Omggg I just read your post ೃ⁀➷ SCARS & KITTENS ☆.｡.:* and it's just beautiful pleaseee make more scenarios of Saku and crush bestfriend, this made my heart race 😽😽 hope you read this ⸜( •⌄• )⸝
Sakuya realizes you and him might match in more ways than just keychains.
PAIRING . . . nct wish sakuya x fem!reader
WORD COUNT . . . 4.0k
CONTENT . . . best friends crushing on each other, fluff, mutual pining, yearning, teasing, saku's lowkey down bad
SUZA'S NOTE . . . errr so i’m not sure if this was a request or not but here u go anon 😁😁 tysm for liking scars and kittens!! working on THIS little monster put me in a writer's block as great as the wall of china. genuinely, it’s been a looong while since i struggled like i did writing this 😭😭 and i wanted to post this on saku’s bday but i didn’t wanna wait. hope u enjoy!! :)
TAGLIST . . . @gyubvlin
On a Saturday morning, Sakuya sends you a text saying to meet him at Hongdae station later in the day.
It’s a sunny mid-afternoon when you get on the subway. The weather has gotten colder and it’s finally time to switch your summer clothes for a bit warmer wardrobe, so to celebrate that, you put more effort into your look today.
This, and because you haven’t seen Sakuya for more than one week.
It’s not a long time in the grand scheme of things, but you are used to meeting Sakuya nearly every day. It’s been weird to see him cancel every hang out this week, but since the exam season is coming up, you assumed that he’s been busy studying and didn’t think further. You smile at the thought of seeing him again—after all, you’ve kind of missed him this week.
You notice Sakuya almost immediately after you get out of the train. His shoulder is pressed against a white pillar and he’s playing on his phone, head hung low. You watch him for a moment with a light frown. Something is off. It’s obviously Sakuya you’re looking at—you know your best friend when you see him—but his backpack or his keychains are nowhere to be seen. He never goes anywhere without his backpack, and he wouldn’t detach the keychains either, so what’s going on?
You walk up to him with a suspicious look.
Sakuya’s head lifts and he waves at you with a full smile. “Hi.”
Murmuring a reply, you eye him with crossed arms. “Where are your keychains? Or your backpack?”
“I’m glad to see you too,” he says in a flat tone. “I got a new bag.”
Sakuya grabs the thick strap passing through his chest and pulls it. A bag swings from his back to the front and he lifts it and shows it off like a trophy. It’s a plain, black leather bag with two shoulder straps, a few silver metal details, and a tiny matching pouch attached to it. It’s stylish and very simple—nothing like something Sakuya would wear.
You stare at the bag with pure confusion in your eyes, and resting your hand over your mouth, you mutter after a few seconds of silence, “Saku, what is that?”
“What do you mean?” He stares blankly.
His hands drop the bag and it falls to his side again. Your eyes follow the movement.
His stare on you is a mix of confusion and nothingness. His eyes dart to the side for a moment, then back at you. “Yeah, it’s a bag. You just said so.”
“Yes, Saku, I know it’s a bag.” You roll your eyes. “What I mean is, why, I… Where are your keychains?”
Sakuya’s mouth corners twitch upwards a little. “I bought the bag this week. I didn’t have time to decorate it. Oh, and I’m starting a new keychain collection.”
You remain as frozen as you were, looking between Sakuya’s amused face and his plain bag with mouth slightly open. Sakuya chuckles. He places his hand between your shoulderblades and pushes you to walk.
“Let’s go,” he says. “I’ll explain on our way.”
You follow Sakuya around the streets of Hongdae, hands in your pockets, occasionally bumping your elbow into his. As you walk, he tells you everything about his week, then about his day, and about something else you can’t really focus on. Your eyes are glued to his bag, hanging off his shoulder and separating your bodies. It just doesn’t make sense. Sakuya wouldn’t buy a bag like this for himself, never in his life. You know him too well to know that. Honestly, the bag is not ugly, it’s just the style that you would see on—
“Hey!” Your train of thought is broken as Sakuya flicks your forehead with perfect aim. “It hurts…”
“Sorry.” He doesn’t look apologetic at all. “You weren’t listening.”
“Yeah, I can’t focus! Seeing this… Why did you buy a new one anyway?”
With a sigh, Sakuya explains.
His previous bag, the black backpack, had its shoulder straps stretched so long from the weight of fifty-something keychains that it became impossible to wear it comfortably. Not just that, but Sakuya’s habit of wearing the backpack on only one shoulder made the straps uneven, even if regulated to be the same length, which only made the problem worse.
Sakuya wasn’t bothered by it, though. It was his mother, whom he video-called on Monday, that saw the state of his backpack and scolded Sakuya for wearing a bag in such a strained condition. He went shopping after she sent him money and bought a new one.
The new bag is more versatile and better quality. The old keychains are fine, but it would be a hassle to move all of them from the old bag to the new one. He’s going to collect keychains anyway, so he might as well start a new collection.
Taking a slow inhale, you nod at Sakuya’s words. “Still, you could’ve attached at least one. Or just do something with it instead of leaving it plain.”
“I told you I didn’t have time.”
“One keychain! It would take two seconds.”
Sakuya shakes his head. “No. New bag, new keychains.”
“Alright,” you say. “It just feels weird. Even now, when we walk, doesn’t the silence bother you? There’s nothing jingling, no keychains accidentally brushing my legs… It’s so weird.”
“I didn’t notice,” he says, running his hand through his hair.
Your eyes narrow on him. His ears are completely red, and he’s looking away from you, as if to avoid showing you his face. You want to ask what’s wrong, but feel like it’s better to leave this unquestioned. You stare at him a little bit longer until your own ears grow pink. Biting back a smile, you shake your head and look ahead.
“Whatever. We have to buy you some keychains today.”
Perhaps it’s because it’s a Saturday afternoon, or because the weather is good for the first time in days, the market is more crowded than usual. You and Sakuya have been doing a pretty good job avoiding bumping shoulders with people, but there are a few times where you get separated.
At some point, you wrap your fingers around Sakuya’s wrist and let him lead you through the busy crowd. Sakuya is glad for walking ahead. This way, you can’t see the blush on his face and his brain malfunction painting itself very clear on his features.
Why is he so nervous today? Sakuya doesn’t understand. Licking his lips over and over again in attempts to calm down, he focuses on walking. An idea lingers in the back of his head to slip his hand into yours, but it becomes no more than an idea.
After you pass the food section, you finally reach the shops with everything and nothing in particular to offer. This part of the market is less crowded, too, so you can walk more comfortably.
Usually, the reality is that Sakuya drags you from store to store with coin-like eyes and you follow him around like a tired puppy. The roles are reversed today; with a hand still around his wrist, you lead Sakuya around the market, eyeing every accessory each shop has to offer with twinkling eyes and a smile so bright it melts Sakuya’s heart. He follows you without any complaints, mostly. As time passes, you grow more and more distracted by everything, and Sakuya starts to grow impatient.
“Let’s go over there.” He taps your arm and points to a certain shop.
It’s a shop near the one you’re currently in. There doesn’t seem to be any customers in it, but what caught Sakuya’s attention is a keychain display and a really cool toy sword he wants to check out.
You vaguely look towards the direction of the shop. “Alright, just a minute.”
A minute passes and you’re still in the same spot: checking out hair accessories, completely ignoring Sakuya’s foot tapping against yours.
He watches you examine each accessory, put them together and set them apart, as if you were going to give them a very meticulous review. Your lips are slightly pouted and your eyes are narrowed, and although Sakuya finds you really cute right now, he also wants to leave already.
Sakuya sighs. “We still haven’t bought anything, you know.”
You hum. “How are we supposed to buy something if everything is cute?” You put the glittery strawberry hairpin that’s in your hand to Sakuya’s hair, angling it left and right. “Cute.”
Sakuya gently takes the hairpin from your hand and puts it back on the display. His slender fingers brush yours as he does so, and butterflies bloom in his chest.
“We have to buy at least one keychain, you said it yourself. And I’m starting to get hungry,” he says. His hand lands on your shoulder as he leads you out of the store.
“We’ve seen like thirty keychains already. Couldn’t you buy any of them?”
“We’ve seen like thirty hairpins already, couldn’t you buy any of them?” Sakuya mimics your voice. The action earns him a glare from you, but you look so cute he can’t help but laugh. “I can’t have random keychains in my collection. That’s not it. They shall all be bought with purpose.”
The word comes out of your lips with a sigh, and you walk ahead with crossed arms. A grin involuntarily welcomes itself on Sakuya’s face. He catches up to you quickly, standing in front of you to block your path. When you try to bypass him, he blocks you again. You roll your eyes and click your tongue.
“What? What’s wrong?” He asks, staring at you with a stupid smile that reaches his crinkling eyes.
“Nothing,” you mutter as you turn your head to the side.
Sakuya quickly pulls out his phone from his pocket and snaps a photo of you. You whip your head back to him at the shutter sound and reach for his phone in frantic moves.
“Hey! Delete it! I didn’t consent!!”
Sakuya swiftly avoids your attempts at stealing his phone as you fight him with all your might, yelling different phrases at him. He giggles like a little girl, occasionally yelping when you almost grab his hand. Ultimately, he puts his arm high up in the air and you nearly climb him trying to reach the phone.
He starts to laugh like an evil cartoon character right in your face. “Who can’t reach it?” Who can’t reach it?” He repeats between the laughter.
He goes on like this for a few more seconds until you lean in and touch Sakuya’s nose with your tongue.
His whole body freezes. His face, down to his neck, is burning hot. What did you just do? This was intentional, right? No? Why would you do this? Sakuya feels like his brain is short-circuiting. He doesn’t realize that his arm dropped down and you snatched the phone out of his grip. He touches his nose with his index finger, then stares at it and blinks profusely.
You put your face close to his, and mimicking his evil laugh, you say, “Who’s a loser now? Huh?”
He stares at your face, a breath away from his, with parted lips, and he thinks his knees are going to give out. He’s trying his best to calm his racing heart. He has to use all the power in the world not to look at your lips right now. He forces himself to move away and let out a chuckle, praying it sounds natural, and when he sees your satisfied smile, he thinks you don’t know what you just put him through.
“Still you,” he manages to say.
You keep on walking, but Sakuya is absent-minded. His face is still burning, and the autumn air has nothing on the hot blood coursing through his veins.
Do you have any idea what you just did to him?
At some point, instead of entering the shops, you and Sakuya stroll around the market and sight-shop from afar. The conversation has died down, so you’re walking side by side, listening to the shop owners yelling their marketing phrases and the bustling noise of the crowd. You stare at your and Sakuya’s feet, trying to match the steps to his every now and then, but ultimately give up as it feels unnatural. You twirl the cherry-flavored lollipop in your fingers—the only thing you and Sakuya bought today—and take a slow breath.
“Let’s split,” Sakuya says with a lollipop in his mouth. His teeth clash against the sugar as he does so.
“Why? Do you want to go home?”
“No, no. That’s not what I meant.” He runs a hand through his hair. “I have an idea.”
“Let’s split for… thirty minutes, let’s say. Each of us will buy something, and after time’s up, we’ll meet again.”
You tap the lollipop against your lower lip. “Doesn’t that defeat the purpose of shopping together?”
“We’ve been shopping together for over two hours. Did we buy anything?”
“Fair point.” You nod, and after a moment of silence, you say, “So, thirty minutes? And we just buy whatever we want.”
“But do we buy something for each other or…?”
“Whatever you want,” Sakuya shrugs. “We have to buy at least one thing, though.”
You and Sakuya stop walking and face each other. You smile. “Alright,” you say, “Who sets the timer?”
“I will,” he says, pulling his phone out of his pocket. He points to his right with a wide grin, where his feet are already dragging him. “I’m going this way!” He beams.
“I’m not!” You laugh, walking away to the left.
Before you disappear from each other’s sight, you both turn around and give each other bright smiles.
Once he’s left alone, Sakuya finally feels like he can breathe in peace.
He suggested separating because he wants to buy a keychain, yes, but the truth and something he would never admit out loud is that he needs a break from you.
He can’t stop thinking about the… incident, or whatever it was when you pretty much licked his nose earlier. The sight of your face so close to his that he could count your eyelashes is still in front of his eyes and doesn’t seem to be going away any time soon. And you did this just to get his phone and delete a picture. This isn’t best friend behavior, is it? The picture probably looked good anyway.
If Sakuya’s honest with himself, those kind of thoughts have been bothering him for a while. Everything you’ve been doing, even the simplest things like hugging him or sharing your food, does not feel very best friend behavior to Sakuya anymore. He knows nothing has changed about the way you act and it’s just his mind doing weird things, but it’s been driving him crazy for weeks.
He thought if you saw each other less often, those lingering thoughts would eventually go away and everything would be normal again, so he canceled all hangouts with you this week. He was lucky that you assumed he was busy studying and didn’t question him. But luck didn’t help that much, because his thoughts and feelings remained unchanged, and on top of that, he started to miss you.
Still, in his mind, he thanks himself for coming up with the idea of splitting up, even if it’s just for thirty minutes. At least he doesn’t have to worry about looking like a burning tomato.
Now without you, Sakuya revisits every market you’ve been to that he thinks has nice items. He walks from shop to shop, checking out every keychain and charm with sharp eyes, but it is not until the fifth store he walks into that something looks worth buying.
The store is the same one where you saw the strawberry hairpin. There’s a small display rack of keychains and other bag charms near the counter. Sakuya walks up to it with glistening eyes. The keychains all seem to be from the same collection, as they all have the same pastel color palette and similar design style.
One particular keychain grabs Sakuya’s attention. It’s a fluffy heart in pink and red tones that has a winking face sewn on it. It’s a decent size, too, as it nearly fits into Sakuya’s full hand when he takes it off the display. Sakuya smiles. Somehow, the face on the keychain reminds him of you.
Although he’s ready to go to the checkout, he walks around the store a little more. Without thinking much, he picks up a few more items, including the glitter strawberry hairpin.
Just as Sakuya’s timer goes off, his phone rings in his pocket.
“Hey, are you done?” Your voice beams through the speaker when he picks up.
After he bought the items from that one shop, he didn’t look for anything else. He’s been walking aimlessly for quite a few minutes now, wondering if you bought anything.
“I am,” he says. “Where are you?”
“Actually, I found this really nice cafe, it’s just right around the corner if you leave the market. I’m already inside. And I ordered drinks!”
Hearing your voice is enough for Sakuya to know that you’re smiling. His mouth corners also lift a bit.
“I’ll send you my location.”
There is nothing special about the cafe’s interior. It’s about the same color palette of beiges and browns as any regular cafe in Seoul, but Sakuya guesses that the modesty of the place is what made you come here. It’s right by the street market, like you said, and it’s small enough to hear some of the noise from the outside. Except you, there are only two or three other customers.
You’re sitting at the table by the window. Your hands are neatly folded in your lap and you’re already staring at Sakuya with a small smile, glancing down at the two drinks in front of you.
“Did you wait long?” Sakuya asks after he sits down opposite you.
“No, it’s fine,” you say. “You were right, you know. The moment we separated I actually bought some things. I think I was done after, like, fifteen minutes.”
The conversation between you and Sakuya goes on as you’re sipping your drinks. Yours in an iced americano and Sakuya has brown sugar milk tea.
Sakuya stares at you this whole time. He watches your sparkling eyes and lips moving with a smile as you tell him about what happened when you were shopping alone, and he can’t help but think about how pretty you are.
“You look nice,” he blurts out, almost matter-of-factly.
His fingers play with the straw of his drink, bending and folding it to his liking. His eyes stay focused on the different shapes the straw takes, but he can see your flustered face from his peripheral, and it makes him bend the straw harder.
“You dressed up more than usual,” he adds as an afterthought.
“Oh.” Your voice is a little shaky, softer than before. “Yeah, I did. Thanks.” You pause for a few seconds. “I didn’t think you’d notice.”
A strange kind of silence falls between you that Sakuya has never felt before. It’s nowhere near awkward, but it’s not entirely comfortable either, at least not in the usual way. It almost makes him regret complimenting you. Sakuya feels as if a spell has been cast, and if any of you speaks up, a bubble will burst and something meaningful will be lost forever.
The small moment is so loud in Sakuya’s head that a thought inherently forms in his head: is this what it would be like if you were dating?
Stop. What kind of thought is that? He freezes in his seat, like a deer caught in the headlights. His eyes, wide and scared as if afraid you could hear his thoughts, shift from the straw between his fingers to your face. You’re staring at him. A blush that’s definitely not makeup covers your cheeks and there’s a look in your eyes that carries a sort of hesitancy about something.
Sakuya bites his lip. Obviously, you can’t read his mind, so what’s with that look? Tugging at his hair, he forces himself to break the spell. He clears his throat and asks, “Should we see what we bought?”
Your face goes back to its usual brightness with a blink. “Oh, yeah! Should I go first or do we do it together?” you say, already placing your bag on your lap and rummaging in it.
“Alright. Okay, so I did buy myself a few things…”
Sakuya isn’t really paying attention to anything you’re saying. He sits on the chair, leaned back, watching you show him the items you bought, but everything you say and do seems to float around his head rather than enter his brain. He can’t focus. He stares at your face, your frame, your smile, as the lingering what ifs in his head come and go.
“Oh, and I got you something, too.”
Sakuya straightens on his seat with a hum.
“Since I really can’t stand to see you walk around with a naked bag…”
Sakuya lets out a surprised sound at the item you put on the table. It’s a heart-shaped keychain, pink and fluffy, with a winking face—the same keychain Sakuya has bought for himself.
He breaks out into a teeth-tight grin as air leaves his lips. “Tssk, no way.”
Sakuya grabs his bag and places his keychain on the table, right next to yours. “We bought the same one!”
You gasp with excitement and take the keychains into your hands, wiggling them around. “No way!” You laugh.
“This was the best one out of all of them,” Sakuya says as he points at the charms in your hands.
“I know, right? It’s so cute, I loved it too.” Your smile softly fades. “It’s kind of a bummer, though? You probably don’t want two identical keychains.”
Sakuya’s eyes move between your face and the keychains. He hums. “One is yours, so...”
You look at him in a shy manner. “You want to match?”
Silence falls upon you once more. You observe the keychains in your hands with your lower lip between your teeth, as if pondering if you really want one. Sakuya squeezes his hands resting in his lap in anticipation. The words take it repeat in his head. At this point, he ignores the strange rhythm of his heartbeat beating in his chest.
You put one keychain back on the table and wordlessly attach the other one to your bag. Once you’re done, you pet the keychain, lift your bag, and show it off to Sakuya with the cutest smile he’s ever seen.
Letting out an excited yelp, Sakuya grabs the keychain from the table and attaches it to his own bag. “Ha!”
“Wait, this is so cute!” You laugh. “We’re actually matching. Our bags are kind of similar, too!”
You begin to point out the similarities between your bags, and Sakuya goes quiet once again. He doesn’t tell you that the reason he bought this particular bag is because it subtly matches yours, and he doesn’t mention that the bag is a bigger size than his previous one so you can comfortably put your things in it, like you always do.
He looks at your beaming face again, then at the matching keychains, and he can’t contain the grin dancing on his lips. His chest blooms with warmth and his stomach feels like it’s about to do a backflip. Even gripping the material of his pants does not make the butterflies go away. He sinks into the mix of excitement and embarrassment, and strangely, Sakuya lets himself accept the feeling.
The questions from earlier reappear in his head, but somehow, they don’t sound as scary anymore. His eyes soften on your frame. After all, you and Sakuya could be a good match.
divider by @dollywons
© 2025 suzayaaa. do not steal, copy, or translate my works.
