Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

Jisung never meant to come back after the first time.

It was supposed to be for class. Field observation. His professor had called it that; “find examples of real-world injuries outside of the classroom. Observe how they occur, how they’re treated, and report back.”

Most of his classmates had taken the safe route. Emergency rooms. Ambulance ride-alongs. Things with paperwork, supervision, and strict sign-in sheets.

But Jisung had always been… restless. Too squeamish for an ER. Too impatient for waiting rooms. He told himself he needed something raw, something authentic, something that would look impressive when he turned in his report.

That’s how he found the basement.

The first night, he told himself it was perfect. The air was thick with sweat and smoke, the kind that clung to your clothes even after you’d showered. Cuts and bruises bloomed under fluorescent lights. Split lips. Swollen knuckles. Concussions that left men stumbling. Textbook injuries, unfiltered.

He stayed just long enough to scribble a few shaky notes in his notebook, then packed his bag and rushed for the stairs, vowing never to set foot down there again.

He would’ve left clean too, if the fight in the far ring hadn’t started just as he reached the door.

He should have kept walking.

But the sound caught him first. The crack of glove against jaw. The roar of the crowd. A rhythm that was nothing like the messy scrambles he’d seen earlier.

And then he looked.

That’s when he saw him.

Minho.

He didn’t know the name yet. He didn’t know anything at all. Just that the man in the ring didn’t fight like the others. He didn’t swing wild. He didn’t waste energy. He was precise. Controlled. Every strike was efficient, clean, as if he’d already decided on the ending and was only entertaining the rest of them until it came true.

Jisung froze on the stairwell, hands white-knuckled on the railing. He couldn’t breathe, couldn’t blink, couldn’t leave.

He stayed until the fight ended, until the other man collapsed to the floor and didn’t get back up.

That was weeks ago.

Now, Thursdays had a rhythm. Hoodie pulled low, backpack slung loose, slipping into the same corner seat as always. Notebook unopened at the bottom of his bag. His eyes fixed where they didn’t belong.

Every week, he swore he’d stop. Every week, he found himself back in the basement, watching Minho bleed and breathe and move like the whole world bent around him.
And then tonight, something shifted.

A cut opens on Minho’s cheekbone—fine line, bright. The other guy grins, the kind of grin you regret. Minho wipes at the blood with the back of his glove, studies it, and then studies the grin like he’s choosing which plate to lift next. He steps back in.

It’s efficient. That’s the word Jisung’s professor would use. Efficient footwork. Efficient targeting. Efficient end.

The bigger man stumbles, hits the floor on a sucked-in breath. Somebody counts fast; somebody else throws a towel. Minho stands where he is, breathing steady, dark eyes up under the bare bulb. The cut keeps bleeding. The drop slides over his cheek and vanishes into his jawline.

Jisung’s legs feel like they forgot what bones are

The crowd erupted, wild with cheers and curses, money flashing as hands exchanged bills.

Jisung stayed frozen in his corner, pulse drumming in his ears.

And then he heard it.

“Minho! Fucking knew you’d do it!”

“Twenty-five and still wiping the floor with them!”

“Lee Minho, worth every damn cent.”

The name cracked through him. Minho.

It stuck sharp in his chest. Until now, the man in the ring had been untouchable, faceless; just a shadow carved under the fluorescent lights. Now he had a name. An age. Twenty-five. Out of college. Older. Established. Already carved into the world in a way Jisung wasn’t.

Jisung was twenty-one. A first-year med student who still got lost in the anatomy lab, who still stumbled over flashcards and lab notes. He had no business standing here in this basement, memorizing the lines of a fighter’s body instead of his textbooks.

But he mouthed the name anyway. Minho. Quiet, testing the weight of it against his tongue.

He clung to it like it was his alone. His first scrap of proof that Minho was real.

And yet Minho didn’t know his name. Didn’t know anything about him, except maybe that he stood in the same corner every week, notebook untouched, staring too long.
Except one minor detail; Minho hadn’t forgotten.

The crowd thinned out fast after the fight. The smell of bodies and sweat rung through the thick air. Jisung slung his bag over his shoulder, head ducked, every nerve taut with relief knowing he got away with it again this time unharmed; ready to slip out before anyone noticed him.

He thinks he’s made it to the stairs before he realizes he hasn’t moved. He thinks he’s invisible until he isn’t.

“Lost?”

The voice is close. Too close.

Jisung jerks. Minho is in front of him, rinse of sweat and antiseptic and iron in the air, long enough to be a wall, broad enough to be a choice.

Up close, the cut looks worse. Not dangerous. Just messy. The kind of thing you should clean before it crusts, before it scars wrong.

“I—” Jisung says. Then nothing. Air.

Minho’s gaze drags down him and back up, patient as a weigh-in. “You’ve got a good view from that corner,” he says, mildly. “Every week.”

Jisung’s mouth opens. Closes. Opens again like it’s forgotten it’s attached to a person. “That’s not- I mean, I don’t–I’m just—”

“Just what?” Minho asks.

Jisung’s ears are hot. His hands are hotter. He can hear his pulse in his throat, in the bruise-buzz of the ceiling light, in the concrete, everywhere. Say something. Say the thing you practiced on the way here. Say it.

“It’s for class,” he blurts. “Medical. First aid. We–we’re doing modules on… um. Acute injury. Cuts. Bruises. You know. I’m… observing.” He winces at his own voice, thin and ridiculous. “To learn.”
Minho’s expression doesn’t change. Not really. But something moves behind it, a quiet little ripple. “Right,” he says, a tone so agreeable it’s almost cruel. “For class.”

Jisung nods too fast. “Yes.”

Minho looks at him for a long beat, then tips his head toward the back corridor. “Come on, then. Watch up close.”

Jisung’s feet carry him before the rest of him votes. The hallway is narrower than it should be, low cinderblock walls sweating a winter-cold damp. A flickering EXIT sign stains everything tired red. Minho leads without checking if Jisung is following, as if of course he is.

The locker room is full of small metal benches, dented lockers and a sink that runs rusty for a second before the water remembers how to be clear. Minho peels his wrap off with neat movements, glove then glove, a ritual he could do in the dark. He sets them on the bench like they matter. He looks in the cracked mirror, then at Jisung’s reflection beside his shoulder.
“You said cuts,” he says.

Jisung nods again, stupid bobblehead. “Yes.”

Minho turns. He’s close enough that Jisung catches the thump of his own heartbeat ricocheting off Minho’s steadiness. “Clean it,” Minho says, as if they agreed on that hours ago.

Jisung stares. “I— I don’t have—”

Minho lifts a brow toward an open locker. Inside: a battered first-aid kit, tape and gauze and alcohol pads jostling for space. “If you’re here to learn, learn.”

It’s a trap. He knows it. He steps into it anyway.

His fingers don’t want to work. He fumbles the packet, rips it jagged, almost drops the pad. Minho doesn’t move. The cut is small but red, stubborn. Jisung reaches up and then stops, inches from skin, realizing he has to finish the motion or admit there was never a plan. The after-sweat warmth of Minho’s cheek radiates against his knuckles.

“Go on,” Minho murmurs.

Jisung breathes. Touches.

The pad bites antiseptic into the cut, and Minho exhales through his nose, the barest shift. Not a flinch. Just recognition. Jisung feels the sound go straight through his hand.

“Sorry,” he says.

Minho’s mouth curves. “Are you?”

Jisung doesn’t know what to do with the question. He dabs carefully, tries to be clinical. Fails. Everything is too close. His eyelashes keep threatening to touch Minho’s jaw when he leans in. He can see the pores of his skin, the way sweat and light make a tiny constellation across his cheekbone.

“Pressure,” Jisung mumbles, because his brain needs to say something that sounds like knowledge. He slides a fresh pad against the cut and presses, gentle. “To stop the bleeding.”

Minho watches him instead of the mirror. “How long have you been in this class?”

“A while,” Jisung lies. Then, immediately, “Two weeks.” Then, surrendering, “I’m auditing. Not… formally. I mean. I read a lot.”

Minho’s eyes warm, not kindly. “You read a lot down the stairs to a basement?” His voice is soft as the pad in Jisung’s hand. “You memorize the way I wrap these,” he adds, almost conversational, nodding toward his bandaged knuckles. “You like the sound the bell makes when it’s for me.”

Jisung’s throat tightens. “I—”

“Don’t lie,” Minho says, still gentle. “It wastes air.”

His cheeks burn. He nods instead, a tiny movement. He isn’t sure what he just agreed to—maybe everything.

Minho reaches past him, slow enough that Jisung could have moved if he wanted to. He doesn’t. Minho takes a strip of tape, tears it with his teeth, and holds it out. Jisung takes it with a shaky hand. He anchors the gauze, tape stretching, the curl of it sticking to his own finger. He fixes it. He doesn’t breathe again until the white is neat and small across Minho’s cheek.

“Done,” he whispers.

Minho doesn’t step back. “And the knuckles,” he says.

Jisung blinks down at Minho’s hands. Close, the bandages look brutalized—sweat and chalk ground into the fabric, edges grimed. He swallows. “They’re not cut,” he says.

“Yet,” Minho says. “Go on.”

He unwraps with clumsy care, every pass revealing skin–scraped, swollen at the crest of the joints, the kind of damage that lives under the surface and waits. Jisung’s fingertips brush the back of Minho’s hand and he jerks like he touched a socket.

“Sorry,” he says again.

“Hmm.” Minho’s eyes never leave his face. “Colour?”

Jisung blinks. “What?”

Minho’s mouth tucks, that almost-smile. “Your face. It’s red,” he says, as if reporting a lab result. “Does my asking make it worse?”

“Yes,” Jisung says, helpless, before he can come up with anything smarter.

“Good,” Minho says, so quietly it could be the pipes.

Jisung cleans the scuffs. He does it right, because it matters and because Minho is watching him and because he’ll die if he doesn’t do one thing right tonight. He smooths ointment over split skin, cuts tape into neat spirals, winds fresh gauze around each hand the way he saw him do it before the fight. His fingers remember the pattern better than his head does.

“Where’d you learn that?” Minho asks.

Jisung’s mouth is dry. “Here,” he says, the truth scrubbing something raw inside his ribs. “Watching.”

“How many weeks?”

He counts the old tickets in his head, the bus times, the excuses he fed his roommate about study groups that ran late. “Five,” he says. Then adds, because the number doesn’t feel like it means enough, “Six.”

Minho’s lashes drop, lift. “You planned your Thursdays around strangers hitting me.”

“I—” Jisung stops. “Not strangers.” It slips out without permission. He chokes on the rest. “Not… you.”

Silence. Then: “Look at me.”

Jisung does. He wishes he didn’t know what he looks like—caught, embarrassed, small. He holds the look anyway. He owes that much.

Minho steps closer, close enough to be counted in heartbeats. “You come down here for class,” he says, like someone reading a sign aloud. “You watch because you like medicine.”

Jisung says nothing. He knows better now.

Minho considers the new bandages, flexes his fingers. The fabric pulls, holds. “You’re steady when you want to be,” he says. “Except when you’re not.”

Jisung bites his lip. “I should— I should go.”

“Should you?”

“I— yes.” He swallows. “I have— tomorrow I have to—”

“Come back,” Minho says, as if Jisung didn’t speak at all.

Jisung freezes. He doesn’t know what to do with the words. They fall into the space between them like a coin into deep water.

“For class,” Minho adds, deadpan.

Heat crawls up Jisung’s neck. “I don’t—”

“You’ll come back,” Minho says, and it isn’t a question. “You’ll use the door at the end of the hall, not the side stairs. You’ll stand where I can see you.”

“I always—”

“I know,” Minho says, and something about how he says it knocks the breath out of Jisung more than any punch would. “It’s easier when you don’t pretend otherwise.”

Minho moves then, finally stepping past him. The air cools by degrees. He picks up his wraps, tucks them into his bag, shoulders it. At the threshold he pauses and glances back like he remembered one small thing he meant to do.

“What’s your name?” he asks.

Jisung nearly says someone else’s. Nearly says “no one.” “Jisung,” he manages, voice thin as a thread.

Minho rolls the name on his tongue like testing weight. “Jisung.” He nods once, satisfied. “Don’t be late next week.”

Then he’s gone, the door sighing shut behind him, the hallway swallowing the echo of his footsteps whole.

Jisung stays where he is because he can't not. The room hums around him–the sink dripping, the bulb wobbling in its fixture, the metal bench still warm where Minho sat for a breath and a half. He presses his fingers to his own cheeks. They’re hot. Of course they are.

He should leave. He should stop.

He picks up the bloody alcohol pad and drops it into the trash with a soft, decisive sound.

“Okay,” he whispers to the empty room, to the stain on the gauze, to the shape of a man leaning like a promise in a doorway.

He binds the first knot inside his chest and pulls it tight.

Chapter Text

As we all knew by now, Jisung had watched Minho before. Too many times, if he were honest. Long before last week, before the words that had clawed their way under his skin, he’d been there in the shadows, waiting for the sound of fists meeting flesh. He told himself it was for class—observing how injuries formed, seeing damage in real time instead of sterile diagrams—but that excuse had worn thin the first night he came home flushed, trembling, grinding into his sheets with the rhythm of Minho’s hits still echoing through his head.

It had been easy when Minho hadn’t known. Jisung could leave before the end, cut out before anyone saw the flush on his face or the half-hard tent in his jeans. He could tell himself it didn’t matter, that it wasn’t personal. Just another exercise. Just another body in motion.

But now Minho had seen him. Spoken to him. Given him an order.

Don’t be late next week.

The words clung to him, gnawed at him, made everything else dull and wrong. Jisung wasn’t used to being seen—he’d spent most of his life slipping under radars, speaking only when asked, letting louder people take the air. He liked it that way. Being invisible was safe.

Minho had ruined that in a single sentence.

All week, Jisung felt it crawling up his spine—the humiliation of being caught, the heat of shame, and underneath, something worse. Want. He hated how his body reacted when he replayed Minho’s voice in his head, how the memory of that sharp stare made him ache low in his stomach. The disgust in Minho’s tone hadn’t pushed him away. It had made him harder.

And beneath that was the part nobody knew, the part he could never admit out loud. He wasn’t just shy, wasn’t just anxious—he was untouched. Completely. He had never been kissed, never been touched, never even dared to let someone close. Twenty-one years old and still carrying around that heavy secret like a bruise that would never fade. A virgin in every sense of the word, and the thought of Minho looking at him and seeing that for what it was—pathetic, laughable—made his stomach knot with shame. But twisted deeper still, it made him shiver. Because at least in his head, in the dark, he could imagine it differently. He could imagine Minho being the one to change it, to tear that inexperience out of him with those hands that bruised and broke.

He’d come apart in his dorm bed more times than he could count, hand working desperately under the covers while Felix slept in the next room, heart hammering with the fear of being heard. Every time, it was Minho’s face that pulled him under, Minho’s voice calling him out. You like watching me fight? That’s disgusting.

He’d moan into his pillow, shame and desire tangling until he didn’t know which was worse.

By the time Thursday came, Jisung was ruined. He tried to pretend it was just another night, another walk, but his hands shook when he buttoned his shirt, and he caught himself checking his reflection twice in the dorm mirror. Nothing fancy—just something fitted, something that didn’t make him look like the anonymous boy in the corner. Something that might make Minho glance twice.

He hated himself for it. He wanted it anyway.

Felix nearly caught him at the door, eyes narrowing at the change. “Where are you going?”

“Library,” Jisung lied. His voice cracked, and Felix smirked like he didn’t believe him, but he let it slide.

The walk was too long and too short all at once. Jisung’s stomach churned the whole way, his body pulled toward a place he should never have returned to. The warehouse loomed familiar and wrong, the air vibrating with the echo of voices and fists.

He found the spot Minho had told him to stand. Not hidden, not safe. Right where the light caught, where anyone could see him. Where Minho would see him.

And that was the worst part. He wanted it .

When Minho finally stepped into the ring, Jisung’s chest caved in. He couldn’t look away. Every hit landed like a jolt in his veins, every movement making him ache. Minho fought like it was nothing, like every blow cost him less than breathing, and Jisung was drowning in it, dizzy with how badly he wanted.

Then Minho’s eyes cut across the crowd. Sharp. Direct. Straight to him.

Jisung froze. Heat flooded his face, a rush of panic and humiliation locking his lungs. He should have looked away. He couldn’t.

Minho smirked, just barely, like he knew. Like he’d always known.

Jisung’s knees went weak. His whole body screamed at him to leave, to run, to pretend this had never happened. But he stayed rooted in place, burning alive under the weight of being seen. The humiliation carved deep, but instead of scaring him off, it curled inside him like fuel. His cock twitched in his jeans, mortifyingly obvious, as disgust gripped onto his shallow form.

The fight dragged on longer than the last, brutal in a way that made Jisung’s lungs hurt just from watching. Minho wasn’t struggling, not exactly — but each round left blood on the floor, skin split, sweat dripping down his temple in shining rivulets. He moved like it was inevitable, like the fight had been decided the second he walked into the ring, and the crowd screamed his name in broken voices while his opponent staggered to keep upright.

Jisung couldn’t breathe. His nails dug half-moons into his palms, his jeans too tight around his hips, cock straining with every strike Minho landed. He had tried to look like he belonged tonight — a fitted shirt, dark jeans, hair a little neater - but he already felt stripped bare under the weight of Minho’s presence, trembling with the sick pulse of wanting to be seen.

When the final hit came, it was clean. Minho’s fist connected, his opponent dropped, and the warehouse erupted. Minho didn’t even raise his arms — he just stood there, chest rising heavy, blood spattered across his knuckles, gaze already drifting across the crowd. Searching.

Jisung froze.

And then Minho found him.

That same razor-sharp stare, cutting through smoke and bodies and noise until it pinned Jisung in place. His heart jolted into his throat, heat crawling up his neck. He tried to look away, but his body wouldn’t move.

Minho smirked. Just a flicker. A curl at the corner of his mouth. He climbed out of the ring, towel tossed around his neck, steps deliberate as he disappeared behind the curtain to the locker rooms.

Jisung’s knees nearly buckled.

He stayed rooted for too long, lungs gasping shallow, before he realized—he had nothing. No notebook. No pen. Nothing to hold, nothing to hide behind. His excuse was gone, forgotten back at the dorm, because he’d spent too long staring at his reflection tonight, too long trying to make himself look like someone Minho might notice.

And Minho had noticed.

The thought made his cock twitch again, humiliation sharp enough to sting .

He forced himself to move, legs shaking as he followed the trail of voices and footsteps to the back. His stomach knotted tighter with each step.

The locker room door swung open before he touched it. Minho leaned against the frame, hair damp with sweat, shirt clinging to his chest. His gaze swept over Jisung in one slow, devastating line — from the styled hair to the fitted shirt, to the way Jisung’s hands fidgeted at his sides.

“No notebook tonight?” Minho’s voice was low, mocking. “Guess you weren’t here to study, huh?”

Jisung’s mouth went dry. His tongue tripped against the roof of his mouth, scrambling for some excuse, anything at all. “I— I forgot it, I just—”

Minho stepped closer. Jisung backed up instinctively, spine hitting the wall with a dull thud.

“Forgot it,” Minho repeated, voice curling dark at the edges. “Or maybe you were too busy dressing up for me.” His hand brushed the collar of Jisung’s shirt, knuckles grazing skin. “Sungie.”

The nickname cracked something open in him. His knees wobbled, breath shuddering, cock aching hard enough he wanted to curl in on himself. He couldn’t think, couldn’t speak, could only drown under the weight of it.

Minho leaned in, breath hot against his ear. “What are you really here for, hm? Doesn’t look like you’re writing notes. Looks like you’re waiting for me.”

Jisung’s chest caved. His voice broke when it came out, pathetic and small. “I just— I needed—”

“You needed,” Minho cut in, tone sharp. “Yeah. I know what you needed.” His hand pressed flat against the wall beside Jisung’s head, boxing him in. “You watch me fight, you get hard in those jeans, you come back anyway. You’re disgust me.”

Jisung whimpered. His thighs pressed together, desperate for relief, shame clawing through him. The word should have hurt, should have made him run, but it only made him throb harder.

Minho tilted his head, studying him with cold amusement. “You’re gonna give me your number.”

Jisung’s heart lurched. “W-why?”

“So I don’t have to drag your pathetic ass out of the crowd every week. You want to be here, you answer when I call. Simple.” Minho’s smirk cut deep. “Unless you’d rather keep lying about your little class project.”

Jisung’s hands shook as he fumbled for his phone. He opened it, screen glowing too bright, and stammered through the words. “I— I can give you—”

“No.” Minho plucked the phone from his hand like it was nothing, thumb moving fast, typing in his own number. He shoved it back against Jisung’s chest, hard enough to make him stumble. “You don’t give me yours. I give you mine. You answer when I say. That clear, little one?”

Jisung’s stomach flipped. His whole body burned. “Y-yes.”

Minho smirked again, satisfied, before pulling back. He didn’t wait for more — just turned, towel slung over his shoulder, and disappeared deeper into the hall, leaving Jisung trembling, clutching his phone like it might burn him alive.

On the screen, one new contact glared back at him.

Minho.

Chapter Text

Thursday came, and for the first time, Minho wasn’t there.

Jisung didn’t realize it at first. He lingered by the warehouse door, heart already pulling tight, the same way it had every week since Minho’s voice carved its way under his skin. He waited for that familiar shift—the crowd splitting just slightly when Minho walked through, the ripple of voices when his name was shouted, the subtle lurch in his chest when those sharp eyes passed over the crowd.

But the minutes dragged on, and the ring filled without him.

It wasn’t unusual, not really. Minho didn’t owe the place consistency. He fought when he wanted to fight. He wasn’t chained to Thursday nights, didn’t have to show up just because Jisung had dragged himself out here, desperate and shaking. Still—some part of Jisung had expected it, like a pulse he could rely on.

And when it didn’t come, it felt wrong.

He shouldn’t have been surprised. Minho wasn’t predictable; he wasn’t safe. He didn’t exist for Jisung to orbit around like this. But the empty spot at the edge of the ring clawed at him, turned his stomach sour.

Jisung shifted on his feet, nails digging into his palms. He could leave. He should leave. But his body stayed rooted, lungs pulling shallow, waiting even when there was nothing to wait for.

And then the fight began, brutal and fast, and it was clear Minho wasn’t coming.

The warehouse wasn’t the same without him.

Jisung knew it the second he slipped further inside, hood tugged low, heart hammering like it always did. The crowd buzzed, bodies pressed shoulder to shoulder, but the air felt thinner, restless. Without Minho, everything looked cheaper—like the fights were street scraps instead of spectacle.

The first two men swung at each other wildly, fists glancing off shoulders and ribs, sloppy footwork dragging them through the dirt. Nothing clean. Nothing that made Jisung’s chest clench with awe. He realised how spoiled he was—how much he’d gotten used to Minho’s rhythm, his sharp, lethal precision. Every move Minho made told a story. This was noise.

He told himself to leave. Told himself there was no point in stayng if Minho wasn’t fighting. His notebook was still on his desk at the dorm, empty tonight because he hadn’t needed an excuse. He’d known from whispers on the walk over: Minho wasn’t on the line-up.

Still, he stayed.

Like a dog lingering under the table long after the food was gone. Pathetic.

The first fight ended fast—one man down, spitting blood into the dirt, the other barely able to stand. The crowd roared anyway, desperate for scraps. Jisung pressed back against the wall, throat tight, stomach rolling.

He should leave. He had no reason to be here without Minho. But leaving felt worse.

So he stayed.

The second fight broke out messier, crowd pushing closer, and Jisung got shoved with it. Bodies slammed, elbows flew, and someone’s shoulder hit his ribs hard enough to knock the air from him. He stumbled, hands scrambling for balance, but there was no room—another shove sent him forward, his wrist catching against the concrete wall as his lip split on the edge of a boot someone didn’t bother to move.

Pain burst sharp. Copper flooded his tongue.

He scrambled up fast, cheeks burning, wrist throbbing from where he’d caught himself. Nobody even looked. The fight raged on, cheers deafening, and Jisung stood there, bleeding into his sleeve like he didn’t exist.

For one sick second, he thought he heard a laugh. Not at the fighters—not at the blood on the floor—but at him, the boy who couldn’t even stand up straight in the crush of bodies.

His chest caved. He bit down hard, the taste of iron thick on his tongue.

If Minho had been there—

He cut the thought off before it could finish, but it still hurt. If Minho had been there, he would’ve seen. He would’ve known.

Jisung wanted that so badly it made him sick.

Instead, he stumbled out the back door, wrist clutched tight to his chest, lip swelling. Alone.

Felix noticed the bruise the next morning. Of course he did.

“You fall down the stairs?” he asked around a mouthful of cereal, eyes narrowing at Jisung’s swollen lip.

“Yeah,” Jisung mumbled. His voice cracked. He ducked his head, hair falling into his face.

Felix snorted. “Clumsy.”

Jisung forced a laugh, forced the lie to stick. It was easier than admitting the truth: that he’d been hurt in a place he didn’t belong, that he’d been stupid enough to keep going even when Minho wasn’t there, that he was so desperate for scraps he’d gotten himself bloodied for nothing.

His wrist ached when he flexed it. His mouth still stung. He swallowed them both down.

At night, he stared at his phone. At the single name sitting in his contacts like a live wire.

Minho.

His thumb hovered over it until the screen dimmed, until his chest ached from holding his breath. He wanted to type something, anything. I got hurt. I waited for you. I needed you.

But he couldn’t. The thought of Minho laughing, of him not answering at all—it split Jisung open from the inside. He dropped the phone on his chest and pressed his face into the pillow, muffling the sound of his own frustration.

Pathetic. Always pathetic.

He jerked himself off that night, wrist aching, body raw. His lip burned every time his breath hit it, and he came harder than he meant to, filthy and desperate, Minho’s voice tearing through his skull. Disgusting. Little one. Dressing up for me.

He hated himself after. Always did.

By the weekend, Felix had had enough.

“You’re sulking,” he announced, tossing Jisung’s hoodie at him. “And you’re coming out with me tonight.”

“I don’t—”

“You don’t get a choice.”

Jisung went. He didn’t want to, but Felix was stubborn, and maybe some part of him wanted to be dragged. Wanted to stop thinking.

The bar was loud, lights bleeding into each other, music thudding heavy in his chest. Felix shoved drinks into his hand, teased him until he drank, laughed until Jisung was dizzy and warm. For a while, it almost worked. For a while, he laughed too.

But the alcohol only dulled the surface. Beneath it, everything still ached. His lip stung when he smiled, his wrist twinged when he lifted the glass, and Minho’s name burned in his pocket.

Always Minho.

By the time Felix disappeared into the crowd with someone’s number scrawled on his arm, Jisung was too drunk to keep fighting himself. He slipped into the bathroom, hands braced against the sink, breath ragged.

His reflection stared back at him, cheeks flushed, hair sticking up, mouth swollen. He looked wrecked.

He pulled out his phone anyway.

His thumb hovered. His heart pounded.

He typed. Deleted. Typed again. Backspaced until his vision blurred. His fingers kept betraying him, slipping on the glass, sending letters he didn’t mean, words he didn’t want. He clenched his jaw, chest heaving, and finally, without thinking, he sent it.

I waited for you.

The screen blurred. His stomach twisted. Panic shot through him, but it was too late—the message was gone.

He fumbled, tried to type again, delete it, anything. His fingers slipped. Another message sent.

I got hurt.

His throat closed.

He dropped onto the toilet lid, phone clutched tight, heart hammering against his ribs. Fuck, fuck, fuck. He wanted to throw up. He wanted to die. He wanted to take it back.

But the screen stayed silent.

Minutes passed. Felix called through the door once, laughing, and Jisung mumbled that he was fine. He wasn’t fine. His whole chest felt like it was caving in.

He staggered out of the bar an hour later, half-carried by Felix, phone still burning in his pocket, unanswered.

The screen stayed silent so long Jisung thought he’d pass out before it lit up.

Then—

Buzz.

One message.

His stomach lurched as he grabbed the phone, vision blurring with alcohol and panic.

The reply was short.

You don’t belong there.

Jisung’s chest hollowed, breath stuttering. It should have hurt. It did hurt. But then another message came, quick, like Minho hadn’t meant to hesitate at all:

Not without me.

Jisung’s breath caught. His pulse roared in his ears. He blinked hard at the screen, the words sinking slow, heavy, like stones in water.

Another buzz.

Stay out of trouble, Sungie.

His knees curled up tight against his chest. The nickname—soft, dangerous, his—slipped like a knife under his ribs. It was possessive, like Minho was staking a claim, and for one dizzy second Jisung couldn’t tell if he wanted to cry or come.

The phone trembled in his hands as he pressed it to his chest, body shivering all over. He’d wanted Minho to see him, to acknowledge him. And now Minho had. Not cruel this time. Not just mocking. Something else. Something worse.

Because it meant Minho cared enough to tell him to stay away. Cared enough to call him his.

Jisung bit his lip until it stung again, tears hot at the corners of his eyes, cock twitching against his jeans. His heart felt like it was trying to claw out of his chest.

And he knew, deep down, he’d never be able to stay away.

Chapter Text

The messages came late. Too late.

He should’ve ignored them. He should’ve let the phone buzz itself quiet against the counter, unread and unanswered, like he always did. Nobody texted him—not unless they wanted something. And when people wanted something, it was easier to shut the door before they ever knocked.

But then he’d seen the name.

Jisung.

Not some half-forgotten number saved under a first name and nothing else. No—his. Just the way Minho had typed it in himself, all casual arrogance when he’d grabbed the boy’s phone and punched it in. The glowing three syllables now looked wrong, too soft against the darkness of his kitchen.

His thumb hovered over the screen before he even realised he’d picked it up.

I waited for you.
I got hurt.

Two sentences. That was all. But they lodged under his skin like glass, impossible to dig out.

For a second, Minho didn’t move. He just stared at the words, heart a dull, heavy thump in his chest. Then something sharp twisted through him—anger first, quick and reflexive. Anger at the boy for being stupid enough to wait around in that place like it owed him something. Anger at himself for not being there when he should’ve known better. Anger at whoever the fuck had put hands on him.

Pathetic little thing.

That was the thought that followed next, bitter and tight. The kid didn’t belong there. He was too soft, too fragile, too green. He didn’t fight, didn’t train, didn’t bleed for the rush of it the way the rest of them did. He just watched. Always watching, eyes wide, lips parted, shaking like he didn’t know whether he wanted to run or fall to his knees.

And yet… there he was. Every week. Waiting.

Minho dragged a hand down his face, trying to smother the image that came with it—the way Jisung looked with his hood tugged low, notebook clutched to his chest like a shield, cheeks flushed pink. The way he’d dressed up last time, too obvious to miss, like some trembling offering at Minho’s feet.

Pathetic.
His.

That last thought snapped too loud in his head, and Minho shoved it down hard. He didn’t want him. He didn’t. The boy was a fan at best, a distraction at worst. That was all.

But the thought of anyone else seeing that softness, that desperation? Of anyone else noticing what Minho had already noticed?

His jaw locked.

Someone would chew him up, spit him out, and Minho would be left with the taste.

So he’d answered. Fast, sharper than he meant. A slip of the tongue, a slip of the hand—he wasn’t sure which.

You dont belong there.

Not without me.
Stay out of trouble, Sungie.

 

The moment the words sent, he knew he’d fucked up. He could picture it too clearly: Jisung curled in bed, knees to his chest, lip trembling, eyes wide as he read the messages. He could practically hear the boy’s hitched breath, the desperate sound he’d make as that stupid little blush spread down his throat.

Minho cursed under his breath and threw the phone onto the counter. The metal clatter echoed, too loud in the empty apartment.

He didn’t care. He didn’t.
But the next morning, he still found himself checking for a reply. Yet there was silence.

The basement gym reeked of sweat and stale blood. Monday nights weren’t usually busy, but tonight the crowd pressed shoulder to shoulder, buzzing restless. Minho wrapped his wrists slow, methodical, the ritual steadying him even as his head burned.

He wasn’t here to fight. Not tonight. Just sparring, maybe, enough to burn the twitch out of his muscles. Enough to forget the gnawing echo of Jisung’s messages replaying over and over in his skull.

But then he saw him.

The same fighter from weeks back—the one Jisung had stared at too long, the one Minho had flattened in the ring like it was nothing. The man’s face was still ugly, jaw set crooked from an old break, a grin splitting his mouth wide when he caught sight of Minho.

“Well, well,” he rasped, spitting red into the corner. “Didn’t think you’d show up tonight.”

Minho said nothing. He tugged his wraps tighter, ignoring him.

The man leaned against the ropes, voice carrying across the room. “Your little slut missed you last week.”

Minho froze.

The words cut deep, fast, hot. His whole body went still, a coil wound too tight. Slowly, he turned his head.

“What?” His voice came out low, dangerous.

The man smirked. “You heard me. Pretty boy with the notebook. Been hanging around like a lost dog. Yours, right?” He tilted his head, mocking. “Didn’t look too happy when you weren’t there.”

The room tilted.

Something inside Minho snapped clean in two.

Before the man could blink, Minho vaulted the ropes, gloves still hanging loose at his wrists. His fist connected with the man’s jaw hard enough to crack teeth, the sound sharp and ugly in the air. The room roared, surging forward, but Minho didn’t hear it. He only saw red.

The man staggered, spat blood, laughed like it didn’t hurt. Minho didn’t give him the chance to finish.

He drove forward, every hit heavier than the last, knuckles cracking bone, chest heaving with fury. Each punch landed with the weight of Jisung’s face in his head: Jisung pressed against a wall, bleeding, Jisung’s soft mouth split because Minho hadn’t been there.

He wasn’t fighting for the win. He was fighting because someone had dared to put a name to what was his.

“Mine” Minho spat the words through clenched teeth, punctuating each syllable with a blow.

The man’s head snapped back, blood spraying across the mat. His body sagged, knees buckling, but Minho didn’t stop. He hammered him down, again and again, until the gym fell silent. Until there was nothing left to hit but meat and bone.

Hands dragged at him, pulling him back. Someone shouted his name. The man lay sprawled on the mat, chest barely moving, face unrecognizable.

Minho stood over him, chest heaving, blood dripping down his forearms.

Nobody said a word about Jisung again.

Later, in the locker room, Minho scrubbed his hands under cold water until the sink ran pink. His knuckles throbbed, split open in three places, but he didn’t care.

He should’ve walked away. He should’ve ignored the words, let them slide off like he always did. Instead, he’d nearly killed a man over a boy who didn’t even know what kind of trouble he’d stepped into.

Minho braced his palms against the sink, head hanging low, water dripping off his chin. He could still feel the phantom weight of Jisung’s messages in his pocket, burning. He’d meant what he said. The boy didn’t belong there.

Not without him.

The thought made his teeth grind. He couldn’t decide if it was possession or protection, if the heat in his chest was rage or something worse. He didn’t want to find out.

So he dried his hands, wrapped his knuckles, and left without another word.

But even as the night swallowed him whole, one thing stayed carved in his head like stone:

Jisung might not belong here.
But he was still his.

Chapter Text

Jisung couldn’t stop rereading the messages.

Not without me.
Stay out of trouble, Sungie.

They glowed back at him whenever the room went dark enough to make the screen feel like the only light left. He knew what they were, really—short, sharp orders from someone who didn’t do softness, a reminder of his place. But every time he scrolled back up and found them sitting there, his chest pulled tight, his stomach tipped, and the air felt different in his lungs, bright and thin, like he’d run too hard without moving at all.

He told himself to put the phone on the desk and leave it there. He told himself to close his eyes and sleep. Instead, he lay on his back with the blanket kicked down and the phone balanced over his heart, each breath lifting it, each breath lowering it, as if it were something alive he had to keep steady with his body alone. He didn’t like that the messages were all it took to make him shake; he hated that each time he whispered the words in his head, his thighs pressed closer and the heat turned mean. He hated that wanting felt so close to being sick.

He wanted them carved into him anyway.

The bruise on his lip faded from purple to yellow. The ache in his wrist moved from a throb to a dull pull he only noticed when he reached for things one-handed without thinking. He told Felix it was fine, kept it tucked under sleeves, learned to hide the flinch when someone slapped him on the shoulder in passing. He could hide almost anything if he didn’t open his mouth.

When Thursday came, he stayed in.

He told himself it was because he was sore. He told himself it was because if Minho wasn’t fighting last week, there was no guarantee he would fight this week either. He told himself it would be less humiliating to wait in the quiet than to wait in a crowd and feel stupid when the ring filled without him. Mostly, he told himself nothing at all, lay in the dark with his phone on his pillow and listened for a buzz that didn’t come.

Felix knocked twice and then climbed into his bed without asking, smelling like detergent and sugar from some late-night convenience store run, warmth arranged around him as if he could absorb the shake right out of Jisung’s shoulders. “You’re weird this week,” Felix said into the quiet. “You know that?”

Jisung hummed and pretended to be asleep. He was not. His eyes stayed open until the blue outside the blinds turned lighter than the screen.

By Friday he had convinced himself the worst of it had passed. By Saturday he almost believed it. On Sunday he heard someone in the cafeteria say there were fights on other nights, too, not only the ones where the crowd came to scream and hold up phones. Mondays, sometimes. Wednesdays. When people wanted to train and then forgot how to stop. He pretended not to listen while he filled his cup.

He did not mean to go on Monday.

He was supposed to be in the library. He could still see the table where he had intended to sit, the row of anatomy models that made the corner smell like plastic and formaldehyde. Instead, his feet did what they always did, carried him down familiar streets at a pace that made his lungs hitch, down the stairs that always felt steeper than they were, toward the air that tasted like sweat and copper and old concrete.

The basement gym held a different kind of noise. Smaller crowd, quieter, more purposeful. There were no bets shouted over shoulders, no cheap beer sloshed on shoes. Men wrapped their hands and moved like it mattered who watched. The ring light seemed lower, the shadows heavier. Jisung tried to keep close to the wall, tried to take up less space than the line on the floor allowed, tried to swallow the fact that his heart started to run the second he saw the ropes.

He told himself Minho wouldn’t be here.

He saw him anyway.

Not in the way he saw him under the biggest bulb, bathed in noise and light, eyes flicking across faces like choosing. This was Minho with his jaw set, wrap tightening around knuckles, a cut still scabbed thin on his cheekbone from a week Jisung could recite by heart. He moved differently. Not coiled stillness, not the practiced boredom that meant everyone else was already done whether they knew it or not. This was heat that didn’t hide itself. This was a line drawn somewhere Jisung couldn’t see.

Jisung didn’t realize he had stopped breathing until the first hit landed.

It wasn’t like Thursdays. It was worse. Cleaner and worse. There was no theatre, no patience; Minho didn’t stalk, didn’t study. He stepped in and took the space as if the world came smaller for him and stayed that way until he was finished. The first punch cracked like something breaking clean; the second sounded like it landed on bone; the third Jisung felt in his teeth. The man across from Minho was not small. He had that heavy way of moving that made it seem like he could soak hits and keep walking. It did not matter.

Jisung should have looked away. He didn’t know why he didn’t look away. He could say it was because watching mattered, because his hands remembered where to put pressure now and he should know what hurt looked like from this angle too. He could say it was because he needed to see how someone like Minho decided to end things when he didn’t need to prove anything to anyone. He could say anything at all, but the truth sat hot and ugly under his tongue: there was a place in him that uncoiled only when Minho fought, and it did not care what it said about him.

Minho drove the other man into the ropes, not with ragged speed but with the same insistence Jisung had seen in him when he told people what to do and expected them to do it. He didn’t waste. He chose. He made choices that hurt. Jisung felt them land like blows to his own chest and for a split second wanted to cry with the force of it, the way it put him under and kept him there. He had thought he’d seen Minho angry before. He had not. Anger looked like stillness here, like the refusal to be moved by any hand that wasn’t his own.

The man’s head snapped back; the sound of it made the nearest people wince. Someone started to say enough, then didn’t. Minho stepped in with another strike like the word didn’t exist in his language. The body hit the canvas hard. The sound seemed to take the air out of the room; even the breath in Jisung’s lungs felt stolen. Minho stood over him and for one stretched second did not move at all, as if the rest of the world were nothing but a noise too far away to notice. Then he looked up.

The look found Jisung the way it always did, unerring. It had weight. Jisung felt it land and keep pressing, the way a palm on the sternum could hold a whole body to a door. He did not know what was in Minho’s head; he only knew what the look did to the shape of the room. It emptied it. It made a line from the ring to the wall where Jisung kept pretending to be invisible, and the line was a leash someone else held.

He should have left. He should have pulled his hood up and put his head down and walked back up those stairs until his heart stopped miscounting beats. Instead, his feet moved the way they always moved when Minho’s eyes told them to, slow at first and then with no memory of deciding, toward the corner, then the ropes, then the narrow gap where the crowd parted because something in Minho’s face said they should.

No one told him to follow. He followed.

The locker corridor was colder than the room outside, cinderblock seeping the kind of damp that found skin and stayed. Jisung could hear his own shoes on the concrete, could hear the rush of a shower somewhere, could hear his own breath in the places between. Minho didn’t look back to check if he was behind him. He didn’t have to. Jisung couldn’t have turned around if he wanted to, and he did not want to.

Minho stopped halfway down the corridor, turned, and looked at him properly for the first time since the fight. The weight of it pinned Jisung worse than any ropes.

“What are you doing here on a Monday?” Minho’s voice was flat, but the question landed sharp.

Jisung’s mouth opened, then closed. He didn’t know how to explain that not coming last week had been worse than bruises, that the silence had eaten him alive, that being here was the only way to breathe again. He shrugged instead. “I just—wanted to see.”

Minho’s head tilted, unreadable. “And what? Get yourself knocked around again?” His gaze flicked once to Jisung’s still-healing wrist. Then, almost offhand but with a curl of something Jisung couldn’t name: “At least you got a bruise out of it. Bet that helps in your little anatomy class.”

It was dry, mocking—but there was a ghost of humor in it, the faintest crack in the stone mask. Jisung startled a breathless laugh before he could stop himself. “Yeah. Super helpful. Real hands-on.”

For a second Minho’s mouth twitched, something almost like amusement before it vanished. “Idiot,” he muttered, but not unkindly. 

Then, Minho turned and pushed the door out to the side lot with his shoulder. He set his bag down and wiped his knuckles with a towel that came away pink in spots. Up close the heat coming off his skin felt like a thing the air had to bend around. Jisung stood just outside the reach of it and held himself very, very still.

“Phone,” Minho said without turning. The word was ordinary. Jisung’s hands fumbled as if he had been asked to solve something delicate with gloves on. He passed the phone over and tried not to watch Minho’s fingers on something that had spent nights against his ribs. Minho didn’t type. He only checked that the name at the top still read the way he had left it: Minho. The corner of his mouth did something too small to be a smile.

“Come on,” he said, and closed the door, now bringing them outside of the gym.

Jisung did not remember saying yes. He remembered the way the outside air felt thin and early, the way the lot smelled like oil and snow waiting to happen even though it hadn’t rained in days, the way Minho’s car door made a sound that felt expensive when it shut. He remembered how small the passenger seat made him feel, the way the dash lights turned his hands a dim blue, the way his heart decided to live inside his throat until it forgot what throats were for.

The ride started quiet. The city slid by in pieces Jisung didn’t register, only flashes caught at the edge of his attention: a closed storefront with paper taped across the windows, a traffic light reflected in a puddle it didn’t belong to, a man on a corner smoking with his shoulders up around his ears. Minho’s hand sat on the wheel with a grip that looked careless and wasn’t. When he shifted, the tendons pulled under his skin. The small movement made heat curl low in Jisung’s belly like a warning he ignored.

He tried to think of something to say and it made things worse. What could he say that didn’t sound like begging. What could he say that didn’t sound like lying. Thank you would sit wrong in his mouth. Sorry would be a joke. He shut his mouth and kept breathing evenly until even that felt like a tell.

Minho spoke first.

“You’re trouble, sweetheart.”

The word slid across the console and landed on Jisung’s skin like a hand. He felt it everywhere at once. It sounded like mockery. It sounded like ownership. It sounded like something no one had ever called him, not really, not in any way that felt like it attached itself to the inside of his ribs and stayed there. He didn’t know what to do with his face. He did not know what to do with his hands. His body had already decided, without permission: heat rushed to his cheeks so fast it hurt, his chest tightened, and the ache low in his stomach sharpened until it felt like it had edges.

He made a sound that was supposed to be a laugh and wasn’t. It came out thin.

Minho’s eyes stayed on the road, but his voice was sharp with casual precision. “Why’d you come tonight?”

Jisung stared at his knees, heat rushing up the back of his neck. He didn’t answer.

Minho didn’t seem to mind filling the silence. “Couldn’t stay away? Or just needed another injury for your homework?” The edge of his mouth curved. “What’s the diagnosis, then? You look like a kid who doesn’t know when to quit.”

Jisung’s hands twisted in his lap. He wanted to defend himself, but words wouldn’t come. Every time he thought of an excuse, the look Minho had given him in the ring burned through it.

The quiet stretched, heavy.

“You’re too easy to read,” Minho said finally, softer now. “Sit there acting like you’ve got nothing to say. But your face—” He glanced sideways, long enough that Jisung’s stomach flipped. “Your face says everything.”

Jisung swallowed hard. He wanted to disappear. He wanted Minho to keep going.

The car rolled to a stop at a red light and the quiet turned thick enough to chew.

Jisung turned his head and looked before he could stop himself. Minho was already looking. The look was unreadable in the ways that mattered, and obvious in the ways Jisung could not stand to have spelled out. It said I see you. It said I know what you are. It said don’t lie to me even if you must lie to everyone else.

Minho leaned in.

Not fast. Not cruel. Deliberate in the way a hand placed on the back of the neck and left there could be deliberate. The space between them narrowed until Jisung could count the flecks in Minho’s irises, could see the clean line of his mouth, could feel his own pulse jump against the back of his tongue. Jisung’s lips parted without a plan. He couldn’t help it. He had never been kissed. He had thought about it in ways that made him press his face into pillows and try not to make noise, but thinking did not teach a body what to do when the thing it feared and wanted moved closer.

He went very still. His hands tightened on his jeans. He forgot how to breathe and then remembered and then forgot again. He knew he was making it obvious. He knew he looked young and breakable and foolish and he could not make himself be anything else.

Minho stopped. The space of it was the width of a breath. The look he gave Jisung then was different from the looks Jisung catalogued; it wasn’t softer, but something in it changed temperature. Minho’s eyes dipped to Jisung’s mouth and back up. His own mouth tipped, not a smile.

“Not yet,” he said quietly. “You’re not ready for that.”

It did not sound like a refusal. It sounded like a decision made for him.

Jisung felt it like a blow. Humiliation came first, hot and blinding, his body telling him to shrink until he could fit in the seam of the seat and disappear. Relief followed so quickly he wanted to be sick from it, a rush that made spots dance in his vision. Under both was want, steady as a bruise. Not yet meant something. Not yet meant there was a later. Not yet meant Minho had noticed and chosen and was choosing again.

The light turned green. Minho’s hand went back to the wheel. Jisung stayed very still and tried not to shake.

They did not speak the rest of the way. The road became the kind of quiet that made the inside of the car feel too private for the world outside to see. When Minho turned onto Jisung’s street, Jisung noticed the feeling he always had when he was about to get out of a car after a long drive, the sudden ridiculous wish to make the distance longer so the small space could stay exactly as it was.

Minho pulled up in front of the dorm and put the car in park. He did not look at Jisung immediately. He glanced once at the door, once at the set of windows Jisung knew were his, once at the mirror. Then he turned his head. The air shifted again.

“Get inside, sweetheart.”

It was the same word as before, and it wasn’t. It was gentler at the edges, or maybe Jisung’s ears made it that way because they wanted to. He nodded. His voice didn’t work yet. He fumbled the handle twice and got the door open on the third try, his hands not his own. The night air felt too cold on his face and he did not trust himself to look back, but some stupid part of him did it anyway. Minho’s profile was all angles and calm. The look he sent over was brief and unarguable. Inside.

Jisung went.

He did not realize he was shaking until his keys slipped when he tried to fit them in the lock. He pressed his forehead to the door for a second and breathed until the urge to cry for no reason passed. When he made it inside, the stairwell was silent. Felix’s room was dark. Jisung closed his door carefully, leaned against it, and let his eyes adjust.

His heart did not slow for a long time. He crossed to the bed and sat on the edge, hands in his lap, the shape of the car still around him, the quiet still in his ears. He pressed his fingers to his mouth on a reflex he didn’t understand and then jerked them away, shame hot and nonsensical. Nothing had touched him. He was the same as he had been an hour ago, except he was not. Something had shifted its weight and now all of him tilted around it.

He lay back and stared at the ceiling until he had to close his eyes. The words he kept pretending didn’t matter unfurled behind his ribs and looped there. Not without me. Stay out of trouble. Sweetheart. Not yet.

He knew he should hate how much the shape of those words owned him. He knew he should learn to breathe without waiting for a phone to buzz. He knew how pathetic it sounded even in his head when he admitted that the promise tucked inside not yet made his chest feel like it was too full to hold everything properly.

He turned his face into the pillow and let himself break as quietly as he could. It wasn’t crying, not exactly. It was a kind of relief that hurt. It was every thought he hadn’t said out loud catching up to him at once and making a mess inside his throat. He was twenty-one years old and had not been kissed and a man who fought like he was bored of the world had leaned in close enough for Jisung to count the flecks in his eyes and then stopped because he said so. He felt small and seen and sick with wanting.

The phone on his nightstand stayed dark. He didn’t reach for it. He could feel the shape of Minho’s name in the room even when he wasn’t looking.

When sleep finally came, it wasn’t clean. It came with the weight of a palm on his chest, the smell of bleach and iron, the echo of a voice telling him what he was and what he wasn’t, the knowledge that he would go wherever it told him to. He dreamed his mouth remembered how to be a thing that could be used for something other than apology and he woke with the certainty that when it happened, it would be because Minho let it.

He lay there in the pale morning and listened to the building wake up, the pipes clanking and the door down the hall slamming and Felix knocking once and not waiting for an answer. He breathed through the want like it was a pain he could manage and then, when it quieted, like it was an instruction.

He knew he should stop. He knew he would go back anyway. He knew the word yet would sit where his heart belonged until someone decided what to do with it.

He went to class, he made coffee, he nodded when people spoke and managed to put the right words in the right order when they expected them, and all the while something in him curled around that word and kept it warm.

He was not ready. He would be. He didn’t know which of those frightened him more.

That night he put his phone face down and failed to keep it that way for long. When the screen lit the dark again, it was only the time. He let his eyes close and saw Minho’s mouth in the red of a stoplight and felt the space of a breath between them stretch into something as big as the week had been. He had thought humiliation would be the thing that undid him. He was beginning to understand that patience might be worse.

Chapter Text

Jisung had thought the car ride home would quiet him.
That Minho’s silence, heavy in the dark, would calm the frantic pounding in his chest. That being dropped off at the curb with nothing but a single look would let him breathe again. Instead, it had done the opposite. Minho’s stillness wasn’t calming; it was sharp, like a blade pressed just close enough to his throat that every shallow breath reminded him it was there

He shouldn’t still smell like him.

Jisung stands under the shower until the water goes cold and mean against his skin, palms flattened to tile, forehead bowed like he could force the heat out of him by sheer will. It doesn’t work. Minho clings anyway— in the soft rasp of a voice that keeps replaying in the back of his skull like the world’s cruelest lullaby.

He turns the water off because the pipes shudder and because the dorm’s hot-water gods have given up. Steam thins, sound returns: the drip of the showerhead, the thud of his heart, the whisper of fabric when he drags the towel down his ribs. He’s shaking. He tells himself it’s the cold. He knows it’s not.

Even now, hours later, lying in his bed with the lights off and the city murmuring outside his window, he could feel that presence like a phantom. He could see Minho’s hands on the wheel, his profile lit red at the stoplight, his voice curling soft and taunting: Not yet.

The words chewed at him, made his chest feel too tight. He’d never been told “not yet” like that—like a promise, not a denial. And it had ruined him. His body wouldn’t stop reacting; every time he closed his eyes, he felt Minho’s gaze pinning him to the passenger seat, that jacket heavy over his lap like Minho had branded him in fabric instead of ink.

He shoved the blanket off, shoving his hand under his waistband almost angrily.

His cock was already hard, throbbing painfully. Pathetic. He was pathetic. He couldn’t stop picturing Minho, calm and devastating, not even breaking a sweat as he reduced Jisung to a trembling mess in a single night. He thought about those hands—the same ones that wrapped and unwrapped gauze so neatly—on his throat. Around his wrists. He imagined Minho leaning in like he would kiss him, and stopping again, that amused glint in his eyes as he watched Jisung shatter from almost nothing.

His breath stuttered.

This wasn’t enough. Just rubbing himself through his briefs felt weak, wrong. He wanted to feel more—he wanted to feel Minho’s hands. His body burned with shame as his fingers slipped lower, clumsy, skirting over his rim, pressing experimentally. He’d never… He swallowed hard. He’d thought about this before, sure, but never done it. Not really. Not like this.

Minho’s voice replayed in his head, that low, steady tone: Breathe. Do what I say.
His cheeks flamed. He slid one finger inside.

The stretch was sharp, uncomfortable, but his cock twitched hard, leaking into his waistband. He whimpered into his pillow, biting it to muffle himself. Minho would probably mock him if he saw this. Call him desperate, disgusting. Minho would be right.

He curled his finger tentatively, his body clenching around it, and nearly cried at how empty it felt. He pictured Minho’s thigh instead—the solid muscle under his jeans, the way Minho had sat like a king while Jisung had knelt awkwardly in front of him last week. He imagined himself in his lap, Minho’s thigh between his legs, Minho’s voice rasping in his ear: Go on. Show me.

His hips jerked up involuntarily, his breath ragged. He pushed a second finger in, whining softly at the stretch. He wasn’t even close to ready for more, but the idea of Minho’s cock splitting him open made him dizzy. He fucked himself clumsily, legs trembling, rutting into his hand.

He came fast, messily, thighs shaking, a sob catching in his throat.

The shame that followed was suffocating.

He wiped his hand on the sheets, chest heaving, tears pricking the corners of his eyes. His fingers were slick, his hole sore, and the only thing he could think was how badly he wanted Minho to do it for him. To hold him down, to mock him for being so easy, so ruined, and to keep him like that until he forgot how to breathe on his own.

He rolled onto his side, curling up tight, but the shame didn’t loosen its grip.

“Coffee,” Felix says, and drops a cup in front of him with a cruelty that looks like love. “And a mirror, because you look like yesterday chewed you up and spit you out.”

Jisung wraps both hands around the paper. The warmth feels like something that might stop a tremor. “Thanks.”

Felix watches him over his own straw. He’s always watching; it’s not suspicious so much as how he moves through the world. “You’re worse this week.”

“Midterms,” Jisung tries.

“Yeah.” Felix leans in, conspiratorial. “Say ‘hyung’ again. You said it in your sleep.”

The coffee nearly sloshes over his fingers. Jisung stares at the lid like it might save him. “I didn’t.”

“Okay,” Felix says easily, with the kind of grin that means he knows he’s right and is choosing mercy. “You don’t have to tell me. But if a random car drops you home again from the ‘library’ , I'm gonna have to start questioning.” —his eyes drop, deliberately, to Jisung's bewildered face. Jisungs never been able to hide anything, especially from his best friend—“and you look like this? He either wants to eat you alive or he’s already halfway through.”

Jisung makes a sound that might be a laugh and might be a small animal dying. Felix pats his shoulder, lets his hand slide in an older-brother circle, and then lets him go.

“Class,” he says. “If you faint because you haven’t had a vegetable in a week, I’m not catching you.”

“I have carrots in the fridge,” Jisung lies.

“Uh-huh.” Felix taps the side of Jisung’s cup with his straw on his way out. “Text your hyung back.”

He doesn’t look up quick enough to deny it, and the red on his face is answer enough.

That afternoon, Felix wouldn’t let it go.

They were sprawled across their dorm floor, Felix tossing a stress ball lazily between his hands, when he glanced over and said, “You’ve been acting like you’ve got a crush.”

Jisung froze. “What?”

Felix smirked. “You’re jumpy. Distracted. Blushing whenever your phone buzzes. Come on, Sungie, I’ve known you forever.”

“I don’t—” Jisung swallowed. “–It’s not—”

“It is.” Felix rolled onto his stomach, chin propped in his hands. “Who is he? Or she?”

“No one,” Jisung muttered, tugging his hoodie tighter.

Felix laughed. “Sure. And I’m the Pope.” He leaned closer, lowering his voice. “Whoever it is, they’re making you look like a kicked puppy. I swear, if this guy’s bad for you—”

“He’s not,” Jisung blurted, too fast.

Felix’s brows rose. “So it is a guy.”

Jisung’s face burned. “Lix—”

Felix grinned. “Okay, fine. I’ll drop it. But for real, Sungie… don’t let anyone mess with you, okay? You’re too soft for that.”

Jisung bit his lip and nodded. He didn’t know how to explain that Minho wasn’t just “messing” with him. Minho was rewriting him.

The wound lab is fluorescent and unforgiving. Seungmin is neat even in nitrile, wrapping gauze like he’s been doing it for years; I.N. (Jeongin to the roster, Innie to the rest of them) is meticulous in an entirely different way, measuring strip lengths like the tape is going to complain if he wastes an inch. Jisung’s hands, usually good, are clumsy. He tapes the wrong edge and curses under his breath and Seungmin’s eyebrow lifts in a way that says he will not ask, because he is kind, and also, he is collecting evidence.

“You okay?” Seungmin asks anyway, because the kindness wins.

“Yeah,” Jisung says, and means no. “Didn’t sleep.”

“Mhm.” Seungmin pins the gauze with the efficient tug of someone who would be a nightmare in an argument. “You’re flushed.”

“I run hot.”

Jeongin hums. “Like a fever.”

“Like anxiety,” Seungmin corrects gently, and their eyes meet over the mock arm they’re bandaging. It’s a whole conversation he doesn’t know how to have, and they let him not have it. He loves them for it and wishes they would pry him open anyway.

Jisung’s phone buzzes in his pocket like a nerve firing. He could ignore it. He does not. He palms it under the table, hands already shaking in a way that makes the motion obvious, and thumbs the screen awake.

Where are you.

It shouldn’t be a question that hits like a hand settling around the back of his neck. He swallows around the lump that pops up and types, stupidly, truthfully.

Lab.

A beat. He can see Minho’s voice even when it doesn’t show on a screen: the measured drag of it, like he tastes every line before he says it aloud.

Stay where you are.

His body obeys before his brain catches up. He doesn’t stand, though all of him wants to, buzzing and wide-eyed like prey when the brush moves in the grass. He stares at the door instead and hears nothing; the rest of the class hums around him, oblivious.

“Sung?” Seungmin says softly, and Jisung realizes he’s holding the tape like it’s trying to escape. He forces a smile, too many teeth, and the door opens like the room is listening to him.

Minho doesn’t belong here and somehow he fits anyway. It’s not the hoodie or the way his jeans cut clean lines or even the fact that his eyes go through the room before they settle exactly where they were always going to stop. It’s the quiet built into his posture. There’s a stillness in him that makes other people loud. The TA at the front starts to speak and then doesn’t. Jisung forgets to breathe.

He doesn’t know if anyone else can see it—the line between them, tight and bright as wire—but he can feel it pulling. Minho tips his chin the smallest amount and Jisung is already moving before he thinks to ask permission.

“Bathroom,” he says to no one, and Seungmin’s hand brushes his sleeve as he goes. It feels like a gift, that touch. It feels like a goodbye. He follows the shadow out into the hall.

Minho waits in the narrow stretch between lab doors, hands in his pockets, a picture of patience if you didn’t know better. Jisung stops a step away because his thighs remember firm and his hips remember hands and his mouth remembers how close almost was in the car. He fumbles the honorific out like it will pay for the rest of him. “Hyung.”

The first ever ‘ hyung ’ lands like he intended it to; intimate. Something in Minho’s eyes warms—not kind, exactly, but proprietary. “Show me your hands.”

Jisung startles, then holds them out, palms up. Minho doesn’t touch, not yet. He looks. The nitrile gloves are powdered where he’s rubbed at his palms, the tips a little grim from tape adhesive. He flips one over with a glance and Jisung watches his own wrist turn like Minho owns the joint. The bruise from last week is still in yellow-green bloom along the radius. Minho inhales; it’s barely there. It still makes Jisung blush, stupidly glad to be noticed.

“You hold pressure wrong when you rush,” Minho says, like he’d been at the lab table; like he’s always at every lab table, like he could be if he wanted to. “Come with me.”

“I— class—”

“Ten minutes won’t kill you,” Minho says, and because his voice is quiet, it doesn’t sound like an order until Jisung is already nodding. “Bring your kit.”

He grabs the pocket kit and lets himself be led down the secondary stairwell no one uses, into the empty classroom with the broken projector and the windows that wring the late-afternoon light into ribbons across the floor.

Minho takes the chair by the front, sits like he owns whatever he puts his weight on, and crooks two fingers. Jisung goes to him the way water goes downhill.

“You’ll need practice,” Minho says, and it sounds like he is talking about bandaging and nothing else. He pats his thigh, not a suggestion. “Sit.”

“Okay,” Minho says, and Jisung’s heart stumbles because he hears you’re okay in it even though it isn’t there. “Show me pressure.”

He has to remember why they’re here. He reaches for the gauze. His fingers fumble the edge and Minho’s mouth tilts in a way that would be cruel if Jisung didn’t want to wear it.

“Slow,” Minho says. “No one’s bleeding out.”

Jisung finds the edge, rolls the gauze out, presses two fingers to Minho’s knuckles because that’s where the bruises always bloom. The heat of Minho’s skin through the thin wrap runs down his arm into his chest and pools there. Minho watches his face while Jisung watches his own hands. The classroom is very quiet. The hallway is a world away.

“Pressure,” Minho says. “You know that part.”

Jisung presses. Minho’s thigh tightens underneath him like a casual flex, a small private cruelty that has no purpose but to make Jisung gasp. It works. His breath stutters. His hips move without permission, a small slide that drags the tight line of his cock over the slope of Minho’s leg and burns. He freezes, humiliated.

Minho’s fingers tighten minutely at his waist. Not a threat. Not mercy either. “Keep going,” he says, and Jisung wants to scream because he can’t tell which thing he means.

He does both badly: presses where he’s supposed to, rolls the gauze, and tries not to move at all even though the heat at the base of his spine is lighting up every nerve he left available. Minho lets him try. The patience in it is its own kind of cruelty. Only when Jisung’s hands start to shake does Minho let his lips part on a small, amused sound.

“You’re not going to live through Thursday if you can’t even sit still in a chair,” he says, and there’s fondness under the menace in a way that collapses Jisung’s lungs.

“I can,” Jisung says, and hates that it sounds like begging for permission. “I will.”

“I know.” Minho glances down at his own hand where Jisung’s ridiculous, careful wrap is settling. “Good.” He lifts his gaze again, slow, deliberate. “Now you’ll stop pretending you aren’t hard and you’ll listen when I tell you how to use me.”

The words snap something clean in Jisung’s spine. All his breath falls out and he has to drag it back in on a whine swallowed between his teeth. “Hyung—”

“That’s right,” Minho murmurs, the corner of his mouth not quite a smile. “You call me that and then you do what I say.”

Jisung nods before he remembers that he should maybe also speak. “Yes.”

“Good.” Minho’s hand shifts, anchors low at Jisung’s waist. “Don’t hide your face.”

“I—” He wants to. He wants to tuck himself into the small safe dark made by Minho’s shoulder and pretend the rest of the world is a room he can leave. He doesn’t. He looks. The stare back is steady and unblinking and it makes his stomach drop like a ride he shouldn’t have gotten on. “Okay.”

“Here,” Minho says, and adjusts him the smallest amount, a careful drag back and down so the seam of Jisung’s jeans finds the highest point of his thigh. “Now. Forward. Slowly.”

Jisung moves. The first pass is almost nothing—fabric against fabric and the drag of not-enough friction—but it lights him up anyway, a bright hot vein from pelvis to chest that steals the sound right out of him. Minho’s thigh tenses just enough to meet him.

“Again,” Minho says, patient.

He does it again. The second time is worse, which is to say: better. Minho’s hand is a steady weight guiding him through the motion he’s terrified to call what it is. His palms go to Minho’s shoulders because there’s nowhere else to put them and because his hands need something to hold or he will float away. Under his fingers, Minho is heat and density and something that hums like low power, like the moment right before a lightbulb warms.

“Talk,” Minho says quietly, and his face is close enough that Jisung can see the nick of a razor under his jaw. “How does it feel.”

Jisung’s voice comes out wrecked. “Good.” It’s a useless word. He tries again and hates himself for how honest it is. “Too much. Not enough.”

“That’s more like it.” Minho’s eyes flick downward and back up again, the smallest reward. “Don’t hold your breath.”

He hadn’t noticed he was. He lets it go in a rush and drags air back in, ragged. On the inhale, Minho’s thigh lifts one centimeter under him—nothing, everything, the exact right amount—and Jisung’s vision blurs on a sudden, helpless noise.

“Better,” Minho says, and there’s so much pleased in it that Jisung wants to cry.

He finds a rhythm, if you can call it that: a slow forward press matched to Minho’s barely-there flex, a backward drag that is murder and mercy. The seam of his jeans is going to imprint him; he will have a line there he’ll recognize by touch later and he’ll think about this room and die a little. His fingers curl into Minho’s hoodie where it stretches tight over his shoulders and he keeps his eyes open the way he was told to, lets himself be ruined on purpose where Minho can see every second of it.

“You’re shaking,” Minho says softly.

“I can’t—” Jisung tries to make sense. “I don’t know how—”

“I’m telling you how,” Minho says, not unkind. “I’m right here.”

That does something huge and stupid in Jisung’s chest. He nods like that will save him.

“More pressure.” Minho’s hand tightens. The word is the same one they use in class and Jisung cannot believe language can be this cruel, this kind. “Yes. Just there.”

Jisung makes a sound he’d be ashamed of if he hadn’t left shame at the door. His hips learn what Minho wants from him faster than his brain does. He rocks forward and back in the careful small movement he’s allowed and every time he thinks he cannot possibly get hotter, he does. His cheeks hurt. He realizes distantly that his mouth is open.

“Hyung—” It’s a warning and a plea and he doesn’t know for what.

“Look at me,” Minho says. Jisung does, even though it feels like stepping off a ledge. “Good boy.” The words are a quiet blade that slides right under his ribs. “You’re going to come.”

“I—” He wants to argue. He never lasts when Minho is this close to him, he never lasts even alone when Minho is only a voice he makes up in his own head. Lasting is a moral question he is not built for. He nods anyway so he won’t cry. “Please.”

“Tell me what you’re asking for,” Minho says, and now the mouth is definitely a curved thing, a small cruel mercy of a smile.

“Permission,” Jisung says, because he can’t lie even to save himself. “Please.”

“Then show me how much you want it.” Minho doesn’t raise his voice. He doesn’t have to. “Harder.”

Jisung moves. He does not think about the door; he does not think about the window light wrapping around them like a ribbon; he does not think about the way his thighs will scream tomorrow in a class where he will have to look people he loves in the eye and pretend he is fine. He thinks about Minho’s hand at his waist, the press of his thigh, the low hum in his chest that means this pleases me. He drags forward and back, forward and back, faster than he meant to, ugly and raw, breath tearing out of him in shameless sounds he will remember later and blush himself sick over.

“Shh,” Minho says. “You’re okay.” The words slip under the noise and flatten it, gentle as a palm. “There you go.”

He breaks fast. He always was going to. It hits sudden and vicious, a bright detonation at the base of his spine that runs down and then up at the same time, his whole body going tense enough he’ll feel it in his calves for days. He clamps down on a cry and it still comes out of him anyway, small and awful, and he comes in his underwear like a boy in a story about shame.

Minho holds him exactly where he is. He doesn’t pull him off, doesn’t let him collapse into his shoulder, doesn’t let him leave. He steadies him through it, the low murmur a constant line under Jisung’s shaking. “Breathe. That’s it. You did fine.”

Jisung is still catching breath when he realizes tears have made tracks down both cheeks. He wipes at them, mortified, smearing wet over the cuff of the hoodie he is not supposed to ruin. Minho catches his wrist halfway through, gentle and brief, a no that doesn’t require a second one.

“Don’t stain my sleeve,” Minho says, like this is the part he cares about. He reaches behind him without looking and tosses a clean towel from his bag into Jisung’s lap. “Here.”

Jisung chokes on a laugh that isn’t one and presses the towel into himself. It hurts already, the oversensitive throb. He cleans himself with hands that won’t obey him and tries not to die inside. Minho doesn’t help; he doesn’t look away either. When it’s over, Minho takes the towel from him like he is collecting evidence and folds it into itself until the white stays white.

Minho leans back in the chair, one ankle propped over his knee, calm like nothing just happened, like Jisung isn’t sitting there flushed and shaking, his thighs trembling from what Minho just made him do. He’s folding the towel so neatly it looks like a habit, hands steady and precise.

“Thursday,” Minho says at last, voice soft but firm, like a hand closing around his throat. “You’ll be there.”

Jisung swallows. His voice is a whisper. “Yes.”

Minho glances up, a small hum in his throat. “It’s a big one,” he adds, deliberate. “Front row. You don’t move. Understand?”

“Yes,” Jisung says again, a little breathless.

Minho studies him for a long moment, eyes sharp but warm at the edges, the kind of look that makes Jisung feel stripped down and tied up all at once. Then Minho leans forward, rests his forearms on his thighs, and says quietly, “Wear something nice. One of those soft shirts that makes you look like trouble.”

Jisung’s cheeks burn so hot they hurt.

“Good,” Minho murmurs, leaning back again, satisfied with Jisung’s silence. He rises to his feet, his shadow long in the late light spilling through the blinds, and offers a hand without asking if Jisung can stand.

Jisung takes it.

“Come on,” Minho says, leading him out of the room like he’s nothing more than a shadow that follows where told.