The first thing on the corner of the street is the sign of the coffee chain, generic and blue. Inside the cafe, officer workers fill the space, buttoned up and prim, ladies in muted tints while men are freshly shaven. Changkyun scans the crowd quickly, frowns when he doesn’t find what he’s looking for. There’s no bright blonde hair; no one with too many earrings, twin helixes sticking out beneath floppy hair. Instead, a particularly broad man in a crisp white shirt catches Changkyun’s eye and he finds his gaze tracing the way the man’s bicep curves under his shirt before he remembers what he’s here for.

Hoseok.

Right.

Changkyun looks through the crowd again, slower this time. He tries not to linger on the broad man, but then the broad man turns and Changkyun realises that the broad man is Hoseok.

Huh, Changkyun thinks, but what comes out instead is –

“Yo, you look like a respectable member of society now eh.”

Hoseok has black hair, straight and falling a little over his brow, not too long and bleached like it used to be. The face he’s makes is the same though, a scowl with the brows furrowed even as his cheeks rise in vague amusement. Changkyun finds himself in a headlock in an instant, Hoseok’s knuckles rubbing against his scalp more aggressively than he remembers.

“Stop, stop,” Changkyun gets out before he loses hair from Hoseok’s new strength.

“Hello to you too,” Hoseok laughs when he does let Changkyun stand properly again. “And don’t you look respectable yourself, hmm?” Changkyun follows Hoseok’s pointed look to his own hair, black for once, then to his clothes, a plain black tee with jeans that are not ripped. Amused, Changkyun holds his hands up, waves his black painted nails in Hoseok’s face.

“Oh, okay, maybe not,” Hoseok says, moving back a few steps. “Come on, take a seat. I haven’t seen you in a while.”

“I just came back,” Changkyun says, folding himself into the seat instead of mentioning how long it’s been. Seven years. Too long. “Like, literally, I just landed yesterday, and I’m still jetlagged from flying.”

Hoseok smiles.

“Well, America is quite far from Korea.”

Changkyun almost rolls his eyes before he remembers that even though this is Hoseok, he’s not seen him in ages and he can’t tell if this Hoseok would be offended by the eye-rolling. Changkyun settles for flipping through the menu.

“I just wanted to see some familiar faces now that I’m back, you know.” The hand wave he does reeks of nervousness, but if Hoseok picks up on it, he doesn’t say.

“Have you met Ki yet?”

Changkyun shakes his head.

“Nah, you’re the first I contacted.”

“Oh.”

There’s a long pause, and then –

“Wow.”

If Hoseok wore pearls, he might be clutching them now. He doesn’t have anything on his neck, however, so the gesture mostly just looks a little lame.

(Alternatively, Changkyun is trying to ignore the fact that he’s starting to feel warm under his neck.)

“I’m honoured,” Hoseok says, before Changkyun manages to say anything embarrassing or dumb, like maybe he should have contacted Ki first if he had known Hoseok would be insufferable. Instead, he just nods and orders a sandwich. They don’t talk for long, mostly because Hoseok’s lunch break is only an hour long and he can’t be late because he has a meeting afterwards.

(“I know, Lee Hoseok, actually being punctual. My old school teachers would flip.”)

Before Hoseok leaves, he tells Changkyun it was nice meeting him again, and then, just like how Changkyun expects it to go, Hoseok asks –

“Do you want to meet Ki? I can call her and we can arrange something.”

If Changkyun wasn’t warm before (he wasn’t), he definitely is now (nope, nope, he isn’t). He nods.

“Yes, that’ll be nice.”

Hoseok just smiles, the same way he used to, ruffling Changkyun’s hair, less painfully and more affectionately this time.

“Okay, I’ll let you know.”

Hoseok leaves waving with his phone in hand – the cover still something from some anime even though it’s not the same one from before – and in that moment, Changkyun feels like he’s fifteen again, almost like he’s never been gone at all.

(Except, of course, he has, and Hoseok’s proper office attire is testament to that even if it does looks good on his now more muscular build.)

It takes only two days before Changkyun gets a time and place from Hoseok to meet Ki. The message is stuffed between random memes and pictures of cats they’ve exchanged, but it’s there, and when Changkyun turns up at the diner, the first thing he sees before he even steps into the restaurant is a familiar silhouette on the streets, long hair mussed, a trail of smoke between her lips.

So Ki still smokes.

“Hey,” Changkyun says, relieved when Ki smiles. He’s not sure why he’d been expecting otherwise. Maybe it’s the dark hair. She had been so different when he’d left, tresses forever a changing hue of something obnoxious. Then again, she still looks about the same, sans hair colour, which is more than what he can say about Hoseok who had clearly bulked up and cleaned up so well Changkyun would never have guessed his past if he hadn’t been there with him.

“Hey,” Ki says, turning a little so her ci