the heartbreak that never happened; [yehsung/ryeowook]
the heartbreak that never happened
yehsung/ryeowook, ninja!kyuhae, pg-13
2,117 words
Summary: Ryeowook marries Yehsung in Canada, but not without some internal conflict first. So this is all thanks to the wonderful thundersquall, without whose persuasion this would never have materialized. Please direct all complaints for the cheesiest Yehwook ever to her lj. ♥
When Ryeowook is seven, he believes he's going to marry the pretty girl down the street who passes by every Sunday morning with a balloon fisted in her hand. She's chubby-cheeked and fair and Ryeowook wants to run down the street and hug her tight.
By the time he turns eight, the pretty girl doesn't pass by their street anymore. Ryeowook is sad in the way only little boys can be sad, but he doesn't scream or throw a tantrum or muffle his sobs in his pillow. He plays with a few new toy cars, colors the pages of new coloring books, and he feels okay again.
It's a not-quite-pain, but he doesn't know it at the time, and that's alright with him. He has his cars and crayons to keep the young, boyish hurt at bay.
-
When Ryeowook is thirteen, he decides that marriage is for girls who doodle names on the margins of notebooks and old ladies who sit by their rickety rocking chairs dreaming about the past long gone. It may have something to do with that girl, the one with pigtails bouncing off her head, the one he kinda sorta liked. It may have something to do with her holding hands with the boy who sat near the window, looking out at the clouds. It may have something to do with his heart clenching at the sight, wishing that their fingers weren't wound quite so tight, and knowing that he could do nothing about it.
So he sings, and he sings loud and clear until the birds on his windowsill fly away in fright, until the sky turns bleached bone white in the morning sun, until he's gone dizzy and about to pass out from the lack of oxygen.
This is what heartbreak feels like, he thinks. I won't feel it again anytime soon.
-
He's small, stubborn and resolute when he enters the company. In the presence of other trainees, he's soft-spoken, passive, kind. Everyone likes him. Though he is initially cautious, he quickly grows to like almost everyone as well.
When the other boys fall in love, some with other girls, a few with other boys, he is privy to it all. Once, he catches a boy and a girl making out in the janitor's closet, and he stammers hastily mumbled apologies before getting the mop and slamming the closet door shut. Another time, he is happily chatting with one of his friends, and when he turns around two boys are rubbing their noses together. He grabs the hand of said friend and is out the door faster than he can say 'kiss.'
A few months later, he debuts with Super Junior, and he doesn't have to think about things like kissing and touching and illicit encounters for a while. Never mix business with pleasure is the oft told principle at work here. His days and nights are filled with music and movement and loud laughter, nevermind that some of them whined loudly during breaks, wishing they had girlfriends or at least a date to this and that movie premiere. Nevermind that some of them sneaked into each other's bedrooms at night, and he could hear their moans from the paper-thin walls that separated their quarters. It was all he had hoped for and more, and he is happy.
-
A year into their debut, with Kyuhyun added to the group, he begins to feel his resolve crumbling in the face of a certain someone. He doesn't know how it started, or why it even did, but he's deeply disturbed by this development.
"Ryeowookie, you left your--" Yehsung is saying, but he takes an abrupt step forward, loses his balance after apparently crashing onto a speck of dust, and trips spectacularly in front of him.
"Hyung!" he exclaims, and the note of absolute worry in his tone bothers him. "Are you alright?"
Yehsung looks up at him with a crooked half-smile. "I'm okay as long as you're the one helping me up."
"Greasy," Heechul comments off-handedly as he passes by with a tray of cookies in hand. "Don't fall for his tricks, magnae!" he says over his shoulder before retreating into Siwon's bedroom.
"Who's falling for whose tricks?" Kyuhyun says, appearing out of nowhere with a laughing Donghae in tow. "Oh, did Yehsung-hyung fall again?"
Ryeowook is embarrassed to admit that that may be the first time he realized, with a start, almost like a lightning bolt to the head, that he may possibly have a crush on the older man.
Crushes are okay, he says to himself as he lies on his back that night. He can't wait to get over it.
-
To his dismay, he doesn't get over it. In fact, Yehsung's - no, Jongwoon's - daily quota of failure increases when he's around, and sad to say, his embarrassing crush intensifies too with every misstep, every crash down a small flight of stairs, every goofy (yet incredibly attractive) smile.
He decides that he may possibly, kinda, sorta love him when he's cornered to a wall, shirt open a few buttons, hair ruffled. He doesn't even remember how he got that way, much less why Yehsung's mouth is mere centimeters above his own.
He swallows, closes his eyes in half-anxiety, half-arousal. When Yehsung kisses him, he's half-expecting him to bump their heads and kill the mood entirely, or aim his lips at the wall first so he would taste plaster in his tongue, but Yehsung is surprisingly smooth and he knows exactly where to touch, where to go so that he nearly bucks his entire body with want.
Yehsung tangles his fingers into his hair and attacks his neck with feverish kisses. He doesn't miss the murmured, "You don't know how long I've wanted to do this." It's moaned into his neck between licks and nips, and he shudders, slides his arms around Yehsung's waist.
So it isn't a crush, and I'm not getting over it, he thinks as he and Yehsung go back to the rehearsal room, hand in hand.
-
No one is surprised when Donghae gives Kyuhyun a promise ring after their latest concert, backstage and to the tune of many hoots and congratulatory claps on the back. It's been a long time coming, and Ryeowook thinks that maybe, just maybe, the promise of forever doesn't have to be only for silly little girls or nostalgic old ladies.
No one is surprised when Yehsung announces a few days later, to everyone gathered in the living room, that he plans to usurp the 'throne of romance' with a wedding, a real wedding of his own. It's only when someone (possibly Siwon) bursts into tears that he realizes everyone's looking at him, expecting him to say something, anything. Yehsung has the most hopeful look on his face, and the longer the silence goes on, the more his face falls into an expression of desperation.
"Oh," he starts, and everyone leans in. He squirms, trying to avoid the probing eyes. "Um. I. Well. Okay."
Yehsung falls to his knees in front of him, and Ryeowook is torn between dying of embarrassment and hitting everyone over the head with a hammer for being so loud and annoying in the middle of a moment he's supposed to cherish for the rest of his life.
-
"Umma, I'm getting married," he says into the phone the next day. He's fiddling with the cord and the the blue of his jeans may have started to fade as he rubbed his palm on it every second.
"It's not a girl, right?" His mother says, unexpectedly.
"How... how did you know?" And really, he didn't have to ask, because his mother probably knew anyway.
"Oh, please, Ryeowook," she says in that flippant tone she liked to use whenever she was sure of herself, which was always, "you're in a band with fourteen other boys. You've been together for god knows how long, and you've never once told me you had a girlfriend. You never even at least pretended to have a scandal so your father could see it on the news. Now tell me who the young man is."
He stands there gaping for a while, before he realizes that anyone could barge in and take a picture for posterity.
"Well?" she prompts impatiently. "Hurry up. This dish isn't going to cook itself, and I don't have all day."
"Umma, it's Yehsung," he says, then quickly amends it to "Kim Jongwoon. That's his real name. I've told you before, right?".
His mother makes a haughty 'tut-tut' sound. "Oh, Ryeowookie, really? How about that other boy? The Chinese one?"
He frowns. "Henry?"
"No, no. The other one, the older one."
"... Hankyung-hyung?"
"Yes! He's a darling boy; on television he's so quiet and handsome. You should have went for that."
He deliberately forgets to send invites to his mother, before Yehsung scribbles one at the last minute and pushes it into the mailbox before he can voice out a half-hearted objection.
-
It takes forever and a day for everyone to arrange their flights to Canada. Being that Yehsung and Ryeowook would rather commit couple suicide than pay for everyone's plane tickets and hotel fees, Leeteuk had taken it upon himself to coerce everyone into shelling out a few bucks from their individual bank accounts. Years of practice at being an authority clearly paid off as he convinced even their respective families to pay for their own tickets.
And being that Super Junior is Super Junior, of course the preparations don't go off without a hitch. Both Heechul and Sungmin wanted to be the flower person, with Heechul threatening to step on Yehsung's face if he didn't get his way. Good thing both Hankyung and Siwon were there to calm him down, or Ryeowook may have burned something (like Heechul's hair - no matter how much he loved his hyung, sometimes he just went too far). Leeteuk was on the verge of having an aneurysm when he spied Eunhyuk and Shindong doing an experimental breakdance with the champagne glasses as props. Kangin may or may not have been drunk as he stepped into the room and loudly declared that he was going to lift Ryeowook's bridal gown train. Which didn't exist, by the way, as he and Yehsung had agreed on wearing classic black tuxedos.
But being that Super Junior is Super Junior, the wedding proper comes together splendidly. Not a dry eye is left as Kyuhyun sings, soaring over the sweet melody of Henry's violin, and Ryeowook walks down the aisle. When he's led up that one step to the altar, it's Yehsung who trips, and laughter goes around the room.
Some things never change, no matter how old or suave or sophisticated one gets.
"Do you, Kim Ryeowook, take this man, Kim Jongwoon, to be your lawfully wedded husband, to be by his side for richer or poorer, in sickness and in health, 'til death do you part?"
Ryeowook ignores the loud sobs coming from the pews on the left (his mother, Yehsung's mother and possibly Siwon or Zhou Mi), takes Yehsung's warm hands into his own and says, "I do."
-
When Ryeowook is nineteen, he falls in love for the third time. It may have something to do with those stolen kisses in the recording booth. It may have something to do with the comfort he feels when they sit close together that it would be impossible to put even a thin piece of paper between them. It may have something to do with how Yehsung's eyes on him always strip him to the bone, pare away flesh and blood until he feels clean, peeling away all the layers he's cloaked himself in until he finds his beating heart.
When Ryeowook is twenty-seven, with a ring on his neck and Yehsung's lips on his hand, he falls in love for the fourth time. And he realizes that he loves him even when he's too tired to kiss him, or too angry to give in to the magnet of his arms. He loves him even when the world watches with vicious eyes and he can't tell him so. He loves him when he tells it anyway, in the dead of the night, in the glare of the afternoon sun, in front of a sea of blue and roaring screams.
He still braces himself for heartbreak.
It never happens.
yehsung/ryeowook, ninja!kyuhae, pg-13
2,117 words
Summary: Ryeowook marries Yehsung in Canada, but not without some internal conflict first. So this is all thanks to the wonderful thundersquall, without whose persuasion this would never have materialized. Please direct all complaints for the cheesiest Yehwook ever to her lj. ♥
When Ryeowook is seven, he believes he's going to marry the pretty girl down the street who passes by every Sunday morning with a balloon fisted in her hand. She's chubby-cheeked and fair and Ryeowook wants to run down the street and hug her tight.
By the time he turns eight, the pretty girl doesn't pass by their street anymore. Ryeowook is sad in the way only little boys can be sad, but he doesn't scream or throw a tantrum or muffle his sobs in his pillow. He plays with a few new toy cars, colors the pages of new coloring books, and he feels okay again.
It's a not-quite-pain, but he doesn't know it at the time, and that's alright with him. He has his cars and crayons to keep the young, boyish hurt at bay.
-
When Ryeowook is thirteen, he decides that marriage is for girls who doodle names on the margins of notebooks and old ladies who sit by their rickety rocking chairs dreaming about the past long gone. It may have something to do with that girl, the one with pigtails bouncing off her head, the one he kinda sorta liked. It may have something to do with her holding hands with the boy who sat near the window, looking out at the clouds. It may have something to do with his heart clenching at the sight, wishing that their fingers weren't wound quite so tight, and knowing that he could do nothing about it.
So he sings, and he sings loud and clear until the birds on his windowsill fly away in fright, until the sky turns bleached bone white in the morning sun, until he's gone dizzy and about to pass out from the lack of oxygen.
This is what heartbreak feels like, he thinks. I won't feel it again anytime soon.
-
He's small, stubborn and resolute when he enters the company. In the presence of other trainees, he's soft-spoken, passive, kind. Everyone likes him. Though he is initially cautious, he quickly grows to like almost everyone as well.
When the other boys fall in love, some with other girls, a few with other boys, he is privy to it all. Once, he catches a boy and a girl making out in the janitor's closet, and he stammers hastily mumbled apologies before getting the mop and slamming the closet door shut. Another time, he is happily chatting with one of his friends, and when he turns around two boys are rubbing their noses together. He grabs the hand of said friend and is out the door faster than he can say 'kiss.'
A few months later, he debuts with Super Junior, and he doesn't have to think about things like kissing and touching and illicit encounters for a while. Never mix business with pleasure is the oft told principle at work here. His days and nights are filled with music and movement and loud laughter, nevermind that some of them whined loudly during breaks, wishing they had girlfriends or at least a date to this and that movie premiere. Nevermind that some of them sneaked into each other's bedrooms at night, and he could hear their moans from the paper-thin walls that separated their quarters. It was all he had hoped for and more, and he is happy.
-
A year into their debut, with Kyuhyun added to the group, he begins to feel his resolve crumbling in the face of a certain someone. He doesn't know how it started, or why it even did, but he's deeply disturbed by this development.
"Ryeowookie, you left your--" Yehsung is saying, but he takes an abrupt step forward, loses his balance after apparently crashing onto a speck of dust, and trips spectacularly in front of him.
"Hyung!" he exclaims, and the note of absolute worry in his tone bothers him. "Are you alright?"
Yehsung looks up at him with a crooked half-smile. "I'm okay as long as you're the one helping me up."
"Greasy," Heechul comments off-handedly as he passes by with a tray of cookies in hand. "Don't fall for his tricks, magnae!" he says over his shoulder before retreating into Siwon's bedroom.
"Who's falling for whose tricks?" Kyuhyun says, appearing out of nowhere with a laughing Donghae in tow. "Oh, did Yehsung-hyung fall again?"
Ryeowook is embarrassed to admit that that may be the first time he realized, with a start, almost like a lightning bolt to the head, that he may possibly have a crush on the older man.
Crushes are okay, he says to himself as he lies on his back that night. He can't wait to get over it.
-
To his dismay, he doesn't get over it. In fact, Yehsung's - no, Jongwoon's - daily quota of failure increases when he's around, and sad to say, his embarrassing crush intensifies too with every misstep, every crash down a small flight of stairs, every goofy (yet incredibly attractive) smile.
He decides that he may possibly, kinda, sorta love him when he's cornered to a wall, shirt open a few buttons, hair ruffled. He doesn't even remember how he got that way, much less why Yehsung's mouth is mere centimeters above his own.
He swallows, closes his eyes in half-anxiety, half-arousal. When Yehsung kisses him, he's half-expecting him to bump their heads and kill the mood entirely, or aim his lips at the wall first so he would taste plaster in his tongue, but Yehsung is surprisingly smooth and he knows exactly where to touch, where to go so that he nearly bucks his entire body with want.
Yehsung tangles his fingers into his hair and attacks his neck with feverish kisses. He doesn't miss the murmured, "You don't know how long I've wanted to do this." It's moaned into his neck between licks and nips, and he shudders, slides his arms around Yehsung's waist.
So it isn't a crush, and I'm not getting over it, he thinks as he and Yehsung go back to the rehearsal room, hand in hand.
-
No one is surprised when Donghae gives Kyuhyun a promise ring after their latest concert, backstage and to the tune of many hoots and congratulatory claps on the back. It's been a long time coming, and Ryeowook thinks that maybe, just maybe, the promise of forever doesn't have to be only for silly little girls or nostalgic old ladies.
No one is surprised when Yehsung announces a few days later, to everyone gathered in the living room, that he plans to usurp the 'throne of romance' with a wedding, a real wedding of his own. It's only when someone (possibly Siwon) bursts into tears that he realizes everyone's looking at him, expecting him to say something, anything. Yehsung has the most hopeful look on his face, and the longer the silence goes on, the more his face falls into an expression of desperation.
"Oh," he starts, and everyone leans in. He squirms, trying to avoid the probing eyes. "Um. I. Well. Okay."
Yehsung falls to his knees in front of him, and Ryeowook is torn between dying of embarrassment and hitting everyone over the head with a hammer for being so loud and annoying in the middle of a moment he's supposed to cherish for the rest of his life.
-
"Umma, I'm getting married," he says into the phone the next day. He's fiddling with the cord and the the blue of his jeans may have started to fade as he rubbed his palm on it every second.
"It's not a girl, right?" His mother says, unexpectedly.
"How... how did you know?" And really, he didn't have to ask, because his mother probably knew anyway.
"Oh, please, Ryeowook," she says in that flippant tone she liked to use whenever she was sure of herself, which was always, "you're in a band with fourteen other boys. You've been together for god knows how long, and you've never once told me you had a girlfriend. You never even at least pretended to have a scandal so your father could see it on the news. Now tell me who the young man is."
He stands there gaping for a while, before he realizes that anyone could barge in and take a picture for posterity.
"Well?" she prompts impatiently. "Hurry up. This dish isn't going to cook itself, and I don't have all day."
"Umma, it's Yehsung," he says, then quickly amends it to "Kim Jongwoon. That's his real name. I've told you before, right?".
His mother makes a haughty 'tut-tut' sound. "Oh, Ryeowookie, really? How about that other boy? The Chinese one?"
He frowns. "Henry?"
"No, no. The other one, the older one."
"... Hankyung-hyung?"
"Yes! He's a darling boy; on television he's so quiet and handsome. You should have went for that."
He deliberately forgets to send invites to his mother, before Yehsung scribbles one at the last minute and pushes it into the mailbox before he can voice out a half-hearted objection.
-
It takes forever and a day for everyone to arrange their flights to Canada. Being that Yehsung and Ryeowook would rather commit couple suicide than pay for everyone's plane tickets and hotel fees, Leeteuk had taken it upon himself to coerce everyone into shelling out a few bucks from their individual bank accounts. Years of practice at being an authority clearly paid off as he convinced even their respective families to pay for their own tickets.
And being that Super Junior is Super Junior, of course the preparations don't go off without a hitch. Both Heechul and Sungmin wanted to be the flower person, with Heechul threatening to step on Yehsung's face if he didn't get his way. Good thing both Hankyung and Siwon were there to calm him down, or Ryeowook may have burned something (like Heechul's hair - no matter how much he loved his hyung, sometimes he just went too far). Leeteuk was on the verge of having an aneurysm when he spied Eunhyuk and Shindong doing an experimental breakdance with the champagne glasses as props. Kangin may or may not have been drunk as he stepped into the room and loudly declared that he was going to lift Ryeowook's bridal gown train. Which didn't exist, by the way, as he and Yehsung had agreed on wearing classic black tuxedos.
But being that Super Junior is Super Junior, the wedding proper comes together splendidly. Not a dry eye is left as Kyuhyun sings, soaring over the sweet melody of Henry's violin, and Ryeowook walks down the aisle. When he's led up that one step to the altar, it's Yehsung who trips, and laughter goes around the room.
Some things never change, no matter how old or suave or sophisticated one gets.
"Do you, Kim Ryeowook, take this man, Kim Jongwoon, to be your lawfully wedded husband, to be by his side for richer or poorer, in sickness and in health, 'til death do you part?"
Ryeowook ignores the loud sobs coming from the pews on the left (his mother, Yehsung's mother and possibly Siwon or Zhou Mi), takes Yehsung's warm hands into his own and says, "I do."
-
When Ryeowook is nineteen, he falls in love for the third time. It may have something to do with those stolen kisses in the recording booth. It may have something to do with the comfort he feels when they sit close together that it would be impossible to put even a thin piece of paper between them. It may have something to do with how Yehsung's eyes on him always strip him to the bone, pare away flesh and blood until he feels clean, peeling away all the layers he's cloaked himself in until he finds his beating heart.
When Ryeowook is twenty-seven, with a ring on his neck and Yehsung's lips on his hand, he falls in love for the fourth time. And he realizes that he loves him even when he's too tired to kiss him, or too angry to give in to the magnet of his arms. He loves him even when the world watches with vicious eyes and he can't tell him so. He loves him when he tells it anyway, in the dead of the night, in the glare of the afternoon sun, in front of a sea of blue and roaring screams.
He still braces himself for heartbreak.
It never happens.