Chapter Text
Things would have been easier for Wonwoo if life was fair.
To begin with, he wouldn't have to be feeling arctic all the time if life didn't decide to fuck with him and make him cold-blooded—quite literally. Or, if life was being just a tad bit evil but still overall merciful, it would've made him miserable but with the consolation of offering him the solution to all his woes and sufferings on a silver platter, wrapped in a big red bow, just within an arm's reach.
But no, life is too big of a motherfucker to do either.
It'd fucked Wonwoo by making him this freezing popsicle who can't melt , much less feel warmth or heat and who, despite the sweltering summer sun beating down on his three layers of clothing, could not, for the life of him, maintain a temperature above 30 degrees celsius. All this, while the solution to his life crisis masquerades right in front of him, walking on two legs and maintaining at least a ten feet radius away from him.
When Wonwoo was young, he'd always just thought he was sick. Now, he was pretty sure he was cursed: always feeling cold all over like it's a perpetual ice age to be living inside his body, and the only antidote is a boy who hates his guts, for reasons Wonwoo can't even fucking remember .
It started as a good ol' academic rivalry, but it's escalated beyond that if the way they treat each other now is any indication to go by:
Kim Mingyu is the definition of sunshine and it's comic how his smile and his skin and his personality is the very depiction of the thing that could cure Wonwoo, except, he is all but that towards Wonwoo, himself. Rather than fresh from the dryer blanket or puff of steam rising up from a cup of hot coco warm, Mingyu towards Wonwoo is more like angry, sloshing lava and steaming hot magma—if either of them were several hundred degrees below zero.
Like ice to fire, being in the same vicinity as each other inevitably ends up with them just crashing and burning and sucking out all the oxygen in the room with how much they hate each other.
And it's pathetic, really, the way Wonwoo needs Mingyu to feel the warmth and the heat that will keep him alive when all Mingyu's ever done is treat Wonwoo with a certain coldness the latter is no longer unfamiliar with. If Wonwoo doesn't already feel like Captain America during his days under the ice, he was pretty sure Mingyu's arctic glares would freeze him to death. Never mind that Wonwoo's already on borrowed time, and every day, the ice inside his body just manages to freeze half of his organs into semi-functionality.
If he can't do anything about the way Mingyu treats him, heck, even with just the way he looks at him, he might as well forget about his remaining days left and just die then and there.