[fic] Run the Outlaw Way
Author ofolivesnginger
Fandom: EXO
Pairing: Xiumin/Luhan
Rating: PG13
Words: 6693
Summary: Four years later, Luhan is still careless and fearless, and sort of terrifying.
a/n: Cross posting (again) my SNCJ Secret Santa 2013 fill, here! I loved this prompt, and I wish I could have handled the tone better, but I think in the end I did my best given the little time I had as pinch hit. First time writing xiuhan, pls forgive!
Prompt: "a minseok/luhan 'bros before hoes' college!au fic wherein during their final year brotp turns into something a little bit more"
The soccer season finishes its last match on a night in November.
Their team takes home second in the games within their confederation. In the locker room, their coach cries with himself locked in his office, and the rest of the team gathers around the little slit of a window hammering on the door, trying to sing him songs to make him feel better. Luhan catches wind that it’s their best score in fifty years, or something abstract like that. The only thing he remembers feeling when he was dragged by Minseok off his knees and off the field is how much he’d wanted to belong in the dewy grass for a little bit longer.
“I don’t even want to describe how dirty...” Minseok’s lips contort at him, a hand on his locker, eyes roaming Luhan’s jersey. He doesn’t finish his sentence, just lifts a corner of Luhan’s shirt and shakes a couple of times. Luhan dazedly watches the dirt clot splat onto the tiles.
The two of them quickly sneak off to the showers. Luhan’s singing to himself the song that was performed at halftime, systematically spitting out water every few seconds. His eyes are shut tight.
“Aren’t you tired?” Minseok shouts across the stream.
“No.” He holds out his travel size shampoo bottle in Minseok’s general direction, eyes still clenched. “Come wash my hair for me.”
“Get lost. Hurry up and rinse, I know this place we can go.”
The team planned on a celebration on the following weekend, but the two of them both wanted to enjoy a little on their own while the energy is still pumping full in their systems. Minseok’s sliding on his socks when Luhan comes out with a towel hiding his crotch, skittering across the floor on tiptoes like an ant. He plasters his whole dripping body against Minseok’s locker as he opens his own adjacent, bare white ass pretty much winking. “Show some manners, peachbum.”
Luhan pulls his boxers up, turns around, and there’s this snicker caught between his smile, pulled so wide it curves downwards. Minseok knows this face. “You’re going to make a really bad joke, don’t do it.” In response, Luhan shakes his butt at him childishly for a moment before going back to his bag. Minseok contemplates many things, like grabbing a shoe, or lifting a foot, but in the end just sighs and buckles up his own jeans.
“Come on, Luhan. The place closes at one.”
--
Just before New Years, Minseok gets asked out by a girl in his economics class, and he tells Luhan this as hoping it’ll bring excitement during last few days of finals, pretty much crashing into the caf table Luhan is settled in. Luhan watches him blow at his coffee and stir the rice in his bowl while he explains. “It was so sudden, I’m sorry Lu. Are you not going home this year?”
Luhan thinks about it, and a great deal of emotions shoot through him one after the other. In the end he shakes his head. “Don’t feel like it.” He got asked to a party just a few days before, but he turned it down, thinking the two of them would spend it together again watching fireworks from the rooftops of Minseok’s apartment. Minseok picks up on his disappointment, and Luhan watches his smile dim a little with guilt, and berates himself for being too careless. “Go, don’t worry about me,” he tries to rectify, patting him on the arm, smile back on, “Seriously. We’ve watched the same fireworks in the same spot for four years, even I need a change of scenery.”
He says this, sharing the triumphance wholeheartedly, but something still drops in his stomach. It hangs there, shaking every time Luhan jostled around. It’s impossible not to think of everything with a sort of finality; his head now involuntarily attaches ‘last’ as an adjective to anything they get to do. Sitting in the cafeteria, watching Minseok flip through cue cards for his exam in two hours, Luhan wonders about the longevity of things, whether things only end when you let them. A few days ago Minseok offered to share his apartment after graduation, but Luhan caught himself from saying yes, wondering if it’s the best course of things, that their friendship extends so far there would be barely any privacy, breathing space.
The pendulum drums, loud especially on the night of the 31st, when he gets kidnapped to the party by some other Chinese friends that hadn’t gone home. It’s pure suffocation, which he might have enjoyed another night when he didn’t have too many pressing things on his mind. Hours later, he’s sitting on the steps outside the clubhouse, half a bottle beside him when he takes out his phone. He dials Minseok, leaning his cheek onto the screen, and the call’s three rings in when he suddenly remembers what’s supposed to be happening right then. Before he gets a chance to sit up, the phone’s being picked up, and Minseok sounds cautious, the question behind his “Hello?” leaning closer to worried than anything Luhan imagined.
“Minseok, I’m sorry, I-I’m drunk. I have no idea why I called,” he breathes.
From the receiver, Luhan hears the scrape of a chair, and his heart speeds. Minseok mumbles something, and a softer voice does the same. Luhan holds his breath until he hears Minseok breathe into the phone again. “Jesus, I’m sorry, I have to be interrupting-”
“It’s fine, she left to the washroom. Luhan, you okay?”
“Yeah! Yeah, I’m fine. Don’t worry.”
Luhan swallows the lingering taste of alcohol on the back of his tongue. He stares into the darkness of the backyard, black outside the halo of the porchlight he sits in, stares into the bushes. He isn’t drunk, not really, and he was fine until he answered. Now he asks himself this, and it freezes him cold, how far he is from understanding why calling Minseok had been his first reaction, some sort of muscle memory.
“Really? You suck at lying.”
“I’m not lying!” Luhan retorts, and even this scares him too, like they’ve had this exchange so many times his mouth can take over. Even in his own ears it sounds too abrupt, too hollow. Minseok waits on the other end, expecting a continuation, but this time Luhan himself is a little blown away to recover fast enough and gloss over the rough edges.
“You’ve got things on your mind, don’t you.”
Luhan kicks at the gravel under his feet, grinding a particularly large stone into the ground. “Are you gonna watch the countdown?”
“To be honest,” Minseok laughs a little, “the TV here’s been stuck on a game of baseball for a while now.” Luhan feels his weariness, almost a little smug. A moment later, Minseok says, “Want me to come back?”
“What? No, no no no.”
“Luhan, come on. I know you’re thinking it’s tradition. Let’s count down together, okay?” No, not okay, he mouths, thinking about the click of heels he heard through the phone, fading into the distance as she walked away from whatever meal Minseok was having with her, and he couldn’t have this. From the other end, Minseok says “it the last year we get to do this” and that shakes him a little bit harder.
“What about,” he swallows. He doesn’t know her name.
“We’ll finish up here, and then I’ll send her home, don’t worry. Where do you want to go?”
“Your place, I guess,” he says, thinking about rooftops, even though he doesn’t feel like being exposed tonight. They agree on a time, and Minseok quells his guilt with assurances. Luhan hangs up and suddenly he feels not lighter, but uncomfortably stuck, like the air congealed in his lungs. He carries this weight all the way home.
In the threshold of Minseok’s apartment Luhan wonders what it means that he has the key to his house, that the first fallen shoe he kicks over as he steps in belongs to himself. He slaps a hand blindly on the wall and the light in the living room switches on just like this. Luhan wanders to the kitchen, pulls out a bag of romaines and a bottle of creamy caesar from the fridge. He fixes himself a salad to compensate for the dinner he should have had, before he rushed back to a house he knew would be empty for a good few hours. The TV hums while he stabs his fork, clattering against the porcelain. He sticks his bare feet in the foot massager they got some Christmas past, when it was on sale on top of an employee discount at the supermarket he used to work at. He turns up the TV, but the vibrations drown out the drama anyway, and he falls asleep with his plate on his lap until Minseok comes back an hour and a half later.
Minseok raps his knuckles on Luhan’s forehead, and it jerks him awake. “You’re back,” he goes to stand, and Minseok’s got sharp eyes and fast hands, snatching the plate before Luhan notices. “Listen, I’m really sorry for doing this to you.”
“Ah, stop it. We weren’t feeling each other anyway.”
Minseok collects the plate for him, fork and stray croutons and all, and it’s the first time Luhan notices him like this, him and his every mundane detail. The loose threads behind the buttons of his pea coat, the cuff of the fancy dress shirt he wore for tonight, peeking out the sleeve of his jacket. His hair, windswept more handsomely than messy, definitely gelled and shaped. He smells faintly different. Minseok takes his plate to the sink, peels off his coat, rolls his sleeves up lean forearms to wash his hands. He dries his hands. Minseok turns to him, smiles at him. Toothy little smile, gums flashing, pushing up the apples of his pink cheeks. When he walks by he still carries the cold air of the night, until he walks into his room and changes into softer things. Luhan’s thinking about the slant of his eyes, the slant of his nostrils.
Minseok drapes a blanket over Luhan’s head, like veiling a bride, and slides in beside him. Luhan tucks the blanket around the bulge of the two of them as well as he can, and then with a tired sigh lets his head fall onto Minseok’s shoulder like dead weight. “A lot to think about, isn’t there.”
You don’t even know, Luhan thinks, but he just says yes. Minseok watches the TV with him, a Chinese station, playing a rerun of the New Years programme from last year. Minseok watches the spectacular performances, not understanding a word, but he listens to Luhan mindlessly gossip about the actors and actresses on the screen. It’s twenty minutes to midnight, and Luhan chatters about whatever’s on his mind, anything and everything irrelevant. There is a red digital clock in the corner of the screen, counting down the seconds, and at three minutes to go Luhan falls quiet.
Minseok looks down at him, nuzzled into his own shoulder, and finds him with his eyes closed, a sweet and subtle smile on his lips. When the clock runs down to 15 seconds, the hosts on stage begin counting with the audience, and Luhan opens his eyes but he doesn’t speak, doesn’t jump around shouting the way he usually does with decorations draped all over him. At the stroke of midnight, firecrackers go off from the TV, and Minseok turns towards his window, where a rocket whistles through the silence and explodes, setting the whole sky ablaze. When he turns back his heart almost seizes, because Luhan is now looking over too, his head lifted and nose pushed up towards the direction of the window. When Minseok turns, they are so close he can see himself reflected in the eyes before him, feel his even breath. Luhan doesn’t move, only stares back at him, lips set in a way that makes Minseok want to shut down. He had never felt so vulnerable before this moment, so fragile, and he waits for the air to break like the first crack of a glow stick. The moment Luhan drops his eyelids to blink, Minseok panics, and then the moment is over.
Minseok shifts, and Luhan sits up, runs a hand through his hair. He watches Minseok for another moment before yawning, getting up from the couch. “Happy new year’s, I’m gonna pass out.” He heads to the guest room, almost exclusively for him at this point, and strips down to his underwear. Minseok watches him kick his clothes aside, and finally with a wave close his door.
--
In the summer after second year, Luhan took a month off the job he was working and went home. The house in Beijing stood unaltered from his memories-a sort of mild wine shade, grimed and rain washed relentlessly until white streaks of scum caked the walls, tide lines washing up a shore, descending around the windowsills and kitchen vents like the sagging face of an old man. The inside of his house is just about the same, a sort of painted on gentleness, masking what’s really a staleness, fermenting a household of lukewarm parents. “You dyed your hair,” his father had told him. He ran a hand through the blond and it felt like wires around his buzzing fingers.
Sleeping in his old bed, in his old room, Luhan fell into a different area of subconscious, projected in a dream he had one night. In the dream, his dad’s on a diving board with him, crouched behind little Luhan in his wetsuit, swatting at his arms so they hang horizontal, holding him by the wrist with three fingers of his large hand. In the other two there’s a stopwatch, with the nylon strap tickling where it hangs over his wrist. Behind him, his father’s mumbling endless instructions, things like knees to your chest, like full arm movements, ninety degree angles, facing your fears, and filtered in through Luhan’s ears they are nothing. He hears nothing but the waves of the pool seven meters below him, mumbling the secrets they hide in their depths. Luhan looks down into the turbulent water and sees its face, finds its mouth opening and closing like a fish, waiting to swallow him into its gentle embrace. He remembers thinking that it’s no longer the plunge past the surface that scares him, but the height between where he is with his soles firmly planted and where he has to go, the fear of crossing that distance alone, carried by nothing than the air and gravity. His father stops talking and releases him, backs down the ladder. The child on the tip of the board looks back, and their eyes meet. He takes the plunge, and he pisses his pants in the pool and he woke up crying.
It was a particularly hot night in Beijing, and the fan in his room whirred unendingly, a continuous lullaby soothing the pounding of his heartbeat. Luhan snatched his phone from the chair, blinded by the screen before he made out the 3:13AM, and he was halfway sliding to unlock it before his thumb froze. Suddenly he knew with clarity what he was planning to do, and it was the first time that the thought seized him, that he reprimanded himself for this kind of subconscious dependence. Luhan put his phone back down, shrinking back into the stiff blanket with his mind a jumbled rubix cube, and the only flash of color he could see was red, red of the back of his eyelids when he pushed off the diving board and forgot all else except how to face his fears alone.
--
Snow comes late this year, and from some newfound bravery Luhan suggests they play a casual game when the first snow covers their fields. The sky’s getting dark when they finish, and they two of them step out of the showers steaming in the cold air. Minseok frowns at Luhan’s wet hair, and tells him distastefully he’s going to catch a cold.
When they’re at the crosswalk where the two of them usually part, Luhan suddenly grabs Minseok’s hand, the one not on the strap of his bag. “What? I gotta go,” Minseok says lightly, shaking his arm, but Luhan doesn’t let go. “What is it?”
“Nothing, just. Stay over today.”
Luhan looks weird, his expression something unplaceable. There’s a guilty conscience inside Minseok which jumps at this idea, the one that crystallized when he woke up on the morning of the 1st heart hammering, body defenseless, swindled to hardness by seductress of his dreams, who for all Minseok would remember as he jerked himself off in the shower had eyes that reflected himself and lips and shut him down. Suddenly he thinks about the things he hadn’t done, hadn’t carried through, and the guilt of it consumes him for a moment, until it’s too late and he’s being dragged the other way by Luhan towards his dorm. Luhan pulls Minseok into his room, not even letting him go while he opens the door, and only inside releases him. In the middle of the room they stand, both absorbed in their own conversations in their heads. Luhan looks lost suddenly, so Minseok steps in. “Well, okay. I’ll stay for a bit then. We can do our readings together later.”
Luhan spreads his work all across the coffee table, crouching over it with his legs crisscrossed on the floor, muttering things to himself as he flits from package to package. Minseok is fixing coffee in the corner of the kitchenette, stirring milk into the blend when suddenly a chin sets itself on his shoulder. “Make me one too,” Luhan slurs, jaw hardly moving.
Minseok sighs. “Why didn’t you say so earlier.”
Luhan hangs like a sack on his back, watching his fingers work. Minseok brings another mug down from the cupboard, rinses the spoon he just tossed in the sink, and pulls over the big tin of instant coffee in the corner.
“Hey, Minseok.”
“Hmm?”
“Can I tell you something…?”
“What is it?” He turns back to the fridge, and Luhan leaves his shoulder while he does, and when he’s back leans dutifully back down on it. Without a word he starts tipping the spout of the carton.
“That’s good.”
He sticks the spoon in and stirs.
“Don’t be alarmed, but...I think I might be feeling things for you.”
Everything stops.
He’s not alarmed. Not in the way that shouts at him to run. Minseok gives himself three seconds to feel petrified before he forces himself to feel Luhan instead, very much alive behind him right now, having just done something extraordinary. Luhan’s grip on his hips suddenly feels unsure, his breathing painfully regulated like he’s trying not to breathe on Minseok by accident, if some unfortunate situation was to turn up. Minseok lets himself think for a few more seconds, before he slowly turns around and meets Luhan in the eyes. They look almost hurt, when he hasn’t even responded yet, and Minseok wonders how much Luhan had put himself through already just to get here.
He pushes a mug into Luhan’s hand. “Let’s talk.” He takes them to the sofa, clearing out little spaces on the coffee table for their drinks. Luhan shrinks into the other side of the seat, knees tucked into his chest and hands wrapped around them. Minseok drinks his coffee from the other side, crossing his own legs. He watches Luhan pick at a lint ball stuck to the tip of his light grey socks, and suddenly feels an irrepressible urge to hold him.
It becomes apparent to him that Luhan is finished talking, and beyond everything that he’d implied, there isn’t much to say. This isn’t much of a surprise, ever since the day they both began to feel it. He could ask when things changed, or why, or what it was, but a part of him thinks it was sooner or later, that as soon as the glowstick of the thought cracked there was no undoing it, and Luhan couldn’t unconvince himself from his conclusion. Now, across him, Luhan has pulled both his socks off, and is trying to warm his feet with his hands.
“I don’t really know what to say, Minseok. I don’t really know.”
“It’s okay.”
Minseok lowers his mug. He takes a deep breath, deep enough to hear, lets it out through his nose.
“Let me think about it.” He says softly. “I need some time to think about this.”
Luhan nods eagerly, looking down at his feet. He keeps nodding, until he’s satisfied with it himself, worked out whatever it is going on in his head, and then he looks up with something akin to the sunny look Minseok’s used to, just a smidgen more subdued. He reaches across the space between them with an extended fist, mouth curling into a smile. “Alright.”
Minseok watches him, and he can’t control himself from smiling back. He scoots forward to meet it with his own fist, rocking like a bug until their bare feet touch, Minseok’s overlapping. He forgets about the fistpump, eyes on Luhan’s feet, which are ice hold under his own.
He moves back a little, and then lifts his foot, plants it back down right over Luhan’s until they’re fully covered. Beneath him he feets Luhan’s icy toes wiggle.
Minseok looks up, and Luhan looks up. Their eyes meet. Smiling, Luhan pulls his feet out from underneath and sets them on top of Minseok’s, like he’s trying to take over his job instead.
--
He’s been sitting here, spinning a pencil between his fingers for the last half hour, thinking about the two of them.
When sophomore year started, Luhan was still in a relationship with one of Minseok’s better girl friends whom he’s known since high school. It was a strange arrangement-they started dating a couple of months after first year started, and it actually did a great part in bringing Luhan and Minseok together, outside of the friendship that just hit off when they met on the varsity team. Stranger still was that because of this, Minseok warmed up to Luhan first as a lover than a friend.
Luhan had been, when he was 18, caught between the high school puppy love and something that ran a little deeper than the casual flirting. At first Minseok had thought their relationship wasn’t built upon much substance-there’s only so much to be said about a relationship between two people who’ve only known each other for a month and a half. He’d never dated before himself, always found the idea too immense to handle, and the casualness with which Luhan’s carried on baffled him all the way into spring and summer. He couldn’t understand what bound them together. It seemed to go, with no direction or purpose, endlessly on uninterrupted regardless. When second year came around, it had become one of Minseok’s unsolved mysteries, how something so stagnant can survive for so long. In his mind he was certain this was not how relationships were meant to work.
Near the end of summer Minseok took a part time job at the library on campus, and he kept it when school started again. What was significant, in the winter of second year, was that unexpectedly Minseok had been left with a big project to do pretty much by himself when his group member suddenly had to fly back home for a funeral. The job he had became a problem quickly, and he was sweating in his hands when he decided that he could try to reach out for a friend he thought might help him.
“Hello?”
Luhan picked up on the second ring, and Minseok almost knew by memory what he looked like greeting someone with this much brightness.
“I’m in a bit of trouble and I might need you to help me,” he said, mouth going dry in a heartbeat, trying to wet his lips. There was a pause from Luhan’s end, and Minseok thought he’d fuckin done it and it was going to die. “Is that...okay?”
“Yeah,” Luhan said, breathless. “Yes. Of course. Anything.”
There were two things Minseok didn’t know at the time. The first was, that it was only after this phone call that Luhan truly regarded the two of them as best friends. It sounded ridiculous the day Luhan finally told him, as if everything they’d done together in the first year had been dismissed, but Luhan’s reasoning woke him up like cold water. “You’d never asked for anything from me before,” he said. “It never felt complete when you didn’t.”
The second thing he didn’t know was that it would have been the one year anniversary of Luhan’s relationship during the week that he took over his shift for him. He only found out about it when he found their group of friends in the library silently studying the way they never did, and someone else slipped to him that the two of them had broken up, and nobody dared to stir the atmosphere.
Later that evening through skype, he asked if she was okay, and received on Luhan’s behalf a speech on all the things he’d done wrong. When the call ended, Minseok left his own dorm room, climbed up some stairs to Luhan’s. His roommate was out, so he sat him down on his bed, arms crossed. “I can’t believe you skipped an anniversary for this, especially when you had plans.”
Luhan was incredulous. “You’re telling me she broke up with me over this?”
“I’m telling you she broke up with you for being generally inconsiderate. Dates and milestones, things like that, you have to take them seriously.”
Luhan was hurt and offended, like he didn’t know why he was getting shit from both ends. It was a cold fight they had of avoiding each other for a week or two, until their first ever finals were over, and eventually Minseok made up with him first. “If you’re staying here for the winter, come have dinner with my family,” he extended, and Luhan agreed. Near New Year’s, a few of their friends carpooled back to Minseok’s home.
Luhan found his paradise strolling around the house laughing at every framed up picture of Minseok when he was younger, and Minseok gave up on stopping him after a while, refusing to get any more embarrassed than he was. For some reason Luhan’s fascinated with the whole household, and he tells him why, flipping through the volumes of scrapbooks Minseok’s mother kept of him when he was little. “Your life is so in order, you and your whole family,” he said. “It’s so clean and organized, it’s freaky.”
When he slept that night, with Luhan sprawled on his floor, Minseok had come to understand their difference. It was how he was raised, Minseok knew. Money is time, and his parents had enough money to cut scrapbooks, to collect china, to make the bed every morning. Minseok thrived on this system of planning, following through, filing in, cycle after cycle of completion, and it had never failed him.
But what is Luhan? He’s terrifying. He’s careless. He would hop on a plane and come to Korea alone. He’s careless and he’s fearless, and everything that’d been in his way to where he is now he’d fought through on his own. Minseok doesn’t know what to do with this overwhelming need to protect him, to walk through things together with him, to take what he lashes at him and feel the exhilaration of the unknown spicing his bloodlines, but to know in the end that he would never have to be afraid of where the hand might take him.
“I think I like you.”
The sheer destructive force behind the these few words terrifies him, and Luhan was still as careless, still as fearless two years later. Minseok extends his head, and he calls into the dark ahead, so, so afraid of the things he will find waiting, but his cry echoes past the shadow, and he gets no answer.
--
Minseok thinks about it, and he gets away with doing nothing more, until suddenly February rolls around, and another date of significance plants itself like a landmine in their calendar.
Minseok stares at the little square of the 14th, with its font color changed from red to pink, and it hurts his brain to think about it. In first and second year Luhan dated, but he was always dumped before he had a chance to celebrate Valentines with his girlfriend. It’s another thing they’ve got going, this time purely unplanned, for four years now, getting together and doing hardcore things like anime marathoning or gaming in their beds to distract themselves from the idea of the holiday. This year, though, Luhan has disappeared for a good week immersed in a project, and Minseok almost thinks he’ll get turned down when he shows up at Luhan’s door asking if he wanted to take a breather.
“Let’s go for a drive?” He twirls his keys, brows raised and eyes wide, suggesting enthusiastically with all he can. Luhan’s dark circles sag like his shoulders, and it’s not a good look on him. Minseok is expecting something, but it’s not this lack of response, and for a moment he fears he’s done something wrong, because Luhan looks almost burdened.
The thought plagues him. Even in the driver’s seat, backing out of the lot, Minseok tries to convince himself it’ll work, lift Luhan’s spirits. Luhan’s looking out the window, and it’s not quite dark enough yet to see his reflection.
“Where to, captain?”
“Just wanted to drive around the city, catch up on things. You’ve been hiding pretty well for the past week.”
“Yeah, I was...”
Minseok chances a glance over, and he wishes he hadn’t, because Luhan had never looked so disinterested when he’s with him.
He swallows it. They head into the city, off the winding roads of the campus, past a few stretches of highway, until there are traffic lights again. Minseok wishes Luhan would sleep, rather than lean against the window dispirited. He turns on the radio, playing quietly, but Luhan doesn’t seem to react, and it starts to nag at him a little bit too.
When they hit the big roads, the sun’s gone, and the city is lit top to bottom. There are no radios not playing love songs, save for the traffic alerts with its monotonous announcements. With 60’s classics playing in the background, Luhan says absolutely nothing, watching lights fly by his eyes, occasionally lifting his head to examine a building or two at a red light. He doesn’t look over, not once, and after a while Minseok becomes grateful, because there is no warmth nor excitement nor hope on his own face left to hold. Luhan rolls down the window and slings his forearm out to feel the night breeze, and Minseok rolls down his window desperately wishing he could air out the elephant in the room. He gives himself one last chance to look over, and he finds Luhan reclined into his seat, a bittersweet little smile on his mouth as he watches the scenery go, fingers drumming the frame of the window.
Minseok turns away. He drives back with both hands on the wheel.
He parks in the lot outside his own apartment. When he switches off the ignition, the car goes to rest, and suddenly everything is much too quiet. He doesn’t need to look over to know what Luhan will look like, physically upset, maybe so disappointed that he’s silently crying again like he always did in the most unpredictable moments. He doesn’t need to look, or want to look, but he forces himself to anyway, and when he finds Luhan lightly asleep Minseok almost bursts into tears. “Hey,” he shakes him awake gently. “We’re back.”
Luhan rubs his eyes. Suddenly, his disorientation is gone, he remembers the ride, and he shrinks away from Minseok’s hand. Minseok can’t even let himself feel it. “Will you come up, Lu?”
On his lap, Luhan threads his fingers together. And then he turns his head to Minseok, regarding him with something so undefined, but Minseok understands nevertheless. “Please?” His voice breaks, and when it does something flits past Luhan’s iris. Luhan knows he’d been caught with it, so he turns away, but a moment later he sighs, first sound he’s made in hours, unbuckles himself, and steps out the car.
Minseok gets out, watching Luhan, whose expression changes as he lifts his head. Minseok turns around, and it takes him off guard. “What’s happened here?” Luhan whistles, glancing up at the 10 storey apartment with not a spark of light from its windows.
“There was a blackout,” the watchman behind the desk tells them. “Use the stairs.”
--
It’s not much a climb to the fifth floor. At first Minseok worries Luhan’s too fatigued for it, but he almost gets left behind when Luhan passes two steps at a time. He waits for Minseok at the top of every platform, and then speeds ahead again like he’s silently racing him. When they get to his door, Minseok fumbles with his keys, and with an exaggerated sigh Luhan shines the flashlight of his phone on the keychain. When they get in, Luhan kicks his shoes off gracelessly, stomping with his nose stuck high into the house, and it’s the best thing Minseok has ever seen as he places his shoes on the rack for him. Luhan looks over now with a bratty smirk, all air of discontentment dispersed, and every cloud inside Minseok disappears.
The heaters are off. In the dark Minseok squints at his thermometer, and he’s sure it’s definitely closer to 0 than 20. While Luhan’s in the washroom, Minseok slips under his thick goose-down comforter, back against the wall and laptop screen lighting up the whole room. Luhan comes in and immediately winces, shielding his eyes. “Sorry,” Minseok turns down the brightness. “Come on, get in.”
Even with the blanket, Luhan’s face quivers. He rubs at his arms under the blanket, and the room is filled with the sound of skin rubbing against the rough texture of skin. Luhan pulls a pillow over, hugs it koala style, until he suddenly gets some kind of idea and lifts up the blanket, ducking completely under the covers.
Minseok has no idea what he’s up to. He peels a corner, and underneath Luhan’s twisting like a fish on land, shoving pillows into a corner. He slips out and off the bed, dragging a good bunch of Minseok’s sheet off with him. Luhan comes back with all the pillows from the couch and his own room, and he tries to stack them all in all corners of Minseok’s queen sized bed. When it’s done, he throws the cover over the two of them and lights up the horrible fort with his phone. Luhan struggles to find an angle to lie down.
“You’re screwing up my whole room,” Minseok says, reaching after his clumsy writhing form, tucking his sheet back around the mattress. Luhan keeps tumbling around, until he ends up lying between Minseok’s legs, back against his chest.
Minseok sits in the dark, hearing his own breath off the blanket collapsing in on them. Tentatively, he wraps an arm around Luhan’s waist. Luhan lights up his phone again.
“Talk.”
“I already talked, you talk.”
Minseok sighs. He counts the minutes in their fort, watching Luhan play Candy Crush on his phone past his shoulder. Minutes pass, Luhan wins a round, and the Minseok reaches forward and turns off his screen.
In the dark, he bends his head down onto Luhan’s shoulder, until their ears are pressed together and he’s breathing heavily.
“Talk,” Luhan croaks.
Luhan in his pajamas smells of boy, youthful and healthy, ineffably fresh and alluring. Minseok breathes him in for a while, listening to the voices inside his own head. There are too many things to say. I’m a realist. This wasn’t my plan. You were always so brave. You make me want to be a better person.
“Aren’t you afraid?”
Luhan thinks for a while, and then shakes his head back and forth against Minseok’s chest.
“That-that we could really fuck a lot of things up?”
Luhan thinks again, and this time Minseok reaches a hand, rests it gently on the side of his neck. Luhan’s pulse beats steady, sure under his fingertips. It’s his skin that shivers. “Honestly, the thought of us separating still hasn’t crossed my mind.”
Minseok inhales deeply, incredulous at the thought. To him it’s incomprehensible, incredible, and he’s starting to think he can’t live without it, Luhan’s lack of foresight. He’s spending his nights twirling in his chair before the window looking, as if it’ll simply transpire, for some believable future he sees for the two of them after college, and the only thing he sees is the reflection of himself staring back at him with the same question.
“Are you gonna kiss me?” Luhan whispers. Minseok has nothing prepared, no dinner date or thought out confession, or even condoms and lube in the night stand drawers. But there’s something shouting in him now. Are you going to kiss me? These are the questions Luhan asks. Yes, he thinks. I want to. What else matters.
Minseok kisses him. Suddenly Luhan’s dialing himself again, scrawling until he’s sitting in Minseok’s lap, arms wound around his neck, chest to chest against the wall. Luhan slips off Minseok’s shirt and presses him back to the cold wall, but Minseok swallows his yelp for the tongue rolling in his mouth. Clothes are chucked onto the floor. When there’s no more air under, Luhan peeks out head first into the cold, and Minseok follows. With the duvet warming them, the two of them shuck the rest of their clothes, until it’s just the warmth of a body laid across another, beat of a heart beating against another.
The light comes on.
Minseok pushes up, sitting on his knees as he examines the place. The whirr of the heater starts up again, and the light of the bedroom illuminates the scene for the first time in all its nakedness-Minseok is covered in a sheen of sweat, pupils blown, knuckles white where he props himself, and Luhan is pleading, mouthing his name prettily, Minseok, Minseok. Minseok can’t remember the past nor the future. He takes Luhan’s mouth. He holds him in his hands. School might end in half a year, there might not be a place for them in the world, they might die tomorrow. What else matters.
When he wakes up the next morning, Minseok can’t feel his left arm, where Luhan’s head was pillowed for the whole night after they fell asleep. When Luhan comes to, he flips himself around like a pancake, propping his chin on his hands, fingers crossed over Minseok’s chest.
“Morning,” he says, peeking up his lashes. Minseok smiles at him, a little wildly, the way thieves grin as they speed past the borders with a million dollars in their trunks. Minseok feels like a felon, a law breaker.
“Good morning.”
He leans back, scratching his head, stretching out his sore arms as he yawns. Luhan lies down on his chest, and they listen to the sound of the morning together.
“You still haven’t talked, you know,” Luhan says. “What’re we gonna do about us?”
Minseok looks down at the crown of his head, black roots growing from the blond. He falls back, shaking his head a little. He closes his eyes. Below him, Luhan kicks his legs, and it’s the first time he realizes they’ve been tangled. Neither of them showered, and the whole blanket traps the unmistakable smell of their crime. Quite inappropriately, Luhan’s stomach grumbles.
What are we gonna do, he wonders. What a great question. There’s room in his agenda for a million things to be written.
End.
Fandom: EXO
Pairing: Xiumin/Luhan
Rating: PG13
Words: 6693
Summary: Four years later, Luhan is still careless and fearless, and sort of terrifying.
a/n: Cross posting (again) my SNCJ Secret Santa 2013 fill, here! I loved this prompt, and I wish I could have handled the tone better, but I think in the end I did my best given the little time I had as pinch hit. First time writing xiuhan, pls forgive!
Prompt: "a minseok/luhan 'bros before hoes' college!au fic wherein during their final year brotp turns into something a little bit more"
The soccer season finishes its last match on a night in November.
Their team takes home second in the games within their confederation. In the locker room, their coach cries with himself locked in his office, and the rest of the team gathers around the little slit of a window hammering on the door, trying to sing him songs to make him feel better. Luhan catches wind that it’s their best score in fifty years, or something abstract like that. The only thing he remembers feeling when he was dragged by Minseok off his knees and off the field is how much he’d wanted to belong in the dewy grass for a little bit longer.
“I don’t even want to describe how dirty...” Minseok’s lips contort at him, a hand on his locker, eyes roaming Luhan’s jersey. He doesn’t finish his sentence, just lifts a corner of Luhan’s shirt and shakes a couple of times. Luhan dazedly watches the dirt clot splat onto the tiles.
The two of them quickly sneak off to the showers. Luhan’s singing to himself the song that was performed at halftime, systematically spitting out water every few seconds. His eyes are shut tight.
“Aren’t you tired?” Minseok shouts across the stream.
“No.” He holds out his travel size shampoo bottle in Minseok’s general direction, eyes still clenched. “Come wash my hair for me.”
“Get lost. Hurry up and rinse, I know this place we can go.”
The team planned on a celebration on the following weekend, but the two of them both wanted to enjoy a little on their own while the energy is still pumping full in their systems. Minseok’s sliding on his socks when Luhan comes out with a towel hiding his crotch, skittering across the floor on tiptoes like an ant. He plasters his whole dripping body against Minseok’s locker as he opens his own adjacent, bare white ass pretty much winking. “Show some manners, peachbum.”
Luhan pulls his boxers up, turns around, and there’s this snicker caught between his smile, pulled so wide it curves downwards. Minseok knows this face. “You’re going to make a really bad joke, don’t do it.” In response, Luhan shakes his butt at him childishly for a moment before going back to his bag. Minseok contemplates many things, like grabbing a shoe, or lifting a foot, but in the end just sighs and buckles up his own jeans.
“Come on, Luhan. The place closes at one.”
--
Just before New Years, Minseok gets asked out by a girl in his economics class, and he tells Luhan this as hoping it’ll bring excitement during last few days of finals, pretty much crashing into the caf table Luhan is settled in. Luhan watches him blow at his coffee and stir the rice in his bowl while he explains. “It was so sudden, I’m sorry Lu. Are you not going home this year?”
Luhan thinks about it, and a great deal of emotions shoot through him one after the other. In the end he shakes his head. “Don’t feel like it.” He got asked to a party just a few days before, but he turned it down, thinking the two of them would spend it together again watching fireworks from the rooftops of Minseok’s apartment. Minseok picks up on his disappointment, and Luhan watches his smile dim a little with guilt, and berates himself for being too careless. “Go, don’t worry about me,” he tries to rectify, patting him on the arm, smile back on, “Seriously. We’ve watched the same fireworks in the same spot for four years, even I need a change of scenery.”
He says this, sharing the triumphance wholeheartedly, but something still drops in his stomach. It hangs there, shaking every time Luhan jostled around. It’s impossible not to think of everything with a sort of finality; his head now involuntarily attaches ‘last’ as an adjective to anything they get to do. Sitting in the cafeteria, watching Minseok flip through cue cards for his exam in two hours, Luhan wonders about the longevity of things, whether things only end when you let them. A few days ago Minseok offered to share his apartment after graduation, but Luhan caught himself from saying yes, wondering if it’s the best course of things, that their friendship extends so far there would be barely any privacy, breathing space.
The pendulum drums, loud especially on the night of the 31st, when he gets kidnapped to the party by some other Chinese friends that hadn’t gone home. It’s pure suffocation, which he might have enjoyed another night when he didn’t have too many pressing things on his mind. Hours later, he’s sitting on the steps outside the clubhouse, half a bottle beside him when he takes out his phone. He dials Minseok, leaning his cheek onto the screen, and the call’s three rings in when he suddenly remembers what’s supposed to be happening right then. Before he gets a chance to sit up, the phone’s being picked up, and Minseok sounds cautious, the question behind his “Hello?” leaning closer to worried than anything Luhan imagined.
“Minseok, I’m sorry, I-I’m drunk. I have no idea why I called,” he breathes.
From the receiver, Luhan hears the scrape of a chair, and his heart speeds. Minseok mumbles something, and a softer voice does the same. Luhan holds his breath until he hears Minseok breathe into the phone again. “Jesus, I’m sorry, I have to be interrupting-”
“It’s fine, she left to the washroom. Luhan, you okay?”
“Yeah! Yeah, I’m fine. Don’t worry.”
Luhan swallows the lingering taste of alcohol on the back of his tongue. He stares into the darkness of the backyard, black outside the halo of the porchlight he sits in, stares into the bushes. He isn’t drunk, not really, and he was fine until he answered. Now he asks himself this, and it freezes him cold, how far he is from understanding why calling Minseok had been his first reaction, some sort of muscle memory.
“Really? You suck at lying.”
“I’m not lying!” Luhan retorts, and even this scares him too, like they’ve had this exchange so many times his mouth can take over. Even in his own ears it sounds too abrupt, too hollow. Minseok waits on the other end, expecting a continuation, but this time Luhan himself is a little blown away to recover fast enough and gloss over the rough edges.
“You’ve got things on your mind, don’t you.”
Luhan kicks at the gravel under his feet, grinding a particularly large stone into the ground. “Are you gonna watch the countdown?”
“To be honest,” Minseok laughs a little, “the TV here’s been stuck on a game of baseball for a while now.” Luhan feels his weariness, almost a little smug. A moment later, Minseok says, “Want me to come back?”
“What? No, no no no.”
“Luhan, come on. I know you’re thinking it’s tradition. Let’s count down together, okay?” No, not okay, he mouths, thinking about the click of heels he heard through the phone, fading into the distance as she walked away from whatever meal Minseok was having with her, and he couldn’t have this. From the other end, Minseok says “it the last year we get to do this” and that shakes him a little bit harder.
“What about,” he swallows. He doesn’t know her name.
“We’ll finish up here, and then I’ll send her home, don’t worry. Where do you want to go?”
“Your place, I guess,” he says, thinking about rooftops, even though he doesn’t feel like being exposed tonight. They agree on a time, and Minseok quells his guilt with assurances. Luhan hangs up and suddenly he feels not lighter, but uncomfortably stuck, like the air congealed in his lungs. He carries this weight all the way home.
In the threshold of Minseok’s apartment Luhan wonders what it means that he has the key to his house, that the first fallen shoe he kicks over as he steps in belongs to himself. He slaps a hand blindly on the wall and the light in the living room switches on just like this. Luhan wanders to the kitchen, pulls out a bag of romaines and a bottle of creamy caesar from the fridge. He fixes himself a salad to compensate for the dinner he should have had, before he rushed back to a house he knew would be empty for a good few hours. The TV hums while he stabs his fork, clattering against the porcelain. He sticks his bare feet in the foot massager they got some Christmas past, when it was on sale on top of an employee discount at the supermarket he used to work at. He turns up the TV, but the vibrations drown out the drama anyway, and he falls asleep with his plate on his lap until Minseok comes back an hour and a half later.
Minseok raps his knuckles on Luhan’s forehead, and it jerks him awake. “You’re back,” he goes to stand, and Minseok’s got sharp eyes and fast hands, snatching the plate before Luhan notices. “Listen, I’m really sorry for doing this to you.”
“Ah, stop it. We weren’t feeling each other anyway.”
Minseok collects the plate for him, fork and stray croutons and all, and it’s the first time Luhan notices him like this, him and his every mundane detail. The loose threads behind the buttons of his pea coat, the cuff of the fancy dress shirt he wore for tonight, peeking out the sleeve of his jacket. His hair, windswept more handsomely than messy, definitely gelled and shaped. He smells faintly different. Minseok takes his plate to the sink, peels off his coat, rolls his sleeves up lean forearms to wash his hands. He dries his hands. Minseok turns to him, smiles at him. Toothy little smile, gums flashing, pushing up the apples of his pink cheeks. When he walks by he still carries the cold air of the night, until he walks into his room and changes into softer things. Luhan’s thinking about the slant of his eyes, the slant of his nostrils.
Minseok drapes a blanket over Luhan’s head, like veiling a bride, and slides in beside him. Luhan tucks the blanket around the bulge of the two of them as well as he can, and then with a tired sigh lets his head fall onto Minseok’s shoulder like dead weight. “A lot to think about, isn’t there.”
You don’t even know, Luhan thinks, but he just says yes. Minseok watches the TV with him, a Chinese station, playing a rerun of the New Years programme from last year. Minseok watches the spectacular performances, not understanding a word, but he listens to Luhan mindlessly gossip about the actors and actresses on the screen. It’s twenty minutes to midnight, and Luhan chatters about whatever’s on his mind, anything and everything irrelevant. There is a red digital clock in the corner of the screen, counting down the seconds, and at three minutes to go Luhan falls quiet.
Minseok looks down at him, nuzzled into his own shoulder, and finds him with his eyes closed, a sweet and subtle smile on his lips. When the clock runs down to 15 seconds, the hosts on stage begin counting with the audience, and Luhan opens his eyes but he doesn’t speak, doesn’t jump around shouting the way he usually does with decorations draped all over him. At the stroke of midnight, firecrackers go off from the TV, and Minseok turns towards his window, where a rocket whistles through the silence and explodes, setting the whole sky ablaze. When he turns back his heart almost seizes, because Luhan is now looking over too, his head lifted and nose pushed up towards the direction of the window. When Minseok turns, they are so close he can see himself reflected in the eyes before him, feel his even breath. Luhan doesn’t move, only stares back at him, lips set in a way that makes Minseok want to shut down. He had never felt so vulnerable before this moment, so fragile, and he waits for the air to break like the first crack of a glow stick. The moment Luhan drops his eyelids to blink, Minseok panics, and then the moment is over.
Minseok shifts, and Luhan sits up, runs a hand through his hair. He watches Minseok for another moment before yawning, getting up from the couch. “Happy new year’s, I’m gonna pass out.” He heads to the guest room, almost exclusively for him at this point, and strips down to his underwear. Minseok watches him kick his clothes aside, and finally with a wave close his door.
--
In the summer after second year, Luhan took a month off the job he was working and went home. The house in Beijing stood unaltered from his memories-a sort of mild wine shade, grimed and rain washed relentlessly until white streaks of scum caked the walls, tide lines washing up a shore, descending around the windowsills and kitchen vents like the sagging face of an old man. The inside of his house is just about the same, a sort of painted on gentleness, masking what’s really a staleness, fermenting a household of lukewarm parents. “You dyed your hair,” his father had told him. He ran a hand through the blond and it felt like wires around his buzzing fingers.
Sleeping in his old bed, in his old room, Luhan fell into a different area of subconscious, projected in a dream he had one night. In the dream, his dad’s on a diving board with him, crouched behind little Luhan in his wetsuit, swatting at his arms so they hang horizontal, holding him by the wrist with three fingers of his large hand. In the other two there’s a stopwatch, with the nylon strap tickling where it hangs over his wrist. Behind him, his father’s mumbling endless instructions, things like knees to your chest, like full arm movements, ninety degree angles, facing your fears, and filtered in through Luhan’s ears they are nothing. He hears nothing but the waves of the pool seven meters below him, mumbling the secrets they hide in their depths. Luhan looks down into the turbulent water and sees its face, finds its mouth opening and closing like a fish, waiting to swallow him into its gentle embrace. He remembers thinking that it’s no longer the plunge past the surface that scares him, but the height between where he is with his soles firmly planted and where he has to go, the fear of crossing that distance alone, carried by nothing than the air and gravity. His father stops talking and releases him, backs down the ladder. The child on the tip of the board looks back, and their eyes meet. He takes the plunge, and he pisses his pants in the pool and he woke up crying.
It was a particularly hot night in Beijing, and the fan in his room whirred unendingly, a continuous lullaby soothing the pounding of his heartbeat. Luhan snatched his phone from the chair, blinded by the screen before he made out the 3:13AM, and he was halfway sliding to unlock it before his thumb froze. Suddenly he knew with clarity what he was planning to do, and it was the first time that the thought seized him, that he reprimanded himself for this kind of subconscious dependence. Luhan put his phone back down, shrinking back into the stiff blanket with his mind a jumbled rubix cube, and the only flash of color he could see was red, red of the back of his eyelids when he pushed off the diving board and forgot all else except how to face his fears alone.
--
Snow comes late this year, and from some newfound bravery Luhan suggests they play a casual game when the first snow covers their fields. The sky’s getting dark when they finish, and they two of them step out of the showers steaming in the cold air. Minseok frowns at Luhan’s wet hair, and tells him distastefully he’s going to catch a cold.
When they’re at the crosswalk where the two of them usually part, Luhan suddenly grabs Minseok’s hand, the one not on the strap of his bag. “What? I gotta go,” Minseok says lightly, shaking his arm, but Luhan doesn’t let go. “What is it?”
“Nothing, just. Stay over today.”
Luhan looks weird, his expression something unplaceable. There’s a guilty conscience inside Minseok which jumps at this idea, the one that crystallized when he woke up on the morning of the 1st heart hammering, body defenseless, swindled to hardness by seductress of his dreams, who for all Minseok would remember as he jerked himself off in the shower had eyes that reflected himself and lips and shut him down. Suddenly he thinks about the things he hadn’t done, hadn’t carried through, and the guilt of it consumes him for a moment, until it’s too late and he’s being dragged the other way by Luhan towards his dorm. Luhan pulls Minseok into his room, not even letting him go while he opens the door, and only inside releases him. In the middle of the room they stand, both absorbed in their own conversations in their heads. Luhan looks lost suddenly, so Minseok steps in. “Well, okay. I’ll stay for a bit then. We can do our readings together later.”
Luhan spreads his work all across the coffee table, crouching over it with his legs crisscrossed on the floor, muttering things to himself as he flits from package to package. Minseok is fixing coffee in the corner of the kitchenette, stirring milk into the blend when suddenly a chin sets itself on his shoulder. “Make me one too,” Luhan slurs, jaw hardly moving.
Minseok sighs. “Why didn’t you say so earlier.”
Luhan hangs like a sack on his back, watching his fingers work. Minseok brings another mug down from the cupboard, rinses the spoon he just tossed in the sink, and pulls over the big tin of instant coffee in the corner.
“Hey, Minseok.”
“Hmm?”
“Can I tell you something…?”
“What is it?” He turns back to the fridge, and Luhan leaves his shoulder while he does, and when he’s back leans dutifully back down on it. Without a word he starts tipping the spout of the carton.
“That’s good.”
He sticks the spoon in and stirs.
“Don’t be alarmed, but...I think I might be feeling things for you.”
Everything stops.
He’s not alarmed. Not in the way that shouts at him to run. Minseok gives himself three seconds to feel petrified before he forces himself to feel Luhan instead, very much alive behind him right now, having just done something extraordinary. Luhan’s grip on his hips suddenly feels unsure, his breathing painfully regulated like he’s trying not to breathe on Minseok by accident, if some unfortunate situation was to turn up. Minseok lets himself think for a few more seconds, before he slowly turns around and meets Luhan in the eyes. They look almost hurt, when he hasn’t even responded yet, and Minseok wonders how much Luhan had put himself through already just to get here.
He pushes a mug into Luhan’s hand. “Let’s talk.” He takes them to the sofa, clearing out little spaces on the coffee table for their drinks. Luhan shrinks into the other side of the seat, knees tucked into his chest and hands wrapped around them. Minseok drinks his coffee from the other side, crossing his own legs. He watches Luhan pick at a lint ball stuck to the tip of his light grey socks, and suddenly feels an irrepressible urge to hold him.
It becomes apparent to him that Luhan is finished talking, and beyond everything that he’d implied, there isn’t much to say. This isn’t much of a surprise, ever since the day they both began to feel it. He could ask when things changed, or why, or what it was, but a part of him thinks it was sooner or later, that as soon as the glowstick of the thought cracked there was no undoing it, and Luhan couldn’t unconvince himself from his conclusion. Now, across him, Luhan has pulled both his socks off, and is trying to warm his feet with his hands.
“I don’t really know what to say, Minseok. I don’t really know.”
“It’s okay.”
Minseok lowers his mug. He takes a deep breath, deep enough to hear, lets it out through his nose.
“Let me think about it.” He says softly. “I need some time to think about this.”
Luhan nods eagerly, looking down at his feet. He keeps nodding, until he’s satisfied with it himself, worked out whatever it is going on in his head, and then he looks up with something akin to the sunny look Minseok’s used to, just a smidgen more subdued. He reaches across the space between them with an extended fist, mouth curling into a smile. “Alright.”
Minseok watches him, and he can’t control himself from smiling back. He scoots forward to meet it with his own fist, rocking like a bug until their bare feet touch, Minseok’s overlapping. He forgets about the fistpump, eyes on Luhan’s feet, which are ice hold under his own.
He moves back a little, and then lifts his foot, plants it back down right over Luhan’s until they’re fully covered. Beneath him he feets Luhan’s icy toes wiggle.
Minseok looks up, and Luhan looks up. Their eyes meet. Smiling, Luhan pulls his feet out from underneath and sets them on top of Minseok’s, like he’s trying to take over his job instead.
--
He’s been sitting here, spinning a pencil between his fingers for the last half hour, thinking about the two of them.
When sophomore year started, Luhan was still in a relationship with one of Minseok’s better girl friends whom he’s known since high school. It was a strange arrangement-they started dating a couple of months after first year started, and it actually did a great part in bringing Luhan and Minseok together, outside of the friendship that just hit off when they met on the varsity team. Stranger still was that because of this, Minseok warmed up to Luhan first as a lover than a friend.
Luhan had been, when he was 18, caught between the high school puppy love and something that ran a little deeper than the casual flirting. At first Minseok had thought their relationship wasn’t built upon much substance-there’s only so much to be said about a relationship between two people who’ve only known each other for a month and a half. He’d never dated before himself, always found the idea too immense to handle, and the casualness with which Luhan’s carried on baffled him all the way into spring and summer. He couldn’t understand what bound them together. It seemed to go, with no direction or purpose, endlessly on uninterrupted regardless. When second year came around, it had become one of Minseok’s unsolved mysteries, how something so stagnant can survive for so long. In his mind he was certain this was not how relationships were meant to work.
Near the end of summer Minseok took a part time job at the library on campus, and he kept it when school started again. What was significant, in the winter of second year, was that unexpectedly Minseok had been left with a big project to do pretty much by himself when his group member suddenly had to fly back home for a funeral. The job he had became a problem quickly, and he was sweating in his hands when he decided that he could try to reach out for a friend he thought might help him.
“Hello?”
Luhan picked up on the second ring, and Minseok almost knew by memory what he looked like greeting someone with this much brightness.
“I’m in a bit of trouble and I might need you to help me,” he said, mouth going dry in a heartbeat, trying to wet his lips. There was a pause from Luhan’s end, and Minseok thought he’d fuckin done it and it was going to die. “Is that...okay?”
“Yeah,” Luhan said, breathless. “Yes. Of course. Anything.”
There were two things Minseok didn’t know at the time. The first was, that it was only after this phone call that Luhan truly regarded the two of them as best friends. It sounded ridiculous the day Luhan finally told him, as if everything they’d done together in the first year had been dismissed, but Luhan’s reasoning woke him up like cold water. “You’d never asked for anything from me before,” he said. “It never felt complete when you didn’t.”
The second thing he didn’t know was that it would have been the one year anniversary of Luhan’s relationship during the week that he took over his shift for him. He only found out about it when he found their group of friends in the library silently studying the way they never did, and someone else slipped to him that the two of them had broken up, and nobody dared to stir the atmosphere.
Later that evening through skype, he asked if she was okay, and received on Luhan’s behalf a speech on all the things he’d done wrong. When the call ended, Minseok left his own dorm room, climbed up some stairs to Luhan’s. His roommate was out, so he sat him down on his bed, arms crossed. “I can’t believe you skipped an anniversary for this, especially when you had plans.”
Luhan was incredulous. “You’re telling me she broke up with me over this?”
“I’m telling you she broke up with you for being generally inconsiderate. Dates and milestones, things like that, you have to take them seriously.”
Luhan was hurt and offended, like he didn’t know why he was getting shit from both ends. It was a cold fight they had of avoiding each other for a week or two, until their first ever finals were over, and eventually Minseok made up with him first. “If you’re staying here for the winter, come have dinner with my family,” he extended, and Luhan agreed. Near New Year’s, a few of their friends carpooled back to Minseok’s home.
Luhan found his paradise strolling around the house laughing at every framed up picture of Minseok when he was younger, and Minseok gave up on stopping him after a while, refusing to get any more embarrassed than he was. For some reason Luhan’s fascinated with the whole household, and he tells him why, flipping through the volumes of scrapbooks Minseok’s mother kept of him when he was little. “Your life is so in order, you and your whole family,” he said. “It’s so clean and organized, it’s freaky.”
When he slept that night, with Luhan sprawled on his floor, Minseok had come to understand their difference. It was how he was raised, Minseok knew. Money is time, and his parents had enough money to cut scrapbooks, to collect china, to make the bed every morning. Minseok thrived on this system of planning, following through, filing in, cycle after cycle of completion, and it had never failed him.
But what is Luhan? He’s terrifying. He’s careless. He would hop on a plane and come to Korea alone. He’s careless and he’s fearless, and everything that’d been in his way to where he is now he’d fought through on his own. Minseok doesn’t know what to do with this overwhelming need to protect him, to walk through things together with him, to take what he lashes at him and feel the exhilaration of the unknown spicing his bloodlines, but to know in the end that he would never have to be afraid of where the hand might take him.
“I think I like you.”
The sheer destructive force behind the these few words terrifies him, and Luhan was still as careless, still as fearless two years later. Minseok extends his head, and he calls into the dark ahead, so, so afraid of the things he will find waiting, but his cry echoes past the shadow, and he gets no answer.
--
Minseok thinks about it, and he gets away with doing nothing more, until suddenly February rolls around, and another date of significance plants itself like a landmine in their calendar.
Minseok stares at the little square of the 14th, with its font color changed from red to pink, and it hurts his brain to think about it. In first and second year Luhan dated, but he was always dumped before he had a chance to celebrate Valentines with his girlfriend. It’s another thing they’ve got going, this time purely unplanned, for four years now, getting together and doing hardcore things like anime marathoning or gaming in their beds to distract themselves from the idea of the holiday. This year, though, Luhan has disappeared for a good week immersed in a project, and Minseok almost thinks he’ll get turned down when he shows up at Luhan’s door asking if he wanted to take a breather.
“Let’s go for a drive?” He twirls his keys, brows raised and eyes wide, suggesting enthusiastically with all he can. Luhan’s dark circles sag like his shoulders, and it’s not a good look on him. Minseok is expecting something, but it’s not this lack of response, and for a moment he fears he’s done something wrong, because Luhan looks almost burdened.
The thought plagues him. Even in the driver’s seat, backing out of the lot, Minseok tries to convince himself it’ll work, lift Luhan’s spirits. Luhan’s looking out the window, and it’s not quite dark enough yet to see his reflection.
“Where to, captain?”
“Just wanted to drive around the city, catch up on things. You’ve been hiding pretty well for the past week.”
“Yeah, I was...”
Minseok chances a glance over, and he wishes he hadn’t, because Luhan had never looked so disinterested when he’s with him.
He swallows it. They head into the city, off the winding roads of the campus, past a few stretches of highway, until there are traffic lights again. Minseok wishes Luhan would sleep, rather than lean against the window dispirited. He turns on the radio, playing quietly, but Luhan doesn’t seem to react, and it starts to nag at him a little bit too.
When they hit the big roads, the sun’s gone, and the city is lit top to bottom. There are no radios not playing love songs, save for the traffic alerts with its monotonous announcements. With 60’s classics playing in the background, Luhan says absolutely nothing, watching lights fly by his eyes, occasionally lifting his head to examine a building or two at a red light. He doesn’t look over, not once, and after a while Minseok becomes grateful, because there is no warmth nor excitement nor hope on his own face left to hold. Luhan rolls down the window and slings his forearm out to feel the night breeze, and Minseok rolls down his window desperately wishing he could air out the elephant in the room. He gives himself one last chance to look over, and he finds Luhan reclined into his seat, a bittersweet little smile on his mouth as he watches the scenery go, fingers drumming the frame of the window.
Minseok turns away. He drives back with both hands on the wheel.
He parks in the lot outside his own apartment. When he switches off the ignition, the car goes to rest, and suddenly everything is much too quiet. He doesn’t need to look over to know what Luhan will look like, physically upset, maybe so disappointed that he’s silently crying again like he always did in the most unpredictable moments. He doesn’t need to look, or want to look, but he forces himself to anyway, and when he finds Luhan lightly asleep Minseok almost bursts into tears. “Hey,” he shakes him awake gently. “We’re back.”
Luhan rubs his eyes. Suddenly, his disorientation is gone, he remembers the ride, and he shrinks away from Minseok’s hand. Minseok can’t even let himself feel it. “Will you come up, Lu?”
On his lap, Luhan threads his fingers together. And then he turns his head to Minseok, regarding him with something so undefined, but Minseok understands nevertheless. “Please?” His voice breaks, and when it does something flits past Luhan’s iris. Luhan knows he’d been caught with it, so he turns away, but a moment later he sighs, first sound he’s made in hours, unbuckles himself, and steps out the car.
Minseok gets out, watching Luhan, whose expression changes as he lifts his head. Minseok turns around, and it takes him off guard. “What’s happened here?” Luhan whistles, glancing up at the 10 storey apartment with not a spark of light from its windows.
“There was a blackout,” the watchman behind the desk tells them. “Use the stairs.”
--
It’s not much a climb to the fifth floor. At first Minseok worries Luhan’s too fatigued for it, but he almost gets left behind when Luhan passes two steps at a time. He waits for Minseok at the top of every platform, and then speeds ahead again like he’s silently racing him. When they get to his door, Minseok fumbles with his keys, and with an exaggerated sigh Luhan shines the flashlight of his phone on the keychain. When they get in, Luhan kicks his shoes off gracelessly, stomping with his nose stuck high into the house, and it’s the best thing Minseok has ever seen as he places his shoes on the rack for him. Luhan looks over now with a bratty smirk, all air of discontentment dispersed, and every cloud inside Minseok disappears.
The heaters are off. In the dark Minseok squints at his thermometer, and he’s sure it’s definitely closer to 0 than 20. While Luhan’s in the washroom, Minseok slips under his thick goose-down comforter, back against the wall and laptop screen lighting up the whole room. Luhan comes in and immediately winces, shielding his eyes. “Sorry,” Minseok turns down the brightness. “Come on, get in.”
Even with the blanket, Luhan’s face quivers. He rubs at his arms under the blanket, and the room is filled with the sound of skin rubbing against the rough texture of skin. Luhan pulls a pillow over, hugs it koala style, until he suddenly gets some kind of idea and lifts up the blanket, ducking completely under the covers.
Minseok has no idea what he’s up to. He peels a corner, and underneath Luhan’s twisting like a fish on land, shoving pillows into a corner. He slips out and off the bed, dragging a good bunch of Minseok’s sheet off with him. Luhan comes back with all the pillows from the couch and his own room, and he tries to stack them all in all corners of Minseok’s queen sized bed. When it’s done, he throws the cover over the two of them and lights up the horrible fort with his phone. Luhan struggles to find an angle to lie down.
“You’re screwing up my whole room,” Minseok says, reaching after his clumsy writhing form, tucking his sheet back around the mattress. Luhan keeps tumbling around, until he ends up lying between Minseok’s legs, back against his chest.
Minseok sits in the dark, hearing his own breath off the blanket collapsing in on them. Tentatively, he wraps an arm around Luhan’s waist. Luhan lights up his phone again.
“Talk.”
“I already talked, you talk.”
Minseok sighs. He counts the minutes in their fort, watching Luhan play Candy Crush on his phone past his shoulder. Minutes pass, Luhan wins a round, and the Minseok reaches forward and turns off his screen.
In the dark, he bends his head down onto Luhan’s shoulder, until their ears are pressed together and he’s breathing heavily.
“Talk,” Luhan croaks.
Luhan in his pajamas smells of boy, youthful and healthy, ineffably fresh and alluring. Minseok breathes him in for a while, listening to the voices inside his own head. There are too many things to say. I’m a realist. This wasn’t my plan. You were always so brave. You make me want to be a better person.
“Aren’t you afraid?”
Luhan thinks for a while, and then shakes his head back and forth against Minseok’s chest.
“That-that we could really fuck a lot of things up?”
Luhan thinks again, and this time Minseok reaches a hand, rests it gently on the side of his neck. Luhan’s pulse beats steady, sure under his fingertips. It’s his skin that shivers. “Honestly, the thought of us separating still hasn’t crossed my mind.”
Minseok inhales deeply, incredulous at the thought. To him it’s incomprehensible, incredible, and he’s starting to think he can’t live without it, Luhan’s lack of foresight. He’s spending his nights twirling in his chair before the window looking, as if it’ll simply transpire, for some believable future he sees for the two of them after college, and the only thing he sees is the reflection of himself staring back at him with the same question.
“Are you gonna kiss me?” Luhan whispers. Minseok has nothing prepared, no dinner date or thought out confession, or even condoms and lube in the night stand drawers. But there’s something shouting in him now. Are you going to kiss me? These are the questions Luhan asks. Yes, he thinks. I want to. What else matters.
Minseok kisses him. Suddenly Luhan’s dialing himself again, scrawling until he’s sitting in Minseok’s lap, arms wound around his neck, chest to chest against the wall. Luhan slips off Minseok’s shirt and presses him back to the cold wall, but Minseok swallows his yelp for the tongue rolling in his mouth. Clothes are chucked onto the floor. When there’s no more air under, Luhan peeks out head first into the cold, and Minseok follows. With the duvet warming them, the two of them shuck the rest of their clothes, until it’s just the warmth of a body laid across another, beat of a heart beating against another.
The light comes on.
Minseok pushes up, sitting on his knees as he examines the place. The whirr of the heater starts up again, and the light of the bedroom illuminates the scene for the first time in all its nakedness-Minseok is covered in a sheen of sweat, pupils blown, knuckles white where he props himself, and Luhan is pleading, mouthing his name prettily, Minseok, Minseok. Minseok can’t remember the past nor the future. He takes Luhan’s mouth. He holds him in his hands. School might end in half a year, there might not be a place for them in the world, they might die tomorrow. What else matters.
When he wakes up the next morning, Minseok can’t feel his left arm, where Luhan’s head was pillowed for the whole night after they fell asleep. When Luhan comes to, he flips himself around like a pancake, propping his chin on his hands, fingers crossed over Minseok’s chest.
“Morning,” he says, peeking up his lashes. Minseok smiles at him, a little wildly, the way thieves grin as they speed past the borders with a million dollars in their trunks. Minseok feels like a felon, a law breaker.
“Good morning.”
He leans back, scratching his head, stretching out his sore arms as he yawns. Luhan lies down on his chest, and they listen to the sound of the morning together.
“You still haven’t talked, you know,” Luhan says. “What’re we gonna do about us?”
Minseok looks down at the crown of his head, black roots growing from the blond. He falls back, shaking his head a little. He closes his eyes. Below him, Luhan kicks his legs, and it’s the first time he realizes they’ve been tangled. Neither of them showered, and the whole blanket traps the unmistakable smell of their crime. Quite inappropriately, Luhan’s stomach grumbles.
What are we gonna do, he wonders. What a great question. There’s room in his agenda for a million things to be written.
End.