Do Kyungsoo was a whiz with languages. They had always come easily to him and learning them was his thing.

            Hence his choice of major when enrolling at South Korea Seoul University last year: linguistics. He’d contemplated majoring in one—or four—languages he’d yet to learn, but soon rejected that idea after discovering that (1) a student could at most only double major, and that (2) the language courses offered by SKSU were both meager in scope and embarrassingly lower level in difficulty.

            Also, Junmyeon—who was two years older, but had been held back once and so was only a year ahead— had already spent an entire two terms at the university and dispensed the knowledge that the most complex language taught at SKSU was Farsi, something Kyungsoo had mastered years ago and didn’t really feel like repeating for nearly 8,000,000 Won a year. Not that money had ever been a problem for the Do family, but Kyungsoo had experienced the weight of at least a little filial responsibility when deciding his area of study. His hyung had pointed out that a degree in Linguistics wasn’t much better than Kyungsoo’s original academic plan, but the younger of the Do brothers had always liked understanding the root of things and Junmyeon had later commented to Kyungil that at least Kyungsoo would be trying something new for once.

            It’s not that Kyungil’s younger brother didn’t do things outside of his comfort zone—he had tasted that cauliflower rice from that one restaurant that one time, thank you very much—but he’d definitely never been overly adventurous or aggressive in his pursuit of difference. Which is why his friendship with Kim Junmyeon had initially struck everyone who knew Do Kyungsoo as a little unexpected and somewhat strange.

            Kim Junmyeon had been Kyungsoo’s best friend since the two’s first meeting at an extra-curricular Mandarin class when both were still elementary students. Junmyeon was there because he was the future heir of a popular upscale hotel chain with a successful Chinese branch. Kyungsoo’s family was as wealthy as the Kim’s but the Do boy was there because he had already learned Japanese and his parents just didn’t know what to do with their prodigy of a second son.

            Put simply, Kyungsoo had been bored. And when child Kyungsoo was bored, he moped; he could usually be found lying around the house, muttering in various languages to his Pororo plushy, and being a general nuisance to anyone who tried to talk to him because they didn’t know any better. (That poor maid had no idea that when she’d asked “Young Master” what he wanted for lunch, he’d respond with a “Pororo is hungry too! Why didn’t you ask him?!” In perfectly accented English no less.)

            That incident was neither the first, nor the last.

            So Kyungsoo’s parents, tired of having a constantly harassed staff, told their younger son to pick a hobby and promptly kicked him out of the house. The banishment wasn’t permanent—obviously it lasted no more than the duration of a summer afternoon, and dusk was his playtime curfew anyway—but Kyungsoo had been seven and the memory was still vaguely traumatizing every time he thought about it. No one was surprised when Kyungsoo said he wanted new language classes, and his parents readily agreed, glad to finally have him out of their—or rather, his nanny’s—hair.

            So Kyungsoo started taking Mandarin two days a week after school. But it wasn’t long before he’d started to mope again, because he’d been in the class a whole one month and Mandarin wasn’t even that hard and he was bored again.

            Enter Junmyeon—and Kyungsoo’s salvation. The Kim boy was already nine and when he’d appeared in Kyungsoo’s advanced level class one day, introducing himself in near-flawless Chinese, Kyungsoo was smitten.  (His fluttering childhood crush was fleeting when Kyungsoo realized that the older boy had said his greetings in Mandarin because actually his Korean was terrible.) But they say you never forget your first love, which might be why Kyungsoo made the effort to offer to tutor the elder in their native language, is probably why Junmyeon actually took him up on it, and is most definitely why the two were still best friends nearly twelve years later.

            It helped that Kyungsoo thought the rest of his Mandarin classmates were immature idiots with no language abilities; whereas Junmyeon’s Korean was horrible but he at least could converse passably with Kyungsoo in Chinese.

            What everyone found so unexpected and strange about this was not that Kyungsoo and Junmyeon were friends, but that the younger boy had actually been the one to initiate their friendship. Though Kyungsoo had never been that extroverted before, there is indeed a first for everything, and Kyungsoo’s parents were understandably relieved when the nanny reported a decrease in conversations with Pororo and an increase in Junmyeon’s presence around the Do household.

            Kyungsoo’s parents were unable to observe their son’s change themselves because they were never around. Yet the Do sons hadn’t suffered too much at this lack of presence because the two had always been close and their nannies generally looked after them lovingly. When both became too old for nannies, Kyungil, as the heir to the family business—the production of high-end music equipment—had been sent to boarding school. But Kyungsoo’s penchant for languages (and his strong, though completely platonic, attachment to a certain brunette chaebol) allowed the second Do son much more freedom. When he had a new language to learn and Junmyeon to keep him company, Kyungsoo didn’t mope; honestly, that in itself was enough for his parents and they simply left their younger son to his own devices.

            Which is why, the day Kyungsoo turned 13 and Junmyeon appeared with a tiny Siamese kitten as a gift, Kyungsoo’s parents let him keep it. They weren’t at home to say no and by the time they found out about the pet, their son was already so in love with the animal that they couldn’t make him part with it.

            Their absence is also why they didn’t do anything when Kyungsoo—and Junmyeon—had taken Pororo—yes, that’s what Kyungsoo had named the cat—and “run away” one weekend the summer before Kyungsoo started high school. Really they’d just gone camping in Junmyeon’s backyard, but Kyungsoo’s parents hadn’t stopped them because Kyungsoo’s parents hadn’t known.

            And again, that’s why the Do parents were surprised when their elder son graduated from high school with a diploma and a boyfriend, and Kyungsoo had said that not only had he known about his brother and Yijeong for years, but also that he thought he maybe liked boys too. Mr. and Mrs. Do were slightly disappointed that they would (probably) never get grandchildren, at least not ones with Kyungil’s tell-tale smirk and easy humor—which originally belonged to Mr. Do—or with Kyungsoo’s genius and his owl-like eyes—about the origins of which both parents were admittedly confused.

            But if Kyungsoo’s parents were good at being constantly gone for business, they were even better at loving their sons, so it didn’t matter to them who their children dated, as long as those people made said children happy.

            Junmyeon definitely made Kyungsoo happy, and for the longest time the Do parents were absolutely sure that the Kim boy would become their younger son’s Jang Yijeong equivalent. Although they made sure to remain mute on that comparison in front of their younger son because Kyungil was always going on about his Jeong-ie being incomparable, to which his boyfriend would respond with a small smile and a bigger blush.

            But as far as the younger Do son’s love life was concerned, aside from a very drunken kiss the night of Junmyeon’s high school graduation—one that both vehemently deny when questioned—Kyungsoo’s friendship with Junmyeon remained exactly that.

            (Besides, even though both were now in university and Junmyeon’s Korean had long since improved, every so often both boys huddled together in SKSU’s library to study up on their native language. Kyungsoo did it for fun, but Junmyeon was still sometimes a little self-conscious, so the two friends occasionally continued the tutoring sessions they’d started long ago. Which is why, Kyungsoo told Junmyeon one September afternoon near the start of the younger’s first university term, they could never have dated—because Kyungsoo was still technically Junmyeon’s tutor and that would be weird.)

            As it turned out, these tutoring sessions usually just became the two meeting up to study separate subjects while sitting together. And so, most Tuesdays would find Do Kyungsoo and Kim Junmyeon at a quiet spot in the science wing of the university’s large library. It was decided early on that the two would meet up in the section most helpful for Junmyeon since medical textbooks usually weigh at least three times as much as any book Kyungsoo has to read for linguistics. (Junmyeon was, of course, to be the next CEO of Hotels Kim, but he was also much too smart for a single major and had decided to pursue a dual degree in business and medicine.)

            And aside from the weight of the books, there were simply too many for the older boy to check out from the library and carry around all at once. At least that’s the argument Junmyeon spews when he arrives every Tuesday to a sighing Kyungsoo who immediately complains—without fail—that “Hyuuuuung, the medicine section is so far away from the bathroom”—and civilization. Junmyeon’s response to Kyungsoo’s grievances is a familiar one; they repeat this cycle every week but neither boy minds because best friends need to spend time together yet both boys also have school work to do, so this Tuesdays-in-the-library thing was a sort of compromise in the middle.

            When Kyungsoo started his second year—and Junmyeon his third—the younger’s workload increased enough that their Tuesday nights would have bled into Wednesday mornings if they hadn’t also started meeting up on Thursdays. That’s not to say they sometimes didn’t stay up all night on Tuesday only to do the same thing all over again Thursday night too, because they did. But knowing that there would be more productivity two days later made it a little easier for the two friends to occasionally (read: often) stop their Tuesday studying early and go get food instead. If snacks were on the menu, it was dukbokki for Junmyeon and sundae for Kyungsoo; if either had spoken that day to Mrs. Kim or Mrs. Do respectively, they usually went for something a little less fattening—the two would go to the elder’s dorm where Junmyeon would eat snack on sushi while Kyungsoo simultaneously prepared two servings of his famous kimchi spaghetti and questioningly tsked how Junmyeon had ever survived the first year of university without him.

            Unfortunately—also during Kyungsoo’s second year—the Chemistry Club started holding meetings in the science wing on Thursday afternoons, so the two were forced to venture elsewhere, and it was Junmyeon who’d suggested they relocate to the small café across from their current study location, instead of moving to simply another wing of the library itself. The light squeak in his voice and the incorrect grammatical structure of his sentence as he made this proposition caused Kyungsoo to look up from his copy of The Etymology of Etymology, at which point he’d noted the other boy’s faint blush with interest.

            “Finally,” he whispered to himself as his friend looked at him somewhat nervously.

            You see, Kyungsoo looked at life as if it were a language like any other. And the language Junmyeon was speaking was something he recognized. Do Kyungsoo may have been inexperienced in romance in general, but he could definitely recognize the signs: his best friend had a crush, and he'd had it for a while.