Chapter Text
What’s the first thing you see that makes you realize you are home? If we ask Maeda Riku, he will probably answer that it wasn’t the small rack by the entrance overflowing with shoes nor the chipped paint near the hallway that had been waiting months for a fresh coat. It was something else entirely. Something his eyes searched for before anything else, as naturally as breathing. Every moment the door opened, and the world outside finally loosened its grip on him, Riku found himself looking for it instinctively.
The whole reasoning behind it started because Riku suffered from a truly devastating case of fear of missing out. Back in high school, he had spotted a beautiful green Instax camera displayed in the window of a shop near his house and immediately decided his life would somehow become incomplete without it. Unlike most of his classmates, Riku had been working part-time jobs for years. Some of it was because he liked having his own spending money, but most of it came from habit.
He had always tried to help around the house however he could, picking up shifts after school and contributing whenever things got a little tight. So, once he set his mind on the camera, he simply added a few extra shifts and started setting money aside. Every time he passed the store, the camera sat there waiting behind the glass, taunting him. But eventually, after weeks of work and a ridiculous amount of self-control, he finally walked into the shop and bought it himself. The only problem was that he never used it.
Riku was the kind of person who treasured things so deeply that he became afraid of wasting them. He kept waiting for a perfect day, a perfect memory, a perfect moment worthy enough to be immortalized forever. But life rarely announced itself as important while it was happening. One week became a month. A month became nearly a year. And the camera sat safely inside its box, preserved so carefully that it almost defeated the purpose of owning it at all.
Then Korea happened—in the form of a carefully curated exchange program to begin his higher education journey. The camera went into his suitcase almost as an afterthought. He hadn’t packed it for any real reason. Maybe he’d thought, in that vague way people do when facing the unknown, that a new country deserved some kind of proof he’d been there. Or maybe he’d imagined, in a fleeting moment of absurdity, that he’d stumble into idol stardom by sheer luck, and future fans would love to see photographic evidence of his pre-debut era. But thinking realistically, ambition had never been something that really lived inside of Riku—at least not the loud, hungry kind everyone else seemed to wear so easily. His deepest wishes were tangled up in the unnameable ache of searching for something that didn’t have a description yet.
Whenever people asked about his dreams, his answers always felt incomplete somehow, as though everyone else had been handed a map while he was still trying to figure out where he wanted to go. There was no grand wish waiting for him in Korea. If anything, he had come hoping distance might help him understand himself a little better, hoping that somewhere between unfamiliar streets, new routines, and the version of himself that existed far away from everything he knows, might finally help discover what it was he had been searching for all along.
The problem with Korea, Riku quickly learned, wasn't the unfamiliar streets or the subway maps that looked like abstract art. It was the language. Riku had taken a few classes before moving, but while he could read the characters well enough, actual comprehension remained elusive and spoken fluency felt like a distant dream. Consonants still stuck stubbornly to his tongue, vowels twisted into shapes his mouth had never been taught to make, and every conversation felt like a high-wire act performed without a safety net. He smiled too much, nodded too often, and walked away from interactions increasingly convinced that one day he was going to accidentally donate a kidney, sign away his first-born, or join a cult simply because he misunderstood a question.
By the time he finally caved and hired a tutor, exhaustion had settled deep into his bones. The decision came at three in the morning while staring at a Duolingo streak that mocked him with its false sense of progress. Between the homesickness, the constant misunderstandings, and the loneliness that came with being perpetually one step behind every conversation, he was running out of ways to convince himself things would eventually get easier. Then Kim Daeyoung walked into his life like some sort of karmic reward for surviving all of it.
Daeyoung was the kind of awkward person who somehow looped back around to charming. Eternally delightful and prone to rambling about history, he possessed an almost supernatural ability to trip over his own enthusiasm. He grinned too widely when explaining things, slipped into satoori the more excited he became, and—most significantly of late—had started wearing a pair of undeniably large, slightly thick-rimmed glasses.
Riku watched, chin propped on his palm, as Daeyoung's hands sliced through the air like a historian possessed. The topic didn't matter but the enthusiasm was infectious. Daeyoung's oversized glasses slipped down his nose for the third time in as many minutes, and he pushed them back up with a finger. "Nice glasses, Grandpa," Riku drawled, stretching his legs under the cramped study table.
Daeyoung's grin only widened at the insult, his eyes sparkling with amusement. "They're highly functional," he insisted, adopting a mock-haughty tone as he adjusted them again. "My eyes get tired. And—" he tapped the side of his head, "—they help me think better. A'ight?" The satoori bled into his vowels, thick as honey, completely ruining the scholarly effect. Riku snorted. "Sure, they do." He leaned forward, elbows on the table, closing the distance between them. "You're trying so hard to look intellectual it's physically painful to watch."
Instead of getting defensive, Daeyoung just laughed, a bright, clear sound that made his shoulders shake. "It's working though, right? Admit it, I look very distinguished," he teased back, leaning in slightly. The afternoon light caught the thick lenses, magnifying the way his eyelashes fluttered as he held Riku's gaze. Dorky? Absolutely. But there was something disarmingly enticing about the way he beamed under Riku's attention, fully embracing the joke. The silence stretched comfortably between them, charged with a warm, unspoken energy, broken only by the soft hum of the library. Riku watched him for a while, idly spinning a pencil between his fingers.
Then, without really thinking, he reached out and plucked the glasses right off Daeyoung’s face. Daeyoung startled with a breathless laugh, blinking owlishly. "Hyung—!" Riku ignored him, holding the glasses up to his own eyes and squinting through the lenses. "Jesus," he muttered, tilting his head. "You weren’t kidding. You do need them." He turned them over in his hands—the frames were heavier than they looked, the hinges worn from constant adjustment. Daeyoung made a lazy grab to take them back, cheeks flushed a pleased pink. "I told you," he said, the grumble in his voice entirely fake. He slid the glasses back onto his face, deliberately misaligning them for a second so one lens sat slightly higher than the other, giving him a lopsided, vaguely cross-eyed expression just to see if he could make Riku crack a smile. Which he did.
Somewhere between botched sentences and lukewarm convenience store, something shifted without fanfare. Daeyoung’s enthusiastic smiles whenever Riku managed a conversation without errors stopped feeling like encouragement from a tutor and started feeling like pride from a friend. The transition was so quiet, so organic, that Riku didn’t notice the exact moment loneliness unclenched its teeth from his ribs. He only recognized the absence when he found himself automatically checking his phone after lectures, knowing Daeyoung’s messages would already be there.
Daeyoung invaded his routines like sunlight through curtains: inevitable, warm, completely impossible to refuse. He’d appear at Riku’s dorm door unannounced, dragging him out into the city. They’d wander through quiet night parks or they’d cram into tiny cafes where Riku finally stopped worrying about mispronouncing his coffee order because Daeyoung would just order for him. The silence between them became the comfortable kind—the type that didn’t need filling. Riku stopped remembering how hollow Korea had felt before him.
The camera clawed its way out of obscurity thanks to a freshman seminar assignment so aggressively philosophical that Riku briefly considered skipping class. "Bring something valuable for you," the professor had announced with the breezy sadism of someone who shouldn’t be this conscious at seven in the morning, "explain how it creates a true sense of home for you." Riku had stared at the assignment sheet like it might combust if he glared hard enough, already dreading the inevitable moment when someone would pull out their great-grandmother's heirloom necklace while he fumbled with a half-assed explanation about—well, nothing, because he hadn't actually thought of anything yet.
Daeyoung, of course, took this as a personal challenge. He barged into Riku’s dorm that afternoon like a human hurricane and proceeded to ransack Riku’s shelves. "You own nothing meaningful?" he gasped, clutching a half-empty bottle of shampoo. "This is just way too depressive.” Riku groaned into his hands. "It’s not that deep. Just help me pick something."
Then Daeyoung found it—the green corner of the Instax peeking out from beneath a pile of neglected notebooks. He unearthed it with the reverence of an archaeologist discovering a lost artifact, holding it up to the light like it might dissolve. "You’ve had this the whole time?" he breathed, thumb brushing over the unused shutter button. Riku shifted uncomfortably. "I’m just saving it for the right moment."
Daeyoung’s hands were already moving before the words left his mouth—adjusting the lens cap with fingers that fumbled just slightly from excitement. The afternoon light caught the edge of his glasses as he glanced up, and Riku didn’t have time to brace before Daeyoung’s grin hit him like a physical force. "Can we take a picture together, hyung?"
Looking back, Riku would return to this memory constantly, turning it over in his mind like a river stone worn smooth by time. He remembered how Daeyoung's knee had knocked against his as they crowded together on the dorm room bed, how his smile still carried traces of the banana milk they had shared earlier, how those silly glasses kept slipping down his nose every few seconds. He remembered the warmth most of all. The kind that settled quietly beneath his skin. The kind that made an unknown country feel a little less unfamiliar.
The photograph developed slowly between their hands, colors and shapes emerging from nothing. Riku found himself staring at it longer than necessary. Then staring at Daeyoung longer than necessary. Somewhere between the professor's absurd assignment and that tiny square of film, he realized the question might not have been as stupid as he'd originally thought. Because he now understands the reason for it to exist in the first place.
He still didn't know what created a true sense of home. He certainly couldn't have explained it in front of a classroom full of strangers. But looking at the photograph, and then at Daeyoung, sitting cross-legged on the bed and waiting excitedly for the results, Riku had the strange feeling that he might actually be on the right track to answering that question someday.
Out of everything he had brought with him across countries—the untouched camera, the homesickness he carried like a second skin, the handful of belongings crammed into a dorm room that never quite felt like his—Daeyoung had somehow already become the most valuable thing he had in Korea. Neither of them knew it yet, but the future would spend years proving just how true that was.
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Of course they caught feelings—ridiculously, inconveniently, like catching a cold in July. Something irreversible had clicked into place. And once they'd both become aware of it, every interaction became a minefield of half-glances and aborted sentences. Their usual easy rhythm stuttered into something painfully self-conscious—two people suddenly hyperaware of every accidental brush of fingers, every silence that stretched a second too long.
The universe had a funny way of twisting intentions into unexpected shapes. When Riku and Daeyoung had agreed to attend the college music festival with their friend group, neither anticipated how the night would unravel. These days, their hangouts had settled into a careful pattern of never being alone together, always orbiting each other within the safety of friends' laughter and overlapping conversations. The festival promised more of that buffer, loud enough to drown out whatever pulsed between them.
It ended the way all good festivals do, with sore feet and sticky hands clutching half-empty drink cups, voices hoarse from singing along to songs they only half-knew. One by one, their friends peeled away toward buses, trains and dorm rooms with slurred goodbyes and exaggerated hugs, until the crowd thinned to nothing. And then—impossibly—there they were. Just Daeyoung. Just Riku. No witnesses.
The silence between them stretched just long enough to be uncomfortable, then snapped like an over-tuned guitar string. Daeyoung cleared his throat and launched into a rambling review of the headlining band's setlist. Riku watched the way his hands moved through the air as he talked, fingers sketching invisible musical notes between them. "And that cover of 'Crush'? Criminal," Daeyoung declared with the gravity of someone reporting a felony. "They took the bridge at the completely wrong tempo." Riku snorted, shoving his hands into his pockets as they fell into step beside each other. "You say that like they kicked a kitten on stage, Daeyoung-ah."
Somewhere between debating whether the bassist had been slightly out of tune during the second verse and recounting how Yushi had somehow inhaled five servings of tornado potatoes without sharing, the tension dissolved partially. Riku found himself laughing at Daeyoung's impression of their mutual least-favorite professor attempting crowd surfing, realizing with startling clarity that his shoulders hadn't been this relaxed in weeks. The laughter bubbled up from somewhere deep and unguarded, like it was always meant to be.
Not too long after, Riku spotted the fireworks—colorful tents lining the riverbank, workers scurrying like ants beneath the skeletal frames of launch platforms. His elbow nudged Daeyoung’s ribs lightheartedly. "Look," he said. "We should stay. Just for a few minutes." His voice hit that particular pitch it always did when he was trying—and failing—to sound casual. Daeyoung’s "Yeah, okay" came out approximately three octaves lower than he probably intended.
They settled against the wrought iron barrier, close enough that Riku could feel his breath. The first firework tore through the sky with a sound like fabric ripping. Around them, couples cheered and leaned into each other’s orbits with practiced ease. A girl nearby balanced her phone precariously while her boyfriend kissed her cheek mid-photo. Two teenagers shared a single pair of wireless earbuds as they watched the sky. Meanwhile, Riku and Daeyoung existed in a pocket of stillness—two friends who’d accidentally wandered into a scene far too romantic for whatever this was between them.
The fireworks painted the sky in bleeding watercolors—violet melting into pink, red dissolving into green—but Riku might as well have been staring at a blank canvas for all the attention he paid them. His attention kept slipping sideways, stolen by the way each explosion painted fleeting constellations across Daeyoung’s profile: the sharp jut of his Adam’s apple bobbing when he swallowed, the beauty marks that decorated his face. It was ridiculous, really. Seoul was putting on a pyrotechnic masterpiece, and Riku was cataloging the way Daeyoung’s eyelashes cast minute shadows when he blinked.
The first time their eyes met, Riku convinced himself it was coincidence. The second time, his pulse did something complicated against his ribs. By the third stolen glance—Daeyoung’s pupils wide and glowy in the intermittent flashes—Riku’s face burned hot enough to rival the sparks raining down above them. They looked away in unison, as if choreographed, as if they’d been caught red-handed at something far more incriminating than standing shoulder-to-shoulder at a public event.
The absurdity of it clawed up Riku’s throat like laughter or maybe panic. Here they were, two idiots pretending not to stare at each other. Tt was the kind of contrived rom-com moment he’d have rolled his eyes at in theaters. Yet now, Riku understood with startling clarity why protagonists in those scenes always forgot their lines. His own mind had become a cacophony of half-formed thoughts tripping over each other.
Somewhere between the fifth firework’s burst and the sixth’s dying shimmer, Daeyoung turns his head—lips parted around some half-formed thought, expression caught between amusement and anticipation. Riku never learns what he was about to say. His brain whites out in one glorious, catastrophic malfunction. There’s no conscious decision, no rational thought—just the sudden gravitational pull of Daeyoung hovering inches from him.
Later, Riku would blame the fireworks—the way their intermittent flashes made Daeyoung’s lips look pinker than usual, the way his laughter still carried traces of chips he had earlier. Later, he’d curse the unbearable proximity, the way Daeyoung’s sleeve kept brushing his wrist like an accusation. But at that moment, there was no logic. Only impulse. The space between them vanished in a heartbeat as he crashed his lips against his.
It lasted perhaps three seconds. Maybe less. Long enough for Riku to register the startled hitch of Daeyoung’s breath. Long enough to memorize the exact texture of his lower lip catching against Riku’s own—chapped from cold air, slightly sticky from beer. Then reality came crashing back with the force of a cymbal clap. Riku wrenched himself away so violently he nearly toppled into a group of bystanders.
Panic hits Riku like a fire alarm at three in the morning—impossible to ignore. His mouth moves before his brain catches up, words tumbling out in a landslide of apologies so frantic they trip over each other. "I didn't—that wasn't—" His hands flutter uselessly between them like injured birds. "God, I didn't mean to make this weird." The moment the words leave his mouth, he realizes their catastrophic irony—kissing your friend generally is an excellent way to accomplish that. "I mean, not that kissing you is weird. It’s just—" His voice cracks spectacularly on the last syllable. Somewhere between his third aborted sentence and fifth existential crisis, the Han River starts looking like a viable escape route.
What finally stops him is Daeyoung laughing—not mocking laughter, but the kind that bursts out when someone's so overwhelmed their nervous system short-circuits. It's high-pitched, slightly unhinged, and cuts through Riku's spiral. When Riku risks a glance upward, Daeyoung's entire face has turned a precise shade of scarlet. While his own mouth keeps opening and closing like a goldfish that's forgotten how water works, fingers twitching at his sides as if trying to conduct an invisible orchestra.
Then—with the grace of a man deliberately stepping onto live train tracks—Daeyoung blurts, "I think I'm in love with you, hyung." The words hang between them, glowing brighter than the fireworks. Riku's brain whites out. Daeyoung's hands fly up as if to physically catch his own words. "Hold on, no, I don't think—wait, that came out wrong. Or right. I don't know." He rakes fingers through his hair. "I mean—I'm completely sure I'm in love with you—" His voice drops to a whisper, "—Hope this means you feel the same way, too."
Riku's first reaction isn't excitement—it's the sudden, staggering realization that he's been holding his breath for months without knowing it. Relief crashes over him like a rogue wave, so potent his knees nearly buckle beneath the weight of it. He laughs—a wet, startled sound caught somewhere between pure joy and barely-contained hysteria—because if he doesn't laugh right now, he's absolutely going to sob into Daeyoung's stupid, rumpled jacket.
"Idiot," he chokes out, swiping at his eyes with the back of his hand. The dying fireworks paint Daeyoung's stunned face in alternating streaks of red and green. "Of course I’m in love with you." The words tumble out like they've been waiting behind his teeth for months, worn smooth from how often he's turned them over in secret.
Daeyoung lets out a sound that’s half laugh, half sob, like all the tension he’s been carrying finally gives way at once. Needless to say, when their lips meet again, it’s nothing like that first desperate collision from earlier. This kiss unfolds slowly, tenderly, as if they’ve been handed all the time in the world and intend to spend it learning each other all over again in this new light.
Riku feels it first in his chest—the quiet certainty settling between them, soft and steady. Then Daeyoung’s hands find his waist, thumbs tracing absent-minded circles through the fabric of his shirt, and something warm blooms beneath Riku’s ribs. The kiss tastes like Daeyoung’s relieved laughter, like the remnants of Riku’s impulsive act, like every unsaid feeling finally finding somewhere to go.
The world shrinks to the warmth of Daeyoung’s touch, to the way his fingers tighten ever so slightly when Riku steals another kiss. Somewhere beyond them, people are gathering their things and heading home. Neither notice. Daeyoung murmurs something against his lips—words lost to a smile and a voice still trembling with emotion—and Riku kisses him again before he can finish, smiling into it as they both dissolve into quiet, breathless laughter.
The camera emerges almost as a reflex, pulled from Riku's bag with a rustle of fabric and the soft clatter of loose change. Riku’s fingers brush against the worn strap before he even realizes he's reaching for it. "Wait," Daeyoung murmurs. The city hums below them, indifferent to the way Daeyoung's gaze flicks from the camera to Riku's face and lingers there for a moment. Then he lets out a quiet laugh. "This is one of those moments, isn't it?"
Riku doesn't answer, he just puffs out his cheeks in a way that is answer enough. Daeyoung is already taking the camera. The shutter clicks before Riku can prepare, a half-formed complaint dying on his tongue as Daeyoung captures him mid-breath, eyes wide and lips parted. The flash washes the space between them in silver for a heartbeat. Then Daeyoung is grinning, twisting away when Riku lunges for the camera. "No, no, my turn," Riku insists, wrestling it back with fingers that keep catching in Daeyoung's sleeves instead.
What follows is a quiet sort of chaos. Stolen snapshots of Daeyoung bathed in city reflections, one hand raised in mock protest while the other remains stubbornly anchored to Riku's wrist. Riku tries to be subtle about the way he lingers behind the viewfinder, adjusting the focus until Daeyoung's eyelashes cast delicate shadows across his cheeks. He fails spectacularly. "You're staring," Daeyoung accuses, though there's no real complaint in it—only a warmth that settles somewhere beneath his ribs when Riku shrugs and takes another picture anyway.
The photos don't develop perfectly. One catches Daeyoung mid-motion, blurred slightly at the edges as though he's too alive to be contained by a square of film. The other captures Riku glancing sideways, trapped in a private thought that softens his expression into something unbearably fond. They're imperfect. But when Daeyoung presses his thumb against the still-developing image of Riku's profile, tracing the curve of his jaw with a reverence that makes Riku's breath hitch, neither of them care.
Because the camera doesn't capture everything. It misses the way Riku finds himself looking for Daeyoung first whenever they enter a room, or how conversations somehow become easier when they're sitting next to each other. It can't preserve the inside jokes already piling up between them, the comfortable silences, or the small moments that somehow linger in his mind long after they happen. But the pictures become proof anyway—not of perfection, but of something far more important. Of the unspoken promise hidden in the way their shoulders bump as they turn back toward their destiny. Of their beginning, still warm in their hands.