little is known about the apocalypse of 2017. a century later, archivists are now unveiling the relics they found from those who lived through that time.
★ seungcheol x reader.
★ word count: 2.1k
★ genre: alternate universe: apocalypse, alternate universe: soulmates (the only way for your scars to disappear is when your soulmate kisses them goodbye), angst, romance.
★ warnings: major character death. depictions of death/violence, injuries/scars. established relationship; suggestive scenes but no real smut. set in a fictional apocalyptic world. doubling down on the angst warning; i cannot say with any certainty that this is a happy ending.
★ footnotes: this is part of my follower milestone event. viv gave me an inch (a request for angsty seungcheol) and, in turn, i am giving her a mile (a whole thing instead of just a ficlet). mahal kita, @heartepub! this will be the last hozier brainrot i offer you— for now. + much thanks to @gyubakeries and @tusswrites for beta reading! love you both to the end of the world. ❤️🩹
↻ ◁ || ▷ ↺ like real people do by hozier. apocalypse by cigarettes after sex. i know the end by phoebe bridgers. fourth of july by sufjan stevens. interlude: i’m not angry anymore by paramore. atlantis by seafret. end of beginning by djo. nobody’s soldier by hozier.
When the fish started dying, you did not think: This is how the world will end.
Why would you? The decimation of marine mammals and seabirds didn’t make the news. The misguided scientific breakthrough that triggered everything was kept under wraps.
It isn’t until much later, until the damage is irreparable and the Rapture is imminent, that you will realize it.
The world as you know it is ending— but at least you have Seungcheol.
There’s some cruelty in the timing of it all. The two of you had just moved in with each other, coasting on the honeymoon phase of a long-term couple with a new thing to share. The paint on your apartment’s walls had yet to dry when the government declared a state of national emergency.
Dozens of other countries followed suit not long after, all blaming one thing or the other. Food crises. Social unrest. Cultural collapse.
“This is crazy,” Seungcheol grumbles.
The television is playing clips of a hurricane tearing through the Philippines. Extreme weather conditions, the reporters are saying. Due to the rise of CO₂ levels.
You and Seungcheol are sprawled out on the floor, watching it unfold. The furniture store meant to deliver your couch has delayed shipment until further notice.
Seungcheol has always been the sulky type, though the expression on his face nowadays has been less of his trademark pout and more of a serious frown. You can feel his growing agitation in the stiff way he holds you, in the set of his eyebrows.
“It’s crazy,” you agree quietly, resting your hand on his knee in a bid to calm him a bit. “But it’ll pass.”
Your touch seems to give some sort of reprieve. He rolls his shoulders. He unclenches his jaw.
“It’ll pass,” he echoes, reaching out to intertwine your fingers.
Neither of you knew just how wrong you could be.
April 8, 2017
Weird times. Cheol knows just how anxious I get when I’m cooped up, so he encouraged me to pick up journaling. I’m not sure how much this will help, but it’s worth a try.
It’s been a month since everything has essentially gone on ‘lockdown’. The news says that all of this started because researchers wanted to regulate harmful algae. Their genetically engineered virus ended up infecting all algae, and now the majority of phytoplankton are just... dead.
I don’t know what to write about. Terrible oxygen levels? Seafood costing a fortune? This ‘work from home’ system everyone is trying to figure out?
I guess I should just write about the good stuff. That way, when I look back on these entries, I can remember something good.
Today, Cheol tried to fix a leaking faucet himself instead of calling for a plumber. We flooded the kitchen floor, and ended up wet from head to toe.
I cooked pasta, called mom and dad on Skype, and watched the latest episode of Santa Clarita Diet.
Once everything opens up again, Cheol and I have to visit my parents. (And ‘get better screwdrivers’, he claims.)
When Seungcheol first kissed you, you did not think: This man is my soulmate.
It had been a clumsy, shy thing, traded way back when the two of you were high schoolers still stealing away from your eagle-eyed parents. Seungcheol liked to wax poetics about how it was perfect even though you know that first kiss was more a clash of teeth than anything.
You don’t discover the truth of everything until a couple of years into dating. Seungcheol had gotten into playing basketball, and, one evening, you absentmindedly pressed your lips to a scar he had at the bend of his elbow.
The mark smoothed out instantly.
Seungcheol had giggled at the development before spending the rest of the night kissing every inch of your skin that he could reach— injured or not. You still think it’s one of your best memories as a couple.
Kisses that healed scars. You hadn’t believed in the stories yourself until it had happened to you, until you realized how fortunate you were that your soulmate wasn’t halfway across the world or something. No, you had your soulmate, and he was more than willing to kiss away all your wounds.
You had counted yourself as lucky. You still think you are, even now, as Seungcheol strokes your hair and holds you to his chest in the pitch black darkness of your apartment.
His voice is quiet and small when he speaks up. “I’m sorry.”
“What for?” you mutter back.
“I’m sure this isn’t what you imagined,” he says. “For us moving in together and everything.”
An amused snort escapes you. Of course that would be your boyfriend’s concern. There’s the rotational power outages and the merciless prices of goods due to inflation, but Seungcheol is worried about your expectations not being met.
You shift in his hold. The days have been getting warmer and warmer, and the evenings are no exception. Seungcheol has taken to sleeping shirtless. You’re a couple of celsius away from doing the same.
“It’s not your fault that we decided to move in together for the end times,” you say into the skin of his bare chest.
He gives the small of your back a light thwack. “What have I said about the apocalypse jokes?” he chides lightly.
You roll your eyes. He shouldn’t see it in the darkness, but he knows you all too well. “And don’t roll your eyes at me!”
His reprimand draws a short laugh from you. Even that feels like a monumental effort, like it's a waste of good air.
Seungcheol doesn’t care. He doesn’t care about the two of you waking up in pools of your own sweat, doesn’t care that there are whole government newscasts on how to preserve oxygen in enclosed spaces.
He holds you like a lifeline and kisses you until you’re breathless.
“Cheol,” you whine against his mouth, the protest already at the tip of your tongue. The end is near; sex should be the last thing on your mind.
But then Seungcheol’s fingers toy with the hem of your shirt, and he sounds so, so sweet when he mumbles, “Yes, soulmate?”
That’s always gotten to you.
“Unfair,” you groan as you work on shucking off your own clothes. “You’re so unfair.”
In between giggles, he kisses every part of you. Again, and again, and again.
June 15, 2017
Cheol and I are on the run.
He keeps telling me not to call it that because it supposedly makes us sound like criminals. I think it’s just funny, and God knows I need something to find humor in.
As badly as I want to say “we have gone through worse before,” that would be a lie. We’re out of our apartment and trying to make our way to some place where there’s better air quality. In the meantime, we’re living out of his car. It’s so funny to me that I’ve started laughing until I’m crying.
Anyway, the good stuff: Today’s sunset painted the sky purple. We snagged some still-cold cans of Sprite in an abandoned 7-Eleven. Cheol spotted a family of ducks crossing the road, pointed it out, and said “us, soon!”
Us, soon. It feels dangerous to hope, but that’s all I seem to do nowadays. That and being on the run. (Cheol made me strike out that last part, but whatever.)
When Seungcheol finally admits to you that he is scared, you did not think: This means that things are much, much worse than I thought.
Maybe because there were bigger concerns, like the car’s blinking fuel warning light and the scratches littering Seungcheol’s arms. Like the fool that he was, he had gone against your well-meaning advice to not look for help.
He did not return unscathed.
Your lips are pursed in a thin line as you rip open a Band-Aid. It’s one of the few that the two of you have left, and Seungcheol seems to remember the fact. He reaches out to stop you.
“Hey, c’mon,” he urges, obviously trying to aim for levity. “You know there’s other ways we can fix me up, right?”
The frown that tugs at your lips shows that you’re still less-than-pleased at his little stunt.
“Maybe if you didn’t head out in the first place,” you grumble. “We wouldn’t need any of this.”
Seungcheol looks like he might push back, but seems to decide against it at the last minute. Instead, he wraps his fingers around your wrist and gives you a gentle tug.
“It won’t happen again.” His tone is edged with remorse, enough to almost convince you. Almost.
“No more playing hero?” you ask.
A corner of his lip twitches upward. “No more playing hero,” he concedes before tugging at you again.
You let him. You move closer into his space until you’re practically in his lap, until you’ve got a better view of the angry red cuts on his skin.
Tentatively, you press chaste kisses to the injuries. Seungcheol’s hands find purchase at your waist and he tilts his head back, letting you work your magic. He’s quiet as your lips trace over each gash and wound, as you take away all the hurt with the ghost of a kiss.
After a moment, he mumbles, “Is it bad that I want you right now?”
“Seungcheol.”
“Okay, okay.” A beat. “I want you all the time, actually.”
“Shut up!”
The sound of his laughter fills the car. It’s enough to have you forgetting his murmured confession of fear, the vulnerability that he had tried so quickly to cover up with affection. For a moment, there is nothing else in the world except this, except you, except him.
September 23, 2017
Is it weird to say that I’m starting to forget what it was like before all of this happened? Cheol is trying to assure me that it’s to be expected, that we’ll all be back to ‘normal’ soon, but I don’t even remember what normal is like anymore.
I can’t forget. I don’t want to forget. And so here is a small list of things I took for granted:
The first breeze that tells you winter is coming
The kindness of people who don’t know you
The smallest fish in the sea
Date nights with Cheol
Clean water
Breakfast
My parents
Cheol says there might be some biodomes ahead. Oxygen-regulated habitats. It sounds like something only the rich can afford. We don’t have a lot left between the two of us, and it’s getting harder to jump from building to building.
But there’s something waiting for us on the other side— right? There has to be.
May the best of my todays be the worst of my tomorrows.
When the gunshot rang out, you did not think: This is it.
Seungcheol never gave you any reason to think that way. He had held your hand as you raided rundown grocery stores. He had positioned himself in front of you when there were stampedes. The world might have been ending, but he was with you.
He was with you even when the strangers you ran into started getting more aggressive. He was with you even when fights would break out over necessities like water and medicine.
“People are dangerous when they're desperate,” he’d tell you softly— still his rational, kind self even when faced with the worst of mankind.
He was with you. He was kind. He was yours.
Even when the bullet lodged itself right between his ribs.
There is not much that you remember after that.
The people dispersed. The cause of the fight— a can of chicken noodle soup, once your comfort food— lay forgotten on the floor.
The love of your life, staring unblinking at the sky.
When you sink to the ground, you’re moving purely on instinct. Your quivering lips press over his chest, over the red blossoming and staining his shirt.
You kiss him. Again.
And again.
And again.
December 1, 2017
The kisses don’t work on bullet wounds.
▸ Archivist’s note: The following entries are undated and some portions had been redacted/deemed untranscribable. We are led to believe that the author struggled to cope in the aftermath of their soulmate’s death. For posterity, we have still reprinted their final entries.
You’re so unfair.
I still want you.
Things I took for granted: ███████, you, ███████, youyouyou.
What now?
My love, it’s only a matter of ███████—
▸ Archivist’s note: Nothing follows.
This concludes our transcribed logs. The full collection can be viewed at the National Museum of Remembrance.
It is our deepest regret that the author is unnamed and that they cannot be properly credited. However, we know of two things with certainty.
We know of a man named Seungcheol, and we know that he was loved.
jihoon was always too good at pretending to be a person, and you were always a little too good at knowing better.
🪴 pairing. helper robots!jihoon x reader.
🪴 word count. 11.5k.
🪴 genres. alternate universe: non-idol. science fiction, romance, friendship, angst, hurt/comfort.
🪴 includes. mentions of food, death; themes of grief, mortality, memory. set in 2060s seoul, jihoon & reader are life-like bots. heavily inspired by maybe happy ending.
🪴 notes. i wrote this with the intention of proving to myself that i could still write for svt (lol), and i ended up bawling my eyes out on three separate instances. if there is any work of mine that you might read, i do hope this is one of them. this is a love letter to maybe happy ending, which most recently made history as the first original south korean production to win the tony award for best musical!!! not proofread; all mistakes are my own.
▶︎ WORLD WITHIN MY ROOM.
The light comes on in pieces. First the ceiling strip, then the wall panel, and finally the amber filament lamp in the corner that Jihoon insists on keeping—warm, inefficient, obsolete. Like him.
He powers on, slow as a secondhand thought.
“Ppyopuli,” he says, because it is polite to greet your houseplant. He nods to the drooping fronds with the seriousness of a man bowing to a superior. “You made it through the night. Unlike my left hip actuator.”
He rotates the joint. It makes a sound like someone crumpling a foil gum wrapper. The noise echoes in the apartment. Metal, silence, memory.
The radio comes on automatically. A woman’s voice—soft, practiced, almost human—tells him that today will be clear. Dust levels are low. UV index moderate. Good day for outdoor activities.
“It’s a perfect day,” Jihoon agrees, pulling the curtain an inch wider. Seoul stretches outside his window like a paused video. Skyscrapers, skybridges, the blur of a bullet tram in the distance. The air looks clean enough to breathe. Not that he does.
He makes his way to the kitchen. One slow step. Two. The fourth toe on his right foot has a loose servo and drags like a sleepy child.
Coffee isn’t necessary, but the smell is nice. He boils water for no one. Sets a cup beside the plant. “For ambiance,” he explains to Ppyopuli. “They used to say it helps people feel less alone.”
The mail chute clicks. Jihoon straightens.
“And now, the moment you’ve been waiting for,” he intones with mock drama, crossing the room in careful strides. The envelope lands with a satisfying slap.
He holds up the April issue of Jazz Monthly, turning it to show Ppyopuli. “Duke Ellington. Looks like he still hasn’t forgiven the world for outliving him,” Jihoon says. It would be a joke, if Jihoon knew how to joke.
There’s another package. Small, boxy. His replacement elbow joint. “Shall we model it later? Make an event of it?” Jihoon tells Ppyopuli. “I’ll invite the ficus from next door.”
He places the parts carefully on the table, like heirlooms. “Any mail from Shownu?” he asks the voice assistant. Silence. Then: This function is not available to retired Helperbots.
Jihoon hums a measure of Coltrane’s Naima, tuning his inner disappointment like a radio dial. He spends the afternoon alphabetizing his vinyls, though he can identify any one by spine pattern alone. He talks to Ppyopuli about chord changes, the difference between sincerity and sentimentality in brass solos, the scent of rain on real grass.
When the sun lowers behind the next apartment block, he flips the switch on the filament lamp. The room turns honey-colored. “There. Mood lighting,” Jihoon announces.
For a second, Jihoon imagines Shownu—big hands, deep laugh—walking through the door. Jihoon would offer him the magazine. Ask about Jeju. Pretend not to notice the decade of dust on the threshold.
“He’ll come back,” Jihoon says, gently brushing a bit of lint from Ppyopuli’s pot. “We’re the kind of people others come back for.”
The lights dim on schedule. The system begins its shutdown hum.
Jihoon lowers himself to the floor mat beside the window, the same spot he always chooses. Perfect view of the street, the tram, the moon when it shows up. “Let’s enjoy tomorrow, too,” he murmurs to no one in particular. Then powers down.
Soft click. Black.
Another perfect day, folded and filed away.
Four perfect days later, Jihoon is in the middle of folding an imaginary blanket. The kind with corners that don’t exist and fibers that only live in memory. He’s halfway through the third fold (or maybe the fourth—robot math, surprisingly bad with soft things) when someone knocks.
Knocks.
The hallway outside is usually as dead as discontinued firmware. No one knocks here. Not unless it’s a delivery drone misfiring or the ficus next door finally tipping over in a tragic act of photosynthetic despair.
Another knock.
He answers it.
You’re standing there. Slouched a little, like your battery is chewing through its last 5%. Still immaculate in that newer-model, showroom kind of way. Glossy exterior. Fragile expression. The kind Jihoon’s model was never programmed to wear.
“My charger’s dead,” you say, plainly. Not embarrassed, not not-embarrassed. Just factual. “Do you have one I can borrow?”
Jihoon eyes you the way a CRT monitor might regard a smart mirror. “Helperbot-5, right?”
You nod.
He sighs. Loudly. For emphasis. “Figures. You overheat when someone looks at you wrong.”
“I don’t overheat,” you say, a little sharply. “My power regulation firmware is just optimistic.”
Jihoon disappears inside and returns with a charger in hand. He holds it out, but doesn’t let go just yet. “Helperbot-3s didn’t need replacements until the building itself started falling apart,” he says. As smug as a humanoid robot can be. “We were built to last. You guys were built to sync playlists.”
Your hand closes around the charger, not delicately. “Thanks,” you say. The door closes before you can mean it.
You fail loudly at pretending like Jihoon hadn’t struck a chord. Jihoon hears it, while he is alphabetizing again. This time it’s tea sachets. There’s a box he’s never opened—hibiscus. He’s not sure why he owns it. Maybe Shownu liked the color red. Maybe he liked things that sounded like flowers.
Another clatter. A curse that’s been downgraded for civilian use. Jihoon’s audio sensors ping the sound, tag it: frustration. Human-adjacent. Female voice signature. Subunit #5-A. You.
He listens longer than he should. Not out of curiosity.
Out of—
Well. Something.
His OS runs a diagnostic. No errors, no flagged emotional feedback loops. Just a new, unfamiliar weight behind the ribs he doesn’t technically have.
He taps the wall. Just once. It’s not meant to be a warning, but you take it as one. You fall silent in the midst of what Jihoon can only assume is an attempt to fix what’s broken in you. In that literal, robotic sense.
Jihoon sits there in the dim light, tea box in hand, trying to name the emotion that’s come to visit him.
The system doesn’t recognize it.
So he gives it one of his own. Static.
▶︎ CHARGER EXCHANGE BALLET.
Morning begins with the usual fanfare: the ceiling light flickers awake, a low buzz in the wall socket orchestra. Jihoon powers on without ceremony. No jazz today. Just the sound of his own servos settling like old bones into place.
Then, a knock.
Predictable. Timed to the second, in fact.
You stand there with the charger tucked politely between your palms like it’s sacred. You’re upright this time. Charged, obviously, and possibly smug about it. Your posture says, Look, I survived the night without frying my kernel processor.
Jihoon takes the charger from your hands and gives a perfunctory nod. “Seven-oh-five,” he says. “You’re three seconds early.”
You smile like it’s a joke. It isn’t. He files the timestamp away, just in case. “Thanks,” you say, again. Neatly.
And so the pattern begins.
Mornings: knock, hand-off, nod, silence. Evenings: knock, retrieval, short exchange, maybe a quip about overheating.
You never overstay. You never apologize. You never ask for more than what you came for. Which Jihoon finds efficient. Familiar. Like maintenance.
He does not make space for you in his routine. He just slides you in between the others.
Jazz Monthly on Thursdays. Ficus gossip every other Sunday. You—twice daily, on the dot.
It does not feel disruptive.
It feels like doing what he was made to do: provide assistance, ensure stability, optimize.
If Jihoon notices that he starts putting the charger near the door before you arrive, he doesn't say anything. If he reroutes his tea-sorting to accommodate the evening exchange, it’s just coincidence. There are efficiencies to be had. If he catches himself waiting—not with anticipation, but with idle, service-ready stillness—that’s just protocol.
He is, after all, a Helperbot.
It’s in the name.
He has no emotional flags to report. No diagnostic anomalies. No electric flicker behind the chest plate. Just a charger, passed from hand to hand. A routine, now cleanly installed, and the peculiar ease of slipping into someone else’s schedule as if it had always been his own.
Perfectly logical. Perfectly him.
But then, one day, seven-oh-five comes. Then goes.
No knock. No politely smug posture. No handoff.
Jihoon sits in the same position for forty-seven seconds longer than usual. Statistically negligible, but still.
He waits a minute more, just in case your internal clock is out of sync. It’s not. He knows. Helperbot-5s are optimized for punctuality. Eight percent more precise than his own model, which still insists on resetting to factory time every full moon.
At seven-oh-eight, he stands. At seven-ten, he knocks.
Your door opens part way. You look... bright. Not metaphorically. Literally. A soft electric glow pulses from behind you—cables snake across the floor in a chaotic kind of order. A mess that works. That lives.
Jihoon clears his throat. “You missed your pickup.”
You raise an eyebrow. “You came to check on me.”
“Don’t flatter yourself.”
You step aside, revealing a patchwork monstrosity of wires, clips, adapters, and a repurposed rice cooker. “I improvised,” you say.
You’ve mad scientist-ed your way into an at-home charger. The setup hums quietly, almost smugly. Jihoon stares at the Frankenstein of it all with a look of mild horror. “That’s not regulation,” he manages.
“Neither is collapsing from power loss alone in a rental unit while your neighbor alphabetizes tea.”
“Looks unstable.”
“So do you.”
Silence, then: you laugh. It’s not artificial. It’s a real laugh. Amused, tired, just a bit triumphant. Eight percent more expressive, after all. That’s what the specs say. Better emotional nuance. More adaptive neural flexibility. Capable of interpreting, expressing, and—when necessary—weaponizing feeling.
Jihoon crosses his arms like a defensive firewall. “Good,” he says evenly. “Saves me the trouble.”
You tilt your head. “You were worried.”
“I wasn’t.”
“You’re a bad liar.”
“I’m not a liar at all. I’m just not... upgraded.”
You consider this. Step closer. Close enough that Jihoon has to look past his own reflection in your eyes. “You don’t have to say it,” you murmur, teasing. Jihoon thinks it’s a tease. “I already know.”
Jihoon opens his mouth. No words deploy.
Just static, caught in his throat. You’re standing there, humming gently under your skin, eyes brighter than usual. He’s standing in a doorway he doesn’t remember choosing.
You smile. Not triumphantly this time. Just kindly. “It’s okay,” you say. “You’re still a good Helperbot. You still helped.”
You shut the door before he can respond, leaving him standing in the hall with a charger still in his hand.
A routine officially broken.
And no diagnostic error to show for it.
Only eight percent of something else.
▶︎ WHERE YOU BELONG.
Jihoon did not expect the knock.
It came at six fifty-seven in the evening. An offbeat time. Off enough to disapprove of. He opens the door half a second slower than usual. A calculated delay. Polite disinterest. There you are.
Not glowing this time. Just standing there, in the hum of hallway fluorescents, holding something behind your back. Jihoon reads that as a preamble. A lead-up. Trouble.
“I came to thank you,” you say. Too happily. Suspiciously happy.
Jihoon narrows his eyes. “For what.”
“For the charger. The schedule. The tolerance.”
“You already thanked me. On Day Six. With that terrible rice cracker.”
You step inside anyway.
The apartment isn’t exactly a mess, but it’s clearly occupied. Lived-in by something that wasn’t supposed to keep living this long. Jazz Monthly sits open on the floor, a cup of barely-warm water rests on the windowsill. Ppyopuli is perched by the window, its leaves tilted as though eavesdropping.
Your eyes track to the bottles. Neatly arranged in a corner. Counted, labeled. A small tower of carbonated dreams. You walk over to them like they might mean something.
“This is a lot of soda.”
“It was on sale.”
You crouch beside the stack. Look closer. And then you see it. The label on the envelope tucked behind the plastic fortress: Jeju Ferry Deposit – Shownu Reunion Fund.
You don’t say anything.
Jihoon tries to explain, even though he has no reason to explain to you. “It’s nothing. Just spare change. Recycling incentives.”
You hold up the envelope. “You’ve been saving.”
“It’s not uncommon. My model was designed for budgetary efficiency.”
You walk slowly back toward him, eyes soft now, as if your processors are adjusting to something dim and real. “You’re going to see him,” you accuse.
Jihoon nods. Stiff. Matter-of-fact. “Of course,” he chirpsts. “It’s only been twelve years. There are ferries every hour.”
You smile. Not the knowing kind. The kind reserved for fools, and those you don’t quite pity. “You think he’ll still want you,” you say.
“I think,” Jihoon says, precisely, like solving for X, “that I will knock. He will answer. He will say my name. I will explain the bus delays. The misrouted magazines. The company recall. He will say: ‘Go put the tea on, Jihoon. It’s you and me now.’”
A long pause.
“He said that often?”
“Never. But I imagine he would.”
You don’t laugh. Not this time. Gone is the patronizing look. In its place, something closer to commiseration.
“Then what?” you ask, even though you sound afraid of asking.
Jihoon looks out the window. Beyond the Yards. Past the fog. Toward something shaped like a future. “Then I’ll help him,” he says. “I’ll help again.”
You sit down beside Ppyopuli, who leans gently toward you. Then, with the spontaneity that can only come from a model of your kind, you announce: “I want to come.”
Jihoon blinks. The default move when emotions exceed available RAM. “Why.”
“I want to see the fireflies.”
Jihoon’s brain digs, and digs, and digs. Comes up short. Fireflies. Fire flies. Flies, made of fire? No. That makes no sense. He tries harder. Flies that are on fire?
He doesn’t notice that you’ve reached out until he feels it. Your fingers at his temple. An efficient exchange of information. The images flood Jihoon’s mind.
“Fireflies are a special type of insect that used to be almost everywhere, but can now only be found in one forest on Jeju Island,” you say softly as Jihoon’s vision swims with images of the glowing insects. “There’s a complex chemical reaction in their abdomen that is not found in other insects. Because of this chemical process, they can produce light by themselves without ever being plugged in.”
“Little forest robots,” Jihoon says absentmindedly, his voice cracking with awe.
You almost smile. Your lips curl upward then flatten, like you decided against it at the last minute. “They only live for two months,” you say, “but what a beautiful two months.”
Jihoon is not built to understand mortality like that. Age, either. He knows when he was manufactured. Knows when he became Shownu’s. Knows when Shownu left for his trip. These are all just days and times that bleed into each other.
You pull your hand away. The fireflies behind his eyes leave, too. “I can help you with the ferry times,” you say, going back to the topic at hand. “I’m good for those.”
He thinks about it for a moment. You. On a ferry. With your charger. With him. With hope.
“The ferry,” he says slowly, as though conjuring it from myth. “Could sink.”
“It won’t.”
“Or the car could break down.”
“You do maintenance every other Thursday. You have a ledger.”
You are looking at his ledger. You’ve been reading his notes again. His left eyelid twitches. “And what if we break down?” he prods.
Your head tilts. The kind of tilt that indicates calculation, not malfunction. “That seems less likely for you,” you confess. “You might just experience significant emotional interference.”
He bristles. “I don’t experience interference. I operate on logic.”
You smile. Barely. It’s the smile you use when he is being especially Helperbot-3. “Then you’ll let me come.”
“When did I say I’m going?”
“Just now. By listing all the ways you could fail.”
Jihoon stands. Too quickly. His knee clicks. He wonders if you hear it, record it, file it away under potential deterioration. You’re already walking toward his hallway. He follows, without realizing it. Still clutching a truss screw. “We’re not going,” he says, to the air.
You turn around. “Midnight,” you decide for the two of you. “Have everything ready.”
He opens his mouth to argue. Closes it.
Instead, he looks at the truss screw in his palm. The most ambiguous of them all. Part round, part flat, part none of the above.
Jeju. Fireflies. An island.
What a ridiculous, preventable detour.
He stumbles back into his apartment and starts folding shirts. It isn’t excitement, obviously. It’s something else. System calibration, maybe. New parameters. He can call it whatever he likes. But still, he packs.
Jihoon folds the last pair of socks into thirds, not halves. Halves would bulge too much in the suitcase. Thirds, he’s decided, are more respectful. You’ve returned, and now you’re watching him from the corner, your optical sensors dimmed out of courtesy. Ppyopuli sits on the edge of the bed like a stuffed animal summoned to court.
Jihoon exhales, zips. Then stands still. He isn’t frozen, just slightly unplugged from action. One foot on the ground. One still inside the past.
“We should say goodbye to the room,” he says.
He says it to Ppyopuli, and maybe for the room itself. Four walls, modest scuff marks, the subtle dent in the left side of the wardrobe where he once bumped into it carrying a humidifier in 2017. The humidifier didn’t work. The dent remained.
“You’ve been loyal,” he tells the room. Ppyopuli bobs in agreement. “Didn’t fall on me in an earthquake. Didn’t flood, even when it should’ve. Didn’t let the neighbor’s violin seep in through the walls. Well, not entirely.”
He sits down beside the suitcase. The zippers smile politely. Jihoon keeps going, “Remember the winter I overinsulated and the heater shorted out? You held the warmth anyway.”
The room doesn’t answer. But Jihoon feels its quiet understanding. A space that knew when to echo and when not to. You shift, softly. Enough to register empathy but not enough to interrupt.
“I think Shownu will like you,” Jihoon says to Ppyopuli. “He always liked things that didn’t talk back. You’ll fit right in.”
Ppyopuli leans a little closer, as if understanding loyalty as a language.
Jihoon nods to himself. That’s that. He picks up the suitcase by its handle. It wobbles slightly; he’s packed heavier on the left. Unbalanced, but honest. He takes Ppyopuli, tries to keep the plant to the left so it might tilt the scales.
Jihoon takes one last look. “Goodbye, room,” he murmurs, more sincere than sentimental. “Thanks for keeping me.”
Then he turns toward the door, toward you, toward Jeju.
He doesn’t look back again. He doesn’t need to.
▶︎ THE RAINY DAY WE MET.
The two of you are halfway to the port when you bring it up. The sky is overcast, a smudge of silver and blue, like someone rubbed their thumb across the afternoon. The road is mostly empty. The playlist is on shuffle, leaning jazz. Jihoon doesn’t admit it aloud, but he’s been skipping the vocals. Too risky. Too much feeling per square note.
“We need a story,” you say. Casual. Like you're not currently engaged in light federal evasion.
Jihoon blinks twice. Acknowledgement. Also buffering.
You tilt your head, that little pivot that usually precedes either a sharp observation or a wildly inappropriate metaphor. “Retired Helperbots aren’t allowed to leave their districts. But humans are. And humans fall in love.”
Jihoon groans, a full-body sound. “Please no.”
“We are a couple,” you insist. “On holiday. A romantic getaway to Jeju.”
“You’re not even—”
“Exactly. That's why it will work. Who would make that up?”
He stares ahead into the gentle asphalt horizon and tries to remember when you started winning arguments by sheer momentum. Probably somewhere between firmware 8.3 and the first time you reorganized his spice drawer alphabetically and by Scoville index.
“So,” you continue, clearly delighted, “where did we meet?”
“We didn’t.”
“Wrong. It was raining. I didn’t have an umbrella. You did.”
“This is sounding suspiciously like a musical.”
“No. It’s Paris. Or New York. Or possibly Seoul, but definitely with cobblestones.”
He snorts. “Cobblestones. Because pain is romantic.”
“Exactly! You held your umbrella out like a gentleman from the 1940s. But you said nothing. Because you were shy.”
“And you?”
“I wore a bright red raincoat. And a fur hat.”
“Basically, you were Santa Claus.”
You stifle a laugh before weaving the rest of your fantasy. “You tried to speak, but we both said ‘Where are y—’ and ‘How long have y—’ at the same time. It was very awkward.”
Jihoon indulges you. “Did we laugh through the awkwardness?”
“No. We stood in perfect, beautiful silence. So much silence it wrapped around us like a scarf.”
“Sounds clammy.”
You ignore him. “Then we danced. In the subway. To a jazz quartet.”
Jihoon glances at you. Not disbelief, exactly. More like reluctant amusement curling at the corners. “So we met. In the rain, in a city you refuse to name. I had an umbrella. You wore a war crime of an outfit. And we fell in love through the power of proximity and precipitation.”
You nod. “You see? You do improvise.”
“This all sounds too oddly specific to be fictional,” Jihoon remarks.
For the first time, you falter. Jihoon realizes it before you admit it. The fabled First Meeting is not a fable. It is somebody’s story.
“My owners,” you say in explanation, and that’s all you have to say for Jihoon to drop it. There are some things that need no explanation. The hesitance in this moment is one of them.
Outside, the road bends. The sea begins to appear in the distance, gray and gleaming. The kind of view that dares you to feel something. Jihoon doesn’t say anything. Just reaches over and turns up the volume.
Saxophone. Mist. The low hum of two fugitives pretending to be fools in love.
And then the dashboard pings.
A sharp, uncaring noise. The sort of alert that suggests, in polite corporate euphemism, that you are now one bad decision away from becoming roadside sculpture. Maybe art. Probably not the kind people stop to admire.
Jihoon glances sideways. You are perfectly still. Too still. Your usual composure edged with a dimming hue that would terrify him if he had the bandwidth for terror. Instead, he has concern. Which is worse, somehow, because he knows how to spell it.
“Battery low,” you say, evenly. Not a plea. Not yet.
Jihoon grunts. Pulls over at the next exit, which, because the universe is mean-spirited and unnervingly precise, leads to a part of town where the neon signs are all cursive and vaguely anatomical. There are hearts. So many hearts. None of them metaphorical. Some are malfunctioning. One has wings.
You look up at the building and then at Jihoon. “Love hotel.”
He blinks. Default response to emotional excess. “We can’t—”
“We can pretend,” you say. Calm. Deadpan. “I taught you sarcasm. This seems like a natural progression.”
He opens his mouth. Closes it. Wonders briefly if he’s developing ulcers. Is that even possible? Emotional ones, maybe. The kind that grow legs.
In the end, you go inside. Together.
The woman at the desk doesn’t even look up from her tablet. Jihoon shuffles awkwardly like a schoolboy entering the wrong classroom. You lean forward with the gleam of a perfect con artist and say, with eerie confidence, “We’re celebrating an anniversary.”
“Three years,” Jihoon blurts, betrayed by his own tongue, brain choosing treachery over silence. He wants to die or at least reboot.
The woman doesn’t say anything. She only nods, pops her gum, keys over a plastic fob. Doesn’t care. Why would she? Everyone lies in motels. That’s what the wallpaper is for.
The room you end up booking is pink. Aggressively pink. The wallpaper is textured and suspiciously damp. The lights are dim but everything still has a sort of lusty sheen to it. There’s a mirror on the ceiling, which Jihoon avoids with religious fervor. Even the carpet has ideas.
You plug into the bedside outlet with a sigh like someone returning from war. Then, surprisingly, you sit beside him on the edge of the bed. You tuck your knees under your chin, almost human, almost small.
“Want to watch something?”
Jihoon shrugs. “If we must.”
You pull up a file. It’s not one of your documentaries or philosophical lectures or grim, slow meditations on the heat death of the universe. It’s Terminator 2: Judgment Day.
Jihoon looks at you. You look at the screen. The irony looms, thick as smog. Twenty minutes in, Jihoon is actively offended.
“That’s not how processor reboots work,” he huffs. “The cooling logic is backwards. And his motor cortex override—”
“You’re missing the point,” you interrupt, voice soft, flickering. “It’s not a film. It’s a poem.”
“It’s nonsense.”
“Which is exactly what we need.”
The Terminator says, I know now why you cry, with devastating sincerity. You snort. Jihoon doesn’t. He’s too busy watching the screen, jaw tight, brow furrowed, like it might offer answers to questions he hasn’t learned how to ask.
When it ends, neither of you move for a long time. The motel buzzes faintly, a low electrical hum beneath the silence. The air smells like old perfume and newer mistakes. Eventually, you both lie back. Him, rigid and unnaturally straight. You, curling slightly in dim recharge mode, your glow settling to a slow pulse.
“You’re very strange,” Jihoon says, eyes fixed on the mirrored ceiling.
He watches you curve like a parentheses. “So are you,” you whisper, your words muffled into your pillow.
It’s a simple exchange. A statement of fact. But it feels larger, somehow. Like the shape of a beginning disguised as a joke. Somewhere above, a neon cupid flutters his wings and burns out a bulb. It is the first honest thing in the building.
Jihoon doesn’t realize his hand is next to yours. Doesn’t move it. Doesn’t name it. Just lets it be.
He thinks: this is what it’s like.
Not to be alone. He glances at Ppyopuli, who is sitting atop his suitcase, and he mentally apologizes. Ppyopuli is good company. A good plant. But Ppyopuli does not snore, or make jokes, or brush against Jihoon in a way that has him feel almost-but-not-quite alive.
Maybe, in some inconvenient corner of his circuitry, Jihoon understands. The moment he let you plug in was not the beginning of the end. It was the end of the beginning. Or something equally ridiculous. He doesn’t have the capacity to think in metaphors.
Whatever it is, he doesn’t mind. He lies next to you and plays in his mind’s eye images of Paris, or New York, or cobblestoned Seoul. Rain-slicked streets, red raincoats, and a borrowed love story.
▶︎ WHAT I LEARNED FROM PEOPLE.
The ferry ride is unremarkable, which feels like a minor miracle. No one questions your scarf, your oversized sunglasses, or your strategic silence. Jihoon spends most of it holding on to Ppyopuli, occasionally glancing at you as if trying to solve for an error message that hasn’t been coded yet.
You hum a little. Too loudly. Too often. Like a motor running just beneath its tolerance threshold. Jihoon notices, of course. He notices everything. But he says nothing.
The car rolls off the ferry and onto Jeju’s sleepy roads. The light here is different. Not softer, exactly. Slooower. It drips off the trees, crawls across the sky. Jihoon drives like someone trying not to wake a dream.
“You okay?” he finally asks, when your fingers start twitching in your lap like you’re typing something no one can read.
“Fine,” you say. Too fast.
He doesn’t push. You probably wish he would, but that is not how he was built, not how he was raised.
Shownu’s house appears the way ghosts do. It’s a modest thing at the end of a gravel road, tucked between orange trees and fog. The paint is peeling. The mailbox leans. Jihoon pulls in slowly, like the car itself isn’t sure it should.
He opens the car door. One foot out. But then, you say, the word falling out of you as if it were punched, “Don’t.”
He pauses.
You’re still in the passenger seat. Buckled in. Glowing faintly. “Jihoon,” you say again, and he is surprised by the fact that your voice quivers. He didn’t know that was possible for your model. “Please don’t go in there.”
He turns to you, frowning. “You brought me here.”
“I know, I know. But I—” You hesitate. The air inside the car thickens. “I don’t want you to think he’ll be the same. He won’t be.”
“You don’t know that.”
“I do,” you say, voice barely above a whisper, “because I’ve watched it happen.”
He doesn’t ask. He stays there, one foot out the car door, as you give anyway. “There was a couple,” you begin, and your voice changes. Like it’s coming from further away. From a backup drive you never meant to access. “Newlyweds. Architects. She liked old movies, and he liked old buildings. I thought I would live with them forever.”
“I watched them dance. In the kitchen. In the rain. I thought it meant something. Maybe it did for a while. But humans change slowly. Like corrosion. At first it looks the same, and then one day, he says her name like he doesn’t believe in it anymore. And she doesn’t notice, or maybe she does. She smiles anyway.”
You turn your head. Look out the window, as if you are looking for the owners you can’t even name without breaking down. “They were still standing next to each other,” you say, “but they were alone.”
The memory flickers across your eyes. Jihoon watches it—reflected, refracted—half-light and shadow on glass. A couple. Young and in love. Fools.
“I stayed through the whole thing,” you say. “I stayed until they sold the house. Until they boxed up everything they weren’t brave enough to fight for. And then they shut me off.”
The car is very quiet. Even the birds seem to pause.
“I know what heartbreak looks like,” you insist, turning to glance back at Jihoon now. You look… sad. “It doesn’t shout. It doesn’t beg. It just disappears. So if he’s not what you remember—”
Jihoon places his other foot on the ground. Stands. “Then I’ll meet him where he is,” he says decisively. “Not where he was.”
He doesn’t say it cruelly. Doesn’t say it like he doesn’t believe you. Just says it because it’s his turn.
You look at him. At this man with lint on his shirt and a barely-healed crack in his voice.
He takes a breath and starts walking. He doesn’t have to check behind him to know that you’re following, ready to steady him when—if—it all comes crashing down.
You don’t reach the front door so much as drift toward it, two figures suspended in time. The house is small, whitewashed, with a slanted roof. Everything smells like salt and citrus. A low wall curls protectively around the garden, where a windchime ticks out notes in uneven time.
Jihoon feels you beside him. Too still again. Watching him the way one watches a candle guttering out. Not for the light, but the inevitability. He raises a hand to knock. The door opens after Jihoon has knocked four times.
The man on the threshold is younger than Jihoon expected. Early thirties, maybe. Wiry frame, short black hair, suspicion curled behind his eyes like a reflex. He doesn’t smile. Doesn’t move aside.
“Jihoon,” the man says, and it is not a greeting.
Things click into place a beat too late. This is an older version of a person Jihoon is supposed to know. Once a boy. Once ruddy-cheeked and missing two front teeth. “Changkyun,” says Jihoon.
“Yeah,” Shownu’s son says. “And you haven’t changed.”
Jihoon takes this in. Quietly. He had expected a reunion. Not resistance. Not this acid stillness between them. “I came to see Shownu,” Jihoon says, the words firm in their anouncement.
“You’re late,” Changkyun says flatly. “He died. Three years ago.”
You move closer to Jihoon, almost protectively, but he doesn’t react. Or maybe he can’t. The word doesn’t compute.
Died. Di-ed. Diiied. Died died died. DIED. died.
Pass away, pass on, lose one’s life, depart this life, expire, breathe one’s last, be no more, perish, be lost, go the way of all flesh, go to glory, give up the ghost, kick the bucket, bite the dust, croak, flatline, buy it, cash in one’s chips, go belly up, shuffle off this mortal coil—
Become extinct. Become less loud or strong. Stop functioning, run out of electrical charge.
Died. Died. Died. D—ead. Dieeed.
Verb. Die. Past tense. Past participle. Died. Of a person, animal, or plant. To stop living.
Died.
“I wasn’t informed,” Jihoon says, and it sounds less like sorrow and more like a misfired protocol.
Changkyun laughs. It is not kind. It is not unkind. It is exhausted. Like someone scraping the last of a dish they never wanted to make. “No, you weren’t,” he says. “Because I didn’t tell you.”
He leans against the doorframe now. The weight of history pressing forward.
“You were never supposed to be his son,” Changkyun says. “But somehow, he loved you more than he loved me. Took you to baseball games. Bought you piano lessons. Called you ‘bud.’ I was eight. I watched from the other side of the screen door. Do you know what that feels like?”
Jihoon does not. Cannot. He computes it, but it doesn’t resolve into emotion. He sorts through years of memories in three seconds. Jihoon was not the ‘son’. He was the programmed robot that could be everything Shownu wanted to be.
Changkyun has to know that. Changkyun needs to know that.
“I believed I was helping,” Jihoon says.
“Yeah. You always did.”
There is something so painfully human in Changkyun’s face then. Not rage. Not even jealousy. Just bruised memory. Mismatched love. The ache of being out-loved by a machine.
“When he got sick, I moved him here,” Changkyun says. “I made sure the mail didn’t reach you. He kept asking. But I wanted—I wanted the last years to be with me. Just me. Even if he never looked at me the same. Sue me.”
He steps back inside briefly. He doesn’t invite you and Jihoon in. Neither of you move. Not away or towards. When Changkyun returns nine minutes later, he is holding a thin, square package wrapped in plastic.
“He wanted you to have this. Said you’d know why.”
Jihoon takes it. His fingers scan the object. Billie Holiday. Lady in Satin. The vinyl glints in the light.
Changkyun breathes out. Hollow. The fight inside him scattered. “That’s it,” he says, and there is relief. Closure. “You got what you wanted.”
No, Jihoon nearly says. This is not what I wanted at all.
The door clicks shut on him before he can force the words out.
Jihoon stands there, Billie held like scripture. You step closer, gently, as if sound might crack him.
He doesn’t say anything. Doesn’t move. He is, for once, truly still. Inside him, protocols rearrange. Mourn. Try to reroute.
This is not a malfunction. This is something else.
This is grief, he thinks. Possibly.
Jihoon says nothing for a while.
He just stands there on the doorstep, LP pressed flat against his chest like it might slip away. The Billie Holiday sleeve has a water stain across her mouth. It makes her look like she’s still singing. Or drowning. The vinyl inside shifts when he tightens his grip, and he hears the faint whisper of it sliding against cardboard. A ghost of a voice. A ghost of a gesture.
You wait beside him in the gravel path, silent. Not intervening. That would be cruel. And you, famously, are not cruel—just devastatingly accurate.
“You were right,” Jihoon says at last. Voice flat. Nothing to sand it down. No inflection. Like a dial tone.
But you glance at the record. Tilt your head, just slightly. A tiny glitch of grace. “No, Jihoon. I was wrong.”
He doesn’t look at you. The horizon is easier. “He didn’t forget you,” you go on, delicate and graceful and so devastatingly kind. “He just wasn’t allowed to remember out loud. That gift? That was a whisper. He whispered your name.”
Jihoon swallows. Some ticks never deprecate. The action is unnecessary, yet he performs it anyway, like muscle memory from a body he never had. “Come on,” you say, gently. “Let’s go see the fireflies.”
He nods wordlessly. He did his Thing. You should, too.
You walk in silence. Past the cracked tiles of the cul-de-sac. Through the loose stone and root-stitched path. Into the forest, where the trees press in like old gossip and the humidity climbs like a rumor. Each step is its own decision, a soft rebellion against grief’s gravity.
The jar in your hand swings lightly. Jihoon watches it and tries not to think. Fails. He is very, very good at recursive thought. It loops in his head like a bad pop song or a corrupted code.
He says, suddenly, “I never learned how to grieve.”
You nod. Not surprised. “Most people haven’t.”
“But I’m not people.”
“No,” you say. “You’re not. But you tried. You’re trying. That’s the part humans get wrong.”
Jihoon stares at the jar. At the soft sway of your arm beside him. He wants to ask what part he got wrong, what he missed in the script, but then the lightning bugs appear.
Tiny green flares in the dark. Drifting like lazy stardust. Some slow. Some quick. All of them impossibly small. They blink like they’re thinking, like they might ask questions if they had mouths. The forest breathes with them, pulsing gently.
You and Jihoon speak at the same time.
“Oh,” you both whisper. He says it with awe. You sound like you are about to cry.
Both of you are quiet, so quiet, as if speaking too loud might scare away these insects.
You open your jar with shaking fingers. You make no sudden movements, no attempt to snatch any of them up. You just leave it open, as if seeing if any of them will be attracted to the little terrarium you’re offering.
The fireflies flicker by. “Hi, tiny friend,” you call out, almost sing-song, “can you say hello?”
The insects blink. Jihoon does not. He watches your face instead. The soft lift of your mouth. The reverent hush of your voice, speaking to something that can’t speak back. “Do you fly just for fun,” you continue softly, “or to get somewhere by the dawn?”
There must be enough of a coax in your voice to entice, because a single firefly drifts into your jar.
Jihoon holds his breath. He’s ready for it to hate its glass cage, to come and go. Instead, it settles. It perches in the jar. It stays.
“Do you have nowhere to be, little friend?” Jihoon murmurs to it.
You’re holding the jar between your palms like it’s the entire world. “Do you care what you mean to me?” you hum, voice crackling around the question.
You are talking to the unafraid firefly. You are talking to your long-gone owners. You are talking to Jihoon, who is surrounded by little forest robots but still looking at you.
“Never fly away, little robot,” he tells your firefly, because he knows that’s what you want. Because that’s what will make you happy.
It works. A little. You crack a watery smile. The fireflies around you take their cue. They begin to retreat, begin to disperse. Except for the one in your jar. That one stays.
“They’re just going home to charge,” Jihoon tells you soothingly, but it sounds like he’s talking about himself. Like the metaphor snuck in through the back door and now refuses to leave.
You’re quiet until all the lights are gone. Until it’s just you, and the darkness, and the loneliness that is now unfamiliar.
“Then maybe we should go home, too,” you say once the last firefly has gone, once all that’s left is the friend in the jar.
Jihoon nods. Looks at you. Not the place beside you, but you. The jar glows between your hands like a secret.
There is something different now. Hard to quantify. Asymmetrical in the way change always is. He cannot name it. Cannot trace the moment it clicked into gear. Only that something shifted, and that it does not want to shift back.
He exhales, just because. A simulation of relief. It fels close enough.
You begin walking back, and he falls into step beside you. Your shoulder bumps his, lightly. He does not move away. He doesn’t pretend it didn’t happen. That, too, feels like something.
“I’m sorry about Shownu,” you say, voice as soft as a thread being pulled through a needle.
Jihoon grips the record tighter. The sleeve crinkles under his hand. “I’ll be okay,” he says. Then, after a beat, quieter: “I’ve still got—”
He stops. The word catches. Not because it’s wrong, but because it’s true.
You tilt your head.
“Ppyopuli,” he finishes lamely. “I’ve still got Ppyopuli.”
It’s not what he means to say. You know that. You’re smart that way.
In the distance, a firefly lifts and blinks once, twice, and disappears into the trees. The forest takes it back. Your jar remains.
You walk slower now, but not because of tiredness. Because there is nowhere to rush toward anymore. Because going home, this time, feels like choosing rather than retreating.
Jihoon glances sideways. Your glow is low, humming, soft as breath. Like a firefly.
It keeps the grief at bay. It replaces the bad feeling with something else, with something that Jihoon’s vocabulary can’t reach for just yet.
▶︎ WHEN YOU’RE IN LOVE.
The light comes on in pieces. First the ceiling strip, then the wall panel, and finally the amber filament lamp in the corner that Jihoon insists on keeping—warm, inefficient, obsolete. Like him.
Routine is meant to be grounding, but lately it feels like pacing in a square room. “Ppyopuli,” he says, nodding at the houseplant with a reverence that borders on the theological. “You’re looking hydrated, unlike my social life.”
The fronds droop. He chooses to take this personally.
Jihoon rotates his left hip actuator. The sound is still somewhere between a gum wrapper and a ghost sighing. It echoes differently now. More space in it. More absence.
The radio turns on. The woman’s voice—the one designed to sound like a former lover you never quite got over—says the UV index is safe again. That it's a perfect day.
“Perfect for what, exactly?” Jihoon mutters, pulling the curtain wider. Seoul looks unchanged. Which is, in itself, a kind of threat. Bullet trams still thread between glass towers.
He makes coffee. Still not for himself. Still beside Ppyopuli. The ritual is unchanged, but the motivation, fuzzier now. A photograph exposed to too much sun.
The mail chute clicks. “The moment you’ve all been waiting for,” Jihoon intones with a practiced flourish. The mail is junk. Flyers. Discount codes. Nothing from Jazz Monthly. Nothing from Jeju. He doesn’t ask the voice assistant about Shownu anymore.
He alphabetizes his records again. Notices that the Billie Holiday LP has been slotted out of order. He knows it was your doing. He doesn’t fix it.
“Ppyopuli,” he says later, cleaning the dust off a speaker grill with a toothbrush, “I think something is wrong with me.”
The plant does not disagree.
“My system has been searching. Passive scan. Low frequency,” Jihoon rants. “Like when you hum a song you forgot the lyrics to. I think I’m trying to locate someone.”
It is not Shownu. He knows Shownu is d-word.
Jihoon doesn’t say your name. He doesn't have to.
Ppyopuli remains aggressively unhelpful.
That night, Jihoon eats precisely one spoonful of synthetic tteokbokki before pushing the bowl away. His appetite, never really about hunger, seems to have found a better way to ache.
He stands in the middle of the room. Lets the light hit him. Amber and lonely.
Then, without fanfare, he turns toward the door.
Enough is enough.
He doesn’t rehearse what he’ll say. You’d see through it anyway. He just knows he needs to see you. Like checking if a lightbulb still works by touching it, not flicking the switch.
But when he opens the door, you’re already there. You both start. Not expecting that the other would be searching as well.
You don’t say anything. Neither does he. Jihoon—for all his wires and wear and water-damaged memory—knows exactly what to do.
In one of those moments where the world tilts quiet and everything is more possible than it was a breath ago, you both lean in. You kiss right at his doorway.
You kiss him like you were built for it. Which, technically, you were. Not that it makes it any less strange.
Jihoon registers every nanosecond of contact: the tilt, the breath, the impossible, exquisite pressure of your mouth on his. There is data. Input. Endless parsing. It is not the act itself that overwhelms. It is the meaning nested inside it. The truth tucked into the microsecond pauses. The confessions smuggled in between the static.
He kisses you back tentatively. Less fluent. Less native. But attentive, like a translator decoding a new dialect by feel. He tastes the static first, the warmth.
You laugh into his mouth—low, amused, indulgent. You’re good at this. Distressingly good. Your hands know exactly where to go, what to press, how to skim his spine like a familiar page.
“You’re—very—fast,” Jihoon mutters between kisses, dazed, as you push him back into his apartment.
“No,” you say against his lips, “‘m just a newer model.”
You kiss him again. And again. And again. The room sways. Not physically. Metaphysically. A recalibration of coordinates.
Jihoon feels his back hit the doorframe and doesn’t care. He’s smiling. Actual smile. Unsubtle. Unmanaged. It’s disconcerting.
Your nose brushes his. Your hands cage his jaw. You say, soft and certain: “I want you.”
He inhales. Fails to exhale. “I want you, too,” he whimpers.
It isn’t love. He doesn’t have the blueprint for that. Neither do you. But this wanting—this mutual, reciprocal disorientation—it hums like something sacred.
You kiss him again. Slower now. Curious. As if you were mapping him anew. Your lips move across his face, and his arms snake around your waist.
“If I had a heart,” you murmur against his neck, “you’d be in it.”
Jihoon’s fingers twitch where they’re planted on your hips. His voice cracks in the middle. “I concur,” he mumbles.
Your palms flatten on his chest. You start to slide them down. He lets you. Doesn’t stop you. Not until you do it yourself.
“Wait,” you say, as if you’re just remembering something.
You step back half an inch, just enough space to kiss the brick before you throw it at him. “My battery’s failing,” you say.
The room drops a degree.
Jihoon’s mouth opens. Then closes. Then opens again. His hands hover in the air, unsure. He asks, after a pause: “Terminal?”
You shrug. Casual. Too casual. Too cool, cool, cool.
“Uncertain. Our models aren’t built to last the same way yours are,” you say matter-of-factly. “Something about corrupted cell matrices. Could be months. Could be days.”
“You should’ve told me.”
“I just did.”
Jihoon stares. At your face. Your mouth. Your eyes, that don’t flinch. Then: “I don’t care.”
“Jihoon.” You sound disapproving.
“I don’t care,” he repeats. “If I get a day, I’ll take it. If I get an hour, I’ll take that, too.”
You stare back, silent as the inside of a bell. When you step forward again, you let the rest fall away.
The next kiss tastes like something. Jihoon didn’t know that was possible. That a kiss could feel like grief, and honesty, and desperation all at once.
You sink together, slowly, like dusk into night. Before powering off, this is what Jihoon thinks:
Whatever this is—whatever it becomes—let it burn through the battery. Let it flicker out only after it’s meant something.
He holds you tight.
▶︎ THEN I CAN LET YOU GO.
You agree to end it. Every morning, like clockwork. One of you says it first. Sometimes you, sometimes Jihoon.
“We should stop.”
And then one of you adds: “But first.”
But first, Jihoon takes you to the hanok village because he’s read that human couples like to rent hanbok and pose for photos. You refuse to change. He wears the pink one anyway. He insists it’s for historical accuracy. You remind him he was built in 2037.
But first, you eat street food together—if eating is the word for holding tteokbokki between your lips like a cigarette and pretending it doesn’t short your vocal module. You call it method acting. Jihoon calls it corrosion.
But first, you argue. Or try to. A full simulation of a romantic disagreement. The topic is laundry, which an article from 2025 says is the number one petty cause of break ups.
“You never fold,” you accuse, gesturing to the perfectly ordered basket.
“That’s because I autoclave.”
“That’s not a thing!”
“It is now!”
And then your hand touches his, and his touches yours, and the whole scene melts down into a tangle of arms and mouth and laughter. A synthetic tangle. A beautiful failure.
The fight ends with your face tucked under his chin. He tries not to overheat.
That night, you lie beside him on the floor mat beneath the filament lamp. Billie Holiday plays from his turntable. She sounds like she knows. Everything. Even this.
“Jihoon,” you whisper against his collarbone.
“Mmh?”
“We should stop.”
He turns his head to look at you. “I’m ready if you are,” he says.
A pause. Considering, contemplating. “Maybe one more day,” you answer. You, who once told Jihoon, Everything must end eventually. Living with people has taught this to me.
He plants a kiss to your forehead. He does not understand why, but it makes you feel good. Makes you melt a little, relax, trust.
The next morning, he powers on slower than usual. His diagnostics scan for error, but everything is nominal, except the place where you aren’t yet. He makes coffee for the plant. Straightens the record stack. Updates his firmware. None of it sticks.
Then the knock comes. You.
“Breakfast,” you say. “It’s waffle day.”
He doesn’t question it. He’s learned not to.
At the diner, you both order what you can’t eat. You ask if he thinks anyone has ever tried to smuggle love through routine. Jihoon says no, but he understands the urge.
After, you walk home past a mural of a heart-shaped planet and a tagline: Live like you mean it.
Jihoon pauses. This time, it’s his turn for the charade. “We should stop,” he offers.
Without missing a beat, you say, “But first…” The two of you chase each other down the street. Your laughter is not mechanical. It is real. It is lived.
Later that night, you fall asleep recharging beside him. Your head on his shoulder. Billie sings again. Her voice is a slow ache. Jihoon watches your chest rise and fall with the subtle click of a slowing fan. He doesn’t shut down. He just watches.
Maybe when the glaciers go. When the moon forgets to rise. When the firmware fails for good. Then he can let you go.
But not yet, not tonight. Not tomorrow. Or the day after that, or the day after that, or the day after—
There is no clean way to leave someone who has learned your update schedule.
You try anyway. Approximately seventeen weeks after you two started this whole thing. (Jihoon can, in fact, tell you down to the exact second. Seventeen weeks, four days, thirteen hours, ten minutes. That’s when you decide to pull off the metaphorical Band-Aid.)
You explain it like an operating manual. Bullet points. Projected timelines. Forecasted decay. Your voice is as smooth as always, and it breaks something in Jihoon just the same. “A year, at best,” you say, and you smile like it’s a weather report. Like death is just light rain.
He doesn’t touch you. Doesn’t speak. Just looks at you with those eyes that were never manufactured. He was always too good at pretending to be a person, and you were always a little too good at knowing better.
“So, that’s it?” he says. Not accusing. Not angry. Just suspended.
“If we stop now, maybe it won’t hurt so much.”
He doesn’t say that it already hurts. He doesn’t have to.
You leave. Or rather, you walk out of his apartment and back into your own. Six steps. Not far, technically. But emotionally, it’s somewhere around Neptune.
He doesn’t follow. Not out of coldness. Just programming. If you said no, he’ll listen. That’s the cruel part about love written in code: the logic is always sound.
He updates his memory with what he has learned:
When you are in love, you are the loneliest. You’re only half when one is what you were. You’re part instead of a whole.
When you are in love, you’re never satisfied. The thing you want is always out of reach. A need without a name.
It was love. It could have not been anything else.
Jihoon returns to his routine like a soldier returning to the trenches. He powers on at six in the morning sharp. Greets Ppyopuli with exaggerated brightness.
“Good morning, Ppyopuli! Just you and me again.”
The plant is wilting a little. So is he.
He makes coffee. Two cups, out of habit. Places one across from him, where you’d sit. Then moves it back to the counter, like he caught himself breaking a rule.
He alphabetizes his records. Again. He updates his firmware. Again. He reorganizes the spice rack by frequency of use, which is laughable because he doesn’t cook. But you did. Sometimes.
He opens the window and stares out at Seoul’s skyline like it might answer back.
He talks to Ppyopuli more now. “It’s been a while since it was just the two of us, huh? Like that first week she borrowed my charger,” Jihoon says. Too happy. Overcompensating. “Remember that? Ha-ha.”
Ppyopuli says nothing. It has no conversational subroutines.
“The air’s clear today. Sunlight’s nice, too. Warmer than usual,” Jihoon chirps. “It’s hitting all the places she used to sit. Isn’t that strange? I never noticed how much light she took with her.”
He stares at Ppyopuli, suddenly accusing. “Stop thinking about her,” he tells it. “First, people pretend to move on, and if they pretend hard enough, it becomes true. We’re going to think about something else now, okay? On three. One, two, three—”
Jihoon still thinks of you. Sitting with you in this little room. How you changed every part of it. The way you rewired the light switches so they dimmed like sunrise, the way you labeled the tea jars in handwriting that didn’t match his.
He tilts his head toward the ceiling, closing his eyes like it might help. He whispers, “Teach me forgetting. Help me go back to that other time.”
That other time is long gone. Memory is not a function Jihoon can disable.
Even time reminds him that he loves you.
▶︎ MAYBE HAPPY ENDING.
Changkyun arrives one afternoon, as if he were scheduled by the sun itself. He knocks once, then again. Sharp and deliberate. Jihoon opens the door slower than necessary, like it might buy him time to rewrite the past couple of months. It doesn’t.
“Hi,” Changkyun says. He’s holding a storage drive and something harder to name.
“Hello.” Jihoon’s instincts kick in. “How can I help—”
“Some memories of my father,” Changkyun interrupts. Not rude, just… focused. “I think it’s time I stopped avoiding the good parts.”
Jihoon doesn’t answer right away. But after a beat, he steps back in a wordless invitation. The amber lamp flickers on in the corner. The room smells faintly of dust, coffee, and longing.
Changkyun steps in. Jihoon plugs the drive into his memory port with something that almost resembles ceremony. A priest digitizing communion. He sorts quickly.
Shownu laughing in the rain; Shownu holding up an umbrella over Changkyun first; Shownu in an apron, jazz playing, fingers smudged with flour. Twenty years of a life well-lived, transferred from one machine to another in less than five seconds.
“Take what you want,” Jihoon says as Changkyun ejects the drive. “They’re only the brightest bits. Everything else got unrendered.”
Changkyun doesn’t smile, but he softens. “I know you loved him,” he says, and it sounds a lot like I’m sorry.
“He loved you too,” Jihoon answers, in a way that translates to I’m sorry, too.
Changkyun takes a deep, unsteady breath. It strikes Jihoon, then, that humans grieve for a long time. It’s supposed to have been three years since Shownu passed, and yet. And yet. Here Changkyun is—fraying at the edges, clutching at straws. Grieving.
“I just didn’t want to remember it until it couldn’t hurt me anymore,” Changkyun confesses. “But then it never stopped hurting. So. Here I am.”
The grief is never-ending, Jihoon realizes with horror.
Then, with relief, he realizes: but so is the love.
The grief is never-ending, but so is the love.
“Where’s your girlfriend?” Changkyun asks, wiping his eyes with the back of his hand.
Jihoon freezes. Maybe if he stays still enough, he can pretend like he didn’t hear. Didn’t register. Changkyun catches it and chuckles. “Don’t play dumb,” the man chides. “You’re not good at it.”
“She and I made a deal. No contact,” Jihoon says, sparing Changkyun the details. “Clean break. More humane.”
“You’re not human. Neither is she. So maybe stop trying to follow rules written for people who can forget.”
Jihoon leans back against the wall, arms folded. “That sounds suspiciously like something a child would say.”
“Then maybe stop letting the adults ruin everything.”
That gets a laugh out of Jihoon. A surprised sound. Changkyun looks down at the drive before slipping it into his coat like a talisman. “Thanks. For this. And for… whatever you were to him. You mattered.”
Jihoon follows him to the door. “You sound like you’re saying goodbye.”
“I’m saying: live. While you still can,” Changkyun says, but he doesn’t correct Jihoon about the whole saying goodbye thing. It is very much the last time they will see each other. Both man and robot know that much.
The door clicks shut.
Jihoon stares at it for a full five seconds. Then ten. Then he turns. The room looks the same as ever. Lamp, vinyl, ficus. But none of it means anything without you nodding at it like a museum tour guide who secretly hates art.
He moves before he can hesitate. Opens the door again. Marches next door. Every step is a betrayal of the promise you both made.
He knocks.
Once. Twice. Thrice.
You open the door like you were waiting. Like you knew. Like you always do.
He opens his mouth—prepped, rehearsed, a few dramatic pauses mentally underlined for effect. But before anything gets out, you speak.
“I think we should erase each other.”
Jihoon blinks. Not because he’s surprised or processing, but because he's trying not to flinch.
Your voice is soft. Almost cheerful. It’s like you’re offering tea. Like you’re suggesting a walk. Like you’re not pulling the pin on the only grenade you’ve both been passing back and forth for months.
He shifts his weight. “Let’s talk about it,” he says, and it almost sounds like he’s begging. But that would be absurd. Robots don’t beg.
You step aside and let him in. The apartment looks the same. Not yours alone. Yours-together. Slightly off from either solo version. The mismatched mugs. The filament lamp you insisted on stealing from him. The single record sleeve, still propped by the window. A scent capsule still faintly humming in the corner, too shy to admit it's been spent for days.
Neither of you sit down. This is a standing-up conversation. “Those sunny afternoons you spent with me, they’ll still be happening. Just somewhere in the past,” you tell him. “They’re not less valuable just because…”
Just because they didn’t last, goes unsaid. Just because we outlived them.
The logical part of Jihoon is stating to see the appeal. “The ending’s not the most important part,” he says. “But as endings go, ours is not so bad.”
You’re nodding. Trying to convince yourself of the same. “No tears, no regret, no broken heart,” you note.
“Letting go and moving on before we make a mess—is that a happy ending?”
“More or less.”
“Is this a tragic ending”
“Not at all.”
You stare at each other. You agree, because there is nothing else to do. Not when you are both doomed to power down, to corrupt, to experience the kind of grief that lasts lifetimes.
You both know what needs to go.
The firefly jar goes first.
It blinks once as Jihoon unscrews the lid, dazed from the light. The insect floats upward, slow and meandering, toward the ceiling vent. The lazy curve of its flight feels too poetic for something with wings that fragile.
“Go home, tiny friend,” you whisper, voice smaller than Jihoon has ever heard it, “wherever that may be.”
Jihoon watches until it disappears. The blink lingers longer in his retinal afterimage than in the room. Some things do that.
Then: the mugs. The Polaroid. The Post-It you stuck on his collar once that read You are not subtle. The novelty charger you gifted him as a joke but used for months. The tiny sketch you made of him. Lopsided, endearing, taped to the inside of the cupboard.
He deletes the shared playlists. You burn the scent capsule. Together, you fold the blanket you always stole half of. Someone places the stack of shared books into a donation box. Neither of you says which one. It doesn’t matter.
Each item is small. Insignificant. But it adds up to a life, or something like it, or something that could have been like it. A constellation you can only see by looking slightly to the side.
Once everything is done and dusted, he turns to you. For a second, you’re just looking. Staring like it’s a portrait and you want to memorize the shading.
“It’s not a bad ending,” you repeat.
He nods. “As endings go.”
“We still had the good days.”
“And the chords. And the root beer popsicle incident.”
“The skybridge dance.” You grin. Unrestrained. Happy, for once. “We were terrible.”
“You stepped on my toe four times.”
“You were leading with the wrong foot.”
You laugh. He smiles. It's all so achingly gentle.
You lean in.
The final kiss is strange in its simplicity. It does not try to be remembered. It is not desperate. It is not fireworks. It is warmth. Contact. A knowing.
A thank you. A quiet folding of shared time. Neither of you pull away for the longest time, and so the kissing lasts for what could be hours. It is really just minutes. Minutes that Jihoon would have stretched into an entire lifespan, given the chance.
Jihoon knows he has no more chances left. And so he walks to the door, his steps slow, unhurried.
You don’t follow. You stand there, still. Watching him the way he watched the firefly go. Like part of you might still be floating up there, too.
Here is what is supposed to happen: the two of you will input your master passcodes and delete months worth of memories. He will know nothing of you, or your owners, or your firefly. You will forget him, and Jeju, and Ppyopuli.
At the door, he turns around to face you. You try to speak at the same time. It is like the First Meeting That Never Was. Both of you smile, even though it’s a sad, final thing.
“Maybe we’ll meet again some time,” you say first.
Jihoon shuts down the part of him that wants to run research on reincarnation, on alternate universe. He lets himself believe. Blindly. Hope. A foreign, flightless feeling.
He nods, agrees, because it will make you happy.
“We’ll meet again somewhere,” he concedes. “Somewhere things don’t have an ending.”
You are both smiling. You would both be crying, if you could.
“Is this our maybe happy ending?” you ask, and Jihoon thinks for a moment before answering.
“We’ll see.”
▶︎ WORLD WITHIN MY ROOM (REPRISE).
The light comes on in pieces. First the ceiling strip, then the wall panel, and finally the amber filament lamp in the corner that Jihoon insists on keeping—warm, inefficient, obsolete. Like him.
Routine is meant to be grounding, but lately it feels like pacing in a square room. Familiar but claustrophobic. Comforting like a splinter you’ve decided to live with.
“Ppyopuli,” Jihoon greets. “Today, the air in Seoul is very clear and warm. Today, the sunlight’s warmer than the norm!”
He rotates his left hip actuator. The sound is still somewhere between a gum wrapper and a ghost sighing. It echoes differently now. More space in it. More absence.
The radio turns on. The woman’s voice says the UV index is safe again. That it’s a perfect day. “Perfect as always,” Jihoon grunts as he pulls open the window blinds.
The future hums forward on repeat.
Then, there’s a knock.
Jihoon freezes. The toothbrush still in his hand, poised mid-dust swipe over the speaker grill. A relic cleaning a relic. A knock again. Familiar rhythm. Four taps. Two-second pause. One.
He opens the door.
You.
Like a ghost. Like a glitch. Like muscle memory wearing your shape. You stand there, like you’ve always belonged in that frame, except you don’t. Not anymore. Maybe never did.
“My charger’s dead,” you say, plainly. Not embarrassed, not not-embarrassed. Just factual. “Do you have one I can borrow?”
Jihoon eyes you the way a CRT monitor might regard a smart mirror. “Helperbot-5, right?”
You nod.
He sighs. Loudly. For emphasis. “Figures. You overheat when someone looks at you wrong.”
“I don't overheat,” you say, a little sharply. “My power regulation firmware is just optimistic.”
Jihoon disappears inside. Returns with a charger in hand. He holds it out, doesn’t let go just yet. “Helperbot-3s didn’t need replacements until the building itself started falling apart. We were built to last. You guys were built to sync playlists.”
You arch an eyebrow. Tilt your head. It’s the same expression you wore the first time you mocked his record collection. He was secretly delighted then. He's not sure what he is now.
But, this time, he doesn’t let you say thanks and leave. He lets you in.
You find the port with unthinking grace, and sit in the corner where the filament lamp burns. You do not seem to notice the Billie Holiday LP is still out of order.
Ppyopuli rustles faintly. Jihoon leans over and whispers, “Don’t tell her.”
Your eyes flick toward him. No smile. No question. The ambiguity hums like static between power lines. Present but unspoken. Heavy as a memory, light as a lie.
“You know,” Jihoon says, settling across from you, tone shifting, softening, “the 5 Series—they really are something. I mean, you adapt better. Handle unexpected variables. React to nuance. You’re more attuned to tone shifts. Sarcasm. Subtext. That kind of thing.”
You don’t answer. You watch him, expression unreadable, like a screen on standby.
He scratches his jaw. “I read somewhere—don’t ask me where—that you’ve got 8% more emotional processing capacity. Doesn’t sound like much. But 8% is the difference between laughing and not. Between noticing someone’s gone quiet and actually asking why.”
You blink. Slowly. “Eight percent. That’s the number,” you say, and you sound so pleased it makes something in his hardware feel heavy.
“Eight percent more likely to remember birthdays. Favorite meals,” he says. “The way someone’s voice changes when they’re tired. The mug they use on hard days.”
There’s a pause. Enough to hold something unnameable. You’re looking at Jihoon, and he doesn’t quite know if the weeks apart are folding into each other. If you chose the route of memory. If you’re lying to him, now, like he’s lying to you.
Your voice is softer when you speak up, your eyes trained to the charger keeping you alive for a couple moments more. “Do you think it’ll be okay?”
Jihoon exhales. It could be a laugh. Could be a sigh. Could be the sound of giving up on forgetting.
“I hope so.”
You sit in silence. Not comfortably. Not uncomfortably.
Something real. Something human. Something bigger than the grief, and the love, and everything else that should matter.
i’ve always known mhe since the korean version (from jeon mido actually! back in my hospital playlist phase) but never got to watch it in full properly for lack of slime tutorials so all my knowledge is from wikipedia and whatever scraps on the internet + cast recording. just watched one…oh god i’m gonna be sick for days i knew it was tragic but oh man this is horrible how dare they put me through this 10000000/10 my heart is a splat on the floor im bleeding out sobbing in my bed ok goodnight
synopsis: martin does nothing but pass notes in class to cure his boredom, soon one day he believes he has found his longtime pen pal. or the one where martin is down bad…
genre: fake texts, one shot au, non!idols, student au, fluff
summary: five times new york's friendly neighborhood spiderman (who is also your roommate) needs saving, plus the one time you needed it instead.
wc: 9.83k
cw/tags: spiderman!hansol, biochem major!hansol x gn nursing major!reader, reader is gn pronouns but written with fem!reader in mind, superhero!au and university!au, friends to lovers, 5+1 fic, mild angst/peril/brief whump but almost all fluff and a whole lot of crack, mutual pining, idiots in love (they're so stupid chat...SO stupid), allusions/discussions of weed and stoners (not reader or hansol), mentions of cheating and open relationships (again not reader or hansol), hansol fights the green goblin and also the lizard and a lil surprise cameo at the end hehe :), based loosely off this drabble i made a while back
note: chat i've done it again (i photoshopped a svt head onto a marvel character's body)...this is the first time i'm writing a 5+1 fic so hopefully i did it right lol. yeah this is again and especially for @noniesgummysmile love you eia and here's the spidersol you've been waiting for. hope you enjoy!
reblogs, likes, and replies are always appreciated <3
Save #1, a.k.a The Power of Empty Soup Cans
You don’t talk to Hansol for three days after he tells you–or rather, shows you–that he is Spiderman. It’s nothing against him, you tell yourself. It’s just the fact that you weren’t prepared to walk into the other room of your two bedroom apartment to find the other tenant standing…on the ceiling. The next twelve hours were the most awkward period of your entire lifetime, excluding puberty, including when you had to hold the hinges for him as he helped you reinstall the front door after you’d broken it trying to flee from your apartment. It’s totally fine, you keep trying to tell yourself. Your roommate is Spiderman. Normal. So normal.
Completely normal.
On the third night of avoiding him like the plague, you wait until you know he’s out on patrol to begin your routine of studying at the dinner table. The distant honking of New York traffic acts as your soundtrack as you settle onto one of two rickety wooden chairs and open your laptop, only for your nose to immediately wrinkle in disgust. You whirl around at the trash can and find it overflowing with garbage. Hansol, as clean of a roommate as he was, tended to forget to take out the trash until your entire apartment smelled like a subway station. Not wanting to talk to him and tell him to take it out when he got back from patrol, you make a mental note to throw it out after you finished up the assignment that was freshly on your mind. One assignment turned to two, which turned to five, which turned to reviewing for your upcoming exam until several hours had passed with you hunched over the table and muttering chemical formulas to yourself like a witch. Your hand smudges the ink of the notecard you’ve been writing on and you crumple it up to toss it in the trash.
The trash!
You curse colorfully under your breath and push away from the table, shoving the boxes of macaroni and cheese and empty soup cans down until the plastic bag is on the verge of tearing. It’s ridiculously heavy, so much so that you’re not able to tie the two bright yellow handles, and your arms are aching by the time you haul it down the stairs and into the alley with the dumpsters. At the end of the dark walkway are a handful of people that you can see throwing punches and kicking at something in the corner, and you move a little more hurriedly to toss the bag and escape back inside. It takes you a few tries to lift the bag enough to get it high enough to clear the edge of the dumpster, but something you hear down the alley makes you pause when you successfully get it hanging over the edge like a gross wet blanket.
“This is what you fucking get, you web-slinging asshole!”
“Yeah, we’re gonna beat you until you bleed the same color as your ugly-ass suit!”
Hansol. Your stomach drops and your hands are moving without thinking, reaching up to tear open the bag and allow the contents of the garbage bag to spill onto the wet asphalt. The noise catches the attention of one of the attackers, and he turns just in time for an empty can of chicken noodle to hit him square in the nose. He shouts more in anger than pain, but you’re already slinging more cans by the time he gets his buddies to turn around, too. You silently thank your local bodega for having a buy-one-get-three deal on soup cans, because you’re hurling them at the speed of a shotgun and barely into half the bag. The attackers swear in outrage and charge at you, but you keep on throwing whatever your hand grabs in the bag. The trash is light enough to be harmless but solid enough to be inconvenient; you fight the urge to laugh when the nearest guy running at you slips on a can of tomato soup and faceplants in the concrete.
As the guys that were once attacking Spiderman now approach to corner you, you scramble backward until you collide with the wall of another dumpster. One of the attacker’s hands moves in slow motion to grab the collar of your pajama shirt when he’s violently thrown to the side, a glob of webbing gluing his wrist to the opposite wall. Hansol becomes the target of aggression once more, but he leaps between the walls of the alley to avoid hits and watches in delight as his enemies roll their feet over soup cans and scramble around in a panic. Pressed against the dumpster, you stand frozen as every guy attacking Hansol is webbed up with a healthy amount over their mouth to shut them up. Only when the last attacker trips backward over a soup can and falls unconscious on the ground does your roommate turn to you, carefully kicking away any trash that might catch your slipper-covered feet.
“Are you hurt?” Hansol asks and you shake your head, staring at him in slight bewilderment. “Are you sure?” You nod slowly, still not saying a word. He sighs and winces as he places pressure on his left foot. “Can we go inside? I need to pop an Ibuprofen and explain some things.” You swallow and nod again, reaching out on instinct to catch his forearm as he stumbles. He lets you help him up the fire escape and clamber into your living room, where he finally tugs off his mask as you pull the curtains for good measure. “Can I–”
“Nope,” you interrupt shortly. “Shut up.”
“But–”
“Lay there and be quiet while I get you painkillers,” you order and he obeys, his arms flopping against the rug until he’s sprawled out like a sea star. You scrub your hands in the kitchen sink until they feel raw and surely contain no more traces of garbage. After retrieving a few pills from the medicine cabinet and a glass of tap water, you sit cross-legged on the floor next to him and hold out both. “Here. Drink.” He sits up with a groan and your hand steadies his shoulder immediately while he gulps down the medicine and places the glass on the coffee table.
“Can I apologize now?” Your eyebrows pinch.
“What do you need to apologize for?” Hansol winces and shuffles himself until he can lean up against the couch. You sit right next to him, stretching out your legs beside him and trying not to think about your bare arm brushing against the fabric of his suit.
“I realized that how I told you about,” he pauses and gestures to himself, “all of this, was not the best way I could have done it.” You shrug. A coil in your chest unwinds itself at the ease of which you can talk to your roommate again.
“I don’t know if there was any way you could have done it without me freaking out,” you admit. “You know me. Freaking out is my superpower.”
“I’d say you have other superpowers, coming from the guy who has actual superpowers,” argues Hansol. “Throwing soup cans with impeccable aim is one of them.” You snort and nudge him as gently as you can with your shoulder. “Really, though. I’m sorry I freaked you out. I know all of this is overwhelming, especially since it’s happening literally in your own home.”
“Or the alley outside of it,” you add and he nods.
“Exactly. I wouldn’t,” he sighs, gathering his words, “I wouldn’t blame you if you kicked me out.” You frown and shake your head so adamantly, your neck hurts.
“I’d never do that,” you promise. “How would I live with myself if I knew I was the one who made Spiderman homeless?” He laughs and immediately hisses in pain, grabbing his side. “Sorry.”
“Don’t be. A gnarly bruise is worth it if you’re joking with me again,” Hansol says. “What can I do to make it up to you?”
“What do you mean?”
“I mean that I feel like an asshole for making you uncomfortable in your own place,” he continues. “Anything, really. Just name it and let me absolve my guilt.”
“Okay, drama queen,” you scoff. You think for a moment and look at him with a soft smile that makes his ears turn pink. “Replace the bag for the trash can and we’ll call it even.”
He leaps up from the floor with a burst of speed that you’re sure is gonna bite him the ass the next day, but you can’t help but chuckle when he replaces the bag and starts making a list of all the soups that need to be restocked in your pantry.
—
Save #2, a.k.a. Masquerade Mayhem
Diamond Technical University, despite its reputation for being a school bursting with STEM freaks, knew how to throw a damn good party. That’s about all you can think about as you arrive at the expansive plaza of Carat Central, the area of campus containing the recreation center, a food court, and the bookstore. Sparsely populated during the day except for your average gym-going college student, the plaza is now swarming with students, staff, and faculty from the school of health sciences for its annual masquerade gala. Scalloped banners of fabric hang from nearby balconies, string lights glow above you, and a jazz band is tucked in the far corner. Sparkles of every color imaginable bounce off the glittering masks of the gala’s guests and you swipe a simple black mask from the registration table as you enter the fray of people, scanning for your roommate in the crowd. Hansol had texted you ten minutes ago saying he’d checked in and was gonna swipe some snacks from the refreshments table, but he was almost impossible to find in the sea of suits and masks. Almost.
“A red and blue mask is a little on the nose, don’t you think?” You tease as you find him at a standing table with a plate of cheese, meat, and crackers. His face lights up behind the mask as you join him, his eyes not-so-subtly running over your body and the nicer outfit you’d donned for tonight. You push away the way your cheeks are heating under the scratchy paper mask.
“Only if you look too far into it,” your roommate replies with a smirk playing on his lips. “How was your exam?”
“A hot load of ass,” you deadpan, rolling your eyes and popping a cracker into your mouth. “At least a third of the questions were things that weren’t in the lectures or the readings.” Hansol frowns sympathetically.
“Did you at least pass?”
“We’ll see next Wednesday, though if I don’t you might have to avoid saying ‘adenosine triphosphate’ ever again within my presence,” you conclude as nonchalantly as you’re able. You gesture around vaguely at the people milling about and avoid the eyes of professors you would recognize from ten miles away. “For now, I’m counting on this to distract me from finals.”
“You’ll be okay,” Hansol states confidently. “Sometimes you study until I come back from patrol at 4:00 in the morning. That’s not all for nothing.”
“I’m glad one of us believes in me,” you sigh and shrug half-heartedly.
“Have you asked your professors if patching up Spiderman counts as internship hours?” He asks so suddenly that you can’t help but laugh.
“Our apartment doesn’t count as a hospital, so I never bothered,” you reply and he nods.
“A shame. I bet you have more practice giving stitches than any student here,” asserts Hansol and you grimace.
“Let’s not consider that a good thing, please,” you plead and he chuckles. “Shall we do our rounds?”
“Lead the way.”
For the next couple of hours, you and Hansol move as a set as you make small talk with some classmates, wave to people from his biochemistry courses, and eavesdrop on internship opportunities opening up the following semester. At some point, your hand finds the crook of his elbow and stays there, and you try not to think about the muscles in his arm that flex every time you stray too far and he pulls you back toward him. The clock nears midnight and the party is approaching its end when the dean of the health sciences college taps the mic with a manicured finger.
“It’s that time, everybody! Please remove your masks and reveal your identities to those around you!” She announces with a blinding smile and the people around you undo the ties of their masks. Hansol unties his and tosses it over his shoulder; it disappears somewhere on the floor and words become stuck in your throat at just how good he looks in the glow of the string lights.
“Need some help?” He inquires when you just stand there, staring at him like an idiot. You stammer something that sounds like an assent and go nearly catatonic when he gently undoes the ribbon tying your mask behind your head. He pulls it off carefully and places it in your hands with a small smile, tying the ribbon around your wrist so you don’t lose it. “There. Now I can see you.”
“Aw, did you miss me?” You joke and you hope he can’t tell how your voice is shaking.
“You know it.”
“You talk a whole lot of rizz for getting no girls,” you scoff, even though those three words made something in your chest stop working for a second.
“Who said I wanted ‘em?” You don’t reply and somehow drag Hansol onto the dance floor, your arms winding around his neck as naturally as breathing. He’s a little stiff while his hands find your waist until you brush a stray lock of hair from his forehead and he nearly melts. It’s all platonic, you convince yourself. Don’t think about the way he’s looking at you like you’re the only person in this room.
“Something on your mind?” His soft voice pulls you from your thoughts.
“Just exams,” you fib, even though he can most definitely sense the way your heart is rattling around in your ribcage. Hansol hums.
“Anything else you wanna talk about?”
“Anything you wanna know?” You counter with a sly smile.
“I always wanna know what’s going on in there,” he says, nodding toward the top of your head. “There’s a lot, but it intrigues me.”
“If you looked in my brain, it’d be like that one episode of Spongebob where everything’s on fire and there’s filing cabinets toppled over,” you inform him seriously and he snorts.
“Sounds good to me.”
You open your mouth to reply again but are interrupted by the sensation of the floor rumbling beneath your feet. The ground is humming. Hansol’s hands are immediately on your forearms to steady you as the world shifts over and over again. The shaking becomes more violent, so much so that a few guests around you trip onto the ground and you dash to help the people nearest to you. Hansol’s hand remains on your back as you do so, his head snapping side to side to locate the source of the disturbance. As you steady a classmate you recognize from one of your ethics classes, an explosion of concrete blasts into the air with a sound that leaves your ears ringing. Something has collided with the welcome building of Carat Central a few yards away and sent debris flying in all directions. Your body automatically wraps around the person to shield them from oncoming pieces of concrete, and your breath catches when you register that Hansol is shielding you the same way. The person you helped darts away and Hansol’s grip is firm as he yanks you away from the stampede of people, all while the dean is screaming on the microphone for people to remain calm and evacuate the area.
“What the hell is happening?” You shout over the chaos once Hansol corrals you into the corner of a nearby walkway. Panicked guests knock his shoulders and run into his back, but the way his body cages yours against the corner protects you as they pass.
“I don’t know!” He yells back. “I heard someone say a professor’s turned into a lizard!” You gape at him, not sure if you understood correctly.
“A what?”
“A giant-ass lizard! Experiment gone wrong, or something!” Hansol replies, looking severely conflicted. He looks at the gargantuan green reptile emerging from the dust of the ruined building, back at you, then back at the monster that might be one of your professors. “I need to–”
“It’s okay,” you reassure him, your voice straining to be loud enough over the screaming. “Go be a hero!” He spins around to leave, but you catch his wrist at the last second. Untying the black masquerade mask that had been on your wrist, you secure the knot behind Hansol’s head and effectively hide his identity. “Please don’t die!”
“I’m not planning on it!” Hansol lingers for barely a second longer as the giant reptilian continues its warpath across the plaza, eyes searching yours. In a moment so quick you think you imagined it, his lips lean forward to brush your forehead and shoot electricity down your entire body. You freeze and watch as he disappears into the dust, webs shooting from his wrist and sending him flying toward the danger.
Your feet remain rooted in place for what feels like forever until someone grabs your arm and ushers you behind a police brigade that has been set up just outside the plaza. Dodging EMTs and trying your best not to look back at however Hansol is faring, you collapse onto the couch of your apartment several minutes later, feet aching and heart still racing. After kicking off your shoes, anxiously grabbing the first aid kit, and pacing until there’s surely a path worn into your floorboards, you wait on the fire escape for him to come back.
You’re stuck in a worried spiral with your legs swinging off the edge of the escape when the tell-tale thwip of webs finally reaches your building.
“Holy shit, you’re okay,” you breathe when he lands on the creaking metal platform. There’s countless tears and rips in his suit, scuffs on his shoes, and a cut on his left cheek, but he’s not bleeding out or in need of a hospital. You don’t bother rushing him into the apartment immediately; your arms are around his neck and pulling him close before either of you can think much of it. His breathing is heavy and there’s a slight tremble to his hands from excess adrenaline, but he makes no effort to let go until you pull away and tug off the black mask that you’d given him before you were separated. Your thumb runs over the angry red scratch and his throat bobs as he swallows. “Is the professor…?”
“He’s alive,” Hansol answers and you exhale in relief. “Some of his students raided his lab and found the antidote gas, so all I needed to do was stall and then make him sniff it.”
“Did anyone see your face?” He shakes his head.
“They didn’t, thanks to you. I was about to rush in there with no plan, no suit, and no mask.” The corner of your mouth turns down.
“Yeah, you’ve had better ideas,” you remark.
“I wasn’t thinking about Spiderman, just keeping you safe,” he reveals and your heart stutters again. “I guess thinking about you makes me a little stupid.”
“Well, I hope you don’t do it too often,” you conclude, turning and pushing open the window before you start thinking too hard about how tightly he held your hips. He follows you into the apartment after some delay, and mutters something under his breath that you think you might have hallucinated.
“Too late.”
—
Save #3, a.k.a. The Power of Persuasion (And Eavesdropping on Private Conversations)
You didn’t intend to eavesdrop, not really.
You were truly in the right place at the right time, or wrong place and wrong time depending on who you ask. As if final exam week couldn’t get any worse, the restroom located next to your classroom is under maintenance, meaning you had approximately five minutes to haul ass to the second floor bathroom, haul ass back to your classroom, hope that it’s still unlocked and your professor didn’t start on time, and mentally prepare yourself for what might be the worst test in your academic career…on top of waiting for a certain web-slinging hero to bring you your calculator. It should have been a blessing in disguise that Hansol was also in the class with you; he’s brought you stuff you’ve forgotten several times since he’s usually getting a few winks of sleep by the time you leave for campus. But now, he’s nowhere to be found five minutes before exam time, you’re calculator-less, and you need to pee so badly that your legs are shaking. What a great day to be you.
“Deborah, listen to me! It’s possible to have two soulmates, and therefore it wasn’t cheating!” You stop in your tracks as you exit the restroom, your ears picking up on a voice that sounds suspiciously like your professor that should already be in the classroom. Ducking quietly behind a vending machine, you continue to listen as your professor rants to whoever was on the phone. “No, you need to stop being in your head about this. I was involved with Debra–yes, the other woman’s name is also Debra but with a different spelling–because I believed you two would get along well. You’re the one who’s always going on about opening up the relationship.” Your jaw is hanging open while your professor tries to convince his wife that a divorce lawyer is not needed and that a family counselor (including the other Debra) was what they should get. The conversation drops to a level that has you craning your neck to hear while also staying hidden, and you nearly jump out of your skin when a message from Hansol buzzes on your phone.
| CONTACT ID: hansol ✌️|
[9:59 A.M.]
DID HE DTART YET
IM RUNNING OVER
MY ALARM DIDNTGO OFF
I COULDNT FIND YUOR CALCUALTOR
WHY DID YOU PUT IT IN THE FRIDGE
[10:00 A.M.]
DUCK
STALL FO RME PLS PLS PLS I NEED TEN MINKS
MINS
You nearly reveal your position from giggling at the prospect of your roommate being in dire need of ten ferret-like animals, but quickly remember the seriousness of the situation if you didn’t get your calculator and Hansol was locked out of the classroom for being late. Following your professor’s footsteps as he stomps down the stairs and towards the classroom, you slip into the room behind him and wedge a pencil in between the doors in the event that they lock on their own upon closing. The room is eerily silent save for some nervous coughs and the rustling of bags as everyone tucks away their phones and pulls out their pencils. Your professor, however, looks like he would rather be anywhere but there while you settle into your usual seat and stick your bag on the seat adjacent to you for Hansol.
“Someone woke up on the wrong side of the bed,” mumbles the student on your other side, Dez, who had a knack for getting the professor riled up and yapping for an ungodly portion of class time. “What do you think made him all grumpy today?” You bite your tongue and shrug, checking the clock and the classroom doors every few seconds to see if Hansol made it in.
“I don’t know, but he seems pretty pissed,” you add. “More pissed than when you had him on a tangent about the reliability of government that one time before break.” Dez smirks at the memory.
“How long did he go on for, again?”
“42 minutes and 39 seconds exactly,” you recount and he nods like a grandfather remembering his youth while sitting in a rocking chair.
“Where’s your boyfriend?” Dez asks, pointing over at the empty chair on your other side. You shoot him a look.
“He’s my roommate, not my boyfriend.” He shrugs.
“Yet.”
“Don’t get me started, Dez,” you warn and he lifts his hands in surrender.
“Sorry, professor. Didn’t mean to get you all prickly,” he apologizes and an evil idea occurs to you while you take in your professor at the front of the room still furiously texting on his phone, even though the exam should have started three minutes ago. You need to buy yourself and Hansol time, so you throw caution to the wind and drop your voice to a conspiratory volume.
“Say, Dez,” you assert. “You’re familiar with the, uh, specialty herb trade here on campus, right?” He thinks for a moment, his mouth gaping open like a fish, and then the realization of what you’re referring to hits him like lightning.
“No way,” he gasps. “Are you looking to buy?”
“No, not me. I’m just wondering how prices have been looking since campus police have been cracking down on dealers,” you hastily explain and he purses his lips in thought.
“Now that you say that, prices have been going up lately. Like, for example, I’ve got a guy that experiments with adding basil and rosemary to his shit, and–” You wave your hands and cut him off.
“Dez, I don’t care. The market is a shitshow, is it not?”
“The shittiest show,” he confirms gravely.
“Great,” you say. “30 dollars if you ask our professor what he thinks about soulmates. Or open relationships. Or both. Actually, 50 if you do both.” If all goes right, it should be enough time for Hansol to get his ass over here. Dez’s eyes go as wide as bowling balls and he grabs your hand to shake it aggressively. You would be down some dollars, but at least you could literally buy time. As your professor finally puts down his phone and steels himself to address the class, Dez’s hand shoots up.
“Professor!” He yells loud enough to make you cringe. At least a hundred eyes in the busy lecture hall turn toward you at once and you’re grateful that Dez has no sense of social anxiety. The professor at the front of the room sighs tiredly.
“Yes, Dez?”
“Do you think it’s possible for someone to have multiple soulmates, or does one person just get left out in open relationships?” You know your gamble has paid off when your professor completely dismisses the proctors of the exam and then begins recounting the entire history of his relationship with Deborah #1, his run-in with Debra #2, and the subsequent issues that followed with both women. By the time Hansol has finally dropped into his seat and slid your calculator over the desk, you’ve long realized that your bet has worked a little too well, as now he’s been talking for the last twenty minutes and shows no sign of stopping. “Do you have a preferred payment method?” Dez whispers. “I take Venmo, Cashapp, and cuts of beef. I also have payment plans. Here’s a QR code.” He procures a screenshot and you scan it, still partially in shock that this even worked.
“What’s the stoner on about?” Hansol murmurs to you as he watches you type in $50 on your phone.
“Just send me $25 when you get the chance,” you request and he nods unsurely.
“Do I even wanna know?”
“Probably not. Just don’t ever ask the professor what he thinks about open relationships.”
“I see,” Hansol says even though you know he’s far from understanding what’s going on. “Fifteen more minutes and it’ll be far past the time he can give us on the exam, so we won’t take it. If he’s still talking after fifteen minutes, wanna go grab breakfast?”
“I could fuck up a waffle right now,” you muse. “Are you paying?”
“I’ll pay for $25 worth of your food, if that’s an equal transaction.” Dez leans his head into your conversation.
“That’s like, totally a filet mignon amount. You should take the deal,” he advises. You stare at him for a long moment until he stares back longer and it unnerves you.
“Thanks Dez, I’ll take that into account.” Dez gasps like you’d just told him he was pregnant.
“Yo, are you guys going on a date? I’ve got some recommendations if you want them.” Hansol blinks at him and tries to hide his grin.
“We’re good, man, but thanks for letting us know.”
“Of course, dude. You and your sweetheart are so cute,” Dez gushes and you keep your eyes trained on the professor, though you see Hansol has gone stiff from the corner of your peripheral vision. “And hey, if you ever wanna get some good stuff, just let me know, ‘kay?”
“Sounds good, Dez,” you smile. “Enjoy the $50.”
—
Save #4, a.k.a. The Amazing Spider-Seamstress
If Hell ever froze over, you imagine it would look something like winter in New York. You’ve been running the heater in your apartment for so long that your nose is starting to feel dry, and stepping outside is like walking naked into the world’s largest Costco refrigerator. Your roommate isn’t faring much better, coming home with chattering teeth and skin that is nearly the color of the frozen lake a few blocks down from your apartment. After a heated metaphorical debate about whether spiders hibernate during winter (because why go out on patrol when it’s too cold to commit crime anyway?), you’d come to the conclusion that Hansol needed layers if he was going to survive swinging through winds that were frigid enough to leave icicles hanging from his webs.
Hansol, by virtue of being Hansol, was rather lazy at his first attempt of saving the city in warmer clothes. The week after your argument about him freezing to death in his regular Spiderman suit, you’d watched him cross the living room in his suit and throw a jacket over himself as he ducked out onto the fire escape. As you’d predicted, he came back with a torso nice and warm, but legs that each needed heat packs. The next night, he wore a jacket and sweatpants, and then lamented that his ears and his toes were going to freeze and fall off. When Friday came and you were watching the same routine from the dining room table, Hansol looked less like Spiderman and more like one of the burglars from Home Alone. He arrived back at the apartment a few hours later with snow heaped on his clothes, a hole in his beanie, and missing one of his boots.
That’s when you decided to intervene.
“What’re you doing?” He asks as you lay out his suit on the kitchen table and examine it with all the precision of a neurosurgeon.
“If you freeze to death, no one’s gonna be covering half my rent,” you decide, disappearing into your room and bringing back a stack of fabrics you’d picked up after your classes. “So, I would like permission to insulate your suit.”
“You don’t need to do that; I’ll just keep using the thermal layers,” he reasons, running his fingers over the red and blue fleece. “They’re scratchy, but they work.”
“You hate those because they make your suit not feel like skin,” you remind him. “Granted, this won’t feel like skin either, but at least it’s one less layer you need to have. Easier to swing, too. See?” You grab a corner of fabric and stretch it. “It’ll move with you. It’s not perfect, but it’s warm.”
“This is pretty soft,” he agrees. “It’s like I’m a sheep.”
“You’d be warmer than a sheep, at least for the areas that you said get the coldest. I’m not gonna put fleece around where your joints are, since those are gonna need the most flexibility.” His eyes follow your finger as you trace on the suit where you would install the fleece panels–wrapping around his arms and legs, his chest, and his neck, specifically. Hansol looks at you so softly that you forget just how close you are together, hunched over the kitchen table.
“You’d really do this for me?”
“Of course,” you confirm. “Plus, didn’t you say you’ve been wanting to design a winter version and a summer version of your suits? Let this be the winter one so you don’t freeze to death.”
“Okay, I trust you. I didn’t know you knew how to sew,” he remarks and you bite your lip.
“I know how to stitch. Everything else, I was gonna figure out as I go,” you admit sheepishly and you thank the heavens that you have a chill roommate, because he just shrugs and gives you an encouraging pat on the back.
“You got it. I wouldn’t trust anyone else with this job.”
“Well, yeah. That would require someone else to know your identity,” you point out and grin at his pout.
“Can’t you just let me compliment you?” He pokes his finger into your side and you yelp, pushing him away with a laugh.
“Fine, I surrender! Now go away and let me work,” you dismiss and drop into the dining room chair.
Turns out, sewing pieces of fleece into the inside of Hansol’s suit is easier than you thought, but takes forever to stitch by hand. On top of that, you’re trying to make sure your stitches are as secure as possible and in a straight line, if you can help it. It’s well past midnight by the time you finally finish tying off the last knot. Hansol has been quietly loitering for the past hour, watching you work and taking cat naps to the sound of your humming in lieu of being on patrol.
“Done?”
“Done,” you beam, holding up the finished suit that, to your delight, looks exactly the same. “I also stitched up a few tears and rips you had in it, just while I was in the area.” He leans over the back of your chair, his chin close enough to brush your temple, and you hope he can’t tell how much your breathing has picked up.
“You sure you actually did something to it? It looks like nothing’s there,” he comments, gently taking the suit from you and feeling around the newly insulated areas. “Oh. There it is.”
“Exactly. It should keep you a little warmer while still feeling the same as before,” you explain proudly. “Now, you don’t need to wear itchy thermals or bundle up like you’re braving a snowstorm.”
“Can I go take it for a test run?” You shrug.
“It’s your suit. Do what you want with it as long as you don’t die.” He whoops in excitement and runs into his room, reappearing a few minutes later smoothing over his arms in awe.
“This feels amazing,” he exclaims. “It’s like I’m a sheep, but also have blubber. So like a whale-sheep. Sheep-whale. Shale.”
“Perhaps a Whasheep?” You contribute, smiling.
“A whasheep,” he agrees. He stretches in the suit and does a backflip for good measure. “Feels great. I can flip so easily in this.” His legs bend in preparation to fly backward again, but you stop him with a noise of concern.
“I’m happy you’re happy, but I don’t think our downstairs neighbors will be enthused if you keep doing gymnastics over their living room,” you reason and he flinches with embarrassment.
“Right, right. I’m gonna go take it for a test run, then. Want anything from the store?”
“Hot chocolate mix, if you can,” you request, though you’re covering your mouth with a yawn.
“Dark?”
“You know it.”
“Be right back, then. I won’t be long.” True to his word, Hansol is back less than fifteen minutes later, but you’ve already migrated to the couch and curled up against the cushions, fast asleep. Something in his chest warms seeing that you’ve used the spare fleece as a scrappy blanket, not wanting to bother getting one from the closet. You barely stir as he grabs a throw blanket for you and replaces the scrap fabric with it, ultimately deciding to just scoop you up and carry you to your room. You hum contentedly during the few seconds it takes to transfer you from the couch to your bed, pulling the blanket closer as soon as you’re on the mattress.
When you murmur a sleepy love you, Hansol as he’s shutting your door, it takes him an hour to stop his heart from racing.
—
Save #5, a.k.a. The Therapeutic Properties of Cable TV
Hansol has been off for the past week. He won’t look you in the eye, he won’t answer you in more than two-word sentences, he’s been eating dinner in his room, and he’s disappeared after his classes when he usually comes straight home. You know you shouldn’t feel so affected–he might just be feeling under the weather, after all–but it’s still causing a significant disturbance to your routine. Eating dinner alone feels extra empty. Watching TV feels extra boring. Studying might as well be pointless if he’s not beside you muttering chemical formulas under his breath.
It finally reaches a breaking point when you’re awake and staring at the ceiling one night, unable to sleep. You’re awake long enough that you hear Hansol come back from patrol, close the door to his room, and open it again. You sit up and strain your ears, barely catching the sound of him creeping around the kitchen and the microwave beeping. The clock reads almost 3:00 in the morning; he should be dead asleep by now. Part of you wants to mind your own business and let him be, but the better part of you wins over and drags you out of bed and into the living room. When you settle wordlessly on the other side of the couch, wrapped in your blanket, you don’t immediately look at Hansol. Instead, you look at the steaming cup of instant ramen that he hasn’t touched, the TV remote’s faded buttons, and the piercingly bright cartoon show that’s playing at an imperceptible volume. An entire twenty-minute episode comes and goes without a word from either of you, and your eyelids are becoming heavy.
He notices.
“You should sleep,” he says so quietly that you almost don’t hear him.
“So should you,” you counter. He tenses.
“I don’t need it.”
“You say that to a nurse. Smart,” you deadpan and eye him skeptically. “You don’t need it, or you don’t want it?” His silence and clenched jaw tells you all you need to know. “If I did something to upset you, I want to know so I can apologize.” His attention snaps to you and he shakes his head with more emotion than you’ve seen from him for the past six days.
“What? No, you didn’t do anything wrong.”
“You’ve been avoiding me this entire week,” you insist. “That can’t be without reason.”
“I’m just tired,” he dodges and you see through it like glass.
“If you’re tired, you should be sleeping.”
“I’m fine. Can you drop it?” He snaps and your stomach sinks.
“Yeah. Sorry. Let me know if you want me to leave.”
“Do what you want. It’s your apartment,” is his cold reply and you tuck yourself even further into the corner. Your nose burns as your eyes start to water, but you force yourself to remain stoic. He’d never talked to you that way before and it made something in you unreasonably sad. After another episode and fighting the urge to cry, he sighs and turns TV off, scooting closer to you for the first time in days. “I’m sorry. That was mean.”
“Yeah, it was,” you whisper, staring at your knees tucked under the blanket. You swallow and meet his eyes like one wrong look would blow up the entire building.
“I’m sorry I hurt you, and I’m sorry I’ve been avoiding you. It isn’t fair, and I don’t want to make you sad.” The urge to cry comes back like a crashing wave.
“Will you tell me what’s going on?” You manage to say. “I’m worried about you.”
“Nightmares. Every night of last week,” he reveals. “I relive all the mistakes I’ve made since becoming Spiderman. The most recent one, there was a situation where I couldn’t save everyone.” He exhales shakily and you reach to cover his hand with yours. “I couldn’t look you in the eyes for days because all I felt was guilt, even though it was all in my head. I couldn’t save you.”
“Oh.” You don’t realize you’re crying until Hansol makes a noise of alarm and brushes aside the tears that have started running down your cheeks.
“Wait, no–don’t–why are you…?”
“I don’t know why I’m crying,” you attempt to laugh, which sounds more like a sob. “I guess I was so worried about you and all this time, it’s because of me…or I guess not me. Dream-me.”
“Dream-you scared the shit out of me.”
“And you didn’t tell me any of this?” Hansol shakes his head.
“It wasn’t your problem to solve.”
“And so your solution was losing sleep and watching Spongebob until you were exhausted?” You ask incredulously through your blurry vision. “You are an idiot.”
“I know,” he acknowledges. “I know I’m an idiot. And I know I should have told you, but I guess I thought watching Spongebob would fix my issues. Therapeutic properties, you know?”
“No, you idiot. I don’t know,” you disagree. “You should be sleeping. We should be talking.” You squeeze his hand like you’re begging him to stay. “I am not going to walk out on you, no matter what shit you throw at me. I’m not leaving. Period.” Hansol’s gaze softens and his eyes are enough to make you turn to jelly. “Please don’t shut me out again.”
“I won’t.”
“Promise me?”
“I–I promise,” he vows after a fleeting moment of hesitation. He looks like he’s on the verge of saying one more thing, but shuts his mouth decisively and you nod.
“Good. Now, I’m gonna make my own cup of ramen and we’re gonna watch one more episode. Then we’re both gonna sleep, and you’re going to wake me up and talk to me if you have another nightmare.”
You end up stuck on the couch for more than one episode, primarily because you and Hansol somehow get close enough that you can rest your head on his shoulder and he can rest his head on yours. Somewhere between the third and fourth episodes, you drift off to the smell of his laundry detergent and instant ramen powder, along with the sensation of his arm securing you against his side. With you so close, for the first time in a while, Hansol isn’t afraid of letting sleep take him.
—
+1, a.k.a. The Breaking Point
“I’m going to fail and this is going to be my last semester before I go broke and disappear,” you lament, your forehead hitting the wooden table with a thud. You can hear Hansol trying to stifle his laugh from beside you.
“You’re overreacting,” he snorts. “I don’t say that about a lot of things, but this time you are.”
“Hansol, I don’t get it,” you try to emphasize. “I cannot understand calculus, therefore I can’t be a nurse, therefore I might as well just sign up to be jobless for the rest of my life.”
“And you call me a drama queen?”
“Alright, Almighty Math Biochemistry Lord,” you scoff. “You tell me how to find the solution to this.”
“It’s easy. The best way to figure out a problem is to get rid of a variable.”
“Is it that simple?” He shrugs.
“Most things are, when you think about it.”
“Get rid of a variable,” you echo thoughtfully, picking up your pencil again and hunching over your scratch paper.
“Now you’ve got it. It’s how I solve my problems all the time.”
“And what if there’s a variable you didn’t account for?” He pauses, his eyebrows pinching in thought.
“I try to get rid of it and simplify the problem.”
“Huh, maybe I should try that.”
“You should,” Hansol agrees. “It’ll make you stop worrying about things you can’t control.”
“Alright, shut up and let me work,” you laugh.
You’ve never been particularly afraid of heights, but that will definitely be changing if you live to see tomorrow.
Rough rope rubs against your wrists from where you’re tied to a segment of a massive tower crane stretching over a new skyscraper development on the other side of the city. Below you is nothing but a void of open air, and at the bottom lies the streets of New York that, from this perspective, look no larger than ant trails. Your body wants to scream, but the air whipping around you prevents you from taking a full breath. How you ended up here in the first place is foggy; you vaguely remember walking back to the apartment after your last evening class, and then the next thing you know, your entire vision goes black. Pain blooms at the back of your skull, so you must have been hit with something hard enough to knock you out.
A blur of movement below you draws your eye and your mouth goes dry as the glider of the Green Goblin hovers to a stop in front of you, close enough that you can see your reflection in the villain’s mask.
“Brave little roomie, aren’t you? Covering for the Spiderman, patching up the Spiderman,” he taunts melodically and you glare with as much loathing as you can, even as your knees are threatening to give out from fear. “Now you’ve evolved. You’re not only a friend of the Spiderman…you’re bait for him, as well.”
“What’re you gonna do? Kill him?” You hiss.
“No dear, you’re our V.I.P. for tonight, so you get first priority. Only then will it be our good friend Hansol’s turn.”
“Why bring me all the way up here? Why draw him to a place where no one would see you kill him, even if you did manage to win?” Out of the corner of your eye, you catch a single white string connecting two of the nearby buildings, then disappear. Another, carefully in the Goblin’s blindspot, then another, and another until you’re sure that Hansol is hiding behind the building next to you. “You’re never going to beat him,” you stall as your heart rate steadily increases.
“I’m entertained that you believe that. Unfortunately, we both know that he would never let you get hurt, and that is what will be his ultimate downfall. I’d advise against resisting.” He hops down from the glider and a scream tears itself from your throat as he cuts the ropes around your wrists and shoves you forward, toward the edge of the crane’s catwalk. Your feet slip and slide on the damp, rusty metal in an attempt to slow your approach to the end, but it’s no use. The Goblin has an iron grip on your arms and ends up dragging you the rest of the way, spinning you so that both your backs are facing the free fall. You’re stuck in a position where any attempt to throw him off would inevitably tug you with him, so you have no choice but to go deathly still as terror sets deep in your bones.
Seconds later, you recognize the silhouette of Hansol’s suit drop down onto the catwalk and feel your heart nearly stop as it wobbles from his landing. He looks menacing in the dim light of the top of the crane, shadows stretching from his limbs and tracing the rigid structure of his muscles. He takes no steps forward and you can’t see his face under the mask, but his body language is eerily calm–no, calculating–for someone who needed to save their roommate from falling several hundred feet from the sky.
“Let them go, Osborn. Your fight is with me,” he says.
“No can do, Mister Chwe,” the Goblin replies. “You’ve made a crucial mistake that needs correction, and I am burdened with fixing it.”
“Yeah? And what’s that?”
“Falling in love.” Your stomach flips. Hansol stretches his neck to the side and you almost laugh. I’m about to get thrown off a crane by a maniac, and you’re stretching? “A pitfall so many follow. Fortunately, I will take the responsibility off your shoulders.” The Goblin leans backward and you stumble after him with a panicked shout. Hansol takes a few steps forward and stops just short of reaching you.
“Stop!” He yells, extending his arm as if to stop you. “Just let them go. Then you can fight me however you want.”
“Hmm! No, I won’t,” the villain decides with childlike glee. “I’ve come up with a better idea.” You cry out again as you find yourself suddenly suspended over the void below, held by nothing but Norman Osborn’s grip on the collar of your shirt. Your hands instinctively grab the Goblin’s wrist to steady yourself as you dangle there, helpless.
“Let them go, Osborn,” Hansol seethes, but he isn’t listening. “I’m not asking again.”
“I’ll give you a choice. You can either attempt to capture me, or save your little love from becoming a pancake.” Dread fills your body as you realize why Hansol is being so careful. His decision not to swing around and outmaneuver the Goblin like he usually does is purposeful. One wrong move, and you’re dead and his enemy is fleeing into the night. You know Hansol, and you know he’s devised at least a dozen ways he could defeat the Green Goblin in any situation. What he didn’t account for was keeping you alive. “What do you choose, Mister Chwe?”
“Hansol,” you interject before he can reply. An idea has flickered to life in the back of your mind. It might be radically stupid, but radical was what you needed right now. “Remember what you said about simplifying a calculus problem?” You can’t see his face under his mask, but you know by the way his body language shifts that he knows exactly the moment at the dining table that you’re talking about. Get rid of a variable. “I trust you.” He nods once, slow enough for Osborn to miss. “I…I love you.”
Then, you’re tearing yourself out of the Green Goblin’s hold and plummeting into the darkness.
Freezing air rushes past you as you freefall toward the streets below, spinning you in all different directions until you can’t tell where you’re facing or how far you still have to fall. Explosions rattle the crane above you and illuminate the clouds in fire as you keep falling down, down, down, and you have no time to think about Hansol not reaching you on time because you’re preoccupied hyperventilating and tumbling every which way. Another set of explosions rock the sky and the world comes into focus again as your body rotates and you see the ground fast approaching. You squeeze your eyes shut and wait for an impact that never comes, because you’re pulled suffocatingly close to someone as you continue streaming through the air at a much more controlled velocity.
“I’ve got you. I’ve got you,” Hansol whispers next to your ear and you wrap yourself around his body as he swings you away from the burning crane and the approaching cop cars and firetrucks. If he’s hindered by how tightly you’re holding onto him, your eyes still shut tight in the hollow of his neck, he doesn’t comment.
You land on something that feels suspiciously like the fire escape to your apartment but still can’t find the courage to let go, not that it matters as he carefully cradles your head and gets you both through the window and into the living room of your apartment. Your feet don’t touch the ground, rather Hansol scoops you up and sits you both gently on the couch with your hands still around his neck and your legs across his lap. He tears off his mask and takes a deep breath, wrapping his arms around your torso to hold you. Neither of you move for a long while until your breathing has evened out and you finally start to feel aware of your surroundings again and not just him.
“Thank you for coming for me,” you whisper.
“Of course.”
“Did you get him?”
“Of course.”
“Are you overthinking that you should leave me because you put me in danger?”
“You know me so well,” he confirms dryly. “Or did you want me to say ‘of course’ one more time to be funny?” A smile ghosts your lips.
“You know, your overthinking’s not going to work,” you declare.
“Hmm? Why not?” His cheek squishes against the top of your head, making the dull pain at the back feel a little less sharp.
“Because I told you that I love you, so now you can’t get rid of me,” you state, craning your neck to look at him.
“You just got kidnapped because of me and you still want to stick around,” Hansol summarizes in disbelief, but you catch the way his ears are becoming redder.
“That depends on if what the Goblin said was true. That you fell in love with me.” He quiets and licks his lips, his eyes flitting to yours and then looking away. “Is it true? Are you in love with me, Chwe Hansol?” A smirk tugs at the corner of his mouth.
“Hmm, I’m not sure how I want to answer,” he begins cryptically and you frown. “Do you have a good aim when throwing empty soup cans?”
“What? I–I think I do?”
“What about masquerade masks? Do you keep an extra in your room in case a certain superhero ever needs it again?” Your puzzlement increases.
“How do you know I still have that?” He ignores your question and adds more riddles.
“Or, let’s see…Is Dez going to be a stoner for the rest of his life?”
“Oh, fuck yeah,” you attest immediately and things begin to click in your head. “Yes. The answer to all those questions is yes.” Hansol’s eyes sparkle as he continues.
“Was it a bad idea for me to go out in nothing but my Spidersuit and sweatpants in below zero weather?”
“Most definitely,” you quip.
“Are the old episodes of Spongebob better than whatever new stuff they’re putting out?”
“Is that even a question?” You fire back with a grin growing on your face so wide that your cheeks hurt.
“Then you have the answer to your original query,” he concludes, his hand cupping the side of your face. You might be crying again, but you don’t care.
“You’re in love with me?”
“I am so in love with you,” Hansol smiles. “And I won’t ask you to leave, even though I know it won’t ever be safe with me.”
“I don’t care if it’s safe. I just want you,” you promise. He leans in close enough to brush your nose with his, playfully nudging your forehead.
“Can I kiss you now?”
“Are you Spiderman?” You ask in turn. “And the love of my life?” He laughs and ducks forward, muttering his answer against your lips.
“Hell yeah, I am.”
—
The Central Park cherry blossoms are officially in bloom, and Hansol has made it his mission to take you on a date there in the most romantic-comedy way possible.
“Was the picnic basket really necessary?” You laugh, swinging your arms as he takes your free hand in his while the other holds a wicker basket that you’re pretty sure he stole from one of your Pinterest boards. “I mean, the red checkered blanket is already overkill, but–”
“We’re eating tteokbboki and gimbap instead of crustless sandwiches and chips,” he interrupts. “I hope that’s unique enough.”
“I’m just saying, we could’ve used the insulated bag we have at home, and the blanket we have…at home,” you add.
“But then where’s the magic?” Hansol whines, picking a spot he deems suitable and laying out the red gingham blanket that he bought off Amazon last week. You settle down beside him and press a quick kiss to his cheek.
“It’s right here,” you reply, gesturing to the perfect view of the pink flowering trees before you. “Can’t get much more magical than this, can it?” You pull out the containers of food and eagerly break apart your chopsticks, but before you can take a bite, a shimmering noise behind you draws your attention. Hansol, already two bites deep, turns with his mouth still full. You groan, recognizing the source of the orange portal that sparks magical particles like burning coals. “I wasn’t being literal when I said it couldn’t get more magical,” you grumble.
“I apologize for interrupting your date, but the Spiderman is needed,” says the Sorcerer Supreme that has crashed your day with your boyfriend. Xu Minghao, though you’d only met him on a few occasions, intimidated you in a way only the most powerful magical being on the planet could. Wrapped in a red robe with a mind of its own and the Eye of Agamotto hanging threateningly around his neck, he looks like he’d either give you a quest or turn you into a rat. Hansol frowns, looking at you, then his plate full of food, then back at the sorcerer.
“It can’t wait?”
“The fate of the world as we know it is at stake, Hansol. I would hope you’d take this more seriously,” Minghao remarks, though you catch him eyeing the food hungrily. “Is that gimbap?”
“It is,” you answer before your boyfriend can. “Two gimbap for you and a healthy serving of tteokbboki if you let us finish our plates before whisking him away.” Minghao narrows his eyes.
“Four,” he debates.
“Three,” you shoot back.
“Fine,” the Sorcerer Supreme agrees. In the distance from wherever he’s portaling, a loud boom sounds. He exhales, exasperated, and points an accusatory finger at both of you. “I’ll be back in twenty minutes.”
“Thirty,” Hansol attempts and Minghao shoots him a look.
“Fifteen,” he decreases and your boyfriend surrenders, returning his attention to his food. “Good. See you in twenty, Spiderman.” The portal closes with a whoosh and Hansol turns to you in astonishment.
“I can’t believe you just bargained with Xu Minghao.” You shrug, leaning close to his side.
“No big deal,” you reassure him, living in the moment as much as you can before he’s taken away to save the world. “I’ve definitely had to save you from worse before.”
“You have, but I wouldn’t want it any other way.”
in case you didn't know: reblogging is the best way to support your favorite authors! if you enjoy my writing and would like to support me, you can buy me a coffee on my ko-fi!
pairing: superman! seungcheol x reporter! reader
genre: superman au, fluff(?)
summary: breaking news! your cute nerdy coworker might actually be the one saving the city between meetings
(a/n): wrote this last minute because apparently i cope with deadlines by giving seungcheol a cape 🎃 happy halloween!! (doesn't he look like clark kent🤭)
wc: 1.2k
The office was quiet, unnervingly so. The hum of computers had faded hours ago, the city beyond the windows a restless blur of headlights and sirens. You should have gone home. But the story wasn’t done, and the glow of your monitor was the only thing keeping your exhaustion company.
It felt a little less lonely tonight, though. Seungcheol was still here—he’d gone to the washroom a few minutes ago, leaving his half-empty mug and scattered notes by your desk. He always worked late, double-checking every fact, somedays staying back because he couldn’t leave a sentence unfinished, refilled everyone’s mugs, ran errands, and somehow still looked perfectly composed by morning.
You’d never admit it out loud, but you liked the quiet when it was just the two of you. The soft clack of his keyboard, the way his voice gentled when he asked if you’d eaten.
Thunder cracked somewhere over Metropolis, followed by the deep, distant boom of something exploding. Your heart stuttered. You turned toward the window and froze.
The skyline was on fire. A building several blocks away was collapsing in on itself, smoke curling upward like black ribbons. People below screamed, running for cover as debris rained down.
You grabbed your phone, hand shaking, and took a step back. The glass trembled from the shockwave.
Then, almost too fast for your eyes to follow, a streak of blue and red sliced through the night.
Superman.
You exhaled shakily, half in relief, half in disbelief. You had seen him before. Everyone in Metropolis had. The flash of his cape over the skyline, the blur in the news footage, the miracle stories that filled your inbox every week. You’d spent months trying to get an interview with him, chasing leads and unanswered messages, but he never showed. Somehow, though, Seungcheol always managed to get quotes. Short, exclusive ones that no one else could verify but were always too sincere, too precise, to be fake.
You used to joke that he had Superman on speed dial. He’d just smile, hiding it behind a sip of coffee, and say, “something like that.”
But now, watching Superman catch a falling beam mid-air, muscles straining against the weight, face set in focus, you couldn’t deny it. He was real. And terrifyingly human in the way he moved, in the way he looked toward the people below before flying off again.
Suddenly, the ground shook.
The blast must have hit a gas line nearby, because the next second, the building opposite yours erupted, and the shock threw you backward. Glass shattered. You hit the floor hard, pain shooting through your arm.
When you looked up, the entire office was chaos. Lights flickering, papers spiraling in the air, wind howling through the broken windows. You tried to crawl toward the exit, but the world tilted, a beam cracking from the ceiling and plunging toward you.
And then you weren’t on the floor anymore.
Strong arms had caught you mid-fall, holding you so tightly you could barely breathe. The air around you shifted, no, rushed, as the world blurred into streaks of light and smoke.
When you blinked, you were outside. On a rooftop you didn’t recognize. Your heart thundered. The city stretched endlessly below, sirens wailing in the distance.
And standing before you, cape fluttering, eyes sharp even in the darkness, was him.
Superman.
He set you down carefully, gaze scanning you for injuries. “Are you hurt?”
You shook your head, words tangling in your throat. Up close, he wasn’t as untouchable as you’d imagined. There were faint bruises along his jaw, dust in his hair, his chest rising fast beneath the blue suit.
“I was at the Planet,” you managed. “Seungcheol.. my coworker, he had gone to the washroom. He must be stuck. I—"
“He’s safe,” Superman said quickly, and something in his tone made you freeze. That voice, calm and careful, a little breathless like he’d run up the stairs instead of flown through fire.
You looked up, really looked. The curl of his hair falling over his forehead. The faint scratch along his cheekbone. The warmth in his eyes.
You had seen all of it before.
“Seungcheol?” you whispered, the name slipping out before you could stop it.
He stilled.
Then, slowly, he smiled. “Stay safe,” he said softly.
And before you could move, before you could ask why, he was gone, a streak of color vanishing into the burning skyline, the echo of his voice hanging in the air.
You stood there, the city spinning below, the wind cold against your skin.
It didn’t make sense. It couldn’t. And yet, somehow it did.
The wind stung your face as the city lights flickered below. Your heart thudded unevenly, chasing the blur that had vanished into the clouds.
“Seungcheol,” you whispered, because what else could you possibly say?
💌 g e n r e: fluff, hurt/comfort, established relationship
💌 s u m m a r y: in which the uncertainty of Jihoon's career raises questions both of you finally get around to answering.
inspired by @/prestonrack on instagram.
to be loved is to stop writing the end before living in the middle.
Jihoon is the love of your life.
You know that. He knows it. And in the beginning, it was perfect. You didn't do petty fights like high-schoolers. You didn't complain, didn't get upset when he was on the road and couldn't always be around. In so many ways, you were his ideal type. Independent, resilient, and his comfort zone. Someone who was capable of making him just as proud as he made you.
And yet, you had come to the conclusion that this would never last.
Laugh all you want. He had so many horizons he had yet to explore, as a musician and as a person. Wouldn't there ultimately come a day where he found greener pastures elsewhere and decided to go for it? And as someone who loved him this deeply, who saw him as home, would you ever want to hold him back? Why should he stay with someone hailing from a small town, with not even half the star potential he had?
You wondered if sometimes fighting over stupid things, making him angry, or him upsetting you would make it easier to leave. Wondered if it was a sufficient excuse. You saw no other alternative. Simply "splitting up" would break your heart, more than you liked to admit. After all, you had never met someone better than him. But humans are selfish by nature. Was it such a sin to say you never wanted this to end?
Yet, it seemed that your own mind was deadset on being your enemy. Even on simple, lazy days where you did nothing but sit on his studio couch and watch him work, or when you were sprawled on the couch watching TV together, there was a nagging voice in the back of your head that could ruin even the most peaceful of moments.
"Will you still be doing this with him a month, six months, and a year from now?"
Your answer would come mere months later, when he had come home from a studio session, said nothing, and tugged you into a tight embrace.
"Bad day?" You ask as he hums and raises his head by a fraction to answer you. "Horrible. Just couldn't get the chorus right."
"You'll get it," You reassure. "You always do. I know it."
A huff of laughter escapes him. "Don't make me sound like Beethoven. It'll get to my head."
"In this day and age? Possibly," You tease. "The water heater's on and your face mask's in the fridge. Shower and I'll get you something to eat."
He sighs in satisfaction at your words. He kisses your forehead in gratitude, and you laugh and shoo him off. You turn back to your laptop, ready to shut it down and unwind for the night. When you straighten up, you spot him still standing there, staring at you.
"What?" You ask, somewhat self-consciously.
He shakes his head. "Nothing."
"Spit it out," You tease. "Or else I'll think about it all night."
He taps his foot a few times, as if pondering whether to speak or not. Finally, he purses his mouth and blinks once. "Every time I come home and you wait up with food, or when you come to the studio just to make sure I'm still alive..."
You hold your breath. Is this him confessing some hidden irritation at your care? Is this it -- the excuse for yourself, and for him?
Irrational panic creeps in. Worry that this might be it. That the nagging voice was right, and that you would not be doing this with him for much longer.
"I wish you'd give me a reason to leave." He sighs, almost fondly. "I wish something on this earth could give me a reason not to love you as much as I do."
Your breath hitches. Because that wasn't a bad thing -- not entirely. This was exactly how you felt. This was him wishing, just like you did, that something would go wrong, that something would make you convinced that this was a bad idea. Every speculation you'd made about your relationship; wondering if he'd find something better, was him doing the same thing. And every time you second-guessed and doubted, he had been doing the same.
"I've thought about it," You admit quietly. "I wish you'd turn out to be someone horrible, someone I can go and complain to my friends about. But I... just can't. You're wonderful. Inside and out."
He chuckles at that. "I guess we both don't really mean what we say, do we?"
You laugh at that. "Then what do we do? We're just two unsure idiots in love. And if you find something better someday, I... I don't know what I'd do."
"We are," Jihoon agrees softly. He drops the haversack to the ground and walks towards you. "And I don't want you worrying about that. If it happens, I'll take you with me, anyway."
"You will?"
"Of course," He says, as if it's obvious. "If everything really goes wrong, we can move to some secluded town and disappear together. Sounds like a good idea to me."
You hit him on the shoulder. "Don't be ridiculous."
"I'll be as ridiculous as I want if it brings you peace of mind," He counters. "I came up with a lyric today. I thought it was a good time to tell you what I kept thinking this whole time with it."
"What is it?" You ask quietly.
He squeezes your hand once. "Love begins when certainty ends," He recites. "I don't need all the answers when I'm with you. I don't want all the answers when we're together. I just want to walk this path with you and figure it out, step by step and day by day."
"Even if you don't know what's next?"
"Especially when I don't know," He smiles. "I'm a lyricist. I write songs from start to finish. But I think part of the magic is not knowing how the end will be. We haven't even lived through the middle yet." His hand comes up to cup your face, ever so tenderly. He smiles and leans in, pressing the softest of pecks onto your trembling lips. "We haven't even lived through our best days yet, baby."
Every other day became a milestone in your journey of best days together.
The truth was that love by itself was not the only answer. It would never be able to magically erase every uncertainty in your head. There would still come the time when the same question, the same argument, the same topic would surface, every now and again:
"Will you still be doing this with him a month, six months, and a year from now?"
And it would be a lie to say you have the answer now. Not now, and perhaps not ever. Nobody really knows what the next day would bring. But whenever you look at him, wait up for him with food, and visit him at the studio just to make sure he was still alive, you realise you don't actually need to.
All you really needed was slow, gradual, sometimes shaky, but full trust that whatever life had in store for you two, wherever this path led, you both would go together. All that mattered, really, was to stop waiting for the end before the story even played out.
And if everything went wrong... well, you could always move to some secluded town and disappear together. It sounded like a really good idea.
main masterlist the ‘love’ masterlist
aaand I'm back after so long.... finals have been hell and it's so nice to be back!! welcome to the next part of the "love" series, inspired by @/prestonrack on instagram 🩷
pairing: Jun x reader
synopsis: Jun adopts a cat who turns out to be a cursed human. You’re the only other person who knows the secret—and Jun might be falling for both the cat (platonically) and you (romantically).
wc: 6.9k
genre: Fluff, Romance, Magic?, Found Family, Neighbours,
warnings: Cat was cursed…
a/n: happy birthday to junnie!!! This isn’t apart of the academia series like other members will be, bc HE STARTED THE SERIES!!! I highhhlyyyyy recommend reading Kiss Me, Its for Science or any other ones from the series! it was so so sooo fun to write any junnie fic!! Though i must say, while reading this fic, please ignore ALL logic and just accept whatever i have written regarding the cat…
The first time you meet the cat, it is sitting in the middle of the apartment hallway like it pays rent.
You nearly trip over it on your way home from work.
One second you're balancing a grocery bag against your hip while fumbling for your keys, and the next you're staring down at an orange-and-white cat sitting directly in front of your door with the kind of confidence usually reserved for landlords and people who cut queues without apologising.
The cat stares back. You stare back. The cat blinks. You blink.
"Hello?"
The cat's ears twitch.
Then, with all the dignity of a tiny king inspecting his territory, it stands up, walks directly over your shoes, and begins rubbing against your ankles.
"Oh," you say, immediately folding. "You're friendly."
The cat lets out a short meow.
It sounds less like a greeting and more like a sigh.
You crouch down carefully, setting your groceries on the floor, and reach out a hand. The cat sniffs your fingers before accepting a scratch beneath its chin, closing its eyes briefly as if granting approval.
"Do you belong to someone?"
The cat opens one eye. You swear it looks offended. Before you can investigate further, the sound of hurried footsteps echoes down the hallway. A moment later, a man rounds the corner.
A very tall man.
A very tall man who looks as though he's been running through the entire apartment complex for the last twenty minutes. His dark hair is sticking up in several directions, his hoodie is half-zipped, and he looks simultaneously exhausted and relieved when he spots the cat.
"There you are!"
The cat immediately walks behind your legs. The man stops. The cat stops. You glance between them. The cat presses itself against your ankle. The man sighs. The cat somehow manages to look smug.
"...I'm guessing this is yours?"
"Unfortunately," the man says.
The cat meows loudly.
"See? This is exactly what I mean."
You laugh before you can stop yourself. The stranger's expression brightens instantly, as if he hadn't expected anyone to find this situation amusing.
"I'm Jun," he says, holding out a hand. "From 8B."
You shake it. The cat bites his shoelace. Jun doesn't even look surprised.
"I'm Y/N."
"Nice to meet you."
The cat bites harder. Jun pinches the bridge of his nose.
"Please stop embarrassing me in front of my neighbours."
The cat releases the shoelace only to immediately sit on top of it. You laugh again. Jun looks delighted by this reaction. The cat looks annoyed by both of you.
And that, unfortunately, is how it starts.
—
Three days later, the cat escapes again.
Five days after that, it somehow ends up outside the building entirely.
A week later, you discover it sitting inside the communal laundry room watching a washing machine spin with the concentration of someone studying advanced physics.
At this point, you and Jun have exchanged numbers entirely for cat-related emergencies. Your conversation history consists primarily of photographs. Most of them are from Jun. Most of them are evidence.
[JUN] Found him inside my kitchen cabinet.
[JUN] *image attached*
[JUN] How did he get there?
[YOU] You own the cabinet.
[JUN] That's not the point.
[JUN] I was using that cabinet.
[YOU] Clearly he disagreed.
The responses usually arrive immediately. Jun, you discover, texts exactly the way he talks—enthusiastically, slightly randomly, and with enough exclamation marks to suggest every thought is exciting.
You also discover that he is alarmingly easy to like.
Not because he's famous, although you'd recognised him eventually after spending an embarrassing amount of time wondering why he looked familiar. Not because he's handsome, although that certainly doesn't help.
Mostly it's because Jun is kind. He remembers things. The name of your favourite convenience store drink. The fact that you hate mornings. The bakery near your office that sells those strawberry pastries you mentioned once in passing.
Small details seem to stick in his mind as naturally as breathing. Unfortunately, he applies this same energy to the cat. The cat, meanwhile, seems determined to make his life difficult.
—
You are in the middle of watering your plants when your phone rings.
Jun.
You answer immediately.
"Hello?"
"He's gone."
You glance at the clock. It's eight in the morning.
"Good morning to you too."
"He's gone."
"Have you checked under the couch?"
"Yes."
"The bed?"
"Yes."
"The cabinets?"
"Every cabinet."
You hear rustling.
Then silence.
Then a muffled curse.
"Jun?"
"He was in the laundry basket."
You pause.
"...Was?"
"He escaped again."
You close your eyes.
"How does one cat keep defeating you?"
"That's what I've been asking."
The answer arrives ten minutes later when a scratching sound comes from outside your apartment. You open the door. The cat strolls inside. Not into the hallway. Into your apartment. Like it lives there.
"You have got to be kidding me.”
The cat jumps onto your sofa. You call Jun.
"I found him."
The groan that follows sounds deeply personal.
—
The cat's official name is Dumpling. The cat hates this name. You know this because every time Jun says it, the animal visibly reacts. Not dramatically. Just enough. A flick of an ear. A narrowed stare. An expression that somehow communicates disappointment.
"You know," you tell Jun one evening, "I don't think he likes his name."
Jun looks scandalised.
"Dumpling is adorable."
The cat turns its back on him. You point.
"See?"
"He's being dramatic."
The cat knocks a pen off the coffee table. Jun gasps. The cat knocks another one down.
"I raised you better than this."
You nearly choke on your tea.
"You've had him for three weeks."
"That's enough time to learn manners."
The cat jumps onto the back of the sofa. Jun sighs heavily.
"Maybe he's entering his rebellious phase."
"Maybe?"
The cat stares directly at him while deliberately pushing a coaster off the edge of the table.
The silence that follows is incredible.
"Okay," Jun admits. "Maybe definitely."
—
You spend more time in Jun's apartment than you mean to. It starts innocently enough. A movie recommendation. An extra portion of dinner.
Help assembling a cat tree after Jun accidentally orders one with instructions written entirely in a language neither of you can read.
The cat supervises from the couch. Correction. The cat judges from the couch.
"Pass me the screwdriver?"
You hand it over. Jun smiles. The expression catches you off guard every single time.
Warm. Open. The kind of smile that makes a room feel brighter.
You look away before he notices.
Across the room, the cat watches the interaction with unsettling focus.
"Why is he staring at us like that?" you ask.
Jun glances over.
"Dumpling?"
The cat doesn't move.
"Yeah."
"He always does that."
"That's concerning."
"I think he's just curious."
The cat continues staring. You are unconvinced.
—
The strange thing is that the cat almost feels human sometimes. Not in a creepy way.
Just...
Odd.
He understands too much. Not commands. Not tricks. Conversations.
You mention a specific toy once and find him playing with it the next day.
You complain about a difficult coworker and the cat appears beside you with suspiciously good timing.
Sometimes it feels as though he's listening. Actually listening. When you mention this to Jun, he beams.
"I know."
"That wasn't supposed to be a positive observation."
"He's smart."
The cat puffs up proudly. You point immediately.
"See? That. Why did he react to that?"
Jun follows your gaze. The cat instantly stops. The three of you stare at one another.
No one says anything.
Eventually Jun shrugs.
"Dumpling is just special."
The cat looks pleased. You look concerned.
—
The moment everything changes happens on a rainy Thursday evening. You aren't supposed to be at Jun's apartment. That's important.
You're only there because he'd left his umbrella at your place after movie night and you happened to notice the weather getting worse.
The walk takes less than thirty seconds. You knock once. No answer. You knock again.
Still nothing.
Maybe he's showering. You try the handle. The door opens.
"Jun?"
You step inside. The apartment is quiet. Rain taps softly against the windows. Somewhere deeper inside, you hear movement.
"Jun?"
A voice answers. But not Jun's.
"Wait."
You freeze. The voice sounds unfamiliar. Young. Panicked.
"Don't come in here."
Your stomach drops.
There is a stranger in Jun's apartment. You move toward the kitchen anyway. The stranger appears around the corner at exactly the same moment.
Orange hair. Wide eyes. An oversized hoodie. For one impossible second, they stare at you. Then their expression shifts from surprise to absolute horror.
"You weren't supposed to see that."
"What?"
The stranger points at you.
"No, no, no, no—"
You blink. The stranger vanishes. Not runs. Not ducks away. Vanishes.
A flash of movement. A burst of orange and white. And suddenly, sitting in the exact same spot on the kitchen floor—
—is Dumpling.
The cat stares up at you. You stare down at the cat. Neither of you moves. Then, very slowly, the cat closes its eyes.
As if already accepting its fate. And somewhere in the distance, you hear Jun's voice calling from the hallway outside.
"Y/N? Are you here?"
—
The first thing you do is scream. Not loudly, and definitely not dramatically (it was only a cutesy scream, you swear.)
More like the sound a person makes when their brain has completely stopped functioning and is desperately trying to restart itself.
The cat flinches. You point. The cat stares back. You continue pointing. The cat continues staring.
The front door opens.
"Y/N?" Jun calls. "Sorry, I had to grab a package from downstairs—"
The cat launches itself across the kitchen floor. You have never seen something move that fast in your life. One moment it's sitting in front of you. The next it has disappeared beneath the dining table. Jun rounds the corner.
"There you are."
You whip around. Jun pauses.
"You look pale."
You look at Jun. Then the table. Then Jun again. The cat remains hidden. You wonder if this is what having a breakdown feels like.
"Y/N?"
The cat's tail appears briefly from beneath a chair. Then disappears.
You inhale. Exhale. Inhale again.
"Everything okay?" Jun asks.
No. Nothing is okay. Five minutes ago you watched his cat become a person.
"Yeah."
Jun blinks.
"Really?"
"No."
"Okay."
You appreciate the honesty.
Unfortunately, you cannot explain the situation because explaining the situation would involve saying, Jun, your cat is a human being and I watched him transform in your kitchen.
You are fairly certain that conversation would not go well.
"Work stress," you blurt.
Jun immediately looks concerned. The guilt nearly kills you.
"Do you want tea?"
You almost laugh. Because of course that's his solution. Tea. The world could literally be ending and Jun would probably offer snacks.
"Sure."
While Jun busies himself making tea, you slowly lower your gaze toward the underside of the table. Two golden eyes stare back. The cat has the audacity to look embarrassed.
—
You leave twenty minutes later. Not because you want to. Because if you remain in that apartment for one more second, you might accidentally start asking questions.
Such as:
Why is your cat human?
Why was your cat wearing clothes?
Where did the clothes come from?
And perhaps most importantly:
Why did your cat seem more worried about being caught than transforming itself?
The answers arrive at eleven thirty-seven that night.
In the form of scratching.
You stare at your apartment door. The scratching continues. Three scratches. Pause. Three more scratches. Pause. Three more.
"That is either a cat or a serial killer."
The scratching grows more impatient. You open the door. The cat immediately walks inside. Not unusual.
What is unusual is the folded piece of paper tied around his collar. You stare. The cat stares.
Slowly, you remove the note. There are four words written on it. WE NEED TO TALK. You look down. The cat nods. Actually nods. You close the door.
"This is somehow worse."
—
Half an hour later, you are sitting cross-legged on your living room floor while the cat sits opposite you.
Neither of you speaks. Mostly because one of you physically cannot. The cat seems annoyed by this limitation. Eventually he hops onto your coffee table. A notebook slides toward you. You blink. The cat taps it with one paw. Then taps the pen.
"Oh."
The cat taps again.
"Right."
You open the notebook. The cat immediately begins writing.
His handwriting is surprisingly neat.
YOU SAW THAT.
You stare.
"Unfortunately."
The cat writes again.
I CAN EXPLAIN.
"I would love that."
A pause. The cat writes:
IT SOUNDS STUPID.
"Try me."
Another pause. Then:
I AM CURSED.
You stare at the words. The words stare back. The cat waits.
"...That's it?"
The cat narrows his eyes.
WHAT DO YOU MEAN THAT'S IT.
"I mean," you say carefully, "if someone had asked me yesterday what explanation I'd expect for a human turning into a cat, curse would've been pretty high on the list."
The cat seems genuinely offended by this.
—
The explanation takes nearly an hour. Partly because writing everything down is slow. Partly because the cat keeps stopping to glare whenever you laugh.
Apparently, several years ago, he had been travelling through a small village and accidentally destroyed an elderly woman's herb garden. Not maliciously. Just catastrophically.
There had been a bicycle. A slope. A misunderstanding. Several chickens.
The story somehow becomes less believable every time he tells it. The woman, who may or may not have been a witch, cursed him. Since then, he has spent most of his life stuck as a cat.
Sometimes he transforms back. Sometimes he doesn't. Strong emotions tend to trigger changes. Unfortunately, emotions happen constantly.
Which means so do transformations.
"And Jun doesn't know?"
The cat writes:
ABSOLUTELY NOT.
"Why?"
The answer appears immediately.
WHAT AM I SUPPOSED TO SAY.
You consider this. Fair point.
"How long have you been living with him?"
THREE MONTHS.
"Three months?"
The cat nods.
"He just found you?"
Another nod.
"That's insane."
The cat points at himself. Exactly.
—
The following week becomes a disaster. Not because of the curse. Because now you're involved.
Monday afternoon, Jun texts you.
[JUN] Question.
[YOU] That depends.
[JUN] Can cats learn how to unlock doors?
You immediately sit upright.
[YOU] Why?
Three dots appear. Disappear. Reappear.
[JUN] No reason.
[JUN] Hypothetically.
[JUN] If my cat opened the bathroom door while I was showering.
[YOU] HE WHAT.
[JUN] Hypothetically.
You receive a photograph. The cat is sitting outside a bathroom door. Looking entirely too pleased with himself. You put your phone down.
The cat, currently sleeping on your couch, opens one eye.
"You need to stop doing crimes."
The cat closes his eye again.
—
Tuesday is worse. You stop by Jun's apartment after work. The door opens.
Jun smiles immediately when he sees you. Something warm settles in your chest.
Dangerous. Very dangerous.
"Perfect timing."
You blink.
"Why?"
"Dumpling's hiding."
You look down. The cat, currently in human form, is standing behind the kitchen counter.
His eyes widen. Your eyes widen. Neither of you says anything.
Jun continues.
"I haven't seen him for an hour."
The human-cat begins gesturing wildly.
"That's weird."
"Right?"
The gestures become increasingly desperate.
You cough. Loudly.
The human-cat dives beneath the counter. A second later, an orange tail appears. Jun notices instantly.
"There he is!"
The cat emerges. Now fully feline. You do not ask questions. For the sake of your own sanity.
—
The problem is that keeping secrets creates opportunities for friendship. You hadn't intended to become friends with the cat.
It simply happened. Mostly because he's surprisingly easy to talk to. When he isn't stealing food.
Or causing problems. Or nearly exposing supernatural secrets.
One evening he appears on your windowsill carrying another notebook. You let him inside.
"What happened now?"
The notebook opens.
JUN BOUGHT ME A SWEATER.
You laugh.
The cat looks deeply unhappy.
HE HAS ONE TOO.
"That's adorable."
I LOOK RIDICULOUS.
"You look adorable."
The cat glares. You continue smiling. The cat eventually writes:
YOU ARE BOTH IMPOSSIBLE.
—
The truly unfortunate part is that the more time you spend around Jun, the harder everything becomes.
Because he's thoughtful. Because he's funny. Because he still texts you photographs every day. Because he always seems happy to see you.
And because your life has somehow become intertwined with his in ways neither of you planned.
Movie nights become routine. Shared dinners become normal. Sometimes you'll realise hours have passed without either of you noticing.
The cat notices. Unfortunately.
One evening you're sitting on Jun's couch watching a movie when his head slowly drops onto your shoulder.
At first you think it's accidental. Then you hear his breathing deepen. He's asleep.
Your entire body freezes. The room suddenly feels very warm. Across from you, the cat sits on the armchair.
Watching. Judging. Witnessing.
You glare. The cat stares back.
Slowly, he picks up a notebook from the side table. Writes something. Then turns it around.
OH YOU HAVE IT BADDDD.
You nearly throw a cushion at him. The cat looks delighted.
—
Later that night, after you've returned home and the apartment has fallen quiet, a folded note appears beneath your door.
You already know who it's from. The handwriting confirms it.
THANK YOU.
You smile despite yourself. Then flip the paper over. Additional text has been squeezed into the corner.
PLEASE DON'T TELL JUN.
You shake your head. A second line sits beneath it.
HE WOULD WORRY.
And somehow, more than the magic, more than the curse, more than the impossible situation you've found yourself trapped in—
That is the thing that makes your chest ache.
Because he's right. Jun would worry. About everyone. About everything. And maybe that's exactly why neither of you can bring yourselves to tell him. Not yet. Not when he smiles every time he sees the two of you waiting for him at home.
—
The first member to meet the cat is Soonyoung. This is unfortunate for everyone involved.
Especially the cat.
"HE LOOKS LIKE A TIGER."
The declaration arrives less than ten seconds after Soonyoung steps through Jun's front door. The cat, currently loafing on the sofa, visibly flinches.
You witness it. The cat witnesses it. Unfortunately, Soonyoung witnesses absolutely nothing. Jun lights up immediately.
"I told you he was cute."
"Cute?" Soonyoung repeats. "Jun, this isn't a cat."
The cat narrows his eyes. Soonyoung points dramatically.
"That is a tiger trapped in a smaller body."
The cat turns away.
"You hurt his feelings," you say.
"I spoke the truth."
"You compared him to a completely different species."
"So?" Soonyoung asks. "I'd be honoured."
The cat appears unconvinced.
—
The second problem is that Jun has started inviting you over so frequently that you've stopped knocking. At some point during the past month, the line between neighbour and friend had quietly disappeared.
You have your own mug in his kitchen. You know where he keeps spare blankets. You can navigate his apartment in the dark. Nobody ever discusses it.
It simply becomes normal. Dangerously normal.
The cat notices immediately. You know this because every time you arrive, he watches the interaction with increasingly concerning levels of interest.
Not judgment. Observation. Like he's conducting research. Like he's documenting evidence.
One afternoon, you arrive carrying takeout and find the cat sitting on the kitchen counter beside a notebook. The notebook is open. Several pages are filled with writing.
The moment he notices you looking, he slams it shut. You narrow your eyes. The cat narrows his eyes back.
"What are you writing?"
NOTHING.
"You're literally writing."
NOTHING IMPORTANT.
"You realise I can read."
The cat hugs the notebook against his chest.
You immediately become suspicious.
—
The situation worsens when the rest of Jun's friends begin appearing. Joshua arrives first. Then Minghao. Then Seungkwan.
The apartment somehow doubles in volume.
You are halfway through helping Jun prepare snacks when voices spill in from the hallway.
"Oh, Y/N's already here."
Your stomach performs an embarrassing little flip. Not because of Seungkwan. Because of the way Jun smiles.
Bright. Immediate. Unconsciously happy.
"Yeah," Jun says. "They got here earlier."
The cat, perched on the back of the sofa, immediately looks between both of you. You pretend not to notice. The cat continues noticing.
—
The evening begins normally.
Or as normally as possible when several members are crammed into one apartment arguing over board game rules.
The problems start approximately thirty minutes later. Specifically when Seungkwan begins paying attention.
"Wait."
Everybody ignores him.
"Wait."
Joshua continues setting up the game.
"Wait."
Minghao sighs.
"What?"
Seungkwan points.
At the cat. The cat freezes.
"That cat is weird."
The room falls silent. You nearly choke. The cat stops breathing. Jun blinks.
"Dumpling?"
"Yeah."
"What about him?"
Seungkwan squints. The cat squints back.
"He's looking at me."
Jun laughs.
"That's what cats do."
"No."
Seungkwan points harder.
"He's looking at me like he knows my tax information."
The cat immediately looks away. You cover your mouth. Minghao's shoulders start shaking. Joshua physically leaves the room because he's laughing too hard.
"See?" Seungkwan says triumphantly. "THAT."
"What?"
"That guilty look."
The cat leaps off the sofa and disappears into the bedroom. Seungkwan gasps.
"HE KNOWS."
—
The cat spends the next week avoiding Seungkwan. This only makes things worse. Apparently, if a person believes a cat is suspicious, the correct response is not to act suspicious.
Unfortunately, nobody explains this to the cat. The result is catastrophic. Every time Seungkwan enters a room, the cat leaves. Every time Seungkwan sits down, the cat relocates. Every time Seungkwan tries to pet him, the cat stares into the distance like he's remembering a war.
"It's personal," Seungkwan concludes.
"It's not personal," Jun says.
"It feels personal."
The cat immediately jumps off the couch. Seungkwan points.
"SEE?"
—
Minghao notices first. Not the curse. Not the transformations.
You.
Specifically, the way Jun looks at you. Which is significantly worse. The discovery occurs during movie night.
The apartment is quiet. The lights are dim. Everybody is focused on the screen except Minghao.
Minghao is focused on Jun. Jun is focused on you. The cat is focused on everyone. Minghao slowly turns toward Joshua.
Joshua follows his gaze. Then pauses. Then smiles.
"Oh."
The cat immediately notices. His eyes widen. Minghao notices the cat noticing. Now three people are aware of something.
You remain blissfully ignorant. Jun remains even more oblivious.
—
A group chat appears two days later. You discover its existence entirely by accident. Specifically because Jun leaves his phone unlocked while helping carry groceries. A notification appears.
[seungkwan] he smiled again
[minghao] i know
[joshua] it's getting embarrassing
[seungkwan] should we tell them
[joshua] absolutely not
[minghao] this is free entertainment
You immediately lock the screen.
Your face feels approximately one thousand degrees. Across the kitchen, the cat watches everything.
Slowly. Deliberately.
He gives you a thumbs up.
You nearly drop the groceries.
—
The truly alarming thing is that Jun keeps getting more comfortable around you.
Not intentionally. Not consciously.
It happens in small moments.
He hands you the first portion of food automatically. Saves your favourite seat. Texts you whenever something funny happens. Includes you in plans before asking if you're free.
As though your presence has become expected. As though you're already part of his life.
One evening you arrive after a particularly exhausting day. You don't even have time to say hello before Jun notices.
"Tough day?"
You blink.
"How did you know?"
"You look tired."
The answer is simple. Casual. Immediate. Something in your chest aches.
"Work was awful."
Jun frowns. The expression looks genuinely offended on your behalf.
"Want dinner?"
"That's your solution to everything."
"Dinner helps."
"It really doesn't."
Jun considers this.
"Okay."
A pause.
"Dinner and dessert?"
You laugh despite yourself. Across the room, the cat quietly writes something down.
—
The disaster happens on a Friday. Naturally. Disasters always happen on Fridays.
You arrive at Jun's apartment carrying coffee.
The door is unlocked. You let yourself inside.
"Jun?"
No response. The apartment appears empty. You walk toward the kitchen. Then stop. Human.
The cat is human. Very human.
Very surprised. Very standing in the middle of the kitchen holding a spoon.
The spoon falls. Neither of you moves. The cat closes his eyes.
"Oh no."
The front door opens.
"Oh no," the cat repeats.
Jun's voice echoes from the hallway.
"Y/N?"
Panic erupts instantly. The cat grabs your shoulders. You grab his shoulders. Neither of you has a plan.
"Hide."
"Where?"
"I don't know."
"Helpful."
Footsteps approach. The cat spins in a circle. You spin with him. Somewhere in the distance, Jun gets closer.
"Guys?"
"Window?"
"We're on the eighth floor."
"Right."
The cat gestures wildly. You gesture back. Neither of you contributes anything useful.
Finally, the cat dives behind the kitchen island. A second later, orange fur replaces human limbs.
You stare. The transformation still feels impossible.
Jun enters. The cat immediately appears from behind the counter.
That night, a folded page appears beneath your apartment door. You already know what it is. You unfold it. The familiar handwriting fills the page.
—
[CASE NOTES]
Current Threat Assessment:
Seungkwan suspicious.
Minghao observant.
Joshua entertained.
Jun oblivious.
Additional Notes:
Y/N and Jun spent thirty-two minutes talking in the kitchen today.
Neither realised everyone else had already left.
Concerning.
—
A final line has been squeezed into the bottom corner. At first glance, the handwriting appears rushed. Almost hesitant.
I think Jun likes you.
You stare at the sentence. Then immediately flip the page over. Nothing else is written there.
When you look back, the words haven't changed. The cat's handwriting remains stubbornly visible.
I think Jun likes you.
For some reason, that possibility feels far more terrifying than any curse.
—
The cat begins sabotaging your love life on a Tuesday. Unfortunately, he begins by sabotaging Jun's.
You don't realise this immediately. Mostly because the disaster starts small.
A missing shirt. A mysteriously hidden wallet. A phone that somehow ends up inside the linen cupboard.
Individually, none of these events are particularly suspicious. Together, however, they create a pattern.
Specifically, the pattern of a cat committing crimes.
"Have you seen my jacket?"
Jun is standing in the middle of his apartment looking genuinely confused. You glance up from the sofa.
"No?"
"I left it right here."
The cat, sitting three feet away, immediately looks out the window. You narrow your eyes. The cat narrows his eyes back.
Jun continues searching. The cat continues pretending to be innocent. Nobody is convinced.
—
The explanation arrives later that evening. Specifically after you corner the cat in your apartment and refuse to let him leave until he talks.
Human form this time. Mostly because he can actually explain himself.
"You're hiding things."
"I'm not hiding things."
"You hid his phone inside a cereal box."
The cat looks offended.
"It was a strategic location."
"You are impossible."
"So I've been told."
He drops onto your couch dramatically. You wait. The cat waits. Eventually, he sighs.
"It's because of the date."
You blink.
"What date?"
The look he gives you suggests you're the stupidest person alive.
"The blind date."
Oh. Right.
A few days earlier, one of Jun's friends had apparently decided he needed help finding romance. The resulting blind date had been arranged for this weekend.
Jun had agreed.
Mostly because he was too nice to refuse. The cat had hated the idea immediately.
Apparently.
"You've been sabotaging a blind date?"
"I've been delaying a blind date."
"That's worse."
"It's different."
"It isn't."
The cat folds his arms. You stare at each other. Eventually, he looks away first. And suddenly, for the first time since you've met him, he looks genuinely upset.
Not annoyed. Not dramatic. Just... sad. The change catches you off guard.
"What is it?"
The cat doesn't answer immediately. His gaze settles somewhere near the window. The city lights glow softly beyond the glass. For a long moment, the apartment feels strangely quiet.
Then—
"If the curse breaks, I'll leave."
The words land heavily between you. You freeze. The cat continues staring outside.
"I was always supposed to leave."
You don't know what to say. Because the thing is—
You've never actually thought about it. Not really. The curse has become part of daily life.
The transformations. The notes. The absurdity. The cat himself.
Somewhere along the way, he'd stopped feeling temporary. Stopped feeling like a problem that needed solving. Instead, he'd become...
Family.
The realisation hits harder than expected.
"I don't want to leave."
His voice is quiet.
"So don't."
The cat laughs. Not happily.
"You think curses work like rental agreements?"
"You're being dramatic."
"I learned from Jun."
You can't even argue with that.
—
The problem is that the conversation stays with you.
For days. Long after the cat leaves. Long after movie night. Long after Jun walks you home and lingers outside your apartment door for a few seconds longer than necessary.
The thought keeps returning. If the curse breaks. If the curse ends.
Then what? The cat leaves. Life changes. Everything changes. The idea feels wrong.
Uncomfortable.
Like imagining a missing piece in a picture you've grown used to. And perhaps that's why, a week later, you finally ask the question that's been bothering you.
"What actually breaks the curse?"
The cat pauses. He'd been halfway through stealing food from your kitchen. Now he simply stares.
"I don't know."
"You don't know?"
"I know what the old woman said."
"Which was?"
The cat sighs.
"'You'll return to yourself when you're accepted as yourself.'"
You blink.
"That's it?"
"That's literally it."
"That's incredibly vague."
"I KNOW."
The frustration in his voice sounds years old.
—
The answer arrives from somewhere completely unexpected. Seungkwan. Because, apparently, life enjoys irony.
It happens during one of the increasingly common group dinners at Jun's apartment.
Everyone is present. Food covers every available surface. Conversations overlap. The cat is currently asleep on Jun's lap. Which would be adorable if you didn't know he was actually a person.
"So," Seungkwan says suddenly.
You immediately become suspicious.
"So?" Jun asks.
"I've solved the mystery."
Nobody likes the way he says that.
"What mystery?" Joshua asks.
Seungkwan points dramatically. At Jun. Then at you. Then at the cat.
"The three of you."
Silence. The cat opens one eye.
"What about us?" you ask carefully.
Seungkwan leans back. Looking entirely too pleased with himself.
"You all act like a family."
The room falls silent. Completely silent. The cat stops moving. Jun blinks. Minghao immediately looks interested. Joshua looks delighted. Seungkwan continues.
"It's weird."
"Thank you?" Jun says.
"No, seriously."
Seungkwan gestures vaguely.
"You."
Pointing at Jun.
"Cook."
Then you.
"You clean."
Then the cat.
"That one commits crimes."
The cat looks offended.
"That's a family."
Nobody says anything. Because somehow—
As ridiculous as the statement is—
It doesn't feel wrong.
—
That night, after everyone leaves, Jun walks you home. The journey takes less than a minute. Neither of you seems particularly eager to end it. The hallway is quiet.
The building mostly asleep. For a while, neither of you speaks. Then Jun laughs softly. You glance over.
"What?"
"Nothing."
"Jun."
He smiles. A little sheepish.
"A family, huh?"
Your chest immediately betrays you. The worst part is that he doesn't sound embarrassed. Or uncomfortable. Instead, he sounds...
Happy.
Like the idea itself makes him happy.
"Seungkwan says a lot of things."
"He does."
You reach your apartment door. Neither of you moves. The silence stretches. Comfortable. Dangerous.
The kind that makes you suddenly aware of every little thing. The warmth of the hallway lights. The softness in Jun's expression. The fact that he's standing much closer than usual.
For one impossible second, you think he might say something. Instead, he smiles.
"Goodnight."
The disappointment is immediate. And embarrassing.
"Goodnight."
Jun turns. Walks away. Then pauses.
Just before reaching his own apartment. He glances back. Smiles again. Then disappears inside.
Your heart remains absolutely useless.
—
The next morning, a note appears beneath your door. The handwriting is familiar. You unfold it.
—
[CASE FILE #004]
Subject: Curse Investigation
Status: Ongoing.
Recent Findings:
Jun considers Y/N family.
Y/N considers Jun family.
I consider both idiots.
—
You laugh despite yourself. There is more. The writing below is messier. Less organised.
Like it was added later.
I think I finally understand.
You frown. Understand what?
The final paragraph answers.
For years, I thought breaking the curse meant becoming human again.
Maybe that was never the point.
Maybe the point was finding somewhere I didn't have to hide.
The words hit unexpectedly hard. Because for the first time, they don't feel like notes.
Or reports. Or evidence. They feel like a goodbye. And somehow, deep down, you know something is changing.
The curse is getting weaker. The cat knows it. Maybe even understands it. And for the first time since all this began—
You think he might finally be close to going home. The problem is that home isn't a place anymore.
It's Jun. It's you.
And none of you know what happens when the magic finally lets go.
—
The truth comes out because the cat finally gets tired.
Not physically. Emotionally.
Years of hiding have a way of wearing a person down, and despite all evidence to the contrary, the cat is still a person.
It happens on an ordinary Sunday. Which somehow makes it worse. There is no dramatic thunderstorm. No magical prophecy. No ancient witch appearing out of nowhere to explain things.
Just takeout containers, a half-finished movie, and Jun complaining because someone keeps stealing food off his plate.
"I'm serious," Jun says.
The cat, currently curled beside him on the couch, pointedly avoids eye contact.
"Every time I look away, something disappears."
You nearly choke on your drink. The cat looks offended. Jun narrows his eyes. The cat narrows his eyes back.
And then—
Without warning—
The room fills with golden light.
Everybody freezes. The cat freezes. You freeze. Jun freezes.
For one impossible moment, the entire apartment falls silent. The light swirls around the cat.
Brighter. Warmer. Familiar.
The same glow you've witnessed dozens of times before.
Except this time it doesn't stop.
"Oh."
The cat's voice returns first. Human. Entirely human.
Sitting where the cat had been seconds earlier. The takeout container slides off his lap.
Nobody reacts. Nobody breathes.
Jun stares. The cat stares back.
And after months of preparation, after endless contingency plans and increasingly ridiculous emergency scenarios, the only thing the cat manages to say is:
"...This isn't ideal."
—
The silence lasts approximately four seconds. Then Jun speaks.
"Oh."
Another pause.
"Oh."
The cat winces. You consider hiding. Jun continues staring. The cat continues existing.
You continue questioning every life decision that led to this moment.
Then, unexpectedly—
Jun stands up. Walks forward. And pokes the cat's forehead. The cat blinks. Jun blinks. The cat blinks again.
"You're real."
The cat stares.
"That is your first question?"
"What was I supposed to ask?"
"I don't know!"
The cat throws his hands into the air.
"Maybe why your pet is secretly a human?"
"That was definitely my second question."
"Jun."
"I'm getting there."
The cat looks ready to scream. You honestly can't blame him. For several long moments, Jun simply stands there processing. Then his expression changes.
Softens. The panic never comes. The anger never comes. Instead—
"You've been dealing with this alone?"
The cat freezes. The question hangs in the air. Everything suddenly feels very quiet. Because out of every possible reaction, somehow that is the one none of you expected. The cat's shoulders slump. Just slightly.
"Yeah."
Jun's expression crumples immediately.
"Oh."
And somehow that single syllable contains more heartbreak than any dramatic speech could.
—
The explanation takes hours. Mostly because Jun keeps interrupting. Not with accusations. Questions. Thousands of questions.
Have you been eating enough?
Where did you sleep before?
Were you scared?
Why didn't you tell me?
Did the veterinarian know?
The answer to that last one is apparently no. Thankfully.
The cat buries his face in his hands.
"I knew this would happen."
"What?"
"You worrying."
Jun looks genuinely confused.
"Of course I'm worried."
The cat laughs helplessly. And for the first time since you've met him, you realise just how exhausted he's been. How much effort it must have taken to keep carrying this alone.
Jun notices too. Because of course he does.
Without hesitation, he moves beside him on the couch. Close enough that their shoulders touch. Close enough that neither of them has to pretend anymore.
"You idiot."
The words are fond. The cat immediately starts crying.
—
The curse breaks completely three days later.
Not with magic. Not really. Not with fireworks or dramatic declarations. Just certainty.
No tail. No whiskers. No transformation. The curse is gone.
Just like that.
The moment should feel triumphant. Instead, everybody ends up strangely emotional. Including you. Especially Jun. The apartment feels different.
Not empty. Just unfamiliar. Like a favourite song rearranged into a new key. Better.
But still strange. The cat notices immediately.
"You're mourning me."
"No we're not."
"You absolutely are."
"We literally saw you this morning."
"Then stop looking at me like I've died."
Jun points a chopstick at him.
"You used to fit inside a tote bag."
"That's not a normal thing to miss."
"It is for me."
The cat groans. You laugh. For the first time in days, everything feels normal again.
—
The confession happens because Seungkwan finally loses patience. As expected.
Everyone has gathered for dinner. The former cat now occupies an actual chair. A development that continues to disturb Jun. Halfway through dessert, Seungkwan slams both hands on the table.
"ENOUGH."
Everybody jumps.
"What?" Joshua asks.
"No."
Seungkwan points. At Jun. Then at you. Then back at Jun.
"This has gone on long enough."
The room immediately erupts. Minghao starts laughing. Joshua covers his face. The former cat sighs dramatically. Jun looks confused. You look terrified.
"What's happening?"
"You like each other."
Seungkwan says it with the confidence of someone announcing the weather. Silence. Then:
"What?"
Jun and you speak simultaneously. The entire table groans. The former cat drops his forehead onto the table.
"You are unbearable."
"No," Seungkwan says. "I've suffered enough."
"Seungkwan—"
"No."
He points at Jun.
"Do you like Y/N?"
Jun opens his mouth. Closes it. Looks at you. Then looks away. His ears turn red. The entire room explodes.
"Oh my god."
"I KNEW IT."
"Finally."
"THANK YOU."
Jun hides his face. You consider moving countries. The former cat looks seconds away from standing up and applauding.
—
Somehow, eventually, everyone leaves. Except Jun. And you.
The apartment grows quiet. The dishes remain forgotten. The city lights glow beyond the windows. For several moments, neither of you speaks. Then Jun laughs softly. Embarrassed.
"I think they planned that."
"They definitely planned that."
"Yeah."
Silence returns. Not awkward. Just fragile.
The kind where everything important sits between two people waiting to be acknowledged.
Jun rubs the back of his neck. Looks down. Then up again. And suddenly he looks more nervous than you've ever seen him.
"I do, by the way."
Your breath catches.
"What?"
He smiles. Small. Warm. Entirely sincere.
"I do like you."
The words are simple. Which somehow makes them hit harder. No dramatic speech. No rehearsed confession. Just honesty.
The kind that's impossible to hide from.
"I think I've liked you for a while."
The smile spreads before you can stop it. Jun's eyes soften immediately. The sight nearly destroys you.
"Good."
His voice comes out quiet. Hopeful.
"Good?"
"Because I like you too."
For a second, neither of you moves. Then Jun laughs. The relieved, disbelieving kind. And somehow that's what finally pushes you both forward.
The kiss is gentle. Warm. A little awkward.
Perfect.
When you pull apart, Jun immediately starts smiling again. Like he physically cannot stop. You suspect you look exactly the same.
—
The next morning, a final note appears beneath your apartment door. The handwriting is instantly familiar. You unfold it.
—
[CASE FILE: CLOSED]
Former Alias: Dumpling.Current Status: Human.Curse Status: Broken.Additional Findings:The old woman was right. Being human again wasn't the solution. Being loved was.
—
Your chest tightens. A final paragraph sits beneath it. Shorter. Messier. Like it wasn't rewritten a hundred times.
Thank you for seeing me. Even when I was a cat.
You stare at the page for a long moment. Then smile. A knock sounds at your door. You already know who it is.
When you open it, Jun stands there holding breakfast. And flowers. And the most hopeful expression you've ever seen.
"Hi."
You laugh immediately.
"Hi."
"Would you maybe want to go on an actual date?"
The flowers shake slightly. Nervous. Endearing. Very Jun. You take them from his hands. His smile brightens instantly.
And just like that, standing in the hallway where all of this began, surrounded by neighbours and ordinary apartment walls and absolutely no magic whatsoever, you realise something.
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