Probably no one remembered Taemin back then – fresh and young and innocent and still very much a child at fourteen – as clearly as Kibum did.

 

Kibum had been so fascinated with Taemin – he couldn’t understand how a fourteen-year-old had the ability to make him fawn over him so much. For Taemin, he’d wake at an unearthly hour to prepare breakfast (not just the instant porridge that was very often their morning fare) but rice and seaweed soup or kimchi stew or beef or pork with fried egg. For Taemin he’d rush to have the boy’s uniform washed and dried and ironed and ready for school on time. For Taemin he’d sit for hours trying to figure out puzzling math questions or struggling to make sense of English prepositions and the past present participle. 

 

Then over the years he’d watched Taemin grow. Watched the child he loved grow up denied of the childhood most of his peers enjoyed, spending his spare hours between school and sleep in the dance or vocal studio (rejecting friends’ offers to the soccer field or the park – till these offers finally stopped coming entirely), collapsing exhausted in bed at night, but waking renewedly determined every morning. 

 

Watched the child with the bouncy mushroom haircut and wide blinking eyes grow into a man whose dark hooded eyes radiated passion (and sometimes, learned anger and desperation and sadness and glee and everything mixed in between), whose lean limbs flexed dancer’s muscle with every move, whose voice stayed strong and steady and unwavering through all the high notes. 

 

Kibum had watched a child forced into adulthood within five years and it hurt, because he missed the fourteen-year-old who’d tell him he wanted tofu stew for breakfast and who blinked a hundred times a minute and who’d smile at him and tell him school had been good that day, because he’d done well for a test that Kibum-hyung had helped him to study for.