -

“Shit yeah, but I heard he was faking it, like he wasn’t even pregnant -

Apparently all his self control goes only as far as hearing sanitized accounts that he coaxed out of
Haechan and Youngho, and it takes exactly one instance of hearing it with his own ears for him to
snap.

It takes him back to that first time he met Taeyong, to what he said - I’ll always be marginalized,
my career will always be a punchline, nobody will take me seriously if they find out I’m fucking a
resident.

He stops typing, and he stands up, hackles rising, and he rounds his desk to the neurology
resident’s. The guy looks up at him quizzically, his laughter paused, and makes a baffled sound
when Jaehyun grips the arms of his swivel chair and spins him around to face him. There's a
moment of palpable panic, and he hears the guy's brain ticking while he tries to figure out if
Jaehyun's about to throw a punch.

“Don’t ever talk about him again,” Jaehyun says, evenly and calmly, but he can tell that the guy
knows he's not fucking around.
He sees his Adam's apple bob and he hears his spit go down his throat, and then the two betas
laugh nervously, and the other guy attempts to defuse the situation.

“Come on man, we were just kidding,” he says.

“Don’t ever talk about him again,” he says again, just as calmly, just as evenly, but he’s an alpha,
and he knows the effect he can have on people.

“Sorry dude,” the guy says. “I didn’t know it was that serious.”

He wants to say it is that fucking serious. He wants to say that's my mate you're running your
mouth about. He wants to say you're a doctor, fucking act like one. But he chooses to end it there.

“Thank you,” Jaehyun says, and returns to his seat.

There’s an awkward silence for a moment, before the two neuro residents fall into subdued
conversation, and Jaehyun spends the next thirty seconds deleting the last sentences he typed.

I will gut this motherfucker like a fucking pig is not what he meant to put in his admission note on
Mrs. Cho.

The bar sways around Jaehyun in glimpses of dark countertops, leather barstools, sofas and squint-
inducing lighting. He’s down a couple of flights of craft beer minus the ones he didn’t like - the
budget limoncello and the gatorade for grownups - and it’s safe to say he’s drunk.

The bill is paid, the drinks are finished, it’s almost midnight, but nobody seems to be quite ready to
move. Maybe the others linger because an easy, hazy evening is coming to an end, and going home
would mean falling asleep and falling asleep would mean waking up before sunrise and going to
work. Jaehyun lingers because this is his first time meeting Taeyong since that night at the
hospital, and he can’t seem to get enough of him.

He doesn’t know if he’s just drunk, but Taeyong is positively glowing today. He’s flushed from the
bridge of his nose down to the sliver of chest he can see before his shirt hides the rest. He’s a little
tipsy, too, far less guarded than when he walked in tonight. He throws his head back and laughs at
something Haechan said, and Jaehyun is perfectly aware of the dopey dip of his own lids, and the
dopier lift of his lip corners when he sees Taeyong laughing. He feels very warm, and very dizzy,
and he drops his cheek into his palm and props his elbow up on the table so he can keep looking at
him without having to hold his head up on his own.

It’s not that they haven’t talked since that day. They’ve texted back and forth plenty, especially in
those weeks right after his surgery.

Morning, how are you? (No more pain thank the lord)

Hey you, did you get the package? (THANK YOU?? I love it so much!!! I’m wearing the pjs right
now they’re so soft TTTT)

Good luck! (Hey, thank you! I’m so fucking nervous) You’ll get it for sure! (But I’ve taken all this
time off and I’m worried they’ll think I’m a flaky nurse and nobody wants a flaky nurse) You took
time off for the first time in a decade. They know you. You’re going to be Head Nurse Lee Taeyong
today for sure <3

Stupid stuff. Normal stuff. But they haven’t hung out, just the two of them, since that night, for
several reasons. It was easy, slipping back into comfortable conversation, but it went without
saying that neither was too sure about meeting the other in person and breathing in the other’s
scent, sitting side by side without revisiting that night, without talking about the future. He’s glad
for this, for Haechan inviting them all out and making this easy again.

Youngho slaps his hand down on the table and shakes him out of the painfully obvious way he was
staring at Taeyong.

“Alright, fuckers, I’mma head out,” Youngho says, waving his phone at them to show he’s called
for a driver. “I have an early start tomorrow.”
He seems to be the only one among them that could pass for sober in these squinty lights, and the
only one who seems to have any sense of the passage of time.

“Boo,” Haechan says.

“Booooo,” Jaehyun adds.

Youngho shrugs, but it sets into motion what was on the brink of happening for almost half an
hour.

“You wanna walk home?” Taeyong says to Haechan.

“Might as well ask if I want a paper cut on my ballsack,” he says. “When would I ever say yes to
that question.”

“It’s a nice night,” Taeyong tries.

“We can roll down a window in the cab -

The night is ending, he thinks, his gaze lingering for a moment too long on Taeyong’s bow shaped
lips and the way they move around the words he’s saying. The night is ending and he has to send
Taeyong home now. He doesn’t know when he’ll get to see him again like this, because the ice is
broken now, but he doesn’t know if it’ll stay broken. There’s too much between them. Too many
feelings. Too much history. Too many people waiting for them to take the next step, and all of it
clings to their ankles and trips them up.

“I’ll walk you home,” Jaehyun says.

Taeyong turns to look at him, his lips parting in surprise, but he struggles to say anything for a
moment. He feels a rush of emotion in his chest, Taeyong’s feelings, not unlike what they felt
when Taeyong walked through the bar doors and caught Jaehyun’s eye earlier tonight. Affection,
so much warm, fuzzy affection.

“You live in Woodlands,” he says, finally, like he’s asking him how it makes sense for him to
walk ten more minutes in the opposite direction of his forty five minute drive home.

Jaehyun shrugs.

“It’s a nice night,” he says.

Taeyong’s walking slow. Ambling down the street with his hands deep in his pockets to resist the
thoughtless call-of-the-void type urge to slip his hand into Jaehyun’s. He doesn’t want this night to
end just yet.

Seeing Jaehyun today, it really shook him. His soft hair, his plump lips, his pretty hands. They
were all things he got used to when he saw him everyday, but he lost the habit now, and they hit
him with the full force of dizzyingly handsome. More than that, his scent, and that rush of emotion
he felt when Taeyong looked at him. Mirrored, counted twice over in his chest, his anxiety and
Jaehyun’s. His elation and Jaehyun’s. His affection and Jaehyun’s. It shook him.

Yellow streetlights illuminate their path, a broad trail bordering the riverside park. Somewhere in
the distance, someone is singing. Busking, the strum of an acoustic guitar, scattered applause, and a
lovely voice. A chilly late November breeze raises goosebumps on his arms. He shivers lightly.

“You cold?” Jaehyun asks, and when Taeyong looks up at him, he sees the way that breeze ruffles
the hair tumbling onto Jaehyun’s forehead.

It makes him think of running his fingers through it. He knows what it feels like. Soft. Like baby
hair. Like the sheep-print grey velour pajamas from that post-op care package Jaehyun had sent to
his house. It makes him smile, and his thoughts tumble from petting his hair to pajamas to the
gardenia plant he gifted him, to the birthday present Jaehyun got him, that delicate gold necklace
with a cube shaped pendant and a T embellished on one face that hasn’t left his neck since he put it
on months ago.

“I’m okay,” he says.

They walk on in silence, and he feels a little tickle of joy in his belly. A little hum of uncertainty. A
little flutter of affection. It makes him breathless in a way.

“I’m glad we did this,” he says.

“This?”

“Drinks. This walk. I’m - well, I missed you,” he says, and his ears light up the moment he’s said
it.

Tickle, hum, flutter. Jaehyun’s pace falters, and he stops walking.

“You did?” He says.

Taeyong looks down at his feet, and then up at Jaehyun. Tickle, hum, flutter, and he’s not sure if
they’re his feelings or Jaehyun’s. Maybe both. Mirrored. Counted twice over.

“Of course,” he says.

Jaehyun’s looking at him with something unreadable on his face, but Taeyong feels the strength of
his feelings doubling, tripling, until there’s nothing he can recognize about the feeling except its
intensity, like that single moment of not knowing if something’s freezing cold or burning hot, but
knowing it’s not normal. It’s not something safe. He fears it for a second, on instinct.

He sees Jaehyun’s lids dip when he drops his gaze to Taeyong’s feet. Yellow light on his
eyelashes, on his cheeks, washing out the flush that betrayed his drunkenness. He sees him huff a
breath, and another, and then he moves to him. Slowly. Clumsily. Every arc of it uncertain until his
hands curl around Taeyong’s arms. He seems to gain courage then, surer of himself when he pulls
him closer, surer still when Taeyong’s hands come up to rest on his chest - or clutch at his sweater.
Taeyong doesn’t quite know how benign his own touch is in this moment. He just knows how
close their faces are. He knows Jaehyun’s breath fanning against his lips and their noses brushing
and their foreheads touching.

The song goes on in the distance, a love song, no doubt. The night gets chillier. The stars twinkle a
little brighter, and everything falls into place and waits for him to tip his lips against Jaehyun’s,
and his stomach plunges. He’s not sure if it’s anticipation or anxiety, and it trips him up. He leans
up experimentally, lets his lips brush against Jaehyun’s chin, and his stomach drops down lower,
ties itself in knots around heat-haze kisses and nuzzling into the scent of baby shampoo and Old
Spice. Betrayal. Disappointment. Hurt.

He feels Jaehyun take a deep breath, and he feels his hands lift to cup his cheeks, and he feels him
press a gentle kiss to the bridge of his nose. And then he doesn't feel him close anymore. He opens
his eyes, and Jaehyun’s warmth has left him already. He’s put distance between them already.

“I didn’t mean to pressure you,” Jaehyun says, and he holds his hand out for Taeyong to take.
“Let’s go.”

But Taeyong doesn’t move. There’s an unsettling feeling in his belly, the kind he feels when he’s
let someone down. When he’s upset someone. Guilty, terrible.

“Aren’t you tired of waiting for me?” he says.

“Taeyong, I thought - I’m just drunk. I thought you wanted me to kiss you,” Jaehyun says.

“I do want you to kiss me,” he says. “I’ve wanted it for a long time, but that’s not what’s tripping
us up, is it?”

“I’m not tired of waiting for you,” Jaehyun says, gentle as always, but on the brink of frustration. “I
don’t know what hurt you but I don’t expect you to be able to fix it in a few months.”

“And what if,” Taeyong says. “What if I take twenty years? What if I can’t undo it?”

Jaehyun’s expression darkens, and he fixes him with an inscrutable look.

“Where are you going with this?”

“I don’t want to keep disappointing you.”

“You’re not disappointing me -

“I don’t want to waste your time, Jaehyun,” Taeyong tries.

“Let me decide what to do with my time,” he says. “Don’t fucking make my decisions for me.”

He doesn’t know why that makes his eyes sting, but it does.

He’s such a fucking idiot, he thinks. He’s so fucking wrapped up in his stupid musicals and his old
Hollywood brand of love, and Taeyong thinks he just doesn’t know when to stop loving. He’s so
fucking kind, he doesn’t know when to stop giving. He’s so patient, so good, he’ll never stop
trusting, and he’ll never stop waiting.

In that moment, Taeyong finds something new to be afraid of. Hurting Jaehyun.

“Promise me,” Taeyong says. “When you get tired, or hurt, or when it’s too much, you’ll stop
waiting. You don’t owe me shit, Jaehyun.”

“I know I don’t owe you anything,” he says. “Doesn’t mean I don’t want to give you everything.”

Taeyong sits with crossed legs and crossed arms on his living room floor, watching with no small
measure of befuddlement as his mother sets two cups and two bottles of soju down on his coffee
table.

“You want me to drink soju?” He says.

She knows he can’t hold his alcohol to save his life, and he hates drinking alcohol that tastes like
alcohol.

“I want us to drink soju,” she says pointedly. “Just hold your breath and knock it back like
medicine.”

“What is this supposed to be a cure for?”

“Life, Taeyong. This is the cure for life.”

“Guess we’re dying tonight,” he mumbles, but he leans over grumpily and pours her a drink while
she puts dried squid and tteokbokki on the table.

They clink their glasses together and he does what he was told to do, holds his breath and knocks it
back. It makes him gag, but he swallows hard, grimaces, and slams his empty cup down on the
table in sync with his mother.

She pours him another immediately, and he knocks it back. Clink, swallow, grimace, hiss, slam.
Four drinks go down in rapid fire succession, and Taeyong’s belly is warm, his neck and chest are
warm, and his hands and butt feel all tingly.

Clumsily, he takes a bit of the dried squid and nibbles on it, his free hand rubbing his reddening
chest. He’s getting very drunk very fast, but somehow, it feels like punishment.

She laughs, and she sounds perfectly sober. He didn’t get his poor alcohol tolerance from her.

“You remember December last year?” She says, finally picking up her chopsticks to eat a bite of
the tteokbokki. “I want you think about how far we’ve come from there.”
He smiles lopsidedly, partly because he does remember where they were a year ago, and partly
from sheer relief that they’re taking a break from drinking.

Last year, in December, his mother was in hospital, and Jaehyun came into his life. So much
happened in the months that followed, so many beautiful things and so many terrible things, that he
forgot where they started.

“I got better,” she says. “I left the hospital stronger than ever, happier than ever to be living with
you again, and what made me so happy was that you seemed happier than ever, too.”

“Mom,” he says, not quite sure what to follow that up with. He knows where she’s going with this.
It’s been the same thing for the past five months. It’s always what happened with Jaehyun? Did
you fight? Talk it out, make it better.

He never told her what happened between them. He didn’t tell her about the surgery. He didn’t tell
her anything, because she’s just found her feet again and he doesn’t want to jolt her out of her
newfound stability, so she doesn’t know that he’s trying his best to make it better. He’s trying his
best to make himself better so he never hurts him the way he did.

“You miss him," she says, wary, because the last time they really truly spoke about him, they
fought. “You miss Jaehyun.”

He shrugs. She stares at him, and in her steely gaze he finds the great gaping holes in his
nonchalant front. It’s in the fact that he didn’t wash the sweater he was wearing when Jaehyun put
his arms around him that night after drinks. It’s in the fact that he’s wearing it right now, with his
grey sheep-print pjs and that delicate gold necklace. He misses him, gets all achy inside when he
thinks of him, and he thinks of him often.

“We haven’t done this in a while, huh?” He says instead, in an attempt to move the conversation
away from Jaehyun.

“No, we haven’t,” she says. “Because you don’t want to talk to me.”

“We talk almost everyday,” Taeyong says. “We’re talking right now?”
“No not really. We don’t talk. You walk on eggshells and I’m - I’m the eggshell.”

“What does that even mean?” He grumbles.

“You’re seeing Dr Kim.”

He stiffens with a long piece of dried squid dangling from his lips. He looks up at her, unsure what
to say once again, but fairly sure this is some kind of punishment now. A thousand scenarios flash
through his head for how she could have found out.

"Did she tell you?” He asks.

“No. You called to reschedule your appointment while I was there,” she says.

He sits back against his sofa, chewing on his squid, trying to think of what to say. He draws a
blank. The alcohol isn’t helping.

“I - It’s alright that you didn’t tell me,” his mother says. “I know that - I haven’t been reliable. I
haven’t been the kind of rock a mother is supposed to be -

“Ma -

“No, really. I don’t mean it badly. I’m just glad you have someone to talk to now,” she says.

He takes a second to figure out if she’s guilt-tripping him or if she’s being genuine, and for now it
seems to lean toward genuine, so he takes it.

“Thank you,” he replies.

“That’s all I wanted for you,” she says. “That’s why I kept pushing you to talk it out with Jaehyun.
I want you to have someone you can talk to, and although i’d prefer if it was someone you love,
like your father was for me, Dr Kim will do just fine.”
He laughs, until he realizes what she said, and then his laugh comes trails off with an upward
inflection like he’s asking her what the fuck she’s talking about.

“Dad?” He says. “You want him to be like dad?”

“Well, no, not exactly like him. I hope he’s braver and more loyal than your father was to me, but -
I meant. I meant the years we had together, they were really good years, you know?” She says.

He doesn’t know. He hasn’t the slightest idea what the fuck she means and he hasn’t the slightest
idea why she has the faintest bit of wistfulness about her when she says it. She laughs.

“Maybe time has made it seem rosier than it was, but I remember it being - I remember,” she says.
“There’s a certain kind of invincibility you feel when you love someone who loves you terribly.
Like you can leave your backwater town and move to a big city and find a home and raise a son.
Like nothing can really hurt you. Either of you.”

He finds himself tongue-tied for a second. There’s so much incredulity and spite spinning like a
tornado in his head and it’s churning out houses and cows and cars and nothing very useful or
articulate. It takes him a moment, but he finds his voice.

“You raised a son just fine without him,” he says, chewing viciously on the squid. “And he’s the
one who hurt you.”

“I’m alright, Taeyong,” she says. “He hurt me, but I’m alright. And so is he. And none of it
changes the fact that those years were beautiful. And I loved him, and he loved me. And if I’m
being honest he was no joke in bed -

Taeyong sucks in a sharp breath and takes a piece of squid down his windpipe with it. He spends a
minute hacking it up while his mother slaps his back.

“Mom, what the hell,” he rasps out when his V/Q ratio is non-zero again.

“I’m serious, it’s different with a mate!” She says. “Nothing else compares to that kind of intimacy
-
“I know, okay? Please stop talking!” He says, pouring himself a drink and knocking it back like
medicine. A cure for whatever the fuck this is.

“You know? What do you know?” She says, and then, stutters out a dumbstruck “Oh!”

“Oh my God,” Taeyong groans.

“How was it?” She squeals, slapping him on the back again.

“Ow, it was fine,” he says. “The parts that I can remember, at least. Ow, can you stop hitting me?”

She does, but she cackles. She eats a piece of tteokbokki, and then she cackles again.

“You know it’s good when you can’t even remember it the next day,” she says.

He splutters and pours them another drink, just because if they’re drinking, they’re not talking.
Clink, swallow, grimace, hiss, slam - and his mother starts talking again.

“Taeyong,” she says.

“I don’t want to know anything more about your sex life.”

“No, it’s not that,” she says. “Do you want to meet him once? Your dad?”
“Can I have some more sausage please?” Jaehyun says, thrusting his plate back towards the
cafeteria server.

“Lunch comes with three mini sausages,” she says matter-of-factly.

“Could I have another?” He asks.

“No.”

“No?”

“No.”

“Why not?”

“Lunch comes with three mini sausages,” she says again.

Jaehyun stares at her, incredulous, his eyebrows all the way up behind his bangs.

“And I want more sausage,” he says.

“Can’t help you,” she says, shrugging.

The sounds of spoons on plates and plates being stacked and the din of conversation in the cafeteria
at one pm somehow amplifies the indifference on the lunch lady’s face so much that he almost sees
the words FUCK YOU IN PARTICULAR, JEONG JAEHYUN materialize in the air in front of
him.

He doesn’t know why it’s such a big fucking deal. Was it her cow that went into this sausage? Is
this prison? It’s not like he’s asking her to kiss him or love him or be with him forever. It’s such a
small ask so why is he being denied this?
“Oh, I’m sorry,” he says, moving forward with a white knuckled grip on his plate. “I guess I’m
undeserving of sausage. Maybe this sausage doesn’t want me. Didn’t even think of that. My bad.”

He huffs his way out of the line and to an empty table, where he sets his plate down noisily, sits
down noisily, and eats his lunch with a kind of violence. A few seconds pass, and then he hears the
chair across him being drawn back.

Haechan sinks quietly into that seat, and carefully puts a sausage on his plate.

“You okay bud?” He says.

“Yeah, why?” Jaehyun asks.

“No reason,” he says. “I’m guessing that walk with Taeyong didn’t go so well, huh?”

“Why would you say that?” He says, stuffing his mouth with that extra sausage.

“No reason,” Haechan says warily.

There’s a lull in the conversation, and he uses it to chew the enormous amount of food he shoved in
his mouth out of spite for the lunch lady. It takes him some time, and the food goes down
painfully, and he has to sip some water to lubricate the sausage’s path. When he’s finished with his
mildly Freudian breakdown, he sniffs, and looks up at Haechan.

“I think he wants to end things with me,” he says. “He said he doesn’t want to keep disappointing
me and he doesn’t want me to keep waiting for him. And I’m getting the feeling he just. Just
doesn’t want me.”

“You don’t really think that,” Haechan says, and there’s a gentleness to him that he usually saves
for the children in the PICU.

“I don’t know what to think,” he mumbles. “I told him I’ll wait for him but he keeps pushing me
away and I - I don’t know what I’m supposed to do.”

He wonders if this will be a pattern with Taeyong. Implosion, separation, silence. Waiting, and
waiting. He doesn’t know, but he supposes he should be prepared for it. He has issues. He has
baggage. And Jaehyun has to be prepared to carry it with him.

“It’s - I know it’s hard on you but he’s trying,” Haechan says. “He goes to therapy religiously. He’s
doing his homework, you know? He’s - he’s gone to Seoul to talk to his dad today. That’s as much
for you as it is for him.”

He nods and takes a deep breath, and his system lags for a second before it registers what Haechan
said.

“What?” He says.

“What?”

“Oh, like his grave?”

“Whose grave?”

“His dad’s.”

There’s a moment of horrified silence before Haechan speaks.

“Did he say he was going to kill him?”

“He - what? He’s dead. He said he died,” Jaehyun says.

There’s another moment, equally horrified, somewhat baffled.

“Shit,” Haechan says.

“What?”

“I didn’t know he didn’t want you to know -

“Didn’t want me to know wha - oh shit,” he says. “Oh fuck. His dad’s alive?”

“You didn’t hear it from me.”

There’s a lot of confused metallic screeching in his head as gears turn and things slide into place,
and alarms go off, wailing in the distance, firetrucks and ambulances and police cars and he feels
the crushing weight of realizing something terrible has happened.

“Haechan,” he says. “He abandoned them?”

“Yeah,” Haechan says.

Taeyong stands with his mother on the pavement, looking at the gate. The house is unremarkable,
in an unremarkable neighborhood in Seoul. It’s strange. His head is spinning, and his stomach is all
in knots.

On some nights, he imagined his father being broke, living in a one room apartment in the rattiest
parts of Seoul, or in prison, and on some nights, he spitefully imagined him living in luxury while
Taeyong was passed from relative to family friend, waiting for his mother to get well and take him
home. Never once did he imagine this - this averageness.

“You okay?” His mother says.

“I’m good,” he says, raising one trembling hand to the bell. He presses it, and barely a minute goes
by before the gate is being swung open, and his breath catches in his throat. A man about his
height stands looking at him, and his knees go weak. His heart slams against his ribs and in his ears
and in his fingertips. It’s like looking into the past. Looking into the future - his face thirty years
from now - his face, almost exactly, except for the eyes. Taeyong got his mother’s eyes and
everything else from his father.

His father, the man himself, is standing at the gate to his house, looking at the woman and child he
abandoned with something like happiness on his face. It’s a strange feeling, to want so badly to
throw a punch that it brings tears to his eyes. He doesn’t think he’s ever felt so angry before.

“It’s - I’m - uh, Taeyong,” he says.

“Come in,” his father says.

The living room is average, too. His daughter’s pictures line the wall. Baby pictures. Middle
school swim team. High school graduation. His new wife is setting the table for them to eat.
Taeyong’s mother, on the other hand, chose to drop him off at his father’s doorstep and is currently
sipping a latte in a cafe ten minutes away.

The whole thing is so fucking surreal and Taeyong thinks if he weren’t sitting down on this
perfectly average sofa, he’d crumple to the perfectly average floor.

“I heard you became a nurse,” his father says.

He nods. He can’t manage much more.

“That’s wonderful.”

He wants to say no thanks to you. He wants to say in spite of you. He wants to say so many things
but he swallows thickly and sits in dazed silence for a bit. He’s not sure why he agreed to this. He
doesn’t know what he hoped to accomplish here.

“I’m glad you came to see me,” he says.

He opens his mouth to say something pleasant, like I’m glad to be here, but a humorless laugh slips
out instead. He bites his cheek in an attempt to stop himself laughing, and it works. His laugh trails
off, and an awkward silence takes its place. Within it, he can’t seem to find a single fuck to give
about exchanging pleasantries with his estranged father.

“Why didn’t you come to see me?” He asks without ceremony. “Or - wait. Wait. Why the fuck did
you leave?”

His father has the decency to look pained, but that doesn’t do Taeyong any good. He’s not even
sure he wants to give him the privilege of being pained by this.

“I got scared,” he says. “I was a coward.”

Taeyong huffs out a laugh. It’s not news to him that his father was a coward. It’s certainly not news
to him that his cowardice nearly destroyed their lives.

“Taeyong,” he says. “I didn’t mean to hurt you. I sent money but your mother said you didn’t want
it.”

He takes a deep breath. His mother had told him that before, that his father sent money and she
asked him to set up a deposit for him so he could decide what to do with the money when he grew
older. He grew older, and he wanted nothing to fucking do with it.

“She didn’t need money,” he says. “She needed you. I - um. I needed you."
 The confession makes his eyes sting again. It’s overwhelming, years of anger and hurt he didn’t let
himself feel catching up to him at once. His throat closes up, burning hot, and despite his best
efforts, he cries. He sounds like a dying man, near total abandon in the way his shoulders shake
with deep gasping breaths and the way tears and snot run down his face.

“I’m sorry,” his father says.

He tries drying his face with his sweater pulled over his knuckles only for fresh tears to take their
place, and he tries again, and again, until the pain eases, and his tears run dry, and he swipes his
sweater across his cheeks one last time before he begins to feel like he’s being held under a clear,
starry sky, like he’s been given everything after years and years of grasping at nothing.

He settles his sweater paws in his lap and looks at them, the sweater he wore when Jaehyun held
him in his arms that night. His scent, it holds him like a lullaby, it lingers, it tells him to breathe in,
breathe out, it counts to seven, it promises everything will be alright.

“Taeyong,” his father says. “I really am sorry.”

“You know, I don’t care," he says. “I don’t have to care.”

Chapter End Notes

I TRIED
 They Meant You Just for Me
Chapter Notes

See the end of the chapter for notes

Jaehyun has never once been as uncomfortable in his own bed as he is tonight. Every time he closes
his eyes he sees Taeyong, sitting on his couch, in his lilac scrubs, one can of beer clutched tight in
his hand - he remembers noting how his knuckles blanched when he asked him - your dad isn’t in
the picture?

And Taeyong, that moment’s hesitation that Jaehyun thought was reticence before he spoke - he -
well he died.

He doesn’t know why Taeyong said that. Maybe he believed it then, or he hoped it, or maybe it
was easier than telling him the truth. Maybe he believed that admitting his father failed their family
would take away from the legitimacy of his feelings about mates and commitment.

He rolls onto his side and stares at the wall, following that line of yellow light that spills through
the crack in his curtains, and he remembers that night. Taeyong’s pretty thighs and the lovely lines
of his torso, the broad sweep of his shoulders, catching that golden light. He cried, and he said -
you won’t leave me - and there was so much desperation in that. He didn’t really believe it. He said
it like he was begging him, like a - promise me - went unspoken. Like a - will you? - went
unspoken. Like a - please - went unspoken.

A heavy sigh leaves his lips, and he thinks miserably of the dignity with which Taeyong carried
himself through his mother’s hospitalization and recovery. He had empathy to spare for Jaehyun,
too. He thinks of Taeyong learning how to do that at an age when Jaehyun was having
conversations with his parents about the challenges of college life - never let anyone force you to
drink when you don’t want to, don’t let your roommate walk all over you, and most ironically,
don’t forget to use a condom. That was eighteen for him.

And then he thinks of Taeyong, going to see the man who abandoned him, who forced him to grow
up too soon, who made him believe nobody stays. He knows it makes him feel like kicking down
his father’s door and setting his fucking house on fire, but he doesn’t know what Taeyong’s
feeling. Disappointment, maybe. Anxiety. Hurt. He doesn’t know, and he wants to know, but he
doesn’t want to force himself into this moment. He doesn’t know if Taeyong wants him there.

So he waits. And he clenches his jaw and stares at his wall, and he runs his hand through his hair
and stares at his ceiling, then he sits up in bed and works on his lecture material. And he waits.
Taeyong rests his head on the spotless train window and watches Seoul flit by in a blur. It’s a
beautiful city, prettier still in this sunset glow. The rhythmic rumble of the train is soothing, and he
closes his eyes and lets the sound ground him.

Even with closed eyes, he knows his mother is eyeing him, and has been for a while now. He’s not
sure he’s ready to talk, so he keeps his eyes shut tight.

There’s a sort of sear inside his chest, all tender and hot. He’s not sure what he accomplished
today. He’s not sure if it was a breakthrough or a sort of pointless suffering he inflicted on himself
for no great gain. He met his father. He cried in his living room. He didn’t eat his food. He left.

He’s thinking, incessantly, of the look on his father’s face when he said it. I got scared.

Even on the brink of sleep, his jaw goes tight when he remembers it. Of all the fucking things to
say to his son. Of all the fucking things a father could be. He was scared, and he hurt the people he
loved and who loved him for it.

He’s getting worked up again, water pooling behind closed lids, and he tries to hide it. He props
his elbow up on the window and rests his head in his palm, fingers splaying over his eyes so
nobody sees him crying all over again. The movement serves another purpose. It brings the fabric
of his sweater closer to his nose, and he presses his face into the scent that soothed him so many
times before.

It’s disappearing now, but still, he breathes it in, those last lingering notes of it. It’s a sorry
substitute for being in Jaehyun’s arms. It’s nothing like nuzzling against his chest and letting him
pet his hair. It’s nothing like him pressing a lovely little kiss to Taeyong’s cheek and putting a hot
cup of coffee in his hands and making him breakfast.

He thinks about him, kind, trusting, and patient. Thoughtful. Funny. He makes him laugh and he
pays attention to everyone and everything, and he cares about his work and he make him remember
that he’s flourishing, and feel like he’s flourishing. He makes Taeyong feel cared for, looked after,
and he might be the only person in the world he can tell when he’s scared.
A pause.

And he is scared. He got scared, too.

The lights on the bridge leave long, crooked reflections on the waters of the Gapcheon. Jaehyun
sits on a park bench on the bank and looks out at the Daejeon skyline. It’s late. The city is quiet.
The last train from Seoul pulled into Daejeon station not ten minutes ago, and Jaehyun wonders if
Taeyong was on that train.

He didn’t want to call him, because Taeyong never told him about going to see his father, and if he
doesn’t want him to know, then at least for today, he’ll pretend like he doesn’t know. He doesn’t
want to give him one more thing to worry about.

It doesn’t change the fact that he’s worried sick. It doesn’t change the fact that he felt so restless at
home that he pulled his shoes on and shrugged a jacket on over his pjs and left his apartment, only
to wander aimlessly for a bit, and then end up on a bus to Taeyong’s place. He stood there for a bit,
felt like a stalker, walked around aimlessly some more, and ended up here.

He looks at those twinkling lights. And he thinks of that day months ago, when he told Taeyong he
was willing to stay, and Taeyong told him he didn’t need him. He didn’t realize then how true
those words would ring. How close to home their wishes for each other would remain, forgiveness
for Taeyong, companionship for Jaehyun.

He’ll always forgive him for running, he thinks. For being afraid and pushing him away and
hurting him, as long as he comes back to him. As long as he’s willing to love him. As long as he’s
there by his side on Christmas, this one, and the next, and all the rest.
He’s snapped out of his thoughts by his phone buzzing on the bench, and he looks down to see
who’s calling him so late. His heart jumps into his throat. It’s Taeyong.

He answers, holds the phone to his ear, and forgets what to say for a second.

“Hey,” Taeyong says.

“I was hoping you’d call,” he manages, and he’s so unprepared, he slips up and says, “Are you
okay?”

There’s a moment’s silence, and he slaps his hand over his face and clenches his jaw, because there
goes pretending like he didn’t know about Taeyong’s father. He hopes Taeyong thinks he asked
that only because he’s calling so late.

“You - you know, don’t you? About my dad?” Taeyong says. “Haechan texted. He said he told
you.”

He sighs and scrubs that hand over his face.

“I know,” he says.

“I’m sorry,” Taeyong says wretchedly. “I, um, I didn’t mean to - It just kind of came out because it
was easier than explaining. And maybe I - maybe I -

“You don’t have to explain yourself,” he says.

There’s another chilly silence, and Jaehyun waits, his thumb picking at a crack in the wood he’s
sitting on.

“How did it go?” He asks, hesitant.

Taeyong’s voice comes in steadier, calmer than he thought he’d be when he speaks next.
“He said he got scared,” he says.“He wanted to be there for us. He wanted to be strong for us, but
he got scared, so he ran.”

“Mm,” he says.

It’s not unexpected. He thought that might be it. He wasn’t ready for a lifetime of being a caregiver
for someone so ill. He wasn’t ready for a lifetime of selflessness and service. It’s not unexpected,
but it still makes his jaw go tight against the urge to find him and beat him senseless for what he
put Taeyong through.

“You know something, Jaehyun?” Taeyong says, steady, but quiet and hesitant. “I’ve, um, I’ve
lived my entire life thinking I’m never going to be like him and like, I’m never going to hurt
anyone like that. I could never be that selfish.”

“I know you could never -

“But I am. I’m hurting you,” he says.

It knocks the words right out of his mouth and he finds himself dumbfounded. He wants to comfort
him. He wants to say he’s so lovely and kind and it’s alright that he hurt him, because he knows
now where it came from. He wants to say he blames Taeyong’s father for the hurt. He wants to say
he knows it hurt Taeyong as much as it hurt him. But he’s tongue-tied, all wrapped up in helpless
protectiveness, all tangled up in love.

“There’s what I want to be to you - there’s. I want to always have an umbrella for you. And I want
to drink coffee with you everyday before work. And I want to clean up your ugly ass cuticles. But
all I do is make you wait, and disappoint you, and get scared, and end up hurting you for it."

He’s not sure where he’s going with this. He’s not sure it’s somewhere good. All he knows is that
Taeyong called him, at the end of what was without doubt a taxing day for him. He’s taken the first
step towards him, the way he did that day when his mother was sick. The way he did when he was
scared and alone in hospital. He’s reaching out, and he’s moments from second guessing himself.

It hits Jaehyun all at once then, that if he were someone else, he could wait for them to come to
him. But not Taeyong. Taeyong lingers with outstretched arms, like a kid waiting to be picked up,
and Jaehyun won’t let him go another day without being held.
“I have something to say to you,” Jaehyun says.

“Mm.”

Jaehyun swallows thickly. He’s seen this a thousand times before - I’m just a girl, standing in front
of a guy, asking him to love her - you bewitch me - I wish I knew how to quit you - when you want
to start the rest of your life with someone, you want to start the rest of your life as soon as possible -
and I knew it, I knew it the moment I touched her. It was like coming home - except. Except? Those
are all his favorite movies.

Those are what he clung to in those years after finding out how flawed his parents’ marriage was.
The larger than life versions of love he grew up choosing to believe in, and he’s coming to the
realization that he and Taeyong aren’t that at all.

He loves him, there’s no doubting that. But Taeyong doesn’t need him to be bewitched. He needs
something else from him entirely. He needs him to take this step forward and hold on to him, he
needs him to be sure when Taeyong isn’t, he needs what was woven through the years of Jaehyun’s
parents’ marriage. He needs him to stay.

“I’ll always stay,” he says. “I’ll always stay, Taeyong, if you let me. I know you’re afraid. And I
know it’ll take time for you to trust me, but I - I realized that I never really promised you that. So
I’m making a promise. I’ll always stay.”

He swallows again. Taeyong’s very quiet, and that’s not giving him any courage, but he carries on.

“But I - if I get struck by lightning,” he says. “If I drop dead in a - in a freak beer pong accident -

“Jaehyun - what?” Taeyong says.

It makes him laugh, and wonder if maybe he should have waited until his thoughts weren’t so half-
baked before springing this on Taeyong.

“Just listen,” he says. “If you end up alone again. I know you’ll be fine, Taeyong. I’m not saying
you’re not allowed to hurt, because you’re allowed to feel however you want to feel. But you’re so
fucking brave. So fucking strong. And you know yourself. You know when you need help and you
know how to ask for it and you know how to make sure you live well. You said it before. You’ve
never needed me. You’ll never need me. I know that, and I know you do too.”

He hears how close Taeyong is to tears in the way he’s breathing, long and deep and quivering.
But he doesn’t say anything, and Jaehyun takes it to mean he wants him to keep talking.

“And I love you,” he says, finally.

He waits for any kind of response, but there is none. For a second, he thinks about how
anticlimactic it would be if Taeyong hung up, and he checks his phone to see if the call is still
going. The seconds tick by on his screen, eight minutes and thirty two seconds, thirty three, and he
sheepishly lifts the phone back to his ear. That’s when he hears Taeyong sniffle.

The sound of him beginning to cry makes him realize how close he is to tears, too. There’s a tickle
in his nose. There’s a burning lump in his throat. There’s a knot in his stomach and he knows
what’ll make it all better is sinking into Taeyong’s arms and breathing in a chestful of his sweet
scent.

“You don’t have to feel the same way right now,” he says, gently. “And you don’t have to say it. I
just want you to know that I love you. I want to be with you. I want to come home to you. I want to
make your good days better and your bad days suck less. And if you think you have to fix yourself,
and make yourself completely fucking infallible before you come to me, you’re wrong. I fell in
love with who you are, and it’s okay if you’re a little fucked up and it’s okay if you hurt me
sometimes for it. Everybody’s a little fucked up. Everybody has some baggage and I’m prepared to
carry some of yours, you know? It’ll - it’ll get lighter as we go. You’re working on it. You’ll leave
some things behind, and we’ll tread lighter as we go. That’s, um, that’s everything. I won’t leave.
And I love you. And we’ll be okay.”

He’s crying now, and Taeyong’s crying, too. He can hear his little sniffles and his deep, steadying
breaths, and he hears his voice, quiet, unsure.

“Are you home?” He says.

“Um,” he says, looking up at the shimmering water. “I’m out.”

“Out where?”
“By the, um, by the Gapcheon.”

“Where?” He says, taken aback.

“I - near where we parked that day. On Christmas.”

He hears Taeyong laugh, and he hears him walking, the rustling of movement.

“What?” He says.

“I see you,” he says.

“What?” He says again, looking around stupidly.

The river flows quiet and dark in front of him, the path stretches to either side of him, empty,
dotted with more benches and streetlights. He cranes his neck back and sees him then, looking over
the railing at the edge of the parking lot, one flight of stairs above where he is. Taeyong waves,
and he hears his laughter, through the phone and through the quiet night.

“Oh shit,” he says, grinning, getting to his feet and walking stupidly to the stairs with his phone
still glued to his ear.

“Shit?” Taeyong says.

“I mean, fuck -

“Fuck?”

He laughs, and jogs up the stairs two at a time until he’s standing one step below Taeyong. He
looks at him for a second, at his puffy-eyed, tearstained face, his runny nose, the same light purple
sweater he wore that day to dinner.
“Hey,” he says, into his phone.

It takes him a second to realize that he doesn’t need to be talking into his phone anymore, and he
looks at the screen sheepishly before slipping his phone into his pocket.

“Hey,” Taeyong says. “This is crazy.”

“I know, I just thought of last Christmas and I -

“Me too, I thought of you and I -

“Taeyong, I meant everything I said -

“I want to be with you,” Taeyong says.

There’s a beat of silence, another system lag, before Jaehyun realizes what he said. His eyebrows
shoot up and his mouth opens and closes twice before he figures out what he wants to say.

“But?” He says.

Taeyong shakes his head. And he shrugs. And he shakes his head again and he laughs, but he cries
too.

“Can’t think of anything,” he says.

This time, Jaehyun knows what he heard. This time, Jaehyun wraps his arms around Taeyong
without another moment’s hesitation. He cups his face, he kisses his forehead, his salty, wet
eyelashes and cheeks, and he holds him tight. He’s held, just as tight. His scent settles over
Jaehyun, a midsummer breeze in winter, a sunlit garden in the dead of night. He holds him, and he
sees their future, their home, their garden, tended to by both their hands.
He’ll do it for Taeyong, he thinks. He’ll build him a home that gives and gives and gives until he
remembers how to take. He’ll stay, and he’ll give, even on bad days, even through hurt.

He realizes then, that that’s what his father was trying to tell him. That’s what love is.

They come to a stop on the street outside Taeyong’s apartment. It’s utterly quiet, entirely empty at
nearly two in the morning. Nobody’s walking home from the Gapcheon at this hour except
somebody experiencing some kind of crisis.

“Goodnight,” Jaehyun says.

Jaehyun’s hand is warm in his, and he gives it a little squeeze.

“Goodnight, Jaehyun,” he says, but he doesn’t let go.

“G’night,” Jaehyun says again, but this time, he leans in and presses the sweetest kiss to his lips.

He pulls back a little bit, his nose brushing Taeyong’s, and if Taeyong had any intentions of letting
him go before that, he has none now.

“Night,” he says stupidly, but he cups Jaehyun’s face between two hands, and kisses him a little
deeper.

His lips are lovely, soft, plush against his mouth, and there’s this flutter in his belly, all butterflies,
a pleasant warmth, blooming into heat. He doesn’t want to pull away, but he should. He doesn’t
have work tomorrow but Jaehyun does, and he needs to let him go home.

He goes to pull away, but he feels Jaehyun’s hand sliding over his waist to the small of his back to
pull him closer, the other gripping the nape of his neck and pulling him closer still. He kisses him
deep and gentle, and then he feels his tongue licking into his mouth, sliding against his own, and
then he’s done for.

“You want to sleep here tonight?” He breathes.

Jaehyun pulls away the slightest bit and looks at him, half lidded eyes and lips shining with his spit
and Taeyong’s, and Taeyong’s stomach plunges. His mouth takes what he meant to say and runs
with it.

“Sleep,” he says. “With me. Sleep with me. Have sex with me.”

Jaehyun laughs, just a breathy thing on one exhale, and Taeyong does, too, but somehow none of
that heat dissipates.

He doesn’t resist when he’s pushed against the rough brick of the neighbor’s boundary wall. He
draws in a sharp little breath when his back hits it, but he curls his hands into Jaehyun’s jacket,
over his shoulders, and he pulls him flush against his body.

All he can hear is Jaehyun’s breath. All he can feel is his hot mouth pressing searing kisses to his
lips and his jaw and his neck. All he can feel is his lean body, hard everywhere, shoulders, chest,
abdomen, thighs, pressed up against him, his hands on the wall, caging him in. He presses a thigh
between Taeyong’s, and the pressure makes him reel. It makes him go weak in the knees.

“You know I want to,” Jaehyun says. “I just need to know you’re sure."

“I am. You know I am,” he breathes, and the affirmation hasn’t quite left his mouth when Jaehyun
takes him by the hand and tugs him along towards the apartment building. He laughs, and he has to
jog to keep up with Jaehyun.

They come together again in the elevator, their kisses lazy and deep. Jaehyun has him pinned
against the back wall, grabbing his thighs and hoisting him up so he’s half sitting on the handrail
and his hardening length is pressed right up against Jaehyun’s. He rolls his hips, and he kisses him
deep, and it takes them too long to realize the elevator isn’t moving.

Another little laugh when their tangled hands press the button for Taeyong’s floor. They spill
through the doors on the fourth floor, and hit another bump at his front door. He needs to key in the
passcode, but he doesn’t want to stop kissing Jaehyun.

He’s so fucking warm. So hard. And he remembers what he looks like with no clothes on. How big
he gets. He gets lightheaded and his head lolls to the side, baring his neck like an offering, and
Jaehyun presses his face to that skin, opens his mouth and lets his teeth drag over that skin like a
promise of what he could do. Like he’s telling him he wants to sink his teeth in right there. Fuck
him right there against the door.

He manages to gather his wits and key the passcode in, and the minute they’re inside, he pulls
Jaehyun’s jacket off.

Somewhere in the apartment, a door opens, and he hears Haechan’s voice calling his name
sleepily, and then a mortified screech, and the door slams shut again.

Taeyong laughs, but he doesn’t stop kissing Jaehyun, and he certainly doesn’t stop working on
getting his pants open, because all he can think of getting on his knees and seeing how much of
him would fit in his mouth.

“Think we could make it to the bedroom this time?” Jaehyun mumbles.

It’s different this time, Taeyong thinks. He’s not in heat. He’s not half mad with the need to be
pinned down and filled up and that means it’s so, so different, this time. It’s been too long since he
had sex that he remembers and he’s not too sure what to do with himself. They’ve stripped down to
their underwear and fallen into Taeyong’s bed and now they’re tangled together and kissing, and he
knows he wants more, but he’s tripping himself up trying to figure out how not to be a boring fuck.

He’s conscious of what he’s wearing, his baby blue boxer briefs. He’s conscious of the
goosebumps on his arms and his ashy knees from forgetting to moisturize in the morning. He’s
conscious of Jaehyun, too. Of his hands on his waist, of his breath on his lips in between kisses,
those heavy, lidded glances between deep, burning kisses, of the heat coming off his body.

Jaehyun shifts a little, maneuvers him onto his back, and he flushes furiously at that. His legs
spread and his length bulging through his briefs, and he’s sure there’s a wet patch from the way
he’s leaking, from his length and from his entrance. He’s sure he can see it, see what he’s doing to
him.

But Jaehyun just leans down, takes his face in his hands - in his safe, secure hold - and presses their
mouths together. He kisses him tenderly, and then he kisses him hungrily. He licks into his mouth
and makes him shiver.

He kisses down his neck, then, sucking on the skin till it purples under his mouth, down his bare
chest, ands splaying over his chest and grazing over his hardening nipples. He toys with one,
between index and thumb, and he latches his mouth around the other. It’s a gentle pressure, his
mouth warm and wet on his chest, his tongue flicking, it’s not a maddening pleasure, it’s delicate.
Slicks drips from his entrance down his cleft and he tries to close his thighs but they just clamp
around Jaehyun’s waist.

It makes Jaehyun smile. It makes him abandon his nipples and kiss down his stomach and press his
face to his hardening length and the wetness of the fabric. Taeyong keens and tries to close his legs
again but Jaehyun’s hands grip his thighs hard and part them. He kisses them then, like he’s sorry
for being rough, and he peels off his briefs.

It makes his chest heave to be lying completely bare with his legs spread like that. It makes his
head reel when Jaehyun’s lovely hands touch that hot skin. Jaehyun caresses him like that, gentle,
teasing, in a way, patient. Too patient. So lightly it hurts him to stay still and wait for more. He
toys with him, takes his time with him. Sweetly, delicately.

Taeyong’s eyes flutter shut, and he moves his hips lightly against Jaehyun’s palm - little
movements, making his stomach drop low.

The pleasure is dizzying.

“Jaehyun,” he breathes, curling his fingers around Jaehyun’s wrist.

Gently, he loosens his grip on his thigh and guides his hand down his inner thigh and between his
legs. He trails his hand down over Jaehyun’s knuckles, maneuvering his fingers to his entrance. It’s
wet against the pads of their fingers. He presses down against it gently, and his entrance flutters
and swallows Jaehyun’s finger down to the knuckle.

He props himself up on his elbows to look down at Jaehyun pumping that finger in and out of him,
and he’s met that lidded gaze, with those shining lips parting and sinking down on his length. He
has to bite down on his lip to keep from moaning too loud because fuck, Jaehyun’s mouth is hot
and wet and tight around his length. He rocks into his mouth, sliding between the flat of his tongue
and the roof of his mouth, and he feels that sort of emptiness begin to grow inside him again.

It’s like Jaehyun knows. It’s like he’s feeling what he wants, what he fucking needs, and he slides
another finger inside him. The stretch eases that ache, but it doesn’t disappear. He sucks on his tip,
tongues his slit, and Taeyong’s body tightens and his head spins.

“You’re going to make me come,” he says, breathless.

Jaehyun pulls off his length and looks up at him sweetly.

“That was the idea,” he mumbles, still fingering him open, and Taeyong wants him to so
desperately. He wants him to fuck him until he’s writhing, but he wants more, three fingers, maybe
four, because he feels so empty. He wants him to fuck him till he’s stretched as far as he can go so
he doesn’t feel that emptiness anymore, and he knows nothing will do that for him except
Jaehyun’s knot.

“Just like this? Just your fingers?” He says.

“I don’t want to hurt you,” Jaehyun says.

“The surgery?”

“Mm.”

“I’m fine,” he says. “I’m all healed up. You won’t hurt me.”

“You sure?” He asks, as sweet as ever, and Taeyong’s chest burns.

“Mhmm,” he says.

He wants him so badly. He wants him inside him so badly that it upsets him somewhat when he
slips his fingers out.

Those two fingers and the knuckles of that hand glisten, wet with his slick, when he wraps it
around his own length and strokes. He’s so swollen. He’s so fucking big already, it burns Taeyong
up.
He guides his length to Taeyong’s entrance, and his stomach flutters with anticipation when he
feels that hot skin and that hard flesh pressing against him. His rim gives, stretches slowly around
him, the slightest burn when his length forces past it.

He’s patient. He presses sweet kisses to his cheeks. His gaze rests heavy on him.

“Does it hurt?” He asks. “Should I slow down?”

Taeyong shakes his head and cups his cheeks and pulls him down for a kiss, while his body
swallows Jaehyun’s length, inch by inch. It’s all sticky sweet. It’s all burning hot. It’s a lot that he
wasn’t prepared for when he asked him to spend the night. He thought it’d be nothing, because the
last time was so easy, but it’s not nothing. It’s a lot. It’s too fucking much and not enough. It’s
pleasure and it’s joy and it’s fear and it’s comfort. His eyes sting but he blinks away his tears and
kisses Jaehyun.

He fucks him like that, on his back with his legs wrapped around Jaehyun’s waist, until it’s not
enough, and he pulls out and rolls him onto his front. That makes his body thrum, mouth parting
against his pillow, mouthing wetly against it.

Jaehyun’s thighs press against his, his hipbones against his ass. His tight, muscled torso drapes
over his back and the weight of him presses down on him, in him, all around him. It’s everything
he thought it would be. He’s everything he wanted. He fucks him exactly right.

He reaches over his shoulder and curls his hand into his soft black hair while he fucks him into the
bed, his sweat dripping off his body and onto Taeyong’s skin.

He knows what he’ll do next before he even does it, because it’s what Taeyong wants, and Jaehyun
knows what he wants. He pulls him up onto his knees and against his chest and grips his wrists
hard with one hand and his face with the other. He feels his hot breath against the shell of his ear,
and he’s breathing fast, thrusting into him just as fast and he’s starting to swell. His knot is
growing.

“Babe,” he breathes. “Can you take it?”

“Yeah,” says, just as breathless.

“Don’t push yourself,” he says, kissing the shell of his ear.

“Mm,” Taeyong says, and that’s about all he can manage because he’s stroking himself already
and his release is so fucking close.

That’s when Jaehyun squeezes his cheeks and slips his fingers into his mouth and that fucking
feeling, of being stretched and filled and held and loved, it bursts inside him and he lets out a
muffled, strangled moan. His toes curl, his back arches, his whole body goes deliciously tight and
he spills into his hand and onto his sheets, shuddering.

His chest heaves with the exertion of his orgasm and he sags into Jaehyun’s arms, his eyes
fluttering shut, teetering on the brink of passing out and so painfully overstimulated from the
minute movements Jaehyun’s knot is making inside him.

It makes him sob. It makes him cling to those arms wrapped around him, and it makes Jaehyun
hold him tighter and then he’s all filled up with wetness and warmth and he cries.

Jaehyun kisses his hair. After fucking him like that, he kisses his hair, his shoulder, rubs gentle
circles into his lower abdomen until Taeyong’s quiet sobs turn into a breath of a tired laugh.

“You’re okay, baby,” Jaehyun says. “You’re alright. I’m here. I love you.

He says it again when his knot goes down and he pulls out. And again, in the shower, and again
before he falls asleep. Each time, he’s gentle. Deliberate. Unbelievable sincere when he says I’m
here, and I love you.

That’s what he falls asleep to. Jaehyun’s hand carding through his hair, his sleepy eyes looking at
him, his quiet little reminders that he’ll still be here in the morning, and on Christmas, on his
birthday next year, and the year after that, and always.
Taeyong’s knife hits the cutting board rhythmically, a small mountain of julienned sweet potato
forming in its wake. He hums along to Yoon Hyungjoo’s The Story of Us is playing on the
speaker in his kitchen.

He adds his sweet potato into his jeon mix along with the spring onions and mushrooms he had
chopped earlier, and gives the whole thing a stir with his chopsticks. There’s a slight wiggle to his
shoulders and his butt as he moves around his kitchen. There’s a lightness to his steps that he
hasn’t felt in a long time, and humming the song comes easily.

He hovers a hand an inch above the pan to check if it’s hot enough, and then he adds his
yachaejeon mixture into it. It sizzles, and his stomach growls in anticipation of his dinner. He’s in
that kind of mood today, snacks for dinner and drinks for dessert. It might also have something to
do with the fact that it’s raining, and when it’s raining, Jaehyun likes jeon, and Jaehyun’s coming
over after dinner for work, and well, he likes Jaehyun.

The song ends, and another begins, and it takes a second for him to realize what song it is. The
guitar leads into Song Chang Sik’s voice, and he stiffens for a moment. His hand reaches out with
the intent to skip the song, but he stops short of the speaker and picks up his spatula instead to flip
his jeon. He doesn’t know why.

The song goes on, and he flips his jeon, and then he stands still for a moment. He starts to hum
along to Tobacco Shop Lady, and then the wiggle returns to his shoulders, and then to his butt, and
then his feet do a little twist and he laughs lightly.

The best part of the song comes up, and he waits for it, and when Song Chang Sik launches into
his Ah-jajajajaja he joins in, and he bursts into laughter at the end of it, puhahahaha and his jeon
comes off the heat and more batter takes its place. It sizzles, and he smiles, and he’s alright.

The rain is coming down hard when Jaehyun steps off the bus and ducks under the bus shelter. It’s
a short walk to Taeyong’s place from here, but the way it’s pouring, he’s certain he’ll be drenched
to his underwear by the time he gets there. True to form, he doesn’t have an umbrella.
He sighs, and is just about to step out into the rain again when he hears his name being called. He
looks up, and sees Taeyong’s form hunched over under his sky blue umbrella, waving at him
happily and hurrying over to the bus shelter.

He’s shocked by the intensity of affection that image conjures up inside him. Seeing Taeyong
coming to stand in front of him, umbrella in hand, makes him feel like a marshmallow stuck in a
campfire. Like he’s all butterflies. Like he’s a snow flurry. Maybe this is what new happiness feels
like, or maybe it’s love, or something as simple as feeling at home.

“Hey, I’m glad I caught you before you went out into the rain,” Taeyong says, adjusting the
umbrella to cover him, too. “Jeong Jaehyun, too cool to carry an umbrella to work.”

He laughs, and Taeyong laughs, too, and it’s such a pretty laugh. It’s such a happy laugh. It makes
him want to look at him forever. It makes him lean down and press a little kiss to his lips, slip his
hand into Taeyong’s and pull him to his side.

“Long day?” Taeyong says.

“It always is,” he replies. “But I get to see you at the end of it.”

Taeyong smiles and looks away like he thinks it’s just him being cheesy, but he means it. There’s
something to that warm, gooey feeling, that light, fluttering feeling. There’s something so
incredible about the fact that they’ve lived these separate lives, and they’ve come together like this,
and they speak from their own histories, and they act from their own experiences, but they want so
desperately to fit together. That they want so terribly to build a future together. That Taeyong
brings him an umbrella and makes him jeon on rainy days, and Jaehyun picked up two jars of that
cheesecake Taeyong likes on his way over from work. There’s some weight to that. There’s
something lovely about that.

They walk through the rain, side by side, both with one cold, wet shoulder, with the sound of rain
pattering down on their umbrella, with water in their shoes, but their hands warm where they’re
interlinked.

“Jaehyun?” Taeyong says.

“Mm?”
 “I um," he says, and then he laughs. “I love you.”

“Yeah?” He says, and he thinks he sounds calm even if his heart hammers and trips over itself,
tries to fit a lifetime of heartbeats in the moments it takes for Taeyong to speak.

“Yeah,” Taeyong says. “I love you.”

He looks at him, and he sees what their lives are going to be. Sweet and giving, and terrible,
frightened, miserable, and brave, and happy, and in love, and together. He looks at him, and he
knows he was meant for him, and he sees where he’ll stay forever.

“Love you, too,” he says.

Chapter End Notes

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