oneshots • nctdream x aespa

nosebleed 🐯🌙

Giselle is standing in line to get an iced Americano when the guy in front of her gets a nosebleed.

At first, she doesn't even notice it. She feels so hot and desperate to inhale cold, pure liquid energy that she's not even really aware of others around her; she's just solely fixated on her to-be caffeinated drink.

But then she sees red dots on the floor, between the guy's feet. Two at first, then two more—and only then does Giselle finally understand what's going on and walk up to the stranger, tapping him on the shoulder.

When the guy whips his head around, he reminds Giselle of her grandma's cat and its stare when she startles it with eyes oh so round and oh so wide open. "Yes?"

And there are two bloody trails running down the stranger's philtrum, lips, and chin. Lovely. But, seriously, sans the blood, the guy seems cute. There's an air of innocent nonchalance about him.

So Giselle does what any respectable person would do and tells him about his predicament, because it doesn't appear that the stranger is aware of his life juice loss.

"Hi, I'm Giselle." Confusion. Awkwardness hangs in the air, a tad too heavy. "I mean, you're bleeding?"

The man's eyebrows are thin, and as he furrows them, Giselle can't help but focus on the movement. It's comical and exaggerated, and yet the man looks so, so deadpan, like he's been thinking about the assignment deadline he missed. "What?"

"You're bleeding from your nose," she repeats, and points at the other's face. The black-haired man brings a hand up, brushing the tip of his index finger against his mouth. And judging by the look in his features as he stares at it, it's definitely covered in blood.

"Oh."

Silence. The employee is looking at them weirdly from behind her cash register. The stranger doesn't move yet, and neither does Giselle. There are two customers behind them, joined quickly enough by a third. A fly buzzes around Giselle's head, and that finally makes her move.

She crosses the distance to the counter and just grabs the whole tissue dispenser because, well, the guy is bleeding a lot, and she's sure they have other tissue dispensers anyway.

When she turns back, the guy has plastered his hands to his nose, as if trying to hold the fluids in, but it's in vain. It's gore, too, almost, but Giselle doesn't mind. not too much, anyway. "Here!" She says—or should I say screams—because of the situation and holds out the dispenser for the guy to take.

The man grabs a few fistfuls of tissues and just sticks everything to his nose, his mouth, and his chin; his knuckles are smeared with red, and it all looks a bit ridiculous.

Giselle would laugh, except the man's shirt is now stained, and there's blood on the ground. People are going to think there was a fight or something because people are overly dramatic and think in extremes instead of going with more boring, more probable happenings, like "a stranger got a nosebleed in the middle of the line at the Neo Café."

So she swings an arm around the stranger's shoulders to pull him away from the line and into the restroom sink.

He is still pressing tissues to his nose, but the blood is still gushing out. "Pinch the bridge of your nose," she instructs, and when the stranger doesn't react, just eyes her blankly, Giselle takes it upon herself to tilt his chin downward and apply pressure on the bridge. "Here."

It's awkward and weird to touch someone she absolutely doesn't know in such a way. Giselle can only imagine the internal screams she is most definitely releasing; after all, she, herself, absolutely abhors being touched in the face, all the more so if she doesn't know that the fingers on her have been washed recently.