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Soonyoung hadn’t meant to spiral into full-on detective mode. It started with harmless curiosity, the kind you indulge in while waiting for spreadsheets to load or when corporate training videos play at 0.75x speed. But the moment he saw Mingyu trip on flat linoleum in a straight hallway—arms flailing, limbs doing interpretive dance—he knew. No one that attractive, that chiseled, that protein-bar-invested could also be that clumsy unless they were hiding something. Something powerful. Possibly extraterrestrial. Definitely dramatic.
Like superpowers.
The pattern was too neat to ignore.Fires in the electrical room. Mysterious water leaks. A rogue pigeon that somehow caught fire mid-flight (Soonyoung still wasn’t sure how that one happened—he suspected the legal team was involved in the cover-up). And every time chaos struck, Mingyu would vanish. Gone with a muttered excuse— “bathroom break,” “printer jam,” “I think the fax machine is summoning something unholy”—and like clockwork, Superman would appear downtown.
Majestic. Heroic. Frequently dusted in toner. And guess who else just happened to have toner perpetually smeared on his cuffs?
Soonyoung connected the dots like a man possessed. He had charts. Diagrams. A corkboard connected with red thread, blue thread, purple tinsel (he ran out of string; it was holiday season). He printed blurry screenshots from livestreams and stared at jawlines until his own reflected back at him through the screen. He even tried comparing Superman’s bicep definition to Mingyu’s reflection in the elevator mirror while pretending to check his phone. Subtlety was dead and buried somewhere under the mountain of tinsel-thread logic hanging in his apartment.
At one point, Soonyoung legitimately considered hiring a voice actor to engage Mingyu in casual hallway banter, then pitch-shift the audio and run it through a vocal register matching app. For science. He didn’t just spiral. He pirouetted off the edge of reason and landed in a split.
The theory should have held.
Every graph, every toner-smudged sticky note, every suspiciously timed emergency exit had aligned into a clean narrative: Kim Mingyu, mild-mannered coworker by day, caped crusader by slightly-later-in-the-day. Soonyoung had cracked the case. All he needed was one more variable—a slam-dunk confirmation—that the man who once bench-pressed a filing cabinet during the fire drill was, in fact, hiding otherworldly strength.
But then came the data rupture. The variable that didn’t fit. The glitch in the caped matrix. Because for someone who maybe lifted trucks and inhaled clouds, Mingyu was terrible at handling one (1) soft-spoken coworker named Jeon Wonwoo. Every time Wonwoo walked past—calm, unreadable, eternally cloaked in oversized cardigans—Mingyu turned into a fidgeting sunflower with anxiety issues.
He’d bump into corners. Drop his pens. One time he tried to push his glasses up and accidentally elbowed the whiteboard. And the way he looked at Wonwoo? Soonyoung had seen less intense gazes in melodramatic historical dramas. It was like Mingyu had personally composed a symphony of longing and was now performing it solely through darting glances and breathless “hi”s.
And the post-it incident. Soonyoung would never recover from the post-it incident. Wonwoo had handed Mingyu one, scribbled with a casual “meeting at 3” and a barely-there smiley face. Mingyu looked at it like it had descended from the heavens. Like it had been laminated by angels. He stared. He blinked. Then, with all the grace of a man failing at existence, he stapled it to his own sleeve. Twice.
It was over.
Soonyoung watched all this unfold with his signature snack in hand and came to a realization that shook him to his glittery core: he wasn’t tracking a superhero.
He was tracking a man absolutely, catastrophically in love.
The charts suddenly felt ridiculous. The protein bar? Pointless. He’d been hunting for superpowers when the real mystery was emotional damage disguised as romance. Mingyu didn’t vanish because he had secret capes to don—he vanished because every time Wonwoo said “good morning,” his brain blue-screened.
With a dramatic sigh that echoed through his soul and probably down the ventilation shafts, Soonyoung closed the “MINGYU = SUPERMAN???” folder. Buried it in a drawer with a bent paperclip shaped like a lightning bolt and the unopened snack bar he once used to bribe answers out of Mingyu during a faux-interrogation.
It was time to pivot.
“No more secret identity surveillance,” he declared to no one in particular, dramatically spinning in his chair. “We’re going full rom-com.”
Operation: Get That Fool a Date was officially underway.
Out went the hero-tracking spreadsheets. In came Operation Cupid.exe, and with it, the sheer chaotic force of one Kwon Soonyoung armed with an overactive imagination and far too much access to the office calendar. He orchestrated lunch schedules with the precision of a tactical general. Subtly reshuffled seating charts like a man possessed. Once, he even reorganized the filing cabinets so Mingyu and Wonwoo had to share the same drawer for “miscellaneous forms.” It was fine. It was subtle. It was art.
He began leaving romance novels on Mingyu’s desk—classic pining stories with characters who stared longingly across mead halls or printing stations—with lines aggressively underlined and annotated in glitter pen. Notes like: “Chapter 12: The idiot realizes they’re in love. Sound familiar, Gyu?”
And eye contact practice? A disaster. Mingyu held it for five seconds, forgot how faces worked, and audibly squeaked before dropping his water bottle. The bottle rolled. Bounced off the printer. Knocked over a succulent. Everyone pretended not to notice. Except Soonyoung, who wrote it down in his “progress journal.”
But then came the budget meeting doodle.
Soonyoung glanced over during a particularly boring slide about departmental expenses and nearly screamed. There it was. Scribbled in the margins of Mingyu’s crumpled printout—surrounded by hearts, a halo, and (why??) what looked like a doodle of Wonwoo hugging a toaster—were the very large, very damning initials:
JW♡
Soonyoung made a noise like a baby whale learning to speak and immediately stood up. “Printer emergency,” he blurted, fleeing the room without his notes.
In the supply closet, clutching a box of expired whiteboard markers like a grief-stricken mentor, he whispered, “They grow up so fast.” And then, “I can’t believe I almost called the Pentagon.”
Because the truth was clear now: maybe Mingyu was bulletproof. Maybe he did hover. But the real vulnerability—the real supernova-level weakness—was named Jeon Wonwoo and apparently brewed the world's worst coffee.
And Soonyoung? Soonyoung was no longer hunting heroes. He was matchmaking one love-struck disaster to another, armed with nothing but grit, glitter, and an unshakable belief that chapter 12 always gets them in the end.
Soonyoung had let it go. Really. Truly. Completely.
The whole “Mingyu might be Superman” thing? That was a phase. A fun little rabbit hole from back when he was bored and had too much access to office security footage and not enough supervision. But he'd tossed out the corkboard. Deleted the spreadsheets. The glitter pen he used to highlight “TOP SECRET” on his case files? Burned in a solemn ceremony involving a shot glass, a lighter, and Seokmin yelling, “NOT INDOORS!”
It was over. The superhero fantasy had been debunked—not by logic, but by love.
Because honestly? It didn't matter if Mingyu was secretly saving the city, lifting buses, or deflecting meteors with his jawline.
What mattered—what truly shattered the Soonyoung-shaped illusion—was that Mingyu couldn’t save himself from Jeon Wonwoo. The man was doomed. Beautifully, breathlessly doomed.
Soonyoung had a new goal: matchmaking. Operation Make These Idiots Kiss was in full swing. No more stakeouts—just stake-ins. (Coffee stake-ins. File-room stake-ins. “Oops you both have to reach for the same folder” stake-ins.)
It worked. Of course it worked.
Because they didn’t just fall for each other—they spiraled into love like a meteor re-entering the atmosphere in slow motion. Mingyu softened around the edges. Wonwoo started showing up with an extra cup of coffee “just in case.” Their desks got closer. Their smiles grew longer. Their post-it notes got sappier.
By the time they moved in together, Soonyoung had stopped orchestrating and started chronicling—half wingman, half mythkeeper.
The wedding—when it finally arrived—was less of an event and more of a supernatural phenomenon. A union of aesthetics and divinity. It didn’t just happen, it descended. Fairy lights strung like constellations overhead. A string quartet that somehow played both Vivaldi and the opening bars of a K-drama OST. Floating florals that didn’t so much hover as defy gravity out of sheer romance. The air shimmered like it had been consecrated.
Soonyoung cried through the whole thing. Openly. Loudly.
And that—should’ve been the end.
The final chapter. Happy ever after, fade to black. Two idiots in love, sealed in holy matrimony and matching ring boxes. Soonyoung clinked his glass, full of champagne and vindication. He didn’t think about capes. Didn’t think about toner trails or the time Mingyu caught a falling projector with one hand and called it “reflex.”
He toasted the happy couple with joy in his heart and one glitter pen tucked inside his breast pocket—just for sentiment.
Until.
A flower tower near the photo booth started tilting. Slowly. Majestically. Suspiciously. Maybe it was the wind. Maybe it was hubris. Maybe the universe simply craved drama. It leaned with purpose, poised to obliterate a table full of crystal stemware, fondant cake sculptures, and one extremely breakable swan centerpiece.
And then.
Mingyu moved.
Not “jogged.” Not “caught it at the last second.” No—he moved. One moment he was there, fingers interlaced with Wonwoo’s, sharing a laugh under a canopy of imported wisteria. The next?
He was across the room.
He straightened it gently. Brushed a rose petal off his shoulder. And said—so casually it hurt— “Structural integrity is important.”
Soonyoung froze mid-toast. Blink. Head tilt. Internal buffering.
The phrase was familiar.
The stance was familiar.
The speed—too familiar.
And then it clicked.
Like a thousand conspiracy theories screamed at once. Like the red strings reassembled themselves from the ashes of a long-burned corkboard. Every half-forgotten spreadsheet. Every toner smudge. Every vanishing act wrapped in a “printer jam” excuse.
It all rushed back. Soonyoung screamed.
Across the table, Seokmin choked on his cake pop. “What now?”
“I—He—The tower—THE ARCH—”
“Use full sentences, please.”
“MINGYU IS SUPERMAN.”
Seokmin blinked slowly. “Right. Because we haven’t done this before.”
“I RETIRED THE THEORY.” Soonyoung was vibrating. Full-body tremors of betrayal and cosmic realization. “I deconstructed the wall. I shredded the flowcharts. I burned the glitter pen, Seokmin. I matchmade a superhero. DO YOU UNDERSTAND THE STAKES?””
“Honestly? Not really.”
But Soonyoung was already pacing. Dragging his hands through his hair, muttering about flight patterns and elbow angles. “I almost submitted his fingerprints to a lab. I almost bugged the break room coffee machine. I gave up. I let him go.”
Across the room, Mingyu was now spinning Wonwoo on the dance floor, their foreheads pressed together like a scene written by someone who got rejected by Studio Ghibli for being too sentimental. They were sickeningly cute. Disgustingly domestic.
Soonyoung clutched Seokmin’s arm. “I matchmade a superhero, Seokmin.”
“You also once tried to gift them a couples therapy coupon before they were even dating.”
“Visionary,” Soonyoung muttered. Then louder, “I helped save the city. Emotionally.”
Seokmin gave him a look. One of quiet affection and exhausted tolerance.
Undeterred, Soonyoung sprang to his feet and raised his glass high like a prophecy. “To love! To justice! To Mingyu—who owes me a thank-you, a cape fitting, and at least one feature-length podcast interview.”
“You still don’t have a podcast.”
“I do now. Episode one drops tonight. The Kryptonite of Romance.”
Across the dance floor, Mingyu met his gaze—and winked.
Soonyoung promptly shut down. Brain gone. Systems offline. He sat back down, fished the seating chart out of his blazer pocket, and began fanning himself like a courtly widow from a historical drama.
Then, to no one in particular, he murmured: “Phase two.”
“Baby shower surveillance. Let’s see if this kid can fly.”