Isn't That A Power?

by Pussungie

Summary:

“Giving? I don’t really like that. I prefer receiving.”

Jisung is loud, proud, and extremely clear. His fans remain inexplicably committed to misunderstanding him.

Or: Jisung’s receiving agenda, seven enthusiastic supporters, and one boyfriend particularly dedicated to the cause.

Notes:

Jisung: I’m strictly a bottom.

Fans, holding him at gunpoint: You WILL be topping.

The first thing Jisung remembers afterward is the dress.

Not its color, unfortunately, or anything useful enough to sketch out later and turn into proof that the whole experience had been more than his imagination taking a particularly dramatic jog through the back alleys of his subconscious. That part disappears almost as soon as the hypnotist begins guiding him awake, dissolving beneath the soft drone of his voice, the heat of the studio lights against his face, and the peculiar heaviness of his own body where it lies reclined in the chair. He remembers only that he had been wearing one, that the fabric had moved softly around his legs when he walked, and that he had known himself to be a woman with the same unquestioning certainty with which he knew himself, right now, to be Han Jisung.

The second thing he remembers is the man.

Tall. Dressed in a suit. Broad enough in the shoulders that even half-dreaming, in front of seven members, several cameras, and an entire production crew collectively trying not to make any noise that might jolt him out of the trance, Jisung had apparently thought it important to mention. The woman he had been loved him. He had loved her too, or perhaps almost had, which was sometimes worse, or had simply failed to love her enough at the exact moment when it mattered. In the end, he chose another woman.

It should have been nothing more than a strange little segment. Hypnosis, imagination, the brain filling an empty room because someone had asked it what was inside. It should have evaporated along with the trance as soon as Jisung opened his eyes to Jeongin staring at him with his mouth half open and Hyunjin watching him with lifted brows and the quiet fascination of someone already storing the entire thing for later.

Instead, it settles somewhere beneath Jisung's ribs and stays there for the rest of the afternoon.

Even after filming ends, his body carries the faint, inexplicable ache of it.

Not heartbreak, exactly. There is no face attached to the man, no name, no collection of memories Jisung can point to and mourn. He cannot remember the sound of his voice or the pressure of his hand, only the vague impression of a figure on the other side of a river and the certainty that the woman Jisung had been, or imagined himself to be, had wanted him. Yet, seated in the van with his cap tugged low and his cheek pressed to the cold window, Jisung feels the lingering disappointment as vividly as the remnants of a nightmare, the kind that leaves the heart racing long after the mind has accepted that no one actually died.

Across the aisle, Hyunjin lets the silence last for nearly ten minutes before nudging Jisung's shoe with his own, his expression caught somewhere between concern and the quiet amusement of someone who has already arranged the whole strange story into a neat little picture inside his head.

"A tall man in a suit who chose somebody else," Hyunjin says. "Your subconscious has expensive taste and terrible judgment."

"I never said expensive," Jisung mumbles, still looking out the window.

"You noticed the suit."

"That only proves he wore clothes."

Hyunjin lifts one shoulder. "You sounded impressed."

Without lifting his eyes from his phone, Seungmin says, "Maybe he worked at the suit store and you misunderstood the employee service."

Jeongin snorts from the back. Felix folds over his seat belt, laughing.

"Bro, that's rough. You got rejected in a whole other lifetime."

Chan twists around from the passenger seat. "Come on, don't say it like that."

"What?" Felix asks, still grinning. "Hyunjin started it."

"I summarized," Hyunjin says.

Chan looks between them, already regretting his involvement. "Yeah, alright. Great summary, guys."

Jisung laughs too. It comes easily, as it almost always does when the members offer him a way out of his own thoughts, and performs the useful task of turning the entire thing back into what it is supposed to be: content. A strange, funny segment from a strange, funny day of filming. The kind of clip fans would set to mournful piano music, pair with captions about doomed lovers and reincarnation, and then abandon for the next thing he says with an unfortunate amount of sincerity.

Only Minho does not tease him.

He sits beside Jisung, one knee angled into his space because the van is crowded and because Minho has never observed the borders of separate territory when it comes to Jisung. He scrolls through his phone with one hand, expression blank in the way that usually means he is either reading the news or watching a video of a cat falling off a chair. His other hand rests loose between them, hidden beneath the black puffer coat bunched across their laps.

When Jisung shifts, Minho's pinky finger hooks around his.

It is nearly nothing, the sort of touch that would remain invisible even if someone looked directly at their hands. Jisung continues staring through the window at the gray blur of Seoul and tightens his finger in answer.

The woman from the trance had eventually turned away from the man who chose someone else. She had become a teacher. There had been children, many of them, Jisung thinks, though the details are soft at the edges and difficult to hold. She had made a life out of caring for them, and when the hypnotist asked whether she was happy, Jisung had said yes.

He had not been entirely certain.

Oddly, that is the part that bothers him more than the failed romance.

By the time they reach the underground parking garage, the others have moved on to the significantly more pressing matter of dinner. Jisung trails after them with his shoulders hunched against the cold, nodding vaguely when Changbin asks whether he wants jjajangmyeon or fried chicken, too preoccupied to make the decision he will inevitably complain about later.

He does not realize Minho has fallen into step beside him until a warm hand lands on the back of his neck, fingers slipping beneath the edge of his hood.

“You’re coming home,” Minho says.

Jisung peeks at him beneath the brim of his cap. “I live there.”

“I know.”

“Then why did you say it like you were kidnapping me?”

“Because you look like you might wander into traffic if nobody supervises you.”

“That’s just my face.”

“Worse than usual.”

“Yah.”

He elbows Minho, though without enough conviction to do more than nudge him sideways and pull the corner of Minho’s mouth into a smirk.

The others begin separating naturally once they reach the elevators, Changbin and Hyunjin still arguing over dinner while Felix and Seungmin debate whether either of them possesses the energy to wait for delivery. Chan catches Jeongin by the sleeve before he can follow the wrong pair, asking Jisung one more time whether he wants anything ordered.

Minho answers for him.

“He’ll eat with me.”

Seungmin glances between them and nods with exaggerated solemnity. “They’re going home for a private emotional summit.”

“We live together,” Jisung says as the elevator doors begin to close. “That’s where we go every night.”

“That doesn’t make it any better,” Seungmin calls back. “Arguably worse, actually.”

The doors slide shut over Felix’s laugh.

Their apartment is quiet when they let themselves inside, faintly warm after the cold garage and carrying the clean smell of the laundry Minho had hung that morning. One of Jisung’s hoodies lies abandoned across the arm of the sofa. Minho’s slippers are aligned neatly beside the entryway. Jisung’s are separated by several feet for reasons neither of them could explain.

Jisung toes off his shoes and leaves them where they fall.

Minho looks down at them.

Then at him.

“Later,” Jisung says.

“You always say later.”

“And eventually later becomes tomorrow.”

“That isn’t a defense.”

Minho nudges the shoes into place with his foot while Jisung escapes farther into the apartment, dropping automatically into his usual corner of the sofa and curling one leg beneath himself. He pulls the nearest cushion into his lap, holding it against his stomach while Minho disappears into the kitchen.

The apartment bears both of them everywhere. Jisung’s headphones tangled beside Minho’s tablet. A half-empty cup he had promised to wash sitting beside the perfectly arranged remotes. Minho’s black jacket hanging neatly by the door while Jisung’s coat has somehow ended up over the dining chair. Two lives overlapping so completely that neither of them could separate whose belongings belonged where without thinking about it.

Minho returns with two glasses of water and places Jisung’s directly in front of him before lowering himself onto the other end of the sofa.

For several seconds, he only looks at him.

Jisung picks at a loose thread on the cushion before Minho reaches over, catches his restless hand and pulls it away before he can unravel the seam.

“Talk.”

“About what?”

"Whatever you're chewing on in there." Minho taps the center of Jisung's forehead with one finger. "It's loud."

It is one of the more irritating things about living with him. Minho has nowhere to leave afterward, no schedule or separate apartment Jisung can use to escape the conversation. He can simply sit there in their shared living room, surrounded by their things and all the familiar evidence of a life too intertwined for Jisung to convincingly pretend he is fine, and wait until Jisung gives in.

Which he usually does.

 

Jisung catches his hand before he can do it again and pulls it down against his chest, mostly as a method of restraint. "Do you think hypnosis is real?"

"Some of it."

"Which parts?"

"Relaxation. Suggestibility. Your brain filling in gaps because somebody told it there should be something there." Minho leans back into the cushions. "I don't think you accessed the celestial archives and found your old resident-registration card, if that's what you're asking."

Jisung huffs out a laugh. "What if I did?"

"Then you had terrible taste in men."

"He loved me."

"He married someone else."

"Maybe he had reasons."

Minho clicks his tongue. "Already defending him. Hopeless in every lifetime."

The joke ought to loosen the last of the unease. Instead, Jisung's eyes drift to their joined hands, Minho's palm still pressed to the center of his chest as though he can feel the thoughts moving beneath it.

"I keep thinking about her," he admits.

Minho's thumb strokes once over his knuckles. "The woman?"

"Me. Not literally, maybe, but enough that I still miss her." Heat rises into Jisung's cheeks. "I know hypnosis is probably my brain making a story because somebody asked for one. That doesn't change how obvious it felt when I said I was a woman."

Minho does not laugh, tense up, or ask what exactly Jisung is trying to tell him. He only watches with the attentive stillness he reserves for choreography details, injured animals, and anything Jisung says quietly enough to reveal the soft, easily frightened parts of himself.

"Does that scare you?" he asks.

Jisung thinks about it, his fingers unconsciously worrying at Minho's. "No."

"Then what does?"

"That people will decide I shouldn't have liked it."

Minho's brows draw together slightly.

"I'm not saying the hypnosis proved some secret identity," Jisung says. "I just know I liked being her. I liked that the dress and the man and the whole shape of her life felt natural while I was there. That matters to me even if it was only a story."

"You liked being her?"

Jisung nods, mortification crawling all the way to his ears. "She was romantic. She wore pretty things. She loved a man and wanted him to love her properly, and then she took care of children. It sounds stupid when I say it out loud."

"It doesn't."

"It sounds like I invented a sad drama heroine."

"You invent sad drama heroines for a living. Half your songs are sad drama heroines."

"That's different."

"Why?"

Jisung opens his mouth, realizes there is no immediate answer that does not sound like an excuse, and closes it again. Minho tilts his head and waits, irritatingly unwilling to rescue him from his own question.

"Because they're songs," Jisung says at last. "They're not me."

Minho looks down at the hand Jisung is still holding against his chest. "Everything you make has you in it somewhere. Even if it's only one room in the house."

It is annoyingly perceptive. Jisung hates when Minho does that, walks through the sprawling, deliberately confusing architecture of Jisung's thoughts and opens the one correct door as though there had been a neon sign over it the entire time.

"People are just gonna decide I couldn't possibly have meant any of it," Jisung says.

"People make you breathing into a whole thing."

"Hyung."

"I'm serious. You could say you like oranges and somebody would write twelve paragraphs proving you're actually a peach."

Jisung laughs despite himself. Minho pulls their joined hands closer and presses his mouth to the back of Jisung's fingers, the gesture casual enough to look like nothing and intimate enough to warm him down to his stomach.

"You don't have to decide what it means," Minho says. "You can just like her."

"Past me?"

"Dream you. Story you. Whatever she is."

"She had bad taste in men, apparently."

"Horrendous."

"She should've chosen you."

For a while, Jisung lets the woman from the trance belong to him without forcing her into a verdict.

He is Han Jisung. A man, a boyfriend, an idol, a producer, somebody's hyung and somebody else's dongsaeng. He is loud with a shy heart, pretty because he likes being pretty, and softer than the harder shape he once thought he needed to survive. The woman in the dress does not undo any of that. She is simply another intimate room inside him, one he chose to open instead of pretending it was empty.

Minho's thumb moves idly along his shoulder, and none of it feels like a contradiction.

★ ★ ★

The episode airs several weeks later.

By then, Jisung has mostly packed the hypnosis away under the increasingly crowded category of Things That Feel Catastrophically Significant for Twenty-Four Hours and Then Become Content. Idol life is full of such things. A sincere confession can be cut into a two-second reaction meme; one bad day can be stretched into a permanent personality trait; a joke can be clipped out of its original conversation, translated three different ways, slowed down, color-corrected, set to some devastatingly romantic song, and handed back to him as evidence of a person he did not know he was supposed to be.

The past-life segment spreads exactly as expected.

Fans draw the woman he described in long skirts and old-fashioned hanbok, sometimes standing by a river, sometimes seated in a little schoolroom surrounded by children. Some give the tall man Minho's face. Others choose Hyunjin, Jeongin, or an actor Jisung has never met in his life. There are jokes about him being romantically doomed through every reincarnation, affectionate posts about his soul apparently finding music, love, and children no matter what body it lands in, and one beautifully edited video that makes the entire three-minute hypnosis segment look like a lost historical drama.

Those make him smile, a little warm flutter settling in his stomach.

Then, inevitably, come the arguments.

They begin beneath a translated clip someone posts with the caption: HAN JISUNG SAID HE WAS A WOMAN IN HIS PAST LIFE AND LOVED A MAN???

The replies multiply too quickly for any reasonable person to follow, which has never stopped Jisung before.

“It was scripted. Calm down.”

“He's obviously making it up because that's what you're supposed to do.”

“Why are people using this to feminize him again?”

“He is literally one of the manliest members when the cameras aren't making him do aegyo.”

“Some of you want him to be a girl so badly and it's weird.”

Jisung stares at the last one longer than it deserves.

Jisung understands the warning the comment is reaching for. A real person should not be reduced to a costume, and one strange clip should not become permission to claim an identity he never named. But that is not what happened here. Jisung named the woman himself. He described her dress, the man she loved, and the children she cared for. He had liked the ease with which the story settled around him. The reply does not protect that choice. It treats femininity as something embarrassing that respectful fans must scrub away before they can defend him.

Still, something about the wording scratches.

Want him to be a girl so badly.

As though girlhood itself were an accusation from which he needed to be rescued.

As though the respectful response to Jisung saying, however unseriously, I was a woman, should be to insist that he could not possibly have enjoyed the shape of that story, not even for a moment.

He locks his phone and tosses it onto the practice-room floor with more force than necessary.

"Why are you making that face?" Changbin asks.

Jisung looks up. The room is scattered with the evidence of a break, half-empty bottles, towels, sweat-darkened hair, bodies dropped wherever there had been space. Minho stands near the mirror talking to one of the choreographers. Chan is replaying a recording. Felix and Hyunjin have somehow turned stretching into a wrestling match, though neither seems to know who started it.

"What face?"

"That one." Changbin points vaguely at him. "Like you're arguing with a ghost."

"Maybe my past-life boyfriend came back."

Changbin barks out a laugh. "Tell him Minho hyung will kill him."

From across the room, without even turning around, Minho says, "I heard that."

"See?" Changbin points toward him. "Already threatened."

The ease of the moment makes Jisung feel a little ridiculous. He picks up his phone, shoves it deep into his bag, and decides the discomfort had been nothing more than the temporary sting of finding a sentence written carelessly by someone who did not know it would ever reach him.

He has lived beneath public interpretation for years. He knows better than to let one stranger's wording burrow into him and make a home there.

That is what he tells himself, anyway.

★ ★ ★

Months later, while filming his individual interview for another Two Kids Room episode with Jeongin, a staff member brings up something that happened between them in the past: the two times he got Jeongin to kiss him.

The interview setup is even more exposing than the room he had shared with Jeongin: one couch, one camera facing him directly, pale walls made bright beneath the studio lights, and staff members standing somewhere beyond the lens where he can hear them without having anyone beside him to hide behind.

A staff member asks from somewhere behind the camera, “How did it feel when I.N kissed you twice?”

Jisung’s mouth curves before the question has even properly settled.

There are several ordinary ways he could answer. He could say it was embarrassing. Unexpected. Funny. He could complain that Jeongin had taken advantage of him while he was distracted, which would earn the easy laugh the staff is probably waiting for and allow the interview to continue without incident.

Instead, Jisung lowers his eyes, fingers gathering loosely in his lap as though he is still deciding.

He is not.

“Giving?” he repeats.

The word sits neatly inside the original question, innocent enough on its face. Giving a kiss. Receiving one.

It also carries another meaning, one Jisung knows perfectly well, one used plainly enough among queer people that there is no chance he has stumbled into it by accident.

His lips twitch.

“I don’t really like giving,” he says, gaze still lowered with a shyness that is perhaps slightly too carefully arranged to be entirely sincere. “I prefer receiving. I just…”

He lets the sentence trail away.

The editors will later place the caption precisely where they know it belongs:

계속 받기만 하고 싶음

[Just wants to keep receiving]

There is a beat of silence from behind the camera.

Not confusion.

Recognition.

Then someone laughs, and Jisung looks up.

The pleasure on his face is small but unmistakable, tucked into the corner of his mouth and the brightness of his eyes as he glances toward the staff. They heard the second meaning, and he knows they understood that he chose it on purpose. For one brief moment, Jisung has said something personal without having to strip it of humor first.

He could stop there.

And he probably should.

Instead, he looks directly into the lens.

“Isn’t that power too?” he asks.

The room stills for one brief, suspended moment.

The question works perfectly well if they remain inside the conversation about kisses. There is power in being wanted, in being the one toward whom affection is directed, in receiving without having to chase.

It also works in the other conversation Jisung has quietly opened beneath it.

Receiving as choice.

Receiving as desire.

Receiving as its own kind of control.

The staff breaks first, laughter rising louder this time, and Jisung’s composure finally cracks. His shoulders curl inward, hand lifting to cover his mouth as his eyes disappear into crescents, but the embarrassment comes tangled with satisfaction rather than regret.

He had known exactly how interesting the answer would sound.

That had been the point.

“Do I sound too obnoxious?” he asks, pointedly fixing his posture.

Another burst of laughter answers him.

“Sorry~” Jisung sings, drawing the apology out sweetly, his voice lifting at the end while the grin behind his hand refuses to disappear.

It is not an apology for the innuendo.

Barely an apology at all.

It is the coy retreat Jisung has perfected over years of saying something deliberately dangerous, then folding himself into something soft enough that everyone agrees to treat it as harmless. He stepped close enough to the truth to make certain somebody felt the heat of it.

They had been discussing kisses, and that remained true.

Jisung had also deliberately chosen words used for giving and receiving in a context far beyond kissing. He had known what they could mean when placed in his mouth, known why the staff paused, known why the laughter changed after the second sentence.

The ambiguity protects him.

It does not make the intention accidental.

No one asks him to clarify. Jisung would not have clarified even if they had.

The interview moves on, and he forgets about the comment for almost three full hours.

Or he convinces himself that he has.

Then, in the hallway outside the set, Minho walks past him without slowing and murmurs, "Power?"

Jisung nearly collides with a lighting stand.

Minho does not look back. Only the slight bounce in his shoulders gives him away.

Jisung catches up, grabbing the sleeve of his hoodie. "You heard?"

"Half the monitoring room heard."

"It was about kissing."

"I didn't say it wasn't."

"You're making a face."

"This is my face."

"You're evil."

They reach a blind corner between stacked equipment cases. Minho glances down the hallway once before catching Jisung by the waist and pulling him close enough that the laugh trapped in Jisung's chest breaks into a startled breath.

"So," Minho says quietly, "you don't like giving."

Jisung peers over his shoulder at the staff moving in the distance. "Hyung."

"Not as much as receiving."

"Stop."

"And that's power."

Jisung presses both hands against his chest, though there is no force behind the shove. "I'll kill you."

Minho's brows lift. His hands rest at Jisung’s hips, warm and familiar through the fabric of his sweater, thumbs pressing lightly as though they belong there. In private, the joke carries an intimacy neither of them needs to explain. Not proof, not confession, only a little truth wrapped in enough silliness to survive beneath studio lights.

Jisung likes receiving kisses. He likes receiving praise, touch, attention, reassurance. He likes the particular moment when Minho's usual composure narrows into focus and all that severe beauty becomes devoted entirely to taking care of him. He likes surrender when it is chosen, softness when it is safe, the relief of not having to lead every room he enters.

None of that makes him powerless.

He had said so himself.

Minho's eyes fall to his mouth.

"We're at work," Jisung whispers.

"I know."

"There are people like ten meters away."

"I know."

"You can't kiss me."

"I know."

Minho does not move closer. He only waits, which is somehow far more irritating.

Jisung glances once more down the hallway, catches Minho by the collar, and presses a quick kiss to the corner of his mouth.

When he pulls away, Minho looks unbearably pleased with himself.

"You gave that one," he says.

"Shut up."

"Thought you didn't like it."

"I said not as much."

Jisung escapes before Minho can answer, aware of the elder's silent laughter following him down the corridor. For the rest of the day, he feels bright beneath his skin.

The episode airs on a Thursday.

By Friday morning, the clip has crossed every platform Jisung knows exists and several he has only heard about from staff attempting to explain why something is trending.

At first, it is funny.

Fans pair the caption with clips of Jisung holding out his cheek for kisses, climbing into the members' arms, whining to be fed, fishing for compliments with shameless persistence, and then collapsing into embarrassed laughter the moment anyone actually gives him what he asked for. Someone creates a compilation titled PRINCESS JISUNG MOMENTS. Another edits a pink bow emoji onto his head every time he leans toward affection rather than initiating it.

Minho sends him the crown compilation at six fourteen in the morning without a single word.

Jisung: go back to sleep

Minho: awake

Jisung: clearly your brain isn't

Minho: powerful princess

Jisung stares at the message in bed until the heat in his face becomes intolerable, then buries the phone beneath his pillow as though that might erase both the words and the humiliating happiness they cause.

By afternoon, however, the tone begins to change.

Not everywhere. Most fans are still joking fondly, delighted by the same audacity that delighted the members. But the clip has escaped into the corners of fandom where every gesture becomes evidence in a trial over who is permitted to claim which version of him.

Jisung sees the first argument while sitting in hair and makeup.

A fan has posted: he literally said he prefers receiving and called it power. Proud bottom forever.

The quote replies have become a battlefield.

“Stop assigning sex positions to real people.”

“He was talking about kisses, you freaks.”

“He only said it because I.N likes to tease him.”

“Han is obviously the dominant one. Have you seen him when he gets serious?”

“The way some of you feminize a grown man because he has a pretty face is disgusting.”

“He is one of the most alpha members when he's not playing a character for variety.”

His stylist asks him to lift his chin. Jisung obeys automatically, phone resting low in his lap as foundation is blended along his jaw.

He knew the answer would sound suggestive. That was why he chose it. He was not naming Minho or describing their relationship, but he was offering a true preference about himself. Being receptive mattered to him. He did not believe it deserved to exist only in rooms no camera could enter.

Obviously dominant.

Manly. A real namja.

Not really feminine.

Each phrase attempts to protect him by selecting only the hardest images available, his lowered voice, the muscles in his arms, the authority he carries in a studio, then insisting those images reveal more truth than the things he has volunteered himself.

Then there is the ship art.

That is where the refusal becomes impossible to excuse as simple caution. These are fans who already imagine him with men. They draw him kissing Minho, living through elaborate romances, becoming jealous, getting married, and building whole domestic lives with people he has known for half his life. They are not frightened by the idea of him loving a man. Apparently, the impossible part begins only when he might be the bottom.

Often, the art is beautiful. The artist gets his mouth right, the curve of his cheek, even the slight inward line of his waist. Yet Jisung is the one leaning over the other man, guiding a chin upward, bracing a hand beside a smaller body, initiating with a cool authority that has never felt like his. Sometimes nothing explicit is drawn at all. The posture says enough. TOP HAN, the tags announce. DOM JISUNG.

Other pieces are subtler still. Minho sits while Jisung stands between his knees with one hand at the back of his neck. Jisung presses somebody against a wall. Edits collect lowered stares, hard rap verses, flexed arms, and clipped studio instructions until the accumulation manufactures a smooth, assured dominance. Some are genuinely gorgeous. That almost makes the wrongness harder to dismiss. He recognizes his face and clothes. He does not recognize himself in the role they have given him.

After the receiving comment, the insistence makes even less sense. Shippers were already inventing kisses, confessions, jealousy, marriages, and sex lives for him. Why was the one possibility they refused to tolerate the one that came closest to something he had actually told them?

He had expected fans willing to imagine him loving men to accept the parts of him that did not imitate conventional masculinity. Instead, some accepted the pairing only after rebuilding him into the kind of man they found easier to place there.

The edits that disturb him most begin with the parts he has offered willingly. His hands folded beneath his chin as he calls himself cute. The pleased curve of his shoulders when somebody says princess. The receiving comment from his solo interview. Some splice those moments against stage clips to argue that the softer Jisung is performance. Others do not argue at all. They simply cast him as the one taking control and trust the composition to correct him for them.

Jisung does object to that version being called accurate. He does not describe himself as dominant, alpha, or a top. He is powerful onstage because he is an exceptional performer. He can command a recording room because he knows what he is doing. Neither fact turns into an intimate role the second a fan draws Minho beside him. The art can be skillful and still feel like a stranger wearing his face in the wrong direction.

What makes the reversal almost funny is that the interview is not the only piece of himself he has offered. Over the years, Jisung has called himself weak and tiny while asking to be protected, warned that someone might steal him because he is so small, and admitted that he likes remaining someone Chan and the others believe needs looking after. He once became so touched by a fan saying they had fallen for his princess charm that he nearly cried. He has sung that he wants a husband. He has never treated being the protected, courted, pretty one as a humiliation until other people begin treating it like one for him.

Then there are the things the members have said with their own mouths. Stories about Jisung coming out in his underwear and twerking for Minho, or dropping to all fours because making Minho laugh matters more than dignity. Minho explaining, with far too much satisfaction, that smacking Jisung’s butt produces a particularly good sound. Jisung distinguishing between the muscles he tones because he likes how they look and Minho’s frankly stupid brute strength, which renders most attempts at wrestling him pointless. It is difficult to understand why a lowered stage stare becomes meaningful evidence of dominance while every joke Jisung makes in the other direction is dismissed as meaningless.

The clearest example remains a game in which they were asked to name something at home a person could get on top of. Mount, really, once the Korean phrasing settled into the room. Minho and Hyunjin both answered “Han Jisung” almost at once. The others agreed so immediately that Jisung barely had time to protest before the room dissolved into laughter. He had shouted because there were cameras and because the members were shameless, not because anyone misunderstood the direction of the joke.

Minho, meanwhile, has never volunteered himself for the princess part of anything. He is beautiful enough to make the distinction irrelevant and wears makeup, jewelry, silk, lace, and whatever else a stylist gives him without insecurity. Still, he has never placed himself in the soft, courted, protected role Jisung repeatedly chooses. When a joke leaves one of them to be mounted, handled, babied, or flustered, Minho’s eyes land on Jisung with such reliable ease that everyone else usually arrives there too.

Jisung is not asking strangers to solve the private shape of his relationship. He is asking them to listen to the part he chose to make public. “I prefer receiving” should not somehow become evidence that he must prefer giving.

He locks the phone.

Later, wardrobe offers him two stage jackets. The first is cropped sharply through the shoulders and ends exactly where his waist draws inward, with a slim silver chain meant to rest above his trousers. The second is longer and heavier.

Jisung chooses the cropped one before the stylist finishes asking.

“And the chain?” she asks.

“Obviously.”

The answer makes her smile. Jisung turns before the mirror while she fastens it, watching silver catch against black fabric and the warm strip of skin at his waist.

He can already imagine the screenshots. Some will call him pretty. Some will call the shape feminine. Others will collect the same outfit, his hard verse, and one lowered stare as proof that he is an “alpha” top after all.

The thought irritates him. It does not change his clothes.

Hyunjin notices his expression twenty minutes later.

“You read something.”

Jisung meets his eyes through the mirror. Hyunjin is dressed in ivory and black, long dark hair framing his face with the ruthless precision of a painting.

“Unfortunately.”

Hyunjin’s gaze drops to the waist chain. “And you're wearing it anyway.”

“I like it.”

“Good.”

“That's not the problem.” Jisung adjusts the cropped hem. “They're gonna use this to call me dominant while pretending every time I called myself princess was a joke.”

Hyunjin turns one of his rings. “They will crop whatever they need.”

“Then they can work harder.”

Hyunjin’s mouth lifts as he pats Jisung on the head.

Jisung rolls his eyes and asks the stylist whether she has pearls that will fit beneath the chain.

★ ★ ★

The cropped jacket does not survive the performance neatly.

Under the stage lights, with the first heavy beat rolling through the floor and thousands of voices rising to meet them, Jisung tears through his verse hard enough to make the crowd answer every line. Sweat slips beneath his collar. The chain flashes each time his body turns. He smiles when the song asks for a smile, bares his teeth when the choreography calls for something sharper, and stalks offstage with his chest heaving and the old familiar current still singing beneath his skin.

The comments call him powerful.

Dangerous. Commanding. Masculine. Manly.

The first three please him. The final two feel like somebody has translated the performance into a language he never chose.

Earlier in their career, Jisung wanted desperately to be seen as formidable. Round cheeks and nervousness made people call him cute before they called him skilled, and he worked until nobody could watch him hold a microphone without recognizing the force behind it. What he wanted was respect for his talent. He did not work that hard to be told the reward was masculinity.

Power is not a synonym for manliness, nor is authority at work proof of dominance in bed. A rap verse or a vocal timbre isn't a sex position.

That night, Felix drops into the van seat beside him and shoves a clip from the performance beneath his nose.

“You went crazy here.”

“I know,” Jisung answers, because false modesty requires energy he no longer has.

Felix laughs and rewinds the clip. “Nah, seriously. You looked like you wanted to fight the camera. And the fit was sick. The waist chain went hard.”

Jisung watches himself tip his chin beneath red light. The caption over the edit reads ALPHA HAN ACTIVATED.

“Why is that alpha?” he asks.

Felix looks at the screen. “Because the internet has six words and three of them are alpha?”

“I'm performing.”

“Yeah.”

“I look powerful.”

“Very.”

“I don't look like I want to top somebody.”

Felix chokes on absolutely nothing.

Jisung glances over. “What?”

“Nothing, bro. Direct statement. Respect.” Felix recovers, then lowers the phone. “Is that what has been bothering you?”

“They keep using the best parts of my work to argue that everything I say about myself must be fake.”

Felix's expression settles into concern. “That's messed up.”

Jisung looks back toward the window. He likes frightening people onstage. He likes being pretty. He likes the strength in his body and being babied the moment he walks off it. None of those pleasures cancel the others, and none of them turn him into a dominant man he has never claimed to be.

The problem is not that fans see several sides of him.

The problem is that they keep using one side to overrule the one he chose to show them.

★ ★ ★

The refusals accumulate through little moments, each one small enough to dismiss and therefore difficult to explain without sounding dramatic.

A fan call where somebody smiles brightly and tells him, “Do not let the members call you princess. You are a king.”

Jisung smiles back. “Princess is fine. I like princess.”

The fan blinks, briefly startled, then laughs as though he has made another joke.

A live where a comment asks whether he remembers being a woman in his past life. The chat floods with people warning one another not to make him uncomfortable before he can answer.

“I remember,” Jisung says anyway. “I liked her.”

The comment disappears beneath thousands of others. By the next morning, translation accounts have softened the sentence into he found the experience interesting.

A compilation of his louder moments posted beneath the caption: everyone thinks he is babygirl but this is the real Han Jisung.

The real Han Jisung.

He watches himself shouting during a game, flexing after a workout, swearing when he loses, and directing a recording session with his voice low. All of it is real. None of it is the hidden man beneath a fake princess.

Jisung has spent most of his career code-switching without giving it that name. In unfamiliar rooms full of new staff, he becomes brisker and more controlled. His voice lowers when he explains something. His movements narrow because professionalism gives his nerves a shape that other people cannot mistake for uncertainty.

Around the members, the control loosens. His wrists move more. His voice climbs. He tucks himself beneath broad arms, flourishes his hands when he complains, throws his body across whoever is closest, and lets cuteness become an ordinary language.

Fans notice both. They joke about him “acting straight” around strangers and about the return of his hips, loose hands, and soft little noises the moment he is safely among the members again. Jisung laughs because the observation is usually accurate.

What bothers him is the verdict attached to it. The guarded professional posture is treated as adulthood and masculinity. The ease he shows among people he trusts is treated as a bit.

Jisung knows which version is more vulnerable. That is exactly why he keeps showing it.

He wears the cream blouse with pearl buttons. He smiles when somebody calls him pretty. When Minho’s hand settles around his waist, Jisung does not twist away simply because a camera might understand the tenderness correctly.

He is not offering every detail of his life. He is offering the details he chooses.

That choice is what makes the refusal hurt. He reaches out with something intimate, and fans who call themselves protective push it back into his hands as though he could not possibly know what belongs to him.

Minho notices the anger before anyone else.

Of course he does.

They are in bed on one of the increasingly rare nights neither has an early schedule. Jisung wears the cream blouse half unbuttoned over sleep shorts because he liked it too much to change after dinner. His phone glows inches from his face.

Minho emerges from the bathroom in a black T-shirt and gray sweatpants, hair damp, face bare. He stops beside the bed.

“Put it down.”

Jisung scrolls. “I'm reading.”

“You're arguing with people who didn't ask you.”

“They are saying I only like being a princess when the cameras make me do aegyo.”

Minho sits beside him. The mattress dips, pulling Jisung closer by a fraction.

“The cameras also made you buy that blouse?”

Jisung looks down at the cream fabric. “Hyunjin made me buy it.”

“The cameras made you wear it to bed?”

“I look good.”

“You do.”

The compliment warms him despite the irritation. Jisung locks the phone, then unlocks it again almost immediately.

“They keep saying the controlled version is the real one,” he says. “Like I'm somehow more honest every time I stand straighter. Literally straighter.”

Minho takes the phone from his hand.

“Yah.”

“You know why you stand like that around strangers.”

“Because I'm trying to look competent.”

“You are.”

“I know.”

Minho studies him. “You know who you are, too.”

“I do.” Jisung sits up, irritation sharpening the words. “That's why it's annoying. I'm not confused. They're contradicting me.”

Minho's expression changes, the teasing receding. “Then stop reading people who like their answer better than yours.”

“That doesn't make them stop.”

“No. It just stops them from taking your bedtime.”

Jisung reaches for the phone. Minho holds it beyond his fingertips without effort.

“Give it back.”

“Tomorrow.”

“I hate you.”

“Wear the blouse tomorrow too.”

Jisung glares at him. “I was going to.”

“Good.”

Minho places the phone on the far nightstand and lies down. Jisung remains sitting for three offended seconds before crawling into his arms and arranging Minho’s hand over his waist.

“I'm still mad,” Jisung says.

“I know.”

“Don't sound so pleased.”

“You put my hand here.”

“That’s irrelevant.”

Minho presses his mouth to the back of his hair. “That’s powerful.”

Jisung elbows him and settles closer.

★ ★ ★

The others notice different pieces of the same frustration.

Chan notices when Jisung answers a comment more sharply than usual, then spends the rest of the live trying to explain a sentence that never needed a defense.

Changbin notices when Jisung argues for keeping a demo lyric about surrender after somebody calls it weak. “That's the point,” Jisung says. “Wanting to surrender doesn't mean you have nothing to give.”

Hyunjin notices every time styling built around Jisung’s waist, pearls, or softness becomes “evidence” for strangers who later insist he is secretly the opposite.

Felix notices when the word alpha makes Jisung’s smile flatten.

Seungmin notices the search history, or rather the public version of it displayed directly in front of him because Jisung has apparently forgotten that lowering a phone beneath a table does not render the screen invisible to the person seated across from him.

They are on a break between rehearsals when Seungmin catches him reading a long thread titled STOP FEMINIZING HAN JISUNG: A SERIOUS DISCUSSION.

“Excellent use of your limited time on earth,” Seungmin says.

Jisung jerks hard enough to nearly drop his phone. “Mind your business.”

“You made it my business by setting the screen brightness to lighthouse.”

“Please go bother someone else.”

Rather than leaving, Seungmin pulls out the chair opposite him and sits. “What does the constitution say today?”

Jisung blinks. “What?”

“The one strangers wrote about your personality. Any new amendments?”

Jisung glares at him.

Seungmin extends one hand. “Let me see.”

“No.”

“Then summarize.”

“They’re saying people shouldn't make assumptions about me.”

“Reasonable.”

“Then they spend the next thirty paragraphs assuming I must be the opposite.”

Seungmin nods. “Significantly less reasonable.”

Jisung locks the phone and holds it against his chest. “They keep saying they're protecting me.”

“From what?”

“Femininity. Being a princess. Being a bottom. The receiving comment. Apparently all of that's an attack now.”

“Do you want people to stop calling you feminine or princess?”

“No.” The answer comes immediately. “I like both, and I meant the receiving thing too.”

The teasing leaves Seungmin’s expression.

“That seems pretty clear.”

“It was clear when I said it.” Jisung leans forward. “I don't need strangers inventing things about Minho or treating every gesture like proof. But I did choose to tell them something about me. Why does ‘don't assume’ always turn into ‘he's obviously a top, an alpha, and the manliest member’?”

“Because they don't actually care about uncertainty,” Seungmin says. “They're defending the answer they prefer.”

“I thought people already shipping me with men would be less strange about it. They draw me dating them, kissing them, getting jealous, getting married. Art that makes me the top gets called accurate, but art that lets me receive gets treated like an insult.”

“That makes no sense.”

“It’s like they accept me with a man only after turning me into the version of masculinity they approve of.”

“So they're not accepting you,” Seungmin says. “They’re casting you.”

The word lands cleanly.

Jisung is a bottom. He likes being one. He likes the receptive role and the trust of placing himself in Minho’s hands. The little private details of that relationship belong to the two of them, but the preference itself is something Jisung chose to speak aloud. He chose ambiguity because it let him reveal one intimate truth without surrendering the whole relationship, but that is not an invitation to erase what he said.

Why must top be the defense and bottom the accusation?

“Because people are stupid,” Seungmin says.

A laugh escapes Jisung, small and surprised. “That is your deep analysis?”

“Do you want the longer one?”

Jisung lifts one shoulder.

Seungmin glances at the phone. “They think femininity is an insult, even when they swear they don't. So when they see it attached to somebody they respect, they panic and split the two apart.”

The answer is exactly cruel enough in its accuracy.

“Maybe I'm being dramatic. As usual.”

“You are dramatic.” Seungmin pauses. “Doesn't mean you're wrong, though.”

“Thanks.”

“You’re welcome.”

Jisung rubs his thumb against the phone case. “I know what I want them to think.”

“About?”

“About how I might mean what I say about myself.”

Seungmin’s mouth tightens. “Then stop trying to persuade people committed to ignoring you.”

Jisung rubs both hands over his face.

“You know what's annoying?”

“Everything?”

“I made the comment because I wanted to tell them something.” Jisung's voice softens. “Not everything. Just that part. I liked saying it because it was mine, and because I don't think being a bottom is shameful.”

Seungmin nods once, no teasing this time.

“Then people started arguing that I couldn't mean it,” Jisung says. “That’s what hurts. I handed them the sentence myself.”

“You're not stupid for caring. You're stupid for still reading it. Different problem.”

Jisung kicks him under the table.

Seungmin kicks back harder.

“Ow!”

“You started it.”

“Why are you so evil?”

“You're letting people who heard you perfectly well tell you what you meant.”

The sentence remains after Seungmin rises and walks away, taking an unopened bottle of water as payment for his unwanted counsel.

Jisung looks at the thread one final time and closes it.

He does not become enlightened through one conversation. For the rest of the afternoon, however, each time his hand drifts toward the app, he hears Seungmin asking whether the constitution has received any amendments.

It helps.

A little bit.

It helps until it does not.

The breaking point arrives in a room full of soft lighting and pastel decorations during a fan-sign event designed, with considerable irony, to feel intimate.

Rows of fans move past one member at a time, each conversation measured in seconds and preserved by phones held at careful angles. Jisung has always found fan signs lovely in a way that is also dangerous. There is something deeply disarming about looking directly into the faces of people who carried their songs through difficult years, people who know lyrics Jisung wrote alone at three in the morning and used them to survive mornings of their own.

There is also nowhere to hide.

A young woman sits across from him wearing a headband decorated with tiny silver stars. Her fingers tremble as she slides an album across the table.

"I've loved you since debut," she says in Korean practiced carefully around an unfamiliar accent. "You made me want to write music."

Jisung's smile comes easily. "Really? Then you have to let me hear something sometime."

Her eyes widen. "I'm not good yet."

"Nobody's good before they start."

He signs the page and adds a small quokka beside his name. The girl watches his pen, visibly gathering the courage for whatever she had rehearsed next.

"Also," she begins, "please don't be upset when people call you princess."

Jisung’s pen pauses, not from discomfort with the word, but because he recognizes the apology already forming behind it.

“I'm not upset. I like princess.”

"I know some fans say it's disrespectful, but I don't mean it badly." She rushes through the explanation as a staff member begins signaling that her time is nearly over. "You're strong and talented and still pretty, and I just wanted you to know some of us understand."

For one suspended second, Jisung cannot speak.

The girl misreads his silence immediately, horror crossing her face. "I'm sorry. I shouldn't have—"

"No." Jisung reaches over the table and covers her hand briefly with his. "No, thank you. I understand. Really."

The staff moves her along. She bows repeatedly, clutching the album against her chest.

Jisung watches her go with warmth expanding painfully beneath his ribs.

Then the next fan takes her place.

She is a girl around Jisung's age, confident and smiling, and places a small cardboard crown on the table between them.

“I brought this because everyone’s been calling you a princess lately,” she says with a laugh.

Jisung’s heart lifts before she turns the crown around.

“But you’re obviously a king, right? So I fixed it.” She taps the word crossed out across the front. “I don’t get why people always make you the wife in every ship just because you’re cute. That doesn’t suit you at all.”

PRINCESS has been written across the cardboard and struck through with thick black marker. Beneath it, in block letters, is KING HAN.

“You’re really manly,” the fan adds, giggling as though they are sharing a harmless joke. “You’re the top, right? Tell everyone they’ve got it wrong.”

Nothing in the room changes. Cameras continue clicking. Staff continue smiling and checking their timers. At the next table, Changbin laughs loudly at something another fan has said.

Jisung looks down at the crown.

The girl means to flatter him. That’s the worst part. There’s no cruelty sharp enough to reject cleanly, only affection built around a hierarchy that hollows the praise out from the inside.

Not merely an assumption, Jisung realizes, but a hierarchy. Top, king, alpha, manly: the words have been gathered together and offered as praise. Bottom, princess, feminine: crossed out in thick black marker as though they are stains someone kind has removed for him.

“I said I prefer receiving,” Jisung says.

"I know, but you were joking, right?" The fan grins. "You definitely seem like the one who gives more. Anyone can tell."

She looks at Jisung as though inviting him into a private joke they share.

Jisung smiles because a camera is pointed directly at his face, but the certainty beneath it is not performed.

“You heard me,” he says lightly. “You just decided I had to mean something else.”

The fan laughs, delighted, hearing flirtation where Jisung intended warning.

Time ends. The cardboard crown remains on the table.

Jisung signs the next album, and then another. He compliments outfits, listens to stories, poses in animal ears, accepts several marriage proposals, and gives each person the illusion that they have received the best version of him available within thirty seconds.

By the end, the muscles in his cheeks hurt from smiling.

Backstage, he walks straight past the waiting room.

"Han-ah," Chan calls after him.

Jisung keeps going.

At the far end of the hallway, he finds a narrow staff bathroom, locks himself inside, and stands with both hands braced against the sink.

The mirror shows a man in polished stage makeup and a soft blue sweater embellished with tiny pearls. The stylists had curled his hair lightly around his face. Earlier, when he first saw himself dressed, Jisung had thought he looked lovely.

Now, all he can see is the crossed-out crown and the confidence with which somebody else tried to replace his answer.

Too powerful to receive.

As though trusting someone enough to open his hands is not its own kind of power.

As though being held requires weakness.

As though a princess cannot command a kingdom.

Jisung turns on the faucet and presses cool water beneath his eyes, careful not to destroy the makeup. His breathing has gone uneven, which only makes him angrier. He has always cried too easily, when he is sad, when he is furious, when embarrassment becomes too hot beneath his skin, when emotions simply grow too numerous to fit inside him at once. Tears make every conviction look smaller, reducing anger to sensitivity in the eyes of people who already believe softness is the absence of strength.

A knock sounds against the door.

"Occupied," Jisung calls.

Silence.

Then Minho says, "Open it."

"I'm using the bathroom."

"You've been using it for nine minutes."

Jisung glares at the door. "Did you time me?"

"Yes."

"Go away."

Another silence. Minho can weaponize silence more effectively than most people manage with entire speeches.

"I'm fine," Jisung says.

"Okay."

Footsteps recede down the hallway.

The immediate disappointment is so violent that Jisung nearly laughs at himself. He unlocks the door and yanks it open.

Minho stands three steps away with his arms folded.

"You didn't leave."

"No."

"Then why did you make footstep sounds?"

"So you'd open the door."

"Manipulative psychopath."

"Crybaby liar."

Jisung glares as Minho looks past his shoulder into the empty bathroom, takes Jisung by the wrist, and leads him farther down the hall. He finds an unused dressing room, checks inside, and pulls Jisung through before locking the door.

The second the door closes behind them, Jisung finally lets the anger become tears.

Minho catches him before the first sob properly escapes. Jisung presses his face into Minho’s chest, furious with the fan, the crown, and the fact that people can hear a clear sentence from his own mouth and still call the opposite more respectful.

"Who?" Minho asks.

"Nobody."

"Who upset you?"

"They didn't mean to."

"That wasn't my question."

Jisung tightens his grip. "I don't want you angry at a fan."

"I'm angry at everyone by default. Give me the details."

A broken laugh catches between Jisung's sobs. Minho rubs firmly between his shoulder blades, not shushing him, not telling him to calm down, only staying where he is while Jisung's body exhausts the emotion his mind could not contain.

When he can speak without choking on every other word, Jisung tells him about the crown.

Minho listens without interrupting.

"It was supposed to be nice," Jisung finishes. "She was trying to say I'm strong."

"By saying princesses aren't."

Jisung pulls back enough to see his face. "That's what it felt like."

"Because that's what she said."

"Not exactly."

"Exactly enough."

Minho reaches toward the dressing table, takes a tissue, and dabs beneath Jisung's eyes with surprising precision. Years of watching makeup artists repair their faces have apparently taught him the correct angle.

“I told them, hyung,” Jisung says. “Not about you. Not every detail of us. But I chose to tell them something about me because it matters to me. Why does everyone who defends me have to pretend I said the opposite?”

Minho's hand stills beneath Jisung's eye.

The question is not born from uncertainty. Jisung knows what he meant. That certainty is what gives the hurt such a clean edge.

“Why do they keep acting like being the receiving one would be humiliating?” Jisung continues, voice rough from crying. “Like pretty has to be corrected into handsome, princess into king, bottom into top. If I'm loud or talented or confident, they decide I must secretly be an alpha. What's wrong with being exactly what I say I am?”

His voice cracks over the final word, anger burning fresh across his face.

Minho places the tissue on the table.

Jisung looks down at the pearls sewn into his sweater. The anger is still there, steadier now that Minho is holding it with him.

“I hate that they make it sound like I need permission,” he says.

“You don't.”

“I know.” Jisung lifts his eyes again. “I'm a bottom. I love being your bottom. I like being your princess. None of that's some reluctant confession. I'm not asking you to convince me.”

Minho’s expression softens with immediate understanding.

“Then what are you asking me?”

“Why people who say they love me hear those words as an insult.”

Minho cups the back of his neck, thumb resting beneath his hairline. “Because some people hear ‘beneath someone’ and think it means beneath them as a person.”

Jisung’s mouth tightens.

“They’re wrong,” Minho says.

“That's it?”

“Do you want a presentation?”

A wet laugh slips out of Jisung.

Minho's hand stays firm at his neck. “You trust me. You like me taking care of you. I like that you give me that. But none of that makes you smaller.”

Jisung presses closer, the clean certainty in Minho’s voice settling against his own.

“I liked saying it,” he says. “The receiving thing. I knew what it sounded like.”

“I know.”

“How?”

“You looked proud for three seconds and then remembered the cameras existed.”

Jisung ducks his face into his hands. “Oh my God.”

Minho catches his wrists and pulls them down. “Don’t hide now.”

“I wasn't telling everyone about us,” Jisung says. “I was telling them about me.”

"I know."

“I liked that it could stay inside a joke about kisses and still be true. I knew what I meant, you knew, the members knew. It was one intimate thing I wanted people to hear.”

"I know."

"Stop saying you know."

"Then stop explaining things I already understand."

Despite himself, Jisung laughs, the sound still watery around the edges. Minho's thumb brushes away the dampness beneath his eye.

“I said I was a woman who loved a man, and they said it didn't count. I said I liked receiving, and they said I couldn't mean it. I call myself cute. I say princess suits me. Then they draw me taking control, somehow above the other person, still the top, and call that the version that makes sense. Sometimes it even looks exactly like me, and that almost makes it worse. How many times am I supposed to show them something before they stop correcting it into the opposite?”

Minho remains quiet for a moment, studying him.

“You already answered them,” Minho says.

Jisung frowns. “They didn't listen.”

“Then saying it ten more ways won't fix people who don't want to hear you.”

“So what do I do?”

“Stop acting like their refusal to listen means you still owe them another answer.”

Jisung goes quiet.

He does believe himself. He has believed himself the entire time. The unbearable part is wanting the people who claim to love him to extend the same respect to his own words.

“I want them to believe me,” he admits.

“I know.”

“That isn't helpful.”

“It's true.” Minho's hand moves from the back of Jisung's neck to his jaw. “You can say what you want. You don't owe them ten more explanations afterward.”

“Private and shameful aren't the same thing,” Jisung says.

“Exactly.”

Minho holds his gaze. “You like being pretty. You like being called princess. You're a bottom, and you like me doing everything. You also run a recording room because you're good at your job. None of those things cancel each other out.”

Jisung’s face warms.

Minho continues, dry and certain. “Telling an engineer what the song needs doesn't make you dominant in bed. It makes you a producer.”

Jisung’s mouth trembles between tears and laughter. “You make the argument sound stupid.”

“The argument's stupid. You're not.”

Minho's expression softens again. “You carry songs, stages, and everybody else's moods all day. Of course you like coming home and letting me carry you.”

His thumb presses lightly beneath Jisung’s chin.

“I like carrying you.”

Jisung’s vision blurs all over again.

“That sounded rehearsed.”

“It wasn't.”

“Too romantic. Suspicious.”

“Forget it, then.”

“No.” Jisung catches the front of his jacket. “Say it again.”

“No.”

He laughs into Minho’s shoulder when the elder pulls him close, one arm firm around his waist.

Then Minho murmurs into his hair, “You are my princess. Unfortunately.”

Jisung pulls back. “Unfortunately?”

“High maintenance. Expensive. Cries in staff bathrooms too often.”

Jisung pinches his side.

Minho barely reacts. “Also, anybody who thinks you're an alpha has never watched you hand me a bottle without even trying to open it.”

“Those caps are designed badly.”

“Of course.”

“And I can open them.”

“You don’t.”

“Choice.”

Minho’s mouth twitches. “Power, even.”

Jisung groans and buries his face back into Minho’s neck. The tears have stopped. His skin feels tender, but his certainty remains exactly where it was before the crown. The difference is that he no longer has to hold the anger alone.

A knock sounds at the dressing-room door.

"Hyung?" Felix calls. "You guys in there? Chan's stressing."

Jisung freezes.

Minho covers his mouth before he can answer.

"I saw you drag Hannie this way," Felix continues. "Chan's been pacing, and Seungmin says you're probably committing a felony."

"Not yet," Minho calls.

"Can we come in?"

Minho looks at Jisung.

Jisung imagines wiping his face, fixing his sweater, and walking back into the waiting room without explaining. Not because he doubts himself, but because explaining the same wound again is exhausting.

Then he remembers the girl with the silver stars, who understood the first time.

He nods.

Minho unlocks the door.

Felix enters first, followed immediately by Chan, Changbin, Hyunjin, Seungmin, and Jeongin in such a complete procession that Jisung suspects they had all been lined up outside the door waiting for permission.

"Why are all of you here?" he asks, looking from one face to the next.

"Felix said something was wrong," Chan says.

Felix turns toward him. "Bro, that's not what I said. I said he looked upset."

Chan gives him a look. "You came running over saying, 'Something's wrong, mate, come now.'"

"Yeah, because something was wrong," Felix replies, as if this closes the case.

Hyunjin's gaze goes straight to Jisung's face, eyes narrowing at the swollen lashes. "Who did it?"

Jisung exhales. "Why does everyone want a name?"

"So we can ruin their life," Changbin answers without hesitation.

"Nobody's ruining a fan's life," Chan says sharply.

"I was being supportive."

"Be supportive without felonies."

Jeongin leans against the wall. "Minho hyung already called dibs on the felony anyway."

Still seated close enough that his thigh rests firmly along Jisung's, Minho says, "Correct."

The familiar chaos gathers around Jisung like blankets thrown over him from several directions at once, heavy and slightly suffocating but warm.

Chan crouches in front of the sofa. "What happened?"

Jisung glances at Minho.

Minho does not answer for him, only keeps one hand resting against the back of Jisung's waist.

So Jisung tells them.

Not every detail. He does not explain what Minho’s voice does to him when he says princess in private. He does explain that the receiving joke was a chosen public truth, visible enough to matter and still contained enough not to expose the whole relationship. He tells them about the comments, the past-life segment, the cardboard crown, and the ship art that keeps his face while giving him a dominant role he has never claimed. He tells them that he hates manly when the word is used to correct him and that some fans seem capable of respecting him only after removing everything soft, feminine, bottom, or receptive from the picture.

When he finishes, the room is unusually quiet.

Hyunjin speaks first. “They keep using our styling as evidence against you.”

Jisung blinks. “That is what you took from all of that?”

“No. I heard all of it.” Hyunjin turns one of his rings. “I'm starting with the part I can actually make more inconvenient for them.”

Seungmin inclines his head. “Annoyingly practical.”

Chan sits back on his heels, brows pulled together. “I'm sorry we didn't get it sooner.”

“You didn't do anything.”

“Still. We tease you and call you things. I need to know that doesn't feel the same.”

“It doesn't.”

“Why?” Jeongin asks.

Jisung looks around at the seven faces turned toward him. “Because when you call me princess, you mean princess. You don't say it and then rush to reassure me that I'm actually manly.”

Felix’s expression softens.

Changbin crosses his arms. “Anybody who hears you run a recording session and thinks softness makes you weak is an idiot.”

“And being a bottom doesn't make you any less capable,” he adds with the matter-of-fact tone of somebody discussing weather.

Jisung’s eyes widen. “Hyung.”

“What? We are adults. The word isn't radioactive.”

“Thank you, but you’re basically family, so it should still be a little radioactive for you.”

Jeongin laughs.

Chan’s mouth finally lifts. “Being good at your job doesn't make you manly. It makes you good at your job.”

Hyunjin nods. “Femininity isn't failed masculinity. People act like one is the finished picture and the other is where the lines went wrong.”

“And some of the art probably is beautiful,” he continues. “That doesn't make the composition right. They can draw your face perfectly and still put you in a posture that isn't yours.”

Seungmin glances at him. “That was almost intellectual.”

“I am intellectual. You are all irritating.”

Felix drops onto the arm of the sofa and bumps Jisung’s shoulder. “You're Producer Han, loud idiot Han, princess Han, and babygirl Han. Same person.”

Chan nods. “Exactly.”

Jeongin says, “I still don't get why people are confused. The staff brought up the two times I kissed you, and you looked into a camera and said you prefer receiving. How much clearer do you need to be?”

“Also,” Changbin says, “all of us already agreed you’re something a person can mount at home.”

“Why are you bringing that up again?” Jisung demands.

“Supporting evidence,” Seungmin says.

The room explodes.

Jisung throws the tissue box. Jeongin ducks while Changbin shouts, “The maknae said it!”

“We were talking about kisses!” Jisung yells.

“Of course,” Jeongin replies, innocent as fresh snow.

“I can’t stand any of you.”

Minho’s arm slides fully around his waist. “Receiving affection from all seven directions.”

Jisung turns on him. “You are the worst one.”

“And yet.”

Jisung looks around the room at people laughing not because his certainty is ridiculous, but because pretending they have not always known him is. The tenderness rises too quickly, and his eyes begin burning again.

Seungmin notices first. “Don’t start. We just fixed the makeup.”

“Shut up.”

Felix hooks an arm around Jisung’s shoulders and kisses his cheek. Hyunjin leans in from the other side, Changbin crushes his styled hair beneath one palm, and Chan makes one unsuccessful attempt to protect the makeup before joining the pile.

Jisung disappears beneath limbs, perfume, laughter, and Minho’s sharp complaint that they are crushing him, despite Minho making no genuine effort to remove anybody.

At the center of it, Jisung closes his eyes.

For the first time in weeks, he is not the only person angry on his behalf.

The conversation does not teach Jisung who he is. That part he already knew.

It just gives him witnesses.

At the next wardrobe fitting, the same cropped jacket waits on the rack, now altered with new pearl details, three chain options, and one pair of boots so impractical that Jisung loves them immediately.

“I only sent a few ideas,” Hyunjin says.

“You sent a portfolio.”

The shoulders of the jacket remain structured, the hem stopping where Jisung’s waist narrows. Fine mesh softens the black at his throat. The trousers emphasize the strength of his thighs without pretending the inward curve above them is anything but delicate.

Jisung can already imagine how the outfit will be edited. Some fans will call him princess. Some will insist the pearls are ironic. Others will use his stage expression to announce that the entire soft silhouette belongs to a dominant alpha top.

He does not need courage to choose the outfit. He likes it.

“Use the pearls,” he tells the stylist. “And the thinnest chain.”

Hyunjin looks up from his phone, satisfied.

“Good choice.”

When the outfit is complete, Jisung studies himself properly.

Beautiful. Sharp. Feminine. Powerful.

His.

Hyunjin’s gaze moves over the finished silhouette. “There. The proportions are better.”

Jisung rolls his eyes, but his smile stays. “Do not sound so pleased with yourself.”

“I'm an artist.”

“You sent shopping links.”

“Art takes many forms.”

The stylist laughs while Jisung turns sideways and watches the silver chain flash over his waist.

★ ★ ★

The performance takes place at an end-of-year festival inside a stadium large enough to turn individual faces into constellations.

Backstage, the building vibrates with bass, footsteps, shouted cues, and the mechanical hum of equipment. Staff hurry through the corridors carrying garment bags, microphones, emergency sewing kits, and trays of coffee. Cameras appear from blind corners without warning, making every hallway a potential set.

Jisung shifts into work mode before he realizes it. His posture straightens. His voice settles lower when he checks cues with Chan and confirms a camera change with the floor director. It is not a more masculine truth emerging from beneath softness. It is professionalism, practiced until his nerves know where to stand.

He does not mistake competence for an intimate identity somebody else gets to assign him.

Minho appears behind him in the mirror while a stylist makes one final adjustment to Jisung's collar.

His own stage clothes are dark red and black, fitted cleanly across his broad shoulders. The makeup at the corners of his eyes sharpens his already feline gaze, and his hair has been pushed away from his forehead just enough to make him look irritatingly handsome.

"Move," the stylist tells him.

Minho moves approximately one centimeter.

"More."

He shifts another.

Jisung laughs. "Hyung, you're blocking the light."

"I'm checking something."

"What?"

Minho's eyes travel with deliberate slowness from the pearl at Jisung's throat to the chain resting over his waist.

Heat rushes immediately into Jisung's ears.

"Go check your own clothes."

"Mine are fine."

"Then go be fine somewhere else."

Minho finally steps away, but as he passes, his fingers brush the inside of Jisung's wrist, hidden briefly between bodies and fabric before disappearing.

Powerful princess, the old message echoes in Jisung's head.

He looks at himself one more time.

"Ready?" Chan calls from the doorway.

Jisung stands, the chain giving a faint metallic sound against the fabric.

"Always."

The first explosion of sound onstage erases every coherent thought.

There are moments when performance does not feel like pretending at all, but like distillation. Jisung moves beneath white beams and red strobes, the cropped jacket flaring behind him. When his verse arrives, the camera finds him at exactly the right angle. He tips his chin, lets one hand slide deliberately to the chain at his waist, and delivers the lines with a smile far too knowing to be accidental.

The stadium roars.

The expression is not evidence of masculinity or dominance. It is performance: hungry, arrogant, beautiful, and his.

Later, during the final song, the members scatter across the stage to interact with fans. Somewhere along the way, Felix acquires a glittering plastic tiara (whether from the audience or from his own mysterious inventory, Jisung never learns) and places it directly on Jisung's head.

His first instinct is to rip it off with exaggerated embarrassment.

Both hands rise.

Then stop.

The tiara sits crooked above his damp curls. On the nearest screen, his own startled face appears enormous, eyes wide beneath the stage lights. Felix stands in front of him, grinning with such open expectation that Jisung suddenly remembers every conversation that led him here.

Beyond them, thousands of fans are screaming.

Jisung adjusts the tiara instead.

Then, gathering the edges of his cropped jacket as though they were skirts, he lowers himself into a small, elegant curtsy.

The sound becomes seismic.

Hyunjin catches Jisung's eye, grins, and gives him a neat little bow. Changbin follows with a much deeper one. Jeongin approaches with his microphone and announces, "Her Royal Highness has arrived."

Jisung laughs so hard the tiara nearly slips off again.

Several meters away, Minho watches.

He does not join the kneeling. That would draw too much attention for reasons every member understands without discussion. He only stands with one hand around his microphone, smiling the quiet, proprietary smile that seems to exist almost exclusively for Jisung.

The camera catches it for less than two seconds.

Jisung feels it across the stage.

He straightens, presses one hand over his heart, and bows directly toward Minho.

Minho bows back.

It is nothing.

It is everything they are safely able to give.

★ ★ ★

The clips begin spreading before they have even left the venue.

Princess Jisung trends in several countries. So do Waist Chain Han, Queen Quokka, and a Korean phrase translated loosely by one account as LEGEND OF THE SQUIRREL PRINCESS.

The two-second camera shot of Minho smiling at him accumulates views at an alarming rate.

In the van, phones move from hand to hand.

"Look at this," Changbin says, leaning over the aisle. "They put castle music over your curtsy."

Felix wedges himself between the seats, holding his own phone in front of Jisung. "Everyone loved it, Hannie. Look."

"Not everyone," Seungmin says from behind them.

Chan reaches back and pushes Felix's wrist down a few centimeters. "Mate, give him some space."

"I am giving him space," Felix says.

Seungmin lifts one shoulder. "He knows the internet contains more than one opinion."

Jisung holds out his hand. "Let me see."

Chan hesitates. "You don't have to read anything tonight."

"I know."

And that, Jisung realizes, is the difference.

He knows.

Seungmin passes him the phone.

The post shows Jisung in the tiara beside an older clip of him shouting during a game. The caption reads: his power and softness were never opposites. stop treating one like it cancels the other.

Beneath it are thousands of replies, some thoughtful, some ridiculous, some still arguing in circles as though a single correct verdict might eventually be reached. One person insists the curtsy had only been fan service. Another says he looks happiest when allowed to be pretty. Someone warns everyone not to assign private identities. Someone else replies that appreciating femininity does not require assigning one.

Jisung reads enough to understand that the conversation has not been solved.

Of course it has not. One stage gesture cannot repair every prejudice inside a global fandom. Some people will continue seeing him through whichever frame they prefer. Some will fetishize softness. Others will reject it. Some will defend him so fiercely that they forget to listen. Others will understand him in ways he never expected.

His peace cannot depend on consensus.

He hands the phone back.

Changbin blinks. "That's it? You're done?"

"I'm done."

Seungmin looks faintly impressed.

Jisung leans back and closes his eyes, the plastic tiara tucked carefully beneath his coat on his lap.

From the seat beside him, Minho's knee presses against his.

Neither of them moves away.

★ ★ ★

A week later, Jisung goes live alone.

It is not planned as a statement. He has finished work late and remains in one of the smaller studio rooms, wearing a black hoodie over a white shirt, hair unstyled, round glasses slipping gradually down his nose. The fluorescent ceiling lights are too harsh, washing every trace of life from his face, so he turns them off and switches on the lamp in the corner instead. Amber light settles over the desk and softens the gray walls.

Fans enter quickly.

Jisung talks about music first because music is easy territory. He plays several seconds of an instrumental he has been building, complains at length about a plug-in update as though personally betrayed by the developers, and reads a stream of comments demanding to know whether he has eaten.

Eventually, the conversation wanders toward the festival.

"The tiara?" Jisung smiles, pushing his glasses back into place. "Felix brought it from somewhere. I still have it."

The chat accelerates.

PRINCESS JISUNG

OUR PRINCESS

KING JISUNG

DO YOU ACTUALLY LIKE BEING CALLED PRINCESS?

STOP FEMINIZING HIM

Jisung sees the final comment.

His shoulders tighten, not because he wants to evade the word, but because he is tired of watching other people use respect as a reason to correct him. He could change the subject. He does not.

He adjusts his glasses and leans closer to the screen.

“Some people are arguing again,” he says.

The chat moves even faster.

“Don't fight. Just listen.” His heartbeat is noticeable beneath the hoodie, but his voice stays clear. “I like being called pretty. I like soft. Princess suits me. I've said all of that myself plenty of times.”

There are no members beside him and no Minho beyond the frame to rescue the silence. Jisung does not need rescuing.

“I've also said I want to be protected and looked after. I was happy when somebody became my fan because of my princess charm. Those are important parts of me. They aren't insults you have to erase before you can respect me.”

He reads several comments silently, then looks back into the camera.

“I don't describe myself as manly, dominant, or an alpha. Being strong onstage doesn't secretly mean those things. It means I'm good at performing.”

The chat fills with hearts and crying faces.

“And about the receiving comment, I knew how it sounded.” His ears burn, but he does not retreat. “I meant it. I like receiving.”

The chat becomes unreadable.

Jisung gives one breathless laugh and keeps going.

“I just wanted to tell you about myself. It’s important to me.”

The sentence settles into the quiet studio.

Jisung’s fingers tighten inside his sleeves.

“And yes, we were talking about kisses in Two Kids Room.”

The chat surges again.

He covers his mouth, laughing. “We were. I also said what I said. Receiving can be powerful. You have to be loved well to receive well.”

Embarrassment finally folds him over the desk. “Why did I say that? This is why I shouldn't do lives alone. There's no supervision.”

The door opens.

Jisung jerks upright.

Minho walks in carrying two iced drinks, looks from the phone to Jisung's scarlet face, and immediately narrows his eyes.

"What did you do?"

The chat reacts violently to Minho's presence.

He places one drink beside Jisung and looks into the camera. "He was unsupervised."

"I literally just said that."

"Then we agree. End the live."

"Don't order me around in front of everyone."

Minho leans closer to read the nearest visible comment. "They want to know whether you're a princess."

Jisung stares at him.

There is danger in Minho's eyes, the quiet amusement of someone who has been handed a weapon and is being trusted not to use it.

"Don't," Jisung warns.

Minho settles into the chair beside him and takes a sip of his drink. "What?"

"You know what."

"I don't."

"Liar."

The chat begs him to answer.

Jisung feels the instinct to protect the relationship rise, not an urge to deny princess. There are a thousand ordinary explanations for their ease, years of friendship, shared work, and the intimacy of people who grew up together. Their secret remains theirs even after Jisung names himself.

Jisung pulls the hood closer around his face and looks into the camera.

“Princess suits me,” he says with a small, certain smile.

Minho turns his head.

The change in his expression is tiny, visible only to someone who knows him intimately: surprise first, followed by pride warmed through with something dangerously tender.

"It does," he says.

Jisung's heart stumbles.

The chat disintegrates completely.

He ends the live thirty seconds later, mostly because sitting beside Minho while pretending his pulse is normal has become impossible.

The screen goes dark.

Silence fills the studio.

Minho sets his drink down. "Receiving can be powerful?"

Jisung drags the hood entirely over his face. "I hate you."

"You said what you said."

"I was being sincere."

"That's why it's funny."

Jisung peeks out from beneath the fabric. "Did I sound like I was apologizing?"

Minho's amusement softens. "No."

"The company might—"

"You said softness isn't an insult and receiving can be powerful. I think the stock price will survive."

"I didn't say kisses the second time."

"I noticed."

Jisung groans and hides again.

Minho pulls the hood back from his face and smooths down his hair with one hand. "You did well."

The praise goes through him more cleanly than all the comments waiting beyond the dark screen.

"Really?"

"Really."

"Say it again."

"No."

"You never support me." But Jisung smiles into his drink.

★ ★ ★

The live produces headlines, translations, debates, celebratory edits, concerned threads, and one particularly ambitious infographic titled HAN JISUNG ON FEMININITY: A TIMELINE.

Jisung does not read the infographic.

This requires a humiliating amount of effort.

His curiosity has teeth. It follows him through the next morning, whispering that he should check whether his words were understood properly, whether international translations preserved the nuance, whether anyone thinks he insulted the fans who had only been trying to protect him.

He opens the app twice.

The first time, Seungmin leans over his shoulder and says, "Constitutional court is back in session."

Jisung closes it.

The second time, Minho takes the phone from his hand and replaces it with a peeled tangerine.

Jisung stares down at the fruit in his palm. "Are you training a dog?"

"Dogs learn faster."

"Give it back."

"Eat."

Jisung eats the tangerine.

By evening, the urge weakens.

The members, meanwhile, embrace what they apparently consider a collective mission with varying degrees of subtlety.

Felix calls him princess at every available opportunity until Jisung threatens to revoke the privilege.

Hyunjin sends links to silk blouses, sculptural jackets, heeled boots, pearl details, and one coat so impractical that owning it seems to require a separate source of income dedicated entirely to maintenance.

Changbin begins announcing "receiving is power" whenever anyone hands him food.

Chan attempts to initiate a thoughtful conversation about gender expression, becomes trapped within his own disclaimers, and finally says, "I just want you to know you never have to perform a version of yourself for us," which is the only sentence Jisung needed in the first place.

Jeongin changes Jisung's contact name to POWER RECEIVER and refuses every request to change it back.

Seungmin does nothing obvious, which means he quietly monitors every room for anyone who might make Jisung uncomfortable and destroys them with one sentence before Jisung has time to notice.

Minho remains Minho.

He does not begin calling Jisung princess more often in public or turn his vulnerability into a new running joke. His support lives in ordinary things: placing the silver waist chain into Jisung's hand before a performance without comment, redirecting an interviewer who asks something invasive, listening while Jisung analyzes a single phrase for forty minutes, and then informing him when the analysis has become ridiculous.

★ ★ ★

The first time the members give Jisung another chance to own the joke in public, they do it accidentally.

At least, Chan claims it is accidental.

They are filming a casual group segment in one of the company's lounges, all eight arranged around several low tables covered in snacks and cards printed with questions collected from fans. The game has no meaningful objective, which usually produces the best content. They are expected to answer honestly, steal one another's food, betray years of friendship for the sake of a joke, and create enough chaos for the editors to assemble an episode afterward.

Jisung sits between Minho and Jeongin, which should have warned him before anything even began.

For the first half hour, the questions remain harmless. Who takes the longest to reply in the group chat? Who would survive longest on a deserted island? Who secretly enjoys cute concepts the most? The members answer with the usual mixture of truth, strategic lying, and the complete abandonment of loyalty.

Then Felix pulls a card, looks at Jisung, and starts laughing before he can read it aloud. "This is literally you."

"Which member is the best at receiving love?"

Seven hands point at Jisung.

His own, delayed by outrage, points at Felix.

"Why me?" Jisung demands.

"You know why," Changbin says.

"I give love constantly."

Seungmin raises one finger. "You send memes without context."

"That's a love language."

A second finger. "You enter personal spaces and lie on people."

"Physical affection."

A third. "You ask us to feed you food that's already within reach."

"Trust."

Jeongin turns directly toward the main camera. "He has publicly explained his philosophy."

The staff laughs.

For a fraction of a second, Jisung feels the old shock of exposure, heat rushing into his face, body preparing to deny everything before the joke can become a conversation. Beneath the table, Minho's knee touches his. Not pressing, not warning, not saving him. Only there.

Jisung takes a breath.

"Exactly," he says. "I've got a consistent brand."

Jeongin's brows lift.

"Receiving is power," Jisung continues, reaching over and taking a grape from Minho's plate without asking. "You should all study me."

The room erupts.

Changbin stands and bows. Hyunjin gives Jisung an amused little round of applause. Felix leans across the table, hooks one hand around the back of Jisung's neck, and plants a loud kiss on his cheek. "There. Received."

"Look," Jisung says once Felix releases him, pointing at his own face. "Effortless. I created an environment and received the result."

"That's not power," Jeongin argues. "That's being spoiled."

"What do you think royalty is?"

Beside him, Minho makes a thoughtful sound. "Exploitation of labor."

Jisung turns slowly. "Whose side are you on?"

"The people."

"You call me princess in private—"

The sentence stops one word too late.

Silence snaps across the set.

Jisung's soul leaves his body.

Minho turns his head. Chan looks toward the ceiling with immediate, profound interest. Felix's mouth opens into a perfect circle. Hyunjin turns his face into Changbin's shoulder to hide his laughter, and somewhere behind the cameras, a staff member coughs with the violence of someone attempting not to laugh.

"Privately," Seungmin repeats.

"I meant—" Jisung's voice climbs several pitches. "Not private privately. I mean when cameras aren't—no, casually. As a joke. We all—Felix calls me—Hyunjin does—"

Jeongin leans toward the camera again. "Please preserve this entire explanation."

"Delete it!"

Minho remains infuriatingly calm. "I call many people princess."

Every member turns toward him.

Changbin narrows his eyes. "Name one."

Minho considers this. "Soonie."

Chan blinks. "That's a cat."

"A male cat," Minho replies, as though this settles the matter beyond further debate.

The laughter becomes impossible to contain. Jisung covers his burning face with both hands, but the embarrassment carries no shame beneath it, only the frantic panic of nearly revealing Minho and the giddy relief of being exactly understood.

While the others continue shouting over one another, Minho leans closer.

"You said it," he murmurs.

Jisung peeks at him through his fingers. "You distracted me."

"By sitting here?"

"Intimidatingly."

Minho's eyes curve.

When the segment eventually airs, the editors replay Jisung's unfinished sentence three times, add an alarm sound, and cut immediately to a clip of Soonie wearing a tiny digital crown.

The moment spreads, of course. Everything spreads.

Jisung sees one post insisting the exchange proves a secret relationship and closes it immediately. Another warns fans not to turn his words into access to another person. He likes that one privately from an account nobody knows belongs to him. Then he finds an edit of Soonie labeled MINHO’S OTHER PRINCESS and laughs until his stomach hurts.

Not every interpretation deserves equal residence inside him.

He is learning to choose.

The choice does not always look brave. Sometimes it is turning his phone face down before curiosity becomes punishment. Sometimes it is wearing pearls without searching his name afterward. Sometimes it is refusing to write a sixth explanation for people who ignored the first five.

A careless sentence can still find the bruise on tired nights.

The pain does not mean Jisung is uncertain. It means he cared enough to speak and wanted the people listening to believe him.

There will always be a particular grief in offering a vulnerable truth and watching strangers call its opposite more authentic. The people who matter do not do that. They know his authority at work does not correct his softness, and his talent does not cancel the way he wants to be loved.

Jisung does not need to learn who he is. He needs to stop reopening the question for people who have already decided not to hear the answer.

★ ★ ★

Several nights after the group segment airs, Jisung stands in Minho's bathroom removing the last of his stage makeup.

The apartment is quiet except for the steady rush of the tap and the intermittent scratching of Dori attempting to excavate a cardboard box somewhere in the hallway. They had returned late from rehearsals, eaten leftovers while standing at the kitchen counter because neither possessed the energy to set the table, and showered one after the other. Minho is already in bed, judging by the absence of footsteps and the thin strip of warm light visible beneath the bedroom door.

Jisung wipes the remaining shadow from beneath his eyes and studies his bare face in the mirror.

Without makeup, his cheeks appear fuller. Exhaustion softens the shape of his eyes. A healing blemish sits stubbornly on his chin. He looks nothing like the commanding performer from the festival or the polished person who had spoken with careful conviction during the live.

He looks like himself at one in the morning.

On the counter beside his phone rests the plastic tiara from the concert.

Felix had slipped it into Jisung's bag after the show. One of the fake stones has fallen out, leaving a dull oval of glue behind, and the silver coating has already begun flaking along the band. It is objectively cheap, slightly crooked, and ridiculous enough that Jisung should probably have thrown it away the moment they left the venue.

Instead, he places it on his damp hair.

The reflection makes him laugh.

He picks up his phone and takes a picture, oversized sleep shirt, bare face, crooked plastic crown, no stage lighting or careful angle beyond shifting enough to keep Minho's laundry basket out of the background.

For several seconds, Jisung considers what to write beneath it.

He types a paragraph and deletes it. Tries something meaningful, hates the sound of his own sincerity, and deletes that too.

Finally, he posts only a crown emoji.

The notifications begin multiplying before he can lock the screen.

Jisung places the phone face down.

When he enters the bedroom, Minho is sitting against the headboard with his tablet balanced over one thigh. His hair has dried into a soft, unruly mess, glasses resting low on the bridge of his nose. He looks up as Jisung crosses the doorway.

His gaze stops at the tiara.

"No," Jisung says immediately.

"I didn't say anything."

"Your face did."

"This is my face."

"You've used that excuse already."

Minho sets the tablet aside. "Come here."

Jisung crosses the room and stops between Minho's knees. Up close, beneath the warm bedside lamp and Minho's unwavering stare, the absurdity of the plastic crown becomes significantly more apparent. Jisung prepares himself for the inevitable teasing.

Minho reaches up and straightens it.

The tenderness of the gesture steals the defense before Jisung can use it.

"Pretty," Minho says.

Jisung's eyes fall to the collar of Minho's shirt. "I look tired."

"You are tired."

"There's a pimple."

"Outrageous. The monarchy may not recover."

Jisung pushes at his shoulder. Minho catches his wrist and presses a kiss into the center of his palm.

"I posted it," Jisung admits.

"The picture?"

He frowns. "How did you know I took one?"

"You were in the bathroom for fifteen minutes and came out wearing a crown."

"Maybe I was reflecting."

"With the front camera."

Jisung climbs onto the bed, settling sideways across Minho's lap. The tiara tips dangerously toward one ear. Minho removes it with care and places it on the nightstand beside his tablet.

"Do you want to know what people are saying?" he asks.

Jisung glances toward the bathroom, where his phone remains face down beyond the doorway.

Curiosity stirs, but it is weaker now, more habit than hunger.

"No," he says. "I already said what I wanted to say."

Minho's expression softens.

Jisung loops his arms around Minho's shoulders, pleased with himself. "That was a good line."

"Very mature."

"I might use it in a song."

"Then it'll become less mature."

"You hate my art."

"I hate how often you rhyme something with fire."

"Everything rhymes with fire."

"Does it, though?"

"Get out of my bed."

"This is my bed."

"Then I'm leaving."

Jisung makes no attempt to move. Minho's hands settle at his waist beneath the loose sleep shirt, palms warm against the skin of his sides.

The room quiets around them.

There are several different silences in their relationship. Angry silence, playful silence, the heavy and slightly stupid silence that follows an argument neither of them wants to admit has ended. There is sleep-thick silence and the easy quiet of working in the same room for hours.

This one becomes intimate before either of them moves, awareness gathering beneath the slow circles Minho's thumbs trace over Jisung's waist.

“Done arguing with strangers?” Minho asks.

Jisung knows exactly what he means.

He considers the phone lying face down in the bathroom.

“For tonight.”

“Good.”

“They'll still be wrong tomorrow.”

“They can be wrong without your supervision.”

Jisung looks at him, at the sharp nose softened by glasses and the tired mouth cameras rarely capture. Minho has never asked him to become simpler in order to be loved. He has only learned him accurately.

“I want to say it here too,” Jisung says. “No camera. No making it funny first.”

Minho’s attention sharpens. “Say it.”

Heat still rises into Jisung’s ears, but it is bashfulness, not doubt.

“I'm a bottom. I love being your bottom. I love being your princess.”

Minho goes still, attentive rather than surprised.

“I know,” he says.

The certainty loosens something warm in Jisung’s chest. He winds his arms around Minho’s shoulders.

“Then take care of me tonight,” he whispers. “I don't want to think. I want you to handle everything.”

Minho’s hand closes around his waist. “I know that too.”

By the time Minho kisses him again, the room has grown dark around them, the low golden light of the lamp beside the bed leaving most of the apartment shadowed, illuminating only the side of Minho’s face, the strands of dark hair falling across his forehead, the broad stretch of his bare shoulders where Jisung’s arms rest.

Jisung’s shirt is gathered beneath his ribs, pushed out of the way by a palm spanning his waist, Minho’s thumb idly tracing the soft skin there as he kisses him with a patience that is beginning to feel deliberate.

Not hesitant. Minho has never been particularly hesitant with him.

Patient.

Like he has already decided how the remainder of Jisung’s night will go, has sorted through every task that must be completed (undressing him, opening him, making him come, cleaning him afterward) and sees no reason to rush through any of it.

The thought sends a pleasant shiver down Jisung’s spine.

Minho catches it, of course.

He catches everything.

His hand moves from Jisung’s waist to the back of his neck, gripping firmly enough to hold him where he wants him as he angles Jisung’s face and deepens the kiss. Jisung lets himself be guided, mouth opening beneath Minho’s, his fingers tightening against the smooth muscles of Minho’s shoulders.

It is easy to stop thinking like this.

With Minho’s weight pinning him comfortably into the mattress, one sturdy thigh pressed between his legs and a rough hand controlling the tilt of his jaw, it becomes increasingly difficult to spare any attention for the posts he had read, the artwork, the arguments, or all the strangers who had apparently constructed an entirely different Han Jisung inside their heads.

A version of him who held Minho down.

Who loomed over him.

Who possessed some constant, cool authority Jisung himself had never managed to maintain for longer than five consecutive minutes.

In reality, Minho shifts his thigh half an inch higher, and Jisung makes an embarrassingly needy sound into his mouth.

There he is.

Minho pulls back just far enough to look at him, lips swollen and faintly wet, amusement glinting in his eyes.

“What?”

“Nothing.”

“You made that noise.”

“I didn’t.”

Minho presses his thigh upward again.

Jisung’s hips twitch against it before dignity has time to intervene.

“That one,” Minho says.

“Shut up.”

The corner of Minho’s mouth lifts. Rather than obeying, he lowers his head and kisses along Jisung’s jaw, slow enough to make him impatient, teeth grazing the sensitive place below his ear before his mouth settles against Jisung’s neck.

Jisung tilts his head automatically, offering him more room.

It is an old, instinctive movement by now. Minho’s hand does not need to push him into it, though it remains curled around the back of his neck, warm and possessive, holding him open while his teeth scrape gently over his skin.

A sound escapes Jisung again, thinner this time.

Minho hums in satisfaction.

“Hyung.”

“Mm?”

“You’re smug.”

“Why?”

“You know why.”

Minho bites him lightly.

Jisung’s fingers slide into his hair, half intending to pull him away and instead clutching him closer when Minho sucks at the mark, the hand beneath Jisung’s shirt slipping farther up his side.

It is not as though being a bottom has ever been some new discovery between them.

Minho has been putting him where he wants him for years, turning him around with a hand on his waist, dragging him bodily across beds and couches when Jisung pretends not to hear him, pushing his knees apart, holding both wrists in one hand when Jisung becomes too grabby. None of it has ever felt like a performance they step into.

It is simply them.

Minho enjoys doing everything, and Jisung, despite the occasional urge to be contrary for sport, enjoys letting him.

More than enjoys it.

There is a particular relief in surrendering his own clumsy responsibility, in knowing that Minho will remember what they need even when Jisung’s mind has been reduced to little more than heat and sensation. Minho reaches for the lubricant. Minho adjusts the pillows. Minho remembers the towel and the water and whether Jisung has eaten properly that day. Minho tells him where to put his hands, when to turn over, when to hold still.

Jisung only has to be good and receive it.

The thought should not be as arousing as it is.

Unfortunately, it is very arousing.

He curls his leg more securely around Minho’s hip and grinds upward, shamelessly seeking friction against Minho’s thigh.

Minho lifts his head from Jisung’s neck.

“So impatient.”

“You’ve been kissing me for twenty years.”

“It’s been ten minutes.”

“That’s what I said.”

Minho looks down at him for another moment, at the flush spreading across Jisung’s cheeks and neck, at his hair mussed against the pillow and his shirt bunched beneath his chest, before sitting back on his heels.

The loss of Minho’s weight draws an immediate frown from Jisung.

“Why did you move?”

“To take your clothes off.”

“Oh.”

Jisung lifts his arms obediently.

Minho catches the hem of his shirt and pulls it over his head, leaving his hair standing in static-disordered clumps. Jisung barely has time to push it out of his face before Minho’s hand closes around both his wrists and presses them into the pillow above his head.

“Stay.”

It is unnecessary. Jisung would not have moved anyway.

Still, the simple command shoots heat straight through him.

Minho’s gaze travels slowly down his exposed body, open in its appreciation, the intensity of it enough to make Jisung fight the urge to squirm. The lamp paints his skin warm gold, catching over the subtle definition of his stomach, the narrow dip of his waist and the softer curves beneath.

He knows he is attractive.

Most days, at least.

He knows he has built his body intentionally, that the lean muscle and toned stomach do not erase the natural delicacy of his proportions, the small waist Minho can almost circle with both hands or the fullness of his hips and ass that have attracted a frankly excessive portion of Minho’s attention throughout the years.

Yet being looked at by Minho remains different from seeing himself in a mirror.

Minho looks at him as if his body has been arranged specifically for Minho’s enjoyment.

Not evaluated.

Enjoyed.

A veiny hand closes around Jisung’s waist and turns him with startling ease, rolling him onto his stomach.

“Hyung!”

“What?”

“At least warn me.”

“You survived.”

Minho slides a pillow beneath Jisung’s hips, lifting them into a position that leaves his ass raised while his chest remains pressed into the mattress.

Jisung looks back over his shoulder.

The sight of Minho kneeling behind him, solid thighs spread between Jisung’s legs, gaze lowered with an expression of quiet focus, makes something flutter low in his stomach.

This.

This is the position that feels like falling back into himself after spending too long inhabiting other people’s ideas.

His face pressed into soft bedding, Minho’s hands on him, his body arranged and attended to without Jisung having to orchestrate anything.

Minho catches the waistband of his shorts and underwear together and drags both down.

Jisung lifts his hips to help, kicking the fabric the rest of the way off when it reaches his ankles. The room is warm, but the air against his bare skin still raises goosebumps along his thighs.

Minho’s palm smooths over one cheek of his ass.

Then squeezes.

Hard.

Jisung yelps, trying to look affronted despite the way his hips push instinctively back into Minho’s hand.

“You’re obsessed.”

“Yes.”

The immediate answer catches Jisung off guard.

Minho gives the flesh another slow, appreciative squeeze, fingers sinking in before pulling the cheeks apart to look at him properly.

“Pretty.”

Jisung buries his face into the pillow.

“You can’t say things like that so casually.”

“Why?”

“It’s embarrassing.”

“You shake it in my face every morning.”

“I don't do that every morning.”

“Most mornings.”

“That’s because you like it.”

“Never said I didn’t.”

Minho’s thumb brushes teasingly near his entrance.

Jisung’s breath catches.

“There,” Minho murmurs. “Quiet now.”

“Shut—”

The first press of Minho’s mouth against the inside of his thigh silences him.

He works his way upward without hurry, leaving scattered kisses across warm skin, one hand holding Jisung’s hip steady whenever impatience makes him shift. By the time Minho’s breath touches somewhere more sensitive, Jisung’s fingers have curled tightly into the sheets.

Minho kisses one cheek of his ass.

Then the other.

“Hyung,” Jisung whines.

Minho does not answer. He spreads Jisung wider and lowers his mouth.

The first wet stroke of his tongue tears a sharp gasp from Jisung, hips jolting upward before the arm laid firmly across his lower back presses him down again.

There is no gentler way to explain how thoroughly Minho enjoys eating him out.

He approaches it with the same excessive concentration he gives cooking, dancing or arranging the cats’ meals, as though there is a correct way to dismantle Jisung and Minho alone has spent years perfecting it.

His tongue moves slowly at first, licking over him in broad, wet strokes until Jisung’s body begins to loosen, then circling the tense muscle with maddening patience.

Jisung muffles a moan into the pillow.

Minho immediately grips a handful of his hair and pulls his head back.

“Don’t do that.”

The mild sting at his scalp sends another pulse of pleasure through him.

“What?”

“Hide.”

“I’m not hiding.”

“You’re screaming into the pillow.”

“I’m being considerate of the neighbors.”

“They’ve survived you before.”

Jisung twists his head enough to glare back at him, an effort made difficult by the hand still tangled in his hair.

“You’re so—”

Minho licks into him.

Whatever insult Jisung had prepared dissolves into an open-mouthed cry.

His elbows buckle beneath him, but Minho’s arm remains under his stomach now, supporting his hips and holding him exactly where he needs to be. Jisung gives up on maintaining the position himself, lets Minho carry his weight and control the angle while his tongue presses deeper.

Every time Jisung squirms too far forward, Minho drags him back down onto his mouth.

Not roughly enough to hurt.

Roughly enough to remind him that escaping is not currently one of the options Minho intends to entertain.

Jisung loves it.

The strength. The certainty. Being moved around as easily as one of Minho’s cats, except considerably less dignified and wearing no clothes.

“Minho,” he gasps.

A palm lands sharply against his ass.

The sound rings through the room.

Jisung jerks, a helpless moan escaping as heat blossoms across his skin.

Minho lifts his head.

“That’s why.”

Jisung’s mind is too blurred to follow. “Why what?”

“Your butt makes a good sound.”

Despite everything, a laugh breaks through his panting.

“You’re such a freak.”

Minho smacks him again.

Jisung’s laughter falls apart into another cry.

“Do it again,” he says before pride can stop him.

Minho does.

The third strike lands harder, the sting immediately soothed by a broad palm rubbing over the reddening flesh. That, too, is Minho. The cruelty rarely comes without the caress following close behind, one hand delivering exactly what makes Jisung shudder while the other keeps him grounded.

Minho returns his mouth to him, and soon Jisung is no longer capable of producing coherent insults.

By the time slick fingers replace Minho’s tongue, his whole lower body feels warm and loose, nerves drawn tight beneath his skin. One finger presses inside with little resistance.

Jisung exhales, body opening around the familiar intrusion.

Minho watches him closely, though he does not ask whether he is alright. He does not need to.

The slight tension in Jisung’s shoulders, the way his thighs remain relaxed rather than drawing inward, the low hum of pleasure instead of a sharper, uncertain breath, Minho reads the distinctions without conscious effort.

He curls the finger and Jisung rocks backward.

There.

The movement is answer enough.

A second finger joins the first, stretching him more fully. Minho’s other hand braces around Jisung’s hip, guiding him back to meet every measured thrust.

“More,” Jisung murmurs.

Minho presses deeper.

“Not like that.” Jisung pushes back insistently. “More.”

“You’re going to complain tomorrow.”

“I’ll complain tomorrow anyway.”

“That's true.”

Minho adds another finger.

The stretch burns briefly, enough to pull a strained sound from Jisung, and Minho immediately stills. His palm slides along Jisung’s side, warm and steady, thumb drawing an absent circle over his hip while he waits.

Jisung breathes through it.

A few seconds later, discomfort melts into fullness, his body adjusting around Minho’s fingers.

He presses himself backward.

Minho resumes.

No formal check-in. No interruption that forces Jisung to climb out of sensation and explain himself.

Only Minho knowing.

The fingers inside him curl with practiced precision.

Pleasure bursts white and sharp behind Jisung’s eyes.

“Oh—fuck.”

Minho finds the spot again, apparently pleased by the violent shudder that runs through Jisung’s body.

“Here?”

Jisung reaches blindly behind himself and catches Minho’s wrist.

“Don’t ask stupid questions.”

Minho’s quiet laugh is nearly drowned out by Jisung’s moan when he presses there once more.

He works Jisung open until the resistance has disappeared, until slick sounds fill the room and Jisung is rocking shamelessly onto his hand, chasing every thrust.

There is something obscene about how little Minho requires from him.

Minho does the preparation. Minho holds his hips. Minho keeps him supported when Jisung’s thighs begin to tremble. Even Jisung’s pleasure is found and maintained for him, Minho curling his fingers into that same devastating place until Jisung is breathless and damp with sweat.

Pampered, Seungmin would call it.

Spoiled beyond recovery.

Jisung would argue, except it is difficult to construct a compelling defense while lying face-down with his ass in the air, whining for Minho to put his cock inside him.

“Hyung.”

“Mm?”

“Enough.”

Minho slows.

Jisung looks back at him, flushed and frustrated. “I mean I’m ready.”

“I know.”

“Then why are you still—”

Minho withdraws his fingers.

The sudden emptiness makes Jisung choke on the rest of his complaint.

Behind him comes the familiar sound of the bedside drawer opening, the cap of the lubricant, the foil tearing. Jisung remains where Minho placed him, cheek resting against his folded arms, listening while Minho handles everything.

Warm hands return to his waist.

Minho drags him farther down the bed as if he weighs nothing, positioning Jisung’s knees wider and lifting his hips until the angle satisfies him.

The display of strength sends a new wave of arousal through Jisung.

There is no practical reason Minho needs to manhandle him quite so much. Jisung is perfectly capable of moving himself six inches down a mattress.

Minho knows that.

Jisung knows that.

They also both know he likes it.

The broad head of Minho’s cock presses against his entrance.

Jisung’s breath stalls.

Minho leans over him, chest warm against Jisung’s back, one arm reaching beneath him to wrap securely around his waist.

“Relax.”

It is said softly, close to his ear, the word less a command than a reminder.

Jisung lets his body go loose in Minho’s hold.

Minho pushes in.

The initial stretch is intense despite all the preparation, a heavy pressure that makes Jisung’s fingers tighten around the sheets. Minho feels it immediately and stops partway, mouth pressing against Jisung’s shoulder while his hand rubs slowly over Jisung’s stomach.

Jisung shifts beneath him, taking a deeper breath.

“Keep going,” he whispers.

Minho does.

Slowly.

An inch at a time until Jisung is filled completely, Minho’s hips pressed flush against his ass, the weight and heat of him overwhelming in the most satisfying way.

Jisung releases a shaky breath.

Full.

Perhaps it is his favorite part: the brief stillness after Minho first sinks inside, his body stretched around something that feels impossible until it does not, until the pressure becomes an anchoring presence rather than an intrusion.

Minho kisses the nape of his neck.

“Okay?”

Jisung reaches back and grips his thigh. “Move.”

The first thrust is shallow, Minho pulling out only slightly before pressing back in.

Jisung arches.

The second goes deeper.

By the third, Minho has found a steady rhythm, slow and firm, one arm still locked around Jisung’s waist so he has no responsibility for holding himself upright.

Jisung only receives.

Each thrust drives him forward against the bedding before Minho’s grip drags him neatly back, ensuring he takes the full length again and again.

The sounds escaping him become increasingly difficult to control.

Not that Minho wants him to.

“Louder,” Minho murmurs.

Jisung’s face burns. “No.”

Minho thrusts harder.

A cry tears from him.

“Like that.”

“You’re—ah—annoying.”

Another snap of Minho’s hips steals the rest.

Minho’s control has always been particularly cruel because he knows exactly how much force Jisung likes. Enough to feel thoroughly handled, enough that he will wake the next morning with a pleasant ache in his hips and thighs, but never so much that care disappears beneath aggression.

His hand slides up Jisung’s chest, fingers brushing a nipple before flattening over his sternum, holding him securely against Minho’s body.

“Pretty,” Minho breathes against his ear.

Jisung whines.

“My pretty bottom.”

The words pour heat directly into his stomach.

He presses back greedily, taking Minho deeper.

“Yes.”

Minho’s rhythm falters for half a second.

Jisung feels the reaction and, emboldened by it, repeats himself.

“Yes. I’m your bottom.”

Minho grips his jaw, turning Jisung’s head enough to kiss him messily over his shoulder.

The angle is awkward, mouths barely aligned, but the kiss is hungry enough to make it work.

“You like that?” Minho asks against his lips.

Jisung knows exactly what he means.

The position.

The name.

Minho doing everything while Jisung remains beneath him, spread open, protected from every thought except how good it feels to be taken.

“I love it.”

There is no shame in the answer.

No embarrassed laugh or qualification.

Minho’s eyes darken.

He pushes Jisung’s chest back down against the bed and straightens behind him, both hands closing around his narrow waist. Without the restraint of Minho’s body covering his back, every thrust becomes stronger, Jisung dragged backward onto his cock as Minho drives forward.

The mattress creaks beneath them.

Jisung’s mouth falls open, noises spilling freely now.

“Hyung—Minho—”

Minho adjusts his grip and lifts, pulling Jisung upright onto his knees.

Jisung barely manages to catch himself before Minho’s chest meets his back, one muscular arm banding across his stomach while the other hand closes around his cock.

The sudden position leaves him completely supported by Minho, body held upright against the elder’s strength as Minho continues thrusting into him from behind.

Jisung’s head falls back onto Minho’s shoulder.

“Too much?” Minho asks quietly, lips brushing his temple.

Jisung shakes his head frantically.

“Good.”

Minho strokes him in time with each thrust.

Jisung can do nothing except take it.

His knees have started to weaken, but Minho bears most of his weight, arm locked securely around him. When his head lolls to one side, Minho kisses the exposed stretch of his neck. When his hips lose rhythm, Minho controls it for him. When Jisung’s hand slips uselessly over Minho’s forearm, seeking something to hold, Minho turns his hand and laces their fingers together.

Everything.

Minho gives him everything.

Pleasure builds rapidly, winding tighter with every drag of Minho’s hand and deep thrust of his cock, until Jisung is gasping, body trembling against the solid warmth behind him.

“I’m close.”

“I know.”

Of course he knows.

Minho’s thumb sweeps over the head of his cock. His hips drive upward at the same moment, striking the place inside Jisung that sends sparks racing along his spine.

Jisung cries out.

“There,” Minho murmurs. “Come for me.”

That is all it takes.

Jisung’s orgasm crashes through him, body clenching hard around Minho as he spills over the hand stroking him. His legs give out completely, but he never falls, Minho holding him upright while waves of pleasure leave him shuddering and incoherent.

Minho does not stop.

He slows, thrusting gently through the oversensitivity while Jisung whimpers against his neck, then lowers him carefully back onto the mattress.

Jisung lies boneless beneath him.

Minho follows him down, covering him again, one hand braced beside Jisung’s head and the other gripping his hip.

“Can you take a little more?”

Jisung nods into the pillow.

Minho recognizes the movement, but waits.

Jisung finds his voice. “Yes.”

Only then does Minho’s control finally begin to break.

His thrusts grow less measured, deeper and harder, breath rough against Jisung’s shoulder. Jisung takes all of it, oversensitive but pliant, body stretched and used exactly the way he likes, satisfaction curling warmly beneath the lingering aftershocks of his orgasm.

Minho buries his face against Jisung’s neck and comes with a low groan, hips pressed firmly against him as his body goes rigid.

For several long moments, neither of them moves.

Minho’s weight is heavy above him, carefully held just far enough away not to crush him, his breathing gradually slowing against Jisung’s damp skin.

Jisung closes his eyes.

There is no fanart here.

No imagined version of himself.

No one correcting him into something stronger, harder, or more masculine because they think his own answer is beneath respect.

Only Minho inside him, around him, holding him exactly as he has always wanted to be held.

Minho withdraws slowly.

Jisung makes a small, unhappy sound at the loss before he can stop himself.

“I know,” Minho says, rubbing his hip. “Stay there.”

As if Jisung could go anywhere.

His limbs have apparently resigned from employment.

Minho disappears into the bathroom and returns with a warm cloth, water and one of his own shirts. Jisung watches through half-lidded eyes as Minho cleans him, gentle despite the thoroughly indecent state Minho himself has put him in.

When Jisung flinches from sensitivity, Minho’s hand immediately smooths over his thigh.

“Sorry.”

“It’s okay.”

Minho cleans his stomach next, then helps him into the shirt, guiding each arm through because Jisung has made no effort to assist.

“You’re being useless on purpose.”

“I’m a pampered bottom. I don’t do post-production.”

Minho snorts.

“You can lift your own head.”

“No.”

“Drink.”

The glass is held to his mouth.

Jisung drinks.

This, too, is part of it. Minho never leaves his care half-completed. He does not simply take Jisung apart and expect him to arrange himself afterward. He cleans him, dresses him, makes him drink water, checks the temperature of the room and pulls the blanket over him before finally returning to bed.

Jisung curls against him immediately, sliding one leg over Minho’s thighs and burrowing his face into the familiar warmth of his chest.

Minho’s hand settles at the small of his back.

For a while, Jisung listens to his heartbeat.

“I do love it,” he says eventually.

Minho’s fingers continue their slow path along his spine. “I’m aware.”

“No, I mean…” Jisung presses his face deeper against him, suddenly bashful despite everything they have just done. “Being your bottom.”

Minho’s chest shifts beneath his cheek with a quiet breath.

“I love when you do everything,” Jisung continues. “When you move me around and tell me what to do. When I don’t have to think because you already know.”

Minho kisses the top of his head.

“You’ve always liked being spoiled.”

“That's not the point.”

“It’s part of the point.”

Jisung pinches his side.

Minho catches his hand and tucks it against his chest.

“I like being yours like that,” Jisung admits. “I like trusting you with it.”

The hand on his back stills briefly before drawing him closer.

Minho does not give him a speech.

He only presses another kiss into his hair and says, with the quiet certainty of someone for whom this has never required explanation, “I know.”

And that is enough.

Jisung smiles against his chest.

“Still,” he mumbles, “the people drawing me pinning you against walls are deeply confused.”

Minho considers this.

“You could pin me against a wall.”

Jisung lifts his head suspiciously.

Minho’s expression remains perfectly serious.

“I'd have to cooperate, but you could.”

“Fuck you.”

“You already did.”

Jisung stares at him for a second before dissolving into exhausted laughter, smacking weakly at Minho’s chest while Minho gathers him closer, thoroughly pleased with himself.

Eventually, Jisung settles again, warmth and fatigue pulling him toward sleep.

Minho’s hand remains on his back, warm, steady, and familiar.

Being held beneath another person’s strength has never required reinterpretation.

It is power because Jisung chooses it, loves it, and trusts the person holding him.

He knows exactly who he is.

And in Minho’s arms, there is no one trying to make him become anything else.

★ ★ ★

Jisung wakes sometime after sunrise with Minho's arm heavy across his waist.

The curtains had not been pulled fully closed. Pale winter light stretches through the gap and over the disordered bed, catching on the plastic tiara where it lies upside down on the floor. Jisung's phone remains abandoned in the bathroom, silent beyond the half-open door.

For the first time in what feels like weeks, he is pleasantly emptied of urgency.

Minho sleeps behind him with his face pressed between Jisung's shoulder blades, each slow breath warm through the thin cotton of his shirt. At some point during the night, they had dressed again with very little competence. Jisung's shirt is inside out, and Minho is wearing exactly one sock.

Jisung smiles into the pillow.

The world beyond this room remains every bit as complicated as it was yesterday.

Fans have opinions. Cameras will keep collecting pieces of Jisung and sending them into places where he cannot control what they become. Some people will call him princess with love. Others will use femininity to reduce him. Some will redraw him as a towering alpha, place him above every man they ship him with, and insist they respect him too much to believe he meant what he said.

He cannot govern every interpretation.

He can decide whether their disbelief is allowed to rewrite his certainty.

This morning, it is not.

Behind him, Minho stirs and tightens his arm.

"You're thinking," he mumbles, voice thick with sleep.

"No, I'm not."

"Loud."

Jisung turns carefully within his hold until they are facing one another. Minho keeps his eyes closed, face softened by sleep.

"Hyung."

"Mm."

"Am I powerful?"

One eye opens.

Jisung maintains a solemn expression. "As a bottom."

Minho stares at him for two full seconds before pulling the blanket over his face.

"Go back to sleep."

Jisung laughs beneath the fabric, wriggling until he escapes and climbs halfway over Minho.

"Answer me."

"You're unbearable."

"That's not an answer."

"You're heavy."

"Liar. You said I weigh nothing."

"I lied."

Jisung pinches his cheek. Minho catches his hand and pulls him down until their foreheads touch.

His expression softens in the quiet morning light.

"Yes," he says. "You are."

Jisung smiles.

"Isn't that power?" he whispers.

Minho kisses him before he can laugh at his own joke.

Beyond the half-open bathroom door, the phone continues collecting thousands of answers.

Jisung does not need them yet.

He already has his own.

Notes:

Some linguistic context for English-speaking readers, because the subtitles flatten how bold this moment actually was.

Jisung did not simply say that he enjoys getting kissed. When the staff brought up Jeongin kissing him, he deliberately reframed the subject as 주는 것 versus 받는 것: being the one who gives versus being the one who receives. He then said that he does not particularly like giving and trailed off after saying he would rather receive. The editors emphasized his answer with 계속 받기만 하고 싶음, meaning roughly, “just wants to keep receiving” or, more literally, “wants to do nothing but receive.” The -만 matters because it emphasizes receiving only, in contrast to giving.

That distinction carries a much more obvious sexual implication in Korean than “I like receiving kisses” may communicate in English. Korean discussions of gay sexual roles define the bottom as 삽입 받는 쪽, “the side that receives penetration,” and also acknowledge the cultural stereotype that the giving/top role is masculine while the receiving/bottom role is feminine.

So the bold part was not merely that Jisung made a vague sex joke. He publicly rejected the giving side, aligned himself with the receiving side, and then, rather than treating receptivity as embarrassing or lesser, looked into the camera and asked, “Isn’t that power?”

That is a remarkably pointed thing for a male idol to say on official content, even with the conversation about kisses providing plausible deniability. It was also not an innocent line onto which international fans randomly projected a double meaning. The wording was deliberate, the second meaning landed in the room, and Jisung’s follow-up explicitly defended receiving as a position of power.

Basically: he did not just accidentally sound like a bottom. He knowingly invoked the giving/receiving divide, chose receiving, and then doubled down in front of the world. That is what inspired this fic.