Archive of Our Own ^beta

San was always generous with his touches.

There’s a face pressed into Yeosang’s neck, thick arms wrapped firmly around his middle, but not restricting. The grip is loose enough that he could break out easily if he really wanted, after all, despite how many easy touches he tries to steal from Yeosang like this, he does know how uncomfortable he is with PDA. They’re onstage now, tens of thousands of pairs of eyes on them watching their every move, and San is giving him the chance to free himself from his arms should he need to.

He’s grateful. He really is. Because despite how much San presses, how much he loves to toe the line, to find every boundary and test it to see if it will give, he never breaks that trust. No matter how persistent he can get, his concern is always ultimately with the other party, with their comfort. His own needs can always wait, will always come secondary to him.

So the arms around his middle don’t come as a surprise, even when they tug him back into a broad chest, damp with sweat and heaving with uncaught breath. Even when a nose nuzzles into his sweat-soaked hair, a pleasant tickle that has Yeosang shaking in his hold, it’s nothing he hasn’t tried before. Even when a deep hum rumbles between them as he reaches an awkward hand back to pat at his head like the big kitty he is, the movement strained with nothing but the fact that physical displays of affection have never come naturally to him, it’s still laced with the comforting familiarity that it was San he was touching.

Despite the way his entire body turned rigid in his hold, automatically freezing up at the full-bodied contact of San’s lean long muscles pressed flush to the length of his back, it was tolerable only because it was San. Because while being held and loved and fondled so publicly was something still just too much on the side of foreign to come easy, the action was made tolerable by the one committing it. The press of skin against skin made bearable only by the knowledge that it was San’s skin and San’s body and San’s hold, and that nothing San could ever do to him was something to be afraid of.

But what does come as a surprise, what does have his heart stilling in the cage of his ribs like a clock that’s been wound too tightly that it can no longer keep up with the tension inside it, is the warm huff of breath against the skin at the nape of his neck. What does come as a surprise is the slow press of lips to the flushed skin at the edge of his hairline, nonchalant as the arrival of spring in the warmth of the wind, unannounced, without spectacle.

What comes as a surprise is not how easy San is with his touches, but how deliberate.

How even without looking, he knows it was far too fleeting and subtle to be caught by any one of the thousand pairs of eyes.

The concert passes like a blur of lights and colours and familiar songs, but all Yeosang remembers as the cheering crowds fade to nothingness and he follows the shadows of familiar bodies through the maze of hallways backstage is the burning warmth of a phantom kiss. The touch of a flame to wet skin, the only anguish in the mind. 

The haunting wonder of what it must be like to love him.

Yeosang peels off his damp clothing and finds that at some point in the night his body has turned to gasoline.  And the look in San’s eyes that meet his somewhere in the back of the changerooms, as he strips off his own clothing and Yeosang forces himself to look away, to not take anything that hasn’t first been offered - 

The look in San’s eyes is a housefire.

Want is such a persistent form of hunger.

The takeout ordered earlier sits long forgotten on the coffee table near his crossed feet, just below his distant gaze. It’s too cold to be eaten now, but the refrigerator is a place where leftovers go to die a sad, forgotten death. Is it pathetic to resonate with unwanted food?

Onscreen plays a movie he swears he’s seen before, played out inside the walls of their dorm building. A story of wanting. Of hunger. A pair of lovers who haven’t yet learned the language of coexisting. The humiliation of learning to allow yourself to be loved.

San says it’s romantic. Of course he does.

He’s the one who chose the movie, his decision far too quick and easy to be anything other than premeditated. It elicited a round of groans from the group around them, but Yeosang recognized the subtle vulnerability in his eyes when they met him with just the ghost of a question in the soft raise of his unfilled eyebrows. He recognized the silent plea for validation, the raw honesty with which he approached even the most inconsequential of activities, the gentle revealing of a little piece of himself that he had no real reason to uncover. 

But San was deliberate in every single way. He didn’t allow himself to be careless, even here, even now, in his own home, surrounded by the people who were the closest thing he had to family in this cold and unforgiving city. Even the bond they’d been so dedicated to building between them all isn’t enough to let San be reckless, the evidence of him holding himself back so subtle it’s practically invisible to an untrained eye.

However, despite how much Yeosang could struggle to grasp the proper context for certain social cues or jokes that toed just a bit too closely to the hard lines of something not intended to be funny, he made up for it in just how skilled he was at noticing San. He had, after all, more than enough practice.

And how could he not? When every brush of skin, when every husky laugh, when every deliberate movement of his firm, muscled body caused entire hurricanes to erupt inside Yeosang’s body? How could he keep himself from learning to predict the movements of the tide? The phases of the moon? How could he help but memorize the changing of the seasons, the path of the sun throughout the sky, and the sound of a question pressed like a knife to the skin of his throat?

How could he keep himself from memorizing everything there was to know about San? Especially when San was far too willing to help feed his studies.

Helplessly, he understands the way San watches him then, the tail end of a question in the tense of his brow and the posture of a child, already too afraid of the answer that he can’t bear himself to even ask it in the first place.

But Yeosang is far too skilled by now at reading between the lines. At filling in the silences where San’s words somehow fail him. 

Love is made of a thousand small kindnesses, his mother used to tell him. The peeling of fruit, the wrinkled flesh of a mandarine shared segment by segment, the way a flower is divided into its individual parts torn petal by petal until the nothingness that’s left behind is a space for love to exist. 

A thousand small kindnesses, like the daily existence, the mundane. The words chosen or those not, the coffee divided into two mugs, each a slightly different colour of the same drink. Attention paid generously, not expecting any interest paid in return, because there are no debts in the soul.

Love is made of a thousand small decisions to be kind. 

So he doesn’t protest when San picks the movie.

Watching the way San sees him then, the smile blooming on his face like daybreak, like the start of something new and wonderful, Yeosang wonders if at some point he’d become too careless with his little kindnesses.

Because love and want sometimes come hand in hand. Because we don’t often get to choose with what our hearts are burdened. Because somewhere along the way, Yeosang had become far too free with his kindnesses, far too generous with his attention.

His place on the dorm sofa is cold, in the absence of San’s heat. He nudges the takeout box with his toe, for lack of anything better to do. Like this, he can’t quite trust himself to not do something he’ll regret.

The ghost of a kiss lingers on the back of his neck like slow-burning embers. His stomach is a cavern, a void perfectly shaped into the size of another man. Of broad shoulders and narrow hips. Of small hands and muscular legs. Of a throat made of bronze and eyes that see far too much whenever they look at him.

With a thousand small kindnesses, he’s hollowed out a space for San inside him. And he’s not even remotely prepared for just how unrelenting a hunger want is. His chest is a vacuum, ready to implode in on himself in its desperation to fill every space unaccounted for.

His leftovers go cold on the coffee table at his feet, unable to ease the gnawing hunger of a heart for the object of its longing.

Yeosang has never found touch to come easily. 

Even as a child he remembers ducking away into the safety of his mother’s pant legs when threatened with the foreign intimacy of a hug from a face he hadn’t quite grown accustomed to.

It was cute for only as long as he was, plump with baby fat and the type of innocence that’s just so impossible to reprimand. But somewhere along the line, cute became childish, became something to be scolded for. Cute became something to distance himself from. The act of growing up, he quickly learned, meant cutting out the child inside you bit by bit, apologizing for every piece that remained.

Some things came more naturally than others, the faint fuzz of dark hair along his upper lip, his lower belly, the deepening of his voice, and a height and width that swallowed the fortress of his mother’s body when he hugged her. Some things came naturally like the responsibility placed on his shoulders from the moment he decided to become an idol, like the hours and the commitment and the work he had to put in to turn those childish dreams into reality.

Some things came as naturally as the changing of the seasons, but for Yeosang, touch was never one of those things.

Even when it came to Jung Wooyoung, the closest thing Yeosang had to a brother in every single way, he still found himself tensing up at the anticipation of an arm thrown carelessly over his shoulders, the quick press of an easy kiss to his cheek. Even despite the familiarity with which he knew him, the bond they’d formed together over the slow passage of time, over hushed conversations in the late hours of the night when honesty comes just a little more easily in the darkness of a bedroom, under the same blanket, sharing the same pillow. Even despite the depth with which Yeosang knew him, he couldn’t convince his body that the physical intimacy Wooyoung was so eager and willing to give him was something he was allowed to accept.

He knew it hurt him. He hasn’t always been so good at hiding it. But over time, he’d learned to better communicate the surge of panic that swelled inside him when a pair of arms caught him off guard, his mind a sequence of alarms and bells and screaming tires begging him to get away. And over time, he’d learned to coexist with those feelings, to allow the arms to entrap him, to feel the panic rise and ebb, to override the anxiety with the real and tangible proof that this was okay, this was okay, this was okay.

Over the passage of time, the building of trust, the language developed that all close friends somehow learn to speak when they’ve known each other long enough, over time it didn’t quite become natural, but it became something just a little closer to neutral.

And sometimes neutrality is the closest one can get to acceptance.

This is the way Yeosang learned to accept the physical intimacy of his other bandmates. The way he learned to accept the love they were so eager and willing to give him.

And this is why it isn’t entirely a surprise to him when San drifts slowly closer throughout the course of the movie. It isn’t a surprise when San wordlessly maneuvers his limbs around him as he climbs into Yeosang’s lap, leans back against his body, wraps Yeosang’s arms around his narrow little waist and tugs the blanket up around both of them, as though the furnace of San’s body against him wasn’t enough, or the shame burning int he pit of his stomach at just how much suddenly found himself wanting this.

Touch had never come naturally to him, nor had it come easily. The closest touch had ever been was neutral. But somehow, in the slow roll of the tide and the changing of the seasons, Yeosang found himself wanting it. Somehow the neutrality he’d once built up towards San’s persistent advances had shifted into something no longer neutral, no longer unwanted.

Somehow, along the way, he’d begun to crave it.

The familiar weight of San’s body pressing his own against the sofa. The brush of soft hair in the crook of his neck. The soft pads of his little fingers where they played with Yeosang’s own hands, learning the size and shape of them by touch, memorizing every dip and crease till he swore he’d be able to recognize him even in the dark. The rise and fall of their bodies in the rhythms of their mutual existence, lungs expanding with potential, exhaling with every word left unsaid.

Vaguely, he wonders if San can feel him thrumming. The nervous anticipation, his utter inability to focus on anything but the man nestled between his legs, on anything but the uncomfortably foreign twist of want deep in his belly. He wonders if San’s aware of just exactly what he does to him.

He’s long since stopped watching the movie, so he startles when it ends, when the room around him erupts into a chorus of exaggerated groans and fake gags and the motion of six exhausted bodies extracting themselves from the furniture one by one. It’s getting late, well past midnight. There’s no schedule tomorrow, but today had more than enough to make up for it, their aching limbs and foggy minds screaming for rest.

But San is a dead weight holding him down, and the twinkle of mischief in Wooyoung’s eyes as he’s the last to leave the room is far too telling that whatever force is keeping them here, like this, it isn’t half as subtle as he’d been hoping.

San is so still and complacent in his arms that for a moment, Yeosang wonders if he’d fallen asleep, but then he shifts, just a little, deliberate like the way he approaches every other aspect of his life. The silence builds in the dark room, lit only by the low light of the blank screen, a room completely empty apart from the two.

For being pressed to the entire length of San’s body, Yeosang feels like he’s leagues away, like whatever distance is left between them is one impossible to cross.

The silence only builds the longer they remain there, motionless, suffocating in its persistence. His lungs are lead, heavy and thick, every breath just sinking deeper, deeper inside him. Every exhale pressing him deeper into the sofa beneath him.

Touch has never come naturally to Yeosang. Want, even less so.

Never in his life could he have imagined how it would feel to have the warm weight of San in his lap, heavy and unmoving, pinning him down into a place he isn’t sure he’s ready to escape from. There’s an apology trapped somewhere beneath the lead in his airway. An apology that even now, at the age of twenty-three, he’s not man enough to allow himself to want him.

An apology for the pieces of the boy he once was, trapped beneath the skin of his chest, the pieces that insisted on remaining no matter how much he bloodied his fists trying to tear them out.

He’d never expected himself to get this far. To crave the touch offered him.

And now that he finds himself there, in the space between want and possession, he’s not sure he’ll ever be brave enough to cross that threshold. Here, pinned to the sofa by the weight of his own desire, his hands lie still and unmoving at his sides, tears prickling in his eyes with just how desperately he wants, how incapable he is of actually taking.

His heart is an ocean; San is the sun. How uncrossable a distance, from here to the sky. His lungs are made of lead and he’s drowning. Deeper, deeper down into the ache of holding San’s entire body in his arms and still being able to do nothing but want him.

“San.”

A strangled word. A drowning man.

The body shifts above him, but doesn’t run away. Legs come up onto the cushion of the sofa to straddle his own, the body he’d spent so long committing to memory bowing like a bow to crowd him back against the sofa, dark eyes find his, the lighthouse to a drowning sailor. 

“Yeosang.”  

The answer to a question he doesn’t remember asking. His head is slipping below the surface, his body so impossibly heavy and yet, somehow, never more weightless than in this moment. The heave of his lungs is far too quick, far too shallow, the thundering staccato of his heart. His body is a symphony and San is the conductor. Warm palms slip beneath his shirt, smooth and flat against his body, and Yeosang stutters a gasp. He’s an instrument that San alone is able to play, fingers seeking out the notes with that same deliberate precision with which he approaches every new challenge.

Yeosang is a challenge, and San is more than willing to take him on.

“Please.”

A word pressed into what little space remains between them. Into that uncrossable distance. Into the space between the sea and the sky. The horizon where they meet in the middle, blending blues and greens until it’s impossible for one to exist apart from the other.

Please.

The call of the drowning man to the lifeboat.

Please.

San doesn’t answer with words, but with a stuttered desperate breath and with a slow, deliberate brush of lips. Liquid fire erupts where they meet. Yeosang’s body is made of wax, melting beneath him. Firm thighs tense on each side of him as San lifts himself up above him, imperceptibly so, like he needs Yeosang to know he’s the one in control.

Like he needs Yeosang to know that he’ll guide him. He’ll bear the responsibility of pushing them past the threshold and into that place beyond wanting.

Above him, like this, San takes Yeosang’s face in one warm hand, tilts it up until the light hits his eyes and he can try to make sense of whatever he finds there. It’s all Yeosang can do to allow it. To let him see. To keep himself from closing himself away like he always does, like he always has. It’s all Yeosang can do to allow himself to be seen.

It must be enough.

Because San dives back in, this time, hungrier. His mouth is warm and pliant and eager and inviting against Yeosang’s, wet and hot and intoxicating in a way he’d never known touching to be, and Yeosang is helpless to it. The impossible softness of a tongue presses in, seeks out his own and flicks against it gently, drawing a sound so unexpected and keening out of Yeosang’s lungs that he barely registers the way the weight has vanished from his chest.

San kisses the way he loves. Gentle, eager, and deep.

He kisses Yeosang like it’s only natural to. Like he’s something precious, something worthy of reverence, something to take his time exploring. He kisses Yeosang slow and deliberate, the way he approaches everything else in his life. He kisses him slowly, like they have all the time in the world and like if they work slowly enough, they can make this moment outlast the very passage of time itself.

He kisses Yeosang until they’re both breathless and gasping for air, and then, his nose brushing the length of Yeosang’s, their breaths mingling in the space between them, a distance no longer so daunting now that he knows with all the certainty in his chest that San will be there to meet him halfway, there San watches him and waits.

It isn’t a question that Yeosang finds in his eyes, in the language of San that he’s far too fluent in. It isn’t a question, but a challenge.

Because touch has never come naturally to him. Want has never come naturally to him. But if they’re about to do this - to take this beyond the bounds of wanting and into something deeper and all-encompassing - if they’re about to cross this threshold, San cannot take that step for him. He’s already crossed it. He’s standing now just on the other side. But now it’s Yeosang’s turn to make the leap.

And the smile that has dimples tugging into the softness of San’s cheeks is all the proof he needs that San will be there to meet him halfway.

He takes a few deep breaths, a swimmer flooding their blood with oxygen to prepare them for the journey ahead, and with his eyes falling shut, he leans forward and takes the plunge. It’s not even a heartbeat before he finds him, San’s mouth right there waiting for him, their lips and tongues working in a careful succession, their blues and cyans and indigos blending together somewhere in the middle where their trembling bodies engulf one another.

San’s hands drift down his body and linger at the hem of his shirt, and Yeosang barely registers the silent question before permitting it, arms raised to help guide the fabric off his body. He whines when San pulls back, wide-eyed and flushed and disastrous, drinking in every inch of pale skin offered to him, like he doesn’t quite believe he deserves it.

Whining again, Yeosang squirms, blushes, tries to hide himself from San’s reverant gaze. “Please.” He insists again, “Please.”

It comes out half-whispered and trembling, but it’s enough to break San from his reverie.

Without any fanfare or forethought, San reaches behind his head, tugs his own shirt up and over, discards it somewhere on the floor, like the only thing that matters to him in this moment is touching him. And maybe, a part of him wants to believe, maybe that’s the truth.

It’s a thought he never often allows himself to entertain, the idea that he could possibly be wanted just as badly. Despite the fame and attention stardom brings, he had never learned to see himself as an object of desire. It never came naturally, not the way it seemed to for the others. 

Seonghwa, Wooyoung, even San seemed to take on another persona, another version of themselves. It was like a character they played, when the time came for them to make themselves desirable, to bring out the seduction and force the audience to have no choice but to want them, they would put on this other version of themselves, this sexier, confident persona. They could flick it on in a moment’s notice, the change palpable in the sudden shift of energy in the room. 

But Yeosang had never quite managed to figure out how they did it.

His sexiness, his charisma, when he needed to play it up, to make something far greater out of it than what it really was, it was entirely his own. It was vulnerable. Honest. Real. His character was himself. His sexiness was a charade that he couldn’t even fully believe in. His confidence was a lie.

But now, here, San is holding him like something lovely, pressing kisses into his burning flesh, the column of his throat, the dips and ridges of his stomach, he’s devouring him with such a dedicated reverance that Yeosang can almost believe he’s really something worth being adored. With the whispered questions, the broken pleas, the slow stripping of the few layers of clothing left between them and the unveiling of miles of unmarked skin as smooth and clean and lovely as the slow creeping dawn of a new day, as the slow roll of the sea, as the way the sky pales the closer it gets to the horizon, the way the sun dips down to kiss the twilight sea.

Here, now, San’s lips on his skin and the strain of desperation in his voice is almost capable of convincing Yeosang that maybe want is not such a bad type of hunger. That the ocean beneath San’s sky is not such a bad place to be.

Drowning only hurts as long as you keep fighting it. The succumbing is incredibly, beautifully painless.

They don’t go all the way. Not tonight.

Their bodies are warm and wet everywhere they’re touching, bare skin against bare skin, face to face, heart to heart, the San-shaped void inside of him satisfied with the slow drag of San’s warm cock against his own, sweat-soaked foreheads tipping together at the divine friction. A rock and a hard place. They’re pressed together somewhere in the middle. 

San is so incredibly pliant in his lap, allowing Yeosang to have his way with him, his little hands pressing Yeosang’s fingers into his hipbones, insisting that he hold this little control over him. They both know he doesn’t really. It’s the slow rock of San’s hips that’s grinding them together, Yeosang’s hands doing nothing more than holding onto him for dear life, lest he be swept all too quickly away, lest this moment run out far too quickly, and things return to how they were, but also somehow fundamentally different, like never before.

The noises that spill from San’s lips are incredible, the ecstasy pinching at his face is incredible, the impossible seduction of the movement of his body on top of his is incredible, San is incredible, San is incredible, San is incredible. 

Yeosang wants him, and he can’t stop wanting. He wants him when San’s pace quickens, when his thrusts grow sloppy, when his brow pinches and his lip twitches and a strangled gasp spills from his golden tongue. He wants him when San whispers “Sangie” like a desperate prayer into the column of his throat. He wants him when he feels San’s body spasm and jolt above him, trembling so delightfully as his orgasm strikes him with all the force of a storm touching down, painting Yeosang’s belly with warmth and wet, and sending Yeosang teetering over the precipice after him, helpless to do anything but whatever San asked of him.

They catch their breath, San’s weight collapsing on top of him, the spread of their semen sticky and wet between their soft bellies. San nuzzles into his neck like he has no intention of ever leaving him, and Yeosang finds himself wrapping both arms automatically around him, trapping him there, as though this alone would prevent him from ever having to go.

San is warm in his grasp, a comfortable familiarity in every single way. Warm hands trace up and down the length of his body, as San peppers sleepy kisses into every square inch of skin he can reach without lifting his head.

And even now, after all this, after everything, even now with San’s naked body on top of him, pinning him to the sofa, even now with the comfortable press of San’s perfect soft little  cock, sticky with release, nestled in the crook of his inner thigh, even now, with his arms wrapped around him and holding him so impossibly tight, refusing to let go until this moment that they’re living in is used up, even now he still wants San desperately.

But as San’s fingers continue tracing sleepy shapes into his sides, and as his breathing slows in the space Yeosang made for him within the safety of his own chest, and as he presses his own kiss to the warmth of San’s shoulder, and to the small freckle on his collarbone just begging to be kissed, the want shifts into something just a little less hungry, just a little more desperate. 

He loves San.

The way the moon loves the sun, the ocean loves the sky, the waves love the shore.

He loves San. He wants him. Wants a thousand small kindnesses, a thousand small reasons to tell San he loves him, a thousand long lifetimes just to unearth every reason why, to press every single one into the softness of his skin, to learn every language just to find the right words to explain just how much San means to him.

He wants and wants and wants, heart aching for the very man above him, aching with fondness and longing and so, so much love.

Touch never came naturally to Yeosang. But somewhere along the way, that ceased to matter. 

Because loving San came most naturally of all.