Chapter Text
Dr. Irwin Zhou does not know what love is.
Sure, he knows what romantic love is. Having his first love be his best friend turned out fantastic for him. He knows he loves Julian very much, but that's about all he knows about the emotion. So, when he is asked a question about it, in a joking manner for the record, he had little to no actually intelligent response to it.
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"What do you mean you LOVED that guy?" Irwin sat up from Julian's blue bedsheets in less than a few seconds, shocked. This earned giggles from the man with a head resting on his lap, who gave him an endearing head pat.
"You do know that romantic love isn't the only type of love out there right? What do you know about love, anyway?" Julian pulled a sly grin, as he played with the strands of Irwin's hair, attempting to mix the two different colours together. The words earned an embarrassed blush from Irwin, turning away to save face. Of course, Julian had meant the questions in a light-hearted way of his usual sarcasm. He knew, or at least thought, that Irwin, top veterinarian student in the cohort, knew that there were different kinds of love. Right?
Unfortunately, Irwin did not. He was a science student who dropped literature in secondary school, so he would have no clue about abstract concepts. He focused on the things that were real and physical, not emotions or words that only had meaning in the human mind. The question lingered in Irwin's mind for a long time, even after Julian had fallen asleep in his bed next to him that night. And that night was the night he figured that he was going to find out what different forms of love meant, along with examples of his own.
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Irwin wonders about the different kinds of love he had been given in his life. He ruled out parental love, because his parents were barely home. He had sibling love, with Steve, all his life. He loves Steve of course, and starts to realise what Julian meant. He also loves Julian very much. He's known this since they gotten together, and maybe even way before that. Irwin thinks about Joni, who he deeply cares about and shows affection towards on the regular.
He writes it all down as the thoughts cross his brain one by one.