When Yunho arrives at school the next day, he can’t find Jaejoong on the playground. He doesn’t know if Jaejoong just isn’t there yet or if maybe he’s hiding again to get away from the noise, but either way Yunho is disappointed. He wanted to play some more. But Hyojin is running another game of pirates on the play-structure and Yunho likes playing pirates so he doesn’t worry about it for long. He’s too busy being the lookout, climbing as high as he can without getting yelled at and watching the horizon for other ships to attack, calling down what he sees to First Mate Boah to tell Captain Hyojin so she can decide what to do.

By the time the teachers call them to come inside and start class, Yunho and the rest of Hyojin’s crew have fought a whole ship full of Imperial soldiers and stolen all their food and shiny things and are looking for a place to bury it all. Pleased with himself — he fought with three soldiers with guns and beat them all with only a sword — Yunho practically skips to the door to line up with the others.

“How come Hyojin always gets to be captain?” Youngwoon complains from behind him. “Aren’t we supposed to take turns?”

“Yeah, but Hyojin’s best at it,” Yunho says. He doesn’t mind Hyojin always being captain. She’s not afraid of a good fight and she’s always fair about listening to her crew’s ideas. He looks around, standing on his tiptoes to see if he can find Jaejoong in the line.

“What are you doing?” Youngwoon asks. “We’re moving.”

“Sorry,” Yunho says, turning to follow the line inside. “I was just looking.”

“Looking for what?” Youngwoon asks as they go to their cubbies to put away their jackets and switch their outside shoes for inside ones.

“Nevermind,” Yunho mumbles. “He’s not there anyway.”

“Oh.” Youngwoon stands from switching his shoes and offers his hands to Yunho. Yunho takes them and lets Youngwoon pull him up. “Yeah. It’s weird, Heechul not being here with us.”

Yunho blinks. Heechul isn’t who he was looking for. And Youngwoon isn’t really Yunho’s friend; he’s a year older and he can be really grouchy sometimes. But he was Heechul’s friend too and it suddenly makes Yunho feel closer to Youngwoon, knowing that they both miss him.

“Yeah,” he says. He scuffs a foot against the floor.

“Morning meeting’s starting,” Youngwoon says. He drops Yunho’s hands and walks towards the rug in the center room. Yunho starts to follow him, but Youngwoon squeezes in between Minwoo and Donghee. Yunho stops. Guess he isn’t sitting with Youngwoon today. He twists the hem of his tee-shirt and looks around. He still doesn’t see Jaejoong anywhere. Is he out sick? It’s only his second day.

Yunho sighs then heads over to an empty spot by Yoochun.

It’s not until after morning meeting when they all split up to go to their separate classrooms that Yunho finds Jaejoong. He’s already in their classroom, sitting at the same desk he did yesterday; all the way in back and all by himself again. He looks up as the others enter the class, his eyes wide and staring again. Yunho doesn’t think he looks afraid, exactly, but he doesn’t think he looks anything else either. He tries to catch Jaejoong’s eye, but it’s just like the day before. Jaejoong’s too busy watching everything to notice.

So Yunho grabs two pencils and two of the worksheets for their first lesson and walks to the back of the classroom. Halfway there, Jaejoong finally notices him and the wide eyes follow him all the way back until Yunho reaches the desk and slides into the seat next to him. Yunho smiles and holds out the extras.

Jaejoong stares at him. “What are you doing?” he asks.

Yunho frowns, not quite sure how to answer that question.

“You’ll need them,” he says. “For the lesson.” But Jaejoong is shaking his head.

“No. Why are you sitting here?”

“We don’t have assigned seats,” Yunho says, still not quite sure what Jaejoong is asking. “Or, do you not want me to?”

That would be sad, he thinks. They had fun coloring yesterday, didn’t they?

Jaejoong hesitates a moment, then looks away, shifting in his seat. He shrugs.

“It’s okay, I guess.”

He doesn’t sound very enthusiastic but Yunho beams at him anyway. He holds out the paper and pencil again and this time Jaejoong takes it.

Miss Seung starts class, telling them all good morning and then taking attendance. Then she picks up the piece of purple chalk (Yunho loves that they have colored chalk. Sometimes, if they’re lucky, Miss Seung lets them draw on the chalkboard with it) and starts to write numbers on the board. As she does it, she makes them all count with her. One, two, three…all the way up to twenty. Then she picks up her pointer stick and starts pointing to numbers for them to name, first in order, and then more randomly.

Yunho tries and he’s getting better, but sometimes he still gets confused after ten, especially when Miss Seung starts going faster.

After they’ve finished practicing the numbers, Miss Seung tells them to copy the numbers down on their papers and then try some of the counting problems on the bottom half of the sheet.

“Whoa!” Yunho says, watching as Jaejoong writes beside him. “Your writing’s so neat. Mine’s still all messy.”

Jaejoong scuffs a foot against the ground and doesn’t look at him.

“My noona taught me,” he says after a moment.

“Really?” says Yunho, tucking his feet up under himself so he can lean up on the desk to see better. Jaejoong looks up at him, another one of those not-quite-afraid-not-quite-anything-else looks. He nods.

“She likes to read with me,” he says, looking back at his paper. “And she helps me with my writing.”

Yunho looks at the neat lines and the curves that only wobble a little bit. And Jaejoong isn’t looking at him but his pencil isn’t moving and Yunho thinks he can see the other boy peeking up at him so he makes his smile big.

“You’re good,” he says. “I try to be neat, but it takes so long. I don’t like to go slow.”

Jaejoong doesn’t answer for a minute then, “Slow is boring,” he agrees, and his voice is quiet, like yesterday. But he’s talking. And Yunho definitely thinks it’s a nice voice. “But faster is messy and then no one can know what it says. Noona says faster can be later.”

His pencil starts to move again, slow but steady, and Yunho watches in fascination.

“Yunho,” comes Miss Seung’s voice, quiet but firm. “Please sit in the chair properly and do your work.”

Yunho looks up to find her standing beside their desk and he ducks his head and sits back on his heels.

“Sorry, teacher,” he says. It’s not the first time she’s had to tell him to sit still or sit properly, and his mother tells him all the time at home, too. And he tries, he really does. It’s just hard and then sometimes he forgets.

He pulls his own paper back towards himself and starts again, trying to make his numbers more neat. Slow is boring, really boring. But he thinks his writing is a little neater.

By the time he finishes copying the numbers, Jaejoong is already on the problems, counting quietly on his fingers.

“I only have ten,” he says, staring from his paper to his fingers.

“Huh?” says Yunho.

“Fingers,” Jaejoong says. “I only have ten.”

Yunho stares at him. “But — aren’t you supposed to?”

“But eight and seven is more than that.”

Oh. He looks at his own paper, and there is a problem that says to do eight plus seven and that is definitely more than ten. He thinks for a moment, then says, “What if we use mine too? If you make seven fingers and I make eight fingers, then we’ll know how many it is, right?”

“Okay,” Jaejoong says, turning to face Yunho and holding up his hands, counting out seven on his fingers. Yunho puts down his pencil and counts eight on his own hands. Then they count together, and they have to take turns pointing and each of them says the wrong number once or twice and then they have to start all over again, but eventually they know that eight and seven makes fifteen.

Yunho picks his pencil back up and carefully writes down the answer. “Let’s see if there’s more that are more than ten.”

Jaejoong nods. And he’s not smiling. And he’s not talking very much. But he’s not ignoring Yunho or telling him to leave him alone, either.

When Miss Seung wraps up their lesson, telling them all to put their names on their worksheets and turn them in so they can go eat snack, Yunho practically bolts from his seat. They’re not supposed to run in the classroom, not when it’s not free play, but he can walk fast when he wants to and he’s hungry. Miss Seung always says it hasn’t been that much time, but breakfast always feels so long ago.

As fast as he tries to be, he still has to wait in line behind some of his classmates to turn in his sheet. He bounces up and down on his toes impatiently, peering over Daewon’s head as if that might make things go faster, but maybe if he stops seeing the line and then looks again, it will get shorter.

“Yunho, stop,” Seongja complains from behind him. “You’ll step on me.”

“Sorry,” Yunho tells her. He tries to hold still. Seongja is fussy. If she gets mad enough, she’ll hit him for it and then tell a teacher on him. Usually nothing bad happens, Yunho thinks Miss Seung understands that sometimes Seongja just gets mad, but he still always feels like he was in trouble. It’s not a feeling he likes, so he tries extra hard not to make Seongja mad.

While he waits, he looks around for Jaejoong. He thought the other boy was behind him, assumed he would follow Yunho to the line, but Daewon is in front of him and Seongja is behind him so he doesn’t know where Jaejoong is.

Yunho spots him after a moment, standing all the way at the end of the line. His head is down, looking at the floor, so Yunho can’t see if his eyes are still big, but he’s fidgeting with his sheet a little and every time one of the other kids walks by on the way to the door, he turns to look before dropping his gaze to the floor again. Yunho wonders if maybe Jaejoong doesn’t like waiting either and he thinks for a moment about waving him up to stand with Yunho, but they’re not supposed to skip ahead in line. And if it was Daewon or Yoochun behind him he could maybe get away with it, but not if it’s Seongja. The only universal exception to the line-skipping rule is Junsu, who always skips to stand with Junho, even if it means going backwards. But that’s only because they’re twins.

Yunho sighs and turns around again and tries to wait patiently.

Snack, when Yunho finally gets to turn in his sheet and go to the table, turns out to be sliced up melon and mat tang. Yunho grins and races around to where there are a couple of open seats, grabbing some napkins and a little tray from one of the other teachers as he goes. He puts the tray on the table and pulls one of the larger snack trays towards him. He’s not totally sure he’s allowed to have some of both, but he can’t decide which looks better so he takes some anyway, carefully spooning out melon and then fried sweet potato into little piles on his tray. Then he notices Daewon coming over to sit.

“No!” he says, dropping the serving spoon back on the big tray and scrambling to place both hands on the seat next to his. “Jaejoong’s sitting here.”

Daewon blinks at him. “Why?” he says.

“Because,” says Yunho. Jaejoong can’t sit all by himself again. That’s no fun.

“But he’s not here,” Daewon argues.

Yunho glares stubbornly at him. “He’s coming.” He glances back across the table. Jaejoong is at the back of the crowd again. He looks like maybe he doesn’t want to be there, like maybe it’s too many people, but the teachers are herding the group forward anyway. And Jaejoong is little; small like Minwoo is small. Too small to push back against a crowd like that. But Minwoo always knows where he’s going and he’s good at using his size to slip through the other kids. And Jaejoong just looks lost.

“See?” Yunho says to Daewon. Then he raises one hand and waves. “Jaejoong! Jaejoong, come sit. There’s sweet potato!”

Jaejoong’s wide eyes click to Yunho and Yunho smiles big at him. Jaejoong doesn’t smile back, but Yunho thinks maybe he looks relieved and he does come over, hurrying away from the others. As he slides into the seat Yunho saved him, Daewon huffs and goes off to look for somewhere else to sit. Probably Yunho should feel bad about making him mad, but he’s too busy smiling and pushing one of napkins over to Jaejoong.

“Melon or sweet potato,” he asks, curious. “Which do you prefer? I like both,” he adds. “Melon is good, but potato makes me more full.”

“Melon,” Jaejoong says after a moment. “It’s juicy.” He picks at his napkin at little, scrunching up one of the corners, then says, “I don’t have a tray.”

“Oh,” Yunho says. He thinks for a moment, then says, “You could go get one. I’ll save your seat.”

Jaejoong looks around the room with his wide eyes, staring at all the other kids between them and the teacher handing out trays.

“Or you can share mine,” Yunho offers. He likes that idea better anyway. He pushes his tray between them, then takes a potato and sticks it in his mouth. Jaejoong’s eyes flick to his face and it’s impossible to smile around the sticky sweet potato, but Yunho tries anyway, nodding at him. Jaejoong reaches out and takes a piece of melon and bites it in half. As he chews, his eyes go back to watching the room.

“Is it too noisy again?” Yunho asks. He wants to know why Jaejoong keeps making a face like that.

Jaejoong doesn’t answer at first, just sits eating his melon with his hand hovering by his mouth. Yunho takes another piece of potato.

“I don’t know anyone,” Jaejoong says at last.

“Oh,” Yunho says. And he gets it, he thinks. New places are scary, and making new friends is hard. Then he smiles again. “You know me,” he says.

Jaejoong doesn’t say anything. Takes another piece of melon. But his eyes are on the tray now instead of watching the room so much.

“Everyone’s nice,” Yunho tells him. “Well, not Seongja, always. Sometimes she gets mad. And sometimes the older kids can be bossy. But it’s okay. It’s fun.”

“It’s big,” Jaejoong says.

Yunho nods. He’s used to it, but he guesses it is big. It’s bigger than his apartment. And some of the toys are better.

“I like it,” he says. “There’s more things to play. Wanna do blocks after snack?” He grabs a piece of melon. The sweet potato is good, but it’s making him thirsty.

Jaejoong hesitates, tucking one leg up underneath him and winding the other around his chair leg. He reaches out and takes one of the pieces of potato.

“Okay,” he says.

Jaejoong likes towers. Yunho learns that when they go to play blocks after snack, because it’s what Jaejoong mostly makes. Towers, and also bridges. The towers aren’t that tall — Jaejoong seems to have a hard time keeping the blocks balanced — but that’s okay. It makes their project more interesting, Yunho thinks.

“What are we making?” Jaejoong asks, pausing on one of his towers and watching as Yunho adds some larger rectangular blocks to the edges.

“I don’t know,” says Yunho happily. “It could be anything. What do you think it is?”

“I don’t know,” Jaejoong says.

“There’s no wall,” Yunho says, thinking. “So probably not a castle.”

Jaejoong nods, but doesn’t say anything. He goes back to his tower and doesn’t look at Yunho.

“Maybe it’s a city!” Yunho says. “A big city with lots of buildings and people and things.”

“But—” Jaejoong hesitates and his lower lip into his mouth. Yunho looks at him curiously and waits. Jaejoong had good ideas yesterday when they colored. “But there’s caves,” Jaejoong says at last, pointing to one of his bridges. Or Yunho thought it was a bridge, but it kind of has a back so maybe Jaejoong is right. Maybe it’s a cave.

“Maybe it’s a old city,” Yunho says, thinking of the shows his mother watches sometimes, where buildings are sometimes part of the ground or made of rocks.

“It could be underwater,” Jaejoong suggests.

“Yeah!” Yunho agrees. That’s good. Underwater cities are always good, right? “Did it get flooded?”

Jaejoong shakes his head. “No,” he says. “It was on a island but then it sank.”

Yunho nods. “Cool.” He thinks of his finger-divers from yesterday. “Do mermaids live there now?”

Jaejoong nods. “Uh-huh,” Jaejoong says, and he sounds less hesitant now. Yunho grins and puts down some more blocks while he listens. “All the humans are gone so now there’s mermaids. They swim all over and keep fish as pets. But they keep getting eaten.”

“Oh. By what?”

Jaejoong frowns, his eyebrows furrowing as he thinks. “At first, humans, they think. People fishing. But it’s not actually.” He scans the bucket of blocks, then grabs a medium-sized red one and puts it in one of the larger caves.

“Agh! There’s a monster,” says Yunho.

“It’s got two faces,” Jaejoong says, taking some smaller, tube-shaped blocks and putting them on top of things. “You can’t sneak up on it.”

“And it probably sees in the dark,” Yunho says. That sounds like a thing a sea monster could do, especially one that lives in caves.

Jaejoong nods. “It can’t see when it’s light,” he decides. “So it only comes out at night, but it can smell everything.”

“Does it eat all the mermaids?” Yunho wonders.

“Not yet,” Jaejoong says. “But probably it will if it can. Especially little mermaids. Like babies.”

“Ah, that’s not good,” Yunho says. “The mermaids can’t keep living there if kids get eaten by a monster.” He takes some more of the tube-blocks and starts amassing a mermaid army. “They’d better kill it.”

“And eat it,” Jaejoong says. “It’s like an octopus, a little. So they can eat it if they can kill it.”

Yunho wrinkles his nose. He doesn’t like octopus. But he supposes the mermaids might. And, anyway, if the sea monster was going to eat them, why shouldn’t they eat it right back?

The mermaids are just about to go after the sea monster when Miss Seung calls for everyone to put away their games for class again. Jaejoong jumps, dropping the mermaid block he was holding and looking around at their teacher, startled. Yunho giggles. Did Jaejoong forget they were at school?

Jaejoong turns back to look at him at the sound. “What?” he demands. “What’s funny?”

Yunho opens his mouth to reply, but then he sees Junsu coming with Junho. He stands and moves out of the way, tugging Jaejoong’s shoulder to make him follow.

“Yaaaahhhh!” Junsu yells, spotting their city and rushing over. “Dinosaurs are attacking!” He kicks the city, knocking blocks all over everything and laughing.

“Junsu,” Miss Seung says, “playtime is over. Come and sit at your desk now.”

Junsu gives the blocks on last kick then hurries over to sit with his twin. Yunho kneels back down on the floor and starts picking up blocks. They have to clean up before class starts.

“It’s broken.”

Yunho looks up. Jaejoong’s eyes are wide again, but he doesn’t look afraid or lost. He looks upset.

“We have to clean up anyway,” Yunho points out. He always lets Junsu smash his buildings before clean up. They have to get put away anyway and it makes Junsu happy.

“He broke it,” Jaejoong says again. “We were playing and he broke it.” And now he doesn’t just sound upset. He sounds angry.

“Don’t be mad,” Yunho begs. They were just having fun. He doesn’t want Jaejoong to be mad. He reaches up and tugs at Jaejoong’s sleeve. “Jaejoong, don’t be mad. It’s okay.”

“But we were playing,” Jaejoong says again, kneeling slowly down beside Yunho. “It was ours. How come he can just come smash it?”

“Junsu always breaks things,” Yunho says, putting more blocks into the bucket. “Sometimes I go to the twins’ house to play and Junho and me just make things so Junsu can smash them.”

“He’s your friend?” Jaejoong asks.

Yunho shrugs. He likes the twins, but he’s not sure it counts as friends. He doesn’t play with them like he did with Heechul.

“They live close,” he explains. “Sometimes I play there when my umma has to work.” He shrugs again. “Junsu just likes to break things.”

“Oh,” Jaejoong says quietly. He reaches out and picks up a block. “But…but we made the city.”

Yunho turns to look at him. Usually, when Junsu breaks things he shouldn’t, people get mad, or they get sad. Yunho knows because when it happens, they either start yelling at Junsu or sometimes they cry. And Yunho understands that; when you work really hard on something and someone else comes along and ruins it, that’s not fair, and he thought that Jaejoong was going to be mad, and maybe also sad a little, only maybe that was wrong because Jaejoong isn’t yelling or crying. Instead, he’s just sitting there, holding the red block that was the sea monster and staring at it.

When Heechul used talking about leaving, going to a new school for big kids, he talked about being nervous. And about being excited. He wondered if the playground would be cooler than the one they had and if the school lunches would be okay. He talked about being scared he’d get lost in a bigger school and about if the homework would be hard and about if any of his friends from preschool would be at the same school as him. And Yunho had sat there and not known what to do.

“You’re leaving,” he remembers saying once. “It’s not fair.” He’d thought Heechul would understand even if he wasn’t saying it very clearly, because Heechul was always pretty good at understanding. But all Heechul had said was, “You’ll graduate in a little, don’t worry.”

And Yunho remembers feeling mad and sad, but he also remembers feeling something else. Something worse. Because Heechul never said anything about missing him. And something about the look on Jaejoong’s face reminds him of that other feeling.

He reaches out and takes Jaejoong’s hand.

“It’s okay,” he says. “We can build it more again later.”

Jaejoong freezes and his eyes snap to where Yunho’s fingers are curled around his and Yunho wonders suddenly if maybe that was wrong. If maybe Jaejoong is like Woosung, one of the older kids who doesn’t like to be touched, and Yunho wonders if he should let go. But then, very quietly, Jaejoong asks, “Promise?”

Yunho nods and smiles big. “Promise,” he says.

Jaejoong’s eyes go up to his face and for once they’re not wide and watching everything. Instead they’re narrow and focused only on Yunho. Then he holds up his other hand.

“Pinky-promise,” he says, and Yunho frowns.

“What’s that?”

“My noona says when you make a pinky-promise then you can’t break it,” Jaejoong says.

“Oh,” says Yunho. He’s never heard of that before, he thought all promises you didn’t break. And he doesn’t think Heechul ever mentioned it. But maybe Heechul didn’t know. “Okay.” He holds up his own free hand and Jaejoong winds their pinky fingers together.

“Promise?” he says again, and Yunho grins.

“Promise.”

“Yunho, Jaejoong,” says Miss Seung from the other side of the room, “finish putting your things away and come sit down.”

Yunho looks up. Oops. Everyone else is waiting for them.

“Okay, teacher,” he says, gently tugging his hands back and starting to pick up blocks again. “Sorry.”

They clean up quickly, even though Junsu kicked some of the blocks pretty far. Yunho collects the scattered ones while Jaejoong puts everything else back in the block bucket. Then they pick up the bucket together to put it back on the shelf and Yunho leads the way back to their desk in the corner.

And Jaejoong still doesn’t smile. And he still doesn’t talk that much. But his eyes are less big and when Yunho leans over to see what he’s doodling on his worksheet he doesn’t flinch either. And when Miss Seung scolds again, telling Yunho to sit properly in his chair, it’s Jaejoong, not Yunho, who scoots his chair a little closer so Yunho can still see.

Probably it’s not much, but it makes Yunho happy anyway. He smiles.

--

A/N: okay, so we majored in psych in college, but child psych was never our area of focus, so though we are doing some research to help, this is still quite challenging and we're still figuring it out. and we've no beta on this piece. so our apoligies if the boys are a little inconsistent (especially in their speech patterns. remembering how to speak five-year-old might actually be the most difficult part of this).