Prepare for an onslaught of updates.  I have the next two finished already so I'll just need to edit them real quick before I put them all up.

Anyway, this one is really short, kind of more of a drabble than an acutal one-shot.  I was surprised how quickly this wrapped up and was concerned with putting it up as is.  It's actually been done for a couple of days but I've been waiting trying to see if I could figure out anything to add to it before I decided to just go with it as it is. 

#22 – Murmur

Every night Taemin and Kibum would lie down in their bed in the dark of their room and speak to each other before they fell asleep.

This has been going on since the early days of their relationship when all of SHINee still shared a single room.  Taemin would usually head to bed first, having school to attend school the next day.  But it usually wasn’t long before Key would come in and kiss the maknae gently on his forehead and wish him sweet dreams before climbing up into his own bed in hopes of sharing them. 

And when they got their own room upon their move to another dorm – well, it just made it all the easier.  There was no pretense either.  The couple would retire to their room, and the others knew that it would still be at least an hour before they couple would be ready for sleep, because they would stay up just talking to each other (alright, alright – sometimes they did other things – but they talked a lot too). 

Sometimes they were simple things.

How much they had missed each other during the day if they had had separate schedules, and then they would talk about what they did that day or how they thought they performed on their different appearances. 

Or sometimes it was just talking about something that they had seen that day, or found interesting and wanted to share with each other.

It was really the simple act of companionship – the chance to just be with each other, without having to account for anyone else or wonder about what others would think about what they said. 

It was them building on the very things that made them fall in love in the first place.  It wasn’t the appearance of each other that had made them fall.  While both of them very much loved the way each other looked and didn’t want anything to change, it wasn’t something so shallow that gave them the strength to face down the rest of the world and society as they had. 

It was the people that they had discovered by talking.  The same way that anyone would come to know someone was the same way that they had grown to love each other.  Through speaking in their early pre-debut days: telling each other of their insecurities, their experiences, their thoughts, etc. about whatever it was that they were facing. 

And they continued to grow closer through the sharing of their thoughts and ideas and feelings with each other as much as possible. 

As they grew older and more mature, more confident in their relationship, their nightly murmurings continued. 

In their own apartment, no longer needing to retire to their bedroom to have private conversations, they would still find themselves whispering to each other while laying their heads down on their pillows at night. 

Initially about their worries about really being on their own in the world for the first time, and then about little things that couples would generally say to each other.  It could be anything from Kibum reminding Taemin that it was his turn to do the laundry or Taemin promising to meet up with Kibum for lunch the next day. 

Then Jinae was welcomed into their world, and those shared few minutes in bed at night, were the only real moments that they had to themselves the whole day and they treasured them and depended on them to keep the couple grounded. 

Then a cry would break the night, and one of them would rush off to sooth their daughter. 

And later, when there son was brought into their home as well, their lives got even busier and their time to just be as a couple was even more precious to them.

Especially as they became more recognized in their fields, and more responsibility was laid on their plate, it was those simple moments.  Those few minutes at night, before they would drift off to sleep, where they could finish every statement that a child or a phone call had interrupted earlier in the day became some of the most beautiful moments of their entire relationship.

Eventually their lives would slow down.  Their children would grow and leave for lives of their own, children of their own. 

But Kibum and Taemin could only pray that their children would find something as precious as what they had been blessed to discover with each other.  And hope that they lay down at night with someone that they could talk all the way to morning with.