Haejang-guk
Haejang-guk is hang over soup. It'll make any drunken college student feel better. Especially if it's made with awkward love by their beautiful new roommate. Even if their girlfriend is right there.
OR: College lovers RumiZoey/ New Roomate Mira
read on Ao3
general audience, minor angst such as grief and vague SH mention
Haejang-guk. The hangover soup. That was the first thing that Rumi smelled when she woke up, dazed and sore all over.
Weight. That was the first thing that Rumi felt when she attempted to sit, only to be protested by a familiar grunt from a Zoey shaped lump splayed over her.
For a moment, Rumi smiled into the hair that was as soft and black as raven feathers, a thick arm drawing the shorter woman closer like it planned to keep her there.
Then the waking world began cruelly dragging Rumi into awareness, her brows furrowing as she noticed the pieces that weren't adding up.
Last night, she was obligated, as the captain of several extra-curriculars, to appear at frat party and of course Zoey came to. They were a package deal.
Several drunken peers complimented Rumi's "tattoos" that were actually cracks in the golden prize she could've been so she drank to fill all the empty gaps that nobody else could see. Except for Zoey who'd been throwing up in a trashcan.
Eventually, they arrived home and collapsed on the nearest soft thing - the couch. And fallen asleep in a tangle of limbs and rhythmic heartbeats.
Yet none of that satisfied the question suddenly burning in Rumi's mind.
If Zoey was here, who was cooking?
The answer came with an apron, long legs and pink hair. Mira Kotadoski. The new flatmate.
"Morning," she spoke curtly in a stiff manner, like defensive indifference which was betrayed by a blush lightly colouring her cheeks. "I, uh, cooked this. For you."
That word hovered like butterfly beneath the other shoe about to drop - brief, hopeless but beautiful in its fragility. For better or worse, the shoe didn't care for neither beauty nor fragility.
Eyes hiding behind her glasses despite the transparency, Mira glanced at the sleeping woman clinging to Rumi's chest in her sleep like she knew she belonged there, like she knew who didn't.
"For both of you."
Clear of the fog that'd slowed her thinking, Rumi nodded in an almost frantic motion before sitting up, somehow avoiding the crime of waking up a sleeping Zoey.
"Thanks," she paid her gratitude quickly and accepted the awkwardly offered bowl.
Silence settled for a moment but Mira didn't, she stood straight and twitching like a woman held at gunpoint until Rumi realised she was the gun. "Uhmm, would you like to sit down?"
As if she'd remembered how to breath again, Mira sighed and conceded briskly. "Yeah, fine, okay."
The couch dipped beneath Mira's weight. She was no heavier than a woman of her age and height was expected to be but it still felt like a bomb dropped.
This couch was for two people. Figuratively and literally. Before Rumi ever tainted the world with her presence, Celine bought an entire furniture shop in a blind panic for a pregnant Mi-Yeong who briefly complained about a sore back.
Scared. Excited. Loving. Rumi had only ever heard stories about that Celine. Tales told by her Auntie Min Ju.
The Celine she knew, her Celine in a way, was still scared, excited and loving but hesitated with every action that wasn't neutral, stalled on affectionate words and shut down at a simple "I love you." like she only remembered whose last words they were.
So, when the couch was given to seventeen year old Rumi moving into her college apartment, it meant the world.
And when eighteen year old Rumi opened her home to the love of her life, Zoey - a bubbly exchange student, it held her world.
Now, the couch, the world, gained someone new and it adapted to hold her.
Will it keep her?
Will it remember her shape and welcome her after hard days and take the weight off her shoulders as well as her feet?
Or will she fail to even dent the cushion?
