COMMUNICATION : Yeon Sieun
pairing : Yeon Sieun x american!fem!reader
genre : fluff
description : As a transfer student to Eunjang, and not speaking Korean very well, Sieun takes it upon himself to find different ways to talk to you.
requested by : anon! thank you so much lovely! 🤍
note : anything sieun says would be in Korean unless i’ve specified otherwise 🤍 (this probably isn’t very good but bare with 😞)
Sieun doesn’t talk much. You were pretty much the same as him in that sense. Except instead of choosing not to talk, it was difficult to talk in another language in a school of people you didn’t know.
Not to mention you didn’t know a lot of Korean. The sentence structure was confusing, the particles were brain hurting. But you understood more then you could say.
Familiar words would come up and you’d pick up what the mean. And you knew enough to get by. Sorta.
Like Hello, thank you, no, yes, excuse me, please.
Moving from America was difficult enough, but trying to study when the homework was in a different language?
You had asked most your teachers if they could translate the homework for you or get an English version. To no avail.
Google translate it is.
You’ve only been in Korea for a month, and already the walls of Eunjang feel taller than they should.
The syllables your classmates speak blur together like static. You nod a lot. Smile even more. Laugh when someone else does, just to keep up.
Not at first.
Yeon Sieun doesn’t speak to you.
He doesn’t avoid you, just watches quietly when the teacher asks you a question and you freeze, but pretends he’s not watching.
When you whisper into your phone’s translator. When you scribble a vocabulary word three times in the margin of your textbook like maybe repetition will make the meaning stick.
You hadn’t heard the rumours of him around school. The ones about him killing his classmate. You didn’t understand what they were saying but it was obvious to tell that it wasn’t good.
Who were you to judge? The boy didn’t seem harmful or cold. More misunderstood. Everyday was the same, sitting with his head on the desk in most lessons, most of the time asleep. At least that was what people were fooled to believe.
He wasn’t asleep most of the time, how could he?
You were assigned to sit next to him. You didn’t mind. It was more peaceful then when people would try to talk to you and you had to pretend to understand.
But on a Tuesday that smells like chalk dust and rain, your pen ran out of ink. Your last one of course.
Glancing to your side, there’s one boy who’s busy talking to his friends. And they don’t seem like the kind to be considerate of the language barrier.
Your only other option was Sieun. He wouldn’t mind right? The boy must have at least ten pens on him. You’ve seen the way he clicks his pen and grips it tighter in his hand whenever someone’s frustrating him.
His head was on the desk as usual but you could tell he wasn’t sleeping. He seemed more emotionally drained then physically. You could understand that.
Gently, half hesitant you tapped his shoulder. And the first time he ignored you. Until you muttered a dodgy, quiet ‘excuse me’ in his mother tongue with an accent.
Sieun looked up, eyes not as cold as others say. And you can feel the eyes of some people staring at you two as if to say ‘why are you talking to him’
You motioned towards your pen, slightly awkwardly hoping he’d understand, adding a small ‘please’ in Korean to be polite.
The boy looked at you for a moment, his eyes not giving anything away except for a rare tiredness he couldn’t put into words.
Not that you would understand it anyway.
Then he gave you his pen. The one he was using. Before getting a different one for himself and going back to his work.
You slightly nervously say ‘thank you’ before going back to your work. Honestly it was hard having to switch from the translator to the page.
It was just writing the same thing twice but one in another language.
The next day was the same. Wordlessly translating meaningless words, ignoring the looks of other people seeing a foreigner in their class, either one of disgust or odd intrigue.
You sat back on your seat, noticing that Sieun wasn’t here yet. To be honest you were a couple minutes early to this class. But Sieun seemed to always be there before anyone else.
Then as if on cue, he walked in. His eyes still carried the exhaustion, and his bag hung loosely off his shoulder. He walked towards his seat, not even glancing at you.
He placed a blue sticky note on your textbook before going back to his seat next to yours.
You blink.
In deep ink, he wrote,
책 = Book
Book, you repeat in your head. That’s one more word to your vocabulary at least. And it was appreciated more than he knew. Or maybe he did know.
You glance up.
His head is already buried in the uncomfortable wood, and his eyes are closed tightly, as if he was trying to rid of a headache.
That afternoon, he doesn’t sleep through lunch. Instead he finds the empty stairwell you go to during breaks.
It’s quite, empty. But it doesn’t feel omelet. Just a break from the all too overbearing boys there.
You don’t look up from your phone when you hear the door open. Just assuming it was someone trying to get through.
Until he drops next to you, legs out in front of him, backpack abandoned next to him.
“You okay?” he spoke, unsure if you would understand. Luckily it was a word you had heard enough to get.
You nod with a small, polite smile unsure why he was here, but not exactly disliking the company.
He doesn’t say anything else for a while. Just pulls out his phone, same as you, but doesn’t scroll. You catch it from the corner of your eye, his screen’s blank. Just dim light reflecting your outline beside him.
You think maybe he’s waiting for you to leave.
But when you shift your bag to stand, his hand suddenly moves, not touching you, but palm facing out like a stop sign. Then he opens the translator app on his phone.
He types something. Tilts it toward you.
“You always come here?”
You blink, then nod. You tap your fingers twice against your knee, thinking, before gently nudging your own phone toward him. He passes his without question.
You type slower than he did.
“Quiet. Easy to breathe here.”
He reads it for longer than necessary, mouth tugging into the faintest almost-smile. Then types,
“You don’t like the cafeteria?”
You shake your head.
“Noisy. And… hard to listen. Fast.”
He nods like he understands, not just the words, but the feeling under them. Then, as if out of nowhere, he pulls something from his bag. A small, beaten-up paperback.
He flips through the pages. Not in Korean. English. A translation copy of some old Korean novel, pages full of scribbles and circled words. He taps a sentence, then hands it to you. You squint down at the faded line under his thumb,
“Sometimes, being near is louder than being loud.”
You look at him. He’s not looking at you, just resting his head back against the wall, eyes half-lidded. But you get it.
He didn’t come here to talk.
He came here to be near.
And for the first time since coming here, your heart calms in a way you can’t explain with any of the words you know yet.
The following week, the folded notes stop.
Instead, he brings you something else.
A small stack of flashcards, clipped together with a binder ring. You blink down at them as he hands them over, plain, rectangular cards, some already marked with faint creases like they’ve been flipped through too many times.
You glance at him. He doesn’t explain. Just nods, nudges his backpack to the side, and sits like always, legs out, back against the wall.
You flip the first one over.
A doodle.
A square stairwell, two stick figures sitting side by side, and a little speech bubble with a heart drawn outside of it, not inside. Almost like he’s saying, this isn’t about words.
The second card, a drawing of a tray of food. One side scribbled out, the other circled in soft highlighter.
You grin. The cafeteria again. He’s teasing you.
Third card, a sad face with spiraling lines above its head. You touch your temple.
He nods, understanding, headache.
But it’s the fourth card that makes you pause.
Just a sketch of a coffee cup. Steam curling from the top. Below it, a tiny envelope drawn open, like it’s meant to contain something. A message, maybe.
You turn it toward him, silently asking.
He pulls out a second stack. His set.
One by one, he flips his own cards, stopping on one that matches yours, the same coffee cup, same steam, same open envelope.
He taps it twice with his thumb, then leans his head back and closes his eyes. Not asleep. Just… resting.
You mirror him, pressing your shoulder just slightly closer this time.
And just like that, the system forms,
No language yet. Just picture cards. Shared symbols. Matching decks.
Some cards are more complicated. One day, he shows you a sketch of a hand holding another. No faces, no background. Just the gesture. Then places it between you both without saying anything.
You don’t pick it up. You don’t need to. You let your pinky hover near his on the cold stairwell step, barely brushing.
It says enough.
Another day, you walk in to find a card already placed where you sit.
An open book. But one of the pages has a bandage on it.
He doesn’t look at you when you pick it up. Just waits, eyes on the far wall, unreadable.
You hold it, studying it quietly. Then you slide out your phone, open your drawing app, and sketch your reply with trembling fingers.
A closed book.
Bandage removed. Page wrinkled, but healing.
You show it to him.
He finally looks at you, and you see something shift behind his eyes, like the moment when clouds break and sunlight filters through, slow and pale.
Still no words. Not a single one exchanged. Yet, at least. You didn’t mind that though. Throughout the school days you could both tell the other was too exhausted or drained to communicate properly. So maybe this way was easier in that sense too.
But it’s more than enough.
That’s how it goes.
Some people build a friendship on conversation. Get to know each other solely on words you can’t promise are true.
You build one in the white space between sentences, in quiet drawings, flicked glances, and unspoken invitations.
In this stairwell, silence isn’t empty.
It’s fluent.
What neither of you realise throughout this though, is that you were both learning each others language. Slowly, but surely.
Not that the effort wasn’t enough already, but it would be nice to understand each other through words too.
Sieun honestly was learning English quicker then you were Korean. But that was to be expected when the homework he had to balance was already in his language.
You however, were trying to balance learning a new language, and translating your homework into your native one.
Another couple weeks later. You had picked up the language technique - if you could even call it that - way better then before. And it was more fun than anything. Maybe drawing what you felt was easier than saying it.
You know what the card means before he even gives it to you.
It’s a door. Drawn a little crooked, but clearly open, just slightly, just enough. A keyhole with no key. A welcome, not an ask.
He slides it across the step toward you. No eye contact. Just his usual slouched posture, hood half-up, fingers twitching faintly from cold or nerves. Maybe both.
You look at it. Then at him. His soft, dark eyes looked even more hypnotising through the lighting of this room.
Then you nod once, a hint of a smile on your face.
And that’s all it takes.
His apartment is exactly what you expect.
Sparse. Neat. Quiet. Everything placed like it has a reason to be there.
The shoes by the door lined up. The blanket on the couch still folded in sharp corners. The books stacked without titles visible, like he doesn’t want to be asked about them.
He watches you walk in without saying anything. But when you stop in the doorway, uncertain, he raises one hand, flat like a barrier.
Then curls his fingers slowly, beckoning.
Come in.
No words. Just the same language you’ve built between you.
He motions toward the floor cushions near the coffee table. You settle down, glancing around while he ducks into the kitchen.
A beat later, he returns with two mugs of something hot. You try to thank him in Korean, quietly, and he pauses.
Then replies in slow, clumsy English,
“Warm. Good for… um. Cold.”
It’s not smooth, but it hits you square in the chest. You knew he understood a tiny bit of English but you could tell that this was something he truly cared about getting.
You grin, can’t help it. He glances down, ears going pink with the fear of getting something wrong. Or maybe the sight of your smile and slightly crinkled eyes had more of an effect on him than he would let on.
You take a sip, hum a little, “mmm,” followed by a thumbs-up. More than grateful that he was trying.
It’s more than most people have done before for you. Who would attempt to learn a whole language just to understand someone they spend time with.
His shoulders ease.
And for a while, you just sit like that. Cross-legged. Quiet. Familiar. Steam rising. City noises muffled by the window.
Then, Sieun opens the small notebook sitting next to his phone. He flips to a page and turns it toward you.
What do you call this?
Below the question is a sketch of the tea kettle.
You blink. Then answer, spelling it slowly aloud, writing it in your own little travel notebook, the one you’ve been secretly building since the second week you met him.
Then you point to the same drawing and ask, in halting Korean,
“And… Korean?”
He pauses. Smiles faintly.
Says the word, slow. Clear. You repeat it. He nods.
Then he points to the word you wrote.
“Tea,” he says.
It goes back and forth like that.
No pressure. No lessons. Just gentle exchange. And the fact he was trying to understand you better meant more to you then he could ever realise.
You were in his home country, the effort should be from you to him. And whilst you were doing everything to understand the language and culture more, it felt safer knowing you had someone who was helping you along the way.
Sieun looks at you. Really looks at you. The kind that says he’s paying more attention to you than anything else in his world.
And whilst most of the time, his eyes are unreadable, you understand it more than the words in your vocabulary.
“I like you” He speaks in easy English. Practised. And it almost takes the wind out of you. Because before you could reply, he’s leaning forehead and placing the most gentle kiss to your cheek.
He pulls back quicker then he leaned it, slightly awkward sitting there waiting for a reaction.
Had he read the situation wrong?
Instead of ignoring the turmoil in your mind right now, you smile, barely visible and return the ministration, your soft lips placed upon his upper cheek.
Yours was more stable. Slower, More sure now that you knew that your feelings were mutual.
Sieun could’ve forgotten how to breath right there if it wasn’t for the fact his heart was going a hundred miles per hour.
Your faces were close now. Not close enough to be considered romantic but enough to suggest something intimate.
“I like you too” You reply. In Korean. And when you had learnt them words just a few nights ago, you realised you recognised them. Not from around school, or on TV. But from Sieun.
When he would murmur quiet Korean in the safety of the stairwell, as if he didn’t even realise he was doing it. Soft mumbling, barely audible, things you didn’t understand yet. But you recognised them words when you learnt them.
For someone who doesn’t smile much - at all - Sieun’s eyes are glistening with something more heartfelt than before.
Adoration.
And the corner of his lips are turned up slightly, not a smile, but almost. And you notice it straight away, point it out as if it was the rarest sight on the planet. And maybe it was.
He attempts to brush off the fact he was close to breaking his facade, furrowing his eyebrows slightly as if he was confused, but the ghost of a smile still plays at his lips.
And you giggle. Soft, warm, warm enough to fully break the mask behind his eyes and he smiles, really smiles.
Something he hasn’t done in a long time. Not since Su-Ho.