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Sunghoon is snowed in, nine hours of traffic and even more miles of snow lodged between him and school. And to make matters worse, his only friend Sim Jaeyun has never been acquainted with the concept of empathy before.
“I told you to drive back for the break,” Jaeyun’s laugh crackles over the line, not a hint of remorse or coddling in his voice.
“To do what?”
Jaeyun’s loud sigh exaggerates the severity of the situation. Unlike most people who have a god-given talent of attracting nurturing, patient friends, Sunghoon’s stuck with one who boasts a talent of making everything seem worse than it actually is.
“What everyone does during the holidays—spend time with family!”
“I didn’t wanna get snowed in at home,” Sunghoon whines, resisting the urge to drag his nails down his face. “If I were stuck with everyone just long enough for them to start getting insufferable, I think I might just die.”
“And now you’re snowed in at the dorms*, and that’s leagues worse,”* Jaeyun points out, then taps out the conversation for an unnecessarily loud chips interlude.
“Thanks, Jake. You really know how to cheer me up.”
“Anytime!”
He uses his toes on the right foot to slide off the sock on his left, then sighs in relief when the cold air hits his skin. There’s a Christmas movie playing in the background where everyone is gay and hilariously misrepresented (and Sunghoon sincerely hopes that was on purpose because if it isn’t satire...) and the ceiling is marred at places where water damage has left some yellow blooms behind before. The marshmallows floating in his depressing cup of hot cocoa have melted into one congealed mess, not unlike the state of his mind at present.
He’s always been an introvert, which means that he hasn’t made that many friends his whole life. He never used to mind spending the holidays like a hermit. And then he just has to meet people he actually likes and now, all he laments over is how boring his days are without any of them around.
Maybe that old creep Oscar was onto something—if you know nothing of victory, you will be spared the knowledge of defeat.
Jaeyun forced him to attend some weird, cult-ish campus book club once, as his plus one. That quote was the only thing his sluggish brain retained from the whole experience, mostly cause Mr. Wilde went on a tangent about how the ugly and stupid have it best in this world and Sunghoon couldn’t decide which side he belonged to. While everyone was nodding their heads in collective understanding of (whatever they understood), Sunghoon was dozing off in his seat wondering if he still doomed to damnity for being so pretty despite his brain not exactly hitting the mark.
Jaeyun was only there to get dicked down while looking mysterious with one leg crossed over the other and his bottom lip permanently stuck between his teeth, but he’s book smart in a way that Sunghoon wasn’t equally as gifted.
His only consolation at the time was a boy who sat opposite him in the circle. He’d looked so soft, like a charcoal painting smudged with purpose. Sunghoon doesn’t know if it was accidental or with calculated intent that their eyes kept meeting over the tops of their own copies of Dorian Gray, aka one of the most homoerotic books of its century.
Then the meeting came to an anti-climatic end that didn’t feature a scene where they exchanged numbers, and things quickly went from homoerotic to homophobic.
As Jaeyun lapses back into his one-man conversation and Sunghoon tries his very best to tune the guy out, something else comes into focus.
Someone’s singing.
And don’t get him wrong—it’s a beautiful voice, kind of deep and nasally but pretty, but why is he being subjected to the horrible experience of listening to ‘Last Christmas’ while he’s snowed in and depressed?
He ends the call with a quick, ‘I’ll call you back later’ and creeps closer to the door to investigate.
The walls at their dorm are paper-thin, but Sunghoon’s patience for overplayed Christmassy music is wearing even thinner.
The fact that the title of this song combined with the extreme weather condition sounds like a prognostic of certain imminent death at 19 years old doesn’t help.
It’s a crime that the culprit is making him tap his foot to ‘Last Christmas’ when he’s been nibbling on protein bars to sustain himself the past two days. It’s a crime that anyone is this (seemingly) happy and in the mood to sing at the top of his voice when they’re all stuck at school, expected to spend the New Year’s countdown here as well.
And because Sunghoon isn’t an uncultured swine, he knows the lyrics to the song and finds himself relatively calm when the music grows faint towards the end...
Only to start swelling again.
“OooOooOOOoOh!”
Like some cartoon character would, Sunghoon huffs and puffs and fucking squats down pathetically by his door to figure out his next step. He’s, for very painfully obvious reasons, not just dealing with any crazy person. This guy plays ‘Last Christmas’ on loop. ON LOOP!!!
So clearly, all of the above reasons manifest as a renewed sense of purpose in him to man up and fling his door open, storm towards the source of the music, and ask the guy to turn down his crappy music.
Sunghoon was driving off the edge of sanity hill with no hands looped over the damn wheel. He was expecting to put up a fight when he inevitably gets thrown around the hallway for being a sore, bitter hater with curled up lips like dried tea leaves on Christmas Eve, and was not at all, in the least bit, prepared for the sight that greeted him.
Dorian Gray Boy gets the door, as doe-eyed as you can get with eyes like those.
The surprise in his face crumbles into disappointment—which triggers the functioning part of Sunghoon’s brain to kick start again. He realizes a little too belatedly that half of the sentence he’d rehearsed in his mind had already made its way out into the frigid air of their common hallway, and that he’d just screamed in this poor dude’s face: “YOU’RE A JOY-SHITTER SHITTING ON MY CHRISTMAS SPIRIT.”
“Oh.”
The boy gapes, then slowly straightens his spine and closes his mouth.
Sunghoon’s angry fist suddenly feels too awkward, held mid-air like some kind of blunt pitchfork. But it feels weirder to draw attention to it by slowly lowering it, so he keeps it there despite the burning muscles in his arm.
With even more disgust than the average human is able to comprehend, Sunghoon has his surmise confirmed that this guy is listening to the Emilia Clarke version.
Last Christmas, I gave you my heart // but the very next day, you gave it away // this year... to save me from tears, I’ll give it to someone special...
“Should I—do you want me to turn it down?” A faint blush seeps into the boy’s smooth cheeks and an apologetic smile quickly takes the place where the shock had shown on his mouth just seconds before. “Oh, I’m sorry I... that’s a bit of a stupid question.”
“Yeah.”
I’m a huge fucking dick. Colossal. Gigantic. Humongous penis. I deserve hell.
“You know why it’s stupid?”
Huh?
Sunghoon bets he looks dumb right now. He feels dumb.
The boy’s behavior is suddenly changed, and even the way he stands feels different. It’s a whole 180 from that deer-in-headlights look he was wearing earlier. He tosses his hair back (even though his bangs are so cropped there’s not much obstructing his view, or his forehead) and his shiny mouth twists into a sneer. “I said, do you know why it’s a stupid question?”
Stunned doesn’t describe it. No.
Sunghoon’s so stumped and bewildered that he forgets how to speak.
The boy waves one hand before his face and sighs. “All that hair on that big head of yours and you still don’t have a single thought behind your eyes. Your question’s dumb because I’m not going to turn it down for you, mo-ron.”
The door slams in his face (not before he gets flipped off) and Sunghoon is effectively locked out.
And see, Sunghoon might be a colossal dick, but it looks like he might’ve just met his match.
He’s slumping, in a daze, halfway back to his own room when he turns around to deliver a message of the deepest sincerity—”I hope you stub your toe on a HUUUUGE sack of coals! Big. Huge.”
His only answer came in the form of ‘Last Christmas’ being blasted three notches higher than he can stand.
Turns out the devil works hard but the dorm admin works even harder.
In a flurry of rage, Sunghoon had typed out a very incoherent hate crime in written form last night—that one might mistake for a drunken message of sorts—and sent it out to Heeseung, fuming and threatening to escalate and file a formal complaint.
So he wakes up on Christmas to the best gift of all time: a letter slipped under his door and no music playing.
He slits the envelope with his thumbnail and hums as he reads all the love packed into this very tiny note.
“Hi. I just want you to know that you ruined my Christmas by taking away the one thing that makes it still feel somewhat like the holidays while I’m stranded miles away from home. And if you’re wondering if this is considered gaslighting, yes it is. Thanks. With rage, Sunoo.”
It’s a good thing he woke up at eight, way before his alarm was scheduled to ring. He has all of the day ahead of him to pen a reply.
He makes himself comfortable at the island and gets working on it—
(Only, Sunghoon’s never written a letter before and he isn’t sure how to start. And it doesn’t seem appropriate to model it after an example so infused with anger.)
It’s exactly 8:55 a.m. when Sunoo-from-313 reverts. And Sunghoon doesn’t know this, of course, because he’s definitely not been pacing back and forth in front of his door trying to detect moving shadows from the small gap to see if Sunoo has dropped by yet.
As soon as he’s sure Sunoo has padded back to his unit, Sunghoon drops onto all fours and gets on his belly to read it, like a kid opening parcels.
It kind of feels like that.
“Straight up plagiarizing the lyrics, really? Do you have nothing better to do? With pity, Sunoo.”
(Dear angry neighbor,
It’s not like you have anything better to do. Isn’t that why you’re even entertaining my letters now?) Sunghoon hesitates briefly before holding his breath.
(—I’m sorry. I kinda feel bad now, about how I overreacted last night. I MIGHT have watched one too many romcoms and my friend is one annoying asshole. I was irked by your lack of taste in music, but it only contributed about 60% to the overall anger. Let me know how I can make up for it. Very, very sincerely, Sunghoon.)
(Let me play my Christmas music again!!! Not kidding, Sunoo.)
(Anything but that. Please. Begging, Sunghoon.)
The knock on his door comes faster than he’d imagined it would. Just three short raps against his door, and Sunghoon barely spares himself a few short seconds to straighten out his shirt before he opens it. Sunoo is there as promised, in the flesh, appraising him **with apprehension and doubt written all across his face.
It’s a Christmas miracle, Sunghoon swears.
“You’re really looking to make amends?” Sunoo questions, an eyebrow arched.
“Yes,” Sunghoon says breathlessly, like he’s been ready and gearing up for this moment his whole life. He’s just really glad that he doesn’t have to spend Christmas alone—even the idea of taking trash out sounds enticing now. Then he winces when his brain kindly reminds him that he’d just yelled at Sunoo the night before, and his conscience won’t allow him to step foot out the door if he doesn’t apologize in person. Before Sunoo can turn around to lead them... somewhere, Sunghoon snakes a hand around his arm to halt him mid-turn. “Hey.”
“You can’t just grab people when you want to talk to them, you know.”
“Sorry,” he quickly mumbles through numb lips.
“Yeah. Write that down. No grabbing.”
He doesn’t mean to sound like Joe Goldberg but Sunghoon thinks he isn’t crazy—that definitely carried a certain kind of flirtatious tone.
Sunghoon shoves his hands into his pockets. “So, what’s first on the agenda?”
Sunoo throws his hands into the air. “I don’t know! I’m bored out my mind and if I have to see another picture of my family hanging out without me in front of a real Christmas tree, I might just break down and kick the fake one in our pantry to pieces.”
His eyebrows crumple into a single one. “Poor tree.”
“It’s made of plastic—I wouldn’t kill actual plants,” Sunoo deadpans, but Sunghoon has his reservations. Sunoo looks like the type to spray pesticide in a glasshouse if he had the chance to—does pesticide kill plants? “Anyway. Now that listening to season-specific music is out, what else do people do on Christmas?”
“I was hoping you’d have plans ready,” Sunghoon mumbles.
“What were you going to do?” Sunoo asks, and the question has never crossed his mind. He does a double-take and tries coming up with an answer that would conceal half of his epic patheticness. “Before, you know, before I asked if you wanted to hang.”
Sunghoon shrugs.
It’s when they pass by the empty common room where yet another (sad) plastic tree stands in a desolate corner, next to a flickering TV someone forgot to turn off that Sunghoon realizes this was always going to be a bad idea.
Keep your friends closer and your enemies even closer. Not the piece of advice to take when your enemy is a Dorian-Gray reading, punk-rock-emo-hairstyle donning, Christmas-obsessed person who will vow to ruin all remnants of love for the holidays that might’ve remained in your heart after you grew out of your childhood bedroom.
There’s only one thing worse than listening to those stupid carols... something that had slipped Sunghoon’s mind, an amateur mistake he’ll never forgive himself for making.
For someone who looks so cold and distant, Sunoo sure smiles a lot when he’s watching ‘Last Christmas’. The movie, not the music video for the cursed song. Sunghoon’s going to be honest—he spent most of the longest hour and half of his life observing every micro-expression that crosses Sunoo’s face than the actors on screen themselves. Because he’s in awe of how this crazy little short man can find enough joy in himself to laugh till he’s holding his stomach when they’re snowed in, short on food, and depressed on Christmas Day.
But he supposes there’s something about the way Sunoo’s face is a canvas of blue, red, and white, and turns into a kaleidoscope of colors with no one has names for when the lights are turned off and they’re hunched over a single bowl of cold popcorn in their very own makeshift cinema...
“This is such a stupid movie,” Sunghoon scoffs towards the end, and he didn’t watch all of it, but it doesn’t take a genius to piece together the more-than-obvious plot points to fill in the blanks all that Sunoo-watching left behind.
Sunoo, entranced by bad film magic and barely-functioning heaters, thinks they’re close enough to bump shoulders. So they do, though it’s more of a one-sided affair. He rams the jut of his shoulder into the crook of Sunghoon’s neck and shushes him.
“We’re getting to the good part...”
“You’ve watched this before? And you willingly wanted to watch it again?” asks Sunghoon in disbelief, which earns him another sharp jab in the gut.
As unmoved as Sunghoon pretends to be, he must’ve whispered a year’s worth of prayers up to the ceiling when their fingers brushed over each other’s and he silently plead that Sunoo wouldn’t hear the wild racing of his shaking heart.
It’s the bad movie magic. It has to be.
Then Sunoo’s eyes curve up into the shape of two crescent moons when he finally gets to hear that stupid song play again, and Sunghoon thinks...
He forgets what he’s thinking.
There’s no electricity or fire whenever their fingers get tangled up in the bucket of popcorn. They don’t make the lights overhead swing with such intensity you might think there was an earthquake, and they don’t generate so much heat that you might fear the popcorn will all pop once more.
Maybe that’s why the memory of it lingers in Sunghoon’s mind at night when he tosses and turns for hours on end.
For the first time in his life, Christmas didn’t feel overly chaotic, or too boring and stagnant.
Sunghoon presses a cold palm to his cheek and lets out a breath he’s been holding (because yes, he is the main character of a Wattpad novel).
He feels like he's being transported back into a dark time in his past when he used to bury his head into pillows to scream about meeting eyes in the hallway with his ugly crush. Only, Sunoo is hot and definitely worth screaming about. So he does, and he sincerely hopes that Sunoo doesn't lodge a complaint against him for that.
His alarm fails him again the next morning. It’s Sunoo who wakes him up, pounding on his door like rent is due.
Sunghoon tries to slap down the cowlick at the back of his head, only to put too much force into it and almost sends himself into the ER with a concussion.
Sunoo’s leaning nonchalantly against the door opposite his when Sunghoon finally swings it open.
“Good morning,” he greets Sunoo warily, but his mouth is being stupid and he can’t help it—he blooms open like a damn flower in the presence of the sun and his lips hurt. They do. He wishes his body wouldn’t make it so obvious that he’s putting a few extra degrees into the jut of his hip to slut it up a little.
Of course, Sunoo barely acknowledges the valiant effort before pushing himself off the wall.
“Let’s go.”
“Where?”
“To look at what’s outside,” he replies like it should be obvious.
“Like, twelve inches of snow.”
Sunoo ignores him, to no one’s surprise. Sunghoon obediently trails after him, though. Down the stairs, past rooms with music playing softly behind closed doors...
When they reach the foyer, and all they can see is an endless white cape, Sunghoon turns to look at Sunoo in question.
“And we’re here because...”
“Because you ruined my Christmas.”
“I thought I made amends for that when you forced me to watch that stupid mov—Ow!”
Sunoo really doesn’t hold back in his punches.
“You ruined my favorite holiday of the year. Do you think that’s all it takes to make it up to me?” It's phrased like... like Sunoo might be pulling out his snow machine to pave a path for him to sneak all way to his porch. Sunghoon shifts his weight from his left foot to the right.
“So, how can I—what would you like me to...”
“Look up.”
Sunghoon does, then his eyes snap down to the ground immediately, cheeks burning and the ends of his fingers cramping up. Holy. Holy shit.
All he can see creeping into his vision is the toe of Sunoo’s boots.
Lightly, Sunoo leans forward onto his toes and they touch. Through the material of the shoes.
But fuck.
“You don’t have to. If you don’t want to.” Sunoo’s shrugging, but he’s blushing too, all red at the tips of his ears and all the way down to his neck. His neck.
Sunghoon is being coerced into falling for the spirit of Christmas... and all it fucking took was bribery with some plastic mistletoe.
Sunghoon’s mind is as blank as the fresh sheet of snow outside when he leans in and tugs Sunoo forward. Then, as though the sunlight is shining off the surface to blind their eyes, Sunghoon swears everything in the world disappears for just a moment.
“Are you going to be snowed in for New Year’s too?”
Sunoo tucks his chin further into his turtleneck. “You ask like I might have some alternative, magical ride back home that wouldn’t require three feet of snow to melt overnight.”
Sunghoon scoots closer. The couch dips with his weight. The stubs of Sunoo’s lashes cast long shadows on his cheeks that keep dancing with the flickering flames contained within the fireplace in his peripheral vision.
“Be my date on New Year’s, then.”
“Fuck off,” Sunoo mumbles dismissively.
“I’ll think about it.”