Chapter Text
˙ ✩°˖🥃🌶️🍊 ⋆｡˚
“Please explain to me why the fuck you’re dragging me to an ice cream parlor at ten AM on a Saturday?”
Hyunjin knows the answer, and he knows even if Jisung changed the answer, the facts would remain the same – Hyunjin is nursing a hangover, underslept by several hours thanks to the end-of-winter-break party Changbin bullied them into attending, and desperate for something greasy and salty; namely, not ice cream.
“Because I told Minho I wanted to take him on an ice cream date, and I need to make sure that I don’t take him to a shitty ice cream parlor,” Jisung reiterates, just like Hyunjin had known he would. Hyunjin groans as they near the parlor.
“Couldn’t you have taken Innie? Or Chan? Or someone that actually likes sweets?”
Jisung levels him with an eye roll so scrathing he must have picked it up from Minho and Minho alone. “Like anyone in their right mind would go to get ice cream on a Saturday morning.”
“Uh,” Hyunjin splutters, gesturing to himself. “Hello?”
Jisung snorts. “Like I said. Anyone in their right mind. Now, come on, I need to see if this place is cute enough for a date–”
“You’ve been with Minho for over a year,” Hyunjin growls. “I think you could take him to a dumpster and he’d still tell you it was a good date.”
“You’d be surprised,” Jisung rolls his eyes as they approach the building. “He can be pretty damn picky.”
Hyunjin has always gravitated towards savory. Even his scent, complex and sharp, betrays his preferred palette. Woodsy whiskey and chili, a tinge of blood orange that blooms all the more brightly as he gets close to his rut, or (apparently) when he gets turned on.
He hates his scent, because others don’t particularly like his scent. It’s Alpha … almost. The orange undercuts the whiskey, the chili overpowers the fruit, and the whiskey only makes the spice spike even more.
Sorry, he remembers his high school boyfriend wincing after his presentation. You’re just … kind of a lot.
Always too much. Never enough. Never right.
Maybe that’s why Hyunjin and Jisung got along so well. Hyunjin, with his unorthodox aroma, bitter and confusing. Jisung, with his bloom of blueberry and basil; sweet and docile and so very non-Alpha.
A lot of Jisung is not-sterotypically Alpha, and Jisung eventually confessed (that first day of University, when they found themselves randomly assigned as roommate and decided to celebrate with a bottle of soju Jisung had nabbed from an upper-classman friend) that he, himself, didn’t feel a lot of the stereotypically Alpha urges.
It’s not that I don’t want to be an Alpha, he’d confessed. I don’t mind my ruts, and I get … protective over people I love. It’s that I want someone who … maybe wants to take control. And I haven’t found anyone that wants to do that.
Enter, not twenty-four hours later, Lee Minho. Omega with eyes like the sharp end of an arrow, and a tongue and scent to match. Earl grey and cardamon.
Jisung’s jaw had dropped, and then so had the cup of boba tea in his hand. It had exploded at their feet, the tapioca pearls rolling across the quad grass and landing at the feet of the upperclassmen.
“I’m so sorry,” Jisung had whimpered.
“Please excuse him, he’s lacking whatever part of his brain should control hand-eye coordination,” Hyunjin had added.
The Omega had raised a brow and stalked forward. Hyunjin remembers thinking that he eyed Jisung the way a predator eyes its prey.
“You got boba tea on my shoes,” he’d eventually said. Jisung had visibly gulped, though his cheeks had been red, and Hyunjin had very much wanted to crawl into a hole because he knew what Jisung’s horny face looked like, and it was the one he’d been wearing.
“I can buy you a new pair?” Jisung had squeaked. The Omega raised a brow. “Two pairs?”
And then the Omega had huffed, a little hissing laugh that showed off his front teeth. “Oh my God, your face. Relax, they’re just shoes. You can apologize to me over coffee, hmm?”
And the rest was history. Jisung – with his blueberry and basil, his protectiveness, sure, but also his unyielding softness – spent one lunch-turned-coffee-turned-shopping-turned-dinner-turned-evening with Minho – with his earl grey and cardamon, his desire to care so sharp it was almost incendiary – and never looked back. They were both unorthodox, yes, but in the exact same direction as each other.
Would Hyunjin find that? Would he find himself trudging through the cold in search of a perfect ice cream parlor? He hoped not. But for midnight ramen runs? For museum dates? For movie marathons and to overly-priced cocktail bars?
Maybe he’ll find a nice Alpha or Beta or Omega who simply can’t smell. That’s got to be a condition people deal with, right? Maybe he’ll find someone, like him, who leans towards salty and bitter.
Hyunjin has never liked sweets. Even as a child, he never got why the other kids turned into frantic monsters at the mere notion of candy or cake. He loves snacks, but he likes them salty and savory. The first time Jisung saw him make a plate of bacon as a midnight snack, he’d literally fallen off of his bed, and because Jisung insisted on lofting his dorm bed as high as it could go, it was a surprisingly nasty fall.
“What?” Hyunjin had shrugged. “I wanted a snack. It’s got protein.”
“Have, like, chips then!”
“We’re out.”
“Have cookies like a normal person!”
“I don’t like sugar.”
“Ew, are you, like, on a diet?”
“No, I just don’t like how sugar tastes.”
Jisung’s never really gotten over it. He’s constantly trying to find what (quote-on-quote) sweet treat will make Hyunjin (quote-on-quote) see the light.
He doesn’t like candies – he swears he can feel his tooth enamel withering away at the thought – and he doesn't like cakes – it’s just too much frosting, every time. Cookies are either too dry or too moist. Pudding has a weird texture, no matter how much Minho desperately tries to convince him otherwise.
And ice cream? He just doesn’t get it. You can’t eat it in the winter (though as they approach the ice cream parlor, he sees a slew of bodies inside through the frosted windows, so apparently Hyunjin's the weird one), and in the summer, it just melts. Who wants a dessert that has to be enjoyed in a time crunch?
All that being said, even he can admit to himself, as they enter the building, that the ice cream parlor is cute. The walls are pastel pink, which might have been overbearing and grating if not for the absolute jungle of plants – potted, hanging, and in between. There’s a cluster of them at one corner between a collection of light pink tables, and pothos vines drape across the ceiling between fairy lights and shimmering pendant lamps. The walls are covered with art so random and mismatched that it looks intentional – postcards next to a Monet print, a vintage movie poster for Breakfast at Tiffany’s beside a LED-light sculpture of a maraschino cherry. The music is soft, something Hyunjin thinks might be a lofi remix of … Animal Crossing?
And of course, the feature of the shop is the ice cream counter. If the front of the building is reserved for seating (besides the tables and chairs, there’s also a fuzzy white loveseat, several stools against a window bar, even two hanging chairs suspended from the ceiling), then the back is reserved for the counter. It’s also pink, with scalloped edges and shiny glass partitioning patrons from the actual ice cream. There’s a dizzying list of flavors typed on a sign behind the counter, and a separate chalkboard sign boasting ‘Seasonal Flavors”; the title and the flavors (Cinnamon Stick, Peppermint Cocoa, Mulled Cranberry sorbet) are written in elegant cursive, surrounded by small doodled snowflakes and, oddly, little cats in earmuffs and scarves.
It’s cute. It’s sweet. It’s a cavity in a retail space.
And that’s the only thought he’s able to conjure before the small hits him. And it hits him with all the subtlety of a semi-truck.
Vanilla and lemon. Ripe in the air, so bright and sweet that he feels as though it’s dripping down his throat. He gasps, and he feels his vision pulse as he takes in even more of that intoxicating scent–
“Yo, are you okay?”
Jisung steps into his field of vision, brow furrowed and cheeks puffed with worry. Hyunjin shakes his head; when he inhales again, he does it slowly. The smell is still there, but it doesn’t threaten to bowl him over again.
It doesn’t make it any less appetizing, any less intriguing. Hyunjin has never smelt something like that before.
“Do you smell that?” Hyunjin asks. Jisung cocks his head but sniffs, nostrils flaring.
“You mean the … ice cream?”
“The lemon one,” Hyunjin says. He sniffs again. “Lemon and vanilla … like a lemon bar?”
Jisung sniffs again, eyes brightening. “Yeah, now that you mention it, I can smell that. But, like, I mostly smell ice cream? Because it’s an ice cream shop?”
Hyunjin clucks his tongue. “Thanks, captain obvious.”
There’s no one yet behind the ice cream counter, but given the small line waiting and its general state of ease, Hyunjin assumes that the employee had stepped to the back right before they entered.
“Well, it’s cute,” Hyunjin sighs, crossing his arms as he addresses Jisung. “Can we go now? I’m hungover and I need real food.”
Jisung scoffs. “Uh, no. I have to sample the flavors!”
“It’s ten AM!” Hyunjin whines.
“You know, you’re letting yourself be constrained by societal expectations of mealtimes,” Jisung explains, dragging Hyunjin towards the counter. “Look, there’s an espresso machine. You can have coffee.”
Small mercies, he supposes.
“And maybe you can figure out what ice cream you smelled when we walked in.”
Hyunjin looks down at the tubs of ice cream, brows raising. Clearly, this isn’t your basic ice cream shop, because the flavors are complex. Spiced Earl Grey; Coconut Caramel Swirl; Chili and Chocolate; Blueberry Jasmine sorbet.
Then there’s the list of specials – Sunshine Specials, the sign says. Brownie Boy leads the list, followed by a flavor just called Oi Oi Oi that boasts chunks of something called Tim Tams, and then the nebulously named Flat White. There’s the Bloodiest Orange, whatever that means, as well as Not Your Mum’s Chocolate and Triple X Vanilla.
“These flavors are really cool,” Jisung says quietly.
“Weird,” Hyunjin suggests, if only to be difficult about Jisung dragging him out of bed. But then he glances at the little cat doodles again and feels oddly bad. “It’s a cute place though. Nice vibe. If you like ice cream, I guess.”
Speaking of ice cream, he scans the flavors more intently, because that lemon-vanilla scent is still sticky at the back of his tongue. He spots a lemon closest to them. Lemon and blackberry ice cream. Hyunjin cocks his head. He didn’t pick up on the blackberry scent when they’d entered, and sure, there’s gotta be vanilla in some of these ice creams, but he feels oddly confident that the vanilla very much belonged with the lemon.
He hardly registers the line movie, nor does he register when they end up next to order.
“Hi, welcome to Sunshine Sweets, what can I get for you?”
The voice is deep, rich, and it’s the thing that makes Hyunjin look up first. And then he freezes, because the face before him does not match that voice in any way, shape, or form. For one thing, the owner of the voice is pretty. Pretty, pretty, pretty floats across his mind; pretty the way a woman is pretty, made all the more beautiful in the androgynous flashes of male.
Huge eyes – big and sparkly and warm, deep brown beneath long, feathery lashes. Heart shaped lips, petal pink and upturned in a smile that seems far too genuine for a customer-facing job. Long, bleach-blonde hair, pulled half back with little braids woven into the sides; the hairstyle shows off ears that Hyunjin swears look pointed, all beneath a pink beret that shouldn’t be nearly as attractive as it is. He’s wearing makeup, too – a shimmer of pink shadow on his eyelids, highlighter on his cheekbones, a gloss on his lips. Hyunjin can’t tell if he’s wearing skin makeup or not. He finds himself suddenly overwhelmed by the urge to swipe his thumb across the man’s face, to find out what lies beneath Schrodinger's concealer.
(Hyunjin’s instinct is Omega, but he’s not an idiot; subgenders don’t pick and choose based on appearance alone. Jisung’s a great example – cute as a bug, giggly and chaotic, but still an Alpha. Hyunjin has met heaps of Alphas and Betas who were beautiful and delicate the way Omegas are often thought to be.)
Even the uniform that the man wears is cute. A white button down with a pink bow tied beneath the collar, and a sage green apron on top. It’s cinched around the man’s waist – a tiny waist at that–
“Do you do samples?”
Jisung’s voice alerts Hyunjin to the fact that he’s definitely been staring like an idiot – a true knothead, Minho would have scoffed.
The man – Hyunjin looks furtively for a nametag but doesn’t find one, and with another scan of his face, decides he must be some kind of Angel – smiles fully, and the force of it is like looking directly into the sun but without any of the pain.
“Sure do,” he reaches to the top of the glass partition with a gloved hand and plucks a stubby wooden spoon from a glass jar (even the glass, Hyunjin notices, is pink). The Angel smiles eagerly at Jisung, like he’s just as excited for the sampling as a customer. Jisung bites his lips anxiously and looks at Hyunjin.
“What do you think Hyung would realistically try?” He asks. Hyunjin sighs.
“I don’t know, Ji, you know him best. Didn’t he basically live off pudding last year?”
The Angel gasps. “What flavors?”
“Um,” Jisung considers. “He got really hooked on this matcha one from a bakery near us? He likes fruity stuff in general…”
The Angel hums, a little notch forming between his brow, like the decision is life or death. “Here, try this one.”
He reaches down to a tub of green ice cream – Matcha Flan, the label reads – and scoops an appreciable amount onto the wooden spoon before passing it to Jisung. Ji pops it in his mouth and squeaks.
“Wow, that’s so good,” he praises, mouth still half-full, but Angel beams.
“We also have a spiced pineapple custard that might hit on the creaminess of a pudding,” the Angel says seriously, and then his smile turns shy, hopeful even. “Is this Hyung you’re talking about your boyfriend?”
“Yes,” Jisung says, just as shy, cheeks aflame. The angels squeals. “I want to take him on an ice cream date, so I’m sussing out the best spots.”
“Obviously, I’m biased,” the Angel grins, “but if he’s interested in unique flavors or is a bit of a foodie, I like to think we’re the best shop that can offer that. If you end up coming in, you can even call the shop and I can put on music the both of you really like! Or reserve the best table!”
A literal Angel, then. Jisung clearly thinks so – the expression he wears is one Hyunjin has only seen him aim at baby animals.
“You’re my hero,” Jisung says, awed. The Angel laughs self-consciously and ducks his head, but not before Hyunjin can spot the blush at the tips of those small, pointed ears. “Okay, enough about him, though. Do you have any recommendations for me?”
The Angel pops back into business mode with a sharp nod. “What desserts do you like? And what’s your boyfriend’s scent?”
The question catches Hyunjin off guard – Jisung too, by the looks of it, but he still answers. “I could eat an entire cheesecake literally at any point,” he says – no, brags, if that puff of his chest is anything to go by. “And, um, he smells like cardamon? That’s one of his scents at least.”
The Angel squeals again and practically skips to the other side of the counter with a fresh spoon. The bite he hands to Jisung is creamy white with tiny specks of brown running through it.
When Jisung tastes it, he moans. Hyunjin hides his face in his hands as several customers turn towards the noise, but neither Jisung nor the Angel seem to notice.
“I call it the Churro Cheesecake,” the Angel explains. “But it’s really just mascarpone with cinnamon and cardamon,”
“No,” Jisung shakes his head. “It’s an orgasm on a spoon. And could I maybe get two scoops of it in a waffle cone, like, right now? If that’s okay?”
“That’s kind of the reaction I’m going for,” the Angel smiles, practically twirling as he prepares the desired confection. Moments later, Jisung is holding a massive ice cream cone in his hand, and the Angel is directing him to check out at an iPad.
Hyunjin looks back down at the flavors, and his nostrils flare of their own accord. That scent. That lemon-and-vanilla aroma seems to swirl through the air just like the cardamon flecks in Jisung’s ice cream. He squints at the flavor labels, and now that he’s looking, he notices a lot of lemon. The lemon blackberry he’d seen earlier, lemon and rosemary, lemon merengue, some flavor called citrus dream–
“Did you want to sample anything?”
Hyunjin jumps and somehow, in his unique brand of clumsiness, smacks his head on the glass partition. The Angel looks mildly horrified when he rises.
“Are you okay–?”
Jisung butts in, ice cream smudged on the tip of his nose. “Oh, Hyunjin actually hates–”
“Can I try the lemon blackberry?” Hyunjin interrupts. Jisung whips his head in his direction, jaw dropped, but the Angel just grins.
“Of course!”
Hyunjin barely has any time to consider his request, nor raise a pointed brow at Jisung’s still-shocked expression, before a spoon is being handed over the counter in his direction. Hyunjin takes it, and in doing so is given the startling image of the Angel’s hands against his. He didn’t know someone could have such small hands …
He pops the spoon into his mouth before he can do something stupid, like ask if he can hold the Angel’s hand just to see the difference in their finger lengths.
Ugh. Ice cream.
His hangover rears its ugly head the second the sugar touches his tongue, and he’s never been the best at keeping his expressions at bay; and maybe he should also figure out how to stop himself from speaking before thinking – it had never been a problem before, but maybe Han Jisung is contagious in some way – because he furrows his brow at the spoon, wrinkles his nose, and says.
“Ew. That’s not right.”
“Excuse me?”
Fuck. He said that out loud.
He drags his gaze away from the spoon and up to the Angel. The Angel has, to this point, been like sunshine in a human body, all sweet smiles and glittery words. Now, though, that button nose is wrinkled, those dark eyes shiny and narrowed, and those heart shaped lips curled in pouty offense. The grimace shows off his teeth; his incisor is pointy, like a kitten’s fang.
It’s an expression meant to scream fuck you, but it’s betrayed by the shimmer in his eyes. He’s actually kind of hurt.
“I …” Hyunjin stammers, shaking his head, “I didn’t mean that.”
“Didn’t mean it?” the Angel tilts his head, blinking a little furiously. “Or didn’t mean to say it?”
“Um … both?”
“Please excuse him,” Jisung jumps to Hyunjin’s defense. The ice cream is starting to melt, a sticky disaster, the sight of which makes Hyunjin’s stomach turn even more. “He hates sweet things. I know, we’ve tried to understand what’s wrong with him, but clearly it’s terminal–”
The Angel’s eye twitches.
“That’s fine,” he says thinly, crossing his arms. “You’re more than welcome to not like ice cream. But I’d prefer you not be rude about it where other customers could overhear you.”
Hyunjin feels his eye twitch at the insinuation.
“I wasn’t trying to offend you,” he says slowly. “You’re taking what I’m saying out of context.”
“Then what’s the context?”
“I’m just looking for a specific flavor,” Hyunjin says.
The Angel’s pouty anger gives way to intrigue. “Okay. What flavor?”
“I don’t know.”
“Hyunjin,” Jisung hisses. “Let it go–”
“You don’t know?” The Angel repeats. “I kind of have, like, every flavor–”
Not every flavor.
Not whatever Hyunjin smelled.
There’s a headache curling at the back of his head, and last-night’s party seems to be making itself known in an acrid burn in his throat, overpowering the last of the lemon-vanilla with old, cheap beer.
“Forget it,” Hyunjin drops the wooden spoon into a jar (this one a leaf-green) labeled Discards and shoves his hands deep in the pockets of his sweatshirt. “Can I just get a coffee?”
“If you tell me what flavor of ice cream you want,” the Angel says. Hyunjin had been moving expectantly towards the iPad, towards the coffee machine, but his movements stutter and stall.
“What?” he asks. The Angel huffs, pouty and seemingly desperate to please, and it’s really fucking cute despite the building headache.
“You said you’re looking for a specific flavor. Tell me what flavor?”
He wants to help, Hyunjin gets that. It tracks – a person who would willing curate a playlist in the name of Jisung and Minho’s probably five-hundredth date would make finding a customer’s desired flavor his life’s mission.
But Hyunjin kind of thinks he might throw up if he stands here, smelling the too-sweet scent of Jisung’s ice cream and squinting against the Angel’s sun-bright beauty.
“It doesn’t matter, okay?” Hyunjin says, a little too snappy to be polite in any universe. He smells his scent spike, and it’s then that he realizes he forgot his scent patches in his bleary-eyed stumble from his dorm that morning. That sharp tinge of whiskey, the stinging bite of chili powder, the undercurrent of ripe orange – permeate from his body.
The Angel must smell it too, and it’s not a surprise when his eyes widen. It’s not a surprise, but it hurts anyway.
Hyunjin takes a step back, as if he can put distance between his scent and the Angel’s nose, but in doing so, he backs right into Jisung; more importantly, into Jisung’s ice cream cone. It smushes, sticky and freezing and every flavor of awful at the nape of Hyunjin’s neck, at his hair.
The Angel stills, small hand jumping to his cheeks in surprise. Jisung is frozen in a grimace.
Hyunjin feels the last thread of his patience snap.
“Listen,” he says tightly, eyes still on the little Ice Cream Angel, in his pink beret and his green apron, with his video game lofi music and kitten-doodled signage. “Your shop is very cute. I’m sure your ice cream is very good. But to be honest? I’m hungover, I can’t stand sugar on a good day, and I can’t fathom what would bring someone to willingly eat ice cream in the middle of February at ten in the morning.”
Jisung groans.
The Angel’s nostrils flair.
And then he turns towards Jisung, smile back on his face, however stiff.
“Like I said, let me know when you plan to bring your boyfriend in. Even,” his eyes flicker to Hyunjin, “if it’s ten in the fucking morning, I’ll make sure it’s a good atmosphere for the two of you.”
“Thanks,” Jisung squeaks. “You’re the best.”
When Jisung drags him out by his wrist, pausing only to grab a wad of napkins from a dispenser, Hyunjin doesn’t resist.
The last thing he sees is the Angel looking a little more sad than he does the angry spitfire he was before.
And when the door slams behind him, it does so with a waft of lemon-and-vanilla temptation.
˙ ✩°˖🍋🍦☀️ ⋆。˚
Felix always volunteers for the morning shifts at the shop. He’s always been a morning person – my little lemondrop, like a piece of sunlight himself, his mother would say – but he supposes that’s the natural consequence of being raised in a bakery; well, above a bakery would be more accurate, but he spent countless mornings blinking awake to the barely-there whisper of dawn, padding down the stairs from his family's apartment to the kitchen below, and into his mother’s waiting arms. His sisters liked the bakery well enough, but Felix loved it. He loved the mornings he spent in the quiet, side by side with her, learning how to fold croissants, how to temper a perfect vanilla custard, and how to know on instinct the perfect method of pairing flavors.
He could have stayed there, he knows. After everything that happened, he probably should have wanted to stay there.
But Felix was no coward. Or maybe he was. Moving on a whim to a country you’ve never really known is kind of brave, so long as you don’t call it running away.
Sunshine Sweets (nee The Custardry, before the sweet Halmeoni who hired him in the first place let him take the creative reins) was kind of a perfect in between. A home away from home, at least if he closed his eyes and imagined that the sweetness was baked goods alone.
So, truly, he’s never minded the morning shifts, and besides, a nine-AM start time was child’s play compared to the bakery’s pre-dawn demands.
He’s just never had a customer rattle him quite so early, and in more ways than one.
The sound of his key in the dorm-room door is like music to his ears. It’s only three PM, but their evening dance practice was cancelled, and all he wants to do is crawl into bed and wallow.
Well, that’s the second thing he wants to do. The first thing is sorting out the scent still lingering at the back of his mind.
Ew. That’s not right.
Felix shivers his way inside and toes off his shoes. He tosses his keys with a bit too much force; they overshoot the bowl by the door and clang instead against one of the many cans of scent neutralizer beside it. When he peels off his coat, his scent blooms, a weary whimper of lemon, the vanilla sickening and artificial in his tiredness.
It’s his own fault he reeks with such intensity. He forgot to pack another scent patch. And when your scent is strong as an atom bomb and sweeter than raw sugar? Forgetting a scent patch means danger.
Felix huffs to himself and leaves his scent in the doorway, storming towards the kitchen instead. He tears open the spice cabinet, eyes flickering from jar to jar, label to label. He opens a jar of allspice, but the smell is wrong. He closes his eyes and tries to remember –
Burning, fire, warmth, passion–
His fingers find the chili powder almost instinctively. He inhales so deeply that his nose twitches with the threat of a sneeze.
He looks towards the liquor shelf with far more trepidation. They weren’t a hard-liquor kind of dorm – it was expensive, for one, and after the last time they tried shots (which resulted in Seungmin spewing his guts right in the middle of their brand-new area rug), whiskey was promptly banned. But he’s sure it was whiskey or bourbon he smelled.
And orange, right? Not a summer-bright tangerine, though; a winter’s orange, a bloom of heat in the ice of a frost.
They don’t have oranges. They don’t have whiskey. There’s only the sorry container of chili powder at the memory of Ew. That’s not right. still ringing in his mind.
His scent blooms again, overtired and frustrated.
His fucking stupid scent.
He remembers, clear as day, when he first realized there was something wrong with his scent. Seventeen, a week after his presentation, and manning the counter at the bakery because he was still too tired to stand for long but stir crazy at the thought of remaining in bed any more. His parents and sisters had complimented his scent, assuring him that, surely, the strength of it would lessen.
He was then (as he remains now) a walking lemon bar. Achingly sweet. It poured off of him.
And apparently? It was all too enticing to Alphas.
Felix’s dad had walked in on a man with his eyes flashing red. He hadn’t touched Felix – had barely made it to the counter – but the image had firmly planted itself in Felix’s worst nightmares. If only it had ended there–
My little lemondrop, his mother had said, you’re just too sweet for this world.
Felix huffs at the memory and peels the fraying scent patch off of his neck so aggressively that it tugs at his skin before he chucks it in the trashcan. Without the meager protection of the patch, his scent pours from him, growing sicklier by the second. Felix’s scent doesn’t sour – of course it doesn’t, that wouldn’t be nearly ironic enough. No, when Felix is upset, it bleeds saccharine and nauseating.
“Lix-ah?”
Figures his roommate would notice his return; for one, his nose is sharper than anyone else Felix has ever met. For another, and despite having met Felix a mere three months prior, he seemingly views Felix as some kind of stray kitten in need of constant attention.
Not that Felix is complaining about constant attention.
Minho enters the room, eyes on his phone. “There you are, want to tell Hyung what’s got you smelling like–”
Minho’s eyes raise from his phone, then flicker in a double take before pocketing the device.
“–stale lemonade,” Minho finishes weakly.
“Thanks, Hyung,” Felix huffs, eyes still locked on the chili powder. “You sure know how to build a guy up.”
Minho clicks his tongue, walks over to Felix, and tugs him against his side. Felix goes easily, not hesitating to lean his full body weight against his Hyung. When Felix transferred to University in Korea, he’d barely had time to pack, let alone worry about who he’d get roomed with. He was last minute enough that the second year Omega dorms were all full; Minho was probably hoping to avoid getting a new roommate given that his assigned one never showed for fall semester. Certainly the last thing he’d have wanted to deal with was a walking, talking sugar bomb with irritatingly persistent nightmares and a half-grasp on all thing Korean.
Felix has enrolled halfway through, arriving at the tail-end of November with a single duffle bag of clothing and a suitcase full of scent patches. He’s been terrified and relieved and tired and hungry. He wasn’t even signed up for any classes, would be spending the last month of the fall term taking dance classes and catching up on required Korean testing. He was kind of a mess, and he smelled like it too.
But Minho had taken one look at him, hummed thoughtfully, and asked if Felix wanted to get takeout.
He was exceedingly patient with Felix – he never got mad when Felix misunderstood an aspect of Korean culture, and when Felix woke that first night screaming and whimpering, Minho hadn’t just comforted him, he’d brought Felix into his nest, scented him until he was a boneless, purring puddle.
He knew Minho was gentler with him than with others. He didn’t push Felix to meet all of his friends, but he did bring Seungmin and Innie (a second year Omega and a not-yet-presented first year respectively) into the fold. They were sarcastic, teasing, but undeniably safe. They often joked that they were only friends with Felix for the free ice cream, but their softness towards him proved otherwise time and time again.
They never commented on his scent. Felix wonders if Minho warned them not too early on. But at least Felix gets to wear their scents (sans Innie, though he’s been more on edge lately, so his presentation must be approaching) on him, to cover up some of his own.
Minho doesn’t seem the least bit surprised now when Felix turns his face and presses it against Minho’s neck. His earl grey and cardamon scene immediately soothes the fraying edges of Felix’s nerves. Minho responds by carding his fingers through Felix’s hair, waiting until his lemon-and-vanilla sugar scent is purer, less like aspartame and more like sunbaked sugar.
“So,” his Hyung finally asks, “what’s got you tearing through our cabinets smelling like someone pissed in your cereal?”
“Ew,” Felix says, though it immediately reminds him of–
Ew. That’s not right.
Minho pulls back, brow furrowed. “Come on, what happened? You’re normally in a great mood after you work at the parlor?”
Felix groans and drops his head with a thud against this kitchen counter, right next to the bottle of chili powder.
“I met a guy with the best scent in the world.”
“Oh!” Minho says. “That’s … that’s good, Bbokie. Right?”
Felix turns his head to the side to glare up at his Hyung.
“It would be. Except I think he might be kind of an asshole-”
“-Oh.”
“And he hates sweet things,” Felix adds softly. Minho’s expression falls even further, and Felix’s scent seems to pulse again, as if to remind them both that, as far as scents go, Felix’s is pure sweetness.
“Oh.”
“Yeah,” Felix sighs. “Oh.”
At least his friend was sweet. Felix hopes he decides to bring his boyfriend to the shop.
Besides, chances are, he’ll never meet Mr. I-Hate-Sweets again.
Surely, he’ll forget about his scent soon.
Except, Felix kind of feels like he’s lying to himself; because that scent seems to be lingering at the back of his throat. And he didn’t really know scents could do that.