Chapter Text
Mark was tired.
He had hit that specific level of tiredness where it hurt to blink and everything was either way too funny or depressing enough to make him wanna cry. Despite being the most exhausted he'd been since he'd started university, there he was, in a dimly lit 24-hour laundromat, feverishly writing a paper while his clothes tumbled noisily behind him.
He sat with his laptop perched precariously on his knees, bullshitting his way through a closing paragraph. He almost felt like if he stopped writing, he wouldn't be able to start again, so he kept pushing through the fog clouding his brain. At the time, forcing himself to leave his dorm seemed like a good idea. He would get some laundry done and he there was no way he could fall prey to the temptation of his bed, that had been calling out to him all night.
He finished his final sentence with a flourish, and with a quick glance at the time, 11:54, he felt an almost embarrassing sense of relief. He checked over one last time for grammar errors, and halfway through he decided that he really didn't care anymore, so he saved the document and clicked over into a new tab to start uploading it.
The wifi in the laundromat was weak to say the least, and so he sat there, on edge for the full three minutes that it took to finally upload. As soon as the upload was confirmed he closed his laptop with a deep sigh and leaned forward to put his head in his hands.
A few years ago being up at midnight would have been a breeze for Mark, but seeing as he had gotten a grand total of 8 hours of sleep in the past three days, he felt like he had reached the edge and verily jumped off.
Behind him he heard the jingling of the door opening, and his last functioning braincell wondered if it was some type of crazy person come to put him out of his misery. Mark pulled his heavy head out of his hands and glanced over his shoulder to see a stupidly tall, stupidly pretty boy carrying two loaded laundry baskets, one on either arm.
Mark was severely sleep deprived, so he thinks he could be forgiven for the way he let his eyes and mind roam. The newcomer was wearing a black t-shirt with the sleeves cutoff, as well as a look of intense concentration. He didn't seem to notice Mark yet, all of his focus on trying to make sure his ridiculous piles of clothes didn't drop onto the floor. Mark wondered if he noticed that he'd already dropped three items from the pile since he'd walked in.
The stranger finally bumped into the line of washing machines and proceeded to pour the clothes into them until they were full, and then moved on to the next empty machine. By the time he was done he'd used four machines, and he set the baskets down with a sigh of relief. He then reached into one of the seemingly empty baskets and pulled out a bucket of tide pods, tossing two into each machine, before starting them up one after the other, going through almost an entire roll of quarters.
He'd started absentmindedly singing under his breath, his voice low and steady. Mark didn't recognize the song, but he kind of wanted to. The boy, after finally starting his laundry let out a loud noise as he stretched in what looked like an immensely satisfying way. His shirt rode up to expose the very top of his briefs and just a little bit of his toned stomach, and Mark once again cursed his stupid, gay brain for staring.
And of course that was the very moment his phone decided to go off.
The stranger startled and looked over to where Mark was blatantly staring at him, and they sat in silence for a moment, both awkward for different reasons. Mark, too tired to fully process his embarrassment, tucked his head down between his knees. Curled up in a ball like that Mark could almost pretend that he was somewhere else, and that a handsome stranger wouldn't soon be calling him out for his weird staring. He heard footsteps headed towards him and accepted his fate.
"Hey I didn't see you there! Well actually I didn’t expect to see anyone here, I’m Yukhei by the way!" Mark turned his head just enough to see the stranger looming over him. His hair was falling into his face and weak lights were casting some sort of glow around him that Mark immediately wanted to call "ethereal", and in that moment Mark finally understood what his friends meant when they called him a gay disaster.
“Uh, hi,” Mark finally croaked out, slowly shifting to sit up and maybe regain some semblance of dignity. When his back cracked, loudly, three separate times, he realized that it was a lost cause. But the stranger just laughed, a loud, belly laughed that bounced off the walls and around the inside of Mark’s skull. When he was finished he boisterously sat (how do you even boisterously sit?) in the chair next to Mark, leaving almost no space between them.
“Hey man, are you okay?” He easily inserted himself into Marks space, one long arm wrapping around his shoulders and his other hand patting Mark on the arm, jostling him a little.
“Mark, I’m Mark,” he finally managed, moments too late, his brain finally coming back online “And I’m fine, thanks.”
He thought the universe might cut him some slack after the hell that had been his past few days, but instead of respite, here he was with a big, warm boy draped all over him, smelling like laundry detergent and smiling like Mark was his favorite person in the world.
“That’s good to hear,” Yukhei says, doing Mark the favor of pretending like he’s not being hopelessly awkward. “What’re you doing out so late?”
Mark was genuinely confused by the attention, because he thought it was a long established uni student etiquette to make grim eye contact with people who were equally tired and worn down, and that singular moment of understanding was the full extent of any interaction but this boy, Yukhei, was watching Mark with big, interested eyes, waiting on Mark’s answer and he didn’t seem to be leaving any time soon. Mark was too tired to resist, and so he settled in for a conversation.
“Yeah you know I was just” he shrugs and gestures vaguely to his clothes taking up two dryers “Working on a paper and decided it was a great time to do some laundry” The delivery was deadpan but Yukhei threw his head back and laughed again, and Mark wondered if he’d suddenly become funny and no one had told him.
By the time Mark’s clothes were finished drying, Yukhei had managed to engage him in almost 20 full minute of conversation, and Mark’s awkwardness had settled down to an almost imperceptible simmer. When the loud buzzer sounded Mark jumped slightly, and when he went to retrieve his clothes he realized how cold it was in the room without Yukhei right next to him.
With his basket loaded down with fresh dry clothes, Mark turned and almost bumped into Yukhei, who was looming with that smile on his face, the one that made Mark’s face heat up involuntarily. Yukhei set Mark’s laptop on top of the clothes pile and raised an eyebrow.
“See you around?” and Mark wanted to think that he sounded hopeful, but he wouldn’t let his imagination run off like that.
“Uh yeah,,,see you” and Mark walked out of the laundromat with Yukhei helpfully holding the door open for him. He could almost hear Jeno’s voice in his head, yelling at him for not making a move or getting Yukhei’s number or something, but Mark had never been one to put himself out there, and he thought the nice memory of Yukhei would be good enough.
When Yukhei said “See you around”, Mark didn’t anticipate seeing him literally everywhere, all the time. Yukhei was taller than most, so spotting him loping across campus was pretty easy. The real mystery was how he managed to zero in on Mark without fail if they were within a 100 yards of each other. Jeno and Donghyuck had taken to teasing him relentlessly.
There had been one such occasion, when the three of them were sitting under a tree on a sunny day, trying to offset the hours spent in the library. Donghyuck and Mark had their backs against the trunk, while Jeno was sprawled like a starfish in front of them.
“Do you you remember that time that Mark laughed, and Yukhei popped up out of nowhere like thirty seconds later?” Donghyuck managed to tease in between bites of his granola bar.
Jeno crowed with laughter and rolled over onto his stomach to properly get in on messing with Mark. “I can almost imagine the way his head snapped around before he made his way over.
Hyuck shoved the wrapper of his finished granola bar into his pocket before he turned to Mark with a devilish sparkle in his eye.
“I wonder if we can recreate the results.” was the only warning he gave before he tackled Mark and began tickling him, as Jeno quickly latched onto his flailing legs.
A moment later when they finally let up, Mark’s face was red, half from laughing, and half from the mortification of his friends making a scene in the middle of campus.
The blush spread from his cheeks and all the way down his neck when Yukhei appeared moments later, fresh from a McDonald's run. Mark refused to explain why Jeno and Donghyuck kept laughing, but Yukhei gave him his fries anyway, so he figured it wasn’t all bad.
Yukhei also popped up when he wasn’t with his terrible friends, in the library or in the cafeteria. Mark had even started taking a slightly different path to his last class because he knew it would lead to him running into Yukhei, and he knew that no matter what mood he was in, Yukhei would be able to make him smile, even if only a little bit.
After days of relentless interactions, Mark thought that he and Yukhei were actually something akin to friends. Now Mark had the presence of mind to crack jokes and make Yukhei laugh on purpose, instead of him amusing himself with Mark’s specific brand awkward.
The only downside to their blooming friendship was the dread Mark could feel growing in tandem, because he his feelings were straying further away from platonic admiration, and moving dangerously toward a full blown crush.
He’d thought Yukhei was beautiful from the moment he met him, but now that surface level attraction had taken root in Mark’s heart, and was threatening to bloom into something completely different.
During a late night study session, while he watched Yukhei pour over his study guide with single minded determination, Mark realized that he had two options. He could create the distance himself, because the way things were going, it was going to hurt a hell of a lot when he fell all the way, and being around the object of his affections was only going to make it worse. His other option was to just let it happen and try his hardest not to let his feelings leak between the two of them, because Yukhei was the best friend that Mark could ask for, even if he made his heart feel like it was made of fragile glass.
Mark was startled out of his revere by a gentle nudging at his calf, and when he looked up, Yukhei was sliding him the other half of his cherry danish, which he must have noticed Mark eyeing. Then he shot Mark a smile which let him know definitively that the first option was never really an option at all.