( yohan's bowl isn't empty but gaon's is and he uses that as an excuse to busy himself, reaching across with his arm tucked close to pour first for yohan and then sitting back to pour for himself.

it's easier to meet yohan's eyes across the table that way. yohan's not wrong. gaon isn't sure he's parent material, either. especially burdened so immediately by trauma and loss, with the ghosts of should-have-beens haunting the years that followed. and elijah had been young, too. too young. and none of that would have been easy even for someone equipped with it. gaon sees it. he understands. and he knows elijah, too, and things aren't necessarily great but they could have been a lot worse, all things considered. alternatives. lost into a system.

he tips his bowl back at the returned question, just drunk enough to be caught off guard. he shakes his head as he swallows, then shrugs, setting the empty bowl back on the table and then shrugs again. )

Maybe? One day? ( an extraneous question, existing outside of whatever the fuck it is between them. he'd thought about it before. with soohyun, maybe, a hypothetical he couldn't ever quite wrap his mind around. he waves the question off instead, gesturing to yohan's bowl. ) I've been too busy with work, I don't have any grandmothers to bully me about it. You don't get to start.