Chapter Text
one: it's not that deep
There are exactly three things Kim Mingyu is sure of in this life:
1. The best kind of fried chicken exists in that perfect liminal space between crispy and heart attack—the kind that requires five napkins per bite.
2. Seungkwan has a vendetta against his eardrums and will scream at the slightest provocation.
3. Jeon Wonwoo is, without contest or competition, the single most boring human being to ever draw breath on this planet.
Not in a mean way. Mingyu’s not an asshole. He just calls it like he sees it. Wonwoo is the human equivalent of unflavored oatmeal. He doesn’t even talk that much. In group hangouts, he’s just there. Like an accessory. A quiet scarf of a human being, wrapped around Jun or Soonyoung, eyes drooping behind black frames and a cup of Americano with an extra shot.
Not unpleasant. Just... beige. Wallpaper.
They’ve been in the same friend group for five years. Ate dinner together. Showed up to the same movie nights. And at least one road trip that got them banned from one gas station north of the city—but Mingyu can count on one hand the number of times he’s been alone with Wonwoo.
Two fingers, actually.
And both interactions were so awkward, he’s pretty sure they set civil communication back by a decade.
The first one happened during his freshman year of Architecture, he had two deadlinnes due, a half-written paragraph about concrete tension stress ratios, and a stomach growling loud enough to alert campus security. But instead of finishing his work like any rational, functioning adult, Mingyu was making fries and when he was about to eat and spiral in peace, disaster struck: no mayo.
He looked at his fries and felt a hollow kind of grief. Because fries without ketchup & mayo are just... sad potatoes.
So in a moment of desperation, he messaged the group chat.
mingyu: anyone have mayo? please im on my knees
He stared at the screen for a minute. Most of the group must be either asleep or cramming. Or both.
jun: we have some in our fridge
jun: but i'm at the library with soonyoung dying over thermo
jun: wonwoo's home tho, probably gaming, so just give him a call when he doesnt answer your knock
Mingyu stared at the message with growing dread. Wonwoo. Of all people.
It wasn’t that he had anything against Jeon Wonwoo. It’s just… they didn’t talk. Not really. It was just mutual orbit. Group chat overlap. Acquaintance-adjacent, at best. Five years of "pass the chips" and "can you move your bag?”
Still, he wasn’t going to eat sad fries like a fool. He was going to march up to that dorm and get his damn mayonnaise.
Ten minutes later, Mingyu stood in front of Jun and Wonwoo’s door. He knocked.
Inside, he heard the squeak of a gaming chair, then the low clink of a headset being removed. A pause. When the door opened, Mingyu was met with exactly what he expected: Jeon Wonwoo, looking slightly annoyed at being interrupted, dark hair slightly disheveled, glasses reflecting the RGB glow of multiple computer monitors behind him.
"Jun said you needed mayo?"
"Uh. Yeah," Mingyu said, “For fries."
Wonwoo blinked. “At midnight?”
"Architecture deadlines," Mingyu offered, as if this explained everything. "The hunger gets weird."
Wonwoo nodded like yeah, okay, that tracks. Then turned and disappeared without another word.
Mingyu stood in the doorway awkwardly, trying not to read too much into the sound of gunfire coming from the paused game.
Wonwoo came back with a squeeze bottle. Held it out. Very businesslike. "Here."
"Thanks," Mingyu said, trying to smile. "I’ll bring it back tomorrow."
"Keep it. Jun hates mayo."
And just like that, the door closed, and Mingyu was left holding a bottle of Hellmann's and the distinct feeling that he'd just participated in the world's most anticlimactic drug deal.
The second time they interacted was equally thrilling.
Mingyu had claimed his favorite study spot in the engineering building's third-floor lounge—not because he had any business in the engineering building, but because the architecture library was always packed and the engineering students were too busy having existential crises to bother him.
He'd spread his materials across an entire table, sketches and reference books creating a fortress of academic desperation, when Wonwoo appeared, looking like he hadn't slept in approximately seventy-three hours straight—hair disheveled, eyes hollow behind smudged glasses. Their eyes met across the room. Recognition flickered. A silent assessment occurred, like two stray cats deciding whether to fight or ignore each other.
"Mind if I sit?" Wonwoo asked, gesturing to the only other table in the small lounge—currently occupied by Mingyu's backpack and snack collection. “Everywhere else is packed and I need to revise a few important notes.”
"Oh. Sure." Mingyu hastily moved his things, watching as Wonwoo set down a stack of textbooks that could double as weightlifting equipment. "Rough midterms?"
"Fluid dynamics," Wonwoo replied as he sat.
"Sounds... wet?" The joke left Mingyu's mouth before his brain could intervene.
The corner of Wonwoo's mouth twitched—not quite a smile, but an acknowledgment of Mingyu's attempted humor. "That's one way to put it."
They worked in silence after that, occupying the same space without really sharing it. Occasionally, Mingyu would look up when Wonwoo muttered something under his breath suspiciously like a threat to Isaac Newton's lineage or aggressively erased an equation. Once, their eyes met accidentally when they both reached for their water bottles at the same time, and they quickly looked away.
Three hours later, Mingyu packed up his things, stretching his stiff back. "Good luck with your... fluids," he offered as a parting pleasantry.
Wonwoo didn’t look up. Just nodded.
And that was that. Another thrilling chapter in the non-relationship of Mingyu and Wonwoo. Two entire one-on-one conversations in five years.
At least, that’s what Mingyu thinks—until a Tuesday midnight at exactly 1:47 AM, when he’s ¾ into a pity scroll through Instagram, sulking over a cancelled hangout.
And then he sees it.
A photo. Posted twenty-seven minutes ago.
Wonwoo.
A mirror shot. Effortless. Hoodie slouched, bedhead a little too precise to be accidental. He’s just there—low effort, high impact. Caption: should’ve let the bed win
And without thinking, without analyzing—without the safety net of conscious thought—Mingyu taps the heart.
Then stares at it.
Then stares harder.
Then immediately goes, “…shit,”
It’s an accident. That’s what he tells himself. Easy mistake. The like button is right there, and he’s got big thumbs. It’s not that deep.
But, in a moment of horrifying self-awareness, Mingyu realizes something else:
He’s never liked one of Wonwoo’s posts before.
Not once. Not in all the years of their group friendship. Not a single heart. So now this one? This single, lonely like in a sea of digital indifference?
It stands out.
Worse—it’ll show up on Wonwoo’s notifications as “kim_mingyu liked your photo.”
He considers unliking it.
He stared at the little heart, now solidly red, pulsing back at him accusingly. It wasn't that they disliked each other. It was just... they were opposites.
Mingyu—loud in every room, friends with half the campus, once got a deadline extended by sweet-talking the department secretary with a Tupperware of homemade cookies. It worked. It always works.
And then there’s Wonwoo—quietly terrifying in that Engineering way. Probably dreams in equations. The kind of guy Seungcheol refers to as “the final boss,” and who Jun once described as “what would happen if a library and a cat had a baby, and that baby was raised by a motherboard.”
They were the only two in their six-person friend group who had never hung out alone. Not once. Not even accidentally. An unspoken mutual agreement that had never needed discussion.
It's fine,he tells himself, We're in the same friend group. Liking photos is normal. People like photos all the time. That's literally what Instagram is for.
So let's get one thing absolutely straight, crystal clear, carved-in-stone clear: Mingyu does not have a thing for Jeon Wonwoo.
Wonwoo is boring. That's not an opinion; it's a fundamental law of nature, like gravity or the fact that printers can sense fear. He wears a rotation of dark shirts like he was born in grayscale. He plays the same video game for eight hours straight and emerges looking mildly satisfied and vaguely threatening.
Also, he never smiles at Mingyu. Not really. He does that polite, corner-of-the-mouth twitch thing that says “I acknowledge your existence” but not “I enjoy it.” He’s a statue. A wall.
Jun insists he’s funny. Soonyoung swears he’s a menace when he wants to be. But they’re both liars. Jun once tried to fry an egg with a hairdryer and Soonyoung believes Mercury retrograde is responsible for his parking tickets.
Mingyu, bless his heart, is just normal. He cooks. He vibes. He has a 5-step skincare routine and a complicated love-hate relationship with AutoCAD. He’s normal. Unlike Wonwoo. Who is not normal. Who probably alphabetizes his socks and reads quantum physics textbooks as "light bedtime reading.”
So no. There’s no reason for Mingyu to notice him.
And yet…his thumb, having tasted rebellion, was now scrolling through Wonwoo's sparse profile. Each image more intriguing than the last. A stack of engineering textbooks with a simple coffee cup beside them. A sunset from what Mingyu recognized as the roof of the engineering building. A candid shot of Jun and Soonyoung mid-argument, both faces contorted in what could only be described as competitive stupidity.
Then, a photo from two years ago. A rare full-face shot of Wonwoo, clearly taken by someone else, caught mid-laugh in the campus library. His head thrown back, eyes nearly disappearing into crescents, nose scrunched. It was so unlike the Wonwoo that Mingyu knew—the one who mostly observed their group's chaos with that inscrutable, judgmental expression—that he found himself staring.
And then, horror of horrors, his thumb double-tapped again.
The heart flashed red.
"FUCK!" Mingyu yelped, instantly un-liking the photo with the panicked desperation of a man disarming a bomb. His phone hovered midair. Frozen.
That was a photo from TWO YEARS AGO.
And he had just liked it.
In the middle of the night.
During midterms.
But he knew. He knew the notification had already been sent. Somewhere across campus, Wonwoo's phone had just lit up with the words: "kim_mingyu liked your photo… from 2 years ago."
There was no recovery from this. None. He'd just committed the cardinal sin of social media. He'd been caught red-handed, digging through Wonwoo's past at midnight. Mingyu tossed his phone across his bed like it had burned him and stared at the ceiling of his dorm room.