When the first knock comes—an angry banging through the thin walls from the apartment to the left side of Jongin’s—it’s barely half past seven in the evening on a Saturday and Yixing’s only been crying for a measly fifteen minutes.

A second knock comes from the same side some ten or so minutes later, after it becomes clear that Jongin’s a complete failure of a father and doesn’t know how to quiet his tiny baby down. Yixing is four months old and Jongin loves his son more than he loves his own life, but he hasn’t gotten a decent sleep in weeks and he doesn’t know what he’ll do to his rude neighbor if the lady knocks one more time. In any event he can’t be held accountable if he reacts badly.

He really has to pee—has had to since before Yixing started to wail—but he knows that if he puts his son down then Yixing will really start to scream. Jongin’s tried everything he can think of, but at the end of the day he doesn’t have a woman’s chest and he doesn’t have the ability of a new mother’s body to automatically produce food at the first sound of a baby’s cry. He doesn’t want to be bitter and angry toward Yixing’s absent mother, doesn’t want the negative vibes to affect Yixing, but it’s hard not to despise someone who went to sleep next to him like every other night and then was gone the next morning when he woke up. They weren’t married but they had a child together, for god’s sake, and Jongin has been asking himself constantly since she left why that wasn’t enough for her. Why Yixing wasn’t enough.

There’s a third knock, on Jongin’s door this time, and he props Yixing up against his shoulder to be held with one hand so he can grab the broom from the bathroom with the other. He opens the door like that, the perfect image of a Spartan dad with a makeshift weapon held out from his body in his best effort of protection for his son, but the person waiting for his attention in the hallway is not the middle-aged spinster who lives to his left. Instead Jongin looks down a little to meet the eyes of the man who teaches music at a retirement home during the day and at night moonlights as the live show at the little bar down the street.

“Byun Baekhyun-ssi?” Jongin says the other man’s name like a question. Baekhyun raises a curious and amused eyebrow at the broomstick still held protectively in front of Jongin and Yixing and Jongin coughs awkwardly before lowering it and attempting—badly—to hide it behind his back.

Yixing cries, like Yixing always seems to cry, and once the broom is gone Baekhyun’s expression changes to one of utter sympathy.

“I couldn’t help overhearing,” Baekhyun begins slowly, not wanting to offend.

Jongin’s face falls. “Sorry,” he apologizes. He drops the broom to the floor behind him and shifts Yixing slightly so the child’s being held by both of Jongin’s hands again. “Sorry.”

At that Baekhyun looks absolutely horrified and he waves his hands frantically in front of his face. “No, no! Don’t worry about it! He’s a baby and baby’s cry. It’s fine. My parents had a ‘surprise’ a couple of years ago and my little brother basically did nothing but cry for at least the first six months of his life.” He’s rambling, probably because he feels bad about showing up at Jongin’s door like this in the first place, and it’s nice for Jongin to hear that at least one person in the world doesn’t automatically hate his baby just because Yixing always cries. Still, he can’t help waiting for the inevitable “It’s just that…” from Baekhyun to signal that just because he understands that babies cry doesn’t mean that he’s okay with the sound ruining his Saturday night plans.

Jongin tenses when the “It’s just that…” comes, and Yixing chokes on his own snot as he does his best to make his discomfort with the tightness in Jongin’s hold extremely clear to anyone with working ears in a 50 meter radius.

“It’s just that,” Baekhyun says, “my little brother would only stop crying when my mother or I sang to him. Have you tried that?”

Actually, no, Jongin hasn’t. And he’s surprised enough at the unexpected turn in the conversation that he’s not even embarrassed to admit to the building’s resident singer that he can’t, in fact, sing. Baekhyun tries to tell him that it’s the thought that counts and that babies don’t care about tone or pitch or stuff like that, but then when Jongin lets out a few lines of a currently popular song, Yixing screams louder and Baekhyun grimaces. The smaller man lets out a tiny, apologetic laugh, then says “May I?” and holds out his hands for Yixing.

Jongin wants to consider this offer, at least for a moment, but he doesn’t get the chance to before the lady next door pokes her head out into the hallway and rudely tells them to get back inside before she calls the cops on Yixing for disrupting the peace.

“He’s just a baby!” Baekhyun surprises Jongin by shouting back at her. She sets bolt on her door and makes to march out of her apartment and right toward them, so Jongin doesn’t even think, he just grabs the other man by the sleeve and drags him into his apartment, shutting the door firmly behind him as he hears the neighbor lady reenter her own apartment and yell at him through their shared wall.

Baekhyun takes this all in stride and even flips the woman off after checking to make sure that the way Jongin’s holding Yixing has the baby facing away from him. Jongin appreciates the care—and the gesture.

“May I?” Baekhyun repeats after a beat, turning toward Jongin and holding out his hands again. This time Jongin gives Yixing to Baekhyun’s hold willingly and, when Yixing doesn’t stop crying but doesn’t immediately wail louder either, escapes to use the bathroom.

He makes his way back into the apartment’s tiny living room a couple of minutes later and finds Baekhyun lying on the loveseat with his head propped up on the arm rest and his feet dangling over the edge because the couch is too short, even for him. Yixing is curled up on Baekhyun’s chest, his head tucked under Baekhyun’s chin so that he can feel the soothing vibrations on both his belly and his forehead as Baekhyun softly sings him a lullaby.

It’s really an adorable sight and Jongin realizes that, for the first time in what’s now probably an hour, Yixing’s not making any noise. In fact, the only sound in the room is Baekhyun’s gentle voice; even the neighbor’s stopped berating Jongin for his son’s tears.

“You’re a lifesaver,” Jongin whispers, unwilling to disturb the peacefully resting Yixing and not wanting to disrupt the strange spell Baekhyun’s cast over the room either.

Baekhyun shushes him with a finger to his lips and Jongin subconsciously mirrors the movement, to which Baekhyun breaks into a smile and winks at him, all the while steadfastly maintaining the melody or the rhythm of his soothing song. Jongin tiptoes toward Baekhyun and his baby, takes a seat on the floor with his back resting against the same couch where the other two lay.

The last thing Jongin remembers is the warmth of delicate fingers as they card through his hair, and he falls asleep like that, listening to Baekhyun’s voice sing him and Yixing into dreamland.