Pairing : Hyunjin x reader (9th member, maknae)
Synopsis : During a variety show game segment where a camera zooms in to see if your pupils dilate when looking at the members, you stay cool and unbothered… until Hyunjin takes the seat across from you. One look, and your reaction is undeniable, sending the studio into chaos and the internet into meltdown.
The studio lights hum like a low promise. A circular table sits under a theater of cameras; spotlights carve the edges of your face into something soft and obvious. The host’s grin is theatrical— wide, delighted, like he’s handing the night a corkscrew and taking bets on when the bottle pops.
“Next game!” he says. “We call it… ‘Tell Me With Your Eyes’.”
Your heart does that cute, stupid flip people write about in playlists. You sit in the hot seat, smile fixed, palms cool against your knees, while eight familiar silhouettes fill the other chairs across from you. They’re loud and ridiculous, already jostling like it’s rehearsal for a circus that happens to be emotionally devastating.
A technician rolls over a small device : nothing more than a camera with a macro lens and a soft ring light. The rules, explained in jokey pseudo-science by the host; the camera will slowly zoom in on your eyes while each member takes a seat across from you. If your pupils dilate noticeably when someone locks eyes with you, the hosts will declare the love-detecting machine “validated.” The audience hoots. The members exchange smug glances.
You promise yourself not to react. You will be cool. You will be calm. You will not—under any circumstances—give them anything.
First up, Felix. He arrives with his signature, sunny dumb-blur energy and does a little pointless dance just to see you twitch. You just blink. Nothing.
Jisung barges in next, he squeaks something hyper and hopeful but your pupils stay steady.
Chan then slides forward grinning. The camera closes in on your eyes; nothing changes. “Tough crowd,” he mouths. The studio laughs. You breathe out, triumphant.
Jeongin strolls over next with that sly, foxlike grin, and you flashed a smile at him. Still nothing with your pupils.
Seungmin approaches and drops a very dry one-liner that would make a sap cry, and yet, your pupils remain disappointingly ordinary.
Lee Know glides up next, says something casually ridiculous and the audience chuckles. Your eyes do not betray you.
Changbin bursts in after him, flexing his biceps like a cartoon bodyguard. You roll your eyes playfully and your pupils refuse to cooperate with the script.
They’d then pat each other on the back, trading fake sad and rejected faces as if you broke their hearts while the host calls for one more final round for the last remaining member, theatrically dramatic, and the studio hums with anticipation.
Hyunjin stands from his seat last.
He doesn’t burst in on a joke. He doesn’t make a spectacle. He just walks measured, and when he reaches the chair across from you, something in the room hushes. It’s not the lights. It isn’t scripted. It’s him. He sits, shoulders relaxed, and tilts his head in a princely way that says he’s both completely aware of every eye in the room and completely uninterested in the audience. He only cares about you.
You look at him. The sound for a heartbeat filters out—muffled host chatter; plastic creak of a mic stand. Time thins, the camera lens a hot star at the edge of your vision.
It happens so fast it feels like being kissed by the dark. One second your eyes are normal, and another second, they’re wide, black wells that seem to drink in the light of the ring camera. There is no pause. Your body betrays you and stiffens like a secret forming.
Screams ripple from the members like a wave; teasing remarks and clapping erupted. They are all dying at the revelation.
Hyunjin, meanwhile, is impossibly still.
You can feel his presence like a second heartbeat. His cheeks are burning a color that’s almost, but not quite, shy pink. The corner of his mouth lifts, and his eyes, when they meet yours, are bright and a little wild, like someone who just read a secret line in a play and is delighted to find you memorized it too.
The host explodes theatrically: “WELL. WELL. WELL. SCIENCE HAS SPOKEN.” The audience roars, the members jab at one another, and every camera tries to catch the exact second your lids opened wider.
You bury your face in your hands and curse internally with an air of mortified fury. “Guys..stop..this is a trick—” you wheeze, words muffled. You want to die. You want, simultaneously, to laugh and to punch someone for making your insides flip out like an accordion.
Hyunjin then reaches out; not for theatrics, but for something small and steady, and rests a light, absurdly gentle finger on your wrist. His touch anchors you. He lets the audience be ridiculous and protects you with the smallest careless bravery.
The members keep teasing chaotically, and Hyunjin just let them; giving you the one look that says without words : I saw you first.
After the segment ends, backstage is a madhouse. The producer wants replays. The editing team marks the clip. In the hair and makeup room, members are still poking and teasing you, but Hyunjin stays near, drinking you in like he means to learn every inch of your unguarded reaction.
You tried to be indignant. You failed spectacularly.
The next day, the clip is everywhere.
X explodes in GIFs : the slow zoom to your eyes, the exact frame of dilation, Hyunjin’s little pinch-of-a-smile at the end. TikTok fan edits of the moment into a billion slow-mo soundbites bombarding everywhere. Hashtags trend across every social media, reaching to even other fandoms.
You open your phone and the mentions are a wildfire. DMs pour in from your friends : “I knew it!”, “Girl, what the helly?”, “Are you okay?” You can feel the blush creeping up your neck even over the glow of your screen.
Hyunjin’s feed? Quiet. He posts nothing. But he saves some edits he liked to a private folder. He watches them when the world isn’t watching. But when he catches your eye in the practice room, he stays nonchalant.
“I’m sorry,” you tell him later, somewhere between the chaos of interviews and the hum of a van. Your voice is small and earnest.
He lifts your chin with one finger and smiles like he’s decided on a small, excellent cruelty. “Don’t be,” he murmurs. “You reacted, and it was honest. I like honest.”
You want to fold into him, confess a hundred little betrayals—how your stomach still dropped, how you’d lied to yourself for days and nights, how seeing him made the world clap in stereo. Instead you smack his arm and he laughs, the sound a little relieved, a little proud.
“Also,” he says, a half-smirk grazing his mouth, “now the internet thinks we’re a science experiment. We should milk it.”
You glare. He leans in, conspiratorial, teeth flashing in a grin. “Not in public,” he promises. Then his voice drops, soft as the inside of a secret. “But definitely out of public.”
You laugh because you’re too dizzy not to. You laugh because the thing that scared you a lot is now a warm, ridiculous secret between two people who know the exact shape of each other’s foolishness.
And the truth— public, messy, viral or not—sits easy in your chest. The world may have seen the pupil-dilating proof, but the part that matters is private : the way Hyunjin’s hand finds yours after lights go down, the way his smile says without drama that he noticed first, and the way both of you will, from now on, always test each other with quiet glances.
