[changmin/yunho] baby and i make six [1]
title : baby and i make six
pairing : changmin/yunho
rating : nc-17
words : 11,313
summary : changmin's life comes to what can be described as a standstill in the years after the group is finally disbanded. he thinks he's got his life figured out when reality throws a curveball at him and forces him to reconnect with his ex-bandmates.
a/n : written for kpop_olymfics. haven't written in much too long and so it's a bit choppy. thanks to those who beta'd/looked this over for me!
Changmin wakes on the morning of July 15th to something very normal, that being his growling stomach but then there’s also something not so normal, and that’s the sound of a crying child.
Sitting on the sofa in his living room and tightly hugging one of his sister’s old toys, she quiets as soon as Changmin walks out, staring at him for a long moment before she starts crying again. Changmin’s nearly convinced himself that he’s just having a very realistic dream or that this is just an unordinary symptom of his current state of hunger so he walks right past the girl to go into the kitchen. He’s got a glass of orange juice and some cold pajeon in hand when his mind finally catches up to everything that its just seen and Changmin slowly takes three sleepy steps back and turns to his right, staring with wide eyes at the crying thing on his couch.
“It’s a girl,” Soo-yeon says redundantly from his left, “the note says as much.”
Changmin turns to her and gives her a confused look, wondering again if this is some hunger induced dream he’s having because nothing is making sense to him, including his own sister.
“I said, it’s a girl,” she repeats without prompting, “her name’s Mi-sun.”
Changmin stares all the same, eyes blinking steadily as his gaze travels from his sister back to the girl on the sofa. She’s still crying and flailing her little arms in the air as if she wants to be picked up. Well, Changmin’s certainly not going to do that. No, Changmin decides he’ll go back to sleep and wake up from this dream (or nightmare) and all will be well again. There’ll be some hot breakfast waiting on the table in place of all the children things.
“Read it,” Soo-yeon says flatly as he tries to get away from the noisy scene, “it was addressed to you anyway.”
And so Changmin reads it, unfolding the letter, eyes scanning through the neatly hand-written message. He goes from confusion to astonishment to shock and then back to confusion before finally settling on being something that could only be described as what the fuckery.
It’s a child and it apparently might be his.
“I found her outside on the doorstep,” is what Changmin’s told, and he’s bordering on hysteria right now, eye twitching a little as he glares at his sister.
“What do you mean you found her outside on the doorstep? You don’t just find kids. They come from-,”
“I know where they come from,” she replies with a roll of her eyes, “and I’m telling you, I was getting ready to go to work this morning when I opened my door and found her there. She was sitting on the steps and staring at me. The letter was tucked into a blanket and had your name on it so I took her in.”
Changmin blinks again, the world moving so slowly around him right now and he really, really just hopes that this is a realistic dream he’s having. Unfortunately, a pinch to the arm and a quickly forming blue bruise tells him otherwise. “You don’t just take kids in from the outside because my name is on the letter!” he yells, “you call the police!”
“But the letter says the baby’s yours,” she tells him pointedly, waving her carrot in the general direction of the letter that Changmin had slammed onto the table earlier.
“No,” he says, teeth gritted, eyes flicking towards the letter. “It said it was either mine or the-,” his eye twitches again, “or the others.”
That’s right, that is indeed what the letter said. Written in such tiny hangul are the words of some woman that one of them had evidently slept with for God knows how many years ago. Slept with and apparently, impregnated.
As Changmin slowly processes all the information he has now gathered, he realizes the severity of this situation. There are only five possible fathers for that child in his living room: him, Jaejoong, Yoochun, Junsu or Yunho. In other words, the five ex-members of the now defunct Dong Bang Shin Ki.
Fuck.
- - -
Changmin enrolled into the army just a year after Yunho did. He was 29, somewhat young for enrollment considering all idols, especially SM-idols, went only when they absolutely had to but he didn’t want to put it off any longer. Besides, with Yunho gone, it wasn’t like he was going to go solo (a thought that the company entertained but in the end did not carry through with) and his acting career didn’t really go as they expected either(due in large part to the fact that he’s sadly not the best at controlling his own face). In the end, the company had decided to send him off as well in hopes that by the time he returned, they would still be able to squeeze another album or at the very least, three singles out of them.
Things didn’t go as planned. In the one year that Yunho was released from the army, he met a girl and settled down with her instead, marrying her in a private ceremony just four days before Changmin’s service was over. He still remembers how pretty the invitation was and how pointless it was for Yunho to send him one despite the fact that there was no way he’d be able to attend. Maybe Yunho thought he would ask for a personal day off just to attend or maybe Yunho was just being polite, that’s a very Yunho-like thing to do.
In the end, Changmin sent his congratulations with his family and told his mother to buy Yunho a very nice set of china and some picture frames, homely things that he knew his Hyung would appreciate. He knew that if he had asked for the day off, he would’ve gotten it but he didn’t want to. There’s just something so awfully cliche about attending the wedding of an ex.
- - -
“Why didn’t anyone feed her?” Changmin’s mother asks, shocked that her daughter and son, both adults, would just sit there and stare at the crying child. “She’s just hungry! And look, if you would have just asked her why she was crying, I’m sure she would’ve told you! What in the world were you two doing?”
“Arguing,” Changmin’s sister replies, “Oppa says that she’s not his but I was saying there’s a 20% chance she might be. Anyway, don’t you think she has his eyes and nose? I think so,” she murmurs.
Changmin almost lunges at her and in his mind, he does, grabbing the nearby pillow as well to suffocate her but as his mother fixes her steely gaze on him and tells him in her best no-nonsense voice to grab the formula and heat it up, he goes to do so like the dutiful son that he tries to be.
“Doesn’t matter who her father is,” his mother tells them, “not right now. We have to feed her and get her all clean before the poor thing gets sick.”
Once a mother, always a mother. Within fifteen minutes, the little girl is slurping up a bowl of ramen, sucking on her thumb and holding onto the old stuffed toy as she sleepily blinks her eyes at them.
“Looks like your eyes alright,” his mother says after a long pause, “did you call your company yet?” she asks. Changmin shakes his head and she sighs, gesturing for him to walk with her to the other side of the room as she instructs her daughter to watch the child. “You have to call them,” she tells him, “this isn’t something we can handle on our own. If it is your child- well the mother said in her letter she can’t support her, right? If it is your child, you’ll have to take care of her and if she isn’t, then she’ll have to be handed over to the proper authorities.”
Changmin knows all this, he’s always been the reasonable and mature one but he finds very quickly that thinking himself as calm and collected doesn’t ensure that he really is calm and collected. Mind over matter doesn’t work all the time it seems.
He sleeps on it that night, re-reading the letter a few more times before he takes out a sheet of paper and slowly starts to list all the women that he’s slept with in the past four years of his life. By the time he’s done, there’s a list of twenty-six that he can remember, and a lot more that he can’t. Too many drunk nights and one night stands. Too many faces and bodies for Changmin to pretend that he still recalls and even worse, too many mediocre performances for him to remember if he had a condom on or not.
- - -
The company doesn’t respond the way that Changmin expected. Instead of telling him that they’ll take care of everything, the higher-ups tell him that they have no plans to take any stand at all with this debacle. They express their sympathies and have told him that they would love to help but they see no reason. So basically, Changmin thinks as he walks away, they’re washing their hands of this and of them.
Not to be deterred and simply unable to let it go because he doesn’t have an option to, Changmin realizes that the only thing he can do is to go after each of his ex-members himself. It’s not exactly what he wants to be doing, considering how it’s been years since he’s seen any of them but when he opens his house door to find Mi-sun staring at him, his decision’s already been made for him.
Changmin spends a bit of his own time that night in researching his ex-bandmates. He finds out what they’ve all been up to, using Google and Wikipedia for the basic part of his research before he gets into Naver to start taking more detailed notes. He has to dig hard to actually find addresses and phone numbers for each of the other four. As Changmin reads over the paragraphs of notes, he wonders what his own blurb were to say if he had one.
Thirty-six, mostly jobless and living with his family in a four bedroom apartment in Seoul, single and casually dating. Or would it go a little something like this instead: thirty-six, mildly depressed adult with a fondness for alcohol and dependency for over the counter sleep medication, unwilling to leave the house on most days and as anti-social as they come. Yeah, Changmin thinks as he folds the papers back into separate envelopes, maybe something like that.
- - -
The first one he decides on visiting isn’t really someone that he’s looking forward to seeing but then again, that could be said for all of them. This isn’t a leisurely visit and he certainly isn’t doing any of this to catch up on old times. No, this is all business and he wants to make sure it stays that way. But as always, things are never that simple and like Murphy said, what can go wrong, will go wrong.
- - -
Changmin rings the doorbell and stuffs the envelope back into his messenger bag, tugging a little on the sleeves of his collared shirt as he shoves his hands into his jeans pocket. He’s nervous and he knows he doesn’t have any reason to be but he is nonetheless. It’s been a good ten years and counting since he’s seen any of these people and even if they were once close enough to be family, a decade’s lack of communication will sever the ties (if the lawsuit didn’t already).
The door opens and Changmin stands there even more awkward, eyes shifting from the left to the right before he finally brings his eyes up to gaze into his Hyung’s, a polite smile he reserved in the past for CEOs or fangirls on his face. “Hey, can I come in?”
There’s a bit of shock and some head shaking going on, as if Jaejoong thinks he’s dreaming or drunk before he nods his head and lets Changmin in out of confusion more than anything else, a bit of drool still on the corner of his mouth that tells Changmin his Hyung was still sleeping.
“So, um…” Jaejoong mumbles, scratching his head and looking down when one of his cats meows at the stranger in the room, sniffing cautiously at Changmin’s socked toes. “What are you doing here?” Jaejoong blurts out, as tactful as he always was.
Changmin has the strangest urge to just punch Jaejoong, an urge that’s maybe not so strange as it is rude, and he wonders how to go about this exactly. He takes a seat on the black leather couch even though he hasn’t been offered one yet and waits for Jaejoong to do the same. He spent last night brainstorming and really, wouldn’t the best approach be the direct one? Even if it isn’t, Changmin’s never been good at bullshitting and beating around the bush isn’t quite his style.
“I need your DNA. A swab of the inside of your cheek or a hair or even some blood would do” Changmin says, knuckles turning white from how hard he’s fisting his hands. Jaejoong blinks at him and Changmin realizes he might need to supply a bit more information, “There’s a kid- not mine, or I don’t know if it’s mine but there’s a kid that was dropped off at my house and apparently it’s one of ours so I need to find out whose it is.”
Jaejoong stares at him as if he’s grown another head, smiling oddly at first and then laughing, nodding his head as if he’s finding all of this funny. Changmin feels that earlier urge to punch Jaejoong build until it turns into a need, really and so to stop himself from bodily harming another, he reaches into his bag for some photos that Soo-yeon had taken and developed so that Jaejoong can see what he’s talking about exactly.
“Her name is Mi-sun, she’s about three years old and she was either fathered by you, me, or the other three. So you can either swab the inside of your cheek or pull out a hair for me, and I’ll be out of your way.” Changmin’s voice is tired and cold, an obvious and familiar glint in his eyes as he gazes at Jaejoong from across the couch.
If the circumstances were different, if things hadn’t unfolded the way they did, Changmin thinks they’d be joking about this right now, probably sitting side by side and composing a list of names for the possible mother instead of sitting across from each others as strangers. He remembers still how close they used to be, remembers very clearly how Jaejoong used to baby him and give into his demands but that was a long time ago. Changmin doesn’t want to be here now and he doesn’t want to pretend that he’s even remotely interested in being friends.
There’s a few minutes of silence and as Changmin is about to say something else, Jaejoong reaches up with a hand and yanks hard, barely wincing as he pulls out more than enough hairs. He holds out his hand after that, palm facing Changmin so that the other man can choose whichever strand he wants.
“Take what you need,” Jaejoong says with a shrug, “it’ll grow back, no big loss.”
Changmin pulls a plastic baggy out of his bag, a little smaller than a sandwich-size ziplock one and lets Jaejoong drop the hairs into it before he carefully writes out Jaejoong’s name in big, thick letters. The smell of permanent marker is pungent and Changmin wrinkles his nose in annoyance, putting everything away save one photo of the little girl. “Keep it,” he says, “she might be yours.”
Jaejoong holds onto a corner of the picture with his thumb and index fingers, rubbing at the wax of the photo before he places it back down on the table and nods his head in thanks. She’s got dark brown eyes and the most adorable smile but then again, aren’t all kids cute when they’re young? It’d be unfortunate if it was one of theirs and ugly.
Clearing his throat, Changmin shifts on the couch and the leather squeaks as he packs up everything again. He stares at Jaejoong for a second, head tilted as he takes in the weariness in Jaejoong’s body, the tell-tale wrinkles that frame Jaejoong’s eyes and for just a second, smiles, finding it funny in a way that his Hyung has aged since they last saw each other. It’s only natural and Changmin expected it of course but still, to see that even the most ethereal of them has aged and shrunk reminds Changmin of how normal and human Jaejoong can be sometimes.
“Well, thanks,” he says after a short pause, “I’ll be going now.”
Jaejoong sees him to the door and for a minute, as he stands by the entryway and watches Changmin kneeling on the floor to put on his shoes, he feels like offering his dongsaeng to stay for a beer or some soju but the moment passes as soon as Changmin stands. He towers over him still, taller than Jaejoong even remembers. “You’ve grown,” he says stupidly, staring at the tips of Changmin’s hair.
That earns him a wry smile but it’s a smile nonetheless, “Honestly, I think you’ve just shrunk. Bye.”
It’s only as Jaejoong’s eating a pasta dinner for one much later that night that he realizes throughout the entirety of their conversation in the afternoon, not once had Changmin addressed him by name.
- - -
It’s not hard for Changmin to locate Junsu. Out of the five of them, the older man is the only one still singing and performing for the public. Years after the unofficial disbandment and Junsu’s still booking musical stages. The demand isn’t nearly as high as when he was twenty-four but if there’s one thing that Junsu’s always been the most careful with, it’s his voice.
Changmin gets himself a ticket for an afternoon show, sitting in the back right by the doors so to make a quick exit after the last act. It’s slightly boring if only because Changmin’s not as enamored with Junsu’s voice as the rest of the audience seems to be. He thinks it’s sort of like listening to an old record. Junsu’s voice is as pleasing as it always was but the appeal had faded for Changmin somewhere between their second and third years together in the same group.
“I need to talk to you,” Changmin says when Junsu exits the building long after the play has ended. Changmin can’t quite tell if Junsu is surprised or not, having always found it hard to judge what Junsu was feeling even when they were as close as brothers. “It’s important,” he adds.
Junsu doesn’t hesitate, looking at his manager before beckoning for Changmin towards his car. “In private?”
Changmin shrugs, “Preferably.”
“My studio is only a few minutes away, we’ll go there then.”
As Changmin gets into the car, he’s reminded of how well he used to get along with Junsu. The older man, despite having the image of a silly fool, always knew when to get serious and when to crack a joke. He appreciates it even as they’re riding in the car towards Junsu’s private studio.
“It’s nice,” is all Changmin says before he gets straight to the point, having very little interest in Junsu’s musical equipment, “there’s a kid at my house right now and apparently, one of us is the father. I’m here to get some DNA.”
And as if this was a request for a tissue to blow his nose with, Junsu nods his head and disappears into what seems to be the bathroom, coming out seconds later with a jar of cotton swabs. He opens his mouth and swipes, handing the used Q-tip to Changmin. “That good enough?”
“Yeah, great.”
Changmin stares for a bit and realizing that his task has been fulfilled, starts to head for the door but he’s stopped short by Junsu.
“The paternity test will come back negative. There’s no way that’s my kid,” Junsu tells him.
“Results will be out in ten days,” Changmin says, “if she’s not yours, you won’t have to see me again.”
“I gave you my cheek swab, test it if you wish. I assume the company is the one fronting the bill so it doesn’t matter to me whether you test it or not, I’m just telling you that she isn’t mine. I’m not stupid enough to mess around and get a girl pregnant.”
Changmin wants so badly to tell Junsu that mistakes happen all the time and that people fuck up even when they don’t plan on it but he doesn’t. There wouldn’t be a point in telling Junsu all of that, it’s something they all live with now. Anyway, Junsu’s right. It’s not that he’s not stupid enough or less horny than they were, it’s just that if he did mess up, his father would’ve already taken care of the situation before it even became one.
“Good for you,” Changmin says, “guess I won’t be seeing you then.”
And Changmin leaves, realizing on the way home that he much prefers the awkwardness of Jaejoong’s visit to the business-like attitude that Junsu had. It’s hard to believe that he once thought of Junsu as one of his closest friends. Seems as if people do change, after all.
- - -
“Oppa!” Soo-yeon screams loudly from the living room, doing it again a mere thirty seconds later when Changmin doesn’t manage to make it from the kitchen in a satisfactory time, “Oppa! She’s hungry! What are you doing in there??”
“It takes more than a minute to heat up rice, just so you know,” Changmin replies grumpily, “besides, she’s always hungry. And she’s always crying. Just stick a pacifier in her mouth and she’ll shut up.”
His sister scowls at him, grabbing the plate of food out of his hand to feed Mi-sun. “She’s not a baby, Oppa. She’s three years old already. You can’t stick a pacifier in her mouth and ask her to shut up.”
“She still sucks on her thumb like a baby and she hasn’t said a single word since she’s gotten here. All she does is cry for her mother who abandoned her,” Changmin replies.
Soo-yeon glares at him, “Mom said not to use that word around her. We don’t know what’s going on yet and if she’s not speaking, it’s because she’s not comfortable with us yet. Just so you know, your attitude isn’t helping. I pray that the kid isn’t yours then, poor Mi-sun, what would she do with an irresponsible father like you?”
Changmin falls backwards on the couch, sprawled out all over it as he sighs, “Poor me,” he says quietly, “what would I do with a three year old child?”
- - -
Yoochun turns out to be the hardest to locate and it’s not because he’s disappeared off the face of the earth but simply because Changmin has no idea which continent he’s actually on. Yoochun had gone into business in the years following the unofficial split of the group and after his acting days were over with, he decided (and very wisely so) to step foot into the world of gourmet cuisine. Last Changmin had heard about him, Yoochun was doing fairly well for himself with a string of restaurants under his name but the problem still is that Changmin has no clue if Yoochun’s in America, Europe or Asia. It wouldn’t do to fly around on an airplane for hours aimlessly and so he’s forced to admit that he needs some help.
“You need more than some help,” Jaejoong says with a knowing smirk on his face, standing by the doorway and staring at Changmin, “you have no clue where Yoochun is right now, do you? Did your mother tell you to come or was it one of your sisters?”
Changmin scowls back, fighting the urge to give into Jaejoong’s cajoling, “Are you going to tell me or not?”
Jaejoong rolls his eyes and takes a step back, opening the door a bit wider so Changmin can enter, “Get in, I have a number that you can call.” As Changmin enters, toeing off his shoes carefully, Jaejoong locks up, “It wouldn’t kill you to admit that you need my help though,” he mutters under his breath, “at least a please or a thank you would be nice.”
“Would you please give me a number so I can reach him? Thank you so much,” Changmin says, the sarcasm so thick that Jaejoong doesn’t even bother with a reply, waving his hand in the general direction of the couch so Changmin will know to sit.
Jaejoong’s cat comes meowing and Changmin suppresses a shiver when she rubs against his leg and sniffs at his socks once again. Changmin wiggles his toes to get her to stop, knowing for certain this time that the socks are fresh and clean.
“Why does your cat like to smell my toes?” he asks when Jaejoong returns with a cell phone in hand, “my socks are clean so you can tell her to stop.”
“She’s a cat…” Jaejoong says, trailing off as he concentrates on searching through his electronic phonebook, “for one thing, she wouldn’t understand it if I told her that they’re clean and for another, all she does is laze around and sniff at unfamiliar things. She’s a cat, not a baby and speaking of that, how’s our Mi-sun doing?”
“We’re not speaking of her,” Changmin says, “and she’s doing fine. Also, she’s not ours, she belongs to someone out of the five of us but that doesn’t make her ours.”
“Touchy,” Jaejoong says under his breath, scribbling a number down on a piece of scrap paper, “here, call and see if Yoochun’s there or not. The number is old so I’m not sure if it’s still in use but it was his home number so it should be working.”
Changmin pockets the piece of paper, slipping it into one of the folds of his wallet, “Old number?”
Jaejoong shoves his phone into his pocket and shrugs, “I haven’t spoken to Yoochun in a few years now. He’s busy, I’m busy, things happens.”
Changmin wants to ask but he reminds himself that none of this matters to him anymore. He doesn’t care about Jaejoong or about Yoochun, in fact, all he wants to do is go home and sleep without having to wake to the annoying cries of the kid. “Thanks for the number,” he says, getting ready to leave again.
“Hey, have you spoken to Yunho yet?” Jaejoong asks as Changmin’s tying his laces.
“He’s next on the list,” Changmin says after a slight pause, fingers working deftly as he speaks, “why?”
Jaejoong taps his fingers against the door and shakes his head a little, “Just don’t be an ass to him, he’s going through a tough enough time as it is.”
“What are you talking about?” Changmin asks, brows furrowed as he turns around to stare at Jaejoong, “why would I be an ass to him?”
“I’m just saying that you should exercise a bit more tact when you break all of this to him, alright? The last thing he needs right now is for you to storm in there like you did in here, rude and in a hissy fit.”
Changmin can tell Jaejoong just wants him to ask about why he should be more tactful and he can just tell from the way Jaejoong phrased his sentences that he wants him to ask about what happened to Yunho but he’s not going to be baited. “For the record, I’m not being rude, I’m trying to get all this done so I can send it into the labs but if my promptness rubs you the wrong way, I apologize. I’ll be seeing Yunho tomorrow and I’ll try my best to be less, ‘hissy’ about it.”
Jaejoong watches as Changmin exits his apartment, “I’m being serious, Changmin. Don’t be like this to him and you know exactly what I mean.”
By the time Changmin turns to fix Jaejoong with a look, the door has already been closed and as Jaejoong’s words replay in his head, he wonders for a very brief moment, if he should’ve asked what Jaejoong meant after all. Maybe, then he would’ve been a bit more prepared for what would happen next.
- - -
Yunho’s getting a divorce.
The moment Changmin finds out is also the same moment in which his feet suddenly start to move on their own, bringing him off the couch and to the shoe cabinet where his sneakers are so that he can get his shoes and leave. Bag in hand and socks crooked from how hard he shoved his feet into the sneakers, Changmin mumbles something under his breath about a sudden appointment with a doctor that he’d forgotten about, running off as soon as he gets the doorknob to work in his favor.
Yunho’s getting a divorce and Changmin finds that he’s incapable of looking his ex-boyfriend in the eye long enough to offer his condolences, mainly because Yunho’s always been good at catching him when he lies.
- - -
“You ass! You could’ve told me!” Changmin hisses angrily in Jaejoong’s living room.
Jaejoong would be amused if Changmin weren’t so annoyed right now. Instead, he finds himself just a bit smug as he watches Changmin try to wear a hole out on his carpet. “But I did tell you. I told you to be more aware of yourself and I told you that Yunho was going through a tough time, didn’t I? You were the one that didn’t bother to ask why. Besides, it’s been all over the news the past couple of days. Don’t you read the news or hell, don’t you even watch TV? All the media outlets have been covering this topic.”
Changmin’s fury dissipates when he hears that, able to imagine just how crazy the media has been on Yunho these past few days. Yunho doesn’t deserve any of this. “Why?” He asks quietly, “I mean-,” he cuts himself, unsure of how to ask what he’s thinking.
Jaejoong narrows his eyes a little before shrugging, “You’re asking the wrong person,” he replies, “I found out on the news just like the rest of the Korean population. And that’s not exactly stuff that Yunho would give an interview about.”
“But it’s Yunho,” Changmin says quietly as he finally takes a seat on the couch, “he would never get a divorce. He wouldn’t give up on their marriage like that. He’s- he’s Yunho,” Changmin murmurs. He’s unable to explain why but the idea that Jung Yunho would get a divorce is so unlike him and so uncharacteristic of the man he once knew so well, that Changmin would honestly accept alien mindswap as an answer as to why this is happening.
“I don’t know,” Jaejoong repeats, staring at the off-white wall behind Changmin, “ask him yourself.”
Changmin shakes his head, fingers entwined, “Don’t know how to,” he finally admits. “Don’t want to either. You were his best friend, don’t you have any idea?”
Jaejoong smiles and gazes at Changmin with something very much like pity, “And you were the one he loved the most, don’t you have any idea?”
- - -
It takes two days for Changmin to summon up the courage to go back to Yunho’s house in Gwangju. Yunho never moved, not even after all he made enough money to buy the entire block three times over. “I like the ambience and it’s just home, you know, Changmin-ah?” and Changmin would say he understood when he never really did. Home is for comfort and Yunho’s house was old, creaky and not appealing to him. Changmin never voiced those opinions out loud of course and he had merely chalked it up to another difference in opinion they had but now, as he stands outside of the door to Yunho’s, he finally thinks he understands how much “just home” meant to Yunho after all.
“Hey, Hyung,” Changmin says as Yunho opens the door, eyeing him wearily for a second before he greets him with a smile. “Can I come in?”
“Sure,” Yunho says, “how was the doctor’s the other day?” he asks just to be polite.
“Great,” Changmin mumbles, “got some test results back,” he says.
“Drink?” Yunho says, handing over a familiar mug that’s filled with mostly lukewarm coffee, “a pack of sugar and some milk- if that’s still how you take your coffee.”
“Yeah, that’s perfect, thanks.” Changmin worries on the corner of his lip, a nervous habit that Yunho was aware of then and aware of now. Changmin blurts it out in the end, nearly knocking over the cup of coffee in his hand, “Sorry about the divorce. I um- I’m really sorry.”
Yunho stays silent for the longest time, staring off into space before he shakes his head and offers Changmin another smile. “Pathetic isn’t it? Nearly forty and freshly divorced.”
“Not at all,” Changmin says quietly, wanting so badly to ask why but unable to ask. “Do you need any help? With anything?”
“Nope, let’s be honest, we all saw it coming,” Yunho says with a light chuckle.
There’s a long, long pause and Changmin takes a sip of his coffee and then another, finishing the cup simply because he doesn’t know what to say. It’s been a few years since they last saw each other and it’s awkward. Things aren’t the way they used to be and as Changmin drums his fingers along his knee, he suddenly feels as if he’s sixteen again. He doesn’t like his own skin, doesn’t like the situation and just wants to get out of here.
Yunho seems to feel the same, beating him to it. “Changmin, we’re too old for this, okay? So why don’t you just tell me what you want from me so I can give it to you.”
“I don’t want anything,” Changmin says, “I just wanted to offer you some help so I came over,-”
“That’s not why you’re here. You didn’t even know about the divorce until I told you. So I’ll ask again, what is it that you want?”
This isn’t how it’s supposed to go. Changmin stares at Yunho, feeling that familiar urge to throw up, skin crawling as he gazes at a man that he respects more than anything and will always love. “There’s-,” Changmin stops himself and then shakes his head, “it’s nothing, nothing at all. Don’t worry about it, okay?” Changmin can just do the test with the other four’s DNA and if it isn’t theirs, then it will have to be Yunho’s. The older man has enough on his plate.
As Changmin’s leaving, he turns to offer his condolences again, this time much more prepared for the look that he expects Yunho to give him. Except, it’s not the look he’s expecting and when he sees how defeated and worn out Yunho looks, Changmin drops his bag and goes to give him a hug, wishing he could squeeze the sadness out of his Hyung’s body.
“You should’ve asked,” Yunho whispers as soon as Changmin’s close enough, “why didn’t you come to me first? I would’ve helped you, I wanted to help you.”
Changmin closes his eyes, slowly loosening his arms from around Yunho’s body to let them drop down, “Who told you?”
“I called the company about the divorce. Had to let them know what was going to happen since there’s no way I can deal with this shit storm on my own. They thought I already knew about the kid and asked me how the DNA collecting was going. Figured out then that that’s why you called earlier to ask if you could come over for a visit. Should’ve known you had a reason, you never did ask to talk if it weren’t for something important.”
“Yunho-,” Changmin says quietly, “I really am sorry. It’s just- I thought you had enough on your plate so I didn’t ask.”
“No, that’s why you didn’t ask just now but why didn’t you ask a week ago before all of this happened? Why didn’t you ask for my help then? Why am I the last to know about this? Last to be asked? I always told you, Changmin, all you have to do is ask for help and I’ll always give it to you but you never ask. You just don’t.”
Changmin doesn’t have a reply for that. No snarky response or bullshit answer. For the second time in his life, Changmin’s unable to say a word back to Yunho.
“I already swabbed and dropped it off at your house yesterday when you weren’t home. Soo-yeon said she’ll hold onto it. You didn’t have to come, I’m sorry for wasting your time and thanks for the sympathies.”
Changmin nods his head and leaves, feeling so odd as he walks down the steps and onto the sidewalk. The door closes behind him, clicks as its locked and Changmin doesn’t have to turn around to know that Yunho’s watching him from the window. If he wanted, he could go back inside, ask for help among other things but Yunho’s right, he never did then and he doesn’t now.
- - -
The invitation reaches Changmin weeks before he’s done with his service and to be honest, he can’t say that he’s all that surprised. Yunho had always said that he wanted to start a family by the age of thirty and by Changmin’s count, Yunho’s already a few years late on that goal of his.
The card is lovely, a delicate shade of cream with handwritten names and properly curled ribbons. Changmin knows that this was sent as a formality but he checks over the date anyway, smiling once he sees that the wedding is to be held just days before his release.
“Really couldn’t have waited?” Changmin says to no one in particular, checking off the box next to unable to attend before he slips it back into the pristine envelope and tosses it into the trash. There really isn’t a point for him to respond and he’s sure that Yunho doesn’t expect him to either. It had been his choice to end things just like it had been his choice in the beginning.
- - -
In the end, Changmin sends off all five vials of DNA samples in one of those standard brown manilla envelopes. He buys a calendar especially just to mark off the days until they’ll get the results back, using a vivid red Sharpie each time as if it would make the results come faster. He’s anxious and having Mi-sun running around his home with his sisters and mother cooing over he doesn’t make him feel any better.
Truth be told, he’s not ready for a child. Truth be told, he doesn’t know if he ever wants to have a child. Changmin’s always said that he wanted to have a family of his own but he realizes more and more these days that wanting to have a family doesn’t necessarily mean he’s ready to raise one.
part 2 here
pairing : changmin/yunho
rating : nc-17
words : 11,313
summary : changmin's life comes to what can be described as a standstill in the years after the group is finally disbanded. he thinks he's got his life figured out when reality throws a curveball at him and forces him to reconnect with his ex-bandmates.
a/n : written for kpop_olymfics. haven't written in much too long and so it's a bit choppy. thanks to those who beta'd/looked this over for me!
Changmin wakes on the morning of July 15th to something very normal, that being his growling stomach but then there’s also something not so normal, and that’s the sound of a crying child.
Sitting on the sofa in his living room and tightly hugging one of his sister’s old toys, she quiets as soon as Changmin walks out, staring at him for a long moment before she starts crying again. Changmin’s nearly convinced himself that he’s just having a very realistic dream or that this is just an unordinary symptom of his current state of hunger so he walks right past the girl to go into the kitchen. He’s got a glass of orange juice and some cold pajeon in hand when his mind finally catches up to everything that its just seen and Changmin slowly takes three sleepy steps back and turns to his right, staring with wide eyes at the crying thing on his couch.
“It’s a girl,” Soo-yeon says redundantly from his left, “the note says as much.”
Changmin turns to her and gives her a confused look, wondering again if this is some hunger induced dream he’s having because nothing is making sense to him, including his own sister.
“I said, it’s a girl,” she repeats without prompting, “her name’s Mi-sun.”
Changmin stares all the same, eyes blinking steadily as his gaze travels from his sister back to the girl on the sofa. She’s still crying and flailing her little arms in the air as if she wants to be picked up. Well, Changmin’s certainly not going to do that. No, Changmin decides he’ll go back to sleep and wake up from this dream (or nightmare) and all will be well again. There’ll be some hot breakfast waiting on the table in place of all the children things.
“Read it,” Soo-yeon says flatly as he tries to get away from the noisy scene, “it was addressed to you anyway.”
And so Changmin reads it, unfolding the letter, eyes scanning through the neatly hand-written message. He goes from confusion to astonishment to shock and then back to confusion before finally settling on being something that could only be described as what the fuckery.
It’s a child and it apparently might be his.
“I found her outside on the doorstep,” is what Changmin’s told, and he’s bordering on hysteria right now, eye twitching a little as he glares at his sister.
“What do you mean you found her outside on the doorstep? You don’t just find kids. They come from-,”
“I know where they come from,” she replies with a roll of her eyes, “and I’m telling you, I was getting ready to go to work this morning when I opened my door and found her there. She was sitting on the steps and staring at me. The letter was tucked into a blanket and had your name on it so I took her in.”
Changmin blinks again, the world moving so slowly around him right now and he really, really just hopes that this is a realistic dream he’s having. Unfortunately, a pinch to the arm and a quickly forming blue bruise tells him otherwise. “You don’t just take kids in from the outside because my name is on the letter!” he yells, “you call the police!”
“But the letter says the baby’s yours,” she tells him pointedly, waving her carrot in the general direction of the letter that Changmin had slammed onto the table earlier.
“No,” he says, teeth gritted, eyes flicking towards the letter. “It said it was either mine or the-,” his eye twitches again, “or the others.”
That’s right, that is indeed what the letter said. Written in such tiny hangul are the words of some woman that one of them had evidently slept with for God knows how many years ago. Slept with and apparently, impregnated.
As Changmin slowly processes all the information he has now gathered, he realizes the severity of this situation. There are only five possible fathers for that child in his living room: him, Jaejoong, Yoochun, Junsu or Yunho. In other words, the five ex-members of the now defunct Dong Bang Shin Ki.
Fuck.
- - -
Changmin enrolled into the army just a year after Yunho did. He was 29, somewhat young for enrollment considering all idols, especially SM-idols, went only when they absolutely had to but he didn’t want to put it off any longer. Besides, with Yunho gone, it wasn’t like he was going to go solo (a thought that the company entertained but in the end did not carry through with) and his acting career didn’t really go as they expected either(due in large part to the fact that he’s sadly not the best at controlling his own face). In the end, the company had decided to send him off as well in hopes that by the time he returned, they would still be able to squeeze another album or at the very least, three singles out of them.
Things didn’t go as planned. In the one year that Yunho was released from the army, he met a girl and settled down with her instead, marrying her in a private ceremony just four days before Changmin’s service was over. He still remembers how pretty the invitation was and how pointless it was for Yunho to send him one despite the fact that there was no way he’d be able to attend. Maybe Yunho thought he would ask for a personal day off just to attend or maybe Yunho was just being polite, that’s a very Yunho-like thing to do.
In the end, Changmin sent his congratulations with his family and told his mother to buy Yunho a very nice set of china and some picture frames, homely things that he knew his Hyung would appreciate. He knew that if he had asked for the day off, he would’ve gotten it but he didn’t want to. There’s just something so awfully cliche about attending the wedding of an ex.
- - -
“Why didn’t anyone feed her?” Changmin’s mother asks, shocked that her daughter and son, both adults, would just sit there and stare at the crying child. “She’s just hungry! And look, if you would have just asked her why she was crying, I’m sure she would’ve told you! What in the world were you two doing?”
“Arguing,” Changmin’s sister replies, “Oppa says that she’s not his but I was saying there’s a 20% chance she might be. Anyway, don’t you think she has his eyes and nose? I think so,” she murmurs.
Changmin almost lunges at her and in his mind, he does, grabbing the nearby pillow as well to suffocate her but as his mother fixes her steely gaze on him and tells him in her best no-nonsense voice to grab the formula and heat it up, he goes to do so like the dutiful son that he tries to be.
“Doesn’t matter who her father is,” his mother tells them, “not right now. We have to feed her and get her all clean before the poor thing gets sick.”
Once a mother, always a mother. Within fifteen minutes, the little girl is slurping up a bowl of ramen, sucking on her thumb and holding onto the old stuffed toy as she sleepily blinks her eyes at them.
“Looks like your eyes alright,” his mother says after a long pause, “did you call your company yet?” she asks. Changmin shakes his head and she sighs, gesturing for him to walk with her to the other side of the room as she instructs her daughter to watch the child. “You have to call them,” she tells him, “this isn’t something we can handle on our own. If it is your child- well the mother said in her letter she can’t support her, right? If it is your child, you’ll have to take care of her and if she isn’t, then she’ll have to be handed over to the proper authorities.”
Changmin knows all this, he’s always been the reasonable and mature one but he finds very quickly that thinking himself as calm and collected doesn’t ensure that he really is calm and collected. Mind over matter doesn’t work all the time it seems.
He sleeps on it that night, re-reading the letter a few more times before he takes out a sheet of paper and slowly starts to list all the women that he’s slept with in the past four years of his life. By the time he’s done, there’s a list of twenty-six that he can remember, and a lot more that he can’t. Too many drunk nights and one night stands. Too many faces and bodies for Changmin to pretend that he still recalls and even worse, too many mediocre performances for him to remember if he had a condom on or not.
- - -
The company doesn’t respond the way that Changmin expected. Instead of telling him that they’ll take care of everything, the higher-ups tell him that they have no plans to take any stand at all with this debacle. They express their sympathies and have told him that they would love to help but they see no reason. So basically, Changmin thinks as he walks away, they’re washing their hands of this and of them.
Not to be deterred and simply unable to let it go because he doesn’t have an option to, Changmin realizes that the only thing he can do is to go after each of his ex-members himself. It’s not exactly what he wants to be doing, considering how it’s been years since he’s seen any of them but when he opens his house door to find Mi-sun staring at him, his decision’s already been made for him.
Changmin spends a bit of his own time that night in researching his ex-bandmates. He finds out what they’ve all been up to, using Google and Wikipedia for the basic part of his research before he gets into Naver to start taking more detailed notes. He has to dig hard to actually find addresses and phone numbers for each of the other four. As Changmin reads over the paragraphs of notes, he wonders what his own blurb were to say if he had one.
Thirty-six, mostly jobless and living with his family in a four bedroom apartment in Seoul, single and casually dating. Or would it go a little something like this instead: thirty-six, mildly depressed adult with a fondness for alcohol and dependency for over the counter sleep medication, unwilling to leave the house on most days and as anti-social as they come. Yeah, Changmin thinks as he folds the papers back into separate envelopes, maybe something like that.
- - -
The first one he decides on visiting isn’t really someone that he’s looking forward to seeing but then again, that could be said for all of them. This isn’t a leisurely visit and he certainly isn’t doing any of this to catch up on old times. No, this is all business and he wants to make sure it stays that way. But as always, things are never that simple and like Murphy said, what can go wrong, will go wrong.
- - -
Changmin rings the doorbell and stuffs the envelope back into his messenger bag, tugging a little on the sleeves of his collared shirt as he shoves his hands into his jeans pocket. He’s nervous and he knows he doesn’t have any reason to be but he is nonetheless. It’s been a good ten years and counting since he’s seen any of these people and even if they were once close enough to be family, a decade’s lack of communication will sever the ties (if the lawsuit didn’t already).
The door opens and Changmin stands there even more awkward, eyes shifting from the left to the right before he finally brings his eyes up to gaze into his Hyung’s, a polite smile he reserved in the past for CEOs or fangirls on his face. “Hey, can I come in?”
There’s a bit of shock and some head shaking going on, as if Jaejoong thinks he’s dreaming or drunk before he nods his head and lets Changmin in out of confusion more than anything else, a bit of drool still on the corner of his mouth that tells Changmin his Hyung was still sleeping.
“So, um…” Jaejoong mumbles, scratching his head and looking down when one of his cats meows at the stranger in the room, sniffing cautiously at Changmin’s socked toes. “What are you doing here?” Jaejoong blurts out, as tactful as he always was.
Changmin has the strangest urge to just punch Jaejoong, an urge that’s maybe not so strange as it is rude, and he wonders how to go about this exactly. He takes a seat on the black leather couch even though he hasn’t been offered one yet and waits for Jaejoong to do the same. He spent last night brainstorming and really, wouldn’t the best approach be the direct one? Even if it isn’t, Changmin’s never been good at bullshitting and beating around the bush isn’t quite his style.
“I need your DNA. A swab of the inside of your cheek or a hair or even some blood would do” Changmin says, knuckles turning white from how hard he’s fisting his hands. Jaejoong blinks at him and Changmin realizes he might need to supply a bit more information, “There’s a kid- not mine, or I don’t know if it’s mine but there’s a kid that was dropped off at my house and apparently it’s one of ours so I need to find out whose it is.”
Jaejoong stares at him as if he’s grown another head, smiling oddly at first and then laughing, nodding his head as if he’s finding all of this funny. Changmin feels that earlier urge to punch Jaejoong build until it turns into a need, really and so to stop himself from bodily harming another, he reaches into his bag for some photos that Soo-yeon had taken and developed so that Jaejoong can see what he’s talking about exactly.
“Her name is Mi-sun, she’s about three years old and she was either fathered by you, me, or the other three. So you can either swab the inside of your cheek or pull out a hair for me, and I’ll be out of your way.” Changmin’s voice is tired and cold, an obvious and familiar glint in his eyes as he gazes at Jaejoong from across the couch.
If the circumstances were different, if things hadn’t unfolded the way they did, Changmin thinks they’d be joking about this right now, probably sitting side by side and composing a list of names for the possible mother instead of sitting across from each others as strangers. He remembers still how close they used to be, remembers very clearly how Jaejoong used to baby him and give into his demands but that was a long time ago. Changmin doesn’t want to be here now and he doesn’t want to pretend that he’s even remotely interested in being friends.
There’s a few minutes of silence and as Changmin is about to say something else, Jaejoong reaches up with a hand and yanks hard, barely wincing as he pulls out more than enough hairs. He holds out his hand after that, palm facing Changmin so that the other man can choose whichever strand he wants.
“Take what you need,” Jaejoong says with a shrug, “it’ll grow back, no big loss.”
Changmin pulls a plastic baggy out of his bag, a little smaller than a sandwich-size ziplock one and lets Jaejoong drop the hairs into it before he carefully writes out Jaejoong’s name in big, thick letters. The smell of permanent marker is pungent and Changmin wrinkles his nose in annoyance, putting everything away save one photo of the little girl. “Keep it,” he says, “she might be yours.”
Jaejoong holds onto a corner of the picture with his thumb and index fingers, rubbing at the wax of the photo before he places it back down on the table and nods his head in thanks. She’s got dark brown eyes and the most adorable smile but then again, aren’t all kids cute when they’re young? It’d be unfortunate if it was one of theirs and ugly.
Clearing his throat, Changmin shifts on the couch and the leather squeaks as he packs up everything again. He stares at Jaejoong for a second, head tilted as he takes in the weariness in Jaejoong’s body, the tell-tale wrinkles that frame Jaejoong’s eyes and for just a second, smiles, finding it funny in a way that his Hyung has aged since they last saw each other. It’s only natural and Changmin expected it of course but still, to see that even the most ethereal of them has aged and shrunk reminds Changmin of how normal and human Jaejoong can be sometimes.
“Well, thanks,” he says after a short pause, “I’ll be going now.”
Jaejoong sees him to the door and for a minute, as he stands by the entryway and watches Changmin kneeling on the floor to put on his shoes, he feels like offering his dongsaeng to stay for a beer or some soju but the moment passes as soon as Changmin stands. He towers over him still, taller than Jaejoong even remembers. “You’ve grown,” he says stupidly, staring at the tips of Changmin’s hair.
That earns him a wry smile but it’s a smile nonetheless, “Honestly, I think you’ve just shrunk. Bye.”
It’s only as Jaejoong’s eating a pasta dinner for one much later that night that he realizes throughout the entirety of their conversation in the afternoon, not once had Changmin addressed him by name.
- - -
It’s not hard for Changmin to locate Junsu. Out of the five of them, the older man is the only one still singing and performing for the public. Years after the unofficial disbandment and Junsu’s still booking musical stages. The demand isn’t nearly as high as when he was twenty-four but if there’s one thing that Junsu’s always been the most careful with, it’s his voice.
Changmin gets himself a ticket for an afternoon show, sitting in the back right by the doors so to make a quick exit after the last act. It’s slightly boring if only because Changmin’s not as enamored with Junsu’s voice as the rest of the audience seems to be. He thinks it’s sort of like listening to an old record. Junsu’s voice is as pleasing as it always was but the appeal had faded for Changmin somewhere between their second and third years together in the same group.
“I need to talk to you,” Changmin says when Junsu exits the building long after the play has ended. Changmin can’t quite tell if Junsu is surprised or not, having always found it hard to judge what Junsu was feeling even when they were as close as brothers. “It’s important,” he adds.
Junsu doesn’t hesitate, looking at his manager before beckoning for Changmin towards his car. “In private?”
Changmin shrugs, “Preferably.”
“My studio is only a few minutes away, we’ll go there then.”
As Changmin gets into the car, he’s reminded of how well he used to get along with Junsu. The older man, despite having the image of a silly fool, always knew when to get serious and when to crack a joke. He appreciates it even as they’re riding in the car towards Junsu’s private studio.
“It’s nice,” is all Changmin says before he gets straight to the point, having very little interest in Junsu’s musical equipment, “there’s a kid at my house right now and apparently, one of us is the father. I’m here to get some DNA.”
And as if this was a request for a tissue to blow his nose with, Junsu nods his head and disappears into what seems to be the bathroom, coming out seconds later with a jar of cotton swabs. He opens his mouth and swipes, handing the used Q-tip to Changmin. “That good enough?”
“Yeah, great.”
Changmin stares for a bit and realizing that his task has been fulfilled, starts to head for the door but he’s stopped short by Junsu.
“The paternity test will come back negative. There’s no way that’s my kid,” Junsu tells him.
“Results will be out in ten days,” Changmin says, “if she’s not yours, you won’t have to see me again.”
“I gave you my cheek swab, test it if you wish. I assume the company is the one fronting the bill so it doesn’t matter to me whether you test it or not, I’m just telling you that she isn’t mine. I’m not stupid enough to mess around and get a girl pregnant.”
Changmin wants so badly to tell Junsu that mistakes happen all the time and that people fuck up even when they don’t plan on it but he doesn’t. There wouldn’t be a point in telling Junsu all of that, it’s something they all live with now. Anyway, Junsu’s right. It’s not that he’s not stupid enough or less horny than they were, it’s just that if he did mess up, his father would’ve already taken care of the situation before it even became one.
“Good for you,” Changmin says, “guess I won’t be seeing you then.”
And Changmin leaves, realizing on the way home that he much prefers the awkwardness of Jaejoong’s visit to the business-like attitude that Junsu had. It’s hard to believe that he once thought of Junsu as one of his closest friends. Seems as if people do change, after all.
- - -
“Oppa!” Soo-yeon screams loudly from the living room, doing it again a mere thirty seconds later when Changmin doesn’t manage to make it from the kitchen in a satisfactory time, “Oppa! She’s hungry! What are you doing in there??”
“It takes more than a minute to heat up rice, just so you know,” Changmin replies grumpily, “besides, she’s always hungry. And she’s always crying. Just stick a pacifier in her mouth and she’ll shut up.”
His sister scowls at him, grabbing the plate of food out of his hand to feed Mi-sun. “She’s not a baby, Oppa. She’s three years old already. You can’t stick a pacifier in her mouth and ask her to shut up.”
“She still sucks on her thumb like a baby and she hasn’t said a single word since she’s gotten here. All she does is cry for her mother who abandoned her,” Changmin replies.
Soo-yeon glares at him, “Mom said not to use that word around her. We don’t know what’s going on yet and if she’s not speaking, it’s because she’s not comfortable with us yet. Just so you know, your attitude isn’t helping. I pray that the kid isn’t yours then, poor Mi-sun, what would she do with an irresponsible father like you?”
Changmin falls backwards on the couch, sprawled out all over it as he sighs, “Poor me,” he says quietly, “what would I do with a three year old child?”
- - -
Yoochun turns out to be the hardest to locate and it’s not because he’s disappeared off the face of the earth but simply because Changmin has no idea which continent he’s actually on. Yoochun had gone into business in the years following the unofficial split of the group and after his acting days were over with, he decided (and very wisely so) to step foot into the world of gourmet cuisine. Last Changmin had heard about him, Yoochun was doing fairly well for himself with a string of restaurants under his name but the problem still is that Changmin has no clue if Yoochun’s in America, Europe or Asia. It wouldn’t do to fly around on an airplane for hours aimlessly and so he’s forced to admit that he needs some help.
“You need more than some help,” Jaejoong says with a knowing smirk on his face, standing by the doorway and staring at Changmin, “you have no clue where Yoochun is right now, do you? Did your mother tell you to come or was it one of your sisters?”
Changmin scowls back, fighting the urge to give into Jaejoong’s cajoling, “Are you going to tell me or not?”
Jaejoong rolls his eyes and takes a step back, opening the door a bit wider so Changmin can enter, “Get in, I have a number that you can call.” As Changmin enters, toeing off his shoes carefully, Jaejoong locks up, “It wouldn’t kill you to admit that you need my help though,” he mutters under his breath, “at least a please or a thank you would be nice.”
“Would you please give me a number so I can reach him? Thank you so much,” Changmin says, the sarcasm so thick that Jaejoong doesn’t even bother with a reply, waving his hand in the general direction of the couch so Changmin will know to sit.
Jaejoong’s cat comes meowing and Changmin suppresses a shiver when she rubs against his leg and sniffs at his socks once again. Changmin wiggles his toes to get her to stop, knowing for certain this time that the socks are fresh and clean.
“Why does your cat like to smell my toes?” he asks when Jaejoong returns with a cell phone in hand, “my socks are clean so you can tell her to stop.”
“She’s a cat…” Jaejoong says, trailing off as he concentrates on searching through his electronic phonebook, “for one thing, she wouldn’t understand it if I told her that they’re clean and for another, all she does is laze around and sniff at unfamiliar things. She’s a cat, not a baby and speaking of that, how’s our Mi-sun doing?”
“We’re not speaking of her,” Changmin says, “and she’s doing fine. Also, she’s not ours, she belongs to someone out of the five of us but that doesn’t make her ours.”
“Touchy,” Jaejoong says under his breath, scribbling a number down on a piece of scrap paper, “here, call and see if Yoochun’s there or not. The number is old so I’m not sure if it’s still in use but it was his home number so it should be working.”
Changmin pockets the piece of paper, slipping it into one of the folds of his wallet, “Old number?”
Jaejoong shoves his phone into his pocket and shrugs, “I haven’t spoken to Yoochun in a few years now. He’s busy, I’m busy, things happens.”
Changmin wants to ask but he reminds himself that none of this matters to him anymore. He doesn’t care about Jaejoong or about Yoochun, in fact, all he wants to do is go home and sleep without having to wake to the annoying cries of the kid. “Thanks for the number,” he says, getting ready to leave again.
“Hey, have you spoken to Yunho yet?” Jaejoong asks as Changmin’s tying his laces.
“He’s next on the list,” Changmin says after a slight pause, fingers working deftly as he speaks, “why?”
Jaejoong taps his fingers against the door and shakes his head a little, “Just don’t be an ass to him, he’s going through a tough enough time as it is.”
“What are you talking about?” Changmin asks, brows furrowed as he turns around to stare at Jaejoong, “why would I be an ass to him?”
“I’m just saying that you should exercise a bit more tact when you break all of this to him, alright? The last thing he needs right now is for you to storm in there like you did in here, rude and in a hissy fit.”
Changmin can tell Jaejoong just wants him to ask about why he should be more tactful and he can just tell from the way Jaejoong phrased his sentences that he wants him to ask about what happened to Yunho but he’s not going to be baited. “For the record, I’m not being rude, I’m trying to get all this done so I can send it into the labs but if my promptness rubs you the wrong way, I apologize. I’ll be seeing Yunho tomorrow and I’ll try my best to be less, ‘hissy’ about it.”
Jaejoong watches as Changmin exits his apartment, “I’m being serious, Changmin. Don’t be like this to him and you know exactly what I mean.”
By the time Changmin turns to fix Jaejoong with a look, the door has already been closed and as Jaejoong’s words replay in his head, he wonders for a very brief moment, if he should’ve asked what Jaejoong meant after all. Maybe, then he would’ve been a bit more prepared for what would happen next.
- - -
Yunho’s getting a divorce.
The moment Changmin finds out is also the same moment in which his feet suddenly start to move on their own, bringing him off the couch and to the shoe cabinet where his sneakers are so that he can get his shoes and leave. Bag in hand and socks crooked from how hard he shoved his feet into the sneakers, Changmin mumbles something under his breath about a sudden appointment with a doctor that he’d forgotten about, running off as soon as he gets the doorknob to work in his favor.
Yunho’s getting a divorce and Changmin finds that he’s incapable of looking his ex-boyfriend in the eye long enough to offer his condolences, mainly because Yunho’s always been good at catching him when he lies.
- - -
“You ass! You could’ve told me!” Changmin hisses angrily in Jaejoong’s living room.
Jaejoong would be amused if Changmin weren’t so annoyed right now. Instead, he finds himself just a bit smug as he watches Changmin try to wear a hole out on his carpet. “But I did tell you. I told you to be more aware of yourself and I told you that Yunho was going through a tough time, didn’t I? You were the one that didn’t bother to ask why. Besides, it’s been all over the news the past couple of days. Don’t you read the news or hell, don’t you even watch TV? All the media outlets have been covering this topic.”
Changmin’s fury dissipates when he hears that, able to imagine just how crazy the media has been on Yunho these past few days. Yunho doesn’t deserve any of this. “Why?” He asks quietly, “I mean-,” he cuts himself, unsure of how to ask what he’s thinking.
Jaejoong narrows his eyes a little before shrugging, “You’re asking the wrong person,” he replies, “I found out on the news just like the rest of the Korean population. And that’s not exactly stuff that Yunho would give an interview about.”
“But it’s Yunho,” Changmin says quietly as he finally takes a seat on the couch, “he would never get a divorce. He wouldn’t give up on their marriage like that. He’s- he’s Yunho,” Changmin murmurs. He’s unable to explain why but the idea that Jung Yunho would get a divorce is so unlike him and so uncharacteristic of the man he once knew so well, that Changmin would honestly accept alien mindswap as an answer as to why this is happening.
“I don’t know,” Jaejoong repeats, staring at the off-white wall behind Changmin, “ask him yourself.”
Changmin shakes his head, fingers entwined, “Don’t know how to,” he finally admits. “Don’t want to either. You were his best friend, don’t you have any idea?”
Jaejoong smiles and gazes at Changmin with something very much like pity, “And you were the one he loved the most, don’t you have any idea?”
- - -
It takes two days for Changmin to summon up the courage to go back to Yunho’s house in Gwangju. Yunho never moved, not even after all he made enough money to buy the entire block three times over. “I like the ambience and it’s just home, you know, Changmin-ah?” and Changmin would say he understood when he never really did. Home is for comfort and Yunho’s house was old, creaky and not appealing to him. Changmin never voiced those opinions out loud of course and he had merely chalked it up to another difference in opinion they had but now, as he stands outside of the door to Yunho’s, he finally thinks he understands how much “just home” meant to Yunho after all.
“Hey, Hyung,” Changmin says as Yunho opens the door, eyeing him wearily for a second before he greets him with a smile. “Can I come in?”
“Sure,” Yunho says, “how was the doctor’s the other day?” he asks just to be polite.
“Great,” Changmin mumbles, “got some test results back,” he says.
“Drink?” Yunho says, handing over a familiar mug that’s filled with mostly lukewarm coffee, “a pack of sugar and some milk- if that’s still how you take your coffee.”
“Yeah, that’s perfect, thanks.” Changmin worries on the corner of his lip, a nervous habit that Yunho was aware of then and aware of now. Changmin blurts it out in the end, nearly knocking over the cup of coffee in his hand, “Sorry about the divorce. I um- I’m really sorry.”
Yunho stays silent for the longest time, staring off into space before he shakes his head and offers Changmin another smile. “Pathetic isn’t it? Nearly forty and freshly divorced.”
“Not at all,” Changmin says quietly, wanting so badly to ask why but unable to ask. “Do you need any help? With anything?”
“Nope, let’s be honest, we all saw it coming,” Yunho says with a light chuckle.
There’s a long, long pause and Changmin takes a sip of his coffee and then another, finishing the cup simply because he doesn’t know what to say. It’s been a few years since they last saw each other and it’s awkward. Things aren’t the way they used to be and as Changmin drums his fingers along his knee, he suddenly feels as if he’s sixteen again. He doesn’t like his own skin, doesn’t like the situation and just wants to get out of here.
Yunho seems to feel the same, beating him to it. “Changmin, we’re too old for this, okay? So why don’t you just tell me what you want from me so I can give it to you.”
“I don’t want anything,” Changmin says, “I just wanted to offer you some help so I came over,-”
“That’s not why you’re here. You didn’t even know about the divorce until I told you. So I’ll ask again, what is it that you want?”
This isn’t how it’s supposed to go. Changmin stares at Yunho, feeling that familiar urge to throw up, skin crawling as he gazes at a man that he respects more than anything and will always love. “There’s-,” Changmin stops himself and then shakes his head, “it’s nothing, nothing at all. Don’t worry about it, okay?” Changmin can just do the test with the other four’s DNA and if it isn’t theirs, then it will have to be Yunho’s. The older man has enough on his plate.
As Changmin’s leaving, he turns to offer his condolences again, this time much more prepared for the look that he expects Yunho to give him. Except, it’s not the look he’s expecting and when he sees how defeated and worn out Yunho looks, Changmin drops his bag and goes to give him a hug, wishing he could squeeze the sadness out of his Hyung’s body.
“You should’ve asked,” Yunho whispers as soon as Changmin’s close enough, “why didn’t you come to me first? I would’ve helped you, I wanted to help you.”
Changmin closes his eyes, slowly loosening his arms from around Yunho’s body to let them drop down, “Who told you?”
“I called the company about the divorce. Had to let them know what was going to happen since there’s no way I can deal with this shit storm on my own. They thought I already knew about the kid and asked me how the DNA collecting was going. Figured out then that that’s why you called earlier to ask if you could come over for a visit. Should’ve known you had a reason, you never did ask to talk if it weren’t for something important.”
“Yunho-,” Changmin says quietly, “I really am sorry. It’s just- I thought you had enough on your plate so I didn’t ask.”
“No, that’s why you didn’t ask just now but why didn’t you ask a week ago before all of this happened? Why didn’t you ask for my help then? Why am I the last to know about this? Last to be asked? I always told you, Changmin, all you have to do is ask for help and I’ll always give it to you but you never ask. You just don’t.”
Changmin doesn’t have a reply for that. No snarky response or bullshit answer. For the second time in his life, Changmin’s unable to say a word back to Yunho.
“I already swabbed and dropped it off at your house yesterday when you weren’t home. Soo-yeon said she’ll hold onto it. You didn’t have to come, I’m sorry for wasting your time and thanks for the sympathies.”
Changmin nods his head and leaves, feeling so odd as he walks down the steps and onto the sidewalk. The door closes behind him, clicks as its locked and Changmin doesn’t have to turn around to know that Yunho’s watching him from the window. If he wanted, he could go back inside, ask for help among other things but Yunho’s right, he never did then and he doesn’t now.
- - -
The invitation reaches Changmin weeks before he’s done with his service and to be honest, he can’t say that he’s all that surprised. Yunho had always said that he wanted to start a family by the age of thirty and by Changmin’s count, Yunho’s already a few years late on that goal of his.
The card is lovely, a delicate shade of cream with handwritten names and properly curled ribbons. Changmin knows that this was sent as a formality but he checks over the date anyway, smiling once he sees that the wedding is to be held just days before his release.
“Really couldn’t have waited?” Changmin says to no one in particular, checking off the box next to unable to attend before he slips it back into the pristine envelope and tosses it into the trash. There really isn’t a point for him to respond and he’s sure that Yunho doesn’t expect him to either. It had been his choice to end things just like it had been his choice in the beginning.
- - -
In the end, Changmin sends off all five vials of DNA samples in one of those standard brown manilla envelopes. He buys a calendar especially just to mark off the days until they’ll get the results back, using a vivid red Sharpie each time as if it would make the results come faster. He’s anxious and having Mi-sun running around his home with his sisters and mother cooing over he doesn’t make him feel any better.
Truth be told, he’s not ready for a child. Truth be told, he doesn’t know if he ever wants to have a child. Changmin’s always said that he wanted to have a family of his own but he realizes more and more these days that wanting to have a family doesn’t necessarily mean he’s ready to raise one.
part 2 here