Super Junior AU; Hanchul; The Best Days of Our Lives
Title: The Best Days of Our Lives
Chapter: 23/25
Fandom: Super Junior AU (High School)
Pairing: Hankyung/crossdressing!Heechul (main), Kangin/Eeteuk, Kibum/Donghae, Yehsung/Ryeowook, Kyuhyun/Sungmin, bestfriends!Eunhae.
Word count: 4,105
Rating: PG-13
Summary: Coming into a strange new world can be strange enough. Unfortunately, someone’s forgotten to tell Hankyung something Very Important.
A/N: I made the mistake of not actually talking about this before, but the business with the fan club is not reflecting current fandom happenings with regards Only13 and stuff like that. I got the idea for the fan club from watching things like Hana Yori Dango, which has already been mentioned. I'm not actually saying anything about real life when I write about the fan club. I just thought I should say this, just in case people get the wrong idea.
And the Siwon/Xiao Li is almost an exercise in writing het, which I don't manage that well ^__^ But here we go, back to good old fashioned boy love. This is a long chapter...and I don't know why XD
Chapter 1 / Chapter 2 / Chapter 3 / Chapter 4 / Chapter 5 / Chapter 6 / Chapter 7 / Chapter 8 / Chapter 9 / Chapter 10 / Chapter 11 / Chapter 12 / Chapter 13 / Chapter 14 / Chapter 15 / Chapter 16 / Chapter 17 / Chapter 18 / Chapter 19 / Chapter 20 / Chapter 21 / Chapter 22 / Chapter 23 / Chapter 24
“You seemed angry today,” said Heechul on the phone that night, as Hankyung sat at his desk with various textbooks spread out in front of him.
“I was angry,” said Hankyung mildly, and quickly solved another equation.
“You don’t get angry,” said Heechul, and Hankyung didn’t know if it was the connection crackling or something else that made Heechul’s voice sound like it caught.
“Everyone gets angry,” said Hankyung with a laugh.
“Not you,” said Heechul, and there was an element of forcefulness in his voice. “You don’t get angry. You get worried when people yell, and you get flustered, and you ask the girl who’s kissing you really politely if she’d mind letting go of you. Hankyung, you don’t get angry.” There was a pause, in which Hankyung didn’t interrupt whatever Heechul was thinking about. “It worried me,” he said finally.
Hankyung stood up and wandered over to his bed, where he lay down on his back, one hand above his head. “Why?” He asked, because he was a little bit confused.
“It was scary,” admitted Heechul and Hankyung definitely heard his voice catch this time. “You don’t get angry, and you were so tense and it was like there was a wall separating you from me. I was scared about what you would do, but you had an awful self control, like there was something building up inside of you until you wouldn’t have been able to take it anymore.”
“I was fine,” said Hankyung, and then, in an attempt to lighten the mood, he added, “I’m scary when I’m angry, you’re just hot.”
“I’m always hot,” said Heechul, and seemed to take the bait, but later, when they were saying goodbye, he suddenly said, “I’m not saying that you can’t get angry. Just - just tell me, so I can help.”
“It’s probably just as well that I never get angry if you’re going to react like this,” said Hankyung with a private smile, but he agreed anyway.
*
In January, a horrible cold seemed to sweep it’s way through the school, leaving no survivors, except for Hankyung, who had the immune system of an ox after growing up in the countryside. Even Heechul didn’t remain unscathed - in fact, he was one of those who were hit the hardest, and this did not make for a happy Heechul, and Hankyung spent a week putting up with complaining and requests for something else for the invalid, you wouldn’t want to put out the invalid, would you? Kyuhyun was also hit quite hard. Apparently, his sickliness as a child had not quite cleared up, and he spent a couple of days at home before he came back into school, still completely ill, but refusing to follow Sungmin’s demands that he go home for fear that he miss something important at school.
Someone who Hankyung hadn’t expected to be hit so hard was Eeteuk, who forced himself into school despite anything, simply because he was in his last year and hoped to get a scholarship to the local college after he graduated. On Monday, he came in with Kangin telling him to go home; by Tuesday, he had to force Kangin to let him leave the house; by Wednesday, he collapsed from a fever in the middle of dinner.
No one had quite been expecting it, least of all Eeteuk, who had been in the middle of a sentence when he suddenly stopped, put a hand to his head, said that he felt a bit woozy, and then fainted. Eunhyuk, who had been sitting next to him, managed to catch him around the shoulders before he slipped off his seat and hit the floor, but there were a few hearts in throats before he did it. Kangin cursed and jumped out of his seat to rush around and take Eeteuk off him. He placed a hand on his forehead, and then cursed again.
“He’s so hot he might as well be on fire,” he said in an exasperated voice. “See, this is why he should listen to me more often.”
Heechul reached over and poked Eeteuk in the face, taking the chance to do so while the boy was unconscious. “Ew,” he said, and retracted his hand. “He’s sweating.”
“Of course he’s sweating,” said Kibum, looking carefully at the boy. “He’s running a fever.”
“Maybe you should take him to the nurse’s office,” suggested Siwon, as Xiao Li blinked at them all in total confusion as to what was going on. Hankyung thought that this was an excellent idea, because currently all that was happening was that everyone was looking at Eeteuk be unconscious, without actually doing anything about it.
Kangin seemed to agree with him, because he pulled Eeteuk to his feet and tried to pull him out that way, and when that didn’t work, he picked him up bridal style, and started walking like that, ignoring the strange looks he got from the other people in the dinner hall. Hankyung and Donghae went with him to open any doors on the way - or, at least, that was what they claimed. In reality, Hankyung had finished and was bored, and Donghae wanted to see what Kangin said to Eeteuk, because he was, according to Donghae, bound to be very angry.
They met a girl and a boy on their way, who seemed to be in Kangin and Eeteuk’s class, from the way they greeted Kangin and then did a double take as they saw Eeteuk in his arms. “What the hell is going on?” The girl asked, a slight smile on her face. “Did you knock Eeteuk-shi out or something?”
“He’s fainted because the stupid idiot refused to stay home after he knew that he was suffering from a fever,” said Kangin, and he didn’t stop walking and the girl and boy joined the group.
“Wow,” said the girl, and hopped a little as she tried to put her hand on Eeteuk’s forehead to feel for herself.
“I take it you weren’t going to let him leave the house today,” said the boy with a grin.
“You try stopping Eeteuk from doing something when he wants to do it,” grumbled Kangin, and the two newcomers laughed at him and then said goodbye and wandered off again somewhere.
“I didn’t know that people knew you and Eeteuk lived together,” said Hankyung.
“Everyone knows it,” said Kangin, in a tone that suggested that he wasn’t really paying attention.
“They just think that there are two bedrooms for a reason,” said Donghae with an insinuating smile.
The nurse agreed with Kangin - Eeteuk probably shouldn’t have even left the house, and should have spent the day in bed with plenty of fluids, and Eeteuk was also told this when he finally woke up. The nurse left them to look after a boy who had been hit in the face with a football, and Kangin turned to Eeteuk with a mixture of annoyance and exasperation on his face.
“You’re an idiot,” he said.
“I’m not,” said Eeteuk, and huffed and folded his arms. There was a light sheen of sweat on his forehead, and while he seemed to have regained some of his former strength, he still lay back on the bed, and his smile was weak.
“You are,” insisted Kangin. “Say sorry.”
“I’m sorry,” said Eeteuk, looking as though someone had just fed him fish oil.
Kangin looked at him for a few more minutes before he sighed and turned to Hankyung. “Could you go to the classroom and get his things for him? I’m taking him home.” He ignored the protests from Eeteuk. “Someone from the class will point out his things for you. Donghae, you can go back down to the table if you want. Tell Kibum that he can’t have a lift home anymore.”
“That’s not very fair,” said Donghae, but it wasn’t Kibum that he was referring to. “I wanted to watch you shout at Eeteuk.”
“I’m not going to shout at him,” said Kangin with a frown. “I’m going to practically tie him to the bed to stop him from getting up, and force feed him chicken soup.”
“Kinky,” said Donghae with a grin, and bounced out of the room before Kangin could say anything to him, or attempt to hit him, and Hankyung shook his head and followed Donghae out of the room.
Hankyung received some very weird looks as he walked up the third year corridor, similar to the looks Ryeowook had been subject to when he had come into Yehsung’s classroom. As he walked into class 3.3, he just hoped that he had the right room, and that he wasn’t going to end up making a total fool of himself in front of his seniors.
“Hello?” A tall, pretty girl smiled at him as he walked in, and she paused in putting up posters on the wall. Hankyung thought it likely that she was the class leader, and so he smiled back as she climbed back down the mini ladder she’d been standing on.
“I’m looking for Eeteuk’s table,” he said. “He’s not very well, and Kangin’s taking him home.”
“Oh,” said the girl, and her smile faded. “Is he all right?”
“Yeah,” said Hankyung in a bright voice, because a couple of the boys in the corner were looking worried too, and he thought that if he sounded all right, then they’d believe him when he said Eeteuk was all right. “It’s just his cold.”
“We heard Kangin tell him to go home second period,” said the girl with a roll of her eyes. “That boy never does anything he’s told.”
“This is his desk,” said one of the boys, putting his hand of the third one of the back in the second row. He pointed to the one behind that. “That’s Kangin, I don’t know if you want to take his things too.”
“I probably should,” said Hankyung doubtfully, because Kangin hadn’t mentioned that. “He didn’t say so, I think he was too worried about Eeteuk.” Too late, he realised that what he’d said could have had some not-so-good connotations, which would never have been picked up on before but the current atmosphere surrounding the group was one of great interest ever since Ryeowook and Yehsung had been revealed.
The girl rolled her eyes again. “Honestly,” she said, pulling Eeteuk’s coat from the rack, “the only way those two could be more obvious about it would be if they started making out in the middle of a biology lesson.”
Hankyung blinked at her a couple of times, aware that he probably looked completely dim and stupid. “Excuse me?” He asked.
“Don’t worry,” said one of the boys. “Everyone already knows.”
“And everyone knows that Kangin and Eeteuk don’t know that everyone knows,” said the girl with a smile.
“Know what?” Hankyung thought that he should really get all the facts straight before he assumed something and managed to make the situation worse than what it probably was.
“We all know that Eeteuk and Kangin are going out together,” said the girl. “I mean, they’re already living together, what’s not to know?”
“They’re friends,” said Hankyung desperately, who felt that he shouldn’t really be having this conversation, and he wasn’t too sure which direction he should take it in, but just to be on the safe side, he was denying everything. “Best friends. And they have two bedrooms.”
“And one of those two bedrooms aren’t used,” said the girl with a grin. “I should know. I went over once really early last year to work on a project with them, and they’d slept through the alarm, and while they wandered around still in their pyjamas getting ready and the like, I peeked into the second bedroom and it certainly had not been slept in.”
“So.” Hankyung certainly did not have a clue where to go now. “You know?” He asked, drawing his shoulders back so he could make a quick get away if he needed to.
“Of course we know,” said the boy. “We’ve been in the same class as them for three years, you’d think we’d be able to notice these things.”
“But they don’t know you know,” said Hankyung. “They still think it’s a perfect secret.”
“That’s what makes it so funny,” said the girl with a grin.
“I just thought you should know,” said Hankyung faintly, as he put the stuff he’d been given in the boot of the car, and Kangin made sure that Eeteuk was comfortably in the car while Eeteuk tried to push his hands away and weakly laughed. “Everyone in your class, and possibly the whole school, knows about you and Eeteuk.”
Kangin straightened up and stared at him. “Bloody hell, Hankyung,” he said after a while. “You were only gone five minutes.”
“I didn’t tell them,” said Hankyung loudly, holding his hands up in defence. “They already knew!”
“What do you mean, they already knew? Are you sure they weren’t just referencing us living together?”
“That’s what they did reference,” said Hankyung. “But not in the way that you’re thinking. A girl who I think may have been your class president said that she went to your house once and she could tell that you hadn’t used one of the beds. Believe me, she knew.”
Kangin turned pale, and he bent down to talk to Eeteuk. “I told you Na-yin knew,” he said. “Why the heck didn’t you set the alarm on time?”
“That was a year ago,” protested Eeteuk, and lay his head back against the seat. “Can we go and deal with this tomorrow?” He asked. “My head is really hurting me.”
“I don’t think you have to deal with it,” said Hankyung. “According to the girl I was talking to, they’ve known for ages and they think it’s funny that you don’t know they know.”
“Na-yin can be scary sometimes,” said Kangin. “She always seems to know everything.”
“She’ll make a good mother then,” said Hankyung, and waved off the questioning look Kangin gave him. “Don’t worry,” he said. “I’ll ask around discreetly, and see if there really is anyone else who knows.”
“Imagine this,” said Hankyung to Na-young and In-jin, while Ryeowook sat behind them and nodded encouragingly. “Imagine that there was a couple, who everyone knew was going out, but they didn’t know everyone knew. What would you do?”
“Is this about Kangin-oppa and Eeteuk-oppa?” Na-young asked, glancing around at Ryeowook for confirmation, who stared back, a little shocked. “Because everyone knows about them, but no one says anything because they might find it embarrassing.”
Hankyung felt like banging his head off the wall placed very conveniently to the left of him. “So you know as well,” he said, and Ryeowook shook his head slightly in confusion. “How long have you known?”
“I don’t know,” said In-jin thoughtfully. “I suppose it’s like Sungmin and Kyuhyun. It’s just always been obvious.”
“How long have Eeteuk and Kangin been keeping this a secret?” Hankyung asked Ryeowook.
“About three years,” said Ryeowook faintly. “They didn’t get together until after they moved in together.”
“Oh,” said Na-young. “We thought longer than that.”
“So really,” said Hankyung, and he rested his head against the cool wall because he could feel some pressure building up behind his eyes, “this is a rumour that became true, rather than something that was true that became a rumour, as it was with you and Yehsung.”
“I suppose,” said Ryeowook, who looked confused by that statement, as if he couldn’t quite work out what it was supposed to be saying.
“Well, that’s good,” said Hankyung, and he stood up. “I guess I don’t have to do any more investigating, I can just tell Kangin that it’s his own fault for making rumours true.”
“Yes?” Ryeowook looked completely confused now.
In the end, it wasn’t a case of Eeteuk and Kangin being revealed, because it’s hard to be revealed when everyone already knows anyway. It was more like it was revealed to Kangin and Eeteuk.
*
Throughout January, Hankyung noticed that Xiao Li’s Korean improved, so slowly that nobody really noticed until she started to laugh at one of their jokes at a lunch time, and everyone stared at her, and she repeated the joke to Hankyung in Chinese, who stared at her hardest. Clearly, she could understand a lot more than she spoke it, but through endless nights of studying, by the end of the month she was able to say enough disconnected words to almost get her meaning across. The girls in her class seemed to find her adorable, and had adopted her without any fuss whatsoever, and helped her along by saying a lot of words that they thought she might be meaning whenever she lost what she was saying, or got stuck.
Siwon’s Chinese had improved remarkably too, though Hankyung knew that this was because he studied it for at least an hour ever day. He no longer needed Hankyung to finish quite as many sentences, but Hankyung was still the one who spoke to Xiao Li the most, because everyone wanted to include her in whatever they were doing, especially Heechul, who didn’t think it was fair to leave her out just because she couldn’t speak the language. The improvement in Siwon’s Chinese ensured that lessons for Xiao Li weren’t quite so difficult for her anymore - things like maths were fine, because she could follow numbers and letters, but things like history had been a major problem, because she didn’t understand the Korean that the teacher spoke, or the Korean in the actual textbooks. In the end, Siwon had ordered Chinese versions of all the school textbooks for her, and tended to just open it to the page that they were studying at the start of each lesson. The teachers had learnt to not call on her for answers, because while she recognised her name and stood up, she would just stand there, smiling pleasantly, while Siwon tried to translate as best he could. The few times he managed to get the question across, he hadn’t understood any of her answer, and the whole thing had turned into a complete disaster that resulted in a laughing class and a very confused teacher.
She demanded to see the dance team in practice, and wouldn’t take no for an answer - or more, Heechul hadn’t let Hankyung give no as an answer, and while Siwon attended a council meeting, Xiao Li sat in on a practice, sitting next to Heechul as they danced in the center of the room, going over old routines that the other boys knew by heart, and which Hankyung was still learning. They had a break after around half an hour, and Heechul handed them bottles of water and Xiao Li smiled at them.
“I like it,” she said in Korean. “Dance. I dance.”
“You dance?” asked Eunhyuk, rubbing a towel over his face while he looked at her in surprise.
“Yes,” said Xiao Li. “I show?”
“Go ahead,” said Eunhyuk, and motioned to the open floor.
She slipped off her shoes and removed her blazer, placing it carefully on the seat she had been occupying, and she moved to the middle of the room. After a few seconds, she closed her eyes and began to move to a non-existent beat of music, weaving this way and that, her toes pointed, and it seemed as though suddenly she didn’t have a skeletal structure, as if it was liquid that ran through her, as she bent and twisted, and Hankyung recognised it from the Chinese dancers that he’d seen so many years ago, as she tripped lightly across the floor, arms held above her head, morphing and changing into dramatic poses. There was complete silence when she finished and opened her eyes, a happy flush on her cheeks.
“Wow,” said Eunhyuk, as Donghae stood up with wide eyes, and Shindong started clapping. “You’re good.”
“Thank you,” said Xiao Li in Korean, and bowed gracefully.
“That’s better than good,” said Shindong. “That’s not just talent like it was with Hankyung, she’s had training.”
“I’ve done traditional Chinese dances for five years,” said Xiao Li to Hankyung in Chinese, as she pulled her shoes back on. “I haven’t tried it in a while, so it probably looked really weird.”
“It looked fantastic,” said Hankyung, still a little amazed by it, and then he turned to Heechul, and said, in Korean, “didn’t it look great?”
“If I was straight,” said Heechul with a smirk, “I’d so hit that.”
“Ew,” said Hankyung. “I’m not translating that.”
“Yes,” said Heechul to Xiao Li, and held his thumbs up. “Good, good.”
“I only have one thing to say,” said Eunhyuk with a grin. “Siwon, you did well.”
“Stop perving on the poor girl,” said Hankyung, rolling his eyes and thinking that it was all very well and good when she didn’t understand what they were saying, because he’d be worried about how she’d react if she had understood. A thought struck him. “Do you allow girls in the dance team?” He asked casually, trying to be subtle and not managing it very well.
“That’s not the right question,” said Eunhyuk. “The right question is, does she want to join the dance club?”
“Yes please,” said Xiao Li, before Hankyung even asked her, having understood the question in Korean. She grinned at them and stood up expectantly, and Donghae stood up too, and started showing her a routine that Hankyung had been finding difficult, set to a old H.O.T song, and while the routine wasn’t as complicated as the one that he’d first attempted, it was full of complicated hand and leg movements that Hankyung kept tripping up on. Xiao Li, with her training, managed to get it almost straight away, and before long it was her who was laughingly trying to explain to Hankyung how to do something.
“I really like her,” said Heechul with a smirk, as Xiao Li collapsed to the floor laughing as Hankyung tried to follow her movements. “I really, really like her.”
“Xiao Li dances?” Siwon’s facial expression was almost comical when they broke the news to him on the way home that night, Xiao Li having been delivered to her car safely.
“And how,” said Heechul, and slapped Siwon on the back. “Promise me one thing,” he said. “Sleep with her at least once before you split up, because I doubt you’re going to find anything like that anywhere other than China itself.”
Siwon looked scandalised. “I don’t want to sleep with her,” he hissed, looking around to see if anyone had noticed, despite the street being deserted apart from the three of them.
“Huh,” said Heechul. “That’s what Hankyung said about me, and look what happened there.”
“I don’t want to talk about that,” said Siwon. “I mean, we’ve only been out three times, that’s just a ridiculous thing to say.”
“But you’ve thought about it,” said Heechul, who seemed determined to get the truth out no matter what embarrassment it caused Siwon, and also Hankyung, who certainly didn’t want to be hearing this. To be honest, the embarrassment was probably a bonus in Heechul’s eyes.
“I-” Siwon looked at Hankyung for some help, but Hankyung was too busy avoiding his eyes to look at him. “I don’t want to talk about this,” said Siwon after a couple of minutes of just making weird noises and stuttering.
“So you have,” said Heechul with a grin.
“I’m not talking about this,” said Siwon, and turned off towards his house. Heechul laughed at him.
“One of these days,” said Hankyung thoughtfully, as they neared Heechul’s house, “he’s going to stop speaking to you or something.”
“He knows I’m only joking,” said Heechul, and stopped outside his gate and wrapped his arms around Hankyung’s neck. “Besides, he loves me too much to do that.”
“I suppose he does,” said Hankyung, grinning. “God knows why, though.”
“You know what?” Heechul ignored his jibe, and instead took a step closer so he could talk quietly into his ear. “You’re a dancer too.”
“Your point?” Hankyung was getting good at not letting his voice shake when Heechul was breathing into his ear, though it had taken some time.
“My point,” said Heechul, still in that same quiet voice, “is that we’ve never tried to see if you can bend that way. Maybe we should. Sometime.”
“Um,” said Hankyung, and thought that Heechul really was very good at this seducing lark, as he pulled away and smirked and walked into his house, leaving Hankyung in the street breathing quite deeply.
Chapter: 23/25
Fandom: Super Junior AU (High School)
Pairing: Hankyung/crossdressing!Heechul (main), Kangin/Eeteuk, Kibum/Donghae, Yehsung/Ryeowook, Kyuhyun/Sungmin, bestfriends!Eunhae.
Word count: 4,105
Rating: PG-13
Summary: Coming into a strange new world can be strange enough. Unfortunately, someone’s forgotten to tell Hankyung something Very Important.
A/N: I made the mistake of not actually talking about this before, but the business with the fan club is not reflecting current fandom happenings with regards Only13 and stuff like that. I got the idea for the fan club from watching things like Hana Yori Dango, which has already been mentioned. I'm not actually saying anything about real life when I write about the fan club. I just thought I should say this, just in case people get the wrong idea.
And the Siwon/Xiao Li is almost an exercise in writing het, which I don't manage that well ^__^ But here we go, back to good old fashioned boy love. This is a long chapter...and I don't know why XD
Chapter 1 / Chapter 2 / Chapter 3 / Chapter 4 / Chapter 5 / Chapter 6 / Chapter 7 / Chapter 8 / Chapter 9 / Chapter 10 / Chapter 11 / Chapter 12 / Chapter 13 / Chapter 14 / Chapter 15 / Chapter 16 / Chapter 17 / Chapter 18 / Chapter 19 / Chapter 20 / Chapter 21 / Chapter 22 / Chapter 23 / Chapter 24
“You seemed angry today,” said Heechul on the phone that night, as Hankyung sat at his desk with various textbooks spread out in front of him.
“I was angry,” said Hankyung mildly, and quickly solved another equation.
“You don’t get angry,” said Heechul, and Hankyung didn’t know if it was the connection crackling or something else that made Heechul’s voice sound like it caught.
“Everyone gets angry,” said Hankyung with a laugh.
“Not you,” said Heechul, and there was an element of forcefulness in his voice. “You don’t get angry. You get worried when people yell, and you get flustered, and you ask the girl who’s kissing you really politely if she’d mind letting go of you. Hankyung, you don’t get angry.” There was a pause, in which Hankyung didn’t interrupt whatever Heechul was thinking about. “It worried me,” he said finally.
Hankyung stood up and wandered over to his bed, where he lay down on his back, one hand above his head. “Why?” He asked, because he was a little bit confused.
“It was scary,” admitted Heechul and Hankyung definitely heard his voice catch this time. “You don’t get angry, and you were so tense and it was like there was a wall separating you from me. I was scared about what you would do, but you had an awful self control, like there was something building up inside of you until you wouldn’t have been able to take it anymore.”
“I was fine,” said Hankyung, and then, in an attempt to lighten the mood, he added, “I’m scary when I’m angry, you’re just hot.”
“I’m always hot,” said Heechul, and seemed to take the bait, but later, when they were saying goodbye, he suddenly said, “I’m not saying that you can’t get angry. Just - just tell me, so I can help.”
“It’s probably just as well that I never get angry if you’re going to react like this,” said Hankyung with a private smile, but he agreed anyway.
*
In January, a horrible cold seemed to sweep it’s way through the school, leaving no survivors, except for Hankyung, who had the immune system of an ox after growing up in the countryside. Even Heechul didn’t remain unscathed - in fact, he was one of those who were hit the hardest, and this did not make for a happy Heechul, and Hankyung spent a week putting up with complaining and requests for something else for the invalid, you wouldn’t want to put out the invalid, would you? Kyuhyun was also hit quite hard. Apparently, his sickliness as a child had not quite cleared up, and he spent a couple of days at home before he came back into school, still completely ill, but refusing to follow Sungmin’s demands that he go home for fear that he miss something important at school.
Someone who Hankyung hadn’t expected to be hit so hard was Eeteuk, who forced himself into school despite anything, simply because he was in his last year and hoped to get a scholarship to the local college after he graduated. On Monday, he came in with Kangin telling him to go home; by Tuesday, he had to force Kangin to let him leave the house; by Wednesday, he collapsed from a fever in the middle of dinner.
No one had quite been expecting it, least of all Eeteuk, who had been in the middle of a sentence when he suddenly stopped, put a hand to his head, said that he felt a bit woozy, and then fainted. Eunhyuk, who had been sitting next to him, managed to catch him around the shoulders before he slipped off his seat and hit the floor, but there were a few hearts in throats before he did it. Kangin cursed and jumped out of his seat to rush around and take Eeteuk off him. He placed a hand on his forehead, and then cursed again.
“He’s so hot he might as well be on fire,” he said in an exasperated voice. “See, this is why he should listen to me more often.”
Heechul reached over and poked Eeteuk in the face, taking the chance to do so while the boy was unconscious. “Ew,” he said, and retracted his hand. “He’s sweating.”
“Of course he’s sweating,” said Kibum, looking carefully at the boy. “He’s running a fever.”
“Maybe you should take him to the nurse’s office,” suggested Siwon, as Xiao Li blinked at them all in total confusion as to what was going on. Hankyung thought that this was an excellent idea, because currently all that was happening was that everyone was looking at Eeteuk be unconscious, without actually doing anything about it.
Kangin seemed to agree with him, because he pulled Eeteuk to his feet and tried to pull him out that way, and when that didn’t work, he picked him up bridal style, and started walking like that, ignoring the strange looks he got from the other people in the dinner hall. Hankyung and Donghae went with him to open any doors on the way - or, at least, that was what they claimed. In reality, Hankyung had finished and was bored, and Donghae wanted to see what Kangin said to Eeteuk, because he was, according to Donghae, bound to be very angry.
They met a girl and a boy on their way, who seemed to be in Kangin and Eeteuk’s class, from the way they greeted Kangin and then did a double take as they saw Eeteuk in his arms. “What the hell is going on?” The girl asked, a slight smile on her face. “Did you knock Eeteuk-shi out or something?”
“He’s fainted because the stupid idiot refused to stay home after he knew that he was suffering from a fever,” said Kangin, and he didn’t stop walking and the girl and boy joined the group.
“Wow,” said the girl, and hopped a little as she tried to put her hand on Eeteuk’s forehead to feel for herself.
“I take it you weren’t going to let him leave the house today,” said the boy with a grin.
“You try stopping Eeteuk from doing something when he wants to do it,” grumbled Kangin, and the two newcomers laughed at him and then said goodbye and wandered off again somewhere.
“I didn’t know that people knew you and Eeteuk lived together,” said Hankyung.
“Everyone knows it,” said Kangin, in a tone that suggested that he wasn’t really paying attention.
“They just think that there are two bedrooms for a reason,” said Donghae with an insinuating smile.
The nurse agreed with Kangin - Eeteuk probably shouldn’t have even left the house, and should have spent the day in bed with plenty of fluids, and Eeteuk was also told this when he finally woke up. The nurse left them to look after a boy who had been hit in the face with a football, and Kangin turned to Eeteuk with a mixture of annoyance and exasperation on his face.
“You’re an idiot,” he said.
“I’m not,” said Eeteuk, and huffed and folded his arms. There was a light sheen of sweat on his forehead, and while he seemed to have regained some of his former strength, he still lay back on the bed, and his smile was weak.
“You are,” insisted Kangin. “Say sorry.”
“I’m sorry,” said Eeteuk, looking as though someone had just fed him fish oil.
Kangin looked at him for a few more minutes before he sighed and turned to Hankyung. “Could you go to the classroom and get his things for him? I’m taking him home.” He ignored the protests from Eeteuk. “Someone from the class will point out his things for you. Donghae, you can go back down to the table if you want. Tell Kibum that he can’t have a lift home anymore.”
“That’s not very fair,” said Donghae, but it wasn’t Kibum that he was referring to. “I wanted to watch you shout at Eeteuk.”
“I’m not going to shout at him,” said Kangin with a frown. “I’m going to practically tie him to the bed to stop him from getting up, and force feed him chicken soup.”
“Kinky,” said Donghae with a grin, and bounced out of the room before Kangin could say anything to him, or attempt to hit him, and Hankyung shook his head and followed Donghae out of the room.
Hankyung received some very weird looks as he walked up the third year corridor, similar to the looks Ryeowook had been subject to when he had come into Yehsung’s classroom. As he walked into class 3.3, he just hoped that he had the right room, and that he wasn’t going to end up making a total fool of himself in front of his seniors.
“Hello?” A tall, pretty girl smiled at him as he walked in, and she paused in putting up posters on the wall. Hankyung thought it likely that she was the class leader, and so he smiled back as she climbed back down the mini ladder she’d been standing on.
“I’m looking for Eeteuk’s table,” he said. “He’s not very well, and Kangin’s taking him home.”
“Oh,” said the girl, and her smile faded. “Is he all right?”
“Yeah,” said Hankyung in a bright voice, because a couple of the boys in the corner were looking worried too, and he thought that if he sounded all right, then they’d believe him when he said Eeteuk was all right. “It’s just his cold.”
“We heard Kangin tell him to go home second period,” said the girl with a roll of her eyes. “That boy never does anything he’s told.”
“This is his desk,” said one of the boys, putting his hand of the third one of the back in the second row. He pointed to the one behind that. “That’s Kangin, I don’t know if you want to take his things too.”
“I probably should,” said Hankyung doubtfully, because Kangin hadn’t mentioned that. “He didn’t say so, I think he was too worried about Eeteuk.” Too late, he realised that what he’d said could have had some not-so-good connotations, which would never have been picked up on before but the current atmosphere surrounding the group was one of great interest ever since Ryeowook and Yehsung had been revealed.
The girl rolled her eyes again. “Honestly,” she said, pulling Eeteuk’s coat from the rack, “the only way those two could be more obvious about it would be if they started making out in the middle of a biology lesson.”
Hankyung blinked at her a couple of times, aware that he probably looked completely dim and stupid. “Excuse me?” He asked.
“Don’t worry,” said one of the boys. “Everyone already knows.”
“And everyone knows that Kangin and Eeteuk don’t know that everyone knows,” said the girl with a smile.
“Know what?” Hankyung thought that he should really get all the facts straight before he assumed something and managed to make the situation worse than what it probably was.
“We all know that Eeteuk and Kangin are going out together,” said the girl. “I mean, they’re already living together, what’s not to know?”
“They’re friends,” said Hankyung desperately, who felt that he shouldn’t really be having this conversation, and he wasn’t too sure which direction he should take it in, but just to be on the safe side, he was denying everything. “Best friends. And they have two bedrooms.”
“And one of those two bedrooms aren’t used,” said the girl with a grin. “I should know. I went over once really early last year to work on a project with them, and they’d slept through the alarm, and while they wandered around still in their pyjamas getting ready and the like, I peeked into the second bedroom and it certainly had not been slept in.”
“So.” Hankyung certainly did not have a clue where to go now. “You know?” He asked, drawing his shoulders back so he could make a quick get away if he needed to.
“Of course we know,” said the boy. “We’ve been in the same class as them for three years, you’d think we’d be able to notice these things.”
“But they don’t know you know,” said Hankyung. “They still think it’s a perfect secret.”
“That’s what makes it so funny,” said the girl with a grin.
“I just thought you should know,” said Hankyung faintly, as he put the stuff he’d been given in the boot of the car, and Kangin made sure that Eeteuk was comfortably in the car while Eeteuk tried to push his hands away and weakly laughed. “Everyone in your class, and possibly the whole school, knows about you and Eeteuk.”
Kangin straightened up and stared at him. “Bloody hell, Hankyung,” he said after a while. “You were only gone five minutes.”
“I didn’t tell them,” said Hankyung loudly, holding his hands up in defence. “They already knew!”
“What do you mean, they already knew? Are you sure they weren’t just referencing us living together?”
“That’s what they did reference,” said Hankyung. “But not in the way that you’re thinking. A girl who I think may have been your class president said that she went to your house once and she could tell that you hadn’t used one of the beds. Believe me, she knew.”
Kangin turned pale, and he bent down to talk to Eeteuk. “I told you Na-yin knew,” he said. “Why the heck didn’t you set the alarm on time?”
“That was a year ago,” protested Eeteuk, and lay his head back against the seat. “Can we go and deal with this tomorrow?” He asked. “My head is really hurting me.”
“I don’t think you have to deal with it,” said Hankyung. “According to the girl I was talking to, they’ve known for ages and they think it’s funny that you don’t know they know.”
“Na-yin can be scary sometimes,” said Kangin. “She always seems to know everything.”
“She’ll make a good mother then,” said Hankyung, and waved off the questioning look Kangin gave him. “Don’t worry,” he said. “I’ll ask around discreetly, and see if there really is anyone else who knows.”
“Imagine this,” said Hankyung to Na-young and In-jin, while Ryeowook sat behind them and nodded encouragingly. “Imagine that there was a couple, who everyone knew was going out, but they didn’t know everyone knew. What would you do?”
“Is this about Kangin-oppa and Eeteuk-oppa?” Na-young asked, glancing around at Ryeowook for confirmation, who stared back, a little shocked. “Because everyone knows about them, but no one says anything because they might find it embarrassing.”
Hankyung felt like banging his head off the wall placed very conveniently to the left of him. “So you know as well,” he said, and Ryeowook shook his head slightly in confusion. “How long have you known?”
“I don’t know,” said In-jin thoughtfully. “I suppose it’s like Sungmin and Kyuhyun. It’s just always been obvious.”
“How long have Eeteuk and Kangin been keeping this a secret?” Hankyung asked Ryeowook.
“About three years,” said Ryeowook faintly. “They didn’t get together until after they moved in together.”
“Oh,” said Na-young. “We thought longer than that.”
“So really,” said Hankyung, and he rested his head against the cool wall because he could feel some pressure building up behind his eyes, “this is a rumour that became true, rather than something that was true that became a rumour, as it was with you and Yehsung.”
“I suppose,” said Ryeowook, who looked confused by that statement, as if he couldn’t quite work out what it was supposed to be saying.
“Well, that’s good,” said Hankyung, and he stood up. “I guess I don’t have to do any more investigating, I can just tell Kangin that it’s his own fault for making rumours true.”
“Yes?” Ryeowook looked completely confused now.
In the end, it wasn’t a case of Eeteuk and Kangin being revealed, because it’s hard to be revealed when everyone already knows anyway. It was more like it was revealed to Kangin and Eeteuk.
*
Throughout January, Hankyung noticed that Xiao Li’s Korean improved, so slowly that nobody really noticed until she started to laugh at one of their jokes at a lunch time, and everyone stared at her, and she repeated the joke to Hankyung in Chinese, who stared at her hardest. Clearly, she could understand a lot more than she spoke it, but through endless nights of studying, by the end of the month she was able to say enough disconnected words to almost get her meaning across. The girls in her class seemed to find her adorable, and had adopted her without any fuss whatsoever, and helped her along by saying a lot of words that they thought she might be meaning whenever she lost what she was saying, or got stuck.
Siwon’s Chinese had improved remarkably too, though Hankyung knew that this was because he studied it for at least an hour ever day. He no longer needed Hankyung to finish quite as many sentences, but Hankyung was still the one who spoke to Xiao Li the most, because everyone wanted to include her in whatever they were doing, especially Heechul, who didn’t think it was fair to leave her out just because she couldn’t speak the language. The improvement in Siwon’s Chinese ensured that lessons for Xiao Li weren’t quite so difficult for her anymore - things like maths were fine, because she could follow numbers and letters, but things like history had been a major problem, because she didn’t understand the Korean that the teacher spoke, or the Korean in the actual textbooks. In the end, Siwon had ordered Chinese versions of all the school textbooks for her, and tended to just open it to the page that they were studying at the start of each lesson. The teachers had learnt to not call on her for answers, because while she recognised her name and stood up, she would just stand there, smiling pleasantly, while Siwon tried to translate as best he could. The few times he managed to get the question across, he hadn’t understood any of her answer, and the whole thing had turned into a complete disaster that resulted in a laughing class and a very confused teacher.
She demanded to see the dance team in practice, and wouldn’t take no for an answer - or more, Heechul hadn’t let Hankyung give no as an answer, and while Siwon attended a council meeting, Xiao Li sat in on a practice, sitting next to Heechul as they danced in the center of the room, going over old routines that the other boys knew by heart, and which Hankyung was still learning. They had a break after around half an hour, and Heechul handed them bottles of water and Xiao Li smiled at them.
“I like it,” she said in Korean. “Dance. I dance.”
“You dance?” asked Eunhyuk, rubbing a towel over his face while he looked at her in surprise.
“Yes,” said Xiao Li. “I show?”
“Go ahead,” said Eunhyuk, and motioned to the open floor.
She slipped off her shoes and removed her blazer, placing it carefully on the seat she had been occupying, and she moved to the middle of the room. After a few seconds, she closed her eyes and began to move to a non-existent beat of music, weaving this way and that, her toes pointed, and it seemed as though suddenly she didn’t have a skeletal structure, as if it was liquid that ran through her, as she bent and twisted, and Hankyung recognised it from the Chinese dancers that he’d seen so many years ago, as she tripped lightly across the floor, arms held above her head, morphing and changing into dramatic poses. There was complete silence when she finished and opened her eyes, a happy flush on her cheeks.
“Wow,” said Eunhyuk, as Donghae stood up with wide eyes, and Shindong started clapping. “You’re good.”
“Thank you,” said Xiao Li in Korean, and bowed gracefully.
“That’s better than good,” said Shindong. “That’s not just talent like it was with Hankyung, she’s had training.”
“I’ve done traditional Chinese dances for five years,” said Xiao Li to Hankyung in Chinese, as she pulled her shoes back on. “I haven’t tried it in a while, so it probably looked really weird.”
“It looked fantastic,” said Hankyung, still a little amazed by it, and then he turned to Heechul, and said, in Korean, “didn’t it look great?”
“If I was straight,” said Heechul with a smirk, “I’d so hit that.”
“Ew,” said Hankyung. “I’m not translating that.”
“Yes,” said Heechul to Xiao Li, and held his thumbs up. “Good, good.”
“I only have one thing to say,” said Eunhyuk with a grin. “Siwon, you did well.”
“Stop perving on the poor girl,” said Hankyung, rolling his eyes and thinking that it was all very well and good when she didn’t understand what they were saying, because he’d be worried about how she’d react if she had understood. A thought struck him. “Do you allow girls in the dance team?” He asked casually, trying to be subtle and not managing it very well.
“That’s not the right question,” said Eunhyuk. “The right question is, does she want to join the dance club?”
“Yes please,” said Xiao Li, before Hankyung even asked her, having understood the question in Korean. She grinned at them and stood up expectantly, and Donghae stood up too, and started showing her a routine that Hankyung had been finding difficult, set to a old H.O.T song, and while the routine wasn’t as complicated as the one that he’d first attempted, it was full of complicated hand and leg movements that Hankyung kept tripping up on. Xiao Li, with her training, managed to get it almost straight away, and before long it was her who was laughingly trying to explain to Hankyung how to do something.
“I really like her,” said Heechul with a smirk, as Xiao Li collapsed to the floor laughing as Hankyung tried to follow her movements. “I really, really like her.”
“Xiao Li dances?” Siwon’s facial expression was almost comical when they broke the news to him on the way home that night, Xiao Li having been delivered to her car safely.
“And how,” said Heechul, and slapped Siwon on the back. “Promise me one thing,” he said. “Sleep with her at least once before you split up, because I doubt you’re going to find anything like that anywhere other than China itself.”
Siwon looked scandalised. “I don’t want to sleep with her,” he hissed, looking around to see if anyone had noticed, despite the street being deserted apart from the three of them.
“Huh,” said Heechul. “That’s what Hankyung said about me, and look what happened there.”
“I don’t want to talk about that,” said Siwon. “I mean, we’ve only been out three times, that’s just a ridiculous thing to say.”
“But you’ve thought about it,” said Heechul, who seemed determined to get the truth out no matter what embarrassment it caused Siwon, and also Hankyung, who certainly didn’t want to be hearing this. To be honest, the embarrassment was probably a bonus in Heechul’s eyes.
“I-” Siwon looked at Hankyung for some help, but Hankyung was too busy avoiding his eyes to look at him. “I don’t want to talk about this,” said Siwon after a couple of minutes of just making weird noises and stuttering.
“So you have,” said Heechul with a grin.
“I’m not talking about this,” said Siwon, and turned off towards his house. Heechul laughed at him.
“One of these days,” said Hankyung thoughtfully, as they neared Heechul’s house, “he’s going to stop speaking to you or something.”
“He knows I’m only joking,” said Heechul, and stopped outside his gate and wrapped his arms around Hankyung’s neck. “Besides, he loves me too much to do that.”
“I suppose he does,” said Hankyung, grinning. “God knows why, though.”
“You know what?” Heechul ignored his jibe, and instead took a step closer so he could talk quietly into his ear. “You’re a dancer too.”
“Your point?” Hankyung was getting good at not letting his voice shake when Heechul was breathing into his ear, though it had taken some time.
“My point,” said Heechul, still in that same quiet voice, “is that we’ve never tried to see if you can bend that way. Maybe we should. Sometime.”
“Um,” said Hankyung, and thought that Heechul really was very good at this seducing lark, as he pulled away and smirked and walked into his house, leaving Hankyung in the street breathing quite deeply.