Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

The campus festival smelled like sugar and rain. Lanterns dripped light over tarps and tables, and Yunho’s stall smelled different—yeast, butter, the kind of warmth that clung to his hair and skin long after the ovens cooled.

He had grown up in the back of a bakery, kneading dough against counters that had belonged to his grandmother before him. She’d taught him how to wait for yeast to rise, how patience made bread and people softer. When she passed, the bakery fell into his hands—too big for him at first, but he kept it alive out of muscle memory and devotion.

Now, he balanced classes with baking. On nights like this, he borrowed the ovens, stacked trays into his car, and sold loaves no one else wanted to stay awake for.

People bought the pretty ones first, the round and golden. What remained near midnight was the loaf Yunho refused to discount. Ugly bread, he called it. Too lopsided for photos, too honest for shallow appetites. His grandmother would’ve said, the ones who need it will find it.

He was already planning how to eat it himself when someone stumbled to his table. Tall. Cap pulled low. Mask hiding most of his face.

“Please tell me that’s bread for sale,” the boy said, voice thin and frayed.

“Bread, yes” Yunho confirmed, tapping the tray. “The ugly kind.”

“Ugly is my type.” The boy grabbed the loaf like he’d been dared, tore into it while it was still steaming. He winced, swallowed, and went back for more.

Yunho almost smiled. “Water,” he said, passing a paper cup.

The boy tipped it back, throat rough. “I’m Mingi.”

“Yunho. Student?”

“Trainee. Was here to perform.” He rubbed his jaw under the mask. “I’ve smiled for three hours straight.”

“I stand behind ovens for eight.”

Mingi stared at the crust like it had something to say back. “I’m coming tomorrow.”

“The festival ends tonight.”

Mingi blinked, almost stricken. “Then I guess I’ll starve.”

Yunho wasn’t reckless about anything. Not when it came to coursework, or rent, or the bakery he had promised to keep breathing. But he reached for a paper bag anyway, tore the edge, and wrote his number in block letters. Sliding it across felt stranger than letting someone bite into his bread.

“If you get desperate. I reheat well.”

Mingi’s eyes went young above the mask. He held the paper bag like a backstage pass. “You—sure?”

“An artist can’t sing on an empty stomach,” Yunho said. It was both a joke and the truth.

Mingi grinned, sudden and boyish. “I’m not an artist yet.”

“Eat more slices, and we’ll see.”

He did.

Chapter Text

The bakery had its own heartbeat. Yunho had grown up with it; he could tell the time of day by the rhythm. Mornings were sharp and fast—the hiss of espresso, the chatter of office workers trying to beat the clock. Afternoons were slower, sunlight pouring in dusty streams across flour-dusted tables. Nights were quiet until they weren’t, the ovens rumbling awake like familiar friends stretching their backs.

But after midnight, the bakery was his. The hum of the fridge. The tick of the proofing box. The low groan of pipes shifting in their sleep. It was a language he understood better than the one his professors spoke in crowded lecture halls.

Yunho sat at the counter with a notebook open to his economics assignment. His handwriting trailed down the page in slanted lines, smudged at the edges where flour had clung to his wrist. He pushed a hand through his hair and sighed. Numbers didn’t rise the way dough did. They didn’t soften with patience. They just sat there, waiting for him to wrestle them into submission.

His phone buzzed once against the wood. He almost ignored it—too tired, too far gone into half-baked equations. Then he saw the message.

Unknown: …are you awake?

Yunho blinked at it. The ellipses—hesitant. Like someone knocking on a door already half open.

Yunho: always.
Yunho: you outside?

The reply came quick.

Unknown: yeah. sorry. i can leave if you’re busy—

He was already sliding the deadbolt back.

‧₊˚♪ 𝄞₊˚⊹

Mingi stood under the awning like he was trying to disappear into his hoodie. Cap low, mask high, hands shoved in his pockets. He looked taller than Yunho remembered from the festival, and younger too. There was a sharpness in the set of his shoulders, but his eyes—red-rimmed, tired—gave him away.

“I didn’t want to wake you,” Mingi said, muffled through the mask. “I was just… walking.”

“You texted,” Yunho said, stepping aside. “That counts as asking. Come in.”

Mingi hesitated on the threshold like the bakery was something he wasn’t sure he was allowed to enter. Then he slipped in, shoulders hunched, eyes darting everywhere but Yunho. He didn’t touch a thing.

Yunho hooked a thumb toward the nearest chair. “Sit.”

“I’m not hungry,” Mingi muttered automatically.

“Okay,” Yunho said mildly. He disappeared into the back and returned with a steaming mug and a plate. “Hold this anyway.”

Mingi’s fingers closed around the cup, trembling just enough that Yunho noticed. He lowered the mask and drank like he’d forgotten how. His throat worked around the swallow. When he set it down, his hands lingered around the warmth.

Yunho leaned on the counter, watching him. “Bad day or bad week?”

Mingi gave a broken laugh. “Yes.”

“Sorry. That was a choice question.”

Mingi picked at the napkin edge. “…Evaluations today. Again. They told me to be bigger and smaller at the same time. I don’t know how to do that.”

“Bigger and smaller,” Yunho echoed.

“Like—‘don’t be awkward, but don’t be loud. Relax, but keep the lines sharp. Your voice is warmer when you’re tired, but don’t sound tired.’” He looked up finally, eyes raw. “I’m trying. It feels like chewing glass politely.”

Yunho’s mouth twitched, not into a smile but into recognition. “Chewing glass is a terrible diet.”

“They said it’s the only option,” Mingi muttered.

Yunho pushed the plate closer. “Try this one instead.”

Mingi stared at the thick slice of bread, steam rising in faint curls. “I said I wasn’t hungry.”

“Okay,” Yunho said. “Then don’t eat it.”

Mingi lasted about thirty seconds before he took a bite. His shoulders dropped a fraction. He chewed like it was the first thing all day that didn’t hurt to swallow. By the second bite, he stopped pretending. By the third, he was already slower, deliberate, like he wanted to stretch it out.

“You’re in school?” he asked between mouthfuls.

“Half of me is,” Yunho answered. “The other half runs this place.”

Mingi’s eyes flickered around the room again, softer now. “How old were you when—”

“Thirteen when I burned my wrist for the first time,” Yunho interrupted gently. “Sixteen when I realized the ovens felt more like home than anywhere else. Eighteen when it all became mine.”

Mingi whistled low. “That’s… a lot.”

“It is,” Yunho admitted. “But it’s simple. Bread is simple. You do the steps, wait the right time. Don’t panic when it looks dead. Most dough only looks dead right before it rises.”

Mingi’s chewing slowed. His throat worked once. “…Is that true for people too?”

“Most days,” Yunho said. He pushed the mug back into Mingi’s hands. “Not all. But most.”

Mingi blinked hard. The silence stretched, not heavy, just there. He sat back in the chair for the first time, mask tugged low, shoulders unclenching a little.

He stayed until the tea was gone, until Yunho had filled three lines of his assignment with numbers that didn’t mean much. When Mingi finally stood, it was with reluctance in the angle of his feet.

“Thank you,” he said quietly. “I didn’t know where else to go.”

Yunho slid the bolt back for him. “Now you know one place.”

‧₊˚♪ 𝄞₊˚⊹

After that, Mingi came often.

Not every night, but often enough that Yunho found himself leaving an extra mug by the kettle without thinking. Sometimes Mingi slumped at the counter and ate silently while Yunho worked through notes. Sometimes he was talkative, telling stories about training schedules, about trainers who told him he wasn’t enough and then didn’t explain what enough meant. Sometimes he fell asleep mid-sentence, mask slipping down, mouth parted. Yunho would drape his jacket over him and keep kneading in silence.

And Yunho—he talked more than he expected too. About professors who side-eyed his flour-dusted notes. About classmates who thought he was “quirky” for refusing hangouts. About how mornings came too early, how his grandmother used to say patience was the most expensive ingredient.

“You sound like her,” Mingi said once, blinking through sleep.

“Sound like who?”

“Your grandmother.” His words slurred. “You talk about patience like it’s real. Like it can… fix things.”

Yunho swallowed. “Sometimes it can.”

Mingi’s head lolled onto his arm. He didn’t answer.

‧₊˚♪ 𝄞₊˚⊹

By the third week, Yunho was noticing things he shouldn’t.

The way Mingi rubbed at his temples when his head ached from practice. The way his laugh was different when he forgot himself—loud, startling, real. The way he lingered by the door each night like he was reluctant to step back into a world that demanded so much.

Don’t get used to this, Yunho warned himself. He’s a trainee. His life is moving faster than yours. You can’t hold on to something like that.

But when Mingi washed his mug in the sink one night before leaving, shoulders bent in concentration, Yunho had to look away. He hadn’t asked him to. He didn’t have to. It was such a small gesture, but Yunho felt it echo somewhere deeper than it should.

‧₊˚♪ 𝄞₊˚⊹

Mingi was noticing things too.

How Yunho never flinched when he was quiet. How he never asked him to smile. How the bakery smelled like home even though it wasn’t his. How Yunho treated him like he wasn’t fragile glass or raw clay to be shaped, just… a boy sitting at a counter at midnight.

Don’t get used to this, Mingi told himself. You’re supposed to be strong on your own. You don’t get to lean on someone who owes you nothing.

But when Yunho slid a slice of bread across the counter without looking up, like it was the most natural thing in the world, Mingi’s chest ached in a way he didn’t know how to name.

‧₊˚♪ 𝄞₊˚⊹

By the end of that month, they had a rhythm. Yunho measured flour. Mingi stole bites of whatever was cooling. Yunho complained about textbooks. Mingi muttered about choreography. They shared silences without filling them. They shared exhaustion like it was a secret no one else was allowed to know.

And slowly, without either of them deciding, the bakery after midnight became something more than a room with walls and ovens. It became a place where they could both stop pretending. A fragile, hesitant sanctuary.

When Mingi left one night, Yunho stood in the doorway long after he disappeared into the street. He thought of the way Mingi had laughed at something dumb he’d said, too loud for the empty shop. He thought of how natural it had felt, like the laugh had been waiting here all along.

Upstairs, Yunho collapsed into bed with flour still clinging to his hair. The sound of that laugh was enough to carry him into sleep.

And across the city, in a dorm room too quiet for its own good, Mingi lay awake staring at the ceiling. The smell of warm bread clung to his clothes. He closed his eyes and thought, This is what safe feels like. He didn’t know when he’d stopped associating safety with four walls and started associating it with a boy who never asked him to perform.

He drifted off before he could answer.

‧₊˚♪ 𝄞₊˚⊹

By the end of November, Yunho had memorized the sound of the back door creaking open. It startled him the first few times, breaking the quiet hum of ovens and the steady rhythm of kneading. Now it barely made him flinch.

Mingi slipped in like he belonged there—hood up, mask tugged low, posture collapsing as soon as the lock clicked behind him. He didn’t need to ask anymore. Yunho always had something waiting.

Tonight, it was a plate of rolls, butter melting down the sides.

Mingi tore into one with a sigh, half-hungry, half-exhausted. “You ever think bread is underrated?”

“Every day,” Yunho said. He leaned against the counter, wiping his flour-dusted hands on a towel. “People take it for granted. Eat it fast. Forget what it takes to make it.”

Mingi chewed slowly, watching him. “Kinda like trainees.”

The words hung between them, sharper than either expected.

Yunho tilted his head. “That bad today?”

“They said I was stiff. Then they said I was lazy.” His laugh was hollow. “I can’t be both, right?”

“You can’t,” Yunho agreed. “Maybe they just don’t know what they’re looking for.”

Mingi stared down at the half-eaten roll, shoulders tight. “I believe them more than I believe myself, most days.”

Something twisted in Yunho’s chest. He wanted to argue, to tell him all the reasons they were wrong. But instead, he simply said, “Then maybe you need someone else to believe you for a while.”

Mingi blinked at him, eyes wide in a way Yunho rarely saw. “…You?”

“I can try,” Yunho said. His tone was matter-of-fact, but his hands had curled tight around the towel.

For a moment Mingi didn’t answer. Then he reached for another roll, quieter this time. “…That’s dangerous.”

“Why?”

“Because I’ll start depending on it.”

Yunho met his gaze steadily. “Then depend.”

The silence that followed wasn’t heavy. It was steady, like a loaf left to rise.

‧₊˚♪ 𝄞₊˚⊹

A few nights later, rain drove most people off the streets. Mingi arrived soaked through, hood dripping, sneakers squeaking against the floor.

“You’re a mess,” Yunho said, already reaching for a towel.

“You sound like my mom,” Mingi muttered, but let Yunho press the towel into his hands.

He scrubbed at his hair until it stuck out in uneven angles, then sniffed the air. “…Cinnamon?”

“Limited edition,” Yunho said. “Don’t expect it every night.”

“Too late. I’m spoiled now.”

Yunho rolled his eyes, but warmth tugged at the corner of his mouth. He set a steaming mug on the counter. “Drink before you collapse.”

Mingi cupped it gratefully, steam fogging his glasses. “You know,” he said slowly, “if I didn’t come here, I think I’d forget I was a person.”

Yunho froze, towel dangling from his hand. “…What do you mean?”

Mingi stared into the mug. “At the company, I’m just—voice, height, image. A piece they can shape however they want. Useful, or useless. Nothing in between.”

“And here?” Yunho asked.

Mingi’s smile was small, tired. “Here I’m just… me. No one’s watching.”

The words carved something raw and quiet into the room. Yunho swallowed, his own exhaustion momentarily forgotten.

“I like you better than useful or useless,” he said softly.

Mingi’s laugh cracked in the middle. He covered his face with one hand. “Stop saying things like that.”

“Why?”

“Because I’ll believe you.”

Yunho’s voice was gentle. “Good.”

‧₊˚♪ 𝄞₊˚⊹

The nights blurred. Sometimes Mingi came in buzzing with leftover energy, tossing out jokes until Yunho rolled his eyes. Sometimes he was silent, barely eating, too tired to lift his head. On those nights, Yunho didn’t push. He worked in the background, the steady scrape of dough on the counter filling the space until Mingi eventually dozed off.

One night, his head dropped onto the counter mid-sentence. Yunho sighed, but the corners of his mouth betrayed him. He draped his jacket over Mingi’s shoulders, careful not to wake him.

As he turned away, Mingi mumbled something half-asleep. Yunho paused, leaning closer.

“…Don’t go.”

The words were slurred, barely audible, but they rooted Yunho to the spot. For a moment he just stood there, jacket in his hands, staring at the boy who didn’t even know what he’d said.

Finally, Yunho whispered, “I won’t.”

And he meant it more than he should have.

‧₊˚♪ 𝄞₊˚⊹

Outside, life didn’t pause. Yunho dragged himself through lectures, scribbled notes with flour-stained fingers, dodged questions from classmates about why he never joined outings. His professors never knew he was running a bakery in the hours before dawn.

Mingi stumbled through practices, smiled for evaluation videos, collapsed in dorm beds that never felt like home. His fellow trainees never knew that between exhaustion and fear, he had a corner of the city where someone looked at him like he mattered.

But inside the bakery, time bent differently. The air always carried yeast and sugar. The counter always had crumbs waiting. And the two of them, without naming it, built a rhythm that belonged only to them.

Yunho told himself not to get used to it. Mingi told himself not to hope for more.

But the truth grew anyway—quiet, steady, patient. Like dough under a cloth, waiting.

Each in their separate beds, they whispered the same thought neither dared to share:

I don’t want this to stop.

Chapter Text

The announcement came on a Tuesday morning, which felt unfair. Tuesdays already asked too much of people.

Yunho found out through the headline that was clean and inevitable: New Idols to Debut Under KQ Ent. —Confirmed lineup. The press photo was precise: Mingi in black and white looking stoic as is expected of a newly debuting idol rapper.  

Yunho put the phone down and went back to work. Flour, water, salt, yeast—four things that made sense if you treated them right. He told himself this didn’t change anything. He told himself it changed everything.

By afternoon his phone lit with a message.

Mingi: did you see it?
Yunho: I did.
Mingi: i’m terrified
Yunho: Good. You care.
Mingi: and i’m happy
Yunho: Good. You earned it.
 (pause)
Mingi: Do you… still want me to come by? it’ll be harder now.
Yunho: I want you to live. If that includes bread sometimes, I’ll leave the back door open.
Mingi: you’re too kind
Yunho: I’m practical. Stars still need dinner.

There wasn’t time for a visit that night, or the next. The city swallowed him. Schedules multiplied like a trick of light. The bakery door didn’t creak at 1 a.m., and when the proofing box ticked, the sound felt louder in the empty shop.

They learned a different rhythm.

Calls from vans, from stairwells, from hallways where Mingi whispered like he was hiding in plain sight.

“Three interviews today,” he said once, voice thin. “I forgot my own birthday in one of them.”

“You don’t like cake,” Yunho said, pouring batter into a pan. “Tell them your favourite is bread.”

“They’ll think it’s a bit.”

“Everything you say is a bit if they decide it is.”

Mingi laughed quietly. “You always sound like you’ve lived three lives already.”

“I’ve lived one long morning,” Yunho said. “How are your knees?”

“Loud,” Mingi admitted. “But I can still jump.” A pause. “Do you miss me?”

Yunho didn’t look at the phone when he answered. “I miss what you do to the quiet.”

Mingi didn’t speak for a few seconds. When he did, his voice had shifted into that soft place Yunho only ever heard after midnight. “I miss the way you never told me what to be.”

“Don’t get used to that,” Yunho said, half-smiling into the batter. “I tell dough what to be all day.”

“Dough’s not a person.”

“Don’t tell it that,” Yunho murmured. “It’ll stop rising.”

He heard Mingi exhale, small and grateful. “I’m at the studio,” he said reluctantly. “Manager’s waving. Send me a crumb if you can.”

“I’ll send you a loaf,” Yunho said, and hung up first, for both their sakes.

‧₊˚♪ 𝄞₊˚⊹

The bakery too changed under the weight of new decisions. Yunho finished a group of finals with sleep in his eyes and flour under his nails. He stood outside a classroom where everyone was arguing about internships and realized suddenly that he did not want a desk. He wanted ovens. He did not want a city that knew him as a child. He wanted a street he hadn’t learned by heart, a window that would change the way the afternoon light fell on cooling racks.

He went home and opened the notebook that held lists of birthday orders and weekly totals and turned to a blank page. He wrote lease ends in June and underlined it twice. He wrote new city and circled it because the word felt dangerous and true. He wrote can I afford it? and then, because his grandmother had taught him that sometimes you answered fear with math, he wrote numbers until the page was less frightening.

When he told Mingi, it was after midnight again, the call coming from somewhere that sounded like a stairwell.

“You’re moving?” Mingi asked, startled.

“After graduation,” Yunho said. “If I can find a space that doesn’t collapse in the first rain.”

“Why?”

“Because I’ve been kneading in the same corner since I was thirteen,” Yunho said. “Because I want to see if bread rises differently when the wind has a new name.”

“That’s poetic,” Mingi murmured.

“It’s practical,” Yunho said. “I need a better oven.”

Silence. Then: “Is it selfish that I don’t want you further away?”

“You don’t come by now,” Yunho said lightly.

“I come by,” Mingi insisted. “In my head.”

Yunho’s mouth shifted. “I’ll leave the back door unlocked there too.”

Mingi laughed, breathless. “You can’t keep saying things like that.”

“Why not?”

“Because I’ll believe you,” Mingi said, just above a whisper.

“Good,” Yunho replied. “Believe me.”

The line went quiet. Yunho could hear footsteps down the hall on Mingi’s side and the tick of the proofing box on his. They were both in rooms that had claimed them, both making themselves small so the rooms would allow it. He pressed the phone to his ear and listened until Mingi said, “I have to go,” in the voice that meant he would have stayed.

‧₊˚♪ 𝄞₊˚⊹

Graduation didn’t feel like a victory. It felt like waking up after a long nap and realizing the sun had already moved. Yunho wore the robe, took the photos, accepted the congratulations in the language of pomp and circumstance, and then went back to the bakery to sweep the floor.

When he locked the door that night, he pressed his forehead to the glass a moment and let himself imagine a different window. A bigger table. A room where he could host more than he could feed. He wanted a place where people would come and sit and talk until the air changed temperature from all the quiet heat of living. He wanted, he realized, a place where Mingi could walk in without ducking.

His phone buzzed.

Mingi: saw the photos. you looked bored.
Yunho: I looked dignified.
Mingi: that too. i’m proud of you.
Yunho: Eat something.
Mingi: are you my mom again?
Yunho: Your career is trying to make you forget to be human. I’m here to annoy you into remembering.
 (pause)
Mingi: i… needed to hear that. i always do, i guess.

A second message landed, then disappeared before Yunho could open it, replaced with a new one:

Mingi: sorry. too much.
Yunho: Send the too much.
 (long pause)
Mingi: sometimes i want to stay on the phone even when we’re both quiet. is that weird?
Yunho: It’s the only normal thing you’ve said all week.

This time Mingi didn’t retreat.

Mingi: stay? even if i fall asleep?
Yunho: I’ll hang up when you start snoring.
Mingi: i don’t snore
Yunho: Sure.
Mingi: …thank you.

Yunho set the phone beside his pillow and lay staring at the ceiling as the breaths on the other end went slow and even. He listened to a room he’d never see and to a boy he was not allowed to claim. He fell asleep to the sound and woke three hours later with the line dead and a text waiting:

Mingi: good morning. didn’t snore.
Yunho: Liar.
Mingi: bakery tonight?
Yunho: Back door open. Don’t trip the mop bucket.
 Mingi: i’ll try my best.

He came; he left; he didn’t stay. Yunho pretended it was enough. Sometimes, late, when he stood under the small light in the kitchen and stared at the wall where the shadows pooled, he felt like he was waiting for the proofing box to tick but hearing a heartbeat instead.

‧₊˚♪ 𝄞₊˚⊹

The space came by accident—a “for lease” sign taped crooked in the window of a corner unit three districts away, on a street that felt like a it could be home. The windows were too big; the floor was scarred; the ceiling was higher than his worry. The back room smelled like old books and stubborn hope.

Yunho stood in the middle of it and pictured a counter, a long table against the window, a row of stools for kids who would come by with coins and unreasonable requests. He pictured a place where mornings would spill across the floor and everything would smell like butter and promise. He pictured, wildly, a door that would open without creaking when Mingi pushed it, cap tugged low and a grin already forming because the air hit him like a memory.

“Do you want it?” the landlord asked, bored and kind in the way of men who had seen too many people want too many things.

“Yes,” Yunho said, before he could talk himself out of it.

That night he sat cross-legged on the bakery floor with papers spread out like a meal and called the one person he wanted to tell first and least.

“I found a space,” he said, without preamble.

“Where?” Mingi’s voice came filtered through something metallic; he was in a hallway again.

“Three districts over. Corner lot. Big windows.”

“Can you afford it?”

“I can make it work,” Yunho said.

“That means you can’t.”

“It means I will.”

Mingi laughed softly. “You sound like me.”

“Maybe we’re both idiots.”

“Maybe,” Mingi said. Then, more carefully: “Will you… be lonely there?”

“I’m always lonely for a week in every place,” Yunho said. “Then the ovens start talking and I’m fine.”

“Talk to me too,” Mingi said impulsively.

Yunho hesitated, caught between gratitude and the fear of expecting too much. “If you’re not asleep.”

“I never am,” Mingi said ruefully. “Tell me the colour of the walls when you paint them. Send me a picture of the first loaf that comes out weird. Tell me if the window squeaks when it rains.”

Yunho exhaled, tiredly happy. “Okay.”

“Do you need help moving?” Mingi asked, ridiculous, with a schedule that would crush a less stubborn person.

“I need you to eat lunch before three,” Yunho said. “That’s more useful.”

“Bossy,” Mingi teased. Then, soft, the way he had spoken in the bakery once, eyes heavy and unguarded: “I’m proud of you.”

“Work well,” Yunho said, because if he said anything else it would be a confession. “I’ll save you the corner seat.”

“What corner seat?”

“The one by the window,” Yunho murmured, already seeing it. “With the best view.”

Mingi didn’t answer for a long moment. When he did, his voice sounded like a smile sounded when you couldn’t see it. “Then leave it open for me.”

‧₊˚♪ 𝄞₊˚⊹

The weeks that followed were a montage neither of them had time to watch: contracts, paint, permits, ovens, deliveries, schedules, cameras, choreography, measurements, rehearsals. Yunho learned the names of the new street vendors and which hardware store would cut a board to length without an argument. Mingi learned the new route from stage to stage, which cameraman liked him and which microphone failed him, how to say something that sounded humble when it needed to and honest when it could.

They called each other from unreasonable places. Mingi whispered from under a costume rack while someone pinned fabric into shapes around him.

“Don’t laugh,” he warned. “It’s a crop top.”

“I’m not laughing,” Yunho said gravely. “I’m supportive.”

“You’re laughing,” Mingi accused.

“I’m smiling,” Yunho corrected. “There’s a difference.”

“What are you doing?”

“Watching paint dry. Literally.”

“Riveting,” Mingi said.

“More dignified than a crop top.”

“I hate you,” Mingi said, cheerful now. “Save me a roll.”

“I’ll save you two.”

“I’ll hold you to that.”

“You always do.”

Other nights, it was Yunho calling, breathless at 2 a.m., hands covered in a thin film of oil.

“The oven igniter is a diva,” he reported. “It refuses to spark unless I apologize.”

“Try a ballad,” Mingi suggested.

“I don’t sing.”

“You hum.”

“Fine. I hum.”

Mingi hummed first, on the other end, soft and off-key, and Yunho leaned his head against the cool steel and let himself laugh without bracing for the echo.

There were days when they didn’t speak, not because they were angry but because exhaustion built a wall that neither could climb. When those days ended, the first thing Mingi always said was, “Are you there?” and Yunho always answered, “Yes,” as if it were a vow rather than a fact.

‧₊˚♪ 𝄞₊˚⊹

The bakery closed its old door for the last time in a thin, pale dawn. Yunho stood with his palm flat against the glass and said goodbye the way his grandmother had taught him—quiet and grateful, without bargaining for memory. He loaded the mixer into a borrowed truck, tied down the racks, folded the sign like something tender, and drove toward the new street with the radio off so he could hear the rattles and plan which ones he could fix.

He sent a photo of the empty space before he took the first box in. Bare walls, bright windows, floor scuffed raw, promise sitting everywhere like sunlight.

Yunho: Home (almost).
Mingi: ♡♡♡
Mingi: send me another when the first loaf burns a little
Yunho: I don’t burn loaves
Mingi: you’re allowed to lie to me once a month
Yunho: We’ll spend it on something better
Mingi: like what?
Yunho: We’ll find out.

He painted the walls a warm white that felt like morning even at night. He dragged the counter to the right place and then back because the right place moved when the light did. He set the oven like an altar and left room for a table by the window. He slept on the floor the first night with his hoodie for a pillow and woke to sounds the building made when it remembered it could hold people again.

On opening day, he texted one sentence and a photo of his hand on the handle.

Yunho: I’m turning the sign.

The call came in immediately from a hallway buzzing with noise.

“Wait,” Mingi said, breathless. “Wait—put me on speaker. I want to hear the bell.”

Yunho laughed, surprised, and tilted the phone toward the door. He flipped the sign. The bell chimed, ordinary and triumphant.

“Perfect,” Mingi said, softer than the static. “We did it.”

“We did nothing,” Yunho said. “You’re in another city.”

“I’m in your pocket,” Mingi said, like a boy telling a secret. “It counts.”

Yunho leaned his shoulder on the frame and listened to the sound of distant footsteps through Mingi’s mic, the backstage scramble of someone important to many people and necessary to him. He didn’t say I wish you were here. He said, “Eat before soundcheck.”

“Yes, mom.”

“And stretch your knees.”

“Yes, grandma.”

“And—”

“And breathe,” Mingi finished, fond. “I remember.”

“Good.”

A voice offscreen called Mingi’s name, urgent and clipped.

“I have to go,” he said. “Send me a picture when that table fills.”

“It will,” Yunho said.

“It will,” Mingi echoed, as if saying it together made it true.

The line went dead. The bell chimed again. The first customer stepped in, hair damp from the drizzle, drawn by the smell that had always been Yunho’s favourite way of saying hello. He smiled, served, counted change, and thought of a boy on a stage lifting a mic and turning toward light.

Between ovens and stages, they kept a thread. It wasn’t large. It was not dramatic. It was not proof for anyone else. It was a call, a text, a picture of a window and a table and a roll saved under a napkin with a name that never got written on it.

At night, when the new city slept in its unfamiliar way, Yunho stood in the doorway and looked at the chair by the window, already a little worn from customers who came to stay longer than they planned. He touched the back of it and imagined a cap, a low laugh, a hand waving hello without asking permission to exist.

He turned off the light, locked the door, and carried home the quiet the way he always had.

Somewhere across town, under hot lights, a beat dropped. A crowd roared. A boy breathed in, breathed out, and sang like someone who had learned to be loud and okay at the same time.

Between them, the thread held.

Chapter Text

The new bakery took the light differently.

In the old shop, morning sun fell from the side—thin strips across the counter, a rectangle on the floor for a cat to claim. Here, the light came forward, steady through two tall windows that made the place look like it was always in the middle of a beginning. Yunho liked it more than he expected. The first week, he moved the tables three times a day, as if the room and he were learning each other’s habits. By the second, he had stopped apologizing to the oven when it complained and started patting it like an old dog.

Customers learnt him fast. The woman from the corner plant shop who asked for a loaf with “a good crust and a golden soul.” The delivery guy who always left with a roll tucked in his pocket “by accident.” The university student who studied under the big window with her headphones on, returning every Saturday as if the chair charged her phone.

He saved that same window seat each morning—wiped it first, without thinking angled the chair to look outward. When people asked if it was reserved, he’d nod. “Yes, for someone important.” He said it with a straight face so they would laugh.

They always did. But the chair stayed empty more days than it didn’t.

At night, when he flipped the sign and the bell chimed in the low room, he sent a photo of the chair anyway.

Yunho: Still empty. You’re late.
Mingi: (photo of his shoes in a practice room, tape on the floor like borders; sweat on the laces)
Mingi: counting steps. thinking about that chair.
Yunho: Count slower. Come sit first.
Mingi: i’ll try. manager says we live here now.
Yunho: Then who’ll eat the plate I just set?
Mingi: don’t tempt me. i’ll come running.

The group debuted and everything multiplied. Photos, interviews, stage clips—every day a different backdrop and the same seven boys remade into sharper angles. Mingi learned to turn toward cameras like they were gravity. Yunho learned to scroll past comments that used his friend’s name like a weather report and not an actual person. He didn’t love the part of himself that bristled when they got the softness wrong.

Calls came from vans with weak reception and from hallways that sounded like metal and waiting. When time allowed, Mingi spoke with the urgency of someone borrowing minutes from the day.

“Did you eat?” Yunho would ask.

“Define eat,” Mingi would mutter.

“Chewing while moving doesn’t count.”

“Then I ate air.”

“Eat something else.”

Sometimes it was quiet. Yunho could hear water running in a studio bathroom while Mingi washed his face between takes.

“I look tired,” he said flatly.

“You are tired,” Yunho said. “There’s no moral in it. It’s just true.”

“Say something nice before I go back.”

“You’re steady,” Yunho said. “Even when they ask you to be five people, you stay this one.”

Yunho imagined him closing his eyes, absorbing the words like steam. He never asked, Is it enough? He never said, I’m scared for you. He held both truths without pressing them into the conversation.

He sent photos of ridiculous bakery disasters on purpose—cinnamon knots that came out looking like exhausted commas; a loaf with a mouth like it wanted to speak. Mingi sent photos of smudged setlists and his own wrist with tape marked CUE 7. Sometimes the exchange was just emojis—bread, sparkles, a phone on low battery, a heart. Some days, that was all they had.

By the time autumn pressed its forehead to the city, the bakery had a name people used like a direction. I’ll meet you at L’amour. The new oven learned the edge of his patience and stopped staging small rebellions. The stool by the counter placed where it would have developed a permanent scuff where Mingi’s shoe would have hit if he were here at midnight, pretending to sit while really falling asleep.

He didn’t come.

He tried. Twice, schedule disasters turned him around before he reached the street. Once, a van stopped two blocks away while a manager answered a call, and he sent a picture of the crosswalk and wrote: I can smell sugar. The van pulled away before he could see the door. He texted Next time, and then a string of apologies he didn’t owe.

Yunho wrote back: You’re never late, don’t worry. 

‧₊˚♪ 𝄞₊˚⊹

The visit happened on a day that had been ferried between five calendars and still almost broke. Mingi should have gone home. He should have slept or collapsed at the dorm and been grateful for the few adjacent hours with no meetings or practice stapled to them. Instead, he took a cap from the bottom of a pile, tugged it low, and told the driver he’d meet up later.

“You shouldn’t—” the manager started, but it was a weak protest. Mingi had worked without complaint for twelve hours and smiled where the reporters wanted him to. He was allowed to be selfish for once.

The street felt like breath. The air felt like a hand on his back. He turned the last corner and saw it—the frame of glass, the wooden door, the chalkboard with TODAY: love straight from the oven. He laughed, a sound that cracked like he did when he was too tired to perform even for himself.

He pushed. The bell didn’t chime. Yunho’s head lifted from the sink.

Mingi saw it, the way surprise ran across his face and then got out of the way of joy. Yunho didn’t rush him. He just leaned on the counter with one hand and said, like he’d been practicing it, “You found it.”

“You left your back door unlocked, again,” Mingi said, stepping in like the threshold had always been shallow. He pushed his hood back and wiped sweat off his neck with his sleeve. “I didn’t want to text in case you had a mop threat going on.”

“Only when you’re around,” Yunho said. “You have a talent for tripping over buckets.”

“I stepped into one bucket,” Mingi argued, and already his voice had relaxed into the pitch that belonged to this room. He slid onto the stool by the counter, eyes moving everywhere at once. “It’s different.”

“Windows,” Yunho said, following his gaze. “New oven. A table that doesn’t wobble.”

“It’s—” Mingi searched for a word and picked the smallest one because it fit best. “Nice. Feels like you.”

Yunho’s ears turned pink, just at the tips. He picked up a towel like he needed his hands to be doing something. “You look like a person who missed lunch and two snacks.”

“I ate protein powder, and chicken breast juice” Mingi said, grimacing. “Does that count?”

“No.” Yunho turned, reached, lifted. A plate appeared. A knife too. His movements were as steady as they had always been: one thing, then the next, no drama. “Sit properly.”

“I am,” Mingi lied, already tearing into the warm roll like patience had its limits. The first breath of steam hit him in the face and he closed his eyes because he couldn’t do anything else. He chewed. The room shifted.

“I forgot,” he murmured. “What it’s like to eat food someone made on purpose.”

“That’s depressing,” Yunho said mildly. “And accurate.”

“Don’t make me cry into your bread,” Mingi warned.

“It could handle it,” Yunho said. “Sturdy crumb.”

Mingi laughed, awake enough now to find it funny. He looked around as he ate—at the small low shelf with three storybooks on it even though Yunho didn’t have kids; at the jar of mismatched spoons; at the plant that had given up on keeping its leaves but was trying again anyway. “It’s home.”

Yunho didn’t flinch at the word. “It’s work,” he said. Then, softer: “It’s both.”

Their eyes snagged. Yunho looked away first, toward the windows. Outside, the sky was the particular pale of evening mid-week—soft and already forgetting the day.

“Help me close?” he asked, casual as a hand offered in a crowd.

Mingi’s grin was immediate. “Boss me around.”

“You’re untrainable,” Yunho said, but he handed him a clean towel anyway. “Tables first.”

“Yes, chef.”

“Don’t call me that.”

“Yes, pastry chef.”

“Better.”

They moved around each other with the kind of ease you don’t earn quickly. Mingi wiped tables like he’d been here every night, like he had muscle memory stored in the walls. Yunho stacked chairs and checked oven knobs twice. Mingi dragged the trash bag out and tied it in one motion, flexing hands that had learned choreography for hands, not for this, and yet they fit this too.

“Where does this go?” Mingi asked, gesturing at a bin of clean utensils.

“Third shelf,” Yunho said, and watched, against his will, the way Mingi moved when he wasn’t being watched by anyone else—extra height like an inconvenience he’d learned to be gentle with; shoulders young under a hoodie that belonged to everyone and no one; a mouth that rested in an almost-smile when it wasn’t required to be anything else.

“You’re staring,” Mingi called over his shoulder, amused.

“You’re in the way,” Yunho lied.

“So move me.”

“Impossible.”

“Stubborn,” Mingi accused, but he stepped to the side anyway, as if obeying had always been his favourite way to argue.

It was ridiculous how domestic it felt. How easy. The sink ran. The floor dried in strips. The bell stayed quiet. For half an hour they lived a life that would have made no sense on paper and made all the sense in practice.

The last thing was the sign. Yunho turned off one row of lights and left the soft ones on. The room looked like a held breath. He stood with his palm on the glass and felt the way the cool pressed against the heat of his skin.

Mingi came to stand beside him. “It’s prettier at night,” he said. “You always loved that part.”

“I like that the room gets smaller,” Yunho said. “Like it fits me better.”

“I like that it fits me at all,” Mingi answered, too quietly for a joke.

Yunho looked at him. Mingi looked back.

There it was—the thing that had been gathering weight in corners, under chairs, between sentences. Yunho could feel it, the shape of it, dangerous and simple. He could have walked away. He could have asked if he was tired. He could have said the exact thing that would keep them exactly where they were.

He didn’t move.

“Come sit,” he said instead, and led the way to the window seat that had been waiting since several mornings.

They sat side by side like kids who had run too fast to get here and needed to remember breathing. The street was mostly empty, one runner passing, a couple splitting a low conversation between them as if they were afraid to waste words tonight.

Mingi pushed his cap back so his hair could fail at standing up. He rested his head against the window frame and stared at the bakery from the outside in. Yunho watched him in the reflection and was unprepared for the ache that rose in his chest—something like grief and relief meeting each other.

“This is stupid,” Mingi said suddenly.

“What is?” Yunho asked.

“The way this makes everything else feel loud.” He gestured at the counter, the oven, the plant that had almost given up. His fingers trembled, only a little. “The way I miss this when I’m on stage. The way—” He broke off, shook his head, and laughed at himself. “I sound ungrateful.”

“You sound human,” Yunho said. “Stages are loud. This is quiet. People need both.”

Mingi considered that, then decided to accept it, the way he always did when Yunho refused to explain kindness like a theory.

They didn’t talk for a few minutes.

When Mingi spoke again, his voice had shifted into the register Yunho associated with after midnight, honesty, and sleep.

“Do you know what I think about on stage?”

Yunho smiled, because he had prepared an answer for that question every time he’d considered it in secret. “Your lyrics, I hope.”

Mingi shook his head. He was looking at Yunho’s hands where they rested on his knees, at the flour ground into the lines even at the end of the day. “I think about this place first.”

“Because you’re hungry,” Yunho tried, light.

“Because it’s the only time I know I’ll breathe afterward,” Mingi said, not light at all. He swallowed. “Because every day I’m required to be five versions of myself, and the only one I recognize is the one who walks through your door and stops being careful.”

Yunho’s mouth opened. Nothing came out. He felt the room lean toward them both. He heard his own heartbeat in the space between the fridge and the wall.

“This is going to sound like a lyric,” Mingi went on, almost apologizing for it. “And I hate that. I don’t want it to sound like a line. It’s not. I’ve been trying not to think it because if I think it, I’ll have to say it. And if I say it, I’ll—”

“—have to mean it,” Yunho finished, not sure whether he was saving him or pushing him.

Mingi nodded. He turned his head and finally looked at Yunho fully. His eyes were tired in the way that meant he was past pretending. “I think I—”

The bell over the door rattled once in the draft from a bus passing; the room remembered it was a room.

Yunho’s hand flexed on his knee. “Mingi,” he said gently, “you don’t owe me anything.”

“That’s why I want to say it here,” Mingi said. The smile that came wasn’t stage-worthy. It made him pretty in a way cameras didn’t catch. “Because you don’t ask. Because I want to give it anyway.”

Yunho could have said don’t. He could have said not tonight; you’re too tired; you’ll regret being honest. He could have said all the responsible things that sounded like care and were actually fear.

He didn’t.

He waited.

Mingi took a breath and tasted cinnamon he wasn’t eating and light he wasn’t under and a kind of courage that only arrived when you were seen without being asked to be seen.

“I think I know what this is,” he said, and the words felt less like a risk and more like a map clicking into place.

Yunho looked at the boy beside him and knew, with the certainty that made bread rise and rooms warm and quiet hold, that the next sentence would change the shape of all their nights.

He nodded, as if to say: I’m here. Say it when you’re ready.

Mingi swallowed. He pressed his palm flat on the bench between them, grounding himself on the wood he’d decided was home.

And then—because the truth had grown patient, and because he was done being careful where he had learned he didn’t have to be—he began.

“I like you,” he said. Just that. Not sung, not shouted—just dropped between them like a pebble into water, rippling everything. “More than I should. More than I can probably afford to right now. But it’s the truth.”

Yunho froze. The words were heavier than he’d prepared for. He had imagined them once, maybe twice, in a way that felt like daydreams he’d lock away with receipts. But hearing them out loud, unembellished—it made his throat close.

Mingi laughed, but it cracked in the middle. “See? I told you it’d sound like a lyric. Except it’s not. It’s… all I can think about, when I’m on stage, when I’m too tired to keep my eyes open. I think about this place. About you.” He exhaled sharply, shaking his head. “It’s stupid, right?”

“No,” Yunho said quickly, maybe too quickly. His palms were damp, his shoulders tight. “Not stupid.”

Mingi looked at him, desperate for something more. Yunho hesitated—because he wanted to say I like you too but he also wanted to say don’t do this to yourself, don’t ruin your career, don’t get caught by something you can’t carry. The weight of both truths nearly broke him.

“You’re famous,” Yunho said finally, voice low. “You’re everywhere. People expect—everything from you. You don’t need… me complicating that.”

Mingi’s eyes softened in a way Yunho hadn’t seen before—like he pitied him for even thinking it. He reached out, slid his hand over Yunho’s, and held it steady.

“I don’t want everything,” Mingi whispered. “I just want you.”

The honesty in his voice was terrifying. Yunho’s instinct was to pull away, but Mingi’s grip was firm—pleading, not demanding. His thumb brushed over Yunho’s knuckles, grounding him.

“I’m not saying it’ll be easy,” Mingi went on, quieter now. “It’s probably the dumbest idea I’ve ever had. But every time I think about the future, it’s not the lights or the stage or the crowds. It’s this. Sitting here. You.”

Yunho stared at him, at the boy who had shown up weeks ago asking for bread and never stopped coming back. At the boy who smiled until his face hurt for strangers, but came here to rest his mouth. At the boy who somehow still had the courage to risk saying this, when Yunho himself was too scared to.

His chest felt hot. His throat ached. “You’re going to regret this,” Yunho said weakly, but his voice trembled.

“I won’t,” Mingi said firmly. “You know I won’t.”

The silence between them tightened. Yunho’s mind tried to list reasons—career, secrecy, timing—but every reason sounded smaller than the fact of Mingi’s hand warm over his.

“…I like you too,” Yunho admitted finally, voice barely above a whisper. He almost wanted to laugh at how small it sounded, after all this time holding it in.

Mingi’s breath hitched, relief breaking over his face like sunrise. He let out a shaky laugh, pressing their hands tighter together. “Do you know how long I’ve been waiting to hear that?”

Yunho’s lips curved despite himself. “Longer than I’ve been waiting to say it.”

For a moment, the world was just that—two hands linked on a wooden bench, a bakery that smelled of cinnamon, a confession that had been circling both of them like a tide finally arriving.

Mingi leaned his forehead against the window, smiling at nothing, eyes glassy. “God, I thought I’d explode if I didn’t say it tonight.”

“You almost didn’t,” Yunho murmured.

“I almost didn’t,” Mingi admitted. Then he turned back, softer now. “But you waited. You always wait. That’s how I knew I could say it.”

Yunho swallowed hard, the words catching in his chest. That’s how I knew I could say it. He looked down at their hands and thought about dough rising when it was given time, about bread that needed patience more than skill. He thought about his grandmother teaching him to wait.

He squeezed Mingi’s hand once, like a promise. “Then let’s not waste it.”

Mingi’s smile wobbled but held. “Let’s not.”

They didn’t kiss. They didn’t need to. They sat there until the street outside emptied, until the lights dimmed, until the tea on the counter went cold. The world outside was demanding, merciless, bright. But here—just for tonight—it was enough to sit, to breathe, to hold on.

Chapter Text

The bakery smelled of sugar and yeast when Mingi finally showed up.
 It was late—closing time had passed hours ago, the chairs flipped on tables, the lights half-dim. Yunho was wiping down the counters, sleeves pushed up, hair tied back. His shoulders ached, but there was a satisfaction in the rhythm: cloth to counter, rinse, repeat.

The door chimed softly.

He looked up, half-annoyed because he’d forgotten to flip the Closed sign. But then he saw Mingi standing there, hoodie pulled low, mask still on, shoulders slumped like the day had wrung him out.

“You’re late,” Yunho said automatically, and then softer, “You’re here.”

Mingi tugged the mask down and smiled weakly. “Missed the bread?”

“Always,” Yunho replied, though the truth in his chest was heavier than bread.

Mingi stepped inside, leaned against the counter, and sighed. “The practice rooms feel like cages lately. I just… needed air.”

Yunho put the rag aside. He wanted to reach out, but they were still orbiting—close enough to feel the pull, too cautious to land.

For a moment they said nothing. Just the hum of the fridge, the faint crackle of the neon sign outside.

Then Mingi asked, voice low, “Did you mean it? Last time. About choosing this. About choosing me.”

Yunho’s throat tightened. He remembered their last late-night call, words blurted in exhaustion: If you want this, if you want me, then don’t keep hesitating.

“Yes,” he said. Steady, even though his palms were damp.

Mingi studied him, then laughed—nervous, breaking the tension. “Good. Because I think I’m falling apart otherwise.”

He leaned in before Yunho could prepare. Just a brush of lips, tentative, almost clumsy. A kiss that wasn’t practiced or performed, just raw.

Yunho froze for a heartbeat, then exhaled against Mingi’s mouth. His hands found the edge of the counter for balance.

It was brief. Too brief. They pulled back, both wide-eyed, both red-faced.

“That was—” Mingi started.

“—stupid?” Yunho offered, chest tight.

“—the best thing I’ve done in months,” Mingi corrected, grinning now, messy and boyish.

Yunho laughed, shaky. “You’re ridiculous.”

“And you still let me,” Mingi teased, leaning closer again, though he didn’t close the distance. Not yet.

Yunho looked away, cheeks burning. “Don’t get used to it.”

But the truth was already there, between them: they had crossed a line, and neither wanted to step back.

‧₊˚♪ 𝄞₊˚⊹

The weeks after blurred in secret brightness.

Mingi showed up when he could—sometimes for ten minutes between schedules, sometimes for hours when practice ended early. He’d sit in the corner booth, hoodie up, pretending to be invisible while Yunho kneaded dough.

“You look like a stalker,” Yunho teased once, rolling dough into neat rounds.

“I’m quality control,” Mingi argued, mouth full of a pastry. “Keeping the standards high.”

“You’ve eaten six already.”

“Exactly. Dedicated employee.”

Yunho shook his head knowing it went against all the diets forced on Mingi, but the warmth lingered.

When Mingi couldn’t come, the phone filled the gap. Texts at 3AM, calls squeezed into commutes.

Mingi: Good morning, ugly bread boy.
Yunho: Practice until midnight? Don’t forget to eat.
Mingi: What if I just quit and work at the bakery instead?
Yunho: No idols in my kitchen. Too loud.

Sometimes Yunho would fall asleep with the phone on his chest, Mingi’s voice still buzzing faintly. It was dangerous, he knew—this attachment, this tether. But the bakery felt less lonely with Mingi woven into the hours.

‧₊˚♪ 𝄞₊˚⊹

But reality pressed in, sharp and relentless.

Mingi’s group blew up faster than anyone expected. Suddenly he was everywhere—on music shows, variety programs, interviews. His face lit up billboards; fans screamed his name.

And he was exhausted.

He cancelled visits more often than not. The calls grew shorter. Once, Yunho watched an entire concert stream online, thousands of fans chanting Mingi’s name, while he folded laundry in his small apartment. Pride and ache tangled in his chest.

When they finally talked again, Mingi’s voice cracked with guilt. “I’m sorry. I don’t want you to think I’ve forgotten.”

“I don’t,” Yunho said, though part of him wondered if it was true.

“You sound tired,” Mingi whispered.

“I am. But I still want this.”

There was a silence heavy enough to bend the line.

‧₊˚♪ 𝄞₊˚⊹

The bakery changed, too. Yunho threw himself into expanding the business. He moved to a bigger space, hired part-timers. The shelves no longer emptied by noon; people lined up before opening.

It was comfortable, steady. Enough to live well, not just scrape by.

But at night, when he locked up and walked home, he still looked at his phone, still waited for a name to light up the screen.

‧₊˚♪ 𝄞₊˚⊹

Their first anniversary wasn’t celebrated together. Mingi was in Japan, promoting. Yunho worked late, then went home to leftover stew.

At midnight, his phone buzzed.

A photo. Mingi in a hotel room, hair a mess, holding up a tiny cupcake with one candle.

Happy us day, the caption read. Blow it out for me.

Yunho laughed, blinked fast, and whispered, “Happy us day,” into the empty kitchen.

‧₊˚♪ 𝄞₊˚⊹

When they finally reunited—months later—it was in the bakery again.

Mingi dropped onto the couch, groaning, “I think my body is eighty years old.”

“You eat like it too,” Yunho said dryly, handing him soup.

Mingi slurped, then reached out, fingers brushing Yunho’s wrist. “Still mine?”

Yunho froze, then nodded. “Still yours.”

And when Mingi leaned in this time, the kiss was firmer, less hesitant. A promise pressed into lips.

‧₊˚♪ 𝄞₊˚⊹

They didn’t have answers for the future yet. Fame grew brighter. The bakery grew steadier. The distance stretched and shrank with every schedule, every text, every stolen night.

But Yunho knew this:
 When Mingi kissed him, the world felt less impossible.

And Mingi knew this:
 When Yunho looked at him, he remembered who he was outside the stage lights.

That was enough—for now.

The bakery bell rang less for Mingi as the months wore on.
 Schedules piled, stages blurred. Sometimes Yunho caught glimpses of him through a phone screen—laughter rehearsed for variety shows, outfits brighter than fireworks. He’d freeze the frame sometimes, just to study the curve of his smile and remind himself that it was still real, still his.

But it hurt, too. Watching from a distance. Knowing that smile belonged to the world before it came home to him.

‧₊˚♪ 𝄞₊˚⊹

The first fight wasn’t dramatic.

Mingi cancelled again—he’d promised to visit on Yunho’s birthday, but the manager called him into an emergency rehearsal.

“It’s fine,” Yunho said over the phone, keeping his voice steady.

“You don’t sound fine,” Mingi muttered.

“I said it’s fine.”

Silence crackled. Mingi’s breath hitched, like he wanted to fight harder but didn’t know how. Yunho stared at the cooling candles on his kitchen table, the cake he’d baked for himself, and swallowed the bitterness.

When the call ended, he blew the candle out alone.

‧₊˚♪ 𝄞₊˚⊹

Weeks later, Mingi showed up unannounced, eyes shadowed from lack of sleep. He pushed through the door of the bakery and dropped his head on the counter.

“I messed up,” he mumbled.

Yunho crossed his arms. “Which time?”

“This one,” Mingi said, sliding a small box across the counter. Inside was a bracelet, silver and subtle, initials engraved on the inside.

Yunho blinked. “Mingi—”

“I wanted to give it to you in person. I couldn’t make your birthday, but… this is better late than never.” His voice cracked. “I hate this. I hate being away.”

Yunho softened, sighed, and closed the box. “I don’t need gifts.”

“I need you to know I mean this,” Mingi whispered, eyes wet but stubborn. “Even when I’m not here, I’m yours.”

It wasn’t enough to erase the ache, but it was enough to keep Yunho from giving up.

‧₊˚♪ 𝄞₊˚⊹

By the second year, Yunho’s bakery thrived. He hired part-timers, upgraded ovens, even closed one day a week for rest. He was proud—but the pride dimmed when there was no one to share it with.

Mingi called when he could, often late. Yunho learned to fall asleep to the sound of his breathing, the muffled city noise in the background of hotel rooms.

“Tell me about the bread today,” Mingi would ask, voice rough with exhaustion.

“Sold out by noon. Someone asked for the recipe.”

“Don’t give it. Trade secret.”

“Like us?” Yunho teased gently.

Mingi went quiet. “Like us.”

‧₊˚♪ 𝄞₊˚⊹

The late-night call that changed everything came when Mingi was overseas.

It was past 3AM when Yunho’s phone buzzed. He almost ignored it, but the name flashing made him answer.

“Yunho?” Mingi’s voice was thin, frayed.

“What’s wrong?”

There was a pause. Then: “I feel like I’m losing you while I’m still loving you.”

Yunho’s breath caught.

“I don’t see you. I don’t touch you. I’m just… a voice in your phone,” Mingi continued, breaking apart. “And I hate it. I hate this distance. I don’t want you to think I’ve forgotten, but I don’t know how to keep you when the world is pulling me everywhere else.”

Yunho closed his eyes. The truth was sharp: he had felt the absence, had felt the gap widen. But he also knew this—he didn’t want to lose Mingi.

“Then we don’t let go,” Yunho said softly but firmly. “Not unless one of us says it’s over. Until then, we hold on. Even if it’s by threads, even if it hurts.”

There was a choked laugh on the other end. “You make it sound simple.”

“It’s not,” Yunho admitted. “But it’s real.”

Silence stretched, then Mingi whispered, “Then I promise. No matter what, I’m holding on.”

Yunho pressed his forehead to his arm, tears burning but unfallen. “Me too.”

‧₊˚♪ 𝄞₊˚⊹

The call didn’t fix everything. The distance still stretched, the missed dates still hurt. But it became a touchstone—a promise they both returned to when the world felt too loud.

Mingi wore his bracelet under stage outfits. Yunho touched it every morning before kneading dough. They lived in two different rhythms, but somewhere in the middle, they belonged to each other.

‧₊˚♪ 𝄞₊˚⊹

Their second anniversary was spent on a call again. Mingi whispered from a dark hotel room, “Happy us day,” and Yunho replied, “Happy us day,” into the quiet of his bakery apartment.

They were apart, but they were still us.

And sometimes, Yunho thought, that was enough.

Chapter Text

The invitation arrived in a box that tried too hard.

Thin black ribbon. Heavy card. A scent strip that smelled like something expensive arguing with a forest. Mingi opened it on the floor of the practice room while the others stretched, then laughed under his breath.

“Another suit party?” one member groaned, peering over his shoulder.

“Fashion week showcase,” Mingi read. “KQ wants two of us on the carpet. Something about ‘Visibility.’”

“You’re tall,” the kid said, resigned. “Congratulations and condolences.”

Mingi texted Yunho a photo of the card on his knee.

Mingi: suit jail
Yunho: At least the bread table will be good.
Mingi: you’re the bread table
Yunho: Show some restraint
Mingi: no

He didn’t love those rooms—too much perfume, too many cameras, conversations that sounded like a foreign language where the verb was always leverage. But he liked clothes that felt like choices. And he liked the idea of walking into a room knowing he had someone to text jokes to from the bathroom.

His stylist handed him a jacket the colour of midnight and an earring shaped like an exclamation point. “Try not to look bored,” she said, pinning his cuff. “People pay for this room.”

‧₊˚♪ 𝄞₊˚⊹

The venue was all edges and reflections: mirrored walls that made the crowd look multiplied, a runway that cut the room like a thought you couldn’t ignore. He did the photos, smiled, turned his face where they told him to turn it. He said hello to designers he only knew by their tags and thanked people who pronounced his name like a brand.

By the time the speeches started, his face ached. He slipped to the edge of the crowd, near a tall plant that looked expensive and worried.

“Are you hiding,” a voice asked, amused, “or pretending to study botany?”

Mingi turned. The man was shorter than him, sharp in a suit that looked effortless and dangerous. Bleached hair under a dark cap, rings that caught the light like winks, eyes bright in a way that suggested he refused boredom on principle.

“Both,” Mingi admitted. “I’m working on a thesis about endangered ferns.”

“Tragic,” the man said gravely. Then he smiled. “Hongjoong.”

“I know,” Mingi said, and immediately wanted to bite his tongue. “I mean—your work. The spring show with the wire collars? It looked like scaffolding and wings at the same time.”

Hongjoong’s eyebrows lifted, delighted. “You actually watched it.”

“I watch a lot of things,” Mingi said. “I like when people build something that could break and then it doesn’t.”

“That’s the job,” Hongjoong murmured. “Make it look inevitable.”

They stood in companionable exile for a minute, listening to a speech about craft that sounded like tax law. Mingi sipped water and imagined Yunho stealing canapés with an expression of moral superiority.

“Do you like these things?” Hongjoong asked, tilting his head toward the room.

“I like wearing the suit,” Mingi said. “I don’t love earning it.”

Hongjoong barked a laugh. “I like making the suit and then taking it off as fast as possible.”

“So we agree,” Mingi said. “We’re both trapped.”

“We’re both bored,” Hongjoong corrected, eyes warm. “Which makes us dangerous. Come on.”

He led him past the crowd like a current, stopping by a mannequin in the corner. He pinched the hem between forefinger and thumb, pleased. “Hand-bound. They hid the stitch in the shadow.”

Mingi leaned closer. “It feels like a secret.”

“All good garments have secrets,” Hongjoong said. “Otherwise… they’re just fabric pretending.”

“People too,” Mingi said before he could stop himself.

Hongjoong’s gaze flicked up. He didn’t press. “You hungry?”

“Always.”

“Then we’re friends.” He lifted a plate, piled it carelessly. “Tell me what you’re hiding in this room, Mingi-who-watches-my-shows.”

Mingi stole a grape and considered not answering. Then he pictured Yunho at the bakery, closing the blinds, turning the day into a room they could breathe in. He surprised himself with how easily the words arrived.

“Someone,” he said. “He bakes. I breathe better near him.”

“Honest with strangers,” Hongjoong said, approving. He didn’t ask for more. “Me too.”

“You bake?”

“I love someone,” Hongjoong said, casual as a cufflink. “He glows. He makes rooms behave. I’ve known him my whole life it seems, yet he’s not mine. Yet.”

“Yet,” Mingi repeated softly.

“I bought a ring,” Hongjoong said, cheerful in a way that felt like whistling in a tunnel. “No plan past that. I’m very brave or very stupid.”

“Sometimes that’s the same thing,” Mingi said. He thought about Yunho’s hands, flour ground into the lines; about the way the bakery cat had started sleeping at the window as if it were guarding something sacred. “I don’t have a ring.”

“You have a baker,” Hongjoong said. “That’s better.”

They circled the room once, two men pretending not to be watching for exits. Hongjoong asked questions that were easy to answer. He never poked at the parts that hurt unless Mingi held them out first. In return, he offered stories like small gifts—messy fittings with artists, quiet victories over budgets, the thrill of seeing an idea hold its shape in real light.

“You know the best thing about fashion events?” he asked as a camera flash popped behind them.

“What,” Mingi said, already expecting a joke.

“Leaving,” Hongjoong said, and grinned when Mingi nearly choked on his water.

They exchanged numbers near the emergency exit.

“Strictly for gossip,” Hongjoong warned. “And pictures of bread.”

“You’ll get some crumbs,” Mingi promised.

“Text me when you’re lonely. Or when you’re not.” Hongjoong said solemnly.

‧₊˚♪ 𝄞₊˚⊹

After that, the thread of their friendship tugged across schedules with an ease that surprised them both. Hongjoong sent pictures from studio floors—spools and sketches, a lap full of fabric, a cuff with pins pointing like compass needles. Mingi sent photos of backstage ruins—tape constellations, shoes sleeping after shows, his own wrist with set times scrawled in pen.

They made each other laugh at rooms that took themselves too seriously. They also—when the nights fell correctly—told the truth.

“I’m jealous of your domesticity,” Hongjoong admitted once, eyes half-closed in a late taxi. “I think my heart is most alive in beautiful chaos, and yet I keep dreaming about two chairs facing a window and the miracle of silence you rave about.”

“Most days I have two chairs,” Mingi said. “But one is always empty.”

“Make a third,” Hongjoong said gently. “Just in case.”

The third chair would come later, for a little boy with pockets full of pebbles. But that was a different chapter. For now, the chair remained a promise.

‧₊˚♪ 𝄞₊˚⊹

The contract renewal came like a storm you could see on the horizon and still couldn’t dodge. Bigger venues. More foreign calendars. A stack of clauses thick enough to hide a person in.

Mingi sat in a conference room that smelled like lemon cleaner and pressure while a legal team flipped pages. His manager smiled the kind of professional smile that made him miss the days when the man had shouted at him to drink water like a real person.

“So,” someone said, fingers drumming the table. “Compensation we’re aligned on. Image rights we can discuss. Public conduct—no smoking, no appearances without approval—”

“My private life is mine,” Mingi said, calm as a glass of water.

Silence held its breath.

The lawyer blinked. “We’ve always appreciated discretion—”

“I’m not asking for permission,” Mingi said, hands flat on the document. “I’m stating terms. You have my work. You don’t have my home.”

The manager pinched the bridge of his nose. “Mingi—”

“I will do every schedule. I will show up. I will protect the brand because it protects seven boys who deserve it.” He looked each person in the eye. “But I will not be told who I can love or whether I can marry.”

“That would be… unconventional,” the lawyer said delicately.

“It would be humane,” Mingi said.

The room shifted. Someone scribbled. Someone sighed. The manager tried to talk him down; Mingi did not raise his voice. He repeated the same sentence until it sounded like stone:

“My private life is mine.”

It took three meetings. It took a provision wrapped in quiet language about “non-interference in lawful domestic arrangements.” It took a clause that seemed vague enough to ignore and clear enough to defend. It took all the courage he had punched into his chest on rooftop nights he’d wished for Yunho’s breath on the line.

He texted Hongjoong a photo of the page when it was done.

Mingi: Clause 17: I get to be a person
Hongjoong: You always were. Now it’s in a suit.
Mingi: I’m going to ask him.
Hongjoong: Where and when. I’ll set the table.

‧₊˚♪ 𝄞₊˚⊹

Hongjoong booked a private room at a restaurant that treated light like an instrument. Not the kind of place with white tablecloths and quiet money—this one had edges softened by plants, a long table of walnut, the kind of candles that made faces look kinder. He called the chef himself, asked for food that felt like warmth and not like theatre. He told the staff nothing important, only that it mattered.

“Don’t make a spectacle of it,” he warned the manager. “Make it a memory.”

“I know how to leave a room alone,” she said, amused. “We’ll pretend they own it.”

Mingi tried on suits and rejected them all. He ended up in something simple: charcoal jacket, open throat, the bracelet Yunho had worn thin at the edges engraved now on his own wrist as well. He pressed the ring box into his pocket like a heartbeat.

He texted Yunho: Dinner? I found a place with amazinggg bread.

Yunho: Amazinggg bread?
Mingi: Bread that would carry you out of a bad mood
Yunho: Yeah? then marry it
Mingi: Trying to

Yunho arrived in a shirt that made his shoulders look like a safe place to stand. He smelled faintly of vanilla and ovens. He looked around the room and smiled, small and surprised.

“This is nice,” he said.

“I wanted it to be ours,” Mingi managed, praying his hands didn’t shake. “Just for tonight.”

The first courses came like conversation prompts: small plates meant to be shared, meant to make you pass things across the table and ask how the other liked them. They ate slowly, laughed easily. Mingi told a story about a live broadcast where his mic betrayed him. Yunho told the one about a regular who asked if sourdough could be domesticated. The room forgot them in the kindest way.

Halfway through, Hongjoong texted:

Hongjoong: Are your hands shaking?
Mingi: Yes
Hongjoong: Good. Don’t waste that. Say it while you feel it.
Mingi: Thank you for the room
Hongjoong: Thank me with cake at your bakery when he says yes.

Mingi slipped the phone away and tried to breathe like a person not about to jump.

“Walk with me?” he asked Yunho when dessert was still a promise and the candles had shrunk to thoughtful light. There was a small terrace outside, vines trained up a trellis, the city moving past like someone else’s story.

Yunho stepped out, hands in his pockets, head tipped back to find whatever stars the light pollution hadn’t bullied. Mingi stood beside him and felt everything he’d saved for years queue up at his mouth.

“You look terrified,” Yunho said softly, not unkind.

“I am,” Mingi said. “I have been the whole time. It never stopped me.” He took the ring box out, not opening it yet, only holding it like a truth.

Yunho’s eyes flicked down and then up—fast, a flinch of hope and fear. “Mingi…”

“I fought for it,” Mingi said, too fast now, afraid if he paused, he would drown. “In the contract. They don’t own my life. I put it in writing. Not because paper makes it real, but because I needed the world to stop pretending it could tell me where home is.” His breath hitched. “Home is you.”

The word shook them both.

“I don’t have speeches,” he said, helpless. “I only have facts. I’m tired all the time and I’m still happiest when I see your flour on my sleeve. I think about you on stage and it makes the crowd make sense. I want—” He swallowed. “I want to build years with you. All the boring ones. All the good ones. All the ones where I come home and you scold me for eating protein powder.”

Yunho blinked fast, mouth pressed into a line like he was trying not to spill.

“Marry me,” Mingi said, opening the box. The ring was simple, matte gold, a thin line, engraved inside with JYH ♡ SMG. “It doesn’t have to be public. It doesn’t have to be now-now. It just has to be true.”

Yunho laughed then—a broken sound, relief and joy crashing into each other like waves against a stubborn rock. He put both hands over his face, dragged them down, shook his head in disbelief, and smiled like he’d been holding the expression in a drawer for years.

“You idiot,” he whispered, and Mingi’s heart nearly fell out of his body. “Of course.”

“Of course?” Mingi echoed, ridiculous with hope.

“Of course,” Yunho said again, firmer, like kneading. “Yes.”

Mingi didn’t realize he’d been holding his breath until he was in Yunho’s arms. It wasn’t dramatic. It wasn’t cinematic. It was better. It was the feeling of his forehead pressed to a shoulder that remembered him. It was a laugh in his ear and Yunho’s hands clumsy with emotion at the back of his neck. It was two people who had already chosen each other a hundred times finally saying it out loud to a vine and a city that politely looked away.

“Let me put it on,” Mingi said, clumsy with delight. He took Yunho’s hand and slid the band home. It fit like it had been measured with patience instead of a ruler.

Yunho’s thumb turned it, slow. “You fought for this.”

“I did,” Mingi said, chest aching with pride and relief. “I will.”

“Then I’ll fight for the boring days,” Yunho said. “So you have somewhere to land.”

“Deal,” Mingi said, voice rough. He kissed him, small and sure, a signature on a document that mattered more because nobody else needed to see it.

Inside, the staff pretended to refill candles and the manager pretended not to notice two men who had made a room holy by telling the truth in it. The dessert arrived anyway—something with citrus and cream and a curve like a grin. They fed each other bites that were more laughter than food.

Mingi texted Hongjoong a photo of the ring on Yunho’s hand, Yunho’s fingers sticky with lemon glaze.

Mingi: He said yes.
Hongjoong: Obviously.
Mingi: Thank you
Hongjoong: Ask him if he’ll bake my wedding cake when I finally stop being a coward.
Mingi: You’ll never be a coward. Just dramatic.
Hongjoong: Same thing when done correctly. Congratulations, idiot. Go home.

They did. They walked without talking for a few blocks, hands brushing, the city generous for once. When they reached the apartment over the bakery, Yunho paused on the stairs, turned, and kissed Mingi in the dim light like a promise kept and a promise made.

“Tomorrow,” Yunho said, forehead to forehead, eyes bright. “You can help me open.”

“I have rehearsal,” Mingi apologized, already sorry.

“Then you can help me tonight,” Yunho said. “We’re out of cinnamon.”

“I was made for this,” Mingi said solemnly. “I’m a mess with a mission.”

He measured sugar badly and Yunho fixed it. He spilled flour and Yunho laughed and didn’t, for once, scold. They worked sideways, bumping shoulders like kids, giddy and serious at the same time. The rings flashed dull and secret when they washed their hands.

At 3 a.m., they stopped. The dough rested. The city did too.

“Thank you for finding me,” Mingi said into Yunho’s shirt.

“I didn’t,” Yunho murmured. “You remembered where to come back to.”

‧₊˚♪ 𝄞₊˚⊹

They married on paper a month later in a room that smelled like toner and overwatered plants. The clerk didn’t look up when they signed, which felt like a blessing. Hongjoong waited outside on a bench wearing sunglasses too big for his face, holding a bouquet of eucalyptus and bakery twine.

“For the grooms,” he said, bowing absurdly. “Apologies for the lack of peonies. I’m allergic to budgets.”

Yunho laughed and hugged him. Mingi squeezed his arm, grateful in a way he didn’t know how to say. The three of them ate noodles in a shop with fogged windows and called it a reception. The server congratulated them without needing the story and brought a free egg.

That night, in the bakery after closing, they did the real thing.

Hongjoong had snuck back to string a line of cheap lights across the ceiling—small warm drops like possibilities. The counter held a single cake under a glass dome. Yunho took it out and set it down like an offering. It was plain, white, with a circle of sugared citrus on top.

They stood behind the counter, hands together. Yunho wiped his thumb over Mingi’s knuckles, touch leaving a pale mark like a blessing.

“Say it,” Mingi asked, voice shaking.

“I marry you,” Yunho said simply, as if he were stating a recipe. “I marry the days you can’t come home and the ones you can. I marry the way you laugh when you’re too tired to. I marry your mess and your discipline and the way you leave your socks everywhere and call it artistic.”

“Defamation,” Mingi whispered, wrecked with love.

“I marry the work,” Yunho continued. “I marry the quiet. I marry the part of me that was lonely and the part you rearranged with a knock on a door I didn’t know was open.” He smiled, helpless. “I marry the person who eats protein powder and calls it dinner. I will feed you until you learn.”

Mingi was crying now. He did it efficiently, like someone accustomed to not ruining the scene. “I marry the mornings you hate and the ovens that complain and the way you think patience is a verb.” He took a breath. “I marry the third chair we don’t need yet.”

Yunho blinked, startled, then laughed into his tears. “You’re not allowed to be prophetic. It’s bad for scheduling.”

“Too late,” Mingi said, steadying. “I marry the person I come home to even when I’m in another country. I marry the loud and the okay and the pieces between.”

They traded rings again, because it felt right to do it where their fondest memories lived. Yunho kissed the inside of Mingi’s wrist. Mingi kissed the scar on Yunho’s forearm where he’d burned himself as a kid. The lights hummed like insects in summer. Somewhere, a cat decided this was all very reasonable and curled up on the window seat.

They cut the cake with a bread knife because what else would they use. It tasted like lemon and milk and permanence.

‧₊˚♪ 𝄞₊˚⊹

The world didn’t change because of a ring and a paper. That was the point. The world stayed rude and fast. Schedules multiplied. Cameras blinked. Contracts counted views. Yunho’s morning alarm stayed ugly. The ovens stayed particular.

But there were differences that mattered.

Mingi wore the band on a chain under his stage clothes and touched it before he went on. Yunho learned the trick of explaining absences to regulars with a smile that meant exactly what it needed to and nothing else.

On nights when both of them were home, they made dinner that wasn’t heroic and ate it while still in socks. On mornings when they were not, they left notes near the kettle: Bread in the second tin, Stretch your knees, Don’t be brave when you’re tired; be boring. They kissed in doorways more often than not, because doorways were where choices happened.

When reporters asked Mingi what kept him grounded, he said, “Breakfast,” and smiled at a camera that couldn’t know. When bloggers wrote about Yunho’s “mysteriously improved pastry lamination,” he took the compliment and didn’t tell them it was because he was relieved, content, and sleeping more, because there was a shoulder his head had permission to land on.

Years unfolded, flawed and good. There were fights they didn’t dramatize. There were reconciliations that tasted like citrus on cake. There were friends who understood and friends who would understand later when the world finally allowed the truth in. There were holidays where they pretended the bakery’s hours were a religion and the stage’s call times were a myth.

And there were Wednesdays that would never make it into a narrative but were the reason the narrative mattered: an afternoon where Yunho closed early because the rain made the streets slow; a night where Mingi got home before midnight and lay on the floor, laughing at nothing while Yunho tossed him a dish towel to use as a pillow.

They did not become easier men. They became truer.

Five years moved like tide around them, and still the window seat held, the rings warmed to their fingers, and the room where they first told the truth kept making bread that tasted like a decision.

When Mingi texted Hongjoong on an ordinary Tuesday—do you still have the ring—the reply came fast: I still have the fear. Mingi sent back a photo of his hand in flour, ring white at the edges, and wrote: Fear is just patience dressed badly. Hongjoong didn’t answer, but a week later his sketchbook had a new page with sketches that symbolize courage.

The future kept arriving, imperfect, exactly on time. And every night it could, the bakery went quiet, and two men sat by a window in a city that had learned to let them be—and spoke softly to each other like people who had built something fragile, heavy, and entirely theirs.

Chapter Text

Weekends became a game of timing and luck.

Sometimes Mingi arrived at dawn, face hidden under a cap, eyes bright in that wrecked way. He’d punch in the door code, slip past the bell with a hand over it, and find Yunho at the bench, kneading with his hip against the counter, humming nothing. Mingi would stand behind him and wrap his arms around his middle without speaking, cheek pressed between Yunho’s shoulder blades like he could plug himself into a socket.

“You smell like airports,” Yunho would murmur, not stopping the fold and turn.

“You smell like a promise,” Mingi would answer, and it would be ridiculous, and they would both pretend it wasn’t.

Other weekends, they lost and the timer went off. Flights, rehearsals, a last-second stage call. They lived inside a calendar that did not know them, and they kept a separate one in their chests that did.

At night, when the bakery slowed into the sigh it made after washing up, they were tender without needing it to be a scene. Mingi sat on the flour-dusted counter with bare feet swinging and Yunho wedged his hips between Mingi’s knees, both of them laughing into each other’s mouths like they were sixteen and getting away with something. Hands learned faces they’d already memorized; mouths relearned patience. When they crossed the small apartment in the half-dark, bumping into chairs and each other, it felt like the kind of intimacy no camera could fake—quiet, real, a language with only two native speakers.

Between those days, the world tugged at them.

Mingi’s circle widened until he could feel it spin. Fashion pulled him as hard as music. He wasn’t a designer, not like Hongjoong, but clothes understood him—how to cut a line so height looked like intention, how to make stage lights feed, not flatten. Stylists learned to ask him what felt right on his skin; he learned to say no without apology.

And then a fashion week invitation put him in the same room as the person everyone whispered about in those rooms.

They met beside a lonely plant and became friends out of boredom and recognition. Hongjoong had a mouth that never quite agreed to be serious and hands that carried pins like weapons and love letters. After that night, Mingi graded events by whether he could find Joong in the crowd.

He called him Joong faster than most people could, like the vowels liked him. In return, Hongjoong called him trouble with fondness baked in. They sent each other show notes and videos that weren’t for anyone else, voice notes late at night when the room had stopped demanding and started listening.

And somewhere in the middle of a long winter, Mingi started saying, “Tell him,”

“Tell who what?” Hongjoong asked, feigning innocence so dramatically it should have been illegal.

“Tell Wooyoung you love him,” Mingi said, rolling his eyes as he laced up boots in a hallway that looked expensive on purpose. “You glow like a lamp when you say his name.”

“I glow like that generally,” Hongjoong sniffed. “It’s the moisturizer.”

“Tell him,” Mingi repeated. “Before the room decides your life for you.”

Hongjoong clicked his tongue and stared at a cuff. “He knows,” he said finally. “He must. I’m not subtle.”

“Men are profoundly stupid,” Mingi said.

“You’re right,” Hongjoong replied gravely. “I know at least one.”

They both laughed, and then didn’t.

The thing with advice is that it sounds clean until it has to live in a room with you. Mingi was brave on behalf of other people. He was also married in a way that made the world mind its own business because the paper said it had to. He didn’t have to ask a friend to do a hard thing alone.

Still—“Tell him,” he kept saying, on rooftops after shows, in cars that moved too fast, on the floor of Yunho’s apartment when they finally got a night all together and Joong sprawled across the rug like a cat.

“Tell him,” he said one more time, and Hongjoong looked at the ceiling and said, “Maybe,” in a voice that sounded like a maybe you pay for later.

‧₊˚♪ 𝄞₊˚⊹

The news didn’t break. It slid out sideways because it was the kind the world knew how to read without being taught.

People saw Wooyoung laughing with San more than usual. They saw a shape in a pocket that didn’t make sense. They saw a ring box in a store bag and picked a story that felt right.

Mingi was in a van when the first headline flew across his phone: Son of Jung Tech slated to wed; sources say engagement imminent. He blinked at the screen until the letters went soft. He called Hongjoong immediately and got the sound of someone being brave and failing.

“Hey,” Mingi said.

“Hey,” Joong said, far too brightly. “Insane day, right? Publicists are hysterical. I told them to breathe into bags. Nobody listened.”

“Where are you?”

“Studio,” Joong answered. “Where else.”

“Eat,” Mingi said, because it was the only order he had any right to give.

“I will,” Joong lied perfectly. “Don’t be dramatic.”

“I’ll swing by,” Mingi started, and his manager started shaking his head so fast Mingi could feel the breeze. “Soon. Tonight. I’ll be there.”

“You don’t have to babysit me,” Hongjoong said, gentle like a bandage. “I’m not bleeding. I’m just—” He sighed. “Never mind. How’s Yunho?”

“Kind,” Mingi said helplessly, and they both let out a breath that felt like they’d been keeping the roof from collapsing with their shoulders.

“Tell him I said hi,” Joong said. “Tell him his cinnamon rolls are a hate crime. I ate three and I resent them personally.”

Mingi made him promise to drink water. He hung up, stared at the manager until the shaking stopped, and said, “I’m going.”

“You have the launch show rehearsal,” the man said, already scrolling through battles, calculating losses. “It’s locked.”

“I’ll be fast,” Mingi said.

“You won’t,” the man said, but he started moving things anyway, because it was his job to make impossible things look like accidents.

‧₊˚♪ 𝄞₊˚⊹

The party was too bright.

Not the engagement party—that came later—but a pre-party, a warm-up, a gathering of people who liked to draw circles with their bodies and invite each other inside to say see, we belong to something. Mingi walked in through a service door, cap low, hand at the bill. He skimmed the room for a mouth that couldn’t lie.

He found Hongjoong at the edge, as always, pretending to be very interested in a lighting rig.

“You told him?” Mingi asked, skipping hello.

“Don’t be stupid,” Hongjoong said cheerfully, and then the smile made a sound like glass and fell. “No.”

“Joong—”

“No,” he repeated, gently, like he was explaining gravity. “He looked so happy when he told me he had… news. I decided my heart could be useful enough to sit still for once.”

Mingi swore softly and pulled him into a hug. It wasn’t dramatic. It didn’t need to be. Hongjoong stood very straight and then folded very small.

“Tell me to stop,” Joong said, voice muffled against Mingi’s jacket. “Tell me to stop wanting things that aren’t mine.”

“Want them,” Mingi said. “You can want them and still choose not to ruin a room.”

Hongjoong let out a laugh that felt thin. “That’s the nicest way anyone’s ever told me to grow up.”

“Says the man who uses wire to make angels out of teenagers,” Mingi said. “You’re already grown. You’re just… brave in stupid ways.”

“I learned from the best,” Joong said, which was unfair, and made Mingi wish again that the world could be made of small rooms where people said true things and were fed afterward.

They stood like that for a minute that pretended to be longer.

Mingi’s phone started shaking in his pocket. He didn’t look. It stopped. Started again. He looked.

EMERGENCY CALL — NEED YOU HERE. NOW.

He closed his eyes.

“I have to go,” he said.

“Of course you do,” Hongjoong said, already stepping back, the performer sliding over the friend like a costume. “You’re saving the economy.”

“Eat something,” Mingi said, because the small bossy things were the only ones that felt like they stuck. “Sleep. Don’t… don’t do anything stupid.”

“I never do anything stupid,” Joong said, a lie so sweet it almost tasted real. He reached up and tugged on Mingi’s cap brim like a big brother pretending to be annoying. “Go. I’m okay.”

He wasn’t. He would be. Both could be true.

Mingi jogged out the service door, into a van, into a schedule that swallowed him whole before he could even take a breath. He texted as they pulled away: Call me if you can’t sleep. He got back a picture of a crooked whiskey glass and two words: I won’t.

He sent the picture to Yunho too, followed by: Hold him in your head for me.
Yunho wrote back: Done.

‧₊˚♪ 𝄞₊˚⊹

The engagement party itself was muddy with reporters and sharp with light. Mingi didn’t go; he couldn’t. Maybe he wouldn’t have anyway. He watched the clips on mute in a hallway between rehearsals and thought of Joong’s hands and how they knew how to make fittings into something like safety. He thought of a ring in a pocket, and a year that hadn’t found him yet.

He called on breaks. Sometimes Hongjoong picked up and handed the phone to the ceiling. Sometimes he didn’t, and Mingi sat with the quiet like it was a second body in the van.

Just a few blocks away—San and Wooyoung laughing in rooms that had made a different decision, a bar, a jacket mislaid in another room, a future choosing them roughly. Mingi didn’t know enough to name it; he knew enough to respect the gravitational pull when it finally arrived.

‧₊˚♪ 𝄞₊˚⊹

Two months later, Yunho woke up on the floor of the bakery.

He had poured batter, set timers, answered a supplier call, and then the room had simply tugged sideways. When he opened his eyes, flour dust floated down in the low light like patient snow.

“Hey,” a voice said somewhere above him, very gently panicking. “Hey, don’t move.”

Minjae. He worked weekend mornings, square-shouldered and calm, the only person who could carry three trays and an argument without sweating. He was kneeling, hand under Yunho’s head, voice trying so hard not to tremble that it made Yunho smile.

“I’m okay,” Yunho said, which is the first lie people tell when they don’t want to scare the ones who love them.

“You fainted,” Minjae said flatly. “People who are okay don’t do that.”

“I stood up too fast,” Yunho tried.

“You didn’t stand at all,” Minjae said. “You… evaporated.”

They sat on the floury floor together. Minjae fetched water, bullied him into sipping. Yunho breathed until his heart unclenched. He wanted to go back to the mixer immediately, which is the second lie people tell when they want to be stronger than bodies.

“Go home,” Minjae ordered when the colour finally returned to Yunho’s mouth. “Rest. I’ll close.”

“You can’t—”

“I can,” Minjae said. “Don’t make me call your husband.”

Yunho’s mouth twitched. “He’ll panic.”

“Good,” Minjae said, moral as ever. “He owes us both a breakfast anyway.”

Yunho let himself be shepherded upstairs. He lay down with his phone on his chest and closed his eyes for ten minutes that turned into thirty. He woke up to three missed calls, four texts, and the slice of a thought sharp enough to make him sit up too fast again.

No. It was impossible.

Except—his body had been odd for weeks. Too tired. Smells making choices for him. He had cried at a commercial for drain cleaner.

He didn’t tell anyone where he was going. He put on sunglasses like a joke and took a cab to a clinic two neighbourhoods over, the kind with a waiting room painted a colour meant to be calming and succeeding only in being beige.

He told the nurse he didn’t have time. She told him time didn’t care. They drew blood. They made him sit in a chair that reclined with drama. He waited with his hands clasped over his stomach because his hands knew something his mouth didn’t.

When the doctor came in with the look that says I’ve done this a lot, but I still like it, Yunho started crying.

He wasn’t loud about it. He just… came apart in the careful way he did everything. The tears were ridiculous on his face—clean, bright, soft, like he’d been drawn to have them. Even the doctor faltered for a second, caught by the wrongness of beauty and grief sitting down together so politely.

“Congratulations,” she said, because that was the word even when it had to walk into a room and make itself welcome. She sat. “You’re pregnant.”

Yunho covered his mouth. A sound came out that wasn’t quite laughter and wasn’t quite a sob. He leaned his head back and stared at the ceiling tile pattern like it could be an anchor.

“Okay,” he said finally, voice gone light with shock. “Okay.”

“Is there someone you want me to call?” she asked gently.

“Yes,” he said, and then, because he wanted to say the name first and last, “Mingi.”

‧₊˚♪ 𝄞₊˚⊹

Mingi almost didn’t pick up. He was halfway through a run, sweat in his ears, a choreographer clapping the beat with hands like a metronome. He saw Yunho’s name and stepped out of the room like the floor had moved.

“Hey,” he gasped. “Hey, I’m here. Are you—”

“I fainted,” Yunho said, which was not a great opener.

“Where are you?” Mingi demanded, already waving at a manager, already grabbing a jacket, already moving even before anyone said he could. “I’m coming. Don’t—don’t move. Breathe. I’m coming.”

“You can’t,” Yunho said softly. “You have practice.”

“I don’t care.”

“You do,” Yunho murmured, and Mingi wanted to throw his phone at a star for implying that careers were physics and love was not.

“Talk to me,” he said, breath rough as he walked fast toward nothing he could fix with his hands. “Tell me. Please.”

Yunho took a breath that sounded like he had been practicing calm for someone else. “I’m at the clinic,” he said. “They did tests.”

“What tests?”

“The kind that tell you your life just… changed its shoes,” Yunho said, and a small, shocked laugh came through the line like a bell.

Mingi stopped in the hall. People moved around him, polite, urgent, oblivious to the moment unhooking him from gravity.

“Tell me,” he whispered.

“I’m pregnant,” Yunho said, and the word rang in the metal hallway and the flour-white room at the same time.

Silence. Not empty—full of everything they were too afraid to say and too new to name.

“Okay,” Mingi said, and he said it like a door opening. “Okay,” again, because one wasn’t enough. His back hit the wall and slid down it. He laughed and covered his face and then he was crying, too, ridiculous and beautiful in a hallway with bad lighting.

“Are you—” Yunho began, voice fragile with worry.

“Happy,” Mingi said, honest like a cut. “Terrified. Stupid with joy. I don’t know how to breathe right now. But happy most.”

Yunho started crying again, and he did it like he always did—tidy, luminous, unfairly pretty. The nurse handed him more tissues and looked away to give him a privacy shaped like kindness.

“I didn’t think this was for me,” he confessed, voice wobbling. “I thought I got ovens and early mornings and… you. And that was enough. It still is. But now—”

“Now we get both,” Mingi said, and the we felt like a mountain putting its palm against their backs.

“I don’t know how to carry this and the bakery and you and—”

“You don’t carry me,” Mingi said fiercely, wiping at his eyes with his sleeve. “I carry you. And the bakery. And whatever else needs carrying. I’ll rent arms.”

“You’re so dumb,” Yunho said, which is the love language of people who are too moved to be eloquent.

“Married dumb,” Mingi corrected, because he was allowed arrogance once a year. He sobbed and laughed again. “I have to tell Joong. He’s going to cry on your cake.”

“Don’t tell him yet,” Yunho said, and the fear in it was gentle—fear of breaking the softest thing by showing it to the light too fast.

“I won’t,” Mingi said immediately. “It’s ours until you want it to be everyone’s.”

Yunho sniffed. “Come home when you can.”

“I’m already halfway there,” Mingi said, which wasn’t true in any direction but was true in the only one that mattered.

‧₊˚♪ 𝄞₊˚⊹

He didn’t make it that day. The stage ate him. He danced like his body had learned a new verb and didn’t know how to conjugate it. He sang like someone had put a future under his ribs and asked it to vibrate. Between takes, he stared at walls and saw flour dust.

When he finally reached the apartment, it was after midnight. The city had rolled onto its side and tucked itself in. He climbed the stairs too fast and had to stop halfway to breathe like a person. He didn’t knock. He walked in like the room waited for him because it did.

Yunho sat on the couch, one knee up, a cup cooling in his hands. He looked up and smiled—quiet, exhausted, devastating. His eyes were still a little swollen from earlier and it only made him more beautiful in the unfair way that had been mentioned now by at least one nurse and several bakery customers under their breath.

“You came,” Yunho whispered, and then laughed at himself, because of course he had.

“I was always coming,” Mingi said, and the words were too honest to be clever. He crossed the room in three strides and sank to his knees in front of Yunho like a prayer that didn’t need a god. He pressed his forehead to Yunho’s stomach, breath shaking. “Hi,” he said to a future the size of punctuation. “I’m an idiot. Your other appa will explain.”

Yunho’s hand slid into his hair, fingers trembling. “You’re perfect,” he whispered.

“Wrong adjective,” Mingi said into cotton and heat.

“Correct feeling,” Yunho answered, and then he started crying again, and Mingi did too, because apparently that’s what they were now—two men who cried on Tuesday nights for reasons that felt like finding a door you’d been pushing from the wrong side.

“You look so pretty when you cry,” Mingi blurted, ruined by it.

Yunho huffed a laugh through tears, eyes shining in that way that made him look like he had been written by someone with a grudge against composure. “Shut up.”

“Never,” Mingi said. He kissed the corner of Yunho’s mouth like he was scared of breaking the bubble and then dared more. The kiss was salt and relief and yes, it was also heat, because the body doesn’t stop being a body when the soul is busy. They moved carefully, like people who had just been given a fragile thing and didn’t want to drop it. Clothes were obstacles and then not; the couch became a witness and then a bed. They loved each other with hands that had learned patience from ovens and performances both. They were gentle where they hadn’t been before and more certain where they usually hesitated. It wasn’t cinematic. It was theirs.

After, Yunho lay on his back, Mingi’s head on his chest, both of them listening to the steady busy sounds of a city obliged to keep going.

“What now?” Mingi asked the ceiling.

“Now we sleep, then tell the cat” Yunho said.

“That traitor will tell the neighbourhood,” Mingi said, voice heavy with the kind of joy that makes you brave.

“And Joong?” Yunho asked softly.

Mingi swallowed. He thought of a boy in a too-bright room with a glass he didn’t finish. “When you want,” he said. “When you’re ready. I’ll keep him intact until then.”

“You always do,” Yunho murmured, and there was a comfort in it that felt like bread out of the oven—burning a little, perfect anyway.

He turned his face and kissed Mingi’s hair. Mingi tightened his arms like a ring made of living.

In another apartment, Hongjoong sat at a table with fabric and whiskey and the quiet company of a heart that had decided to keep beating whether or not anyone thanked it. He looked at his phone for a long time, screen lit with several are you okays, then typed I’m okay and didn’t send that either. He promised himself he’d go to the ocean soon and be stupid with his feet in cold water until his bones remembered they were mostly salt.

The city did what cities do—pretended to sleep. The bakery cooled, the oven lights clicked off, and two men lay with hands over a future none of their contracts had prepared them for. The room breathed around them.

“Hi,” Mingi whispered again to the small universe between them, ridiculous and sincere. “We’re going to be so annoying about you.”

Yunho laughed into the dark, pretty and wrecking and alive. “We already are,” he said.

And in the thin place between night and morning, where promises go to stretch before work, they held on—like they had said they would—threads knotted tight, gentle where the knots tugged, ready.

Chapter Text

Mornings were when Yunho missed him least.

There wasn’t time for missing. The light came up slow through the bakery windows, the mixers started their soft growl, the flour rose in the air like first snow. His hands knew the order before his head woke fully: scale, pour, whisk, fold, rest. Dough was a clock. Dough forgave you if you kept your part of the promise.

By nine, the line outside the door turned the glass into fog. By noon, the trays were stripped. Someone always asked if he slept here. Someone always told him his bread tasted like “home,” a word that could mean a hundred things depending on the mouth that said it.

Afternoons were when the ache arrived. Quiet crept in around two, when the lunch rush dissolved and the room remembered how to breathe. Yunho wiped counters slower, stretched his back in the doorway to the kitchen, pressed a hand to the spot low on his belly where the future had chosen to anchor itself. He spoke to it without meaning to.

“Doing okay?” he murmured. “We’re doing okay.”

Evenings, the loneliness was a physical thing—the absence of a jacket on the chair, the silence where a laugh should be, the bed that held its own shape too well. Mingi called when he could. Sometimes it was a van whisper, sometimes a dressing room with laughter hissing like electricity, sometimes a dark hotel with the city pressed against the window. His voice came through thin and warm and the exact shape of relief.

“Tell me about the bread,” he’d say.

“What if I tell you about the pickles I wanted to put on the melon today,” Yunho would threaten, because pregnancy had given his cravings a sense of humor.

“I support your art,” Mingi would answer, deadpan. “But the nation is not ready.”

They joked. They made the small sounds that kept bigger ones at bay. But there were nights the call didn’t come, and those were the hours that stretched. On those nights, Yunho set two plates anyway. He ate from one, left the other to hold the place of a man halfway around the world, and then washed both with the same care.

The day he met Seonghwa, it was cold enough to hurry you without making you mean about it. He was sweeping the front step because it gave his hands something to do that wasn’t worrying. The door swung, bell chimed, warmth curled out onto the street, and a man stopped just beyond it like he’d been caught by the smell.

He looked like… restraint. A neatness that came from habit, not money. Head pulled low, hair tucked cleanly behind one ear, mouth softened by tiredness. He held himself like someone who knew how to make space for other people first and had trouble finding any left for himself.

Yunho saw the way his gaze lingered on the trays in the window—croissants shouldered together, a braided loaf that had come out prettier than it had any right to.

“Evening,” Yunho called, cheerful because he meant it. “Hungry?”

The man blinked, like he’d been far away and the word had reached him. “I was—just walking,” he said politely, already half turning. “Sorry.”

Yunho shook his head, set the broom against the doorframe, disappeared inside, and came back with a small loaf wrapped in paper. “Take it,” he said, holding it out. “Still warm.”

“I can’t—” the man started, as people always did when kindness surprised them.

“Please,” Yunho said. “If I take it back in, I’ll eat it, and my doctor says I have to pretend I have self-control.”

That earned him the smallest smile—there and gone. The man accepted the loaf with both hands, a gesture that made something in Yunho’s chest settle.

“Thank you,” he said quietly. “I’m Seonghwa.”

“Yunho,” he answered, then gestured at the sign above the door. “This is me. Well, and two teenagers who know how to burn their fingertips and complain.”

Seonghwa’s eyes flicked to the window again. “It smells like… mornings,” he said, and the way he said it made it sound like a place instead of a time.

“Come back when you’re less polite and more starving,” Yunho said. “I’ll make the stubborn kind of toast.”

“What’s stubborn toast?” Seonghwa asked, despite himself.

“The kind that pretends it doesn’t want butter,” Yunho said solemnly.

Seonghwa huffed another laugh, shook his head, and took a step back onto the sidewalk. “Maybe,” he said.

When he was gone, Yunho stood with the broom in his hand and realized he was still smiling. He told the baby, “We liked him,” and felt ridiculous and right.

The loaf didn’t survive the night. Two evenings later, Seonghwa drifted by again, the way people drift past something they won’t admit they want. Yunho, who had been pretending very hard to sweep the same square of step for ten minutes, lifted a hand like he was hailing a cab.

“Evening, neighbor.”

Seonghwa paused. “We’re neighbors?”

“Everyone is until they prove otherwise,” Yunho said. “There’s cinnamon bread. It’s rude not to say hello to cinnamon bread.”

“It would be disrespectful,” Seonghwa agreed, surrendering. He stepped inside.

The bell chimed in that particular hopeful way it had when someone meant to stay for a minute.

Yunho cut two thick slices, laid them onto a plate, and slid it across. “Tea?”

“Please,” Seonghwa said, polite again, and Yunho decided he loved how the word sounded in his mouth.

They ate at the end of the counter because tables made new people nervous and the counter felt like a confession box for small truths.

“What do you do?” Yunho asked, because it was the normal question and he wanted to ask the less normal ones later.

“Kitchen,” Seonghwa said. “At a… big company.” He hesitated, smiled as if at himself, and added, “Assistant, for now. Long days. Learning.”

“Bread is also long days and learning,” Yunho said. “Except my boss is a bowl.”

“At least your bowl doesn’t send emails,” Seonghwa murmured, and Yunho laughed out loud.

He noticed little things. The way Seonghwa held the mug with both hands, as if warmth were a thing you could store. The way his eyes went intent when he listened, even to dumb stories about flour deliveries. The way he kept checking the time and then forcing himself not to, like he needed permission to exist for ten minutes without a timer ticking.

“Do you draw?” Yunho asked as Seonghwa traced the curve of the plate with his thumb, absentmindedly precise.

Seonghwa blinked. “What makes you think—?”

“Your hand is moving like a pencil,” Yunho said. “People who think in lines do that.”

A beat, and then Seonghwa, shy and a little surprised to be seen: “Sometimes. Recipes, mostly. Not… not real drawing.”

“Recipes are real,” Yunho said firmly. “If you ever want to trade ideas, I pay in sugar.”

He said it lightly, but Seonghwa sat up like a thread had been pulled straight. “I’d like that,” he said, too quickly. Then, softer: “Thank you.”

They didn’t say much more that night. He paid for a single roll and tucked it away like a trophy. When Yunho locked the door after him, he felt absurdly pleased to find a single fingerprint on the glass.

The third time they met, it was raining with a kind of commitment that argued with umbrellas. Yunho propped the door open anyway, set a towel down for the inevitable puddles, and watched the street blur into watercolour. Seonghwa came in damp and careful, shook himself once like a dog pretending to be polite, and set his cap on the counter.

“Don’t say it,” he warned. “About the weather.”

“I would never,” Yunho promised, already reaching for a dry towel. He handed it over. Seonghwa took it with gratitude too big for a small kindness, and something in Yunho’s chest pinched.

They talked longer. It was easier to talk when the world was being dramatic about rain outside; people are braver with windows between them and the weather.

“Where’d you grow up?” Yunho asked.

“Jinju,” Seonghwa said, and you could hear water in the way he said it. “You?”

“In a bakery,” Yunho said. “Which is like a city if you squint, but Gwangju.”

Seonghwa smiled into his tea. Yunho told him about his grandmother’s rules that weren’t rules, about the oven you patted twice for luck. Seonghwa told him about his mother who worked two jobs and still ironed his shirts for interviews, about the apartment that could fit inside this bakery and the plant he couldn’t keep alive but refused to give up on.

He didn’t talk about the life changing events. He didn’t say whose name had been in his mouth the night his life changed shoes. Yunho didn’t push. He recognized the posture of someone with a door they weren’t ready to open.

“Come by tomorrow,” Yunho said impulsively. “It’s soup day. I make too much for one person.”

Seonghwa shook his head politely. “I couldn’t—”

“You must,” Yunho said, matching his politeness with a gentleness that was firmer.

“Fine,” Seonghwa surrendered, laughing. “Who am I to argue with you.”

After he left, the bakery felt less like a room you worked in and more like a room that knew your name.

The soup day turned into a routine. And with the routine came the extra pieces that didn’t fit in anyone else’s story but belonged to Yunho’s.

He started waiting for Seonghwa without meaning to. He’d cut an extra slice of bread and leave it near the stove as if it were a place card. He’d tidy the same shelf twice. When the bell rang and Seonghwa said, “Hi,” sheepish and sweet, the room shifted into a shape that relieved Yunho’s back.

They sat on stools and complained about the stupidest things—pastry boxes that never folded the same way twice, a manager who believed water was a personality trait, a supplier who called everyone “boss.” They traded recommendations for cheap fruit and the best bus routes. They argued about whether savoury breakfasts were moral. Yunho watched colour return to Seonghwa’s face while he ate, and Seonghwa watched Yunho’s shoulders lower, just a little, when someone else was in the room.

One evening, Seonghwa stood too quickly and winced, hand at his lower back. The sound he made was small but honest. Yunho felt his mouth move before his brain approved.

“You’re expecting,” he said softly.

Seonghwa froze. His eyes did the thing eyes do when a private truth is seen gently—fleeing first, then thinking, then deciding. He nodded.

“I am,” he said. His hands found the edge of the counter and held it like a railing.

“Me too,” Yunho said again, same word, new weight, as he touched his own abdomen. He lowered himself back onto the stool and patted the one beside him. “Surprise. Guess we’re in this together. Sit. Tea gets angry when ignored.”

Seonghwa sat. He wrapped his hands around the mug and stared at the steam like it had answers. Congratulations spilling from their tongues.

“Scared?” Yunho asked.

“Yes,” Seonghwa admitted, the word falling out like it had been waiting. “And… not. Both. I didn’t plan this. But when I think about—” He stopped, swallowed. “It feels right.”

“Those two things can sit together,” Yunho said. “I didn’t plan either. I still forget, in the middle of the day, and then remember while I’m shaping rolls and almost cry into the flour.”

Seonghwa huffed a laugh that was mostly a breath. “I cried at a commercial for a vacuum.”

“Congratulations,” Yunho said gravely. “You’re one of us.”

They exhaled at the same time, and it turned into something like a laugh and something like relief.

“Does he—” Yunho began, then corrected himself. “Does your partner know?”

Seonghwa looked down. “It’s… complicated,” he said carefully. “But I’m not alone.” He glanced up, met Yunho’s eyes. “I mean—now I’m not.”

“Now you’re not,” Yunho agreed, and he meant it in more ways than one.

The next week, Seonghwa brought a small notebook he claimed was ugly. It was not. He showed Yunho a clumsy sketch of a rice porridge he wanted to try with toasted sesame and julienned pear. Yunho beamed like a teacher grading his favourite student.

“You’re hired,” he said.

“I work two jobs already,” Seonghwa protested, smiling despite himself.

“Then you’re hired emotionally,” Yunho said. “I’ll pay you in baked goods.”

He met Yeosang and Jongho because Seonghwa needed him to. It happened on a Sunday afternoon when the bakery was pretending to slow down and the kitchen at Jung Tech had spit the two men back out into the world with enough energy left to be people.

Yeosang stood in Yunho’s doorway, all straight lines and impatience, took one look at the lamination on the counter, and said, “Your croissants are smug.”

“Your cheekbones are rude,” Yunho returned, and just like that, they were friends.

Jongho shook his hand like he meant it. He had a voice that could calm both toddlers and mixers, and he listened when Yunho talked about the oven’s moods like it was a member of the staff. They stood three across at the counter and argued about butter temperature until the sun moved.

San and Wooyoung arrived later, loud with good intentions. Wooyoung leaned across the glass and demanded the entire inventory with the authority of someone who had never been told no. San ignored the menu, asked Yunho how he was feeling, and meant it. Yunho, who was used to being the one who offered comfort first, let himself be the one receiving it and was surprised by how good it felt.

He realized, halfway through watching Seonghwa explain something to San with his hands, that he’d been folded into a net without fanfare. A circle had opened and made room. He wasn’t only Mingi’s secret anymore. He was Yunho, who made bread and soup on Thursdays and had three new people who would yell at him if he lifted a sack of flour alone.

That night, with the shop dark and the apartment soft, he lay on his side and pressed his palm to the small curve under his shirt.

“Today you got uncles,” he whispered. “Four, at least. Maybe five if Wooyoung stops trying to fight the pastry case.”

The baby did not answer. The quiet did.

Across the walls in a different apartment, Seonghwa sat on his own bed and did the same, head bent, mouth moving with words Yunho would never hear but understood anyway.

They were two men in two kitchens learning the same lesson the hard and lucky way: that loneliness can be stubborn, but so can kindness. And that sometimes the world hands you a family in the shape of a regular who comes back a second time and a third, and a fourth, until you stop counting and start setting an extra plate without thinking.

Chapter Text

The first contraction had Yunho gripping the edge of the counter, in his house. He had just enough energy to ring Seonghwa.

“Hospital bag—where’s the—” Seonghwa’s voice cracked in panic.

“Already packed,” Yeosang cut in, all calm efficiency as he appeared from the doorway, snatching the bag off the chair like he’d been preparing for this moment for months.

Seonghwa was pale, muttering prayers under his breath as he bundled Yunho into the car. Yunho hissed as another wave of pain hit, nails digging crescents into his thighs.

“It’s okay, you’re okay,” Seonghwa murmured, one hand hovering helplessly near his shoulder.

By the time they rushed into the hospital ward, Yunho’s vision blurred at the edges. Nurses swarmed, asking questions he couldn’t answer between clenched teeth.

And then, a shout across the corridor. Shoes pounding.

Another figure sprinted in—cap low, mask tugged down but unmistakable.

“Mingi.” Yunho’s voice broke on the name.

“Where—” he gasped, chest heaving from the run.

“Here.” Seonghwa pointed toward the delivery room, and Mingi bolted inside without a second thought.

The hours stretched into something unmeasurable. Yunho clutched Mingi’s hand so tight that his knuckles whitened.

“You’re crushing me,” Mingi whispered at one point, half a laugh, half a wince.

“Good,” Yunho gritted out. “Then stay.”

“As if I’d move.” Mingi kissed his damp forehead, murmuring nonsense encouragements. “You’re beautiful even like this. Do you know that?”

“You’re insane,” Yunho gasped, another contraction wracking him.

“Crazy for you,” Mingi said, voice raw but steady. He meant it.

Through every scream, every push, every ragged breath, he was there. His free hand smoothed Yunho’s hair back, wiped at tears that weren’t all from pain. He whispered, “You’ve got this. You’re stronger than anyone I know.”

The hours blurred. Pain, voices, the world shrinking down to the rhythm of breath and push and hold. Yunho thought he might break apart, and then — suddenly, sharply — the cry split the air.

Everything stopped.

The nurse lifted a tiny body, flushed and furious, lungs wailing. Yunho’s chest constricted, not with pain now but with something so vast it made him dizzy.

‧₊˚♪ 𝄞₊˚⊹

Hours later, Yunho lay pale but radiant, a tiny bundle nestled against his chest. His own tears blurred the little face, but the weight in his arms was real, solid, alive.

Mingi hovered, his eyes wet, brushing Yunho’s hair back with trembling fingers. His voice broke in wonder. “He’s—he’s perfect.”

“Meet Haneul,” Yunho whispered, tired but glowing. He tilted the bundle just enough for Mingi to see.

The baby’s fist curled around the edge of Yunho’s gown, as if claiming him.

Mingi let out a sound that was almost a sob. “Our sky,” he whispered. “You’re here.”

Seonghwa stepped closer, pale with exhaustion but smiling. He touched the baby’s tiny hand gently. “Welcome.”

Mingi clapped his back, his voice rough but sincere. “Thanks for being here. For being family.”

The word didn’t sting anymore.

‧₊˚♪ 𝄞₊˚⊹

That night, when the room was quieter, Mingi sat at Yunho’s side, chin resting on the edge of the bed, eyes fixed on the bundle between them.

“You did it,” he murmured. “I’ve never been so proud.”

Yunho tilted his head toward him, hair messy, eyes soft despite the exhaustion. “We did it. He’s ours.”

Mingi laughed quietly, still disbelieving. “I don’t care what anyone says. This—this is the best debut of my life.”

Yunho rolled his eyes, but the corners of his lips curved. He pressed Haneul closer, then pressed his forehead to Mingi’s.

“We’re really a family now,” he whispered.

Mingi kissed him, slow and reverent, and whispered back, “Always were. Always will be.”

The first night, Yunho barely slept. Every sigh, every rustle of the tiny body in the bassinet had him bolt upright, heart in his throat. He sat there for hours, palm hovering just above Haneul’s chest, counting each small rise and fall.

“Breathe,” he whispered, though the baby needed no reminder.

From the chair, Mingi’s voice floated out, low and raspy. “Babe, you need rest too.”

“I can’t.” Yunho’s eyes never left the bassinet. “What if he—”

“He won’t,” Mingi said gently. He dragged the chair closer, resting his chin on Yunho’s shoulder. “Look. He’s stubborn, just like you. Already snoring.”

Yunho let out a weak laugh. “That’s not a snore.”

“It’s definitely a snore.” Mingi grinned, exhaustion softening into affection. Then he hummed a tune—an unreleased melody, half-formed lyrics under his breath. The baby’s face relaxed at the sound.

Yunho blinked back tears. “You’re going to make him love music before he knows his own name.”

“Someone’s gotta. You’ll handle carbs.”

“Carbs?” Yunho frowned.

“Bread. Cookies. Croissants. He’ll grow up spoiled on both.”

The laugh that bubbled out of Yunho was shaky, but real.

‧₊˚♪ 𝄞₊˚⊹

The next day, the hospital room filled with their circle.

San and Wooyoung arrived first, bursting in like a storm.

“He’s so small!” Wooyoung gasped, peering into the bassinet. “How is he real? Yunho, did you bake him?”

Yunho stared at him. “What—”

San sighed, setting down a bag of gifts. “Ignore him. Congratulations.” He looked at Haneul and, despite himself, softened. “He’s… perfect.”

Wooyoung nearly dropped the stuffed dinosaur he’d brought, recovering just in time. “Best friends. Me and him. Watch.” He made a ridiculous face until Haneul blinked, unimpressed.

Mingi swatted his arm. “Back off, he’s only a day old.”

“Exactly,” Wooyoung said smugly. “Prime time to establish dominance.”

San groaned, dragging him toward the chairs.

‧₊˚♪ 𝄞₊˚⊹

Yeosang and Jongho came next, precise and practical. They brought food, fussed over Yunho until he was forced to eat, and adjusted the blanket around Haneul with surgeon-like focus.

“Drink water,” Jongho ordered.

“Sit straight,” Yeosang added.

Mingi saluted. “Yes, chefs.”

They ignored him, more interested in making sure Yunho finished his soup.

‧₊˚♪ 𝄞₊˚⊹

Then the door opened again, and Seonghwa walked in—pale from exhaustion but glowing with something gentler. In his arms, wrapped snug in a pale blanket, was another newborn.

“Meet Byeol,” he said softly.

The room quieted. Mingi stood, stunned, as Yunho leaned forward.

Byeol squirmed, tiny hands flailing. Haneul stirred at the sound, letting out a whimper, as though answering her. When Seonghwa leaned close, Byeol’s little fist brushed against Haneul’s blanket.

“They’re already reaching for each other,” Seonghwa murmured, awe softening his voice.

Mingi swallowed hard. “Sky and star,” he whispered. “Of course they came together.”

Yunho’s lips curved despite his exhaustion. “They’ll grow up side by side.”

Byeol’s eyelids fluttered, as if she agreed. Haneul hiccupped.

The room filled with quiet laughter.

By evening, the room felt like something more than four walls. It was voices and warmth, gifts piled in corners, the gentle noise of chosen family.

Mingi leaned back against the bed, looking around with wide eyes. “This feels like home.”

Yunho, with Haneul tucked in his arms, nodded. “Because it is.”

‧₊˚♪ 𝄞₊˚⊹

That night, when the visitors had gone and the room was dim again, Yunho traced a finger along Haneul’s tiny fist.

“You’ll never be alone, my sky,” he whispered.

Mingi wrapped an arm around both of them, kissing the crown of Yunho’s head. “Because we’ll never let you be.”

Across the room, Seonghwa rocked Byeol in his arms, whispering something just as soft, promises woven into the quiet. Two newborns shifted in their blankets, unaware of the threads already tying them together.

A family, stitched by love, choice, and something bigger than all of them.

Chapter Text

Preschool made the days louder. Haneul wore small shoes with velcro straps, Byeol with laces that Seonghwa tied carefully each morning. They left in pairs, one adult on either side, two children in the middle holding hands like glue.

Byeol usually announced their arrival to the street. “Going to school!” she’d declare, her hair bouncing. Haneul followed her tone more than her words, echoing softly, “School,” like the syllable itself was enough.

At drop-off, Yunho crouched to adjust straps, Seonghwa smoothed hair back, and both children tugged impatiently, ready to join other voices. It was the first time the found family scattered into wider halls, and yet they carried each other everywhere—Byeol handing Haneul blocks at playtime, Haneul handing her crayons, both saving seats during story hour. Teachers whispered, “inseparable,” as if they were witnessing twin stars.

‧₊˚♪ 𝄞₊˚⊹

Back home, Mingi’s absence stretched and folded in complicated ways. When he was gone, the apartment felt wider. When he was present, it shrank to fit his laughter. Haneul learned to name the difference even if he couldn’t explain it. He learned that the chair with the scarf meant the house was full, and the chair without it meant the house was trying.

Every return started the same. Mingi dropped to his knees, arms wide, eyes wet with missing. Haneul always ran into him, always tucked his face into his shoulder, always sighed in relief—and then always, always said, “Minny.”

“Papa,” Mingi begged.

“Uncle Minny,” Haneul repeated, smiling into his neck.

“Traitor,” Mingi groaned, falling sideways onto the rug. Yunho laughed until his stomach hurt, covering his mouth with a flour-dusted wrist. Byeol copied once—“Minny!”—and Mingi lay on the floor in theatrical despair. Seonghwa, carrying folded laundry past the scene, murmured without looking, “You’ve lost. Accept it.”

But at night, in the dim, Haneul curled into Mingi’s chest without a word. His little hand found Mingi’s shirt and fisted tight. And Mingi knew: titles didn’t matter. The belonging was already there.

‧₊˚♪ 𝄞₊˚⊹

Not every time could Mingi come back to them. Sometimes Yunho packed an overnight bag, wrapped Haneul’s scarf three times around his neck, and boarded a train to Seoul.

Haneul learned the city by its rhythms—the rush of subways, the tall glass buildings, the way Mingi’s schedule stretched until it nearly swallowed him whole. Practice rooms with mirrored walls, waiting rooms with vending machines, company cafeterias where staff whispered and bowed.

Haneul was too young to understand the fame rising around his father. But he understood how tired Mingi looked, and how Yunho’s hand on his back was steady even when the world spun too quickly.

And then there was Hongjoong.

At first, he was only a voice greeting them in phones, then a figure crouching to Haneul’s height to wave. “Hey, you must be Haneul.” His smile was small but sure, his voice kind even when rushed.

Then he began staying longer. Sitting on the floor during practices when Mingi was too busy. Offering crayons from his bag. Letting Haneul climb into his lap while he sketched designs in a notebook. He never pushed, never asked for more than Haneul gave. But children sense gentleness. Haneul began tugging on his sleeve, showing him drawings, tugging him to sit closer.

Yunho noticed. The way Hongjoong tied Haneul’s laces without being asked. The way he bent to whisper encouragement during Mingi’s showcases. The way his hand hovered protectively when they crossed busy streets.

Soon, “Uncle Joong” became as natural a title as “Minny, or Hwa Appa”

‧₊˚♪ 𝄞₊˚⊹

By four, Haneul had started noticing things beyond toys and crumbs.

He noticed Mingi’s eyes went softer when Yunho was near, even in crowded rooms. He noticed Seonghwa sometimes lingered at the window after Byeol fell asleep, face calm but not peaceful. He noticed Hongjoong’s sketches always had something tucked into them—a little crown, a seashell, a bird—that reminded him of things Haneul had babbled about days earlier.

He didn’t have the words for it, but he stored it all away.

‧₊˚♪ 𝄞₊˚⊹

Byeol was his constant. She declared herself his protector at three, insisting, “Hold hands or you’ll get lost.” He let her, even though she was the one forever running toward pigeons or puddles. He didn’t mind being tethered.

They shared crayons, snacks, and secret languages—half words, half gestures. When one cried, the other cried too, less from pain and more from loyalty. When one laughed, the other laughed louder, as if competing for joy.

One night, after an especially exhausting day of chasing each other, they collapsed together on Seonghwa’s couch. Byeol looked at him with solemnity only toddlers could conjure. “Best friends,” she declared.

“Best friends,” he echoed, sealing it like a treaty.

The adults melted into puddles around them.

‧₊˚♪ 𝄞₊˚⊹

Haneul turned five in a room so full it might have burst. Balloons dotted the ceiling. The bakery had been transformed with ribbons and banners, though one sagged because Wooyoung had insisted he could hang it without a ladder and then promptly failed.

The cake gleamed under candles. Yunho crouched beside Haneul, one steady hand on his back. “Make a wish,” he said gently.

Haneul scrunched his eyes shut. His wishes were simple: He had lots of bread to eat, Papa comes back home fast, and that Byeol’s hand never slipped out of his.

He blew too hard. Wax spattered. “Pleh,” he announced gravely, and everyone laughed like he’d said something wise.

Later, long after frosting had smeared cheeks and gifts had been opened, the children lay side by side at Seonghwa’s, half-asleep. The room was warm with the hum of adults still talking in the kitchen.

Haneul rolled toward Byeol. “When we’re big,” he whispered, “we’ll still be best friends, right?”

Byeol, eyes half-closed, nodded against her pillow. “Always.”

Seonghwa, seated nearby with a book in his lap, looked up. His throat tightened. Yunho, leaning against the wall, heard it too. And somewhere across the country, Mingi stood at a window after a concert, scarf pulled over his mouth, wishing he could be there for the answer he already knew.

‧₊˚♪ 𝄞₊˚⊹

The world, for Haneul, was not absence and presence. It was arms to run into, laps to fall asleep on, and hands that always caught his. He didn’t know the struggles behind it—the contracts, the whispers, the exhaustion. What he knew was enough: Appa’s warmth, Papa Minny’s laughter, Appa Hwa’s care, Uncle Joong’s steady smile, and Byeol.

Chapter Text

The stylist’s hands moved through his hair—part, smooth, spray, fix—and Mingi stared at his own reflection while the room behind him shifted from chatter to countdown. Someone called five minutes. Someone else joked about the fan project. Someone slapped his shoulder and said, “Let’s kill it.”

He smiled exactly the way the cameras liked. It wasn’t a lie; it just wasn’t the whole truth.

Under the lights, he became the version of himself the world had minted: bigger, sharper, louder, shoulders squared, grin cocked like a promise. The stage fed him in a way nothing else did, sound slamming into his ribs until he forgot how to hold himself small. He loved that part—the rush, the choir of strangers shouting his name like they’d known him all his life, the choreography sliding into muscle memory so exact it felt like a second skin.

It was the part after that left him hollow. The makeup came off and he stood in the mirror with a towel around his shoulders, and the room stopped being a storm and turned into tired air. His phone lit up. Yunho’s name. A photo first: Haneul folded in half on the couch, socks kicked off, mouth open, one hand clutching a wooden train like it might try to leave without him.

Mingi’s own mouth softened. He touched the screen with a finger, a stupid human move, as if touch could cross distance that way. A message followed: Sang himself to sleep. The wrong words. On purpose.

He grinned helplessly at the glass. The door opened without knocking and Hongjoong stuck his head in, already rolling his eyes like the older brother the universe had assigned him.

“Stop mooning at your phone,” he said, coming in anyway and dropping into a chair across from him. “We have a dinner reservation in ten and I need your brain to live in this reality.”

“My brain is in reality,” Mingi said, then showed him the photo like a teenager. “Look.”

Hongjoong took one glance and melted despite himself. “He got taller in a week.”

“Don’t say that.” It came out too quick, a reflex. “I missed last week.”

The word landed in the space between them like a tack. Hongjoong didn’t flinch; he understood the way certain syllables hurt. He leaned back and let his foot tap a rhythm into the floor.

“Yunho okay?” he asked.

“Yeah.” Mingi swallowed. “He always says he is, and then he’s right.”

“Annoying,” Hongjoong said, fond. “Come on. Ten minutes. Then you can go back to narrating your child breathing.”

They went. Outside he was held for another short talk. Mingi flipped the switch he had learned to live with: stage persona off, company persona on. He spoke crisply about brand partners, nodded through talk of international schedules, smiled in the right places, deflected two nosy questions about his “ideal type” with a joke so practiced it left no fingerprints.

He did it for a living, and he did it well. It still made his teeth ache.

After, in the car, he slumped into the corner seat and opened the thread again. Yunho had sent a second photo: Haneul’s hand on a paper crown he’d mangled crafting at preschool, glue still wet, glitter everywhere. The caption read: He wanted to save this one for you. Told the teacher his Papa is the music boss.

The laugh bubbled up and broke before it became a sound. The door clicked, the van started, and the city slid by in neon. He typed: Tell him I’m the cleaning-the-glitter boss tonight.

Three dots, then: He says you have to be back first “Minny.”

“Traitor,” Mingi typed back, wiping his eye with the heel of his hand. Put the phone by his ear? If he’s already out, I’ll whisper anyway.

It was one of the small compromises they’d invented. He didn’t always get to sing Haneul to sleep. But sometimes the phone lay on the pillow beside the boy’s head, and Mingi whispered over a line of glowing pixels, and it was almost enough to pretend his breath warmed the same room.

He’d never meant to live like this. But the decision had arrived early and loudly and without a path that didn’t break something.

‧₊˚♪ 𝄞₊˚⊹

They’d been kids, still, when the company sat him down and told him what success would cost.

“Dating is fine,” one manager had said with a smile that didn’t reach anywhere real. “Privately. The public doesn’t need to know.”

“What about marriage?” he had asked, reckless with hope and the knowledge that love had already moved into his bones and refused to leave.

The smile thinned. “When you’re thirty-five,” another one joked, and laughter skittered around the table because humor is a knife with a blunt edge. “Right now, you’re married to the fans.”

He said what kept the peace. He said, “I understand.”

He understood more, later, when success arrived in a body too big for him to carry and a shadow attached itself to his shoes. He understood when the sasaeng rumors licked at his front door and a camera lens appeared across the street from Yunho’s building. He understood that fame was a fire, and all fires ate. You either fed it what you chose or watched it take everything else.

So, he chose. “We keep you out of this,” he told Yunho, sitting on the flimsy couch in the bakery apartment, hands twisting each other into knots. “You and Haneul. No pictures. No posts. I’ll come home when I can, but—” He bit down hard on the rest: it will hurt.

Yunho watched him with those eyes that always looked at the centre of a person and not the costume. He reached out, untangled Mingi’s hands, flattened them between his own palms like dough he meant to work back to calm. “Okay,” he said simply. “We’ll take quiet. You carry loud.”

“I don’t want him to grow up thinking I’m—” Mingi stopped because the sentence did not have an ending he could live with.

“He’ll grow up knowing you are his,” Yunho said. “We will make sure that part is louder than everything else.”

He believed him. He had to.

‧₊˚♪ 𝄞₊˚⊹

But belief did not erase the minutes. The first time Haneul walked happened at two in the afternoon on a Wednesday, of all mundane miracles. Yunho sent the video and Mingi watched it between makeup and rehearsal, pressing his tongue to the roof of his mouth to keep from making an embarrassingly loud noise in front of the team. He hit repeat until someone said his name twice and he realized he had been standing motionless in the middle of the dressing room with his heart beating so hard it had reshaped his skin.

He called immediately. The video connected. There was Yunho, smiling and flushed, hair stupid and perfect from the afternoon’s chaos. “You saw?”

“I saw.” It came out a sound and not a sentence. “How many steps? Did he—did he fall? Is he okay?”

“Four and a half,” Yunho said, proud and amused. “He fell on his butt. He is not fragile.”

“I missed it.” The words sneaked out anyway, sour on his tongue.

“You saw it,” Yunho corrected, gentle and stern at once. “You saw him. That counts.”

Sometimes it almost did.

At fansigns, someone inevitably asked him if he wanted kids. The answer waited on the back of his teeth: I wanted one so much I made a universe around him and now I live in it when I can. What he said was the version that kept them safe. “Maybe someday,” he smiled, dimple precise, and signed the album and added a heart and said thank you and hated himself just enough to not get rusty.

On the nights that didn’t end—flight, showcase, hotel, rinse, repeat—he found a corner of darkness and composed messages instead of melodies. He learned purple today. Says “pul-poo.” He drew you with long hair. Yunho responded with pictures of apples cut into rabbits and Haneul in a cardboard box he refused to vacate for two hours because it was a “boat.”

The years carved the habit into bone.

When he watched Haneul sleep in the rare middle-of-the-night returns “Should I wake him?” he whispered once, hovering over the little bed like a thief who wanted to get caught.

Yunho shook his head, hand warm on his back. “He woke three times to check the hallway. You can hold him in the morning until he complains.”

Mingi sat down and pressed his forehead to the rail. “I hate this.”

Yunho didn’t argue with the honesty. He slid beside him on the floor so their shoulders touched and they could hate it together. “I know,” he said. “Me too.”

“You should hate me a little,” Mingi muttered, because people who are tired say mean things to themselves and call it truth.

“I won’t,” Yunho said, like stating weather again. “You love us in the shape you can. We love you in the shape we can. If all the shapes don’t match yet. They will.”

“Say Papa,” Mingi whispered to the sleeping boy, absurd because he wouldn’t hear, necessary because it was a prayer that kept catching in his teeth.

“mmm Minny,” Haneul murmured without waking, mouth vibrating around the m. Mingi grimaced, Yunho snorted, and they startled into giggling on the floor beside the bed like teenagers with a shared secret.

“How are we going to explain the nickname in therapy,” Mingi groaned.

‧₊˚♪ 𝄞₊˚⊹

He did not do it alone. When you are loved by a bakery owner, you are loved by everyone who wanders through the door and decides to keep coming back.

San had a way of drifting in at exactly the hour the room needed light. He’d clap Mingi on the back after a brutal schedule and say, “Your shoulders are up by your ears again,” then push him down on a stool and force tea into his hands and tell stupid stories until the lines in Mingi’s forehead softened. Wooyoung treated him like a human instead of an image: the same relentless teasing as his members for missing a step in a private dance practice. Yeosang pretended not to care and then showed up with lists labelled “better sleep habits on tour” and “snack suggestions that won’t make you die at rehearsal.” Jongho took the kids in both arms and made them squeal until the room sounded like relief, and at the same time looked at Mingi and asked, quietly, “Are you actually okay,” and stood still for the answer.

And Hongjoong—Hongjoong had met Yunho and Haneul during a Seoul run and never fully let go. He became “Uncle Joong” by accident and then on purpose. He always had stickers in his pocket. He always had time to crouch and tie a shoelace. He always had an idiot-perfect sense for when Mingi needed someone to sit in silence with him and pass him a bottle of water without making it a thing.

“I can’t keep doing these international schedules without losing my mind,” Mingi confessed once, forehead tipped against the cold window of a rehearsal room while his Hongjoong hyung waited for him. “I feel like… I’m two people.”

“You are,” Hongjoong said simply. “We all are. The trick is not letting them hate each other.”

“How.”

“You make them meet,” he said. “On purpose. Every day. Even if it’s a text. You don’t let Idol Mingi pretend Appa Mingi is a costume.”

Hongjoong shoved a banana into his hand like he was a coach and not a designer with too much liner on his eyes.

‧₊˚♪ 𝄞₊˚⊹

The worst days didn’t look dramatic from the outside. They were the quiet ones that followed a stretch too long, a return too short, and a leaving that came two hours early. That’s when Haneul’s face changed—no tantrum, no crying; he just moved like a person walking in a room full of invisible furniture. Carefully. Head down. Waiting to bump into something again.

Yunho never pretended not to notice. He didn’t turn the ache into a lesson or an errand. He put stools by the counter and asked if Haneul wanted to “guard the dough.”

At night, he took the late calls and let Mingi sob without naming it sobbing. He didn’t fill the silence with solutions. He said things like, “He asked for your song at bedtime,” and, “He pretended the couch was a boat, and it had a captain,” and, “He saved his sticker for you even though Wooyoung offered him five other stickers.” He was fluent in the language of small proofs.

When schedules allowed, Yunho packed a bag and brought Haneul to Seoul instead. It was messier, more complicated, sometimes dangerous. But he decided that this was one of the shapes love could take too: meeting at the halfway place instead of leaving everything to the return. They learned the building’s back corridors. They made friends with security guards. Haneul grew up napping under costume racks, eating noodles with the staff, coloring at the corner of dressing rooms until the staff started making sure there were crayons in every room.

And in those corridors, Hongjoong became family in a way that later would matter too much for coincidence. He sat cross-legged on practice room floors and let Haneul drive a toy car over his knee until the child fell asleep mid-vroom. He slipped a candy into Mingi’s pocket and then threw another at Yunho’s head when Yunho pretended not to want one. He said, “You good?” with his eyes more than his mouth and took answers without requiring them to be articulate.

Back in the small town, when Yunho and Haneul returned, the oven exhaled like a living thing and Mingi’s absence arranged the air into a shape that held. The found family tightened the net: Seonghwa cooked too much soup on weeks that looked bad on the calendar, Jongho carried the heavy sacks without letting Yunho pretend he didn’t need the help.

This is how they survived it: not by being heroic, but by being relentlessly ordinary in the face of extraordinary pressure. Bread rose. Children grew. Calls came. Calls failed. Love did not.

‧₊˚♪ 𝄞₊˚⊹

The worst argument Mingi and Yunho had started because of a paper calendar. It shouldn’t have. It did.

He was home for eighteen hours and the day-plan lay on the table under a mug ring. “You scheduled a delivery at seven tomorrow,” he said, too sharp. “I’m leaving at five. I could’ve—if you had—why didn’t you—”

Yunho raised an eyebrow. “Speak, poet.”

“Ask me to help,” Mingi blurted, ugly. “Sometimes it feels like you don’t need me.”

Yunho stared at him for a long second, then set the knife down carefully and leaned his elbows on the table.

“Needing you and arranging my life so it doesn’t collapse when you’re gone are not opposites,” he said. “They are the same thing. If I pretended that I didn’t know how to function, you’d hate me for making you choose. I refuse to make you choose.”

Mingi closed his eyes. The flare died as quick as it came. He reached for Yunho’s wrist. “I’m sorry.”

“I know,” Yunho said, and that was worse than being forgiven. It was being understood.

“I hate that you have to be this strong,” Mingi whispered.

“I don’t,” Yunho said. “I just am. And you are whatever you are, and together we are less tired. That is the math.”

He hummed it into Mingi’s shoulder later, a warm weight across his back, their breaths syncing without asking. “We’re doing it,” he said into the dark. “Not perfectly. Enough.”

“I want perfect,” Mingi confessed, a little boy in a big body.

“Then sleep,” Yunho murmured, kissing his hair. “Tomorrow, we try again.”

‧₊˚♪ 𝄞₊˚⊹

Trying again became a religion.

He did the little rebellions that no one noticed but them. He rerouted a day off to detour through their town for exactly two hours between flights. He skipped an afterparty and took a train that rattled more than it moved so he could arrive at the bakery at dawn and lift Haneul out of bed without waking him all the way and make pancakes badly and eat them with too much syrup until the child’s laughter turned into sugar itself. He tucked notes into Yunho’s recipe book that said things like you’re ridiculous and marry me again and I remembered to bring the scarf home on purpose, for reasons he didn’t ask about out loud.

He let himself be “Minny” in public and “Papa” under quilts. He hid behind caps and masks and walked two paces behind on crowded streets and took Yunho’s hand only in the pocket of his coat when select few eyes were around—which led to one of the bruises he carried in a tender pocket of his heart: the way Haneul had picked up their hands on a quiet sidewalk and tried to put them together like puzzle pieces.

“Hold hands,” the boy had commanded, proud of the solution he’d invented to a problem he shouldn’t have had to solve.

“We can’t, buddy,” Mingi had said, keeping his voice bright and not feeling bright. “Too many people.”

Haneul’s face had folded a little, like paper bent and then smoothed. He’d let go and dropped back between them, and the rest of the walk had been their feet and a corner of silence that didn’t belong outdoors.

That night, Mingi had cried in the bathroom with the shower on too hot to drown the sound, and Yunho had walked in anyway and turned off the water and sat on the floor with him and put his forehead to Mingi’s temple and said nothing until the quiet stopped hurting so much.

“I have to fix it,” Mingi said hoarsely. “I can’t keep asking him to be the brave one.”

“You won’t,” Yunho said, like a vow that had more than one person holding it.

That night, he watched his son sleep in the bed across from their couch, one foot uncivilized-ly free of the blanket, one arm stretched toward the other apartment across the hall like he could touch Byeol through walls.

Yunho dozed beside him, head on his shoulder. The room breathed. Every apartment in the building breathed. The city, already tired, breathed. Mingi stared at the ceiling and felt the vow rise, patient and huge.

I won’t ask him to carry my absence like homework.

I won’t ask Yunho to set himself on fire to keep me warm.

I will build a different shape out of this life or I will stop pretending I can’t.

The phone buzzed with tomorrow before midnight. He ignored it for five minutes, then ten, until it stopped. He leaned and kissed Yunho’s hair and then got up to tuck the blanket back over Haneul’s wild foot.

“It’s Papa Haneul-ah,” he whispered.

The boy shifted, sighed. He didn’t answer. He didn’t have to. Mingi had learned to hear that word in other sounds: the even breath, the neuron-deep trust, the way the small body relaxed and stayed relaxed even when the door clicked and the world asked them to be two people again.

He lay back down. Yunho’s hand found his in the half-dark and squeezed once—here—before slipping heavy with sleep.

Mingi didn’t sleep. He stared at the slash of streetlight on the ceiling and rewrote the script he had argued with the company for. He pictured a contract with different clauses. He pictured interviews with different answers. He pictured a future where the bakery door opened and he didn’t have to remove his hand from the one it held.

He pictured Haneul at school pickup with both parents at the gate, and no one whispered, and no one took a picture except the people in front of him with eyes that loved him for free.

He pictured his two stages finally layered over each other until they weren’t two, exactly, but one wide piece of ground he could stand on without wobbling.

And he made himself a promise he would spend the next years keeping: he would not let his son learn love as a secret. He would not break what Yunho held together by being careful. He would find a way. If the door wouldn’t open, he would build a new door. If the world demanded one name, he would answer with both.

In the morning, he’d leave again. He always did. In the morning, there would be pancakes and glitter on the floor and the scarf on the chair and a train that rattled too much and a schedule that thought it owned him.

Tonight, there was a bakery that smelled like home, a man who had taught him that patience is an act and not just a romantic word, and a little boy who had chosen his nickname and, in doing so, given Mingi a map.

He closed his eyes. Sleep came late, but it came. He dreamed of a stage with no barricade and a kitchen with no clock, a crowd that cheered not for the idea of him but for the fact that he had made it home in time for breakfast.

‧₊˚♪ 𝄞₊˚⊹

And yet, guilt always had a way of clawing back in.

One weekend, after a two-month tour, Mingi finally made it home. He dropped his disguise at the door and walked into the apartment, heart hammering. Haneul was at the table with crayons, hair sticking up in tufts.

“Papa!” The boy shrieked, bolting forward, nearly knocking his chair over.

Mingi caught him in his arms, lifting him high, breath stolen by the ‘papa’. He pressed kiss after kiss to his son’s cheeks, clung to the weight of him. For a moment, the world shrank to just this—warmth, laughter, the thud of a small heart against his chest.

But then, Haneul pulled back and asked, “Are you staying this time?”

The words sank like stones.

Yunho was in the doorway; His eyes softened, but the ache was there too.

Mingi crouched to Haneul’s level. “Not for long,” he admitted, throat tight. “But I’ll come back. I always come back.”

The boy frowned, small hands curling into Mingi’s hoodie. “Promise?”

Mingi swallowed hard. “Promise.”

That night, after Haneul fell asleep tangled between them, Mingi whispered into the dark, “He doesn’t believe me anymore.”

Yunho reached across the space, found his hand. “Then we keep proving it. One day at a time.”

‧₊˚♪ 𝄞₊˚⊹

Mingi’s rebellion against the rules came in small, quiet ways.

A day stolen between schedules to sit in the back of the bakery while Yunho worked, flour smudging his sleeves. Sneaking Haneul into a dance studio on a holiday, spinning him in his arms until they both collapsed laughing. Recording secret birthday songs at midnight, whispering, “For you, always you,” before sending them.

Each act was tiny, almost invisible to the world, but to him, they were everything. His way of saying I’m here, even if I’m not allowed to be.

Still, the weight pressed down heavier with each passing year. Every goodbye left Haneul clinging tighter, every absence stretched longer. Mingi saw it—the way his son curled into Yunho’s side, the way questions formed in his eyes.

It broke him in ways no stage could repair.

‧₊˚♪ 𝄞₊˚⊹

In Seoul the next week, during a brief mercy of a lunch break, Mingi slid into a seat on a low couch and called. The screen filled with Yunho’s cheek and then corrected to show the countertop, which—of course—was currently covered in flour and the two children’s elbows.

“Say hi,” Yunho said, turning the camera as if he were directing a docu-drama. “You have thirty seconds and then I’m staging a coup against gravity.”

“Hi,” Mingi said, immediately softer.

“Minny!” Haneul shouted, then frowned at himself, then grinned anyway.

“Sky,” Mingi answered. He watched him and Byeol dust their noses with flour on purpose and laughed with his whole chest. “You’re trouble.”

“Yup,” Byeol said, proud and concise.

Yunho’s hand came into frame, swiping a bit of flour off Haneul’s brow with a thumb. It was such a tiny gesture. It made something in Mingi that had been coiled unwind another fraction.

“I’m going to fix this,” he said, after the call, to the empty practice room and the posters and his own reflection. “I swear.”

He would need time. He would need leverage. He would need Hongjoong’s relentless brain and Wooyoung’s outrageous courage and Yeosang’s will and Jongho’s patience and San’s weird, fearless kindness. He would need Yunho’s certainty. He would need luck, and he had never trusted luck. He would build his own.

For now: call when you can, come when you can, tell the truth even if you must wear a mask while you say it.

For now: catch the little hand at the bottom of every staircase. Kiss the man who held the house together. Let the nickname sit like a ring on your finger and know what it means even if the world can’t see it shine.

He stood up when the manager yelled two minutes. He slipped the stage version of himself on over the quiet version like a jacket he could not yet take off in public. He checked the scarf in the bag—not even the one from the chair; another, because he’d started carrying pieces of home with him on purpose. He counted the people who would be there when he opened a door that wasn’t a green room.

“Let’s kill it,” someone said again, grinning, and clapped him on the back.

“Let’s go home after,” he said, under his breath. “Let’s always find a way to go home.”

He walked to centre. The lights burned. He smiled the smile that wasn’t a lie but wasn’t the whole truth. He sang into a room that loved him loudly. He made himself a new promise for the thousandth time.

When the song ended, when the roar rolled over him and left him trembling, he looked just past the crowd, toward a place only he could see: a small bakery with a bell, a scarf on a boy who called him by the wrong name and the right claim, a man who would answer the door at any hour and say, “You’re late,” and mean, “You’re safe.”

Two stages. One life.

Chapter Text

Every morning at school, Haneul watched.

Other kids had two hands to hold — one on each side, like little bridges that never broke. Moms leaned down to fix collars, dads carried bags that looked too heavy for kids’ shoulders. Sometimes they kissed right at the gate, not even shy, and the children laughed like it was funny.

Haneul had Appa. Which was perfect, because Appa and Hwa appa always remembered where the zipper got stuck and which sock felt scratchy. But he also had Papa. And Papa never came at the same time. Papa stood a step behind, hat low, mask on, like he was playing hide-and-seek even though nobody had said “go.”

When Appa squeezed his hand and walked him to the gate, Haneul asked quietly, “Why doesn’t Papa hold your hand here?”

Appa crouched so they were level. His smile was soft, but his eyes were tired in a way Haneul didn’t understand yet.
 “Because sometimes we have to be careful outside,” he said. “Not because we don’t want to. Just because it’s safer this way.”

“Like crossing the street?” Haneul asked. That made sense.

Appa nodded. “Exactly. We wait for the light. Then we go together.”

Haneul thought about it all day, even when he was supposed to be coloring.

‧₊˚♪ 𝄞₊˚⊹

When Papa did come, it was different.

He bent down fast, kissed Haneul’s temple so quick it felt like a secret. His hand twitched like he wanted to hold Appa’s too, but then kids and teachers were all around and it didn’t happen. Haneul still felt proud, though, like he had both of them there at once, even if it was only for five minutes.

At “Family Morning,” he sat between Yunho and Seonghwa on the tiny rug. His friends shouted things like, “We go to the park!” and “We watch cartoons!” When it was his turn, Haneul picked up his courage like a heavy backpack and said, “We make bread. Appa bakes it. Sometimes Papa sings for me.”

Appa’s hand squeezed his shoulder.

It felt like the truth, even though it wasn’t the whole truth.

‧₊˚♪ 𝄞₊˚⊹

Sometimes, Papa had to leave too early. The phone buzzed, and he leaned down to whisper, “I’m sorry, Sky. I’ll try next time.”

And then it was just Appa and him again.

Haneul didn’t cry, but he got quiet. Quiet in the way where brushing his teeth felt too hard and he wanted to stomp instead. Quiet in the way he asked if broccoli could be “not alive today.”

Appa always noticed. He sat on the stool in the bathroom and said, “Want me to wait here until you’re ready?”

Haneul brushed too hard, spat too much, and announced, “Mint is spicy.” Appa laughed and kissed his hair, like that was the most important thing anyone had ever said.

‧₊˚♪ 𝄞₊˚⊹

Weekends at the river with Wooyoung and San made everything feel easier. They were loud, always holding hands, always kissing, always making Byeol and him squeal with too many hugs. They called it “gross love” and laughed when Yeosang told them to stop.

Haneul liked watching. But he didn’t understand why his own parents weren’t close like that.

So one day, when he grabbed Papa’s hand, he reached out the other for Appa’s too. For a second, both were there, warm and real. Then a group of teenagers walked by and someone gasped — a sharp little sound that made Papa drop his hand like it was hot.

The line broke.

Haneul’s chest squeezed in a way he didn’t have words for yet. He walked slower the rest of the way, kicking pebbles until his shoes scuffed white.

At bedtime, when Papa called on the phone, Haneul asked without looking at the screen, “Will you stay next time?”

Papa was quiet, then said, “I’ll try.”

Haneul whispered, “Okay,” but it didn’t feel like okay.

He turned into his pillow, and Appa rubbed circles on his back until sleep won.

‧₊˚♪ 𝄞₊˚⊹

Haneul decided he had to fix it.

Other kids didn’t have to tell their parents to sit close or hold hands. It just happened. But maybe his parents didn’t know the rules. Maybe they needed help.

So he tried.

At breakfast, he dragged two chairs together so Appa and Papa had to sit side by side. Appa smiled, sat down easily. Papa quietly shifted his chair back a little.
 Haneul’s spoon clattered in his bowl.

Later, he coloured three people on paper — Appa with an apron, Papa with a microphone, him in the middle. He drew their hands all touching. He taped it to the fridge.
 Papa ruffled his hair. “That’s beautiful, Sky.”
 Appa kissed his forehead. “You’re our best artist.”
 But the next morning, Papa still sat far away.

So he tried again.

“Wear this!” Haneul announced, holding out two matching sweaters. He had picked them out himself, dragging Appa’s hand through the shop, tugging Papa by the wrist later when they visited. Blue, with stars.
 Appa chuckled. “That’s nice, Haneul.”
 Papa blinked like he’d never seen clothes before. “Uh—do we both have to?”
 “Yes,” Haneul said fiercely. “Team Sky.”
 They wore them. Just inside. Never outside.

It wasn’t enough.

‧₊˚♪ 𝄞₊˚⊹

He started being difficult.

He pouted when Papa had to leave, refused to say goodbye. He stomped when Appa said “bedtime.” He crossed his arms at the dinner table and declared, “Rice is boring.”

Appa worried, kept crouching low to meet his eyes. “Did something happen, Sky?”

“No,” Haneul said. But the word felt like a lie in his mouth.

Papa hugged him too tight one night, whispering, “I’m sorry, I’m sorry,” against his hair. Haneul squirmed free, not because he didn’t want it, but because sorry wasn’t enough.

‧₊˚♪ 𝄞₊˚⊹

The night it all spilled out, he hadn’t meant for it to.

He had been told to pick up his toys. He refused. Appa sighed, Papa frowned, and suddenly the whole room felt sharp. His eyes burned before he even knew he was crying.

“I don’t want to!” he shouted. “Why can’t you be like Wooyoung and San? They always hold hands! They go everywhere together! Why don’t you love each other?!”

The silence after was heavy. His chest heaved. The toys blurred through tears.

Appa was the first to move. He wrapped arms around him, firm and warm, even when Haneul kicked weakly. “Oh, Sky,” he whispered. “We do love each other. So much. More than anything.”

Papa crouched too, eyes shining, mask nowhere in sight. “He’s right,” he said, voice rough. “We should have shown you more. I’m sorry you felt like we weren’t together. But we are. Always.”

Haneul hiccupped, clung to both of them, one hand fisting Appa’s shirt, the other curling around Papa’s wrist. “Then show me,” he whispered, small and broken. “Please show me.”

‧₊˚♪ 𝄞₊˚⊹

The next weekend, they tried.

Papa came to the park, no cap, no mask. He held Appa’s hand openly, fingers laced like he never wanted to let go. People stared. Some whispered. But Papa didn’t drop his hand this time.

Haneul swung on the swing, grinning so hard his cheeks hurt. Byeol clapped and shouted, “Higher!” He thought maybe the sky could hear him better like this.

The swings creaked, carrying Haneul higher and higher. His hair whipped across his forehead, cheeks pink from the cold.
 “Higher, higher!” Byeol shouted from the next swing, legs kicking like she was trying to run into the sky.

“Not too high!” Yunho called, though he was smiling, one hand shading his eyes.

“They’re fine,” Mingi said, though his grip on the chains when he pushed Haneul suggested otherwise. He laughed when Haneul tipped his head back, shouting into the air, “I can see everything!”

“Not everything,” Byeol argued, panting as she swung. “Only the tops!”

“Still counts,” Haneul shot back, proud.

When they tumbled off eventually, dizzy and wobbly, Yunho had already spread a blanket on the grass. Ice cream cups sweated in a bag, condensation soaking the napkins.

“Choose,” Yunho said, holding them out like treasure.

“Strawberry!” Byeol declared immediately.

“Chocolate,” Haneul said, just as fast.

Mingi eyed the last cup. “Mint choco. The most superior flavor.”

“Ew!” Byeol squealed, sticking out her tongue. “That’s toothpaste ice cream!”

“It’s refined,” Mingi defended solemnly.

“Those people don’t eat toothpaste,” Haneul argued, spoon clutched like a weapon.

Yunho chuckled, shaking his head. “You two are impossible.” He tucked napkins under their cups, wiping the drip already sliding down Byeol’s hand.

Mingi leaned back on his elbows, the winter sun soft across his face. He didn’t even reach for a cap or mask. He looked… free.

When Haneul noticed, he froze mid-bite chocolate smudging his lip.

Mingi’s chest tightened. He reached out, thumb brushing the smear away.

Appa’s hand settled warm on Haneul’s back. Byeol licked her spoon and announced, “You’re all sticky now,” which made Haneul laugh so hard he dropped his cup in the grass.

“Appa!” he gasped.

“Don’t worry,” Yunho said, scooping it up with a sigh. “Five-second rule for chocolate love.”

They all laughed until their stomachs hurt, the kind of laughter that pulled the sting out of everything else.

‧₊˚♪ 𝄞₊˚⊹

Later, when the cups were empty and the sun was slipping lower, they sat in a messy circle. Byeol showed off shells she’d brought from home, declaring each one had a royal title. Haneul gave one a voice, deep and silly, making her snort ice cream out her nose.

Yunho leaned against Mingi’s shoulder, quiet but comfortable. Haneul noticed, and his chest filled with something that made his fingers itch to draw it. Not on paper this time, but in his mind. Appa and Papa, right next to each other, no space between.

When they walked home, Haneul held both their hands again. This time, neither let go.

He glanced at Byeol skipping ahead and whispered, just loud enough, “See? Fixed.”

“Fixed what?” Mingi asked, glancing down.

“Family,” Haneul answered, certain.

Mingi looked at Yunho, and Yunho looked back, eyes soft. No one corrected him.

Because for once, it really was that simple.

Chapter Text

The realization didn’t arrive like thunder. It arrived as a small, ordinary sound: the click of a light switch in Haneul’s room at 6:12 a.m., the soft pad of little feet, the rustle of a blanket tugged too high.

Mingi was home—really home—for once, a rare week with no flights. He lay there awake, listening to the house breathe: kettle beginning to think, distant traffic, Yunho’s quiet yawn in the kitchen. Then a whisper from the doorway.

“Minny?” Haneul blinked in. Hair wild, cheeks pillow-lined, voice still fog-soft. “Are you going to work very far today?”

Mingi sat up. “No,” he said, and watched the boy’s shoulders loosen so obviously it hurt. “I’m here. All day.”

“Okay,” Haneul said, and padded across the carpet like a lit candle and climbed into bed without ceremony. He sprawled across Mingi’s chest with the shameless gravity of five-year-olds. He smelled faintly of shampoo and sleep. “Then can we go to the park… and the big store… and the bakery… and also we can all hold hands again?”

“Sky,” Mingi said, torn between laughter and breaking, “that’s a lot of errands.”

“Please,” Haneul said, as if asking about errands and hands were the same category of request.

Mingi looked at the ceiling. It didn’t have an answer written there. The answer was already lying on his chest, waiting.

It wasn’t just the question. It was the pattern: the way Haneul evaluated days by how many moments he could keep; how he rotated to press himself between them even on couches; how he tracked where Mingi. Mingi had told himself for years that secrecy was a shield. Maybe it had been. Maybe it was also a weight they were making their son carry.

He kissed Haneul’s hair. “Okay,” he said. “We’ll try everything.”

“Even holding hands?” Haneul peered up.

“Especially that.”

He padded to the kitchen afterward and found Yunho at the counter, fingers chopping veggies, eyes heavy with the nice kind of sleepiness. The bakery would open late for Yunho; they’d planned a slow morning, a breakfast that didn’t know how to rush.

“Big schedule today,” Mingi murmured, leaning into him. “Park, store, bakery, all while holding hands.”

Yunho smiled against his jaw. “Ambitious,” he said. “Are you ready for that kind of fame?”

Mingi exhaled. “I think I’m done with the other kind.”

Yunho stilled, the way you pause when you’re sure you heard something important. He set the bowl down and turned fully, searching Mingi’s face. He didn’t speak. He waited.

“I can’t keep asking him to be brave about this,” Mingi said, voice soft, a little hoarse with the truth. “I thought hiding was protecting you. Maybe it was. But it’s hurting him now. And you. I see it.” He swallowed. “I don’t want to be the reason he thinks love is something you hide when people look.”

“Mingi,” Yunho said, and the way he said his name frayed the air.

“I’ll talk to the company,” Mingi went on. “I’ll post a letter. I’ll do it carefully, but I’ll be clear. I don’t want him to learn we’re a family from the corners of rooms. I want him to learn it from my mouth.”

Yunho’s hand rose slowly and cupped his cheek. He didn’t cry—Yunho looked prettiest when he did, but this was not that kind of moment. This was steadier. “We’ll do it together,” he said. “Whatever comes.”

“I know,” Mingi whispered, slipping his arms around him like he’d missed the shape. “I’m scared.”

“I know,” Yunho said again, and then, gentler: “Cake helps.”

Mingi huffed a laugh into his shoulder. “You and your religion.”

“At least there is a lot of sweets for the feast,” Yunho said primly, then bumped their foreheads in a gravity-cancelling kiss. “What made you decide now?”

Mingi glanced toward the hall, to the room with a small bed and a small person who had asked a big thing like he was asking for strawberries. “He did.”

Yunho nodded once, an amen.

‧₊˚♪ 𝄞₊˚⊹

There were meetings. Of course there were. Long table, short patience. Mingi spoke like he never had: calm, steady, impossible to argue with if you looked at the facts and not the fear.

“I’m going to acknowledge my family,” he said to the men who had once told him to delay being human. “My husband. My son.”

“You realize,” someone began, “the optics—”

“I’ve realized for five years,” Mingi answered. “I know the fans. I know the ones who love me as a person will stay. And the ones who don’t can leave. I won’t keep explaining my life to my son in whispers.”

“Your endorsements—”

“Are with me because I work hard and keep my word,” Mingi said. “I intend to keep both.”

Silence. Then the familiar dance of risk and mitigation. They proposed a soft launch—an essay, a carefully timed reveal. Mingi, for once, didn’t fight the method. He wasn’t here to set a fire. He was here to open a window.

He wrote the letter himself. On paper first, because his brain trusted ink. Then, over tea with Yunho, he read it aloud.

To the people who have let my songs into your days —

I’ve always believed music is about telling the truth in a way that makes room for other people’s truths.

Mine is simple. I love someone. We built a life that smells like bread in the morning and sounds like laughter at night. We have a son whose hand I want to hold everywhere, not just at home.

I’m grateful to be an artist; I’m more grateful to be a husband and a father. Those things are not in competition. They make each other possible.

Thank you for letting me grow. If you choose to keep walking with me, I promise to keep making work that is honest and alive.

— Mingi

Yunho listened and didn’t wipe his eyes because he knew it would make Mingi stop and fix the smudge and the spell would break. He just reached over, took the paper, and folded it carefully, like something you put in a pocket over your heart.

“Post it,” he said.

Mingi did. His hands shook exactly once. Then, strangely, he felt lighter. The comments exploded, naturally—shock, kindness, some static. His phone buzzed itself into a migraine. He put it face down. He watched Haneul instead, who was building a tower out of wooden blocks and announcing each level like an architect with an audience of one.

“Sky,” Mingi said, kneeling. “Want to go to the park and the big store and the bakery?”

Haneul looked up, eyes saline-bright with the part that never quite stopped worrying.

“And let’s hold hands too,” Mingi said, reaching for Yunho’s palm without looking to see who was watching.

‧₊˚♪ 𝄞₊˚⊹

The wedding arrived like a promise that had been waiting for forever. Seonghwa and Hongjoong—long orbit, short fall, a ceremony that felt like a soft thunderclap. The venue was a converted greenhouse; all glass and green and light caught in leaves.

“That’s illegal,” Wooyoung announced gleefully, sweeping in with San. “I love it here.”

“It’s dangerous,” Yeosang muttered, accepting a plate of cake anyway. Jongho already had two.

Yunho had been in the kitchen since dawn, sleeves rolled, hair tied back, a smear of strawberry on his wrist like a secret. The cake was Haneul-and-Byeol approved: three tiers of vanilla sponge, whipped cream that tasted like clouds, strawberries nested like jewels between layers. The top had a small sugar star, because Byeol had requested it and she did not request so much as decree.

“Do you like it?” she asked, tugging Hongjoong’s sleeve just before the ceremony. She wore her expensive star hair clip from Wooyoung, because branding matters.

Hongjoong looked undone and perfect, eyes already shining. “I like it so much I might marry it,” he teased, then softened at her glare. “But I choose Seonghwa.”

“Good,” Byeol said, satisfied, and ran off to show Haneul her bouquet, which was mostly ribbon.

Mingi watched Hongjoong take Seonghwa’s hands under the greenhouse shadow, watched them say the words everyone knew they meant months ago. He glanced sideways at Yunho, who was wiping a non-existent crumb from Haneul’s face. The world made sense, suddenly, in a way he hadn’t let himself imagine out loud.

Reporters lingered outside the gate. Everyone knew they would. Fame, like weather, arrives whether you check the forecast or not. Their friends stood in a constellation around them—barriers without being barriers, presence doing the work security sometimes can’t.

During the vows, the wind quieted. Even the cameras seemed to lower their eyes. Seonghwa’s voice wavered and held. Hongjoong laughed a little when he cried, because he was that kind of person: joy that didn’t apologize. They kissed and everyone yelled like it was a victory and not just sanity.

After, there was a puddle of time where congratulations turned into hugging turned into multiple people talking at once. That was when Wooyoung kissed San with such commitment that three aunties clapped and one photographer forgot to take a picture. It was also when Mingi felt the moment arrive, familiar as a chorus you’ve been rehearsing for months.

“Ready?” he asked Yunho, voice low.

Yunho glanced at Haneul—sticky from strawberries, flower petal stuck to his sleeve, looking at the world like it kept meeting his expectations. “Ready,” he said.

They stepped out together. Not dramatically. Not to a podium. Just… through the door.

Hands found hands. Mingi didn’t let go.

The first reporter to spot them blurted, reflexively, “Is this—are you—”

“Yes,” Mingi said, before the question even finished chasing its tail. He didn’t raise his voice. He didn’t sermonize. He just stood there with his family and let people see the shape of them. “This is my husband, Yunho. This is our son, Haneul. We’re here for our friends’ wedding. Please be kind.”

Cameras clicked like rainfall. Someone shouted about statements and timing and fans. Mingi repeated, gently, “Please be kind,” and Yunho nodded, a small bow of gratitude and warning both. Behind them, San and Wooyoung materialized shoulder to shoulder, ridiculous and loyal; Yeosang’s stare could cut glass; Jongho folded his arms and, without moving, looked like a mountain.

Hongjoong slipped by long enough to squeeze Mingi’s shoulder and whisper, “Proud of you.” Seonghwa hugged Yunho so swiftly and sincerely that Yunho forgot to be surprised until later. Byeol staged a one-girl parade around Haneul, who waved at the cameras solemnly and then asked very seriously, “Can we get more cake now?”

“Yes,” Mingi said, laughing with relief so sudden it almost unseated him. “We can get more cake now.”

He didn’t look at his phone. He didn’t need to. The letter had already paved the street; this was just walking down it.

Inside, the greenhouse turned into a kitchen. Plates clinked, laughter leaked out of corners, music wandered along the glass. Haneul used two forks because he could. Byeol stole a strawberry off the second tier when she thought no one was looking and was caught by exactly everyone. Yunho cut slices with the steadiness of a surgeon and the glee of a thief, passing plates into palms like blessings.

Mingi cornered him eventually by the sugar flowers and kissed him like the world was allowed to witness ceremony outside of ceremony. The kiss wasn’t dramatic. It was domestic: we did it, and I love you, and I want this to be boring now—in the best way.

“Public service,” Wooyoung announced, walking by with a tray. “Proud of you both.”

“Thank you for your service,” Yunho deadpanned.

“Your contribution to cake will be remembered,” Mingi added, and Wooyoung slung an arm around his neck for a second, squeezing hard before dashing off to DJ badly.

Later, when the sun pressed itself low against the glass and the speeches had all been made and the kids were doing that slow wobble children do when their batteries are red, Haneul crawled into Mingi’s lap, heavy and careless. He tucked under Mingi’s chin like he’d grown there.

“Now everybody knows,” he murmured, syrup-slow.

“Everybody knows,” Mingi agreed, one hand splayed over the small back, the other reaching blindly to find Yunho’s fingers and tangle, unashamed. “And I don’t mind. As long as you know.”

“I know,” Haneul said, already half asleep. “You’re my Papa. And Appa is my Appa. And we all eat cake.”

“Empirical truth,” Yunho said, kissing Mingi’s knuckles. His eyes shone, not with the pretty kind of crying but the steady kind: joy that had learned to stand up straight. “We’re going to be okay.”

“Better than okay,” Mingi said, with a calm he hadn’t earned before this moment. “We’re going to be boring.”

Yunho laughed, soft and delighted. “Promise?”

“Promise.”

Outside, the greenhouse glass sending light back into a darkening city, a designer and his sweetheart slow-danced in socks to a song they wouldn’t remember later. Somewhere, on phones and on TVs, a letter and a photograph turned into a thousand conversations. Some of those conversations would be kind. Some would not. Most would move on.

Inside, strawberry crumbs stuck to small fingers. The bell of a bakery far away waited for morning. And in a folding chair near the cake table, a boy slept between his parents while their hands stayed laced, and the people who loved them made sure the room stayed exactly as gentle as it looked.

Bread is meant to be shared. Music is meant to be heard. Love is meant to be lived where light can find it.

When the last song faded and the night loosened, Mingi stood and shifted Haneul to his shoulder. Yunho steadied the boy’s legs with one palm and steadied Mingi with the other. They walked out the door and into the kind of air you can only breathe after a storm.

No masks. Two stages, finally one.

Home.