the universe will follow

Weirdly enough, when working the overnight shift at the hotel, you rarely feel tired. It could be 11pm or 1am—which, it is 1am right now—but still those lingering feelings of sleepiness and exhaustion lag behind. If asked jokingly by the guests checking in/out during the night, you might say it’s something to do with how busy you were or the way your cortisol and adrenaline are keeping you hyper alert. But in honesty, the nightshift was the perfect place for you. It was normally quiet, the lights were dimmed to a passive low glare, and the air seemed a little cooler, a little softer. Tonight’s shift was thankfully rather mild. You chased down the location of a guest’s lost baggage with the local airport, and arranged three taxis and one after-hours DoorDash delivery. You went up to Floor 9 to confirm that the bathroom was wheelchair accessible, and then down to Floor 2 to drop off a cleaned suit jacket. But you felt almost energetic. Almost. And between all your little minor tasks, you’ve had the time to study. Which of course, like every shift, you say you will but never actually do. You did, however, deep dive into the mysterious owner of the phone currently sitting in pants pocket. Stray Kids was pretty cool you’ve learnt. The songs you’ve listened to on low volume—Saiyan, JJAM, S-Class, Limbo, Miroh, Side Effects—were all surprisingly good, even to your admittedly non-kpop ears and mediocre music taste. Not exactly what you would want to hear on an endless loop, but it sounded like you’d enjoy it while running or studying. You’d have to listen to some more… maybe that one that caught your eye—Red Lights? And it didn’t exactly calm you to learn how devastatingly attractive all the members were. In their own ways, each boy looked carved into existence by the finest hands of the likes to Gian Lorenzo Bernini or the divinely talented Michelangelo. You get why they’re famous, you see how they look under the spotlights. They truely have the kind of beauty that you always thought was reserved for only sinful things. The renaissance of it all; the sinners and fallen saints—with a beauty that bordered upon decadence. Indulgence. Hedonism. And they were, in many ways, an intoxicating curiosity. Watching the music videos, your eyes kept gravitating towards the one you started to recognise was Seungmin. His voice was gorgeous. Liquid light pouring out over everything. You couldn’t really believe that he was texting you. You, the teenage runaway, the very questionably medicated, the idiot who didn’t wait until the morning to just hand in Felix’s lost phone. It took only two hours of “research” into the group before you had to stop and process. Before you had to stop and remind yourself your were at work. That’s what you were there to do, to work. You had a family of five checking it at 1:20am and they would need rental car readying for the morning, including insurance and paperwork done. You clocked out at 1:30am but already knew you’d be going into overtime a bit for this one. And you didn’t want to just up and leave all this work for the early morning shift to fix up either, that’s just rude. Just forget it, get to work…

The phone in your pocket buzzes—curtsy of you finally putting the damn thing on silent mode—at the same time the revolving glass door opens with your 1:20am check in… at 1:53am. The well-practiced customer-service-smile is quickly plastered on as you greet them with an only slightly passive aggressive, “Good morning! Bad traffic, I’m guessing?” You couldn’t have checked them in faster if your life depended on it. And by the time you finally get back onto the staff-only area and see the morning shift sitting around with iced coffee, you have to take a second to think about that. “Hey guys,” you start to say as you unhook your backpack and give the two a very polite look, “you know your shift has already started, right? You should have been at the front dest like half an hour ago.” “Yeah, we were waiting for you to finished ‘till we went out there.” The eldest of the two said casually. Too casually. “Right… but I mean, you—your shift is already clocked in but you’re not doing anything.” “We were waiting for you to finish!” Staring rather blankly, you genuinely don’t know where to go from here, “you could have—have taken over you know? That family didn’t check in until ages after my shift ended and yours started. I only handled it because I thought you both weren’t in yet. You should of done their check in, not me…” “But it was your shift?” “Yeah, but it ended! And—l…” You give up. Don’t even bother trying to explain. You just decide not to waste any more of your time or energy or life on this useless conversation with your useless coworkers. Fucking hell. You scan your ID card to clock out—at 2:19am no less—and fished out your jacket, shoulder your backpack, and double check your things before stepping outside. It was still so warm at this hour, the dramatic spike in temperature makes you feel like you’ve just stepped through some sort of incorporeal wall of warmth. The sky above—that was filled with the most brilliant pinks and oranges and purples at sunset—is so dark and devoid of any visible stars. The warm air messing up the sky. It was among the first things you learnt in Astronomy 1110. About how from an astronomical perspective, heat is actually one of our worst enemies to seeing into space. It comes down to two main principles of atmospheric turbulence and reducing atmospheric transparency, which blurs star images and washes out faint objects. It’s like right now, you’re looking at a distant object across the hot street in the weakening light of the moon. The air above the pavement looks wavy and blurry. Since your lectures, you can recognise that as thermal turbulence. That’s what Dr. Al-Shammari said on his first lecture. That hot air is less dense than cold air, and when hot air rises from the ground at night and mixes with cooler air higher up, it creates pockets of air with different densities. The light from a star travels in a straight line through space, but when it hits those turbulent, shifting pockets, it gets refracted dozens and dozens of times in different directions before reaching your eye down here on earth. That’s why the stars no longer look like clear points of light; they look like flickering, hazy, distorted smudges. Astronomers call this “poor seeing.” You suppose you do now too. In class, in your written tests and oral exams, in your own mind. It’s such an odd thing to you the way science of your degree works to change your perception and beliefs about the universe. You don’t think the same way anymore, everything reduced down to scientific things. Like the sky tonight. Your heart says the sky is pretty even without the starlight. But the science says that the heat is scattering light and reducing atmospheric transparency. The science is calling the simple sky a phenomenon, the way it’s hiding all those faint, distant objects like galaxies, nebulae, and dimmer stars.  And the science isn’t wrong. Of course it’s not. 

And tonight, you don’t need to look through the telescopes at the Innovation Building to see how the stars just won't focus into sharp points, but rather they dance around the blackness as blurry, boiling flicks of dim light. The breath that’s pulled from your lungs is warm and humid. It sticks to your skin wetly, the swelling heat of outside already making your limbs feel heavy. The staff exit you walk out of is at the end of a cul-de-sac off the street and—other than a very dim green “Exit” light—it’s so black that can’t see yourself. Shutting the heavy door as quietly as possible—not being able to see much freaks you out, makes you overthink that someone might be there watching you, waiting for you—with only a faint metal click, you dash down the impasse. The tarmac underfoot is damp with the humidity. The walk to the bus station is the second worst part of your journey home after the night shift. It’s not extremely long—only about 1km of flat track—but there was never anyone out on the streets at this hour. Only the homeless and criminals and delinquent teenagers. Only the people you are fucking terrified of accidentally running into or getting followed by. Walking alone at twelve or one-two-three in the morning was a horrible idea but it was the only way you had. You were just thankful the pathway was on the main road through the city. And security cameras—even if they weren’t working—loomed around you. Your hands nervously twitched at your sides, hand instinctively reaching for the phone in your pocket. It’s only when you tap the screen to check the time do you realise two things: that this isn’t your phone, it’s Felix’s, and that Seungmin has been texting you since 1:24am. You look up from the phone and intensely look around your surroundings out of paranoia. When you don’t see anyone or any movement in the heat, you decide to quickly text Seungmin back. Anything to distract you until the bus station, anything to do with you hands. The streetlight were similar to the ones next to the train tracks by your apartment in the soft, yellowy light. Felix’s phone was on dark mode, but you had to turn up the brightness slightly to see without the streetlight’s glare on the screen.

Fucking hell, Seungmin. Fuck. You aren’t even that far from the bus station anymore—Seungmin was a pretty good distraction—and it’s so quiet around you that even if you whispered on the phone, it would sound like yelling. You would have lied better if you knew Seungmin was checking the weather and timezones of your city. Who the hell does that?? You can’t help but feel somewhat embarrassed over your predicament. This happens every single time you get a night shift: you walk the 1km from the hotel to the bus station in a panicky rush, but nothing every actually happens. You pass some homeless people that stare and some intoxicated teens randomly, but you’ve never really run into immediate danger. If ever asked, you say that you’re never scared to make that walk, but you always are. But no one is ever there to see the panic and paranoia, so you can lie to your heart’s content. But Seungmin, beautiful infuriating fucking Seungmin, was texting. He saw the way your irrationally leached through the two phones from across the world, and he’s waiting for you to call him. And Felix. That is quite possibly the last thing you need. But apparently it’s not for Seungmin… who’s done waiting (it’s been 50 seconds) and is ringing Felix’s phone. In your hand. Right now. Right fucking now. The phone buzzing impatiently in your hand. The street was ending just up ahead before you’d need to cross the road. You really really didn’t want to—not here, not know, not like this—but you felt like Seungmin wasn’t lying when he said he’d keep calling until you answered him. So with a deep sigh you accepted the call.

You get dressed in the comfiest set of pyjamas you own while pretending like you’re not panicking. It’s your nicest set too—the fruit print pyjamas you bought with the money you had saved up to buy a prom dress your senior year. You didn’t go to prom or your graduation ceremony, instead spending the day in bed wearing the pyjamas and watching Twilight. And, of course, you were an inpatient at the hospital at the time too… which made leaving rather difficult. But you still ended up in university, despite everyone else’s doubts and disbelief. And somehow you ended up here. Turning Felix’s phone back on to text Seungmin that you finished showering. You’ve half the mind to block Seungmin, take the sim card out of the phone and throw the whole thing away into the river. Let all this chaos drown out in the water. It would probably be for the best, dissolve some of the inevitable blame you’re about to get hit with once the phone gets tracked down to you. To your shitty apartment with the cold water and broken front door lock and uncomfortable proximity to the railroad tracks. To the place you call home and try to look after your cats Mercury and Mars in. When the boys management get their teeth into you, you’re so far beyond fucked that it almost makes you laugh. You can only guess how many idols numbers are on that phone. How much contact information and private records. How many secrets are in the message logs. The proof is right there: they’ve all blocked Felix’s phone. Except Seungmin. Except the boy who told you to drink water and shower. Except the boy who's currently waiting for you to text back after doing what he said. The boy who—for some reason you don’t know—you just overshared more personal information to than anyone else. More than you’ve even shared to Jack in the two years since you’ve known each other… and you have only texted Seungmin a few times. The both of you aren’t even texting in the same language; Felix’s phone is auto translating Korean to English. It’s with those depressing thoughts that you drag yourself out of the bathroom and back into the kitchen. Mars is curled up and asleep in the middle your bed, a furry blob of a cat purring in the low light. Mercury is sleep on the kitchen table. The kettle is steaming lightly on the countertop… you don’t even remember turning it on. Outside the sun is beginning its descent into overcast clouds thickening the western horizon. In the time it took you to shower the sun turned from a warm amber into a cool, neutral blue. The type of blue in those sad indie films, or painted on hospital walls. The lights at the train station are burning a bright yellow, and they glow on the slick pavement like a dozen fireflies scattering across the road. The temperature is cooling down as well, and the wind picking up lazily. And oh lord, how everything is so very still and quiet. Like some kind of suspended animation playing in your eyes. It would make you feel somewhat out of place if not for the shitty drugs you take to keep you tethered to the world. You don’t want to text back, don’t want to disturb the rare peacefulness—even if it comes from your self hate and the world’s own sorrow. But before the world can fall apart again in your bedroom, you refuse to think or feel anything before quickly texting Seungmin back again. You can keep it up, you can keep the mask up for a little bit longer…

The playful mask crashes down like a building collapse. Your head feels hot and dizzy. Any chance of sleep abandoned you from Seungmin’s first text—still here puppy—and is long gone by now. Your hands feel shaky but they’re steady as you reach out to reopen the window next to your bed. It opens with a low grinding sound of metal on metal. The rush of cool air is instantaneous and it almost stings your heated cheeks as you take deep breaths. Mars—having fitfully moved to the left corner when you curled up on your bed mid-text—stands and moves carelessly to lay down again directly between your legs. Throws himself down like he pays rent. Nudges your legs open a little to make more room for him to sprawl out. Sleeps. You reach down absentmindedly to pet him and Mars swats your hand away, and then licks his paw like you were the one to touch it. You choose to ignore him. The wind has picked up enough that the curtains brush against your cheek. What the fuck was that conversation? Why did you follow along and do everything that Seungmin said? Better yet—why did you listen and not fight it?? You showered because he asked. You closed the window because he told you too—said it was unsafe (it was, but you didn’t have the energy to care, Mars was too lazy to try and escape, and Mercury hated heights anyway), implied he cared about your safety—and went to bed at 7:03pm. Before the sun has even gone down completely. The seven o’clock train hasn’t even arrived down at the station yet. But you… think you like. Seungmin seems so oddly gentle in a rough deny-it-to-the-grave kinda way. He took over your night by texting and telling you what to do, not demanding exactly, but more like guiding, insisting. He told you he’d sort out the mess you got yourself into, that he believes you when you say it was a misunderstanding. Calls you puppy, even though that’s Felix’s contact name for him. He texts you like he cares about you. That’s new to you. Very very new. You want to be Seungmin’s friend so badly. But you know that you cannot; he’s fix the phone issue, you’ll mail it back to whatever address you’re given, probably sign some kind of NDA, and never talk again. The thought of that—never texting Seungmin again—twists your stomach into knots. You know that you are edging into dangerous territory already by feeling so much. It’s a one-way ticket to Brokenheartsville. But like the idiot you are, you’ve prepaid for a ticket and hate being late. You lay down in bed and open a webpage on your own phone, before reaching for the bottle of pills on your bedside table and swallowing them down. From the kitchen you see Mercury stretching in the shadows. You go to research more about Stray Kids and people who you’re texting, but you fall asleep before the keyboard loads.

It’s barely light outside when you wake up to Mars staring to you. All judgemental with his green-yellow eyes. You two stare at each other for a long moment before he meows and walks off the bed and into the kitchen. Most likely to his empty food bowl. With sleep-heavy movements you tap your phone screen. 6:03am. “Fuck me.” You groan. Your first lecture isn’t until 8am, meaning you could have gotten another hour of sleep before getting up. Head fuzzy and tired, you feel like you got no sleep despite the clock showing you that you slept almost 11 hours. If anything you overslept. From the kitchen, Mars mirrors your groan with another meow. Somehow even that sounded rude. Or perhaps you were just still half asleep. Mars meows loudly again, longer this time, joined by Mercury from somewhere in the bathroom, and you haul yourself up. Nope. Definitely just rude. You get up out of the warm, cozy bed to feed the cats, and Mars is being just so affectionate—circling your legs, head-butting your calfs, looking up at you with adoration. You open the can of cat food and divide it into their bowls with wet sloppy sound (that’s particularly nauseating first thing in the morning). Mercury—your most genuinely loving cat—starts meowing politely into the fabric of your pants. Placing it on the group, you watch as they both abandon you completely and start eating like they had been staved for years. They haven’t. On some stupid principle, you refuse to look at Felix’s phone yet, and instead gather up your messy hair into a bun and go to find clothes to wear for the day before showering. The water is freezing but it works well to wake you up. You wash your hair quickly, mind focusing on what you have to do today. ‘Work.” You remind yourself, ‘I’ve gotta go to work today. And I have my lectures. And a lab. And fucking work.” You’re making yourself a peanut butter toast for breakfast when Felix’s phone on your bedside table rings with a text message. When you return to the kitchen with the phone, Mars is sitting on the counter next to your sandwich. Eyeing you down with audacity. You tear off a little piece of the bread as an offering to him while you open the phone.

‘Of course,’ you think to yourself, ‘I fucked this up again. He hates me, he doesn’t want to ever talk to me again…’ You feel like you always do this. You don’t have friends and it’s so noticeable to everyone around you, and it’s why no one wants to try and approach you to be friends. You come across as desperate and insecure, as lonely and staving for attention, for reassurance. No one wants to be friends with friendless people. You feel so far removed from yourself now. You’re so obsessive when speaking these days—monitoring and analysing every word and conversation, obsessing about how wrong and uncomfortable you sound when talking, how restrained—that it sounds like you’re beginning to lose control over the language. Your struggle to communicate bleeds into every aspect of your life. You can’t speak, or write, or text. And that much is evident to everyone at else. You don’t have friends. You have cats. Mars and Mercury. Mercury came first, black and white like a Calla Lily, originally named Mariner for the NASA Mariner 10. The Mariner 10 was the first spacecraft to use gravity assist to visit multiple planets, and conducted three flybys of Mercury while discovering the planet’s magnetic field. The spacecraft had long been orbiting the Sun in a silent, heliocentric orbit by the time you were born, having exhausted its fuel and shut down in 1975. But you felt a sort of kinship with the Mariner 10—brilliant and fast, left to spin around and around in the limitless void of space, all alone and burnt up—and it was the first you learnt about in elementary school. Your kitten back then was your lifeline, the fluffy mass the reason you got through the first year of university. You didn’t start calling Mariner as Mercury until a few months later in the year, when you got Mars. Your silly little ginger boy, named after NASA's Opportunity rover on Mars, who you found shaking in a kill shelter and could never leave to die. You only called him Opportunity for a few days before admitting it was ridiculous and calling him Mars. Mercury’s name change sort of just happened around the same time, until you one day realised you were called out for Mars and Mercury. Your two planets, orbiting you like the sun in your galaxy of an apartment. The limitlessness of space condensed down into your bedroom, entire solar systems collapsed into those four walls and exposed pipes. They were your only friends. You knew this; already conceded to the loss of others. You were acquaintances with Jack, sure, but that didn’t mean much to either of you. Your obsession with space and physics marring any other human connection. A sort of blackout screen placed over the part of your brain that controlled relationships. And love. It was your fatal fault—to believe everyone in the world hates you, that you’re unloved and unlovable—and it’s your mistake to convince yourself that it’s true. It isn’t true. Of course it isn’t… because Felix’s phone ringed with a text message back.

Slinging your backpack down on the middle seat to prevent others sitting there, you take the window seat in the back of your 7am bus. The juice is sugary sweet on your tongue. Dilapidated buildings leaning halfway into the river pass by the wide, dirty window. The 6am train is only now leaving the station, your bus braking for the red railway light. You really like Felix and Seungmin. They’re nice and funny, sweet in their own ways. Seungmin keeps trying to reassure you about the lost phone, and apparently he’s already told his other members about you texting him from Felix’s phone. He makes it sound like it’s going to be okay. And, as the train crosses slowly over the tracks in front of your bus, you think that it might just be okay too.

Most days you feel like a self destructive idiot. An involuntary masochist, if you will. You’d blame your parents or childhood for it if you didn’t know that deep down, you could only really blame yourself. You’ve always been a rather atypical person—far too ambitious for your own good, but too apathetic to ever do anything about it—and it has always worked to your detriment. To your inevitable downfall. To the fiery star that collapses into a supernova every night. It always happens at night. If you were a more sentimental person, then you’d probably think it must have something to do with the thinness of the darkness. How the quiet and cold plunge everything down below. It’s a funny thing, the hours between 12am and 5am, the way you feel both invincible and doomed all at once. Those hours are vulnerable, and lonely, and so fucking exhausting to endure. You choose to study physics because of your love of space. The fancy words and complex concepts. The infiniteness of it all. The ever-expanding galaxies swallowed by galaxies. Whole solar systems collapsing in silence and pure, blinding, burning light. And the way people are innately impressed by the degree. You like that no one calls you a failure or a dumb fool anymore. You like how it makes you feel. But you still call yourself a failure. All the time. Today especially. You woke up late, having overslept your alarm, and rushed out in a hurry to just make your 7am mathematics lecture in time. No coffee, no morning shower, no breakfast. Deafly writing illegible notes on category theory for the next two hours. A day of chaos that made you so thankful you didn’t have work today. And then that biochemistry test. 25% of your weighted gpa for the semester subject, 35 questions on molecular mechanisms and system-level interactions. The test you just absolutely, completely, undeniably fucking failed. You don’t even need to wait for the results to come though to know didn’t pass. You knew halfway through the test that you had already failed it. You’d be lucky to escape this without getting put on academic probation for the subject. And to top it all off, the lost phone you found just keeps texting. All day, the phone ringing during lectures, walks between classes, when you were busy cleaning coffee off your shirt, and on the buss back to your apartment. Because of course you forgot to try and mute it, or put it in silent mode.

Seungmin. He was the only number still texting since the first one blocked you. And he just kept on texting. The phone lighting up again and again with his notifications. For you it was odd—you’ve never had someone keep constantly messaging you, no matter the reason, others just ghost you or don’t even bother sharing their number. But here this (unknown) man was, texting and texting. It was almost comforting, the idea of someone’s constant existence calling to you. Well, you tossed your backpack to the floor of your apartment, sat on the chair by the door—too exhausted to get any further inside—and decided it was finally time to read his messages and text back.

“This is ridiculous.” You sighed. And it was. Of course it was. Listening to a stranger, doing what he told you through text seemed not only peculiar but actually quite dangerous. In retrospect, you know it was a risky decision to make. You didn’t know this man—but you stood up nonetheless, drained the last sip of water from the glass, and slowly dragged yourself towards the bathroom. Phone abandoned on the kitchen counter. Pealing off the coffee-stained shirt and too-tight jeans, you quickly jumped into the shower, knowing that if you didn’t move fast enough then there was a good chance you would be too tired to move. You didn’t follow one thing though; the shower was ice cold. Not because you didn’t want a nice hot shower—good god you did—but you hadn’t been able to afford to pay the hot water bill this month. Or for the past three. But Seungmin did need to know that. You had already overshared and overstepped too much as it is. Shame began curling in your gut. Your cheeks heating in embarrassment despite the cold water pouring down your face. What have you done? Why? Why are you like this? Thoughts start spiralling and plummeting, free falling and dropping, twisted down into the dark depths of your brain and rooting. Seungmin. Felix. Stray Kids. You have the phone of Felix Lee. How the fuck did that happen?? You’ve heard a bit about Stray Kids—they’re internationally famous, it’s kind of hard not to hear the name thrown around—and some of their songs playing on the buss radio home. And your friend Jack likes them you vaguely recall. You can’t say you known them each by name or can name many songs, you don’t know what awards (if any) they’ve won, or what gossip encircles them. But you do know that this is bad. Very, very bad. The Korean entertainment industry is insane, everyone knows that. A fake rumour can destroy a hard-fought career for anyone. It’s a place where actors get canceled for a speeding ticket, idols get removed from their groups over a relationship, models stop getting booked if they gain a little weight. It’s all parasocial relationships and media training. All smoke and mirrors. Lies. Fear. Pain. Loss. You could never really get into the K-Pop craze that exploded in the early 2020’s. Too busy dealing with Covid and school and all that mess. You were never able to get past the surface level. And after a while you stopped trying, instead sticking to the music you listened to as a child. The same music your grandfather played Judy Garland. Doris Day. Frank Sinatra. Ella Fitzgerald. Nat King Cole. The Andrew Sisters. Eartha Kitt. Peggy Lee. Chuck Berry. Rosemary Clooney. All the old singers and Hollywood stars from his era and age. Your grandfather loved Hollywood, even if he never got to see it. The songs ticking on the staticky cassettes player in his green 1970 Chevrolet Corvette. The windows rolled down, cigarette smoke caught in the wind, the music crackling through the old car. As you grew up, you added your own music taste to the list—Marina and the Diamonds, Lana Del Ray, Hozier, Noah Kahan. The sad folksy music dominating your free Spotify account. You tried not think too hard about that. But somehow, despite all that, you ended up entangled in such a strange situation with—based on your quick google search—one of the most popular and famous Korean boy group. You were sure there were thousands of—no, millions—of fans who would probably kill to be in the position that you have found yourself in. To have found the phone of a Stray Kids member. Seungmin said that it has a tracker. But they can only track the phone within 10 miles… if you believe him. Surely their security and management are working on finding you and the phone’s location. How much trouble are you going to get into? You can’t prove that you didn’t know who the owner was or that you haven’t looked through the entire phone. You haven’t, but it’ll be your unreliable word against their lawyers. With a sigh and a light bang of your head against the tiled wall, you turn the water off and step out.

You had been running late for all your lectures this week, but you were finally on time for this one. Actually, you were almost an hour early for this class. But that was mostly because you had a class two hours beforehand which meant that there was no time to travel all the way back to your apartment for only an hour before having to return to campus. But still, at least you were on time.

The innovation building was the best on your university campus — walls of blue glass, tall concreted lecture theatres, wooden floors and hanging lights, and your favourite: the laboratories. Marine biology. Geophysics. Chemistry. Biotechnology. Medical science. Design technology. Engineering. And your own major, Physics. Only two of your classes were held in the pretty building—Astrophysics 323 and Chemistry 101—the rest of your classes and labs were unfortunately scattered across the entire campus. Which, you bitterly remember, take a 15 minute walk between each of the buildings, even if your lectures are back-to-back. One of the many reasons you run late. ‘But,’ you think, ‘that one isn’t your fault, it’s the class organisers… Technically.’ But, this rainy Monday morning, you were sitting at one of the tables outside the lecture theatres waiting for your professor to unlock the doors. A takeout cup of green tea cooling by the laptop. Headphones on. Your hand fidgeting with a pen while reading your lecture notes. And on time. You hear them before you see them. A large group of what you suspect are foreign exchange students (not surprisingly, the university was known it’s science and technology departments, and international students were common) and their staff or translators. All dressed up in dark hoodies and face masks. ‘Did they get the memo covid was over?’ You wondered amused. You can’t hear what anyone is saying through your headphones, but you watch discreetly as they all walk past you and out the main entrance. One of them pauses and swiftly walks to the staircase before lifting a leg onto the third step. He puts down a water bottle and phone to retie his shoe as another person approaches and stands next to them almost like a bodyguard. Curiously sparks bright just as that one song—that you’ve been meaning to unlike from your spotify favourites for months now—plays too loud and jarringly. With a little sigh, you look away to turn your phone on and skip the song. But by the time you raise your head again, they’re gone. The sparks flicker and fate. Professor Manalo opens the lecture theatre doors wide and you take the opportunity to go in early to get the good seats in the front. You wash your hands in the deep porcelain sink with deionised water, then put the lab’s black rubber gloves on before taking your designated seat on table B2. Marina and the Diamonds spins around in your headphones. Slowly the room filled up with your fellow students, squawking boys and gossiping girl, all with their lab coats and safely glasses on, as the instructor sets up the projector screen. The practical goes well as always, and two hours later you’re walking out those same doors. Rummaging around in your backpack for the portable charger, you realise belatedly that it’s… missing? ‘Oh course it is. Why wouldn’t it be.’ ‘Great, great, great,’ you think while rushing to the seat that you sat in earlier, ‘if someone stole it already…’ But of course, the table is empty. Unfamiliar students and staff dot the area casually, but no sign of your charger. Fuck. Eyes searching the area, you find nothing but people, their bags, laptops, one abandoned empty coffee cup—that you bin—and some scattered pens. You double check. Then triple check. No charger. But your doomed hope skyrockets when you spot a small black square tucked into the side of the main staircase, and race over to hopefully retrieve your lost charger. You pick it up and it’s… a phone. Not yours. Not your charger. Great. Just great. “(Y/N)! You comin’ to the next lecture or skipping ‘n shit?” Jack, your classmate, yells (too loudly) from the main door. “Huh? Oh yeah, ‘m coming…” You pocket the phone, needing to hand it in at the student centre after your last lesson. And hopefully someone else handed in your charger? ‘Yeah, I’m not that lucky.’

Who the hell is going to believe you when you say that you did try and hand the lost phone in. You really did try, even leaving your last lecture of the day 10 minutes early to try and make it to the administration building before it shut. But by the time you got there only 3 minutes late it had already closed. And it wouldn’t be opened until Monday. Extinguishing any minuscule amount of hope you had to return the phone and find your charger. What a waste of time. And now here you were: sitting on your bed, bag of popcorn on your starry sheets, laptop open and abandoned on your lecture notes, and mystery phone light up in hand. For starters when you turned the thing on, the phone wasn’t password protected and took you straight to the homescreen. The display was thankfully in English too, with auto translate turned on from what looks like japanese or korean. The lockscreen and homescreen were the same image of some skyline unfamiliar to you. You refused to open the photos app on principle, but you did have to try to find out who the phone belonged to so you could return it. The text app was light up with 43 unread messages. You really really shouldn’t look. You should just turn the phone off and wait to respectfully hand it in on Monday. This is someone else’s property and privacy, you’d feel pissed off if a stranger went through your own phone. That’s what you keep telling yourself as you open the text messages and see the most recent messages. 11 different people tried to contact the phone in the hours since you’ve had it. The most recent one—named Hyunjinnie?—you open and read last few messages looking for the name of the phone owner, before texting them. You try the second one when the first blocks you.

They left you on fucking read??? For a second you’re tempted to submerge the phone into the dish water. To blow up the electrics and your stupid little desire to help a stranger out. Who the hell blocks or leaves someone on read who’s trying to return a lost phone?? Without another look or attempt, you turn the phone off to the sound of a train screaming past your apartment, and the warm yellow streetlights beginning to blotting out the stars.

It’s 4:12am when the phone lights up. Because of course the owner doesn’t have the damn phone on silent mode. Blearily you feel around in the dark of your bedside table for the phone, turning the brightness down low before reading the text.

On one side of the world, you’re out like a light with your face smushed against a pillow. On the other side, Seungmin is staring down at your texts.

AN: ahhhh panic, panic… okay so this is my first published fic, so please if there’s any mistakes or if you have some opinions, please do send them through! Can you guess whose phone the reader’s got, or who’s gonna be her favourite???