Work Text:
When they first started dating, Taehyung would have always thought that the thing to tear their relationship apart would be actual conflict. Namjoon overthinks everything, gets too in his head, and Taehyung knows he’s terrible at communicating, to a point where it’s almost painful. So it would be easy to say, to guess, that it would be that difficulty in communicating that would lead them to a breaking point, if they ever found one.
That breaking point is instead found in the damn IKEA crib that Namjoon has been staring at for almost twenty minutes, as though if he stares at it long enough, the crib will put itself together. “I’m pretty sure you have to connect-” Taehyung says, starting to point.
“No! That’s not what the instructions say,” Namjoon sighs, looking down at the paper. The instructions which, for some reason, are written exclusively in Dutch, and they’ve been doing their best to translate on the fly.
“The instructions don’t say anything useful!” Taehyung snaps back, roughly jerking his fingers through his hair.
“How would you know? You can’t read them.”
“Neither can you!”
Taehyung blames the argument on Seokjin’s baby. On the stupid toddler with Seokjin’s stupidly pretty face and the stupid smile that Taehyung knows is just gas. It doesn’t make Taehyung love his nephew any less; neither the stupid face or the argument. Then again, maybe it’s what Seokjin wanted, for them to argue over a crib.
Or he didn’t want to be the one to put it together. “Lazy bastard,” Taehyung mutters and then realizes what that sounds like, flushing and turning to look at Namjoon. “Not you.”
“Jin hyung,” Namjoon says, just as darkly.
—
It takes them four hours to build the crib. Around the third hour, Seokjin joins them, his son in his hand, wielding a bottle as a defense to not help otherwise. Namjoon and Taehyung alike fix cold deadpan stares on him; Seokjin is lost to the delighted face he makes whenever his son coos or gurgles, during one of the rare occasions he's actually awake.
Fatherhood suits Seokjin, Taehyung thinks, not for the first time, and watches Seokjin out of the corner of his eye. Every time Seokjin looks down at his son, a soft smile spreads across his face and he relaxes just a little more, as though the sight of the baby is enough to lift the weight of the world off of his shoulders.
Their bedroom is quiet when Taehyung settles in for bed; Namjoon always comes to bed an hour and a half after him, and tonight is no different. Namjoon groans as he rolls into bed, burrowing under the blankets. "I want a baby," Taehyung says into the darkness. Namjoon just groans into the pillow.