On his second day back at college, Minho woke up and immediately rolled over, groaning loudly, curling in on himself.
Of course, it was just as horrible as ever to wake up early and attempt to convince himself to get up and get right to classes, but it was particularly disheartening to have returned to feeling all-over-achy and deadly sore in his neck and back. All it took was one night. One night of sleeping on that darn mattress, and as he put his cold feet to the scratchy dorm room carpet he felt that he'd become a hobbling old man.
With his whole body seeming to scream out complaints, he forced himself to the door to get his slippers on, gather up his toothpaste and toothbrush, and head for the bathroom. The light of the hallway and the noise of the students drowsily puttering around, albeit low and quiet, was already overwhelming.
Clutching the doorknob, Minho gave a hushed sigh and straightened himself out, despite the fact that that really, really hurt, sending a shooting pain up his back. Even if it hurt ten times more, he was not going to walk through a public area stumbling around and hunched over and rubbing his sore back.
If only he hadn't spent so long snoozing his alarm and refusing to face his fate (dealing with a sore body all day), he would've had the time to take a hot shower, which surely would've helped. Oh well. Hopefully he'd have time tonight.
Of course, as he went about his day, in and out of classes and whatnot, he just dealt with it, though it only seemed to get worse the longer he went on. What was he going to do, go to Jisung, begging to be saved from some tense, sore muscles?? Ew.
It wasn't like he wasn't used to dealing with and concealing the pain he would wake up with from all the past months he'd spent sleeping in that bed, but he was temporarily out of practice and now he worried about anyone looking at him while he shifted uncomfortably in his plastic, fold-out chair, grimaced as he tilted his neck just slightly in the wrong direction, or let his face sink into a particularly sour expression as he forgot to cover up the fact that he was in constant pain and let the discomfort color his face.
Maybe the worst part of it all was that as he took his seat in the huge, echoey lecture hall that Bio was held in, Seungmin was leaning over in his seat to rub his thumb into Jeongin's neck. Minho lowered his backpack to the floor beside the isolated chair he picked (trying particularly hard to conceal a grunt at the strain that had put on his back), towards the top of the room, as always, and bit down a curling lip.
Could he not just get through one day without having relief dangled in front of his face almost tauntingly?
♡
Minho sat idly at the lunch table, in his usual, secluded seat at the end of the table, while the others did their regular laughing and chatting and eating. His phone sat turned-over in the otherwise empty table space in front of him and he stared blankly at it.
Because he was the only one not eating, he was receiving a few concerned glances that seemed precursor to concerned questions, and that was just about enough to convince him to just go and get something, but at the thought of consuming something he felt rather sick and decided it wasn't worth it after all. It was all because of the stabbing ache in his lower back, intense enough to make him feel nauseous and therefore steal away his appetite.
Of course, the noise of the cafeteria, like a swarm of buzzing wasps, stung Minho's head with an incessant throbbing, because he'd had a steadily growing headache since his first class that morning— or several, actually. He was collecting all types of headaches, which had been alternating and switching around. Currently, the pain was lingering around his forehead and the base of his head. If it was just quiet at the table he sat at, maybe he would've been able to handle it, but Hyunjin was currently panicking out loud to the whole group about the rumors he'd heard of a pop quiz.
With a nearly inaudible sigh, Minho threw in the towel and scooped up his phone and rose to his feet. He'd just go upstairs and lie down until it was time to get back to class. As he slung his backpack over one shoulder, biting his cheek to keep from wincing as he turned around, Chan called out, "You're not eating, Minho?"
He only answered with a wave of his hand and an incoherent grumble that was meant to brush him off. Thankfully, there were no more disturbances (aside, of course, from the bright hallway lights) as he made his way to his room.
The moment he shut his door behind him he lowered his tense eyebrows and let his eyelids droop as he let the 'neutral', alert expression he'd been maintaining all day melt away. The backpack fell to the floor with a thud that sent a twinge of pain to his temples, and immediately after he shut the blinds and immediately laid down on the bed, surprisingly relieved to be there after it causing all this mess for him in the first place.
Things really hadn't been going right for him all school year, but at least there was the roommate situation. Getting Hyunjin as his roommate may have been the mightiest stroke of luck he'd ever had, because now the dorm room was a place that he could actually rest, rather than sit tensely and carefully, knowing someone else was in the room to see him. He needed that so much now, clinging to the solitude of the room like a buoy in a sea of the stress of keeping a stiff upper lip.
He really couldn't afford to fall asleep now with the thirty-or-so minutes that remained before his literature class. Just resting his eyes, to block out even the grey, dim light of the shaded room , was good enough for now.
Of course, he did fall asleep, and to his chagrin he really felt no better when he woke. If anything his head felt even foggier than it had before he dozed off, which was the reason he was so slow to pick up his phone and check the time.
Luckily, he hadn't slept too long, and he was only a few minutes late for class. However, unbeknownst to him (because he was far too focused on the pain in his head rather than the lunch table conversation), the Literature teacher had indeed decided to kick off the new semester with a pop quiz.
Normally, such a thing would be no big deal. Literature was easy, and Minho always did almost exceptionally well on tests and quizzes without needing to study much, but today he doubted his ability to string together a single coherent sentence.
Head throbbing, eyes glazing over, he grasped at every available straw his fried brain would offer, gripping his pencil with a fear-tightened fist as he scribbled onto the page laid in front of him so hard his lead broke a few times.
And when it was done he rubbed his face discreetly, covering up his scrunched-up expression from the prying eyes of the fifty-some other people in the classroom. All he could do was hope for the best and pray that he'd managed to get more questions right than he expected.
Curse that lousy mattress.
꘎♡━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━♡꘎
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okay so for those of you that didn't see my announcement, im currently on a trip and that is the reason why this update is double late :,) i decided to heavily edit (basically this whole chapter was originally meant to last for about one paragraph and then i decided it needed a detailed description) this which took a while bc it's been so hard to focus. it's also the reason why this update currently has no pictures bc for some reason they don't work on mobile for me? so someone plz remind me to add pictures at some point ;-;
