exohousewarming | DAY EIGHT 💫 #95 3 AM Story

Prompt number : 95
Title : 3 AM Story
Pairing : Baekhyun/Chanyeol
Rating : PG
Warning : none
Word count : ~1,9kw
Sumamry : The more Baekhyun eats, the more Chanyeol loses his sleep. (Or alternatively, the story of a man handling the craving of his pregnant husband).
Author note : Thank you for the mods for being patient although my progress in finishing this fic is slow af. Thank you for the prompter for submitting this prompt, tbh I love it so much and I want to explore it more but I only had little time to write and I'm sorry if it doesn't meet your expectation. I hope you guys will enjoy the fic!

When Chanyeol feels his body is shaken by someone, he refuses to open his eyes. He doesn’t want to lose another second of sleeping, especially with how he was working until late last night to finish his work and he needs to wake up early because he has this important meeting first thing in the morning.

But when he slowly realizes whose small hands that shake his body belong to, he immediately opens his eyes and sits straight. “Baekhyun?”

The said person only calls Chanyeol’s name in small voice, and after that he hears something loud enough to fill the quietness of their room.

It’s Baekhyun’s growling stomach.

“...are you hungry?”

His husband nods his head slowly while replying, “I want to eat the midnight snack you usually make. The sausage with vegetables one.”

“But we just ate that yesterday?”

“I want it again,” Baekhyun pouts while rubbing his slightly larger stomach, “Our kid wants it too.”

That’s it. That’s the sound of Chanyeol losing his battle on 3 a.m with his enemy, or all man’s enemies everytime their partner is pregnant, named ‘pregnancy craving’.

--

It starts with how Chanyeol notices how Baekhyun starts eating more on the first trimester. His husband usually is not a person who particulary eats a lot, so it’s always been a strange thing to see him eat more than Chanyeol does. Sometimes, he even eats Chanyeol’s portion if they eat their meal together, or simply taking Chanyeol’s snack that is tucked securely on the top kitchen cabinet. The biggest loss Chanyeol ever had is coming home to find three big bags of potato chips and all his popsicle were missing. Baekhyun only smiled innocently at that.

(It reminds him that there’s one time where one of their kimchi jar oddly didn’t have any juices anymore and the next day Chanyeol came home to find his husband drinking the kimchi’s juices straight from another jar that he laughed so much until there was no sound coming out from his mouth. What a good memory to have.)

The second trimester is even worse.

Baekhyun starts buying more food, to the point Chanyeol needs to ban him to go grocery shopping with him judging by the way Baekhyun carelessly throw all the snack to their cart. Their monthly budget exceeds a lot because of that. And to make it worse, Baekhyun also starts to ask Chanyeol to buy him food, when some of his request doesn’t even make sense to Chanyeol.

“Honey, I want sour cream.”

“...Baekhyun-ah, I thought you don’t like it?”

“But I want it. I want to eat it with the vanilla ice cream we have on our fridge.”

“...What?”

Or that one time when his request something so far, far away.

“Chanyeol-ah, I want rameeen.”

“Oh? Then let’s eat at Minseok hyung’s place—“

“I don’t want Minseok hyung’s ramen. Do you remember the ramen that we ate on our vacation in Japan last year? I want thaaat.”

“...Baby, we can’t just go to Japan just to eat their ramen.”

Or that one time when he doesn’t even care about the time at all.

“Baby, it’s 3 a.m and you want me to cook kimchi pasta just like what Kyungsoo usually make?”

Baekhyun nods wordlessly.

“Why don’t I make it for breakfast—“

“I want it now, Chanyeol-ah. Your baby also want it now.”

“...Okay.”

Baekhyun does the last one a lot. He likes to wake Chanyeol up on the unruly hour of the night and asks him to cook something. Chanyeol can’t even mutter how tired he is with having to cook after getting his sleep time cut out. He almost cut his finger that one time because he dozed off while cutting onion.

It’s even harder when the ingredients he needs the most is not there. He has no choice other than putting his sweatpants and jacket on to go to nearest convenience store from the apartement, which is 15 minutes away. Seems like his neighbor already use to the sound of Chanyeol’s running on the hall just because Baekhyun complains that he always takes too much time from buying ingredients.

Well, at least all those hard works somehow pays off when he watches Baekhyun earnestly eat every food that he cooks, his eyes close as if he tries to savor the flavour and his mouth humming in happy tone as he chews it down. “It’s so good,” he says.

Chanyeol usually smiles like an idiot after that complement, and his frown comes back as he learns he needs to wash all dishes while his husband goes back to sleep. Goodbye to his own sleep then.

--

“Seafood fried rice.”

“Beef curry rice. ”

“Doenjang jjigae.”

“Spaghetti with meatballs, and lots of cheese. And kimchi, what the heck is this combination?”

“Spicy chicken wings, and he wants it homemade.”

“Chocolate brownie. Wow, hyung, you might as well opening your own restaurant just like Minseok hyung with how you becomes skillful with cooking all kind of recipes,” Jongin says it innocently, like he really meant it.

Chanyeol only mutters ‘gee, thank for the complement’ under his breath. He’s currently having a lunch together with his friends and they can’t stop teasing him while listing all the food that Chanyeol ever makes for Baekhyun before.

“I heard from Baekhyun that even your mother in law is impressed with your cooking skill,” Jongdae adds.

“She helps me a lot to be honest. Sometimes I call my mom or Baekhyun’s mom to ask for recipe. Mostly Baekhyun’s mom, because sometimes Baekhyun asks something impossible such as ‘I want something like what my mom used to cook’ when his mom is not even in Seoul, and it’s on 3 fucking a.m.”

Sehun who sits beside him laughs like a mad man at that, which earns himself a smack on the back of his head by Chanyeol. Damn brats.

--

Chanyeol doesn’t know if it is a good thing or not that his body seems to remember that he needs to wake up at 3 a.m, judging with how many times Baekhyun wakes him up for the last couple months. So, when he open his eyes and see it’s already past 3 a.m, he takes a deep breath thinking, ‘This is it. Baekhyun gonna wake me up in three... two... one—‘

No one shakes his body, yet.

‘Okay, maybe another three... two... one—‘

Nothing’s happen.

‘Two... one—‘

This time, Chanyeol turns his body around, expecting that he will find his husband reaching for his arm, but he finds the space behind him is empty. “Baekhyun?” he calls loud enough to echo on their room, but no one answers him.

There’s no light from the bathroom, so Baekhyun must be somewhere else.

Just as he sits straight up, he heard someone’s scream that makes his blood rushes faster. “Baekhyun,” he calls louder, getting up from the bed and walking out from the bedroom. His guts telling him to go to the kitchen, and it turns out to be right when he sees a small figure looking at the mess of something brown on the floor. Is that nutella?

“Baekhyun, are you alright?” as he worriedly approaches his husband and titls his head up, the tears on Baekhyun’s eyes is still fresh. “Baby, why are you crying? Did you hurt yourself?”

Baekhyun doesn’t answer, instead he averts his eyes from Chanyeol’s and cries even more.
Chanyeol never feel this confused and worried at the same time for a while now, not after the first time Baekhyun woke up him at three in the morning that he thought ‘Don’t tell me you gonna give birth right now?!’ when it’s only the second trimester. So, he calms himself first before he gently leads Baekhyun to sit on the chair of their dining room and he takes a seat across him. He takes his husband’s small hand into his and squeezes it lightly, hoping that it will ease whatever Baekhyun feels right now.

Baekhyun cries for whole minute before he murmurs, “I’m sorry.”

“Sorry for what? You did nothing wrong.”

“I’m sorry I woke you up,” he sniffs, “I didn’t want to wake you up because you always look tired and all that I think about is my own needs of food. I feel so... fat right now. I didn’t want to eat anymore but I felt hungry, our baby also hungry and then I thought I could make something by myself but I made a mess instead.”

Both of them glance at the the mess on the floor and Baekhyun’s breath hitches as tears roll on his wet cheeks again. “I’m sorry.”

“Ssh, it’s okay. Baby, you did nothing wrong,” Chanyeol says, his hands gently cups Baekhyun’s cheeks and rubs the tears away. “You know that you can wake me up anything you want, I was more worried if you go to the kitchen by yourself. What if next time it will be a glass jar of peanut butter? There’s gonna be shards of glass and you can seriously hurt yourself.”

“Also, you’re not fat at all. Have you seen yourself on the mirror? You still look good as usual, even the baby bump makes you more beautiful because it’s a reminder that you’re carrying our baby now,” Chanyeol puts his hand on Baekhyun’s abdomen, slowly rubbing it before he leans down to give it a small kiss on top of the clothes. Baekhyun only looks down at him with fond gaze and he ruffles Chanyeol’s hair slightly.

“I’m sorry,” his huband croaks in raw voice, making Chanyeol’s heart to ache. He quietly promises to himself that he wouldn’t let Baekhyun to cry like that again.

“It’s okay now if you understand,” he smiles. “Now let me make you something else, or do you want nutella that badly?”

“But that’s the only nuttela that we had?”

Chanyeol chuckles. “Well, I can run to the convenience store. It’s been a while since I did that, even our neighbors asked me if you stop craving something at 3 a.m anymore.”

The exaggeration makes Baekhyun laughs for the first time that morning and it looks sincere and Chanyeol can’t stop himself to think that even when his husband’s wet hasn’t dry yet, his eyes still red from crying and their kitchen has a crappy light, Baekhyun still look as beautiful as he always been.

“No, just cook with whatever with have now,” he says. “The sooner I eat, the sooner we can cuddle and sleep.”

The ideas of cuddling with his small husband honestly tempted Chanyeol a little bit, but as he heads to the kitchen and finds the mess of nutella on the floor saying hello to him, he realizes that he’s not gonna get that cuddle anytime soon.