pairing: BaekChen
length: 2293 words

“Hi, you must be Kim Jongdae!” A boy with a sunny smile and messy hair held out his hand in greeting. There was a dark green baseball cap covering the wavy chestnut brown hair, but messy strands were still poking out from underneath, much to Jongdae’s disapproval.

“And you must be Byun Baekhyun,” he answered as he gingerly took hold of the other male’s hand and shook it. At the very least, Baekhyun’s hands looked well-groomed. The rest of him… Not so much. From what Jongdae could see as he unabashedly scanned his blind date’s appearance, this guy was the total opposite of him.

While Jongdae was wearing a crisp white polo shirt and light gray slacks with polished black shoes, Baekhyun was dressed in an over-sized bright red jacket and faded blue jeans with holes ripped to showcase knobby knees. And to Jongdae’s alarm, Baekhyun had two different shoes on his socked feet: a dirty white tennis shoe was on his left foot and a navy blue tennis shoe was on his right foot.

Jongdae wanted to leave right now. And he was never trusting Chanyeol to set him up on a blind date ever again.

Baekhyun sheepishly scratched the back of his neck as he said, “Sorry for being late! I woke up an hour ago and I almost forgot about this until Chanyeol texted me a reminder about half an hour before our meeting time.”

“It’s fine.” Jongdae sent him a tight-lipped smile, but in reality, he was fuming inside. Time was money and money was time; he didn’t have spare minutes to waste on a dolt like Byun Baekhyun who didn’t seem to have any consideration for other people’s time. What kind of people was Chanyeol hanging out with in his spare time? But, despite wanting to leave, Jongdae reined in his irritation—difficult as it was to do—and decided to give his blind date a chance. “Shall we head inside?” he asked, motioning to the door of the café they were standing outside of.

“Well, actually, I was thinking we could go somewhere else.”

Jongdae arched an eyebrow in bewilderment. “What’s wrong with this place?”

“To be honest, it looks really boring. Kind of like a place where old people go to waste time and be old together and do old people stuff, y’know,” Baekhyun admitted as he looked at the outside of the café, completely oblivious to the way that the other male’s mouth dropped open at that response.

“This—this is the café I always go to with Chanyeol,” Jongdae spluttered as he touched his face and felt for wrinkles; Chanyeol always commented on how Jongdae looked much older than his actual age and while he had always assumed that his freakishly tall co-worker was joking, perhaps that wasn’t the case. Maybe he really was, God forbid, an old geezer who was past his prime, which was why he was still single.

While Jongdae was internally freaking out over his supposed elderly age, Baekhyun twirled around and curiously watched his blind date go through a mid-life crisis. “You okay, Jongdae?”

The other male immediately rounded on Baekhyun, who jumped backwards to avoid Jongdae’s face bumping into his, while ranting loudly, “I can’t believe Chanyeol purposely set me up with a kid like you to make fun of my age! I’m only a few months older than him! That doesn’t make me ancient!”

“Well, dinosaurs are ancient and you kind of look like one, so—” Baekhyun immediately shut up when Jongdae sent him the darkest glare he had ever seen in his short life.

“Anyway, how old are you, kid?” But before Baekhyun could respond, Jongdae plowed forward without a pause as he wrung his hands anxiously. “Oh no, Chanyeol better not have sent me up with some grade school kid. The FBI will put me on a watch-list and I might end up in jail, because that joker thought this would be a good prank.” Jongdae suddenly grabbed Baekhyun’s hands, which were very smooth to touch, and asked in a strangled voice, “Please don’t report me if you’re underage. Please. I’m only interested in consenting adults, I promise. I can’t lose my job. Not when I’m in the running for a promotion.”

Baekhyun laughed loudly at the desperation in the other male’s eyes and the nonsense coming out of his mouth. “Don’t worry. I’m way over eighteen. I don’t look that young, do I?”

Jongdae looked at him suspiciously while responding, “Maybe. But how do you know Chanyeol? I work with him and I’ve met some of his other friends before, but I’ve never met you.”

“Family friends,” the other male answered with a nonchalant shrug. “We drifted a bit during university, since we were in completely different majors, but we reconnected at his older sister’s wedding last year. You know Yura, right?”

Jongdae nodded, but his eyebrows were still furrowed with mistrust. “Even so, you still haven’t told me how old you are.”

“I was born in May of ninety-two. May sixth, to be exact,” Baekhyun clarified with a beaming smile.

And Jongdae’s jaw dropped open again, because this kid was actually older than him and Chanyeol? “You’re kidding me.”

“I am a certified early nineties kid,” the older male reaffirmed while pulling out his wallet. It was decorated with Pikachu, which looked utterly childish to Jongdae who owned a sleek black leather wallet in contrast. Baekhyun flipped his wallet open and pulled out a thin card before handing it to Jongdae. “Check my birthday for yourself if you don’t believe me.”

To his relief, in neat black print, the numbers 1992-05-06 were etched onto the identification card underneath the name Byun Baekhyun and a photo of the grinning card owner.

“See? I’m not a liar,” Baekhyun said smugly as he took back his identification card from the younger male who was now silently thanking the heavens for assuaging his previous fears. “Anyway, now that you’ve verified who I am, let’s go to a different place! I know just the spot!”

Feeling extremely relieved that he wouldn’t be charged as a criminal for something Chanyeol would have been responsible for, since this was all Chanyeol’s bright idea, Jongdae agreed as he smoothed out the wrinkles near the bottom of his polo shirt. After all, he needed to look impeccable during this date, even if Baekhyun didn’t seem to share his sentiments.

“Awesome! You’re going to love it!” The older male rapidly clapped his hands together like a seal would. “I promise we’ll have lots of fun! You’ll definitely feel young there!”

“Okay, okay, I get it. And I’m not old, by the way. I’m younger than you by four months,” Jongdae added with a grimace. This wasn’t what he had agreed to at all when Chanyeol had first proposed the idea of a blind date during one of their lunch breaks. In fact, this was the exact opposite. Jongdae sighed, wondering what he had just signed up for as Baekhyun suddenly grabbed his hand and began pulling him to who-knows-where.

--

God, no, this wasn’t what he had agreed to at all.

“You brought me to a d-drug dealer’s den, d-didn’t you,” Jongdae croaked as he took in the complete messiness of the underground room as Baekhyun eagerly bounced inside while pulling in the terrified male. It looked like an actual dump with empty chip bags and dirty clothes strewn all over the wooden floor. The furniture seemed to be falling apart, barely held together with gray masking tape. The lights were eerily dim and there was a dank smell permeating the muggy air. This is it. I’m going to die here, even though I’m so young. Park Chanyeol, you are the first person I’ll come back to haunt for landing me in this mess. I am never listening to you ever again.

“Of course not, silly! You’ve got the wrong idea!” Baekhyun immediately began tidying up the mess—or at least he tried to—while a cold sweat broke out on Jongdae’s smooth forehead. “This is my secret hide-out! Or, well, it’s not a secret anymore since I showed you how to get here, but you get what I mean.”

No, Jongdae didn’t understand anything right now. All he knew was that Chanyeol was the worst friend ever and he was never going to go on a blind date ever again. Jongdae was okay with being single for the rest of his life.

“C’mere!” The older male was patting at an empty space on the couch while waving an unopened party-sized bag of barbeque-flavored Lay’s. “I thought I was out of chips, but I found this while I was cleaning!”

“Great,” Jongdae answered weakly as he delicately stepped around the messes on the floor, trying to avoid dirtying his polished shoes which he now regretted wearing. He cringed as he watched Baekhyun tear open the bag of potato chips, especially when orange crumbs flew out while the preservative nitrogen gas escaped after being sealed inside for so long.

Baekhyun noticed the younger male looking at him, so he the open bag in front of Jongdae’s face and cheerily asked, “Want some? We can snack and play video games together!”

“I’d rather not,” the younger male said with a pinched smile. The sooner he left, the better it would be for his currently waning sanity. Jongdae looked down at the silver watch on his right wrist and exclaimed, “Oh, look at the time! I have somewhere I need to be! It’s such a shame that we’re cutting this short, but it can’t be helped!”

“But we didn’t even get to do anything fun yet.” Baekhyun’s bottom lip slightly wobbled and the outer corners of his big, round eyes were turned downwards. “I wanted to play Super Smash Bros. with you, since it’s my favorite game.”

Jongdae’s ears instantly perked up and he paused in the middle of standing up from his seat. He hadn’t played the fighting game since his university days, but the franchise had always been one of his favorites since childhood. When he was younger, Jongdae would beg his parents for the newest title in the series, even though he would have to buy a new gaming system to play it on each time. Despite not having time or anyone to play the fighting game with now, Jongdae still kept up with the latest news updates from Nintendo, especially around the E3 gaming convention when new titles would be unveiled.

So when Baekhyun dangled this tantalizing carrot in front of him, Jongdae felt his knees go weak and he settled back onto the couch while curiously asking, “Who do you main?”

The older male’s eyes lit up upon realizing that his blind date was willing to stay and have fun with him. He quickly dropped the gigantic bag of Lay’s potato chips onto Jongdae’s lap, causing the younger male to yelp when stray crumbs flew onto his neat clothes, before reaching forward to brush aside some of the miscellaneous junk covering the coffee table in front of the couch. “I usually play as Lucas,” Baekhyun answered as he dug around for the game. Once he had recovered the game box, the older male stood up from the couch to insert the game into the console. “What about you?”

“I’m a beast at using Fox,” Jongdae boasted as he took a game controller from Baekhyun, who was also holding one for himself and came back to the couch to sit next to the younger male. “He’s consistently one of the best characters to use and he’s not insanely broken like Meta Knight was for a while.”

“Lame,” Baekhyun commented dismissively while the character-choosing screen loaded. “You’re just another casual, aren’t you? Everyone tries to play as Fox, but they actually at using him.”

“I’ve been playing as him since the first game!” the younger male immediately defended himself as he moved his cursor over Fox’s panel. “Everyone else jumped on the bandwagon way after I did!”

Baekhyun coughed loudly, but Jongdae heard, “Old,” pass through the other male’s lips and that only fired him up even more to prove his skills.

“You’re going to regret challenging me to this, Baekhyun. I’ll destroy you before you can even try to inflict damage on me.”

“If you say so,” Baekhyun answered in a sing-song voice as he tapped several buttons on his controller to automatically send their characters to the Final Destination stage. No useless obstacles to distract them and items were completely off. This would be a battle based purely on skill and skill alone. “Best out of five?”

Jongdae smirked as he replied, “Guess I’m leaving after round three then.”

Yes, Kim Jongdae still had some youth left in him. He’d show that obnoxious prat, who looked like he had sipped more than his fair share from the Fountain of Youth, that Kim Jongdae was not someone to be messed with when it came to Super Smash Bros. With age came experience and Jongdae was no longer the one who always died first whenever he had played with his friends during his childhood; nowadays, he swept Level Nine NPCs for breakfast, lunch, and dinner.

Byun Baekhyun, with his stupidly youthful face, wasn’t going to be the last man standing at Final Destination. Not today.

But maybe Jongdae wouldn’t beat him too badly this first round as a thank you for inviting him over to his, admittedly, fun—but very, very cluttered—hide-out. Jongdae would overlook the mess this once.

But Baekhyun’s mismatched shoes definitely needed to go. That would be the first thing Jongdae fixed after he wiped the floor with Baekhyun himself during their Super Smash Bros. match.

♈♈♈