Ship/Member: Wonhui Major Tags: N/A Additional Tags: Soft, Slow, Boys who can't talk Permission to remix: Yes
***
When Junhui slinks into Wonwoo’s room with his phone in his hand and his hoodie pulled up, Wonwoo has already made a spot for him on the foldable lounge chair behind his desk, moving the dirty clothes that he usually lets pile up there.
Junhui doesn’t say hello. He shuts Wonwoo’s door softly and shuffles around Wonwoo’s large, queen-sized bed and around the crook of Wonwoo’s new, too-large desk to lean over Wonwoo’s gaming chair. Wonwoo leans an inch to the side and cocks his head up. He’s in the middle of a raid, hands on the keyboard, eyes fixed on his teammate’s vitals and the swarm of enemies pouring into the level.
“Hey,” Wonwoo says, without looking up.
Junhui hums back and then shakes Wonwoo’s chair back and forth a few times before stepping away to settle into the lounge chair.
Wonwoo doesn’t need to look back to know that Junhui has curled up, socked feet tucked under him, pulling out his cell phone. He’s appeared at Wonwoo’s bedroom door, what, five nights in a row? A whole week?
Wonwoo doesn’t have time to think about it: the battle doors in the game open and he loses himself in the flow. When he curses under his breath, Junhui laughs behind him, and when Wonwoo finally is able to land some solid blows, Junhui chimes, “Nice, nice.”
This is how it always goes. Usually, Junhui will watch Wonwoo play until the early hours of the next day, or Wonwoo will put on a movie or a twitch stream for them both to stare at. It’s comforting. It’s nice. But tonight, the game is souring and Wonwoo is tired, his edges all frayed. It’s been an exhausting day and despite the too-long hot shower Wonwoo had boiled himself in after finally getting back from work, his face still feels dirty and his hair oily. His character takes a bad hit, and Wonwoo feels it as a punch of hot anger. His jaw tightens and shifts, his fraying irritation getting pulled like a tight rubber band.
Behind him, Junhui has scooted the chair to the edge of the desk and is playing with one of Wonwoo’s nendroids. Moving it back and forth, plastic base scraping softly over the desk.
Wonwoo turns his game off. He does it fast, letting the frustration out as he drops from the raid, shutting it all down with saving. The background music and booming gun blasts of the game die with it.
And then his room is silent. When Junhui shifts, the rustle fills the room.
“Are you done?” Junhui asks and Wonwoo nods, feeling dumb. The anger is gone already. He was never any good at keeping it, and in its wake is nothing but exhaustion.
God, Wonwoo is tired. He feels like slumping forward in his chair and passing out, but he needs to turn on something else, pick out a movie or a show, something to fill the space so the silence doesn’t balloon out more than it already has. Junhui will leave soon if he doesn’t.
And Wonwoo doesn’t want him to leave. He doesn’t need the company and honestly, getting more sleep the last few nights would have been nice. But for the months that Junhui and Minghao were gone, Wonwoo had received only a handful of texts from Junhui, usually about game news or the occasional picture of Shenzhen with a text, This is what I told you about! And that was it. Wonwoo knows that Junhui would text Soonyoung good morning and that he and Chan exchanged long paragraphs and that Seungkwan would get deliveries of random things, all signed by Junhui and all some type of inside joke that Seungkwan would just laugh when Wonwoo asked him what they meant.
Junhui did facetime Wonwoo twice. Maybe three times. But they were all short and quiet, with Wonwoo fumbling for things to say. He can’t help but think that Junhui had just done it to tick his name off the list, so that he could tell the fans, of course, I message all the members!
And then they came back home and Junhui began to show up at Wonwoo’s door every night. Wonwoo knows that it means something. Wonwoo and Mingyu live on a different floor now with a different code, it’s not as though Junhui is ending up here by accident. But Wonwoo doesn’t know what he wants (he has to want something) or how to keep him (Junhui wants to be kept, right?). It’s as though Junhui’s a little bird waiting patiently in the maws of a trap while Wonwoo fumbles, too stupid to figure out how to throw the lever.
“How’d the shoot today go?” Wonwoo asks, desperately. It’s the first thing that popped into his head.
Junhui slides the nendroid back to its original position and grabs the puzzle ball beside it, a knot of interlocking metal rings and rope. He starts tugging on one of the rings. “Good,” he says, voice pitched high.
“Are you tired?”
Junhui looks tired. There are bags under his eyes and a weariness under his face. But he only shrugs one big, animated shrug, his shoulders collapsing back down as though weighted.
The silence is growing more stifling. More brittle. And Wonwoo should know better than to toe the line but he’s dirty and tired and restless for something that this silence is irritating. “You keep coming back,” he says. And then, because he wants to be funny: “Did you miss me?”
Wonwoo means to say it like a joke but, as always, his voice falls flat. It lands wrong. Junhui doesn’t look up from his puzzle ball but his face shifts. Eyes narrow. Today, during their group photo shoot, one of the interview questions had been: The8, Jun, did you miss Korea while you were gone?
“Of course,” Minghao had said back. “I think Korea has become another home for me. I missed the members, too. It was strange, being away.”
“I missed my favorite seolleongtang restaurant!” Junhui had said. He had laughed, all of his teeth on show, eyes darting between the staff and the members. “I missed it so much!”
Here and now, in the silence of Wonwoo’s bedroom, Junhui licks his lips and looks up with a sudden smile.
“Did you miss me, Wonwoo-ah?” Junhui echoes, stretching the vowels out like gummies. And when Wonwoo looks away, face suddenly hot, Junhui laughs.
I did miss you, Wonwoo thinks about saying, or maybe, If you didn’t miss me, then why are you here? Instead, he says nothing and the silence is back, worse than ever. Junhui is still smiling, eyes wide and focused on the puzzle ball. Wonwoo picks at the end of his knitted sleeve.
Wonwoo glances up just in time to see Junhui’s eyes flit up to look at the bedroom door, and then back down.
Wonwoo needs to throw the trap. He needs to do something. Anything.
So Wonwoo stands, shuffling past the desk and squeezing in front of the lounge chair to get out from behind the desk, Junhui pulling his legs up to let Wonwoo pass. It takes some poking around to find his bluetooth speakers, and when he does, he turns them on. Finds a playlist on his phone, and plays it. Coin by IU chimes on and Wonwoo tosses his phone on the bed before crawling on top of it, stretching out over the covers.
He kooks at the white, blank ceiling for a moment before he looks at Junhui. Junhui is looking back, only the fear from before is gone, replaced with a languid curiosity. Wonwoo pats the bed beside him. Junhui, without a moments hesitation, stands. He falls onto the bed and curls into a ball at the bottom, his back pressed against Wonwoo’s legs.
They lay like that. The music plays. Songs change, swelling and falling away like the tide. Exhaustion begins to drag Wonwoo down, the tension of his back pulling apart and his eyes fluttering shut. His glasses shift when he moves his head against the pillow.
“This is too hard,” Junhui whines suddenly. When Wonwoo drags his eyes back open, Junhui is holding the puzzle ball up. He’s still curled on his side, his face hidden from Wonwoo. “Do it for me.”
When Wonwoo had first gotten that puzzle ball, he had tried to solve it for all of twenty-five minutes before looking up a How To video online.
“Keep trying,” he says instead. And in a moment of fuzzy, sleepy bravery, he moves a hand down to pull back Junhui's hoodie and pull at Junhui’s hair. One soft tug, feeling the hair slip through his fingers. “You’ll get it.”
#I feel like this is so loose from the prompt, but once I got started I couldn't stop ;;. Sorry!
[FILL] Wonhui homecoming
Major Tags: N/A
Additional Tags: Soft, Slow, Boys who can't talk
Permission to remix: Yes
***
When Junhui slinks into Wonwoo’s room with his phone in his hand and his hoodie pulled up, Wonwoo has already made a spot for him on the foldable lounge chair behind his desk, moving the dirty clothes that he usually lets pile up there.
Junhui doesn’t say hello. He shuts Wonwoo’s door softly and shuffles around Wonwoo’s large, queen-sized bed and around the crook of Wonwoo’s new, too-large desk to lean over Wonwoo’s gaming chair. Wonwoo leans an inch to the side and cocks his head up. He’s in the middle of a raid, hands on the keyboard, eyes fixed on his teammate’s vitals and the swarm of enemies pouring into the level.
“Hey,” Wonwoo says, without looking up.
Junhui hums back and then shakes Wonwoo’s chair back and forth a few times before stepping away to settle into the lounge chair.
Wonwoo doesn’t need to look back to know that Junhui has curled up, socked feet tucked under him, pulling out his cell phone. He’s appeared at Wonwoo’s bedroom door, what, five nights in a row? A whole week?
Wonwoo doesn’t have time to think about it: the battle doors in the game open and he loses himself in the flow. When he curses under his breath, Junhui laughs behind him, and when Wonwoo finally is able to land some solid blows, Junhui chimes, “Nice, nice.”
This is how it always goes. Usually, Junhui will watch Wonwoo play until the early hours of the next day, or Wonwoo will put on a movie or a twitch stream for them both to stare at. It’s comforting. It’s nice. But tonight, the game is souring and Wonwoo is tired, his edges all frayed. It’s been an exhausting day and despite the too-long hot shower Wonwoo had boiled himself in after finally getting back from work, his face still feels dirty and his hair oily. His character takes a bad hit, and Wonwoo feels it as a punch of hot anger. His jaw tightens and shifts, his fraying irritation getting pulled like a tight rubber band.
Behind him, Junhui has scooted the chair to the edge of the desk and is playing with one of Wonwoo’s nendroids. Moving it back and forth, plastic base scraping softly over the desk.
Wonwoo turns his game off. He does it fast, letting the frustration out as he drops from the raid, shutting it all down with saving. The background music and booming gun blasts of the game die with it.
And then his room is silent. When Junhui shifts, the rustle fills the room.
“Are you done?” Junhui asks and Wonwoo nods, feeling dumb. The anger is gone already. He was never any good at keeping it, and in its wake is nothing but exhaustion.
God, Wonwoo is tired. He feels like slumping forward in his chair and passing out, but he needs to turn on something else, pick out a movie or a show, something to fill the space so the silence doesn’t balloon out more than it already has. Junhui will leave soon if he doesn’t.
And Wonwoo doesn’t want him to leave. He doesn’t need the company and honestly, getting more sleep the last few nights would have been nice. But for the months that Junhui and Minghao were gone, Wonwoo had received only a handful of texts from Junhui, usually about game news or the occasional picture of Shenzhen with a text, This is what I told you about! And that was it. Wonwoo knows that Junhui would text Soonyoung good morning and that he and Chan exchanged long paragraphs and that Seungkwan would get deliveries of random things, all signed by Junhui and all some type of inside joke that Seungkwan would just laugh when Wonwoo asked him what they meant.
Junhui did facetime Wonwoo twice. Maybe three times. But they were all short and quiet, with Wonwoo fumbling for things to say. He can’t help but think that Junhui had just done it to tick his name off the list, so that he could tell the fans, of course, I message all the members!
And then they came back home and Junhui began to show up at Wonwoo’s door every night. Wonwoo knows that it means something. Wonwoo and Mingyu live on a different floor now with a different code, it’s not as though Junhui is ending up here by accident. But Wonwoo doesn’t know what he wants (he has to want something) or how to keep him (Junhui wants to be kept, right?). It’s as though Junhui’s a little bird waiting patiently in the maws of a trap while Wonwoo fumbles, too stupid to figure out how to throw the lever.
“How’d the shoot today go?” Wonwoo asks, desperately. It’s the first thing that popped into his head.
Junhui slides the nendroid back to its original position and grabs the puzzle ball beside it, a knot of interlocking metal rings and rope. He starts tugging on one of the rings. “Good,” he says, voice pitched high.
“Are you tired?”
Junhui looks tired. There are bags under his eyes and a weariness under his face. But he only shrugs one big, animated shrug, his shoulders collapsing back down as though weighted.
The silence is growing more stifling. More brittle. And Wonwoo should know better than to toe the line but he’s dirty and tired and restless for something that this silence is irritating. “You keep coming back,” he says. And then, because he wants to be funny: “Did you miss me?”
Wonwoo means to say it like a joke but, as always, his voice falls flat. It lands wrong. Junhui doesn’t look up from his puzzle ball but his face shifts. Eyes narrow. Today, during their group photo shoot, one of the interview questions had been: The8, Jun, did you miss Korea while you were gone?
“Of course,” Minghao had said back. “I think Korea has become another home for me. I missed the members, too. It was strange, being away.”
“I missed my favorite seolleongtang restaurant!” Junhui had said. He had laughed, all of his teeth on show, eyes darting between the staff and the members. “I missed it so much!”
Here and now, in the silence of Wonwoo’s bedroom, Junhui licks his lips and looks up with a sudden smile.
“Did you miss me, Wonwoo-ah?” Junhui echoes, stretching the vowels out like gummies. And when Wonwoo looks away, face suddenly hot, Junhui laughs.
I did miss you, Wonwoo thinks about saying, or maybe, If you didn’t miss me, then why are you here? Instead, he says nothing and the silence is back, worse than ever. Junhui is still smiling, eyes wide and focused on the puzzle ball. Wonwoo picks at the end of his knitted sleeve.
Wonwoo glances up just in time to see Junhui’s eyes flit up to look at the bedroom door, and then back down.
Wonwoo needs to throw the trap. He needs to do something. Anything.
So Wonwoo stands, shuffling past the desk and squeezing in front of the lounge chair to get out from behind the desk, Junhui pulling his legs up to let Wonwoo pass. It takes some poking around to find his bluetooth speakers, and when he does, he turns them on. Finds a playlist on his phone, and plays it. Coin by IU chimes on and Wonwoo tosses his phone on the bed before crawling on top of it, stretching out over the covers.
He kooks at the white, blank ceiling for a moment before he looks at Junhui. Junhui is looking back, only the fear from before is gone, replaced with a languid curiosity. Wonwoo pats the bed beside him. Junhui, without a moments hesitation, stands. He falls onto the bed and curls into a ball at the bottom, his back pressed against Wonwoo’s legs.
They lay like that. The music plays. Songs change, swelling and falling away like the tide. Exhaustion begins to drag Wonwoo down, the tension of his back pulling apart and his eyes fluttering shut. His glasses shift when he moves his head against the pillow.
“This is too hard,” Junhui whines suddenly. When Wonwoo drags his eyes back open, Junhui is holding the puzzle ball up. He’s still curled on his side, his face hidden from Wonwoo. “Do it for me.”
When Wonwoo had first gotten that puzzle ball, he had tried to solve it for all of twenty-five minutes before looking up a How To video online.
“Keep trying,” he says instead. And in a moment of fuzzy, sleepy bravery, he moves a hand down to pull back Junhui's hoodie and pull at Junhui’s hair. One soft tug, feeling the hair slip through his fingers. “You’ll get it.”
#I feel like this is so loose from the prompt, but once I got started I couldn't stop ;;. Sorry!