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"Here," Han Sooyoung says as she drops an apple— gently— onto Kim Dokja's head.
Kim Dokja startles, his neck straightening from where he'd been hunched over his phone. Han Sooyoung catches the apple before it can fall to the floor, setting it on the tabletop.
"... Huh?"
"What, you've never seen an apple before?" Kim Dokja's mouth pulls into a scowl. She grins mockingly in return as she rounds the table, waving her hands in a cramped flourish so as to not dislodge the lunchbag wedged under her arm. "Nourishment. You should try it some time, it might do you some good."
She plops down in the seat across from him just in time for him to push the fruit back towards her. "I had an apple for breakfast, I'm fine."
"Don't reject my generosity so casually?" Then, she frowns. "...Just an apple?"
Kim Dokja gives her Annoying Smile Number Sixteen, which usually means if you know the answer, why ask?
"Kim Dokja."
"What's Dokja done this time?" Yoo Sangah asks as she settles into the seat to Han Sooyoung's right. Han Sooyoung rolls the fruit back at Kim Dokja and, using only her eyebrows, does her best to convey that she can and will rat him out to Yoo Sangah if he doesn't start eating that apple.
Kim Dokja says serenely, "Nothing."
This bastard—
Before Han Sooyoung can give Kim Dokja a piece of her mind, another voice says from behind him, "If you're going to lie, at least try to make it believable."
Kim Dokja doesn't flinch at the sudden arrival despite having his back turned, but Han Sooyoung does, too preoccupied with staring down Kim Dokja's ugly mug to notice the shadow that had materialised at his shoulder. The shadow turns out to be Yoo Joonghyuk, looking down at them as Kim Dokja moves his textbooks off of the seat next to him for Joonghyuk to drop into.
"Ugh," Han Sooyoung recovers quickly enough, scowling. "You're here."
Yoo Joonghyuk gives her a dark look, setting his huge lunchbox on the table. "As if I don't eat here every day?"
"I was hoping your little fanclub would waylay you for a bit," she huffs, crossing her arms. Before Yoo Joonghyuk can continue antagonising her— which he does just by existing, sometimes— Yoo Sangah interrupts.
"Dokja, do you want to trade your apple for my tangerine?"
So she had overheard their conversation. Kim Dokja gnaws on his lip uncertainly, but offers the apple to her.
"If you're sure?"
"Fuji apples are my favourite kind," she tells him cheerfully, handing him the tangerine. Sooyoung is pretty sure she didn't have a favourite type of apple up until about thirty seconds ago.
"Are we trading food?" Jung Heewon asks as she approaches, Lee Hyunsung in tow. “I want some of Kim Dokja’s lunch. I’ll give you gummies.”
“Absolutely not,” Kim Dokja says. Yoo Joonghyuk sets one of his two bento boxes down in front of him, as if to prove a point. “This is mine, you can’t have it.”
“Please,” Jung Heewon says plaintively, “Hey, Yoo Joonghyuk, share with the rest of us peasants.”
“No.”
Jung Heewon groans, slumping onto the table melodramatically. She watches, forlorn, as Kim Dokja opens his bento box: garlic and soy sauce chicken on top of rice, with a side of what looks like spinach namul and celery slices. Despite the faint steam still curling out of it, there isn't any condensation dotting the sides of the box— no one knows how Yoo Joonghyuk does it. Han Sooyoung is beginning to suspect black magic.
“Stop drooling,” Yoo Joonghyuk tells Jung Heewon. She scowls, sitting upright and opening her lunchbox with no small amount of vitriol.
“Whatever,” she sniffs haughtily, throwing a small pack of gummies in Kim Dokja’s general direction. It lands just shy of his orange. “Take them anyways. Oh, and Uriel said to give you this.” A cookie wrapped in plastic, slightly misshapen and obviously homemade, joins the pile.
“Too much sugar is bad for you,” Yoo Joonghyuk grumbles at the same time that Lee Hyunsung says, “Oh, I packed an extra spring roll, here!”
“I don’t need this much food?”
“I brought a juice box for you, too,” Yoo Sangah says, ignoring Kim Dokja outright. She sets it in front of him, lined up next to the tangerine, and the gummies, and the cookie, and the spring roll (sitting on top of a napkin that Lee Hyunsung had produced from somewhere). Kim Dokja stares down at the little spread of food helplessly.
“...I’m not even hungry,” he says, in a very small voice. Jung Heewon shrugs, already tucking into her container of noodles.
“Take it home, then,” she says around a mouthful of food. Lee Hyunsung frowns.
“But the spring roll…”
“The tangerine will get crushed to pulp by your books,” Yoo Joonghyuk says to Kim Dokja. “Don’t.”
"Fine, fine." Kim Dokja ducks to pack the gummies and the cookie into his bag as Joonghyuk reaches for the fruit. He peels it with unsurprising deftness, in a long, unbroken spiral of rind; the air is shot through with the sour-sweet tang of citrus. While his hands are occupied, Heewon reaches across the table to snag a bit of namul, shoving it into her mouth before he can bat at her.
"'S good," she says, grinning. Yoo Joonghyuk's frown takes on a distinctly smug air. "Did you make it yourself?"
"Obviously," Joonghyuk says, setting the orange peel in the communal trash pile. He pries apart the segments before offering the fruit back to Dokja.
Kim Dokja opens his mouth expectantly.
"How old are you, again?" Yoo Joonghyuk asks him exasperatedly. Kim Dokja wiggles his eyebrows. Yoo Joonghyuk looks like he might shove the whole tangerine into his mouth, followed by the peel for good measure, but instead he rolls his eyes and, gently, tenderly, feeds Kim Dokja a slice.
"Ew," Jung Heewon and Han Sooyoung say at the same time. Kim Dokja, looking entirely too pleased, chews his tangerine slice, and finally takes the rest of the fruit, pulling off another segment.
Then he says, sweetly, "Open up, Joonghyuk-ah."
Yoo Joonghyuk, who is famous among their peers for his impressive resting bitch face, too tall and strong by now to legally still be considered a highschooler, and an all-around generally uncooperative bastard, opens his mouth to accept the fruit. Kim Dokja's eyes curve into neat crescents. Han Sooyoung mimes barfing onto the table, but she doesn't quite manage to hide her own smile.
Later, after kicking some sense into Kim Dokja over his complaints on her newest chapter— forced romance?! she would never— she asks: "What do you think love is, then?"
He stops for a second, peering into his pouch of gummies pensively on the step beneath her. "I think," he says. "It's the little things."
"Like what," Han Sooyoung says impatiently, tapping her foot. She wants to get home to her keyboard, the next line of her story already gathered at her fingertips, but Kim Dokja had insisted on waiting for Yoo Joonghyuk to finish cleaning up after the cooking club meet.
Dokja shrugs. "Wanting to spend time with each other, I guess. Feeling safe, cared for." He pours the remaining gummies into his palm. "Wanting them to be well fed, too. Joonghyuk-ie likes the orange ones, right? I'll give him the rest."
Han Sooyoung lets out a small, incredulous sigh, and opens the notes app on her phone. "Yeah," she says. "He'll like that."