The Terrifying Ordeal of Being Known | Choi Jongho
Pairing: Choi Jongho x GN!Reader
Genre: Fluff, Established Relationship
Summary: Jongho subjects Y/N to the terrifying ordeal of being known. They love every second of it.
Word Count: 425
Warnings: Very self indulgent fluff, mentions of food, tiny mention of alcohol, Reader’s gender is not mentioned, no pronouns used, but they are said to have periods
A/N: Maybe cheese is my love language. This is my submission for the first clownracha monthly prompt of 2023. This month’s prompt was Self Indulgence, and when I say I took that to heart, I mean it.
This fanfiction is property of @/hobi-is-golden, reposting on any other platform without explicit permission is prohibited
There are few things more romantic than having someone know you inside and out, know you almost as well as you know yourself. You’d never had that before, not really. And learning everyone’s little quirks, the things that made them the person you fell in love with was exhausting when it wasn’t extended back to you.
But when you met Jongho, that changed. The way you remembered just the right temperature that he liked the room at when he slept mirrored the way he remembered which blanket you liked best when you stayed over at his place. When Jongho started blending your details with his, it was so natural that you almost didn’t notice.
He’d pick up your favorite from the coffee shop that you frequented whenever he came over, and he’d ask for extra cinnamon and an extra shot of espresso when he knew that your period was fucking you over, just like you did. On your best days, when you were feeling satisfied with yourself or brag to him over text, he’d swing by and pick up your favorite sweets from the convenience store as a little prize. You’d only mentioned liking them to him once.
The moment that you realized, the day that it fully sank in that Jongho was the one, was when he brought you brunch while you worked from home – the comfort of his home that is. He knew you never ate in the mornings, that eating too soon after waking up gave you a stomach ache, and that you were working too hard to wait for lunch.
He proudly presented you with a plate of your favorite foods. Pancakes, two sausage patties, a few strawberries, and scrambled eggs. Scrambled eggs topped with shredded colby jack cheese. Your favorite cheese to put on eggs. He put down a glass of juice – apple, because you only liked orange juice as a mixer.
You looked at him, your jaw hanging open in awe. When had he taken the time? How had you gotten so lucky?
“It’s all how you like, right?” He asked, looking a little concerned by your reaction as he mentally ran through his little checklist. You absolutely beamed at him.
“It’s absolutely perfect, Jjong. You’re perfect.” You pulled him closer, wrapping your arms around his middle from where you were sitting. He giggled.
“You deserve the best.” He mumbled into your hair, pressing a tiny kiss to the top of your head before pointing your attention back to the food in front of you.”
Summary: Maybe leaving you in charge of the most important part of a plan wasn’t the wisest decision. Then again, how were your friends supposed to know that you wouldn’t react well to accidentally kidnapping an idol?
Genre: Comedy, Action? A lil bit of fluff bc Christmas be comin’
Warning(s): Borderline criminal activity? PLEASE do not do what Y/N does in the story, just, there are better ways of surprising people dear lord--I repeat we DO NOT ENDORSE SASAENG BEHAVIOUR otherwise enjoy the fic
Word Count: 3451
Theme Song: Emergency - Day6
AN: Based off this prompt. This is not going to be the only time I use this song I know it. Stan Day6 my dudes, Entropy is just bop after jam after bop after jam. Please, do yourself a favour and give it a listen
~~~
It was meant to be a prank.
And an easy one at that.
You could hear the steps in your head as you drove, eyes flicking back to the monitor then back to the road.
Step One: Find your best friend. He’ll have been out at a business meeting, and will be waiting for a night bus on Fehler Street. An empty street, with an empty bus, that always ran late. No one would be there to see and demand an explanation and thus ruin the surprise. This was, by far, the easiest part.
Step Two: Slip on the blindfold and quickly yeet him in your car (gently, no matter what the others said you should do, you were not going to throw him.)
Step Three: Bring him back to your house, put him in your room until the downstairs is surely decorated and then finally...
Step Four: Surprise him with his early Christmas present by removing his blindfold to reveal his family, flown over after two years of living on the other side of the planet.
Simple really.
You spotted the road sign demanding 30 along the street and you cursed, applying the brakes a little bit too hard. A small grunt pricked your ears and you shot back an apology, before being forced to bring the car to a stop at a red light.
Your friends had encouraged you to be the one who did it.
After all, he knew you best and wouldn’t freak him out as much if you were the one to apply the blindfold.
You’d had it all clear in your head.
You'd calmed your nerves, but there wasn’t even many of them to begin with. What could have possibly gone wrong? You were clever and he was a calm guy, he’d see the funny side and then probably burst into tears as he saw his mother’s loving smile, after all that time of only seeing it digitally.
Heart-warming.
Easy.
God, how could you have been stupid enough to screw up on Step One?
The red haze continued to drift across the streams lacing the edges of the road, dashed methodically by the diligent attempts of windscreen wipers to chase away spatters of rain from the glass.
But the rain kept pouring.
You figured it’d flood the streets at this rate. Perhaps a bonus, a mark in your favour.
Truth be told, it had been excessively dark when you’d gotten into your car to make the drive and enact the plan in the first place. Blame the winter weather, it had banished the sun for weeks.
It was pitch black when you’d reached Fehler Street, the rain lulled into a silent drizzle, speckling the windshield like glitter. The bus stop was illuminated by a dull lamppost, its bulb clearly overdue for a change by months. You’d pulled up against the pavement where the bonnet just brushed the light, keeping a close eye on the lone figure, hunched to stare at his hand.
His back had been facing you, he was the same height and wore a long, fashionable trench coat, much like your best friend always did. You questioned the beret that became apparent the closer you drew, but he always kept with times, a close eye on the fashion trends and threading his own twists in them. Perhaps berets had finally become ironic.
The issue here was, you hadn’t thought much of it, even if the signs were there. He seemed a little shorter than usual, wearing a pair of boots that seemed a lot heavier than he ever would have normally considered wearing. A broader shoulder too.
And that beret.
Scarlet morphed into amber, setting you free. You accelerated round to the left, tipping your head to avoid the spotlights of an oncoming van.
Where you could you go?
Could you logistically catch a train?
A plane?
What were you thinking?
What were you even doing?
The blindfold had caught his nose slightly, and you hadn’t been able to halt an apology before it left your lips.
Luckily he didn’t fight back. You hadn’t worried about fighting then, your friend had the biceps of cooked tomatoes and a will as weak as them too.
But even as your hand enclosed around his arm and led him away and into the darkness, urging him into the backseat like a cat into a carrier, not a single thought of how your fingers no longer reached halfway round his arm crossed your mind.
Of course they did now, but what use was it now?
You’d been too preoccupied with the frozen figure on the opposite side of the road, trying to calculate if they were looking at you or the other way.
It was too late.
“Where are we going now?”
You swerved, a yelp stuck in the back of your throat as you straightened your lines.
He hadn’t said a word since your brief exit from your car, where the porch lights had made reality seem too cutting.
“D-Do you mind?” you clamoured, making the mistake of glancing into the rear-view mirror.
Your eyes met ink, a pair of black stars, catching the passing white of the headlights that briefly unveiled their true deep brown from the shadows.
You immediately shot your eyes back onto the road. You imagined he smirked a little. Not that you really knew.
On the drive back to the house your roommate’s boyfriend offered freely as HQ, you’d said very little, and he had said nothing at all. It was a short journey, and your excitement had kept you preoccupied, away from glancing back at the man you’d ‘kidnapped’.
It wasn’t really fair to even include apostrophes. You had kidnapped someone.
Abducted. Snatched. Captured.
Mistakenly.
As you’d pulled up, you clambered excitedly out of the car and didn’t grace his face with a single glimpse, not even as you brought him up to the back door, outdoor lamp startlingly piercing, and knocked.
You didn’t look up even as you had a realisation while waiting for the door to be unlocked, “Ok, you don’t have to worry- wait, did I tell you that it’s me, Y/N?”
You only raised your head when the voice you heard was not one you recognised, as the man replied, “No, you didn’t, and I wished that made all of this make more sense.”
It couldn’t really be described as a head-raise, really. More of a snap.
The face you saw bore no resemblance to your best friend.
His nose was pointed, jawline too broad and sharp to match his proportions, cheeks shallow and lips beautifully curved but thin.
This man, that you’d seized from the streets, with no knowledge of who you were, was the complete opposite of him.
His nose was much rounder, his cheeks soft, lips full, and his whole stature in possession of a much more mature aura. Lord his skin tone was several shades darker than your best friend too.
He was also much higher on the social ladder.
Hell, he was actually on it.
You’d always admired that trait in your friend, actively going against the grain and commenting on the order that everyone merely followed without a second thought.
It rarely made him popular however, and he was not a celebrity by all means, even if he stood out in the crowd.
This man though, was.
And wouldn’t stand out in a crowd, because the crowds were too big to let him be seen at all.
Instead of your friend, you’d blindfolded and taken Jongho instead.
The main vocalist of Ateez, who could sing an entire stage away.
A K-pop idol, who didn’t know you, and never should have.
.
.
He gazed somewhat absently at the back of your head, your hair obscuring much of your face from his angle in his seat.
He allowed his lips to spread into a tiny smile.
God, was this hilarious. It took an immense amount of strength to not burst into utter laughter.
But he knew you wouldn’t appreciate it, so kept it under wraps.
You weren’t a sasaeng. It was obvious. They all possessed a strange glint in their eyes, the kind of gleam that he imagined the Victorian archaeologists had when they were presented with a new sarcophagus.
Deranged people going out of their way to steal treasure they were never destined to find.
But you, when you pulled down his blindfold and he found himself standing in front of the backdoor of a small but quaint house, and then peered down and looked you square in the eye.
It was clear there had been a mistake.
Now, why you had planned to blindfold someone in the middle of a winter’s evening and take them to that house he had no idea, but you hadn’t been rough, nor did you seem unkind, and so he’d waited.
After seeing an excitement quickly drain away from your features to be replaced with sheer terror, and after watching you interrogate yourself under your breath, leading him back to your car, urgently clambering back inside and immediately driving the two of you away...
He felt a kind of pity.
It was also evident you didn’t know where you were going, or what you were doing. You were too jumpy for that.
He lowered his voice, trying to avoid startling you again - lest it sent you off the road this time.
“Look, Y/N? It’s ok, just drive me back to the bus stop, I doubt the bus will even be there yet.”
He didn’t receive a response. All he heard was the squeak of your hands as you tightened them around the wheel.
He tried again, a laugh lilted into his voice. “Hey, I won’t even say a word about what just happened, ok? We’ll go our separate ways. Sound good?”
You considered his offer, and dearly wanted to say something, only to find your voice stuck in your throat.
You resulted to a nod, though a part of you hoped he would ask something again, as if he took that as an answer, it meant he was looking at you.
“Good,” he responded, jolting your heart into an even faster beat.
As your head swam in a sea of churning thoughts, your subconscious took charge and managed to get your hands to take you back to the bus shelter.
Taking the corner, you just about managed to steady your breathing.
Until your vision was slapped with coursing red and blue.
You slammed the brakes, body lurching until your ribs dug into the wheel.
It was a single car, with two officers, one on the pavement talking to a woman, the other in the road, standing where you had previously parked.
Their heads flicked towards the origin of the screeches of tires, the woman’s hand flying up in an affirmative point.
"Ah.” Jongho muttered. “I’m sure we can-”
He never got to finish, as you kicked the reverse pedal and spun the wheel, sending the car back up the road in a frenzy.
He gripped onto the shotgun seat desperately, feeling his body being shoved into the footwell by momentum.
The rear-view mirror depicted an officer running towards the vehicle, an open hand raised urgently, lips parted wide in a shout.
You didn’t stop.
Another mistake.
.
.
Tearing out of the junction, blessed with clear roads, you sped away from the city, away from the house, the plans, the friends you had.
Once he retrieved himself from the floor, eyes as wide as dinner plates, he exclaimed, “What the hell are you doing?”
“I don’t know!” you yelled back. “What am I doing?”
“Driving away from the police?! Making them think you’ve done something wrong!”
“But I did do something wrong!”
“Wasn’t this an accident?!”
“Yes but-”
“Well then you didn’t-”
“I abducted a K-pop idol!” you insisted. “Whether it was by accident or not, I don’t think the law cares!”
He sunk back into his seat.
How did he even get into this situation.
“Why did you blindfold me and drive me to that house?” he asked as gently as he could muster.
You swallowed thickly. “I... I was supposed to bring my best friend to my roommate’s boyfriend’s house for his surprise Christmas present.”
“The boyfriend’s surprise present?”
“No! No my best friend’s present.”
“A Christmas present on the 1st of December-?”
“An early Christmas present,” you added indignantly, lips pursed and eyes narrowed into a scowl, almost boring a into the glass.
“I...?”
It was his turn to run out of words.
.
.
As you drove into the night, the number of other cars thinning one by one, you began to grow antsier by the second.
Jongho decided to break the silence.
“Does this mean that we’re fugitives now?”
After a few seconds of silence, as you pondered his statement, you replied gruffly, “No, only I’m a fugitive.”
You glanced into the rear view mirror, not meeting his gaze, to you fortune, but rather watching his expression fill with... disappointment?
“What am I then in this scenario?”
His eyes flicked up.
You pushed yours to look away.
“Uh, I don’t know,” you paused, “hostage?”
You cautiously peered into the glass, hoping not to run into his stare there.
You didn’t, instead finding him nodding, opting to look out of the window.
You managed to work up the courage to state, “You seem, really too calm about all of this.”
He didn’t look away from the window.
“Do I?”
You hummed in affirmation.
“Oh, well,” he shrugged, “I guess it’ll just look funny on my KProfile page.”
You scoffed in horror.
“And Twitter is going be quite amusing when I get back.”
There was so much wrong with what he just said.
Your thoughts were entrained on just one objection to it.
“Jongho! I could go to jail!”
You heard a chuckle, and you opened your mouth to call him out, when he leant forward, leaning against the back of the other chair. He was far enough forward that you could just about see the edges of his face in the corner of your eyes.
“Relax Y/N, I wouldn’t let you go to jail. Victims get a say in the punishment for criminals here. And you’re not even a criminal. You don’t deserve a prison sentence. You didn’t do anything wrong, just messed up.”
“A lot,” you interjected.
“Well, yeah, a lot, but it was a good intention.”
“You really believe my mess of a story?” you cried. You regretted your words immediately, it made you sound like it had all been a lie.
“Should I not?” he asked lowly, almost reassuringly.
You shut your mouth, turning your head away so you didn’t have to catch a glimpse of his handsome face.
He smiled tiredly. He wasn’t sleepy, only that the adrenaline had worn off and left him a little low. Still, he wasn’t going to waste a minute. This was almost as exciting as his concerts.
“Can we have some music on?” he enquired.
“Sure.”
You pressed the stereo on without thinking.
The playlist was the one you always used. It wasn’t all Ateez.
But of course the song you’d left it to start on was automatically an Ateez song.
As soon as the rousing horn of Pirate King played you wanted a sinkhole to swallow you whole.
“Oh, you’re an Atiny?”
The lilt of surprise shocked you to say the least.
He continued. “Sorry, you just don’t seem like the type.”
“I just,” you searched frantically for words, “listen to the songs sometimes.”
“Oh yeah?”
“Yes. I-I think this playlist is the one with the most Ateez on it, though. The others don’t... they don’t have any where near as many on them. Uh, sorry.”
“So no bias then?”
You almost choked on your own saliva. “Nope. No bias at all. I actually only know you, and... what’s the other one? Min- Mongo?”
Jongho let a rise of laughter bubble from his lips. “Mongo? Yeah there’s Mongo too, I love Mongo. My favourite hyung, Mongo.”
His laughter was slightly contagious, if you were honest. However it didn’t subside the horror that twisted your heart and gripped your vocal chords.
Truth be told, you’d been a fan of Ateez since the first unveils.
Jongho had always stood out to you, with his soaring vocals and softer personality. He wasn’t the one everyone else went for, but they were always the more interesting people.
You felt awful lying to him, but you weren’t sure you wanted him to know the truth either.
You heard him mumble, “I’m telling Mingi that that’s his name now. Mongo. Knowing him he’ll like it. Mongo-hyung. You know what, it’s got a little bit of a ring to it.”
You interrupted, knowing you would relive the moment before your eyes for as long as the song played, and asked, “Hey, do you mind if I skip? Not really... feeling the vibes right now.”
“Be my guest,” he answered, voice still tinged with amusement.
You felt traitorous pressing skip. Never had you skipped Pirate King before, when it came on the stereo. The only thing you pressed when it came on would be the dial to turn the volume up.
Luckily, shuffle granted you a song by Day6, which was much more harmless.
Though the lyrics were apt to say the least.
“Hey, I know this one,” Jongho mentioned, “what’s it called again?”
“Emergency.”
“That’s the one.”
There was a brief silence.
You knew what was coming.
“Hey that fits the situation quite-”
“Yeah I know.” You rolled your eyes.
You tried to pay closer attention to the song rather than the feeling of Jongho’s presence.
You relished in the familiarity Young K’s vocals, and the satisfying harmonies of Wonpil’s voice.
Hearing the siren in the distant background of the song set you on edge a little bit, but listening to Dowoon’s part forced you to crack a smile.
Until the sirens didn’t stop.
You snapped your head up, eyes reaching the wing mirror instinctively.
Just as you did so, there was a flash of blue as headlights blinked aggressively, with two other cars careening round the corner you’d just passed.
“Oh sh-!”
Jongho, who quickly caught on, sat bolt upright in his seat.
“What do I-?!”
“Well you can do two things,” he asserted, “you can either pull over and that’ll be that,” he hesitated dramatically, “or you could drive like a maniac and see if you could escape, drop me off and then burn the car.”
“I- what?!”
“I’m kidding, just pull over,” Jongho sighed. “It was nice meeting you though, Y/N. Thanks for the ride.”
“No problem,” you replied out of reflex, very much confused, stress evident in your voice, as you manoeuvred your hands to steer the vehicle into a stop by the side of the road.
As the engine puttered into a stop, you felt your breath get stuck in your throat, fear trembling through your veins.
.
.
You weren’t expecting what happened after to say the least.
The officers had questioned you, but Jongho did as he promised.
You weren’t even going to go to court.
You’d never felt more relieved in your life after you heard the laughs from their mouths, as Jongho seemed to tell a tall tale of sorts, twisted to feature some of the events that had transpired.
You’d been completely zoned out, however, your thoughts whirling as your face showed nothing, reliving the conversation you and your bias had had.
It was short, and fleeting, as all these things were, but that meant it was all the harder to forget.
“Can we do this again sometime?”
“What?” you’d cried incredulously.
“Though, with less blindfolds and more talking next time?” he continued, as if you’d understood his words fully.
What he’d said was barely tangible to you, but you nodded all the same.
Before he’d gotten out of the car, you’d met eyes again.
This time, you forced yourself to stare back, let yourself melt into that watchful, yet patient and welcoming gaze.
And then he was gone.
Well, he was right outside your car, with the door left open so it let all the cold of the night in, but you barely noticed it swarming at your legs.
Instead, you just stared at the torn piece of paper, twitching in the cool breeze upon the seat empty beside you. The scribbled number etched across its surface seemed to drift across the lines, and blurred in your eyes as you focused too intently on it.
You’d gotten Jongho’s number?
By accidentally abducting him?
Why had he trusted you with it?
What was he thinking?
~~~
AN: This turned out to be way longer than expected. Who saw that coming, am I right
