the ministry of exo and the half-blood prince of changsha
Some AU Fics I Have Planned (And Will Never Write) #2:
like breathing was easy
harry potter au: kris is a curse breaker for gringotts. lu han is his muggle childhood friend. yixing is a healer. cancer is cancer, and tom riddle is forever. [warning]character death
Yixing is the only one of Kris' friends to ever meet Lu Han. He showed up at Kris' apartment one afternoon, expecting Kris to still be in Xi'an, but the door opened to a fully lit living room, the kitchen buzzing with the sound of a hot wok, a stranger's voice calling out in unaccented Mandarin, "Wu Fan, you have a visitor."
No one at Hogwarts ever called Kris by his Chinese name, not even Yixing, who still speaks some Mandarin, mostly to his parents, and had bonded with Kris on their first day by reciting Chinese tongue twisters. But Lu Han was special to Kris in ways Yixing would never be. This was just one of the many.
Kris always introduced Lu Han as a starving artist. Lu Han always introduced himself as Kris' older brother. Neither of these things were strictly lies, but neither of them were the full truth. Lu Han was older, an artist, not a wizard, and was, to Yixing's professional eye, ghastly underweight. He had anemia, a low appetite, unnaturally bright eyes, and an ease with Kris that no one else shared. Around Lu Han, Kris was unchanged: gruff, overprotective, naggy. But when Lu Han was around and Kris was in another room, in the kitchen cutting vegetables or having Yixing help him set the table, Kris was distracted in a way Yixing had never seen him, constantly looking over his shoulder and calling out for Lu Han, asking him if he was all right.
"Your brother?" Yixing had asked that evening, as Lu Han slept on the couch and Yixing slept in Kris' bed.
"Childhood friend," Kris grunted, and pulled the blanket tighter around their bare shoulders.
There were things that Yixing knew but Kris pretended were still secrets. That Kris was not from a poor family, and didn't need a high-paying, high-risk job to support himself in style. That despite having a high-paying high-risk job, Kris did not, in fact, live in style. That Kris had two apartments, the one Yixing sometimes stayed in after nights of hard drinking in wizarding London, and another one in Surrey, close to the Royal Marsden. That despite years of being Kris' classmate, Kris' drinking buddy, sometimes Kris' no-longer-one-night-stand, despite there never being a girlfriend in the picture, Yixing was never Kris' favorite. The first time meeting Lu Han, Yixing had watched Kris busy in the kitchen making tea and dinner without magic, Lu Han singing old Chinese ditties with his impossibly skinny bare feet on the armrests, and he knew this was another secret, another thing he would pretend he didn't know.
Yixing had turned away, then and later, so as not to see more.
-
Yixing is a Healer and spends his life in the broken seams of other people's lives, bringing those pieces together the way only magic knew how. But there are things that magic can't heal. This was the hardest lesson for Yixing to learn when he graduated Hogwarts and begun his apprenticeship with St. Mungo's. Magic can do a lot of things Muggle medicine can't do, but death worked the same on wizards and Muggles alike. We can heal better, Yixing's mentor had said, but better doesn't mean eternal life.
The night before his first big trip as part of Gringott's staff, Kris had given Yixing the keys to his London apartment, so you can water the plants when I'm away. It was a joke. Kris kept no plants in his apartment. But Kris did keep Lu Han's medical records in his apartment, and a few years later, while carrying in a stack of mail, Yixing spotted the sheets of paper, neatly printed by computers and not by hand, folded on Kris' kitchen table.
Yixing is a half-blood. His mother was the witch; his father, a research biologist. Nothing in life is immortal, he'd once told Yixing. But then he pointed at a grainy black and white photo of human chromosomes in one his reports, the noodle-like tubes with brightly lit ends, and said, this comes close.
At eight, the word telomerase sounded like a spell. But at twenty four, flipping through the medical bills and drug descriptions made in Lu Han's name, Yixing had known that the strongest, most powerful words were neither charms nor curses. Sometimes they were just words that spoke truths no one could change or harness. Kris, Yixing thought, understood that.
-
When Kris graduated from Hogwarts and begun his apprenticeship with Gringotts, the Boy Who Lived was the only known living speaker of Parseltongue. In the last weeks of Harry Potter's life, the Ministry sent over a linguistics expert to interview him. What knowledge he still had by then (he hadn't spoken in years) was etched into meters of magical tape and compared with snake and human anatomy so as to approximate a written pronunciation guide. Filed away in the Ministry of Magic records department, the report was the most complete record of Parseltongue. But even with the report, it would still take years of careful study and a life's work for someone to actually learn how to speak. The expert had concluded, we are better off waiting for another of Salazaar Slytherin's descendants to emerge.
When the Boy Who Lived finally died, in the early morning hours, his wife by his side, there were no known living speakers of Parseltongue left. Then, Kris was twenty-two, a newly certified Curse Breaker. Shortly afterwards, he bought his first flat outside London, close to the hospital Lu Han frequented for his chemotherapy treatments. It was absurdly run-down and took an hour to commute into the city. Kris said it he liked having space away from all the idiots he knew in school; Yixing explained, to anyone who asked, that Kris liked it for the large windows, which let in light perfect for an artist's studio.
When Lu Han eventually died, in the early morning hours, swathed in blankets and and a thin smile of acceptance, in a hospital room with no one, not even Kris, by his side, there were no known living speakers of Parseltongue left. That would remain true until ten years later, when rumors start up of a man who rose from the ashes of the Pindus forest fire, his face smeared with venom, the last of Nagini's daughters twined around his neck. His tongue was forked, the villagers tell Baekhyun, when he and his team of Unspeakables go to investigate. He spoke like a snake. His hair was scorched gold by the flames. He moved like sunlight on the surface of a lake, like a shadow in the water.
"He was looking for the dead," one of the eyewitnesses insists, jabbing her finger into the distance. The arc of her outstretched hand shoots through the trees, over land, over water, through buildings and buildings and buildings, and Baekhyun thinks about flying, the arc of seventh-year Kris' broom as he dove, head first, for the glint of the Snitch, the gold of Lu Han's hair the one and only time Baekhyun ever saw him as they crossed paths in the lobby of Kris' apartment, Kris' sprawled handwriting at the checkout desk of the Records Department, next to the title of a report bound carelessly and never read, now missing.
That evening, Baekhyun sends an owl in the same direction, to London, where Yixing is staying in Kris' abandoned flat. Yixing is asleep, exhausted after a midnight shift at St. Mungo's, when the owl arrives. So it isn't until the afternoon, when he wakes up to a stray owl feather drifting into his mouth, that Yixing digs through his stacked treatises on dragon pox and hexes to find a folded piece of old parchment about the size of Yixing's palm, covered from front to back with detailed instructions on how to dispose of Lu Han's body. Impersonal and brusque to the end, Kris hadn't even said a word of goodbye when he'd given Yixing the letter ten years ago. But now, Yixing thinks, maybe it was only because Kris wasn't saying goodbye at all.
-
Immortality is such a selfish thing, Yixing had said to Kris once.
They were still in sixth year, sitting in the Charms classroom, Yixing trying an advanced healing spell for the third unsuccessful time. Kris was sitting by the window, the light streaming in behind him so that his face, silhouetted, was unreadable, when he had replied, What if you want it for someone else?
But you only want it for the people you want to survive, Yixing had said.
What if you trade your life for theirs instead? Kris had countered.
No spells can do that, Yixing reminded him, and that was the end of that.
Years after Baekhyun's owl, ashy and tired from Albania, wakes him up from sleep, Yixing will treat a man who accidentally drained all his memories into a Pensieve. It will be the first time Yixing encountered a real Pensieve, and he will spend weeks afterwards wondering what memories he would choose to empty and revisit, if he could. Maybe his father's face when he found out Yixing was, after all, a wizard, or the first time he had successfully completed an operation as an apprentice Healer. But this memory of sixth-year Kris will never be a candidate. It remains too clear, too distinct, in Yixing's mind. He will remember, always, Kris' large hands flattening the pages of an advanced History of Magic text. He will remember, always, that the book was opened to the last chapters, spread out in clean black and white, gleaming in the early afternoon sunlight. He will remember, always, that they were the chapters on the seconding Wizarding War, and Tom Riddle.
Yixing will remember, always, the smile on Kris' face when he turned away from Yixing and towards the windows of the Charms classroom, how it seemed ancient and beyond desire, how it was the look on his face when he handed Yixing his final words in English, how it was the smile on his face when he turned from Yixing towards the narrow doorway separating the kitchen and the living room, to see Lu Han, alive and laughing, on his couch.
clumsily written in the style of the harry potter canon and fanon that raised me when i was still a complete fanfic novice, and set to "angels", by the xx. this story might be confusing, so, basically -- lu han dies of cancer and kris starts learning parseltongue because he thinks he can duplicate tom riddle's work with immortality. he leaves yixing with a letter detailing how to preserve lu han's body so he can revive it. when baekhyun sends yixing the owl describing what he saw, yixing knows that kris has come back for lu han's body. i intended, originally, for the revived body to be kris' soul split into lu han's corpse but it's open to interpretation ._.
like breathing was easy
harry potter au: kris is a curse breaker for gringotts. lu han is his muggle childhood friend. yixing is a healer. cancer is cancer, and tom riddle is forever. [warning]character death
Yixing is the only one of Kris' friends to ever meet Lu Han. He showed up at Kris' apartment one afternoon, expecting Kris to still be in Xi'an, but the door opened to a fully lit living room, the kitchen buzzing with the sound of a hot wok, a stranger's voice calling out in unaccented Mandarin, "Wu Fan, you have a visitor."
No one at Hogwarts ever called Kris by his Chinese name, not even Yixing, who still speaks some Mandarin, mostly to his parents, and had bonded with Kris on their first day by reciting Chinese tongue twisters. But Lu Han was special to Kris in ways Yixing would never be. This was just one of the many.
Kris always introduced Lu Han as a starving artist. Lu Han always introduced himself as Kris' older brother. Neither of these things were strictly lies, but neither of them were the full truth. Lu Han was older, an artist, not a wizard, and was, to Yixing's professional eye, ghastly underweight. He had anemia, a low appetite, unnaturally bright eyes, and an ease with Kris that no one else shared. Around Lu Han, Kris was unchanged: gruff, overprotective, naggy. But when Lu Han was around and Kris was in another room, in the kitchen cutting vegetables or having Yixing help him set the table, Kris was distracted in a way Yixing had never seen him, constantly looking over his shoulder and calling out for Lu Han, asking him if he was all right.
"Your brother?" Yixing had asked that evening, as Lu Han slept on the couch and Yixing slept in Kris' bed.
"Childhood friend," Kris grunted, and pulled the blanket tighter around their bare shoulders.
There were things that Yixing knew but Kris pretended were still secrets. That Kris was not from a poor family, and didn't need a high-paying, high-risk job to support himself in style. That despite having a high-paying high-risk job, Kris did not, in fact, live in style. That Kris had two apartments, the one Yixing sometimes stayed in after nights of hard drinking in wizarding London, and another one in Surrey, close to the Royal Marsden. That despite years of being Kris' classmate, Kris' drinking buddy, sometimes Kris' no-longer-one-night-stand, despite there never being a girlfriend in the picture, Yixing was never Kris' favorite. The first time meeting Lu Han, Yixing had watched Kris busy in the kitchen making tea and dinner without magic, Lu Han singing old Chinese ditties with his impossibly skinny bare feet on the armrests, and he knew this was another secret, another thing he would pretend he didn't know.
Yixing had turned away, then and later, so as not to see more.
-
Yixing is a Healer and spends his life in the broken seams of other people's lives, bringing those pieces together the way only magic knew how. But there are things that magic can't heal. This was the hardest lesson for Yixing to learn when he graduated Hogwarts and begun his apprenticeship with St. Mungo's. Magic can do a lot of things Muggle medicine can't do, but death worked the same on wizards and Muggles alike. We can heal better, Yixing's mentor had said, but better doesn't mean eternal life.
The night before his first big trip as part of Gringott's staff, Kris had given Yixing the keys to his London apartment, so you can water the plants when I'm away. It was a joke. Kris kept no plants in his apartment. But Kris did keep Lu Han's medical records in his apartment, and a few years later, while carrying in a stack of mail, Yixing spotted the sheets of paper, neatly printed by computers and not by hand, folded on Kris' kitchen table.
Yixing is a half-blood. His mother was the witch; his father, a research biologist. Nothing in life is immortal, he'd once told Yixing. But then he pointed at a grainy black and white photo of human chromosomes in one his reports, the noodle-like tubes with brightly lit ends, and said, this comes close.
At eight, the word telomerase sounded like a spell. But at twenty four, flipping through the medical bills and drug descriptions made in Lu Han's name, Yixing had known that the strongest, most powerful words were neither charms nor curses. Sometimes they were just words that spoke truths no one could change or harness. Kris, Yixing thought, understood that.
-
When Kris graduated from Hogwarts and begun his apprenticeship with Gringotts, the Boy Who Lived was the only known living speaker of Parseltongue. In the last weeks of Harry Potter's life, the Ministry sent over a linguistics expert to interview him. What knowledge he still had by then (he hadn't spoken in years) was etched into meters of magical tape and compared with snake and human anatomy so as to approximate a written pronunciation guide. Filed away in the Ministry of Magic records department, the report was the most complete record of Parseltongue. But even with the report, it would still take years of careful study and a life's work for someone to actually learn how to speak. The expert had concluded, we are better off waiting for another of Salazaar Slytherin's descendants to emerge.
When the Boy Who Lived finally died, in the early morning hours, his wife by his side, there were no known living speakers of Parseltongue left. Then, Kris was twenty-two, a newly certified Curse Breaker. Shortly afterwards, he bought his first flat outside London, close to the hospital Lu Han frequented for his chemotherapy treatments. It was absurdly run-down and took an hour to commute into the city. Kris said it he liked having space away from all the idiots he knew in school; Yixing explained, to anyone who asked, that Kris liked it for the large windows, which let in light perfect for an artist's studio.
When Lu Han eventually died, in the early morning hours, swathed in blankets and and a thin smile of acceptance, in a hospital room with no one, not even Kris, by his side, there were no known living speakers of Parseltongue left. That would remain true until ten years later, when rumors start up of a man who rose from the ashes of the Pindus forest fire, his face smeared with venom, the last of Nagini's daughters twined around his neck. His tongue was forked, the villagers tell Baekhyun, when he and his team of Unspeakables go to investigate. He spoke like a snake. His hair was scorched gold by the flames. He moved like sunlight on the surface of a lake, like a shadow in the water.
"He was looking for the dead," one of the eyewitnesses insists, jabbing her finger into the distance. The arc of her outstretched hand shoots through the trees, over land, over water, through buildings and buildings and buildings, and Baekhyun thinks about flying, the arc of seventh-year Kris' broom as he dove, head first, for the glint of the Snitch, the gold of Lu Han's hair the one and only time Baekhyun ever saw him as they crossed paths in the lobby of Kris' apartment, Kris' sprawled handwriting at the checkout desk of the Records Department, next to the title of a report bound carelessly and never read, now missing.
That evening, Baekhyun sends an owl in the same direction, to London, where Yixing is staying in Kris' abandoned flat. Yixing is asleep, exhausted after a midnight shift at St. Mungo's, when the owl arrives. So it isn't until the afternoon, when he wakes up to a stray owl feather drifting into his mouth, that Yixing digs through his stacked treatises on dragon pox and hexes to find a folded piece of old parchment about the size of Yixing's palm, covered from front to back with detailed instructions on how to dispose of Lu Han's body. Impersonal and brusque to the end, Kris hadn't even said a word of goodbye when he'd given Yixing the letter ten years ago. But now, Yixing thinks, maybe it was only because Kris wasn't saying goodbye at all.
-
Immortality is such a selfish thing, Yixing had said to Kris once.
They were still in sixth year, sitting in the Charms classroom, Yixing trying an advanced healing spell for the third unsuccessful time. Kris was sitting by the window, the light streaming in behind him so that his face, silhouetted, was unreadable, when he had replied, What if you want it for someone else?
But you only want it for the people you want to survive, Yixing had said.
What if you trade your life for theirs instead? Kris had countered.
No spells can do that, Yixing reminded him, and that was the end of that.
Years after Baekhyun's owl, ashy and tired from Albania, wakes him up from sleep, Yixing will treat a man who accidentally drained all his memories into a Pensieve. It will be the first time Yixing encountered a real Pensieve, and he will spend weeks afterwards wondering what memories he would choose to empty and revisit, if he could. Maybe his father's face when he found out Yixing was, after all, a wizard, or the first time he had successfully completed an operation as an apprentice Healer. But this memory of sixth-year Kris will never be a candidate. It remains too clear, too distinct, in Yixing's mind. He will remember, always, Kris' large hands flattening the pages of an advanced History of Magic text. He will remember, always, that the book was opened to the last chapters, spread out in clean black and white, gleaming in the early afternoon sunlight. He will remember, always, that they were the chapters on the seconding Wizarding War, and Tom Riddle.
Yixing will remember, always, the smile on Kris' face when he turned away from Yixing and towards the windows of the Charms classroom, how it seemed ancient and beyond desire, how it was the look on his face when he handed Yixing his final words in English, how it was the smile on his face when he turned from Yixing towards the narrow doorway separating the kitchen and the living room, to see Lu Han, alive and laughing, on his couch.
clumsily written in the style of the harry potter canon and fanon that raised me when i was still a complete fanfic novice, and set to "angels", by the xx. this story might be confusing, so, basically -- lu han dies of cancer and kris starts learning parseltongue because he thinks he can duplicate tom riddle's work with immortality. he leaves yixing with a letter detailing how to preserve lu han's body so he can revive it. when baekhyun sends yixing the owl describing what he saw, yixing knows that kris has come back for lu han's body. i intended, originally, for the revived body to be kris' soul split into lu han's corpse but it's open to interpretation ._.