title: how many licks does it take to get to your centre?
pairings: hakyeon/jaehwan (haken)
rating: g
summary: Hakyeon picks up the wrong jacket at work and doesn't end up regretting it nearly as much as he thought he would.
length: ~1.2k
warnings: i might have butchered hakyeon haha rip
a/n: for
aemilla! bc they finished fae fic and i promised i would write smt small for them so
It’s only Hakyeon’s second week working retail, and he’s pretty sure that the hecticness of it all is going to end up chasing him away to a new job very quickly.
It feels insane, going from an easy paced, family owned cafe with only a steady stream of customers around breakfast and lunchtime and the biggest mess being maybe a spilled coffee or a couple of crumbs or food left behind to.. this. Clothes never put back in their place and instead strewn everywhere, racks knocked over all and spilled onto the floor all the time, food left and smeared everywhere despite the “no outside food or drink” sign on the door, people constantly crowding every walkway that he needs to navigate the store floor -- it’s ridiculous.
But he breathes out, remembers the day is over, and tries to shake the weariness out of all his limbs as he walks into the break room. He feels more exhausted than he ever has before, juggling ten hour shifts on his feet all day and literal pounds of schoolwork for the next five hours after that, body barely up to physically nor mentally keep up with everything he’s trying to do at once.
He grabs his jacket off one of the chairs and his bag out from underneath the break table before he leaves out the back door, taking a long, deep breath of fresh air once he steps outside. The weather is awful crisp, though, so Hakyeon shifts his bag onto either arm as he slips into his jacket.
He starts walking towards his bus stop, steps only slowing once he moves to pull the collar of the jacket around the bottom half of his face and realizes something is off. The sleeves are hanging farther over his fingers than he remembers and when he presses his nose into the fabric and inhales, it’s an incredibly unfamiliar scent that greets him in return.
Hakyeon’s first instinct is to start rooting through the pockets to try and figure out whose jacket it is, left hand meeting the familiar touch of a cold phone screen and right hand hitting something sticky, which he automatically pulls back from with a small shriek. Leaving the phone be in the left pocket, he hesitantly gropes around the right once again before his fingers wrap around something hard and not sticky, pulling it out between a finger and thumb daintily and holding it in front of him.
It’s a lollipop -- Tootsie Roll, by the looks of it -- though it’s smaller than one usually is and recovered in saran wrap. There’s a piece of paper wound around the stick with a twist tie, and Hakyeon moves to unravel it when there’s a loud shout from behind him, “Hey!”
He whips around in surprise and nearly drops the lollipop in his haste, making quite a few abstract noises as it bounces around dangerously in his palms before he catches it properly, wincing when the exposed sticky part touches his skin again. After he stops squinting his eyes in slight disgust his vision focuses and brow furrows, “Jaehwan?”
It’s his coworker, who he’d worked almost every one of his shifts so far with, wearing only a t-shirt and carrying a jacket over his arm and -- oh. Hakyeon flushes from something that definitely isn’t the cold as he looks down at the jacket he’s wearing and then back at the one Jaehwan’s holding, everything clicking into place as he goes to speak, “I’m sorry, I didn’t mean---”
But Jaehwan decides to speak at the same time, grinning and holding his hand out, “If you wanted to wear my jacket so bad, you could have just asked, hyungnim. I can’t just let anyone steal my stuff and ruin my experiment, no matter how cute they are.” Bewildered beyond belief, Hakyeon just watches as the other unfolds the piece of paper and spreads it out to show him.
It’s a list of tallies covering almost every inch of the paper, How Many Licks? written in messy hangul at the top. Jaehwan is grinning like an absolute idiot, refolding the paper back up into tiny form and fastening it back around the stick of the lollipop before he shivers, holding out the jacket slung over his arm again.
“You look really small and comfy in my jacket, but yours doesn’t fit me and I really, really don’t want to get hypothermia or something,” he says as he continues to speak without waiting for a response, doing some odd little dance from one foot to the other, probably to keep warm. “No matter how appealing I might seem as a statue slash popsicle, I don’t think it’d be as pleasant for me.”
“You…” Hakyeon tries to get words out and miraculously fails, for once, shaking his head instead and just shrugging the jacket off his shoulders to hand over. He catches a last whiff of what he now knows to be Jaehwan’s scent before said boy takes it and he receives his own back, slipping its familiar creases back around himself. It feels a lot tighter, now, and when he stuffs his hands into his pockets he’s a little disappointed that he doesn’t really have anything interesting. His brow furrows when he doesn’t find anything, though, head raising, “Where’s my---”
“Shhh,” Jaehwan shakes a hand in Hakyeon’s direction before it moves back to his phone, where he’s typing away furiously -- no, actually, it’s Hakyeon’s phone, where he seems to be typing away furiously. “Gimme a sec.”
“Give that back!” He yips, hands sliding to his hips after he reaches forward for it only for Jaehwan to hold the device high and out of his reach, laughing to himself. “Don’t be a dick, Jaehwan.”
“Just tryna give you my number, jeesh,” he says, turning back and handing Hakyeon’s phone back with it locked, bending down and leaning over to flick the latter’s nose just gently. “See you around, nerd.” He throws his own jacket on over his shoulders and Hakyeon sees him pull out the Tootsie Pop and unwrap it before popping it in his mouth and pulling out a pen, most likely to record every time he licks it, skipping away.
He unlocks his phone and it’s open to his messages, a new one typed out to a new contact named “cutie jaehwan” with a million kissy emojis and heart emojis afterwards, a big sappy gross message underneath that’s already been sent. It goes into relative detail about how apparently Hakyeon wants to swathe himself in every piece of clothing Jaehwan has ever worn, bury himself in Jaehwan’s arms, wants to kiss him under the moonlight.
Hakyeon shouts a bunch of obscenities after Jaehwan’s quickly fleeing form but he’s pretty sure by the way the younger laughs, he knows just how red his cheeks actually are as he reads the message over again, head shaking in something that’s probably supposed to be disappointment but ends up quelling a lot more excitement in his chest than his sleepy self figured it could. Maybe this new job won’t be so bad after all.