if we fly to neverland - kyuhyun/donghae - chapter 1
Title: if we fly to neverland [DISCONTINUED]
Pairings: Kyuhyun/Donghae
Part: Chapter 1
Genre: AU, Romance, kid!Suju
Rating: PG-13
Summary: Donghae wants to stay a boy. Kyuhyun wants to be a man. Sometimes Donghae wonders if everything would be better if they stayed the way they were, because then, all the heartache and pain wouldn’t hurt as much.
Chapter one
When Donghae was ten, he became friends with Kyuhyun.
They had known each other for a year, but neither seemed intent on showing the other interest. Their personalities just didn’t match in the beginning. Donghae was a typical boy: he loved pretending he was an animal down to the stance and roar and he loved to play rough, never keeping in mind how his mother always yelled at him for coming home with dirty clothes. Kyuhyun, on the other hand, was introverted and was usually holed up in a corner in the courtyard during recess, keeping himself company with handheld videogames when he’s not locked in his room vigorously pressing keys on the keyboard and mashing his computer mouse, killing zombies and aliens and whatever else he could attack with a sword.
It all happened during recess on a Thursday.
The playground was bustling with activity. The slide and the swing set were never unoccupied for more than a few seconds, children moved in unison on the monkeybars, little hands going left then right then back again, and the jungle gym looked like a fortress complete with royalty sitting in the center and guards blocking every hole. The sandbox wasn’t terribly crowded, and it was there where Donghae was down on his hands and knees, fingers buried in the yellow grains, roaring and screaming at his friend on the other side.
“Is that a tiger?” his friend, Hyukjae, said, shielding his eyes with his hand and squinting with a grimace. “Or a lion?”
“I’m a lion!” Donghae shouted, letting out another roar that sounded more like a puppy than anything else, and Hyukjae picked up something invisible next to his feet.
“Hey! Lions can’t talk! What are you?”
Instead of a proper response, Donghae hissed and advanced. Hyukjae dropped his arm and cocked the invisible gun in his hands. Donghae stopped and eyed Hyukjae closely.
“It is a lion,” Hyukjae said, pointing the gun at Donghae. “I better kill it before it kills anyone. Bang!”
Donghae rolled sideways at the sound and, on all fours, began to run past his classmates and out of the sandbox. However, when he felt the hot cement under his palms and knees, he winced in pain and quickly jumped to his feet, and behind him, he heard Hyukjae say, “Whoa! It’s a mutant lion! Bang! Bang!”
Donghae laughed and ran in a zigzag line, swooping between passersby and jumping over the ones drawing on the ground with colored sticks of chalk.
When he heard Hyukjae’s Bang-Bangs getting closer behind him, he broke a right and made for the fence on the far side of the courtyard, where a lone Kyuhyun was sitting cross-legged against the criss-crossing bars, eyes focused on the console clasped in his hands.
Donghae didn’t know why but for some reason, he couldn’t stop his legs, and he kept going and going toward Kyuhyun with increasing speed until he tried to steer himself to another direction by throwing himself on the ground. As he fell, his foot knocked the game down on the cement with a loud crack, and the next moment, he felt something stinging the side of his arm where he caught himself.
“Hey!” Donghae heard Kyuhyun scream, his voice distraught and angry, but Donghae didn’t reply at once. The pain started to build on his arm, like a thousand needles pricking him at the same spot, and when he sat up and looked at it, he saw blood pooling in a large, red circle, running down his skin and onto the ground.
“Donghae-yah!” Hyukjae yelled, running over to Donghae’s side and looking at the wound on his arm with creased eyebrows. “Donghae-yah, are you okay?”
“Look what you did!” Donghae heard Kyuhyun protest, and, not bothering to answer Hykjae, he turned his head to the ground where Kyuhyun’s videogame fell in countless broken pieces. “What did you do that for? I didn’t do anything to you!”
“Stop!” Hyukjae yelled, helping Donghae to his feet, but Donghae’s eyes were still trained on the ruined console. “Don’t you see he’s hurt? He’s bleeing! Donghae-yah, let’s go tell the teacher.”
Hyukjae tugged at Donghae’s good arm but he didn’t budge.
“I’m sorry,” Donghae said, his eyebrows furrowing in apology, and Kyuhyun’s eyes widened for a second. “I really am. I’ll-I’ll get you a one tomorrow. A brand new one. I promise.”
Kyuhyun only stared at Donghae, disbelief washing over his face, and Donghae managed a smile despite the throbbing pain. He was a big boy now and it was only a scratch, nothing serious. If he cried over these things, nothing would happen anyway, and he would only end up getting a lecture from his mother about how crying never solved anything, and he’d spend the rest of the day in his room trying not to cry even more.
“You will?” Kyuhyun asked, his voice soft.
Donghae nodded and flashed another smile.
“Yeah. First, I have to get this fixed then I’ll ask Dad to buy one tomorrow.”
“Come on,” Hyukjae said, wrapping an arm around Donghae’s wrist and urging him to start walking. Donghae had only taken a few steps when he heard Kyuhyun call out his name.
“Can I come with you?”
Kyuhyun sounded unsure about the question, but Donghae understood why. Kyuhyun wasn’t the type of person who talked to people a lot. As a matter of fact, Donghae doesn’t remember ever talking in school except when answering the teacher’s questions, or when someone asked him a question about the assignment. He never made an effort to start a conversation, which was probably why he was by himself all the time.
“Sure,” Donghae said, his smile widening, and he thought he saw a glimmer flash in Kyuhyun’s eyes. “You can tell me about the game you were playing so I can tell Dad what to buy.”
“There. Nice and protected.”
The school nurse smiled and put the rubbing alcohol, gauze, and cotton squares back into a drawer. Donghae flapped his arm on his side and laughed at how strange it felt that he couldn’t move his elbow.
“Just make sure to clean it regularly and don’t get too active with that arm until it heals up. Understand?”
Donghae nodded and started to poke his wound on the soft gauze with his finger. The nurse slapped his hand away and wagged her own finger in front of his face.
“And don’t poke it or it’s never going to heal.”
“Sorry,” Donghae said with an apologetic smile, and he jumped off the bed and made his way across the room.
“I called your parent, by the way,” the nurse said as she straightened the sheets.
“Which one?” Donghae asked, his heart beginning to pick up speed.
“Your father. He didn’t seem to mind it much, though.”
Donghae sighed in relief and scratched the back of his head. His father was never the one to scold him, and he couldn’t remember a time where he saw him get angry at all. He was always proud of whatever Donghae did and gave him rewards when he won something, but when he didn’t win, he’d give Donghae a bigger reward, because he told him that he would rather see Donghae smiling despite his losses than not at all. This made him different from his mother, who always scolded Donghae for the littlest things, but his father had told him that she loved him very much, and that she was only looking out for his well-being. She should show it a different way, then, Donghae had said when he was grounded for breaking a vase, and his father smiled and patted him on the head, and said, We all have different ways to show we love each other. Your mother loves you very much, but this is they only way she can show it. If she didn’t scold you or ground you for causing trouble, do you think she’d be the same mom? Your mom?
Donghae didn’t think so.
“Thank you for my arm!” Donghae said as he made his way out the door.
“You’re welcome. Just remember what I told you.”
“I will!”
Donghae waved goodbye and slipped out into the warm sunlight, and he saw the courtyard completely empty except for someone swinging in one of the swings, the tips of his feet just missing the sand by a few centimeters.
“Kyuhyun?” he said, shielding his eyes and making out well-groomed black hair and long arms coiled around the chains, and the boy looked up at the sound, startled.
“Donghae,” Kyuhyun said, jumping off and walking across the sandbox.
“What are you doing here? Didn’t class start already?” Donghae asked, nursing his elbow with his other hand.
Kyuhyun nodded with a shrug. “I asked to go to the bathroom, but I wanted to see how you were doing.”
Donghae laughed and showed Kyuhyun the bandages. “I’m fine. It’s just a scratch. It’s probably not even going to scar.”
Kyuhyun smiled and ran his palm over the soft, coarse material, each finger tipped with curiosity. Donghae watched him trace patterns and shapes, pressing carefully here and there just to see if Donghae was telling the truth.
“It doesn’t hurt?” Kyuhyun asked, dropping his hand to his side.
Donghae shook his head.
“No. It feels weird, though. I can’t move my elbow.”
Kyuhyun laughed and it was the first time Donghae ever saw it, and he had been beginning to wonder whether he was even capable of smiling in the first place. Kyuhyun’s eyes had disappeared and Donghae saw a missing tooth, and it was then that Donghae looked at Kyuhyun as a boy just like him, not as a heap of flesh and clothes pushed up in a corner that no one ever seemed to pay attention to.
“You should smile more often,” Donghae said, and at once Kyuhyun’s face began to blush with pink. Donghae smiled as Kyuhyun turned away, trying to hide his face the best he could.
“And you should cry more often.”
Donghae was taken aback by the response, and was about to ask him what he meant when Kyuhyun continued.
“I know it hurt when you fell. It was in the way you smiled.”
Donghae raised an eyebrow and rubbed his elbow. Kyuhyun had never talked to Kyuhyun before, and of all people, he saw right through him.
“I didn’t want anyone to worry,” Donghae admitted, turning his attention to his shoes. “Crying never solves anything. It just makes everything worse.”
“Sometimes, it’s good to cry,” Kyuhyun said, tapping the tip of Donghae’s shoes lightly with his own. Donghae turned back to Kyuhyun, and Kyuhyun managed a half-smile. “You can’t always keep everything bottled up. Sometimes, it’s nice to let it all out, and when you do, you always feel better.”
“Sounds like you cry a lot,” Donghae said, but his tone didn’t denote ridicule, and Kyuhyun understood.
“Not really. Just when I need to.”
The boys stood in the middle of the courtyard for some time, neither one not knowing what to say or what to do, and it was when Donghae remembered that Kyuhyun had asked to go to the bathroom a while ago that he grabbed Kyuhyun’s arm and began to walk toward their classroom.
“Come on or you’ll get in trouble,” Donghae said, picking up speed, and Kyuhyun managed to catch up in no time thanks to his long legs. But he kept in pace with Donghae, laughing all the while at how funny they looked walking across the hallway, and he didn’t seem to mind the fact that Donghae was gripping his arm as though he was afraid to let him go.
• chapter one ♕ chapter two →
Pairings: Kyuhyun/Donghae
Part: Chapter 1
Genre: AU, Romance, kid!Suju
Rating: PG-13
Summary: Donghae wants to stay a boy. Kyuhyun wants to be a man. Sometimes Donghae wonders if everything would be better if they stayed the way they were, because then, all the heartache and pain wouldn’t hurt as much.
Chapter one
When Donghae was ten, he became friends with Kyuhyun.
They had known each other for a year, but neither seemed intent on showing the other interest. Their personalities just didn’t match in the beginning. Donghae was a typical boy: he loved pretending he was an animal down to the stance and roar and he loved to play rough, never keeping in mind how his mother always yelled at him for coming home with dirty clothes. Kyuhyun, on the other hand, was introverted and was usually holed up in a corner in the courtyard during recess, keeping himself company with handheld videogames when he’s not locked in his room vigorously pressing keys on the keyboard and mashing his computer mouse, killing zombies and aliens and whatever else he could attack with a sword.
It all happened during recess on a Thursday.
The playground was bustling with activity. The slide and the swing set were never unoccupied for more than a few seconds, children moved in unison on the monkeybars, little hands going left then right then back again, and the jungle gym looked like a fortress complete with royalty sitting in the center and guards blocking every hole. The sandbox wasn’t terribly crowded, and it was there where Donghae was down on his hands and knees, fingers buried in the yellow grains, roaring and screaming at his friend on the other side.
“Is that a tiger?” his friend, Hyukjae, said, shielding his eyes with his hand and squinting with a grimace. “Or a lion?”
“I’m a lion!” Donghae shouted, letting out another roar that sounded more like a puppy than anything else, and Hyukjae picked up something invisible next to his feet.
“Hey! Lions can’t talk! What are you?”
Instead of a proper response, Donghae hissed and advanced. Hyukjae dropped his arm and cocked the invisible gun in his hands. Donghae stopped and eyed Hyukjae closely.
“It is a lion,” Hyukjae said, pointing the gun at Donghae. “I better kill it before it kills anyone. Bang!”
Donghae rolled sideways at the sound and, on all fours, began to run past his classmates and out of the sandbox. However, when he felt the hot cement under his palms and knees, he winced in pain and quickly jumped to his feet, and behind him, he heard Hyukjae say, “Whoa! It’s a mutant lion! Bang! Bang!”
Donghae laughed and ran in a zigzag line, swooping between passersby and jumping over the ones drawing on the ground with colored sticks of chalk.
When he heard Hyukjae’s Bang-Bangs getting closer behind him, he broke a right and made for the fence on the far side of the courtyard, where a lone Kyuhyun was sitting cross-legged against the criss-crossing bars, eyes focused on the console clasped in his hands.
Donghae didn’t know why but for some reason, he couldn’t stop his legs, and he kept going and going toward Kyuhyun with increasing speed until he tried to steer himself to another direction by throwing himself on the ground. As he fell, his foot knocked the game down on the cement with a loud crack, and the next moment, he felt something stinging the side of his arm where he caught himself.
“Hey!” Donghae heard Kyuhyun scream, his voice distraught and angry, but Donghae didn’t reply at once. The pain started to build on his arm, like a thousand needles pricking him at the same spot, and when he sat up and looked at it, he saw blood pooling in a large, red circle, running down his skin and onto the ground.
“Donghae-yah!” Hyukjae yelled, running over to Donghae’s side and looking at the wound on his arm with creased eyebrows. “Donghae-yah, are you okay?”
“Look what you did!” Donghae heard Kyuhyun protest, and, not bothering to answer Hykjae, he turned his head to the ground where Kyuhyun’s videogame fell in countless broken pieces. “What did you do that for? I didn’t do anything to you!”
“Stop!” Hyukjae yelled, helping Donghae to his feet, but Donghae’s eyes were still trained on the ruined console. “Don’t you see he’s hurt? He’s bleeing! Donghae-yah, let’s go tell the teacher.”
Hyukjae tugged at Donghae’s good arm but he didn’t budge.
“I’m sorry,” Donghae said, his eyebrows furrowing in apology, and Kyuhyun’s eyes widened for a second. “I really am. I’ll-I’ll get you a one tomorrow. A brand new one. I promise.”
Kyuhyun only stared at Donghae, disbelief washing over his face, and Donghae managed a smile despite the throbbing pain. He was a big boy now and it was only a scratch, nothing serious. If he cried over these things, nothing would happen anyway, and he would only end up getting a lecture from his mother about how crying never solved anything, and he’d spend the rest of the day in his room trying not to cry even more.
“You will?” Kyuhyun asked, his voice soft.
Donghae nodded and flashed another smile.
“Yeah. First, I have to get this fixed then I’ll ask Dad to buy one tomorrow.”
“Come on,” Hyukjae said, wrapping an arm around Donghae’s wrist and urging him to start walking. Donghae had only taken a few steps when he heard Kyuhyun call out his name.
“Can I come with you?”
Kyuhyun sounded unsure about the question, but Donghae understood why. Kyuhyun wasn’t the type of person who talked to people a lot. As a matter of fact, Donghae doesn’t remember ever talking in school except when answering the teacher’s questions, or when someone asked him a question about the assignment. He never made an effort to start a conversation, which was probably why he was by himself all the time.
“Sure,” Donghae said, his smile widening, and he thought he saw a glimmer flash in Kyuhyun’s eyes. “You can tell me about the game you were playing so I can tell Dad what to buy.”
“There. Nice and protected.”
The school nurse smiled and put the rubbing alcohol, gauze, and cotton squares back into a drawer. Donghae flapped his arm on his side and laughed at how strange it felt that he couldn’t move his elbow.
“Just make sure to clean it regularly and don’t get too active with that arm until it heals up. Understand?”
Donghae nodded and started to poke his wound on the soft gauze with his finger. The nurse slapped his hand away and wagged her own finger in front of his face.
“And don’t poke it or it’s never going to heal.”
“Sorry,” Donghae said with an apologetic smile, and he jumped off the bed and made his way across the room.
“I called your parent, by the way,” the nurse said as she straightened the sheets.
“Which one?” Donghae asked, his heart beginning to pick up speed.
“Your father. He didn’t seem to mind it much, though.”
Donghae sighed in relief and scratched the back of his head. His father was never the one to scold him, and he couldn’t remember a time where he saw him get angry at all. He was always proud of whatever Donghae did and gave him rewards when he won something, but when he didn’t win, he’d give Donghae a bigger reward, because he told him that he would rather see Donghae smiling despite his losses than not at all. This made him different from his mother, who always scolded Donghae for the littlest things, but his father had told him that she loved him very much, and that she was only looking out for his well-being. She should show it a different way, then, Donghae had said when he was grounded for breaking a vase, and his father smiled and patted him on the head, and said, We all have different ways to show we love each other. Your mother loves you very much, but this is they only way she can show it. If she didn’t scold you or ground you for causing trouble, do you think she’d be the same mom? Your mom?
Donghae didn’t think so.
“Thank you for my arm!” Donghae said as he made his way out the door.
“You’re welcome. Just remember what I told you.”
“I will!”
Donghae waved goodbye and slipped out into the warm sunlight, and he saw the courtyard completely empty except for someone swinging in one of the swings, the tips of his feet just missing the sand by a few centimeters.
“Kyuhyun?” he said, shielding his eyes and making out well-groomed black hair and long arms coiled around the chains, and the boy looked up at the sound, startled.
“Donghae,” Kyuhyun said, jumping off and walking across the sandbox.
“What are you doing here? Didn’t class start already?” Donghae asked, nursing his elbow with his other hand.
Kyuhyun nodded with a shrug. “I asked to go to the bathroom, but I wanted to see how you were doing.”
Donghae laughed and showed Kyuhyun the bandages. “I’m fine. It’s just a scratch. It’s probably not even going to scar.”
Kyuhyun smiled and ran his palm over the soft, coarse material, each finger tipped with curiosity. Donghae watched him trace patterns and shapes, pressing carefully here and there just to see if Donghae was telling the truth.
“It doesn’t hurt?” Kyuhyun asked, dropping his hand to his side.
Donghae shook his head.
“No. It feels weird, though. I can’t move my elbow.”
Kyuhyun laughed and it was the first time Donghae ever saw it, and he had been beginning to wonder whether he was even capable of smiling in the first place. Kyuhyun’s eyes had disappeared and Donghae saw a missing tooth, and it was then that Donghae looked at Kyuhyun as a boy just like him, not as a heap of flesh and clothes pushed up in a corner that no one ever seemed to pay attention to.
“You should smile more often,” Donghae said, and at once Kyuhyun’s face began to blush with pink. Donghae smiled as Kyuhyun turned away, trying to hide his face the best he could.
“And you should cry more often.”
Donghae was taken aback by the response, and was about to ask him what he meant when Kyuhyun continued.
“I know it hurt when you fell. It was in the way you smiled.”
Donghae raised an eyebrow and rubbed his elbow. Kyuhyun had never talked to Kyuhyun before, and of all people, he saw right through him.
“I didn’t want anyone to worry,” Donghae admitted, turning his attention to his shoes. “Crying never solves anything. It just makes everything worse.”
“Sometimes, it’s good to cry,” Kyuhyun said, tapping the tip of Donghae’s shoes lightly with his own. Donghae turned back to Kyuhyun, and Kyuhyun managed a half-smile. “You can’t always keep everything bottled up. Sometimes, it’s nice to let it all out, and when you do, you always feel better.”
“Sounds like you cry a lot,” Donghae said, but his tone didn’t denote ridicule, and Kyuhyun understood.
“Not really. Just when I need to.”
The boys stood in the middle of the courtyard for some time, neither one not knowing what to say or what to do, and it was when Donghae remembered that Kyuhyun had asked to go to the bathroom a while ago that he grabbed Kyuhyun’s arm and began to walk toward their classroom.
“Come on or you’ll get in trouble,” Donghae said, picking up speed, and Kyuhyun managed to catch up in no time thanks to his long legs. But he kept in pace with Donghae, laughing all the while at how funny they looked walking across the hallway, and he didn’t seem to mind the fact that Donghae was gripping his arm as though he was afraid to let him go.
• chapter one ♕ chapter two →