kim seokjin smells like formaldehyde and drugstore aftershave.

there’s a small ink stain on his lab coat pocket and he wears wire framed glasses. when he takes off his glasses there's a cute mark left on the bridge of his nose, or so jisoo thinks.

kim seokjin is handsome, which is a fact, and not an opinion. all the girls in jisoo’s class had said so, as they giggled over diagrams of pig’s brains.

they’re introduced through an impromptu meeting, after seokjin had been pulled into their professor’s office in passing. jisoo gives him a small nod, watching as he shifts around awkwardly, a clipboard clenched against his chest.

the first thing he says to her is: “ah, you were in the festival beauty pageant.”

their grey haired professor laughs and takes it as a sign that the two will get along. jisoo isn’t so sure. the tall young man acts if they had never met before, as if she hadn’t been sitting in the front row of recitation the entirety of the semester. as if she hadn’t made fearless eye contact with him each time she volunteered to help hand out test leaflets.  

“is that guy still calling you beauty queen?” her best friend jennie asks through sips of iced coffee.

it was rare for the two of them to see each other outside of classes since jisoo became a lab assistant. whenever they did, usually in between quick bites to eat or a caffeine fix, they still somehow talked about school. even though jennie was preparing for a counseling degree, she still patiently listened to jisoo whine about the lab. most notably, a certain grad student who practically lived in the lab.

“yeah, i hate it.” jisoo frowns, absently pushing around the ice in her glass with a straw. “ugh, he doesn’t take me seriously at all.”

she’s been working in the lab for over a month and yet all she does is print out lab instructions, wipe brain juice off of tables, and disinfect equipment. at this point she’s less of a lab assistant and more of a glorified cleaner.

occasionally she gets to perform literature reviews when prompted by seokjin stumbling into the lab with mussed hair and crooked glasses. he sends her emails in the middle of the night and sometimes she catches him sleeping on the couch when she opens up the lab in the morning.

needless to say, the flawed illusion of kim seokjin as an esteemed graduate student was quickly shattered. his glasses are never not smudged with fingerprints. he stares off into space for several periods of time. his lab coat is never clean.

and he has yet to call jisoo by her actual name, or really pay much attention to her at all other than to ramble off lists of tasks.  

“i’m sorry, jisoo.” jennie gives her an empathetic pat on her hand. “just gotta stick it out for the resume.”

“i know, i know.” jisoo sighs, brushing back her bangs. “at least it pays pretty well.”

“there’s that, too.” her friends nods sagely. “do you still have to take on tutoring jobs?”

“mm.” she hums. “but i’m just tutoring one kid now. actually, i should