By the time Min-woo made it to Jae-min's apartment, the ink on his palm had faded to a pale blue ghost, barely legible except to someone who already knew what they were looking for.
"Nine numbers," he announced, dropping onto the couch and shoving his hand toward Jae-min's face. "I got nine perfectly good numbers."
Jae-min grabbed his wrist and squinted at the smudged line of digits. "And the tenth?"
"Gone. Wiped. A casualty of the mission."
"How does a whole number just disappear?"
"I got distracted."
Jae-min lowered Min-woo's hand slowly, giving him a long, flat look. "By what?"
"Nothing." Min-woo pulled his hand back and shoved it into his pocket like that might retroactively hide the answer. "Focus. We have nine out of ten. That's basically the whole number."
"That's not how numbers work."
"It's basically the whole number, Jae."
Jae-min sighed and grabbed a notepad off the coffee table, uncapping a pen with his teeth. "Okay. Write out what you've got."
Min-woo recited the first nine digits from memory, slow and careful, and Jae-min copied them down in a neat row with a blank space left at the very end.
"Now," Jae-min said, tapping the pen against the paper. "Think. What did it look like before it smudged?"
Min-woo closed his eyes, brow furrowed in concentration, like the number might reappear behind his eyelids if he wanted it badly enough.
"It's not coming."
"Try harder."
"I am trying." A pause. Then, slowly, "It felt round. Like a circle. Maybe."
Jae-min stared at him. "That's not a digit, that's a shape."
"I'm working with what I've got."
Jae-min dragged a hand down his face, then looked back at the notepad. "Round. Okay. So—zero, six, eight, nine. Maybe three."
"That's five options for one number."
"Do you have a better idea?"
Min-woo didn't.
They spent the next twenty minutes taking turns dialing, Jae-min's phone set to a blocked, anonymous line borrowed from an app Min-woo swore was untraceable and Jae-min privately suspected was one bad update away from getting them both arrested.
The number ending in zero rang twice before an old woman picked up, her voice cracked and confused. "Yeoboseyo? Who is this? Speak up, I can't hear you—"
Jae-min hung up so fast the phone nearly slipped out of his hand.
"That one's a no," Min-woo said, unnecessarily.
The number ending in three connected to what sounded like a baby's phone—someone's cracked, sticker-covered device, a child's babbling voice filling the line before it cut off into static and then silence.
Min-woo pressed both hands over his face. "Okay. Not that one either."
"We're running out of options."
"We have two left." Min-woo straightened, cracking his knuckles like he was preparing for something far more dramatic than dialing a phone number. "Third time's the charm."
"You said that about the last one too."
"I meant it more this time."
Jae-min dialed the number ending in eight.
It rang once.
Twice.
Then—
"Hello?"
Jihan's voice, calm and immediate, filled the line before either of them had fully braced for it.
Jae-min's thumb slammed down on the call end button so hard the phone nearly skittered out of his grip. For a second, neither of them moved. The apartment had gone completely silent except for the faint hum of the refrigerator in the next room and their own breathing.
Then Min-woo let out a slow, delighted breath. "That's him."
"That's him," Jae-min echoed, staring at the screen like it might ring back on its own.
They wrote the complete number down together, checking it twice against the smudged remnant on Min-woo's palm, and then sat back against the couch cushions in a strange, satisfied silence.
It lasted about ten seconds before the real problem set in.
"Okay," Min-woo said slowly. "We have his number."
"We have his number," Jae-min agreed.
"So now what?"
Jae-min frowned. "What do you mean, now what? We text him."
"No." Min-woo shook his head, sitting up straighter. "Think about it. If you text him first, he knows you have his number. Which means he'll wonder how you got it, and even if he doesn't wonder that out loud, it changes the whole shape of things. You want him choosing to reach out. Not you handing yourself to him."
Jae-min opened his mouth, then closed it, because the logic tracked exactly the way it always did when Min-woo actually stopped joking long enough to think.
"So he needs my number," Jae-min said slowly. "Without knowing I gave it to him."
"Exactly."
Silence settled over the room again, this time thoughtful instead of triumphant. Min-woo drummed his fingers against his knee, staring at the ceiling like the answer might be written there.
Then he sat up so fast the couch cushion shifted beneath him.
"Tae-hyun's on the basketball club roster," he said. "The junior training thing. Your team's been fielding requests for extra practice partners this month, right? Some of the younger guys."
Jae-min blinked. "...Yeah. Coach mentioned it last week."
"So." Min-woo's grin was already spreading, sharp and pleased with itself. "What if the club sent a contact sheet. Names, numbers, all of it—meant for whoever's coordinating Tae-hyun's session. Except instead of it going to the right person, it accidentally lands in Jihan's inbox."
Jae-min was quiet for a second, turning it over.
"He'd think it was meant for Tae-hyun."
"Right. He'd assume the school just had the wrong contact on file. He forwards it along like a good older brother, no big deal—" Min-woo spread his hands. "Except before he does that, he has to actually look at the list. Every name on it. Including yours."
Jae-min stared at him.
"Put my name first," he said slowly.
"Exactly."
A slow smile crept across Jae-min's face, matching Min-woo's own.
They worked fast after that—Jae-min pulling up his team roster, copying down names and numbers from his teammates' contacts one by one, careful to keep the formatting clean and official-looking. At the very top of the list, he typed his own name.
*Lee Jae-min.*
Beneath it, a short line: *Training session — Junior Club (Kang Tae-hyun).*
He read it over twice, then looked at Min-woo. "This is either genius or the stupidest thing we've ever done."
"Why not both?"
Jae-min huffed a laugh, sent the message through the same anonymous line, and set the phone down on the table between them.
For a moment neither of them spoke. Then Min-woo held up a hand, and Jae-min, feeling somewhere between ridiculous and electric, slapped it.
They grinned at each other like two people who had just gotten away with something.
---
Across the city, in an office lit gold by the last hour of daylight, Jihan's phone buzzed once against the desk.
He glanced at it between signatures, expecting nothing more than another notification from the office group chat, and picked it up out of habit more than curiosity.
The message sat there, plain and unremarkable—a list of names, numbers, a short line about a junior training session. His eyes moved down it once, already reaching for the forward button. *Tae-hyun's* club, obviously. The school must have logged the wrong contact somewhere along the way.
Then his thumb paused.
The first name on the list caught him before he'd even meant to read it properly.
*Lee Jae-min.*
Jihan went still.
He read it again, slower this time, as if the letters might rearrange themselves into someone else's name if he looked hard enough. They didn't. A small, unguarded smile broke across his face before he could stop it.
"Jae-min," he murmured, testing the sound of it out loud in the empty office.
He reached for the pen resting beside his tablet and copied the number down carefully onto the back cover of the nearest notebook, the ink dark and deliberate against the cardboard, before forwarding the original message along to his brother without another thought toward it.
He set the phone down.
Picked the notebook back up.
Looked at the name and number written there in his own hand, and let the smile spread further this time, unchecked.
"It seems the universe wants us together," he said quietly, to no one at all.
"...Jae-min."