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Yoosung is 171 centimeters tall exactly. He knows this because—and this is important—he checks every day.
Now, in reality, this is a bit silly. There’s no real reason for him to care that he’s shorter than the average man, but he does.
A lot.
There are days where he doesn’t care as much, and he can joke about being short and let others poke fun at him. Other days he stands by the height markers on the wall and sees that he’s still 171 centimeters and he hates it.
In the back of his mind he knows that it’s the dysphoria talking. It can’t rag on him about his chest anymore (thanks Jumin), so now it seeps its way into his head and mentions how short he is compared to every other man he knows, how he’s thin and baby-faced and immature and all of these other things that Yoosung knows shouldn’t listen to. The height thing just happens to stick.
Yoosung checks his height that morning and finds that he’s still 171 centimeters. He briefly laments the fact and goes to school.
Yoosung doesn’t pay attention in class, but he hears two girls chattering behind him. One of them says, “I don’t know! His hands were really small,” and while he doesn’t know the context of this conversation in the slightest, it unlocks an insecurity he never had. He opens the messenger app.
yoosung ★: do i have feminine hands??????? :’0
ZEN : do you really wanna be the guy who obsesses over his hand size?
Yoosung considers this. It is, unfortunately, a very good point. Sometimes he gets hung up on the slightest things.
And, of course, there are moments he wishes he could be more like Zen—maybe with a bit more humility—because to be that confident and masculine would be a dream. (Also, to be that tall would be a dream, and when that crosses his mind Yoosung realizes he’s doing the exact same thing he was chastising himself for less than thirty seconds ago and ugh.)
ZEN : besides, plenty of men have ‘feminine’ hands. like jumin.
Jumin Han: I believe the word you’re looking for is slender, and you’d be correct. My hands have been featured in magazines.
ZEN: die.
The messages between his friends are a welcome distraction, both from the dysphoria and the lecture he’s been ignoring for the past twenty minutes and will continue to ignore for the foreseeable future. Yoosung looks fondly at his phone.
His friends are helpful in these situations—Jumin and Zen and Jaehee and Seven, and sometimes V. Yoosung is grateful. Not everyone has friends who pay for their testosterone (thanks again, Jumin) and not everyone has friends who assert that plenty of cis men are just as short, if not shorter, than Yoosung (thanks Zen), and not everyone has friends that send images of cats with the word “VALID” plastered over them in white text. (Thanks, Seven.)
And then there’s MC, but MC is different—not because she isn’t Yoosung’s friend, but because she’s MC, and Yoosung has different feelings for her, therefore making her different. (The different feelings are difficult, complicated ones embarrassing to dissect, and even more embarrassing to think about.)
Speak of the devil, MC enters the chatroom. It’s at this point Yoosung gives up on all pretenses of rejoining the lesson and instead types responses to her messages as they appear.
MC : yoosung i have never seen your hands but i’m sure they’re very good.
yoosung ★: ah!! i’m sure yours are good too i guess??
A second of thought passes. Yoosung contemplates his entire life and everything he’s ever said and adds another message.
yoosung ★: wait, no, i’m sure they’re good!!
MC: well thank you!! but this is about you and your very good hands!! which are, as i’ve stated, very good.
A chat lasting less than two minutes and consisting entirely of vague hand compliments should not make Yoosung feel flustered, and yet...
MC: aren’t you at school?
And suddenly the bubble has burst, because Yoosung is in school, and in the middle of class to boot. Though that’s never stopped him before. And, well, it’s just that talking to MC is so nice (though sometimes talking to her and choking up on his words and getting flustered feels like he’s drowning on dry land) and Yoosung is very inspired to keep doing so, but then he thinks about it and how she wants the best for him and he puts the phone down.
(He’ll talk to her after class, probably.)
MC always sends him a good morning text.
It’s nice! Really nice, in fact. Yoosung has no complaints, unless having something to look forward to in the morning counts,. He supposes it could be, because it certainly would be disappointing to start expecting morning messages only to stop getting them as time goes on. Yeah. That would be… not good.
Luckily, that doesn’t happen! Nor would it, probably, and if it did, MC would have a good reason for it, he’s sure.
The messages are pretty energetic. MC punctuates a lot of her sentences with exclamation points, which is very, very cute.
MC: !! good morning! i hope you have a good day at school!!
And Yoosung replies with something equally energetic, with a few emoticons here and there.
yoosung ★ : i will now that you messaged me! :0
It’ll go on like that for a while, which is nice. It’s nice to see what she has to say, and Yoosung finds himself smiling down at his phone as he reads her messages. She really is so cute—
In the most platonic way possible! Haha! Whoops! Well, moving on.
MC is really cool that way, personality wise. After all, she and Yoosung haven’t known each other for very long, but it feels like they’ve known each other forever. Like they’ve been waiting to meet each other.
(A friendly way. A very friendly, extremely platonic way.)
And so it makes sense Yoosung likes talking to her whenever he can. She gets him. She likes to talk about LOLOL with him even though nobody likes to do so, she responds to all of his messages about being tired of school, she supports his efforts to branch out into things like cooking, even when he isn't very good at them. And, most importantly, she has no idea he’s trans, which is great.
Well, not great. It shouldn’t be great, because Yoosung isn’t ashamed of being trans. He’s come to accept it, and he’s more than comfortable with himself (comfortable enough to ignore the small triggers of dysphoria here and there) but there is something kind of fun about hanging out with someone who doesn’t know he’s trans. A sense of euphoria in being able to pass and never being questioned about it. It’s nice! She’s nice.
He feels like a broken record, reiterating that things are nice and MC is nice, but truly, she’s so kind. Even just knowing her for a few days gives him that idea. Knowing she’s funny and kind and so, so cool. With him. And everyone.
Though, her being cool with everyone is complicated. It’s good! It’s definitely good that she’s cool with everyone, because if she wasn’t it’d be awkward. It’s good that she’s friends with all of Yoosung’s friends, because then she can talk to them and joke around with them and get to understand all of them on some basic level.
It’s just when she does talk to them—when she pays attention to Jumin or 707, who are good guys with their own fun quirks, or to Zen, who is handsome and charming and really, really apt to flirting with her, well—
It kind of hurts. Just a little.
Like a tightening in his chest, where he sees something developing—sees the lines connecting and the events in motion—and can do nothing to stop it.
It comes to Yoosung’s attention that he has a crush on MC.
Yoosung has liked girls before, alright?
He is a living, breathing guy who has liked girls before. That’s not to say girls have liked him in return—that is very rarely the case—but Yoosung knows what crushes are. He gets them.
Or, well. No. He doesn’t. He doesn’t get them at all. Feelings are so complicated and all of Yoosung’s past crushes have sort of mixed in with the denial and the depression and also the general awkwardness of being alive and living and thus, Yoosung doesn’t know what normal crushes that aren’t put under the stress of everything else are like, but he thinks what he feels with MC might be similar, which is bad.
Well, it’s good! Because talking to her feels like he’s on top of the world, and she’s nice and cute (he’s never seen her in real life, but still, she’s probably cute) and she thinks he’s nice and cute (which is flattering. He enjoys the flattery) and thus is the perfect girl. It’s bad, Yoosung reminds himself, because he has yet to meet her in real life, and they’ve only known each other for so long, and every other reason.
He lays silently in his bed, scrolling through old chats on his phone as he considers these pros and cons. The rational part of his brain (the part that graduated at the top of his class) recognizes the pros outweigh the cons, just a little bit, in terms of emotional gratification.
Of course, says the biting voice in the back of his head, MC would never consider him an option, anyways.
It stings. Yoosung tries to push it away but it remains, persistent as the urge to check his height every morning and worry about the size of his hands and compare himself to every other male standard. Girls like MC—who are adorable and funny and kind—look to guys like Zen, or guys like Jumin. Guys who have something going for them. Guys who meet the standard.
(Guys who are normal.)
Yoosung doesn’t measure up.
He has to stop thinking about this—and what helps to stop thinking about things? Video games! Yoosung plays video games that night, and he falls asleep at his desk, just barely avoiding drooling on his keyboard.
And he doesn’t think about MC, or her cute morning messages, or the standards she probably has. (The standards he’s projected onto her.)
He doesn’t think about any of it.
Yoosung wakes up in the morning, and it seems his bad mood has followed him to the daylight hours, because he feels awful.
The morning, too, seems to be out to get him. He doesn’t have the energy to cook, so he settles for making himself some toast and spreading butter on it. He doesn’t have the energy to fix his appearance, so he settles on wearing a beanie and not looking in any reflective surface for too long, and he shouldn’t have the energy to check his height again (it’s not like it ever changes) but he does and wow, would you look at that, still 171 centimeters.
Whatever. It’s not like it matters.
(It does matter. It matters so much. He wouldn’t check if it didn’t matter.)
He remains just as exhausted waiting for his bus, and in the quiet—which is only interrupted by Yoosung’s intermittent thoughts about skipping, which he won’t do, probably—he hears his phone ring.
It’s MC.
Suddenly, all of the resentment evaporates and he nearly drops his phone trying to answer as quickly as possible.
“I—uhm—hey?”
“Hi!”
Her voice? Her voice. Her voice! She sounds exactly how he imagined, but also not at all, because he barely remembers how he imagined her sounding, because the real voice is so—
(So cute.)
Yoosung finishes his thoughts there, because it’s not in his best interest to think about… that.
(About how cute her voice is.)
And so he tries to have a normal conversation with her. A regular conversation in which he doesn’t fixate on her voice or her mannerisms or any of that. Just an average, human conversation.
“It’s funny you called. I was just thinking about you.” Oh God. Why did he say that? He wasn’t even just thinking about her. He’s going to die.
“I was thinking about you, too! I guess you could say that’s why I called.” She laughs after saying that, and Yoosung refuses to attribute any adjectives to her laugh. It’s just a laugh. A regular, perfectly normal laugh. That also happens to be absolutely adorable.
“I, ah, thanks,” he scratches the back of his neck. Why is he doing that? For what purpose? This is so weird— he’s so weird. Ugh. Since when was talking this hard?
“No problem,” says MC, and he imagines she’s smiling, and maybe relaxing, wherever she is. “You don’t have to thank me for thinking about you, though! That’s silly.”
“Well, you know, I am pretty silly,” says Yoosung. His whole existence is a joke. This, right here? This instance? This is a punch line, and it’s getting a rousing applause from the audience.
“Oh, I’m sure you are, Mr. Honor’s Student,” says MC, “Seven told me about that, you know? I knew there was some hidden depths there or whatever. It’s so cool. Like a comic book character or something, with a secret superpower. Except you have the power of knowledge, I guess.” She pauses for a moment, like she’s thinking.
Yoosung’s happy this conversation isn’t taking place in person—partially because all of the complimenting is making him a bit flustered, and partially because it’d be embarrassing if he started looking too focused while she was just rambling, because he could hang on to her every word for hours and not get bored.
“Are you good at math? I’m terrible at math, and I’ve been wanting to talk to somebody about it for a while, try and get some help,” she says, and this is something Yoosung could work with.
“I used to focus on sciences! Which is basically math in a trench coat, so I guess you could say I’m good at math.” He smiles. “Is that why you called?”
“Oh no! I just wanted to talk to you, I guess,” she says.
“Oh,” he replies, and that simple statement shouldn’t make his heart skip a beat, but it does. “Thank you, then.”
“Stop thanking me! I should thank you for answering. I know nobody really calls these days, but I kind of wanted to, especially since we’ve been texting for a while and all, and you seem really sweet in the chat, so.”
He’s going to die. She’s too cute.
“Wait, are you in school right now?”
“Oh, no, I’m waiting for the bus—” which is here. And two blocks ahead of him. Oh boy. He didn’t notice the bus passing him. “Which just passed me. I should go, but I had fun talking to you!” Fun isn’t the right word. He had an awful surge of anxiety talking to her, which shifted into embarrassing infatuation, but still.
“Bye! Have a good day at school. Work hard for me!”
She hangs up, but Yoosung can still replay the whole conversation in his head as he runs after the bus. The driver takes pity on him and stops to allow him in, though he gives a bit of a stink eye. Yoosung pays it no mind; he has better things to think of.
MC asked him to work hard for her.
Well, if she asks, how can he not?
They call more often, after that.
It’s usually her who initiates it, but sometimes Yoosung gets bored while studying (which he’s been doing a lot more, lately) or it’s taking a while to fall asleep at night, and MC is just a few taps away on his phone, so he gives her a ring or two. Or many, over the course of a couple of days.
It is… fantastic to talk to her. To know she wants to talk to him. Oh, it’s just perfect. Usually girls are casually friendly with him, or sometimes indifferent, but MC talks to him with this active enthusiasm he grows fond of.
In one call, he mentions, somewhat jokingly, that this is the most conversation he’s ever gotten out of a girl. It’s not that much of a stretch.
MC replies, “I can’t imagine why,” and she laughs, but her tone isn’t sarcastic. She isn’t exaggerating the obvious. In fact, she sounds sort of… genuine.
Yoosung is quiet for a moment, and he thinks about his friendship with MC and there’s a moment where he realizes his feelings—which are absolutely and undeniably present, and very romantic, despite his protests a few days ago—could, hypothetically, in one of the many possible universes, be reciprocated. In fact, his feelings could be reciprocated in this universe. Unlikely as it seems.
And it is very unlikely, because when he thinks about the idea of MC liking him, he can only call himself back to the fact that MC knows so many other people that do measure up in the ways Yoosung doesn’t. It’s easy to think his feelings might be reciprocated until he thinks about Zen, or Jumin, or 707, and then the idea becomes so unrealistic and alien that Yoosung can’t help but feel bad for himself.
Instead of feeling bad for himself, he deflects.
“I know,” he says, laughing, “After all, I’m so charming and good-looking that it’s unbelievable, right?”
“Is this a Zen impression?” says MC.
“It is! How would you rate it? I’m thinking it needs a lot more self-praise in there.” He can be happy with this. With joking and avoiding the subject at hand and just being MC’s friend. Yoosung is happy with that.
(Absolutely, totally happy with that.)
MC hums in contemplation, “I’d give it an eight. It’s good, but I specifically remember calling so I could talk to Yoosung.”
“My condolences.”
“Stop that!” MC replies, scolding but good-natured, “I don’t want you putting yourself down.”
She’s so nice it hurts. Yoosung replies, “I’m sorry, it’s a force of habit. You should have met me a few years ago. It used to be worse.”
He used to do this all the time in his early transition. He used to go back and forth with Rika—
God, he misses Rika. It’s hard not to think of how much he misses her, sometimes. She always knew what to do, always knew what to say.
—and he would complain about how nothing was going right and he was the problem, but of course he wasn’t. Rika made sure he knew that. He’s sort of reminded of that when he talks to MC.
Okay, it’s a little weird to compare a girl he has feelings for to his late cousin, but it’s more the comfort than anything. The idea that someone out there cares about Yoosung enough to make sure he cares for himself.
“You’re a good friend,” he tells MC.
“I like you,” she tells him.
Oh.
What?
“Excuse me—?”
“As a friend!” interjects MC, and that makes more sense. Yoosung can think of this moment and feel embarrassed over it later. Except, MC is still talking.
“ God, that’s not right either. I do like you in, like, a non-friendly way. I don’t want you to think I don’t, but you don’t even know me in the real world or whatever, and I didn’t want to tell you yet and—ugh—can you pretend I stopped talking like, thirty seconds earlier?”
Yoosung blinks, “And thirty seconds ago was before you said that you—”
“Yes! Before I said that! I’ll say it again at a later date, but at the moment I need you to pretend you never heard it.”
He’s got to be having some sort of vivid auditory hallucination, at this point. His thoughts keep diverting between different things, like how MC just said she likes him and how she did so in the most adorable way possible and how unexpectedly happy he is to be himself right now, in this very moment.
“Heard what?”
“Thank you,” says MC, “I am going to head to bed and die now. Or maybe not. Depends on where my evening takes me.”
“Hopefully not in the direction of death?” replies Yoosung, “I’d really like for you to be alive when we talk again.”
“Yoosung, you are physically killing me,” MC speaks, her tone deadpan.
“What, how?”
“‘MC, I’d like you to be alive when we talk again. I’m Yoosung and I’m really cute and sweet and also I’m going to kill you with both of those objective facts,’” sarcastic MC is new, and Yoosung likes her just as much as every other side of her he’s met. “That’s my Yoosung impression. How would you rate it?”
Yoosung holds back laughter, because she’s so funny and cute and kind and he’s maybe just a little bit in love with her. Like, a reasonable amount of love to feel for someone who he’s known for a week and has never seen in real life.
“It’s on the nose,” he manages, and he is smiling so much.
“I’ll work on it,” says MC, “I said I was leaving a minute ago, didn’t I? I’m going to do that, and I’ll try not to die since you want me to be alive or whatever. If I don’t succeed I’ll be sure to become a ghost and haunt you forever. It’ll be a very friendly haunting.”
“I’ll look forward to it.”
There’s a bit more banter from there, but it all melds together as Yoosung reflects on the conversation. He mostly focuses on the big thing, which is that MC likes him.
And Yoosung likes her back.
Where does he go from here?
yoosung ★: say hypothetically, i like this girl.
707 : lol is it MC?
yoosung ★ : :0 how did you know?? omg.
707 : i have eyes and basic reading comprehension.
yoosung ★ : oh, i get it. you’re making fun of me.
707: very fast on the uptake. i’m proud of you, honor’s student yoosung.
yoosung ★ : haha. anyway, i like MC.
oh. huh. it feels weird to actually type that.
707 : you like a girl… i’m tearing up. they grow up so fast.
yoosung ★ : this is serious!! i’m going to tell you something and you have to keep it secret.
707: MC told you that she likes you.
yoosung ★: okay how did you guess that?
707: i didn’t lol. i talked to her about it 20 minutes ago and she told me.
anyway what’s the problem? you like her, she likes you.
wait! let me guess… you’re desperately in love with me.
yoosung ★ : you wish.
no, i just feel like… what if she doesn’t really like me?
like, what if she meets me in person and she changes her mind?
707 : are you afraid that she’s not going to be attracted to you after learning that you’re
trans?
yoosung ★ : YEAH KINDA!!!!!!!!!
707 : allow me to provide you some comfort in these troubling times:
you’ll be fine.
yoosung ★ : …
elaborate?
707 : i mean, MC doesn’t seem like the type of person to reject you based on the most
superficial thing imaginable.
but secondly, even if she was, wouldn’t that be dodging a bullet?
you want someone who likes you no matter the circumstance, right?
yoosung ★ : i mean, ideally yeah.
but i don’t know. what if she sees me differently after she knows?
707: she won’t, but even if she did, it wouldn’t matter.
i’m going to be really serious for a moment. you’re seeing a very rare 707 persona.
yoosung ★: :0 a collectible 707!!!!
707 : exactly!
anyway, you’re as much a man as any of us, and i don’t want you hinging your self-esteem
on the opinion of one girl.
MC is a nice girl!! and a very funny one. and one who enables my jokes and pranks and
such. but you are a man fully independent of how she feels about you.
yoosung ★ : :’D SEVEN!!!!!!!!!!!!!
that’s so kind omg.
707 : of course it is!! i’m the kindest friend you have and also the best one.
yoosung ★: hm… jumin did pay for all of my gender reassignment stuff so that’s hard to
beat…
707 : he has the emotional intelligence of a brick.
yoosung ★: a very rich brick, covered in cat hair.
707 : D:
yoosung ★: i’m kidding. in all seriousness, you’re the best. thank you so much.
707: anytime.
now PLEASE go have a conversation with this girl before she changes her mind.
Yoosung calls MC. He sits on his bed, with his knees to his chest, and he holds the phone between his ear and shoulder. He tries to think of what to say to her while the phone rings, tries to plan this whole conversation in his head—but then she picks up, and he’s already speaking before she can get a word out. So much for planning.
“Okay, hear me out for a moment,” he starts, “So… what we talked about last time…” he trails off. What is he supposed to say? What is he even trying to do here?
“We talk about a lot of things,” says MC, and he can hear caution in her voice, “I feel like I know what this is about, and it’s totally fine if you don’t feel the same. It’s kinda disappointing, of course, but I like being your friend, too—”
“It’s not that! I’m not rejecting you or anything. It’s, uh, quite the opposite. I’m just a little bit… surprised, is all. I wanted to ask you a question, if that’s okay?”
Yoosung hears her exhale. She says, “That’s totally fine.”
It takes him a moment to actually say anything, but he manages to speak. “Say, hypothetically, that I’m trans. Does that—does that change anything, at all?” There’s a base sense of embarrassment, even though he has nothing to be embarrassed about. He’s come out to a decent amount of people, be it casually or otherwise. It’s not supposed to be a big deal, but there’s some of him that still fears rejection. That still fears ostracization.
MC says, “Yoosung, why would that change anything?”
“Well, I don’t know! You’re the first girl I’ve ever talked to, like, seriously about this kind of stuff. Or at all about it. And I didn’t know if you wanted like, a more masculine guy or something? And some girls have that thing about tall guys, and I’m not exactly one of those—”
“Stop talking! Oh my God,” says MC, “I like you so much and I hate to hear you worrying about stupid stuff!”
“So what you’re saying is,” Yoosung pauses, “You aren’t against dating a shorter guy?”
“Shut up!” MC says, and then there’s a moment of silence before she starts again. “In all seriousness, I like you for you! And no circumstance could change that, and you know that!”
“I didn’t know that!” he says, and at the sound of MC’s protest, he adds, “Okay, maybe I could infer that, but the question was still important!”
“Sure it was,” says MC.
“So,” Yoosung says, “Where do we go from here?”
Yoosung is 171 centimeters tall exactly, but his girlfriend is 160 centimeters tall, and that’s cool! He gets to poke fun at her for being short, sometimes, and she makes this one face and crosses her arms and it is extremely endearing.
Speaking of! Yoosung has a girlfriend now! Which is very, very cool and very, very fun to talk and brag about, mostly to Zen. Him! With a girlfriend! A cool, funny girlfriend who accosts him with a hug upon meeting him in real life for the first time.
It’s actually wonderful she does that, because preceding the meet, Yoosung was surrounded by this near-tangible wall of nervousness. Sure, it’s all fun and games when you’re laughing and talking about pre-dating over the phone, but what if all this apparent attraction fades once she sees him in person? What if Yoosung is too awkward when he talks to her? What if she decides she is into taller guys?
And then she’s there, arms wrapped around him, and she goes, “You’re not even that short,” and all of his worries slip away.
It takes a while—he and MC meet a few more times over the next few weeks, and each time is more perfect than the last, if that makes any sense at all—but soon enough, Yoosung only measures himself every few days, to once every few weeks, to not much at all.
He doesn’t need to. Life seems to move on in a positive direction no matter how tall he is, and it’s time he stops letting the superficial hold him back.
…
Okay, that is until he realizes he’s going through some sort of late-term growth spurt, which is the cherry on top of the cake, to be honest. Not only does he have the coolest girlfriend, but now apparently he’s having some medical anomaly miracle? And he didn’t even have to consider getting that surgery where they put metal in his shins and try and make him taller? Incredible—
But not as incredible as the security in himself is, of course.
Maybe it’s a bit silly, but there’s something very perfect about his life right now—Yoosung doesn’t need to worry about anything, because MC likes him so much, and nothing about him could change that—and he feels so much for her in turn. More than he’s ever felt for anyone.
(He’s really, truly in love with her.)
And even if she didn’t like him, Yoosung knows he has everyone else—Seven and Jumin and Zen and Jaehee and everyone else in the RFA—to hang onto him. To support him and care about him and cheer him on.
Still, it’s really cool MC likes him. He can’t stop smiling when he thinks about it.
And he likes himself, which is more than enough.