Chapter Text
Mingyu has quite possibly the worst luck in the world when it comes to love. It’s not like he’s falling short of having people fawn over or anything (not to sound conceited), it’s just that he gets bored too easily or never feels a connection or they get bored with him or he accidentally sneezes on them or any other disaster situation.
Minghao laughs at him and tells him that he’s dumb. Jeonghan shakes his head sympathetically and tells him that he’ll find it one day. Seungcheol is entirely unhelpful and just asks Mingyu if he wants to play basketball the next day. Seokmin ignores him entirely in favor of staring off into the distance (because really, there’s only so many times Seokmin can listen to Mingyu complain about his abysmal love life). And Wonwoo just pats him on the head and then asks him what he wants for dinner.
Mingyu then stops complaining about his love life and starts complaining about the god-awful friends that he has somehow acquainted himself with.
“Don’t hate,” Minghao says. “It’s not our fault you suck at love.”
They’re all sitting around in Wonwoo and Mingyu’s living room, chomping away at some Chinese food that Minghao had brought over. Mingyu’s currently lying on the floor with his head halfway underneath the ugly coffee table that Wonwoo had bought because it was “aesthetic.”
“But you should help me,” Mingyu whines in the manner of a five-year-old. “Aren’t you supposed to be my friends?”
Seungcheol pats him on the stomach in what Mingyu supposes is meant to be comforting but really just ends up hurting. “I just don’t understand why you even care,” Seungcheol says. “We’re young and no one else has found it either.”
Mingyu glares. “Yeah right,” he snorts. “Like we all don’t know you and Jeonghan are fucking.” Jeonghan chokes on his food, but Mingyu keeps going. “And Minghao has been secretly seeing that dude in his Chinese literature class and Seokmin is trying to win over that girl that lives down the hall.” At that, Mingyu sits up and all but throws himself into Wonwoo’s lap.
“Please,” Mingyu pleads. “As my fellow single-dude, help me out.”
Wonwoo looks pointedly at him and just gestures back to everyone else in the room. “Shouldn’t you be asking them, since like, you know, they’re all in relationships?”
Mingyu whines, laying all six-foot-three of him across Wonwoo’s lap and starts mock-crying. “Relationships! They all have relationships and I don’t! And I swear I’m more attractive than all of you losers!”
Minghao levels a clean punch straight to his stomach and Mingyu yelps in pain before flailing, accidently hitting Wonwoo in an extremely sensitive place. Wonwoo, in turn, cries out, before knocking Minghao on the knee, and the three of them are reduced to a pile of pain on the floor.
Jeonghan looks at them with absolutely no sympathy and just remarks, “this is why you’re not in a relationship.” Mingyu whimpers in pain. “I swear, you’re literally five-years-old. No one wants to babysit a child.”
“Besides,” Seungcheol continues. “None of us are in relationships.”
“Lies,” Mingyu hisses. “You all are two-faced snakes and hoes. I can’t believe you would just allow me to experience loneliness without help.”
“You’re not lonely,” Seokmin helpfully supplies. “You have Wonwoo.”
Mingyu starts mock-crying again and buries his face in Wonwoo’s neck. “ALL I HAVE IS WONWOO, THAT’S SO SAD AND PATHETIC.”
Wonwoo huffs in laughter, completely ignoring the insult and just tugs Mingyu closer to him. “It’s okay,” he hums, and Mingyu finds comfort in the vibration in his neck. “We’ll be forever alone together.”
“I DON’T WANT TO BE FOREVER ALONE.”
“You’re so dramatic,” Jeonghan says. “How about we set you up on blind dates? Would that help?”
Mingyu perks up at that. “Blind dates?”
Minghao laughs. “Blind dates will never work, he’s so undesirable that none of them will stick.”
“If it gets him to shut up, I don’t care.”
“Okay,” Seungcheol says. “How about we all pick someone to set Mingyu up with, and then he meets them. We all get to pick one and then if they all fail, we’ll just let Mingyu suffer in peace.”
Mingyu nods. “Sounds fun!” he says excitedly.
Wonwoo rolls his eyes at him. “Only Mingyu would be excited at the prospect of going on dates with people he doesn’t know anything about.”
“It’s a plan then,” Jeonghan says. “Once a week, on Friday nights, you go on a blind date. I call picking first!”
With that, Operation Get-Mingyu-In-A-Relationship-So-He-Stops-Being-An-Annoying-Pain-In-The-Ass is launched.
Jeonghan sets Mingyu up with a guy named Jisoo who is apparently from the U.S. Mingyu likes English and burgers, so he’s pretty excited.
They meet at a Thai restaurant and Jisoo ends up being really nice and pleasant company. Mingyu’s actually pretty stoked about the rest of the date, and the two make conversation about burgers and America and bald eagles. Mingyu never understood why they were called bald because they had feathers so it’s not like they were actually bald. The conversation is going swimmingly well in Mingyu’s opinion, until it takes a turn for the worst.
Jisoo sets down his utensils and asks, quite seriously, “how do you feel about God?”
Mingyu just blinks at him and says dumbly, “God?”
Jisoo nods enthusiastically. “How do you feel about our lord and savior Jesus Christ?”
Mingyu has never been one for religion, and he has absolutely no problems with people who are religious, but Jisoo starts telling stories about pillars of salt and pillars of sand and Mingyu can’t relate to it other than dumbly commenting that he vaguely remembers that from a Coldplay song.
Needless to say, Jisoo doesn’t take kindly to that.
Mingyu goes home that night and complains to Wonwoo, who just laughs at him and pulls him onto the couch to watch reruns of BBC’s Sherlock because Wonwoo is an actual nerd. Mingyu ends up eating all of Wonwoo’s popcorn and then falls asleep with his head on Wonwoo’s leg to the sound of John Watson’s high-pitched rants about how his detective boyfriend needs to chill out with the cocaine.
There’s always next week, Mingyu thinks.
Minghao picks the next week, and Mingyu meets Junhui inside a shady looking Chinese diner. Junhui is a hot piece of ass, so Mingyu reckons that this could work and they could become the most attractive couple to ever exist in the entire world.
They talk about school for a little bit, but then Mingyu mentions something dumb that Minghao did the other day and Junhui’s eyes light up with the passion of about a thousand suns and launches himself into a story about Minghao and how well the other dances.
Mingyu decides pretty quick that this isn’t going to work out and calls Minghao on his way home to tell him that Junhui is completely in love with him and that he needs to get on it.
“How’d it go?” Wonwoo asks as soon as Mingyu steps inside the apartment.
“Apparently Minghao set me up with the boy from his Chinese Literature class that is absolutely in love with him, so I don’t think I’ll be seeing him again.”
Wonwoo laughs at that, and Mingyu pouts. “I can’t believe he would still pick Minghao after seeing how gorgeous I am.”
Wonwoo laughs again, this time throwing his head back completely. His long, lean neck is bared at Mingyu, and Mingyu looks away quickly. “You’re so conceited,” Wonwoo concludes. “Do you want to go get ice cream?”
Mingyu pouts some more and then agrees because he loves ice cream and Wonwoo is decent company. He ends up getting ice cream all over his face because he is a messy eater, and Wonwoo laughs as he wipes it off with a napkin, teasing him about how maybe he really is a five-year-old stuck in the body of a twenty-one year old.
They walk home with Wonwoo’s arm tucked into Mingyu’s because he’s cold, and Mingyu ignores the warmth on his cheek from when Wonwoo’s fingers had brushed over it earlier.
Jihoon is an absolute disaster. Honestly, where did Seungcheol even find this guy? He’s grumpy and clearly not looking for a relationship, and when Mingyu cracks a joke about his height, Jihoon punches him in the stomach and then storms away before they can even get inside the diner.
Mingyu pouts and then calls Seungcheol to complain, who laughs at him and tells him that Mingyu has no manners at all, and well, guess his blind date pick didn’t go too well. After scowling at Seungcheol over the phone, he calls Wonwoo because he really wants a burger and he is determined not to eat alone.
“Didn’t go well, I take it?” Wonwoo asks when he arrives at the diner.
Mingyu shakes his head, pouting through a mouthful of fries. He shoves the tray at Wonwoo, having had ordered one of the cheeseburgers that Wonwoo loves so much. He swallows, and then says, “I said he was short and then he punched me and stalked off.”
Wonwoo laughs at him, his nose crinkling beautifully, and Mingyu looks away pointedly. Instead, he chooses to tease Wonwoo about how bad the other is at Overwatch and then they rush home after eating to start an Overwatch battle.
Wonwoo ends up winning anyways and demands that Mingyu make some ramen for him as punishment for insulting his honor, and they spend the rest of the night laughing over food.
It’s become sort of a ritual, Mingyu realizes, to always end his Friday nights with Wonwoo. He watches as Wonwoo smiles because of the story Mingyu tells about how he had walked in on Seungcheol and Jeonghan earlier with their pants down, literally. It’s a soft smile, stretching its way across his face before transforming into a full blown laugh when Mingyu describes how Jeonghan had screamed so loud that his neighbors had come running and seen the scene too.
It’s beautiful, Mingyu thinks to himself as he looks at Wonwoo, before promptly shoving the thought out of his head because it’s weird to feel that about his best friend.
That night, when Mingyu climbs into bed after screaming his voice raw when watching a horror movie and secretly enjoying Wonwoo’s warmth, he thinks that maybe this whole single thing isn’t so bad.
When Seokmin presents Soonyoung to him, Mingyu is completely prepared for this date to go extremely badly. There are a couple reasons for this: 1) Seokmin is a naive little boy and is quite dumb when it comes to things, 2) Seokmin had said that Soonyoung was sweet but he thinks everyone is sweet, so really, Soonyoung could be an axe murderer for all he knows, and 3) he says that Soonyoung is a dancer, and Mingyu knows a total of one dancer and Minghao is batshit crazy, so if Soonyoung is anything like him, well, Mingyu is leaving.
Mingyu is completely unprepared, however, when the date goes extremely well. Soonyoung is attractive, with dark hair and bright eyes, and he reminds Mingyu of Seokmin with how easily he laughs and cracks jokes. They spend the entire dinner playfully teasing each other and laughing over dumb jokes, and before Mingyu realizes it, they’ve finished dinner and have been talking for a couple of hours after their meal had finished.
Soonyoung is actually sweet, Mingyu realizes. He’s a great conversationalist, a supposedly great dancer, funny, smart, and would make a wonderful boyfriend. Still, Mingyu can’t help but think to himself that there is something missing.
Mingyu offers to walk Soonyoung home, and they spend the entire way laughing and joking, without any awkward silences that dates usually bring. When he drops Soonyoung off at his door, Soonyoung pecks his lips quickly and sweetly, and Mingyu promises to go out again. He means it when he says he has a good time.
Unconsciously, Mingyu is half-smiling to himself when he finally wanders into the apartment to find Wonwoo passed out on the couch. A quick look at the clock tells Mingyu that it’s almost midnight, and oh God, was he really out with Soonyoung for that long?
Mingyu turns back to look at Wonwoo on the couch and feels something like unease settle in his stomach. The TV isn’t even on, so why wasn’t Wonwoo in bed? Mingyu shakes his head to clear the ridiculous notion that Wonwoo may have been waiting up for him to come home, and just grabs a blanket and spreads it over Wonwoo’s thin body.
Wonwoo grumbles adorably in his sleep and Mingyu can’t resist the urge to brush his fingers through Wonwoo’s hair.
Mingyu goes to bed that night to dreams of Soonyoung’s laugh and Wonwoo’s eyes.