bittersweet | idol producer oneshot

bittersweet

wenjun really despised the first days of each semester.

he had been in university for three years now and yet he just couldn't seem to get used to watching all the freshmen run around like headless chickens and fish out of water, scrambling to find their academic advisors and revise and confirm their schedules - crowding up every single walkway, either crying out of relief or sobbing from distraught - in the process.

and - ugh - not to mention. the fucking questions.

apparently each freshman seemed to have some sort of blaring misconception that every college student was extremely sociable and happy to make friends and help their struggling underclassmen. and even though it was the start of the spring semester and they should honestly know better by now, wenjun was still bombarded five too many times on the 10-minute (well, now 20-minute) walk from his dorm to the cafeteria by 16-year-old-looking children that had been forced to drop the security of their first-semester schedules and reevaluate their entire existences.

needless to say, wenjun didn't like talking that much.

what he disliked even more than unnecessary talking was being run into by stupid people with eyes turned incompetent while in a rush. so he held back the loudest yell (mostly because raising his voice above a halfhearted murmur was notably uncharacteristic) when he felt the force of a bull knock into his shoulder, accompanied by the cold rush of liquid streaming down his shirt from the cup in his hand and the sound of a screamed "ah, mama!" from his perpetrator. fucking freshmen.

what probably made the whole experience even more annoying was that his so-called perpetrator was probably one of the most beautiful people he'd ever seen. honestly screw the 16-year-old-looking, prepubescent-seeming comment he'd mentally made earlier. his assailant had unceremoniously dropped the fattest stack of papers wenjun had ever seen, but had abandoned the struggle of trying to shove them into a pile upon seeing the abstract coffee painting that was now wenjun's only white shirt. his eyes widened to match wenjun's - whose dilated pupils were shamelessly trying to process all the images his eyeball nerves were receiving - and quickly reached back into his bag to pull out a travel-size pack of napkins that wenjun would have normally thought of as extremely moronic from any average-looking person.

a very pretty boy with dirty blonde hair and brown eyes and nice ears (wenjun was quite possibly crazy or unreasonably deprived of good-looking people at his mediocre-visuals-at-best university) and pink lips and a perfectly straight nose was now gently pressing at his chest. was he living his best life?

and then the pretty boy opened his mouth, what the fuck.

his voice was slightly high-pitched, likely even higher pitched than normal from his obvious stress, and it sounded like he spoke all of his words from the back of his throat instead of his actual mouth. what wenjun managed to actually comprehend from the other's rambling and rushed muttering sounded like absolute gibberish.

"oh my god, i'm so sorry. it's my first day. well, not like first day as in first day - sorry, that was probably confusing. it's not my first day of university - haha, that would be weird, considering a semester has already passed, but you'd be surprised by how many people transfer in halfway through." cue gibberish. "- sometimes people think i'm an exchange student but, nope, i'm 100 percent chinese. except, haha, i did a magazine ad in korea this one time, so i wouldn't blame them. it got pretty famous, actually. i had a korean name and everything - it was jungjung - " a considerable amount of garbling about his time in korea, except wenjun didn't know a thing about the country or who "oon-key" and "hung-soap" were.

wenjun was pretty sure his shirt was as dry as it was going to get, considering this jungjung? boy had been continuously dabbing at it with quite an intensity, but the boy just seemed to press even faster and left literally no room for breathing, much less room for getting interrupted. "but, yeah, it's my first day working in the freshmen advising office and it's so busy, like, what the fuck? and the printer wasn't working in our office so i literally had to run all the way to the senior advising office to print!" he, no shit, tutted. was this boy living in a real-life chinese drama? the blotting got even faster and more passionate, to a point where he was practically beating wenjun's chest with a fist poorly cushioned by a square of one-ply tissue. "but i didn't really know how to use the printer so a lot of the schedules turned out double-sided or black-and-white or upside-down and i had to reprint but i didn't have time to check which schedules were bad so i just took them all in one stack and that's why i ran into you because the stack was so big and i was in such a rush." he stepped back - good timing, too, because wenjun had an immorally thin layer of fat lining his body and his ribs were starting to crack - and sighed heavily, rubbing his forehead with the back of his hand like he'd just run a marathon. wenjun concluded that he'd probably wasted enough breath to have done the equivalent. "oh. by the way, my name's zhengting. zhu zhengting."