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“I’m ed.”

Mingyu throws his head back into his pillows and flings his biology textbook across the room with as much strength he could muster. The textbook is flung a measly two feet forward before it bounces off the edge of his bed, and Mingyu watches in dismay as the book falls to the floor, pages crumpling under its weight with a less than satisfying crunch.

“Hey—” Junhui visibly perks up from his sprawled out position at the foot of Mingyu’s bed, and he reaches down to salvage whatever’s left of the textbook. He flips through it, thumbing the corner of a page as he reads with about as much enthusiasm a literature major could have for science. “Why not ask that Jeon Wonwoo boy-crush of yours for help? It’ll be a fantastic opportunity for you to romance him.”

“First of all, you’re a sorry excuse for a roommate— go back to your own ing bed. Second of all, I’m not romancing or crushing on anybody, okay? I just appreciate a good face.”

“In times like this, I think your capacity for romance is equivalent to that of this plankton,” Junhui drawls, a finger tracing the outline of a cell of some sort. (At least, Mingyu figures it could be a cell.)  

“So obsolete, so minuscule, so insignificant—”

“Yo, even I know that’s no plankton— hey!” It takes Mingyu longer than it should have to notice Junhui’s blatant middle finger product placement, and he snatches the textbook back with a dejected pout on his lips.

“Look, you can either grow a pair, get Wonwoo to tutor you and share some intense chemical bond, or miss your chance at the love of a lifetime and blatantly copy off his work like the useless being you are,” Junhui goes back to annotating his literature book, feet dangling dangerously close to Mingyu’s face. Mingyu leans back in disgust.

“I heard he’s a natural at science, and a big sweetheart. Professor Chwe assigned you to share tables with him during your practical exams, didn't he?”

“I can't do that to him— come on, dude, please help me.”

Junhui gives Mingyu a look that has Mingyu feeling like he’s no better than the bubblegum stuck to the bottom of a person’s shoe— unwanted, yet still clingy as . It makes him feel like . Something in Mingyu’s expression must have revealed his desperation more than he had wanted it to, because his roommate’s expression shifts and Junhui reaches for his phone on the bedside table.

“Go get ready, I'll call Minghao over to tutor you.”

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Mingyu lets his finals approach with the skewed and definitely flawed attitude of out of sight, out of mind. As he counts the days left to his practical, however, Mingyu increasingly finds himself having the urge to drown himself in the vat of dilute hydrochloric acid nestled comfortably at the back of the science lab.

He hates the onslaught of practical lessons that Professor Chwe terrorises them with, and would much rather be back in the classroom, not-so-subtly staring at the pretty bio-chem major seated diagonally across from him. They have been classmates for a year now, yet Mingyu still hasn’t been able to muster up the courage to speak to him.

Mingyu feels a hard tap on his shoulder and he swings his body to the side in response, hot bubbling acid threatening to spill out of the test tube he has clamped tightly between a pair of wooden tongs. He looks back in time to see Minghao flinch, his lips pressed into a grim line.

“Spill that on me and I will beat you to the ground with this bunsen burner, man. Why is your solution red?”

Mingyu lifts his head to scan the classroom, and sure enough, nobody else in the lab has solution with colour a poor rendition of the artificially flavoured cherry pop Junhui always packs their shared fridge with. Minghao lets out a resigned sigh and walks away, and Mingyu is fairly certain he hears Minghao cursing him to every last circle of hell in Mandarin.

The next time someone taps him on the shoulder, Mingyu takes the extra precaution to set his test tube back down on the rack before turning. Mingyu’s heart stops and his brain short-circuits when he sees Jeon Wonwoo standing before him, wrapped up in his overly large white lab coat and safety goggles sitting low on his nose. He looks adorable.

“Hey, um— I'm Wonwoo, I believe we’ll be sharing tables during the finals— ah, Minghao was saying something about how you needed my help?”

Mingyu finds himself standing so stiff he swears his neck should've snapped into two when he whips his head around to glare at Minghao from across the room. Minghao returns this with a toothy grin and two thumbs up, and Mingyu is left questioning his choice of friends.

“I, uh– I don't need any help.”

Wonwoo looks over to the test tube rack apprehensively, and Mingyu has to stop himself from grabbing the smaller student’s shoulders and violently shaking the living daylights out of him because , he's so cute.

“Your test tube is... purple. Our practical is in a week, if you need help, I can—”

Now, Mingyu really wants to drown himself in that vat of hydrochloric acid. He fails to stop himself from spilling a lame excuse (one that drains Mingyu of every last ounce of dignity he has left).

“Oh, yeah, I was just experimenting. Purple is my favourite colour, so I wanted to— uh— see it.” Mingyu really needs to tape a piece of that filter paper stored high up in the shelves to his damn mouth, he thinks, because Wonwoo looks adequately taken aback by his answer.

Mingyu flashes Wonwoo a smile he hopes is charming, the same smile that gets him out of trouble every time he gets caught with the beer the class monitor, Seungcheol, sneaks in, or when he goes running down the hallways of the dormitory dead drunk with Junhui. (He does receive a warning slip under his door from the resident adviser, Jisoo, though. It’s hard to take him seriously when he dots his ‘I’s with hearts and signs off with a smiley face.)

It takes Mingyu’s breath away, seeing Wonwoo up this close. He’s able to fully appreciate Wonwoo’s strong jawline, the sharp slope of his nose, and slanted, mono-lidded eyes. Mingyu finds himself feeling small under Wonwoo’s enigmatic gaze, but he sees something akin to a hint of amusement in his eyes. He can’t be sure, because Wonwoo has already left to return to his table with a gentle upturn of lips directed Mingyu’s way and a reassuring pat to his arm. Mingyu swears to himself that he's not in love.

﹍﹎﹍﹎﹍﹎

Wonwoo, despite Mingyu’s protests, has taken it upon himself to become Mingyu’s temporary lab partner. It’s funny, how Mingyu’s heart tightens thinking about how Wonwoo could very well just be helping him out of some friendship debt to Minghao, instead of genuine interest. He finds himself enjoying Wonwoo’s amused exhales too much, when he chastises Mingyu for getting a question wrong, and when Mingyu inadvertently knocks another beaker off the edge of the table.

As to whether Wonwoo feels any inkling of regret or not, he certainly doesn't let it show, and Mingyu thinks that he deserves an award and cash money for the earth-shattering feat.

“Mingyu, wait—”

Wonwoo barely manages to finish his sentence before he's flinching sharply as the test tube Mingyu was heating up bursts, shattering across the table. Hot solution lands on Mingyu's coat sleeve, and Wonwoo is quick to swat the boy’s arm away. A rubber stopper rolls over to Wonwoo’s side of the table, and to his horror, Wonwoo finds that someone has doodled the face of a rubber duck across the top of it. A black sharpie pen lies uncapped beside Mingyu’s pencil case, leaving too little to imagination.

“Mingyu, I told you it was an exothermic reaction! You were supposed to test for hydrogen, and you can’t use a rubber stopper.”

Wonwoo watches as Mingyu shrugs his shoulders dismissively and reaches to pluck the rubber stopper out of his hands, a somewhat reassuring smile on his face.

“Yeah, I was going to collect the gas before I tes—” Mingyu’s smile falls as he turns to face Wonwoo, as though suddenly coming to a realisation, and Wonwoo is surprised at the sudden change in the taller student’s expression and tone.

“Where are your safety goggles?”

Wonwoo blinks, unsure of the conversation’s direction. “I lent them to Jeonghan. He lost his pair, and you know how he gets. He’ll be blind by the end of the lesson if I didn’t lend mine to him.”

Mingyu doesn’t respond, pulling off his safety goggles and gently slipping them over Wonwoo’s eyes instead. For a brief moment, Wonwoo forgets how to breathe. From the corner of his eyes, Wonwoo can see Minghao marvelling at them with a -eating grin of his, looking as though he’s having a ing whale of a time, and Wonwoo feels a strong urge to project distilled water from the wash bottle across the room. He firmly ignores how quickly his cheeks are heating up, how colour is definitely blooming up to the tip of his ears, and how Mingyu notices.

﹍﹎﹍﹎﹍﹎

“Gravitational pull comes from the earth, Mingyu, and gravity sticks you to the floor. Why are we even talking about this? You’re not a physics major.”

“No, man, I think I’m very sick or something. That’s not how gravity works for me. Does everyone have different centres of gravity? Because, like— I gravitate towards you.”

Wonwoo tenses at Mingyu’s words. Was that a confession? He feels mildly sorry for the frog he’s dissecting, for if it were still alive it would certainly have died a terrible death from the stab Wonwoo has just taken at it. He sets his scalpel down and turns to face Mingyu, trying to detect the slightest hint of a lie, a joke, anything. He finds none, and instead discovers that he likes that expression on Mingyu. At a loss for words, Wonwoo turns away from the taller student, deciding that the bloody corpse of an amphibian was infinitely more interesting and engaging than whatever nonsense Mingyu was spouting.

“No, really,” Mingyu continues (with Wonwoo not-so-subtly hanging onto every word) and says, “Does this mean that my gravity is pulling me sideways instead? Are you my centre of gravity?”

Wonwoo decides that Mingyu is an idiot.

﹍﹎﹍﹎﹍﹎

Mingyu manages to forget about his finals until the very day of his biology practical exam. He promptly has a meltdown in the morning, and is really only in school because Junhui has promised him that there really isn’t anything to worry about. Junhui sends him off with a kiss on the cheek and a pat on his , as well as a reminder that his table mate is there for him. He's feeling jittery and nervous, but Mingyu’s fairly certain that it’s entirely the fault of the caffeine bomb Junhui forced down his throat that morning.

(“Stop it, Junhui, I'm not drinking that—”

“No, you stop it. This is my special concoction of Red Bull, coffee, cherry soda pop and undying love for you, so you better ing drink it.”)

Mingyu suits up in his laboratory wear and tugs at the tacky rubber gloves, marching into the laboratory without a single clue on microorganisms, photosynthesis, or the circle of life, or whatever the biology could possibly be about. He's beginning to think that he would be better off spending his time inhaling the toxic fumes in the fume box when Wonwoo enters the lab, dressed again in his adorably oversized coat.

The latter’s face is obstructed by the blue surgical mask covering it from nose down, but the slanted crescents of his eyes betray a smile that Mingyu knows is there. Mingyu desperately wants to speak to him, but with Professor Chwe sitting cross-legged on the teacher’s table and a pair of binoculars in his hands (“So that I’ll be able to see when your sorry asses start to cheat.”), he decides against it. Mingyu is almost sure Professor Chwe would be looking through overly zoomed-in lenses, but who’s he to say that Professor Chwe couldn’t very well learn how to work the binoculars over the span of two hours?

Professor Chwe’s call for silence sends Mingyu down a panicked, hysterical spiral, and he suddenly regrets not taking Minghao’s tutoring sessions seriously as he prepares the organisms for inspection under the microscope. Who could blame him though, when his tutor and roommate were the ones making googoo-eyes and kissy faces at each other for most of the tutoring sessions?

Mingyu struggles to fit the microscope slide onto the stage and curses himself for having fat fingers which never seem to listen. He grimaces as he spins the revolving turret of his microscope only to hear a sharp snap, and he starts praying fervently that Professor Chwe’s hearing abilities are about the same as those of the microbes trapped within his petri dish.

Wonwoo's hearing, however, is not. Mingyu can physically feel Wonwoo’s gaze on him, and his cheeks burn with embarrassment as he accidentally snaps the sample of his specimen while trying to release it from the microscope.

, this is terrible.

Mingyu tries, he really, really tries not to let his eyes wander over to Wonwoo’s paper. Junhui’s words reverberate in the empty void of his mind.

“He's an absolute sweetheart, really, he won't mind if you take a look at his paper.”

Mingyu hates himself. He tries not to be obvious as he angles his head slightly to peek at Wonwoo’s paper, the silence in the lab strangely unnerving. He’s suddenly made conscious of his height, and with him being so reminiscent of a sore thumb sticking out of nowhere, Mingyu might as well stick a bright red target on his forehead and let Professor Chwe shoot him at point blank. You got this, Kim Mingyu— , thousands of kids cheat in exams everyday, how bad must you be at life if you get cau—

“Mingyu, , stop that!”

Mingyu jumps at the harsh whisper, and lifts his head to make eye contact with his table mate as inconspicuously as he can— they're talking in the middle of their biology practical exam, darn it— and he finds Wonwoo looking at him as if he were the bacteria frolicking merrily on the slide under Wonwoo's microscope. He certainly feels as insignificant as bacteria under Wonwoo’s unfathomable gaze, and Mingyu suddenly feels jealous of the fungi growing off the sides of the sink separating his side of the table from Wonwoo’s. I'm better off as fungi, maybe then I won't be as big of a failure.

“Jesus, Wonwoo, you gave me a heart attack, I thought you were Chwe.”

“I can see you turning to look at me, you’ll get both of our results nullified,” Wonwoo hisses, quickly turning back to glare at his work. His hands are shaking, and Mingyu swears he hears the snap of pencil lead breaking as Wonwoo writes just a little too hard on his paper.

Mingyu sees Professor Chwe perking up from his meditative, semi-comatose state, and it sends him into a frenzy. To hell with the filter paper, Mingyu really needs this to work.

“I— — dude, if you love me, please let me copy off of you. I have no idea what this ing blob of amoeba I'm looking at is, and I think I busted my microscope.”

“Mingyu, I barely know you.”

“Wanna let me copy anyway?”

Mingyu watches as Wonwoo closes his eyes, letting out an exasperated sigh and pinching the bridge of his nose between his thumb and index finger. Even in his white lab coat, rubber gloves and face mask, Mingyu finds himself staring at Wonwoo again because he's just so pretty. Under normal, not-so-tenuous circumstances, Mingyu’d definitely spend most of his time admiring Wonwoo’s face, but bless Professor Chwe for assigning them to the same lab table anyway, because , at least Mingyu got the chance to be next to his crush, even if it were for a stupid exam.

(“He’s my eye candy, I don't do crushes," Mingyu argues, ready to fire with a thousand reasons as to why he isn’t crushing on Jeon Wonwoo, only to receive the flip of Junhui's middle finger in response.)

Mingyu’s heart nearly catches in his throat when Wonwoo turns to him, eyes sharp and expression contemplative, and further proceeds to do a double take when he sees Wonwoo slide his answer paper across the table.

“Not an amoeba, try lactobacillus acidophilus.”

Wonwoo’s hushed voice sends tingles down Mingyu’s spine, and Mingyu wants to slap himself for finding his voice alluring even when he's talking about bacteria, for God’s sake. He doesn’t miss how the corners of Wonwoo’s lips quirk up in the faintest of ways, and instantaneously (finally) decides that , Junhui was right, this is a crush.

“Does this mean that you love me?”

“No, Mingyu, I still don’t know you.”

﹍﹎﹍﹎﹍﹎

Mingyu ends up passing the biology exam (plus his chemistry one)— granted, with plenty of help from Wonwoo, but still, he passes. Mingyu still sees the smaller student in class every other day, huddled in his oversized knitted sweaters with his customary messy hair, and napping his time away because finals were over and classes were no longer of any use. He gets a chance to talk to Wonwoo again the day before winter break, the boy staying behind in the lab to help pack away measuring tubes and pipettes and other funky instruments Mingyu could give less s about.

Mingyu approaches Wonwoo hesitantly, settling himself on the table island (in the middle of the lab where Professor Chwe demonstrates his eccentric experiments), and watches as Wonwoo returns the last cylinder to its place on the shelf.

"Shouldn’t you be off celebrating the start of winter break, Mingyu?" The deep timbre of Wonwoo’s voice never fails to catch Mingyu by surprise, and Mingyu is again stumbling over himself to find the right words to say.

"I— I wanted to say thank you, for you know— that— " Mingyu cringes at how he sounds like he's speaking around a ing potato, and he can already foresee Junhui giving him the finger when Mingyu updates him tonight.

Wonwoo pauses briefly, nose scrunched up in the cutest contemplative expression before walking over to Mingyu’s island. He rests his hands on the edge of the table and props himself up with his arms, looking at Mingyu from under his lashes, and Mingyu thinks Wonwoo couldn't look more kissable even if he tried.

“Well, you looked like you were about to bomb that paper, and everyone knows how bad you are at biology—”

“I know that the mitochondria is the powerhouse of the cell," Mingyu interrupts, pointing a triumphant finger at Wonwoo. He pauses for a moment before booping the other student’s nose, and Mingyu relishes in the way Wonwoo immediately blinks, eyes widened and lips parted in surprise.

“That— That won’t get you anywhere, Mingyu,” Wonwoo replies after he manages to compose himself. There’s a lovely smile curling his lips, and Mingyu really hopes he’s not imagining the fondness in it.

“ing whatever—”

Wonwoo lets out a small exhale of laughter, lips lifting into a full smile and nose scrunching up ever so slightly. Mingyu watches as his slender shoulders shake with laughter, and finds himself smiling, because Wonwoo is gentle and Wonwoo is kind, and really, Mingyu is head over heels in love with him.

“You know, I could really use a tutor. Just a thought.”

Wonwoo doesn’t say anything in response, but Mingyu sees the tenderness in his eyes and that’s all the answer he needs.

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A/N: so that's it for my debut fic!ヾ(｡´∀｀｡*) I did hansol so dirty, I'm sorry 

I have some loose ends to tie up, is anyone down for a sequel (or more like epilogue)?

comments would be lovely ♡ idk if I'm ever writing again, maybe I need to stay in my beta lane

s/o to my beta ohhh role reversal chorusofthesong, I'm sorry I wrote the prompt I originally meant for you to write huuuu

hit me up on twitter @bbaekstillcute! let's chit chat