Chapter Text
It started as a joke.
Well, not necessarily as a joke per se, maybe just intrigue. The members all talk about it sometimes: fanfiction.
Chan had mentioned it first. He loved the show Arcane so much, and just couldn’t get enough of it. The occasional fan edit on Instagram wasn’t cutting it anymore, and he needed more. Weeks later, after finally reading the fanfictions that catered to his interests the most, he shared them with the rest of the Stray Kids members.
“You know there are people out there who write these things about us.” Felix had said.
And so, as a joke, Jisung went back to his room to research. He was just wondering what people wrote about him, what they thought he was like. If people portrayed him accurately, or if they got him all wrong.
And, God, did they get him all wrong.
He doesn’t yearn after any of his bandmates, especially not after Minho.
So he read more and more, fixing the little mistakes across his screen in his head. Sometimes it’s sentences that he would never think, or things he would never say. It progressed until sometimes, he was making up better endings to the stories he read, or changing the premise to better fit his own personal interest.
Sometimes, he’s having sex with Minho. In the fanfictions, of course.
There were stories about him having relations with other members, too, but not nearly as much as between Minho and him. He already knew about the fans taking a liking to shipping him with his roommate; it wasn’t a secret. Chan sends tweets in their group chat, and Hyunjin makes inside jokes out of them.
He just didn’t realise how sappy they would be. He and Minho are in love in most of the stories he’s read. Full on, butterfly-inducing, singing unicorns in rainbow jackets dancing on cotton candy, disgustingly sweetly in love. And it makes sense, but—
But there was nothing realistic about it. I mean, he’s looked at Minho before, and it didn’t feel like an exploding glitter rainbow, but more serene, like he was home. That’s normal, they were roommates after all. Friendship with Minho has always come easily to him, but it wasn’t love.
Either way, he kept reading. In between schedules, after dance practice, in bed when he couldn’t sleep. He kept reading, and the inaccuracies kept bothering him. So, he did what any sensible person would do, and opened up a document for himself. He wasn’t going to write anything serious, that’s what he told himself. He was just going to take inspiration from some of the fanfictions he read, but with increased accuracy.
It started simple: he took the plot of a canonically accurate story he read about the Stray Kids Survival Show. That one bothered him the most; they didn’t capture the feelings they felt during that time. He kept the essence of the original story, but described it in his own words. Once he got the hang of it, he got confident enough to change the story itself a little, until the ending was completely unrecognisable.
And he was proud of it. And it was fun.
So he kept writing.
One time, Changbin pissed him off during an off-schedule composing session. So when Jisung got back to his dorm, he opened up his laptop and started writing.
And look, it got away from him, before he knew it, he had written 4,000 words of Changbin, Seungmin and Jeongin undergoing the ‘there was only one bed’-trope, and he wasn’t even close to done.
After four hours, three snack breaks and five toilet breaks, he had a work he deemed good enough to show the world.
So he posted it on AO3.
And watched as the kudos climbed up to over 1000.
He ignored what that meant, until he got an email notifying him of a comment:
THIS WAS SO YUMMY YOU CHANGED MY LIFE PLEASE WRITE MINSUNG PLEASEPLEASEPLEASEPLEASE
And another one:
The way you captured the trope was perfect, moaning at the sight of this. Please try Minsung next I feel you’d do them justice
And more:
Licking my screen right now, minsung when????
And that brings us to today.
Jisung keeps rereading a paragraph he wrote the day before; it just doesn’t click. He’s written about twenty confession scenes by now, all in different settings, different universes and with different people. But this one just isn’t working.
A few months ago, after the influx of comments about Minho and him, he couldn’t take it anymore. He couldn’t keep ignoring everyone’s pleas. Minsung this, minsung that. It was driving him insane.
So he wrote a one-shot. Something small, fluffy. He tried to characterise himself and Minho to the best of his ability, making them and the situation as accurate as possible. But when he reached the end—the big confession—his brain stopped working.
So he didn’t write it, easy as that. He implied some conversation, some big earth-shattering kiss, posted the story, and ignored it afterwards.
But his AO3 readers demanded more, and so he wrote more. Some were set in alternate universes, which made the confession scenes much easier to write; he could just pretend it wasn’t about him.
Until one day, a few weeks ago. He took on his biggest project yet, a canon-compliant story that details his and Minho's story, all the way up until their big move-in together. Something that his comments kept asking about, so desperate to hear his voice describe these events. It makes sense, Jisung thought, after all, he knows the real story.
He wasn’t that excited to write it. I mean, thinking about Minho this much, writing him in such an intimate setting—and now, such a realistic setting—it almost made Jisung feel guilt. But also, different. Like it made sense. Like the things he wrote weren’t that far from reality.
But he didn’t want to let anyone down, so he flew through the first few chapters, and started posting them as he went.
One of his favourite chapters covers the moment a few weeks after they first moved in together in their shared dorm.
“Hey, bug, can you take out the trash?”
Jisung’s heart flutters, not just at the nickname—which really did change something in him—but at the sheer domesticity of the moment. They lived together, in the same house. And, frankly, take out the same trash. Their trash.
It doesn’t quite process, but Jisung pushes the moment to the back of his brain— so he can think about it some other time. Some time when his feelings aren’t all-overwhelming. Once they’ve settled, once hearing bug won’t feel like a stab to his chest.
Does Minho ever really call him bug? No. Did he take some creative liberty? Maybe, yes, certainly a little bit.
Comments motivate him to keep going, to keep churning out chapters, to keep processing his own feelings on an alternate-reality basis.
And so he did.
And now he’s staring at a paragraph, ready to pull his hair out over it. He’s come to a point where he needs to make romantic progression in the story; he—Jisung’s character—needs to confess, or at least imply, his feelings for Minho.
It’s not like he can’t imagine confessing to Minho. Of course he can imagine it, he can just imagine how Minho would do anything to make him feel comfortable. How it would be late, and warm, and dark. How the words would spill over his mouth, and they wouldn’t even be that crazy.
But what Jisung would do, doesn’t matter— he’s never going to do it in the first place.
What matters, is that he just can’t seem to get into Minho’s headspace. Yes, Minho would make him—again, Jisung’s character, in his fanfiction—feel comfortable, but how? What would he say, or do?
The door opens behind Jisung, and he immediately slams his laptop screen down. He silently curses himself for telling Minho that he could “oh, come in my room anytime you want! I got nothing to hide”.
“Nothing.”
“I didn’t ask, Ji.” Minho walks into his room and points to the closet. “Can I borrow a shirt?”
“Yeah, of course.” Jisung spins around on his chair, pulling on Minho’s sleeve before he leaves, “Can I ask you something?”
“What’s up?”
“If someone close told you they had feelings for you, what would you do?”
“Depends on what I feel for them.”
“You love them.” This might be a little too on the nose, but if Minho questions it, he doesn’t show it.
“I like to think I would make it clear to them that I love them, so there’s no doubt left. I would try to make them feel special.”
Jisung’s face burns at the words. Deep down, he knew Minho would answer this—hearing it, validates all those choices Jisung made in his writing. He can work with this; he could finish the work people have been nagging him about.
“Thank you, baby.”
A flash of confusion strikes Minho’s face, and Jisung ignores it. He got what he needed; he is not going to think about Minho confessing to him any more than he has to.
“You’re welcome, bug.”
What.
Jisung’s surroundings come crashing down, thunder rings through his ears, his brain cells crumble and fall—
To put it lightly, Jisung’s heart fell straight through his ass, onto the floor. Before Jisung even has the chance to pick it back up, Minho walks out of the room and closes the door behind him.
The.
Fuck.
Okay, take a breath, Jisung.
This doesn’t have to be as big a deal as it seems; Minho could’ve read this in any other fanfiction— nevermind, that’s just as bad. Minho reads fanfiction? About them?
No, he could’ve picked this up anywhere else. Maybe he heard it on a show somewhere, maybe he read it online.
Maybe he looked under a rock and got inspired.
But Jisung’s heart hasn’t made it back to his chest yet— now there’s the looming, tiny, but conceivable possibility that Minho has read fanfiction, about them, possibly from Jisung himself.
But it’s fine— everything’s absolutely fine.