Direction Of Life
Title: Direction Of Life
Pairing(s): QMi
Genre(s): Romance, angst, psychological, AU
Length: 3733 words
Rating: PG-13
Summary: Zhou Mi wants a direction in his life. Kyuhyun wants to change the direction of his life.
Inspiration(s): I heard the sound of a flute when leaving my apartment one morning, and this plot came to mind.
```
Zhou Mi was a happy man. He had everything he needed in life-enough money, clean clothing, stability, a high-class education-and loved every aspect of it. He had a secure yet fun-filled job as a radio broadcaster, and his coworkers were always amiable towards him while they were picking out new songs and improvising their introductions. He lived in a cozy apartment on a quiet street that was decorated with flowers and sunshine (just the way he liked it) and close to his parents' house where he would visit every weekend. He also had admirers of both genders throwing themselves at him, and though he appreciated and even enjoyed the idolization, none of them appealed to him anymore than the average stranger walking down the street.
The only thing missing was a direction. Zhou Mi had a static, almost sessile, lifestyle that genuinely needed a push from behind. His life was never in motion; it was just there, existing solely for the reason of existence. It was a tree rooted to the ground, a paper held down by a weight-he was literally a human pulled downwards by the force of gravity and upwards from the force of the floor, totally in equilibrium and in harmony with Newton's three laws of motion.
And he disliked that. Zhou Mi wholeheartedly disliked the fact that he was just like anybody else or that he was perfectly and functionally normal in the general standards of society. He wanted to stand out somehow, and to have a little excitement in his otherwise customary life. He wanted something else.
The tall lanky man started finding excitement in his life on a Friday. The first thing he did was visit a gay bar, but this was met with disappointment when all he experienced was exasperation from rejecting any of the men who approached him (sorry, but one night stands were out of the question!). Next he tried skydiving, and though it did bring a twinge of excitement, it was certainly not worth the twenty-minute puking session that followed right after. He then dared himself to ask a random girl for her phone number, and though he did get it in the end, he realized that he did not think far ahead enough and never ended up calling her. Shame.
Two weeks later, again on a Friday, he was walking down the grey streets with his pointy hands stuffed in his pockets, just about to give up and continue living his inert life, when a sweet sound mingled in a sea of engine splutters and aggravating honks reached his ears. Now, like the majority of the global population, Zhou Mi was quite fond of music, especially those that could move him to tears. And this sound that he heard, it definitely had the potential of moving him to tears.
It was the sound of a flute, Zhou Mi was sure, and it had this luring characteristic in its euphonious melody, tinged with a subtly seductive undertone. The Chinese man felt like he was a hypnotized sailor giving in to the dangerously beautiful libretti of a singing mermaid, doggedly following the enticing sound until he reached a half-open window on the first floor of an apartment. There, he spotted a skinny silhouette with quite unkempt hair, fingers moving gracefully along the keys of the instrument. Zhou Mi tilted his head to the side, trademark smile gracing his lips. ‘This is it,’ he thought, heart fluttering around in his rib cage. ‘This is what I have been looking for.’
```
He managed to change his routine a bit so that he would have at least half an hour or so just to sit on the grass just beside the window to listen as the wind carried the music towards his receiving ears. For the first week and a half, he only sat there in captivated wonder as he listened, his bony back resting against the rough texture of the cement building. By the third, he started wondering who would be able to make such lovely alluring music. Probably somebody with an imaginative disposition akin to that of Anne of Green Gables, with a clear idea of personal freedom and frequent daydreams about what it would feel like to fly. Zhou Mi imagined a charming young boy (he was sure the owner of the silhouette was male) with dark romantic eyes and a lazy smile who would adore talking in rhymes and have a habit of sighing dreamily whenever he had the chance. ‘A typical sap,’ Zhou Mi concluded with a nod of his head. After four weeks of listening beside the window, curiosity crept onto him and he began wanting to meet this obviously talented musician.
On the forty-sixth day of his new routine, Zhou Mi screamed when he saw a spider resting on his left shoulder. It was one of those hairless ones that had disproportionally (and ridiculously) long legs as thin as sewing thread and a two-part body smaller than the eraser at the end of a pencil-in a word, terrifying. His high pitched yelp was enough to stop the flowing music, and Zhou Mi was not quick enough to find a hiding space before a gangly young man appeared at the window, flute in hand.
Zhou Mi was in the middle of brushing off his shoulders when he saw him-the man that he had dreamed of meeting. He took one good look at him and then raised his eyebrow, as this was not what he had in mind. In addition to his disheveled black hair, the young flutist had hard calculating eyes, twitchy lips, a thin gaunt face, sharp body structures, and a don’t mess with me or else expression on his face-the antithesis of the hopeless romantic Zhou Mi expected to find.
“Oh my god, I’m s-sorry,” the Chinese man apologized like his life depended on it. “I had better go, you must be so startled, I’m not a stalker, I swear, I don’t mean any harm by-”
“I know you,” the messy-haired boy remarked indifferently, voice deep and monotone. “You are the guy who sits beside my window every day.”
Zhou Mi could not help but grin; at least he knew of his existence. “That’s me. My name is Zhou Mi.”
“Kyuhyun,” he replied in the same droning voice.
“You play beautifully,” the taller of the two praised sincerely. “I love listening to you.”
Kyuhyun only shrugged, fingering his silver instrument with downcast eyes.
“Hey, do you want to go for coffee or something?” Zhou Mi asked in one breath, heart fluttering as those glassy black eyes met with his. “I know a great café near here.”
Kyuhyun stood still for a moment before shaking his head. “I’m sorry,” he mumbled before heading back into the confines of his apartment room. Beautiful flute music came oozing out several seconds later.
Zhou Mi walked home with a heavy heart but he was still sitting beside the half-opened window the next day and the day after that, loyal to the music that drew him back again and again.
“You are still here,” Kyuhyun commented several days later, the shadow of surprise etched onto his face.
“Yah, I am,” he answered simply
“Don’t you have somewhere else to be?”
Zhou Mi shook his head. “Not at the moment, no.”
“Then don’t you have a life out there?”
“Yah,” he nodded sadly. “But it is a boring life, really. Each day the same, nothing new, not too much spontaneity going on.”
Kyuhyun looked away. “There is nothing wrong with a boring life.”
“Ah, but there is always something wrong with everything,” Zhou Mi responded cheerfully. “If there was nothing wrong with something, there would be nothing right as well. For me, an unchanging life with an unchanging routine is okay but it just gets dull after a while, you know.”
The flutist’s eyes flashed. “An unchanging life may be dull, but it is safe, stable, and above all predictable.”
“That’s the thing, though! Life itself isn’t predictable!” Zhou Mi objected.
“It is if you make it so,” the other man muttered irately, turning around and thus ending the conversation.
```
The first time Zhou Mi entered Kyuhyun’s apartment was on a drizzling wet Friday. He was wearing a raincoat, thank god, but his shoes were anything but waterproof. The only thing keeping him there was the flute melody, and he shuffled uncomfortably from the cold as he strained to hear it.
“Don’t you have a life!?” a voice shouted from behind him.
Zhou Mi whipped around with a start, only to see his favorite musician standing behind the window with a disapproving look on his. “Y-Y-Yes, I do!” he retorted as indignantly as he could through his chattering teeth. “You j-j-just d-don’t know a-about it!”
“Go home already!”
“But I w-w-want to hear you play!”
Kyuhyun scoffed. “Zhou Mi, your lips are turning blue. Go home before you catch a fever.”
“No!” Zhou Mi pouted childishly, and he would have added a stubborn stomp of his foot if his leg was not frozen stiff.
The flutist growled and opened his window a bit wider. “Get in.”
“What?”
“Are you deaf, too? I said get in!”
There was nothing that could match up to the smile on Zhou Mi’s face as he happily crawled into the warm apartment, limbs tangled and all, landing on the other side with a weak oomph. He was immediately covered by a dry white towel.
“The shower is on the right. I’ll have a change of clothes for you in a moment.”
Zhou Mi slipped out of his soaked shoes and took off his raincoat, taking in the surroundings of the cozy space. It was a one-bedroom apartment with a tiled floor, bleak undecorated walls and simple furniture consisting only of a twin bed, a cream-colored couch, and a wooden dresser. He was struck at how desolate it looked-like a desert without sand. He saw Kyuhyun rummaging through a small closet at the other corner of the room, most likely trying to find something large enough to fit his tall frame. The silver flute was on the dresser, the only gleaming object in sight.
The bathroom was nothing more than a sink, a toilet, and shower, all three cramped into a space smaller than the average closet. Zhou Mi showered with difficultly as his pointy elbows kept bumping everywhere, and really, there was no room to move in that space let alone shower. He was lucky to have gotten out of there with only a nasty bruise on his knee and a towel wrapped around his waist.
“Clothes are on the bed,” Kyuhyun called out once he closed the bathroom door. He was sitting on the couch, eyes glued to the laptop in front of him.
“What are you doing?” Zhou Mi asked as he put on the baggy shirt and pants that Kyuhyun fished out for him.
“Blowing up spaceships.”
“Ah.”
Kyuhyun closed his computer and stood up. “Are you hungry?”
“A little,” Zhou Mi admitted sheepishly. “Do you have a kitchen or something? I’ll make dinner.”
Kyuhyun shook his head. “I don’t have a kitchen. Is takeout okay with you?”
“Oh. Sure.” Then the thought hit him. “You don’t have a kitchen? Then what do you eat every day?”
“Um, takeout? I also have some instant noodles under the sink.”
Zhou Mi frowned. “Come on,” he said, taking hold of the other man’s thin wrist. “I’ll treat you to dinner at a nice restaurant or something.” He opened the door of the apartment and took only one step forward before Kyuhyun started flailing around hysterically.
“No, no, no!” he cried out frantically, desperately trying to free himself from the taller man’s grasp. “Please, let’s just order takeout!”
“But you don’t eat enough,” Zhou Mi chided stubbornly, unable to comprehend his suddenly erratic and out of character behavior.
Kyuhyun was practically on his knees in aberrant distress, feet firmly planted on the ground with no intention of moving. His eyes stared fearfully at the open door. “Please, just don’t.”
It only took one look at the trepidation on the flutist’s face for Zhou Mi to let go of his wrist and close the door. Confusion spread through his system like a computer virus as he stared at the panting Kyuhyun, and he enveloped the younger boy in his arms in an attempt to calm him down. “We’ll order takeout,” Zhou Mi promised, stroking his back in a soothing circular motion. Kyuhyun relaxed a little bit at that.
They ended up having pizza delivered to the door, which they ate in complete silence before Kyuhyun quickly ushered his guest out once the rain stopped.
```
Zhou Mi showed up at Kyuhyun’s doorstep with a bag of groceries and a plate of homemade chocolate chip cookies several days later. “Hey!” he greeted with a bright smile on his face that put the sun to shame. “I got food for you.”
Kyuhyun eyed the white bag like it was infected or something. “What are you doing here?”
Zhou Mi walked past the baffled flutist and set the items on the bed. “Making you something to eat. From what I have heard both from you and your neighbors, you have only been living off of instant noodles and takeout, and that is not healthy.”
“I’m still living!” he retorted. “Plus, the lady next door sometimes gives me some apples from her garden.”
“You’re a sack of bones,” said Zhou Mi simply.
“Look at yourself, you maypole!”
The Chinese man rolled his eyes. “Don’t argue with me. I’m making you supper and that’s that.”
Kyuhyun sighed in defeat and slumped onto the couch. “How the hell are you going to make food for me? I have no kitchen and only one pan.”
Zhou Mi shrugged. “I’ll improvise. After all, I just need hot water and an appliance that could heat the dish up. An oven, perhaps?”
“I don’t have an oven.”
“Whatever.”
Kyuhyun gave him a puzzled look. “Are you even sure you know what you are doing?”
“Not always,” he admitted. “But even if I don’t, I always manage to get things done.”
“Uh huh, right,” he muttered before turning on his computer to play yet another game of Starcraft.
Zhou Mi had a sneaky suspicion that the instrumentalist did not believe his declaration one bit, but after three hours of struggling and another hour cleaning up, he finally made a perfectly presentable dish that was unquestionably more nutritious than instant noodles or takeout.
“Sorry it’s a bit cold,” he apologized guiltily, handing the neat mixture of broccoli, chicken, and fried rice over. “The air conditioner does not exactly provide the best heat for cooking, you see.”
As the food was pushed in his direction, Kyuhyun stared at the plate and then at Zhou Mi. “Aren’t we going to share?”
“Nope,” he grinned. “It’s all yours to finish.”
The messy-haired boy widened his eyes. “All this!? Are you kidding me!? I might die of a stomach explosion or something!”
“It’s just a medium sized plate,” Zhou Mi reasoned. “You can do it.”
“You’re going to make me gain weight.”
“That’s probably a good thing in your case, you know.”
“Look who’s talking!”
“Just eat.”
Kyuhyun picked up the plastic white fork on the dresser and stabbed at a chicken, chewing with a vengeance as he stuffed it into his mouth. He paused in mid-chew all of a sudden, surprise and something akin to amazement etched onto his face.
Zhou Mi’s expression went from smug to disquieted in half a millisecond. “What’s wrong? Is it too salty?”
The younger of the two slowly shook his head. “It’s not that. It just tastes like-”
“Like?”
“Like the stuff my mom used to cook for me.”
The taller man broke into a shy smile. “I’ll take that as a compliment.”
Kyuhyun nodded.
“You know,” Zhou Mi continued. “There are better things out there to eat. I could take you to my favorite restaurant that my friend works at. His Beijing fried rice is the absolute best.”
The flutist did not respond, and instead just sat there motionlessly, as if frozen to his seat. Kyuhyun’s blank expression sent an unpleasant chill down Zhou Mi’s spine as he scrutinized every detail on the plate of food in front of him as if looking for something familiar. There was something off about how hysterical those dark unmoving eyes looked despite the calmness of the rest of his body. Zhou Mi’s mind inevitably wandered back to the time he witnessed Kyuhyun’s previous anxiety attack, and he cringed when the realization hit that Kyuhyun was having another one.
“K-Kyuhyun?”
“Don’t,” the said man whispered, his skin turning a ghostly white. “Don’t!”
Zhou Mi was beside him in a heartbeat, his long fingers grasping the flutist’s tense shoulders. “Kyuhyun, breathe. Breathe!”
“Don’t,” he screamed, pushing away the alien physical contact.
Zhou Mi fell backwards onto the tiled floor, nearly misplacing his shoulder at the impact. He groaned and struggled to pull himself upright. Glancing upwards, his heart jumped into his throat when he saw the man that he cared oh so much about clutching at his hair, trembling like an abused child. “Kyuhyun?”
“I can’t leave!”
“What?” Zhou Mi knitted his eyebrows together, inching closer to the traumatized boy.
“I can’t leave! My mom said to stay right here!”
Zhou Mi thought back to the several months he had included Kyuhyun into his static life. Call him a stalker all you want, but he was absolutely certain that there had been no other person in that apartment besides the flutist. “Kui Xian,” Zhou Mi murmured softly, slowly taking the quivering boy into his embrace. “How long has your mom been out? Have you been counting?”
Kyuhyun gulped, nodding. “Twelve years, four months, and ten days.”
It did not take a genius to figure out that there was something wrong with the picture.
Nighttime had almost arrived when Kyuhyun finally calmed down from his mental collapse. They were on the couch curled up against each other with Zhou Mi’s arms wrapped protectively around Kyuhyun’s thin frame in fetal position.
“She was going out to buy more sheet music for me,” Kyuhyun explained. “I was becoming better at the flute, she said. Needed more advanced music.”
‘You are very good,’ Zhou Mi wanted to say but refrained. ‘And handsome, now that I can look at you this closely,’ he decided to leave out.
“I have always wondered what happened to her,” the smaller boy continued. “She hadn’t been back for quite a while.”
Right. Twelve years is quite a while.
Kyuhyun inhaled sharply, eyes watering. “She said that I was supposed to stay home and practice my flute like a good boy until she came back. And, well, she hasn’t come back yet.”
“And you are still here,” Zhou Mi pointed out.
“I would never disobey my mother!” Kyuhyun retorted.
Zhou Mi gulped before saying a clipped but your mother is not coming back, bracing himself for another nervous breakdown.
He was surprised when Kyuhyun said his next phrase: “I know. But I can’t leave.”
Zhou Mi sighed. “Yes, you can. You can leave with me.”
“Mother also said not to run off with strangers.”
“Well, I am not a stranger anymore,” he noted, lightly kissing the flutist’s cheek. “At least I hope I’m not.”
Kyuhyun froze for a long moment-long enough to make Zhou Mi panic-before he leaned forward to kiss him fully on the lips. Zhou Mi’s eyelids widened at first but then drooped once he realized what was happening, heart rate increasing by tenfold. “No, you are not a stranger,” the flutist breathed into his ear.
Zhou Mi looked into Kyuhyun’s dark eyes and felt a jolt of excitement run up his spine.
```
Three important events happened since that day.
One, Kyuhyun at long last stepped out of his plain little apartment room at Zhou Mi’s urging. The first day, he only made it three steps out of his comfort zone before he started hyperventilating. On the second, he made it through the elevator ride and into the lobby-a drastic improvement in such a short time, really-before he turned blue in the face due to lack of air intake. During the next week, Kyuhyun was able to walk into the open, clutching at his boyfriend’s arm like his life depended on it. When on another one of their Kyuhyun therapy walks as Zhou Mi liked to call them, they passed by a cemetery three blocks over and coincidentally spotted a grave with the words “Cho Seung Eun” carved into it. Contrary to what Zhou Mi expected, there were no tears shed, nor were there any nervous breakdowns; there was only acceptance as Kyuhyun kneeled in front of his mother’s buried bones. “Hi Mom,” he whispered, stroking the smooth rim of the grey stone. “It’s been a while.”
Two, the lovers moved in together. “Seriously,” Zhou Mi had argued. “A home without a kitchen is not a home at all! I’m taking you back to my house and fattening you up if it is the last thing I do!”
And three, Zhou Mi found his direction: his life may have been static and boring and unidirectional and uninteresting, but that all changed once Kyuhyun came around. Zhou Mi’s existence was not a flat hill anymore, since the excitement that he had craved for so long could be accomplished with a faint kiss from the love of his life (seriously, his blood pressure skyrocketed every time the feel of Kyuhyun’s lips brushed against his). Along with it came the snarky comments, sarcastic manners, and childish pranks, but that was pleasingly bearable-adorable, even. Every day, Zhou Mi woke up to his angel cuddled up against his chest, commuted to the radio station with Kyuhyun dominating his mind, listened to the music of his personal musician with a smile on his face, and went to bed clutching his lover and inhaling the sweet smell of his hair-and he would never have traded it for anything else in the world.
Because they were adjacent puzzle pieces. Because they were each other’s life sources. Because their souls were fused into one.
Because their directions in life pointed towards each other.
Pairing(s): QMi
Genre(s): Romance, angst, psychological, AU
Length: 3733 words
Rating: PG-13
Summary: Zhou Mi wants a direction in his life. Kyuhyun wants to change the direction of his life.
Inspiration(s): I heard the sound of a flute when leaving my apartment one morning, and this plot came to mind.
```
Zhou Mi was a happy man. He had everything he needed in life-enough money, clean clothing, stability, a high-class education-and loved every aspect of it. He had a secure yet fun-filled job as a radio broadcaster, and his coworkers were always amiable towards him while they were picking out new songs and improvising their introductions. He lived in a cozy apartment on a quiet street that was decorated with flowers and sunshine (just the way he liked it) and close to his parents' house where he would visit every weekend. He also had admirers of both genders throwing themselves at him, and though he appreciated and even enjoyed the idolization, none of them appealed to him anymore than the average stranger walking down the street.
The only thing missing was a direction. Zhou Mi had a static, almost sessile, lifestyle that genuinely needed a push from behind. His life was never in motion; it was just there, existing solely for the reason of existence. It was a tree rooted to the ground, a paper held down by a weight-he was literally a human pulled downwards by the force of gravity and upwards from the force of the floor, totally in equilibrium and in harmony with Newton's three laws of motion.
And he disliked that. Zhou Mi wholeheartedly disliked the fact that he was just like anybody else or that he was perfectly and functionally normal in the general standards of society. He wanted to stand out somehow, and to have a little excitement in his otherwise customary life. He wanted something else.
The tall lanky man started finding excitement in his life on a Friday. The first thing he did was visit a gay bar, but this was met with disappointment when all he experienced was exasperation from rejecting any of the men who approached him (sorry, but one night stands were out of the question!). Next he tried skydiving, and though it did bring a twinge of excitement, it was certainly not worth the twenty-minute puking session that followed right after. He then dared himself to ask a random girl for her phone number, and though he did get it in the end, he realized that he did not think far ahead enough and never ended up calling her. Shame.
Two weeks later, again on a Friday, he was walking down the grey streets with his pointy hands stuffed in his pockets, just about to give up and continue living his inert life, when a sweet sound mingled in a sea of engine splutters and aggravating honks reached his ears. Now, like the majority of the global population, Zhou Mi was quite fond of music, especially those that could move him to tears. And this sound that he heard, it definitely had the potential of moving him to tears.
It was the sound of a flute, Zhou Mi was sure, and it had this luring characteristic in its euphonious melody, tinged with a subtly seductive undertone. The Chinese man felt like he was a hypnotized sailor giving in to the dangerously beautiful libretti of a singing mermaid, doggedly following the enticing sound until he reached a half-open window on the first floor of an apartment. There, he spotted a skinny silhouette with quite unkempt hair, fingers moving gracefully along the keys of the instrument. Zhou Mi tilted his head to the side, trademark smile gracing his lips. ‘This is it,’ he thought, heart fluttering around in his rib cage. ‘This is what I have been looking for.’
```
He managed to change his routine a bit so that he would have at least half an hour or so just to sit on the grass just beside the window to listen as the wind carried the music towards his receiving ears. For the first week and a half, he only sat there in captivated wonder as he listened, his bony back resting against the rough texture of the cement building. By the third, he started wondering who would be able to make such lovely alluring music. Probably somebody with an imaginative disposition akin to that of Anne of Green Gables, with a clear idea of personal freedom and frequent daydreams about what it would feel like to fly. Zhou Mi imagined a charming young boy (he was sure the owner of the silhouette was male) with dark romantic eyes and a lazy smile who would adore talking in rhymes and have a habit of sighing dreamily whenever he had the chance. ‘A typical sap,’ Zhou Mi concluded with a nod of his head. After four weeks of listening beside the window, curiosity crept onto him and he began wanting to meet this obviously talented musician.
On the forty-sixth day of his new routine, Zhou Mi screamed when he saw a spider resting on his left shoulder. It was one of those hairless ones that had disproportionally (and ridiculously) long legs as thin as sewing thread and a two-part body smaller than the eraser at the end of a pencil-in a word, terrifying. His high pitched yelp was enough to stop the flowing music, and Zhou Mi was not quick enough to find a hiding space before a gangly young man appeared at the window, flute in hand.
Zhou Mi was in the middle of brushing off his shoulders when he saw him-the man that he had dreamed of meeting. He took one good look at him and then raised his eyebrow, as this was not what he had in mind. In addition to his disheveled black hair, the young flutist had hard calculating eyes, twitchy lips, a thin gaunt face, sharp body structures, and a don’t mess with me or else expression on his face-the antithesis of the hopeless romantic Zhou Mi expected to find.
“Oh my god, I’m s-sorry,” the Chinese man apologized like his life depended on it. “I had better go, you must be so startled, I’m not a stalker, I swear, I don’t mean any harm by-”
“I know you,” the messy-haired boy remarked indifferently, voice deep and monotone. “You are the guy who sits beside my window every day.”
Zhou Mi could not help but grin; at least he knew of his existence. “That’s me. My name is Zhou Mi.”
“Kyuhyun,” he replied in the same droning voice.
“You play beautifully,” the taller of the two praised sincerely. “I love listening to you.”
Kyuhyun only shrugged, fingering his silver instrument with downcast eyes.
“Hey, do you want to go for coffee or something?” Zhou Mi asked in one breath, heart fluttering as those glassy black eyes met with his. “I know a great café near here.”
Kyuhyun stood still for a moment before shaking his head. “I’m sorry,” he mumbled before heading back into the confines of his apartment room. Beautiful flute music came oozing out several seconds later.
Zhou Mi walked home with a heavy heart but he was still sitting beside the half-opened window the next day and the day after that, loyal to the music that drew him back again and again.
“You are still here,” Kyuhyun commented several days later, the shadow of surprise etched onto his face.
“Yah, I am,” he answered simply
“Don’t you have somewhere else to be?”
Zhou Mi shook his head. “Not at the moment, no.”
“Then don’t you have a life out there?”
“Yah,” he nodded sadly. “But it is a boring life, really. Each day the same, nothing new, not too much spontaneity going on.”
Kyuhyun looked away. “There is nothing wrong with a boring life.”
“Ah, but there is always something wrong with everything,” Zhou Mi responded cheerfully. “If there was nothing wrong with something, there would be nothing right as well. For me, an unchanging life with an unchanging routine is okay but it just gets dull after a while, you know.”
The flutist’s eyes flashed. “An unchanging life may be dull, but it is safe, stable, and above all predictable.”
“That’s the thing, though! Life itself isn’t predictable!” Zhou Mi objected.
“It is if you make it so,” the other man muttered irately, turning around and thus ending the conversation.
```
The first time Zhou Mi entered Kyuhyun’s apartment was on a drizzling wet Friday. He was wearing a raincoat, thank god, but his shoes were anything but waterproof. The only thing keeping him there was the flute melody, and he shuffled uncomfortably from the cold as he strained to hear it.
“Don’t you have a life!?” a voice shouted from behind him.
Zhou Mi whipped around with a start, only to see his favorite musician standing behind the window with a disapproving look on his. “Y-Y-Yes, I do!” he retorted as indignantly as he could through his chattering teeth. “You j-j-just d-don’t know a-about it!”
“Go home already!”
“But I w-w-want to hear you play!”
Kyuhyun scoffed. “Zhou Mi, your lips are turning blue. Go home before you catch a fever.”
“No!” Zhou Mi pouted childishly, and he would have added a stubborn stomp of his foot if his leg was not frozen stiff.
The flutist growled and opened his window a bit wider. “Get in.”
“What?”
“Are you deaf, too? I said get in!”
There was nothing that could match up to the smile on Zhou Mi’s face as he happily crawled into the warm apartment, limbs tangled and all, landing on the other side with a weak oomph. He was immediately covered by a dry white towel.
“The shower is on the right. I’ll have a change of clothes for you in a moment.”
Zhou Mi slipped out of his soaked shoes and took off his raincoat, taking in the surroundings of the cozy space. It was a one-bedroom apartment with a tiled floor, bleak undecorated walls and simple furniture consisting only of a twin bed, a cream-colored couch, and a wooden dresser. He was struck at how desolate it looked-like a desert without sand. He saw Kyuhyun rummaging through a small closet at the other corner of the room, most likely trying to find something large enough to fit his tall frame. The silver flute was on the dresser, the only gleaming object in sight.
The bathroom was nothing more than a sink, a toilet, and shower, all three cramped into a space smaller than the average closet. Zhou Mi showered with difficultly as his pointy elbows kept bumping everywhere, and really, there was no room to move in that space let alone shower. He was lucky to have gotten out of there with only a nasty bruise on his knee and a towel wrapped around his waist.
“Clothes are on the bed,” Kyuhyun called out once he closed the bathroom door. He was sitting on the couch, eyes glued to the laptop in front of him.
“What are you doing?” Zhou Mi asked as he put on the baggy shirt and pants that Kyuhyun fished out for him.
“Blowing up spaceships.”
“Ah.”
Kyuhyun closed his computer and stood up. “Are you hungry?”
“A little,” Zhou Mi admitted sheepishly. “Do you have a kitchen or something? I’ll make dinner.”
Kyuhyun shook his head. “I don’t have a kitchen. Is takeout okay with you?”
“Oh. Sure.” Then the thought hit him. “You don’t have a kitchen? Then what do you eat every day?”
“Um, takeout? I also have some instant noodles under the sink.”
Zhou Mi frowned. “Come on,” he said, taking hold of the other man’s thin wrist. “I’ll treat you to dinner at a nice restaurant or something.” He opened the door of the apartment and took only one step forward before Kyuhyun started flailing around hysterically.
“No, no, no!” he cried out frantically, desperately trying to free himself from the taller man’s grasp. “Please, let’s just order takeout!”
“But you don’t eat enough,” Zhou Mi chided stubbornly, unable to comprehend his suddenly erratic and out of character behavior.
Kyuhyun was practically on his knees in aberrant distress, feet firmly planted on the ground with no intention of moving. His eyes stared fearfully at the open door. “Please, just don’t.”
It only took one look at the trepidation on the flutist’s face for Zhou Mi to let go of his wrist and close the door. Confusion spread through his system like a computer virus as he stared at the panting Kyuhyun, and he enveloped the younger boy in his arms in an attempt to calm him down. “We’ll order takeout,” Zhou Mi promised, stroking his back in a soothing circular motion. Kyuhyun relaxed a little bit at that.
They ended up having pizza delivered to the door, which they ate in complete silence before Kyuhyun quickly ushered his guest out once the rain stopped.
```
Zhou Mi showed up at Kyuhyun’s doorstep with a bag of groceries and a plate of homemade chocolate chip cookies several days later. “Hey!” he greeted with a bright smile on his face that put the sun to shame. “I got food for you.”
Kyuhyun eyed the white bag like it was infected or something. “What are you doing here?”
Zhou Mi walked past the baffled flutist and set the items on the bed. “Making you something to eat. From what I have heard both from you and your neighbors, you have only been living off of instant noodles and takeout, and that is not healthy.”
“I’m still living!” he retorted. “Plus, the lady next door sometimes gives me some apples from her garden.”
“You’re a sack of bones,” said Zhou Mi simply.
“Look at yourself, you maypole!”
The Chinese man rolled his eyes. “Don’t argue with me. I’m making you supper and that’s that.”
Kyuhyun sighed in defeat and slumped onto the couch. “How the hell are you going to make food for me? I have no kitchen and only one pan.”
Zhou Mi shrugged. “I’ll improvise. After all, I just need hot water and an appliance that could heat the dish up. An oven, perhaps?”
“I don’t have an oven.”
“Whatever.”
Kyuhyun gave him a puzzled look. “Are you even sure you know what you are doing?”
“Not always,” he admitted. “But even if I don’t, I always manage to get things done.”
“Uh huh, right,” he muttered before turning on his computer to play yet another game of Starcraft.
Zhou Mi had a sneaky suspicion that the instrumentalist did not believe his declaration one bit, but after three hours of struggling and another hour cleaning up, he finally made a perfectly presentable dish that was unquestionably more nutritious than instant noodles or takeout.
“Sorry it’s a bit cold,” he apologized guiltily, handing the neat mixture of broccoli, chicken, and fried rice over. “The air conditioner does not exactly provide the best heat for cooking, you see.”
As the food was pushed in his direction, Kyuhyun stared at the plate and then at Zhou Mi. “Aren’t we going to share?”
“Nope,” he grinned. “It’s all yours to finish.”
The messy-haired boy widened his eyes. “All this!? Are you kidding me!? I might die of a stomach explosion or something!”
“It’s just a medium sized plate,” Zhou Mi reasoned. “You can do it.”
“You’re going to make me gain weight.”
“That’s probably a good thing in your case, you know.”
“Look who’s talking!”
“Just eat.”
Kyuhyun picked up the plastic white fork on the dresser and stabbed at a chicken, chewing with a vengeance as he stuffed it into his mouth. He paused in mid-chew all of a sudden, surprise and something akin to amazement etched onto his face.
Zhou Mi’s expression went from smug to disquieted in half a millisecond. “What’s wrong? Is it too salty?”
The younger of the two slowly shook his head. “It’s not that. It just tastes like-”
“Like?”
“Like the stuff my mom used to cook for me.”
The taller man broke into a shy smile. “I’ll take that as a compliment.”
Kyuhyun nodded.
“You know,” Zhou Mi continued. “There are better things out there to eat. I could take you to my favorite restaurant that my friend works at. His Beijing fried rice is the absolute best.”
The flutist did not respond, and instead just sat there motionlessly, as if frozen to his seat. Kyuhyun’s blank expression sent an unpleasant chill down Zhou Mi’s spine as he scrutinized every detail on the plate of food in front of him as if looking for something familiar. There was something off about how hysterical those dark unmoving eyes looked despite the calmness of the rest of his body. Zhou Mi’s mind inevitably wandered back to the time he witnessed Kyuhyun’s previous anxiety attack, and he cringed when the realization hit that Kyuhyun was having another one.
“K-Kyuhyun?”
“Don’t,” the said man whispered, his skin turning a ghostly white. “Don’t!”
Zhou Mi was beside him in a heartbeat, his long fingers grasping the flutist’s tense shoulders. “Kyuhyun, breathe. Breathe!”
“Don’t,” he screamed, pushing away the alien physical contact.
Zhou Mi fell backwards onto the tiled floor, nearly misplacing his shoulder at the impact. He groaned and struggled to pull himself upright. Glancing upwards, his heart jumped into his throat when he saw the man that he cared oh so much about clutching at his hair, trembling like an abused child. “Kyuhyun?”
“I can’t leave!”
“What?” Zhou Mi knitted his eyebrows together, inching closer to the traumatized boy.
“I can’t leave! My mom said to stay right here!”
Zhou Mi thought back to the several months he had included Kyuhyun into his static life. Call him a stalker all you want, but he was absolutely certain that there had been no other person in that apartment besides the flutist. “Kui Xian,” Zhou Mi murmured softly, slowly taking the quivering boy into his embrace. “How long has your mom been out? Have you been counting?”
Kyuhyun gulped, nodding. “Twelve years, four months, and ten days.”
It did not take a genius to figure out that there was something wrong with the picture.
Nighttime had almost arrived when Kyuhyun finally calmed down from his mental collapse. They were on the couch curled up against each other with Zhou Mi’s arms wrapped protectively around Kyuhyun’s thin frame in fetal position.
“She was going out to buy more sheet music for me,” Kyuhyun explained. “I was becoming better at the flute, she said. Needed more advanced music.”
‘You are very good,’ Zhou Mi wanted to say but refrained. ‘And handsome, now that I can look at you this closely,’ he decided to leave out.
“I have always wondered what happened to her,” the smaller boy continued. “She hadn’t been back for quite a while.”
Right. Twelve years is quite a while.
Kyuhyun inhaled sharply, eyes watering. “She said that I was supposed to stay home and practice my flute like a good boy until she came back. And, well, she hasn’t come back yet.”
“And you are still here,” Zhou Mi pointed out.
“I would never disobey my mother!” Kyuhyun retorted.
Zhou Mi gulped before saying a clipped but your mother is not coming back, bracing himself for another nervous breakdown.
He was surprised when Kyuhyun said his next phrase: “I know. But I can’t leave.”
Zhou Mi sighed. “Yes, you can. You can leave with me.”
“Mother also said not to run off with strangers.”
“Well, I am not a stranger anymore,” he noted, lightly kissing the flutist’s cheek. “At least I hope I’m not.”
Kyuhyun froze for a long moment-long enough to make Zhou Mi panic-before he leaned forward to kiss him fully on the lips. Zhou Mi’s eyelids widened at first but then drooped once he realized what was happening, heart rate increasing by tenfold. “No, you are not a stranger,” the flutist breathed into his ear.
Zhou Mi looked into Kyuhyun’s dark eyes and felt a jolt of excitement run up his spine.
```
Three important events happened since that day.
One, Kyuhyun at long last stepped out of his plain little apartment room at Zhou Mi’s urging. The first day, he only made it three steps out of his comfort zone before he started hyperventilating. On the second, he made it through the elevator ride and into the lobby-a drastic improvement in such a short time, really-before he turned blue in the face due to lack of air intake. During the next week, Kyuhyun was able to walk into the open, clutching at his boyfriend’s arm like his life depended on it. When on another one of their Kyuhyun therapy walks as Zhou Mi liked to call them, they passed by a cemetery three blocks over and coincidentally spotted a grave with the words “Cho Seung Eun” carved into it. Contrary to what Zhou Mi expected, there were no tears shed, nor were there any nervous breakdowns; there was only acceptance as Kyuhyun kneeled in front of his mother’s buried bones. “Hi Mom,” he whispered, stroking the smooth rim of the grey stone. “It’s been a while.”
Two, the lovers moved in together. “Seriously,” Zhou Mi had argued. “A home without a kitchen is not a home at all! I’m taking you back to my house and fattening you up if it is the last thing I do!”
And three, Zhou Mi found his direction: his life may have been static and boring and unidirectional and uninteresting, but that all changed once Kyuhyun came around. Zhou Mi’s existence was not a flat hill anymore, since the excitement that he had craved for so long could be accomplished with a faint kiss from the love of his life (seriously, his blood pressure skyrocketed every time the feel of Kyuhyun’s lips brushed against his). Along with it came the snarky comments, sarcastic manners, and childish pranks, but that was pleasingly bearable-adorable, even. Every day, Zhou Mi woke up to his angel cuddled up against his chest, commuted to the radio station with Kyuhyun dominating his mind, listened to the music of his personal musician with a smile on his face, and went to bed clutching his lover and inhaling the sweet smell of his hair-and he would never have traded it for anything else in the world.
Because they were adjacent puzzle pieces. Because they were each other’s life sources. Because their souls were fused into one.
Because their directions in life pointed towards each other.