ONE SHOTS🍒| STRAY KIDS

42. Laundry Fairy

Ship: HyunChan
Top: Chan
Bottom: Hyunjin
(This is more friendly than couple)
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Bang Chan was your average overachieving college student: top of his classes, never missed a lecture, subsisted entirely on coffee and instant noodles, and talked to his microwave when it beeped. ("I'm coming, jeez," he'd mutter like it was the microwave's fault he couldn't find clean chopsticks.)

He lived alone in a tiny studio apartment just off campus. It had all the charm of a repurposed closet, but he loved it. Quiet, private, and most importantly, no roommates. Until the day he came home and found... glitter. Everywhere.

Not just a little sparkle. A snowstorm of glitter. It was on the walls. In his sink. His toothbrush sparkled like it had done hard time at a rave.

Chan blinked. "Did someone break in to commit... glitter-based terrorism?"

That's when he heard a sneeze, a high-pitched, melodramatic, almost musical "ah-CHOO!" from inside his laundry basket.

He picked up a sock, cautiously peering into the pile, and was immediately poked in the eye by a tiny foot.

"HEY! Watch the merchandise!" shouted a very small, very sparkly, very dramatic-looking man who was lounging on top of Chan's dirty gym shorts like it was a chaise lounge.

Chan screamed.

The sparkly man screamed louder.

Then Chan fainted. (To his credit, he managed to land on his bed and not on the laundry fairy.)
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When he woke up, the glitter intruder was sitting cross-legged on his desk, eating one of his protein bars and braiding a shoelace like it was performance art.

"You're awake! Took you long enough, Sleeping Not-So-Beauty."

Chan sat up slowly. "Who... what... are you?"

The sparkly man grinned and did jazz hands. "I'm Hyunjin! A fairy. Long story. Magic malfunction. Got sucked through a wormhole in the garden behind the art building. It happens."

Chan blinked. "We don't have a garden behind the art building. Just... empty beer cans and failed sculptures."

"Exactly," Hyunjin said solemnly. "That's where portals thrive."

Chan tried very hard to process this. "So you're... stuck here?"

"Temporarily," Hyunjin said, licking protein bar crumbs off his fingers. "Unless you can find me a sprig of moonlit lavender, a silver spoon from a noble house, and the honest tears of a man who admits he liked the live-action Avatar movie."

Chan stared.

Hyunjin shrugged. "Or I can crash here for a while. Your vibe is chaotic but cozy."
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The next few weeks were... strange.

Chan found himself stepping around floating glitter clouds, waking up to Hyunjin choreographing interpretive dances in the kitchen, and learning the hard way not to open the fridge too fast (one time it snowed popcorn for an hour).

Hyunjin, in return, made Chan's life better in an unhinged, sparkly kind of way.

He magicked Chan's laundry clean (though it all smelled like lilacs and drama). He "enchanted" Chan's alarm clock to wake him up with ASMR instead of blaring beeps ("Good morning, you gorgeous academic weapon," the clock whispered every morning in Hyunjin's voice).

And when Chan came home from a brutal midterm nearly in tears, Hyunjin handed him a cookie and made his laptop levitate and dance to "Hotline Bling" until Chan was laughing too hard to breathe.
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One evening, Chan looked up from his laptop to see Hyunjin floating upside down in mid-air, reading his philosophy textbook and sighing dramatically.

"You know," Hyunjin said, "if I had a nickel for every time I got stuck in a boring human's apartment and accidentally started caring about them, I'd have... well, one nickel. But still. Historic."

Chan chuckled. "You're not that stuck."

"Oh, please," Hyunjin said, flipping mid-air and flopping dramatically onto the couch. "I could leave any time. I just...uh...haven't felt like it yet. Totally voluntary."

Chan grinned. "So you're staying?"

Hyunjin smirked. "Only because your protein bars are top-tier and your microwave lets me yell at it too."

And that was how Chan, the loner college student who once prized his quiet life, ended up with a chaotic fairy roommate who glitter-bombed his shampoo, crash-taught him ballroom dance at 2 a.m., and made his life just the right amount of magical disaster.
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Moral of the story: If your laundry sparkles, check for fairies. And always keep extra protein bars on hand.

Especially if they have good hair and an attitude problem.