✓ FRAGILE HOURS ✷ Woozi

THE BACKSPACE FILES.

“I hate you.”

He grins, just slightly — the kind of grin that barely shows teeth, soft and private, meant only for the air between them. The track keeps looping in the background, faint and familiar. Somewhere, a clock ticks.

Jihoon shifts in his chair, leans back enough to glance toward her over his shoulder.

“Good morning.”

Minwoo stares at him, eyes narrowed into sleepy slits. She just exhales through her nose and lets her head tip sideways against the back of the couch.

“Morning, Jihoonie.”

For a moment, neither of them moves. The computer hums, the chords loop again, and the world outside is still.

She doesn’t ask if he slept. He doesn’t ask if she’s going to leave soon.

Instead, she pulls the blanket a little higher, and he clicks the playhead back to the beginning of the track. 

The melody starts again, soft as breath.

• • •

#3

The hallway smells like dust and cardboard tape. The stairwell echoes with muffled laughter, the distant thump of a box hitting a wall (hopefully not too hard), and someone yelling “Hyung, that’s not how physics works!”

Minwoo stands just inside the threshold of her new apartment, watching Seungcheol and Mingyu lift her bookcase with the ease of people who spend more time at the gym than she does walking up stairs. 

Her heart is full and uncomfortable.

She should be helping more. She should be doing this alone. These are people with world tours and airport photos and luxury endorsement deals — and they’re here, on their knees, unwrapping her spoons.

Minwoo chews her bottom lip, guilt settling warm in her chest like tea left out too long.

From the kitchen, a voice calls out, cheerful and sharp: “If you keep making that face, your eyebrows are gonna stay like that.”

She turns. Hoshi grins at her over a stack of bubble-wrapped bowls.

“I can carry the—” she starts, but he cuts her off with a scoff.

“Nope,” he says, setting down the bowls with a flourish. “You don’t get to feel guilty. Not today.”

“I just… you all came here, and you’re doing everything, and I—”

He walks past her, taps her forehead with two knuckles. “We need to use our muscles for something good. This is good.” Then, with a wink, “Besides, you think this crew would let you carry a box with your sad little noodle arms?”

She opens her mouth in protest— immediately closes it.

The truth is, she is grateful. Overwhelmed, maybe. Flustered, definitely. But also... warmed.

They’ve filled the apartment in less than an hour. Laughter echoes off bare walls. Someone plays music from a phone speaker in the corner — low, upbeat, familiar:Oh my!

Near the center of the room, Dino is on his knees, holding an IKEA shelf upside down.

“I swear this is how it’s supposed to go,” he mutters, scratching his head.