(no subject)
Super
2min
PG-13, 4413
They need heroes everywhere, even in a backwater farming town.
(for folkin_up_again for shineesanta, original here)
“So, where do you want to be stationed?” Jonghyun asked as they walked down the hallway, past the rows of classrooms. It was odd. Minho had walked down this same hallway almost daily for the last two years, but because he knew that this would be the last time it all seemed unfamiliar. From the outside the classrooms seemed normal, the type of classrooms where students slept between the covers of their books while teachers droned on about the Theory of Relativity or the English subject-verb-object word order. But what happened behind these doors was a little more specialized.
“I'm hoping for Seoul,” Minho said. “But really, who isn't?” It was where his brother had gone.
“I'm not,” Jonghyun said with a snort. “Do you know busy the Seoul teams are? Shit, man. There's always something going wrong in Seoul.”
The auditorium was loud with the chatter of his fellow trainees, around 200 of them in their pressed uniforms, pressing their jittery legs against the cold metal chairs. Minho felt a nervous shake work its way up his arms. Graduation day was important, not just because it meant escaping the container of The Institute, but because it meant receiving your assignment and being sorted into the teams you could spend the rest of your life with. “I hear that seventy percent of Gifted end up marrying people within their own units,” Jonghyun said, his leg bouncing up and down next to Minho's. “I hope that girl, what was her name, the one who can unlock anything? I hope she's on my team.” She was relatively cute, from what Minho remembered. He had caught her breaking into somebody's room, once.
The trainees next to him were animatedly discussing their ideal team. Minho had promised himself he wouldn't speculate, to save himself the potential disappointment, but he couldn't help starting a mental list. Would he be with Park Sunyoung, the girl who could cause things to explode just by blowing on them? Maybe Cho Jinho, the new boy who could turn anything he touched into steel and was graduating early due to his excellent scores in Ability Control and Public Relations. This was wishful thinking, he knew, because Minho's ability wasn't anywhere near their caliber. He picked at his fingernail and allowed the knowledge of his own inadequacy to seep in.
"Welcome, class of 2010," The Director began, and silence fell over the crowd. It was the prickly silence that accompanies moments of suspense, and Minho took a difficult breath. It felt like the weight of the air had increased, partially because he was so nervous but mostly because it really had; Kim Ryeowook, who sat a few rows away, could manipulate atmospheric pressure, but often lost control of his ability under the weight of emotional pressure. Somebody elbowed him in the side and he snapped out of it with an “eep!,” leading the entire auditorium to exhale in relief. “You really need to work on that, Kim,” The Director added, eyes narrowed and hand clutching at his chest.
“Anyway, as I'm sure you're all aware, we're here today to announce the assignments for this year's class of Gifted Individuals. Your assignment will include the province and city you'll be stationed in, as well as your teammate's names. You are all grouped into teams of five, and,” he said, smacking his hands on the podium, “There will be no, I repeat no, appeals for switching teams.”
“What if my team sucks?” Someone shouted, followed by a chorus of giggles.
“Teams are chosen according to the compatibility of your Gifts,” was The Director's decisive non-answer. “Some of you have been training for quite a few years now, so be thankful you've even made it graduation. And, congratulations.” The last bit was clearly an afterthought. He cleared his throat, and everyone gripped the edges of their metal chairs.
195 names passed. The desperation had long since left Minho, and the act of anticipating left him exhausted and deflated in his chair. When “Choi Minho” finally boomed through the auditorium, waking him with all the urgency and reverberation of the voice of God, he was disturbed to find only four other boys left in the room. His heart sunk a little at the lack of female prospects, but his spirits rose when he realized Jonghyun was still seated next to him. Jonghyun looked a little less buoyed by Minho's presence. “Don't look so happy, Choi. I'd trade you for Lock-Girl in a second.”
“Lee Taemin, Choi Minho, Kim Kibum, Kim Jonghyun, Lee Jinki. You're a team and you're stationed in...” He hesitated, as if unsure. Seoul, Minho thought. Let it be Seoul. “Gwangcheon.” Even before his mind caught up, Minho felt disappointment burrow through his chest.
“Gwangcheon?!” One of the boys yelled, indignant. “That's in the middle of nowhere.” Minho recognized him as Kibum, the boy with cheekbones as prominent as his ego. “They don't need us there!”
“They need heroes everywhere,” The Director said, and closed his book.
They dragged their luggage behind them like shackles. The bus ride was long and the walk to Gwangcheon City Hall seemed even longer in the near-freezing cold. They were awkward with each other. Even their mutual hatred of the current situation wasn't enough to bond them. Jonghyun was staying quiet with his chin tucked under the collar of his turtleneck and the eldest boy, Jinki was looking at his feet.
“I don't understand how this could have happened,” Kibum said, yanking his suitcase. “I got As on all my Hero Aptitude exams.”
“I got Bs,” Minho said.
“I failed half of mine,” Jonghyun contributed, cheerfully.
“They decide on teams based on the abilities themselves, not your scores,” Jinki said and adjusted the strap of his backpack. “We should figure out how those fit together. Right, so, what's your Gift, Jonghyun?”
The first time Minho met Jonghyun, Jonghyun had started a fire.
It had been accidental, of course. A mutual acquaintance from their Preventing Collateral Damage class had introduced them. They shook hands, and immediately afterward Jonghyun started frantically pinching his nose. Minho had stood, perplexed, but a look of horror had come over his friend's face and Minho felt himself being shoved out of the way. A sneeze had exploded out of Jonghyun, and along with it a burst of flames from his nose. A volcanic nasal eruption. The next fifteen minutes had been spent attempting to stop The Institute's front lawn from completely burning down, which was only accomplished when a boy whose Gift was vomiting large amounts of water was kind enough to stick a finger down his throat for them.
Minho had been fascinated by his new acquaintance.
“You could do a lot with that,” Minho said, gazing at the short boy's charred nostrils with admiration.
“Not really,” He said, sniffling. “It only happens when I sneeze.”
It seemed that all of their abilities toed the line of the absurd. Jonghyun sneezed fire, Kibum could correctly guess anybody's phone number, and Jinki could temporarily manipulate emotions.
“I tie perfect bows,” Minho mumbled. They all stared in disbelief, except for Jonghyun and the youngest boy, who had yet to speak.
“How about you, Taemin?” Jonghyun asked, and Minho, thankful for the diversion of attention, became acutely aware of their fifth member. The boy had looked noticeably angry the entire bus ride, his eyes narrowed under the rim of his bowlcut. He had stayed trailing at the back for their entire walk into town, absorbed in his own personal crisis. There was a long pause, as if he was deciding whether or not they deserved to know what his Gift was.
“I can make anything appear,” He said. There was a sulkiness to Taemin that differed from Kibum's exaggerated exclamations of his grievances, which Minho realized by now was just Kibum's confusing way of making friends.
“Anything, really?” Jinki asked, eyes wide, halting in his slow climb up the hill. “Can you get me a hand warmer?” Taemin looked put-upon, but set his bag on the sidewalk. He closed his eyes and snapped his palms together. There was a strange feeling in the air that made the hair on Minho's neck stand on end. When Taemin pulled his palms apart, a small plastic packet lay in between them: a hand warmer. They all huddled around him, amazed.
“That is a crazy ability,” Jonghyun said, rubbing his hands against the packet. “Why are you in Gwangcheon with us fuck-ups? You should be in Seoul.”
“Why would they put you here?” Jinki wondered aloud. “With that kind of power, you would be very useful somewhere else.” Minho felt something ugly tickling at his brain, the familiar itch of jealousy.
Greeting them in Gwangcheon were a small assortment of people who looked various degrees of worse for wear. The group was huddled together in their heavy coats, looking at the five boys in a way that could only be described as devotional.
Jonghyun was unimpressed. "What a puny welcoming committee," He whispered in the ear of a stone-faced Kibum. "In Seoul, they hold a parade every time they get a new unit." But Jinki, who seemed to be rising to his position as leader, cleared his throat.
"Hello. We've been sent from The Institute of Gifted Individuals to represent your town. Although I'm afraid our capabilities may disappoint you, we hope that you will call us with any of your problems. We are here to assist you with any difficulties, no matter how small. Our hotline number is..."
An older woman stepped up to Minho, fussing with her permed hair as she spoke. "We've always wanted our own Heroes." She pressed a bag of carrots into his arms. "You're so handsome, and skinny. Please eat these."
"I like your backpack," a little girl called to Kibum, waving her hand above the shoulders of the crowd, causing Jinki to stutter at the interruption of his speech.
Yet, while they all slowly warmed to the citizens of their town, Taemin stayed behind. He accepted a few similar bags of food from the locals, but his eyes never became less distant. He looked up only once, and it was to acknowledge that Minho was staring at him.
The first thing Minho learned about Gwangcheon was that the people there didn't care about how lame or girly his Gift was. It had seemed a threat to his masculinity during his days at The Institute, but here he was novel enough to be respected anyway. He tied so many bows in that first week that even if it hadn't been his ability, he probably would have learned to do it perfectly. He swore that the waitress at the town's only cafe purposefully kept her apron dangerously loose, so that she could ask him to retie it every five minutes. She would walk to his table while he was sipping his coffee and turn around, showing him the slack ribbon flapping around by her legs. “Give me a hand, Mr. Hero?”
Then there were the children, who he didn't mind as much. They would pull on his sleeves and point to their disheveled feet. Sometimes this became a sort of cruel game, where as soon as he bent down to tie a child's laces, they would yank on his hair and run away. Minho couldn't help the fact that he always chased after them.
But all-in-all, he wasn't unhappy. There was something about tying bows that soothed him. The perfect equilibrium of the loops, the satisfying tug as it all came together. It was the untying that felt a little sad; one small pull undid it all. He was on their communal couch, mourning the undoing of his boot laces, when Kibum entered.
"She did it!" Kibum shouted. His excitement was so extreme and contagious that Minho almost wished he had the ability to make it rain confetti, in honor of whoever she was.
“Sooyun finally did it! She called him!”
“That boy with the hat that's always backwards?” Minho asked. Sooyun was so painfully shy, he was surprised she'd managed to dial the numbers without fainting.
“She called him and he picked up and they have a date on Saturday.” Kibum's hands were on his hips in a way that was absurdly proud, considering this accomplishment involved hooking up two middle schoolers. “I am the best matchmaker this town has ever had.” His Gift for phone number divination did come in handy, for this particular niche.
“I saw Taemin walking down the street, today,” Minho started. “Just walking.”
Kibum immediately threw his hands up into the air. “Oh god, not this Taemin crap again. So the kid is weird, get over it.”
“But why--”
“Listen, Minho,” Kibum said, peering down at him in a way that was very condescending and uncomfortable. “You're obsessed with him, and it's strange.” Kibum was wrong, and also not qualified to be acting like his psychiatrist.
“I'm the strange one? He has this amazing ability and he hasn't used it at all, besides that time when we first met.”
“Why don’t you, I don’t know, ask him about it? I’m not going to be the Watson in this game of Choi Minho, P.I. that you‘re playing right now.” Kibum, having officially lost interest, started texting one of his new matchmaking prospects, who was hopefully above the age of 13.
But Kibum was right, he would make a terrible Watson. Minho knew somebody better.
“What are we going to do when we see him?” Jonghyun said, sniffling. His nose was red from the cold and he was shuffling his feet around the dusty alley in an attempt to keep from freezing.
“We follow him.” Minho breathed deep into his palms, drawing the warmth of his core out onto the surface of his skin. “To figure out what he does all day.”
“No offense, Minho, but I don’t think it can be much weirder than what you and I do all day.” Jonghyun had found, to his dismay, that his Gift was very much in demand. He’d spent the last few weeks lighting stubborn fireplaces and melting snow off of roads with jets of nostril flames. Minho had seen him in action a few times, had heard the forlorn sigh every time a handful of pepper was sprinkled out of a shaker and into his palm. Jonghyun couldn’t drink anymore, which was even more upsetting to him than having to work. After a certain fireplace job turned disastrous--the soju on his breath created a fireball that singed the curtains, melted a few family photos, and almost burned down the entire house--he was forced into a winter of sobriety. And a winter of stalking an alienated and sullen high school boy, at Minho’s insistence.
The boy in question passed by the entrance of the alley in a blur of bouncing hair and black coat, and they slid out after him. Under their reasonably distant surveillance, Taemin bought a loaf of bread at the bakery, glanced through the various stalls at the market with visible excitement, which Minho found surprising, until finally sitting for two hours on the outskirts of one of the town’s many farms. Two hours of visually grazing on the frozen crops.
“So, what we’ve got is that Taemin is boring,” Jonghyun concluded as they watched the boy’s silhouette slowly fade into the black-hole darkness that night becomes, when you’re in the middle of nowhere. “And he likes food.”
Yet there was something in Taemin’s silent day that spoke to Minho. It reminded him of an old silence of his own. Minho felt a strange upwelling of sentiment, an uncomfortably warm El Nino of understanding that made him want to sit next to the younger boy on that hill. He might even have done it, have let that bizarre and unwelcome tide carry him out there, if Jonghyun hadn’t started to tow him homeward.
He thought they had been careful, so it nearly gave him a heart attack when, later that night, Taemin barged into the bedroom that they all shared and pointed a finger like a firearm at Minho’s chest.
“I know you hate me,” Taemin said, loudly but steadily, a thunderstorm of a speech. “But you and flamethrower need to leave me alone.”
The door was already mid-slam, bowlcut bouncing out of sight, when Minho found enough of his voice to whisper, “I don’t hate you.”
They’d all known from the start that Minsuk was special. Minho hadn’t been alive yet to witness his older brother’s birth, but he knew from the way that his parents looked at Minsuk (and didn’t look at Minho) that his brother’s life was a triumph his own birth could never have lived up to. Minho had been doomed from the start.
Minsuk was the first Choi son in generations, and was born with a tongue that could speak any language. It had started slow at first: Brazilian Portuguese and Hebrew by age four, Arabic and Dutch by ten. But then the languages started to multiply, his brother’s personal library growing more foreign and incomprehensible with every passing month. Sometimes Minho would sneak in and take a book off the shelf just to let his eyes swim in the unfamiliar print, to drown himself in his own ignorance. Finnish, Chinese, English, Thai. Dinner-time conversation was spent with Minsuk rattling off vocabulary to his very attentive, if lost, parents, while Minho stared at his shoes. His laces were always so perfect. Around the time Minsuk mastered Swahili, Minho stopped talking entirely.
So began the quiet years of his life, the draught of words that left his vocal chords rusty from lack of use. It was a victory over his brother, if a self-defeatist one. Because silence was the one language Minsuk could never speak.
He wanted to dislike Taemin because of how powerful he was, and also because he didn’t seem to care about how powerful he was. The latter seemed almost like a personal insult to Minho. There was Jinki, who by most standards had a proficient Gift, and used it humbly but regularly. He ran a makeshift therapy service, which was popular now, at the beginning of spring, when the community was worried over the upcoming farming season. Five minutes in a patched leather chair across from Jinki, and the farmers left with the wrinkles on their foreheads ironed out and the tremors in their hands stilled. Minho thought it was strange that a nervous person like Jinki could have a calming affect on people. Jinki’s own anxious energy seemed to undergo some sort of emotional alchemy, and come out as relaxation in the people around him.
But Taemin wanted nothing to do with his ability. The snow melted, the hemisphere turned warm, and Taemin stayed cold enough for all of them. Minho was still anchored somewhere between wanting to hold him and wanting to punch him in the face.
“I hate the term ‘Superhuman,’” Jinki proclaimed at breakfast, rustling a newspaper between his hands. There was the usual silence, during which Jinki waited patiently for somebody to ask him to elaborate. Once it became clear that no one else was willing to volunteer this morning, Minho humored him.
“Go on.”
He smiled in Minho‘s direction, and Minho felt a bullet of tranquility hit him in the chest, a ripple of calm that almost made him sigh out loud. “It’s a misnomer. We can do a few things that other people can’t do, but that doesn’t really make us super. That makes us strange. Do you know that, in some countries, they sentence people like us to death?”
“They’re scared of us,” Jonghyun mumbled, his forehead on the table and head encased by his arms. “Hell, my mom was scared out of her mind when I had my first cold.” Kibum sniggered and kicked Jonghyun’s leg under the table.
“In the end, though, we’re still humans,” Jinki continued. “We’re still victim to all the stupid things that destroy other humans, like jealousy, or revenge, or addiction.”
“Or love,” Taemin said, staring out the window. They all turned to look out that same window, curious, but none of them saw what Taemin saw. Minho was starting to get the feeling that no one ever did.
Minho went to the elementary school once a week, during recess, to tie shoelaces. He got used to the tiny hands that grabbed and pulled on everything, from his pants to his ear lobes. He got used to the snot that would rub off on his shoulder, although spending time with Jonghyun made him reflexively dive for cover whenever a child started to sneeze. He felt useful around children. He liked finishing up the lose ends on their feet before they tripped over them.
It was in the height of spring, when pollen was as abundant as oxygen in the air, and Jonghyun was confined indoors with a gas mask until further notice, that Taemin came to the school. Minho looked up from Kyungah’s pink sneakers to see him, standing stiff as a telephone pole. He almost seemed as tall as one these days.
“Hi,” Taemin said.
“Hi, ” Minho countered. Kyungah ran away, and there was silence, except for the sound of children yelling. Sojin must have fallen off the monkey bars, because he heard her wailing that her arm was broken.
“I don’t hate you, you know that, right?” Minho attempted.
“I do. I mean, I do know. I don’t hate you, either.”
In the distance: “It’s really broken! I saw it bend in half!”
“Can I ask you though, why don’t you use your Gift? Is that an okay thing to ask?”
“It’s an okay thing to ask. But it’s a hard thing to explain.”
“I saw her bone, I saw it poke out!”
“I have time, Taemin. I have like, a lot of time, for you to explain it to me. Right after I take Sojin to the emergency room.”
The waiting room chairs were falling apart, stuffing rupturing out of the threadbare covers like wounds. Minho was doing two kinds of waiting in this wounded room. He was waiting for the mold of Sojin’s cast to dry, and he was waiting for Taemin to crack. One to be sealed up, and one to finally be pried open.
“The thing about my Gift,” Taemin started, breathing deep. “Is that the things I can summon, they don’t come from nowhere. I can’t create anything. I’m not that special, I’m not God. When I make something appear, I’m stealing it from somewhere.”
“So?” Minho offered, cautiously. “Nobody at the hand warmer factory will miss one or two of their stock.”
“I can’t choose where I steal it from, Minho. It probably doesn’t come from a factory, or even a convenience store. It could come from campers who are stranded in the snow. That could have been their last hand warmer, before they froze to death. If I summon something as simple a brick, it could come from a house somewhere. That one missing brick could collapse a wall. Summoning a tire could send somebody, somewhere in the world, into a fatal car crash.”
“So you don’t summon anything,” Minho said, a little in awe. “You care too much about those possibilities, all those rhetoricals, to use what you’ve been given.”
“I didn’t always,” He said, darkly, averting his eyes. “I used to summon really sick things, when I was younger and mad.”
“Like what?”
“The worst was bones,” Taemin said, shuddering. Minho thought of Sojin and her cracked ulna, imagined her whole arm turned into a boneless sleeve of skin instead.
“That’s…” Minho said, trying to keep the horror out of his voice, but Taemin looked close to tears.
“Don’t hate me, please don’t hate me. This is why I’m in Gwangcheon, with you guys. I used to be The Institute’s prize student, they made me summon so much shit, you wouldn‘t believe it. I gathered about a years worth of cafeteria ingredients and enough lumber for them to make that fourth dormitory they built three years ago. But I broke down last year because I couldn’t take the guilt. I don’t want to know how many families I starved or buildings I destroyed because I was just following orders.”
“So you stopped?”
“Yes. I stopped,” He was crying now, fat droplets, refracting the room like wet kaleidoscopes. “I stopped altogether, and I swore I’d never use my ability ever again. They graduated me because I was useless to them at that point. I didn’t want to get close to you because I thought you would hate me if you knew. I couldn’t help it though, you’re all so interesting and I was so jealous of how easily you got along, I just want to be with you guys. I just want to be with you, Minho.”
Minho was waiting, waiting, waiting for it all to make sense. They waited in their waiting chairs, the clock biting through minute after minute. It wasn’t until Sojin ran through the double doors, her plaster arm slung across her chest, and asked Minho and “his crying friend” to be the first to sign her cast, that he realized. He realized that he’d be waiting forever.
Minho bent down on one knee, Taemin’s legs bumping shyly against his forehead. This had become a morning routine, but it still felt awkwardly like a proposal. Minho crossed the laces and pulled them taut. He felt Taemin’s body pull taut, too, as if the laces ran straight into his spine. Vertebra that only Minho could tie correctly. A loop, his finger trapped inside of it, the feeling of constriction. The cross-over, pushing through and the final tug. It was summer now. Sweat dripped, sticky, from his forehead and into the carpet. Minho stood back up, and looking down at Taemin he had to wonder if he’d been lied to. He wondered if Taemin was still using his power to summon things, like feelings in Minho that scared him and made him want to bend back down and rip the laces out of Taemin’s chucks.
Jonghyun had been right, they were all fuck-ups in Gwangcheon. They were discarded material, not “super” enough to make headlines. But they were human enough to rely on each other and to try to live, as well as normal people.
They were their own heroes, more than anybody else's.
2min
PG-13, 4413
They need heroes everywhere, even in a backwater farming town.
(for folkin_up_again for shineesanta, original here)
“So, where do you want to be stationed?” Jonghyun asked as they walked down the hallway, past the rows of classrooms. It was odd. Minho had walked down this same hallway almost daily for the last two years, but because he knew that this would be the last time it all seemed unfamiliar. From the outside the classrooms seemed normal, the type of classrooms where students slept between the covers of their books while teachers droned on about the Theory of Relativity or the English subject-verb-object word order. But what happened behind these doors was a little more specialized.
“I'm hoping for Seoul,” Minho said. “But really, who isn't?” It was where his brother had gone.
“I'm not,” Jonghyun said with a snort. “Do you know busy the Seoul teams are? Shit, man. There's always something going wrong in Seoul.”
The auditorium was loud with the chatter of his fellow trainees, around 200 of them in their pressed uniforms, pressing their jittery legs against the cold metal chairs. Minho felt a nervous shake work its way up his arms. Graduation day was important, not just because it meant escaping the container of The Institute, but because it meant receiving your assignment and being sorted into the teams you could spend the rest of your life with. “I hear that seventy percent of Gifted end up marrying people within their own units,” Jonghyun said, his leg bouncing up and down next to Minho's. “I hope that girl, what was her name, the one who can unlock anything? I hope she's on my team.” She was relatively cute, from what Minho remembered. He had caught her breaking into somebody's room, once.
The trainees next to him were animatedly discussing their ideal team. Minho had promised himself he wouldn't speculate, to save himself the potential disappointment, but he couldn't help starting a mental list. Would he be with Park Sunyoung, the girl who could cause things to explode just by blowing on them? Maybe Cho Jinho, the new boy who could turn anything he touched into steel and was graduating early due to his excellent scores in Ability Control and Public Relations. This was wishful thinking, he knew, because Minho's ability wasn't anywhere near their caliber. He picked at his fingernail and allowed the knowledge of his own inadequacy to seep in.
"Welcome, class of 2010," The Director began, and silence fell over the crowd. It was the prickly silence that accompanies moments of suspense, and Minho took a difficult breath. It felt like the weight of the air had increased, partially because he was so nervous but mostly because it really had; Kim Ryeowook, who sat a few rows away, could manipulate atmospheric pressure, but often lost control of his ability under the weight of emotional pressure. Somebody elbowed him in the side and he snapped out of it with an “eep!,” leading the entire auditorium to exhale in relief. “You really need to work on that, Kim,” The Director added, eyes narrowed and hand clutching at his chest.
“Anyway, as I'm sure you're all aware, we're here today to announce the assignments for this year's class of Gifted Individuals. Your assignment will include the province and city you'll be stationed in, as well as your teammate's names. You are all grouped into teams of five, and,” he said, smacking his hands on the podium, “There will be no, I repeat no, appeals for switching teams.”
“What if my team sucks?” Someone shouted, followed by a chorus of giggles.
“Teams are chosen according to the compatibility of your Gifts,” was The Director's decisive non-answer. “Some of you have been training for quite a few years now, so be thankful you've even made it graduation. And, congratulations.” The last bit was clearly an afterthought. He cleared his throat, and everyone gripped the edges of their metal chairs.
195 names passed. The desperation had long since left Minho, and the act of anticipating left him exhausted and deflated in his chair. When “Choi Minho” finally boomed through the auditorium, waking him with all the urgency and reverberation of the voice of God, he was disturbed to find only four other boys left in the room. His heart sunk a little at the lack of female prospects, but his spirits rose when he realized Jonghyun was still seated next to him. Jonghyun looked a little less buoyed by Minho's presence. “Don't look so happy, Choi. I'd trade you for Lock-Girl in a second.”
“Lee Taemin, Choi Minho, Kim Kibum, Kim Jonghyun, Lee Jinki. You're a team and you're stationed in...” He hesitated, as if unsure. Seoul, Minho thought. Let it be Seoul. “Gwangcheon.” Even before his mind caught up, Minho felt disappointment burrow through his chest.
“Gwangcheon?!” One of the boys yelled, indignant. “That's in the middle of nowhere.” Minho recognized him as Kibum, the boy with cheekbones as prominent as his ego. “They don't need us there!”
“They need heroes everywhere,” The Director said, and closed his book.
They dragged their luggage behind them like shackles. The bus ride was long and the walk to Gwangcheon City Hall seemed even longer in the near-freezing cold. They were awkward with each other. Even their mutual hatred of the current situation wasn't enough to bond them. Jonghyun was staying quiet with his chin tucked under the collar of his turtleneck and the eldest boy, Jinki was looking at his feet.
“I don't understand how this could have happened,” Kibum said, yanking his suitcase. “I got As on all my Hero Aptitude exams.”
“I got Bs,” Minho said.
“I failed half of mine,” Jonghyun contributed, cheerfully.
“They decide on teams based on the abilities themselves, not your scores,” Jinki said and adjusted the strap of his backpack. “We should figure out how those fit together. Right, so, what's your Gift, Jonghyun?”
The first time Minho met Jonghyun, Jonghyun had started a fire.
It had been accidental, of course. A mutual acquaintance from their Preventing Collateral Damage class had introduced them. They shook hands, and immediately afterward Jonghyun started frantically pinching his nose. Minho had stood, perplexed, but a look of horror had come over his friend's face and Minho felt himself being shoved out of the way. A sneeze had exploded out of Jonghyun, and along with it a burst of flames from his nose. A volcanic nasal eruption. The next fifteen minutes had been spent attempting to stop The Institute's front lawn from completely burning down, which was only accomplished when a boy whose Gift was vomiting large amounts of water was kind enough to stick a finger down his throat for them.
Minho had been fascinated by his new acquaintance.
“You could do a lot with that,” Minho said, gazing at the short boy's charred nostrils with admiration.
“Not really,” He said, sniffling. “It only happens when I sneeze.”
It seemed that all of their abilities toed the line of the absurd. Jonghyun sneezed fire, Kibum could correctly guess anybody's phone number, and Jinki could temporarily manipulate emotions.
“I tie perfect bows,” Minho mumbled. They all stared in disbelief, except for Jonghyun and the youngest boy, who had yet to speak.
“How about you, Taemin?” Jonghyun asked, and Minho, thankful for the diversion of attention, became acutely aware of their fifth member. The boy had looked noticeably angry the entire bus ride, his eyes narrowed under the rim of his bowlcut. He had stayed trailing at the back for their entire walk into town, absorbed in his own personal crisis. There was a long pause, as if he was deciding whether or not they deserved to know what his Gift was.
“I can make anything appear,” He said. There was a sulkiness to Taemin that differed from Kibum's exaggerated exclamations of his grievances, which Minho realized by now was just Kibum's confusing way of making friends.
“Anything, really?” Jinki asked, eyes wide, halting in his slow climb up the hill. “Can you get me a hand warmer?” Taemin looked put-upon, but set his bag on the sidewalk. He closed his eyes and snapped his palms together. There was a strange feeling in the air that made the hair on Minho's neck stand on end. When Taemin pulled his palms apart, a small plastic packet lay in between them: a hand warmer. They all huddled around him, amazed.
“That is a crazy ability,” Jonghyun said, rubbing his hands against the packet. “Why are you in Gwangcheon with us fuck-ups? You should be in Seoul.”
“Why would they put you here?” Jinki wondered aloud. “With that kind of power, you would be very useful somewhere else.” Minho felt something ugly tickling at his brain, the familiar itch of jealousy.
Greeting them in Gwangcheon were a small assortment of people who looked various degrees of worse for wear. The group was huddled together in their heavy coats, looking at the five boys in a way that could only be described as devotional.
Jonghyun was unimpressed. "What a puny welcoming committee," He whispered in the ear of a stone-faced Kibum. "In Seoul, they hold a parade every time they get a new unit." But Jinki, who seemed to be rising to his position as leader, cleared his throat.
"Hello. We've been sent from The Institute of Gifted Individuals to represent your town. Although I'm afraid our capabilities may disappoint you, we hope that you will call us with any of your problems. We are here to assist you with any difficulties, no matter how small. Our hotline number is..."
An older woman stepped up to Minho, fussing with her permed hair as she spoke. "We've always wanted our own Heroes." She pressed a bag of carrots into his arms. "You're so handsome, and skinny. Please eat these."
"I like your backpack," a little girl called to Kibum, waving her hand above the shoulders of the crowd, causing Jinki to stutter at the interruption of his speech.
Yet, while they all slowly warmed to the citizens of their town, Taemin stayed behind. He accepted a few similar bags of food from the locals, but his eyes never became less distant. He looked up only once, and it was to acknowledge that Minho was staring at him.
The first thing Minho learned about Gwangcheon was that the people there didn't care about how lame or girly his Gift was. It had seemed a threat to his masculinity during his days at The Institute, but here he was novel enough to be respected anyway. He tied so many bows in that first week that even if it hadn't been his ability, he probably would have learned to do it perfectly. He swore that the waitress at the town's only cafe purposefully kept her apron dangerously loose, so that she could ask him to retie it every five minutes. She would walk to his table while he was sipping his coffee and turn around, showing him the slack ribbon flapping around by her legs. “Give me a hand, Mr. Hero?”
Then there were the children, who he didn't mind as much. They would pull on his sleeves and point to their disheveled feet. Sometimes this became a sort of cruel game, where as soon as he bent down to tie a child's laces, they would yank on his hair and run away. Minho couldn't help the fact that he always chased after them.
But all-in-all, he wasn't unhappy. There was something about tying bows that soothed him. The perfect equilibrium of the loops, the satisfying tug as it all came together. It was the untying that felt a little sad; one small pull undid it all. He was on their communal couch, mourning the undoing of his boot laces, when Kibum entered.
"She did it!" Kibum shouted. His excitement was so extreme and contagious that Minho almost wished he had the ability to make it rain confetti, in honor of whoever she was.
“Sooyun finally did it! She called him!”
“That boy with the hat that's always backwards?” Minho asked. Sooyun was so painfully shy, he was surprised she'd managed to dial the numbers without fainting.
“She called him and he picked up and they have a date on Saturday.” Kibum's hands were on his hips in a way that was absurdly proud, considering this accomplishment involved hooking up two middle schoolers. “I am the best matchmaker this town has ever had.” His Gift for phone number divination did come in handy, for this particular niche.
“I saw Taemin walking down the street, today,” Minho started. “Just walking.”
Kibum immediately threw his hands up into the air. “Oh god, not this Taemin crap again. So the kid is weird, get over it.”
“But why--”
“Listen, Minho,” Kibum said, peering down at him in a way that was very condescending and uncomfortable. “You're obsessed with him, and it's strange.” Kibum was wrong, and also not qualified to be acting like his psychiatrist.
“I'm the strange one? He has this amazing ability and he hasn't used it at all, besides that time when we first met.”
“Why don’t you, I don’t know, ask him about it? I’m not going to be the Watson in this game of Choi Minho, P.I. that you‘re playing right now.” Kibum, having officially lost interest, started texting one of his new matchmaking prospects, who was hopefully above the age of 13.
But Kibum was right, he would make a terrible Watson. Minho knew somebody better.
“What are we going to do when we see him?” Jonghyun said, sniffling. His nose was red from the cold and he was shuffling his feet around the dusty alley in an attempt to keep from freezing.
“We follow him.” Minho breathed deep into his palms, drawing the warmth of his core out onto the surface of his skin. “To figure out what he does all day.”
“No offense, Minho, but I don’t think it can be much weirder than what you and I do all day.” Jonghyun had found, to his dismay, that his Gift was very much in demand. He’d spent the last few weeks lighting stubborn fireplaces and melting snow off of roads with jets of nostril flames. Minho had seen him in action a few times, had heard the forlorn sigh every time a handful of pepper was sprinkled out of a shaker and into his palm. Jonghyun couldn’t drink anymore, which was even more upsetting to him than having to work. After a certain fireplace job turned disastrous--the soju on his breath created a fireball that singed the curtains, melted a few family photos, and almost burned down the entire house--he was forced into a winter of sobriety. And a winter of stalking an alienated and sullen high school boy, at Minho’s insistence.
The boy in question passed by the entrance of the alley in a blur of bouncing hair and black coat, and they slid out after him. Under their reasonably distant surveillance, Taemin bought a loaf of bread at the bakery, glanced through the various stalls at the market with visible excitement, which Minho found surprising, until finally sitting for two hours on the outskirts of one of the town’s many farms. Two hours of visually grazing on the frozen crops.
“So, what we’ve got is that Taemin is boring,” Jonghyun concluded as they watched the boy’s silhouette slowly fade into the black-hole darkness that night becomes, when you’re in the middle of nowhere. “And he likes food.”
Yet there was something in Taemin’s silent day that spoke to Minho. It reminded him of an old silence of his own. Minho felt a strange upwelling of sentiment, an uncomfortably warm El Nino of understanding that made him want to sit next to the younger boy on that hill. He might even have done it, have let that bizarre and unwelcome tide carry him out there, if Jonghyun hadn’t started to tow him homeward.
He thought they had been careful, so it nearly gave him a heart attack when, later that night, Taemin barged into the bedroom that they all shared and pointed a finger like a firearm at Minho’s chest.
“I know you hate me,” Taemin said, loudly but steadily, a thunderstorm of a speech. “But you and flamethrower need to leave me alone.”
The door was already mid-slam, bowlcut bouncing out of sight, when Minho found enough of his voice to whisper, “I don’t hate you.”
They’d all known from the start that Minsuk was special. Minho hadn’t been alive yet to witness his older brother’s birth, but he knew from the way that his parents looked at Minsuk (and didn’t look at Minho) that his brother’s life was a triumph his own birth could never have lived up to. Minho had been doomed from the start.
Minsuk was the first Choi son in generations, and was born with a tongue that could speak any language. It had started slow at first: Brazilian Portuguese and Hebrew by age four, Arabic and Dutch by ten. But then the languages started to multiply, his brother’s personal library growing more foreign and incomprehensible with every passing month. Sometimes Minho would sneak in and take a book off the shelf just to let his eyes swim in the unfamiliar print, to drown himself in his own ignorance. Finnish, Chinese, English, Thai. Dinner-time conversation was spent with Minsuk rattling off vocabulary to his very attentive, if lost, parents, while Minho stared at his shoes. His laces were always so perfect. Around the time Minsuk mastered Swahili, Minho stopped talking entirely.
So began the quiet years of his life, the draught of words that left his vocal chords rusty from lack of use. It was a victory over his brother, if a self-defeatist one. Because silence was the one language Minsuk could never speak.
He wanted to dislike Taemin because of how powerful he was, and also because he didn’t seem to care about how powerful he was. The latter seemed almost like a personal insult to Minho. There was Jinki, who by most standards had a proficient Gift, and used it humbly but regularly. He ran a makeshift therapy service, which was popular now, at the beginning of spring, when the community was worried over the upcoming farming season. Five minutes in a patched leather chair across from Jinki, and the farmers left with the wrinkles on their foreheads ironed out and the tremors in their hands stilled. Minho thought it was strange that a nervous person like Jinki could have a calming affect on people. Jinki’s own anxious energy seemed to undergo some sort of emotional alchemy, and come out as relaxation in the people around him.
But Taemin wanted nothing to do with his ability. The snow melted, the hemisphere turned warm, and Taemin stayed cold enough for all of them. Minho was still anchored somewhere between wanting to hold him and wanting to punch him in the face.
“I hate the term ‘Superhuman,’” Jinki proclaimed at breakfast, rustling a newspaper between his hands. There was the usual silence, during which Jinki waited patiently for somebody to ask him to elaborate. Once it became clear that no one else was willing to volunteer this morning, Minho humored him.
“Go on.”
He smiled in Minho‘s direction, and Minho felt a bullet of tranquility hit him in the chest, a ripple of calm that almost made him sigh out loud. “It’s a misnomer. We can do a few things that other people can’t do, but that doesn’t really make us super. That makes us strange. Do you know that, in some countries, they sentence people like us to death?”
“They’re scared of us,” Jonghyun mumbled, his forehead on the table and head encased by his arms. “Hell, my mom was scared out of her mind when I had my first cold.” Kibum sniggered and kicked Jonghyun’s leg under the table.
“In the end, though, we’re still humans,” Jinki continued. “We’re still victim to all the stupid things that destroy other humans, like jealousy, or revenge, or addiction.”
“Or love,” Taemin said, staring out the window. They all turned to look out that same window, curious, but none of them saw what Taemin saw. Minho was starting to get the feeling that no one ever did.
Minho went to the elementary school once a week, during recess, to tie shoelaces. He got used to the tiny hands that grabbed and pulled on everything, from his pants to his ear lobes. He got used to the snot that would rub off on his shoulder, although spending time with Jonghyun made him reflexively dive for cover whenever a child started to sneeze. He felt useful around children. He liked finishing up the lose ends on their feet before they tripped over them.
It was in the height of spring, when pollen was as abundant as oxygen in the air, and Jonghyun was confined indoors with a gas mask until further notice, that Taemin came to the school. Minho looked up from Kyungah’s pink sneakers to see him, standing stiff as a telephone pole. He almost seemed as tall as one these days.
“Hi,” Taemin said.
“Hi, ” Minho countered. Kyungah ran away, and there was silence, except for the sound of children yelling. Sojin must have fallen off the monkey bars, because he heard her wailing that her arm was broken.
“I don’t hate you, you know that, right?” Minho attempted.
“I do. I mean, I do know. I don’t hate you, either.”
In the distance: “It’s really broken! I saw it bend in half!”
“Can I ask you though, why don’t you use your Gift? Is that an okay thing to ask?”
“It’s an okay thing to ask. But it’s a hard thing to explain.”
“I saw her bone, I saw it poke out!”
“I have time, Taemin. I have like, a lot of time, for you to explain it to me. Right after I take Sojin to the emergency room.”
The waiting room chairs were falling apart, stuffing rupturing out of the threadbare covers like wounds. Minho was doing two kinds of waiting in this wounded room. He was waiting for the mold of Sojin’s cast to dry, and he was waiting for Taemin to crack. One to be sealed up, and one to finally be pried open.
“The thing about my Gift,” Taemin started, breathing deep. “Is that the things I can summon, they don’t come from nowhere. I can’t create anything. I’m not that special, I’m not God. When I make something appear, I’m stealing it from somewhere.”
“So?” Minho offered, cautiously. “Nobody at the hand warmer factory will miss one or two of their stock.”
“I can’t choose where I steal it from, Minho. It probably doesn’t come from a factory, or even a convenience store. It could come from campers who are stranded in the snow. That could have been their last hand warmer, before they froze to death. If I summon something as simple a brick, it could come from a house somewhere. That one missing brick could collapse a wall. Summoning a tire could send somebody, somewhere in the world, into a fatal car crash.”
“So you don’t summon anything,” Minho said, a little in awe. “You care too much about those possibilities, all those rhetoricals, to use what you’ve been given.”
“I didn’t always,” He said, darkly, averting his eyes. “I used to summon really sick things, when I was younger and mad.”
“Like what?”
“The worst was bones,” Taemin said, shuddering. Minho thought of Sojin and her cracked ulna, imagined her whole arm turned into a boneless sleeve of skin instead.
“That’s…” Minho said, trying to keep the horror out of his voice, but Taemin looked close to tears.
“Don’t hate me, please don’t hate me. This is why I’m in Gwangcheon, with you guys. I used to be The Institute’s prize student, they made me summon so much shit, you wouldn‘t believe it. I gathered about a years worth of cafeteria ingredients and enough lumber for them to make that fourth dormitory they built three years ago. But I broke down last year because I couldn’t take the guilt. I don’t want to know how many families I starved or buildings I destroyed because I was just following orders.”
“So you stopped?”
“Yes. I stopped,” He was crying now, fat droplets, refracting the room like wet kaleidoscopes. “I stopped altogether, and I swore I’d never use my ability ever again. They graduated me because I was useless to them at that point. I didn’t want to get close to you because I thought you would hate me if you knew. I couldn’t help it though, you’re all so interesting and I was so jealous of how easily you got along, I just want to be with you guys. I just want to be with you, Minho.”
Minho was waiting, waiting, waiting for it all to make sense. They waited in their waiting chairs, the clock biting through minute after minute. It wasn’t until Sojin ran through the double doors, her plaster arm slung across her chest, and asked Minho and “his crying friend” to be the first to sign her cast, that he realized. He realized that he’d be waiting forever.
Minho bent down on one knee, Taemin’s legs bumping shyly against his forehead. This had become a morning routine, but it still felt awkwardly like a proposal. Minho crossed the laces and pulled them taut. He felt Taemin’s body pull taut, too, as if the laces ran straight into his spine. Vertebra that only Minho could tie correctly. A loop, his finger trapped inside of it, the feeling of constriction. The cross-over, pushing through and the final tug. It was summer now. Sweat dripped, sticky, from his forehead and into the carpet. Minho stood back up, and looking down at Taemin he had to wonder if he’d been lied to. He wondered if Taemin was still using his power to summon things, like feelings in Minho that scared him and made him want to bend back down and rip the laces out of Taemin’s chucks.
Jonghyun had been right, they were all fuck-ups in Gwangcheon. They were discarded material, not “super” enough to make headlines. But they were human enough to rely on each other and to try to live, as well as normal people.
They were their own heroes, more than anybody else's.