Archive of Our Own ^beta

Minho doesn’t expect it to hit him the way it does, the day he’s discharged.

The explosion of noise is anticipated, obviously. They haven’t been apart long enough for that much to change. Even the disdain at his uniform he could have predicated, although he feels a little slighted that Kibum doesn’t appreciate the sheer drama of showing up in his fatigues. It’s cinematic! Just because Key had probably given his a ceremonial cremation when he was done.

No, all of that envelopes him like an old blanket, settling over his shoulders on a winter evening. The loudness, the teasing, the bustle of people intruding on intimate moments, it’s all the same. It must be Minho who has changed, because it’s not like Taemin hasn’t been beautiful the whole time he’s been gone. The whole time they’ve known each other, really. It’s just never felt quite so - targeted like this, before.

Minho throws himself at Jinki to cover the swoop in his stomach, the sucked in breath after impact. It’s a stupid thought. Taemin is at Inkigayo for his comeback, hadn’t even known that Minho was going to crash the party. If he’s all dressed up and pretty, it’s for the literal performance he’s about to put on.

There’s a little curl of panic wisping up from the impact zone in his gut, sucked into his veins and pumped through to his extremities by the stuttering heave of his heart. At least, Minho tells himself it’s panic, because if it’s not that then the only other thing he can identify it as is anticipation, and anticipation for what? What, exactly, does the ceaseless machinery of his body think it’s preparing itself for?

His mouth cheerfully pours nonsense for him, the creation of quality Content™ muscle memory at this point. He hears himself promise that he’ll do anything for his members, wonders if anyone can hear the pained whirring sound of his brain melting down when Taemin bunches his cheeks at him and asks for 100 man won.

Kibum, thank god, is distressed enough by his appearance that he doesn’t seem to pick up on the vibes as they file out to hover in the too-empty audience pit. Or maybe Minho is sliding back into his actor’s skin already, the idol mask he’d been so eager to shed two years ago clicking into place. That’s a bit morose for this kind of reunion, so he forces the thought out of his wounded skull, grimly holding all the pieces of himself in place as Key asks if he’s heard the song yet.

“I’ve been teaching babies how to be good soldiers,” he reminds him. “I know the concept escapes you--”

“Aish, I served my time without complaint,” Key protests, and Jinki laughs at him first, so Minho feels perfectly justified in joining in. Key’s fist pings off his deltoid; Minho laughs even harder as his muscles making his point for him, until one of the techs shushes them and then looks quickly horrified at himself for speaking so sharply to the members of SHINee at their maknae’s comeback.

All three of them immediately turn apologetic. Minho thinks all of them feel their own horror these days at the idea of wielding heads as big as their name. It was something that even the Marines hadn’t been able to provide him a respite from. Even those who treated him normally - which had been most people! - had done so with the air of someone making an intentional choice. The decision was always, ‘I will treat SHINee’s Minho as any ordinary recruit’, and not, ‘Choi Minho is an ordinary recruit’.

“It’s good,” Kibum says once they’ve settled down. The lighting switches to something soft and hazy, directed at the stage and the shadows milling about, finding their places. “He’s grown up well.”

As expected wars with in spite of everything. Minho swallows them both down, just nodding alongside Jinki’s quiet hum of agreement. He’s watched videos over the course of his service, of course, has spoken directly to Taemin about comebacks and performances. But as much as he is still their maknae, Taemin has grown without him, in ways the occasional phone call and furtive movie catch ups can’t convey.

Anticipation, or panic? The backing track for Heaven pulses through the air; up on stage, Taemin brings life to this place, turned hollow without the screaming exuberance of fans to fill it up. Minho has seen this man on a thousand different stages, has seen him excited and overwhelmed at the crowds, has seen him too tired or teenaged to want to bother, has seen him drag up his mask of professionalism anyway, no matter how sloppy it might have fit in the moment.

Watching him now is the culmination of all those years of mastery. There’s nothing in his expression, in his movements, in the steady shine of his voice that gives away that he’s performing to three members and a smattering of staff. The piped-in cheering at the end of the first song is a grim resurrection, but Taemin holds himself placid and beautiful while the cameras zoom in on his face, like a creature existing apart from this world.

And then the lights come up again, bright yellow flooding the area. Taemin’s face breaks into a grin as he lets himself pant more fully, chattering something at his back-up dancers that has them laughing out loud. An assistant hurries over with a hand-held fan, the whole gaggle of performers slowly moving off the stage like a many-limbed entity. There are costume changes to do, make up to fix, sets to change before his next performance. Minho blinks furiously, but the after-image of his brilliance doesn’t fade.

“I miss it,” he says to the others, not bothering to hide the surprise in his voice. They both knew his concerns about leaving; they knew his concerns about coming back. “Ah, but that’s always been his power, hasn’t it? To make you wish you were up there with him.”

Kibum makes a retching noise, but keeps any smart comment to himself in a way that means he agrees. Jinki’s expression is more indulgent than a chocolate cake, enough to make Minho shove his hand at it with his own sound of disgust.

He doesn’t take it back, though. He’s never been the type to shy away from his own feelings.

The Idea stage will linger with him for days. Minho couldn’t even say why. The Taemin of it all, perhaps; that Minho watches and can only see him. The way he brings together the disparate parts of performance, the production and the choreography and the lyrics, consumes them all and spits out something that can only be him. It’s beautiful.

Minho has been holding on to a secret for a long time now. It would be easy to put a limit on it, corral it into the space laid out by his encounter with a fellow recruit when they were too tired and too lonely, too giddy and too kind to each other.

But he’s never been the type to shy away from his own feelings, and he thinks that was probably just the start of noticing it. This thing that is too big to swallow down, too impossible to spit out. He thinks it’s probably been there since before he did his service, might have been there his whole life.

He hasn’t decided what to do about it, yet. But he watches Taemin’s Idea, watches Taemin’s body and his voice and the thick red beat of his love for this thing that they do - and he thinks, he’s probably decided to do something.

*

Minho can still remember Kibum tearing him a new one over using the word gay.

It wasn’t even the first time he’d said it. He was eighteen and not especially thoughtful; words cost nothing to say, so he used them freely. He has no idea what he actually said, or even how Key reacted in the moment - he was always doing stuff that pissed him off back then, one more dirty look just glanced right off him. It’s Jonghyun who chides him in the moment, Jinki who smooths it over; Taemin wanders off like he so often does, and Minho forgets about the whole thing until after their schedule.

Jinki starts making...food? (Minho’s not sure what meal it counts as after midnight but before sunrise), and Jonghyun insists on keeping him company by not helping at all. Taemin claims the first shower and everyone lets him, because he is a very indulged maknae, and Minho goes to grab his stuff from their shared room. If they’re cleaning up in age order, he’s definitely taking advantage.

The door shutting behind him when he didn’t close it probably shouldn’t feel so obvious, but Minho’s gut does the math before his brain. He turns around to find Key leaning back against it, arms crossed over his chest.

“You need to watch your mouth.”

Minho blinks. It’s not exactly unusual for the two of them to be at each other’s throats, but he genuinely has no idea what he’s done now to piss off the other - oooooh.

He winces, rubbing the back of his neck. “Haven’t I already been punished enough for that?”

“It’s not about you,” Key snaps. “If you actually understood what you were saying sorry for earlier, you’d know. It’s about who might overhear you.”

At the time, Minho had not put the pieces together correctly, mostly because he had not been in possession of all the pieces, but also because he wasn’t very good at puzzles. Memory gives way to time and supposition and laughing retellings over too much beer; Minho’s dignity insists that he had been very mature in the process of digging his hole deeper, while Key’s rendition of his supposed shocked expression gets more and more exaggerated with each passing year.

“Oh,” he says, or maybe, “Hold on a second!”

Present care overruns past reality; Minho can’t be sure what he was concerned about at the time when he leaned in, but he is sure that he was concerned, “Are you saying--?”

“You’re GAY!?” Key shrieks in the middle of his narrative, a different flare to it every time. Minho’s discomforted protests (‘I never said that!’ ‘I didn’t say it like that!’) give way to grudging acceptance over the years, until he enacts it or re-enacts alongside his friend.

It makes Taemin cackle with glee. Tonight, with all of them gathered in Minho’s apartment in the wake of his discharge, he tips over with the force of it and slops beer down his front. This rescues Minho from his laughter, but it means being subjected to his whines about how much he likes this shirt, hyung, and now it’s going to be all gross and I’m all gross--

Minho scoops Taemin up in a fireman’s carry, punching a yelp of protest right out of his gut while the others cheer (or maybe boo) them out of the room.

“Take your shirt off,” Minho instructs when they get to the cooler quiet of the master bedroom. His curtains are drawn against the glare of Seoul at night, the room’s lighting casting Taemin in a softer glow as he pulls out his French tuck and tosses the beer-soaked shirt at Minho’s face.

“One hundred million won,” Taemin informs him solemnly; Minho chokes.

“The shirt?”

“Oh my god, the view.” Taemin smacks him with one hand, gesturing at his torso with the other. Minho catches sight of the tattoo inked over his hip, and can’t decide how much Taemin is undervaluing himself by.

He makes some crack about getting a member’s discount, grabbing the first of his t-shirts that come to hand. Some navy cotton thing, soft with age and no discernable label anywhere visible. It hangs too-large off Taemin’s shoulders when he pulls it on, and Minho has bundled this man into his clothes any number of times for any number of reasons over the years, but there’s something about this shirt, this room, this moment that makes his breath hitch in his throat.

“I’ll, uh - let me throw this in the wash for you. You should know it’s not actually ruined, I know we taught you how to do laundry.”

“Don’t say that to me like Jinki-hyung didn’t teach you.”

Minho flicks him with the damp shirt, because resorting to gentle violence is the only way he knows to deal with the soft screaming sound reverberating in his skull. Of course, he should have known better; Taemin gives furious chase, and Minho might be faster and more sober than he is, but the apartment is only large for an apartment in Seoul, and Minho is indulgent.

He yells with indignation when Taemin gets his twiggy arms around his throat with a full body tackle, ignores the tickle of silvery laughter spilling over his shoulderblades as he bodily drags Taemin to the laundry. The heave of his chest beats a tattoo into Minho’s back as he pulls himself up into prime piggyback position, locking his legs firly around Minho’s waist.

“You’re a menace,” Minho accuses, putting the shirt into his machine and setting it to run for a single item of clothing, because he’s a sucker.

“Yes,” Taemin agrees.

They both pause to observe the moment where one of them should say something, tease or joke or make some kind of comment, and they both let it slip by. A sigh slips from Taemin’s mouth, runs its shivering edges over the shell of Minho’s ear. Minho knows, abruptly, what it is he’s going to say.

“You really didn’t know.”

For the first time since Taemin plastered himself to his back, Minho is glad to have him there. It means he doesn’t have to look at his face right now. Know what a disappointment he must have been.

“I know now,” he says. Taps his fingers on the lid of the machine, like that might fill the silence he’d left in those early years.

“Mn,” Taemin says noncommittally. Minho is on the verge of setting him down and talking about this properly when the brat digs his heel into Minho’s pelvis, clicking his tongue. “Okay, take me to the beer. I spilt mine.”

*

“So, I know I’m not supposed to talk about the army,” Minho starts, laughing when Jinki covers his face and groans.

“Talk about whatever you need to talk about,” Jinki tells his hands.

One month out from Minho’s discharge, and they’re already getting stuck into SHINee’s comeback. The two of them are staying at the SM dorms, although Kibum had categorically refused to entertain the possibility of even a short stay, and Taemin had pretended like he hadn’t heard the question. Jinki and Minho have always cohabitated easily enough.

It’s not the same place they were at before Minho’s service, and he’s glad enough for that. They’ve been revisiting a lot of old haunts lately, and he knows there’s more to come. Neutral space, unburdened by the weight of history, is a precious commodity these days.

Minho double-taps the marble counter officiously, like it has a purpose other than distraction. He’s about to blow all of that up, of course. No matter how de-personalised the dorm feels over the next few months, it’s always going to be the place he drops the bomb he’s setting now. It has to be. He’s been holding this thing like a frog in his mouth for the past month - year, longer - and he can finally admit that he’s not going to swallow it down.

“...Minho-yah?” There’s caution in Jinki’s voice now, mixed with care. He doesn’t reach over the counter, but Minho can tell that he wants to, the instinct of a decade and more built into his bones. “I mean it, obviously. Whatever you need to say, you can say.”

He doesn’t crack a joke, too earnest by half. And really, isn’t that why Minho had wanted to share this with him first? Surely if he had sought out a gentle touch, he can’t now wish for someone to squeeze it out of him.

“I had sex with a man, in the army.”

He hates it immediately, the way the words sound set free. They don’t explode, is the thing. They sit there between him and his leader, cold and clinical in a way that the sex definitely hadn’t been.

“Uuuuugh,” he groans, scrubbing at his face. “Over a year and I still couldn’t come up with a better way to say it? It wasn’t - bad. Not a bad experience. I had fun!” A short pause. “I’m not ashamed.”

Jinki, to his credit, hasn’t moved much. His eyebrows jump up his forehead a bit, kind of comically, but there’s no sudden gasp, no leaping from his chair. Minho hadn’t expected that of him, but it’s nice to have some things confirmed. Like the basic decency of your eldest member.

“Good,” Jinki says shortly, but there are a thousand thoughts packed into that one word, and even with their long friendship, Minho can only begin to deciphers what they might be. “Good. You don’t have anything to be ashamed of.”

And then - and then Jinki does move. Faster than Minho might have anticipated, certainly too fast for him to prepare himself, especially when he’s not sure what Jinki is trying to - oh.

Also to his credit, Jinki hasn’t let himself go since being discharged. It’ll make the comeback easier on his body, but it makes this hug easier for Minho to sag into. He doesn’t return it, doesn’t feel like he can move his arms just yet, but Jinki is warm enough and strong enough for the both of them right now. Minho blows out the breath sticking too-large in his chest, deflates himself from a size big enough for all of the shapes he is supposed to hold - idol, soldier, son - to something that settles on his skeleton a little easier.

“Ah, hyung,” he says, proud of how his voice wavers only a little. “That’s all you have to say to me? No questions or concerns? Not even one lecture about discretion?”

“Shut up,” Jinki says insistently, bringing the hug to a merciful end. Minho’s tear ducts were starting to work overtime at keeping everything contained. “What am I supposed to say about something that already happened? All I want is for you to be safe and happy. You’re here and you’re not ashamed, so what do I have to worry about?”

“God.” Minho laughs, blinking back up at the ceiling, because if he does anything else he’s definitely going to cry. “Maybe I should have gone to Kibum first. He would have just asked me ‘how big’ and handed me a beer.”

“Yah, stop! That’s not true, you know that’s not true.”

It’s not true, but pulling Kibum’s pigtails is a part of how he processes, even when his friend isn’t around. He’s definitely spent a non-significant part of the past year entertaining himself with various imaginings of Key’s reactions and with the words out in the world now, he finds himself thinking curiously of what his response mind be.

As for Taemin…

“If you don’t mind me asking, why not talk to him first?” Jinki settles back onto his stool at the counter, setting his hand on his chin. Minho finds himself smiling before he registers the reason - it’s a gossipy little pose, although he’s sure that Jinki means it to be encouraging. “Obviously I’m honoured, but we both know he has more experience with this kind of thing.”

It’s an open secret at SM that idols who are questioning their sexuality - or who are very certain that they aren’t straight, for that matter - have a way of finding themselves at Key’s doorstep. He’s got the whole spiel down to a science these days, comfort, advice, condoms. It had kind of surprised Minho at first, that people were so willing to be open with a stranger, but he thinks he’s in a better position to understand it now.

“It builds up,” Kibum had told him once, uncharacteristically gentle. “These kids, they keep this thing inside them for so long because there’s no one they can talk to about it, no way they can express it except maybe by doing something like what we’re doing. And then they meet me and - look, I appreciate that you didn’t want to make assumptions, but I’m not subtle, and that’s on purpose. If they hit the point where they can’t keep it in anymore, I want them to know that they have somewhere to go.”

“He’s good at it,” Taemin had piped up. Minho and Key were sprawled on the floor of their practice room, but Taemin was still going over choreo, watching himself carefully in the mirror. He puffed when he spoke, but in that careful, controlled way that said he was going to hold it together until gravity came calling for him. “It’s happened to me a couple of times now too. I always remember that the first thing hyung said to me was how proud he was. I try to pass that on.”

Minho loves Kibum, but he does not want his friend to tell him how proud he is of him for sucking a dick. He opens his mouth to crack the joke, but of course sincerity spills out of him instead, because isn’t that the whole reason he’d wanted to talk to Jinki in the first place?

“It's not that I actually think he’d be a jerk about it,” Minho hastens to assure him. “But it - no offence, hyung, but you’re kind of like regional finals, you know? Talking to Kibum first would be like trying to jump straight to the Olympics.”

“Aw,” Jinki complains, eyes crinkling at the corners. “I can’t even be Nationals?”

“I don’t think straight people get to go to queer Nationals, sorry hyung.”

Jinki hums his amused agreement while Minho tries to figure out why his own words have set a quiet glow of warmth in his chest. It feels like Jinki is waiting for him to realise it too, or maybe he just doesn’t know what to say. Maybe they don’t really need to say anything more between them, now that this is out. Good, Jinki had said. He’s safe, he’s happy. He’s--

“Ah,” Minho says, clicking. “Hmm.”

“You don’t have to say it,” Jinki offers. “But it does seem a little like that’s what this was building towards.”

“It does.” Minho taps the counter again, gut-checking. Kibum had been right, all those years ago. It grows in you, the urge to tell someone. To claim it, no matter how long the seed might have been dormant for. It had been easier to offer up the truth to himself as action; a thing he had done, not a part of who he was. And he had needed some part of this to be easy, or else he thinks he might not have been able to fit the words through the gate of his mouth.

Ah, but it’s done now, isn’t it? That first action taken, the second now in telling Jinki. The words are outside with him, and they seem so much smaller when they’re not knocking around in his skull.

“I’m not straight,” he tries, testing the ground under him. “I like guys as well as girls. I’m - bisexual? I’m bisexual.”

The ground holds.

*

“You must be the laziest Marine ever.”

Lee Taemin has the most annoying toes in the world, Minho decides. He had not been aware that toes, specifically, could be so obnoxious, until Lee Taemin shoves his under his thigh and starts wriggling.

“I thought talking about the army was banned?” Minho grumbles, swatting in the vague direction of Taemin’s leg. He catches fabric, skims along the line of his calf. Hits the floor, where the rest of his body is already spread out, catching his breath. It takes a second to process the way his fingers tingle in the wake of such a basic touch.

It always takes a second, these days.

“Only from you, hyung,” Taemin says, sickly sweet. The wriggling upgrades to little kicks, his grody dancer’s feet prodding into the muscle of Minho’s outer thigh over and over as Taemin starts to chant ‘hyung get up hyung get up hyung get up’, and this is definitely not the kind of basic touch anyone starts tingling over, Jesus.

“Okay, that’s enough.”

Minho quickly reasserts the one effective power he has in this situation (abs) to lunge up, wrapping both arms around Taemin’s waist. Exposure therapy is a thing, right? He makes sure to twist when he tackles him down, taking the brunt of the fall on his side and most of Taemin’s weight to his chest. It doesn’t stop Taemin from shrieking loud enough to wake the dead - or at least loud enough to stop Jinki and Kibum in the middle of walking through the Don’t Call Me choreo for the millionth time.

Key word: walking through. It’s two in the morning on - Minho’s pretty sure it’s a Thursday, and equally sure it doesn’t really matter. They’re at the pre-comeback point where days of the week are more suggestions than indications of the passage of time, and they certainly don’t have anything to do with when Lee Taemin takes a break or sleeps. The workaholic tendencies they’d left him with in 2019 have blossomed into something that inspires awe and no small amount of terror, and Minho had quickly learnt that he couldn’t just tell him to take a break and be listened to like he once might have.

Taemin had tasted freedom (solo career) and power (SuperM hyung) in the intervening years, and he isn’t relinquishing it lightly (although being a brat had apparently never unhooked its claws from his brain). So if Minho has to trick him into having a rest every now and then, that’s a sacrifice he’s willing to make. Even if it does end up with an armful of squirming maknae perched on top of him.

“You know,” Key drawls, “I said to myself before we started, ‘Key, honey, this time will be different. They’ve grown up now, they’ve matured, it won’t be how it used to be with the noise and the...this’.”

He gestures at the two of them sprawled on the floor, Taemin now aggressively poking at Minho’s stomach like that’s going to do anything other than maybe hurt his finger. Is Minho flexing on purpose? He’ll never tell.

“Get up!” Taemin insists, and the silver of his voice rings so bright with laughter that Minho can only grin and shake his head. Taemin starts shoving ineffectually at Minho’s arm instead, but Minho is only two months out of the Marines, and Taemin has never been large. He can lock one arm easily around his waist and hold him in place, yawning exaggeratedly and letting his other arm flop over his head, just to rub it in.

“You can’t have been this annoying before you left,” Taemin huffs, shoving small palms onto Minho’s chest to try and push himself free. Minho pats a hand over his own mouth to emphasise the yawning. It’s normal. They’re very normal. “I wouldn’t have missed you at all. I would have murdered you.”

“Excuse me?” Minho demands. “You have absolutely no rights to accuse anyone of being annoying. You’re - oof - you’re banned from the word, actually. Here lies Lee Taemin, world’s smallest hypocrite!”

Oof, because Taemin gives up on breaking free somewhere in the middle of Minho’s little speech and decides to turn into a rock instead. Minho has never met another human being above the age of five years old so effective at turning into a dead weight, but Taemin has maintained the skill well into adulthood.

Minho waits to feel weird about it. He can sense the other two exchanging glances, wonder how much they’re reading into things (he’d come out to Kibum not long after Jinki, unable to resist dropping an ‘actually, I’m bisexual’ on him after he’d made some comment about straight guys and sports. Worth every outraged smack he’d received to his shoulders, and Key had mercifully spared them both the safe sex lecture). His members historically have been pretty good about not involving themselves in each others’ business, but that business doesn’t tend to involve...well, each other.

So he gets why the other two would start tip-toeing around concern, and he gets why it would feel weird now, this shift in physical affection between him and Taemin.

But Taemin has always been like this. Jumping on members, using his body as a weapon in the same way he uses his voice to whine, or his little pokey fingers. The shape of him might have changed over time, but Minho has been here with a hundred Taemins over the last decade. Angry and teasing and delighted and devastated, his slight weight pressing into Minho like Taemin alone could anchor him in place. Like Minho could hold him together when the whole world wants a piece of him.

“One,” Taemin huffs, turning his head so that he can rest it on Minho’s chest, “there are definitely smaller hypocrites.”

“Citation needed, but okay.”

Taemin pokes him in the side, this time eliciting a yelp. “Two - two.”

“Comes after one.”

“Shut up. I know what you’re doing.”

Minho’s hand is halfway threaded through Taemin’s hair before he registers his words, the myriad of potential meanings that might be attached to them. He pauses, palm cupping the back of Taemin’s skull, before letting out a soft breath and continuing the work of gently scratching over his scalp, pushing sweat-damp hair this way and that. It’s only weird if they make it weird.

He turtles his head back into his neck so he can look down at Taemin. “What am I doing, then?”

“Distracting me. Trying to make me take a break.”

“‘Trying’,” Minho scoffs. “It’s working, isn’t it?”

A pause from Taemin, who often puts so much effort into his attacks, he forgets about his defense. It’s why he’s terrible at sports, in Minho’s opinion.

“I’m getting up,” Taemin announces.

“Nope.” Minho cheerfully tightens his arm, collapsing him back onto his chest. “You have this choreo down. Key would be over here bleating at both of us if you didn’t.”

“Just because this old man is tragic doesn’t mean you aren’t,” Key shoots back, because there is no such thing as a private conversation in this family. “Also, have either of you thought about how gross this floor has to be?”

“I’m not touching the floor,” Taemin says, smug. And it’s true; most of his core slots neats into Minho’s, and his feet curl over Minho’s ankles.

“I don’t think,” Minho adds, grinning at Taemin with Key’s muttered obviously. Taemin’s laughter shakes out silently against his chest, and Minho loves him so much.

It’s not like, a revelation. It’s fact sunk into his bones, it’s a part of the fabric of his being. Loving Taemin is about as startling as waking up and seeing his own face looking back at him in the mirror. There is this new aspect to it, and it sits weirdly with Minho sometimes, pinches his neck when he turns around too fast, but Taemin has lived in his heart for years. It’s not a surprise to feel him there, now.

“Okay,” Minho says, in lieu of a confession - it’s two in the morning and he has shit he needs to work out, and he’s not telling Taemin anything while he doesn’t have this choreo down. “All right, I’ll let you up. But on one condition.”

Taemin gives him a loud, fed up groan in response. Minho pats his head like one of Kibum’s dogs.

“I’m hungry. Come and get some food with me and you can tell me what you’re worried about with the choreo instead of killing yourself trying to fix it with your body.”

There’s a pause, before Taemin rearranges himself, wriggling up Minho’s body so he can look him in the face. “You’ve never choreographed a thing in your life.”

“Untrue,” Minho complains. There has to be something he’s made up in the last thirteen years that qualifies as ‘choreography’. “And not the point. Don’t you know about the rubber ducky method?”

Taemin gives him a look that says no, he does not know about the rubber ducky method. Minho, warming to his subject, decides to heave himself up into a sitting position using his core strength, taking Taemin with him. It wins him a squeak of surprise - not unlike a rubber ducky, actually.

“The rubber ducky method is a programming thing,” Minho declares, setting his hands at Taemin’s waist. Not holding him down anymore, just - steadying him in place. Taemin likes to be close, he’s being close. Very normal. “If you can’t figure out the solution to a problem, you explain it out loud to a rubber ducky. Obviously it can’t answer you, but it’s the act of explaining it out loud that helps unlock the solution in your brain. Or at least gives you a place to start.”

Taemin’s unimpressed expression is a work of art. Minho has half a mind to fumble his phone out of his sweats and snap a photo.

“Why do you know programming things?”

“My therapist bought it up.” Minho skates over that one relatively fast. “Now, I have absolutely no practical solutions to offer you. But I can offer you the rubber ducky deluxe package and buy you chicken while you talk it out?”

“It must be late,” Taemin sighs. “That almost sounds like a good idea.”

“Aish, this disrespect. When did I ever have a bad idea?” He jabs a finger at Jinki and Key before either of them can open their mouth. “Do not.”

“I’m helping this old man not screw up his hip,” Key shoots back. “Who has time to babysit?”

There are a few things Minho could say to that (three months! You have three months on me!), but Taemin is drilling his forehead into Minho’s shoulder right now, and that feels more important.

“Nnn,” Taemin says.

“You good?”

“I’m great. But there’s always room for improvement.”

“There’s no such thing as perfect, Taemin-ah.”

“That’s why there’s always room for improvement.” A small fist bangs impotently into Minho’s shoulder. “Okay, rubber ducky, have it your way. But if you try to sneak me a single vegetable--”

“I’m your rubber ducky, not your mother,” Minho huffs. “I said I’d get you chicken, so chicken’s what you’re getting. You want anything else - noodles, sauce - that’s on you.”

In answer to this - Minho is sure it’s a perfectly reasonable response in whatever qualifies as Taemin’s brain - Taemin closes his teeth gently over the jut of Minho’s collarbone. If Minho had a follow up statement, it sputters and dies; he can feel the way Taemin’s body goes still in his hold as the silence slams into them with all the subtlety of an NCT track. His thoughts have a like, physical presence as they race from one topic to the next, trying to find something, anything to say, only to have the words wriggle out from under his tongue, wisp into nothing.

“...Hyung?” Taemin says, and his voice is as quiet as Minho has ever heard it.

“Uh. Hm?”

“You going to let me up? Or are we having floor chicken?”

*

They do not have floor chicken.

Post-practice dinner becomes something of a habit, when they can squeeze in the time. Minho tries once or twice to just ask Taemin to rest like a normal human being, but it never works. It’s like Taemin can only stop one thing under the guise of doing something else, even if that thing is just eating with a hyung, even if he can see through Minho’s increasingly thin excuses as to why he definitely needs to talk to Taemin (and only Taemin), and why it has to be over food.

The others don’t try to interfere, and that makes Minho more nervous than if he’d had to fend them off with a stick (the more likely scenario, frankly). It means they’re reading something into the situation, which means he’s been found out, which - okay, he could have anticipated that, but it doesn’t make it any easier to deal with. He anticipates Kibum coming after him with his own big stick at any moment; any corner has a potential Jinki lurking behind it, ready to kidnap him for a ‘quick chat’ or something.

The one thing he can be grateful for as they careen towards their comeback (Minho has started to wake himself up whispering SHINee’s back) is that Taemin definitely hasn’t picked up on anything. He’s too busy being everything that Lee Taemin has to be in the year 2021, which encompasses things that Minho hadn’t been able to picture even as recently as when he’d started his service. And he’d been braced for that change! All four of them had known that parting like they did would change them, had been in some ways looking forward to it.

Minho had anticipated coming back to a Taemin who had grown, flourished in an industry that was eager to see him fill in the space SHINee had left open for him. He just maybe hadn’t had the clearest idea of what that change would look like.

“--not saying you have to stay in bed, I’m just saying that if hyung sees you out of bed, hyung will sit on you until someone like Johnny can come and carry you back to bed,” Taemin is saying into his phone.

Minho watches with amusement as Taemin scowls into the call, meal fully forgotten in the wake of whatever dongsaeng - Taeyong, if Minho remembers his injured babies correctly - is causing trouble now. Minho has seen Taemin annoyed before, of course - has seen him furious, defensive, pouting - but the worried scrunch of frustration between his eyebrows is a new one. Ah, it looks good on him though, gives the roundness of his face a mature cast that Minho still isn’t used to, delights in every time it catches him unawares.

“Listen. Are you listening to hyung? Good. I know you feel guilty, but you don’t have a hundred other members for no reason. Yes, a hundred. Two hundred. One million. Aish, aren’t you supposed to be listening? I’m saying that the things you aren’t there for are opportunities for your other members to get experience taking on duties they might not have had the chance to do otherwise. Doesn’t that make sense?”

There’s a pause short enough to indicate that Taeyong must think that it makes sense, or at least that he doesn’t have an argument at hand to refute it. Minho thinks of Jonghyun swaddled in gauze after his car accident, telling a much younger Taemin he knows he’ll do a good job with Jonghyun’s parts. How Taemin has grown into his voice and his confidence since then. The sting is familiar, but fondness floods through him in its wake, watching Taemin continue to hammer his point home. He learned well. Minho is glad to see it.

“Thank you.” Taemin sits back in his chair, physically relieved to have presumably worn Taeyong down. “Because hyung knows everything. No, Doyoungie messaged me, of course. Your members care about you, Taeyong-ah.”

The two exchange a few more pleasantries and promises to catch up when they can, before Taemin hangs up with the kind of endeared sigh that Minho has heard out of his own mouth and that of his members a thousand times. It dissipates almost immediately when Taemin catches sight of Minho resting his chin in his hand, a broad grin stretching his mouth.

“Stoooooop,” he whines, instantly fifteen again as he kicks out at Minho under the table. Minho lets the assault bounce off his shins, long since inured to this kind of attack.

“I didn’t say anything.”

“You didn’t have to, the smugness is written all over your face. Kim Doyoung just thought that Taeyong might be more inclined to listen to someone from outside of the group when he gets fussy about taking a break.”

“Mn,” Minho agrees, leaning over to steal an untouched piece of broccoli from Taemin’s bowl. “Someone like a hyung. A respected friend. The kind of person with a lot of industry experience, who knows that the best way to get a chronic self-sacrificing type to take a rest is to point out how it will help the people they care about.”

Taemin pouts, but there’s no erasing the change time has wrought on them both. Shades of Minho’s maknae flicker around the edges of him, of course, but it’s the man he is now that has Minho so spellbound.

“This is why I wanted Baekhyun to be the SuperM leader,” Taemin huffs. “You would have been ten times worse if they’d put me in that position instead.”

“Oh no, are you kidding me? That would be way too much. Hyung is fine, but leader Taem is too - ow! Ow, ow, okay, I’m sorry, I’m sorry.”

Taemin lets go of where he’s pinched Minho’s ear between a surprisingly strong thumb and forefinger.

“Definitely still a brat,” he complains, and doesn’t miss the flash of relief that steals Taemin’s features. “Ah, it’s not all so different, is it? I’m impressed with everything you’ve achieved, obviously, but you’re still SHINee’s golden maknae. I wasn’t gone for that long.”

“One year and seven months.”

Minho had been of a mind to keep teasing, but there’s something about the way Taemin bites off his syllables that has him consider his words before speaking again. Not just that, but the precision of what he’d said, the exact amount of months. Minho wonders if Taemin would be able to give him the days if asked, if he holds the same information in his heart for the others.

“I’m here now,” he points out delicately, deciding against pushing on that particular bruise for now. “And a good thing, too. Who else would buy you barbecue?”

“Plenty of people want to buy me barbecue, hyung.”

“Is that so? I should leave and have one of them get the bill, then?”

“If you chose to set such a bad example for your dongsaeng to pass on to his dongsaengs, I definitely couldn’t stop you.”

Minho leans in across the table; he’s trying for sardonic, but he means it just a bit too sincerely for it to hit that way. “Then I guess it’s a really good thing I’m here now after all, hmm?”

Taemin’s cheeks bunch up so high, his eyes squeeze into sweet little crescent moons. He nods, once, a pleased hmm of his own slipping out.

God, Minho wants to kiss him.

*

Don’t Call Me is the sort of comeback that Minho couldn’t have dreamed of as a kid. Back then, everything had been so tense all the time. It wasn’t just his career that hung in the balance of every music show performance, but everyone else’s - the whole company! And SM did nothing to dissuade any of them of the notion, of course, content to squeeze them dry of every drop of effort.

The Marines had been the same in a lot of ways, but it didn’t dangle the prize of worship and adoration over your head while it worked you over. It simply said, you will work hard because you are expected to work hard, and so will everyone else. Sure, there had been times when Minho had resented it; contrary to popular belief, he hadn’t been molded into the perfect soldier over his service. You didn’t stand in front of crowds of screaming thousands, bask in the roar of their love without coming to crave that kind of validation somehow. No matter what kind of certainty the military had offered Minho, it couldn’t give him that.

But this - hard work resolving into success without running them empty (no matter how hard Taemin tries) - there’s a satisfaction in this. They all want to do well, of course, but the desperation that had nipped at their heels as younger idols has all but faded. SHINee has made its mark on the world. Everything they do from here on out is a bonus.

Minho is the odd man out on that in some respects. The artistry of what they do speaks to him less than the performance, the human connection, the stinging satisfaction of his body when they’ve worked hard. For the others, there are new heights they want to achieve, new barriers they want to break. Minho is content to brace himself at their foundations. If the Marines hammered anything home for him, it’s how fulfilling the act of support is.

Social distancing means that there’s no big post-comeback party - secretly, he thinks they’re glad for it. The four of them gather at the dorms instead with some soju and their own memories, ready to indulge in both. They throw on a playlist from like, 2012 and rummage through old content on YouTube, and at some point Kibum gets on his private twitter and starts gleefully reading thirst tweets (Minho never wants to hear the word ‘breedable’ again, thanks). Taemin laughs so hard he collapses into Minho’s side, and it’s nothing to lift his arm, tug Taemin in close and hold him there.

It wasn’t so long ago that all of this had felt impossible. The scene turns scattershot in his brain as he lives through it, like he can save each moment as its own individual photo, safe and available to pour over on demand, but Minho knows he’ll forget. The precise details of whatever filth Kibum is reading out will fade, the particular songs will blur. The warm vibration of Taemin laughing under his arm will quiet, until the only thing he has left is the knowledge of having been together. Of being happy.

It had terrified him, once. He has had to learn how to be glad for it.

Minho’s phone has flicked over to 3am by the time Key mumbles something about calling a taxi home (he will not stay in the dorms, is he supposed to not see his dogs until tomorrow evening?). Jinki is already passed out in bed, and Minho would see Key out but - he gestures with his free arm at Taemin, sacked out on top of him.

He expects the eyeroll. But the way Key pauses before he leaves, rakes his eyes over the two of them with a thoughtful look - Minho tries not to still too obviously, like some prey abruptly aware that they’re not alone in the woods.

“Have you told him yet?”

The words prickle over Minho’s skin, tension waiting for a jump scare. He can guess at what Key means pretty easily - there’s only one secret that he’s keeping from Taemin right now, but Minho isn’t sure if he means in general, or specifically. And he’s not sure he can talk about the general part out loud without getting stuck in the specifics, not when Taemin is cuddled into him pretending to be asleep like he is.

Key doesn’t know. Minho probably wouldn’t have realised if Taemin hadn’t twitched at the word yet, an involuntary shift of his head that had given him away and saved Minho from cracking open Pandora’s box. Being careful not to move the rest of his body, Minho widens his eyes significantly to indicate his predicament, before slowly shaking his head.

Key’s sigh is loud enough that if he hadn’t been awake before Taemin definitely would be now. “Nevermind!” he decides, sailing off towards the door. Which is neither an apology nor a rescue, but Minho supposes he can appreciated Key not digging the hole deeper. He focuses on keeping his breathing even, waiting for the door to click softly shut before seeing if he can lever himself out of it.

“I know you’re awake,” he says, voice low. Jinki’s door is shut, but there’s something about the atmosphere, the two of them all wound up in each other, that calls for quiet.

Taemin shakes his head, mushing his face further into Minho’s chest. Minho laughs in spite of his crawling nerves - how could he not? Taemin is as cute as he’s ever been.

“I wasn’t trying to eavesdrop,” Taemin informs his right pectoral.

“But you would have, given the opportunity.”

Taemin does lift his face then, scrunched with irritation and all pink from the heat of being pressed into Minho’s torso. Minho can’t seem to help himself, brushes a light touch through his fringe until the Olaplexed strands slip back off his forehead, and some of that irritation slides away with it.

“Didn’t think we kept secrets from each other these days.”

Minho’s hand stops, and his heart with it. God, he’s going to strangle Kibum when he sees him next (in like, five hours). Of course, Minho could just say it, keep stroking Taemin’s hair and let the truth drop between them like so much gentle rain. It wouldn’t change anything, would it? Minho has no expectation of Taemin returning his feelings, isn’t even sure how his feelings can encompass everything that is their history, their relationship. It’s not like he loves Taemin more now than he did before. He can’t personally put his finger on what it is that changed, whether it was something in Taemin or in himself, some strange amalgamation of the growth the two of them have experienced over the past couple of years.

Taemin holds himself very still, like he’s waiting to hear Minho’s response before he decides what he wants to do. Fair enough; Minho lets out a slow breath and loops a lock of Taemin’s hair around his finger, carefully smoothing it back out again.

“It’s not a secret in the way where you need to know something and hyung isn’t telling you.”

“What other kind of secret is there? Unless hyung is a spy.”

Minho snorts, flicking his forehead. This earns him a low groan of complaint, Taemin shuffling around until his head is pillowed properly on Minho’s thigh, lying on his back so he can glare up at Minho. The warm flush in his cheeks has faded in blotches; Minho resists the urge to press his thumb against the lingering kiss of red.

“The kind that belongs to hyung until he’s ready to share it, okay? You know Key. He worries too much.

Taemin mulls that over while Minho loses the battle with himself not to touch him again. He at least manages to divert from his original target, soothing a thumb over the bare skin between Taemin’s knotted eyebrows until his frown unravels. He blinks, too-long eyelashes fluttering against Minho’s palm.

“They’ve given me a date,” Taemin says, in lieu of responding to what limited information Minho had been able to impart. Ah, how could anyone expect him not fall in love, honestly? What a frustrating, impossible man.

“A date?” Minho echoes, trying to get his brain to focus on the conversation instead of the little imperfections he can see on Taemin’s skin when he’s bare-faced and close like this. It takes longer than is really reasonable for him to string together the implications of they’ve given and date, but Minho doesn’t think anyone could blame him. “I thought we--”

“--had longer? That makes two of us. But the company doesn’t want to waste any more of my time on corona, and I...don’t disagree.” He shrugs, awkward from his position. “It has to be done. And if I have to keep singing to empty audiences, I’d rather it be for the military than my albums.”

There’s a grim little smile playing around Taemin’s mouth. Minho lets his hand fall away so that he’s not tempted to soothe that as well, trying instead to think of what comfort he can offer in this situation. The most obvious complication is that - well, he enjoyed his time in the military. He doesn’t think you have to be one of Taemin’s oldest friends to understand that he’s not looking forward to it in the same way; any reassurance Minho could offer about it not being so bad will ring hollow. He almost wonders if he should call Key back, but surely if it was Key that Taemin wanted to talk to, then he would be talking to Key?

Before he can figure out what he wants to say, Taemin is already speaking. “Tell me,” he says, eyes slipping shut like the 3am of it all is finally hitting him. “How do I love it like you did? Because I keep trying to be fine about this, and it feels like the world is ending every time.”

Minho thinks he can feel his heart break. There’s nothing lost about Taemin now, no visible hurt that Minho can soothe. If anything, he seems determined, and somehow that’s worse. Like this is his way of tackling the situation well, as though the only problem here is that he is simply too Taemin for the military.

If Minho thought that imbuing Taemin with his own brand of resilience was a) helpful or b) possible, he’d charge right ahead and do it. But Minho two years ago was a completely different person to Taemin now, and the things they needed were worlds apart. He can’t make Taemin love the military any more than his members’ complaints can make Minho stop.

“Taemin-ah…” Minho sighs. “The me that signed up to the Marines was looking for any way to escape being an idol. I had been SHINee’s Flaming Charisma for so long and through so much that the opportunity to start fresh at a task I had no experience with was something I grasped at with both hands. Of course it wasn’t so simple, I didn’t just stop being myself because I cut my hair and put on some muscle, but whatever preconceptions I had - and that other people had about me - I was able to overcome with the kind of work that I already found satisfying.”

Everything about his youth had been so painfully public. Not that Taemin’s has been any less so - in many ways it was worse for their youngest - but they acclimatised in different ways. By the time Minho enlisted, he had been burning the candle at both ends for so long that there was no candle left. The chance to simply - stop being on fire for a bit, to no longer be a light that so many people reached for, it had felt like relief. And he had struggled with the guilt of that, knowing that so many of his peers resented being forced to put their careers on hold, forced to subsume their whole identity into the apparatus of the state - and here he was enjoying himself. Leaving behind, and gladly, an experience that so many people worked so hard for.

But the thing about the military was that it didn’t let him linger in that for long. There was always something for him to be doing, and something he shouldn’t be doing. He was pushed firmly in one direction, restricted firmly in the other. Being held in place like that, Minho began to pull the pieces of himself back together. Eventually, he had to forgive himself for his own healing.

Taemin’s relationship with fame is different, because Taemin is different. Singular. There’s never been anyone like him, and the hordes of eager children coming up as idols and trainees now citing him as an influence are a testament to that. He has changed more lives for the better just by steadfastly existing as himself in public than Minho could on purpose, in the military or out of it. If there has ever been a person who so thoroughly fit the designation of idol, it is Lee Taemin. To take that away from him, even if only for a year and a half, even if every other male citizen has to do the exact same thing, seems so monstrously unfair that Minho really isn’t sure what to do with the feeling.

“I can work hard,” Taemin is saying. “Does the military think idols don’t know how to work hard? I bet basic training isn’t more difficult than concert prep.”

Minho manages a laugh, ruffling his hair. “It’s not, but don’t let the officers hear you say that.”

“Why, is there something about me that is going to make career military men uncomfortable enough to consider me a target?”

It’s not really a question, and that grim smile of his only stretches. Minho wants to assure him that it won’t be the case, but he can’t lie directly to his face.. They both know that even if it’s fine, even if the soldiers he encounters fall more on the side of ‘impressed’ than ‘derisive’ of Taemin’s idol experience, it’ll be because of luck. There’s nothing that he can do to effect the outcome either way. It’s enough to drive a person crazy.

“You don’t have to love it,” Minho says abruptly, startling Taemin into opening his eyes. “Maybe that’s obvious, but I want you to hear it from me anyway. If I had some magic way of making you like it, or doing it for you, I’d do it in a heartbeat. But it’s your time and your life on the line now, not mine. You don’t have to be me to get through this, and it’s okay if the way you get through it is by hating every second. I don’t want that for you, I want this to be a worthwhile experience. But I wouldn’t change a thing about you to make that happen.”

Minho has known this man for fully half his life, and he still can’t tell what’s going on behind the blank intensity on Taemin’s face. He’s not exactly looking at Minho, but his eyes are certainly fixed at a point near - oh, they’re hugging.

Taemin hauls himself into Minho’s lap to do it, arms tight around his neck, face pressed into his shoulder. The warm shudder of his breath condenses on Minho’s collarbone, somehow more intimate than tears. Taemin doesn’t say anything and Minho doesn’t either, just presses a kiss to the top of his head. He couldn’t say how long they stay there like that, wrapped up in each other. He doesn’t care.

*

They all have the access codes for each other’s apartments, even Key’s, so it’s not exactly a surprise when Minho’s front door bangs open. He usually gets a text in advance, but if it’s--

“Taemin-ah.” Minho thumbs the game onto mute, staring up at him from the couch. Taemin’s face is pinched into a frown, arms crossed over his chest. His phone is gripped in his hand, white-knuckled. Obviously there’s a problem, but nothing about Taemin’s closed-off stance is giving Minho any clue as to what that problem...is.

“Yumi’s Cells,” Taemin bites out. “Are you taking the role?”

“Did that get leaked? They approached me for the role, I haven’t said yes yet.”

He’s going to. The concept is interesting, it suits his schedule, and--

“This character is gay.”

And the way the representative had presented the role to him - as if he would be relieved to find that the adaptation would not require anything too obviously queer of him - had maybe gotten under his skin. Minho is aware that his overall appeal rests in wholesome heterosexual fantasies, but he’s a member of SHINee, for god’s sake. Do people think he’s just gritted his teeth through the past thirteen years?

“Yes,” he says evenly. “That’s a part of why I was considering taking it. They’re planning on keeping it in the adaptation, and I want to support that kind of thing.”

Tell him, some insistent voice thuds against the back of his skull, tell him already, just tell him.

“God.” Taemin laughs, tipping his head back at the ceiling. That grim smile is back, the same one from the other night. “You say it so easily.”

An ugly defensiveness grips his throat, ready to rip the confession right out of him and turn honesty into a weapon. He swallows against it, the taste bitter; it’s not Taemin’s fault he doesn’t know. It is, in fact, Minho’s fault, for all that ‘fault’ is the wrong word. Tell him, his pulse beats, tell him, tell him.

“Isn’t that the goal?” he asks gently. “Taemin-ah? Shouldn’t it be easy, sometimes?”

The look Taemin throws him is so sharp it cuts, leaves Minho stinging in its wake. Most of the time - most of the time Taemin is shades of the same boy he grew up with, looked after and looked out for. And then there are these moments, when Minho feels their twenty-two months of separation all too keenly. He wonders, sometimes, if they should have all left him at once. He wonders what they could have done to prevent it.

“You’re not,” Taemin says after a long moment. A statement, but a question. “You would have said.”

Minho scrubs a hand over his face. “Remember when hyung told you there was a thing he wasn’t ready to share?”

“You mean when I had to drag that much out of you?”

“Yes, because I wasn’t ready to share.”

They stare at each other over the back of the couch. It’s his apartment, but Minho feels stripped of all his defenses, too-vulnerable in the face of Taemin’s passion. He had anticipated a lot of potential responses to this all coming out (hah), but not this. Not anger.

Slowly, though, something about Minho’s words must permeate the haze of whatever is driving Taemin right now. His shoulders slump, arms swinging loose from his chest. He braces his hands on the back of the couch, leaning forward until his hair brushes the leather. Minho, heart in his throat, aches to push it back. He’s not sure if the instinct is to offer comfort or take it.

“Park Jimin told me because he heard it from Kim Taehyung who heard from one of the other Hwarang guys,” Taemin says. “I thought...if it’s industry gossip already, it’s something you were taking lightly. Something that you had to know would be important to me, and you hadn’t even given me a warning. I didn’t expect...”

“Why would you?” Minho asks matter-of-factly. “I never gave anyone reason to guess. Even myself. This isn’t - ah, Taemin-ah, sit down would you? I’m stressed just looking at you.”

Taemin grimaces but straightens. Doesn’t bother walking around, hikes one leg over the back of the couch instead and slithers onto the cushions, all sullen grace. Minho does his best not to smile, but he suspects his lips probably twitch by the time Taemin sprawls on the far end, one hand pushing his fringe back on his own. He keeps his fingers knotted at the top of his head, half irritated, all bewildered.

“You’re not gay,” Taemin declares, before shooting him a sidelong glance. “Are you?”

Minho laughs; he can’t help himself. “Aish, Lee Taemin, and what if I was? What happened to telling someone how proud of them you are?”

“Yah! Don’t put that on me, I’ve had a big shock! What do you mean, you didn’t give yourself any reason to guess? You can’t say you didn’t know.”

“Didn’t have a clue. Not until my service. I think I just didn’t have to think about it, so I didn’t let it. I’m bisexual, by the way. If you hadn’t guessed.”

“I hadn’t guessed,” Taemin grumbles. He still seems kind of shell-shocked. Minho does his best not to take it personally. “Hyung. How would I have guessed something like that? You never - you made sure people knew you liked girls.”

God and in at least one of those interviews when pressed to pick a member he’d date anyway, he’d landed on Taemin, hadn’t he? Has he always been a caricature of himself, or is it catching up to him in his old age? What other things from his extremely recorded past are going to bite him in the ass?

“Well,” Minho says, “I do like girls. Enough that I never thought too hard about anything else when I was younger. But my service - ah, it’s hard to explain how determined I was to start fresh. To pare myself down to something new and start over. Looking back, it really isn’t possible. But it put me in the sort of headspace where everything was up for debate. And there was - another soldier, also lonely and homesick, and one thing led to another, and - and when I thought about stopping, I realised that I didn’t want to.”

And he looked like you, in the way a housecat looks like a tiger. And I was alone, and I was furious, and I had been so good for so long.

Taemin had come here angry at the thought that Minho might have taken on too lightly something he didn’t understand the impact of. Only to be told this, which was - not worse, Minho refused to class what he had done as something wrong, but certainly more. Had Minho been thinking of the specific ins and outs of homosexual acts and military law when he sucked his fellow soldier’s dick? Of course not. It was only afterwards, realising not just what he had done, but who he was, that he grasped the magnitude of it all.

He had been relieved, to think of how his appearance and his reputation would protect them both. He had been disgusted with that relief. And he had felt the first flinch, the burrowing rage that worked under your skin and gnawed at the unfairness of it all.

“I know it’s a surprise,” he says softly, staring down at his hands. “If I’d realised news about the role was getting out already, I would have said something to you. At least that I was considering taking it. But I hope you can understand why I needed time.”

He hears the rustle of movement before Taemin’s hands peek into the edge of his vision. Minho counts rings, the metal skin-warm when fingers close over his, one, two, three, four.

“Ah, hyung. I’m sorry I misunderstood so badly. I had you in one place in my mind for so long, it didn’t seem possible...but of course it is.”

Taemin’s throat clicks; Minho manages to tear himself away from their hands to catch his bewildered look before he tucks it away into a smile that only twitches a little at the corners. Poor golden maknae, he’s never done well with concealing his emotions around his member.

Minho clears his throat, wriggling his hands until he can capture Taemin’s with his thumbs, giving them a quick rub of reassurance. His own feelings are easy in the face of this quiet distress, to pack away somewhere unimportant to be examined at a later date. Maybe.

“I’m very proud of you,” he announces ostentatiously, squeezing. “Next time, you might even catch yourself before you storm righteously into someone’s apartment about it. Maybe by our twentieth anniversary.”

“Next time! What do you mean next time, what other secrets could you be keeping?”

It’s a good thing Minho had already determined to project this air of reassuring humour, because he’s not sure he would have been able to keep the cold chill that steals through him off his face. He just laughs, reaching out to flick Taemin’s ear in lieu of replying; he doesn’t want to lie to his friend, but he definitely can’t face telling him the truth right now. Not when Taemin already has him wrong-footed on confession number one.

Taemin yelps his protest, fending him off with a surprisingly stingy slap that Minho obviously has to respond to by turfing Taemin off his couch with his feet. He’s not sure how this ends up with Taemin squirming under his arm and onto his lap - there was a tackle in the middle somewhere - but his nose is abruptly full of hair and the chemical smell of bleach, a whiff of citrusy perfume tangling with it. It’s instinct to wrap his arms around Taemin’s small waist, pull him back against his chest.

“Happy?”

“No.” Taemin lunges for Minho’s phone and quickly unlocks it (he really needs to start using the thumb print scanner). The sound filters back in from the soccer game on the TV; Taemin wrinkles his nose and pulls up some kind of whale documentary. They’re in the middle of Atlantis prep, and Taemin has nothing if not a one-track mind when he’s not yelling at Minho about his acting choices. “Okay.”

Minho rolls his eyes, but Taemin has his phone in that white-knuckled grip so whales it is. He’s ready to settle in for an education, but Taemin won’t stop sighing underneath his chin, and it’s hard to tell if he knows he’s doing it or not. If it were Key, he’d know it was a bid for attention, but if it were Key, he probably wouldn’t be spread over Minho’s lap right now. Minho hadn’t realised being bisexual was going to make his life this complicated.

“You--” good?? he’s going to ask, but Taemin cuts him off, twisting an evil little grin up at him that probably would have had Minho breathless even without what Taemin says next.

“So was it good?”

Minho chokes.

“I mean, it must have been good, right? I guess you could have a bad experience with a man that made you think, ‘wow I’d like to try that again but good next time’, but that seems unlikely?”

“Taemin.” Minho has not yet recalled the correct mechanism for breathing, so his voice squeezes thily out of his chest. “That’s private.”

It’s Taemin’s turn to roll his eyes. “If I had to listen to a blow by blow account of the first time you had sex with a girl, I’m definitely not missing out on this story. Are you kidding me?”

“You heard that? You were supposed to be asleep.”

“We shared a room, hyung! Everyone heard everything all the time!”

God, Minho is absolutely not prepared for the experience of Taemin taking an interest in his sex life. Also - a blow by blow account? He spares a second to be disgusted at his seventeen year old self before scrounging around for the remnants of his dignity. His face is hot, spreading from his ears in - there’s no hiding a blush, no matter how good an actor he likes to think he is. He is not talking to Taemin about this, he’s not--

“Yes, it was good,” he grits out. “I don’t mind - figuring things out, so long as the other person is enjoying themselves, and he was practiced. Is that enough detail for you, you little perv?”

“Practiced,” Taemin echoes sharply, and Minho has to take back his earlier thought about Taemin not knowing how to conceal his emotions, because he has no idea what this tone is supposed to be. But the moment passes before Minho can question it, Taemin’s head tipping back with the force of his laughter. “Ah, I’m glad someone was able to look after you properly then, hyung. Jongin-ah and I didn’t know the first thing about what we were doing when we tried, it was a mess.”

“Oh my god.” Had he known that Kim Jongin was Taemin’s first time? In hindsight he supposes he’s not surprised - he would have known if it had been a member - but also he might have to sit on the urge to strangle Jongin the next time they run into each other. Which is a shame, because he likes the kid. “Wait, are you and Kai still…?”

“Fucking?” Taemin asks blandly. He shakes his head, silvery hair falling into his face. “Not really. Not since the pandemic started. It was nice to spend time with him when SuperM was in America, but it’s not - we aren’t like, together. We want different things from a relationship, I think.”

Minho does his best to assess the moment, instead of simply screaming at the ceiling. Taemin doesn’t seem bothered about what he’s saying - more matter-of-fact, even fond. Maybe Minho doesn’t have to strangle Jongin after all.

“Do you think about a relationship?”

Maybe Jongin can strangle him instead?

“Ah. When I was younger, maybe.” A tight smile. “There’s not really time for that kind of thing at the moment.”

How do I love it like you did? rings in his mind, Taemin’s looming military date as yet unannounced to the general public. It’s never far from Taemin’s mind these days. Minho had managed to get through twenty-two months in the Marines and all that entailed without resenting the military for a second, but the past few weeks have tested his loyalty. He wants to stroke Taemin’s hair, wants to pull him back into his arms. He wants to kiss him, until they can both think about something else for a while.

“I know your career is the most important thing to you,” he says instead, “but if there’s one thing I hope your service can help with, it’s learning how to give other things in your life some time. You deserve to be happy, Taemin-ah.”

“You sound like Shawols.”

“If Shawols are telling you to focus on work-life balance, then Shawols are right.”

“If I had the kind of work-life balance our fans wanted for me, I’d never release another song.”

“And that would be okay,” Minho says firmly. “You’ve done more in thirteen years than most could manage in a lifetime. You could retire tomorrow, and no one would have the right to ask anything more of you.”

Taemin hums noncommittally, and Minho figures that’s the end of that conversation. Taemin settles back into his chest, and before he can stress out about how friendly his hands are supposed to get, Taemin tugs them both firmly around his waist like a seat belt. Minho huffs a laugh into his hair and squeezes gently; message received. Conversation done, time for hugs.

All in all, Minho thinks he managed that pretty well. Does he really need to share that last little secret with Taemin? Minho doesn’t think so. Things are complicated enough for Taemin as it is. There’s no need to throw fuel on the fire.

*

Minho’s resolution to keep his feelings to himself lasts until approximately halfway through the first Advice rehearsal he watches.

It’s not the hair. It’s not! Or like - it’s not because Taemin gets extensions and promptly erases the already wobbly line of the gender binary he’s been straddling. Or - look, that’s a part of it, but it’s not because Minho is more attracted to Taemin the more feminine he looks because of some weird manifestation of compulsory heterosexuality.

Taemin rehearsing Advice with his long hair tied back, his too-large shirt tied in a knot under his ribs (is that Minho’s shirt?), practicing expressions in the mirror as he works through the choreo step by step - it articulates something that has vibrated wordless and uncomfortable in Minho’s chest since the first time he insisted, too-loudly, that he liked girls. His performance is an acknowledgement, an explanation, a challenge, a respite. Minho has always thought that what Taemin does is art, but Advice guts him.

“Cute,” Kibum sighs at him when they’re drinking together later. “Minho-yah, who knew you were going to be such a cute baby bisexual?”

“Three months,” Minho can’t help but remind him, even if he knows Key isn’t talking about their age difference. “And I’m a cute everything.”

Key tips his bottle at him in acknowledgement. “Taemin-ah’s found a way to tell the world how angry he is at it. And I think for the first time, you know what it feels like to have someone say that kind of thing for you. It’s pretty powerful.”

“I’m not angry at the world.”

Key just raises his eyebrows at him, and Minho is forced to revisit that sullen, restless thing living alongside his heart. Would he call it anger? Maybe not the kind he’d seen Taemin practice with, wreathed through every muscle and movement of his body, but a quieter cousin. A resentment, at being forced to bury this part of himself so deeply that it nearly withered and died. Minho closes his eyes, pressing the cool shock of his beer to his cheek.

“‘M gonna tell him,” he mumbles.

“Do you need me to pretend like I don’t know what you’re talking about, or…?”

“Shut up, Kibum.”

“Aish, these babies have no respect anymore!”

But there’s nothing except warmth in Kibum’s tone, nothing in his face that implies actual annoyance. If watching Taemin’s practice had helped the tension ease in that strange tangle of emotion in his chest, so does this. Kibum’s breezy acceptance is a welcome to a place Minho hadn’t known he was looking for, and he hopes his expression can convey his gratitude, because any words would be inadequate.

“You don’t think that’s unfair to him?” Minho asks instead. “Laying all these feelings on him right before he has to ship off for a year and a half?”

“What, like your little crush is a burden he’s going to have to heave through basic training and back?” Key scoffs. “It’s Taemin, he’s been in love with all of us since before he knew what the word meant. Even if he doesn’t want what you want out of this, he’s not going to be upset about it.”

Huh. Minho hasn’t thought of it like that before. He can almost hear the door to new possibilities creaking open in his own head. He sets his bottle firmly down on Key’s countertop. And then picks it up again and puts it down on a coaster, because he doesn’t want to die.

“Wait. Waitwaitwait. You’re going now? Minho, it’s eleven pm.”

“God, we’re old.” Minho snags his jacket off the back of his bar stool and swoops over to Key, smacking a kiss against his forehead just to make him squawk (he does, it’s great). “Besides, he’s just going to be exactly where I left him. Maybe I can even get him to leave before midnight.”

It takes Key a couple seconds of spluttering to figure out a comeback, and Minho is already halfway out the door by the time Key is yelling, “Have more faith in your confession skills!” after him. He cheerfully throws a rude gesture over his shoulder, jogging for the elevator and then - well, holding it open for the next resident to join him, because he’s not a monster. Besides, he still needs to order a car. Now that Minho is alone (except for the apartment resident, he supposes), he’s not sure why this all has to happen so fast.

Is it fast, though? It’s been months since he got back from the military, longer still since that encounter with his fellow recruit. He’s had years of knowing Taemin, of loving him - when was the first time he looked at his friend and wanted? It’s impossible to identify the precise moment, his memories finger-smudged and angled strangely when viewed through this newer, queerer lens.

Maybe it’s just been coming, this moment, always there in the distance but far off enough that Minho could ignore it, until he can’t anymore. Until it’s here, and so is he, hovering in the doorway of Taemin’s favourite practice room.

He’s alone, frowning into the mirrored wall as he repeats the same isolation, when Minho pushes into the room. It’s an issue with his own performance that has him here so late, then; Minho knows from experience that Taemin’s backup dancers would cheerfully murder each other if anyone tried to leave before Taemin was reduced to begging them to take a break.

No one in this industry understands the words work life balance, Minho muses. It’s late in the SM building, but he locks the door behind anyway, flinching at the too-loud mechanism tumbling into place.

“Wahh, creepy,” Taemin complains, pulling a face at him in the mirror. He doesn’t look surprised to see Minho, but why would he be? Their lives are porous for each other; if there is always a part of Minho who expects SHINee to be there when he turns around, he knows it’s the same for Taemin. “Is it lecture time, then?”

“What? Oh - no.”

Taemin is exhausted and looks it, his shirt (it is Minho’s shirt, goddamnit) sweat-drenched and silhouetting him obscenely in the harsh studio lights. Minho could probably count his ribs through the thin fabric, if he tried. Taemin sets his hand into the slim indent of his waist, chest lightly heaving as he forces his breath even. His sweats ride low on his hips, revealing ink, and Minho is fucking stupid with want in the face of him. If he hadn’t come here to confess already, he thinks his own desire would have forced the truth out of him, self-control overwhelmed by the sight of - Taemin, his Taemin, too-tired and determined and beautiful about all of it.

“Hyung?” Taemin’s frown is back. He steps in, radiating concern. “Minho? Is everything okay?”

“I - sort of? That is - yes. Shit, sorry, I’m a mess. Are you - do you have a second? This is going to take longer than a second, a minute? I have - there’s something important I need to tell you.”

That grand speech is met with a second of blank comprehension, before a strange triumph twists across Taemin’s face, somehow satisfied and disappointed all at once. “Oh,” he says, tonally flat. Minho’s stomach flops over and starts to chew on itself. “We’re doing this, then.”

Maybe a younger Minho self would have been confused. It still takes an aging gracefully Minho a beat or two before he cottons on to what this is, or what Taemin thinks this is, and then it takes another pause for him to swallow down the sudden surge of bitterness in the wake of that realisation. He would have picked a fight, once. He wouldn’t have understood.

“Whatever you think ‘this’ is,” he says slowly. “I promise you it’s not. I wouldn’t do that, Taemin-ah, not to you.”

“You wouldn’t know you were doing it though, hyung.” Taemin smiles at him, heartbreaking. “You’d be convinced that you meant it. You’d be so sure that you’d probably convince me too, and we’d be so happy for - a while? And then you’d--”

“Hey.” Minho’s stride eats up the room; he gathers Taemin’s face in his hands before either of them can freak out about the intimacy of it, tipping his chin up. What is intimacy to the two of them after all these years, anyway? He could crawl inside Taemin and not get any closer to him. “I’d what, huh? You think there’s anything you could do these days that would make me change my mind like that? You think there’s anything you could do that would even surprise me? You’re my Taemin. No matter how I feel about you, that doesn’t change.”

It’s like pulling the wrong block out of a jenga tower. There’s a breathless moment where it seems like they might both hold it together, but then Taemin’s face crumples in on itself and Minho is wrapping him up in a bear hug to keep the rest of him in one piece. He presses his lips to the top of Taemin’s head and shushes softly; Taemin’s not actually making any noise, but Minho can feel the tremble of his shoulders, too much emotion thrashing through such a small form.

He couldn’t say how long they stay like that for. Time turns blurry in the practice rooms at the best of times; alone like this with everything they are to each other, it might as well not exist at all. Eventually the trembling passes, tension draining out of Taemin’s body like water from a bath. Minho pulls in a too-loud breath through his nose, and cranes his head back to check on him, giving himself like three extra chins in the process.

“You’ve had a rough time of it, huh?”

“Men are stupid,” Taemin mumbles, scrubbing his already blotchy face even redder. “That includes you, hyung, what the hell. It’s nearly midnight?”

“You can’t say that to me like you weren’t planning on sleeping on the floor.”

“Yeah, a normal thing to do! Not - whatever this is.” Taemin peers up at him cautiously through the long locks of hair that have escaped his bun over the course of the day. “What is this, hyung?”

Minho suspects that they really need to revisit Taemin’s definition of the word normal, but he’s pinned down by the follow-up question before he has a chance to tackle the issue. “Well,” he starts, ignoring the way his gut squirms. What’s left to be nervous about? “It was supposed to be a confession. But then you interrupted me, so I suppose it’s just a bonding moment now.”

Taemin snorts, lowering his gaze. Minho isn’t going to start doing anything insane like counting his eyelashes, but he’s definitely going to admire them. This is Lee Taemin; Minho is personally of the opinion that he should be admired as often as possible.

“And after now?”

“Depends on what you want, I think. If you don’t want things to change, they don’t have to change.” Minho hums, thoughtful. “This isn’t - I don’t need anything from you, Taemin-ah. I love you. I’d like to take you on some dates and kiss you, but if you don’t want to do that, then I still love you. Just like I always have. Okay?”

The noise Taemin makes is - kind of his whiny maknae noise? Like he’s being denied something he wants, and is going to be as bratty as possible about it until one of his hyungs fixes the situation. Which - Minho is a sucker, he will absolutely fix whatever Taemin wants him to see to, but he needs to know what that is first.

“Hyung,” Taemin whines, bearer of the World’s Heaviest Burden. “Minho-hyung, I have a comeback. I’m enlisting! I have to schedule in time to deal with my schedule, you think I have time for dates? Just how many hours do you think are in the day?”

Shit. Shit. Minho does his best to play along, biting back a smile, but he’ll admit he doesn’t try very hard. His lower lip escapes from under his teeth, and now that he feels somewhat confident in looking for it, he doesn’t miss the way Taemin’s eyes dart to follow the slip.

“You’re right,” he says solemnly. If you can be solemn and grin at the same time. “Obviously I’ve been too presumptuous. The great Lee Taemin could never spare some hours for someone as lowly as me when so many other things require his attention. He couldn’t even give up a moment, for a kiss. I’ll have to leave immediately, and never let my shadow fall on him ag--”

He probably should have see this coming, but in Minho’s defence, he had been seriously worried about Taemin for a minute. He’s done his best to be honest, but it’s only Taemin who knows whether that honesty is the reassurance he needs. At least, it’s only Taemin who knows that until he lurches up onto his tiptoes, one forearm looping behind Minho’s neck to drag him down to meet him. By the time Taemin’s mouth eases over Minho’s, soft and sweet and too swift by half, Minho manages to figure out that he’s done a pretty good job so far.

He laughs into their kiss, mixed relief and delight. Its instinct to settle his hands at Taemin’s bare waist, and there’s a second where his caveman brain simply flatlines at the flex of core strength under soft skin. It’s not until he registers the surprised squeak against his lips that Minho realises he’s straightened and simply brought Taemin with him so they can keep kissing, clutching him firmly against his chest.

“Oh my god,” Taemin says loudly, in English. He doesn’t pull back though - the opposite, putting that core strength to work and drawing his legs up until they wrap around Minho’s hips. And like, this isn’t why Minho is into Taemin, obviously, it’s a very deep and sentimental connection the two of them have, really special and unique, but holy shit? What is Taemin racking on the leg press these days? Minho is never going to be able to go to the gym with this man again.

“We should talk,” he asserts, even as he shifts his grip to Taemin’s thighs, hitching him into a more ergonomically friendly position. This has the practical effect of bringing Taemin’s head higher than Minho’s, and he looks smug as hell about it when he cups Minho’s face in his palms, indulging in another kiss like a sip of expensive wine. “We should - ah, don’t be a brat.”

Taemin’s plush mouth curves into a smile against Minho’s as he lets Minho’s bottom lip slip away from his teeth. “You can’t take me on dates,” he says, and Minho is about to launch right into the five stages of grief when Taemin keeps talking. “I really - I really don’t have the time, at this rate enlistment is going to be like going on vacation. But you could - stay with me? Stay with me until I go, hyung, I’ll come home from practice before midnight, and you can spend time with Kkoongie so she knows you well when I’m gone, and we can talk. I want to talk with you so badly, Minho-hyung.”

There are a lot of things Minho could say to that. He could tease. He could set Taemin on the ground and start some of that talking now, or he could push him up against the practice room mirror and put it off for a while longer.

“Okay,” is what he settles on, pressing his forehead against Taemin’s and just - breathing him in, for now, the salt and faded citrus scent of him. Somewhere outside the dance studio, the world thrashes with its comebacks and deadlines and enlistment dates, but Minho had locked the door against all that when he entered the room. It’s just the two of them here.“Okay, let’s do that.”

*

[EXCLUSIVE] SHINEE’S TAEMIN AND MINHO SEEN EATING DINNER TOGETHER THE DAY AFTER TAEMIN’S DISCHARGE FROM MILITARY

Fans will be relieved to hear that Taemin plans on taking time to rest and catch up with friends and family before throwing himself back into his notoriously hectic work schedule. While Shawols are obviously excited to see what Taemin does next, fan response on social media has been largely supportive of his need for a break between his service and his career. They are glad to see his hyungs supporting him in this too, although so far he has only been spotted in Minho’s company after being greeted by his family yesterday upon his discharge.

Rest well, Taemin! Hopefully a SHINee reunion isn’t too far away!