lessons in caregiving - minsung (extended oneshot)

call me baby

CHAN  —

   Chan didn't realize how timely his words would end up being. Because the next morning, after salvaging the rest of what was meant to be a day for Minho to de-stress, he woke up sitting on the couch, with Minho leaned into his side, to his phone buzzing madly in his pocket. (They both fell asleep like that from when they were watching a movie the previous night.)

    Lo and behold, the culprit was Jisung, blowing up Chan's phone with slightly panicked messages. As soon as he opened his phone to read them, Jisung was calling him.

    Chan's eyes went wide as his ringtone went off, and Minho stirred in his sleep, mumbling groggily into his side. Chan accepted the call and held his phone up to his ear with his shoulder so he could use his hands to gently pry Minho off of him and lay him down flat, hoping to let him sleep longer. However, before he could take a single step away from the couch, a searching hand reached out and tugged at his shirt.

    Minho was awake, and asking Chan not to leave, with those sleepy, puffy eyes of his. Chan nearly cooed at the sight of him, but he bit his lip because that'd be awfully weird for Jisung to hear. Speaking of Jisung, he was currently getting rather agitated on the other side of the phone, repeating an increasingly strong 'hello?' when Chan didn't answer.

    "Yeah, Sung, I'm here, sorry. Just woke up."

    "Hyung— gosh, finally. I can't find Minho— I wanted to surprise him and pick him up to take him out for breakfast before the festival but I'm at his house and he's not here but his car's still in the driveway and— well I guess he could've gone on a walk, but he doesn't like to do that this early, and his sneakers are here, too— Ah, maybe I'm worrying too much, but this is weird and I'm just getting anxious... he wouldn't have gone anywhere right before going out with me, so what on earth... I tried texting him and calling him but he's not even reading it! I mean he does like to drop off the face of the earth every once in awhile but he usually replies to me the next morning and he's not— ...Oh right, so, um, you don't know where he is, do you?" Jisung spat it all out in a few seconds, and it left Chan, who literally just woke up, slow-blinking as he tried to process the slurry of words Jisung had just let out.

    "Um..." Chan started, looking down at Minho.

    Minho looked so precious and innocent right now, tangled in the blanket that Chan had draped over him last night, messy-haired and sleepy-eyed, pushing his thumb into his mouth to suck on, still grasping at the hem of Chan's shirt with his other hand. That same precious little baby could (as soon as he got out of little space) possibly tear Chan to shreds for telling his boyfriend about his biggest secret.

    Well, he had to tell Jisung something to calm him down at this point, otherwise the boy would probably have a nervous breakdown and overthink the situation until Chan got Minho to come out of little space and took him home to see Jisung. "Yeah, he's with me," he finally admitted.

    "What?" Jisung exploded. "Why isn't he answering his phone!!"

    Evidently, Minho could hear Jisung's voice as he shouted through the speaker, because he perked up and opened his eyes wide; his thumb fell out of his mouth, and he turned the corners of his lips up in a little, excited smile.

    "Oh, it's probably dead... I forgot to plug it in for him last night."

    "...Last night?" Jisung sounded genuinely worried. Chan facepalmed.

    "He slept over at my place, that's all..."

    "Oh." Jisung paused, so it was quiet while Chan regretted the way he said 'that's all', because it made it far less believable that that was really 'all' that happened. "...He does that a lot, doesn't he..?" Jisung sounded so down all of a sudden, and his words were now coming slowly.