#which made this infinitely funnier | Explore Tumblr posts and blogs

starlightkun · 1 year ago

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❧ word count: 18.3k ❧ warnings: cursing, renjun gets CONSENSUALLY dosed with a magical aphrodisiac For Science ❧ genre: fluff, humor, one (1) heavy makeout scene but no actual smut, 0.1 seconds of angst if you can even call it that, academic rivals to lovers, modern magical creatures au, college au, siren reader, human renjun ft. siren ten, same universe as strawberry sunday ❧ extra info: in my lore, siren scales are visible when they’re in more human-like forms because of magic, and it’s not an indication of their skin tone at all. so when the reader’s scales are mentioned, please don’t take this as any sort of allusion to them being pale/light-skinned! i tried to take care and make sure i wasn’t implying that in how i wrote it, but please tell me if it reads like that this work is set in the same universe as strawberry sunday but can be read as a standalone! there is no continuing plotline between fics in this universe, they simply take place in the same world/magic system and may have overlapping characters (neos may pop up in more than one work!) ❧ author’s note: y’all. get ready for this one. no spoilers but renjun and reader r both crazy and nobody should be subjected to them except each other. like they both look at the other and think “i could fix them but whatever the fuck is wrong with them is infinitely funnier to me” but they’re both Wrong. they could not fix the other. i don't want what they have but good for them. anyway as always i had way too much fun writing this that it went over my projected word count and i hope y’all have a lot of fun reading it too

─── ⋆⋅☆⋅⋆ explore the strawberry sunday universe more here!

“Would you shut up?” You sat back up, grabbing him by the hair.

“Why?”

“I’m trying to kiss you again, idiot.”

2608, 2610, 2612…

The numbers of the study rooms you passed by went up, up, up, as you continued your hunt. You knew he’d be here. It was the day before the first test in your Linguistics in Magical Creatures Studies class, meaning he was going to be holed up in the library until closing time. Now it was just a matter of finding him. Somewhere quiet, obviously, which was why you’d completely skipped the first floor with its wide-open “collaboration areas.” The second floor was all bookshelves and private study rooms that would hold four or five students at most. You peered into the narrow window on each painted metal door as you walked down the hall. While the first floor was recently renovated with new technology and upgrades such as the “collaboration areas” and bright pops of your university’s school colors that made for great promotional photos to put on the website and pamphlets to hand out to new students, this floor hadn’t had seen anything more than a janitor in a good couple decades. The musty, stale smell of old, unused books was all around you, the air conditioning hummed and clicked irregularly, all the furniture had ugly, outdated patterns, and the exactly three desktop computers they did have in a far back corner were practically as old as you. Which, in the digital age, meant that they were artifacts belonging in a museum.

And of course, sitting at very last one, as if he had been hiding behind all of these bookshelves from you personally, was Huang Renjun.

Renjun was sat in the wooden chair facing the computer, clearly deep in thought. He had one foot propped up on the wide chair seat as both of his hands were on the archaic-looking keyboard, speedily typing something out. He wore a pair of jeans, yellow hoodie, and a red backwards baseball cap kept his hair out of his face. An open energy drink can and empty bag of chips on the desk next to him belied that he had already been there for some time.

Now that you had found your target, you put on a burst of speed, stalking up to him from the side and smacking your hand down on the tabletop beside him. “Renjun.”

The human jumped in his seat, looking up from his screen to you. Taking his hands from the keyboard, he made a couple quick clicks on the mouse as he used the other to take his headphones out of his ears. “Y/N. Fucking hell… is your new strategy this semester to give me a heart attack and kill me?”

“If murder was on the table as part of our little academic rivalry, don’t you think I would’ve just drowned you after our Intro course freshman year?” You asked, tilting your head innocently. After all, you were a siren, that would be much easier than scaring him into an early cardiac episode.

Huang Renjun was not your friend. Not necessarily an acquaintance either, you’d known him for going on four years now, since your first class on your first day of college. The two of you were in the same Introduction to Magical Creatures Studies class. He had sat in the very front row, you just behind him in the second row. When your professor had asked an open question to the class, both you and Renjun eagerly blurted out the answer, Renjun just a millisecond before you. Dr. Li gave him the credit, and also requested that you two raise your hands in the future. And from then on you hated Huang Renjun.

Well, hate may be a strong word. You overlapped in at least two classes every semester being in the same major, and were both chronic overachievers. The first to raise your hands when a question was asked, studying in the library until closing (separately), and visiting professors’ office hours just to discuss topics from class further. Your professors noticed this. Some would pit the two of you against each other, and others would try to pair you up, whether on projects, research, or just in general, as a meeting of the minds or whatever. And you two would get your project done, pocket your As, and part ways again. Academic rival slash frenemy was the best way you could describe who Huang Renjun was to you.

“Who knows, you might still, if they ask me to carry the banner,” he muttered, picking his pen up and spinning it between his fingers.

This was your last semester, both you and Renjun were graduating in just a few months. At commencement, each department picked one “outstanding student” to lead the progression, carrying a flag with the department’s name and seal on it. This semester it was Magical Creatures Studies’ turn to select a student for the College of Humanities and Social Sciences, and your program head had already heavily implied that they could choose either you or Renjun, but they hadn’t made their final decision yet.

This was actually a pretty good segue into what you were really here to talk to him about. Pulling your lips into an alluring smirk, you nodded, “You’re right. It doesn’t take a rocket surgeon to figure out that—”

“A fucking what?” He cut you off, his face scrunching up as he blinked at you in confusion.

“Obviously it’s going to be one of us two, since we’re the two best students in the program.”

“Well, yes.” He nodded, seeming to let go of what had presumably been another one of your jumbled human malaphors. You admittedly hadn’t been living among humans for terribly long, and for some reason their idioms just didn’t stick in your brain very well.

“I mean, we not only are dedicated to the field itself and the content we study in class, but the program too. We probably know everybody in it, professors and students, right? Between the two of us?”

Renjun considered this for a moment. “Yeah, probably. We’ve both taken on a lot of SI and tutor opportunities for lower-level classes.”

“Right. So, you know those forums the school has on the online class platform? The general message boards?”

“Yes. Why?”

“I’m going to need you to sit tight with me on this until I finish talking, okay?” You pointed at him sternly. He nodded slowly. “Good. Back in the fall, about the end of September, I was on the message boards, just browsing around killing time. I was in the Tips & Advice section and saw this post. It was a gryphon who was losing feathers on one specific spot on her wing, and she didn’t know why. The witch she went to didn’t know why, nobody could figure it out. I was about to reply asking if it was her left or right, when I saw that somebody else already had. It was her left, and she’s a lefty. The same person replied again, asking if she sleeps with her wings out or not. She sleeps with them out. It turns out she was stress-preening in her sleep. Username: dr_magic2303. A couple weeks later, same message board, Tips & Advice, a human is suddenly producing dark purple goop from his feet but it’s so slippery he can’t even leave to go see a doctor or a witch and he was typing the post from his bathroom. Within an hour, this Dr. Magic is back telling him someone’s put an aether ooze hex on him, and to sit down and scoot on his butt to the kitchen and gather up all these ingredients for a cleansing foot bath. And if he doesn’t have them, then he’ll have to butt-scoot his way to an apothecary or call one who does home deliveries. Now people are posting on there specifically asking Dr. Magic to come heal all their magical aches and pains.”

Renjun stared at you, unblinking. The pen had gone still in his hand.

You breathed in, continuing, “I tracked this Dr. Magic all the way back to their first post in the first week of fall semester of this year. Now, I’ve been trying to figure out who they are on my own, and I’ve made a lot of progress on who they aren’t. But I’m going to lose access to those message boards once we graduate at the end of the semester. I know Dr. Magic has to be an MCS major, there’s no way they would be able to have to breadth, depth, and flexibility of knowledge by just Googling this stuff. And you and me, Renjun, I know we can do this. Not only do we know MCS, but we know the department, the people in it. It has to be us.”

He was still staring at you, mouth slightly agape. Then, his whole demeanor shifted. He dropped his leg so that both his feet were on the ground, and he resumed spinning the pen.

“Okay. I’ll help you.” He nodded thoughtfully. “If you’ll do something for me.”

“Do what?” You straightened up.

“I’ll tell you after we find Dr. Magic.”

You crossed your arms. “No, tell me now or no deal.”

“I tell you after, but you can still say no then if you don’t want to do it.” He bargained.

“That just sounds even more concerning, Renjun. Tell me now or I’ll do it myself.”

“I’m hurt. What happened to ‘it has to be us?’”

“I’m a siren, I know how to sweet talk. Don’t take it personally.” You snorted. “Now, what do you want from me?”

“You’re a siren,” he echoed plainly, as if that were all the explanation you needed.

“And you’re a genius.” You retorted. “Tell me now or I walk out.”

“I... want to experience siren venom. For science.”

Oh, you could kiss him right now, no deal necessary. He was meeting your gaze head-on, a slightly unhinged glint in his eye. Not a hint of fear, just a craving for new experiences, unbridled curiosity. Yeah, he was a bit crazy, you were realizing four years on, and you wanted him.

“You’re insane.”

He leaned back in his seat, putting his hands up in front of him in an ‘I-don’t-care’ gesture, “If you don’t want to find Dr. Magic—”

“I didn’t say no, I said you’re insane,” you corrected him with a grin, dragging your eyes up and down his form as he sat so confidently, negotiating with a siren like it was any average Tuesday for him.

“So do we have a deal?” He set his pen down and held a hand out to you.

“You help me find Dr. Magic, then I’ll spit in your mouth.” You momentarily thought about the disparity in division of labor on that, but decided not to point it out aloud. Easiest handshake of your life. “Deal.”

You wanted to eat him alive.

“You’ve tried IP tracking?” Renjun asked, scrolling through your word document of notes that you’d accumulated on Dr. Magic.

“‘You’ve tried IP tracking?’” You mimicked him under your breath, making your voice so high-pitched to the point of mocking.

He rolled his eyes.

This was your first meet-up to try to hunt down Dr. Magic together. It was a couple weeks after he had agreed to help you in the first place. There was a test and some assignments in a few of your classes to get through first before either of you had enough spare time to dedicate to this. But now the two of you were back in the library, having taken a study room on the second floor and set up with your own laptops. You’d sent him your notes to look through on it while you perused the message board for any new posts from Dr. Magic.

“You do know that any geographical location an IP address can give you will just be the city, right? It’s not like the movies,” you snorted, dropping your voice back down to your normal intonation as you shook your head. “Anyway, I did do some extra legwork with the IPs, and matched most of them to desktop computers here in the library. I think the others are a personal device, their laptop or something.”

“They’re all different.”

You tutted at him, “Oh, you sweet Thursday’s child…”

“That’s not the say—”

“They’re all somehow on other continents. Now, I don’t think Dr. Magic teleporting abroad and cross-dimensionally to make forum posts.”

“VPN?”

“Definitely. They’re covering their tracks, they almost never use their own device, and when they have to, they use a VPN to cover up the IP address of it.”

He made a noise of acknowledgement, eyes still focused on his screen.

Then, something on the forum caught your eye. “Oh! Right here. Thirty-six minutes ago, a dryad posted that she can’t sprout daffodils from her body anymore. Every other plant and flower are fine, except daffodils. She posted it specifically asking Dr. Magic if they know what’s wrong with her.”

“Huh.” Renjun’s brow furrowed. “Just daffodils?”

“That’s what it says,” you confirmed, making a few clicks on your computer. “And… ‘notify me.’”

“You can turn on notifications for forum posts?”

“You can’t,” you informed him smugly. “But one of the sirens in my pod, he’s got a bunch of CompSci friends who I paid to write a browser extension for me that bookmarks forum posts and sends me email notifications when anybody replies to them. So I’ll know exactly when Dr. Magic responds.”

“You…”

“Have definitely spent too much time, energy, and money on this, I know. Sunken cost fallacy, look it up.”

“I was going to say ‘are insane,’” he breathed out, his voice a mixture of awe and disbelief.

When you looked up from your computer at him, you saw that he had a curious gaze fixated on you, eyes narrowed slightly, mouth parted, and head tilted ever so slightly to the side.

You leaned forward minutely, holding his eye contact. “Takes one to know one, Junnie.”

He looked down at his keyboard, shifting in his seat before he looked back up at you. “Why are you calling me that?”

“Do you not like it?”

“I didn’t say that.”

“So you do like it.” You smirked.

He frowned. “I didn’t say that either.”

“Well do you?”

“Answer my question.”

“Answer mine.”

“I asked first.”

“Ooh, how very primary school,” you teased, setting your chin in your hand.

“It’s only fair.” He pointed out.

“We could flip a coin.”

“Y/N.”

“Junnie.”

The human sighed, holding your eye contact wordlessly, looking entirely unamused.

You finally gave in with a casual shrug. “I just am.”

“Seriously? We’ve known each other for four years and you’ve never called me that—you’ve called me plenty of other things—but now suddenly you’ve got a nickname for me?”

“I’m not trying to be derogatory with it, if you’re worried about that,” you clarified. “Just sort of happened. I’m a siren, I flirt with cute people, sorry. Do you want me to stop calling you that?”

He ran his fingers through his hair, pushing some off his face as he turned his focus back down to his screen. “It’s fine.”

“Anyway, I bookmarked the new forum post, so it’ll go on the board.”

“The board?”

“I, uh, I may be using a spare wall in my apartment to host a conspiracy theory board with you know, the red string and thumbtacks and stuff…” You admitted quietly.

“Can I see it?”

“Ho-ly shit,” Renjun breathed out, staring up at the multiple time-stamped printouts of forum posts, pictures of classmates and faculty, sticky notes, and yards of red string that you had pinned to a blank wall in your apartment.

You stood next to him, gazing up at your creation with a strange mixture of pride and embarrassment. This was the first time you’d let someone see this, and you were kind of glad it was Renjun. He actually seemed impressed. You were sure that any of your friends and family would be weirded out at best, and very concerned at worst.

“Yeah, I’m adding color copies off the school printers to the invoice I’m sending Dr. Magic at the end of all this.”

“You’re sending them an invoice for your self-assigned mission to hunt them down?” He snorted.

“Yup. It’s their fault for not using their school-issued login.” You crossed your arms. “Makes them enigmatic.”

Your classmate pointed to one of the headshots. “Is that Dr. Li?”

“Did you think our scope was narrowed to just students? Faculty have access to the message boards, too. And we’ve learned everything we know from our professors, so they obviously have the knowledge and skill to be Dr. Magic.”

“And their names also start with Doctor.” He added dryly, which you took to be a joke.

You decided that it wasn’t at your expense, though, and after giving a short chuckle, continued on with your explanation of why you specifically had your program head up on the board. “When I was grilling Dr. Li for information in the fall, he was giving me very duplicitous answers. Pointed me towards a freshman who I swear didn’t even know the difference between Arctic sirens and glacial sirens.”

“You think it was a diversion.”

“Obviously.”

Renjun tapped his chin thoughtfully. “What sort of questions were you asking him?”

“I couldn’t straight up ask him if he was Dr. Magic. So I was asking him things like... other than you and me, who did he think was the best student in the program, that kind of stuff. Said that kid reminded him of you and me on that first day of Intro to MCS.” You couldn’t help but let out an indignant scoff at the idea. “Can you believe? Didn’t know the difference between Arctic and glacial sirens…”

“Who was it?”

“Some basilisk in one of his Intro classes last semester. Uh…” You snapped your fingers as you tried to remember his name. “Seunghan! Hong Seunghan!”

“Seriously?” The human turned to look at you incredulously, clearly offended at the comparison as well.

“Seriously!”

He clutched at his chest like he was about to have a heart attack. “That’s who he thinks is the next us? I was an SI for that class…”

“I know! He’s not the brightest tool in the shed, huh?”

“So close, Y/N. So close…” He sighed.

“It almost completely threw me off my search for Dr. Magic. I figured I needed to seriously step up my game in his undergrad research or something.” You shook your head at the horrible memory. “Then I realized he might have been trying to get me to do exactly that.”

“Huh.” Renjun folded his arms over his chest as he looked away, pretending not to seem interested. “You did research with Dr. Li last semester?”

“Don’t give me those kicked puppy dog eyes, you’re doing research with Dr. Kwon this semester and she’s like, my academic idol!” You pointed at him accusatorily.

“And Dr. Li is mine!”

You waved your arms in front of you, shaking yourself out of the academic envy-induced frenzy you’d gotten worked up into. “We’re getting off-topic. We’re here to catch Dr. Magic, remember?”

“Right…” He took a deep breath, turning back to the conspiracy wall.

As Renjun studied your work, you studied him. You had a strand of fairy lights clipped up above the conspiracy wall for light and ambiance (mostly ambiance), and they now lit his features from the front. He didn’t have a baseball cap on today, leaving his brown hair to fall over his forehead, down past his eyebrows and just into his eyes. He blinked and shook his head slightly. A piece had presumably been bothering him. The curving slope of the bridge of his nose, his lips, his chin that he still had one hand propped up to hold, a finger tapping against his cupid’s bow like a metronome. You listened closer, curious if it would be mimicking the beat of his heart. The tapping was just slightly slower than his heart, and would stop if he found something that he took particular interest in, then start back up when he moved on again.

Not that you were going to tell him, but you were double motivated to find Dr. Magic now. Seeing Renjun under your venom was going to be a reward all on its own. You understood full well why he felt like he needed to ask you as part of an exchange like this, but he seemed to greatly underestimate his own selling value. Which was good for you. This was a win-win-win in your eyes.

Thinking of the deal made you curious, though. He had that request ready to go almost like…

“So, do you want to be petrified by a basilisk, too?”

Renjun didn’t take his eyes off the wall. “Already have been.”

“Really?”

“My friend Mark is a basilisk. When he had just gotten his powers a couple years ago and couldn’t control them, he kept accidentally petrifying his human roommate. So I figured out when it was most likely to happen, invited myself over and hid his sunglasses. It was strange, being able to think but not speak, see but not blink, and telling my muscles to move and not having them obey.” He casually detailed what sounded like one of the most horrifying experiences ever to you, leaning in towards a specific post from November. “But it only lasted one minute and twenty-nine seconds.”

You stared at him with both admiration and alarm. “You manufactured an opportunity to get petrified.”

“I knew he wouldn’t do it if I asked. He’s a wimp. That, and he couldn’t do it on command at the time, even if he did agree.”

“Have you had your blood drank?”

“Yup.”

“Been flying?”

“How so?” His eyes flicked over to you for a second, and you were glad that you had relaxed again with the more casual conversation.

“With a gryphon, phoenix, take your pick.” You shrugged.

“Uh-huh.”

“Do you have a list for this stuff or something?”

“Written down, no. But I suppose I have a mental list.”

“Poisoned by a wyvern?”

“Would have to find one first.”

You felt your eyes bug out of your head. “You want to be poisoned by a wyvern? You know there’s no cure for that, right?”

“Yes, I took the same class that you did on them last spring.” He reminded you tersely. Your head jerked back minutely, surprised for a second that he had noticed, remembered, and brought it up. The two of you didn’t have a spat in that class, taking an ‘ignore and pretend the other doesn’t exist’ approach that semester when you could, and hadn’t mentioned it since. Seeming to realize what he’d done, Renjun rushed to move on, “So I also know that there’s no cure because they went extinct hundreds of years ago.”

“Supposedly.”

“You think they’re still out there?”

“Maybe.”

“Hm.” He stepped to the side to read over the next post from the first week of December.

You scoffed. “Okay, coming from the guy who believes in aliens.”

“We haven’t explored all of space. But we know what habitats wyverns lived in, and they’re not there anymore.”

“They could’ve adapted, gone somewhere else,” you tried to argue. “I’m not exactly splashing around the ocean right now, am I?”

“Where did they go, then?”

“I... I don’t know,” you admitted, holding yourself by your arms protectively.

“Hmph.”

You tightened your grip, swallowing hard against the lump threatening to grow in your throat. “I just don’t want to believe they’re gone, okay?”

“So this isn’t a scientific hypothesis, but some rosy daydream?” Renjun’s disapproval of the lack of academic rigor in your argument was clear in his tone as his eyes never left your wall, following a red string up to your next connection for Dr. Magic.

“I don’t want to believe that wyverns went extinct because that means that sirens could too! Alright?” You finally snapped, hands squeezing tightly around your biceps as your claws came out with the raw burst of emotion. “I know that Magical Conservation was just some class to you, but I had to sit there and take notes on how exactly the native habitats of sirens—me, my friends, my family—are shrinking, and could theoretically lead to our extinction, and then write a discussion post on it after like it was some intellectually stimulating bit of information. So yeah, maybe I like to imagine that there’s still wyverns out there somewhere, because it gives me a modicum of hope that after everything, there could still be sirens, too. Sorry that that’s not academic enough.”

The image of Renjun that you had been yelling at in front of you was wavering as tears swam in your vision. He’d turned around to listen, mouth parting as he seemed to immediately realize his mistake. The human nodded regretfully, running a hand through his hair before finally picking his words.

“I’m sorry, Y/N. I didn’t mean to be so dismissive. I-I misread the tone of the discussion. Sirens aren’t wyverns, and you won’t meet the same fate they might have. Siren advocacy and conservation groups are making huge progress. The world now is a lot different than it was hundreds of years ago,” Renjun said, and you could hear both the remorse and firm belief in his tone. “And who knows, maybe there are still some wyverns out there. I could be wrong... it’s been known to happen before.”

You took a deep breath, your claws receding back into your fingers and just leaving your normal fingernails. As you looked down at your arms, though, you let out a sigh.

“Damn, I got myself.” You clicked your tongue in your throat regretfully, spotting a few drops of what looked like molten silver metal welling to the surface where you’d punctured your skin.

“Ooh,” Renjun winced sympathetically. “Do you have some… bandages?”

“Even better, I’ve got running water.” You started towards the door, then noted that there were no footsteps behind you. Turning back around, you looked at the human knowingly. “Do you want to watch, Renjun?”

He perked up. “Please?”

“Come on,” you jerked your head, holding your arms level as you shuffled towards your kitchen.

Thankfully, you hadn’t been nearly deep enough to get your scales, just the skin overtop. Turning the kitchen faucet on, you grabbed one of your sleeves, then looked at your classmate imploringly.

“A little help, Junnie?” You nodded towards your other arm, where the end of your sleeve was getting close to your blood.

“Oh, sure.” He surged forward to help you roll up the other one.

“I know you know this but be careful not to touch my blood,” you reminded him, finally pulling up the sleeve you’d started on well enough. Siren blood was a neurotoxin to humans—and not the fun kind like your venom, but a proper ‘kill you in an excruciatingly painful way’ kind.

“Uh-huh, got it.”

A couple drops on your left and a drop on your right had run down to your elbows, and you just managed to catch yourself so that they dripped into the sink and not onto your counter (or gods forbid, Renjun). Looking over to make sure he was watching, you stuck your left bicep under the stream of water first. The ocean blue scales that peeked through your skin shimmered in the kitchen lights directly above your head. Thankfully you hadn’t come anywhere close to nicking one of those. That would’ve actually hurt. Within a second of touching the water your skin had meshed itself back together. You turned your arm to rinse off the blood, then brought it back out to show that there was no scar left. Doing the same with the other, it healed just as quick, no mark left behind to indicate that anything had ever happened.

“Yep…” Renjun breathed out as you grabbed a hand towel and went to dry off your arms. “I don’t think I’ll ever get tired of that.”

“How many does that make?” You giggled.

“What?”

“How many creatures have you seen magically heal themselves? What number am I?”

“You make me sound so…”

“Like a common MCS whore?”

“I was going to say clinical, but damn, tell me how you really feel, Y/N.”

Both of you laughed, and you put the hand towel back.

“You’re the first siren,” Renjun answered your question genuinely anyway.

You hummed as you mulled this over. “I’ll take it.”

He made a dramatic motion of wiping sweat off his forehead, and you reached forward to smack his forearm. You two laughed again.

After a bout of comfortable silence, your eyes settled on him again, still thinking about exactly how you’d accidentally stabbed yourself in the first place.

“I forgive you, by the way,” you said. “I don’t think I said that.”

“You didn’t.” He nodded. “Thank you.”

“You really mean all that? You think I’ll—we’ll be okay? Sirens?”

“Of course I mean it. Or I wouldn’t have said it. It’s the most scientifically plausible. I did take that Magical Conservation class seriously, you know. I know it couldn’t have meant the same thing for me as it means to you, but I did my final paper on siren conservation projects in the Arctic. The progress that’s being made there is incredible. I-I don’t want to tell you about your own species’ problems, obviously, but—”

“I did mine on siren conservation in the tropics.” You let out a dry chuckle at the flawless symbiosis. “You can tell me about your paper sometime, Renjun.”

“And I’d love to hear about siren conservation in the tropics.”

“Ah, ‘a meeting of the minds.’” You did your best impression of Dr. Li, thinning your voice out to sound like an elderly man, which garnered a smile from Renjun. “Isn’t this what our professors always wanted?”

“Uh-oh. We’re giving them exactly what they want.” He shook his head ruefully. “Quick, you need to start yelling at me about something.”

“Well you need to say something obnoxious first.”

Another gentle lull in the conversation, and you watched as Renjun looked around your apartment a lot more carefully than when you two had first entered. Your destination then had been solely the conspiracy wall, but now he seemed to be really taking it in.

“So why don’t you have like… a fish tank or something?” He asked.

“Because that would be cruel! Imagine if someone kept you in a 2-foot by 2-foot box!” You jabbed a finger into his chest accusatorily.

He held his hands up in surrender. “You’re right. That was a stupid question.”

“I’m glad you said it, because I was about to.”

“So why don’t you reply? To the posts.” Renjun asked curiously, back to trolling the message boards for new Dr. Magic posts. You two were holed up in your second floor study room again. “You’ve been tracking Dr. Magic so closely, you’re getting to these posts before they do, and you can help all these students, too. So why don’t you just reply instead?”

Yours and Renjun’s search for Dr. Magic had been going on for a month now, and he’d been proving himself useful. He’d finally convinced you to rule out Dr. Li as a suspect when he found a message board post made from a school computer while Dr. Li was away at a conference giving a presentation. Confirmed to be done at the exact same time. So you’d found another wrong person, but you still didn’t feel any closer to the right person. The remaining people felt like they were going to turn out to be dead ends, and there was nobody good to rule in either.

Spring break was coming up in a few weeks, which meant that commencement preparations would be starting, which meant that the colleges would be announcing who would be chosen to carry their banners, which meant the actual students who were going to be chosen would be told at least a week or two ahead of time. Every time you thought about that you wanted to bite something. Maybe there was some ancestral link between sirens and werewolves. Another paper waiting to be written.

“They don’t want me. They want Dr. Magic.” You told Renjun, hating the irritable edge in your voice when you addressed him. You weren’t upset with him, you were just anxious in general. He didn’t deserve to have you take it out on him.

“Right. Sorry…”

“No, Renjun, I’m sorry,” you sighed, taking the wood pencil out of your mouth that you had been gnawing on. “I just want to get this Dr. Magic stuff over with before midterms because you and I are both going to get super busy studying for midterms, and then no matter which one of us gets picked to carry the banner, that’s going to suck up a lot of time preparing for commencement too. I shouldn’t have snapped at you though, sorry.”

He offered you a small smile. “It’s okay, I get it. It’s another deadline. But it’s a group project, remember? We’ve got this, Y/N.”

You nodded. “Yeah, I know. Just feeling the pressure. I’m going to get something from the vending machine. You coming?”

“No, I’ll keep chugging along.”

“Okay. You want anything?”

“Nah. Thanks, though.”

“Alright,” you nodded, standing up and rolling your neck out. “I’m going to stretch my legs while I’m up, so I’ll be a few.”

“I won’t sound the alarm then.” He gave you a two-fingered salute as you headed to the door.

You meandered around the second floor, taking your sweet time to get to the stairs. There was a vending machine on the second floor, but it had a limited selection. The good snacks were all in the vending machines on the first floor, by the collaboration zones. Your back cracked all on its own as you plodded down the steps, and you let quiet groans with each one, until you finally landed on the first floor. There was a noticeable hum to the first floor, which only increased as you neared the two-thirds of the floor that was taken up by the collaboration zones. The vending machines were on the boundary of the bookshelves and the open spaces filled with tables and TV monitors and so many students.

Stopping in front of the drinks machine first, you mused over the options for a moment. Picking out your preferred seaweed-infused iced tea—an option you only saw sirens and the really hardcore human health-nuts drink—you then sidestepped to the snacks. It took you just a second to select a pack of mini peanut butter sandwich cookies. Neither peanut butter nor peanuts themselves were in the regular diet of a siren, but Renjun sometimes had the cookies on him for one of his werewolf friends and you’d picked up a taste for them. You would’ve never considered even trying them before hanging out with Renjun. Being an MCS major, you didn’t like to admit it, but your social circle wasn’t very diverse species-wise. You had your siren pod, and you were very happy sticking with them, thank you. Renjun, meanwhile, seemed to be best friends or friendly acquaintances with everything except a wyvern. You knew plenty about other species, after all, you excelled in class. But practical experience, you were finding you seemed to be lacking in. Maybe you should start your own Renjun-esque bucket list. Something to consider after finding Dr. Magic.

Taking a step back over to the drinks machine, you made the split-second decision to get Renjun’s favorite non-caffeinated, non-alcoholic drink. Honeydew melon soda. He had already said that you didn’t need to get him anything, but you wanted to.

“Hey, Y/N!” A cheerful voice greeted you, and you spun around, your two drinks and bag of sandwich cookies in hand.

You already knew who it was going to be, smiling at the familiar face of Ten. He was not only another siren, but specifically a siren from your pod, ocean blue scales and golden eyes matching your own. You threw your arms around his neck to give him a hug. “Ten! Ah, hey!”

“Are those… peanut butter?” He looked at the snack in your hand suspiciously.

“Uh, human study buddy,” you brushed off his concerns nonchalantly.

“Right, gotcha.”

The two of you usually hung out a lot—about as much as you and Renjun were together now, you figured—but since your spare time had been taken up with putting the search for Dr. Magic on full throttle, you were blanking on the last time you’d seen him. The beginning of the semester. Oh shit, you felt so guilty now.

The apology immediately started spilling out of your mouth, “Gods, I am so sorry we haven’t hung out, I wish I could say it was classes, or even research or something, but I’ve got this project. I can’t even really explain it without sounding crazy but—”

“Woah, Y/N, it’s okay,” Ten reassured you with a laugh, the same bright smile on his face as always. “I know how you get when you get really into one of your projects. Just let me know when you’ve finished it, and we can hang. Or if you ever need a break from it, too. It’s fine. If you weren’t a little crazy and obsessive, I wouldn’t be able to recognize you.”

He ruffled your hair with a snicker for good measure, and with your hands full of food, you couldn’t fight back, just huff and try to duck out of the way. But he was genuine about his sentiments, which really did make you feel better.

“Thanks, Ten. I’ll get in touch soon, I promise. I think I’m almost done!” You told him proudly.

“Soon in normal person time or soon in Y/N time?”

“Me time…”

“That’s what I thought. I’ll see you in six months then.”

“I’m not that bad!”

“Remember when I wondered aloud if sirens at the North and South poles were related, and you ended up spending our entire winter break researching that?”

“It only took four weeks!”

“You said it would be a quick search.”

“Exactly! People will dedicate their entire lives to that kind of research! I vastly condensed it!”

He shook his head fondly at the memory, elbowing you gently. “Get back to your project so you can finish early again and we can hang out soon, okay? And scoot, I’m trying to use the vending machine. You’re always in my way, I swear.”

You playfully pretended to block him, laughing as he nudged you out of the way with his shoulder. Starting back off towards the stairs, you turned around to give a cheery, “See you, Ten!”

“Bye, Y/N!” He waved to you with one hand, punching in the vending machine code with the other.

In better spirits having seen your friend, you traipsed up the stairs with extra pep in your step. Except Renjun wasn’t in your study room. Huh. Well, nothing in the rules saying a guy can’t take a bathroom break.

Setting his melon soda down next to his laptop, you plopped back down in your chair and kicked your feet up on the table. You ripped open your peanut butter sandwich cookies and cracked open your tea. The cookies were sweet, and while you didn’t have any oceanic reference for what peanut butter tasted like (you were told that “nutty” was a flavor profile unto itself, which wasn’t very helpful), you had decided that you liked it.

Waking your laptop back up, you saw that you had a new email, and shot up in your seat when you saw the subject.

dr_magic2303 replied to a post.

8 minutes ago.

Holy fucking shit, 8 minutes ago. While you were in the library? They could still be there. You looked around frantically. Where the fuck was Renjun when you needed him? Shooting to your feet, you snatched your phone from the table and rushed to throw the door open. Into Renjun’s face.

He stumbled back, holding his face as he let out a string of curses.

“Shit! Sorry, Junnie!” You didn’t sound all too sorry as you bounced on your feet, antsy to get a move on with your search. “No time for an ice pack though. Dr. Magic just replied to that dragon post we had bookmarked eight minutes ago. Which means that they’re probably still in the library! We need to go look for them right now!”

You took off in the direction of the desktop computers on this floor, keeping your voice at a fervent whisper-yell. The second floor computers were their favorite, according to the IPs.

“I know!” Renjun hurried after you, still clutching his nose. “I saw the email, and I tried to call you, but you left your phone in the study room.”

Checking your phone, you did in fact have a missed call from Renjun from 6 minutes ago. Well shit.

“So I went to go get you, but you weren’t at the vending machines, so I came back up to the study room and then nearly got my nose broken.”

You looked over your shoulder at him with wide eyes. “You went to get me? Not look for Dr. Magic on the freshest lead we’ve ever had? When they were quite possibly around the corner?”

The two of you had arrived at the desktops, and there was nobody in sight. One was awake, on the account login screen, the other two asleep on the ancient screensavers. You let out a heavy sigh, looking over at Renjun.

“I went to get you because this is your thing, not mine. I don’t know, I’d figured you’d want the satisfaction of taking the mask off them.”

You nodded. “Thanks, Junnie. Next time, though, just get them.”

“And how about you keep your phone on you?”

“So we both fucked it up.”

He gave you a one-shouldered shrug. “There’s still three more floors, Y/N.”

“Right, come on. You take the first, I’ll go up to the fourth since I smacked you with the door.”

The other floors were busts, and when you finally met back up with Renjun in your study room, you were glad to have your cold bottle of tea waiting for you. Knocking back a third of it in one go, you let out a noise of relief. Renjun had already opened the soda you’d gotten him.

“Thanks, by the way.” He held it up gratefully before taking a sip.

“You’re welcome.”

“And, I’m sorry. That I let Dr. Magic get away.”

“We don’t even know what floor they were posting from yet. They’ve could’ve been on the fourth floor and would’ve been gone by the time you got there anyway.” You brushed away his apologies. “Or they could’ve been on the second and been a psycho and you would’ve been a poor defenseless human all by yourself.”

“Oh, right, without my big strong siren to protect me.” He scoffed. “Woe is me.”

“Exactly,” you laughed, shutting your laptop. “Anyway, I’ll take a look at the IP later. Who knows, they might not have even been in the library. Might’ve been one of those rogue VPN posts.”

“Yeah, maybe.” He looked over you packing up your things. “You heading out?”

You nodded, zipping up your bag and tossing it onto your shoulder. “Prior arrangements. Sorry to cut this short, completely forgot about it when we agreed to meet up.”

“You’re so popular.”

“I know!” You mimicked his sarcastic tone, holding the door open with your foot as you stopped in the threshold. “Oh, hey— the midterm in MCS Linguistics. It’s my only one this semester, I’ve just got papers in all my other classes. Do you want to study together for that?”

“Yeah, sure, sure.”

“First session Saturday? My place for lunch?”

Renjun grimaced, presumably remembering your typical stock of pantry items tailored to a siren’s food preference. “I’ll pack a lunch.”

“Cool. See you in class, Junnie!” You waved to him cheerily as you took off for the faculty advisor meeting with Dr. Kwon that you were going to need to run across campus to be on time for.

“What is it?” Renjun set his book down where he was sat across your coffee table from you, an inquisitive eyebrow quirked up at you.

“What? Nothing.” You bit down on your lip, eyes boring holes into your computer screen.

“No, it’s not ‘nothing.’ You’ve been staring at me ever since I got here, while also refusing to make eye contact with me. What? Something in my teeth? My hair look bad?”

Normally that would’ve made you chuckle—he was wearing a backwards baseball cap again today—but you just bit down harder on your lip and shook your head.

“Now you’re refusing to talk?” He scoffed. “Did you get hexed or something? I can’t believe you’re refusing to talk.”

“No, I can talk,” you insisted. “What uh, what’d you get for number four? On the review packet?”

“Don’t tell me you’re still stuck on number four. Y/N, I’m almost done, and there’s twenty-five questions on this.”

“I’m not, I finished and went back, it was just one that I didn’t—”

But Renjun had grabbed your computer and turned the screen around, and you knew he could see that you had only done the first one. You buried your face in your hands, your skin prickling uncomfortably with shame. Your friend’s sigh was audible, but surprisingly, the next thing said wasn’t a string of derision. Instead, you heard the shuffle of clothes against your rug, and then he was sitting shoulder-to-shoulder and knee-to-knee with you.

“Y/N, what’s going on with you today? Or, not today, the past couple days? You weren’t all there in class yesterday either. I left it alone then because it was Dr. Hyun, and nobody is ever all there for her classes but— what’s wrong?”

You slowly shook your head.

“You can’t tell me?”

You nodded.

“Okay. Is it bad? Like, dangerous?”

You shook your head.

“Alright, that’s good.” The relief was audible in his voice. “Is it family? Or, pod?”

You shook your head.

“School?”

You nodded.

“Alright, yeah. A lot going on. Is it like burn out?”

You shook your head.

“So, new stuff?”

You nodded.

He put an arm around your shoulders. “I’m sorry, Y/N. I know you already had a lot. Getting this midterm over with will be one more thing off your checklist, right? That’ll open a spot for this new thing.”

With a sniffle, you nodded.

“Ah, but you’re not going to be any good studying like this.” He sighed again, dropping his arm from around your shoulders and his presence shifted away from your side. “Come on, quick field trip. Then we’ll come right back to the MCS Linguistics grind. Sound good?”

You finally took your hands from your face to look up. Renjun was standing right next to you, offering you a hand. You tentatively put yours in his, and he tightened his grip to pull you up to your feet.

The two of you ended up in a froyo shop down the street from your apartment. You gleefully picked a gummy shark off the top of your swirl, biting the head off first before tossing the rest in your mouth. Renjun lifted a meticulously curated spoonful of froyo and toppings to his mouth, satisfaction on his face as he tasted his perfect bite. You watched in amusement as he went to start creating his next scoop that had the precise ratio of yogurt and every single topping he had chosen—each partitioned to their own area atop the froyo. You decided to save your second big gummy shark for last, and took a big spoonful from the melting edge of your froyo.

“Why not me?” Renjun asked abruptly, his gaze still on the dessert in front of him.

“Huh?” Your jaw dropped. How could he have known what—

“You haven’t asked me if I’m Dr. Magic. Why not?”

Ah, Dr. Magic. Of course.

“You were my first guess, and the first person I ruled out back in like September,” you admitted with a shrug.

His head snapped up at that. “What? Why?”

“Because you’re such an arrogant, neurotic overachiever that you’d want credit if you did all this. You wouldn’t use an alias.”

“Oh. Huh.” Renjun looked between you and his froyo, a sheepish smile coming to his face. “Strangely, that makes me feel better.”

You watched a dollop of froyo fall off your spoon and plop back into your cup. “And I nabbed your IP address off your laptop the first time we hung out in January and double-checked it with every Dr. Magic post. Just in case.”

“When I was in the bathroom?”

“Uh-huh.”

“Of course you did.”

“Were you taking it as an insult to your intelligence that I had apparently not considered you as an option?”

“Maybe…”

You laughed, and laughed, and laughed. You laughed so hard your sides hurt, there were tears in your eyes, and you genuinely started wheezing. Renjun pretended to roll his eyes, but you saw the smile on his face and knew what he was thinking: success, no more mopey siren.

Once you had enough air back in your lungs to talk, you pointed your spoon at him firmly. “See? Just proving my point. You want people to know you’re smart.”

He crossed his arms. “As if you don’t.”

“Oh, I definitely do. But I know I’m like that.” You put a hand over your chest, looking him dead in the eye. “Do you?”

With your head screwed back on the normal amount, you and Renjun were able to dive back into your study session at your apartment. Several hours into it, though, you noticed Renjun blinking like way too much and constantly rubbing at his eyes. It was to the point where it was distracting for you.

“What’s wrong with your eyes?” You asked bluntly.

That immediately burst the Renjun griping dam (which was really held together with tape and prayers anyway). “The screens hurt my eyes and human blue light glasses don’t do shit and no fairy has let me try theirs out. I know I should probably just take the plunge and buy them but I really can’t justify the price and—”

“Try mine.” You stood up, walking over to a display shelf on the other side of the living room.

“You have a pair? Why? Sirens don’t—”

“You collect magical experiences. I collect magical things.” You said nonchalantly, grabbing the pair of silver frames from where they sat between a phoenix feather (a gift) and a small wristwatch that would tell the correct time until it was put on, then it would be set on the time and date most significant to the wearer in that moment until it was removed. Walking back over to him, you held them out to him insistently, “Here, try them.”

“Oh. Thanks.” Renjun gingerly took them, sliding the arms over his ears and the frames onto the bridge of his nose. The pair you had was a little older, admittedly. You’d picked them up at a novelty shop, so they had some retro charm to them. An older style of frame, thicker lenses. But you thought it added a quaintness to their look. Especially on Renjun, he just looked downright adorable in them.

You sat back down to watch with your head in your hand as his brown eyes blinked from behind the thick lenses, and he looked around your living room like a newborn woodland animal. His face had already relaxed, and he turned his focus down to his laptop screen next, messing with the brightness up, then down. After that, he took out his phone, doing the same with that device.

“Well?” You prompted him, though you truly would’ve been content with watching him look around as if he’d been born colorblind and it were his first time seeing in color. Which, you had an enchanted pair for that too, but he wasn’t colorblind to your knowledge.

The human looked at you, a giddy smile stretching across his face. “They’re perfect! Thanks, Y/N!”

His hand reached up to take them off, but you stopped him.

“Keep them—”

“No, these had to be so expensive!” He protested immediately.

“Just for a week or so,” you finished your sentence pointedly. He was cute, but not that cute. “Make sure you really like them before you buy, okay? If you end up hating them, give them back. If you like them and buy your own pair, you can give them back whenever yours arrive in the mail.”

“Are you sure?”

“Yeah, it’s not like I’m using them. Superior siren eyesight.” You tapped next to one of your eyes for emphasis.

“Thanks for not rubbing it in or anything.”

Scrambling to dial Renjun’s number, you put your phone on speaker as you fervently flicked through all of your Dr. Magic notes. You’d been laying in bed binging some mindless baking competition to numb your brain from all the studying you’d been doing when an email notification had popped up alerting you to a new Dr. Magic post.

“Y/N?” Renjun answered the phone, sounding utterly confused. “What’s—”

“New Dr. Magic post. I ran the IP and they’re in our city!” You blurted out.

“Okay… Well we already knew that, right?”

“Yeah, but this is an IP in our city that they posted from at midnight on a Saturday. Not any of the school computers.” You hit CTRL + F, typing in the string of numbers to quickly cross reference it with your extensive list. “This could be their IP. Like, their actual one, from a personal computer.”

“Oh, yeah. Could be.”

“Can you give me a little more enthusiasm here, Junnie? Did I wake you up or something? It’s only—” You stopped like you’d just walked face-first into a brick wall, eyes locked on the search result.

“Yeah, only quarter after midnight,” he scoffed.

You clicked the next arrow on the search bar, but that was the only match. 1/1 results.

“Y/N?” Renjun called for your attention. “You there?”

You hung up.

Not wanting to lose your nerve, you pressed the doorbell over and over insistently. You could hear the complaining tone of the occupant before his words were even audible.

“Christ, I have neighbors, you know?” Renjun swung open the door with a scowl. The human was in a big, slouching hoodie and pajama pants. His hair was stuck up in a couple different directions, making you think he might’ve just woken up. Except behind him, you could see that his kitchen light was on, and a couple books and his laptop were open on his kitchen table. Late night studying. And the fact that you’d just talked to him on the phone fifteen minutes ago.

“Can I come in?” You requested, fidgeting with the sleeve of your cardigan.

His face immediately softened. “Yeah, of course.”

“Sorry to just show up like this,” you said as you took off your shoes by the front door before following him further into his apartment.

“It’s okay.” He stopped you two in the kitchen, picking up a colorful, patterned cardboard box. “Uh, I was just about to make a midnight snack. Pizza bites, you want some?”

“I… don’t think I’ve ever had them.”

“Perfect, you can try one now then.”

“Mm,” you made a non-committal noise, leaning against his kitchen counter to watch him pour out the frozen food onto a baking sheet.

The oven beeped, and he put the tray in before pressing a couple more buttons.

“So, I was thinking about the Dr. Magic stuff. Not the IP stuff but like… What even is your plan for when you do find Dr. Magic?” Renjun asked as he put the remaining pizza bites in his freezer.

“What do you mean?”

He leaned against the countertop across from you, though in the narrow space of his kitchen, you were practically knee-to-knee. “Like, say we finally find out who they are, we run up to them in the library or on campus or something. Then what? What are you going to do? What are you going to say? You’ve done all this, and I know why you had to. I get it. But, do you know what you’re going to say to them?”

“Probably something along the lines of…” You trailed off, giving an exasperated sigh. Dropping your chin to your chest, you groaned, “Gods, I don’t know.”

“Hey, that’s why you got me. So you can bounce ideas off someone, do a dry run.”

“I thought the words would just come to me, and now that I’m trying, I can’t—”

“It’s fine, Y/N. Let’s think about why you did this. I know it’s really hard to put into words. I mean, I know why you did. I get it. It’s that need to know. Not because you can, but because you have to, right? It’s curiosity in its rawest form. So obviously it’s not going to be some schmaltzy ‘haha I caught you’ spiel or anything.”

Looking up from the kitchen tile to Renjun’s eager features, you shook your head in disbelief. “You’re still helping me… when I know it’s you, Junnie.”

He tilted his head to the side, a comical noise of confusion coming from his mouth, “Uh?”

“I know it’s you, and you know that I know that it’s you.”

“You already ruled me out, because I’m an arrogant—”

“Junnie, you made a post on the forums from your laptop. No VPN. When you knew I was still tracking Dr. Magic’s IP on every post they made, and that I had your IP. That’s not a whoopsie that you make unless you want to be caught.”

The human crossed his arms over his chest, but otherwise seemed entirely calm about being caught. “And you didn’t come in here guns blazing now that you’d caught me, either. Why?”

“I didn’t know how to say it. I mean, you’re right, I only did all this because I needed to know.”

“And now you know.”

“Why now? Why just give up now?” You asked with a shake of your head. “You started posting as Dr. Magic back in August, and I came to you in January. You knew everything I was doing; you could have cruised through the rest of the semester and I’d have never caught you.”

“You wanted to find out who it was by midterms. One less thing on your plate.”

“And now I know…”

“So how does it feel? Finally catching Dr. Magic?”

You wrinkled your nose and sighed, “Bit disappointing. I was right on my first guess.”

“And you immediately dismissed me out of hand for being an arrogant, neurotic overachiever on your first guess,” he pointed out.

“Yeah, but I didn’t really know you then. If I’d known you then like I know you now, I would’ve known as soon as I saw the first post.”

Renjun batted his eyes teasingly. “Aww, Y/N…”

“Doctor underscore magic two, three, zero, three? Twenty-three, oh-three? That’s your birthday, Junnie,” you deadpanned.

“Right.”

Pushing off the counter to stand up straight again, you said, “Anyway, you did help me find Dr. Magic. So, my turn.”

“Oh, no, you seriously don’t have to do that. I rigged the deal—”

“Yeah, about that.” You took a step forward. “How did you think that was going to end up for you, anyway? Were you going to sell somebody else out as Dr. Magic and hope I wasn’t going to talk to them? Spit in your mouth first and ask questions later?”

“I was thinking on my feet.”

“Maybe think laying down next time, Junnie.”

“Ouch.”

“Anyway, come on, you’ll want to sit down for this.” You grabbed his wrist, pulling him towards the living room.

“You don’t need to feel like you have to do this,” he reassured you.

Stopping the two of you in front of the couch, you turned to face him with a smirk. “Believe me when I say that it is going to be a treat unto itself for me to see you under the effects of siren venom. M’kay?”

Renjun’s surprise was evident on his face. “Oh.”

You stepped closer to him, delicately placing a hand on his chest. “Now unless you want me to literally spit in your mouth, I’m going to have to kiss you, to administer the venom.”

His eyes flicked between the hand you had on his chest and your face as he replied. “I’m okay with that—the kissing—if you are.”

“Renjun, I’ve been ready to eat you alive since you said the words ‘I want to experience siren venom for science’ to me.”

“Really?”

“Mhm. So why don’t you sit?” You guided him with the hand against his chest to sit back against his couch. Swinging one leg over his hips, then the other, you lowered yourself onto his lap. “Is this okay?”

“Yeah, yeah,” he nodded, tentatively settling his hands on your thighs. “Is this okay?”

“More than.” You smiled, looping your arms around his neck. “Now, a couple things, before we get started.”

“We haven’t started?”

“You’ll know it when we do.”

“Right.”

“I know you think you know what siren venom is like, but whatever scientific articles you’ve read, or documentaries you’ve watched, or slides you’ve studied under microscopes in lab, cannot actually prepare you for what it’s like. Which, I imagine is why you want to experience it for yourself.” You smirked down at him as you watched his Adam’s apple bob up and down with a gulp. “So before I actually dose you up with it, I need you to tell me what you’re actually okay with doing and what you’re not. Because once you get my venom in you, you’re going to want to let me do anything and everything to you, up to and including kill you, remember?”

“Well that’s off the table.”

“Good to know,” you snorted, running a fingernail down the nape of his neck. You felt a shudder go through him. “Is this okay?”

“Y-Yeah.” He seemed to be fighting to keep his eyes open. You halted your motions to let him think, and watched in amusement as he blinked his mind clear.

Once enough time had passed, you prompted him, “So?”

“I think just kissing,” Renjun answered. “Like, making out, or whatever. If you want…”

You snickered. “What part of ‘eat you alive’ was I unclear about?”

“The ‘eat’ part, actually. How literal is that?”

“Guess you’ll find out,” you teased. Then, you focused again as you sat back a little. “Okay, making out. Making out means different things to different people. So… we know kissing’s on the table. Tongue?”

“Yeah.”

“Teeth?”

“Where?”

“Waist up. You got somewhere you don’t want them?”

He took a moment to think about this. Then shook his head. “No. You can use them. Anywhere.”

“Same goes for you. Hickies?”

“Giving or receiving?”

“Both. You first.”

“Both are okay. You?”

You were already zeroing in on his neck and a small part of his collarbone peeking out from under his hoodie. “Same. Touching over clothes?”

“Okay, as long as you don’t think it’ll be too much with the venom…”

“Oh, Junnie, everything is going to be too much.” You grinned down at him.

His breathing had picked up pace as the two of you were talking. “You? The touching?”

“Good. Great. Touching under clothes?”

Renjun squirmed underneath you, but maintained your eye contact. “Just under my shirt.”

“Smart boy,” you said approvingly. “Me too.”

“Is that it?” He asked quietly, eyes now flicking down to your lips.

“I think so…” You looked around the room to buy a couple extra seconds of thinking time. When you hadn’t come up with anything else, you looked down at the human below you once more. “Ready, Renjun?”

“Yes.”

You took one final look over him like this, how much he already wanted you before he’d even gotten any of your venom in him, and dragged the tip of your tongue over your bottom lip instinctually. His heartrate jumped, and you wondered if it was fear—if the motion had reminded him perhaps of a hungry predator—or need. Or maybe a bit of both.

But you couldn’t tease him nor yourself any longer, swooping down to connect your mouths. You started off with just a couple light, closed-mouth kisses, to ease him into it. You heard him inhale quickly through his nose, his grip on your thighs tightening minutely. Swiping your tongue across the seal of his lips, you were delighted when he immediately parted his mouth in response, his tongue seeking yours out. You hummed contentedly into his mouth as you started stroking a fingernail down the back of his neck again. At the same time, your venom was beginning to mix in with your saliva, being passed onto Renjun.

Once his jaw started going slack in the kiss, and his hands slowly slid off your legs entirely to rest lamely at his side, you deemed him plenty dosed up. Consciously, you blocked off your venom glands once more. When one particularly drawn-out scratch down the back of his neck finally elicited a noise from him, an involuntary whine, you felt something in you snap. You needed more of that.

“So this is what siren venom feels like…” He mumbled breathily, letting his head loll back against the couch cushion as you kissed a path down his jawline and neck. When you felt his breath hitch in his throat over one particular spot, you decided to take your time there, sucking and nipping a mark into his skin.

When humans were… locked in a lover’s embrace, they let off a certain perfume distinguishable only to sirens—which was what made them the favored prey of sirens for so long. A human under the influence of siren venom? Delectable. And every human’s was unique too, so Renjun under the influence of your venom? Absolutely addictive.

With each kiss you stole from his lips, every nip you left on his neck that you then soothed over with your tongue, you got another taste of it. A sweetness that came with a bite, like ginger candy.

Renjun was still talking, though, his vocal cords vibrating under your lips. “My-My heart’s beating so fast, and I’m so warm—that’s so the ocean water doesn’t feel cold, of course—”

“Would you shut up?” You sat back up, grabbing him by the hair.

“Why?”

“I’m trying to kiss you again, idiot.”

“Oh. Right.” He closed his mouth, looking up at you with glassy eyes, waiting. Gods, he was so pretty like this.

You crashed your lips back on his, a mess of teeth and lips and tongue as he tried to keep up with you. But you knew that your venom was in full effect now, every single one of his nerve endings was approximately three and half times more sensitive. So you were sure it was all a little overwhelming. But he was definitely trying his best, kissing sloppily into your mouth with hungry, desperate whines.

Pulling him back off with your grip in his hair, you traced a thumb over his kiss-swollen bottom lip, cooing over how fucked-out he looked like this. “Oh, baby. Oh, poor Junnie. What’s wrong? Can’t even kiss me properly because it feels too good? Baby’s overwhelmed with just a little bit of kissing?”

He opened his mouth wider, darting the tip of his tongue out to brush against the pad of your thumb. You pushed the finger in his mouth, groaning as he immediately closed his lips around it. “Gods, you’re perfect, Junnie.”

Taking your thumb back out of his mouth just to grab his chin with the same wet digit, you attacked his lips with yours again. Ginger candy. His hands that had been lamely resting at his sides the entire time now fumbled at something in the area where your hips met.

“What? What are you trying to do, baby?” You asked, leaning back to look down. He was grabbing at the hem of his hoodie, unsuccessfully yanking it up towards his head as part of it was stuck under one of your thighs.

“‘m too hot. Please…” He panted, dropping it as he looked up at you pleadingly.

You nodded slowly in understanding, knowing that one of the effects of the siren venom was an increase in body temperature, not to mention what you two were just doing. The collar of another shirt was visible underneath the sweatshirt. “Okay, Junnie, we can take your hoodie off. But only the hoodie. Your other clothes are staying on, understood?”

He nodded quickly, hips bucking up against you. Sweat was beading up on his forehead, his hair getting stuck to the damp skin. You shifted back on his lap so that none of the sweatshirt was under you anymore, grabbing the hem and reaching behind him to yank up from underneath him as well.

“Sit forward for me, baby?” You requested in his ear sweetly.

Renjun obliged as best he could, leaning forward to get his back and shoulders off the couch. You pulled the hoodie up over his head, tossing it off to the side, leaving him in a black t-shirt that certainly couldn’t be helping much either. But having that heavy layer off seemed to provide some relief for him, as he let out a sigh, falling back against the furniture again.

You giggled as you settled back into the crux of his lap again, lacing your fingers together behind his neck. “Is that better now, Junnie?”

He shook his head, and you arched an eyebrow curiously.

“Oh? What’s wrong, then?”

Renjun tugged gently at your cardigan where it had shrugged down to show one of your shoulders. “Please?”

Pulling your bottom lip in between your teeth, you thought this over. You had a tank top on under the cardigan, and both of you were still wearing everything else. Not to mention that you were starting to get a bit warm too. Sirens ran naturally cooler than humans, so you were sure that to him, you felt practically refreshing right now, but you honestly were a bit hot for a siren’s tastes.

Giving a contemplative hum first, you finally relented, “Alright, Junnie. But just my sweater. Everything else stays on, because we didn’t talk about that before the venom, do you understand?”

He rushed to strip you of the knit cardigan, his mouth following his hands’ path down your skin. First on your shoulder, then down your arm. You let the garment drop on the floor behind you as he kissed back up along your shoulder, then over the fabric of your tank top until he got to your collarbone, and finally the hollow of your throat. Fondly stroking the back of his head, the pleased purr that had started in your chest turned into a surprised moan when he licked a long stripe up your throat.

Holding his face in your hands so that your noses brushed, and your lips barely ghosted over each other, you let your breaths mingle in the meager space afforded. Renjun ended your little anticipation game quickly, kissing you tongue-first, and you kissed him back just as eagerly, sucking on his tongue with lewd, wet noises. He moaned into your mouth, his hands grabbing at your waist for purchase first, then slipping and curling into the material of your shirt, bunching it in his fists.

Slowing the pace of your kisses, you eventually sat back, appraising the state he was in. You affectionately ran a hand through his hair as you took in his blown pupils, kiss-swollen lips, and pink cheeks. “Junnie? How are you feeling? Need a break?”

You hadn’t given him another dose of venom since the initial one, which wasn’t very large to begin with. But this was his first time experiencing it, so you wanted to check in. He should be just past the peak of it by now, starting to come down but for all intents and purposes still very much intoxicated. Siren venom wasn’t meant to last very long, after all, it took an adult human less than a minute to drown.

“Need you…” He insisted, arching up towards you.

Indulging him in one, two more feverish kisses, you pulled away once again. “I know, baby. And you’ve been doing so good for me. So I need you to tell me if you need a break. Okay?”

“’kay.” He agreed before you sealed your mouth over his again.

Kissing down from his mouth to just under his jaw, at the same time you trailed a finger down the center of his front until it got to the hem of his t-shirt.

He nodded fervently before you could say or do anything more. “Please… please…”

“Shh, shh, shh,” you quieted him down gently. “Doing so good for me, Junnie. The best.”

You slipped your hands under his shirt, just to stroke his waist. His muscles tensed under your touch, and he let out a sound of satisfaction. He grabbed at your thighs again, but you couldn’t tell if it was an attempt at reciprocity or to have something sturdier to ground himself to than your flimsy tank top. The corner of your lips quirked up as you pressed a couple more kisses down his neck to hover your lips over his pulse point, content to start a new mark there as your hands continued to explore under his shirt. It was when you gently raked your nails down over his pecs that you got the loudest moan out of him yet, and you groaned in response.

“Gods, you’re perfect,” you nuzzled your nose into Renjun’s neck, then pressed a couple relatively chaste pecks to his cheek. “Just perfect…”

Taking your hands back out from his shirt, you silenced his whine at the loss of contact by slotting your lips together once more. You cupped his face with one hand, using the other to take one of his hands off your leg and lace them together, palm to palm. This seemed to make him content once more, especially when you brought your connected hands up to the back of the couch, pinning his behind his head. He squirmed under you, letting out a familiar noise of pleasure into your mouth and squeezing your hand tightly.

You knew the venom was well and truly starting to wear off when Renjun began keeping pace with your slow, lazy kisses, his mouth not as sloppy but no less delightful as it moved in tandem with yours. The thumb of the remaining hand on your thigh started to stroke over your skin, and the hand that you were holding gave yours a gentle squeeze. You gave him one, two last lingering kisses, drinking in the dwindling taste of ginger candy while you could, Renjun matching you beat for beat.

Unlacing your fingers and dropping your hand from his face, you drew back from him. Before you could say anything, though, Renjun grabbed you by the back of the neck and pulled you in for one more kiss, sinking his teeth into your already tender, over-kissed bottom lip. You gasped into his mouth, which gave him the perfect opportunity to intertwine his tongue with yours again on his apparent mission to try to kiss the breath from you. A nigh impossible task for a human to do to a siren, but it definitely felt like he was succeeding. He was crushing his lips against yours so hard you were worried about him drawing blood—not because you would mind the pain, but for fear of his safety if he got a direct hit of your blood in his mouth.

In the back of your mind, you were desperately trying to remember if you had maybe accidentally opened your venom glands a second time later on, but just drew a blank. That wasn’t something you did unaware, it wasn’t automatic, it had to be done on purpose. Then, for a brief moment, you were worried about secondary wave syndrome—some humans break down siren venom in two phases instead of one, and the second one almost always kills them if they’re not brought to a human medical doctor for treatment—and you started running through the symptoms as well as the nearest human emergency rooms in your mind. Burst capillaries in the eyes, refusal of food and water, the hospital three blocks over should have an ER, right? But the kiss didn’t feel like when he’d been intoxicated on your venom before, this one felt deliberate, in control. He was in control. You let out a small moan at the thought, and Renjun’s lone hand on your thigh tightened in response.

Once he finally let you go, you both sat there in silence for a good few seconds, you still on his lap. You stared extra hard at the whites of his eyes. They looked normal. He seemed… normal.

It was rare for either of you to be speechless, much less the both of you.

“Well…” you broke the silence. “That was siren venom. You should drink some water. Stay right here, I’ll get it.”

You climbed off of him, heading into his kitchen. Looking at the oven, you were wondering how the timer hadn’t gone off in that entire time when you saw that it wasn’t on. The words ‘TIMER SET?’ were flashing on the screen at you, and the preheat hadn’t been started either. The pizza rolls had just been slowly defrosting on a pan in the cold oven. You couldn’t help but laugh, reaching into his fridge for his Brita filter then securing a couple cups from the cabinets.

Walking back into the living room, you handed the human his cup of water and remained standing as you took a sip of yours.

“You didn’t start the oven, for your pizza rolls,” you informed him quietly.

“Wh— oh, shit,” Renjun groaned, tipping his head back. “I guess I don’t get to give you your first pizza roll tonight.”

“That’s okay.” You dropped onto the couch next to him, shoulder to shoulder.

“So… that was siren venom,” he breathed out, then took a long gulp of his water. Definitely not second wave syndrome.

“That was siren venom,” you confirmed with a laugh, fondly brushing a piece of sweaty hair off his forehead.

“You were right… I was not prepared,” he admitted with a laugh, taking another drink.

“So do you think you would’ve let me kill you?”

“Yeah. I would’ve given you my credit card info, bank password, spilled all of my friends’ worst secrets, let you kill me, killed someone else if you asked me. God, that was…” He said with wide eyes, shaking his head. But there was a familiar glint in his eye as a smile cracked across his face, “Incredible.”

“Glad you think so,” you giggled, patting his chest. “Now don’t become a venom junkie, okay? I couldn’t live with myself if you did and it was my fault.”

“I won’t. Not really what I meant anyway.”

You grinned slyly at what he seemed to be implying, that it might not have just been the siren venom, but that it was you and your venom that made it so incredible. Like how every human had a slightly different essence, every siren had a unique chemical signature in their venom. It’s why using it non-consensually nowadays would be extremely stupid (as well as just an immoral thing to do and also a crime)—it can be matched to the siren in a lab like DNA. In addition, anecdotally, every siren’s venom was said to produce a slightly different high, but no mass studies had backed that up. You were inclined to believe the stories, though.

Renjun was still a bit hazy, though, still riding the high of the venom, so you decided to tuck a conversation like that away for another time.

“So why did you pick Magical Creatures Studies? Other than you’re insane?” You redirected the topic to a more neutral one.

Renjun didn’t seem put off at all about this jump. “When I was a kid, my family traveled around a bunch, for my dad’s job. I got to meet a lot of different kinds of beings, some of them became my best friends, and I never wanted to stop learning about it all.”

“What does your dad do?”

“Government job,” he answered, suddenly interested in picking at his nails.

You furrowed your brow thoughtfully. “Wait a minute… Huang Renjun. As in, your father is Ambassador Huang? That we’ve had to write papers on in class?”

Ambassador Huang was the first human ambassador sent on diplomacy trips to outside nations of magical creatures post-integration. His trips had largely been considered a monumental success, and credited as a big driver behind the huge uptick of immigration that your city has been seeing from outlying areas in the past couple decades. You’d hardly gotten through a single contemporary MCS class without directly learning about him or at least hearing his name. And you’d apparently been going to school with his son for four years and just pumped said son full of your venom and made out with him while he was high on your venom.

“Yeah…”

“Dude! What the hell? You didn’t think to mention that at some point?” You asked incredulously.

“And sound like some uppity nepo kid bragging about my dad? No thanks,” Renjun snorted.

“Yeah, maybe not like day one but like… I don’t know, before I used my venom on you!” You nudged his arm teasingly.

“What does that have to do with anything?”

“I just venom-ed Ambassador Huang’s son!”

“Oh my God, could you not call me that?” He snapped at you. “This is why I don’t tell people! Because now I don’t have a name anymore, I’m just Ambassador Huang’s son.”

You immediately realized your mistake, your stomach dropping as you heard the hurt in his words. “Renjun, I’m—”

“Just go.” He demanded, standing up from the couch and putting distance between you two again. “We both got what we wanted, right? You found out who Dr. Magic was, and I experienced siren venom. That’s all this was, so you can go. You don’t owe me anything else.”

You clenched your jaw, setting your cup on the end table beside the couch. Picking up your cardigan from the floor with as much dignity as you could, you pulled it back on. Neither of you said another word as he watched you stalk over to the front door, shove your shoes back on, throw the door open, and slam it closed behind you.

Drumming your fingertips along your keyboard, you squinted at the flashcards on your screen. You were in a sour mood, which had persisted ever since you’d left Renjun’s last night feeling used.

Ten was next to you at your picnic table outside the student union, finishing up a pencil portrait sketch of one of his other friends—one of the CompSci majors you’d paid to write your browser extension, actually. Dejun, a dragon, whose slit pupils, many bejeweled earrings, and a singular fang poking out from under his top lip featured prominently in the portrait. The sketch was part of Ten’s midterm portfolio check-in for one of his classes. Midterms were literally this week. Like, right now. You forced your sharp teeth further into the wooden pencil in your mouth.

“You’re going to ruin your cuspids like that, Y/N,” Ten chastised you calmly, rubbing at a line with the pad of his ring finger to smudge it before flipping his own non-mangled pencil around and continuing to sketch with the graphite.

“I’ll grow another set,” you grumbled, but took the writing utensil out of your mouth nevertheless.

“And have no teeth in the meantime. Real sexy siren stuff. Sure to lure all the hotties to their deaths looking like GamGam missing her dentures.”

“Shut up!” You shoved his head away, earning a loud peal of laughter from your friend. “As if you’ve been pulling anybody yourself. You’re literally a siren art major covered in tattoos that he designed himself, more piercings than a dragon, including nipple rings, and you haven’t been on a date in… what, almost a year?”

“So we’re both disappointments to the good siren name, huh?” He held up his hands in surrender, still grinning. “Just a couple of poor, celibate sirens doomed to be disgraces to their species forever…”

“Can you not yell that to the entire courtyard, dude?”

“What? Not announce very loudly that you haven’t been with anybody in exactly four—”

You lunged to cover his mouth before he could publicize precisely how long it’s been since you’d hooked up with someone. Ten immediately broke down into laughs behind your hand that was covering his mouth, his shoulders shaking even as you smacked him on the back of the head with your other hand.

“Gods, what is wrong with you?” You hissed at him. “You’re a menace to society. And me.”

When you’d finally let go of his face, he said through a couple more chuckles, “Hey, you could easily do it back to me.”

“Why would I want to do that? And the fact that you’re suggesting it makes me think that you want me to do that, which makes me want to do it even less. You freak.”

Before your podmate could respond, you caught sight of a figure approaching your table head-on. Setting your jaw, your body immediately tensed. There was no mistake, Huang Renjun was walking straight towards you. Ten seemed to have noticed the shift in your body language and mood, as he didn’t say anything further, quietly going back to his sketchbook as you watched Renjun get nearer and nearer.

“Y/N,” he said your name quietly, stopping not quite at the end of the table beside you, but next to the end of the bench across from you.

“What do you want from me now, Renjun?” You replied bitterly, pretending to return your hands to your keyboard as if you were going to refocus on your studies.

“Uhm, to talk, I guess?”

Ten interjected, “Do you guys need a second? I can go—”

You held him in place with a hand around his wrist, your voice curt, “No, Ten. Stay. This will be short.”

Your friend lowered himself back down into his seat.

You then set your hard gaze on Renjun. The marks you had left on his neck were still visible above the collar of his t-shirt. Moving your eyes from that to his face, you cocked your head to the side. “What’s in it for me? You established that our relationship is purely transactional, remember? We apparently just use each other. You scratch my back, I spit in your mouth, quid pro quo.”

“Okay, I’m going now,” Ten declared, wrenching his arm from your grasp to grab his sketchbook, pencils, and backpack before taking off.

“I’m sorry, I didn’t mean it. I don’t see you like that at all, I just... I got defensive and snapped. It’s not an excuse, but still, I want you to know that I don’t mean anything I said. I’m sorry.” Renjun shifted uncomfortably on his feet, but you could see the genuine remorse on his features.

You breathed in, then out.

“I’m sorry too,” you sighed, letting your voice relax back to the natural softness that it held around Renjun. “You’re your own person, aside from just ‘Ambassador Huang’s son.’ I’m sorry for treating you like anything other than Renjun.”

“It’s not that I’m not super proud to be his son or anything, I think he’s really awesome. He was my hero growing up; still is. I mean, I’m going into the same field as him. Kind of. You know? It’s just because we’re going to be doing the same kind of thing, I want to be able to be looked at for what I do. Good or bad.”

“Bad? You plan on using your degree for evil, Renjun?” You teased, scooting over on the bench seat to take Ten’s previous spot and freeing up a place for Renjun to scoot in beside you.

“I could,” he played along, gladly taking the seat offered.

The two of you made eye contact, then burst into laughter at the same time.

“What?” He questioned in mock offense. “I think I’d make a great evil dictator, personally. You don’t think so?”

“Not at all, you’d be great at it.”

“Thank you. My friends don’t take my threats so seriously.”

“Which will ultimately be their downfall.”

Renjun looked back out at the campus in front of you two, his voice turning serious again, “But, seriously, I mean, I don’t want people having all these lofty expectations for me and then be disappointed when I don’t change the whole world, nor do I want them making things easy for me because they know my dad.”

“That’s fair. Unattainable, but fair to wish for,” you nodded in understanding.

“Ugh...” He slumped forward, dropping his head into his arms atop the table.

“Look, Renjun…” You rested one hand on his arm as the other rubbed up and down his back supportively. “You can’t change who your dad is, and you said it yourself, it’s not like you’re ashamed of him either. So don’t brag, and don’t be a dick when somebody brings him up either. Just do your best to show people who Huang Renjun is. And if they still don’t get it, that’s their loss. Because I already know him, and I think he’s pretty cool.”

Renjun sat back up to look you in the face with a skeptical eyebrow raised. “You’re such a cheeseball. Aren’t sirens supposed to be alluring and enchanting?”

“Shut up! I will drown you! See how alluring I am when you’re under a siren call,” you huffed, crossing your arms over your chest.

“I’m kidding.” He grinned at you, nudging your shoulder with his. “That really did make me feel better, thank you, Y/N.”

You smiled back. “You’re welcome, Renjun.”

The two of you kept smiling at each other for a moment before he broke the eye contact, looking down at his hands then shifting his gaze back to the courtyard.

“Uhm, while we’re airing stuff out about last night...” He cleared his throat awkwardly.

“Yeah, Junnie?” You tilted your head to the side, watching as his cheeks started flushing.

“I don’t think I ever said thank you. I kind of popped off on you right after... everything. But thank you, for taking care of me before, during, and after. It didn’t even occur to me to talk about what we could and couldn’t do beforehand. Thank you for that, and for getting me the water. And... all of it in between...” His ears were bright red too at this point, but he managed to look you in the eye as he gave you his genuine gratitude.

You nodded in understanding. “You’re welcome. I’m glad that you felt cared for during all of it. In addition to, you know, everything else you felt.”

“Mm, yeah.” He rubbed the back of his neck.

Studying his face curiously, you said, “You look like you want to ask me something else.”

“Well, I feel like you still weren’t very clear on the ‘eat me alive’ thing.”

You rolled your eyes. “Gods, Junnie, I’m not going to actually eat you—”

“I mean...” Renjun took a deep breath. “I kind of always feel like I’ve got a little bit of siren venom in me when I’m around you, Y/N. My heart races, and my skin is warm, and everything is just better when I’m with you. I want to see you when you’re not around, and when things are hard for you, I want to make everything better. I like you, and between the Dr. Magic deal, and our stupid academic rivalry, and what we did last night, I don’t know what I am to you, but that’s how I feel.”

If someone had told freshman you that Huang Renjun would ever say words like that to you, you’d have laughed in their face to the point of tears— or slapped them. And yet, in that moment, you weren’t surprised in the slightest. It was the most natural, beautiful, delightful, perfect thing that could’ve happened. Just like you leaning over to give him a modest, near-demure kiss on the cheek, absolutely beaming at him as you pulled back.

“I like you too, Renjun,” you admitted.

His eyes went wide before a broad, tender smile spread across his features and he wrapped an arm around your shoulders. He let out a drawn-out sigh of relief, “Ohh, that’s one weight off my chest for this week.”

You laughed in agreement. “Me too. Actually makes everything feel lighter.”

“Yeah, it does,” he said, squeezing your shoulder. “So how much do I owe you?”

“What?”

“You said you were going to invoice Dr. Magic. For the browser extension, and the color copies, and whatever else. How much do I owe you?”

You tapped a finger against your chin, pretending to think before a smirk pulled across your lips. “Mm, should be exactly the price of one nice dinner and a movie.”

“Dinner and a movie? Just how many copies were you making?” He asked with a chuckle and a shake of his head.

“A nice dinner,” you reiterated. “I paid those CompSci majors fairly for their time.”

“I’ll see what I can do.”

Friday night after your last midterm, you were knocking on Huang Renjun’s door. The two of you had seen each other this week for your Linguistics in MCS class, but had been utterly locked into academic mode and hadn’t met up aside from that. So, per his invite, you were here in your “midterms best”— i.e., the pajamas you had been wearing at your own apartment since submitting your last mid-semester draft earlier today. You’d been told this wasn’t going to be a fancy affair.

Judging by the pajamas that Renjun had also answered the door wearing—giving you vivid déjà vu to the last time you were here—you were dressed appropriately for the occasion. He led you in by the hand, informing you there was something he wanted to show you in the kitchen.

You came to a stop in front of a plate piled high with small, pillow-shaped pieces of dough, some with bursts of red sauce leaking out of them. You couldn’t help but let out a sputtering laugh. “Pizza rolls? Did midterms scramble the egg on your face so bad that you missed the part where I said nice dinner?”

You might not have ever eaten pizza rolls, but you knew what section of the grocery store they came from.

“I can’t even tell what that was supposed to be… You’re so beautiful…” He was staring at you with a look of pure adoration, and surprised you by giving you a fleeting peck on the cheek, gone as soon as you’d realized what he was doing. Your hand instinctually came up to brush at your skin, almost in disbelief, as he went back to explaining his plans for tonight. “Anyway, I didn’t get to give you your first pizza roll the other night, and I figured that the last thing you actually wanted right after midterms week was to go out to some hoity toity place and be out at the movie theater really late, right? So, I’ve got pizza rolls, peanut butter cookies, your seaweed tea, and like way more snacks and candy and stuff. So we can chill and watch whatever movies you want tonight, unwind from midterms. And then next weekend, we’ll do your nice dinner and go to the movie theater. Think of it as an IOU.”

A fond smile tugged at the corner of your mouth as you nodded your approval. “Mmm… you’re right. This is great, Junnie. Thank you.”

Set up on Renjun’s couch with the assortment of snacks—pizza rolls included—and your first movie chosen, you settled in next to him, knee to knee, under the same blanket as the two of you ate. You decided that pizza rolls weren’t that bad (you still liked peanut butter sandwich cookies better), convinced Renjun to try some of your ocean flakes again—a favorite snack of sirens, which he’d already tasted on one occasion at a Dr. Magic hunting session and hated—to similar results, and finished off a bottle of seaweed-infused tea by the time the first movie was about a third of the way done. At this point, you were pretty satiated food-wise, and set your empty drink bottle on the coffee table to sit back on the couch.

Linking your arm with Renjun’s, you rested your head on his shoulder as he was still finishing up his plate of pizza rolls. “That was good, Renjun. Thank you.”

“You’re welcome.”

“I call dibs on little spoon first, by the way.”

“Damn.”

Once he was done eating as well, you laid down to eagerly take your promised place as little spoon. Renjun stayed partially propped up against the arm of the couch so he could see the TV as you were nestled back against his chest, one of his arms slung over your waist. Your fingers played with his under the blanket absentmindedly as you got used to your new place, with him, in his arms.

“Renjun?” You said into the quiet. The only noises were coming from the TV. The movie was nearly done, just a couple little resolving scenes after the climax left. You’d seen it plenty of times before—both of you had, it was a favorite that you’d discovered you two shared earlier in the semester—which was why you’d picked it, an easy watch that you both liked. But nothing that required your full attention, so you could talk or miss scenes if you wanted.

“Yeah?” He responded just as softly.

“This is really nice. Hanging out, just us. No school, no Dr. Magic.”

“I know. Almost doesn’t feel real.”

“What? That we’re hanging out without trying to kill each other?”

He let out a couple laughs, catching your hand that had been playing with his under the blanket and lacing your fingers together. “I think there’s definitely some people that would be shocked to see us right now. But I meant more-so that we don’t have any schoolwork to do right now, and that the whole Dr. Magic thing is finally over. Other than the dinner that I owe you.”

“Oh… I owe you… I-O-U…” you sounded the words and letters out slowly. “I get it now.”

“God, you’re perfect,” he sighed dreamily, brushing your hair away from your face to press two kisses to your temple in quick succession.

You turned over to face him to properly protest, “Hey, I didn’t grow up around humans, you know that, right? I just came here to go to school! I moved here like, two weeks before our first day of freshman year—”

“I’m not making fun of you, Y/N!” He promised, sandwiching your hand between both of his and squeezing it tightly. “I respect how difficult it must have been for you to acclimate to the new culture and city when you moved, and so suddenly, on top of starting school. I just love y- love when you do that. Genuinely, I’m so charmed by it. Endeared. Bewitched. Whatever word you want to use. It’s something I never noticed until this semester, when we started doing the Dr. Magic stuff together. Despite knowing you for so long, in the department, in classes.”

“You know what I never knew about you before this semester, Junnie?”

“What?”

“That you were such a softie,” you snickered fondly. “I thought you were all textbooks and GPA and flashcards and whatever.”

The human ducked his head bashfully. “It’s something I’ve been working on this year.”

“Between this and Dr. Magic, I think you’ve been doing pretty well.”

“Thanks.”

“So, why did you do it, Junnie?” You asked curiously. “Not be a softie, I mean, but…”

“What? Be Dr. Magic?” He clarified, to which you nodded. “I didn’t mean to make a persona like that, really. I had to pick a screenname, and the guys had jokingly called me that a couple times when I helped them out with some problems. That’s all.”

“I know why you started the account. Knowledge. That’s also why you didn’t get the credit. You just needed to know. Though, the story behind the name is cute,” you pinched his cheek, and he tried to deter your hand with his shoulder half-heartedly. “I mean more like, why were you hiding your IP and using VPNs and stuff before you even knew that I was trying to track you down? In the fall.”

“I made the first couple posts from the school computers just because I like to do my work there, I wasn’t trying to cover anything up. Then I pictured what I’d do if I found someone posting like I was on the forums. And I would’ve tried to find out who they were. So I started covering my tracks a bit more intentionally after that. Didn’t want any groupies rolling up on me.” He pinched your side teasingly with the last sentence, and you slapped his hand away with an eye roll.

“Oh shut up!” You scoffed, ignoring his hands as he tried to pull you back towards him again.

“I’m kidding, I’m kidding, I’m sorry,” he apologized through his chuckles. “If anything I’m your groupie, I swear. Your number one fan from the moment you showed me your conspiracy board.”

“Mm, fine.” You scooted closer to him, letting him wrap his arms around you once more. “Glad we got that cleared up.”

Renjun shifted to lay on his back, and you easily followed the move to snuggle in mostly on top of him, resting your head in the crook of his neck and your hand on his waist, fingers innocently smoothing over a patch of skin above his hipbone where his shirt had ridden up. It sounded like the credits were on by now, but you didn’t really care about picking another movie as Renjun hummed along to the familiar song that played over the scrolling names. You’d sing along too, if you were alone at your own place. But now you didn’t dare even hum like the human with you for fear of what it could do to him. Renjun’s voice was plenty lovely enough though, even just this casual little bit humming. You’d see if you could get him to sing for you properly one of these days. If an opportunity came before graduation. Who knew what your days would even look like before then.

Gods, graduation. You felt like you could shrivel up and die just thinking about it. Not to mention that you hadn’t even told Renjun that you’d—

“Hey. What are you thinking about?” He suddenly asked, his disapproving tone clear.

You gulped. “How could you tell I was thinking about something?”

“For one, you’ve got your bad thinking face on.” He pinched your bottom lip. “You pout. It’s very dramatic. You look very concerned.”

“I have different thinking faces?”

“Yeah, you look different when you’re studying. I’ve seen you do plenty of that to know the difference. And you’ve got a third face when you’re contemplating. Usually you do that one when you’re looking at menus.”

“I didn’t know I was apparently an open book.” You covered your face with your hands in embarrassment.

“It’s cute, Y/N. You’ve got a cute face, and you make cute facial expressions with it, don’t cover it up.” He gingerly grabbed your hands to encourage you to take them off. “Except I am worried about what’s making you make your bad thinking face right now. What’s wrong?”

With a sigh, you pushed up into a sitting position. Renjun followed your lead curiously, a thoughtful frown on his own features as he watched you pull your knees to your chest.

“Renjun, I need to tell you something.”

He regarded you with a skeptical eyebrow raised. “Okay… go for it.”

Nervously, you smoothed out some wrinkles in your pajama pants as you confessed, “Uhm, Dr. Kwon asked me to carry the banner at commencement. I said yes.”

“I knew that.”

“What?” You looked up at him in disbelief.

“Well, since it was midterms already, I figured that if they’d picked me, they would have asked me by now and since they hadn’t, then they must have picked you. I was just waiting for you to tell me so I could tell you… Congrats.” Renjun grinned brightly at you, reaching out to rest his hand on your arm.

“You’re not upset?” You asked trepidly.

“We’re not petty little freshmen anymore, Y/N. No, I’m not upset. I’m proud of you, you deserve it.”

“So did you.”

“Not any more than you did.” He shook his head firmly. “So would you just accept my congrats already?”

You gave a small, shaky smile. “Thank you…”

“There we go.”

“This is what I was so freaked about… when we went to get froyo.”

“You were afraid of me being mad at you for being picked to carry the banner?” Renjun asked incredulously.

“I didn’t know how to tell you!” You defended yourself. “And now I have to do the commencement practices, on top of senior capstone and my extracurriculars…”

He wrinkled his nose. “Ew, commencement practices. So glad I didn’t get picked now, actually.”

“And that was so convincing, Junnie.”

“You remember what you said to me when we got froyo?”

Scrunching your face up, you struggled to think back to the exact conversation you had that day—you’d been really stressed. “Uh, ‘exactly two gummy sharks on mine please?’”

“Well, yeah, your hyper-specific froyo order—”

“Throwing stones at black kettles much?” You teased.

“Excuse me?” Renjun’s eyes went wide.

“Is that not—? I really thought I got it that time.”

“Did you mean to say ‘throwing stones in glass houses’ and/or ‘the pot calling the kettle black?’”

“…Yes.”

He turned very serious as he went to tenderly cradle your face in his hands. “I’m going to kiss you in like two seconds after I finish what I was saying, okay?”

“Oh, okay,” you agreed weakly, wishing very much that he’d just do it now instead of making you wait. He then let your face go.

“When we were talking about wanting people to know that we’re smart,” Renjun clarified. “You said that we’re both like that, and you knew that you were like that. And then you asked me if I knew that I was like that. I had tried to swear up and down this entire time that I was doing all of this—the needing to be the best—for myself. But it wasn’t. I’m like that too. That’s kind of what Dr. Magic was, me taking a step back from needing everyone to know I was the smartest person in the room. A quasi-experiment, to see if I could do it.”

“I think that after graduation, maybe we both chill on being the smartest person in the room, and try to just spend a summer working on that magical bucket list of yours?” You suggested.

“Oh?” He perked up at this. “Really?”

“You ever seen a werewolf shift?”

“No…”

“That sounds like a ‘not yet’ to me.”

“Sounds like a plan.” He confirmed with a conspiratorial grin that mirrored the one that you could feel across your own face. “You know how sirens can’t get dosed up on their own venom?”

“Yeah…” You nodded, wondering where he could be going with this.

“Well, I know a witch with a proprietary love potion blend that I think we might be able to modify to produce similar effects.”

“Fascinating.” You thought on this for a second, very quickly running through your knowledge of potion properties to imagine what it could be. “Two-factor blood potion?”

“Yes. But we’d put your venom in it instead of your blood so it wouldn’t kill me.”

“That could work…” You mused. “Speaking of, I should really give you a full dose one of these days.”

He breathed in sharply. “That wasn’t a full dose?”

“Nope.”

“Holy shit…”

“Have you ever watched a phoenix reincarnation?” You added another suggestion to your joint summer bucket list.

“Have you? Wouldn’t that literally blind us?” Renjun questioned, something akin to genuine concern on his face now.

You shrugged. “Allegedly. It’s never been recorded in a lab setting, so who really knows.”

“I think we’re going to get each other killed before we can get our PhDs,” he declared with a fond smile and shake of his head.

“Hey, the betting pools said we’d kill each other by junior year, so I think we’re doing well for ourselves.”

“Do you think we can collect on those bets when we graduate and we’re both still alive and have all of our limbs?”

“We’ll burn that bridge when we get there.”

“Oh my god, come here,” Renjun groaned deliriously, kneeling to grab your face with two hands and crash his lips to yours. You curled your fingers in the front of his shirt, pulling him down with you as you fell back against the arm of his couch, still connected.

Yeah, you’d drive off that burning bridge when you got there.

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