Archive of Our Own

He is standing in front of a door.

Upon realizing this, he does what seems most natural: he raises his fist to knock. A glance around tells him that, actually, it is quite late, and all of the house’s internal lights are off (and it is a house he’s standing in front of, not his own apartment or a hotel room, though it’s somehow familiar to him nonetheless). Lowering his hand, Kim Seungmin tips his head to one side in thought before closing his fingers around the knob, turning it to push the door open.

Although the house is silent and dark, it doesn’t hold the edge of anxiety that creeping around at night tends to evoke. Closing the door behind himself, Seungmin takes a closer stock, nudging off his shoes– slippers? he’s still in pajamas– and confidently moving forward. He has definitely been here before, although the shadows and lack of inhabitants and something about his own mind all coalesce to make placing it difficult. As is normal upon letting oneself into someone else’s home, he takes a seat on a couch and waits.

Although Seungmin thinks he’s dreaming he can’t be sure, and he doesn’t want to do something stupid like trying to fly or teleport if he’s just in some drunk, dissociative state. While he waits for something to happen, he tries to recall where he was last, and he’s narrowed it down to somewhere in Asia when there’s the creak of a floorboard behind him.

“Appa? You scared me, what are you–” The newcomer’s voice abruptly cuts off, and as an adjacent room’s light flicks on, Seungmin finishes turning in his seat and gives a startled laugh.

“Okay,” he says, stunned, “definitely dreaming, then.”

The boy says nothing, staring at Seungmin with big, dark eyes, set into a face that still retains the softness of youth. “Who are… you?” Lee Minho asks, but he asks it slowly, like he’s realized the answer partway through. “Why do you look like–”

“Because I am,” Seungmin interrupts, not yet willing to hear his own name spoken from a voicebox that hasn’t existed for seven or eight years, unchanged by rigorous training and an exit from puberty. “Hyung, I forgot how innocent you looked.”

Minho blink-blink-blinks at him, with such a familiarity in it that Seungmin feels his chest start to ache. “Hyung,” he echoes, flatly. He crosses his arms, emphasizing his slight frame, then seems to become self-conscious and drops them. “Why are you on my couch?”

“I suppose it’s because I’m dreaming,” Seungmin says, the puzzle piece of the half-recognized setting clicking into place. “Do you want to sit down? It’s weird that you’re hovering like a toddler who just threw up.”

That makes Minho scowl. “I’m not a toddler,” he says, walking closer and turning on an ambient lamp, “you just got old and barged into my house in the middle of the night.”

“I’m not old,” Seungmin protests.

“Older than I’ve ever seen you.” Minho falters, and then his scowl deepens, and he comes to a halt directly in front of where Seungmin is perched on the loveseat. He wrings his hands around one another, circular and pensive. “Seriously, how are you here right now?”

“I told you,” Seungmin says, squishing himself up against one arm and cautiously patting the cushion next to him, “I’m dreaming. Now come sit.”

After a moment of grappling with himself, Minho does, sitting significantly closer than Seungmin was expecting him to. His narrow shoulders hunch inward and his hair, wet, drips down onto his collar. “Did you not dry off before going to bed?” Seungmin asks, reaching out to toy with a slippery lock, “you’ll get sick.”

Unlike himself, Minho is not in pajamas. He also does not yank himself out of Seungmin’s reach, though he goes tense and resolutely observes a patch of the floor. “It was raining,” he says, quietly.

“Was it?”

Minho swallows. Seungmin drops his hand and pulls it back into his lap. “It was,” Minho says, “when I walked back.”

Seungmin looks at him for a long moment, taking in the teenaged hesitance his Minho has long since grown out of, the downcast eyes– he’s about to say something when Minho suddenly sniffles, hard, and his lashes catch a wayward tear before it could splatter onto his lap. “I’m sorry,” he manages, the words strangled.

“You’re sorry? Hyung, for what?”

Minho sends him a furtive glance, his eyebrows drawing together and his full bottom lip aggressively wobbling, “you’re here because of me,” he says, “because I– failed.”

“I haven’t known you to fail at anything, and I’ve known you for a long time.”

“I got eliminated,” Minho spits, one tear managing to escape the tight clutches of his eyelashes and rolling down onto a round cheek, “you don’t know me that well. I don’t know you– this you. Stupid silk pajama shirt and dog socks. How old are you?”

Why this night, of all the nights Seungmin’s mind had to concoct? Why drudge up such stale shame and fear? “Turning twenty-five,” he responds, as Minho pulls his legs up and into his chest, “and you’re turning twenty-seven.”

“Dumb,” Minho mumbles, tucking his face away into the safety of his knees, “stupid. Am I seeing into an alternate reality? Eomma’s right, I read too much sci-fi.”

“So what’s happening in your reality?” Seungmin asks, although he’s got a clue. Minho gives a wet laugh.

“I just got eliminated,” he repeats, sniffling again. “I won’t get to debut with you guys. It’s over.”

Seungmin nods a bit. He knows what happens next, of course, and tries to project himself backwards in time and remember how those early days had felt– the sleepless nights and the seas of camera lenses, all trained on their young, terrified faces. Whispered confessions, acidic arguments, and a tentative optimism that make those first few frantic years all blend together. Faulty memories of important days (what did we eat at that first big dinner, the one right after debut? How many hours were spent in preparation for that awards show?) and stale feelings (what had that argument with Chan been about? What time did Hyunjin finally fall asleep after we’d talked all night?). “You’re going to get good news tomorrow,” he eventually says. 

“What?”

“In my reality,” says Seungmin, resting his head against the back of the couch, “eliminated participants Lee Minho and Lee Yongbok are brought back in a surprise twist. Thank god for that, I can’t imagine any reality where Stray Kids doesn’t have the two of you.”

Minho, red-eyed and fragile, just stares at him. “Right,” he croaks. “It never made sense that they eliminated him.”

“That’s true for you as well.” Seungmin looks over and smiles at him, taking in the burnt crimson of Minho’s ears and the wet apples of his cheeks. “I cried a lot when you were eliminated, and I cried some more when you were brought back. Horribly embarrassing for me, but I don’t really care, not anymore. I was too relieved to hide how I felt.”

Minho’s mouth twists into an anfractuous line. “What else?” he asks, scrubbing his hands over his face.

“What else? Ah, well…” Seungmin sighs. “There’s a lot to say, hyung. So much has happened. You will grow up to be a very odd man.”

“So will you, I guess,” Minho says as an aside, “stomping into my house like this. So we… make it?”

Seungmin closes his eyes for a second. “We go so much further than you’ll ever imagine possible,” he says, opening them to gaze up at the ceiling. “There will be millions of people cheering us on– cheering you on, specifically, sometimes. You’ll meet celebrities and see the world and sell out stadiums, and you’ll also spend a lot of nights exhausted, or stressed, or lonely. You’ll miss the anonymity and the simplicity of the life you left behind at times, too. But we make it, jagiya, I promise.”

Minho’s expression spasms and Seungmin smiles to himself for his word choice, watching that furious red grow even darker. “What else?” he asks, once more.

“What do you want to know?” Seungmin returns.

“Umm. Do I…” Minho fidgets. He looks at Seungmin’s hands and then his chest, but never quite drags them up to see his face. “I come out. At some point.”

“That was a statement, but yeah, you do.”

“And it’s not…” Minho trails off again, glances at the door, catches Seungmin’s eye for just a moment before forcing his attention away, “it’s not a problem?”

“Never for us,” says Seungmin firmly. “You have a long conversation with Jisung and Chan-hyung over how to go about it, from what you’ve told me, but it’s never been an issue. You aren’t exactly the only one.”

Minho sets his shoulders. He wipes at his cheeks and then clears his throat. “Good,” he says, suddenly brazen, “now I don’t have to fight anyone about it.”

“Well, there will still be a lot of fights,” Seungmin concedes, “but not really about you being gay. That would be a bit hypocritical.”

“So there are others like me? In the group, the ones who debut?”

Seungmin’s body warms from the inside out– his blood seems to flow just a little bit faster, like his heart has crested a hill and now races along some exhilarating new path. “How honest do you want me to be?” he asks.

“Definitely don’t lie,” Minho warns.

“You and I have been in a relationship for almost two years. My Minho, obviously, not you as you currently are.”

Minho’s face does that thing again. “What,” he deadpans.

“Yeah. We’re hosting my birthday party, and we’ve both had a bit to drink, and I say something like ‘hyung, you don’t know what it means that you’re still by my side after all this time’, and you say ‘don’t presume what I do or don’t know, Kim Seungmin’, and I admit that I’ve had feelings for you since I was nineteen, and you say that you have me beat by–”

“Stop,” Minho rushes to say, clambering forward and physically putting his hands over Seungmin’s mouth, “I don’t need to hear the rest.”

“You sure?” Seungmin asks, muffled, “you told me in very explicit terms when your obsession started.”

“Obsession?” Minho says, indignant, “I am not obsessed with you!”

“You’re right, that’s going to happen in about a year when we–”

“Okay!” Minho shouts, and it channels his current self so perfectly that Seungmin pitches forward with laughter, bowled over by his own fondness, “enough of that! Talk to me more about how famous and rich we become.”

“Stupidly,” says Seungmin through giggles. “Unbelievably. Kind of annoyingly, if I’m being honest.”

“Like EXO?” Minho wonders.

“Something like that.”

Minho sits back into his own space and sighs, something enraptured and faraway in his expression. He blinks hard, though no new tears threaten to fall. “It’s tough,” Seungmin says quietly, “and scary, sometimes. But I think it’s where we’re meant to be.”

“Can’t imagine that being worth it right now,” Minho says, looking down at his own hands, “but I believe you, I guess. In your reality, we make it.”

“In yours, too,” Seungmin insists. Minho levels him with a look.

“Sure,” he says. Cynically, he extends a leg and scuffs his socks against the floor. “If we even exist.”

“Let’s not get mired in the details of our own corporeality.”

“You’re… somehow more annoying as an adult.”

That rattles a laugh out of Seungmin, who twists around to better face his physically-impossible counterpart. Minho peeks up at him from behind the shield of his bangs– he’s much more circular like this, somehow, with his harsher edges smoothed over to expose the tenderness within. “You’re cute,” he murmurs. Minho continues looking at him.

Then, without preamble, Minho is scrabbling forward and settling himself down onto Seungmin’s lap. “Whoa,” he says, hands flying up in self-defense or perhaps just alarm, “let’s–”

“Kiss me,” Minho orders. Now that they’re so close Seungmin can clearly see that cherry flush has spread down onto his neck, the extent of the dampness to his hair and shoulders. “Please.”

“Um,” says Seungmin.

“You just said you’re my–” Minho’s face scrunches up. Seungmin’s again hit with a dizzying amount of affectionate aggression. “My partner? So you should kiss me.”

“Our first kiss doesn’t happen like this,” Seungmin says, suddenly breathless. His hands, still raised, are abruptly grabbed by Minho and placed onto his hips. “Also, you’re…?”

Minho frowns at him. “I’m what?” he asks, lowering his weight fully down onto Seungmin’s thighs, his fingers half-sliding between Seungmin’s own. 

“Young?” Seungmin says, nevermind that he can find his Minho in every long eyelash, every stubborn conviction. Around them, the house is still silent and peaceful– the low light casts graceful shadows across Minho’s face. “And distraught?”

“I can be both of those things and you can still kiss me,” Minho says. His hands are cool and slightly shaky where they press down against Seungmin’s own. “I don’t wanna ask again.”

It’s not exactly a difficult choice. Seungmin’s second first kiss with Minho is awkward and needy, with Minho’s blunt nails digging crescent moons into Seungmin’s skin. He closes his eyes and tries to relax, for Minho’s sake if not his own, but his lapful of boy is equal parts insistent and disorienting. Seungmin enjoys taking the reins every now and again– by force, if necessary– but it’s hard to with this Minho, whose need and fear practically spill out of every pore. He bites too hard onto Seungmin’s lip and Seungmin flinches, too-real pain sparking out from the touch. “Hey,” he huffs, pulling back just a bit, “careful.”

“Sorry.” Minho’s rapt. One of his hands finds purchase on Seungmin’s shoulder, staring unblinkingly down at his mouth. “At least you’re not bleeding.”

There’s a beat. Minho’s eyebrows twitch and then he leans in, their foreheads gently knocking together, his next exhale shaky. “We make it?” he repeats, hollow and tentative. Seungmin’s smiling. 

“Yes,” he says, the harsh overhead lights flicking on one by one, “you make it, hyung.”

He finds himself awake without much fanfare. He blinks up at the ceiling a few times, reacquainting himself with truth, his stiff neck and stinging bottom lip. The dream nags at him throughout the morning, an engorged, dizzying sore on his cheek that he can’t help but tongue at. When he sees Minho on the way to the company he smiles, perhaps brighter than usual, and Minho (longer hair, thicker muscles, angular cheeks) tosses him a puzzled look.

“Weird dog,” he says, slouching into his seat. Through the tinted windows behind him late summer is flourishing with promise, with all of its warmth and light; and that light silhouettes Minho, this more familiar version of him, his old desires and new concerns. “Did you sleep okay?”

“Had a weird dream,” Seungmin says. Slides his seatbelt into place with a staccato click. “I’ll tell you later.”

The day, unlike the night, is routine. Freshly returned from a world tour and a much-needed break they find themselves deep in preparation for another comeback, which at this stage consists of drilling choreography down into muscle memory. The afternoon whittles by slowly and Seungmin’s sticky with sweat when he eventually flops onto the floor, plastic water bottle in hand, an equally damp Minho at his side.

“I’m going to tell you about my dream,” he declares, after taking a long drag to rehydrate. Minho grunts as a way to signal that he’s listening. “I went back in time and turned up at your doorstep the night after your elimination, but as my current self, not my survival show self.”

That gets Minho’s attention, and he stares at him with wide eyes for a few seconds before coughing and lifting his chin. “So?” he says, casually, “you two fuck?”

“Of course that would be your first question. You’re such a pervert, hyung.”

“Notice how you’re not answering it.”

“No, I did not have sex with a dream version of nineteen-year-old Lee Minho, although he probably would have tried to talk me into it.”

Minho looks bizarrely proud for a moment, taking credit for something he in no way did. “Yeah,” he says, thunking his head back against the wall, “that does sound like me.”

Seungmin, knowing that Minho won’t prompt him to continue even if he’s achingly curious, takes to elaborating on his own. “It was kind of sad, for a while,” he says, swinging himself down to rest his head on one of Minho’s thick thighs, “he was just a kid. When I told him that he’s gonna come back and debut with the rest of us, he asked me a million questions and argued a bit about alternate realities and then demanded that I kiss him.”

“Kid was reading too much sci-fi,” Minho mumbles, and Seungmin turns his face into Minho’s leg to hide his smile. “Did you?”

“Why are you so stuck on what I did or didn’t do with a version of you that my brain made up?”

“Cradle robbing,” Minho says, grabbing the side of Seungmin’s head so that their eyes can meet– he leans down, mouth slightly open, the lines of his face harsh and dramatic from the downward angle, “is serious business.”

“You’ve grown up into a very weird man, hyung,” says Seungmin.

“So have you.” Minho straightens again, suddenly all nonchalance. “Answer the question.”

Seungmin sighs. He squirms a bit, feeling put-upon, and avoids looking directly at Minho’s face. “We did kiss a little,” he admits, and Minho gives a huge sigh.

“Infidelity,” he moans, loud enough for Jeongin and Hyunjin on the couch to hear and look over, “amorality.”

“Would you shut the hell up? It’s not cheating if it was with you.” He falters. “And also in a dream, hyung.”

“Years of companionship down the drain, no regard for my feelings–” Minho fights back as Seungmin surges up, trying and failing to wrestle him into submission– “tossed aside for a younger, hotter model–”

“No one is trying to argue that teenage Minho is hotter than mid-twenties Minho,” Seungmin interrupts, giggling, yelping when Minho easily tosses him aside and pins him to the floor with a knee to his sternum, “don’t go putting words in my mouth.”

“I’ll put something else in your mouth if you don’t stop trying to two-time me with myself.”

“It’s only the one time, hyung!”

Later, with a boiled dumpling pinched between his chopsticks, Minho brings the topic up again. “I’ve had a dream like that, too,” he says, his informality bordering on blithe, “a while back.”

Seungmin, in his surprise, takes an ambitiously-large bite and mouths frantically around the steam that pours out between his lips. “Hot,” he informs, when Minho gives him an amused look. “Th’a ‘umpling, not–”

“Yes, dear,” Minho interrupts, “I gathered. Don’t talk with your mouth full.”

One Seungmin has cooled his bite down enough to swallow it, he clears his throat and gives Minho a pointed stare. “You didn’t feel like mentioning that earlier?” he asks, casting a wayward glance around the shop they’re tucked into. Minho shrugs.

“No,” he says, simply. Seungmin rolls his eyes and is about to comment on Minho’s ridiculousness when he wiggles in his seat, gearing himself up to speak. “It was a couple years ago. I walked into a practice room and you were already there.”

“But not me, me?”

“No. Post-enlistment Kim Seungmin.”

“Wow,” Seungmin says. He picks up another dumpling as Minho takes a tiny, cautious bite out of his own before dunking it in some chili oil. “How devastatingly handsome was he?”

“He was bald,” Minho deadpans. With a high degree of severity, he sets his dumpling down and pitches his upper body across the table. “Bald. And still in military garb.”

Seungmin smiles. “And handsome,” he says.

“Yeah, whatever. He was alright.” Minho rightens himself, that fond, mischievous glint in his eye, the one he wears like an aged coat. “This was just before I– asked you that question. You know the one.”

“I seem to recall me being the one to ask you out, hyung.”

“Agree to disagree.” Seungmin, blowing dutifully on his dumpling, watches Minho take a bite from the oil-soaked side of his. “Anyway, I was nervous. I knew something between us was changing. He told me to quit worrying.”

Seungmin stays quiet for a while. They eat in companionable silence until Minho starts talking again, unbothered by the way Seungmin’s mind turns over and over on itself, an ouroboros of consciousness. “We talked about a lot of things,” he adds. “Enlisting, touring, the future. The kids.”

“Did you fuck?” Seungmin asks, smug. Minho sneers at him.

“No, but I did try to talk him into it,” he answers.

“Ah, typical.”

“Ha-ha. Really, though, thirties Seungminnie was so different. So grown-up.”

“In a good way?”

Minho shrugs. He swallows down his final dumpling. “Just different,” he says. “But not bad, no.”

They finish up the last scraps of their food, pay, and walk home; at the door to the apartment Seungmin shares with Felix, for Minho always bullheadedly insists on escorting him back, Seungmin sways forward on the balls of his feet. “Hyung,” he says, voice hushed and skewing juvenile, “kiss me?”

Minho stares at him. Seungmin’s not sure what kind of expression he’s wearing– fingers creeping forward to curl into the fabric of Minho’s shirt, pinching inward, seeking comfort and heat– but instead of kissing him he just lifts a hand, rubbing his thumb along Seungmin’s cheekbone. “Let me in first,” he bargains. “I want to say hi to Yongbok.”

Seungmin does. Minho slinks off to find Felix and Seungmin posts himself up in the kitchen, drying and putting away a couple of dishes, distracting himself with domesticity until Minho silently reappears at his side. His posture is curved and accommodating. Dropping the rag, Seungmin turns and steels his resolve. “Hyung,” he says again.

“I know, puppy.”

Real-Minho kisses nothing like dream-Minho; he leads it with a steadying hand on Seungmin’s jaw, the other resting on the curve of his waist, keeping their bodies pulled in flush. With none of the frenzied desperation of the boy from Seungmin’s subconscious mind, Minho keeps their kiss slow and deep, his nose pressing an indent into Seungmin’s cheek. His tongue tastes like chili peppers, faintly, and his hair is soft beneath Seungmin’s palms.

Eventually, they break apart. Seungmin exhales delicately and watches the way Minho’s eyelashes flutter. “Don’t you think it’s weird we’ve had the same kind of dream?” he whispers.

Then Minho smiles at him, lazy and endeared, like Seungmin has missed some crucial, painfully obvious piece of information.

“Seungmin-ah,” he says, “haven’t we always dreamt of the same things?”