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Shen Ricky is in a dilemma.
That’s not out of the ordinary. Ricky has a lot of dilemmas, like about what he should eat for breakfast, which one of his four luxury hair conditioners he should use during his nightly showers, whether or not he should study for his calculus exam a couple days prior or cram it all in the night before (usually the latter), and about which type of bleach he should pour into his eyes whenever he sees his Hao-ge and Hanbin-hyung making out on the couch. That’s usually the one he’s troubled about the most.
It’s not the dilemma part he’s going crazy about, but the reason behind it that he’s about to lose his mind over.
The frozen strawberries in the freezer section of his favorite local convenience store are missing.
————
Ever since he was a young boy, Shen Ricky had always held a love for strawberries. Even when he had just been a young boy living in the bustling city of Shanghai back in China, his very rich and very loving mother had tried her best to feed her one and only son nothing but the best and highest grade quality of foods she could find. Gold-topped steaks, A-grade wagyu beef, beluga caviar, you name it, Ricky had had it by the age of thirteen, all brought out to him on the balcony seats of five-star restaurants upon fine china plates and intricate wooden cutting boards alongside heaps of sterling silver cutlery and black satin napkins, where finely-dressed waiters and waitresses would then fill his tall wine glass with cupfulls upon cupfulls of exotic fruit juice and sparkling water to his heart’s content.
The young boy had been taught to appreciate the delicacies of fine-dining ever since he had been old enough to wear a suit and sit quietly in Michelin-star restaurants, where his mother would teach and lecture him about all the origins and specialties of the food laid out in front of him on the table when it arrived, hoping that one day, her son would grow up to become a fine, distinguished gentleman who was well-versed in the intricacies of good food and wine, as any proper son of a wealthy family was expected to be.
And indeed, Ricky had grown into the man his mother had hoped for him to be, polished, polite, and properly educated in a wide spectrum of connoisseury. Family friends and acquaintances always made a note to comment on the tall, handsome young man that stood beside his powerful mother at business gatherings and galas, swooning and fawning over his smooth, silky voice and vast knowledge in all of the fine arts. It was where all the aunties would try to push their beautiful daughters and granddaughters towards him and his mother hoping that one of them would perhaps catch his eye, hoping that their daughter would be the one Ricky would fall in love with and make his suitor.
Too bad Ricky wasn’t capable of feeling romantic attraction towards women. Oh well.
Amongst all of the wide variety of foods and tastes his mother had brought him up upon, there had always been one particular taste that had stood out to him from amongst the rest. Ever since he had been a toddler, sitting in his high chair while his mother hand fed him small slices of the juicy fruit, Ricky had developed an obsession with the fresh, sweet taste that always seemed to tickle the right parts of his taste buds in all the right ways, becoming favorable to the way the sticky-sweet juice and soft red flesh painted his tongue and throat in a thin coat of raw glacé.
Strawberries.
There was just something about the sweet, tangy fruit that released a happy amount of endorphins around his brain and made his mind all calm and placid whenever he popped one of the red fruits into his mouth, like it was his happy pill or something like that. He had become addicted to the way the syrupy juice popped and squirted out of the red skin whenever he bit down on a strawberry with his teeth and chewed, like a dizzying jelly pop, like a sugar that melted into his heart , and absolutely relished in the taste of it filling up his mouth and taste buds whenever he got the chance to.
It also wasn’t only the strawberry fruit he liked, no, as his love for the strawberry taste in general transcended and flooded over to every single edible thing that was also strawberry flavored. As he grew up and started to wander off on his own more and more often, Ricky found himself ordering strawberry lattes and strawberry milk teas at cafes, buying strawberry-flavored pocky sticks and jellies at the grocery stores, snacking on strawberry popsicles and ice creams in the summer, and when he neared his adult years, ordering strawberry baijiu cocktails for himself during outings. It had turned into an obsession, one that Ricky happily indulged in over some of the others ones his friends had gotten addicted to (he didn’t smoke that much, alright?), and also one that carried over with him when he left Shanghai at the age of eighteen to attend a prestigious university in South Korea.
Apart from being his favorite fruit and taste of all time, strawberries had also ended up being Ricky’s comfort food when he needed it the most. Being all alone in a foreign country, surrounded by a language he didn’t speak and signs he couldn’t read, the Chinese boy had found himself under an immense amount of pressure and stress as he moved into his university dorms and had to sort out all of his paperwork for himself (something that he had never needed to do back home), and had found himself resorting back to old habits to calm himself down whenever it became too much.
Many nights, especially within the first few months following his move, Ricky had found himself curled up amongst his bedsheets and downing an entire carton of grocery store strawberries while trying to push down the monster of anxiety building up in his chest, fighting the urge to cry or break down into a fit of nerves while chewing on the red fruit. It was like a coping mechanism for him to deal with the stress of his decisions, and had been needed many times as to stop the intrusive thoughts swimming around his brain telling him that this was a stupid idea and that he should just go home and attend a college in China, where he would desperately just focus on the sweet, familiar taste of the fruit filling up his taste buds instead of the demons of his own mind.
This habit continued on for some time, with Ricky running out to buy cartons upon cartons of his beloved strawberries to binge upon whenever the stress got to him too much and he just needed a way out, using the familiar sweet taste and texture as a form of sedative to ease his racing mind. It was like a grounding pillar for his body, a familiar taste that made him feel like home was right next to him instead of an entire Yellow Sea away, one that reminded him of the comforting words of his mother and the cool breezes of his hometown.
Slowly but surely, Ricky had adapted to his new life in South Korea and started to feel more and more confident in his new surroundings, gently settling into university and young adult life as the months flew by and his Korean got better. He made new friends amongst his peers, including a Chinese man named Zhang Hao who had quickly taken Ricky under his wing when he had discovered that Ricky was also a Chinese transfer student like he, Zhang Hao’s boyfriend Hanbin, who was also the captain of the dance team, Matthew, another transfer Canadian man who spoke English, and later on, a human-puppy boyfriend who had asked him out after almost an entire year of mutual pining on either end as best friends.
Soon enough, Ricky no longer needed to buy cartons upon cartons of strawberries from the nearest grocery store to battle his anxietic sessions as he started to create a home for himself in a country that had once been completely foreign to him, and stopped making daily half-an-hour treks through the subway lines to do so. But alas, old habits die hard, and Ricky hadn’t been able to completely let go of his comforting love for strawberries even after the dying need for them as a comfort food had fizzled away.
So, instead, the blonde man had started resorting to buying them frozen from the local convenience store a five minute walk away from his and Gyuvin’s shared apartment building (because he seriously didn’t want to waste almost an entire hour of back and forth commute to the nearest grocery store to buy them, he simply just didn’t have the time to do so anymore) and started munching on them during his nightly study sessions, albeit this time in moderation compared to his past binging stages. It was a nice schedule that Ricky had fallen into a comfortable habit of doing, where he and Gyuvin would head out to the convenience store about once every two days whenever they got the chance between academics and other activities to buy two frozen boxes of strawberries and whatever other things they needed (energy drinks, lots of energy drinks for Gyuvin), where he would then let them thaw out on the kitchen table before settling down and going through a small bowl of them every night while he studied and did his homework.
The strawberries tasted almost exactly like the ones at the grocery store and were about ten times more convenient to buy, so Ricky had happily fell into the consistent habit of visiting the convenience store and buying a couple boxes of them at a time every few days for the sake of his studying sessions and sanity (he had been physically unable to focus on his textbook and had ended up nearly flunking his literature test the next day the one time he had attempted to study without strawberries), and everything was great. Perfect. Ricky had an amazing university life in South Korea, kept his grades up to a high standard, hung out with his lovely friend group whenever he wanted to, joined the university dance team, had himself a doting boyfriend and best friend in the same person, and most of all, he had his wonderful strawberries by his side on hand to buy whenever he wanted to.
Until he didn’t.
————-
“What the fuck?!”
Gyuvin’s head immediately whipped up from where it was staring at a shelf of brightly-colored energy drinks when he heard the panicked voice of his boyfriend ring through the air of the convenience store, quickly picking up his basket to scurry over in the general direction of the sound to find him. He ended up finding the blonde man standing in front of the small freezer section located in the back of the store, body statue-still as he stared ahead at something through the glass door with wide eyes and a gaping mouth, looking as if he had seen a ghost amongst the piles of frozen foods or something.
For such a usually calm and collected person, there were not many things in the world that made Ricky’s face morph into such extreme expressions other than, well, cough cough, you know, so Gyuvin immediately realized that something had to be very very wrong for his boyfriend to have gotten shocked into a state that even his usual well-practiced “mysterious and charismatic rich boy” facade and agenda failed to take over.
“Ricky! What’s wrong?!”
Ricky peeled his eyes away from the horrible sight in front of him and turned around to catch a glimpse of his worried brown-haired boyfriend jogging towards him from around an aisle, a worried expression plastered across his handsome features as he wrapped a hand around Ricky’s shoulders and examined his face. “Is everything alright?”
“No! Everything is not alright!” Ricky quietly shrieked and turned back to look at the freezer shelves in front of him, “the strawberries are missing!”
Gyuvin’s look of worry morphed into one of confusion.
“Huh?”
Starting to actually panic, Ricky extended his hands forward and wildly started gesturing to a shelf behind the freezer doors. “They’re gone! There are no frozen strawberries left on the shelf!”
Gyuvin squinted and looked closer, and only then did he realize what was setting his boyfriend off so much. An empty metal shelf that was usually filled with three boxes of pink-wrapped frozen strawberries stared back at him, lonely and empty from where it sat amongst the other boxes of freezer foods and treats. It must have been what was sending Ricky into a small fit of surprised panic, he thought.
For the past ten months or so, Gyuvin and Ricky had been coming to this same convenience store and buying exactly two of the three boxes of frozen strawberries on the shelf every few days (Ricky didn’t buy all three because he didn’t trust himself to not just binge out the entire third box in one sitting instead of rationing it out) as a regular errand, without a single disturbance or problem to offset their schedule. They were usually in and out of the store within a couple of minutes, rushing around to buy the energy drinks and strawberries as quickly as they could as to get back to their apartment and studies as soon as possible, but not without saying a friendly hello to the shift cashier at the counter named YangYang before leaving. It had been that way for a while, and Ricky was more than happy for it to have continued on for a couple more years without an issue, until disaster struck.
As in disaster, he meant no more strawberries . The strawberries that had always been sitting in the freezer every time they arrived were suddenly no longer there, for the very first time in nearly a year.
“There’s no frozen strawberries left?” Gyuvin hesitantly asked while leaning closer to the see-through door to check closely in case Ricky had missed something, but indeed, as he discovered, the shelf was plainly bare with no familiar pink boxes in sight. This was bad.
How could this be?! Ricky’s mind panicked as his eyes couldn’t believe what they were deceiving, how are there no strawberries? He was shocked, and rightfully so, as his one and only study pass was now no longer at his fingertips for the first time in who knows how long.
Gyuvin grimaced, carefully looking at his boyfriend’s panicked face beside him. He knew how much those frozen strawberries meant to Ricky, no matter how stupid or childish it sounded, and had known since the very beginning about how much the blonde man cherished the taste of the red fruits, and about how much he relied on them for comfort and stability. Hell, if Gyuvin didn’t know any better, he would say that Ricky loved his strawberries more than he loved him, his very own partner .
“Someone else probably bought them…” the blonde man sadly said after a few moments of silence, unhappily staring down at the empty freezer like it had personally done harm to him by not being filled with frozen strawberries. Although even that wasn’t too far off the truth.
Gyuvin looked around the store to try to come up with a temporary solution. “Do you want to try something else strawberry flavored, instead? Like, uh, those strawberry-flavored jellies over there?” He turned around and pointed towards a large red bag of candies on the top shelf of the aisle adjacent to them against the wall, hesitantly pulling his bottom lip between his teeth as Ricky turned around gazed in the direction of his outstretched arm.
Gyuvin knew that they didn’t have the time to go all the way to the grocery store to pick up a carton of strawberries there, and they had things to do and places to be unless they wanted to pull another all nighter again (the last one had resulted in such sleep deprivation that Hanbin had literally needed to use a megaphone during dance practice to wake them up), so he was currently trying to rack his brain for every solution his fatigued university mind could supply him with. Jellies just ended up being the first thing.
Ricky stared at the small bag of jellies for a few seconds, the gears turning in his brain and the shocked look slowly simmering out of his eyes the longer he contemplated the situation on hand, until his body finally relaxed and sagged down, shoulders drooping and eyes turning downwards as he tiredly leaned into Gyuvin’s touch.
“Yeah, I guess those could work,” he dejectedly mumbled and turned his head to rest on the crook of Gyuvin’s neck, their basically nonexistent height difference making it easy for both of them to lean into each other and get into a comfortable position without much of a hassle. Seeing as how upset his boyfriend seemed to be by it, Gyuvin knew that the real sentiments behind the simple frozen strawberries had to be traced back even further than to what was seen on the surface and by Gyuvin himself, so all he could really do was not pry too far into it and try his best to comfort the blonde man for a while until his mood rose a bit.
“Alright, strawberry jelly it is, then” Gyuvin nodded and walked over to drop a packet of the candies into the basket hung around over arm, placing it between the bottles of Monster energy drinks he had gotten for himself before turning back around to go back to his boyfriend. Ricky had let go of Gyuvin’s arm returned to his original shell-shocked spot in front of the freezer, albeit this time sadly staring down at the empty shelf with a dejected expression on his face instead of a shocked one, and seemed to be lost in his own world when Gyuvin tapped him on the shoulder again to get his attention. The older man didn’t respond the first couple of times, too lost in his own world to think about anything else around him, and had only looked up and turned around when Gyuvin landed a light smack to his backside and lower back.
“Oh yes, sorry, let’s go,” Ricky seemed to notice his blank out and hurriedly took one last look inside the basket before nodding and looking back up at Gyuvin, wrapping a tentative hand around the other man’s arm and taking a step forward. Gyuvin nearly stumbled forward in surprise at the small action, as he knew very well that Ricky didn’t like to do skinship in public due to his internal and childhood wariness of public homophobia and things like that, something that the brunette heavily respected and abided to whenever they were in public, no matter it be on the bustling streets or in the back section of an empty convenience store.
His mind immediately knew that the simple disappearance of the strawberries had really taken a sudden psychological toll on Ricky as it had driven him to the point where he was seeking out Gyuvin’s touch in public, which, even to all of his own usual puppy-like touchy antics, made him more worried than anything.
“No strawberries today?” YangYang asked them as they set the basket down on the checkout desk and placed all of the items on the counter, curiously looking up at him as he absentmindedly rolled the bottles of energy drinks under the scanner. YangYang had started working at the convenience store just a couple weeks after Gyuvin and Ricky had first started shopping there on a consistent basis, and had soon ended up learning over the weeks and weeks that Ricky always showed up at the counter with two boxes of frozen strawberries, where he would then always tease the other Chinese man about his so called “strawberry addiction” before giggling and placing their things into a plastic bag.
Ricky let out a small sigh, gripping Gyuvin’s arm a little tighter as he opened his mouth. “There’s none left, someone bought out the entire stock today,” he said, which made YangYang look up in surprise from where he was scanning the packet of jellies.
“Gone? That’s the first time that’s happened,” he sounded genuinely surprised about it, which lead Gyuvin to guess that whoever had bought it must have come earlier in the day before YangYang’s shift had started. Ricky nodded and proceeded to say something in Chinese to the other man that elicited a light laugh out of him before he responded with something else Gyuvin didn’t understand, which he probably guessed was some sort of inside Chinese joke that he didn’t get.
Even before the two of them had started dating and had just been best friends, Gyuvin had always made an effort to learn both of Ricky’s fluent languages for the other man. He had seen how nervous and uncomfortable the blonde man had been in a foreign country with a foreign language that he was barely fluent in during the beginning, and had made it his one and only goal to make the Chinese man feel as comfortable as he could while adapting the new culture, henceforth making great attempts to learn basic Mandarin and English in the case that he would ever need to translate for Ricky (even though he had never spoken an ounce of either beforehand). It had proved useful in many situations where Gyuvin had had to roughly translate some things over to Ricky during lectures or announcements, and most importantly for when he had FaceTimed Ricky’s mom with him for the first time and had spoken in what Ricky had said was “surprisingly really good Mandarin”, which had also ended up earning him her enthusiastic approval for dating Ricky (to his absolute relief, and Ricky’s amusement).
In fact, Gyuvin and Hanbin had recently started to study Mandarin together in the library for at least an hour a week for the sake of their Chinese boyfriends, something that the both of them were seriously invested in for the sake of the respective parents. They proved successful, because last week, Hanbin had come racing into the library with a wide smile on his face as he started raving about how he was finally able to have a decent conversion with Zhang Hao’s father over the phone, saying something about how “he needed to be able to communicate with his future parent in laws without the help of Zhang Hao to translate” or something like that. Gyuvin had clapped him on the back and told the older man that he was proud of him before they had gotten distracted with a bunch of translations Ollie had sent Hanbin over text, and had spent the entire next hour learning cuss words and dirty sex talk in Mandarin that had left Ricky absolutely shell-shocked over the first time Gyuvin used them on him. Oopsies.
Also, Hanbin had been unusually sore and stiff in his legs at dance practice the next day, so Gyuvin assumed that it had worked out well on his end, too.
But both YangYang and Ricky spoke English and Mandarin, so Gyuvin was left completely in the dust for the next minute or so where the two of them exchanged conversation in rapid-fire Chinglish before finally saying goodbye and heading out.
“I can’t believe the strawberries are just gone! ” Ricky whined into the cold night air as they exited the convenience store and started making the short trek along the city blocks back to their apartment, looping his arm around the crook of Gyuvin’s elbow and pressing their sides together. The younger man let out a worried sigh and watched as his breath appeared in the chilly air before floating up and disappearing under the yellow glow of a street lamp, clutching the plastic handles of the grocery back on his right hand harder as his left went up to curl around Ricky’s waist.
“Hopefully they’ll be back next week.”
————
They weren’t.
“What the fuck?!”
Gyuvin’s eyes went wide as he stared at the yet again, empty shelf of frozen strawberries behind the freezer door from his spot beside Ricky. The two of them had come back to the convenience store again two days later for their usual snack run with hopeful hearts that the strawberries would have returned, but no. Once again, someone had bought out all of the frozen strawberries in the freezer section earlier in the day, and Ricky would have to, yet again, resort to eating something strawberry-flavored instead.
The last bag of strawberry flavored jellies had actually worked okay as a substitute for the real thing, as Ricky had actually gotten a decent amount of studying in the following night while chewing on candies (and spending half an hour flossing the gunk out of his teeth after), but, in the end, it really didn’t completely make up for the real thing . Don’t get him wrong, Ricky loved everything strawberry and strawberry-flavored, but a bag of strawberry-flavored candies just couldn’t completely make up for the taste of the real, fresh fruit tingling on his tongue.
Ricky sighed. Perhaps he had come back to the store with too high of hopes about finding the strawberries, but the disappointment was present all the same. Looking at the empty shelf in the freezer only made his mood drop and his head hurt, knowing that he’d either have to go all the way to the grocery store to buy himself some, or find another temporary solution to his great strawberry problem.
He chose the latter.
Three minutes later, Ricky placed a packet of strawberry sour gummies into the basket as Gyuvin appeared around an aisle corner with an armful of blue gatorades (the best flavor, fight him) and dumped them all on top of the plastic packaging at once. The brunette picked up the bag of candies from the sea of bottles and held it up to the light and squinted at the label on the packaging, as if trying to figure out if they were truly strawberry flavored or not.
“We can go to the supermarket if you want,” Gyuvin told him after he dropped the packet back into the bag, “we can get some strawberries there.”
Ricky just sighed and shook his head, sadly staring down at the basket hanging off his arm before looking back up at his boyfriend. It was such a Gyuvin thing to do, offer to go massively out of their way to take a fifty minute detour on the night before a massive test just to go get Ricky some strawberries, as the brunette seriously had a long track record of sacrificing his own time for the sake of his friends’ (and more than friends) well-beings. It almost made Ricky’s heart flutter at how sweet he was, if it hadn’t been already slowly sinking in his chest ever since he had first laid eyes upon the same empty shelf again.
“No, it’s fine, maybe we should come back more frequently to see if we can snag a box of them back?” He knew that there was probably someone else out there who was coming into the convenience store and buying out all of the frozen strawberries before he could get to them, which was probably the most logical answer considering that they always made their trips around 10 P.M, as it was definitely more likely than the store supplier just suddenly running out of stock on the berries. He knew that the frozen strawberries technically didn’t belong to him and was really sitting on the shelf for anyone to buy, but Ricky had gotten used to the fact that he had probably been the only person for nearly ten entire months straight who bought them, and over time it had kind of felt like they were only his.
Gyuvin shrugged. “Sure, let’s come back tomorrow night if we have time,” he suggested and started heading up towards the cashier where a bored YangYang was waiting, “now we seriously need to get home. I haven’t even started studying for that economics test tomorrow, and I have it at ten. ”
“That’s really not good time management, you know,” YangYang cheerfully commented as Ricky placed down the contents of their snack run down on the counter, “I started studying for that yesterday and I’m still not even halfway through.” YangYang was one of the few people Gyuvin actually knew by name in his economics class and probably the only one who he could go to if he ever needed help, seeing as the other man was honestly pretty damn smart and his singularly only friend in the class. So if even YangYang out of all people wasn’t even done studying the night before, Gyuvin might as well just go fuck himself and accept the zero.
His eyes closed in frustration. “Please tell me you’re joking,” he pleaded with the Chinese man.
“Nope!” YangYang said and started packing up all their goodies, popping the P sound at the end with a wet smack of his lips that reminded Gyuvin a lot of Woonggi. “I’ve even skipped my date with my boyfriend tonight to study for this, see?” YangYang reached below the counter to pull out his computer and turned it towards the two of them on the counter, the brightly lit screen displaying a page of the (illegal) online copy of the (super expensive) textbook their class required. Gyuvin blinked.
“You have a boyfriend?”
YangYang looked at Ricky like he had grown two heads. “Yeah? Have I never told you guys this before?”
“Um…I don’t think so?”
YangYang shrugged. “Oh, well, I guess I’m telling you now. Maybe we should go on a double date one day or something,” he offered before sliding their bag of stuff their way, “good luck studying for that test, Gyuvin! I’ll keep an eye out for those frozen strawberries of yours, Ricky!”
Ricky shot YangYang a thumbs up while Gyuvin sent up a little prayer to the sky as the stepped out of the store and into the cold night air once again, pulling the edges of his faded university hoodie a little tighter around his body when a particularly chilly gust of wind swept through the city blocks.
“I can’t believe the strawberries are still gone,” Ricky sadly muttered as they started to walk back home, “my strawberries!”
Gyuvin looked over at him. “We can come back tomorrow at an earlier time to see if we could get to them before whoever else is buying them first purchased them,” he offered his boyfriend, who seemed to like the idea based off of the thoughtful look on his face and the small quirk of his lips. He looked beautiful like this, Gyuvin thought as they walked, his perfectly shaped features being nicely highlighted and shadowed out by the glow of the sidewalk streetlights.
“Yeah, let’s catch the strawberry man once and for all!”
Gyuvin snorted, pleasantly shocked at his boyfriend’s childish antics. With all of the cold and mysterious persona that Ricky liked to keep up around people during the day, the blonde man seriously could be a softie at heart sometimes whenever he let his walls down at the times where he was just around Gyuvin alone, feeling comfortable enough that his puppy boyfriend wouldn’t judge him for it. And of course Gyuvin never did, as the two of them were like a pair of puppies and kittens dating each other, and it only warmed his heart even more when he got to see this particular side of his boyfriend. Perhaps it was only Ricky’s two most beloved things in the world that managed to make that soft side of his shine though; Gyuvin & Strawberries.
Man, Gyuvin’s got some competition. No, he’s not beefing with a fruit, what do you mean?
“Did you seriously just name a person strawberry man ?”
“Yep. Let’s hope we’ll get there early enough tomorrow. I’m actually starting to go into withdrawal from the lack of strawberries I’m consuming while stressing,” Ricky complained and let out a fake cry, burying his head into the thick padding of Gyuvin’s bubble coat. The younger man could only laugh and run a comforting hand through the other’s blonde locks, looking up towards the night sky to inhale a lungful of crisp air.
“You make it sound like you’re addicted to crack or something, idiot. Anyways, perhaps they’ll be there tomorrow.”
———-
They weren’t.
“What the fuck?!”
Okay, this is just getting ridiculous , Gyuvin thought as he, once again, stared at the empty freezer shelf. Who keeps buying this many strawberries before three P.M in the afternoon?!
After Gyuvin’s economics test that had ended half an hour ago (he actually didn’t think he too bad, as even his crammed studying had resulted in him not having to use the Christmas tree method for the entire scantron), he had found Ricky waiting for him just outside of the business building, idly talking to a classmate of theirs named Xiaoting as he waited for his boyfriend’s clas to end. The two of them had quickly left after bidding her goodbye with a pair of “bye, jiejie!”s (she usually insisted that Gyuvin call her that instead of noona, as she had said that it was only right if he was learning Chinese) and headed out towards the convenience store once again at two-thirty in the afternoon, hoping to outpace whoever strawberry man was to the freezer.
It turned out that they weren’t fast enough.
“This is the third time!” Ricky whinily complained as he backed away from the freezer door, lips down turned into a soft pout as he dejectedly closed his eyes. Under any other circumstances, Gyuvin probably would have stopped to admire the scarcely present cute pout on his boyfriend’s face for a few moments (and perhaps snap a photo or two for his Ricky album), but didn’t do so in favor of wrapping an arm around the blonde man’s waist.
“We have time to go to the grocery store now, do you want to go?” He tried his best to comfort the other man as he stared into the empty freezer shelf along with him, starting to truly feel sad about the whole situation. It wasn’t like Ricky needed strawberries to live, per say, but they had been one of the only things that had gotten Ricky through the rough patch of his first month or so in South Korea when he had had no Gyuvin and no Zhang Hao, and had ended up being so much more than just a simple fruit to the blonde man after the whole ordeal, and Gyuvin was really starting to worry about it.
If they (and YangYang, who was also on the lookout) didn’t find out who Strawberry Man was soon and issue a compromise with them, Gyuvin really didn’t know what to do to get Ricky his beloved strawberries. He didn’t want to think about it, but the chance of it becoming an actual problem was becoming increasingly and increasingly apparent, and he didn’t like it one bit.
“Yes,” Ricky’s voice drew Gyuvin out of his thoughts, and he turned his neck to the side to meet the dark brown eyes of his boyfriend staring back at him. “Let’s go to the grocery store? And buy a lot?”
Gyuvin giggled. “Of course, let’s buy all of the strawberries you need.”
The two of them then left the convenience store without their usual bulk of strawberries and energy drinks sitting in a bag hung over their arms, waving a quick goodbye to the girl behind the counter who worked the shift before YangYang (Hikaru, Gyuvin knew her from the dance team) before turning south towards the nearest subway station and heading down underground.
Ricky had gotten his full of strawberries that night, but the urge in his chest to figure out who Strawbery Man was still burning strong inside his ribcage.
———-
“Alright, crossing my fingers for this time,” Ricky quietly mumbled as they stepped through the automatic doors of the convenience store four days later, waving an enthusiastic hello to YangYang who was boredly perched behind the counter. Gyuvin nodded and also crossed his fingers for good luck, holding them up to the sides of his face for Ricky and YangYang to see as they trodded down the first aisle towards the back of the store.
They had ended up getting an entire week’s worth of strawberries at the grocery store for Ricky (as much as they could physically carry, basically) and had stashed all of them into their fridge back at the apartment, hoping that it would hold him over until they eventually caught Strawberry Person. They had changed the name after YangYang had pointed out one day that they didn’t even know the gender of the person and figured that it would’ve been rude to keep calling them that only to find out that it had been a woman all along, so away had went Strawberry Man and up had came Strawberry Person .
Even though they still had a carton and a half of strawberries back in their apartment fridge, Ricky and Gyuvin had decided to make another, intermediate attempt trying to catch Strawberry Person on a random Friday at 8 P.M. The two of them had just been rid of all their schoolwork for the week and had finally gotten the chance to just relax for a bit without having to take showers at neck breaking speed and live life in hyperlapse, so it had only been a good idea to try their luck again at the store at an earlier hour.
And oh, had they been lucky by doing so.
“It’s so nice to finally be able to relax for a little bit, again,” Ricky started as they walked down the aisle, “I was seriously starting to think that-“ The blonde man stopped talking when they heard voices coming from the back of the store, too muffled to make out but seemingly coming from right in front of the freezer section.
Gyuvin skidded to a stop in his steps and looked over to meet Ricky’s eyes with a nervous stare, one that was shot right back at him from the blonde man’s gaze. They quietly crept closer.
“Can I have the basket, Nono?” A man’s voice filtered out from the back of the store, slightly muffled from the distance but just audible all the same to make out the words.
“Yeah, here you go,” Nono(?) replied and was immediately followed by the sound of metal clicking and a rustling basket, and then came the telltale sound of the freezer door opening and the familiar rustle of a box being taken out.
Ricky and Gyuvin jumped out from behind an aisle.
About twelve feet in front of them stood two young men about the same age as Ricky and Gyuvin themselves, one of them standing up with a red basket by his feet and the other was in the middle of taking a familiar light pink box out of the freezer.
That’s him! Gyuvin’s mind unhelpfully supplied, Strawberry Person! It did turn out to be a man after all!
Surprised by their sudden appearance, the two men whipped their heads around to look at them and woah, they were handsome . The brown haired one who had been bent over halfway into the freezer dropped the box of strawberries on the floor in surprise as the freezer door slammed shut beside him, the heavy box hitting the tiled floor with a thump! from where it landed at his feet. The white haired one, probably ‘Nono’ from the fact that he wasn’t holding a basket, simply just stared at them with a surprised expression pulled across his face from where he stood behind the other man.
Oof. Did only attractive boys like to eat frozen strawberries? Gyuvin could totally do a science fair project on it.
“So you’re the one who’s been buying out the entire stock of strawberries for the last two weeks?”
The boys stared at Ricky in surprise at hearing his words, blankly staring at the two of them for a couple long, awkward seconds before the brunette got up off the floor and dusted the dirt from his jeans.
“Err…yes?” The way he said it out loud made it sound like a question, an unspoken wonder of who are you guys? lingering in the air between them. Strawberry Man stared at Ricky for a solid ten seconds in confusion as the blonde man seemed to be processing something through his head, where Gyuvin then decided that it was too awkward for him to handle and averted his gaze to the other man instead. Nono (was that his real name? Gyuvin didn’t think so) confusedly ping-ponged his gaze between the two other men before seemingly having the same idea as Gyuvin and looking right back at him, and wow, did this man really remind him of a Samoyed. Gyuvin probably would have gotten into the details about how it was a really weird coincidence for two dog-looking boys to be staring at each other while their cat counterparts were also doing the same thing if it wasn’t for Ricky’s voice cutting him out of his thoughts again, this time in that calm, composed deep voice that he usually spoke in.
“Sorry, I should’ve introduced myself first. I’m Ricky, and this is Gyuvin,” the Chinese man motioned to himself and Gyuvin, respectively, who also broke out of his stare and raised a friendly hand to wave to the other two men. The other brunette, who’s name Gyuvin didn’t catch yet, looked quite shocked for a singular second before a wide grin broke across his face and he bounded forward, tightly grasping Ricky’s outstretched hand with two of his own.
“It’s fine! My name is Jaemin, and this is Jeno!”
Oh, so Nono was just a nickname, then Gyuvin’s mind helpfully supplied him, and the brunette was just about to open his mouth and say something when he noticed the blank look on Ricky’s face. The blonde man looked conflicted, eyes quickly flickering between his hand between Jaemin’s two own and the brunette’s face as they seemed to be panicking about something, something that Gyuvin couldn’t read on his face.
“Jaemin, you’re scaring the man,” Jeno sighed and stepped forward to wrap both of his arms around Jaemin’s waist and pull him backwards from Ricky, shooting the both of them an apologetic look as the other man came away easy in his grasp. “I’m sorry about him, he gets too excited when meeting new people sometimes. I’m Jeno.”
Ricky instantly looked slightly more relieved the second Jaemin’s hands were pulled away from his, and oh , Gyuvin realized what the look in his eyes had been. He had just probably been not quite uncomfortable, but more likely just really really surprised about the sudden enthusiastic touch, and had shown just about the appropriate reaction for someone who didn’t really like skinship.
Gyuvin knew that Ricky didn’t really like to act super coupley in public with him (something that he didn’t really mind), but judging by the way Jaemin was comfortably situated in Jeno’s grasp in a way that definitely overstepped the lines of platonic friendship, he figured that it would be okay if he sidled up to Ricky’s side and placed a gentle, comforting hand on the small of his back. Ricky was an introvert, after all, and Gyuvin figured that the whole wait this is Strawberry Person! situation was probably just a little too much for his social skills to handle, and stepped in to help.
Gyuvin then explained the entire situation to an increasingly-growing-shocked Jaemin and Jeno, the whole story about Ricky and the strawberries and the whole ‘ten months’ thing, with Ricky nodding and going along with everything his boyfriend was saying while trying to focus on the warm hand on his back instead of the nerves slowly building up in the pit of his stomach.
“Oh my god, I’m so sorry!” Jaemin exclaimed once Gyuvin had finished talking and broke out of Jeno’s grasp, “I didn’t know!”
“No, it’s nothing to be sorry about,” Ricky quickly assured Jaemin with a wild wave of his hands and stepped forward again, “it’s not your fault.”
“No, I’ve been taking your comfort food away from you, haven’t I been?!” Jaemin actually seemed quite panicked at the realization and quickly started to nervously run his hands through his long brown hair, messing up the silkily strands even more than they had already been before.
Ricky started panicking too. “No, you haven’t been! The strawberries are there for everyone, you were just buying them like you should have been,” he frantically assured the brunette. Jaemin seemed to calm down a little at Ricky’s words and turned back around to face them from where he was situated just behind Jeno’s shoulder, his chest heaving up and down in deep breaths as he tried to formulate his next couple of sentences, but came out to no avail. Jeno, who seemed to be the Gyuvin to his Ricky and vise versa, stepped into help and explain things to them.
“Jaemin and I have been buying frozen strawberries to make strawberry-flavored foods by ourselves,” Jeno began to explain, “because Jaemin, like you, really likes strawberries but hates the artificial strawberry taste.” Jaemin fiercely nodded his head up and down at the other man’s words, very much agreeing with him.
Ricky tilted his head in confusion. “You like strawberries by themselves, but not the flavor in anything else? Like,” he randomly reached into the fridge and pulled out a bottle of strawberry yogurt, “you don’t like this?”
Jaemin seemed to physically recoil at the presence of the strawberry yogurt like it was a particularly venomous snake of some sort, slightly curling in on himself from where he shrunk back behind Jeno’s back. Gyuvin blinked in surprise.
The blonde man sighed. “Jaemin also really hates dairy, too.”
“Oh.” Ricky quickly put the strawberry yogurt back into the fridge as to not scare(?) Jaemin any further. “Sorry. Making your stuff at home then sounds like a really smart idea, then.”
Jaemin popped back out from behind Jeno’s back with a bright grin on his face and nodded, and Gyuvin curiously trailed the other man with his eyes as he started slowly making his way back over to Ricky. The brunette had a contemplative look on his face when he stopped a respectable distance away from the Chinese man, as if he was quizzically thinking about something to tell Ricky.
“Look, I’m really sorry about taking your strawberries,” he started, quickly cutting off Ricky when the other man opened his mouth to start telling him about how it wasn’t his fault, “I understand how good those strawberries are. I just started buying them from here recently because I got tired of the horrible artificial strawberry taste, I swear. I didn’t know that you also bought two boxes of it every few days.”
Ricky shook his head and tentatively placed a hand on Jaemin’s shoulder, gently grasping it and shaking it a little bit.
“From one university student to another, it’s really fine,” he giggled, which also made the rest of them huff out a laugh. Indeed, the two other boys barely looked older than Gyuvin and Ricky themselves, and based off of the faded gray hoodie that Jeno was wearing, the logo barely visible on the front from all the wear and tear it had probably gone through, he guessed that they were probably seniors or something.
Jaemin cracked a smile. “Yeah, so I have an offer for you.”
Gyuvin piped up. An offer?
The brunette grinned, placing his hands on his hips and shifting his weight onto one foot. “Every morning, three boxes of these get delivered right? Let’s make a deal, I’ll get one of them when I come here in the mornings, and you’ll get the other two?”
Ricky was taken back by surprise. Strawberry Person, the person who he’d been trying to find for two weeks now for ‘stealing’ ‘his’ strawberries, was actually another university student, and was now offering him a deal that gave him two out of the three boxes?
Ricky grinned, and stepped forward to jokingly shake his outstretched hand.
“Deal.”
“Hey Gyuvin, Ricky!” YangYang, who didn’t seem to have heard the entire encounter judging off of the pair of earbuds he was pulling out of his ears when they approached, greeted them when they approached the counter, face lighting up when he noticed the two familiar pink boxes tucked under Ricky’s arm. “You caught Strawberry Person?”
“Strawberry Person?” Jeno’s voice piped up from behind them.
Oh. Gyuvin just realized that they had never told the two of them about the nickname they had given Jaemin.
YangYang looked up in shock at the voice, and his eyes widened when they fell upon the two men behind Gyuvin and Ricky.
“Jaemin? Jeno?”
Gyuvin whipped around in surprise.
“YangYang?”
“Hey, Yang two!” Jaemin squealed and reached over the counter to fiercely ruffle at the Chinese boy’s hair, making him shriek and desperately try to pry himself away from Jaemin’s grasp.
Ricky looked at the encounter in surprise, mirroring Gyuvin’s confused stare when his eyes met his.
“YangYang? Jaemin? You guys know each other?”
Jaemin momentarily stopped messing with YangYang to turn around from the counter and face Ricky with a wide grin. “Do I ever! YangYang here is me and Jeno’s best friend’s boyfriend!”
Gyuvin blinked. “Who?”
YangYang sighed and smiled when he looked over at the two of them while simultaneously trying to bat away Jaemin’s flying hands.
“Huang Renjun,” he answered, and Ricky’s eyes widened.
“Renjun-ge is your boyfriend?”
YangYang stared at him with wide eyes, seemingly trying to figure out how Ricky knew his boyfriend. Gyuvin could tell that the gears in his mind were spinning at a million miles an hour trying to figure out this entire tangled situation, and to be honest, he didn’t blame him. Gyuvin was also very overwhelmed by all the information he had found out over the course of the past few minutes, from the whole hey, we found Strawberry Person! thing to the how the heck does Ricky know YangYang’s boyfriend? situation. It all seemed like one very big, tangled coincidence.
YangYang seemed lost in thought until his facial expression suddenly changed and he turned towards Jaemin, jamming a finger into his chest.
“Wait, you are Strawberry Person?”
“Who is Strawberry Person?! Why do you keep calling me that?!”