168 Hours in a Week (Kyuhyun/Zhou Mi, PG)
Title: 168 Hours in a Week
Author: windlost
Recipient: nashirah
Characters/Pairings: Zhoumi/Kyuhyun
Rating: PG
Genre(s): Fluff, Crack
Warnings: Genderswitch
Author's Note: I think this is a pretty good collaboration of all of my incoherency in 2000 or so words.
Zhoumi thinks his frequent business trips will be the reason his marriage fails - that or the reason his house collapses.
“Kyuyoung.”
“Mm-“
“I thought we went over the rules.” Zhoumi stands with his hands on his hips in a way that showers him with temporary authority.
“Mmm-”
“Are you even listening to me?” Zhoumi drops his suitcase by the door and stares with his Intense Eyes.
Kyuyoung makes the exaggerated and exasperated motion of hitting the space bar on the keyboard.
“Yes, and I did everything you told me to.” She turns away from the computer and bats her eyelashes the way that Zhoumi supposedly goes crazy for.
“You did everything I told you not to.” Clearly, he was unaffected by her charm.
He wonders when that charm stopped working.
Kyuyoung looks at him for a moment, face devoid of emotion. There’s no welcoming him home because that’s not part of their routine. Rather, she jumps over to the bed, the unmade duvet folding in around her. She sits with her legs in a seductive manner, innocently sticking a finger into her mouth for the added effect, and, instead, attempts to draw attention away from the scattered week old laundry currently masquerading the carpet.
“I’m sorry.” She emphasizes on the pseudo-vowel and maybe he won’t think about the lack of clean dishes downstairs.
“I left you alone for a week-”
“-and I’ve been so lonely for a week.” She flips her hair to her left side, soft brown black curls licking her shoulders and hovering above the collar of her nightgown.
Zhoumi blinks.
Kyuyoung bats her eyelashes more.
Zhoumi stares in disbelief.
“Where are the twins?” Zhoumi breaks the silence and Kyuyoung misinterprets the sentence as the prelude to affection. Her lips curl up into a sugared smile.
“Asleep.” She makes sure to end the word with a pop on the ‘p’.
Kyuyoung traces imaginary circles in the soft duvet as she waits for her husband to take a step forward, but it never happens. Zhoumi swiftly (incredulously) turns on his heels and heads for the nursery. If she felt offended-dejected even-she didn’t show it.
She stares at the doorway and at the ghost of the person she married and picks up a pillow off the ground, hugging it as she resumes her drama. The house is a mess but it doesn’t matter; nothing would be different even if it were clean.
Zhoumi screams-waking up the sleeping toddlers-when he sees the state of the nursery. He screams because both his house and his marriage are equally likely to fall apart right now.
Zhoumi begins to question why they’re even married in the first place. He thinks the little bit of sanity he has left is beginning to deteriorate.
“We’re hiring some help.”
Kyuyoung blinks in response.
“Are you questioning my domestic abilities?” She sets down the bowl of pudding, “as a woman?”
Zhoumi doesn’t need to even take a look at the remains of what use to be a kitchen before swiftly answering.
“Yes. I am. I’m questioning, every bit of your abilities.” Zhoumi points to the sink, or rather, the lack thereof. “How is this even possible in a week?”
“It’s not that bad.”
“When did we even get this many dishes?”
“I bought them.” She continues stirring the pudding, “we were out of clean ones.”
“Wh-” Zhoumi gets cut off because Kyuyoung decides to take that exact moment to lick the pudding spoon clean, effectively getting it all over her plush pink lips. Is it just him or did her tongue get longer?
Zhoumi blinks.
“I thought you were on a diet.”
She licks the excess pudding off of her fingers.
“This is for the twins.”
She finishes with the spoon and makes it quite possibly the only piece of clean silverware in the whole house now.
Zhoumi stares in disbelief.
“We are really hiring a nanny.”
“I’m Taemin.” The boy tugs on his v-neck collar, which really, he might as well not be wearing because it practically reaches his naval. “I’m in the third grade of middle school.”
Zhoumi taps on the clipboard with his tentative authority.
“Tell me about your qualities.”
He chews on the tip of the pencil for the added effect.
“My mom kicked me out,” Taemin pops his gum.
There’s the sound of pencil on paper but other than that, the words of the previous sentence just simmer in the silence.
Taemin pops his gum again.
“Oh…” There’s more pencil on paper sounds and Zhoumi finishes adding the whiskers on the cat he’s doodling, “that’s. quite. interesting.”
Taemin leans forward on the couch and props his face up with his hands, rubbing his temples at the same time.
Pencil on paper.
“So what about any previous experience with children?”
Taemin closes his eyes and lets out an exasperated breath.
“I mean. I just really need a place to stay.” He crosses and uncrosses his legs and shifts his position on the floral printed sofa Kyuyoung insisted they needed to match the fengshui of the room, “I have no where to go and my boyfriend doesn’t want to deal with me either.”
Pencil scribbles on paper.
Zhoumi decides the cat should be darker and promptly goes over the light gray fur with heavier strokes. He rounds out the eyes and almost coos at the level of adorable the drawing as achieved.
“And how would you rate your own sense of responsibility.”
By this point, Taemin’s voice is dripping with desperation. He feels like the world is caving in on him and everyone in it is out to get him.
“It was just a small fight. I mean. I just didn’t want to go eat fast food with him even if it was his turn to pick the restaurant. Is it such a sin to want to watch my figure?”
The cat looks about finished and Zhoumi is pretty pleased with himself. The pencil sounds stop. He nods at his paper and contemplates his masterpiece.
“Ok, thanks.” He slaps the writing utensil onto the clipboard, “we’ll let you know.”
“How could he do this? I just didn’t want to eat fries.” Taemin starts bawling into his palms and Zhoumi is not quite sure what went wrong.
The next few interviews go just as swimmingly.
Zhoumi decides that Henry is unfit for the job in just one question.
“Do you even speak Korean?”
“Yes. I speak perfect Korean.” Henry answers in unstilted and unaccented English.
Zhoumi crosses his name out from the top of the page.
“Previous experience with children?”
“Oh. Well. I have a few cats.” Heechul says as he picks a piece of cat fur off of his shoulder.
Zhoumi hires him on the spot with just one question.
Zhoumi watches Kyuyoung put on all seven of her face creams in chronological order and he wonders when she started needing them. When was that exact moment when time eroded the confidence and all they were left with were facades and insufficient remedies for a smile?
Kyuyoung turns around with her own sugared smile. She walks over to the bed, silk nightgown teasing at the top of her thighs.
“Zhoumi…” the way she breathes his name is synonymous with a misplaced I miss you.
Zhoumi stares in disbelief again and wonders where his sanity has gone. He thinks about cats and decides to go downstairs for a glass of milk. On his way, he passes by the guest room, the door cracked and he swears he hears Heechul purring in his sleep.
Kyuyoung lets the unmade duvet fold in around her and she wonders when Zhoumi stopped liking sugar.
“Shhh…” Donghae puts a chubby finger to his lips.
HyukJae nods and tiptoes behind his brother, pudding bowl firmly in his small hands. Donghae hides his face in the pillow he is carrying and HyukJae hides behind him as they approach their sleeping parents, Sunday morning sunshine streaking through the blinds, softening their features, and mistakenly alluding to warmth despite the December air.
Donghae lifts up his own pillow and is about to bring it down on his father’s head when HyukJae holds out a hand and motions for him to stop.
“Wait!”
He stirs the spoon a few times before taking the biggest bite his mouth could hold and setting the bowl on the nightstand.
HyukJae comes back to his brother with pillow from the floor in tow and a mouth full of sticky chocolate pudding.
“Ok. Hngkdjfh-Ready.”
Kyuyoung giggles and Zhoumi thinks he breaks a few ribs when the rain of pillows and four year olds come crashing down on him, relentlessly throwing him out of his dreamland.
The twins jump on the unoccupied spaces of the bed and Kyuyoung attacks them after she fully embraces the morning. Zhoumi finds himself ignoring the cold and the blinding sun. Instead, he concentrates on how the way Kyuyoung holds the twins in her lap, soft brown black curls creating a comforting veil around them, radiates the kind of beauty that all her face creams combined could not market.
Zhoumi wonders where his sanity was in the first place.
He effectively stops questioning his sanity when Kyuyoung’s body suddenly falls into the crevices of his own, filling the voids and completing the pieces. Instead of questions, he’s hit with all the answers.
The answers are in the form of four bodies huddled together, savoring the last bits of morning.
The answers are in the form of her tracing the comforting circles on his chest and appeasing the pressure of his job that he had the unfortunate luck to inherit.
He lazily runs his hands through HyukJae’s soft hair and doesn’t even mind when Kyuyoung’s eyes drift shut again, her head uncomfortably heavy on his arm.
“Breakfast!” HyukJae and Donghae sing in unison as they decide they’re bored with just lying there and listening to their parents drift back to sleep. “Breakfast!”
Heechul’s listening to the symphony of shenanigans from the kitchen. He’s cleaning: dusting off the counter surfaces that aren’t covered with dishes and avoiding the sink all together. He picks another piece of cat fur off of his shoulder and stares at the dishes while the dishes stare back at him.
Heechul contemplates the china and runs a finger down the filthy counter tops.
“Hungry.”
“Breakfast.”
“Hungry.”
Zhoumi rubs his tired eyes, reluctance pumping through his veins. Kyuyoung mumbles a few syllables that kind of sound like pudding.
“Breakfast.”
Kyuyoung buries her face into Zhoumi’s chest and he tries not to think too much about it, but just revels in the warmth.
“Go ask Heechul nanny.” She whispers against his chest, her words dampening a small area near his heart.
“He says he’s busy-” Donghae begins.
“-and not to bother him.” HyukJae finishes.
Zhoumi pushes the blankets and Kyuyoung off of him and jumps out of bed, deciding immediately that he must be insane because it is really cold.
He’s pushing the cart down aisle five when the realization hits him. Zhoumi can’t remember the last time they went grocery shopping together, or rather, the last time he went grocery shopping with them.
He starts feeling uncomfortable in his own skin and a longer string of realizations follows suit. Zhoumi can’t even figure out when they last had a proper meal together, the last time he drove the twins to daycare, or when he even vacuumed the living room floor.
Suddenly, he knows where his sanity went. It never went anywhere, but he was never suppose to have it in the first place. He was suppose to lose it-every bit of it-the day he met Kyuyoung, but he never let go and that was where everything went wrong.
Zhoumi finds Kyuyoung in the breakfast aisle and he conclusively decides, in that exact moment, that the right way to fix everything would be to throw caution to the wind. He holds back his complaints when she decides to buy one of every type of cereal, claiming that they need to broaden their horizons, and he doesn’t even nag when they don’t bother to buy vegetables.
He throws caution to the wind when he uses his credit card instead of his debit and he throws caution when he drives five kilometers faster than the speed limit.
When they come home in the afternoon, after Zhoumi buys Kyuyoung some new face creams and negotiates with his dad about his frequent business trips and after lunch at KFC, they find the house in an immaculate state. Not just any normal immaculate state, but the kind in which the carpet even looks like it’s shining. The dishes are all put away, the sink no longer looks hostile, and the counter tops are actually white.
Heechul is nowhere to be seen but there’s a yellow sticky on the fridge. Going to my mother’s.
Zhoumi doesn’t even care because his house is in the best state it's ever been. He decides that Heechul is the reason his house and his marriage stands.
So he adopts a cat to celebrate.
“When did you get so beautiful?”
“When you stopped leaving.”
Zhoumi pulls Kyuyoung closer into his lap. The twins fight over the bowl of pudding and they fight over the remote for control of Saturday morning cartoons. He even lets her drool on his shirt when they fall asleep in front of the TV.
Zhoumi strokes HeeHee’s black fur and her eyes curl up into satisfying slits. He’s been throwing caution to the wind the whole week and decides that cleaning is caution.
When Heechul comes back from his mother’s house that week, he’s the one standing with his hands on his hips and Kyuyoung immediately jumps up from her napping state and turns to him, sticking her finger in her mouth for the added effect. Her soft brown black curls falling all around her as she attempts to distract Heechul from the lack of clean dishes, again, and the lack of a visible floor, again.
Zhoumi just blinks, again.
This entry was originally posted at http://sujuexchange.dreamwidth.org/9430.html?mode=reply. Please comment there using OpenID (i.e., your LJ account's URL).
Author: windlost
Recipient: nashirah
Characters/Pairings: Zhoumi/Kyuhyun
Rating: PG
Genre(s): Fluff, Crack
Warnings: Genderswitch
Author's Note: I think this is a pretty good collaboration of all of my incoherency in 2000 or so words.
Zhoumi thinks his frequent business trips will be the reason his marriage fails - that or the reason his house collapses.
“Kyuyoung.”
“Mm-“
“I thought we went over the rules.” Zhoumi stands with his hands on his hips in a way that showers him with temporary authority.
“Mmm-”
“Are you even listening to me?” Zhoumi drops his suitcase by the door and stares with his Intense Eyes.
Kyuyoung makes the exaggerated and exasperated motion of hitting the space bar on the keyboard.
“Yes, and I did everything you told me to.” She turns away from the computer and bats her eyelashes the way that Zhoumi supposedly goes crazy for.
“You did everything I told you not to.” Clearly, he was unaffected by her charm.
He wonders when that charm stopped working.
Kyuyoung looks at him for a moment, face devoid of emotion. There’s no welcoming him home because that’s not part of their routine. Rather, she jumps over to the bed, the unmade duvet folding in around her. She sits with her legs in a seductive manner, innocently sticking a finger into her mouth for the added effect, and, instead, attempts to draw attention away from the scattered week old laundry currently masquerading the carpet.
“I’m sorry.” She emphasizes on the pseudo-vowel and maybe he won’t think about the lack of clean dishes downstairs.
“I left you alone for a week-”
“-and I’ve been so lonely for a week.” She flips her hair to her left side, soft brown black curls licking her shoulders and hovering above the collar of her nightgown.
Zhoumi blinks.
Kyuyoung bats her eyelashes more.
Zhoumi stares in disbelief.
“Where are the twins?” Zhoumi breaks the silence and Kyuyoung misinterprets the sentence as the prelude to affection. Her lips curl up into a sugared smile.
“Asleep.” She makes sure to end the word with a pop on the ‘p’.
Kyuyoung traces imaginary circles in the soft duvet as she waits for her husband to take a step forward, but it never happens. Zhoumi swiftly (incredulously) turns on his heels and heads for the nursery. If she felt offended-dejected even-she didn’t show it.
She stares at the doorway and at the ghost of the person she married and picks up a pillow off the ground, hugging it as she resumes her drama. The house is a mess but it doesn’t matter; nothing would be different even if it were clean.
Zhoumi screams-waking up the sleeping toddlers-when he sees the state of the nursery. He screams because both his house and his marriage are equally likely to fall apart right now.
Zhoumi begins to question why they’re even married in the first place. He thinks the little bit of sanity he has left is beginning to deteriorate.
“We’re hiring some help.”
Kyuyoung blinks in response.
“Are you questioning my domestic abilities?” She sets down the bowl of pudding, “as a woman?”
Zhoumi doesn’t need to even take a look at the remains of what use to be a kitchen before swiftly answering.
“Yes. I am. I’m questioning, every bit of your abilities.” Zhoumi points to the sink, or rather, the lack thereof. “How is this even possible in a week?”
“It’s not that bad.”
“When did we even get this many dishes?”
“I bought them.” She continues stirring the pudding, “we were out of clean ones.”
“Wh-” Zhoumi gets cut off because Kyuyoung decides to take that exact moment to lick the pudding spoon clean, effectively getting it all over her plush pink lips. Is it just him or did her tongue get longer?
Zhoumi blinks.
“I thought you were on a diet.”
She licks the excess pudding off of her fingers.
“This is for the twins.”
She finishes with the spoon and makes it quite possibly the only piece of clean silverware in the whole house now.
Zhoumi stares in disbelief.
“We are really hiring a nanny.”
“I’m Taemin.” The boy tugs on his v-neck collar, which really, he might as well not be wearing because it practically reaches his naval. “I’m in the third grade of middle school.”
Zhoumi taps on the clipboard with his tentative authority.
“Tell me about your qualities.”
He chews on the tip of the pencil for the added effect.
“My mom kicked me out,” Taemin pops his gum.
There’s the sound of pencil on paper but other than that, the words of the previous sentence just simmer in the silence.
Taemin pops his gum again.
“Oh…” There’s more pencil on paper sounds and Zhoumi finishes adding the whiskers on the cat he’s doodling, “that’s. quite. interesting.”
Taemin leans forward on the couch and props his face up with his hands, rubbing his temples at the same time.
Pencil on paper.
“So what about any previous experience with children?”
Taemin closes his eyes and lets out an exasperated breath.
“I mean. I just really need a place to stay.” He crosses and uncrosses his legs and shifts his position on the floral printed sofa Kyuyoung insisted they needed to match the fengshui of the room, “I have no where to go and my boyfriend doesn’t want to deal with me either.”
Pencil scribbles on paper.
Zhoumi decides the cat should be darker and promptly goes over the light gray fur with heavier strokes. He rounds out the eyes and almost coos at the level of adorable the drawing as achieved.
“And how would you rate your own sense of responsibility.”
By this point, Taemin’s voice is dripping with desperation. He feels like the world is caving in on him and everyone in it is out to get him.
“It was just a small fight. I mean. I just didn’t want to go eat fast food with him even if it was his turn to pick the restaurant. Is it such a sin to want to watch my figure?”
The cat looks about finished and Zhoumi is pretty pleased with himself. The pencil sounds stop. He nods at his paper and contemplates his masterpiece.
“Ok, thanks.” He slaps the writing utensil onto the clipboard, “we’ll let you know.”
“How could he do this? I just didn’t want to eat fries.” Taemin starts bawling into his palms and Zhoumi is not quite sure what went wrong.
The next few interviews go just as swimmingly.
Zhoumi decides that Henry is unfit for the job in just one question.
“Do you even speak Korean?”
“Yes. I speak perfect Korean.” Henry answers in unstilted and unaccented English.
Zhoumi crosses his name out from the top of the page.
“Previous experience with children?”
“Oh. Well. I have a few cats.” Heechul says as he picks a piece of cat fur off of his shoulder.
Zhoumi hires him on the spot with just one question.
Zhoumi watches Kyuyoung put on all seven of her face creams in chronological order and he wonders when she started needing them. When was that exact moment when time eroded the confidence and all they were left with were facades and insufficient remedies for a smile?
Kyuyoung turns around with her own sugared smile. She walks over to the bed, silk nightgown teasing at the top of her thighs.
“Zhoumi…” the way she breathes his name is synonymous with a misplaced I miss you.
Zhoumi stares in disbelief again and wonders where his sanity has gone. He thinks about cats and decides to go downstairs for a glass of milk. On his way, he passes by the guest room, the door cracked and he swears he hears Heechul purring in his sleep.
Kyuyoung lets the unmade duvet fold in around her and she wonders when Zhoumi stopped liking sugar.
“Shhh…” Donghae puts a chubby finger to his lips.
HyukJae nods and tiptoes behind his brother, pudding bowl firmly in his small hands. Donghae hides his face in the pillow he is carrying and HyukJae hides behind him as they approach their sleeping parents, Sunday morning sunshine streaking through the blinds, softening their features, and mistakenly alluding to warmth despite the December air.
Donghae lifts up his own pillow and is about to bring it down on his father’s head when HyukJae holds out a hand and motions for him to stop.
“Wait!”
He stirs the spoon a few times before taking the biggest bite his mouth could hold and setting the bowl on the nightstand.
HyukJae comes back to his brother with pillow from the floor in tow and a mouth full of sticky chocolate pudding.
“Ok. Hngkdjfh-Ready.”
Kyuyoung giggles and Zhoumi thinks he breaks a few ribs when the rain of pillows and four year olds come crashing down on him, relentlessly throwing him out of his dreamland.
The twins jump on the unoccupied spaces of the bed and Kyuyoung attacks them after she fully embraces the morning. Zhoumi finds himself ignoring the cold and the blinding sun. Instead, he concentrates on how the way Kyuyoung holds the twins in her lap, soft brown black curls creating a comforting veil around them, radiates the kind of beauty that all her face creams combined could not market.
Zhoumi wonders where his sanity was in the first place.
He effectively stops questioning his sanity when Kyuyoung’s body suddenly falls into the crevices of his own, filling the voids and completing the pieces. Instead of questions, he’s hit with all the answers.
The answers are in the form of four bodies huddled together, savoring the last bits of morning.
The answers are in the form of her tracing the comforting circles on his chest and appeasing the pressure of his job that he had the unfortunate luck to inherit.
He lazily runs his hands through HyukJae’s soft hair and doesn’t even mind when Kyuyoung’s eyes drift shut again, her head uncomfortably heavy on his arm.
“Breakfast!” HyukJae and Donghae sing in unison as they decide they’re bored with just lying there and listening to their parents drift back to sleep. “Breakfast!”
Heechul’s listening to the symphony of shenanigans from the kitchen. He’s cleaning: dusting off the counter surfaces that aren’t covered with dishes and avoiding the sink all together. He picks another piece of cat fur off of his shoulder and stares at the dishes while the dishes stare back at him.
Heechul contemplates the china and runs a finger down the filthy counter tops.
“Hungry.”
“Breakfast.”
“Hungry.”
Zhoumi rubs his tired eyes, reluctance pumping through his veins. Kyuyoung mumbles a few syllables that kind of sound like pudding.
“Breakfast.”
Kyuyoung buries her face into Zhoumi’s chest and he tries not to think too much about it, but just revels in the warmth.
“Go ask Heechul nanny.” She whispers against his chest, her words dampening a small area near his heart.
“He says he’s busy-” Donghae begins.
“-and not to bother him.” HyukJae finishes.
Zhoumi pushes the blankets and Kyuyoung off of him and jumps out of bed, deciding immediately that he must be insane because it is really cold.
He’s pushing the cart down aisle five when the realization hits him. Zhoumi can’t remember the last time they went grocery shopping together, or rather, the last time he went grocery shopping with them.
He starts feeling uncomfortable in his own skin and a longer string of realizations follows suit. Zhoumi can’t even figure out when they last had a proper meal together, the last time he drove the twins to daycare, or when he even vacuumed the living room floor.
Suddenly, he knows where his sanity went. It never went anywhere, but he was never suppose to have it in the first place. He was suppose to lose it-every bit of it-the day he met Kyuyoung, but he never let go and that was where everything went wrong.
Zhoumi finds Kyuyoung in the breakfast aisle and he conclusively decides, in that exact moment, that the right way to fix everything would be to throw caution to the wind. He holds back his complaints when she decides to buy one of every type of cereal, claiming that they need to broaden their horizons, and he doesn’t even nag when they don’t bother to buy vegetables.
He throws caution to the wind when he uses his credit card instead of his debit and he throws caution when he drives five kilometers faster than the speed limit.
When they come home in the afternoon, after Zhoumi buys Kyuyoung some new face creams and negotiates with his dad about his frequent business trips and after lunch at KFC, they find the house in an immaculate state. Not just any normal immaculate state, but the kind in which the carpet even looks like it’s shining. The dishes are all put away, the sink no longer looks hostile, and the counter tops are actually white.
Heechul is nowhere to be seen but there’s a yellow sticky on the fridge. Going to my mother’s.
Zhoumi doesn’t even care because his house is in the best state it's ever been. He decides that Heechul is the reason his house and his marriage stands.
So he adopts a cat to celebrate.
“When did you get so beautiful?”
“When you stopped leaving.”
Zhoumi pulls Kyuyoung closer into his lap. The twins fight over the bowl of pudding and they fight over the remote for control of Saturday morning cartoons. He even lets her drool on his shirt when they fall asleep in front of the TV.
Zhoumi strokes HeeHee’s black fur and her eyes curl up into satisfying slits. He’s been throwing caution to the wind the whole week and decides that cleaning is caution.
When Heechul comes back from his mother’s house that week, he’s the one standing with his hands on his hips and Kyuyoung immediately jumps up from her napping state and turns to him, sticking her finger in her mouth for the added effect. Her soft brown black curls falling all around her as she attempts to distract Heechul from the lack of clean dishes, again, and the lack of a visible floor, again.
Zhoumi just blinks, again.
This entry was originally posted at http://sujuexchange.dreamwidth.org/9430.html?mode=reply. Please comment there using OpenID (i.e., your LJ account's URL).