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⊰ i ⊱
a low groan comes from below the embrace of a soft cream duvet, the fabric a marshmallow cloud against the pale blue sky of the bedsheets. a hand peeks out from underneath the blanket and begins to search the surface of the nearby nightstand. it fumbles about until, finally, a phone is in its grasp. the hand quickly retreats into the duvet. seconds later, another low groan interrupts the silence.
"…. 7:58…. ah, shit..."
he knows he should get up; he really does, but knowing and doing are entirely different things.
jeonghan knows this better than anybody.
he has a class in thirty minutes… at a university that is twenty minutes away by bus. he doesn't bother to do the math to plan an on-time arrival—there’s no point anyway. his body and mind have decided to shirk today’s responsibilities, and all parts of jeonghan are as stubborn as the whole; the threat of poor attendance and missed classwork doing little to deter him.
without another thought, jeonghan buries deeper into the warmth of his bed. a familiar heaviness tugs at the lids of his eyes and, without resistance, they flutter shut. the birds outside continue to sing their love song to the morning as jeonghan feels himself, slowly and steadily, slip away.
⊰ ii ⊱
jeonghan awakes seven hours later to a murderous headache and a less murderous but still irritating scratch in his throat. the duvet is nowhere near him as it lies limp against the cold, wooden floor a foot away. nothing covers him aside from his shirt and boxers, but he can still feel an uncomfortable heat stick to his skin, warmth radiating from his body.
the ceiling becomes something worth looking at as he lays sprawled out like a starfish, his brain trying to catch up with the rest of him to figure out the source of his discomfort. this time, he does the math, and he doesn’t like the answer he arrives at.
headache + sore throat + internal heating error = ?
near the tips of his fingers, he feels soft vibrations cross the short distance into his touch. using the least amount of energy possible, he brings the phone close enough for the screen to be visible and turns it on.
32 messages.
he sees the number and already, jeonghan knows who the culprit is. no one else would dare to do such a thing, after all. as annoying as most of his friends are (a.k.a all of them), they all have the right amount of fear in them to know better than to blow up jeonghan’s phone. earlier in their friendship, soonyoung made the mistake of sending jeonghan a spew of texts, ranging from memes to blingee-d tiger photos to suggestions for the group’s dinner later that evening. at said dinner, upon returning from a quick bathroom break, jeonghan’s face had a smile that didn’t meet his eyes, and soonyoung, following a good distance behind him, looked as if he’d witnessed a murder—and he did… kind of. it didn’t take long for the rest of their friends to hear of what soonyoung dubbed “the time he met the angel of death in a pelicana bathroom.”
he glances at the contact name flashing persistently on the screen as 32 becomes 33, and 33 becomes 34. sure, he feels like shit, but the long list of notifications on his lock screen reading “my idiot sent you a message” is amusing enough to pull the corners of his lips upwards. not a lot, but enough for “my idiot” to live another day.
before he can type in his pin to unlock the phone, jeonghan finds himself flinching at the sound of eager knocks on his front door. a dip forms between his eyebrows, the tension causing a bolt of pain to ride through his skull. the knocks become more agitated and carry on for what seems like forever. if he answers the door, the knocking will surely stop, but the day is not working in his favor (for once). he feels the life leave his limbs just as he makes an effort to sit up. morosely, he accepts his fate: to be called to his death bed by someone’s determined desire to either sell him life insurance or those strangely addicting fundraising cookies.
⊰ iii ⊱
the apartment complex jeonghan’s lived in for the past three years is surprisingly nice despite its age and size. it’s in a good location away from the disturbance of honking cars, and the landlady is easy. he pays less than the number he saw printed on a ratty strip of paper, stapled haphazardly against an energy pole near his university. he thanks his good looks and the professor who taught his property management and housing laws class two semesters ago. the landlady likes him so much she even leaves a bag of tangerines on his doorknob now and then.
the only issue, if it is an issue at all, is the size of his kitchen. it is proportionately larger than jeonghan thinks it should be, but to be fair, it is only because, well... he is not a very good cook and supposes the extra square footage could have been used for his bedroom instead.
today, however, he is quite thankful for his spacious (albeit still unnecessary) kitchen as he sits at the dinner table, eyes shut as his chin rests on his knees, his warm duvet wrapped around him. the sound of water boiling and slippers sliding against tile whisper soothingly into his ear and it takes him all he can not to fall asleep again.
⊰ iv ⊱
there are thirteen of them, and admittedly, jeonghan finds himself stupefied as to how they’ve been able to function as a close group of friends. it’s chaotic, no doubt, but he likes being a part of this thirteen-piece puzzle. no one is really sure how they all came together, and when they’re asked about it by others, they resort to the “like dominoes” explanation.
he kind of likes the fate-like aspect of it all. even when it means he’s in the middle of being spoonfed on the couch by an overeager seokmin, who treats the spoon of congee in his hand like an airplane, and jeonghan’s mouth just happens to be this congee airplane’s final destination.
jeonghan fights to keep the laughter pinned in his throat from escaping, especially now that he has a mouthful of boiled rice, ginger, and scallions in the way, threatening to spill out if he does, indeed, laugh. he finds it curious (and extremely amusing) how seokmin sits before him as if he didn’t just try to break jeonghan’s front door an hour ago, jeonghan’s landlady in tow.
jeonghan’s eyes travel down the prominent angle of seokmin’s nose, whose focus is on the steaming congee in the bowl in his lap, to his favorite part of seokmin, the small but bold mole on the inner corner of his cheekbone. jeonghan once drunkenly teased seokmin about it, half-whining that he was jealous of how it got to kiss seokmin every day and get away with it. seokmin, in an equally drunken but very aware state, replied with a clumsy press of his lips to jeonghan’s; and in true jeonghan fashion, he worked the kiss into something more defined, but also something far from innocent.
seokmin didn’t speak to him for a week after that, to the confusion of everyone around them. jeonghan without the constant orbit of an excited and loud puppy? blasphemous. unbelievable. impossible. but no one pried; they couldn’t, not when jeonghan’s face hardened into something foreign and unreadable any time they approached the subject.
it was even more confusing when, at the end of the week, everything went back to normal. at least, that’s what everyone else thought, but jeonghan and seokmin knew the tension between them was decisively different. their usual public displays of affection were starting to mean more than just skin touching and sharing warmth. occasionally, seokmin would embrace jeonghan from behind, chin digging into the crook of his neck, the loud beat of his heart easily inviting jeonghan’s own into a similar rhythm. jeonghan, in return, would sometimes appear to whisper in seokmin’s ear, the reason for the sudden flush on the younger man’s face kept a secret between the two of them.
at some point, the secret was no longer a secret, and truth be told, nobody was surprised. jeonghan sometimes misses the adrenaline that walks side by side with secrecy, but the happiness he felt the first time seokmin smiled in his direction, a smile that was saved just for him, as he rejected a classmate's invitation to dinner was a hundred million, billion, trillion times more potent than any adrenaline rush could be.
similarly, when seokmin thinks the congee has cooled enough to give jeonghan another spoonful, the vulnerable and endeared look he catches on jeonghan’s face as he looks up strikes right through his heart; the understanding that this part of jeonghan is his and only his quick to rush violently through his veins.
⊰ v ⊱
later that night, seokmin stubbornly wraps himself around jeonghan’s body despite the latter’s protests. jeonghan huffs and complains that seokmin might catch whatever he has and weakly pushes against his embrace with a deep pout settling on his lips. still, jeonghan knows, by the way the hold around his waist tightens, that his attempts are futile. he rolls his eyes with fake annoyance and finally allows his body to melt into the bed, into seokmin; and even though the medicine jeonghan took earlier hasn’t quite kicked in yet, he feels much, much, much better.
he just really hopes that idiots don’t, in fact, catch colds.