You made me sleep all uneven
Title: You made me sleep all uneven
Rating: PG-13
Pairing: Xiuhan
Genre: drama, fluff, oneshot,
Warning: blood, mild violence,
Summary: Luhan never wonders if he's wasted all his weeks by Minseok's hospital bed.
also here
He was the kind of person who would hold his head high, but still look at the ground. It was a weird contradiction of confidence, the downcast gaze serving as a constant reminder of his youthful mentality. He would speak of how he never wanted to stop growing, how he envied the likes of Peter Pan and yearned for his own Neverland. It was an obvious pipe dream, the plumbing so outdated that the whole mind must be reworked and the original dream torn out along with the old cogs and copper.
There was one night when the two boys he shared a dorm with were lying in their beds. He had been sitting up in his top bunk, glancing at the clock, urging himself into sleep. He heard a grumble of “stop moving”. It was Luhan, from under his pillow. “You’re squeaking.” The older boy rolled onto his stomach and peeked over the side to where the younger boy lay. “Lu ge,” he said, his voice breaking the silence after ten minutes. “Do you think there’s really like-”
“Don’t,” Luhan growled.
“- A castle under the sea? Like where the little mermaid lives?”
“Stop,”
“And she sings and stuff just like us?”
No reply.
“Except she can’t dance. She would need legs to d-”
“Minseok, If you don’t shut your fucking mouth right now, I’ll shut it for you.”
The boy giggled, but the message stuck. He uttered one more thing before silencing himself for the night.
“That sounded kind of sexual, Lu.”
The younger boy’s pillow collided with his head almost immediately.
*
The same head, housing the mind of the boy dreamer, was foreclosed the second it hit and smashed the window of the van. He was in the problematic position of the back seat: right sided and in the direct line of fire for the speeding car, out of control from shoddy breaks and a fatefully placed pothole. In what seemed like an eternity for him, it smashed into the door and cracked into the 24 year old’s ribs. His last thoughts were not any final plea or prayer to a god, instead it was for the boys sitting next to them. He pushed them back: a last attempt at protecting those with more life to lose than himself.
For the others, it wasn’t like a slo-mo movie at all. Everything happened so fast, most of the boys didn’t even remember the car coming. His arm had pushed back as the younger boy next to him jerked against his belt. There was a flurry of hair and hands, not even enough time for tears to begin welling. By the time the van stopped, there was a 450 degree difference than there was before. Seatbelts unbuckled, and the thuds of gravity followed.
Three boys and the driver made it out, two were incapable of unbuckling themselves, and one hugged his legs as he called the others, speaking in a broken way, piecing together words to emphasize the urgency. The older two managed to wake up one of the members dangling from the web of safety straps. He collapsed as soon as he climbed out, still fatigued, but he tried to smile anyways through his catlike lips. “It’s okay, we’re all okay, right?” He tried to brighten the mood, not realising that there was one boy left in the van. The two rescuers crawled into the side window, dropping down to grab the last of the group.
He was lying against the broken window, blood dribbling from his head and fingers, his dark clothes made it impossible to tell if he was injured anywhere else. The leader gently pulled up his head, knowing from his athletic history that injuries like that are delicate and devastating. His helper clicked the button, releasing him from the trap of tangles. With the force of feathers, the two slowly pulled him out, laying him down on the side. The fawn faced boy took off his sweater and rolled it up: a support for a possibly broken neck. The others followed, trying to keep him warm while the oxygen slowly escaped his lungs.
The ambulance finally arrived to the five boys huddled around their eldest, a torn shirt serving as the only bandage. The leader was the first to look up, his eyes uncharacteristically red and swollen. He stood up, and solemnly explained to the new arrivals what he thought had happened. His words were slow and his voice hit a pitch far lower than before. He stopped talking to let out a shaky cough before glancing at the others. The one who had started crying almost immediately pushed against his eyes with his palms; as if the bags under them had become pink and raw from his tears. The cat faced boy had an arm around Yixing, who was still holding his phone in shaking hands. The last boy, the doe-eyed one, silently followed his friend into the ambulance. He didn’t say a word the whole time, just stared at his friend, the boy who could smile through anything. His mouth was frozen in a quiet frown, and his cheeks were flecked with tears that weren’t his.
The moment came when Minseok had to be pushed out. Luhan stood in the cold darkness, illuminated only by the lamps and lights of the hospital. His eyes welled up, and a sob escaped him.
It was the six week mark.
Three softly shaking fingers dragged the marker across the calendar. Another day gone. Another day of listening to the gentle whirring of drips and monitors until he fell asleep next to the bed. Sometimes he’d wake up in a cold sweat, and his eyes would immediately dart to the patient's face, then to the series of screens next to him. Alive. Thank god, still alive.
Breathing a sigh of relief, he would watch his friend’s peaceful face, eyes twitching every once in awhile. He would gingerly touch the hand closest to him, intertwining his own with the bedridden boy’s. He could feel the quiet heartbeat in his fingers. That, along with the chirping of machines, would lull him to sleep.
Since that night, he had spent every moment possibly in this room. The first few weeks were easy: they had ceased performing to give time for the M members to heal. Jongdae had suffered a concussion and was put in the same room as Minseok. Zitao had broken three of his fingers, all tightly bandaged up in the same night. Yifan, Luhan, and Yixing were mostly fine, only some slight cuts from the broken glass.
The group would sit around the hospital room, listening to the quiet strummings from Chanyeol’s guitar until one of them decided to start singing. Jongdae would sleep through most of it, but occasionally try to sing along in a tired voice. Yixing would say, “Oh, he’s asleep,” every time he noticed the soulful murmurs had stopped. Eventually, it got stronger and stronger until the nurses would come in frequently to remind them that “people are trying to sleep.” The room would quiet as everyone remembered that their songs had failed: one of their members hadn’t woken up for four weeks.
In the less populated moments, Luhan would sit in the chair between the two beds, reading aloud from Minseok’s favourite book: Le Petit Prince. Jongdae would watch and listen as Luhan accented the spoken words, his performance getting more and more animated as the days went by. Jongdae would sometime even recite the story along with his narrator, giggling as Luhan motioned too hard with his hand and fell out of his chair (it wasn’t the first time).
Eventually, Jongdae recovered enough to leave the hospital. The room felt empty without a response to Luhan’s stories and songs. He was just singing to himself, sitting in the chair between the two beds. It was distant, he thought as he chewed his lower lip. Placing a finger in between the pages of the book, he pulled the chair up towards Minseok. It was the closest he’d been since the accident, he hadn’t dared even to breathe on the boy in fear of offsetting the delicate balance of sleep and death.
He inhaled slowly, placing the book on the ground. Balling his hands into fists, he looked at the sleeping boy. He looked- Luhan considered his words carefully- not peaceful, but static. A scar trailed an inch across his head, stitches long since removed. His hair had gotten a little longer, the original colour beginning to return. His face was still round and pale, and Luhan smiled as he remembered the nickname they had for him back in the early days. He opened the book, and continued to read, watching Minseok’s face with a gentle care as if he was just a child who had fallen asleep during a bedtime story.
He continued to read, feeling more and more full hearted now that he could see his audience. He felt as if his words could wake up his dozing prince if he put enough life into every sentence. He would get up, act out carefully choreographed actions that he thought of while backstage or on the nights where he slept in the dorms. Usually he would catch Minseok’s eyelids twitch or the corner of his mouth curve into a tiny smile before returning to the neutral state.
Sometimes when he read, he would get lost in the pauses, the flickering eyelashes, or the slight breeze from the window lightly ruffling the sleeping boy’s hair. He would sit there, unaware of his own smile, as he thought about how close they once were. He would forget that tears did not mix well with paper, but he wouldn’t neglect wiping his eyes when his vision blurred to the point of blindness. A sniffle would escape him, and he’d continue reading, his voice a murmur.
His eyes would remember these moments as the prince looking onto sleeping beauty, but not before he remembered this was not a fairy tale. If anything, the princess was more like a knight who had clung to life as a sword, or a speeding sedan, clashed against him. He was the damsel in distress, the long lost friend who had met on the outskirts of tragedy. Yet, with all the looming sorrow of what was and what could have been, he found solace in the tiny heart beat puttering through Minseok’s fingertips. When he couldn’t will himself into any more metaphors, he would give in, succumbing to the drowsiness. It was a Thursday. It had been a Friday. A Friday six weeks ago.
And then it was Friday again.
9:35 on a Friday morning was when he woke up. It was another seven minutes before Luhan stirred, awoken by the slow movements of his sleepy friend.
“Lu-ge,” he mumbled in the chirpy voice that Luhan would later equate to sound of morning sparrows. His first word. A beautiful first word. “What’s this?” he said, trying to lift his arms. They were wrapped in IVs and wires, the things that had kept him alive.
There’s the typical question. Luhan didn’t have time to process the words. His eyes welled up, pooling until they dripped over his cheeks. Luhan tried to form words, some explanation as to why his hyung was draped in cheap cloth and pierced all up the arms with tiny tubes pumping saline and other fluids into him. Instead, the words flooded over as his heart poured out, adjectives slowly dripping down his cheeks and verbs rushing out of his throat in the form of one quick sob after another.
“I thought you,” he started, “you were...”
Minseok blinked, and his mouth curled in a small, albeit confused smile. “I was what? Dead?”
Luhan could barely nod. His shoulders shuddered and his teeth dug into his lip, trying to stop his chin from quivering. He had to stay strong, but the walls were caving in. Minseok’s smile faded slightly, and he reached his arms as far as they could, his fingers barely reaching the younger boy’s arm. His touch, his finally conscious touch, was enough to shatter Luhan. He fell, burying his face in the blankets covering Minseok’s chest.
Wincing slightly as the tubes were tugged under the weight of the younger boy, he reached his free arm over, pulling his friend close. “Hey, hey, Han, it’s okay, don’t cry.”
Within a half hour, ten more boys were crowded in the room and at least half of them had tears in their eyes. Minseok grinned the entire time, his hand constantly in Luhan’s grasp. Food from all places decorated the tables, chairs, and floor of the room. “We thought you’d be hungry,” Chanyeol had laughed, Baekhyun practically vibrating in excitement next to him. Jongdae, Jongin, and Sehun preformed a quick dance called “the Xiumin Shuffle” which resulted in Jongdae being literally kicked off their stage by Sehun. Yifan and Junmyeon had gotten all the members to make a card. It was filled with uplifting messages such as “When you stop being dead, I’ll cook for you - Yixing” and “I don’t care if you’re older, you should listen to me and wake up - Zitao”. With all the excitement, Minseok was worn down fairly quickly - “How ironic! you’ve been asleep so long, you’re not allowed to be this tired!” Kyungsoo had said. Minseok drifted off while the boys were trailing out of the room. Luhan looked back, looked at the boy curled on his side, and realised this was the first time in seven weeks that his best friend had moved and the first thing he said was,
“Lu-ge.”
Luhan blinked, Minseok was eyeing him from under his arm. He lifted his head slightly to see the younger boy more clearly. “Can I ask you something kind of silly?”
Luhan nodded, unsure of what to expect.
“Can you read me this?” He held up the storybook. “It was next to my bed, I guess someone left it here when everybody was visiting, but I don’t remember it looking this…” he smiled, that big toothy smile Luhan had missed so much, “beat up. It’s kind of like… me, now, I guess.” His face saddened a bit: he had missed a lot over the past two months. Luhan took the book and sat down. “I actually don’t need this to read it, I- it’s kind of embarrassing actually...”
Minseok looked on with inquisitive eyes. “What?”
“I’ve memorized it. You sometimes reacted when I read it so I read it almost everyday because…” He stopped, feeling the sobs nestled in his chest starting to wake up.
Minseok put a hand on his knee. “Don’t cry, I’m okay, I’m really okay.” He paused, hoping his words would anchor in Luhan. “Tell me a new story then.”
Luhan laughed for what seemed like the first time in ages. “I’ve thought of hundreds, where do I start?”
A/N: My first ever fic beta'd by Joanna. I wrote it a few months ago, woops
Rating: PG-13
Pairing: Xiuhan
Genre: drama, fluff, oneshot,
Warning: blood, mild violence,
Summary: Luhan never wonders if he's wasted all his weeks by Minseok's hospital bed.
also here
He was the kind of person who would hold his head high, but still look at the ground. It was a weird contradiction of confidence, the downcast gaze serving as a constant reminder of his youthful mentality. He would speak of how he never wanted to stop growing, how he envied the likes of Peter Pan and yearned for his own Neverland. It was an obvious pipe dream, the plumbing so outdated that the whole mind must be reworked and the original dream torn out along with the old cogs and copper.
There was one night when the two boys he shared a dorm with were lying in their beds. He had been sitting up in his top bunk, glancing at the clock, urging himself into sleep. He heard a grumble of “stop moving”. It was Luhan, from under his pillow. “You’re squeaking.” The older boy rolled onto his stomach and peeked over the side to where the younger boy lay. “Lu ge,” he said, his voice breaking the silence after ten minutes. “Do you think there’s really like-”
“Don’t,” Luhan growled.
“- A castle under the sea? Like where the little mermaid lives?”
“Stop,”
“And she sings and stuff just like us?”
No reply.
“Except she can’t dance. She would need legs to d-”
“Minseok, If you don’t shut your fucking mouth right now, I’ll shut it for you.”
The boy giggled, but the message stuck. He uttered one more thing before silencing himself for the night.
“That sounded kind of sexual, Lu.”
The younger boy’s pillow collided with his head almost immediately.
*
The same head, housing the mind of the boy dreamer, was foreclosed the second it hit and smashed the window of the van. He was in the problematic position of the back seat: right sided and in the direct line of fire for the speeding car, out of control from shoddy breaks and a fatefully placed pothole. In what seemed like an eternity for him, it smashed into the door and cracked into the 24 year old’s ribs. His last thoughts were not any final plea or prayer to a god, instead it was for the boys sitting next to them. He pushed them back: a last attempt at protecting those with more life to lose than himself.
For the others, it wasn’t like a slo-mo movie at all. Everything happened so fast, most of the boys didn’t even remember the car coming. His arm had pushed back as the younger boy next to him jerked against his belt. There was a flurry of hair and hands, not even enough time for tears to begin welling. By the time the van stopped, there was a 450 degree difference than there was before. Seatbelts unbuckled, and the thuds of gravity followed.
Three boys and the driver made it out, two were incapable of unbuckling themselves, and one hugged his legs as he called the others, speaking in a broken way, piecing together words to emphasize the urgency. The older two managed to wake up one of the members dangling from the web of safety straps. He collapsed as soon as he climbed out, still fatigued, but he tried to smile anyways through his catlike lips. “It’s okay, we’re all okay, right?” He tried to brighten the mood, not realising that there was one boy left in the van. The two rescuers crawled into the side window, dropping down to grab the last of the group.
He was lying against the broken window, blood dribbling from his head and fingers, his dark clothes made it impossible to tell if he was injured anywhere else. The leader gently pulled up his head, knowing from his athletic history that injuries like that are delicate and devastating. His helper clicked the button, releasing him from the trap of tangles. With the force of feathers, the two slowly pulled him out, laying him down on the side. The fawn faced boy took off his sweater and rolled it up: a support for a possibly broken neck. The others followed, trying to keep him warm while the oxygen slowly escaped his lungs.
The ambulance finally arrived to the five boys huddled around their eldest, a torn shirt serving as the only bandage. The leader was the first to look up, his eyes uncharacteristically red and swollen. He stood up, and solemnly explained to the new arrivals what he thought had happened. His words were slow and his voice hit a pitch far lower than before. He stopped talking to let out a shaky cough before glancing at the others. The one who had started crying almost immediately pushed against his eyes with his palms; as if the bags under them had become pink and raw from his tears. The cat faced boy had an arm around Yixing, who was still holding his phone in shaking hands. The last boy, the doe-eyed one, silently followed his friend into the ambulance. He didn’t say a word the whole time, just stared at his friend, the boy who could smile through anything. His mouth was frozen in a quiet frown, and his cheeks were flecked with tears that weren’t his.
The moment came when Minseok had to be pushed out. Luhan stood in the cold darkness, illuminated only by the lamps and lights of the hospital. His eyes welled up, and a sob escaped him.
It was the six week mark.
Three softly shaking fingers dragged the marker across the calendar. Another day gone. Another day of listening to the gentle whirring of drips and monitors until he fell asleep next to the bed. Sometimes he’d wake up in a cold sweat, and his eyes would immediately dart to the patient's face, then to the series of screens next to him. Alive. Thank god, still alive.
Breathing a sigh of relief, he would watch his friend’s peaceful face, eyes twitching every once in awhile. He would gingerly touch the hand closest to him, intertwining his own with the bedridden boy’s. He could feel the quiet heartbeat in his fingers. That, along with the chirping of machines, would lull him to sleep.
Since that night, he had spent every moment possibly in this room. The first few weeks were easy: they had ceased performing to give time for the M members to heal. Jongdae had suffered a concussion and was put in the same room as Minseok. Zitao had broken three of his fingers, all tightly bandaged up in the same night. Yifan, Luhan, and Yixing were mostly fine, only some slight cuts from the broken glass.
The group would sit around the hospital room, listening to the quiet strummings from Chanyeol’s guitar until one of them decided to start singing. Jongdae would sleep through most of it, but occasionally try to sing along in a tired voice. Yixing would say, “Oh, he’s asleep,” every time he noticed the soulful murmurs had stopped. Eventually, it got stronger and stronger until the nurses would come in frequently to remind them that “people are trying to sleep.” The room would quiet as everyone remembered that their songs had failed: one of their members hadn’t woken up for four weeks.
In the less populated moments, Luhan would sit in the chair between the two beds, reading aloud from Minseok’s favourite book: Le Petit Prince. Jongdae would watch and listen as Luhan accented the spoken words, his performance getting more and more animated as the days went by. Jongdae would sometime even recite the story along with his narrator, giggling as Luhan motioned too hard with his hand and fell out of his chair (it wasn’t the first time).
Eventually, Jongdae recovered enough to leave the hospital. The room felt empty without a response to Luhan’s stories and songs. He was just singing to himself, sitting in the chair between the two beds. It was distant, he thought as he chewed his lower lip. Placing a finger in between the pages of the book, he pulled the chair up towards Minseok. It was the closest he’d been since the accident, he hadn’t dared even to breathe on the boy in fear of offsetting the delicate balance of sleep and death.
He inhaled slowly, placing the book on the ground. Balling his hands into fists, he looked at the sleeping boy. He looked- Luhan considered his words carefully- not peaceful, but static. A scar trailed an inch across his head, stitches long since removed. His hair had gotten a little longer, the original colour beginning to return. His face was still round and pale, and Luhan smiled as he remembered the nickname they had for him back in the early days. He opened the book, and continued to read, watching Minseok’s face with a gentle care as if he was just a child who had fallen asleep during a bedtime story.
He continued to read, feeling more and more full hearted now that he could see his audience. He felt as if his words could wake up his dozing prince if he put enough life into every sentence. He would get up, act out carefully choreographed actions that he thought of while backstage or on the nights where he slept in the dorms. Usually he would catch Minseok’s eyelids twitch or the corner of his mouth curve into a tiny smile before returning to the neutral state.
Sometimes when he read, he would get lost in the pauses, the flickering eyelashes, or the slight breeze from the window lightly ruffling the sleeping boy’s hair. He would sit there, unaware of his own smile, as he thought about how close they once were. He would forget that tears did not mix well with paper, but he wouldn’t neglect wiping his eyes when his vision blurred to the point of blindness. A sniffle would escape him, and he’d continue reading, his voice a murmur.
His eyes would remember these moments as the prince looking onto sleeping beauty, but not before he remembered this was not a fairy tale. If anything, the princess was more like a knight who had clung to life as a sword, or a speeding sedan, clashed against him. He was the damsel in distress, the long lost friend who had met on the outskirts of tragedy. Yet, with all the looming sorrow of what was and what could have been, he found solace in the tiny heart beat puttering through Minseok’s fingertips. When he couldn’t will himself into any more metaphors, he would give in, succumbing to the drowsiness. It was a Thursday. It had been a Friday. A Friday six weeks ago.
And then it was Friday again.
9:35 on a Friday morning was when he woke up. It was another seven minutes before Luhan stirred, awoken by the slow movements of his sleepy friend.
“Lu-ge,” he mumbled in the chirpy voice that Luhan would later equate to sound of morning sparrows. His first word. A beautiful first word. “What’s this?” he said, trying to lift his arms. They were wrapped in IVs and wires, the things that had kept him alive.
There’s the typical question. Luhan didn’t have time to process the words. His eyes welled up, pooling until they dripped over his cheeks. Luhan tried to form words, some explanation as to why his hyung was draped in cheap cloth and pierced all up the arms with tiny tubes pumping saline and other fluids into him. Instead, the words flooded over as his heart poured out, adjectives slowly dripping down his cheeks and verbs rushing out of his throat in the form of one quick sob after another.
“I thought you,” he started, “you were...”
Minseok blinked, and his mouth curled in a small, albeit confused smile. “I was what? Dead?”
Luhan could barely nod. His shoulders shuddered and his teeth dug into his lip, trying to stop his chin from quivering. He had to stay strong, but the walls were caving in. Minseok’s smile faded slightly, and he reached his arms as far as they could, his fingers barely reaching the younger boy’s arm. His touch, his finally conscious touch, was enough to shatter Luhan. He fell, burying his face in the blankets covering Minseok’s chest.
Wincing slightly as the tubes were tugged under the weight of the younger boy, he reached his free arm over, pulling his friend close. “Hey, hey, Han, it’s okay, don’t cry.”
Within a half hour, ten more boys were crowded in the room and at least half of them had tears in their eyes. Minseok grinned the entire time, his hand constantly in Luhan’s grasp. Food from all places decorated the tables, chairs, and floor of the room. “We thought you’d be hungry,” Chanyeol had laughed, Baekhyun practically vibrating in excitement next to him. Jongdae, Jongin, and Sehun preformed a quick dance called “the Xiumin Shuffle” which resulted in Jongdae being literally kicked off their stage by Sehun. Yifan and Junmyeon had gotten all the members to make a card. It was filled with uplifting messages such as “When you stop being dead, I’ll cook for you - Yixing” and “I don’t care if you’re older, you should listen to me and wake up - Zitao”. With all the excitement, Minseok was worn down fairly quickly - “How ironic! you’ve been asleep so long, you’re not allowed to be this tired!” Kyungsoo had said. Minseok drifted off while the boys were trailing out of the room. Luhan looked back, looked at the boy curled on his side, and realised this was the first time in seven weeks that his best friend had moved and the first thing he said was,
“Lu-ge.”
Luhan blinked, Minseok was eyeing him from under his arm. He lifted his head slightly to see the younger boy more clearly. “Can I ask you something kind of silly?”
Luhan nodded, unsure of what to expect.
“Can you read me this?” He held up the storybook. “It was next to my bed, I guess someone left it here when everybody was visiting, but I don’t remember it looking this…” he smiled, that big toothy smile Luhan had missed so much, “beat up. It’s kind of like… me, now, I guess.” His face saddened a bit: he had missed a lot over the past two months. Luhan took the book and sat down. “I actually don’t need this to read it, I- it’s kind of embarrassing actually...”
Minseok looked on with inquisitive eyes. “What?”
“I’ve memorized it. You sometimes reacted when I read it so I read it almost everyday because…” He stopped, feeling the sobs nestled in his chest starting to wake up.
Minseok put a hand on his knee. “Don’t cry, I’m okay, I’m really okay.” He paused, hoping his words would anchor in Luhan. “Tell me a new story then.”
Luhan laughed for what seemed like the first time in ages. “I’ve thought of hundreds, where do I start?”
A/N: My first ever fic beta'd by Joanna. I wrote it a few months ago, woops