Work Text:
To: BAE JOONYOUNG [idk if you still do shifts at jaehyun-hyung’s jacob bae but you’re crazy cute —ljy98]
To: MOON KEVIN [i really liked your voice when you sang karaoke at the lab mixer last semester —noraebanger96]
To: SON YOUNGJAE [ey youngjae this isn’t for you but i need you to like give me the number of felix from channim’s orgo lab please im begging —sbins79]
To: LEE JAEHYUN [i like my phds hot young and cringy —godhelpme]
——
“What— is that.”
Eric looks up from the sequence he’s analyzing. “Jaehyun-ssi asked me to make it, in the spirit of the holiday.” Sunwoo is standing in the hallway of their tiny laboratory, staring at the Valentine's Box on the front desk. It’s an off-shade of pink—almost magenta, really—and covered in uneven hearts and pieces of glittery fuchsia confetti. For 15,000 won spent on the clearance bin at their university bookstore, it isn’t too bad. Eric almost feels proud. “You like it?”
“No.”
“Coming through. And don’t be rude, Sunwoo-ah.” Haknyeon hip-checks him aside, maneuvers a box of reagents into the room with deft, gloved hands. He’s their senior RA, and seems to possess endless amounts of patience. It's something that Eric can’t decide to be enamored by or terrified of. “You’re doing drills, Eric?”
“Yup, just about done with them.” He tilts his monitor in Haknyeon’s direction, and the elder gives it a once-over before heading into the storage room. He’ll have to email it to him later for checking. Sunwoo heads in as well—they’re both junior RAs, but Sunwoo’s been given the go ahead to start working on samples. It’s a logical decision: he’s always been better in the lab than Eric, quick on his feet and sure with his hands. And Eric? Well. He’s stuck doing protein jigsaws on Excel.
“You hear that, Sunwoo? Eric’s done with the sequencing exercise for this week, and it’s only Monday.” Haknyeon’s tone is playful, slightly muffled by the room divider. “I don’t even know if you’ve opened yours.”
“Give me a break, hyung. Changmin-hyung has me on inventory today. It’s not like I wanted to spend my day surrounded by carcinogens.”
“Yah, we aren’t close. Stick to Changmin-ssi for now.” Tucked away into his desk in the corner, Changmin doesn’t even look up from his paperwork. There are literal stacks of forms surrounding him; it makes Eric think of a squirrel with nesting syndrome. And maybe an obsession with bureaucracy.
Sunwoo grumbles something unintelligible as he leaves the office, and Haknyeon chuckles amidst the jostling of glass and plastic. It’s kind of cute. Changmin catches Eric’s eye, sends him a conspiratory eye-roll. “They’re obsessed with each other, those two. It would be a liability if we had the budget for HR.”
He kinda sees it, to be honest. Haknyeon is always hovering around Sunwoo, supervising his experiments and making sure his pipetting technique is just-so, stuff like that. It makes Eric a little jealous—he’d like to get his hands dirty for once, run a few samples or program the mass spectrometer. “Yeah. Yeah, I get that, hyung. Is calling you hyung okay?”
Changmin raises an eyebrow, then raises his voice. “Well, you are my favorite, after all.”
More muted grumbling from Sunwoo, giggling from Haknyeon. Eric chews on his bottom lip. “It does seem like they’ve got something going on.”
Evidently, it’s the wrong thing to say, because an evil grin creeps onto Changmin’s face. He’s been enabled, kicked into high gear. Eric considers resigning. “Jaehyun put you up to the whole Valentine’s box thing, right? So that people can put in anonymous confessions and whatnot?” He wrinkles his nose. “No way he hasn’t got some sort of ulterior motive for that.”
Changmin isn’t wrong: it had been Jaehyun’s idea. “Maybe it’ll end up like one of those American romcoms, where officemates confess anonymously then fall in love,” he’d said to Eric while locking up the lab for the weekend. “Biochemistry is bleak as it is. Let’s make the season of love a bit more exciting, you know?” And Eric is decently romantic as a person, maybe not entirely a hopeless one. He’s shed a tear to The Notebook and Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, binged all of Crash Landing On You when it came out. Even so, Jaehyun-ssi sounds like he’s full of crap. No offense meant, professionally.
Still, like a good junior RA, he’d obliged. Passed by the university bookstore on his way home. Burned himself with the glue gun while sticking hearts onto the box in his tiny dorm room.
“Yeah, he was pretty enthusiastic.”
“You know what I think?” Changmin’s grin is wicked. “You should write them confessions from each other. Like, get them to think that they both confessed to each other.”
Eric frowns. “That sounds like a disaster. What if they don’t actually like each other? Or figure out that someone else sent them?”
“They won’t! They’re practically looking for an excuse to jump each other.” He lowers his voice to a stage-whisper. “Just pick out a fairly obvious codename and write something generic but flirty.”
It still feels sort of wrong to Eric. Kind of like the beginnings of a mild stomachache. “I’ll consider it, maybe.” He thinks about Haknyeon’s soft grin, Sunwoo’s eyes and the slope of his nose.
They’d make a pretty attractive couple, no lie.
——
Eric is a believer in the scientific method, through both profession and experience. It’s a little bit comforting sometimes, to run things he isn’t sure about through the gauntlet of question, observation, hypothesis, testing, conclusion. And—like it or not—Changmin-hyung had raised a pretty interesting question yesterday.
So, he dedicates the afternoon to deliberate and scientific observation. Watches Haknyeon heat up Sunwoo’s crappy plastic lunchbox for him without being asked to, so that they can all eat together in the lab’s tiny canteen while watching old episodes of Running Man. Listens to Sunwoo wrestle his snark into something more gentle as he badgers Haknyeon for help with the sequence they’re trying to synthesize. Fascinating stuff, really. Eric doesn’t know how he’d missed it.
“Youngjae-yah,” Sunwoo barks from the wet lab. “Can you grab some of the spare buffer from the freezer?”
“Isn’t that closer to you than it is to me? And I’m busy right now.”
He’s working on an analysis job that came in that morning—a real, compensated one. And given that Eric is a lowly junior RA who hasn’t even breathed in the general vicinity of the mass spectrometer yet, it feels like a big deal. Feeds the beast of ego and competence inside of him, former gifted child and all that. He has Haknyeon to thank, really: “This one’s a real job, but it’s pretty straightforward. Nothing you can’t handle.” The elder had winked at him then, skin dimpling prettily under his mouth. “You’ve been good enough at doing these for a while now, Eric.”
“My hands are full! And Haknyeon-hyung is already next door asking for more agar!”
He lets out a theatrical groan-sigh, more for Sunwoo’s sake than his own, and makes his way over to the giant chiller they store reagents in. Each glass bottle is labeled in Haknyeon’s neat print, English and Korean names spelled out in even, blocky letters. The longer English words are especially uniform, as though he’d skimmed them twice over to catch any errors. Eric smiles despite himself, and grabs the biggest jug of ammonium bicarbonate he can find.
Sunwoo, surprisingly, really does have both hands full. When Eric gets to him, he’s somehow holding three or four microcentrifuge tubes in each hand, fingers pressed onto their caps to stop them from popping (Eric can’t blame him, the stoppers on those things are almost purely decorative at this point). “Wow.”
“I know,” Sunwoo grumbles. “I need to get them in buffer with minimal exposure to air, and I realized too late that I wouldn’t have enough to finish every sample. And you know how useless the lids are.” He gestures vaguely in the direction of the desk with his elbow, and Eric quickly fills a small beaker with some of the buffer. Sunwoo springs into motion with a measured quickness, filling each tube with buffer from a micropipette in seconds before placing them onto a rack. There’s an ease to his technique and steady hand that no one can seem to replicate.
“You gotta teach me how to do that, man,” he sighs. “I’m still stuck on computational duty.”
“Natural talent can’t be taught,” Sunwoo intones, sage-like. If not for the million-won-priced pipette between his fingers, Eric might have elbowed him in the side. “But really, you’re doing perfectly fine. You’re no slouch.”
“You tell Changmin-hyung that,” he simpers, and grins when Sunwoo’s brows knit together.
He’s back at his desk when he hears the front door creak open and shut, Haknyeon’s sneakers soft against the tile as he walks into the office. “Those sequences I had you do going okay?”
“Yup, straightforward just like you said.”
“Alright, good job then. Keep up the good work.” Haknyeon gives him a warm smile that feels important, somehow.
Then, in a moment of scientifically motivated inquiry, Eric lowers his voice, in case Sunwoo can hear them. “Sunwoo might need some help, hyung. He’s got his hands a bit full with those samples.”
Haknyeon raises his eyebrows. “Ah, really? Let me go check.”
From the little gap in the room’s lopsided plastic divider, Eric watches as Haknyeon walks over to the wet lab, taps Sunwoo on the shoulder and asks something quietly. There’s a lot of gesturing involved, some shuffling around the desk, and Sunwoo is fake-frowning way too hard and sort of awkwardly. Eric should take videos for blackmail material.
Haknyeon’s ears and neck are shot through with red, and he scratches at his shoulder absentmindedly. Then, he laughs at something Sunwoo says, high and bright, and they start cleaning up the workstation together. Huh.
Question, observation, hypothesis. Time for testing.
——
To: JU HAKNYEON [hey RA-ssi. be mine this valentines? U know where 2 find me —neoguri-vals]
To: KIM SUNWOO [you’re so cute when you grumble, even if you always forget to clean up your work station ~~~ don’t make me remind you again! —jeju]
To: JI CHANGMIN [you’re cool even when you’re mean to people (and also me). I think your smile is neat —therongggg]
——
Changmin locks eyes with him the moment he walks in on Wednesday morning, beckons him over with a frantic look in his eyes. There’s a barely restrained excitement in his movements, and a folded pink note on his desk amidst scattered forms and paper clips.
“Sick, you got one too, Changmin-hyung?” Eric tries to peek at it, and winces when Changmin all but swats his arm away. “Is that what’s got you all worked up?”
“No, and also, none of your business.” He shoves the note further into the sea of reports and tilts his head in the direction of the wet lab. “I mean them.”
He ducks out from the cubicle, cranes his neck until the doorway of the wet lab comes into view. There are several things wrong with what he sees: (1) Sunwoo and Haknyeon are standing much too close together. Like, violates lab safety protocol close. Haknyeon’s ass is practically on Sunwoo’s desk (so crass, Eric immediately thinks. Sorry, hyung). (2) Haknyeon is wearing a ratty Hollister jacket that Eric is positive he’s seen Sunwoo in before. That, and it doesn’t seem possible for chic, neatly-dressed Haknyeon to own something so ugly.
And (3) They’re being so weird. Absolutely self-conscious and awkward in a way Eric has never seen before, like baby animals with hay fever. Sunwoo has a dopey, lopsided smile plastered on, like he’s unused to having adult-sized teeth, and he keeps helping Haknyeon with objects that are definitely within arm’s reach. Ballpens and the box of tissues and rubbing alcohol. Haknyeon is no better: he’s giving their red litmus paper a run for its money. Eric wonders if he’ll turn blue if they dip him in base.
“What am I even looking at?”
“I have no clue. Science can’t explain this.” Then, Changmin narrows his eyes at Eric. “But maybe you can? Oh my god. Was this your doing?”
He raises in hands in surrender. Maybe self-defense? “Hey, you told me that they were just waiting—”
“Yes, but I didn’t tell you to break their firmware!” A pause. “Actually, this is way too funny to be a problem. This is why you’re my favorite. What did you even write? Did you make it, like…kinky?”
Eric yelps as he groans, and it turns into a sound stuck too far back in his throat. Changmin gives him a concerned, mildly embarrassed look. “I just wrote some lame confession stuff. How I thought they’d write it.”
“I don’t even want to know. Did you call Haknyeon baby girl or something?”
“Would Sunwoo even say that?” Hm. Well. “The point is, I didn’t write that—”
“Wait, look—” Changmin pinches him, points him back towards the wet lab. “Things are happening.”
Sunwoo and Haknyeon are talking now, at least somewhat normally. Though the compactness (tininess, their lab is just tiny) of their workspace usually makes it quite easy to hear people even through dividers and thin drywall, the veritable armada of refrigerators, pumps, and machinery cluttering the space tends to veil everything in a thin layer of white noise, muddling words and intonations. Eric can only make out bits and pieces of their conversation, would you like to… and was that… do you think… and date…date?
Both of them glance in the direction of the office, and Changmin ducks back out of sight. For a split second, Eric feels both their eyes on him, gazes warm and a little bit uncomfortable. Do they see him, through all the glassware and calculations and paperwork?
Then, Changmin is pulling him back out of sight by the tail of his shirt. “Date,” he hisses. “Sunwoo asked him out on a date!”
And of course, it doesn’t take a scientist to interpret the meaning of Haknyeon’s excited nod, or extrapolate on the easy smile it pulls from Sunwoo. Experiment concluded. Eric supposes it’s time to file a report.
The two go back to working quietly side by side. Haknyeon is still way too close to Sunwoo, but they seem much more relaxed. Just a normal closeness now, somewhat sweet and comfortable. Still warrants a PPE reminder, though, if it were up to him.
“That went a lot quicker than expected.”
“I guess we really are good at chemistry. Like even the romantic, sex kind.” Eric makes a face at that. “You think we can find Jaehyun a date next?”
“Please, even miracle workers have limits, hyung.” Eric wouldn’t be surprised, actually, if that was part of the reason he’d suggested the Valentines box in the first place. “I’ll go and, uh— do my actual work now.”
Changmin dismisses him with a small wave, and it’s only sort of a lie. The work never stops at the lab: there’s always a report to file or funds to request or reagents to organize. Except that Eric has nothing to do this morning other than wait for Haknyeon to finish ogling Sunwoo and check on the forms he’s already filled out and scanned for errors. Or update the inventory he’d just sorted yesterday with Sunwoo’s (somewhat minimal, but nevertheless appreciated) help. Fine, he just wants to stop talking about the post-grad romcom wet dream happening in the wet lab.
It’s just weird, to Eric. Partly because he’d acted as judge, jury, and executioner in its occurrence, but also because Haknyeon-hyung and Sunwoo are people he knows personally, who exist relative to himself as individuals instead of a paired unit. Haknyeon steals bites of his kimbap during lunch, and he pretends not to notice because they’ll both end up laughing about it anyway. Sunwoo is his longest running streak on TikTok, and randomly gifts him Robux instead of actually being nice, which is obviously quite useless but still sweet. Reducing them to halves of a whole for glorified workplace shipping irks him a little bit.
Jesus. Eric needs to be more employed. He opens a new spreadsheet and starts automating their inventory tracker. Which he’s already done before, of course. Version eight. Point three. Letter b.
“You’re being awfully chill and normal about this, Eric-ah,” Changmin deadpans, and mimics his heavy, hurried typing. “Take it easy on the university-issued keyboard.”
“Sorry, Changmin-hyung.” He continues, quieter. The poor keyboard does deserve better.
——
To: JU HAKNYEON [happy valentines! :)) —ljh97]
To: KIM SUNWOO [happy valentines kim sunwoo! —ljh97]
To: JI CHANGMIN [happy valentines cool guy dont drown in the paperwork yeah? —therongggg]
To: JI CHANGMIN [happy valentines changmin ji —ljh97]
To: SON YOUNGJAE [happy valentines eric! —ljh97]
——
It’s a little past five when Haknyeon raps softly on the plastic wall of Eric’s cubicle, golden light spilling through their one window and into the lab as they close down for the weekend.
“Eric, I’m heading out. Still working on something?” Haknyeon is dressed well, though Eric supposes that he always looks put together. Always clean and well-groomed and handsome. It’s even more notable today, though. His hair is styled up in soft waves over his forehead, and a well-fitted, knit cardigan is draped nicely over his broad, soft frame.
“Yeah, hyung. Working on those analyses that came in yesterday, plus one new one someone ordered this morning.” He stifles a yawn and keeps his eyes on the monitor.
Haknyeon hums, soft and slightly melodic. “Well, good job. I’m saying that to you as your RA. But as your friend, you can really finish that on Monday. It’s Saturday, after all. And Valentines on top of that, if you’ve got any plans—”
Right. “How about you, hyung? Doing anything fun?” Eric’s voice cracks on fun, very uncool, decidedly un-fun. So much for changing the topic in a natural and effortless manner.
“Well, me and Sunwoo’ll be playing Marvel Rivals at his place tonight.” He smiles gently, doesn’t even give Eric shit for the voice crack. Maybe Haknyeon is a smart, competent angel sent from heaven. “We’re always open to a third.”
Eric glances away from the monitor, then, and invests significant effort into finding the tiles beneath Haknyeon’s feet. Even his shoes and socks seem chosen with care, mustard and deep brown lending his figure an earthy undertone. Sunwoo of all people has started looking more put-together since their date a couple of days ago, sweats less rumpled and shirts more passably tucked in. To be loved is to be changed or whatever, and they’ve been kind of inseparable since then, if he’s being honest. Eric thinks he may be going crazy in a purely professional manner.
“I really wanna get these done though, hyung.” Whiny puppy voice. Feed the monster of competence and senior adoration.
“Just do one then. Maybe the one from this morning? Seems a lot easier than the others,” Haknyeon tries. “Then you can drop by after?”
Trio-queuing in Rivals and becoming the thirdest wheel in the history of the Korean republic battle for dominance in Eric’s heart and mind, two picturesque and ridiculous wolves inside of him. “I’ll give it some thought.”
“Okay. Okay yeah.” He squeezes Eric’s shoulder and heads towards the door. “Let us know, okay?”
Maybe he’ll write a no, sorry text now and schedule-send it for later. Would that count? Eric goes back to adding protein fragments.
An hour and a half later, and he’s slowly working through the last and longest of Friday’s orders. Also working through horrible neck pain and bleary eyes, but at least he’s been productive! Even with Haknyeon and Sunwoo joined at the hip like a crab, perhaps there’ll be some extra lab time he can get in to start working on real samples in addition to just analysis. That’ll give him a one-up over Sunwoo, make him the more promising junior RA. Not that he wants or needs one.
The thought of it makes Eric’s eyes throb, and he blinks hard at the screen. He doesn’t dislike Sunwoo. Or Haknyeon. What the hell, man.
The lab door swings open again, and speak of the devil. If Haknyeon is an angel sent from academic, cardigan-wearing heaven, Sunwoo is a grubby band t-shirt grunge-demon. His hair is messy, sticking out every which way from beneath the beanie he’s somehow managed to jam onto his head the wrong way. His arms are bare despite the chilly February weather, slender forearms and wrists.
They really do make an attractive couple. Eric settles for raising a slightly annoyed eyebrow at him.
“Forgot my jacket.” He swings past Eric’s desk and grabs his worn Hollister off the back of a chair.
“Okay.” Back to sequencing. Hundred daltons here, plus a twenty, adjust for cysteine bridges. He looks up from the monitor to check his table of protein masses, and Sunwoo is still there. Hoveringly awkwardly by the door, like he’s waiting for something. “Can I help you?”
“Still not done?” He coughs awkwardly.
“Nope.”
“Gonna take a while? Or…” The door shudders a little as he taps it with his heel for emphasis. Eric suppresses an eyeroll.
“Maybe. Probably. Yes.” A small sigh, from him or from Sunwoo, he isn’t sure. “Anything else?”
Sunwoo jams his hands into his pockets. He looks unfairly tall in the poor early evening light, silhouetted against the space beyond the open door. “Well, I was just thinking we could head out together. If you’re going to be done soon—”
“Don’t you have a date?” It comes out a little harsh, especially for him. Even directed at Sunwoo, who isn’t onionskinned in the slightest.
“Yeah. I just came back for my fucking jacket, man. And thought you might want to head out early. Jesus, Sohn Youngjae,” he bristles back. Eric winces internally, hides it behind the monitor. Everything is so fucked at the moment.
“I’m not done, okay?” He breathes quickly, in and out, in and out. “So just go do your thing with Haknyeon-hyung. I’ll lock up here.”
Sunwoo opens his mouth and closes it again. When he finally speaks, his voice is measured, sort of practiced. “Just don’t forget to do the order that came in this morning, alright? Hak-hyung said it was important.”
And it’s maybe the worst fucking thing he could have said, on top of the nickname drop and the flat, emotionless tone and the assumption that Eric wasn’t already going to, because of course he was. Monstrous, fanged thing of jealousy and neediness and comparison in the pit of his belly, snarling and hissing and wondering Sunwoo should just do it himself, if it’s so important and he’s so amazing and dear to other people but he’s got a date so he can leave early while I stay and work and be a good junior RA who performs and proves his worth, proves that he can work with real samples and run real analyses and matter in any sort of way to anyone at all.
“Yup,” he gets out between gritted teeth. “You can leave now so that I can focus on doing a good job, alright?”
Sunwoo rolls his eyes at that, and slams the door shut with a huff. Save for the hum of pumps and refrigerators, the lab is completely silent. Eric rubs at his temples and groans, short and quiet.
——
A litany of hushed cursing and shuffling pulls Eric from his stupor. He’s been staring at the screen for the past five minutes, waiting for the code of Saturday’s order to finally compile so that he can go home and sulk over dinner. Maybe sleep for 18 hours in a haze of self-deprecation. Or die. All three sound appropriate.
“Hello? Anyone there?” He prays that it isn’t Sunwoo, back for a second jacket or a third argument or whatever godforsaken reason he might have. What if it’s Haknyeon? He doesn’t have the patience or guts or energy to face him either.
There’s a final, resounding thump as a mess of limbs in a long overcoat finally clears the doorframe, clearbook of data and paperwork tucked under one arm. “Sorry, that was rough…got my tie stuck in the hinge of the door, and—” Jaehyun stops when he sees him sitting alone in the office, blinks twice. “Eric? What are you still doing here?”
“Jaehyun-ssi, hi.” He tries to perk up a little bit, inject some enthusiasm back into his voice. Not that he’s in any mood or state to play the part, at this point. “I was finishing some extra work Haknyeon left for me to do. Just thought I’d get it out of the way before the weekend.”
Jaehyun wrinkles his nose. “Isn’t it like, Valentines Day? Don’t you have plans or anything?” He lowers his voice a little, and Eric doesn’t have it in him to point out that they’re the only ones left in the lab. “You know, if Haknyeon and Changmin are working you to the bone, you can always tell me. Especially Changmin, he’s got a bit of a sadistic streak. I really ought to step up more as a boss—”
“No, no! It’s not anything like that. I wanted to do it.”
“Okay, I don’t doubt that. Seems like you.” He walks over to Eric’s desk and runs a hand along the stacks of textbooks and manuals, the baseball figurines in formation next to his mousepad and monitor. “I do take a bit of issue with you doing it this late, though. Why now? Shouldn’t you be resting, or chilling, or doing young people stuff?”
“You’re just three years older than me, Jaehyun-ssi.”
“Don’t deflect, tell me.” Ever the scientist, he doesn’t let Eric off the hook. He supposes it’s why Jaehyun runs his own laboratory at twenty seven, graduated the youngest Ph.D. holder in the university’s history at twenty six. An eye for detail and unanswered questions, and the mouth and ear to pursue them with.
“I guess it would have felt like…slacking?” The words are foreign and uncomfortable in his mouth. “I’m the only member of the lab who hasn’t gotten to work with actual samples yet, just computational stuff. I gotta catch up.”
Jaehyun frowns. “You’re doing just fine, Eric. You can start with samples next Monday, if you’d like. We had you on analysis because you were so good at it, not because we thought you couldn’t do anything else.”
“Really? Just like that?”
“I mean, pretty much,” Jaehyun confirms. Then, his voice softens a little bit. “Is that all, though? I don’t think you’ve ever been under the impression that asking for that wasn’t allowed.”
“Well, no. But I felt like—” Eric’s voice catches a little. What about this is so hard to admit? Jaehyun is watching him, face patient and soft, mouth set in a gentle line. As though he knows what Eric is trying to say, understands the importance in letting him admit it to himself. “Like I didn’t deserve to ask, yet. Until I managed to get more done, you know?”
“I think it’s important to remember, though, that biochemistry isn’t a 1:1 value science.” Jaehyun gives him a small smile. “Input rarely translates directly to output with what we do, you feel me?”
Eric blinks. “Is that supposed to be encouraging?”
“They don’t train you for this in grad school, okay.” Jaehyun straightens up and adjusts his coat, which only makes it even more rumpled. A half-laugh bubbles up in Eric’s throat, but he manages to will it down. “Sometimes, proteins and DNA and lipids don’t tend to cooperate as willingly as, say, ethanol or acetone. You can give an experiment full focus and attention, follow all the instructions to the letter, and it still might go wrong. That doesn’t make you any less of a good scientist.”
“Did you ever have to deal with that?”
“What do you think I spent half of my master’s degree doing?” He looks Eric dead in the eyes, earnest, like he’s teaching him how to understand the language of the universe, all its little parts and intricacies. “The point I’m trying to make is that you shouldn’t be basing your worth on your performance, Eric. It’s dumb, and kind of pointless.” Jaehyun pauses. “Not that you are. No offense.”
“None taken.” A small beep from the monitor: his code is done, and Jaehyun glances over as he does.
“I’m assuming your sequencing job wants you out of here just as much as I do?”
“I’ll just print out a copy for Haknyeon-hyung to go over next week.” He’ll get back to this on Monday, Eric decides, along with whatever else he needs to sort through. Proteins and muddled feelings and chemistry, all of it. “I’ll close up here, Jaehyun-ssi.”
Jaehyun snorts. “Do I look like I’ve got anything going on for Valentine's? Academia sort of kills those prospects, kid. I’ll be in the back.” He purses his lips then, swallows awkwardly. “Say, would Changmin happen to still be here by any chance?”
“Changmin-hyung? I think he clocked out a while ago. You want me to ring him?” He leans over and hits Print before powering off the desktop, their ancient Epson whirring to life in the corner with a labored groan.
“Just had to ask him about something.” Jaehyun doesn’t elaborate further and leaves him standing there in the office. The printer spits its report onto the floor, face up. Eric leans over slowly to pick it up, smoothing over the creases of their hastily loaded bond paper.
Sequence: GluArgIleCys(Br)ValAlaLeuAsnThrAsnGlu. It’s a weird one for sure, not at all typical like Haknyeon as suggested. Eric’s never seen a brominated cysteine, briefly wonders if he should ask Jaehyun for advice. And glutamine at both ends? He might have to redo this one.
One letter abbreviation: ERIC(Br)VALNTNE. He frowns. A migraine has begun at his temples, crawling its way around his forehead.
Order filed by: jeju-guri.
Oh. Jesus Christ.
Eric is out the door, report folded (nay, crumpled) into the pocket of his hoodie. He’s pretty sure his keys are still sitting on the desk in the office. Not that he particularly cares. He’ll go over this with Haknyeon-hyung, with Sunwoo, as soon as he can help it, even if he griefs their Rivals game in the process. Science—and mostly the hammering of his heart against his ribcage, so loud he feels it in his sinuses and ears—demands it of him.
Who is Eric to deny it such?
——
Sunwoo’s apartment is on the third floor of an older building in Jongo-gu, and a broken elevator forces him to sprint up the stairs two at a time. By the time Eric knocks on the door, he’s out of breath and a little dizzy, stomach threatening to scale the walls of his esophagus.
For an excruciating three minutes, nothing happens. He wonders if he’s gotten the address wrong, knocked on the door of some stranger on Valentine's Day; he’d had to dig through their lab groups’ chat logs to find Sunwoo’s address, buried deep in a chain message Jaehyun had initiated to share emergency contact information.
Should he give him a call? Or Haknyeon-hyung? What if they’re busy? Or in-game? Eric feels mildly rabid, perhaps insane. Then, footsteps from beyond the cheap, synthetic wood of the doorframe. The hinges are scratchy and not-quite snug as the door swings open, but it’s music to Eric’s ears.
Haknyeon just stands there for a bit, like he isn’t quite sure who he’s looking at. The emptiness of the moment gnaws at Eric, like his stomach is being wrung dry. Makes him want to bolt all the way back down the stairs and throw up at the bottom.
Instead, he just opens his mouth. “There is no way that sequence is biologically possible. Literally why. And how?”
A small smile tugs at the corners of Haknyeon’s lips. “Well, we had to get through to you somehow. Nothing a bit of messing around with ligase couldn’t solve.” Even in the shitty fluorescent lighting of the hallway, there’s a healthy flush on his cheeks, hair soft and tousled. He’s shed the cardigan for a simple shirt that hugs his shoulders.
Eric’s mouth feels way too dry. “Is uh. Is Sunwoo here?”
“Why wouldn’t I be in my own house?” Sunwoo ducks out from just behind Haknyeon, voice rough and a little bit playful. “Still mad at me, Youngjae?”
“Let’s leave that in the past, sound good? Forgiveness is good for the soul and all.” He feels that it’s the right thing to say, considering the situation. That, and Sunwoo is also very shirtless, a red mark blooming on his exposed collarbones. Sue him for being distracted and susceptible to psychological warfare.
“He told me you yelled at him, which he might have deserved,” Haknyeon teases. “You were pretty confused up until today.”
“Can he just come inside already?” Sunwoo pouts, and Haknyeon laughs and reaches for Eric’s hand, pulls him past the entrance and into the room. It smells like cleaning spray and Sunwoo’s minty aftershave, warm despite the February chill still lingering in the air as the door swings shut behind him. Embers of want and gratitude in the depths of his chest and stomach, filling the moment with a simple and quiet pleasure.
——
leejh97: Alright, just leave the files on my desk. Thanks Changmin
Reacted to this message: “👍”:jichangmin
--20260214, 21:44PM--
you aren’t smooth phdnim. Let’s get dinner tomorrow, call me. >:] :jichangmin