Chapter Text
Omniscient POV:
Meet Oh Sion. 🌙
Oh Sion, twenty years old, from Mokpo.
If you've never been to Mokpo, it's a coastal city in the south of Korea. Small. Warm. The kind of place where the fishmonger knows your name, your mom stops to chat with three different neighbours on one walk to the market, and saying good morning to a stranger is just. Normal. It's just what you do.
Sion was the human equivalent of that city. Warm, easy, always ready to talk to you, genuinely, not out of politeness. He laughed easily. He remembered things people told him.
He said "no worries, hope you're okay!" on autopilot to people who didn't deserve it.
He was, in short, the kind of person who made a place feel softer just by being in it.
Which was great. In Mokpo.
In Seoul, it was apparently a whole thing.
Seoul was a different operating system. People here walked fast and talked careful and kept their warmth in little controlled portions, not scattered everywhere like Sion did.
They didn't do eye contact on the subway. They didn't say hi to strangers.
And they especially did not, Sion was learning, appreciate being asked out by a boy from Mokpo who smiled too wide and talked too fast and made you feel like the most interesting person in the world in a way that was according to several people now "a lot."
First semester at Seoul University. Six weeks in. Four rejections.
Yeri: "You're very chatty, aren't you." In that tone.
Sungchan: "Sorry, I wasn't really listening, you talk faster than I can process."
Two others he was actively trying to forget.
And then Riku.
Riku was a third-year.
Cool in the specific Seoul way unhurried, low voice, a little guarded but with these moments where he'd half-smile at something Sion said, like Sion was slightly more interesting than expected.
Sion had thought, this one.
Maybe this one.
He'd been wrong.
"Sion-ah, I think you're really sweet, but"
"No worries, hope you're okay!"
Autopilot. Mokpo training.
He'd gone home, sat on the Han River bench at midnight, and eaten convenience store kimbap like a man in his villain origin story.
"Okay," he said to the sky. Out loud. To no one. There was a duck nearby but it did not appear invested.
"If anyone is actually up there. I'm not asking for a lot. I just want ONE person to like me back. That's literally it. One. Please."
The duck quacked.
The sky said nothing.
Sion finished his kimbap and walked home.
He did not notice the figure sitting in the tree above the bench, watching him with wide eyes and an expression that could only be described as oh no, this is a problem.
He never noticed.
That was, honestly, kind of the whole problem.