“Hyukkie, before we leave we need to – Sanghyuk, what are you doing?”

Hakyeon frowns from where he’s poked his head into the bedroom, and the rest of him follows quickly inside as he comes in to see why Sanghyuk is staring at a Wonsik that should already be awake and mobile.

“Hyukkie, if you don’t wake him up now we’re all going to be late. What are you looking at?”

Sanghyuk simply gestures to the unconscious corpse on the bed and Hakyeon has to stop and contemplate as well, because – well, Wonsik. His head is half underneath his pillow and one arm and a leg are both hanging at strange angles out of bed, the icing on the cake being one foot missing a sock; having mysteriously parted ways sometime during the night. And he’s still snoring.

Sanghyuk and Hakyeon stare in intrigued silence like how a scientist would stare through their microscope at a very interesting bacterium.

“How is that comfortable?” Hakyeon asks finally, fascinated despite himself. “At least he didn’t fall out of bed again, I guess.”

Sanghyuk makes a face at having been jolted awake more than once by the surprisingly loud sound of Wonsik rolling off the bed and thumping onto the floor in the middle of the night – still totally asleep. Jaehwan had joked that they need to install a baby-proof barrier to keep him rolling off the bed just like a little child.

“Wake him,” Hakyeon gives himself a little shake to focus once more, giving Sanghyuk an authoritative squeeze. “Now. He’s got less than twenty minutes to shower and get changed.”

Hakyeon leaves and Sanghyuk gets to work.

First comes the jostling and jiggling – shaking Wonsik by the shoulder back and forth and calling his name in a mantra to draw him out of the deepest level of sleep and prepare him through the haze of unconsciousness for more drastic measures. Once Wonsik exhibits general signs of life Sanghyuk moves to phase two – trying to get Wonsik to open his eyes. He blows in Wonsik’s face and pulls his ears and pinches his cheeks, Wonsik now being awake enough to be able to put up a broken rumbling stream of mumbled protests that will very quickly fade once more into sleep if Sanghyuk stops; so Sanghyuk doesn’t. He slaps Wonsik’s – hard – once, twice, and is rewarded by Wonsik glaring at him through hardly-open eyeslits. Good. Right on target.

Now comes phase three; getting Wonsik to sit up. Sanghyuk settles himself between Wonsik’s wide flung-open legs and grabs his forearms, pulling on them to raise Wonsik up like a zombie rising from the grave. Wonsik flops forward into Sanghyuk’s waiting arms, bleary-eyed and disoriented, and Sanghyuk’s mind flashes back to every single time they’ve completed a long-haul flight and Wonsik is barely present and conscious – body moving on autopilot but mind still entangled in the reaches of sleep and having to navigate crowded airports and eager fans and bright lights and Sanghyuk just wants to hurry his hyung into the quiet and dark of their van so that he can slowly orientate himself and wait for the world to stop spinning so fast.

Wonsik blinks up at Sanghyuk, finally arrived in the land of the living, and Sanghyuk boops their noses together in greeting. “Hakyeon hyung’s going to kill you if you don’t get moving.”

“Where are we going?” Wonsik mumbles, running a hand through his hair, the soft strands fluffing around his fingers like delicate threads of gold.

“Somewhere,” Sanghyuk answers unhelpfully, and Wonsik grunts at him. Sanghyuk grins.

“Why are we always going somewhere,” Wonsik sighs, letting his head fall forward for a moment to rest, warm against Sanghyuk’s shoulder. Sanghyuk scritches his nails through Wonsik’s curly leg hair, smiling to himself as Wonsik fidgets to try to avoid his fingers. He can’t let Wonsik get too comfortable.

“Kim Wonsik! Han Sanghyuk!” Hakyeon yells a warning from the living room, and Wonsik takes a deep breath. Sanghyuk gets to his feet, pulling Wonsik along by his elbows and not bothering to smother a laugh at Wonsik’s petty grumbling about why Hakyeon seems to feel the need to call them by their full names as if there are other Wonsiks and Sanghyuks running around their dorm.

Sanghyuk bustles Wonsik out of the room and towards the bathroom in an uncompromising backhug so that Wonsik can’t meander off to the kitchen and try to charm someone into making him coffee or breakfast first, Hakyeon calling out his hearty approval at such tactics and Sanghyuk giggling all the way. Sanghyuk’s laughter reverberates through the both of their bodies until Wonsik finds himself smiling too – it’s infectious.

Sanghyuk lets Wonsik go once they have reached their goal, opening his arms with a small ‘jjan!’; his feat of everyday magic, raising the Wonsik beast, completed for the day.

Wonsik thinks of when Sanghyuk was small and young and used to curl around him in sleep, seeking out his shoulder – he never slept on Hongbin, even though Hongbin always sat on his other side in the van. It was always Wonsik.

“I reserve your left shoulder for a nap later in the van,” Wonsik tells him before he steps into the bathroom.

“Alright, I’ll tell everyone it’s off limits,” Sanghyuk agrees. “A lot of people will be disappointed, but they’ll have to learn to cope with life’s ups and downs.”

“Thank you,” Wonsik replies solemnly, and then jumps into the shower at Hakyeon’s frantic shout of “eight minutes, Kim Wonsik!” like somebody lit a fire under him.

Sanghyuk grins at the bathroom door until Hakyeon turns to him with one deadly eyebrow raised and a voice that could cut glass.

“Are you going to the airport in your pajamas?”

*