Chapter Text
Outside, the snowflakes wafted down gently - just one or two at first, and then, without warning, in heavy slurries carried quickly by the wind. Winter had come late this year, but now that it was early December, the ground was finally cold enough for the snow to blanket the world in a glittering layer of white.
With a sigh, Jeonghan tore his eyes away from the window. His library carrel was a catastrophe of scrap paper scribbled over with hexagons and numbers that made increasingly little sense. Though organic chemistry had never been difficult for him, this recent laboratory assignment was impossible to decipher. It was also due in less than twelve hours. Of course, it was just his luck to be stuck with a 279 gram-per-mole compound to identify, when all of his classmates were assigned molecules under 150-something grams. Yawning, he threw his pencil down in disgust and rested his head on folded arms. It was so unfair.
How long had he been here anyway? Not that he cared enough to expend the energy required to sit up and check the time on his phone. Jeonghan felt his eyelids growing heavy, and wondered if maybe a power nap would help clear his mind and energize him to finish his report. He had entered the library just after dinner, and it must be at least midnight now, if not past one. He hadn’t bothered to keep track of the time when all he had figured out about his unknown molecule were three cyclohexanes and a rogue hydroxyl group.
I give up , he thought wearily. It wouldn’t hurt to nap for just a few minutes, right? After all, he needed a break, and was clearly making no progress on his work. Closing his eyes, Jeonghan burrowed his head deeper in his arms. Lab had dragged for forever this morning, and he was just so, so tired…
He awoke with a start. Glancing around, Jeonghan realized that the library was mostly empty, except for a few members from what looked like the Anime Club having some particularly zealous card game in a far corner. Through the window, he realized that the few inches of snow had grown into an alarming opaque layer that looked nearly a foot tall. How long had he been asleep?
As he sat up slowly, Jeonghan felt something unfamiliar draped over his shoulders. His eyes still adjusting to the light, he stretched one arm over his back - and pulled off a strange wad of fabric. “What the -”
The sweatshirt was light grey, and unbelievably soft; the whole thing felt like a warm cloud. Jeonghan had half a mind to rub the fleecy inner lining against his face - except it wasn’t his.
Awake now, and thoroughly confused, he sat up. Holding the sweatshirt in both hands now, he examined it closely. The tags were faded and worn, and there was no sign as whose sweatshirt it might be. Nothing in the pockets of the sweatshirt, either. He looked around, but saw no one nearby who could have lent the sweatshirt to some pitiful orgo student passed out in the library. Jeonghan looked down at his desk, the unfinished lab report glaring up at him.
It was then that he noticed it. As if the sweatshirt weren’t surprise enough, a styrofoam cup, filled to the brim with some clear amber liquid, sat neatly in front of him. A tag reading “Bigelow Peach Tea” dangled from a string, indicating the cup’s contents. Jeonghan studied it closely. The tea was still giving off gentle trails of steam, and when he wrapped his fingers around it, the cup was almost uncomfortably hot.
He looked at his phone. It was 2 in the morning, and the library was silent.
“What time did you even get in last night?” Wonwoo, sitting cross-legged on his bed, peered at Jeonghan over a comically large hardcover copy of David Mitchell’s Cloud Atlas .
“This morning, you mean.” Jeonghan winced. Despite sleeping in until noon, his joints still felt stiff after being cramped at a library desk for too many hours. “Maybe 4 AM?”
He was met with wide eyes from his roommate. “Sucks,” Wonwoo said simply, but Jeonghan knew him well enough to catch the concern in his voice. “Did you figure out your molecule at least?”
“Yeah,” Jeonghan grunted. He rolled his eyes. “It’s fucking estrogen. Can you believe it? All those carbon rings, and two hydroxyl groups when my IR reading only picked up one. Such a pain in the ass.” He sat up slowly in bed, wishing that he didn’t have to be back in lab in an hour. “But whatever. It’s done, I turned it in, and that’s all that matters.”
“Yeah, you’re done,” Wonwoo echoed, turning back to his book. “So don’t think about it anymore.”
“Oh, I’m not.” Standing up, Jeonghan walked over to his chair, where he had hung the unfamiliar grey sweatshirt. “What I’m thinking about is this.” He picked up the sweatshirt carefully and was taken aback again by how soft it was.
“You’re thinking about your jacket?” Wonwoo asked, focused on reading.
“It’s not my jacket,” Jeonghan said flatly.
Wonwoo flipped a page. “Whose is it?”
“I don’t know.”
“You stole someone’s jacket?” Wonwoo raised his eyebrows but kept his gaze on his book. His voice was nonchalant, as if it were normal to steal soft sweatshirts and bring them home from the library. “Jeonghan.”
“I did not,” Jeonghan replied, frustration creeping in. “I don’t know whose it is, it just - appeared - on me last night - “
“Have you ever thought that you should sleep more?” Wonwoo remarked, finally looking up from his book.
“If only it were so easy,” he threw back. “See how much you’ll sleep next year when you take Kahi’s orgo lab.” He paused. “But seriously. I took a nap while I was working yesterday -”
“You took a nap in the middle of the library?”
Jeonghan ignored the blatant judgement. “I took a nap in the back corner of the library where they have the thesis carrels because I was dying, Wonwoo, of exhaustion and overwork, and when I woke up, someone had draped this on me. To keep me warm or something.” He patted the grey fabric delicately, as if he were afraid he might not be allowed to.
“Cute,” Wonwoo replied, clearly not finding the situation exceptionally cute at all. “So just dump it in the lost and found. Whoever lent you the jacket will probably be wanting it back.”
“Here’s the thing, though.” Jeonghan lowered his voice conspiratorially. “Whoever left their jacket for me left me a - a cup of tea, too.”
“So?”
“So what I’m saying,” he explained, ever patient, “Is that I shouldn’t just ‘dump it in the lost and found.’ Whoever lent me their sweatshirt wants it back, sure, but I should probably find them and say thank you.” He smoothed out the sweatshirt’s hood where it had wrinkled slightly after being moved around. “For, you know, taking care of me.”
“You need to raise your standards if you seriously are that turned on by some rando’s old sweatshirt and a cup of tea, Jeonghan.”
“I’m not turned on, I’m grateful -”
“Plus,” Wonwoo continued without missing a beat. “How are you going to find this person just based on their sweatshirt? Like, no offense to her - him - whatever, but it’s kind of a really generic sweatshirt. Everyone and their mom has a sweatshirt like this.”
“True,” Jeonghan acknowledged. “Although you and I don’t. Have sweatshirts like this, I mean.”
He turned the sweatshirt over in his hands, examining the interior lining and trying to find some hint as to who owner might be - initials Sharpied onto a tag, maybe, or anything that could provide some kind of identifying information. But as Jeonghan fumbled to zip up the jacket, nothing about the garment looked particularly helpful - until a blue mark on the zipper pull caught his eye. “Wonwoo, does this mean anything?”
He brought the zipper close to his roommate, who scrutinized it, squinting. An open circular swirl, with a triangular beak attached at the bottom left hand corner and a small protruding line pointing outwards of the upper right hand corner, had been etched in blue ink onto the flat surface of the metal tab. After a minute of concentrated inspection, Wonwoo shrugged. “I don’t know,” he said. “Although I swear to god I’ve seen it before somewhere.”
“Wait, so you know what it is, though?”
“Nah,” Wonwoo shook his head as he stood up, dismissive. “But don’t think too much about it. You don’t have time to be tracking down some secret admirer.”
He wasn’t wrong. Jeonghan stared at the sweatshirt in his hands, the soft fabric warm from his touch. It was true that he was already so busy, and tracking down the owner of the sweatshirt would be so troublesome, and such a waste of time, and it probably wouldn’t amount to anything interesting at all.
But he also remembered warming his hands on the styrofoam cup of tea while blowing the curls of steam away, and he realized he wasn’t so sure.
Jun’s side of the lab hood was already prepared and ready to run by the time Jeonghan had managed to step into lab. The sophomore looked ridiculous, as one did in lab, in his safety goggles and oversized white coat. “I measured out your solution for you already;” he called to Jeonghan as he set up his experiment, gently tapping a layer of sand into his chromatography column. “So you don’t have choose between fighting the masses or waiting half an hour before you can actually start any work.” He angled his head in the direction of the reagents hood, where a line of increasingly antsy students had formed, anxious to grab materials and start their projects.
“My perfect lab partner.” A smile tugged at Jeonghan’s lips as he knelt down to unlock his bench cabinet. “What would I do without you?”
“Most people would probably at least Asian fail,” Jun said, grinning. “You, though, would talk your way out of a bad grade after going to office hours a couple of times.”
“Like I have the time to go to office hours,” Jeonghan scoffed. He fished a beaker out of his bin of glassware. “That’s why we work well together. You do the work, and I do the kissing up.”
“And that,” Jun continued for him, “Is how you pass this god-awful lab with flying colors.” Satisfied with his set up, he stepped away from the hood and dusted off his gloved hands. “Oh yeah - did you finally figure out your molecule?”
“Yeah, at like four in the fucking morning,” He accepted the pair of nylon gloves Jun was handing him with a nod.
“Jesus Christ, I’m sorry,” Jun said, sympathetic. “Did you walk back in the blizzard?”
“It was mostly over by the time I went back,” Jeonghan replied. He hesitated, wondering if he should bring up the sweatshirt. Wen Junhui was brash, fast-moving - he never seemed to be one to dwell on anything for too long. But if his perfect lab practical scores were any indication, Jun also seemed to always know what to do and how to execute things perfectly. If it were anyone else, Jeonghan might have hated him. But Jun was so impossibly nice and encouraging - and always saved his ass in lab - that after four semesters of sharing a chemistry lab hood, Jeonghan had ended up being frustratingly fond of him instead.
“Actually, I wanted to ask you something,” he started.
“For the last time, I am not going to take Dr. Son’s Physical Chem with you,” Jun interrupted, not looking up from his apparatus.
“No, not that - although you should still reconsider - I’ll buy you that anime thing you really wanted, I swear to god - “
“It’s called a Nendoroid, and the Mukuro one sold out already - “
“I’m literally bribing you - “
“It’s not going to work because there’s nothing you can bribe me with,” Jun emphasized. He stared at Jeonghan, waiting. “But you said this wasn’t even about Phys Chem.”
“Ah - right,” Jeonghan said sheepishly, scratching the back of his neck. Having taken two years of lab with Jun, he wasn’t too proud to admit his terror at continuing in the curriculum alone. But Neuroscience majors like Jun were done with chemistry requirements at the end of Orgo, and no sane person took Physical Chemistry for fun. He shook his head. “Let me present you with, say, a hypothetical situation.”
“Okay.” Jun’s voice was tentative, questioning.
“Say you were working in the library super late at night. Like, well past midnight - “
“I wouldn’t, because sleep is important, but go on,” Jun nodded.
“I mean, yeah, you would obviously rather be sleeping,” Jeonghan said pointedly, “But you have this huge assignment due, so you’re not sleeping, you’re working.” He inhaled deeply. “And then let’s say you happen to fall asleep at the library because you’re so tired and when you wake up not only did some random good Samaritan leave you a cup of peach tea which is still hot when you wake up and but also left their sweatshirt draped on you like they were trying to keep you warm but now you have to return their sweatshirt but you have no idea whose sweatshirt it is.” He paused, partly for effect but mostly because he needed air. “What would you do?”
Jun’s eyes darted around, his mouth twitching dangerously. “This isn’t hypothetical at all, is it, Jeonghan?”
“Ah, but I asked you a question first, Junhui.” He smiled at his lab partner as charmingly as he possibly could.
“This isn’t hypothetical at all,” Jun continued, pretending not to hear him. “This happened to you, last night, and you care about this, like, more than you’d like to admit. Which is why you’re asking your lab partner for advice on something like this.”
He was smiling, the brat. Jeonghan found himself almost wishing for Wonwoo’s deadpan inertia. “So you have no idea what to do and are surprisingly unhelpful for once,” he threw back at Jun, a little meanly in his hurry to defend himself.
“This is so cute, Jeonghan,” Jun beamed, his voice growing louder. “Who would have thought Yoon Jeonghan, of all people, would be so interested in secret admirer who apparently has lots of sweatshirts to spare?”
“This isn’t a secret admirer, I’m just trying to be a decent human being and return - “
“Oh my God,” Jun shrieked, his voice reverberating across the sterile white walls of the lab classroom now. From across the room, Wheein glared at them over the mass spectrometer. Jun lowered his voice to a decent decibel. “Oh my God,” he repeated dramatically. “This is like a drama. Am I - am I the knowledgeable yet romantically unlucky side character in this drama of your life, Yoon Jeonghan?”
“You are,” Jeonghan closed his eyes, trying to hold back a smile. “Very annoying.”
“This is just like the romantic plot of Gekkan Shoujo Nozaki-kun - “
Jeonghan made a face. “You know I don’t understand anime references.” He poured his solution into his separatory funnel. “Also, what the hell are you talking about, ‘romantically unlucky side character’? Didn’t Yerin just confess to you, like, last week - “
Jun swallowed noisily. “Ah, you know I’m not into… you know,” he gestured vaguely.
“No shit, Sherlock.” Jeonghan clapped a hand on Jun’s shoulder reassuringly. He lowered his voice to just above a whisper. “I know. But Xu Minghao doesn’t,” he winked.
“Oh - no, haha, Minghao is, like, a little brother, what a weird, random thing to bring up - “ Jun waved his hands, blushing wildly.
“All in good time,” Jeonghan assured him. “But in the meantime, Casanova, tell me what to do.”
He waited as Jun regained his composure. He had to admit, he felt sorry for the sophomore - that irritatingly handsome face and horribly pleasant personality, coupled with his best friends Soonyoung and Chan’s blazing nonmonogamous heterosexuality, drew female admirers towards Jun like Wonwoo to the smell of kimchi fried rice. Of course, Jun was far too shy to actually turn anyone down with normal, adult conversation, resorting to literally sprinting away and hiding every time girls inevitably confessed to him. Jeonghan would have found the whole thing funny if it weren’t so sad.
Jun cleared his throat. “Where is the sweatshirt?”
“I brought it with me, but it’s in my backpack outside,” he explained. “The roommate told me to chuck it in the lost and found so I was going to do that after lab. Unless you had any better ideas?”
Jun shook his head. “That’s no way to handle something like this,” he smiled, having returned to his usual happy-go-lucky self again. “Don’t you want to figure out the identity of this secret admirer?”
Jeonghan smiled back. “Do you even know who you’re talking to?”
“Let me borrow the sweatshirt,” Jun said. “I swear I’ll figure out whose it is in, like, two hours tops.”
“Oh?” Jeonghan raised an eyebrow.
“You said yourself - Casanova, right?” Jun closed the stopper on his chromatography column confidently. “I got this, you’ll see.”
“Suit yourself,” Jeonghan returned. If Jun were half as good at this as he were at orgo lab, then he might, in fact, figure it out within two hours.
“You ran your funnel dry, by the way,” Jun waved his hand at Jeonghan’s side of the hood. “You have to start over.”
“Fuck me,” Jeonghan groaned, slamming a clean beaker onto the counter.
“Literally no,” Jun whistled. “But I’ll find you someone who will, just you wait.”
“What,” Jeonghan seethed, “Is he doing.”
“I thought you said this guy was, like, Mensa-level genius or something.” Wonwoo popped a french fry into his mouth and chewed lazily.
Jeonghan glared at him. “At academics,” he said, trying to keep the irritation out of his voice. “I had no idea he would be this bad at - at whatever this is.”
He stabbed at his salad with a fork as Wonwoo watched Jun unblinkingly. He had lent the grey sweatshirt to his chemistry lab partner under the assumption that the kid might know someone who might know someone who might know who owned the sweatshirt, or something like that. Except now Jun was going around the dining hall - during rush hour, no less - and asking each individual clump of students if they might be the rightful owner of the sweatshirt. Jeonghan felt a deeply uncomfortable flush of secondhand embarrassment watching him, except since this public parading of the sacrificial jacket was on his behalf, the embarrassment was, after all, firsthand. He felt the skin behind his ears burn.
“I can’t look at this anymore,” he stood up, pushing out his chair a little too loudly. “I’m going to get dessert.”
“They have strawberry cream pie today,” Wonwoo offered, trying to be helpful. His eyes, gently crinkled into the start of a smile, were still following Jun’s procession through the dining hall.
“Thank God,” Jeonghan muttered. “The universe doesn’t totally hate me.”
He made his way towards the dessert station at the front of the dining hall, trying very hard to ignore a group of girls pointing at him. “Nayoung, that’s the guy that the jacket guy was talking about,” one of the girls squealed as one of her similarly shrill friends tried to shush her. He rolled his eyes so hard that he thought it might birthe a migraine. I need a nap.
Thankfully, Wonwoo had been right, and a row of perfectly-cut pink pie slices greeted him at the front of the cafeteria. Eyes on the prize, he reached out to grab the largest slice -
- and found himself holding onto the thumb of a large, tan hand that did not belong to him but was, in fact, clutching the rim of the plate holding his pie.
Jeonghan frowned. Where in the world did the hand come from -
“Oh, man, I’m sorry.”
He looked up into apologetic brown eyes, catlike and almost smiling despite a look of startled concern on the wearer’s face. The boy matched him in height, or so it seemed - not that Jeonghan could really tell, as his eyes fell on pearly white teeth biting nervously on barely-parted lips. “I - I didn’t realize you, uh - wanted this one too -”
Jeonghan snatched his hand away quickly, trying to ignore how heated his face suddenly felt. “No, it’s fine, I didn’t -”
“No, it’s not fine.” The boy’s voice was soft and whispery as he picked up the plate and held it out. Jeonghan looked at it, a perfect pink triangle topped with a dollop of whipped cream still quivering delicately from being moved off the countertop. It was finished off with the fattest strawberry he had ever seen, glistening where it had been brushed with sugar syrup. “Here. It’s yours. It’s calling to you.”
“Thanks…?” Jeonghan’s voice trailed off as he accepted the plate. He had to actively restrain from licking his lips. Looking back into the boy’s eyes, he smiled as winningly as possible. “What a gentleman.”
“So I’ve been told,” the boy smiled back. There was something charming about the way the corners of his mouth curled upwards. With one hand, he picked up another slice of pie from the dessert station, his other hand resting in his pocket. He nodded at Jeonghan, as if giving some sort of greeting, and walked away.
Jeonghan stared as the boy exited the dining hall and walked out of sight, the back of his blue hoodie disappearing around the corner. He shook his head, feeling rattled. All he wanted to do was to dive into his pie and then power nap for seventeen hours straight. Walking back to his table, he saw that Wonwoo had now been joined by - goddammit, Jun was trying to sell the sweatshirt story to Wonwoo, of all people. He quickened his pace, carefully gripping the strawberry pie tightly in both hands.
“... and I was like, I have to try to figure out whose it is, because while okay, maybe it is a little creepy, it’s also potentially super romantic, you know?” Jun waved the sweatshirt in the air. “So that is -”
“That is quite enough,” Jeonghan slammed down into his chair, exhaling heavily, as if walking a single slice of pie across 80 feet of tiled dining hall floor had been some kind of taxing dessert pilgrimage. He stabbed his fork into the tip of the pie. “Jun. Have you been asking everyone on this goddamm campus about the sweatshirt?”
Jun grinned unabashedly, “Not everyone yet,” he corrected him. “Since I still haven’t found its rightful owner.”
“I’m surprised that no one is just, like, saying, ‘Oh yes, this is my sweatshirt, thanks for finding it’ just to take the sweatshirt for themselves,” Wonwoo remarked, his eyes fixated on Jun, transfixed by what Jeonghan assumed must have been the ridiculousness of this so-called solution.
“They’re probably avoiding the sweatshirt because you’re freaking them out,” Jeonghan muttered.
“No, they’re not just taking the sweatshirt, because I’m asking them what insignia is hand-drawn onto the zipper tab,” Jun said triumphantly. “If they know without looking, then I know it’s their sweatshirt.”
“Wait,” Jeonghan swallowed. “Do you know what that symbol is? On the zipper?”
“Excuse me, Jeonghan, as if I wouldn’t know the symbol of Konohagakure, the Hidden Village of the Leaf, hometown of the great Uzumaki Naruto, 7th Hokage -”
“Oh my god.” Jeonghan threw another forkful of pie into his mouth. “You’re talking about anime.”
“I will say that the owner of this sweatshirt doesn’t necessarily have the best taste in anime -”
“Naruto,” Wonwoo said thoughtfully. “That’s where I’ve seen the symbol before. I used to watch that in middle school.”
Jun threw the sweatshirt onto the table, his mouth stretching into an open smile. “You watch anime?!” he squealed.
“Just a little -” Wonwoo started, smiling helplessly.
“Oh my god,” Jeonghan repeated, rolling his eyes. “Shoot me now. And I had hoped that it would belong to someone cool, or at least normal-”
“Anime,” Jun interjected fiercely, “Is cool.” He clutched his hands to his heart.
“Kill me,” Jeonghan grimaced. “Oh - have I introduced you guys, by the way?” He pointed his fork at Wonwoo. “Jun, this is my roommate Wonwoo.” He redirected the utensil toward Jun. “Wonwoo, this is Jun, my orgo lab partner.”
“Nice to meet you,” Wonwoo was smiling so much that his nose was crinkled up into his eyes. He offered a hand to Jun. “I’ve heard so much about you.”
Jun shook the outstretched hand vigorously. “Nice to meet you too, Wonwoo. I’m sorry I haven’t heard very much about you. Jeonghan did tell me he has a roommate, but he didn’t tell me that you like anime-”
“I also,” Jeonghan looked at Wonwoo tauntingly, “Was not told that you watch anime.”
Wonwoo shrugged. “Just a little, here and there.”
“We should hang out and talk about it sometime,” Jun started excitedly.
“You guys can talk about other things too, you know,” Jeonghan said woodenly.
“Yeah, like your secret admirer who likes shitty anime, for starters,” Wonwoo teased back.
“You’re pretty lively for once,” Jeonghan responded sullenly, trying to change the subject.
“I’m curious who it is now too,” Wonwoo persisted. “A nice, Naruto-loving weeaboo falls for Yoon Jeonghan, the guy who hates anime more than anything else on the planet? Sounds star-crossed if you asked me.”
“Nobody is falling for anyone here, and I don’t hate anime, I just think it’s -”
“For children, but it’s actually just another art form for conveying stories,” Jun declared passionately. “Wonwoo understands me. Right, Wonwoo?” His eyes sparkled, pleading.
“Don’t worry,” Wonwoo said reassuringly. “I’ve told Jeonghan that he needs to give it a chance.”
“Guys,” Jeonghan said sternly, looking at his now-empty plate in irritation as Jun whooped his approval. He pretended to not notice other students watching them, perplexed at the commotion they - Jun - were making. “Can we just let it go? All of it, the anime and sweatshirt and everything? I’m so fucking tired. I just want to be done with the day.”
“You can be done,” Wonwoo grinned, and for a split second Jeonghan felt disproportionately weirded out by his roommate smiling so much - he had never seen him look so happy. “But I’m not.” He picked up the sweatshirt from where Jun had flung it onto the table. “Now it’s my turn to figure out who this belongs to.”
“Wonwoo,” Jeonghan warned.
“Oh, you don’t have to do a thing, Jeonghan.” He folded the sweatshirt neatly in his lap. “Eat some more pie, take a nap.” He stood up and picked up his backpack. “See you back at the room. And Jun,” he said, tone suddenly kind, losing all hints of that sardonicism it usually carried. “You’re welcome to stop by any time.”