“Listen—” you start, looking around for help but finding no one to back you up. Riwoo hears you mutter a curse under your breath at how Kim Woonhak and Han Taesan were backstabbing baboons who would be dealt with once you got out of this tight spot. Then you meet Riwoo’s eyes once more, putting on your most innocent, lovely smile. “You see, the principal’s been wanting to renovate this wing anyways. I was lending a hand—literally, haha.” You add jazz-hands for flair, hoping it’s at least entertaining enough to warrant a giggle.

However, Riwoo remains unimpressed. His brows meet in the middle of his frown, lips a thin, straight line, the muscle in his cheek twitching in annoyance. Or exhaustion—whichever you plagued him with first. 

“You finger painted…hand painted?—graffiti on the new student council room… My room.”

“Yep!” You nod, flashing all your teeth at him, happy to have helped. “It looks so much more vibrant like this, see—” You gesture towards the mural that looks like a unicorn shat rainbows all over it (with your chin, since your hand is in no state to be moved around freely, not when it's dripping pink and purple onto the ground). “Before I came in, this was all gray. Like concrete, ew. But I fixed it!”

“Fixed it…” Riwoo repeats, every nerve in his body fighting the urge to catch fire and explode like a cartoonic grenade. 

You nod again, wilder this time, getting your hair in your mouth but continuing to speak in spite of it. “Gotta make sure the stuco prez has a nice view.”

The sixth lash from the right on Riwoo's left eye twitches madly. His fists are balled up in the crooks of his elbows, arms crossed over his chest lest they decide to grow an impulse and slam themselves into his own skull. Not that he doesn't deserve it—he probably does—given this was all his fault for letting you get away with your delinquency all this time. 

“Vandalism,” he punctuates, gritting the word between his front teeth, “is against the school rules.”

You aren't convinced, rolling your eyes in easy dismissal. “It's called artistic freedom, look it up.” 

“I did. In the handbook. That I was asked to edit and enforce.”

“Dude, you need to chill out and like, dip your feet in a waterfall or something,” you continue, still too casual for Riwoo’s liking, like his position and power are simply dirt under your fingernails—or paint, in this case—to ignore. “Chase a dragonfly, like your vice president does sometimes.”

Riwoo’s patience is thinning, but he says, “Leehan is a special case. He gets distracted easily, that's all.”

“And that’s why he doesn't look constipated half the time and you do.”

That’s it. He's done being a doormat; he is going to put his foot down and make sure to whip your personality into shape if it's the last thing he does. 

He is so sick of your inability to sit still and follow rules for once. There's always something for him to clean up after: the busted pipes in the girl's bathroom from when you wanted to orchestrate a school-wide water fight for ‘team building’, the time he found out you were selling bootleg DVDs under the table (quite literally) for cash, the time he almost slipped and died from the loose papers you'd left scattered on the floor in a hurry to run to the toilets, because, apparently, peeing yourself is more of an emergency than preventing his potential funeral. 

Not anymore. 

You will respect him, and you will pay for your sins. 

“5 PM, after school. You're fixing this mess or I’m giving you another demerit.”

“But…” Your eyes widen, hands slowly dropping to your sides and getting colourful stains on your uniform. “That means suspension.”

“Good, so you have read the handbook.”

“No, you recite it every time you put me in detention,” you correct, and then regret it immediately. “Uhhhh…. I mean… Can't I just paint your face up there and call it a day?”

“Are you bribing me…?” Riwoo is offended if not confused, blinking an unnatural number of times at your audacity. “You're bribing me…with my own face?”

“Yeah! Is it working?” Not even the tiniest bit of guilt slips out your mouth when you speak, just hope. 

“... No.” Riwoo remains stern, despite the Herculean effort it takes to not give into your foolish smile. He straightens his spine, meets you head-on when he says—“5 PM. Or you find a new school midway through the year.”

And then, before you can get a word in, he speed-walks out of there without looking back, ignoring every single word of protest that makes its way out your mouth and echoes through the wooden door, until he's far away enough to give his heart, and brain, a rest.

The pen scratches against the paper in a smooth tempo, the spine of the ledger occasionally thumping against the desk when Riwoo presses the tip with a little too much force. Sunset orange spills through the murky glass and onto his visage, dappling amber through strands of his hair, his lashes, the raise of his cheek, through the lens of the glasses on his nose-bridge. 

Serene. That's what he feels. 

At least until—

“This is so harddddd. Let me go home!!”

Your whines are met with feigned oblivion and a glide of the page as he prepares to look over this week’s club accounts. Budgeting is a beast, and he's the only person capable enough to make sure no one goes over the limit and plunges the school into a debt they certainly cannot pay off. The principal has already threatened to cut funds and force them into begging on the streets if they were to keep splurging on puppy therapy days and useless visits to the aquarium like three times a year. (This is Leehan's fault, not his.)

(Well…it is his fault for not saying no to the vice president’s whims. But in Riwoo’s defense, he was way too preoccupied with attempting to wrangle you into line.)

“Prez. Yo, prez. Prez!?” you keep repeating petulantly, marching over to wave your scrub-cloth in front of his downturned eyes, failing to snap him out of his work. “Lee Riwoo, I can't do this anymore!”

“Less whining, more cleaning,” he says simply, not looking up for even a second. 

You pout, grumbling at how the paint is too stuck into the surface to come off without boiling hot water and a bone-breaking amount of scrubbing. You'd already struggled to fill and carry a heavy bucket all the way here, then almost collapsed from the level of effort required to reset the wall back into its original state. 

Riwoo hasn't moved an inch from the teacher's desk in the past one hour, no matter how much you attempted to strike up small-talk or huffed or sighed very loudly. He just sat there, writing. Doing math was certainly better than talking to you. 

He thinks you've given up on it after trying and failing too many times than he's bothered to count. Riwoo is swallowed up by tiny numbers floating above the blue lines, by mental additions and subtractions and estimations running across his mind as he mutters quietly under his breath, careful not to lose track of his place. He thinks you've already gone back to cleaning when—

When something soft and feather-like brushes across his cheek, and a looming shadow falls over him. He sucks in a sharp breath, feels goosebumps prickle up on his neck, feels something eerie crawl through his abdomen as he slowly turns his head to check…

“HOLY SHIT—!” he yelps as he jumps out of his skin—and off the chair, straight onto his butt on the floor. 

You blink down at him in confusion. “What? I was just curious about what you were so focused on.” And without regard for his privacy or the fact that he's still flat on his ass, you lean in to poke your head into his ledger, your face getting more impressed as you read down the page. “Damn, you run this place like it's the military,” you note, nodding. “Wait, do you take suggestions?”

“Huh?”

“The athletes get all the funds and us arts kids get morsels. Can't you update the instruments in the music room at least this year?”

“That is not my jurisdiction,” Riwoo says as he finally gets up, brushing the dust off his pants and straightening his tie, pushing back his rimmed glasses. “Also, weren't you the one that busted up a hole through the drumkit?”

You have the shame to look sheepish, flickering your eyes away from his pointed stare. “Uh… Yeah, maybe?”

“Right.”

You pout again. “I had too much sugar, okay? Sometimes I can't control my energy, and sometimes my drums suffer because of it.” 

Riwoo can sense a migraine strutting its way to him; he’ll have to do breathing exercises again if you keep threatening his health like this, and there are not enough ways to inhale and exhale in the world for him to recover from the damage you do. So he pulls himself together, climbs back into his spot at the table, and lets you move to meet his eyes properly. 

“If I say I’ll think about it, will you get back to cleaning the wall?” he asks, drumming the back of his pen on the wood in impatience. 

“Mayhaps,” you reply, but you're smiling when you do it, suddenly in raised spirits. “Will you actually talk back to me and not let me die of boredom all alone over there?” 

Riwoo chews on the thought—considers the pros and cons of saying yes to your request. 

Pros: you do your job, he doesn't have to nag. He doesn't get in trouble by the faculty for enabling your terrible habits. 

Cons: you…you talk a lot. Non-stop. 

“My wrists are sore. I had carpal tunnel once and that was the worst time ever. Swore I'll never get it again, and now look at me.”

And when Riwoo doesn't respond with the empathy you expect him to, you go, “Does the student council also cover medical bills?”

“No.”

“You swore you'd keep me company.”

“I am,” he tosses back. “I'm breathing very loudly so you can use it as white noise while you scrub. Now go on.” 

You huff and puff, but still return to squeezing water into the bucket. Then five minutes after—

“Hmm… I should've used more red on the cherries. Maybe glitter too… Shame that you're making me wipe all of it off…” Then—

“Prez, Prez, why do you wear glasses half the size of your face? Does it not hurt…? But you look nice though, so it's not all that bad.” 

And—

“Have you ever wondered what would happen if babies came in adult sizes? Like, imagine a giant baby in your house, just crawling around,” you're rambling as you lay on your back on the floor, cloth abandoned somewhere to the side, hair coming loose out of your ponytail and fingers stretched to the ceiling as though any further and you could touch it. Evidently, you have made no actual progress. “You’d need a giant cradle. And a giant milk bottle. Oh! And giant diapers, woah…”

Riwoo’s pulse has been climbing with every word you say, effectively building up into a mini explosion in his brain. It's been a slow tick of time while you talked yourself through nonsense, getting distracted with the task at hand with every pressing minute. He tried to reel you back in with his tuts and coughs, but it took a simple turn of his head away from you for you to give up and dramatically throw yourself onto the ground.

It's like he's taken away your life's purpose—of breaking every rule in the book and dragging him through mud along with it.

Also, turns out—and he should have expected this, really—you suck at sticking to a chore. So much so in fact that you do anything not to do what you were told to. 

It's leaking shadows into the room, sun well below the horizon, when you trudge back from your momentary break with a mop in tow. 

He presses his cheek into his palm when he asks, even though he knows without needing to. “What are you doing now?”

“Floor’s all dirty. I'm mopping.”

Of course you are. “You didn't finish the walls yet.”

“I'll get to it after the floors, duh.”

You don't. In fact, you don't even finish the mopping before you've moved onto your next activity. First it's brushing cobwebs out of the dusty corners of the window, then you try to budge the window-panes open with no luck before giving up entirely, then you sit there with a pair of scissors you'd found from god-knows-where, snipping up old test papers out of your backpack for no reason at all other than wasting time. Once you've run out of things to cut up, Riwoo sees the way you eye his ledger and has to lunge to move it out of your dangerous reach. 

He's beginning to wonder if the duties of a school council president involved babysitting too…

And right when he thinks you've given up, when you're trailing the minute hand on the clock while wringing out the washcloth, while he's marking up the last bit of his work, while he's distracted just the slightest…

You pounce for your bag and book it for the hills out the door.

…

Riwoo doesn't know what's just happened. You were here at first, and then you're gone with the wind, like some metahuman speedster keyed up on high-functioning steroids, you've just…

Vanished. 

He picks up his pen off the desk first, then his mind off the floor, before realising that he should follow you and drag you back before you’ve completely evaded the responsibility he's placed upon your shoulders. 

Riwoo sighs deeply before sprinting after the direction you left, trying to not let the creepy hallways scare him into cowering, discreetly muttering consolations to himself when the broken lightbulb blinks once before dying, somehow trudging through a hellish field of weeds until he sees a figure throwing something over the back fence of the school’s perimeter.

A ghost, he thinks at first, but then he hears the signature jangle of the keyrings on your book-bag clattering to the ground and he knows it's no ghost.

It's just the devil incarnate, apparently.

“Y/N! Get back in there now!” he shouts through cupped hands, lungs burning from the run. But you're already stepping on top of one of the empty flower pots and trying to reach for the tall fence, determined to jump over. Riwoo acts fast, albeit exhausted, scurrying through dirt and moss until he's looking right up at you.

“Just a little more—” You're muttering to yourself, elbows propped up on the ledge as you try to push higher. But you make the mistake of looking down and almost die from the shock. 

Your grip loosens, and down you come tumbling, straight into Riwoo's arms.

Or at least you would have…

Had it not been for his terrible reflexes and weariness from having overworked himself the whole week. His hands are just too stiff to reach out, okay? Maybe that's why he's fallen onto his back, in a terrible imitation of the mishap from before in the classroom, and you're there, caging him with both your arms on either sides of his neck, hair a curtain around his face.

And Riwoo—he processes it slowly, eyes flickering from your widened eyes, then to the slope of your nose, and then to your parted lips, a millimetre away…

Badump. 

“I—” you begin, and he gulps just for the sake of needing something to do. This is weird—but not bad weird. Just…so new. 

Okay, that's a lie. He knows the way his heart jumps out of his ribs is not dissimilar to all the times when you've invaded his personal space with zero account for his well-being—for the heat on his neck and the butterflies in his stomach. For the way he’s always on high alert when you're near, an inbuilt radar in his brain for your misbehaviours. 

You are so close. And he is so doomed. 

“Y/N…” he says, mouth moving on its own accord, the badump badump badump growing wings in his chest, threatening to take flight and melt into the pulse between the two of you, in the slowly thinning gap between your lips. 

His fingers twitch where they lay stuck between your bodies, but he doubts he could have reached out even if it weren't. Because the way you look at him, moonlight reflected in the pools of your eyes, the tip of your nose almost grazing his own skin. And then—

You reach out first, gaze going from surprised to crinkled warmth, a hand lightly brushing over the plane of his cheek. He feels it move to place his glasses back onto his nose—and only now does he realises that it had come sliding off when he'd stumbled on his feet before. 

“There,” you whisper, and he's never heard you speak anywhere close to this softly. “It’s perfect again now.”

He is an idiot and his mouth is a traitor, because it goes on to ask, in an undeniably gentle voice— “Perfect?” 

“Hmm… Wait, not quite.” Then you adjust them so that it's not skewed to the right anymore, brushing back the strands that fall over his forehead and scorching every exposed part of him in bright red. And before he can count to ten and calm himself down, you dip lower and something plush meets his skin. 

Your lips. Soft and lovely and pressed against his cheek, right below the mole under his eye. 

The heat is gone as soon as it comes, when you lean back to take your weight off of him and stand up, so quickly he barely registers or remembers anything that's happened in the past 24 hours. There was a wall involved, he thinks. 

He's still splayed out on the dirty ground, dazed out of his mind, when he sees you shoot a dazzling smile of victory down at him before jumping up to grasp the fence-ledge again, calculating momentum—this time, successful in leaping over the boundary. 

It happens in slo-mo in Riwoo’s vision, a blinding halo around your silhouette, a choir of cherubs singing down from the suddenly sunny skies. He thinks he sees rose petals cascading down, and also a pair of wings on your back. 

Either you were a real-life angel—or he'd hit his head a little too hard during that fall.

Or…

Or he was simply beyond the point of going back on these feelings starting to sprout inside him when he looks at you. 

It's only after he hears your feet landing on a crunch of dried leaves that he manages to regain balance and sanity.

“That's a demerit!” he manages to squeak out in a yell—but both you and him know that he's not going to get you in trouble. 

Not when his cheek is still singed with the burn of your kiss. And certainly not when he’s considering keeping the mural up just to have an excuse to get you alone again.

Riwoo is so doomed.

a/n: again again happy birthday to my unofficial official child, i hope you have an awesome day ahead!!! everyone go wish the coolest 14 year old alive and give them all the love at @beomtomie !!!!

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