PARANORMAL LOVE! ᵃ ᵗᵃˡᵉ ᵒᶠ ˢᵘˢᵖⁱᶜⁱᵒᵘˢ ʷⁱᵗᶜʰᶜʳᵃᶠᵗ ᵃⁿᵈ ʳᵒᵐᵃⁿᶜᵉ ☘︎ starring: l.hs ☘︎ teaser!
synopsis⨾ Three objects arrive within the package that LEE HEESEUNG ordered from a fishy etsy witch:
1. A flyer decorated with tacky neon green text that doesn’t exactly scream ‘legit’. 2. A very vague set of instructions promising love and happiness 3. An oddly fluorescent pink heart-shaped pendant that claims to be rose quartz (?)
But why would Lee Heeseung, basketball ace and ultimate campus Casanova, need some shabby withcraft? The answer? You. The girl in the humanities department who seems to hate him and flinch whenever he even glances at you. One problem. You actually don't hate him. No. Far from it. Matter of fact, you're wrapped around his pinky like every other girl. But in your denial, you've convinced the guy you're hopelessly into that you despise him. Now? In a Hail Mary attempt, he's enlisting the help of some very questionable wingmen and even more questionable supernatural services to win you over! pairing⨾ basketball player + STEM student + popular (secret loser)! heeseung x poli sci major + loser! reader
featuring⨾ 02z as wing men and jungwon + yunah (ILLIT) as friends tags⨾ rom-com, college au, my broken humour but on crack, misunderstandings. Lots of it, they both fall hard and fast, pining pining and did I already say pining? lowkey loser x loser. est wc: ~25k?
teaser wc⨾ 3.1k
taglist: @cokewithcameron @dina-10s-blog @firstclassjaylee @bitemhoon @luvelyhanii @asaapjwons @strwbysunoo @chccnne @moonlitmyg @shuichi-sama @heartmira @heeseungswifeee @enhoonxx @jakeslvt @starry-eyed-bimbo @miajojojo @eumppappaverse
🧷 : after doing the poll, here it is! ..ahahaha can you tell I'm actually insane about rom com? if you're interested, please let me know so I can add ppl to the series-specific/general taglist! I'm still not sure if I'll actually pull through, with a fic though...
Lee Heeseung is every single girl’s guilty pleasure.
He’s the sweet guy you’d imagine introducing to your family.
The star athlete you picture yourself receiving a swooping bleacher-side kiss from. He’s the protagonist of every daydream, fictional scenario and love story the girls in your University conjure up during dreary lectures.
To put it simply, liking him is the equivalent of that one cannon crush you’ll share with your best friend in high school. But now, instead of two best friends sharing a crush, imagine a whole room full of young college girls (and some guys) sharing one. You don’t say this in a condescending ‘look at them! flocking around one guy just because he's hot’ way. No.
You’re not above admitting that he’s your dream as well. But not in the ‘he’ll be my boyfriend one day, you’ll see’ kind of dream. The literal way. Dreams are alternate universes that are parallel to our world. Intangible, unrealistic and absolutely ridiculous at times. Which is exactly what the thought of dating (let alone talking) to Lee Heeseung sounds like to you.
Like every girl on campus, you’d look at that gorgeous, doe-eyed man and think to yourself, ‘That is unfair’. Mouth hanging open like an idiot as you wonder about how god must have taken his sweet old time creating him. Somehow, he's the star player of the basketball team who’s also a brilliant computer science student? I mean, seriously, he could have left something for the rest of the peasant population. Not to mention, you’d once seen a video of him belting out ‘Boyfriend’ by Justin Bieber during what you assume was a Karaoke hangout on his Instagram story. Since then, the idea of him singing you to sleep has become a recurring subject of thought. He’s got that earnest boyish charm that could knock a girl clean off her feet and make her thank him for it (though he’s much too kind to do such a thing). You are a firm believer that men can only be one of three good things: smart, hot or kind. Somehow, he’s managed to bypass your perfect algorithm and fit into all three categories.
You, on the other hand, are the messy Political Science major that runs solely on caffeine. The girl who wears a different pair of socks on each foot and stumbles into the classroom with hair sticking out in so many different directions it makes you look like a mad scientist (despite your…disabilities in STEM). Your one redeeming quality is your passion for your major, but even that is starting to wane each day as you grow tired of Professor Flit’s constant yammering about Russian Communism. So, long story short, you and him? No, Nada. Want to hear it in Spanish? Still no. Lee Heeseung is a gorgeous man that you would never have. And you were just fine with that. You weren’t going to deny that he’s your ideal guy. But you’re also not deluded or self-deprecating enough to chase after a guy like a dog chases its tail.
After all, you only ever had one proper interaction with the guy. A good one, admittedly. Flashback to your freshman year, where there was one class you and Heeseung shared, a mandatory English class. The two of you and one other guy happened to be paired for the first assessment. You, being the slightly nerdy and humanities-oriented geek you were, decided it was a marvellous idea to dump absolute brain vomit on all the ways you could present and break down essay structures in your upcoming presentation. 30 minutes in, your other teammate looked bored out of his mind and started to not-so-discreetly doomscroll under the table. But not Heeseung.
Heeseung listened, nodded to every word you had to say and chimed in when he wanted to. He didn’t roll his eyes; he didn’t tell you that ‘it's not that deep' when you told everyone to focus. And maybe he’s just good at acting nice, but if the way his eyes seemed to light up in agreement didn’t do the trick, you’re sure the way his nose crinkled when he smiled would have made you fall in love anyway. It was just that inevitable. But gods, you felt pathetic. Because long story short, all he really did was be a nice guy and nod. Seriously, how easy could you be? Did you regress to a troglodyte or something?
Hence, your life mission is to ensure no one (with the very generous exception of your friends Yunah and Jungwon) would ever find out you like him. Let alone find him attractive. If he greeted you? You’d make sure to give a stiff nod (maybe a wave if you were feeling brave) and then give yourself a pat on the back for not looking like you had it atrociously bad for him. You made sure that each limited interaction you had with him was perfectly controlled. Made sure that each expression was schooled as not to let the slightest hint of your feelings seep through. Because it was embarrassing enough that you were daydreaming about someone leagues (more like worlds) above. Now, think about the disaster if anyone found out? It’d be the target for teasing for endless years, like a cautionary tale. You had convinced yourself that there was no space for anything other than mindless admiration. It was the feeling akin to staring at a pretty painting at a museum before leaving with a skip in your step. After all, art in a museum wasn’t meant to be owned by any average person. Besides, you doubt he hardly knows your existence. And even if he eventually does figure out that you do go to the same university, what was he going to do? Fall in love with you at first sight? That was a ridiculous notion. Because the idea of Lee Heeseung liking you might as well be against Einstein's law of attraction. It’s just not natural. ---
Now, though you’d never know this, with that sceptical filter you always have on life (the one your friend Yunah says ages you 10 years), Lee Heeseung is irrevocably in love with you.
You heard that right. It’s a secret he’ll take to his grave, but he is. It all started in freshman year orientation, when he spotted you in the quad, and everything (and he swears by that) went slow motion. Roses bloomed by your face, and glittery sparkles invaded his visions like shooting stars. He doesn’t know much about art and all that stuff, but every time he reminisces about the moment he first saw you? He can’t help but think that’s how the painting “The Birth of Venus” would look as a real-life adaptation. The chatter of his friends died in the background, and all he could hear was your sweet voice cussing out some guy from your class about not doing his workload for some joint project.
It was magical. “You couldn’t do the work? Don’t fuck with me. Next time? I’ll shove a GoPro up your fucking ass to livestream to our professors how full of absolute shit you are-“ Well. As magical as verbal violence could be. But behind all that, he saw something else: It was honest. Something he could never be.
because god, if anyone knew that Lee Heeseung, certified hotshot, wasn't a smooth talker at all? He’d be cast out as a phoney and permanently exiled. He’d be royally screwed. Let’s rewind: A young Heeseung in 5th Grade gets a confession, a small chocolate box on Valentine's Day, from a girl one year above. Sure, he’s never talked to her before, but he just couldn’t say no, not when she looked like she was on the verge of a nervous breakdown. So he said yes. They broke up, of course, only a month later, after she claimed that he never liked her in the first place. Which was true, but to his credit, he tried! Now you can imagine how a people-pleasing habit and a good face go wrong. A mix that was fated for tragedy, if you will. It was bearable up to middle school until the girls started to get bolder and the rumours larger in high school. Exhibit A: “Did you hear? Heeseung is dating that hot senior from class B. I saw them make out in a classroom!” It really wasn’t the case. Heeseung couldn’t even get out a proper sentence the moment he caught a whiff of a girl's perfume. He was simply asked to tutor the senior by a teacher. So, like any other normal person, he asked her to meet him for a short study session, which she interpreted as flirting. One thing led to another, hence the rumours. But apparently, if you’re handsome, just smiling like you’re a robot on autopilot makes you a hot jock who can flirt for days. This was only one example of the many he could name. But then again, the issue was simple: He couldn’t say no. The Solution? Also simple. Say no. Deny the gossip, say no to parties he didn’t even want to go to, say no to the girls he didn’t know. His friends, Jay, Jake and Sunghoon, always tell him he’s creating problems for himself (which, fair enough, they have a point.). But Heeseung just couldn’t. Not when peers sent him enthusiastic invitations to their parties with hopeful eyes and certainly not when someone professed their love to him with whatever confession they had in stall. So he smiled a bit, buried the side of him that really just wanted to play League of Legends all day instead of partying it away at some other frat house. Unfortunately, one lie turned into two, and suddenly? No one knows ‘mega loser’ Heeseung. All they know is the campus heart-throb, the smooth-talking guy who really only built that persona to counteract how much of a wreck he was. And he couldn’t go back, even if he wanted to. Because that’s the only ‘Heeseung’ most people would ever know. Matter of fact, it was what people expected him to be before they even talked to him. But he’s not the boy wonder everyone thinks he is, and god does he feel like a fraud for admitting that.
So, when he saw you, in all your unapologetic glory, it was (with no exaggeration) life-changing. The way you stood up for yourself, how bold you were, it was blinding. Because you did the one thing he couldn’t do with staggering ease: Staying true to yourself.
At first, it was admiration; it made him look for your face in your one shared class a bit more, but that was it. But then, observing you in fleeting glances turned into rerouting his routes to his lectures just so he could pass by the humanities department (opposite to the computer lab, where he’s usually located). But it wasn't just the fact that you were bold; that wouldn’t have reduced him to the pathetic puppy love state he was in now. But you were considerate, in group projects, he’d hear praises float around about how you managed to find a middle ground in ideas. And sure, maybe this borderlined stalking, but he’s overheard a couple of conversations where you casually bring up minor details about them. Case in point? When you were in line in front of him at Chipotle, you miraculously managed to recite Jungwon’s absurdly long usual order that held up the line for at least 10 minutes.
And God, he wished someone would see him like that. Because maybe if they did, they’d be able to see beyond the fraudulent exterior he’s managed to build over the years. Maybe someone would get to know the Heeseung who has perfect pitch and a very ritualistic idea of how ramen should be cooked. And he thinks that someone might be you. But one problem. Very minuscule, microscopic detail. He thinks you hate him. In the rare times he greets you (one that he has to hype himself up to do), you’ve got that empty, glazed-over look in your face. Almost as if your mind is in another world in its own. Seriously, is he that boring? Or when he makes accidental eye contact with you, you give him a clumsy nod, like a machine with badly oiled gears and walk away as if your joints developed osteoporosis overnight. Not exactly screaming: “wow Heeseung! I love you too! Let’s ditch college and get eloped in the Maldives!”
But Lee Heeseung is anything but a man of inaction.
Which brings him to now, hair still damp from the steam of the basketball locker rooms as he fumbles with his apartment keys, one very important package in hand as he stumbles through the doorway, flinging his duffel bag. You see, a couple of weeks ago, he was hanging out with his friends after exam season. Unwinding by drinking a bit, gossiping, playing league and getting kicked out of various Roblox servers (work hard, play hard). The norm. Nothing that perked his attention beyond the usual. But then one of his best friends, Jake, said something that sounded too good to be true. “Forget about discussing the best pick-up lines- Etsy witches are the new shit. I had a friend who recently hired this Etsy witch to do some weird ritual for him that’s supposed to tether him to his crush. And guess what? It worked!” Jay, the more logical friend in the group, immediately scoffs, rightfully so. Jake was gullible as a toddler; most of these stories, the whole team took with a kilogram of salt. “That’s a load of shit. It’s probably just a coincidence. How stupid do you have to be to believe that?” “No, I’m serious! The guy could barely talk to his crush, then all of a sudden, they were dating!” Sunghoon and Jay had burst out laughing.
Now, Heeseung was never one to believe in ghosts or the supernatural. He never really believed in anything fictional, not after the tender age of 6, when he woke up to his father pretending to be the tooth fairy, placing money under his pillow like a criminal caught in the act. So when Jake brought up the witch, he initially brushed it off as a tall tale. But then his mind wandered to you. Impossible, mysterious and absolutely breathtaking, you. The one person he had no idea how to approach. The person who avoided him for reasons unknown and stared at him like he was singlehandedly the worst thing to happen to you. He realised, maybe it wasn’t that ridiculous to get some external help (in this case, some otherworldly spirit, who knows) and some supernaturally engineered luck, considering it seemed to take more than a miracle to even get you to look at him. So, with an optimistic mind that screamed ‘what’s the worst that could happen?’ and vodka-induced impulse, he managed to locate an Etsy witch, promptly made an order. He really didn’t know what the purchase included. It just advertised itself as a DIY ritual kit of sorts that could manifest masculine energy and attraction. Heeseung didn’t really understand what that meant. He simply chalked it up as a paraphrase of ‘your crush will like you back, and you’ll encounter them more often!’ Which brings him to now, holding the package with a giddy heart (which he tried to calm). He unboxes the box like a starved animal tearing through a carcass in a National Geographic documentary. But he’s thoroughly disappointed to see 3 sad-looking objects:
1. A flyer decorated with tacky neon green text that doesn’t exactly scream ‘legit’.
2. A very vague set of instructions promising love and happiness
3. An oddly fluorescent pink heart-shaped pendant that claims to be rose quartz (?)
Sure he wasn’t expecting the most high quality gemstone in the world, considering the whole package was around 25 bucks. But Heeseung thinks the witch (aka Suzane, single mom of three, according to her Etsy bio) could have at least tried to make it look presentable. But then again, it wouldn’t hurt to try, would it? He just spent 25 dollars, worth around 23 packs of ramen, on this kit after all.
So he opens the instruction manual tucked into the cardboard (though he doubts they’ll help much). They read as follows: Step 1: Read the incantation at the bottom of this instruction sheet. He peers down, and lo and behold, there’s a phonetic transcription of some weird Latin text he’d have a concussion reading. But then again, he had always been good at English and language studies, so maybe that would give him some advantage? So, with some in-head practice, he slowly recites the scripture with some added flair. Who knows, maybe the spirits would appreciate his theatrical and artistic interpretation of the spell? Plus! Mood making is an integral part of building belief in the supernatural. And Suzane, the very legitimate witch, had told him belief was key in making the whole ritual work. And without a scented candle and crystal circle, Heeseung needed all the help he could get in making this incantation as ‘real’ as humanely possible.
Step 2: Picture your target clearly That’s easy. He does that every time before he goes to sleep anyway. Creepy? A bit. But Heeseung firmly believes that it’s a matter of perspective. Plus, it’s not his fault you have such captivating eyes, cute lips and- Right, there’s still a next step. Step 3: Take out the pendant from the box!
He hums as he peers into the flimsy cardboard box that the whole set came in. There, in a smaller, cheap velvet box, is the pendant, nestled into the inner padding. He picks the object up by the thread before noticing how light it is…yeah…maybe it wasn’t real quartz. But who cares, it’s the thought and emotion that he puts into this ritual that will determine the success! And he’s confident that the amount of space you occupy in his head is borderline insane, so maybe that’ll help strengthen(?) the effect of the hex? Step 4: Wear the pendant and have fun! The wearing part? Doable. Having fun? Probably not, considering the fact that his friends would likely never let him live this down. And you know, being 25 dollars down, plus being scammed by an Etsy witch of all people. But that was negligible because 25 dollars was big boy money for a guy who slaved his time off at seven eleven. He wasn’t about to throw the necklace without draining it of everything it could be potentially worth. And so, he wears the glaring proof of his naivety and doomed romance on his neck with a pout as he slumps down onto the cold wooden planks of his modest apartment floor, all without noticing the faint pink glow emanating from the necklace.
🧷 images from pinterest (not mine), banner is by me!, divider credits go to the lovely @/pixopix!