Work Text:
For the first time in eleven weeks, Intak wakes up to the sound of absolutely nothing.
No alarms, no flushing toilets, no towel snaps, no pans clattering around in the sink. No laughing, no talking, no phone calls to a mother or father or grandmother. No snoring, no panicked shouts about sleeping through classes or complaints about pulling an all-nighter.
No knocking on the door from his roommate Taeyang, who gets locked out of their room every other day because he takes a shit every morning and never takes his ID card with him, barring himself from reentering the room without a groggy Intak tripping over his shoes on the floor to open the door.
No singing from Keeho, who gets back from the gym at seven o’clock in the morning every day and takes a shower with the door wide open, “just in case someone wants to join him.” No appreciative clapping from Taeyang, the only one who has taken Keeho up on the offer—more than once.
No bits of conversation float through the paper-thin wall separating his room from the double next door. No delirious babbling from Shota after chugging his third Red Bull of his all-night gaming streak. No thudding on the wall from Jongseob, who hates the 9 AM deadlines for his coding modules and exercises his frustration by trying to break the wall with his forehead.
No breathing. No sounds of life. The only thing that would make the scene apocalyptic would be a tumbleweed cartwheeling across their living room littered with socks and notebooks.
Intak fixes himself a breakfast of champions—an old banana that’s more brown and bruised than it is yellow, mashed together with chunky peanut butter and a tablespoon of chia seeds. He ran out of toast last week and has been too busy with finals to buy an appallingly overpriced loaf from the market, so he eats the mixture with a spoon and tries to distract himself from the baby-food-like texture by scrolling on Instagram.
All of his mutuals from his university have posted about their winter break plans, whether it’s a selfie taken in the bathroom of a plane or a snowflake emoji next to a house emoji on their note. Many of them are back in their hometowns for the holiday break, or snowboarding, or on vacation in a warm, sandy and summery country with their significant other’s family. All smiling, all holly jolly and mistletoe and fa-la-la, and Intak suddenly feels like throwing his phone out of the window.
It’s not that he chose not to fly home and be with his family. It’s the fact that his family is on vacation in the tropics, and the only flight Intak could’ve booked to join them—as all the others were full, and he’s not about to blow half of his bank account on the only seats left in first class—was scheduled to take off during his anthropology final.
As the lone occupant in the apartment, Intak has the sudden urge to run around naked.
“What the hell,” he mutters through a mouthful of peanut-butter-banana-chia-seed, “why not?”
He shimmies his flannel pajama pants off and tosses them in the general direction of the stained couch, which is quickly followed by the old soccer shirt he’s had since he played as a ten-year-old—leaving him in a pair of Calvin Klein boxers and festive holiday socks with red and white stripes. Intak considers taking his boxers off too but decides against it just in case the fire alarm goes off and he needs to evacuate. Also, they’re Calvin Klein, and he enjoys the support and style they give him. Sue a diva for wanting to streak with style.
Of course, as soon as Intak cues up a song he can properly do a handstand and twerk to, there’s a knock on the door. He almost forgets to throw his pants back on to answer the door.
Upon opening the door, there’s not a single soul in sight.
With a shrug, he reasons it must have been the resident spirit haunting their row of apartment buildings, or maybe he’s already hallucinating the presence of his friends in his suffocating solitude. Pulling back the foot propping the door open, Intak tries to shake the uncanny shiver that tingles at the base of his skull and reopens Instagram reels. Ghosts freak him the fuck out.
He wastes away for a couple of days in his apartment, getting up from the couch, or his desk, or his bed only to go to the bathroom or pick up the food he gets delivered to his front door. The DoorDash delivery man has his name and number memorized by now, with the amount of times Intak has ordered a chicken-beans-rice-guac-cheese-sour-cream-corn-salsa burrito bowl from Chipotle. It’s starting to get a little depressing—which he realized after going cross-eyed from watching the entire Fast & Furious movie franchise twice-over—so on day four(?), he decides to explore campus. Maybe break into a couple of lecture halls and give TedTalks to an imaginary audience enraptured by his stance on the integration of modern slang into dating culture.
Intak would open his talk with, “Greetings, learned suzz. Student huzz, if you will. Would any of you be interested in hearing a nonchalant presentation from a Y/N like myself?”
He shuffles along the sidewalk that takes him past the campus’ main library, a futuristic building with eight floors surrounded by a forest. There were rumors about coyotes in the woods. Maybe he’ll go looking for them tomorrow.
“Should I call them suzz, or tuzz?” Intak wonders aloud. “Are they my student huzz, peer huzz, or TedTalk huzz?”
He giggles to himself. He must look insane, talking to himself and puttering about next to the woods where tweakers and stoners go to smoke and where eager university couples sneak away in the dead of night to copulate.
Intak wanders over to the side of campus where the STEM buildings stand tall, shiny, new. As a psychology major—with a double minor in business and product design—he doesn’t get the opportunity to visit this area very often. It’s impossible not to marvel at the grandeur of the new buildings, built on the coin of extremely generous benefactors’ donations. He tries to memorize the different department names spelled out in large letters hung on the outside of the walls, but loses track after encountering a wing of four-floor halls titled, “Dept. of Biochemistry, Dept. of Biology, Dept. of Bioengineering, Dept. of Biochemical Engineering, Dept. of Biomedical Services.” Who knew there were so many branches of biology, chemistry, and engineering? Aren’t they all essentially the same thing?
Passing under some sort of sign with “MAE” in large blue lettering—Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering—Intak enters a courtyard. The courtyard is the center of an atrium, the building itself around five floors tall. It’s almost beautiful, with green grass, ergonomic lawn chairs, and concrete steps, creating a juxtaposition between the natural and the manmade. Which is engineering at its core, Intak supposes. Fitting.
He breathes in the air: cool, crisp, and clean, with the slight hint of chemicals wafting through the air. His nostrils twitch. Chemicals?
Across the lawn, one of the doors along the building is propped open with some sort of metal weight. Because Intak has the survival instincts of a newborn wolf pup, he saunters up to the door, completely disregards the placard mounted by the door stating that proper PPE is required to enter, and invites himself into a space he’s only seen on Breaking Bad.
“What is this?” he gasps, eyes filled with visions of beakers, tubes, smoking liquids, and hazard diamonds. “Is that a human skeleton?”
A plume of steam erupts somewhere to his left. Intak flinches and instinctively covers his eyes, turning to face the danger across the lab bench.
After a few moments, the smoke clears—and behind the curtain, the first living human soul Intak has seen in the past days (with the exception of his DoorDash guy) is revealed.
He’s wild. He’s wild, and beautiful, and bright. Kind of like staring into a neon fluorescent light outside a jazz bar, a beacon or a warning signal or a siren in the night.
“You’re not supposed to be here,” the guy says, eyes squinted sharply through his lab goggles. He’s stirring some thick, boogery substance in a beaker on top of a heating element with his left hand, and with his right, scribbles things down in a notebook.
“I…”
“You’re not wearing a lab coat,” the guy sighs without stopping his experiment, “or goggles. Or long pants. In the middle of winter.”
“Oh, there’s a reason for that,” Intak shares with the judgy scientist. “Someone once told me I have beautiful calves, so I try not to hide them.”
For a second, the lab goes dead silent. The guy blinks at Intak, then glances downward to Intak’s legs, then back up again, seemingly dumbfounded by his beautiful calves.
A bubble in the translucent snotty mixture pops. The guy curses and goes back to stirring. “I’m afraid if you’re not in proper lab attire, I’m going to have to ask you to leave, Mister…”
“Intak!” Intak supplies. He nabs a pair of goggles off a rack and slides them over his face. “Better?”
The guy mumbles something under his breath that Intak can’t hear, but he gives a half-hearted sigh. “Don’t touch anything.”
“What’s your name?”
“Jiung.”
“Where’re you from?”
“Not here.”
“What’s your major?”
That jostles a laugh out of Jiung. In a space full of artificial noise, it’s a pure, light sound pleasing to the ears. He feels himself smile in return. “What is this, first-year orientation?”
“I’m assuming you’re not a first-year, then.”
“Third-year,” Jiung says, shaking his head. “You?”
“Second.”
“I’ve never seen you around these parts before. Not a STEM major?”
Intak chortles a resounding, “No.” He eyes the Arc'teryx logo on Jiung’s jacket peeking out from beneath his lab coat. What a STEM major move, he thinks. “Guess.”
“Hmm.” Jiung sticks his tongue out as he thinks, and it’s maybe just a little bit pink and a lot a bit distracting. Intak is glad he’s not the one running an experiment right now. “Law.”
“No shit, really?”
“You’re wearing a Patagonia sweater vest. It kind of screams ‘Daddy’s money’.”
“You know what, I’m flattered! I’m psych, actually. Minors in business and design.”
“Wow, an academic,” Jiung remarks, sounding less mocking than Intak had anticipated. One might describe his tone as teasing, maybe. Or maybe Intak just hasn’t talked to a real person in a long time. Or maybe he’s just delusional. “Alright, your turn to guess.”
“I don’t want to jump to any conclusions here, but something in chemistry?”
“Cheeky,” Jiung says. “Close.”
Intak wracks his brain and tries to recall the names on the buildings outside. “Um…biochemistry?”
“Nope, biology makes me want to vomit.”
“I’m at a loss. You STEM fields have too many disciplines.”
“I’m chemical engineering. Also, we’re going to ignore the millions of departments under social sciences that sound totally fake and made up?”
“Pretentious! And you thought my vest was haughty!”
“My major isn’t pretentious! It’s completely applicable and useful in the real world!”
“Someone sounds a little too excited to work for Lockheed Martin,” Intak comments, taking a peek at the mystery goop in Jiung’s beaker. “What’s that?”
Jiung’s demeanor immediately flips on a dime. His eyes soften, his voice goes deeper, and he smiles down at his work. Intak likes a man who can compartmentalize. Sue him for going a little weak in the knees at that.
“I’m part of a project team researching lip gloss formulation,” Jiung starts. “We’ve been working on a formula for some sort of polymer base, but so far—,” he pokes at the gel with a stirring rod and a gentle frown, “—it’s not sticky enough.”
“Cool,” Intak stares. “Why lip gloss?”
“I had to choose between a rocket propulsion lab and cosmetic chemistry, and who wants to build defense warheads for the country when they grow up? I hate the government!”
He makes a fair point. Plus, Intak fucks with lip gloss. He’s got his favorite brand, his daily shade. Intak looks up, startled to find Jiung staring at his face very hard. His lips, in particular.
“You’ve got great lips,” Jiung says perfectly professionally. It falls on Intak’s ears like bedroom talk, though.
Because he’s incapable of being normal around pretty, smart people, Intak forces an awkward chuckle out and says, “Your’s ain’t too bad, either!”
Jiung blinks at him. Intak wants to take a shot of the mystery liquids in the waste beaker in the corner of the lab space, but then Jiung cracks a grin. “I’ve been testing the formula on myself. I wanted to add coconut oil for moisturizing properties, but I was worried that it would make the base too oily and slip off the lips, so I was on the fence about adding it in—I’m glad to hear it’s working!”
Intak almost blows out a sigh of relief. Almost. “Where’s the rest of your team?” he asks instead.
“Oh, they went home for break,” Jiung says with no small amount of exasperation in his voice. “Guess I’m the only one who takes deadlines seriously.”
“Ah.”
The scientist rolls his eyes. “Joking, kind of. I think I’m just bitter that I’m stuck here for the break.”
“You’re not here because you’re a chronic workaholic?”
“Well, that too.” Jiung blows out a sigh, puckering those damn lips of his. “Can’t put down the metaphoric cup, you know?”
“I think I put it down too easily,” Intak admits with a laugh. “I get distracted really easily, but I’ll get shit done when it needs to.”
“Nonchalant.”
“Even non-STEM majors need to unwind,” Intak jokingly ribs.
“Oh, I get that. I’ve yet to miss a weekly Friday date night with a glass of red wine.”
“Wine, really? Not even shitty vodka mixed with cranberry juice?”
“Haven’t had a good one,” Jiung remarks.
“You haven’t been to one of the water polo club’s parties, then.”
He shakes his head. “Not a huge fan of big sweaty men in enclosed spaces.”
“So, what do you do for fun?”
“Cook. Drink wine at the beach. Read. Troll people on Reddit if I’m in a particularly perky mood.”
“Reddit?”
A wicked look crosses Jiung’s face. “Can you keep a secret?” He beckons Intak to lean in closer.
When a dog’s owner calls, they come. Similarly, when Jiung calls Intak over, he goes. He nods eagerly.
“You know that post about that one student who walked into their dorm room and witnessed their two other roommates having sex with two other people?”
Intak’s jaw drops. “The fearsome foursome?”
Jiung winks. “I wrote that.”
“You’re joking.”
“Of course, the post was a joke. I lived in a single room when I posted that.”
A full-bodied laugh seizes Intak’s body. “Dude! People were talking about that post for weeks! You must’ve gotten hella Reddit karma for that! Hell, I upvoted that post!”
“Well, thank you for your support, Intak,” Jiung says earnestly.
Intak finds that he likes the sound of his name in Jiung’s mouth a little too much. Maybe it’s the fumes from the mixture bubbling between the two of them finally getting to his monkey brain, or maybe it’s the crippling loneliness combined with the attractive specimen in front of him, but Intak finds himself drumming his fingers nervously on the lab bench.
“D’ya want to grab dinner at mine? I make a mean spaghetti.”
He expects Jiung to shut him down—the man probably has plans on a Saturday night, doesn’t he? The beach, wine, or the club, maybe. Why would Jiung want to go to a stranger’s house for a broke-ass university-student meal of noodles and sauce? Intak can’t even afford Italian seasoning to mix into the bolognese!
When Jiung says, “Sure, why not?”, Intak almost falls over. He doesn’t, because his mama didn’t raise a bitch, but he gets damn near close.
“Really?”
“It’s been a long time since someone’s cooked for me,” Jiung admits, eyes flicking up and down Intak’s figure once again. He feels hot. And he’s not even wearing pants. “Give me fifteen minutes to clean this up, and I’ll meet you outside.”
“For real?”
Jiung laughs, perhaps entertained by the pure disbelief in Intak’s face. “You better not poison me, Intak.”
Intak is in love. He’s in love, and the members on his Instagram Close Friends list are about to find out about the 5’10” bombshell with wicked humor and the prettiest smiley eyes to ever exist in the course of all history who has stolen his heart.
Jiung compliments the holiday lights Intak had strung up around the walls while he was procrastinating studying for his statistics final two weeks ago. He eyes the trash bin full of Chipotle containers, and instead of commenting about the fact that Intak hasn’t taken the trash out in a week, he tells the second-year about how much he loves Chipotle chips. He takes his shoes off. He offers to help Intak cook.
It’s a little bit romantic, maybe a little bit intimate, or maybe all just an illusion in Intak’s mind. But then Jiung takes a JBL speaker out of his bag and starts playing a Christmas jazz playlist off Spotify, and Intak might just be ready to propose.
“Dinner is served!” Intak announces, doing his best to deliver the pan to the placemat in the center of their dining table without any of the sauce spilling out. “Next time, I’ll make sure we have garlic bread on hand.”
“That was quick,” Jiung says, folding a napkin into his lap. He nods approvingly. “I like efficiency.”
“I live in an apartment full of impatient dudes who bang their fists on the table when they get hungry,” Intak confesses. “It’s nice to have courteous company, for once.” He takes the seat across Jiung’s at the four-seater table and begins his pre-spaghetti-dinner routine, working his sweater off over his head.
He hears Jiung make a choked-off noise and glances up, finding the older student’s face about as red as the tomato Intak had dropped on the floor in an attempt to “3-point-shoot” it into the saucepan. “You good?”
Jiung visibly swallows. “Um—what’re you doing?”
Intak suddenly becomes very aware of the fact that no, the average human being does not eat spaghetti shirtless and does not eat dinner with their nipples out.
“I don’t like the sauce splattering on my clothes,” Intak admits, even redder in the face than Jiung. “But—I’ll, um, just be more carefu—”
“No! It’s fine! It’s nice!” Jiung blurts out, wildly waving his hands back and forth like he’s waving at the spread before them. “I’m a guest in your house! You should be able to keep your customs!” He coughs. “I guess it’s a good idea!”
Before Intak can react and put his shirt back on, Jiung unbuttons his own shirt. And lets it hang open, revealing a chest built from a consistent chest-day routine in the gym. Intak hopes he isn’t drooling.
The scene can only be described as charged. Or hungry. In many senses of the word.
Thankfully, both of their stomachs grumble in the next second, saving the two undergraduates from having to navigate a conversation about being hungry enough for “dessert.”
“Thanks for the meal,” Jiung wheezes, eyes roaming everywhere but the helping of pasta in front of him.
“I hope it’s, um, pleasing to you—I mean, to your taste buds!” Intak squeaks, playing eye-tag with…well, with everything about Jiung.
Would it be too soon to make a joke about meatballs, meat, and balls?
“So, Intak, how was your break?” Taeyang breezes into the room, yeeting his duffel bag onto his bunk. “Oi, Intak.”
He prods at the heap of blankets on Intak’s bed, frowning when there’s no movement beneath them. “Where could he be?”
Taeyang opens Life360 on his phone, an app everyone in the apartment had added onto their phones so they could check up on each other’s locations after Shota and Jongseob had gotten lost in the forest by the library one too many times. “What the…”
Keeho barges into the room without knocking, wordlessly holding up his phone opened to the Life360 app on his phone. The two share a look of utmost concern and suspicion.
“Why’s he on the STEM side of campus?”