±0.001% (rounded off to three decimal places) [8/?]
Title: ±0.001% (rounded off to three decimal places) [8/?]
Pairing: Kyumin
Rating: PG13 (rn)
Word Count: ~3,100
Summary: Sungmin is a greeting card writer. He's good only at sympathy cards and rude only to Dr. Cho.
Beta: teexsaurus. she's delicious :9
Chapter 9 [1/2]: -
Before the word ‘hell’ left his mouth, the man sank his foot into the accelerator and Sungmin slammed back into his seat. But that was only something akin to throwing a rag doll against the wall.
“Strap yourself in!” he yelled when a quick glance over revealed that all Sungmin did was to continue staring wide eyed at the dashboard. The car was speeding at two hundred kilometers per hour. “If I die because of you,” he hissed through clenched teeth, one hand leaving the steering wheel and reaching across the stoic Sungmin to grab his seat belt. His fingertips just barely grazed it. “I will make sure you’re coming along with me. Or at least maim you.” He made for the belt again, leaving only his toes on the pedal now. “Make you wheelchair bound for the rest of your life and I’m going to haunt you. Do you know how much I’m insured for?” he grunted while he buckled down Sungmin. “A fucking hundred million won, ok. One hundred million won. That’s way more than what your sorry life is going to cost. Are you listening?” He resumed his seat only to see a truck heading towards him at full speed.
He had driven into the opposite lane.
There wasn’t even enough time to scream but his mouth dropped in shock anyway. Giving the wheel a sharp twist, he steered the car back into the lane in the next second. There was silence for approximately ten counts as the stranger tried to muster a reaction capable of expressing his fury but he could only come up with the age-old, “I’m going to. Kill. You.” Then he looked thoughtful. “I’m going to tie you onto the railway tracks and watch a train cut you into half.” Now, that wasn’t very original, he thought. “I’m going to kick you off the N Seoul Tower-”He would have continued planning but when he checked the mirror, he saw Sungmin sitting as impassively as a photograph and headlights pressing on them from behind.
“I should have just left you there to be run over. Why am I so kind?” he sighed heavily.
. . . . .
He parked the flashy red car in the hostel’s car park where it shone like a ruby amongst filthy rocks, then towed Sungmin to a shabby but reasonably clean room. In his usual loud fashion, he had kicked the door open and startled the man who had been waiting inside.
“Anyone following you?”
“Ditched them at the expressway. Don’t worry, Mr. Park, no one died. Excessive worry is brain reducing. Before you know it, you’ll have a stroke, get a blood clot and slowly die from brain cancer. But I’m nice so I’ll hire you a nurse,” he half-pulled Sungmin through the door and pushed him into the chair in front of the dressing table.
Mr. Park got up from the bed where he was sitting and ran to close the door. “Have you learned nothing!?” He snuck a quick look through the peephole before retrieving a yellow hanky from the pocket of his grey blazer and mopped his perspiration-dotted forehead. “As of today, you are grounded. No more parties, no more late night outs. I’m most certainly not going to rescue you again.” Dear affable middle-aged Mr. Park tried to pierce each word with a dominating look but then he caught sight of Sungmin. “I told you not to take them home,” he frowned. “He looks too nice for you.” Mr. Park reached out to straighten Sungmin’s glasses which were skewing wildly off his nose, but his hand was grabbed by the man.
“This is not home, in fact, it’s just the place, if you know what I mean,” he winked, steering Mr. Park to the door and opening it. “It’s late, your son is waiting for you to tuck him in, goodbye,” he sang. The abandoned man managed to squeeze in the line, ‘There better not be a next time or I’m confiscating your car!’ before the room disappeared behind the door.
After he had forcefully evacuated Mr. Park, he stalked back, sat on the bed opposite Sungmin and stared thoughtfully at him with a fist propping his chin. The perpetual astonished look had ended its run. Blankness now decorated those eyes which disappeared every time his lids drooped. And blinking was all Sungmin seemed to be doing. Suddenly, there was a crashing sound outside. Just one of those crashing sounds you sometimes hear in the middle of the night when you’re feeling terribly exhausted by life but just can’t fall asleep for some inexplicable reason. Just another crashing sound someone made because he was throwing some particularly heavy piece of unwanted furniture or because two people were having a lover’s tiff somewhere and a vase had to be thrown. Anyway, there was a crashing sound. It stilled Sungmin’s lids for a moment so his next blink was a second too long.
The man lifted his hand and deliberated, “Really, it’s not as if I want to do this.” Then he brought his hand down and slapped the back of Sungmin’s head. Those glasses finally plunged off Sungmin’s nose and fell to the floor.
“Well,” he mumbled, staring at his hand, “that didn’t sound as hollow as I thought it would.”
Sungmin’s head was tilted off its axis. He slowly righted himself. “What was that for?” His voice was quiet, still a little devoid of emotion. Then he squinted when he realized his vision had gone haywire. The stranger picked his glasses off the ground and handed it over to him. Sungmin’s manners took over, “Thank you.” He put on his glasses and glanced around the room for the first time.
The man quirked an eyebrow. Bespectacled dude actually seemed pretty normal. As normal as anyone who had just been dragged off a highway and into an unknown hostel anyway. He decided to test him to see whether the little one matched up to his sanity standards. It wouldn’t take a lot. “Who am I!” he exclaimed pompously, as if he had already given his name.
“Do we know each other?” Sungmin’s eyes swept over his face in search of recognition. When he failed to find any, he murmured, “You know, you can’t get brain cancer from a blood clot.”
The tiny twitch in the corner of the man’s lips threw his symmetrical face off balance. But as far as pissed off faces went, it was still mightily aesthetically pleasing. “You don’t know me? Look carefully,” He pressed on and then Sungmin was gazing so fiercely at him that he squirmed a little and it usually took truckloads of mealworms to make him fidget. “No,” Sungmin answered honestly and the glare dimmed into a fairly interested look, “Unless we’ve met in the loo the other day and you have a habit of staring at inappropriate body parts?”
“I’m not a good person but I can honestly say that I’ve never been to the ladies before,” the man said dryly. “Do you know how you got here?” he asked quickly before Sungmin could retort.
“You picked me off the road, pushed me into your car, dragged me into this room and now you’re asking me if I know how I got here?”
“I thought you were shocked into retardation. Why did you follow a stranger if you even had any idea what was going on? What were you thinking, running on the highway like that?”
“I,” Sungmin bit his lip; always the first sign of his distress. “I was just thinking really hard about things.” Then his chin shot up. “You didn’t do anything to me anyway.” At the back of his mind, it did vaguely registered on him what was happening but it was more like he was taking a backseat, watching a movie in slow motion, catching only the motions but none of the dialogue. The other part of him, the part that was in charge of making all those functional decisions had been silenced into submission by the monster in him. He just needed time to get back; for the cycle to pass. It had been some time but he was well acquainted with that little routine. The head slap was a great catalyst though.
A snappy remark was being transmitted from the man’s healthy brain to his tongue but he halted when he saw Sungmin’s hands; torn and still bleeding from the fall he took. Scowling, he hauled Sungmin to the bathroom and ran cold water from the tap. Then he took Sungmin’s hands and put them under the running water.
“You know, from the way I’ve been manhandled tonight, people would have thought my handicap were my legs,” Sungmin mocked himself. “Ouch!” he yelped when the guy started to press on his wounds. The water lapped at the blood that pushed through the split skin and made swirling patterns on the porcelain of the basin.
“You’re handicapped? Doesn’t look like it,” the man smiled and the hard pressure he had on Sungmin’s hands was reduced to gentle prods. ‘This feels weird,’ he thought, ‘weird and nice at the same time. What’s that word for weird and nice? OK, now I’m just weird.’
“Not really,” Sungmin frowned. “I don’t know, I just feel handicapped sometimes.”
“So you’re not handicapped. You just feel handicapped. Sometimes I wish I had a couple more hands too, punch more stupid people,” he grumbled, cleaning out tiny stones from the cuts.
Sungmin suddenly felt like he had something to prove. “This is black,” Sungmin pulled his hand out from his grasp. He held his right hand up in front of the man’s face; a trickle of red was making a meandering path down his palm and over his wrist.
“No, that’s blood. It’s red. If you’re trying to be a smartass-“
“This is grey,” he pulled his other hand out from the water and pointed at the small purple bottle of body foam at the sink. There was a note of urgency in his voice. “This is grey,” he pointed at the silver showerhead. Then he spun around and walked hurriedly out of the bathroom. Completely taken back, the stranger followed his footsteps. “This is grey,” Sungmin continued explaining his case, stabbing a finger in the direction of the yellow curtains. His finger traced paths and curves in midair like smoke from a cigarette as it danced from one object to another. “This is, is,” he stuttered, losing his footing when he came to the cream colored dressing table, “white.” He finally decided. It didn’t matter anyway. His heart was beating too fast, his breathing too shallow and every breath seemed to urge tears from his eyes, words from his tongue, confessions from his being. The room was so quiet, he didn’t want to know who was making all those harsh sounds; sounds of a broken man. But he knew all the same. Somewhere within him, something was giving way. His eyes flickered until they met the man’s own. He looked positively stunned and that spilled the first tear.
He really didn’t want to cry.
“I lied tonight. I can see grey too. In fact, everything is grey and then there are specks of black and white. But I wasn’t born like this…”
There is something oddly reassuring about strangers. They bring with them an air of nonchalance and probably won’t waste a penny on buying any of your secrets. So Sungmin told him everything.
. . . . .
When Sungmin returned home the next morning, he opened the front door and hit something which emitted a ‘Oooff!’. He peeked around the door and saw Kyuhyun lying on the floor in a fetal position, cradling his head in his arms. He was wearing the same clothes from yesterday, Sungmin noticed with a twinge of guilt. He considered apologizing for his behavior last night. Now that he had vented, his thoughts became especially clear. ‘When a friend brings you to somewhere nice, you usually don’t run off half sobbing and make them sleep at the door, waiting for you all night.’
Were they friends now?
Sungmin guessed so.
He kneeled down beside Kyuhyun, extending his hand to rub the sore spot. But at the last second, he hesitated and it turned into an insistent prodding at the side instead. “Are you alright?”
Kyuhyun shot upright when he heard Sungmin’s voice. The pain was momentarily washed away by relief. “Where have you been! I was…” He sounded angry at first, but the anger faded out fast and there was an abrupt sense of helplessness. Even his shoulders drooped. Before Sungmin could say anything to rectify his despondence though, Kyuhyun moved.
“You cried,” he said softly, smoothing the cool pads of his thumbs over Sungmin’s puffy eyelids from under his glasses. It felt soothing but Sungmin flinched. There was an intensity in Kyuhyun’s eyes that he had never seen before. Or maybe that was just because he had never really looked at Kyuhyun. Why did he have to look so sad? Sungmin averted his eyes because he didn’t know what else to do. “I didn’t.”
The fact that Kyuhyun didn’t refute his blatant lie made Sungmin bristled. He settled on getting through with what he had to do, “Look, last night-“
“I’m sorry,” Kyuhyun whispered instead, seizing the words from his mouth and Sungmin stiffened because he didn’t want him to apologize. He had listened to a lot of apologies before and he hated them because it was confusing. Were people apologizing for his condition of which they weren’t responsible for or because they felt bad for him? Or was it merely a convenient way to bring the unfortunate subject to a close? But then Kyuhyun mumbled, “I shouldn’t have allowed you to leave like that, I should have gone after you. Did you get lost? The place was so dark and obscured. If you had told me beforehand, I wouldn’t have brought you there.” His tone was quite accusatory in his last sentence. Sungmin couldn’t believe his ears. People were usually tripping over themselves trying to make him feel better.
“Do you want breakfast?” Kyuhyun got up and moved to the kitchen, shedding an invisible shell of emotions in the process. Sungmin nodded dumbly at his back, jaw slightly slackened. He wasn’t the least bit hungry. Without even checking Sungmin’s answer, Kyuhyun started to pull out dishes from the fridge.
“You’re cooking?” Sungmin asked when he had pulled himself together and followed Kyuhyun into the kitchen. He sat down at the dining table and watched him. “You don’t know how to cook.”
“Don’t flatter yourself, who said I was going to cook? I am just going to reheat stuff.” Kyuhyun was beginning to sound cheery again and Sungmin heaved an internal sigh of relief. “So where were you last night?”
Sungmin’s brain tried not to run into walls. “I was staying with a friend,” he lied. Another lie but he thought it was necessary. Lying was so much easier than revisiting the past; something he had already been through last night.
Kyuhyun was trying to figure out how to use the microwave but he paused and turned around to face Sungmin. “You have no friends,” he stated flatly.
“I do too,” Sungmin protested.
“OK,” Kyuhyun resumed his microwave game. “Aha!” he exclaimed when he finally got it working. “What’s your friend’s name?”
Sungmin's mind worked frantically to come up with a name, “Eunhyuk.”
“And the name of your second imaginary friend?”
Sungmin twisted his lips.
“It’s just that you never go out and you never talk about yourself.” The microwave beeped. Kyuhyun retrieved the plate of pasta and placed it in front of Sungmin together with a fork. Then he sat down opposite him, “I should meet this Eunhyuk sometime.”
“Sure,” Sungmin muttered without any meaning to commit himself. He picked up the fork and stabbed penne with it. Then he stilled. “Does Ryeowook know?”
Kyuhyun shrugged. “If you want to tell him, you’ll tell him. He has already left for work though. So,” he adopted the thinker’s pose, “what is it like to be colorblind?”
Penne dropped from Sungmin’s mouth. “What?” No one had ever asked him this question. It had ‘Sensitive’ stamped all over it. It would be too rude, too cruel to ask this of him. Everyone was too busy trying to skirt away from the subject anyway. Kyuhyun was clearly beyond that. It was as if he was asking him for his opinion on the catch of the day at the fish market (“What do you think about those dead salmon eyes?”).
“I don’t know how to answer that,” Sungmin replied, just a tad too agitated. “What was it like to attend high school five years earlier than your peers?” he shot back.
Kyuhyun sat up a little straighter. “How did you know about that?”
Sungmin appeared to have suddenly developed piles for he couldn’t stop fidgeting in his seat. “You are my subject, it’s only right I do some research on you…” He didn’t mean to blurt that out. He felt mean. “Erm, I didn’t mean to…“
“I don’t know how to answer that,” Kyuhyun threw Sungmin’s words back to him and smiled. The chick had somewhat invested in him. That was a good sign. He relaxed his spine and rested his forearms back on the table.
“You know how to determine the trajectory of a curved ball, how to construct a spaceship, but you don’t know how to express yourself? How classic.” Sungmin’s good nature was always too easily displaced when he was around Kyuhyun.
“I am somewhat a noob expert on aerodynamics, yes, but I have absolutely no idea how to propel myself into outer space. Come to think of it, people wrote laws for energy conversions, for fluid flow, whatever. But no one wrote a law for people. Like, 'Every sad person needs to have chocolate' or 'The relationship between A and B is a smile' or, or, I don’t know, 'Every storm is a chance to dance in the rain'? I think I read that last one somewhere though.”
“Dance in the rain,” Sungmin numbly repeated those last words. He chewed and rolled them around his tongue. They tasted foreign. “Dance in the rain,” he said again, just for emphasis. It sounded like it should come out of a book and not from someone’s mouth; certainly not from Dr. Cho’s mouth anyway. Then he narrowed his eyes. Was he trying to dispense advice in a roundabout way or was he just imitating some quote device?
“I have chocolate and a lot of questions,” Kyuhyun leaned forward. “We can trade answers.”
He looked so sincere that Sungmin wanted to run away again. “I think it’s time for work,” he said aloud and got up from the table. Then he forced himself to walk slowly out of the kitchen.
It was only when Sungmin left then did Kyuhyun allowed the lights in his eyes to go out.
to be continued
p.s.: this took longer than expected cos i was rly busy irl and now i'm busy for the lunar new year ORZ hmmm i'm more sorry about the fact that scenes were long drawn and these 3 scenes took 3.1k words, so it seemed like there were zero developments. meep (this means 'sorry'). this is only part 1 of the chapter. happy lunar new year~ :D
p.p.s.: bloopers are constantly being updated~~
edit: edited a tiny bit cos i'm so fail ;_; but min was lying to kyu, it was not eunhyuk who was with min in the hostel. sorry if that was unclear orz (eunhyuk was sungmin's colleague; appeared in chpt1 before, remember? ;o;)
Pairing: Kyumin
Rating: PG13 (rn)
Word Count: ~3,100
Summary: Sungmin is a greeting card writer. He's good only at sympathy cards and rude only to Dr. Cho.
Beta: teexsaurus. she's delicious :9
Chapter 9 [1/2]: -
Before the word ‘hell’ left his mouth, the man sank his foot into the accelerator and Sungmin slammed back into his seat. But that was only something akin to throwing a rag doll against the wall.
“Strap yourself in!” he yelled when a quick glance over revealed that all Sungmin did was to continue staring wide eyed at the dashboard. The car was speeding at two hundred kilometers per hour. “If I die because of you,” he hissed through clenched teeth, one hand leaving the steering wheel and reaching across the stoic Sungmin to grab his seat belt. His fingertips just barely grazed it. “I will make sure you’re coming along with me. Or at least maim you.” He made for the belt again, leaving only his toes on the pedal now. “Make you wheelchair bound for the rest of your life and I’m going to haunt you. Do you know how much I’m insured for?” he grunted while he buckled down Sungmin. “A fucking hundred million won, ok. One hundred million won. That’s way more than what your sorry life is going to cost. Are you listening?” He resumed his seat only to see a truck heading towards him at full speed.
He had driven into the opposite lane.
There wasn’t even enough time to scream but his mouth dropped in shock anyway. Giving the wheel a sharp twist, he steered the car back into the lane in the next second. There was silence for approximately ten counts as the stranger tried to muster a reaction capable of expressing his fury but he could only come up with the age-old, “I’m going to. Kill. You.” Then he looked thoughtful. “I’m going to tie you onto the railway tracks and watch a train cut you into half.” Now, that wasn’t very original, he thought. “I’m going to kick you off the N Seoul Tower-”He would have continued planning but when he checked the mirror, he saw Sungmin sitting as impassively as a photograph and headlights pressing on them from behind.
“I should have just left you there to be run over. Why am I so kind?” he sighed heavily.
. . . . .
He parked the flashy red car in the hostel’s car park where it shone like a ruby amongst filthy rocks, then towed Sungmin to a shabby but reasonably clean room. In his usual loud fashion, he had kicked the door open and startled the man who had been waiting inside.
“Anyone following you?”
“Ditched them at the expressway. Don’t worry, Mr. Park, no one died. Excessive worry is brain reducing. Before you know it, you’ll have a stroke, get a blood clot and slowly die from brain cancer. But I’m nice so I’ll hire you a nurse,” he half-pulled Sungmin through the door and pushed him into the chair in front of the dressing table.
Mr. Park got up from the bed where he was sitting and ran to close the door. “Have you learned nothing!?” He snuck a quick look through the peephole before retrieving a yellow hanky from the pocket of his grey blazer and mopped his perspiration-dotted forehead. “As of today, you are grounded. No more parties, no more late night outs. I’m most certainly not going to rescue you again.” Dear affable middle-aged Mr. Park tried to pierce each word with a dominating look but then he caught sight of Sungmin. “I told you not to take them home,” he frowned. “He looks too nice for you.” Mr. Park reached out to straighten Sungmin’s glasses which were skewing wildly off his nose, but his hand was grabbed by the man.
“This is not home, in fact, it’s just the place, if you know what I mean,” he winked, steering Mr. Park to the door and opening it. “It’s late, your son is waiting for you to tuck him in, goodbye,” he sang. The abandoned man managed to squeeze in the line, ‘There better not be a next time or I’m confiscating your car!’ before the room disappeared behind the door.
After he had forcefully evacuated Mr. Park, he stalked back, sat on the bed opposite Sungmin and stared thoughtfully at him with a fist propping his chin. The perpetual astonished look had ended its run. Blankness now decorated those eyes which disappeared every time his lids drooped. And blinking was all Sungmin seemed to be doing. Suddenly, there was a crashing sound outside. Just one of those crashing sounds you sometimes hear in the middle of the night when you’re feeling terribly exhausted by life but just can’t fall asleep for some inexplicable reason. Just another crashing sound someone made because he was throwing some particularly heavy piece of unwanted furniture or because two people were having a lover’s tiff somewhere and a vase had to be thrown. Anyway, there was a crashing sound. It stilled Sungmin’s lids for a moment so his next blink was a second too long.
The man lifted his hand and deliberated, “Really, it’s not as if I want to do this.” Then he brought his hand down and slapped the back of Sungmin’s head. Those glasses finally plunged off Sungmin’s nose and fell to the floor.
“Well,” he mumbled, staring at his hand, “that didn’t sound as hollow as I thought it would.”
Sungmin’s head was tilted off its axis. He slowly righted himself. “What was that for?” His voice was quiet, still a little devoid of emotion. Then he squinted when he realized his vision had gone haywire. The stranger picked his glasses off the ground and handed it over to him. Sungmin’s manners took over, “Thank you.” He put on his glasses and glanced around the room for the first time.
The man quirked an eyebrow. Bespectacled dude actually seemed pretty normal. As normal as anyone who had just been dragged off a highway and into an unknown hostel anyway. He decided to test him to see whether the little one matched up to his sanity standards. It wouldn’t take a lot. “Who am I!” he exclaimed pompously, as if he had already given his name.
“Do we know each other?” Sungmin’s eyes swept over his face in search of recognition. When he failed to find any, he murmured, “You know, you can’t get brain cancer from a blood clot.”
The tiny twitch in the corner of the man’s lips threw his symmetrical face off balance. But as far as pissed off faces went, it was still mightily aesthetically pleasing. “You don’t know me? Look carefully,” He pressed on and then Sungmin was gazing so fiercely at him that he squirmed a little and it usually took truckloads of mealworms to make him fidget. “No,” Sungmin answered honestly and the glare dimmed into a fairly interested look, “Unless we’ve met in the loo the other day and you have a habit of staring at inappropriate body parts?”
“I’m not a good person but I can honestly say that I’ve never been to the ladies before,” the man said dryly. “Do you know how you got here?” he asked quickly before Sungmin could retort.
“You picked me off the road, pushed me into your car, dragged me into this room and now you’re asking me if I know how I got here?”
“I thought you were shocked into retardation. Why did you follow a stranger if you even had any idea what was going on? What were you thinking, running on the highway like that?”
“I,” Sungmin bit his lip; always the first sign of his distress. “I was just thinking really hard about things.” Then his chin shot up. “You didn’t do anything to me anyway.” At the back of his mind, it did vaguely registered on him what was happening but it was more like he was taking a backseat, watching a movie in slow motion, catching only the motions but none of the dialogue. The other part of him, the part that was in charge of making all those functional decisions had been silenced into submission by the monster in him. He just needed time to get back; for the cycle to pass. It had been some time but he was well acquainted with that little routine. The head slap was a great catalyst though.
A snappy remark was being transmitted from the man’s healthy brain to his tongue but he halted when he saw Sungmin’s hands; torn and still bleeding from the fall he took. Scowling, he hauled Sungmin to the bathroom and ran cold water from the tap. Then he took Sungmin’s hands and put them under the running water.
“You know, from the way I’ve been manhandled tonight, people would have thought my handicap were my legs,” Sungmin mocked himself. “Ouch!” he yelped when the guy started to press on his wounds. The water lapped at the blood that pushed through the split skin and made swirling patterns on the porcelain of the basin.
“You’re handicapped? Doesn’t look like it,” the man smiled and the hard pressure he had on Sungmin’s hands was reduced to gentle prods. ‘This feels weird,’ he thought, ‘weird and nice at the same time. What’s that word for weird and nice? OK, now I’m just weird.’
“Not really,” Sungmin frowned. “I don’t know, I just feel handicapped sometimes.”
“So you’re not handicapped. You just feel handicapped. Sometimes I wish I had a couple more hands too, punch more stupid people,” he grumbled, cleaning out tiny stones from the cuts.
Sungmin suddenly felt like he had something to prove. “This is black,” Sungmin pulled his hand out from his grasp. He held his right hand up in front of the man’s face; a trickle of red was making a meandering path down his palm and over his wrist.
“No, that’s blood. It’s red. If you’re trying to be a smartass-“
“This is grey,” he pulled his other hand out from the water and pointed at the small purple bottle of body foam at the sink. There was a note of urgency in his voice. “This is grey,” he pointed at the silver showerhead. Then he spun around and walked hurriedly out of the bathroom. Completely taken back, the stranger followed his footsteps. “This is grey,” Sungmin continued explaining his case, stabbing a finger in the direction of the yellow curtains. His finger traced paths and curves in midair like smoke from a cigarette as it danced from one object to another. “This is, is,” he stuttered, losing his footing when he came to the cream colored dressing table, “white.” He finally decided. It didn’t matter anyway. His heart was beating too fast, his breathing too shallow and every breath seemed to urge tears from his eyes, words from his tongue, confessions from his being. The room was so quiet, he didn’t want to know who was making all those harsh sounds; sounds of a broken man. But he knew all the same. Somewhere within him, something was giving way. His eyes flickered until they met the man’s own. He looked positively stunned and that spilled the first tear.
He really didn’t want to cry.
“I lied tonight. I can see grey too. In fact, everything is grey and then there are specks of black and white. But I wasn’t born like this…”
There is something oddly reassuring about strangers. They bring with them an air of nonchalance and probably won’t waste a penny on buying any of your secrets. So Sungmin told him everything.
. . . . .
When Sungmin returned home the next morning, he opened the front door and hit something which emitted a ‘Oooff!’. He peeked around the door and saw Kyuhyun lying on the floor in a fetal position, cradling his head in his arms. He was wearing the same clothes from yesterday, Sungmin noticed with a twinge of guilt. He considered apologizing for his behavior last night. Now that he had vented, his thoughts became especially clear. ‘When a friend brings you to somewhere nice, you usually don’t run off half sobbing and make them sleep at the door, waiting for you all night.’
Were they friends now?
Sungmin guessed so.
He kneeled down beside Kyuhyun, extending his hand to rub the sore spot. But at the last second, he hesitated and it turned into an insistent prodding at the side instead. “Are you alright?”
Kyuhyun shot upright when he heard Sungmin’s voice. The pain was momentarily washed away by relief. “Where have you been! I was…” He sounded angry at first, but the anger faded out fast and there was an abrupt sense of helplessness. Even his shoulders drooped. Before Sungmin could say anything to rectify his despondence though, Kyuhyun moved.
“You cried,” he said softly, smoothing the cool pads of his thumbs over Sungmin’s puffy eyelids from under his glasses. It felt soothing but Sungmin flinched. There was an intensity in Kyuhyun’s eyes that he had never seen before. Or maybe that was just because he had never really looked at Kyuhyun. Why did he have to look so sad? Sungmin averted his eyes because he didn’t know what else to do. “I didn’t.”
The fact that Kyuhyun didn’t refute his blatant lie made Sungmin bristled. He settled on getting through with what he had to do, “Look, last night-“
“I’m sorry,” Kyuhyun whispered instead, seizing the words from his mouth and Sungmin stiffened because he didn’t want him to apologize. He had listened to a lot of apologies before and he hated them because it was confusing. Were people apologizing for his condition of which they weren’t responsible for or because they felt bad for him? Or was it merely a convenient way to bring the unfortunate subject to a close? But then Kyuhyun mumbled, “I shouldn’t have allowed you to leave like that, I should have gone after you. Did you get lost? The place was so dark and obscured. If you had told me beforehand, I wouldn’t have brought you there.” His tone was quite accusatory in his last sentence. Sungmin couldn’t believe his ears. People were usually tripping over themselves trying to make him feel better.
“Do you want breakfast?” Kyuhyun got up and moved to the kitchen, shedding an invisible shell of emotions in the process. Sungmin nodded dumbly at his back, jaw slightly slackened. He wasn’t the least bit hungry. Without even checking Sungmin’s answer, Kyuhyun started to pull out dishes from the fridge.
“You’re cooking?” Sungmin asked when he had pulled himself together and followed Kyuhyun into the kitchen. He sat down at the dining table and watched him. “You don’t know how to cook.”
“Don’t flatter yourself, who said I was going to cook? I am just going to reheat stuff.” Kyuhyun was beginning to sound cheery again and Sungmin heaved an internal sigh of relief. “So where were you last night?”
Sungmin’s brain tried not to run into walls. “I was staying with a friend,” he lied. Another lie but he thought it was necessary. Lying was so much easier than revisiting the past; something he had already been through last night.
Kyuhyun was trying to figure out how to use the microwave but he paused and turned around to face Sungmin. “You have no friends,” he stated flatly.
“I do too,” Sungmin protested.
“OK,” Kyuhyun resumed his microwave game. “Aha!” he exclaimed when he finally got it working. “What’s your friend’s name?”
Sungmin's mind worked frantically to come up with a name, “Eunhyuk.”
“And the name of your second imaginary friend?”
Sungmin twisted his lips.
“It’s just that you never go out and you never talk about yourself.” The microwave beeped. Kyuhyun retrieved the plate of pasta and placed it in front of Sungmin together with a fork. Then he sat down opposite him, “I should meet this Eunhyuk sometime.”
“Sure,” Sungmin muttered without any meaning to commit himself. He picked up the fork and stabbed penne with it. Then he stilled. “Does Ryeowook know?”
Kyuhyun shrugged. “If you want to tell him, you’ll tell him. He has already left for work though. So,” he adopted the thinker’s pose, “what is it like to be colorblind?”
Penne dropped from Sungmin’s mouth. “What?” No one had ever asked him this question. It had ‘Sensitive’ stamped all over it. It would be too rude, too cruel to ask this of him. Everyone was too busy trying to skirt away from the subject anyway. Kyuhyun was clearly beyond that. It was as if he was asking him for his opinion on the catch of the day at the fish market (“What do you think about those dead salmon eyes?”).
“I don’t know how to answer that,” Sungmin replied, just a tad too agitated. “What was it like to attend high school five years earlier than your peers?” he shot back.
Kyuhyun sat up a little straighter. “How did you know about that?”
Sungmin appeared to have suddenly developed piles for he couldn’t stop fidgeting in his seat. “You are my subject, it’s only right I do some research on you…” He didn’t mean to blurt that out. He felt mean. “Erm, I didn’t mean to…“
“I don’t know how to answer that,” Kyuhyun threw Sungmin’s words back to him and smiled. The chick had somewhat invested in him. That was a good sign. He relaxed his spine and rested his forearms back on the table.
“You know how to determine the trajectory of a curved ball, how to construct a spaceship, but you don’t know how to express yourself? How classic.” Sungmin’s good nature was always too easily displaced when he was around Kyuhyun.
“I am somewhat a noob expert on aerodynamics, yes, but I have absolutely no idea how to propel myself into outer space. Come to think of it, people wrote laws for energy conversions, for fluid flow, whatever. But no one wrote a law for people. Like, 'Every sad person needs to have chocolate' or 'The relationship between A and B is a smile' or, or, I don’t know, 'Every storm is a chance to dance in the rain'? I think I read that last one somewhere though.”
“Dance in the rain,” Sungmin numbly repeated those last words. He chewed and rolled them around his tongue. They tasted foreign. “Dance in the rain,” he said again, just for emphasis. It sounded like it should come out of a book and not from someone’s mouth; certainly not from Dr. Cho’s mouth anyway. Then he narrowed his eyes. Was he trying to dispense advice in a roundabout way or was he just imitating some quote device?
“I have chocolate and a lot of questions,” Kyuhyun leaned forward. “We can trade answers.”
He looked so sincere that Sungmin wanted to run away again. “I think it’s time for work,” he said aloud and got up from the table. Then he forced himself to walk slowly out of the kitchen.
It was only when Sungmin left then did Kyuhyun allowed the lights in his eyes to go out.
to be continued
p.s.: this took longer than expected cos i was rly busy irl and now i'm busy for the lunar new year ORZ hmmm i'm more sorry about the fact that scenes were long drawn and these 3 scenes took 3.1k words, so it seemed like there were zero developments. meep (this means 'sorry'). this is only part 1 of the chapter. happy lunar new year~ :D
p.p.s.: bloopers are constantly being updated~~
edit: edited a tiny bit cos i'm so fail ;_; but min was lying to kyu, it was not eunhyuk who was with min in the hostel. sorry if that was unclear orz (eunhyuk was sungmin's colleague; appeared in chpt1 before, remember? ;o;)