#feelings. have mercy on me. maybe he’s down bad but i? might be down badder

[miraclewoozi]

EXCUSE ME. WHO GAVE YOU THE RIGHT—

one of my favourite tropes for one of my FAVOURITE dudes by one of my F A V O U R I T E writers!!!!!!! i’ve been blessed. i’ve been healed. i have very real feelings for this, oh my god.

🙏🏻 This is my first time submitting a request because I can’t stop imagining Dino helping his drunk BFF home while secretly being in love with her 🧎🏼‍♀️Please if you have time!

superpower

summary: not all heroes wear capes, but chan would probably do so if you asked. pairing: lee chan x reader type: drabble genre: fluff au: friends to ?, pining word count: 1.4k (oops) rating: pg15 — still, minors do not have my consent to interact. cw: alcohol/drunkenness, obvi; no pronouns or gendered language is used for reader. a/n: not even remotely proofread (double oops), but i still love this down-bad doofus, so i hope you do, too!

“I’m not saying I have superpowers, but I’m not not saying it.”

Your eyes are blinking a little more slowly than usual, but the unimpressed look you fire off at Chan can’t be missed.

“Can you just —” A hiccup cuts your question in half. You frown with your whole face just to make it clear how serious you are. “Hold my hand? It’s wobbly.”

Chan knows you’re referring to the sidewalk — where you stand and sway along to music that isn’t playing — but that description fits his knees, too. 

He hopes you’re too busy pouting at him to notice the way he wipes his palms against his jeans, afraid you’ll notice how nervous you make him. You start to lean a bit too heavily to one side for his liking, though; and he thinks it’s safe to bet that you’re not noticing much of anything.

That settles it.

The second he envelopes your hand in his, you take it a step further, tugging him close enough that you can slot yourself under his arm.

“Smell nice,” you mumble from his side. “‘s that the new stuff? From the place?”

Now, Chan is the one that’s blinking slowly. He was as drunk as you were until you needed him, and despite his sobering up on a dime — which is a superpower, thank you very much — his processing speed is lagging. You nudge him with your elbow, as if that’ll make what you just said make sense.

“Ahhh!” He plays along, making a big show of realizing things. “Yes, that place. By the thing, right?”

You nod. “Exactly.” 

Behind you both, the Uber that dumped you back at your place pulls away from the curb. Three beats later, you tilt your head and cheer “goodbye” at a long-gone Kia. He feels his heart swell three sizes in chest.

“You like it?” He redirects you because he’s a little bit greedy for your praise — and also because he bought this cologne with the hope that you’d compliment it. Chuckling, he notes, “Considering how much I’m propping you up right now, you’ll probably end up smelling like me.”

When you smile and mutter, “Good,” Chan suddenly feels weightless.

It takes some concentrated effort, but he manages to guide you up the front steps to your apartment building. It takes significant concentrated effort to corral you into the elevator once you clear the threshold. You would’ve spent your night talking the doorman’s ear off, otherwise, providing a dramatic retelling of every single step you took over the last few hours. It takes everything Chan has not to laugh at the relieved sigh he gets in thanks for intervening, although it’s hardly altruistic to want your rambling to himself.

Surrounded by the metallic walls of the elevator car, you point to your joint reflection and muse, “Someone’s awful smiley this evening.”

Chan makes eye contact without having to tilt his head. His brain works overtime to churn out a response that isn’t self-incriminating, but the only thought ricocheting around his brain relates to how cute you look, nestled into him.

With a ding, your reflection is gone. The moment goes with it, and without a barrier in front, so do you — like a bat out of hell.

“Oh, my god,” you wail when your apartment door comes into view. “I thought I’d never see you again!”

Chan chases after you, arriving embarrassingly out-of-breath — and more than a little fond — just in time to watch you wrestle your keys out of your pocket. They clatter to the floor the second they’re free. You groan, bereft at the loss.

“Stay here,” he says firmly with a finger pointed because he knows you, knows you’ll take one or both of you out of commission if you don’t heed his warning. 

Your eyes cross a little bit as you stare down the barrel of it, but you listen, thankfully; and he’s able to pick up your slack without anyone receiving a concussion. He’s able to usher you into your own home without further incident, too.

Once again: superpowers.

The task of kicking your shoes off is apparently too much to ask of you, so you wander off to your bedroom without even trying. His Nikes are discarded so hurriedly that they barely hit your mat by the time he takes off after you. The second he catches up, he wins the pleasure of watching you flop backwards onto your mattress.

Funny, he thinks. His heart makes a similar thwump when you smile at him the way you are right now.

Gesturing to the feet dangling off the edge of your bed, he laughs. “Can I please help you?”

You shoot him with dual-wielded finger guns. He takes that as a yes, please, and gets to work on the triple knots you managed to install in your laces.

“Chan?”

He hums in acknowledgment without looking up, too confounded by your drunken rope-work to take his eyes off his fingers.

Were you a sailor in a past life?

A little louder and a lot more pathetically, you whine, “Chan,” adding several seconds’ worth of the vowel sound in the process.

Chan has no option but to look up at you. As far as he’s concerned, he’s got no choice but to smile with all of his teeth, too. “You rang?”

“You’re so nice.” It’s supposed to be a whisper, he suspects, but it sounds much more like a shout. “How?”

His bemused snort is disguised by the sound of your right shoe hitting the floor.

“I mean it!” You laugh — like he’d ever doubt you — and smack your palms against your duvet for emphasis. “Like, hello? Good boy alert!”

That — well, that does something to Chan that he’s not willing to unpack right now. Instead, he shucks off your other shoe, bites back his smile, and sits back on his heels.

For a minute, the two of you stay that way: you gazing at him, him gazing right back at you. In every second that slips by in comfortable silence, he works to convince himself that the twinkle in your eye is a byproduct of the shots you took, nothing more. You’re smiling at him like that because you won’t have to sleep in your shoes tonight.

Right?

You nibble thoughtfully on your lower lip before your smile turns sheepish. “Chan?”

He’s not thinking that an angel gets its wings whenever you say his name, but he’s not not thinking that.

“The one and only,” he says with a nod, and he only cringes a little bit at his words, after the fact.

Whatever you want to say next seems to be stuck on its way out. In fact, you open and close your mouth twice to no avail. Patience is a virtue, and you are divine, so he waits there — on his knees, no less — and lets you take the lead. Your eyes flick from his face to the fidgeting fingers in your lap, then to the blank space at your side.

“It’s cold out,” you finally declare.

It’s July, but that’s neither here nor there.

“You shouldn’t have to walk home in this weather.”

The sky simply couldn’t be clearer, but Chan would take your word for it if you said that it was green.

“Maybe you should stay.”

He tries not to let the giddiness overtake him. Really, he does. He attempts to shrug nonchalantly, but it's more of a shiver than anything else, and he’s scrambling to his feet before he can chide himself for it.

You laugh — with your whole chest, no less — when he leaps into the spot beside you, settling flat on his back and grinning up at the ceiling. You’re still giggling when you mimic his graceless movements, still beaming when you turn your head to look at him. The air still feels electric, somehow, even after the laughter peters off.

A few moments pass, probably. He doesn’t notice them on their way out.

In a whisper that is actually a whisper, you say his name again, and it kicks off that wild thwump inside his chest.

“Yes?” He responds, much more quietly than his pulse in his ears.

You tug gently at the pillow under his head to draw attention to it. “You’ll probably end up smelling like me now.”