ISS 2011: FOR SPECIALISES (Part 1/2)
To: specialises
From: Your Secret Santa
Title: A Falling Star (Fell From Your Heart)
Pairing/Focus: Woohyun/Myungsoo (with about two paragraphs of Woohyun/Sunggyu, mentioned Sungyeol/Ahn Jihyun, and Hoya/Dongwoo if you squint.)
Rating: PG-13 (language)
Word count: ~12,000
Summary: Woohyun finds his life morphing into a very unorthodox fairy tale when he meets someone who makes him question "happily ever afters."
One night, Woohyun dreams of the tops of buildings.
Woohyun dreams of sitting on the edge of a roof of some thirty story skyscraper, dangling his legs over precariously and letting the Seoul smog envelop him, sink into his very lungs, strangling, suffocating. He's wearing a tank top and one of his skinnier pairs of jeans and he's still sweltering in the heat of the bright lights.
It grows harder to breathe and Woohyun gets to his feet, looks down at the hundreds of cars, the din of civilization, the price of living here. His hands twitch, flex, and he shoves them into his pockets, makes a decision in that split second pause. He steps over the edge, breathes in the rush of falling, of salvation.
Woohyun jerks awake before he sees what happens next, breath heavy, heart pounding in his ears, and looks outside, sees his ground level dorm and wonders to himself if he's borderline. Eventually he sinks into that state of stupor between sleep and consciousness before he realizes that he is running late for class, and he happens to have an exam. Woohyun nearly upends his apartment in search for his lucky boxers and succeeds after twenty minutes, justifying himself because those boxers have always guaranteed him at least sixty points out of a hundred. Which is passable, right?
Debates set aside, Woohyun dismisses the possibility of coffee when he sees his class starts in twenty minutes and it takes forty minutes to get there by bus. He swears under his breath and grabs his bag, scrolling through his phone's contacts and jabbing Dongwoo's name with a vengeance.
Dongwoo's phone rings out. He's still sleeping, and he's the only friend of Woohyun's who can get Woohyun from Point A to Point B in a terrifying amount of time. Well, shit.
Woohyun is half an hour late for class. His professor throws him the most reproachful of stares and slides over a rather thick packet to him and Woohyun hates this class with every fiber of his being. He ends up guessing half the answers and leaving the others blank and storms out of the classroom once class ends.
Dongwoo calls Woohyun once he sits down in the cafeteria, shouldering his backpack like a grudge. Half the school throws around inquisitive looks; Woohyun is the life of every party, what could have pissed him off this much?
"You called me," Dongwoo mumbles eloquently. It's twelve and he just woke up and Woohyun wonders vaguely how late he must have stayed up practicing last night.
"I was running late. Forget about it, I bombed my Bio test anyways."
Dongwoo's face contorts into one of sympathy and Woohyun knows it because Dongwoo wears every emotion he's feeling; wears it loud.
"Hey, who cares, you hate that class anyways. Not like you'll launch into a lecture about mitochondria halfway through a song on stage, right?"
Woohyun can't help but laugh a little, because Dongwoo's trying, and he appreciates it. "Yeah." He affirms. "Right."
Dongwoo's grin is audible over the phone line and Woohyun sees a silhouette stride in through the double doors, tells Dongwoo to go back to sleep, and hangs up.
Woohyun sneezes and a chair scooches out beside him, Sungjong plunking down beside him and drawing himself up, flicking the side of Woohyun's head with charcoal smudged fingers. Woohyun snaps his teeth at Sungjong's outstretched digits and his yelp of surprise is hysterical.
"Everyone's wondering what crawled up your ass and died," Sungjong says, looking unimpressed. Woohyun snorts and leans his elbows on the table, pressing his forehead into his hands. "School drama, you know."
Sungjong's eyes glitter predatorily, "Drama? Dish!" but Woohyun throws him a withering look and Sungjong shrugs, eyes the charcoal under his fingernails and in the whorls of his fingertips. "Hey, you're bound to have classes you won't like. Quit whining." Sungjong wrinkles his nose in annoyance and Woohyun smirks, shoves him, and decides he likes Sungjong a little more than before.
Woohyun shuffles through the rest of his classes with less drama. He perks up a little when Composition comes around, and he busies himself with patterns of eighth notes, the most gorgeous thing he's seen all day. He considers cutting all his other classes in favor of just attending Comp some days, but the thoughts of a diploma hanging on the wall of the small study back at his parents' place stops him in his tracks.
He trudges home at two, busies himself with his term paper, watches the newest episode of the drama he's been following, and devours tonight's Immortal Song with ravenous eyes, pictures standing on that stage as the winner, smile wide enough to split. Woohyun falls asleep on the couch halfway through a skin CF, rolling over onto his stomach and snoring right through the thud of his textbook meeting the floor.
Woohyun dreams of falling this night. He's appalled as to how he got here again, but all is forgotten when he realizes that the ground is getting closer, really quickl-
And like that, he soars, glides above the pavement before a wild gust of wind propels him skyward and he tries not to scream like a child when he sees that he's suddenly higher than before, that if the wind just happens to disappear then he'll die.
I can't die,Woohyun thinks to himself with vigor. I cannot die, I have yet to become a major musician and marry a model.
As if reprimanding his shallow add-on to his statement, the wind's grip around his midsection loosens and he falls about ten feet. This time he screams like a little child and swears he hears laughter ring through the clouds, pictures God himself laughing at him. What the hell, is this punishment for something? True, he's done bad things; snuck beer from Dongwoo's dad's liquor cabinet and got busted and grounded for a month; slept with a Tri-Sig girl who already had a boyfriend, but the guy punched him in the jaw two days after, so that should have been a fair exchange.
It's after the winds pick up that Woohyun learns after that flying sucks. The wind is freezing and it bites at your skin and your eyes water and it's hard to breathe with the air actively punching you in the face every instant. He grunts in discomfort when he falls on his ass onto a cloud.
"Wow," he grumbles, blood rushing in his ears, "Hi-fucking-larious."
Woohyun pauses when he hears that laugh again, a slow unfurling chuckle, and Woohyun is stunned, even a bit miffed. Since when was God so sarcastic?
---
Woohyun is twenty-two. He's halfway through his second year of college at some slightly better than average university stuck in the middle of Seoul. His heart's immersed in music but he's majoring in Medicine. He trudges through his classes and loathes life for his parents, who've never frowned upon his rich as coffee voice, but still find themselves on worse days wishing for their son to come marching home with a doctorate tucked into his back pocket. Woohyun deals with it and strives for excellence to see the smiles on their faces. He's not as much a perfectionist as he'd like to be, though.
---
Woohyun dreams of plummeting from his home in the clouds the next night. He lands in the ocean and for some reason he can't swim. His limbs freeze up and he sinks to the bottom, the seaweed and sand entombing him. He fails his calc test, the next day, as expected.
The following night a pretty pair of hands unearths him, and he awakens on the side of the street. The sky is tinted much too blue for this side of the city, fading into white at the edges.
The straight week of rain clears up the next morning, and he wears a wifebeater to school the next day, styles his hair, and walks home with the number of that pretty girl who sits two rows down from him in Bio tucked into his back pocket.
He dates her for two months before he dreams of standing upon that building once more, but this time, rather than jumping, he's pushed, and he knows that he won't fly this time.
Betrayal, the wind whispers to him, and he awakens the next morning to see one choice sentence on his phone screen; sees her the next day under the arm of another guy. He drinks himself into a stupor and dreams of fingers carding through his hair, the sun warming his face.
"I swear to god, Yeol, it's the weirdest damn thing," he confesses in the halls outside of the auditorium a week after the strangely prophetic dreams continue. Sungyeol stands in a costume with too many ruffles and too much gold trim and - is that eyeliner?
"Maybe you're psychic," Sungyeol remarks, flipping through his book of lines. (That he learned last week, but he's trying really hard to pretend not to know to get in some extra help from Jihyun.)
Woohyun scoffs and rubs at his eyes but part of him starts to suspect that maybe he might be, and it both excites and scares him.
Sungyeol starts to speak but promptly shuts up because at that moment Jihyun traipses by, looking regal in a gown that trails behind her, doll-like. Woohyun watches her shake on her huge heels like Bambi trying to walk for the first time and snorts when Sungyeol runs after her to steady her, ask to run through those lines one more time. Woohyun's had make-ups and break-ups before but it stings a bit each time, and this is no exception.
It rains when he walks home, but by one great stretch of luck he manages to find a seat on the bus, sits between a little old lady knitting something for her eighth grandson and a middle aged businessman on his way home to his kids. Woohyun scrawls the lyrics to a love song on a fast food napkin he finds in the bottom of his jacket pocket, hums an improvised melody and steps off the bus with sore cheeks from where that little old lady pinched them, cooing about what a pretty voice he had. His smile is indelible.
Woohyun's dream is different that night. He waits on the roof of that building once more, but the city's invisible, the small building turned into a skyscraper, hidden amidst the clouds. He hears the telltale ding of an elevator and the hairs on the back of his neck prickle. Woohyun knows he's waiting for someone this time around. He drinks three cans of soda the next night and doesn't fall asleep at all, fights through the following day, and it goes by without many ups or downs, to his immense relief. He claws his way through the next two days like this.
"You look like shit," Sungyeol remarks tactfully on a Wednesday morning. Woohyun makes some ungodly noise resembling a grunt and Sungyeol waves a hand in front of drooping eyes, slaps him on each cheek for good measure. Woohyun aims his kick for the younger's shin and misses.
"Couldn't sleep at all," Woohyun grumbles, leaning his head into his hands. His hair's covered by a beanie pilfered from Dongwoo because his bed head resembles a nimbus cloud sprouting from his cranium rather than that sexy just-happened-to-roll-out-of-bed-with-amazing-hair look he aims for. True to Sungyeol's word, he doesn't look his best. He's in a ratty old hoodie, his eyes are bloodshot, and he has a headache with the caliber of a small bulldozer.
Sungyeol snorts but stops right there, chews through his sandwich silently, and Woohyun's stirred slightly from his reverie when Sungyeol doesn't make a snide remark of any kind. He tries with some effort to think and runs a hand over the top of the threadbare beanie. "What, Jihyun?"
Sungyeol smiles wide enough to split his face in two and launches into a sermon about how fucking awesome life is and about how she said yes and they have a date this Friday, fueled by pure delight. Woohyun feels oddly jealous, thinks of that pretty girl who sat two rows ahead of him in Bio, can't even conjure up the color of her eyes.
He does, however, conjure up a sweep of hair across a forehead, the slow arch of an eyebrow, a whisper on the wind. He goes home and drinks four energy drinks, refuses to sleep.
He gets yelled at when he passes out in Bio the next day, snores loud enough to drown out Professor Lee's lecture. Howon laughs until he's hoarse and slings Woohyun over his shoulder, walks him out of class, gives him a ride home and punches Woohyun in the arm when he protests.
The voice in the winds gives Woohyun a gift that night; Woohyun's back upon the rooftop this night, watches the elevator doors. The sky is gray, tinged violet, and when the doors slide open a gust of wind rages, slices at Woohyun's face with a vengeance. Woohyun throws an arm up to shield himself and peers out with watery eyes, sees a figure; a figure that stands tall and solemn, a figure with dark hair and dark eyes, razor sharp. He turns those eyes on Woohyun and Woohyun stands firm; though he can't help but balk a bit, find himself intimidated.
Predictably, Woohyun trudges into school the next day, eyelids heavy, cursing any class he has ever had before noon. He leans his head onto every table and tries really hard not to doze off in each class, but fails miserably. He's really thankful he has Howon to cover him in biology, or he'd be a goner.
The rest of the day goes by in a sleepy daze, before Woohyun's brought back to Earth once he finishes composition, the pieces of his song still incomplete, waiting to be sculpted into something proper, whole. He furrows his eyebrows and runs a hand through his hair, stumbles out of the classroom with his nose stuffed into a good ten pages of sheet music; different ideas, scraps, tidbits, lyrics. He feels the beginnings of an idea start to take shape, pieces flying together in his head slowly, gaining speed-
-when he's broken off by someone promptly walking (read: slamming) into him.
{A click, a whir of gears, mechanical.}
The two of them fall, Woohyun's sheet music scattered over the floor and a thick envelope falling from the hands of the douchebag who wasn't watching where he was going. Clicking his tongue in annoyance, Woohyun reaches to pick up the sheet music, (that idea's gone now) grunting out a sorry. Feeling the weight of the stack of his papers grow significantly, he looks down and sifts through the papers to find the same thick envelope, a peeling label to a Kim M. emblazoned on the front, and a hand is promptly shoved under Woohyun's nose, fingers beckoning impatiently. "That's mine," the figure drawls, and Woohyun tosses his head back to look this asshole in the eye and stops dead when he sees the guy properly.
He's tall, clothed nicely in an expensive sweater and jeans, with gorgeous bone structure and ears that (frankly) frighten Woohyun. He's got a really pricey looking camera strapped around his neck, flawless and gleaming, but most importantly, he's got dark hair and darker eyes; razor sharp, and currently narrowed at Woohyun's. He'd be really good looking if he smiled, Woohyun can't help but think, because he looks kind of laughable with such a blank expression plastered across that face of his.
He has an eyebrow raised, a challenge, and Woohyun knows he has seen this man before.
Woohyun falters, pushes the envelope into slim, outstretched fingers, mutters a sorry and brushes past. When he exits the building he whirls around, ducks behind a corner whilst yanking out a pencil, adds a sharp to one chord; discord.
{The sheets of paper are set down with care into the basins of chemicals, corrosive, deadly.}
---
"I swear to god, Yeol, you're right. I think I'm psychic. It's the weirdest damn thing."
Woohyun is wide-eyed, hands fluttering to illustrate his astonishment. Sungyeol actually takes him seriously because he's in much too good a mood. (His date with Jihyun was great.) Woohyun looks left, right, and fidgets. "It's... weird as fuck. I dream of something and it happens. I dreamed of this kid and I saw him the next day, no lie. And I've never seen him before!"
"You dreamed about a guy," Sungyeol's trying to say through a straight face. "Hyung, is there something you should be telling me?"
Woohyun shoves at him, scowling. "Seriously, Sungyeol!"
Sungyeol laughs like a hyena and nods, a half-assed attempt at empathy. "Sure, sorry." The two stand there in an amiable silence before Sungyeol pipes up again, "Think you could dream of me making it big?"
Woohyun's fist ends up connecting with Sungyeol's stomach. Lightly.
Woohyun devises a theory after his failed attempt at getting some wisdom from Sungyeol; if he can do something in his dream, it'll happen again.
When he appears on that rooftop again, he manages to see that kid for an instant before he flicks those bladed eyes at him. An instant later the kid leaps over the edge, plummets towards the ground unflinchingly, and lands upon the sidewalk before he takes off, and man, can he run.
Woohyun revises his theory; if he can catch the kid, he'll run into him in the waking world again.
---
From that night forth, every day turns into a waste of time, just a few extra pointless hours between dreaming. Woohyun deliberately tries to get sick on more than one occasion; standing out in the rain, sleeping with the AC on full blast. He refuses to cut class because his grades can't handle it; resorts to attending and sleeping with his head on his textbooks in the hopes that he can absorb the lecture through osmosis.
The kid's annoyingly fast, Woohyun soon learns, and kind of well-versed in the physics involved in dreams. Woohyun chases him for thirteen straight nights. (Well, ten. He pulls a few all-nighters for a ridiculous slew of exams one week.)
They run through the streets of an abandoned Seoul, up stairwells and down fire-escapes. The din from Woohyun's first night here is gone, the bustling crowds vanished. Woohyun's kind of glad, though; less traffic, less hindering him from catching the kid.
Day thirteen finds Woohyun watching the kid run full up the side of the highest skyscraper, arms thrown back, eyebrows furrowed in brief effort. Woohyun takes a running start before he follows, learning rather quickly that in dreamland, he can evidently run up skyscrapers. He passes five floors, ten, and grits his teeth until his jaw is sore, trying not to succumb to the growing fear of falling without warning.
He spots the boy's figure sprinting clear across the roof when he reaches the top and skids to a stop, tries to stop him; he's exhausted, which is odd. If gravity doesn't apply, why the hell would physical limitations matter?
"What are you?" Woohyun asks, a whisper, hoarse from his pursuit, voice hoarse, gasping for breath.
The boy tilts his head slowly and pauses in his flight, arms falling loose to his sides, and the wind picks up, wraps around Woohyun's legs and sinks into his skin. The boy's voice comes to Woohyun's ears, the softest sigh, carried on the breeze. Woohyun grits his teeth to keep them from chattering and hears it, a gift.
Myungsoo.
As expected, Woohyun (literally) runs into the kid again two weeks after the first incident, (the morning after the kid gifts him with his name) walking down a street on campus. This time, however, he knocks the other's coffee out of his hands, where it promptly seeps into the soles of their shoes. Those eyes thin and a sullen mouth opens to reprimand, but Woohyun speaks first, "Shit, I should have watched where I was going...!"
The youth watches him and his mouth shuts, his jaw sets, and he responds, "You should have."
Woohyun feels anger flare up, indignant from having to take shit from a complete stranger when he's trying so hard to be decent, (thank God he's trying to find out more about this kid, or he'd feel much more obliged to skin his knuckles against his teeth) but he looks at the boy standing before him, the sharpness in his gaze dimmed, looking thoroughly unimpressed. The annoyance from earlier is muted, shoulders slack; he looks tired. Woohyun grits out a smile and the other quirks an eyebrow in return, before those eyes jerk wide open in surprise when Woohyun wraps his fingers around his wrist, pulls him down the street with a, "C'mon, I'll buy you another coffee."
Woohyun's trying really hard to be nice, sympathetic, but it's not coming across well because Woohyun's come across as kind of rude, bumped into the poor guy twice, and is now clamping on to his wrist with a bone-tight grip.
There's a quiet noise of protest from the poor unwilling hitchhiker Woohyun's latched onto, before he falls silent as Woohyun pushes open the doors to the closest café. Woohyun yanks him up to the counter before he impatiently pulls his wrist out of Woohyun's grip, mutters, "It was a caramel macchiato."
Woohyun orders two, finds them a window seat, and pushes the dark-eyed teen into his chair. He thrusts the sugary overpriced drink under his nose, both a reminder and a peace offering.
The kid looks down at the cup before he takes it, eyebrows furrowing, and Woohyun waits until he takes the first sip before mumbling; "I'm kind of sorry, y'know, for bumping into you like that. Twice. I probably acted like a douchebag." Woohyun gets an arched eyebrow from him in return, and a tongue peeks out from between his lips, catches a fleck of cream.
"True," he replies, (Woohyun tries with a great deal of effort to keep from punching him in the face) but he pauses there, giving Woohyun a once-over and taking another sip. "But you don't usually apologize for bumping into other kids in the hallways." It's neither a question nor an inference, but a statement. "Why me?"
Woohyun's at a loss and finds himself stammering for a good minute or two be, "Well, erm... your... I felt-" before he sneaks a peek under the polished tabletops, sees brown steeping into the fabric of the other's shoes. "Y-your shoes! Yeah, your shoes. I felt bad, whatever." (Jesus Christ, he thinks to himself, why's he stuttering? He sounds like a total tool.)
The kid nudges Woohyun's ankle with the toe of his once-whitewashed Converse and smirks for once, (which throws Woohyun off; he was absolutely certain that this guy was incapable of showing any visible spectrum of emotion) cocking his head and letting a glimpse of teeth peek through the curve of his lips. He's better looking this way, Woohyun observes.
"Good answer," he replies.
They sit in silence, sipping their equally saccharine drinks, and Woohyun speaks up as his companion drains the paper cup.
"I'm Nam Woohyun."
"Kim Myungsoo," he gets in reply.
I know.
{Gloved hands pluck them out, hang them up to dry, and in the meantime, reach for a second camera.}
Somewhere after that first shared caramel macchiato, Woohyun ends up nearly crashing into Myungsoo again a week later. (He knows that it's bound to happen, he dreamed of Myungsoo two days before; disappearing into a forest, turning into a flock of a thousand birds.) Myungsoo is crouched around a bend in the old stairwell that Woohyun takes as a shortcut, and Woohyun almost trips over him. Myungsoo has ridiculous reflexes when his camera almost comes into contact with Woohyun's kneecap. He ducks and swerves out of the way and Woohyun almost loses his footing, before he swears again.
"You, again!"
"I do have a name, you know."
Woohyun stops, as if burned, and part of him is kind of worried to say those two syllables.
"Myungsoo," he mumbles, abashed, and Myungsoo quirks an eyebrow, looks amused once more. "You did well," he remarks, and Woohyun is this close to rolling up his sleeves, punching him in the face for real this time.
"What the hell were you doing there?!" Woohyun demands and Myungsoo sits back on a step, legs stretching out before him. "Trying to capture it," he says in response.
"Capture what?" Woohyun grits out in annoyance and Myungsoo points to a spot between the planes of the walls and the ceilings. Woohyun stares and sees a stretch of off-white, a smear of sunlight. "The wall, really?"
"It disappeared," Myungsoo says. "The sun was coming in through there and it... curved." Myungsoo curves his hand ornately to illustrate and Woohyun groans, guessing he's one of those quirky photography majors, one who takes pictures of the backs of girls' heads.
"It disappeared when you got here, though," Myungsoo continues dryly.
"You almost killed me because you wanted to take a picture of the damn wall."
"I wanted the shot."
"You're so weird."
"You just can't see."
"You're fucking insane."
"I'm a creative spirit."
"Idiot."
"Asshole."
"Okay," Woohyun says finally with a deep, strained sigh. "How old are you, again?" he asks slowly.
Myungsoo answers with a "Twenty," and Woohyun does punch him. (Just not in the face, but in the arm, and a bit more lightly.) "Speak formally from now on, I'm your hyung!"
---
Somewhere between a few more sleepless nights and a lot more informal speech, Nam Woohyun and the real Kim Myungsoo become friends. This entails the two of them growing close, running into each other in the hallways (because they don't share any classes) and walking around the school idly, talking about the weirdest things.
Woohyun learns a lot about Myungsoo because of their impromptu friendship; that he wears plaid a lot; that he has really pretty (girly) handwriting; that he hides his key under the mat like every other lazy tenant; that he's got a great knack for timing.
Like when Woohyun walks out of class one day and sees Myungsoo waiting for him, camera raised, before snapping a picture of the brief shock that materializes over Woohyun. He lowers his camera with a sigh and flicks through the camera's menu, before Woohyun steps over to his side, examines it carefully, takes in his face from a different point of view.
Myungsoo's a genius, he realizes. He takes the picture from an angle where the light filtering in through the dusty windows throws Woohyun into a halo, makes quiet the surprise in his eyes look reverent. Woohyun has never thought of himself as godly (well, maybe once or twice) but damn it all if Myungsoo doesn't make it so.
"Dude," he starts, with a laugh. "Wow. How'd you even-"
"Chasing the sun," Myungsoo drawls. "Like I usually do."
"You kick ass at this though, man," Woohyun crows, slinging an arm around Myungsoo's shoulders, walking down the hall with him to avoid the stampede of students. "Seriously. I just thought you were a hipster with a major attitude problem!"
Myungsoo wrinkles his nose and makes some noise of disgust in his throat. "Hipster? No. My niche doesn't consist of floral prints and nebulae, thanks."
Woohyun laughs at this, eyes the pixels forming the glowing silhouette of his face. "Still, you gotta show me the next picture you take," he says, and Myungsoo stiffens under Woohyun's arm for a split second.
"If you don't ruin my next shot, maybe I will."
{Fingers hesitate over the shutter, and a soft sigh leaves him, fingernails leaving marks on the worn plastic.}
---
The second semester starts, and Woohyun has a crapload of class work shoved onto him, an flood of calculus problems and biology labs and composition notes. Woohyun considers running away, whines to Sungyeol and Hoya about how he's dying, and Sungyeol scoffs, asks Woohyun if that's the best impression of a dying person he can do, and collapses into Woohyun's lap, leaving Woohyun to lug six feet of Sungyeol around before threatening to drag him into an intersection and leave him there. Goddamned acting majors.
But when Woohyun goes to Myungsoo to complain, Myungsoo listens silently, and it's kind of a comfort to Woohyun, because even though he's not really sure if Myungsoo's listening out of sympathy or because he's got no other alternative, at least Myungsoo's listening.
"I'm dying," Woohyun whines to Myungsoo, after he receives a nasty paper in Bio, dabbling in Biochemistry, which involves chemistry, which involves math. Woohyun hates math and makes it so that Myungsoo knows of his long-standing hatred of math, and Myungsoo rolls his eyes, smacks at his arm gently. "Why are you bitching so much," he says, "Math's easy."
Woohyun looks at Myungsoo like he's sprouted broccoli out of his ears. "Math's awful,"Woohyun groans, and Myungsoo rolls his eyes, "Dude, math's easy. I'll show you. Where's that paper."
Woohyun stares at Myungsoo, baffled, because Kim Myungsoo has never done something this kind for him!
"It's... at home," Woohyun says, and Myungsoo tuts with distaste. "Okay, go get it and bring it over to my place. I'll teach you."
Woohyun gawps for a good minute and almost trips over a crack in the sidewalk. Myungsoo throws him a look and hisses, "Calm down, it's just help, if you don't want any, that's fine."
Woohyun shuts his mouth and nods rapidly, smiles with relief for a second, before his smile grows greasy, "Just, you know, you inviting me over to study could be... you know, misinterpreted, or whatever."
Myungsoo looks at Woohyun dryly and scoffs, "Please, I'm not going to seduce you, if that's what you're worried about," and pulls out a paper from his bag (man-purse) and scribbles down an address in his neat handwriting before he starts off down the other street, on the way to his home. "Come over at seven, I've got stuff to take care of before then."
Woohyun laughs and calls out an affirmation after him before he looks at the tiny piece of paper. He reads it over twice before he stops dead and decides that he wouldn't really mind Myungsoo seducing him.
Myungsoo's apartment is in a quiet neighborhood, far from the college campus; a pretty building, somewhat old, but well-maintained. Woohyun parks his dinosaur of a car outside and gives the engine a kick for not starting up and bringing him here half an hour late, which is still between fashionably late and probably stood you up. He eyes the tiny sheet of paper he had shoved into his back pocket and eyes Myungsoo's tiny, neat handwriting, detailing Room 602, before (kind of hurriedly) heading for the door, pushing the button and hearing a tinny whine from the panel in response. He waits for fifteen seconds (of anxiety) before a click breaks the silence, and a disgruntled mutter unfurls through the speaker; "You're late."
The door clicks open and Woohyun breezes in, takes the elevator up six floors, turns to the left and knocks on the door emblazoned with those three choice digits. Myungsoo's frown meets him and Woohyun grins as cheesily as he can. He gets a kick in the ankles and laughs, pushes his way in past Myungsoo's stern silhouette and looks around, drinks in the place Myungsoo's spun into his home.
It's small, cramped, and a little less neat than Woohyun expected. A throw blanket lies bunched up upon the couch, a pillow on the floor, the TV tuned into a drama, but otherwise it seems clean and homely. (Then again, Woohyun's standards aren't too high. There are turn-offs, but rarely deal-breakers.)
Woohyun flops against Myungsoo's couch, watches tonight's Immortal Song while trying to decode a math problem. Myungsoo's helpful in this area, thankfully, and manages to tell Woohyun that the reason his answer keeps turning up wrong is because he forgot to write in one negative sign. Eventually their study session fades into the two of them flying paper airplanes and throwing crumpled up balls of paper at one another and Woohyun telling Myungsoo about his stupid friends. At one point Myungsoo makes a sound that could be described as both a grunt and a chuckle and Woohyun is left awestruck.
Somewhere halfway through the night Woohyun's stomach growls and when he gets up to rifle through Myungsoo's fridge and finds nothing except a few slices of bread and bottled water, he is scandalized.
"How have you been living?!" Woohyun cries out dramatically, and Myungsoo wrinkles his nose and shuts the refrigerator door for him with a, "God, you're such a girl. Order a pizza."
Which results in Myungsoo calling up a delivery line and Woohyun folding a pizza delivery flyer into a plane and racing it against one of Myungsoo's planes, forged from a rough draft for an essay from one of his other classes. Myungsoo eventually snatches the plane from him and flies it clear across the room when none of their other planes made it across the coffee table, leaving Woohyun baffled and Myungsoo's mouth tilting upwards mysteriously.
"How did you do that?" Woohyun asks, and Myungsoo shrugs. "Guess I got ridiculous wrist strength or something."
(Which leaves Woohyun shifting kind of uncomfortably and remembering that whole deal about Myungsoo seducing him.)
Myungsoo loses every other plane flight after that, leading Woohyun to climb on his coffee table and do a victory dance. This makes Myungsoo start yelling and Woohyun laughs like an idiot until they're both interrupted by the buzzer, signifying that their thousand-calorie dinner has arrived. Woohyun cheers and Myungsoo gets up to answer the door, rifle around for his wallet.
Woohyun, on the other hand, rises to wash up, searching for a bathroom. Myungsoo, preoccupied, does not notice, but Woohyun saunters into the hallway, tries a doorknob as Myungsoo frets over having no cash, and asks if they take credit. Debit? A check? Fine, a check.
Woohyun swings open the door and finds a linen closet. He tries the next and finds a room swathed in darkness, the silhouette of a bed lit by the moonlight. Woohyun flicks on the light out of curiosity and starts when he sees this is Myungsoo's room, takes one step in, another.
It's small, cozy, neat; the bed sheets are white, the down comforter a navy, the walls painted cream. It's very inconspicuous, the occasional textbook littering his desktop. There's one thing Woohyun notices with interest, and it's the array of cameras that Myungsoo's got placed with care on a shelf that's gathering dust, though his Canon EOS 60D is gleaming, as if brand new. There are two older models and an ancient-looking polaroid camera at the edge, one that Woohyun feels like he's seen before. It's only just as Woohyun turns to leave that he spots a splash of color in this otherwise barren room.
Three bulletin boards are on Myungsoo's far wall, the wall that Woohyun didn't first see. There's a myriad of photos pinned across them with insect pins, a few slips of paper with Myungsoo's girly handwriting printed across them, words like tomorrow, winter,sequences of random numbers. This doesn't concern Woohyun, but when he steps closer, his heart leaps up into his throat.
Pinned beneath the new layer of photos, he finds pictures of himself. Woohyun sleeping, Woohyun laughing, Woohyun as a gap-toothed grade-schooler. Woohyun. And what's more, the pictures pinned above them are more and more familiar. There's a picture of a model plane he assembled with his father one summer, a picture of the Chungcheong sky he used to know by heart. He finds his entire life mapped out in images across the cork board and doesn't need to look further when he hears Myungsoo's socked feet tread across the threshold.
Myungsoo's "What are you doing in here," is deathly quiet, and were Woohyun not so overwhelmed by this, he would be scared by the ice in Myungsoo's voice.
"What the fuck is this," Woohyun says, indicating the boards, and he looks to Myungsoo, Myungsoo with his hair hanging in his eyes and pretty fingers. Myungsoo, who joked about seducing Woohyun, whose mouth is tightening, who won't speak up.
"Myungsoo," Woohyun says, emphasizing those two syllables, and Myungsoo's shoulders tense, he shakes his head and ducks his head forward.
"I can't tell you," Myungsoo mutters.
"Why not,"Woohyun asks, fists clenching, indignant.
Myungsoo's silent for a long time and he sighs, deeply, "You wouldn't understand," he says finally, and Woohyun whirls around, bears down upon him.
"Myungsoo, what the hell, you have pictures of me in your room!"
There's more silence, and Woohyun wonders if this is going to become a thing; Myungsoo taking ages to reach down inside himself for words, like he hasn't spoken in years and has to remember how to. He would be more concerned but right now he can't afford it, he feels simultaneously violated andpissed.
Myungsoo's face contorts into one of just a little worry. "I'm..." he begins, before he hesitates, eyes flicking from Woohyun to the floor, and Woohyun is stunned that Myungsoo would hesitate at all.
"Your fairy godparent, kind of."
The door swings shut behind Woohyun with a loud slam and Myungsoo facepalms, for lack of anything else to express himself.
---
"Woohyun."
"Woohyun!"
Woohyun grits his teeth and turns up the volume on his iPod up to deafening proportions, widening his stride to the point where he's running without really running. Regardless, Myungsoo manages to follow his pace without breaking a sweat.
Myungsoo continues pestering him before he steps forward and cuts him off, "Hyung!" he implores, and Woohyun stops, stunned, before sidestepping him and continuing on, his shock at Myungsoo even coming close to calling him 'hyung' making him growl out a "What."
"Stop acting like such a bitch and just listen up, would you?" And Myungsoo almost sounds angry, leaving Woohyun to scoff and whirl around, bristling visibly.
"You didn't tell my secret, right?" Myungsoo asks, and that anger is only diminished by something like concern. Woohyun looks incredulous.
"What secret, you said you were my fairy go-"
Myungsoo's palm slaps over Woohyun's mouth and he hisses in return, shoving Myungsoo back, looking beyond pissed.
"Look," Myungsoo cuts in swiftly before Woohyun can start screaming. "You can't tell anyone. I wasn't even supposed to tell you!"
"What the fuck," Woohyun responds eloquently, "You're not my..." And Woohyun lowers his voice for this because Myungsoo's face turns dangerous. "Fairy godparent," Woohyun whispers. "Fairies don't even fucking exist."
Myungsoo's eyes darken further and Woohyun would be scared if he weren't so annoyed. "I am," Myungsoo growls, before he looks left, right, swallows and tries to be empathetic.
"Look," Myungsoo says, looking to Woohyun with something like pleading in his eyes. "Don't... don't tell anyone, but I am. I don't have your life story pinned up in my room because... because-"
"-because you're madly in love with me," Woohyun cuts in, and Myungsoo looks vicious.
There's a pause between the two of them, more awkward than angry, since yelling at each other seems to have alleviated some of the tension.
"Here," Myungsoo says finally. "I'll prove it to you," and Woohyun rolls his eyes, pushes on past Myungsoo, finally.
"Don't tell anyone!" Myungsoo says after him, and Woohyun pretends like he hasn't heard.
True to his (unsaid) word, however, Woohyun tells nobody.
{The wind whips at the leaves in the trees, the reeds bowing beneath the gales. A finger presses down carefully and the aperture slides shut with an audible click.}
---
"How're you going to prove it," Woohyun grumbles from beneath his hoodie. They're seated in the café where Woohyun first dragged Myungsoo, only this time it's Myungsoo that dragged him here.
"I can predetermine your dreams," Myungsoo mumbles. He doesn't drink a caramel macchiato, but something black and acrid-smelling. Woohyun sips at his more fattening cup of coffee in response and looks back at him.
"What."
"Give me a week, I'll show you."
Woohyun dreams of the Han River, and finds it unglamorous that a boy longing for stardom, for Barcelona and Paris would dream of the Han River. He chalks it up to 'home is where the heart is' and strolls along the banks, drawing closer and watching the city skyline blink as if light-years away, on a distant planet. The sky's painted every color at once but the only color he sees through the backs of his transparent eyelids is a vibrant magenta, orange blooming through it like ink in water. A figure approaches in the distance and Woohyun squints his eyes; sees a boy in a hoodie and sweats sprinting all out down the path, each exhale a gunshot, each footfall a crack of thunder.
The boy stops a while off and turns and lifts his hoodie and Woohyun stares himself in the face, a younger him, with long hair that flops into his face and sweat pouring down his face, his life draining out of him, pumping full on through his veins.
Woohyun wakes up and heads off to classes feeling like absolute shit. Sungjong has no classes and Sungyeol's skipping and Howon's got practice as a trainee, so Woohyun plunks down in the cafeteria by himself until Myungsoo strolls by, drops a crappy old polaroid picture onto the table between them and quirks an eyebrow at Woohyun.
Woohyun sees the banks of the Han River, the skyline blinking as if universes away, and shoves the photo into Myungsoo's chest, scowling slowly. "You gotta try harder than that. People dream of failure all the time."
Myungsoo looks back at Woohyun before he shrugs, almost smirks. "Challenge accepted."
Woohyun gets an A on his next Biology paper, avoids a nasty fall down a flight of stairs when he forgets to tie his shoes, and finds an actual seat on the morning bus. He chalks them up to his genius ("Please," Myungsoo mutters), luck ("You have the worst luck in the world," Myungsoo snorts), and coincidence. Myungsoo scoffs when Woohyun offers up coincidence, teeth glinting and Woohyun feels like knocking them out.
"There's no such thing as coincidence," Myungsoo says, looking thoroughly unimpressed. "There's only magic."
His eyes glimmer just right in the dusty light filtering in through the west hallway. Myungsoo's holding an ancient polaroid camera and his hair's falling across his forehead in a way that makes Woohyun want to bruise him and kiss him better. Woohyun only scowls and turns on his heel and strides out the door around him, before Myungsoo grabs his wrist and wow, he's got a death grip.
Woohyun shoves him and Myungsoo doesn't relent, just stares Woohyun down with razor-sharp eyes and says a "Do you think I'd lie to you?" and it's so quiet and there's a clamor all around them from the rest of the college populace and the street is in absolute chaos from a traffic line two kilometers long, but Myungsoo's voice reaches him crystal clear.
Woohyun stares, baffled, and feels himself shaking his head ages before he has an answer in his mind. His mouth tightens, and he shuffles from one foot to the other, avoids Myungsoo's gaze, boring into him. His eyebrows knit together and he opens his mouth, slowly, closes it.
Myungsoo rolls his eyes and pulls Woohyun in and Woohyun whispers in a furious rush: "So, let's say you're telling the truth. And you have pictures of me up in your room because you're my fairy godparent, and you've been in charge of my fate from the beginning..." Woohyun looks down at the ground and Myungsoo waits for him to walk off, waits for what seems like years on end. Woohyun breathes in and sighs out heavily. "Okay, that's gonna have to change."
Myungsoo stares at him, face flickering from sardonic to incredulous. Woohyun lets it sink in, and just as Myungsoo opens his mouth to question, deny, Woohyun continues, "I can't... refer to you as my fairy godparent. You're younger than me. That's like... calling you my dad. Which is disgusting."
Woohyun pulls back and Myungsoo waits, appalled, before his mouth slowly pulls upwards, the beginnings of something special.
"What'll you go by, then?" He asks, and Woohyun puzzles it over, before he grins. "A guardian angel."
Myungsoo smiles the closest thing to a smile that Woohyun's ever seen from him. (Woohyun counts it as one regardless.)
Woohyun dreams of flying again when he collapses into bed, the weight of the world gone from his shoulders. He shoots straight up, breaks through the stratosphere, and knows that he won't burn up. Myungsoo wouldn't allow that, after all.
{A smile now, fingers lifting two photos off the walls, pinning a new one in its place.}
---
They become friends again. Slowly, but steadily, the awkwardness that comes with knowing that Myungsoo knows all of his worst secrets slowly smoothes itself over. Soon, Woohyun picks up the habit of grilling Myungsoo about the conduct of being a "guardian angel," the rules and regulations, the limitations and abilities. Myungsoo is stingy on information, occasionally dropping little tidbits for Woohyun to chew on, tail wagging. (He thinks Myungsoo finds amusement in watching Woohyun chase after his heels like the puppy he is.)
No, Myungsoo can't fly. No, he does not have comical wings, and no, he does not undergo a Sailor Moon-style transformation, complete with cliché sound effects and tantalizingly short skirt. (Such a shame!) Yes, he has magic, but he uses it for tiny things, like sweeping up broken glass, or cooling his coffee. He can do great things, can predestine, change the courses of history by means of the dreams he conjures, control the skies, but he refuses flatly to making it flood the day of Woohyun's next calc exam. "It's dangerous," Myungsoo says, "and against the rules." Woohyun scoffs at this, "If I could change the course of time, I would."
"How did you become a guardian angel?" Woohyun says during one of his barrages of inquisition, and Myungsoo looks to him halfway through shuffling through a new envelope of photos. Woohyun perks up, hopes inflating, but the other is silent for a long while. Just as Woohyun begins to lose faith in Myungsoo answering, Myungsoo responds quietly, with a shrug, "We're chosen."
"By who?" Woohyun asks, in earnest, feeding off of Myungsoo's brief susceptibility, and Myungsoo picks up on this in that ridiculous way of his, deadpans, "Them."
Woohyun groans, and Myungsoo smirks a bit, pity flickering through his smile, poison in the sweet crunch of Snow White's apple. "At childhood. Given a vessel from where magic is drawn."
"A vessel?" Woohyun asks, scoffing. "Like a boat?"
Myungsoo slaps him over the head with the envelope and Woohyun sees stars and waterfalls and seagulls in the sky behind his eyes. "No. Think... pensieve."
Woohyun furrows his eyebrows. "What."
"Harry Potter."
"Oh!"
Woohyun tries to search the rest of the afternoon for an old stone basin in Myungsoo's apartment; turns up empty-handed.
("Wait," Woohyun will ask one day. Myungsoo will look to him and Woohyun will go on; "If you guys live by these rigid rules all the time, how could you have told me without... being destroyed, or whatever."
"We're allowed to tell only one person," Myungsoo will respond, "Most don't tell their host, though."
"...so what would have happened if anyone would have found out. What happens if anyone else finds out?"
"We're killed. They'll be erased."
Woohyun is silent, before he manages an oh.)
Part Two
From: Your Secret Santa
Title: A Falling Star (Fell From Your Heart)
Pairing/Focus: Woohyun/Myungsoo (with about two paragraphs of Woohyun/Sunggyu, mentioned Sungyeol/Ahn Jihyun, and Hoya/Dongwoo if you squint.)
Rating: PG-13 (language)
Word count: ~12,000
Summary: Woohyun finds his life morphing into a very unorthodox fairy tale when he meets someone who makes him question "happily ever afters."
One night, Woohyun dreams of the tops of buildings.
Woohyun dreams of sitting on the edge of a roof of some thirty story skyscraper, dangling his legs over precariously and letting the Seoul smog envelop him, sink into his very lungs, strangling, suffocating. He's wearing a tank top and one of his skinnier pairs of jeans and he's still sweltering in the heat of the bright lights.
It grows harder to breathe and Woohyun gets to his feet, looks down at the hundreds of cars, the din of civilization, the price of living here. His hands twitch, flex, and he shoves them into his pockets, makes a decision in that split second pause. He steps over the edge, breathes in the rush of falling, of salvation.
Woohyun jerks awake before he sees what happens next, breath heavy, heart pounding in his ears, and looks outside, sees his ground level dorm and wonders to himself if he's borderline. Eventually he sinks into that state of stupor between sleep and consciousness before he realizes that he is running late for class, and he happens to have an exam. Woohyun nearly upends his apartment in search for his lucky boxers and succeeds after twenty minutes, justifying himself because those boxers have always guaranteed him at least sixty points out of a hundred. Which is passable, right?
Debates set aside, Woohyun dismisses the possibility of coffee when he sees his class starts in twenty minutes and it takes forty minutes to get there by bus. He swears under his breath and grabs his bag, scrolling through his phone's contacts and jabbing Dongwoo's name with a vengeance.
Dongwoo's phone rings out. He's still sleeping, and he's the only friend of Woohyun's who can get Woohyun from Point A to Point B in a terrifying amount of time. Well, shit.
Woohyun is half an hour late for class. His professor throws him the most reproachful of stares and slides over a rather thick packet to him and Woohyun hates this class with every fiber of his being. He ends up guessing half the answers and leaving the others blank and storms out of the classroom once class ends.
Dongwoo calls Woohyun once he sits down in the cafeteria, shouldering his backpack like a grudge. Half the school throws around inquisitive looks; Woohyun is the life of every party, what could have pissed him off this much?
"You called me," Dongwoo mumbles eloquently. It's twelve and he just woke up and Woohyun wonders vaguely how late he must have stayed up practicing last night.
"I was running late. Forget about it, I bombed my Bio test anyways."
Dongwoo's face contorts into one of sympathy and Woohyun knows it because Dongwoo wears every emotion he's feeling; wears it loud.
"Hey, who cares, you hate that class anyways. Not like you'll launch into a lecture about mitochondria halfway through a song on stage, right?"
Woohyun can't help but laugh a little, because Dongwoo's trying, and he appreciates it. "Yeah." He affirms. "Right."
Dongwoo's grin is audible over the phone line and Woohyun sees a silhouette stride in through the double doors, tells Dongwoo to go back to sleep, and hangs up.
Woohyun sneezes and a chair scooches out beside him, Sungjong plunking down beside him and drawing himself up, flicking the side of Woohyun's head with charcoal smudged fingers. Woohyun snaps his teeth at Sungjong's outstretched digits and his yelp of surprise is hysterical.
"Everyone's wondering what crawled up your ass and died," Sungjong says, looking unimpressed. Woohyun snorts and leans his elbows on the table, pressing his forehead into his hands. "School drama, you know."
Sungjong's eyes glitter predatorily, "Drama? Dish!" but Woohyun throws him a withering look and Sungjong shrugs, eyes the charcoal under his fingernails and in the whorls of his fingertips. "Hey, you're bound to have classes you won't like. Quit whining." Sungjong wrinkles his nose in annoyance and Woohyun smirks, shoves him, and decides he likes Sungjong a little more than before.
Woohyun shuffles through the rest of his classes with less drama. He perks up a little when Composition comes around, and he busies himself with patterns of eighth notes, the most gorgeous thing he's seen all day. He considers cutting all his other classes in favor of just attending Comp some days, but the thoughts of a diploma hanging on the wall of the small study back at his parents' place stops him in his tracks.
He trudges home at two, busies himself with his term paper, watches the newest episode of the drama he's been following, and devours tonight's Immortal Song with ravenous eyes, pictures standing on that stage as the winner, smile wide enough to split. Woohyun falls asleep on the couch halfway through a skin CF, rolling over onto his stomach and snoring right through the thud of his textbook meeting the floor.
Woohyun dreams of falling this night. He's appalled as to how he got here again, but all is forgotten when he realizes that the ground is getting closer, really quickl-
And like that, he soars, glides above the pavement before a wild gust of wind propels him skyward and he tries not to scream like a child when he sees that he's suddenly higher than before, that if the wind just happens to disappear then he'll die.
I can't die,Woohyun thinks to himself with vigor. I cannot die, I have yet to become a major musician and marry a model.
As if reprimanding his shallow add-on to his statement, the wind's grip around his midsection loosens and he falls about ten feet. This time he screams like a little child and swears he hears laughter ring through the clouds, pictures God himself laughing at him. What the hell, is this punishment for something? True, he's done bad things; snuck beer from Dongwoo's dad's liquor cabinet and got busted and grounded for a month; slept with a Tri-Sig girl who already had a boyfriend, but the guy punched him in the jaw two days after, so that should have been a fair exchange.
It's after the winds pick up that Woohyun learns after that flying sucks. The wind is freezing and it bites at your skin and your eyes water and it's hard to breathe with the air actively punching you in the face every instant. He grunts in discomfort when he falls on his ass onto a cloud.
"Wow," he grumbles, blood rushing in his ears, "Hi-fucking-larious."
Woohyun pauses when he hears that laugh again, a slow unfurling chuckle, and Woohyun is stunned, even a bit miffed. Since when was God so sarcastic?
---
Woohyun is twenty-two. He's halfway through his second year of college at some slightly better than average university stuck in the middle of Seoul. His heart's immersed in music but he's majoring in Medicine. He trudges through his classes and loathes life for his parents, who've never frowned upon his rich as coffee voice, but still find themselves on worse days wishing for their son to come marching home with a doctorate tucked into his back pocket. Woohyun deals with it and strives for excellence to see the smiles on their faces. He's not as much a perfectionist as he'd like to be, though.
---
Woohyun dreams of plummeting from his home in the clouds the next night. He lands in the ocean and for some reason he can't swim. His limbs freeze up and he sinks to the bottom, the seaweed and sand entombing him. He fails his calc test, the next day, as expected.
The following night a pretty pair of hands unearths him, and he awakens on the side of the street. The sky is tinted much too blue for this side of the city, fading into white at the edges.
The straight week of rain clears up the next morning, and he wears a wifebeater to school the next day, styles his hair, and walks home with the number of that pretty girl who sits two rows down from him in Bio tucked into his back pocket.
He dates her for two months before he dreams of standing upon that building once more, but this time, rather than jumping, he's pushed, and he knows that he won't fly this time.
Betrayal, the wind whispers to him, and he awakens the next morning to see one choice sentence on his phone screen; sees her the next day under the arm of another guy. He drinks himself into a stupor and dreams of fingers carding through his hair, the sun warming his face.
"I swear to god, Yeol, it's the weirdest damn thing," he confesses in the halls outside of the auditorium a week after the strangely prophetic dreams continue. Sungyeol stands in a costume with too many ruffles and too much gold trim and - is that eyeliner?
"Maybe you're psychic," Sungyeol remarks, flipping through his book of lines. (That he learned last week, but he's trying really hard to pretend not to know to get in some extra help from Jihyun.)
Woohyun scoffs and rubs at his eyes but part of him starts to suspect that maybe he might be, and it both excites and scares him.
Sungyeol starts to speak but promptly shuts up because at that moment Jihyun traipses by, looking regal in a gown that trails behind her, doll-like. Woohyun watches her shake on her huge heels like Bambi trying to walk for the first time and snorts when Sungyeol runs after her to steady her, ask to run through those lines one more time. Woohyun's had make-ups and break-ups before but it stings a bit each time, and this is no exception.
It rains when he walks home, but by one great stretch of luck he manages to find a seat on the bus, sits between a little old lady knitting something for her eighth grandson and a middle aged businessman on his way home to his kids. Woohyun scrawls the lyrics to a love song on a fast food napkin he finds in the bottom of his jacket pocket, hums an improvised melody and steps off the bus with sore cheeks from where that little old lady pinched them, cooing about what a pretty voice he had. His smile is indelible.
Woohyun's dream is different that night. He waits on the roof of that building once more, but the city's invisible, the small building turned into a skyscraper, hidden amidst the clouds. He hears the telltale ding of an elevator and the hairs on the back of his neck prickle. Woohyun knows he's waiting for someone this time around. He drinks three cans of soda the next night and doesn't fall asleep at all, fights through the following day, and it goes by without many ups or downs, to his immense relief. He claws his way through the next two days like this.
"You look like shit," Sungyeol remarks tactfully on a Wednesday morning. Woohyun makes some ungodly noise resembling a grunt and Sungyeol waves a hand in front of drooping eyes, slaps him on each cheek for good measure. Woohyun aims his kick for the younger's shin and misses.
"Couldn't sleep at all," Woohyun grumbles, leaning his head into his hands. His hair's covered by a beanie pilfered from Dongwoo because his bed head resembles a nimbus cloud sprouting from his cranium rather than that sexy just-happened-to-roll-out-of-bed-with-amazing-hair look he aims for. True to Sungyeol's word, he doesn't look his best. He's in a ratty old hoodie, his eyes are bloodshot, and he has a headache with the caliber of a small bulldozer.
Sungyeol snorts but stops right there, chews through his sandwich silently, and Woohyun's stirred slightly from his reverie when Sungyeol doesn't make a snide remark of any kind. He tries with some effort to think and runs a hand over the top of the threadbare beanie. "What, Jihyun?"
Sungyeol smiles wide enough to split his face in two and launches into a sermon about how fucking awesome life is and about how she said yes and they have a date this Friday, fueled by pure delight. Woohyun feels oddly jealous, thinks of that pretty girl who sat two rows ahead of him in Bio, can't even conjure up the color of her eyes.
He does, however, conjure up a sweep of hair across a forehead, the slow arch of an eyebrow, a whisper on the wind. He goes home and drinks four energy drinks, refuses to sleep.
He gets yelled at when he passes out in Bio the next day, snores loud enough to drown out Professor Lee's lecture. Howon laughs until he's hoarse and slings Woohyun over his shoulder, walks him out of class, gives him a ride home and punches Woohyun in the arm when he protests.
The voice in the winds gives Woohyun a gift that night; Woohyun's back upon the rooftop this night, watches the elevator doors. The sky is gray, tinged violet, and when the doors slide open a gust of wind rages, slices at Woohyun's face with a vengeance. Woohyun throws an arm up to shield himself and peers out with watery eyes, sees a figure; a figure that stands tall and solemn, a figure with dark hair and dark eyes, razor sharp. He turns those eyes on Woohyun and Woohyun stands firm; though he can't help but balk a bit, find himself intimidated.
Predictably, Woohyun trudges into school the next day, eyelids heavy, cursing any class he has ever had before noon. He leans his head onto every table and tries really hard not to doze off in each class, but fails miserably. He's really thankful he has Howon to cover him in biology, or he'd be a goner.
The rest of the day goes by in a sleepy daze, before Woohyun's brought back to Earth once he finishes composition, the pieces of his song still incomplete, waiting to be sculpted into something proper, whole. He furrows his eyebrows and runs a hand through his hair, stumbles out of the classroom with his nose stuffed into a good ten pages of sheet music; different ideas, scraps, tidbits, lyrics. He feels the beginnings of an idea start to take shape, pieces flying together in his head slowly, gaining speed-
-when he's broken off by someone promptly walking (read: slamming) into him.
{A click, a whir of gears, mechanical.}
The two of them fall, Woohyun's sheet music scattered over the floor and a thick envelope falling from the hands of the douchebag who wasn't watching where he was going. Clicking his tongue in annoyance, Woohyun reaches to pick up the sheet music, (that idea's gone now) grunting out a sorry. Feeling the weight of the stack of his papers grow significantly, he looks down and sifts through the papers to find the same thick envelope, a peeling label to a Kim M. emblazoned on the front, and a hand is promptly shoved under Woohyun's nose, fingers beckoning impatiently. "That's mine," the figure drawls, and Woohyun tosses his head back to look this asshole in the eye and stops dead when he sees the guy properly.
He's tall, clothed nicely in an expensive sweater and jeans, with gorgeous bone structure and ears that (frankly) frighten Woohyun. He's got a really pricey looking camera strapped around his neck, flawless and gleaming, but most importantly, he's got dark hair and darker eyes; razor sharp, and currently narrowed at Woohyun's. He'd be really good looking if he smiled, Woohyun can't help but think, because he looks kind of laughable with such a blank expression plastered across that face of his.
He has an eyebrow raised, a challenge, and Woohyun knows he has seen this man before.
Woohyun falters, pushes the envelope into slim, outstretched fingers, mutters a sorry and brushes past. When he exits the building he whirls around, ducks behind a corner whilst yanking out a pencil, adds a sharp to one chord; discord.
{The sheets of paper are set down with care into the basins of chemicals, corrosive, deadly.}
---
"I swear to god, Yeol, you're right. I think I'm psychic. It's the weirdest damn thing."
Woohyun is wide-eyed, hands fluttering to illustrate his astonishment. Sungyeol actually takes him seriously because he's in much too good a mood. (His date with Jihyun was great.) Woohyun looks left, right, and fidgets. "It's... weird as fuck. I dream of something and it happens. I dreamed of this kid and I saw him the next day, no lie. And I've never seen him before!"
"You dreamed about a guy," Sungyeol's trying to say through a straight face. "Hyung, is there something you should be telling me?"
Woohyun shoves at him, scowling. "Seriously, Sungyeol!"
Sungyeol laughs like a hyena and nods, a half-assed attempt at empathy. "Sure, sorry." The two stand there in an amiable silence before Sungyeol pipes up again, "Think you could dream of me making it big?"
Woohyun's fist ends up connecting with Sungyeol's stomach. Lightly.
Woohyun devises a theory after his failed attempt at getting some wisdom from Sungyeol; if he can do something in his dream, it'll happen again.
When he appears on that rooftop again, he manages to see that kid for an instant before he flicks those bladed eyes at him. An instant later the kid leaps over the edge, plummets towards the ground unflinchingly, and lands upon the sidewalk before he takes off, and man, can he run.
Woohyun revises his theory; if he can catch the kid, he'll run into him in the waking world again.
---
From that night forth, every day turns into a waste of time, just a few extra pointless hours between dreaming. Woohyun deliberately tries to get sick on more than one occasion; standing out in the rain, sleeping with the AC on full blast. He refuses to cut class because his grades can't handle it; resorts to attending and sleeping with his head on his textbooks in the hopes that he can absorb the lecture through osmosis.
The kid's annoyingly fast, Woohyun soon learns, and kind of well-versed in the physics involved in dreams. Woohyun chases him for thirteen straight nights. (Well, ten. He pulls a few all-nighters for a ridiculous slew of exams one week.)
They run through the streets of an abandoned Seoul, up stairwells and down fire-escapes. The din from Woohyun's first night here is gone, the bustling crowds vanished. Woohyun's kind of glad, though; less traffic, less hindering him from catching the kid.
Day thirteen finds Woohyun watching the kid run full up the side of the highest skyscraper, arms thrown back, eyebrows furrowed in brief effort. Woohyun takes a running start before he follows, learning rather quickly that in dreamland, he can evidently run up skyscrapers. He passes five floors, ten, and grits his teeth until his jaw is sore, trying not to succumb to the growing fear of falling without warning.
He spots the boy's figure sprinting clear across the roof when he reaches the top and skids to a stop, tries to stop him; he's exhausted, which is odd. If gravity doesn't apply, why the hell would physical limitations matter?
"What are you?" Woohyun asks, a whisper, hoarse from his pursuit, voice hoarse, gasping for breath.
The boy tilts his head slowly and pauses in his flight, arms falling loose to his sides, and the wind picks up, wraps around Woohyun's legs and sinks into his skin. The boy's voice comes to Woohyun's ears, the softest sigh, carried on the breeze. Woohyun grits his teeth to keep them from chattering and hears it, a gift.
Myungsoo.
As expected, Woohyun (literally) runs into the kid again two weeks after the first incident, (the morning after the kid gifts him with his name) walking down a street on campus. This time, however, he knocks the other's coffee out of his hands, where it promptly seeps into the soles of their shoes. Those eyes thin and a sullen mouth opens to reprimand, but Woohyun speaks first, "Shit, I should have watched where I was going...!"
The youth watches him and his mouth shuts, his jaw sets, and he responds, "You should have."
Woohyun feels anger flare up, indignant from having to take shit from a complete stranger when he's trying so hard to be decent, (thank God he's trying to find out more about this kid, or he'd feel much more obliged to skin his knuckles against his teeth) but he looks at the boy standing before him, the sharpness in his gaze dimmed, looking thoroughly unimpressed. The annoyance from earlier is muted, shoulders slack; he looks tired. Woohyun grits out a smile and the other quirks an eyebrow in return, before those eyes jerk wide open in surprise when Woohyun wraps his fingers around his wrist, pulls him down the street with a, "C'mon, I'll buy you another coffee."
Woohyun's trying really hard to be nice, sympathetic, but it's not coming across well because Woohyun's come across as kind of rude, bumped into the poor guy twice, and is now clamping on to his wrist with a bone-tight grip.
There's a quiet noise of protest from the poor unwilling hitchhiker Woohyun's latched onto, before he falls silent as Woohyun pushes open the doors to the closest café. Woohyun yanks him up to the counter before he impatiently pulls his wrist out of Woohyun's grip, mutters, "It was a caramel macchiato."
Woohyun orders two, finds them a window seat, and pushes the dark-eyed teen into his chair. He thrusts the sugary overpriced drink under his nose, both a reminder and a peace offering.
The kid looks down at the cup before he takes it, eyebrows furrowing, and Woohyun waits until he takes the first sip before mumbling; "I'm kind of sorry, y'know, for bumping into you like that. Twice. I probably acted like a douchebag." Woohyun gets an arched eyebrow from him in return, and a tongue peeks out from between his lips, catches a fleck of cream.
"True," he replies, (Woohyun tries with a great deal of effort to keep from punching him in the face) but he pauses there, giving Woohyun a once-over and taking another sip. "But you don't usually apologize for bumping into other kids in the hallways." It's neither a question nor an inference, but a statement. "Why me?"
Woohyun's at a loss and finds himself stammering for a good minute or two be, "Well, erm... your... I felt-" before he sneaks a peek under the polished tabletops, sees brown steeping into the fabric of the other's shoes. "Y-your shoes! Yeah, your shoes. I felt bad, whatever." (Jesus Christ, he thinks to himself, why's he stuttering? He sounds like a total tool.)
The kid nudges Woohyun's ankle with the toe of his once-whitewashed Converse and smirks for once, (which throws Woohyun off; he was absolutely certain that this guy was incapable of showing any visible spectrum of emotion) cocking his head and letting a glimpse of teeth peek through the curve of his lips. He's better looking this way, Woohyun observes.
"Good answer," he replies.
They sit in silence, sipping their equally saccharine drinks, and Woohyun speaks up as his companion drains the paper cup.
"I'm Nam Woohyun."
"Kim Myungsoo," he gets in reply.
I know.
{Gloved hands pluck them out, hang them up to dry, and in the meantime, reach for a second camera.}
Somewhere after that first shared caramel macchiato, Woohyun ends up nearly crashing into Myungsoo again a week later. (He knows that it's bound to happen, he dreamed of Myungsoo two days before; disappearing into a forest, turning into a flock of a thousand birds.) Myungsoo is crouched around a bend in the old stairwell that Woohyun takes as a shortcut, and Woohyun almost trips over him. Myungsoo has ridiculous reflexes when his camera almost comes into contact with Woohyun's kneecap. He ducks and swerves out of the way and Woohyun almost loses his footing, before he swears again.
"You, again!"
"I do have a name, you know."
Woohyun stops, as if burned, and part of him is kind of worried to say those two syllables.
"Myungsoo," he mumbles, abashed, and Myungsoo quirks an eyebrow, looks amused once more. "You did well," he remarks, and Woohyun is this close to rolling up his sleeves, punching him in the face for real this time.
"What the hell were you doing there?!" Woohyun demands and Myungsoo sits back on a step, legs stretching out before him. "Trying to capture it," he says in response.
"Capture what?" Woohyun grits out in annoyance and Myungsoo points to a spot between the planes of the walls and the ceilings. Woohyun stares and sees a stretch of off-white, a smear of sunlight. "The wall, really?"
"It disappeared," Myungsoo says. "The sun was coming in through there and it... curved." Myungsoo curves his hand ornately to illustrate and Woohyun groans, guessing he's one of those quirky photography majors, one who takes pictures of the backs of girls' heads.
"It disappeared when you got here, though," Myungsoo continues dryly.
"You almost killed me because you wanted to take a picture of the damn wall."
"I wanted the shot."
"You're so weird."
"You just can't see."
"You're fucking insane."
"I'm a creative spirit."
"Idiot."
"Asshole."
"Okay," Woohyun says finally with a deep, strained sigh. "How old are you, again?" he asks slowly.
Myungsoo answers with a "Twenty," and Woohyun does punch him. (Just not in the face, but in the arm, and a bit more lightly.) "Speak formally from now on, I'm your hyung!"
---
Somewhere between a few more sleepless nights and a lot more informal speech, Nam Woohyun and the real Kim Myungsoo become friends. This entails the two of them growing close, running into each other in the hallways (because they don't share any classes) and walking around the school idly, talking about the weirdest things.
Woohyun learns a lot about Myungsoo because of their impromptu friendship; that he wears plaid a lot; that he has really pretty (girly) handwriting; that he hides his key under the mat like every other lazy tenant; that he's got a great knack for timing.
Like when Woohyun walks out of class one day and sees Myungsoo waiting for him, camera raised, before snapping a picture of the brief shock that materializes over Woohyun. He lowers his camera with a sigh and flicks through the camera's menu, before Woohyun steps over to his side, examines it carefully, takes in his face from a different point of view.
Myungsoo's a genius, he realizes. He takes the picture from an angle where the light filtering in through the dusty windows throws Woohyun into a halo, makes quiet the surprise in his eyes look reverent. Woohyun has never thought of himself as godly (well, maybe once or twice) but damn it all if Myungsoo doesn't make it so.
"Dude," he starts, with a laugh. "Wow. How'd you even-"
"Chasing the sun," Myungsoo drawls. "Like I usually do."
"You kick ass at this though, man," Woohyun crows, slinging an arm around Myungsoo's shoulders, walking down the hall with him to avoid the stampede of students. "Seriously. I just thought you were a hipster with a major attitude problem!"
Myungsoo wrinkles his nose and makes some noise of disgust in his throat. "Hipster? No. My niche doesn't consist of floral prints and nebulae, thanks."
Woohyun laughs at this, eyes the pixels forming the glowing silhouette of his face. "Still, you gotta show me the next picture you take," he says, and Myungsoo stiffens under Woohyun's arm for a split second.
"If you don't ruin my next shot, maybe I will."
{Fingers hesitate over the shutter, and a soft sigh leaves him, fingernails leaving marks on the worn plastic.}
---
The second semester starts, and Woohyun has a crapload of class work shoved onto him, an flood of calculus problems and biology labs and composition notes. Woohyun considers running away, whines to Sungyeol and Hoya about how he's dying, and Sungyeol scoffs, asks Woohyun if that's the best impression of a dying person he can do, and collapses into Woohyun's lap, leaving Woohyun to lug six feet of Sungyeol around before threatening to drag him into an intersection and leave him there. Goddamned acting majors.
But when Woohyun goes to Myungsoo to complain, Myungsoo listens silently, and it's kind of a comfort to Woohyun, because even though he's not really sure if Myungsoo's listening out of sympathy or because he's got no other alternative, at least Myungsoo's listening.
"I'm dying," Woohyun whines to Myungsoo, after he receives a nasty paper in Bio, dabbling in Biochemistry, which involves chemistry, which involves math. Woohyun hates math and makes it so that Myungsoo knows of his long-standing hatred of math, and Myungsoo rolls his eyes, smacks at his arm gently. "Why are you bitching so much," he says, "Math's easy."
Woohyun looks at Myungsoo like he's sprouted broccoli out of his ears. "Math's awful,"Woohyun groans, and Myungsoo rolls his eyes, "Dude, math's easy. I'll show you. Where's that paper."
Woohyun stares at Myungsoo, baffled, because Kim Myungsoo has never done something this kind for him!
"It's... at home," Woohyun says, and Myungsoo tuts with distaste. "Okay, go get it and bring it over to my place. I'll teach you."
Woohyun gawps for a good minute and almost trips over a crack in the sidewalk. Myungsoo throws him a look and hisses, "Calm down, it's just help, if you don't want any, that's fine."
Woohyun shuts his mouth and nods rapidly, smiles with relief for a second, before his smile grows greasy, "Just, you know, you inviting me over to study could be... you know, misinterpreted, or whatever."
Myungsoo looks at Woohyun dryly and scoffs, "Please, I'm not going to seduce you, if that's what you're worried about," and pulls out a paper from his bag (man-purse) and scribbles down an address in his neat handwriting before he starts off down the other street, on the way to his home. "Come over at seven, I've got stuff to take care of before then."
Woohyun laughs and calls out an affirmation after him before he looks at the tiny piece of paper. He reads it over twice before he stops dead and decides that he wouldn't really mind Myungsoo seducing him.
Myungsoo's apartment is in a quiet neighborhood, far from the college campus; a pretty building, somewhat old, but well-maintained. Woohyun parks his dinosaur of a car outside and gives the engine a kick for not starting up and bringing him here half an hour late, which is still between fashionably late and probably stood you up. He eyes the tiny sheet of paper he had shoved into his back pocket and eyes Myungsoo's tiny, neat handwriting, detailing Room 602, before (kind of hurriedly) heading for the door, pushing the button and hearing a tinny whine from the panel in response. He waits for fifteen seconds (of anxiety) before a click breaks the silence, and a disgruntled mutter unfurls through the speaker; "You're late."
The door clicks open and Woohyun breezes in, takes the elevator up six floors, turns to the left and knocks on the door emblazoned with those three choice digits. Myungsoo's frown meets him and Woohyun grins as cheesily as he can. He gets a kick in the ankles and laughs, pushes his way in past Myungsoo's stern silhouette and looks around, drinks in the place Myungsoo's spun into his home.
It's small, cramped, and a little less neat than Woohyun expected. A throw blanket lies bunched up upon the couch, a pillow on the floor, the TV tuned into a drama, but otherwise it seems clean and homely. (Then again, Woohyun's standards aren't too high. There are turn-offs, but rarely deal-breakers.)
Woohyun flops against Myungsoo's couch, watches tonight's Immortal Song while trying to decode a math problem. Myungsoo's helpful in this area, thankfully, and manages to tell Woohyun that the reason his answer keeps turning up wrong is because he forgot to write in one negative sign. Eventually their study session fades into the two of them flying paper airplanes and throwing crumpled up balls of paper at one another and Woohyun telling Myungsoo about his stupid friends. At one point Myungsoo makes a sound that could be described as both a grunt and a chuckle and Woohyun is left awestruck.
Somewhere halfway through the night Woohyun's stomach growls and when he gets up to rifle through Myungsoo's fridge and finds nothing except a few slices of bread and bottled water, he is scandalized.
"How have you been living?!" Woohyun cries out dramatically, and Myungsoo wrinkles his nose and shuts the refrigerator door for him with a, "God, you're such a girl. Order a pizza."
Which results in Myungsoo calling up a delivery line and Woohyun folding a pizza delivery flyer into a plane and racing it against one of Myungsoo's planes, forged from a rough draft for an essay from one of his other classes. Myungsoo eventually snatches the plane from him and flies it clear across the room when none of their other planes made it across the coffee table, leaving Woohyun baffled and Myungsoo's mouth tilting upwards mysteriously.
"How did you do that?" Woohyun asks, and Myungsoo shrugs. "Guess I got ridiculous wrist strength or something."
(Which leaves Woohyun shifting kind of uncomfortably and remembering that whole deal about Myungsoo seducing him.)
Myungsoo loses every other plane flight after that, leading Woohyun to climb on his coffee table and do a victory dance. This makes Myungsoo start yelling and Woohyun laughs like an idiot until they're both interrupted by the buzzer, signifying that their thousand-calorie dinner has arrived. Woohyun cheers and Myungsoo gets up to answer the door, rifle around for his wallet.
Woohyun, on the other hand, rises to wash up, searching for a bathroom. Myungsoo, preoccupied, does not notice, but Woohyun saunters into the hallway, tries a doorknob as Myungsoo frets over having no cash, and asks if they take credit. Debit? A check? Fine, a check.
Woohyun swings open the door and finds a linen closet. He tries the next and finds a room swathed in darkness, the silhouette of a bed lit by the moonlight. Woohyun flicks on the light out of curiosity and starts when he sees this is Myungsoo's room, takes one step in, another.
It's small, cozy, neat; the bed sheets are white, the down comforter a navy, the walls painted cream. It's very inconspicuous, the occasional textbook littering his desktop. There's one thing Woohyun notices with interest, and it's the array of cameras that Myungsoo's got placed with care on a shelf that's gathering dust, though his Canon EOS 60D is gleaming, as if brand new. There are two older models and an ancient-looking polaroid camera at the edge, one that Woohyun feels like he's seen before. It's only just as Woohyun turns to leave that he spots a splash of color in this otherwise barren room.
Three bulletin boards are on Myungsoo's far wall, the wall that Woohyun didn't first see. There's a myriad of photos pinned across them with insect pins, a few slips of paper with Myungsoo's girly handwriting printed across them, words like tomorrow, winter,sequences of random numbers. This doesn't concern Woohyun, but when he steps closer, his heart leaps up into his throat.
Pinned beneath the new layer of photos, he finds pictures of himself. Woohyun sleeping, Woohyun laughing, Woohyun as a gap-toothed grade-schooler. Woohyun. And what's more, the pictures pinned above them are more and more familiar. There's a picture of a model plane he assembled with his father one summer, a picture of the Chungcheong sky he used to know by heart. He finds his entire life mapped out in images across the cork board and doesn't need to look further when he hears Myungsoo's socked feet tread across the threshold.
Myungsoo's "What are you doing in here," is deathly quiet, and were Woohyun not so overwhelmed by this, he would be scared by the ice in Myungsoo's voice.
"What the fuck is this," Woohyun says, indicating the boards, and he looks to Myungsoo, Myungsoo with his hair hanging in his eyes and pretty fingers. Myungsoo, who joked about seducing Woohyun, whose mouth is tightening, who won't speak up.
"Myungsoo," Woohyun says, emphasizing those two syllables, and Myungsoo's shoulders tense, he shakes his head and ducks his head forward.
"I can't tell you," Myungsoo mutters.
"Why not,"Woohyun asks, fists clenching, indignant.
Myungsoo's silent for a long time and he sighs, deeply, "You wouldn't understand," he says finally, and Woohyun whirls around, bears down upon him.
"Myungsoo, what the hell, you have pictures of me in your room!"
There's more silence, and Woohyun wonders if this is going to become a thing; Myungsoo taking ages to reach down inside himself for words, like he hasn't spoken in years and has to remember how to. He would be more concerned but right now he can't afford it, he feels simultaneously violated andpissed.
Myungsoo's face contorts into one of just a little worry. "I'm..." he begins, before he hesitates, eyes flicking from Woohyun to the floor, and Woohyun is stunned that Myungsoo would hesitate at all.
"Your fairy godparent, kind of."
The door swings shut behind Woohyun with a loud slam and Myungsoo facepalms, for lack of anything else to express himself.
---
"Woohyun."
"Woohyun!"
Woohyun grits his teeth and turns up the volume on his iPod up to deafening proportions, widening his stride to the point where he's running without really running. Regardless, Myungsoo manages to follow his pace without breaking a sweat.
Myungsoo continues pestering him before he steps forward and cuts him off, "Hyung!" he implores, and Woohyun stops, stunned, before sidestepping him and continuing on, his shock at Myungsoo even coming close to calling him 'hyung' making him growl out a "What."
"Stop acting like such a bitch and just listen up, would you?" And Myungsoo almost sounds angry, leaving Woohyun to scoff and whirl around, bristling visibly.
"You didn't tell my secret, right?" Myungsoo asks, and that anger is only diminished by something like concern. Woohyun looks incredulous.
"What secret, you said you were my fairy go-"
Myungsoo's palm slaps over Woohyun's mouth and he hisses in return, shoving Myungsoo back, looking beyond pissed.
"Look," Myungsoo cuts in swiftly before Woohyun can start screaming. "You can't tell anyone. I wasn't even supposed to tell you!"
"What the fuck," Woohyun responds eloquently, "You're not my..." And Woohyun lowers his voice for this because Myungsoo's face turns dangerous. "Fairy godparent," Woohyun whispers. "Fairies don't even fucking exist."
Myungsoo's eyes darken further and Woohyun would be scared if he weren't so annoyed. "I am," Myungsoo growls, before he looks left, right, swallows and tries to be empathetic.
"Look," Myungsoo says, looking to Woohyun with something like pleading in his eyes. "Don't... don't tell anyone, but I am. I don't have your life story pinned up in my room because... because-"
"-because you're madly in love with me," Woohyun cuts in, and Myungsoo looks vicious.
There's a pause between the two of them, more awkward than angry, since yelling at each other seems to have alleviated some of the tension.
"Here," Myungsoo says finally. "I'll prove it to you," and Woohyun rolls his eyes, pushes on past Myungsoo, finally.
"Don't tell anyone!" Myungsoo says after him, and Woohyun pretends like he hasn't heard.
True to his (unsaid) word, however, Woohyun tells nobody.
{The wind whips at the leaves in the trees, the reeds bowing beneath the gales. A finger presses down carefully and the aperture slides shut with an audible click.}
---
"How're you going to prove it," Woohyun grumbles from beneath his hoodie. They're seated in the café where Woohyun first dragged Myungsoo, only this time it's Myungsoo that dragged him here.
"I can predetermine your dreams," Myungsoo mumbles. He doesn't drink a caramel macchiato, but something black and acrid-smelling. Woohyun sips at his more fattening cup of coffee in response and looks back at him.
"What."
"Give me a week, I'll show you."
Woohyun dreams of the Han River, and finds it unglamorous that a boy longing for stardom, for Barcelona and Paris would dream of the Han River. He chalks it up to 'home is where the heart is' and strolls along the banks, drawing closer and watching the city skyline blink as if light-years away, on a distant planet. The sky's painted every color at once but the only color he sees through the backs of his transparent eyelids is a vibrant magenta, orange blooming through it like ink in water. A figure approaches in the distance and Woohyun squints his eyes; sees a boy in a hoodie and sweats sprinting all out down the path, each exhale a gunshot, each footfall a crack of thunder.
The boy stops a while off and turns and lifts his hoodie and Woohyun stares himself in the face, a younger him, with long hair that flops into his face and sweat pouring down his face, his life draining out of him, pumping full on through his veins.
Woohyun wakes up and heads off to classes feeling like absolute shit. Sungjong has no classes and Sungyeol's skipping and Howon's got practice as a trainee, so Woohyun plunks down in the cafeteria by himself until Myungsoo strolls by, drops a crappy old polaroid picture onto the table between them and quirks an eyebrow at Woohyun.
Woohyun sees the banks of the Han River, the skyline blinking as if universes away, and shoves the photo into Myungsoo's chest, scowling slowly. "You gotta try harder than that. People dream of failure all the time."
Myungsoo looks back at Woohyun before he shrugs, almost smirks. "Challenge accepted."
Woohyun gets an A on his next Biology paper, avoids a nasty fall down a flight of stairs when he forgets to tie his shoes, and finds an actual seat on the morning bus. He chalks them up to his genius ("Please," Myungsoo mutters), luck ("You have the worst luck in the world," Myungsoo snorts), and coincidence. Myungsoo scoffs when Woohyun offers up coincidence, teeth glinting and Woohyun feels like knocking them out.
"There's no such thing as coincidence," Myungsoo says, looking thoroughly unimpressed. "There's only magic."
His eyes glimmer just right in the dusty light filtering in through the west hallway. Myungsoo's holding an ancient polaroid camera and his hair's falling across his forehead in a way that makes Woohyun want to bruise him and kiss him better. Woohyun only scowls and turns on his heel and strides out the door around him, before Myungsoo grabs his wrist and wow, he's got a death grip.
Woohyun shoves him and Myungsoo doesn't relent, just stares Woohyun down with razor-sharp eyes and says a "Do you think I'd lie to you?" and it's so quiet and there's a clamor all around them from the rest of the college populace and the street is in absolute chaos from a traffic line two kilometers long, but Myungsoo's voice reaches him crystal clear.
Woohyun stares, baffled, and feels himself shaking his head ages before he has an answer in his mind. His mouth tightens, and he shuffles from one foot to the other, avoids Myungsoo's gaze, boring into him. His eyebrows knit together and he opens his mouth, slowly, closes it.
Myungsoo rolls his eyes and pulls Woohyun in and Woohyun whispers in a furious rush: "So, let's say you're telling the truth. And you have pictures of me up in your room because you're my fairy godparent, and you've been in charge of my fate from the beginning..." Woohyun looks down at the ground and Myungsoo waits for him to walk off, waits for what seems like years on end. Woohyun breathes in and sighs out heavily. "Okay, that's gonna have to change."
Myungsoo stares at him, face flickering from sardonic to incredulous. Woohyun lets it sink in, and just as Myungsoo opens his mouth to question, deny, Woohyun continues, "I can't... refer to you as my fairy godparent. You're younger than me. That's like... calling you my dad. Which is disgusting."
Woohyun pulls back and Myungsoo waits, appalled, before his mouth slowly pulls upwards, the beginnings of something special.
"What'll you go by, then?" He asks, and Woohyun puzzles it over, before he grins. "A guardian angel."
Myungsoo smiles the closest thing to a smile that Woohyun's ever seen from him. (Woohyun counts it as one regardless.)
Woohyun dreams of flying again when he collapses into bed, the weight of the world gone from his shoulders. He shoots straight up, breaks through the stratosphere, and knows that he won't burn up. Myungsoo wouldn't allow that, after all.
{A smile now, fingers lifting two photos off the walls, pinning a new one in its place.}
---
They become friends again. Slowly, but steadily, the awkwardness that comes with knowing that Myungsoo knows all of his worst secrets slowly smoothes itself over. Soon, Woohyun picks up the habit of grilling Myungsoo about the conduct of being a "guardian angel," the rules and regulations, the limitations and abilities. Myungsoo is stingy on information, occasionally dropping little tidbits for Woohyun to chew on, tail wagging. (He thinks Myungsoo finds amusement in watching Woohyun chase after his heels like the puppy he is.)
No, Myungsoo can't fly. No, he does not have comical wings, and no, he does not undergo a Sailor Moon-style transformation, complete with cliché sound effects and tantalizingly short skirt. (Such a shame!) Yes, he has magic, but he uses it for tiny things, like sweeping up broken glass, or cooling his coffee. He can do great things, can predestine, change the courses of history by means of the dreams he conjures, control the skies, but he refuses flatly to making it flood the day of Woohyun's next calc exam. "It's dangerous," Myungsoo says, "and against the rules." Woohyun scoffs at this, "If I could change the course of time, I would."
"How did you become a guardian angel?" Woohyun says during one of his barrages of inquisition, and Myungsoo looks to him halfway through shuffling through a new envelope of photos. Woohyun perks up, hopes inflating, but the other is silent for a long while. Just as Woohyun begins to lose faith in Myungsoo answering, Myungsoo responds quietly, with a shrug, "We're chosen."
"By who?" Woohyun asks, in earnest, feeding off of Myungsoo's brief susceptibility, and Myungsoo picks up on this in that ridiculous way of his, deadpans, "Them."
Woohyun groans, and Myungsoo smirks a bit, pity flickering through his smile, poison in the sweet crunch of Snow White's apple. "At childhood. Given a vessel from where magic is drawn."
"A vessel?" Woohyun asks, scoffing. "Like a boat?"
Myungsoo slaps him over the head with the envelope and Woohyun sees stars and waterfalls and seagulls in the sky behind his eyes. "No. Think... pensieve."
Woohyun furrows his eyebrows. "What."
"Harry Potter."
"Oh!"
Woohyun tries to search the rest of the afternoon for an old stone basin in Myungsoo's apartment; turns up empty-handed.
("Wait," Woohyun will ask one day. Myungsoo will look to him and Woohyun will go on; "If you guys live by these rigid rules all the time, how could you have told me without... being destroyed, or whatever."
"We're allowed to tell only one person," Myungsoo will respond, "Most don't tell their host, though."
"...so what would have happened if anyone would have found out. What happens if anyone else finds out?"
"We're killed. They'll be erased."
Woohyun is silent, before he manages an oh.)
Part Two