DELIVERED WITH LOVE (AND NO RETURN POLICY)
Pairing: Wang Nicholas x Byeon Mirae
Mirae friends: Malakai, Jisoo, Yuri
Genre: fantasy
Warning:none for now
Prologue; The people in Mirae corner
Note: hope you like this, if you like i can also draft how the character look like:)
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Chapter One: Boot Sequence
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The panel swung open slowly, releasing a faint breath of cool recycled air, like the inside of a very expensive, very quiet refrigerator.
Mirae took one step back.
Then another.
Then her shoulder hit the opposite wall of the hallway and she stayed there, because that was as far as she could go.
He unfolded himself out of the box.
That was really the only word for it,unfolded, because he was tall enough that he had to duck slightly through the panel, and then straighten up, and then straighten up more, until he was standing at his full height in her hallway and taking up a genuinely unreasonable amount of it. Not enormous, not intimidating, just there, in the way that very well-proportioned people tend to be there, occupying space with an ease that felt almost architectural.
He blinked once. Twice. His eyes were dark, slightly narrow, the kind that looked a little severe at rest. They landed on her.
He smiled.
It was, Mirae thought distantly, a catastrophically good smile. Wide and sudden and warm, like flipping a light switch in a dark room. It softened his whole face. The sharp jaw, the clean lines of it, into something that looked almost startled by its own cheerfulness.
"안녕하세요," he said. His voice was smooth and unhurried. Then, as if remembering something: "Good morning. I'm Nicholas."
A beat.
"Wang Yixiang," he added. "But Nicholas is fine."
Mirae stared at him.
"You're in standby mode," she said, because she had to say something and that was the only fact she had.
"Was," he corrected pleasantly. "I'm not anymore."
"Right." She pressed her back harder into the wall. "Right. Okay."
Nicholas looked down at himself, he had grey sweatpants, a white t-shirt, clean sneakers, all folded into the box with him with the same improbable tidiness as the rest of it, and then back at her. His eyes did the squinting thing, just slightly, the way someone might squint at something they're trying to read from a distance.
"You have banana milk on your sleeve," he said.
She looked down. She did.
"It's my birthday," she said, as if that explained it.
"Happy birthday." He said it like he meant it completely and simply, without any fanfare. Then he tilted his head. "Are you going to let me in, or?"
"This is in. You're already in the hallway."
"Into the apartment."
She opened her mouth. Closed it. Looked at him; this tall, pleasant, blinking humanoid in her hallway who had arrived in a box and was now asking to come inside with the mild politeness of someone who'd shown up for a scheduled meeting and thought, with perfect clarity: Malakai is going to pay for this for the rest of his natural life.
She stepped aside.
He moved through her apartment with a kind of careful attentiveness, not touching anything but looking at everything, the way someone does when they're trying to understand a place without intruding on it. He paused at her bookshelf. Three shelves, double-stacked, organized by language rather than author because she was the kind of person who shelved by language, and his head tilted again.
"Italian, Korean, English," he read, tracing the spines lightly with his eyes. "And Greek?"
"My friend taught me." She was standing in the kitchen doorway, kettle in hand, watching him. "Do you… are you supposed to…do you want tea?"
He turned around. That smile again, smaller this time, more private. "I don't need it. But I'd like it, if you're making some."
She made two cups.
He sat at her low table, cross-legged, very natural, already looking more at home than most people who'd actually been invited and wrapped both hands around the mug. He had a scar on his left cheek, small and pale. Mirae noticed it and looked away.
"So," she said. "You speak…."
"Mandarin, English, Korean. Some Japanese." He paused. "Enough to get by."
"Taiwanese?"
Something shifted in his expression, something subtle, pleased, like she'd passed a small test he hadn't announced he was giving. "Mandarin is the official language. But yes, I know the distinction."
"I translate books," she said. "It's a reflex."
"I know," he said. "They put it in the configuration."
She stared at him over her mug. "They put my job in your configuration?"
"Your job, your languages, your schedule." He said it easily, without embarrassment. "That you prefer tea over coffee in the mornings. That your apartment is on the fourth floor. That you've been in Seoul for two years." A pause. "That you don't date."
The last one landed with the precise weight of a stone dropped into still water.
"Malakai" she said flatly.
"His name is in there too. He left a note, actually." Nicholas reached and she had absolutely no idea where from, maybe the box, maybe the laws of physics didn't fully apply to him and produced a small folded paper, which he set on the table between them.
She unfolded it.
Yn, His MBTI is ENFP so he will be annoying in a fun way. Also he likes lions and cereal. He is basically a golden retriever in a cool guy's body. You're going to like him even though you'll pretend not to. Happy birthday piccola.
—M
Mirae read it twice. Folded it carefully. Set it back down.
Across the table, Nicholas was watching her with those dark, slightly squinting eyes, the ones that looked stern until he smiled, and then didn't at all and he looked, she thought, completely untroubled. Like sitting in a stranger's apartment on a Saturday morning, having just emerged from a shipping container, was a perfectly reasonable thing to be doing. Like he had nowhere else to be and no particular anxiety about it.
ENFP, she thought.
"You like lions," she said.
"I like lions," he confirmed.
"And cereal."
"Cereal is an excellent food."
She looked at him for a long moment. He looked back, patient and warm and utterly unbothered, the morning light from the window catching the clean lines of his face and the small scar on his cheek, and Mirae thought: this is insane, this is completely insane, I am having tea with a humanoid my Greek best friend ordered online.
Her phone erupted.
Malakai: WELLLLLL???
Jisoo: is he cute
Jisoo: he's cute right
Jisoo: WE MADE SURE HE WAS CUTE
Yuri: MIRAE RESPOND
Malakai: if you don't answer in 30 seconds I'm calling
She turned her phone face-down on the table.
Nicholas watched her do it. Said nothing. Sipped his tea.
"You don't have to keep me," he said, after a moment. His tone was the same easy, unbothered but something in it had shifted just slightly, like a key change so subtle you only catch it if you're listening for it.
"If you want to send me back, that's"
"I'm not sending you back." She said it before she'd fully decided it, and then sat with the sound of it in the air between them. "I just." She wrapped both hands around her mug. "I need a minute."
He nodded. No argument, no relief, no performance of either. Just: okay. Take your minute.
Outside, Seoul was already awake. The particular rumble of it rising up from the street four floors below, motorbikes and morning vendors and someone's music bleeding through a cracked window somewhere. Mirae's apartment smelled like tea now, and faintly like old books, and less like abandoned banana milk.
"Okay," she said, finally. "Ground rules."
Nicholas set his mug down and folded his hands on the table, attentive. Like a very handsome student who actually did the reading.
She pointed at him. "No going through my stuff."
"Obviously."
"No telling Malakai things I say in this apartment."
"Reasonable."
"And you have to tell me when something is in your" she waved a hand vaguely at all of him"the system is making you act a certain way. I don't want to guess."
He considered this. "I can try," he said. "Though I'm not always sure of myself."
It was, she thought, possibly the most honest thing anyone had said to her in two years.
"Fine," Mirae said. "Do you want more tea?"
Nicholas smiled. That wide, switched-on, sudden smile that had absolutely no right to exist in her Saturday morning.
"Yes," he said. "Please."
