It starts with a word.
Hyung.
Changmin rarely uses it. Even when he was a cute innocent maknae with four older brothers, he rarely used it. And now, with only Yunho left? He uses it even less.
But then something changes. Yunho doesn’t notice it at first, too caught up in his pain and his loss that he forgets he still has the baby of the group with him. But Changmin remembers. He knows. He watches from afar, feeling angry and hurt himself, wanting to be comforted. Needing to be comforted. There’s no Junsu to tease. No Yoochun to eat and joke around with at everyone’s expense. No Jaejoong to feed him, although he will never admit that he secretly likes being fed by the man.
They one have each other now. The leader and the maknae.
The first time he says it, the word is foreign on his lips. So foreign he visibly cringes when it slips off his tongue, stumbling over it, coughing to hide his embarrassment.
But Yunho doesn’t notice. He’s too busy staring at a half empty bottle of soju, sitting in their empty dorm, while Changmin tries to coax him to eat something.
The next few times he says it, the word rolls off his tongue a little easier and it gives him a strange comfort when he says it. It is still awkward, and unnatural, but he doesn’t cringe anymore.
And still Yunho doesn’t notice.
Time passes and Changmin’s hurt turns into anger, but he never stops saying it. He doesn’t call Yunho by name anymore. Since it’s just the two of them, grunts suffice. That word that gives him comfort also makes him angry. He stays out of the dorm as much as he can, preferring the company of the other seniors rather than his own group member. The only one left. He sees Yunho during practice and all other times where they have to be together, which in actuality is too numerous to count, but in his spare time, he disappears.
One day he comes home to find the dorm a mess, and Yunho looking frazzled in the middle of it, supposedly trying to find their schedule and the list of interview questions they will be asked on the three different shows they will be filming tomorrow. The schedule and list that Changmin had pinned neatly on the noticeboard in the hallway outside their bedrooms. Yunho is cute in his rumpled state, hair sticking out in every direction, mouth pouty and defiant when Changmin rips the documents he had been looking for from the board and throws it at his head.
In his anger over the mess, he shouts the word. The word that gives him comfort. The shocked expression on Yunho’s face, mouth parted, lips wet and red from him chewing on them as he searched, gives him a sense of satisfaction, even more than the feeling he gets after storming out of their shared space and slamming the door behind him.
Yunho doesn’t come after him. Not that he expects him to. He sits in the Super Junior dorm, mindlessly playing some random game with Kyuhyun that he is barely paying attention to. He doesn’t understand what has changed, if anything even has. He tried calling Hyukjae and Donghae, hyung, and they both stared at him weirdly. That sense of comfort isn’t there. And yet, even when he is furious with Yunho, and he shouts the word in a fit of anger, his heart says that it is right. He doesn’t understand. Or maybe, he doesn’t want to understand.
Then one day, the maknae falls sick.
They have been worked so hard, and it is winter and the cold finally catches up to the young man. He is curled up in his bed, body wracked with shivers as he shakes through the ironic chill of a very high fever. It happens to coincide with a rare midweek break, and so no one seems him in his pathetic state. No one knows he is in the dorm, because he told everyone he’d gone home. He pulls the covers up even more, but finds that he is unable to get warm. The cold is deep in his body, touching his soul, and for the first time in a long time, he cries.
