After Minho stepped out to make the call at Jinki’s urging, it was less than a ring before the line clicked over. Almost immediately Minho could hear a plethora of voices all shouting over each other and one slightly louder voice yelling for quiet.

“Minho?” N all but shouted into the phone. “Are you still there?”

Feeling a little dumb, Minho explained, “I had a family emergency. I just got your calls. What’s going on?”

There was the sound of more scuffling and suddenly Ken was on the line, demanding, “You have to come over right now. It’s really important! We found something.”

N seemed to wrestle the phone back. “We found something,” he repeated. “It’s crazy and scary and you have to see it for yourself. Hongbin … he’s kind of losing it, so you have to hurry.”

“What’s wrong with Hongbin?” Minho asked, struggling to understand as the voices started yelling at each other again.

“Minho?”

This new voice was unrecognizable and Minho took a guess, “Hyuk? What’s wrong over there? Where’s N? Or Ken?”

“They’re fighting right now.”

“Fighting?” Minho barked out. “With each other?”

“Can you please come over?” Hyuk asked, voice cracking. “Please? Ravi said you know where we live already.” To the best of Minho’s knowledge Hyuk didn’t actually live there with the other boys, but Minho supposed that was arguing semantics. 

Over the line Minho could hear Hongbin shouting, and Ravi calling out, “Stop it! You’re not helping! N! Ken!”

Minho supported the phone between his ear and shoulder as he patted down his pockets for his keys before remembering he’d ridden with Kibum in the ambulance. “I’m on my way over now. Go help break up the fight and wait for me. I’ll be there in twenty minutes.” 

“What’s going on?” Jinki asked when Minho came back in. Together they walked back to the waiting room.

“I have to go,” Minho told Jinki, and then Taemin and Jonghyun who were waiting for their return. 

“Go?” Jonghyun asked incredulously. “Kibum is--”

“He’s recovering,” Minho said, feeling overheated .”He’s going to be okay, and we won’t even be able to see him again today. We should all go home and get some rest, eat some decent food, and then come back tomorrow. You have to check in with your work, Jonghyun, and Taemin looks dead on his feet.”

“I’m okay,” Taemin protested weakly, but he was pale and had the beginnings of dark circles under his eyes. “I can stay.”

“You’re not going home to rest,” Jonghyun observed. “Tell me you’re not going to work.”

“It’s important,” Minho repeated. “I wouldn’t be going if it wasn’t.”

Just as Jonghyun made to reply, Jinki spoke up, “I can vouch for him. It is important.”

“I’ll get a cab,” Minho told Jonghyun. “Can you please take Taemin home?” After a second more Minho remembered Joon’s words to him about Jinki and turned to his boyfriend, asking, “Can you go with Taemin and stay with him until I get back?” Technically he was supposed to stay with Jinki, but Taemin wasn’t incapable. Four years of martial arts were proof of that. 

“Of course,” Jinki said without hesitation.

Relenting, Jonghyun said, “It better be really important, Minho.”

Minho thought back to the stressed voices over the phone, and the sound of fighting and the overall distress. “It is.”

Hyuk was waiting for him in the hallway that led to the apartment, sitting on the ground with his legs pulled to his chest and his face burred in his boney knobs. 

“Hyuk?” Minho had only seen him once, and other than the phone conversation, he’d barely spoken to him. The most he knew about Hyuk was that he was still a high school student, headstrong and probably more sure of himself than a lot of adults were.

“You came,” Hyuk said, scrambling to his feet when he saw Minho. “Come on.” He was pushing on towards the apartment door before Minho could ask him anything.

The apartment was … a mess. But it was an organized messed. It was one terrifyingly organized mess, with lines of string holding up a series of photos, with more scattered over all the surfaces of the living room. Plenty had made their way onto the ground, and more were stacked on tables and chairs. There were plenty of papers, too, some that looked like school assignments, others that were hand written notes, and more that were currently undeterminable. 

At the center of it all was Hongbin, his hair an absolute mess, his appearance in complete disarray as he sorted through different sized photos.

“Minho,” N said, sounding a little broken, and looking at him revealed some discoloring around his left eye. He’d been hit recently. Minho knew what a fist to skin looked like. 

Hongbin was mumbled to himself as Hyuk knelt next to him, trying to pry some of the photos out of his hands gently. The act had him shoved suddenly to the side by a furious Hongbin.

“What is this?” Minho asked, turning in a bit of a circle.

Ken crossed his arms, bottom lip split, and he said, “You said for us to go through Leo’s stuff. And this is what happened.”

“Which is?”

Minho reached for a picture and pulled it free from the clip it was hanging from on the line. 

“Don’t!” Hongbin shouted, startling Minho into dropping it.  “You’ll mess everything up! It has to be in chronological order. It’s important.”

They were all pictures of Leo. Hundreds and hundreds of pictures. Much more than Minho thought it was possible to have of one person.

“Can we talk out on the balcony?” N asked, tugging at Minho before he even agreed. He wasn’t surprised that Ken followed them out  and shut the door firmly behind them, blocking out the sounds of Ravi and Hyuk trying to calm Hongbin.

“Tell me,” Minho demanded. “What did you find? What’s with all the pictures?”

N leaned back against the railing, bringing a hand up to his eye to touch the skin tenderly. Across the balcony Ken winced, truly looking regretful.

“We started pulling out all of Leo’s things,” N explained. “We hadn’t touched them since the police started their investigation. Before now none of us had ever touched his stuff. We might live together and love each other, but we have rules. The most important rule is that we respect each other’s space and personal property. It’s a rule we don’t break no matter what. We didn’t know what we were going to find in Leo’s things.”

“What did you find?” Minho asked, glancing through the glass doors to watch Hongbin bow over, curling in on himself. “N?”

“Notes,” Ken said, cutting in with a slight lisp. “Little things left written on scraps of paper, or written formally. A bunch of things. Some of them had been crumpled up, some were just hidden, but none of them were from us.”

“What kind of notes?” Minho asked. And how did these notes correlate to all the pictures or the frantic boys in the apartment?

Clearly uncomfortable, Ken said, “Suggestive notes. Things that … no one but us should have been writing to Leo. And none of us would have written them, because Leo doesn’t like that kind of thing and we respect him enough not to write those things.”

“Then who wrote them?” Minho bit the inside of his cheek, then asked, “Is it possible Leo was in a relationship with someone else and you were just oblivious? You’ve stated before you don’t believe this is the case, but the evidence suggests otherwise.”

“He wasn’t seeing anyone else,” N snapped. 

“I know you think--”

Ken shook his head furiously. “He wasn’t. Whoever wrote these notes to him … they’re not just love notes. Some of them are threatening, too.”

Minho’s eyes narrowed. “They’re threats? What kind of threats?”

N rested his elbows on the railing as Ken said, “Threats about us. About the unique relationship we have. This person knew and he was threatening to tell. To get N fired from his job and tell Hyuk’s parents to get him taken from us, and even worse.”

“Unless?”

The balcony door slid open and Ravi stepped out, closing it a second later and blocking Minho’s line of sight inside. 

“Unless what?” Ken asked.

“The threat,” Minho prompted. “People don’t just make threats for no reason. If he was threatening Leo, what was the point? He was threatening to tell unless what?”

Ravi interjected, “We don’t know that part. And before you ask, we do know it’s a he.”

Statistically the probably of Leo’s aggressor being a female was very low. So low that Minho had all but ruled it out.  Especially considering Leo’s ual orientation.

“How do you know it’s a he?”

Ravi had brought a piece of paper with him, and when he turned it over it was obviously a photo. It was a picture of Leo, surrounded by school mates, looking just as impassive as usual, aside from the tiny smile on his face probably due to Ken’s arm thrown haphazardly around his neck.

“Because,” Ravi said, ing the photo at Minho. “We know what he looks like and what his name is.”

Minho studied the photo again. There were half a dozen boys in the picture, and the picture itself was outdated, easily from when Leo had been in high school. Was the boy in question one of the faces pictured?

“Which?” Minho asked, bringing the picture closer. 

Ravi’s finger pointed to the figure on the fringe of the photo. “Him.”

Minho realized in his haste he’d missed the seventh boy in the picture completely. He hadn’t even seen the figure in the background, tall with hunched shoulders and jet black hair. Maybe it was because the figure had tipped his head just so that his face was hidden and he looked unthreatening. 

“How do you know who this is? You can’t see his face.”

Ken pulled Ravi out of the way so Minho could see once more into the apartment. Hyuk had managed to get Hongbin to his feet and he was leading him towards a bedroom in the back.

“That person,” Ken said, “is Song Yong Sook, and we know it’s him because he’s also in every single one of those photos inside.”

N volunteered, “He’s also been in almost all of Leo’s classes since the beginning of high school, all his extra circular activities, and most of the courses he took in college. He’s been there for years, always there, and none of us knew until Hongbin started looking more closely at his pictures of Leo.”

They let him inside to examine the pictures after that. His earlier estimation of a couple hundred photos seemed a bit on the short side now that he was able to go through them. Some of them were school photos, taken from the clubs Leo had been involved in, but most of them had been candid shots from small cameras and cell phones. But true to Ken’s words, in all of the photos that Leo appeared, the same lurking figure of Yong Sook was present as well.

“Almost ten years worth of pictures?” Minho asked, surprised by the time span of some of them.  

“When Hongbin figured it out,” N said, keeping his voice quiet, “he started putting them in order. He pulled all the pictures we have and went through them meticulously. That was last night, or really early this morning, and he just sort of … lost it.”

“He blames himself,” Ravi said angrily. “Pictures are his thing. He thinks he should have seen it before now. He thinks it’s his fault that  this guy was able to do this to Leo for so long.”

Ken snapped at Ravi, “It’s not his fault.”

“I know it isn’t his fault,” Ravi said, rubbing his face. “That’s just how Hongbin feels.”

“What do you already know about Song Yong  Sook?” Minho asked, feeling disturbed just by the photos. This was obviously a clear case of stalking. Maybe stalking that had turned into something much worse. Foul play was coming back into the picture as a serious possibility. 

“He was in the same year as Leo,” Ken said, handing Minho a class photo from high school. Sure enough both Song and Leo were present, along with many other students. It should have been an average photo, if not for the way Song’s entire presence was concentrated on Leo, and not the camera. “I was able to go back through all our year books, school activities, and schedules. Song was always there. Both in high school and university.” 

Minho questioned, “And you don’t remember him at all? Nothing?”

Ken shook his head, as did N. Minho knew Ravi and the others were a little too young to have gone to school with Leo.

“I don’t know how it’s possible,” N said with shame. 

Ken’s eyes were wet with tears as he said, “In all the time that Leo and I were in school, and even when it was just the two of us dating back then, I never saw this guy. I don’t remember a single instance of seeing him with Leo anywhere. How is it possible that he was this close all the time, but no one realized it?”

Ravi demanded, “How could he get close enough to write all those notes to Leo and harass him without any of us realizing it?”

Minho crossed the room to look at some of the other photos, telling them, “From everything you’ve told me about Leo, he doesn’t seem the type to worry you with much, if anything. He probably thought he could deal with this guy.”

“For nine years?” Ken asked, palming at his tears.

Minho relayed, “In stalking cases, the severe ones, it’s typical for the stalker not to identify themselves for a long period of time. It’s completely possible that Leo didn’t even know he was being followed around for a long amount of time. When the stalker did make himself known, Leo probably thought he could handle it himself.”

“He should have told us,” Ken argued weakly. “We could have done something.”

“He was threatening you,” Minho reminded. “He wasn’t really threatening Leo, he was threatening what Leo valued the most. Leo likely didn’t see himself in a position to do anything but keep it to himself. From what I’m seeing, this kind of stalking would have been methodical and meticulous.”

Hyuk came padding back into the main room, reporting, “Hongbin is laying down. I hope he’ll get some rest.”

Ravi said suddenly, “We know where this guy works. We know where he lives. We want to go get him and make him tell us what happened to Leo. We know it was him.”

Minho finally turned his full attention back to the boys in front of him. “How do you know all this?”

They looked guiltily between each other before N finally relayed, “We took turns today.”

“Took turns?”

Ravi explained, “Some of us stayed with Hongbin and tried to keep him calm. The rest of us called in favors and found out his name. Then we figured out where he worked, and followed him home on his lunch break. We know a lot about him now. We should go get him.”

Minho didn’t think they meant to get him to force him to face justice. The look on Ravi and N’s faces said something  more akin to them beating the information they wanted out of him. Ravi looked scary enough to do it. Even Ken looked scary enough at the moment.

“No,” Minho corrected, coming across a series of cell phone photos from a birthday party. It was truly frightening how easily this Song character had into Leo’s life without anyone realizing it.  “What you need to do is take all of this to the police. This is enough to get the case reopened.”

Ken scoffed. “We trusted them before and they dismissed the case without putting in any real effort. They said Leo just ran off and didn’t care anymore. We’re not trusting them again. We trust you.”

“These photos and this information changes things,” Minho insisted. “They’ll treat this as a completely different case.”

“Will they?” Hyuk asked, surprising them all. “Is that what you really think? Is that the truth, or just what you hope?”

“Any competent officer  you talk to down at the station is going to look at this new evidence and reopen the case. This is enough to get Song down to the station, question him, and make progress. But if you take any of this into your own hands you could ruin everything. Is that what you want?”

Hyuk’s jaw set stubbornly. “What if we don’t get someone competent? Worst case scenario.”

Minho sighed and held up one of the nearby love notes. “A less competent officer may take these kinds of notes as proof that Leo ran off with a lover, and that could put the final nail in the coffin. Someone incompetent could think there’s something suspicious about Leo having kept these and not thrown them out right away.”

“He was obviously keeping them as proof,” Ken argued.

“Leo’s not here to say that,” Minho said. “So it’s all up to interpretation. But I know a couple of good guys on the local force. I could try to get them on the case, and they wouldn’t make those kinds of assumptions.”

Minho watched as N’s fingers brushed Ken’s before linking tightly. Hyuk looked seconds from bursting into tears and Ravi seemed a gasket waiting to blow. 

“But it’s up to us?” Ken asked. “What we decide to do, it’s up to us?”

“Of course.” Minho never wanted them to feel out of control. 

N took a step forward, pulling Ken with him a bit. He held his head high and said, “I think I speak for all of us when I say we want you to handle this.  We want you to take the lead on this, not the police. We trust you.”

“I can’t make him talk to me,” Minho warned. 

“We’re not asking for you to make him talk to you,” N fired back. “We want you to do what you do best. Follow him. See if he does anything suspicious. See if he’s in contact with Leo, or knows where he is. If you think you can get him to talk to you, that’s great, but if the police go in, they might scare him off.  If he’s just some stalker, we want to know, because if that’s the truth, we don’t want to waste any more time on him. We only care about getting Leo back, not about anything else.”

“You’re all in agreement?” Minho asked them. 

A little more rationally, Ken said, “If you can’t get anywhere with this guy, or if you find something significant out, we’ll go to the police. We’ll do what you want, if that’s the case. But until then, we want you to do it your way. The police never made any progress with this case, and they had it for six weeks before giving up. You’ve had it for half that time, and done so much more.”

“Okay,” Minho agreed. “I’ll look into this guy, and see what I can find out. As always, I make you no promises, but I will do everything I can.”

Minho declined to stay for any offered refreshments, his mind instead still on Kibum and how he was going to balance everything without him on his feet to help. 

The first thing Minho saw when he returned home was Taemin snoring on the sofa, his head burrowed into Jinki’s lap while the elder flipped through one of Kibum’s magazines. The kitchen was just barely visible from the door, and the floor looked spotless, like nothing bad had ever happened in the kitchen, at least if you didn’t count Minho trying to cook. 

“You’re home,” Jinki said softly, not making any attempt to move. 

Minho nodded and knelt down next to the sofa. “Is he out?”

“Yep. For a while now.”

Minho waved a hand in front of Taemin’s face, then signed gratefully. “He needs the sleep. Thanks for staying until I got back.”

“I talked to Jonghyun about an hour ago,” Jinki related, his fingers threading through Taemin’s curls. “The hospital is looking to release Key the day after tomorrow. He’ll have to rest when he comes home, though. In bed and without doing much. I think he’s going to hate that.”

“I know he’ll hate that,” Minho said, inching closer to the kitchen to assure himself the floor was spotless once more. “And it’ll be a fight to keep him in bed. I’m considering having Jonghyun come over on his breaks and days off just to sit on him.”

“Actually …”

Minho turned to see Jinki skillfully sliding out from under Taemin. The teenager fussed a little, but settled down immediately, and then Minho was free to wrap his arms around his boyfriend and lean against him. “Actually what?”

“Actually,” Jinki continued, “I was thinking that I could spend the next few days here. I could help out with Key and the house, and then do all the little stuff that you need downstairs. I understand I can’t see any of the cases you’re working on, but there has to be other things I can do that can free up some of your time.”

Minho’s fingers pressed into the small of Jinki’s back. “What about your work?”

“I called them. I told them I had a family emergency.”

Minho echoed slowly, “A family emergency?”

With a forceful tone, Jinki said, “I told them it was a family emergency. Someone very special to me was in the hospital and I needed to be there for him. And for you. Considering I never take any time off, my boss almost felt obliged to give me the days. I’m yours for the next few days, if you’ll have me.”

Immediately, Minho responded, “I’ll always have you.” He wondered though, “What about your cousin?”

“What about him?” Jinki’s lips pressed along Minho’s jaw line. There was nothing provocative about the motion, or even y. It was just intimate, and Minho hadn’t realized how much he needed it until that moment. “Do you want him hanging around with me here?”

“No,” Minho said, keeping his tone even.

“Then don’t mention him.”

Minho pulled back, asking, “Are you mad at him?”

“Try not to look so happy,” Jinki scoffed. “But yes, if you must know. He took off from the hospital earlier without telling me, he isn’t answering his phone, but he did manage to leave me several voice mails about how much of a child he thinks I am.”

“Huh?” That actually seemed out of character for Joon, not that Minho wanted to be that familiar with him. “He called you a child?”

“He implied it,” Jinki said, his hands resting on Minho’s shoulders. He mocked in Joon’s deeper voice, “Don’t go home. Stay with Minho. Don’t come looking for me. Don’t call me again.”

“Oh,” Minho said.

“I’m pretty sure he’s going to insist I use safety scissors from now on, and hold his hand while I cross the street.”

It would have been so easy to tell Jinki exactly what Minho thought of Joon’s activities, and all his suspicions. It probably would have been  too easy to turn Jinki against his cousin. But Minho didn’t want to be that person, especially not with Jinki. 

“Don’t worry about him,” Minho said, glancing at the clock. “I’m going to go put Taemin to bed and then we can eat something and relax.”

Taemin was getting heavy. As Minho scooped him up from the sofa, it was the one thought on his mind. Taemin had been tiny in comparison, the first time Minho had ever carried him to bed. Now he was a lot taller, much heavier, and Minho’s back protested.

“Minho?” Taemin asked in a small voice, just as Minho was placing him on Kibum’s bed. 

“It’s me,” Minho assured, pulling the blankets up over his body. “Go back to sleep.”

“But Key--”

“He’s fine. He’s still at the hospital, but he gets to come home in a couple of days. For now you should go back to sleep. Jonghyun is going back to the hospital tomorrow and I’ll see about him taking you with him.”

“Is he down?” Jinki asked when Minho entered the kitchen. There was rice already cooking and several side dishes had been prepared in a short amount of time. 

“He went out like a light when I told him he could go see Kibum tomorrow. Hey, everything looks really good.”

They ate dinner together in almost perfect silence, Jinki’s foot nudging Minho’s playfully under the table, and Minho leaning over in unabashed ways to steal kisses. They washed the dishes together, shoulder to shoulder when the meal was done, and then Minho pulled Jinki along towards his bedroom.

With the door cracked so Minho could listen for Taemin if he woke before morning, he and Jinki climbed on the bed, spooned together almost naturally, and were out within minutes.