sorry to interrupt
kyungsoo/lu han ; ~4000 ; pg-13
uni!au ; lu han creates a new label of perfection with his mismatched everything and excessive arctic monkeys references, and kyungsoo tries to put up warning signs when they aren’t really needed.
written for sooheaven
There are only two boxes, and they are both pushed neatly against the wall. One rests in the corner, edges lining up perfectly flat and parallel to the wall, and the other sits right next to it so that the gap between them is even and minimal. Each one has its own glossy white label with 18 point font reading “CLOTHES” or “BEDDING AND TOILETRIES.” His backpack lies at the foot of his bed at the midpoint between the bed frame’s edge and the wall. Orderly. It’s not a big deal, but it’s just easier to keep things this way. Straight lines have smaller shadows.
It is not quite perfection, but perfection is nearly unattainable and painfully so. Still, Kyungsoo makes perfection his goal.
The other bed in the room is still bare and empty. There’s a thin layer of dust on the shelves on the opposite wall, and Kyungsoo wonders when his roommate will arrive.
He feels like this waiting is the only part of the typical university experience he’s sharing with most of the freshmen this year. It only took him two easy trips to move everything in - one for each box - and he doesn’t really feel the nervousness that he had heard others talk about or post on their profiles. Just a sense of time passing by uninterestingly.
“Hello?” The door opens and a cheery voice calls out. A tall boy wearing ripped jeans and a bright smile enters the room. “Oh, you’re already here!” he exclaims, reaching to shake Kyungsoo’s hand heartily. “I’m Huang Zitao, and I’m your roommate!”
“Yes, I’m Kyungsoo,” he replies. “Nice to meet you.”
“Yes, yes, I’m sure we’ll be great friends,” Zitao says while still smiling and starting to set his bags down. They’re covered with keychains and extra zippers, essentially noise noise noise. “Do you know a lot of people here already?”
“Not really,” Kyungsoo says. He notes that everything on Zitao and in his hands is black, which is quiet and unquestionable. There is hope.
“Really? I thought you looked like the kind that would have a lot of connections, and you look really nice from hair to eyes to clothes,” Zitao laughs. “If you’re not busy tonight, I’m planning to go to a little welcome-to-university-and-brace-yourself party. It’s not that many people, but they’re all pretty nice and you’d be more than welcome!”
Kyungsoo pauses for a moment. Every stride closer to people is almost always a stride away from flawlessness. The more time you spend with them and the more you like them, the more like them you become. It’s rare for that to be a good thing.
“Come on, it’ll be fun! We don’t even have homework as an excuse yet,” Zitao pleads.
Reluctantly, Kyungsoo nods. Perfection may be possible in the smallest of corners, and it’s impossible to tell until you go looking.
There is too much noise, Kyungsoo thinks when he first walks in. Most all of the words sound friendly, but it’s like someone wrapping him in a too-thick scarf of good intentions and pulling too tight around his neck until it’s hard to breathe. Still, impressions are important, so he smiles timidly while hoping he comes across as a nice boy even though he’s not doing much besides standing by the chips and cheese sauce.
Soon enough Zitao pauses his chattering with his Chinese friends and grabs Kyungsoo by the arm, leading him around the room and introducing him as “my cute roommate” excitedly. There’s only about ten other people there, and he talks to almost all of them at one point or another. A few of them he remembers more than others, like Zitao’s caring Chinese friend Yixing, the regrettably loud and cheeky Baekhyun, and the lanky dancer boys Jongin and Sehun.
There’s one boy he never does talk to; he thinks it’s another one of Zitao’s friends. Unlike everyone else who eagerly compliments Kyungsoo’s crisp clothes or handsomeness, he only briefly glances at Kyungsoo when he walks by, not bothering to stop his ongoing conversation in Mandarin. Something about him seems slightly more interesting than others in the room, but he’s out of eyesight soon enough and Kyungsoo doesn’t care to dwell on it.
Kyungsoo wouldn’t have called it a bad party, and everyone had been pretty nice like Zitao had said, but when he woke up the next morning he couldn’t remember any particular conversation he had had, only a greater sense of unfulfillment.
The one time Kyungsoo had truly found perfection had been in Jinki, but that was three years ago that could never happen again.
Jinki had been an assistant teacher at the private cram school Kyungsoo had attended in the evenings. At first, Kyungsoo had just thought they admired each other for their intelligence, and they had spent classes talking about nothing and everything with the excuse of being too bored for anyone else in the room.Then Jinki had stayed late with Kyungsoo one night well after class had ended and there was no one else to see anything.
Kyungsoo’s textbook had gone ignored while Kyungsoo’s hands were on Jinki’s shoulders and his lips on Jinki’s neck, whispering light bruises into his skin in hopes of telling him how perfect he was. Jinki kissed back of course, something like flowers blooming on Kyungsoo’s mouth, nose, and cheeks. Flowers don’t live forever, and eventually the petals shriveled with Kyungsoo as Jinki left for the military and left the earth in an unfair shower of bullets. And so, Kyungsoo constantly tries to thread himself back together with flawlessness until his cracks fade away forever.
Tuesdays are normally what Kyungsoo thinks of as the unremarkable or the dreadful days. They have no label, stuck between the beginning and the middle, and often they have the imperfect rains where they pavement is barely wet or when the downpour is too much and everything is soaked to misery. It’s a Tuesday, and Kyungsoo expects nothing other than a Tuesday.
It’s only been a few days since the start of the semester, but Kyungsoo is already comfortable enough with his routine that he can walk his routes on campus with his eyes closed if necessary. He doesn’t though, instead choosing to look down at the scratch-free screen of his phone and scroll for a song to fill his ears.
When the chorus arrives, Kyungsoo’s still looking down at his feet and step at the same tempo as the beat, and no one else is around him except for the rainclouds overhead. Quietly, he sings along, “now it’s getting dark, and the sky looks sticky--”
“Shit!” Someone crashes into him, and the headphones are yanked from Kyungsoo’s ears as he blinks back into full consciousness. “I’m so sorry, I wasn’t looking where I was going and I thought I heard something but then it was too late--”
“It’s fine,” Kyungsoo cuts in evenly, neutrally, coolly. He doesn’t need unnecessary conversations, even if the boy across from him is somewhat familiar looking--
“Wait, are you that freshman who came to the party last week with Zitao? Kyungshik?”
“Kyungsoo, actually.” And now he remembers the boy who had been in the middle and talked too much to everyone except for Kyungsoo. He looks different now, maybe not just because he isn’t drunk on alcohol and loud atmospheres, but possibly because the buttons on his shirt match the dark clarity of his eyes and the rosiness of his lips matches the flush blooming on his throat and cheeks.
“Ah, right. I’m Lu Han, in case you don’t remember. Sorry -- not just for now, but for not talking to you as much back then. I was probably a bit preoccupied.” Lu Han runs a hand through his hair. He has an earring, a small sparkling diamond, but only on one side, Kyungsoo notices. Off balance, just like the loudness between his red Converse and his grey checkered sweater.
“It’s fine. Anyway, I’ve got to be going,” Kyungsoo replies, and he starts to walk away. As he walks, he puts his headphones on, but before he can press play again--
“Somebody told the stars ‘you’re not coming out tonight’ and so they found a place to hide,” he hears. He turns around and Lu Han smiles expectantly, almost as if he were breathless. “That’s the song you were singing before when I bumped into you, right?”
It’s a little stunning, Lu Han’s voice is cool and soft, so different from the original song that it sounds completely different. Almost better.
Kyungsoo nods and smiles back briefly in affirmation. Lu Han waves and turns around walking in the opposite direction, and Kyungsoo continues on his original path. He stops gazing at his feet as he walks, and instead of just pressing play he skips back to the beginning of the song.
“Hey,” a cool voice greets Kyungsoo when he walks into his room one day. He looks up and jumps when he sees Lu Han smirking and lying on Zitao’s bed, diamond earring glittering in the light from the window.
“What are you doing here?”
“Here to see you,” Lu Han smirks. Kyungsoo’s shoulders tense, and it must be visible, for Lu Han laughs loudly, throwing his head back even though it’s really not that funny. “Just kidding. I’m waiting for Zitao. He said he’d be back here sometime soon since we planned on going out for a drink with Yixing and Yifan.”
Kyungsoo narrows his eyes. “You’re older, yes, but are you really old enough to get drinks?”
Lu Han laughs again, and the once nice curves of his lips and cheeks are shattered, like smooth glass into iridescent shards, flawed but somehow still appealing. “We go out for bubble tea pretty often. Zitao has no interest in things that aren’t sweet. You’re welcome to join us, you know.”
“No thanks,” Kyungsoo replies stiffly. “I’ve got things to do.” He notices that Lu Han’s shoes by the doorway are upside down and at conflicting angles, and he bends down to fix them.
“Some important things, huh,” Lu Han laughs again. “All right then, Mr. Life of the Party.”
Kyungsoo ignores this and sits down carefully on his bed so that the fabric doesn’t wrinkle. He pulls out a book for one of his classes and puts on his headphones, trying not to notice that Lu Han is staring at him curiously the whole time.
They don’t talk again while waiting for Zitao to arrive. Sometimes Kyungsoo looks up furtively, pretending to examine something else across the room while watching Lu Han out of the corner of his eye, but Lu Han is everything that is not subtle, seemingly gazing at nearly every inch of Kyungsoo at some point.
This kind of occurrence happens more than Kyungsoo expects.
Lu Han will often be in their dorm when he’s not supposed to be, and yet, Kyungsoo doesn’t feel as irritated as he thinks he should. Lu Han is usually quiet in his words but often noisy in his actions, criss-crossing his legs in different directions every five minutes or readjusting his earbuds. Often, he’ll take pens (not Kyungsoo’s, luckily) and draw characters across his forearms and fingers, sometimes Chinese and sometimes Korean, by the looks of it. Kyungsoo doesn’t ask for details because he doesn’t care. Lu Han is just there at the same place at the same time and that’s all.
Grudgingly, Kyungsoo gets used to it, and there’s a strange, subtle coolness in his fingers when Lu Han isn’t there, like a missing mist that should be.
Kyungsoo’s late and it’s the first day of the new semester. Well, technically he’s not late, but he’s later than he’d like to be. This is really not how he wants to start out this first day in class, rushing in with windswept hair to sit in the last seat in the back, next to--
“Say, you look familiar,” a cool voice with a slick smile says, and Kyungsoo thinks the flash of Lu Han’s teeth is better than a pearl stud in his ear.
“I don’t know, are you sure we’ve met before?” Kyungsoo replies with a bigger smirk, ignoring the extra beat per minute in his chest. “What’s someone like you doing in this class?”
“I didn’t want to take it two years ago, or last year,” Lu Han muses, “so I guess I’m taking it now. More like why is a freshman here? Are you sure you’re not lost?”
“Some of us may be smarter than others,” Kyungsoo whispers, fingers walking across the desk in a straight line.
Lu Han scribbles all over his papers, writing and drawing everything that isn’t math, and eventually he rips off a piece and pushes it towards Kyungsoo with two fingers.
“With the exception of you, I dislike everyone in the room♫” it messily reads in English, and even without the music note Kyungsoo thinks he would have recognized the line nearly right away. He merely gives Lu Han a lazy one-sided smirk and plays the game of ignoring Lu Han’s eye contact for the rest of the lecture.
“Hey,” Lu Han says at the end of one class. “Aren’t your grades pretty good?”
“Yes. I’m not writing any papers for you in other classes, though.”
Lu Han sighs, and the corners of his mouth somehow look different in this light. “I never thought of that. I was going to ask if you could tutor me. For this class.”
“Fine.”
“Really?” Lu Han looks mildly shocked, pretty eyes and pretty lips all round, which is an expression Kyungsoo hasn’t seen on him before. “Just like that? You’re nicer than I thought!”
Kyungsoo rolls his eyes. “It’ll basically be me studying for myself but saying everything out loud to another person. I don’t think it’ll be too difficult.”
It turns out that it is slightly more difficult than Kyungsoo anticipated.
The first day, Lu Han steals Kyungsoo’s phone and enters his number in, and Kyungsoo has to spend extra time later to clean the smears of Lu Han’s fingerprints away. He can’t, however, wash away the sound of Lu Han’s untimely snickers and his constant stares.
It could be worse. Lu Han often spends their study sessions with an earbud in one ear while gazing into Kyungsoo’s eyes as he talks about differential equations, and sometimes the older boy sings under his breath while tapping his foot and scribbling numbers unevenly. In general, he listens to Kyungsoo and nods when he understands, but sometimes Kyungsoo gets the feeling that he’s not struggling too much in the first place.
There is a tugging feeling in his stomach that occurs when it looks like there’s a slight flush in Lu Han’s cheeks, sometimes when he leans over to point out mistakes Lu Han wrote on his paper, and sometimes they share awkward silences where Kyungsoo is reluctant to hold eye contact. He tries to fight these by pointing out Lu Han’s imperfections when the older boy complains, slyly commenting on the patterns of his sweaters or the colors of his socks, and Lu Han retorts about respecting elders. They are stupid conversations, but for some reason Kyungsoo cannot forget all of the words he wants to.
“Hey, Zitao,” Kyungsoo asks one night in their room.
Zitao perks up since it’s rare for Kyungsoo to ever initiate conversation. “Hmm?”
“I found these papers on my desk, and there’s Chinese on some of them. What does it say?”
He hands the sheets over to Zitao, who scans them quickly and smiles almost sweetly.
“They seem to be song lyrics, but I don’t know what songs these are.” He pauses for a minute, translating in his head. “‘Been wondering if your heart’s still open and if so I wanna know what time it shuts~,’ ‘I don’t know if you feel the same as I do but we could be together if you wanted to~’ maybe it’s just original poetry? Who wrote these anyway?”
Kyungsoo swallows, taking the sheets back from Zitao and ignoring the curious stare in return. “I don’t remember.”
Lu Han is not anything close to Jinki. Kyungsoo doesn’t even know why they have any sort of connection in his head. Jinki’s voice was warm and rich like the softest of petals and fabric comfortingly keeping him from the wind. Lu Han’s is cool and thinner but somehow still supportive, almost like a hammock; full of gaps and holes but strong enough to stay under him. Jinki was beautifully monochrome, full of warm greys and blacks and white stars, and Lu Han is sometimes black, sometimes green, sometimes red, always loud.
Jinki was perfection, is the only idea of perfection Kyungsoo has ever known, and Lu Han is… Lu Han is unclassifiable. There are colors in his eyes and fingers that have rarely been illustrated before, but there are also times when Kyungsoo wants to wipe him with a chalkboard eraser and make him a blank slate lacking embarrassment and annoyance. Lu Han is confusing, with his song lyrics scribbled everywhere and stuck in the cracks of his lips and his mismatched earrings. Kyungsoo does not know if butterflies in his stomach mean that flowers are going to grow or if the petals have already started shriveling up.
It’s another night closer to midterms, and at this point Kyungsoo is pretty sure Lu Han has more than enough capability to get a good score but just doesn’t care that much anymore. Really, Kyungsoo doesn’t either, but if Lu Han refuses to try to learn the material it means that Kyungsoo has to try that much harder to refuse his eyes from taking in the curves of Lu Han’s nose and lips.
“So, if we look here, we can’t integrate this, but we can--”
“Kyungsoo.” Lu Han’s voice is so gentle, soothing like the sky at half past three, yet so piercing that Kyungsoo shivers. It’s times like this when he especially questions the madness of the world.
“What?”
“You’re so strange,” Lu Han says, tracing some indistinguishable pattern onto a paper with his fingertips.
“Like you’re one to talk,” Kyungsoo scoffs, but Lu Han continues seriously.
“Really. You’re like dawn and dusk in a way, trying to be dark and light and everything in between all at once. But you want to be that perfect combination of everything forever, when really dawn and dusk are always shifting and uncapturable. What you want is to preserve that moment, but the only thing close is a photograph and it’s too stationary. There’s too much missing from something so still.” Lu Han’s voice is sleepy, but his eyes are visibly clear and sparkling like galaxy dust through the dark veil of his eyelashes.
“...You can say things like that but your math grade is this low?” Kyungsoo manages to say, barely keeping the stutter to his thoughts and behind his tongue. “Don’t talk nonsense. Just go away or fall asleep or something.”
Lu Han just laughs gently, voice crackling like breaks in the wind, and he closes his eyes to quickly drift off to sleep. Kyungsoo doesn’t even think about waking him; he just starts gathering the pieces of paper spread out across the table to pull them into neat piles. He notices that on Lu Han’s most recent sheet of notes, the older boy had scrawled the lyrics “the nights were mainly made for saying things that you can’t say tomorrow day.”
“Hey! We did it! We took the midterm!” Lu Han yells loudly as they exit the hall.
“Yes,” Kyungsoo agrees, soaking in the sparkles in Lu Han’s eyes.
“Thank you so much,” Lu Han beams, and without warning he pulls Kyungsoo into a hug. It’s tight and warm, and it reminds him a little bit of Jinki even though Lu Han’s fingers are cool.
“It is nice being with me, isn’t it,” Kyungsoo agrees. “I guess you’re welcome.”
“Shut up. Let’s do something to celebrate! Not bubble tea, that’s not special enough.”
“What about… cake?” Kyungsoo is hesitant to say anything, but it leaves his mouth before he can decide soundly.
“Only if you can make it, because I sure as hell can’t.”
This is how they find themselves in the floor kitchen, using whatever had been in the pantry. It’s not much, just a basic chocolate cake recipe, but somehow it’s two in the morning and Lu Han’s checkered sweater is covered in flour, as is his hair, which is also dotted with sprinkles even though the cake’s not even in the oven yet.
“Hey,” Kyungsoo says warningly as Lu Han swipes a finger in the batter and licks it. Lu Han replies by sticking his tongue out, so young and childishly, and he does it again. Somehow, Kyungsoo doesn’t mind, and although the oven hasn’t heated up fully yet, there’s a warm feeling in his chest.
The cake finishes baking beautifully, but Lu Han cuts a slice and eats it immediately, scarfing it down noisily before Kyungsoo can even get plates out. There are crumbs all over his smooth face, and Kyungsoo reaches out to brush them away without thinking. They both stop for a moment, and then Kyungsoo grabs Lu Han’s nose and tweaks it, making him yelp in pain. It’s half past three and they’re running around the kitchen chasing each other amongst remnants of cake batter, and Kyungsoo doesn’t want the sun to rise.
They stumble back to Kyungsoo’s room, Lu Han making the excuse that it’s too late for him to go back to his own, and coincidentally Zitao’s not there. Lu Han takes Zitao’s bed, and he plays their songs from his phone until they both drift to sleep.
Something hits his nose several times, and Kyungsoo blinks blearily away from sleep to realize that Lu Han’s face is far too close to his, and the air is suddenly too hot. “What--”
“I’m sorry to interrupt, it’s just I’m constantly on the cusp of trying to kiss you~” Lu Han croons softly, happiness dusting his cheeks despite the early hour. “You said my name in your sleep, so can I presume that you dreamt about me nearly every night this week~?”
“I’m never listening to Arctic Monkeys again,” Kyungsoo grumbles, trying to get up off of the couch, but Lu Han laughs and pushes him back down flat. His fingers are so slender but they grip Kyungsoo’s shoulders in a way that’s both strong and soothing.
“Fine then, you can just listen to me sing their songs.” That infuriatingly sleek grin flashes on Lu Han’s face, and the sparks in his eyes and breath seem to dare Kyungsoo on.
Kyungsoo huffs. “Or I could not listen to you at all.” He grabs Lu Han’s checkered sweater (the one he had worn when they first bumped into each other) and pulls him in until those infuriating lips are against his and singing touches into his veins. Kyungsoo angrily bites back, somewhat trying to convey the state of confusion that Lu Han always puts him in, but it doesn’t seem to work because all Lu Han does is sigh heatedly and lean into him.
For once, Kyungsoo regrets his words. Silent Lu Han is not what he likes, but Lu Han a little noisy like this: slightly stifled breathing hot and uneasy; soft humming into Kyungsoo’s skin until it’s flushed; thin fingers audibly skimming against Kyungsoo’s shirt and adding wrinkles in all the right places.
Kyungsoo hates being wrong, but Lu Han was right. Perfection never lasts. It is ever-shifting, just as Lu Han is from minute to minute, but no matter how much he changes he will always be perfect.
yeah this is probably not where i want it to be,, but oh well.
song lyrics are from "do i wanna know" "stop the world i wanna get off with you" and "black treacle" all by the arctic monkeys ((wtf i don't even listen to arctic monkeys))
.
uni!au ; lu han creates a new label of perfection with his mismatched everything and excessive arctic monkeys references, and kyungsoo tries to put up warning signs when they aren’t really needed.
written for sooheaven
There are only two boxes, and they are both pushed neatly against the wall. One rests in the corner, edges lining up perfectly flat and parallel to the wall, and the other sits right next to it so that the gap between them is even and minimal. Each one has its own glossy white label with 18 point font reading “CLOTHES” or “BEDDING AND TOILETRIES.” His backpack lies at the foot of his bed at the midpoint between the bed frame’s edge and the wall. Orderly. It’s not a big deal, but it’s just easier to keep things this way. Straight lines have smaller shadows.
It is not quite perfection, but perfection is nearly unattainable and painfully so. Still, Kyungsoo makes perfection his goal.
The other bed in the room is still bare and empty. There’s a thin layer of dust on the shelves on the opposite wall, and Kyungsoo wonders when his roommate will arrive.
He feels like this waiting is the only part of the typical university experience he’s sharing with most of the freshmen this year. It only took him two easy trips to move everything in - one for each box - and he doesn’t really feel the nervousness that he had heard others talk about or post on their profiles. Just a sense of time passing by uninterestingly.
“Hello?” The door opens and a cheery voice calls out. A tall boy wearing ripped jeans and a bright smile enters the room. “Oh, you’re already here!” he exclaims, reaching to shake Kyungsoo’s hand heartily. “I’m Huang Zitao, and I’m your roommate!”
“Yes, I’m Kyungsoo,” he replies. “Nice to meet you.”
“Yes, yes, I’m sure we’ll be great friends,” Zitao says while still smiling and starting to set his bags down. They’re covered with keychains and extra zippers, essentially noise noise noise. “Do you know a lot of people here already?”
“Not really,” Kyungsoo says. He notes that everything on Zitao and in his hands is black, which is quiet and unquestionable. There is hope.
“Really? I thought you looked like the kind that would have a lot of connections, and you look really nice from hair to eyes to clothes,” Zitao laughs. “If you’re not busy tonight, I’m planning to go to a little welcome-to-university-and-brace-yourself party. It’s not that many people, but they’re all pretty nice and you’d be more than welcome!”
Kyungsoo pauses for a moment. Every stride closer to people is almost always a stride away from flawlessness. The more time you spend with them and the more you like them, the more like them you become. It’s rare for that to be a good thing.
“Come on, it’ll be fun! We don’t even have homework as an excuse yet,” Zitao pleads.
Reluctantly, Kyungsoo nods. Perfection may be possible in the smallest of corners, and it’s impossible to tell until you go looking.
There is too much noise, Kyungsoo thinks when he first walks in. Most all of the words sound friendly, but it’s like someone wrapping him in a too-thick scarf of good intentions and pulling too tight around his neck until it’s hard to breathe. Still, impressions are important, so he smiles timidly while hoping he comes across as a nice boy even though he’s not doing much besides standing by the chips and cheese sauce.
Soon enough Zitao pauses his chattering with his Chinese friends and grabs Kyungsoo by the arm, leading him around the room and introducing him as “my cute roommate” excitedly. There’s only about ten other people there, and he talks to almost all of them at one point or another. A few of them he remembers more than others, like Zitao’s caring Chinese friend Yixing, the regrettably loud and cheeky Baekhyun, and the lanky dancer boys Jongin and Sehun.
There’s one boy he never does talk to; he thinks it’s another one of Zitao’s friends. Unlike everyone else who eagerly compliments Kyungsoo’s crisp clothes or handsomeness, he only briefly glances at Kyungsoo when he walks by, not bothering to stop his ongoing conversation in Mandarin. Something about him seems slightly more interesting than others in the room, but he’s out of eyesight soon enough and Kyungsoo doesn’t care to dwell on it.
Kyungsoo wouldn’t have called it a bad party, and everyone had been pretty nice like Zitao had said, but when he woke up the next morning he couldn’t remember any particular conversation he had had, only a greater sense of unfulfillment.
The one time Kyungsoo had truly found perfection had been in Jinki, but that was three years ago that could never happen again.
Jinki had been an assistant teacher at the private cram school Kyungsoo had attended in the evenings. At first, Kyungsoo had just thought they admired each other for their intelligence, and they had spent classes talking about nothing and everything with the excuse of being too bored for anyone else in the room.Then Jinki had stayed late with Kyungsoo one night well after class had ended and there was no one else to see anything.
Kyungsoo’s textbook had gone ignored while Kyungsoo’s hands were on Jinki’s shoulders and his lips on Jinki’s neck, whispering light bruises into his skin in hopes of telling him how perfect he was. Jinki kissed back of course, something like flowers blooming on Kyungsoo’s mouth, nose, and cheeks. Flowers don’t live forever, and eventually the petals shriveled with Kyungsoo as Jinki left for the military and left the earth in an unfair shower of bullets. And so, Kyungsoo constantly tries to thread himself back together with flawlessness until his cracks fade away forever.
Tuesdays are normally what Kyungsoo thinks of as the unremarkable or the dreadful days. They have no label, stuck between the beginning and the middle, and often they have the imperfect rains where they pavement is barely wet or when the downpour is too much and everything is soaked to misery. It’s a Tuesday, and Kyungsoo expects nothing other than a Tuesday.
It’s only been a few days since the start of the semester, but Kyungsoo is already comfortable enough with his routine that he can walk his routes on campus with his eyes closed if necessary. He doesn’t though, instead choosing to look down at the scratch-free screen of his phone and scroll for a song to fill his ears.
When the chorus arrives, Kyungsoo’s still looking down at his feet and step at the same tempo as the beat, and no one else is around him except for the rainclouds overhead. Quietly, he sings along, “now it’s getting dark, and the sky looks sticky--”
“Shit!” Someone crashes into him, and the headphones are yanked from Kyungsoo’s ears as he blinks back into full consciousness. “I’m so sorry, I wasn’t looking where I was going and I thought I heard something but then it was too late--”
“It’s fine,” Kyungsoo cuts in evenly, neutrally, coolly. He doesn’t need unnecessary conversations, even if the boy across from him is somewhat familiar looking--
“Wait, are you that freshman who came to the party last week with Zitao? Kyungshik?”
“Kyungsoo, actually.” And now he remembers the boy who had been in the middle and talked too much to everyone except for Kyungsoo. He looks different now, maybe not just because he isn’t drunk on alcohol and loud atmospheres, but possibly because the buttons on his shirt match the dark clarity of his eyes and the rosiness of his lips matches the flush blooming on his throat and cheeks.
“Ah, right. I’m Lu Han, in case you don’t remember. Sorry -- not just for now, but for not talking to you as much back then. I was probably a bit preoccupied.” Lu Han runs a hand through his hair. He has an earring, a small sparkling diamond, but only on one side, Kyungsoo notices. Off balance, just like the loudness between his red Converse and his grey checkered sweater.
“It’s fine. Anyway, I’ve got to be going,” Kyungsoo replies, and he starts to walk away. As he walks, he puts his headphones on, but before he can press play again--
“Somebody told the stars ‘you’re not coming out tonight’ and so they found a place to hide,” he hears. He turns around and Lu Han smiles expectantly, almost as if he were breathless. “That’s the song you were singing before when I bumped into you, right?”
It’s a little stunning, Lu Han’s voice is cool and soft, so different from the original song that it sounds completely different. Almost better.
Kyungsoo nods and smiles back briefly in affirmation. Lu Han waves and turns around walking in the opposite direction, and Kyungsoo continues on his original path. He stops gazing at his feet as he walks, and instead of just pressing play he skips back to the beginning of the song.
“Hey,” a cool voice greets Kyungsoo when he walks into his room one day. He looks up and jumps when he sees Lu Han smirking and lying on Zitao’s bed, diamond earring glittering in the light from the window.
“What are you doing here?”
“Here to see you,” Lu Han smirks. Kyungsoo’s shoulders tense, and it must be visible, for Lu Han laughs loudly, throwing his head back even though it’s really not that funny. “Just kidding. I’m waiting for Zitao. He said he’d be back here sometime soon since we planned on going out for a drink with Yixing and Yifan.”
Kyungsoo narrows his eyes. “You’re older, yes, but are you really old enough to get drinks?”
Lu Han laughs again, and the once nice curves of his lips and cheeks are shattered, like smooth glass into iridescent shards, flawed but somehow still appealing. “We go out for bubble tea pretty often. Zitao has no interest in things that aren’t sweet. You’re welcome to join us, you know.”
“No thanks,” Kyungsoo replies stiffly. “I’ve got things to do.” He notices that Lu Han’s shoes by the doorway are upside down and at conflicting angles, and he bends down to fix them.
“Some important things, huh,” Lu Han laughs again. “All right then, Mr. Life of the Party.”
Kyungsoo ignores this and sits down carefully on his bed so that the fabric doesn’t wrinkle. He pulls out a book for one of his classes and puts on his headphones, trying not to notice that Lu Han is staring at him curiously the whole time.
They don’t talk again while waiting for Zitao to arrive. Sometimes Kyungsoo looks up furtively, pretending to examine something else across the room while watching Lu Han out of the corner of his eye, but Lu Han is everything that is not subtle, seemingly gazing at nearly every inch of Kyungsoo at some point.
This kind of occurrence happens more than Kyungsoo expects.
Lu Han will often be in their dorm when he’s not supposed to be, and yet, Kyungsoo doesn’t feel as irritated as he thinks he should. Lu Han is usually quiet in his words but often noisy in his actions, criss-crossing his legs in different directions every five minutes or readjusting his earbuds. Often, he’ll take pens (not Kyungsoo’s, luckily) and draw characters across his forearms and fingers, sometimes Chinese and sometimes Korean, by the looks of it. Kyungsoo doesn’t ask for details because he doesn’t care. Lu Han is just there at the same place at the same time and that’s all.
Grudgingly, Kyungsoo gets used to it, and there’s a strange, subtle coolness in his fingers when Lu Han isn’t there, like a missing mist that should be.
Kyungsoo’s late and it’s the first day of the new semester. Well, technically he’s not late, but he’s later than he’d like to be. This is really not how he wants to start out this first day in class, rushing in with windswept hair to sit in the last seat in the back, next to--
“Say, you look familiar,” a cool voice with a slick smile says, and Kyungsoo thinks the flash of Lu Han’s teeth is better than a pearl stud in his ear.
“I don’t know, are you sure we’ve met before?” Kyungsoo replies with a bigger smirk, ignoring the extra beat per minute in his chest. “What’s someone like you doing in this class?”
“I didn’t want to take it two years ago, or last year,” Lu Han muses, “so I guess I’m taking it now. More like why is a freshman here? Are you sure you’re not lost?”
“Some of us may be smarter than others,” Kyungsoo whispers, fingers walking across the desk in a straight line.
Lu Han scribbles all over his papers, writing and drawing everything that isn’t math, and eventually he rips off a piece and pushes it towards Kyungsoo with two fingers.
“With the exception of you, I dislike everyone in the room♫” it messily reads in English, and even without the music note Kyungsoo thinks he would have recognized the line nearly right away. He merely gives Lu Han a lazy one-sided smirk and plays the game of ignoring Lu Han’s eye contact for the rest of the lecture.
“Hey,” Lu Han says at the end of one class. “Aren’t your grades pretty good?”
“Yes. I’m not writing any papers for you in other classes, though.”
Lu Han sighs, and the corners of his mouth somehow look different in this light. “I never thought of that. I was going to ask if you could tutor me. For this class.”
“Fine.”
“Really?” Lu Han looks mildly shocked, pretty eyes and pretty lips all round, which is an expression Kyungsoo hasn’t seen on him before. “Just like that? You’re nicer than I thought!”
Kyungsoo rolls his eyes. “It’ll basically be me studying for myself but saying everything out loud to another person. I don’t think it’ll be too difficult.”
It turns out that it is slightly more difficult than Kyungsoo anticipated.
The first day, Lu Han steals Kyungsoo’s phone and enters his number in, and Kyungsoo has to spend extra time later to clean the smears of Lu Han’s fingerprints away. He can’t, however, wash away the sound of Lu Han’s untimely snickers and his constant stares.
It could be worse. Lu Han often spends their study sessions with an earbud in one ear while gazing into Kyungsoo’s eyes as he talks about differential equations, and sometimes the older boy sings under his breath while tapping his foot and scribbling numbers unevenly. In general, he listens to Kyungsoo and nods when he understands, but sometimes Kyungsoo gets the feeling that he’s not struggling too much in the first place.
There is a tugging feeling in his stomach that occurs when it looks like there’s a slight flush in Lu Han’s cheeks, sometimes when he leans over to point out mistakes Lu Han wrote on his paper, and sometimes they share awkward silences where Kyungsoo is reluctant to hold eye contact. He tries to fight these by pointing out Lu Han’s imperfections when the older boy complains, slyly commenting on the patterns of his sweaters or the colors of his socks, and Lu Han retorts about respecting elders. They are stupid conversations, but for some reason Kyungsoo cannot forget all of the words he wants to.
“Hey, Zitao,” Kyungsoo asks one night in their room.
Zitao perks up since it’s rare for Kyungsoo to ever initiate conversation. “Hmm?”
“I found these papers on my desk, and there’s Chinese on some of them. What does it say?”
He hands the sheets over to Zitao, who scans them quickly and smiles almost sweetly.
“They seem to be song lyrics, but I don’t know what songs these are.” He pauses for a minute, translating in his head. “‘Been wondering if your heart’s still open and if so I wanna know what time it shuts~,’ ‘I don’t know if you feel the same as I do but we could be together if you wanted to~’ maybe it’s just original poetry? Who wrote these anyway?”
Kyungsoo swallows, taking the sheets back from Zitao and ignoring the curious stare in return. “I don’t remember.”
Lu Han is not anything close to Jinki. Kyungsoo doesn’t even know why they have any sort of connection in his head. Jinki’s voice was warm and rich like the softest of petals and fabric comfortingly keeping him from the wind. Lu Han’s is cool and thinner but somehow still supportive, almost like a hammock; full of gaps and holes but strong enough to stay under him. Jinki was beautifully monochrome, full of warm greys and blacks and white stars, and Lu Han is sometimes black, sometimes green, sometimes red, always loud.
Jinki was perfection, is the only idea of perfection Kyungsoo has ever known, and Lu Han is… Lu Han is unclassifiable. There are colors in his eyes and fingers that have rarely been illustrated before, but there are also times when Kyungsoo wants to wipe him with a chalkboard eraser and make him a blank slate lacking embarrassment and annoyance. Lu Han is confusing, with his song lyrics scribbled everywhere and stuck in the cracks of his lips and his mismatched earrings. Kyungsoo does not know if butterflies in his stomach mean that flowers are going to grow or if the petals have already started shriveling up.
It’s another night closer to midterms, and at this point Kyungsoo is pretty sure Lu Han has more than enough capability to get a good score but just doesn’t care that much anymore. Really, Kyungsoo doesn’t either, but if Lu Han refuses to try to learn the material it means that Kyungsoo has to try that much harder to refuse his eyes from taking in the curves of Lu Han’s nose and lips.
“So, if we look here, we can’t integrate this, but we can--”
“Kyungsoo.” Lu Han’s voice is so gentle, soothing like the sky at half past three, yet so piercing that Kyungsoo shivers. It’s times like this when he especially questions the madness of the world.
“What?”
“You’re so strange,” Lu Han says, tracing some indistinguishable pattern onto a paper with his fingertips.
“Like you’re one to talk,” Kyungsoo scoffs, but Lu Han continues seriously.
“Really. You’re like dawn and dusk in a way, trying to be dark and light and everything in between all at once. But you want to be that perfect combination of everything forever, when really dawn and dusk are always shifting and uncapturable. What you want is to preserve that moment, but the only thing close is a photograph and it’s too stationary. There’s too much missing from something so still.” Lu Han’s voice is sleepy, but his eyes are visibly clear and sparkling like galaxy dust through the dark veil of his eyelashes.
“...You can say things like that but your math grade is this low?” Kyungsoo manages to say, barely keeping the stutter to his thoughts and behind his tongue. “Don’t talk nonsense. Just go away or fall asleep or something.”
Lu Han just laughs gently, voice crackling like breaks in the wind, and he closes his eyes to quickly drift off to sleep. Kyungsoo doesn’t even think about waking him; he just starts gathering the pieces of paper spread out across the table to pull them into neat piles. He notices that on Lu Han’s most recent sheet of notes, the older boy had scrawled the lyrics “the nights were mainly made for saying things that you can’t say tomorrow day.”
“Hey! We did it! We took the midterm!” Lu Han yells loudly as they exit the hall.
“Yes,” Kyungsoo agrees, soaking in the sparkles in Lu Han’s eyes.
“Thank you so much,” Lu Han beams, and without warning he pulls Kyungsoo into a hug. It’s tight and warm, and it reminds him a little bit of Jinki even though Lu Han’s fingers are cool.
“It is nice being with me, isn’t it,” Kyungsoo agrees. “I guess you’re welcome.”
“Shut up. Let’s do something to celebrate! Not bubble tea, that’s not special enough.”
“What about… cake?” Kyungsoo is hesitant to say anything, but it leaves his mouth before he can decide soundly.
“Only if you can make it, because I sure as hell can’t.”
This is how they find themselves in the floor kitchen, using whatever had been in the pantry. It’s not much, just a basic chocolate cake recipe, but somehow it’s two in the morning and Lu Han’s checkered sweater is covered in flour, as is his hair, which is also dotted with sprinkles even though the cake’s not even in the oven yet.
“Hey,” Kyungsoo says warningly as Lu Han swipes a finger in the batter and licks it. Lu Han replies by sticking his tongue out, so young and childishly, and he does it again. Somehow, Kyungsoo doesn’t mind, and although the oven hasn’t heated up fully yet, there’s a warm feeling in his chest.
The cake finishes baking beautifully, but Lu Han cuts a slice and eats it immediately, scarfing it down noisily before Kyungsoo can even get plates out. There are crumbs all over his smooth face, and Kyungsoo reaches out to brush them away without thinking. They both stop for a moment, and then Kyungsoo grabs Lu Han’s nose and tweaks it, making him yelp in pain. It’s half past three and they’re running around the kitchen chasing each other amongst remnants of cake batter, and Kyungsoo doesn’t want the sun to rise.
They stumble back to Kyungsoo’s room, Lu Han making the excuse that it’s too late for him to go back to his own, and coincidentally Zitao’s not there. Lu Han takes Zitao’s bed, and he plays their songs from his phone until they both drift to sleep.
Something hits his nose several times, and Kyungsoo blinks blearily away from sleep to realize that Lu Han’s face is far too close to his, and the air is suddenly too hot. “What--”
“I’m sorry to interrupt, it’s just I’m constantly on the cusp of trying to kiss you~” Lu Han croons softly, happiness dusting his cheeks despite the early hour. “You said my name in your sleep, so can I presume that you dreamt about me nearly every night this week~?”
“I’m never listening to Arctic Monkeys again,” Kyungsoo grumbles, trying to get up off of the couch, but Lu Han laughs and pushes him back down flat. His fingers are so slender but they grip Kyungsoo’s shoulders in a way that’s both strong and soothing.
“Fine then, you can just listen to me sing their songs.” That infuriatingly sleek grin flashes on Lu Han’s face, and the sparks in his eyes and breath seem to dare Kyungsoo on.
Kyungsoo huffs. “Or I could not listen to you at all.” He grabs Lu Han’s checkered sweater (the one he had worn when they first bumped into each other) and pulls him in until those infuriating lips are against his and singing touches into his veins. Kyungsoo angrily bites back, somewhat trying to convey the state of confusion that Lu Han always puts him in, but it doesn’t seem to work because all Lu Han does is sigh heatedly and lean into him.
For once, Kyungsoo regrets his words. Silent Lu Han is not what he likes, but Lu Han a little noisy like this: slightly stifled breathing hot and uneasy; soft humming into Kyungsoo’s skin until it’s flushed; thin fingers audibly skimming against Kyungsoo’s shirt and adding wrinkles in all the right places.
Kyungsoo hates being wrong, but Lu Han was right. Perfection never lasts. It is ever-shifting, just as Lu Han is from minute to minute, but no matter how much he changes he will always be perfect.
yeah this is probably not where i want it to be,, but oh well.
song lyrics are from "do i wanna know" "stop the world i wanna get off with you" and "black treacle" all by the arctic monkeys ((wtf i don't even listen to arctic monkeys))
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