Snowflakes In The Night Sky
Title: Snowflakes In The Night Sky
Pairing(s): QMi, side!EunHae, slight!Victoria/Zhou Mi
Genre(s): Romance, angst, college!AU
Length: 6017 words
Rating: PG-13, self-harm!warning, homophobia!warning
Summary: In which Zhou Mi’s life does not go the way he wanted it to.
Author's Notes: Wow, I was planning on posting this a long time ago but never got to it. Written for yuefeng for the Super Junior Christmas Fic Exchange. Original post here. Beta: Thank you, quixotic_notes!
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Zhou Mi was probably the biggest idiot in the world. The biggest idiot as well as the biggest asshole on the whole damn planet. He fell in love, which in itself was ten different kinds of stupid, making him a complete idiot. Then he ran away from said love, which was fifteen different kinds of heartless, making him a complete asshole.
The worst, however, was that he was the biggest coward to ever walk the earth. The knowledge hurt him, because only cowards asked what if? and only cowards cried for things that might have been.
Zhou Mi had regrets, almost as many as there were snowflakes in the night sky. Most had something to do with a boy named Cho Kyuhyun.
They met in college, and they absolutely hated each other’s guts. Unfortunately, they were each other’s roommate assignments for the next four years, and the minute the two of them looked at each other they knew that they were not going to get along. There was a gap in the social spectrum, after all.
Zhou Mi majored in voice performance; Kyuhyun studied biology. Zhou Mi was the gentleman who pasted on that fake yet effective smile all of his day; Kyuhyun was the loner who treated the world with such brutal honesty. Zhou Mi was from an upper middle-class family who had enough money not to be frugal; Kyuhyun came straight from the streets, the son of a drug addict and a prostitute, both deceased. Among those who knew him, Zhou Mi was respected and admired and loved. No one paid attention to Kyuhyun, and those who spared him a glance took in the cynical gaze and the slouched posture before turning away without another thought.
Their first argument occurred in their second week living together. Zhou Mi’s master plan was to get through his four years by ignoring his roommate, and it had been going quite nicely until his girlfriend of two months, Victoria, came to help him settle in. Victoria was a dance major, gorgeous without even trying. She tidied things up, washed the dirty dishes, and left with a wave of her thin fingers and a dazzling smile on her face.
People on campus thought that they were the perfect couple that would eventually grow up and get married and raise a litter of rug rats. But Kyuhyun, he spun around on his rolling chair, brought his even gaze towards Zhou Mi, and spoke for the first time since moving in: “Does she know that you’re homosexual?”
Zhou Mi’s eyes flashed and he threw the nearest lamp in his roommate’s direction with all his strength, missing by a mere inch. He was not sure if the crash of glass and porcelain alleviated or fuelled his anger, nor was he sure if he was happy to see the look of muted horror on Kyuhyun’s face. He only knew that he was angry, so angry-not at his roommate’s words, but rather at his own reaction. Because the first thought that flashed through his mind was not how dare you say something like that! or I am not a fucking faggot!.
It was how did you know?
Standing on the snowy roof of a twenty-story building really put things into perspective. At least it did for Zhou Mi. If things were different, he would have laughed and spread his arms wide and yelled I am the king of the world! at the top of his lungs. But reality had its way of reminding him that no, things are not different, you are still stuck in the same big shithole you were in yesterday and the day before.
Needless to say, Zhou Mi hated reality.
He took in the buildings around him, all decorated with red and green lights. One billboard had a picture of Cindy Lou from the 2000 live-action version of the Grinch Who Stole Christmas: “Nobody should be alone on Christmas!”
And Zhou Mi had to laugh at the irony.
Things were tense between them, so tense that the uneasiness between them was almost tangible. But while the tension did not go away, both eventually got used to it.
Zhou Mi promptly broke up with Victoria over an expensive dinner at a five-star restaurant, and stuck to the basic Break-Up Spiel: I think you are a great person but I don’t see a future with you […] it’s not you it’s me […] one day I promise you will find somebody who is perfect for you and you alone. Victoria went home believing that Zhou Mi was a kind and warm-hearted person-“The Perfect Gentleman”-which was exactly what Zhou Mi wanted.
He arrived at the dormitory with less weight on his shoulders, but then from the corner of his eye he saw Kyuhyun take one scrutinizing look at him and scoff. Zhou Mi’s blood boiled, and he resisted the urge to throw another lamp, this time without missing. After all, he hardly broke up with Victoria for selfless reasons.
Perhaps the reason why he hated Kyuhyun so much was because the latter was able to see him as he was, not as he wanted to be seen.
It was cold. And snow fell from the sky, transparent and pure and honest and white. White, the color found behind any other color-the true face behind the mask.
Zhou Mi absolutely loathed the snow.
During finals season, Zhou Mi went back to the dormitory at three o’clock in the morning. Not from studying, though. Unlike most rich kids, he hardly ever stayed out late; the only times were when his father phoned. Which was what happened that night.
And the last thing Zhou Mi wanted to deal with was that smug I-know-what-you-did look on Kyuhyun’s face.
“Mind your own business!” he bellowed, his patience running thin as Kyuhyun quirked an amused eyebrow.
“I said nothing.”
“Then shut the hell up!”
“Do you want to talk about it?”
“Not with you!”
Kyuhyun crossed his arms across his chest. “Then with who, huh?”
Zhou Mi glared. “Unlike you, Kyuhyun, I have friends!”
“Do you now?”
“Fuck you! Fuck you!”
“You wish you could,” the biology major sneered.
With that, Zhou Mi lunged, hell bent on strangling his roommate to death and then dumping the body into the nearest river. He grabbed hold of Kyuhyun’s shirt collar and easily lifted him a centimeter above the floor, his free fist held up menacingly. “What did you say?”
“I said you wish you could fuck me,” the reply came without hesitation or fright.
“Say that again,” Zhou Mi growled, voice dangerously low. “I dare you to say that again!”
“What will you do, huh? Punch me? Beat me? Kill me?”
A drop of water fell onto Kyuhyun’s cheek, and Zhou Mi recoiled in horror, the pad of his third finger brushing over his lower eyelid to find it wet. “Stay away from me,” he ordered, desperately covering his face as he staggered backwards. He was not going to cry, not in front of Kyuhyun of all people. “Stay away from me!”
“Zhou Mi,” came the suddenly sympathetic voice.
“Get the fuck away from me!”
“You’re only hurting yourself more by doing this.”
By that time, Zhou Mi had already lost control of his tear ducts and was sobbing openly. “Go away,” he wept brokenly, collapsing onto the floor, humiliated. “Please, just go away.”
But Kyuhyun did nothing of the sort. Instead, he grabbed a pack of dry ramen noodles from the cupboards and arranged himself on the ground beside his distressed roommate, careful to leave a wide enough gap between them. “There’s no need to hide your face, Zhou Mi; I knew that you’ve been crying this whole time.”
Kyuhyun tore the package open and broke off a little piece of the MSG-filled snack to hand to Zhou Mi, who hesitantly accepted it. They ate in silence, Zhou Mi’s hiccups and the crunching of dry noodles the only sounds in the room.
They say that honesty is the key for any relationship to work, for any relationship to continue. Zhou Mi smiled bitterly. “Is that why ours didn’t?” he shouted out into the vastness of the snowy city. “Answer me, you motherfucker! Goddammit, answer me! Answer me!”
There was no response save for the apathetic whistling of the wind.
Zhou Mi’s lip curled. “Typical.”
”Why do you study biology?
“Because I got a scholarship.”
“Is that the only reason?”
“Pretty much.”
“Seriously?”
Kyuhyun looked up from page three hundred and six of his textbook on Darwin, scowling. “If you are expecting me to make up some flowery bullshit answer about how biology has always been my one and only passion in life, you can go fuck yourself.”
“No, I was just curious. I mean, I got a scholarship in political science but I decided on voice performance because I knew that I would like it better.”
“Not that many people have that privilege.”
The performance major frowned. “It was a choice, not a privilege.”
“A choice is a privilege.”
“Not the choice I had,” Zhou Mi muttered. “My father wanted me to follow in his footsteps, study law, and become a persecutor like he did. He said that if I went into voice performance, he would stop supporting me. He calls every other week to try and change my mind.”
“You made a foolish choice going into voice performance, then.”
Zhou Mi quirked a smile. “Foolish. But certainly worth it.”
Kyuhyun laughed dryly, and Zhou Mi found himself analyzing its sound waves and trying to identify its pitches.
“Silent night, holy night,” Zhou Mi sang into the open, just because he wanted to sing. “All is calm, all is bright.” (Kyuhyun always pretended to hate Christmas carols but Zhou Mi had good ears and always caught him humming along to the radio.) “Round yon Virgin Mother and Child, Holy Infant so tender and mild.”
He thought back to the nights they spent together, the tense words and conversations, the equally tense atmosphere both of them endured in the darkness of their dormitories, the tense lien of understanding they had between them. But all that is wound is bound to be unwound eventually.
“Sleep in heavenly peace,” he sang, voice faltering as a tear slipped down his cheek. “Sleep in heavenly peace.”
Zhou Mi had always hoped that falling in love felt like being embraced by a nice pink cashmere blanket. He had always imagined it to be soft, comforting, warm, and above all secure, filled with pink fluff and smelling like ironed shirts fresh from the dryer.
Falling in love with Kyuhyun felt absolutely nothing like being embraced by a nice pink cashmere blanket. It felt more like running on a never-ending treadmill with his worst nightmare trailing after him-absolutely terrifying.
The worst part was looking over his shoulder and realizing that his worst nightmare was having absolutely no trouble catching up.
Homosexuality was a forbidden land never to be treaded on. Zhou Mi knew that. His father made sure he knew it. Mr. Zhou was a conservative man who believed that girls wore dresses, that boys played sports, and that women who were not stay-at-home wives and mothers were freelance whores. Divorced three times, all due to the forceful nature of his personality, he was a hard-headed man who knew what he wanted and knew how to get it.
One time when Zhou Mi was thirteen, an openly gay couple moved into the house right across the street. They were friendly people-a skinny man with a gummy smile named Eunhyuk and his handsome idealistic partner Donghae-and Zhou Mi warmed up to them immediately. He was especially fond of Donghae, who promised to teach him how to dance (“Like a pro,” he had promised, winking). Zhou Mi remembered seeing them walk towards his house, remembered racing down the stairs only to find that his father had beat him to the door.
“Hello, I’m Eunhyuk and this is Donghae,” Eunhyuk greeted cheerfully. “We just moved in. We’re hosting a housewarming party on Sunday evening if you are free at around six. You can also drop by later if you want. We would love to have you over and get to know you better. We have already met your son Zhou Mi, in fact.”
“He’s wonderful,” Donghae added with that handsome smile of his. “Very bright child.”
Mr. Zhou looked them up and down, and his face contorted into an expression that Zhou Mi never wanted to see again.
“You are disgusting. Get your faggot faces out of my sight,” he sneered before slamming the door in their faces.
The next day, when Zhou Mi walked out the door to go to school, Donghae was tending the flowers in his garden. From the corner of his eye, Donghae caught sight of him, and he beamed and waved. This gesture left Zhou Mi with a dilemma. He was so tempted to respond-he wanted to, really badly-but remembering his father’s words, the thirteen-year-old could do nothing but turn his head, and as a result he never learned how to dance like a pro.
Zhou Mi had always known, really. It was not a huge surprise when he finally acknowledged the fact that he was a bit different from the rest of the guys he knew. It was stupidly obvious, like painfully hitting the top of his forehead against the top doorframe when walking out of his bedroom in the morning, because, goddammit, he knew it was there the whole time.
While it was not exactly the hugest surprise, it was certainly the largest blow. He had already failed his father’s expectations too many times to count-not being able to catch a ball, crying every time Leonardo diCaprio died in Titanic, having a tomboy as a best friend, losing every game of one-on-one basketball to said tomboy best friend, joining the Musical Theatre Club-and on top of that, he realized that he would never be able to marry a nice girl and have children with her without a whole thirty years’ dose of flunitrazepam.
So he dumped himself into the dating pool and hoped to God that there would be some woman-any woman-that he could at least learn to fall in love with. He had many girlfriends, enough to be considered popular, but not enough to be considered a player. It was a sad cycle where he would start seeking reasons for an imminent breakup the moment they started dating. He hated being the one to end relationships, but not only because he hated causing the disappointed expressions on his girlfriends’ faces.
He just hated being a coward, that’s all, a coward that ran away when things got tough.
And yet every time he brought home a girl for his father to meet, Mr. Zhou would smile and clap his son on the back. “This one is a keeper,” he would always say.
And every time, Zhou Mi pasted on that fake cheery smile that everybody loved to see.
It was a long way down to the bottom. The cars below looked like little white pill bugs. Zhou Mi let out a deep sigh and wondered if it was physically possible to die from regret.
Two years passed, and while Kyuhyun and Zhou Mi were still apprehensive around each other, at least they were on fairly civil terms.
“So what kind of girl do you like?” Kyuhyun mocked bitterly one normal afternoon during their third year after finding out that he still refused to open the closet door. “Tall? Nice curves? Petite? Cute? Hmm, I don’t know, male?”
“Shut up, Kyuhyun,” Zhou Mi barked without venom, having long gotten used to his roommate’s snide remarks.
“You’re an absolute terrible heterosexual, Zhou Mi.”
“That’s what you think.”
“What are you afraid of?”
“Spiders, but you already know that.” Indeed Kyuhyun did, having once walked in on Zhou Mi pressed up against a corner of the wall, eyes fixated upon a tiny eight-legged insect on the other side of the room.
Kyuhyun snickered. “You’re afraid of spiders. And you’re afraid of being gay.”
“I’m not afraid of being gay.”
“You are afraid of becoming a cock-sucking faggot.”
Zhou Mi directed an icy glare at the other student, secretly checking to see that their dorm door was closed and locked. He knew what was coming, after all. “Kyuhyun, stop it.”
“You are afraid of becoming the queer fairy that your daddy always made fun of.”
“Dammit, Kyuhyun, could you just shut up with the-”
“No, I can’t just shut up!” Kyuhyun bolted out of his rolling chair, ears a furious shade of dark red. “You honestly don’t get it, do you? One day, you will wake up and realize that you’re tired of ruining your life!”
“And what’s it to you?” Zhou Mi challenged. “I ruin my life, fine, it’s my life!”
“Okay fine. I just want to make sure of something, just out of curiosity. You will grow up trying to make your asshole of a homophobic father proud by marrying the first girl you have finally brainwashed yourself into liking. Then, god forbid, once the newly-wedded couple finally decides on an apartment, you will fuck her doggy style so that you could at least pretend that you’re fucking your wife’s best friend’s husband. Then, nine months later, you get a child that you pour your heart and soul into to forget about your worthless status as a closet case until he turns eighteen and decides that his dad is not cool enough to meet his girlfriend and thus he elopes with her to Vegas and you never see him again. Meanwhile, you are becoming really close to your hot next-door neighbour, and on some cruddy Friday evening you have one too many tequila shots and find yourself in bed with this guy, and the next morning you are inelegantly ambushed by your hot next-door neighbour’s wife and just barely manage to jump out the window in your half-naked state and get a bone fracture you never fully recover from. Then once you get over your initial homophobic panic you heatedly persuade your wife to move across the state, and after you finally forget all about your gay fling with your hot next-door neighbour-or after your asshole of a homophobic father dies, whichever comes first-you will wake up from that conditioned stupor of yours, and find out that hey sorry, wife-of-ten-or-more-years, it just, oh I don’t know, slipped my mind that I’ve been gay ever since I remember, hope this tiny bit of information doesn’t change anything between us. But by then, even after a messy divorce, failed child custody and enough gay bar cruising to be pathetic, you’d be too old and cynical to get any guy to even talk to you not to mention go home with you. Then you’d grow old and walk on the streets with a cane, picking up any stray cat you see and naming them all eight of them after characters from Friends. So on the track of consciously trying to ruin your life, you’d might as well abuse your sexual fantasies on some random girl’s boyfriend, permanently break your hip jumping out of your hot neighbour’s window, screw your wife and kid over, and damn a poor unfortunate feline to a life as Phoebe Buffay. And you’re telling me you don’t care?”
Zhou Mi stared at his irate roommate for what seemed like hours. He just stared and stared and stared, unblinkingly. Then in some magical moment, it just came together. “You love me,” he deadpanned, realizing the full meaning of the words just as they escaped his voice box. “You love me.”
Kyuhyun started. His empty silence was answer enough.
Ignoring every instinct to do otherwise, Zhou Mi’s expression hardened. “You are disgusting. I never want to see your faggot face again.”
As expected from him, Kyuhyun nodded blankly, grabbed his coat, slipped on his shoes, and calmly walked out the door. Once the footsteps down the hall faded, Zhou Mi’s cold expression melted into one of grief, and he buried his face into his hands.
Zhou Mi never really thought of himself as weak. Sure, he was thin and had next to no muscle mass, but he did not run with his arms flailing and he never cried over a broken nail. So it was almost shocking how much he felt so goddamn fragile just looking over the building ledge and finally acknowledging the fact that he had a goddamn fear of heights.
He screamed in frustration and threw his hands up into the frosty air. “Ugh, why does it have to be this hard? Goddammit, why did you have to die?!”
Kyuhyun did not return back to the dormitory for a week and a half, a week and a half during which Zhou Mi almost drove himself insane. He knew that Kyuhyun was strong-well, hopefully, strong enough in the sense that he would eventually recover from the ruthless gunshot to the heart that Zhou Mi gave him. Zhou Mi spent that week and a half in a semi-crazed state, switching back and forth between severely depressed to maniacally guilt-ridden.
This resulted in a whole life’s worth of self-loathing compressed into ten days. He hated himself, not only because he treated Kyuhyun, the boy who loved him and took him as is, like utter shit. He hated himself because no matter how much he tried, he could not bring himself to hate Kyuhyun, the “faggot face” that was supposed to repulse him.
He just could not hate Kyuhyun, not anymore.
B-because he lov-
Zhou Mi looked over the ledge once more, heart thumping so hard that it made the blood rush into his head. “You died on purpose, didn’t you?” he yelled into the sky. “The perfect revenge on me. Spot-on. Immaculate. Couldn’t have done it better! Is that what you wanted to hear, you asshole? That you won? And I lost?” Zhou Mi wiped the stray tear from his eyelash and glared at his feet. “Fine, I concede. I hold up the white flag. You win.”
Probably the last thing he expected was a phone call, and one look at the caller ID made Zhou Mi’s blood run cold. He pressed the talk button and took a shaky breath. “Hello father.”
“So then, have you transferred degrees yet? I sent you the application and filled out everything for you already; all you had to do was sign it and file it.”
“No, father, I haven’t.”
“This is your last chance, Zhou Mi. I mean it this time.”
“I know,” Zhou Mi sighed, rubbing his temples. “But father, I don’t want to study law. I love singing.”
“And I love bacon strips. You can sing whenever. You can’t make money whenever.”
“I want to believe that life isn’t all about money.”
“Where do you think your college fund is coming from? The roof above your head? The food you eat? Where do you think all that comes from, Zhou Mi?”
“Father, I’m gay!” Zhou Mi blurted.
“Be serious, Zhou Mi, this is no time for-”
Zhou Mi smiled bitterly. “I’m not joking. I’m gay. I’m in love with my roommate. I’ve mentioned him to you a couple times already. His name is Kyuhyun.”
There was the sound of a wine glass breaking and a muffled curse on the other end of the telephone line. Seconds passed at an agonizingly slow pace. “You’re confused. You must be confused. Most boys are at your age are confused. All you need is a good girl and-”
“Well, I hate to break it to you, dad, but no girl can help me because I’ve known that I was gay ever since my sophomore year in high school.”
“You’ve had girlfriends!”
“Well now you know why I’ve always broken up with them in the end.”
“What about Victoria?”
“We’ve long stopped dating since first year.” Zhou Mi could hear his father’s heavy breathing through the phone, and he gulped.
“You are never to see tha-that boy again, do you understand me?” Mr. Zhou spluttered. “It is because of him, he is the bad influence here! That boy has contaminated your mind!”
Zhou Mi’s eyes flashed. “Father, if it were not for that boy, I would still be wallowing in self-denial, so don’t you tell me that he is a bad influence or a contamination when all along he was the only person who helped me come to terms with who I am!”
“So you believe that boy? You believe that you are a faggot?”
“Yes Dad, I am a faggot.”
“I refuse to have a queer son.”
Zhou Mi swallowed, voice wavering as it dropped two octaves. “If you don’t accept me as a queer son, then you won’t have a son.”
“So be it,” his father gritted out before promptly hanging up on him.
Never in his life had Zhou Mi ever imagined that words could sting.
Zhou Mi loathed the snow. Its beauty and pureness only reminded him of how fake his life was. He faked loving Victoria (and all of his girlfriends prior to her), he faked being that Perfect Gentleman Mimi that everybody expected from him, he faked next to all of the smiles he had to paste on in order to uphold his pleasant image, he faked being a noble heterosexual for his father.
And, as he painfully reflected, he realized that he had involuntarily faked hating Kyuhyun. If he thought about it hard enough, it was actually quite pathetic.
He expected himself to be braver, but once again he failed to meet the expectations placed upon him. So he backed away from the building ledge and took the elevator down to the ground floor. He walked back to the college campus, entered the dormitory kitchen, locked the doors, grabbed the nearest knife, and slit his wrists before he could have any second thoughts.
“Zhou Mi? Zhou Mi? Can you hear me? Open your eyes, Zhou Mi.”
A groan resonated from his body, and Zhou Mi felt lightheaded as he squinted, trying to adjust to the brightness. Another groan: “Where am I?”
“You’re here,” the cheerful voice answered.
“No shit, Sherlock. Where’s here?”
“Here is here. There is there. You just happen to be here and not there.”
Zhou Mi let out an exasperated sigh and pried his eyes open. White. All white. Like he was floating in the dimensions of a blank sheet of pristine white paper. “Am I dead?” he slurred.
“No, you aren’t.”
“Dammit.”
“Don’t be so cynical. You should be happy you lived.”
Zhou Mi looked up and his eyes widened. “Donghae?”
A bright and handsome smile greeted him. “Long time no see.”
“No kidding!” Zhou Mi picked himself off the floor and threw his long arms around the man’s neck.
“You’ve gotten big!” Donghae laughed, noticing the effects of the growth spurt Zhou Mi had when he was sixteen. “You used to barely look over my shoulder.”
Zhou Mi allowed a small smile at that. “So, where is this?”
“It doesn’t matter. What matters is that we meet again and that we make the best of the time we have together.” Donghae beamed, and sat down with his legs crossed. “So how are things with you?”
Following his gesture, Zhou Mi’s face fell.
Donghae nodded. “I see. Family, girlfriend, or school?”
“None of the above, unfortunately.” Zhou Mi sighed. “His name is Kyuhyun.”
“Oh, boyfriend! What’s he like? Kind? Adorable? Makes you laugh?”
“None of the above. He’s rude, he has massive acne problems, and he never says anything that doesn’t hurt. But fuck it, I love him all the more for it.” Zhou Mi chewed on his bottom lip and exhaled sharply. “Donghae, how did you know you were in love with Eunhyuk?”
Donghae smiled fondly. “I always knew, silly! It was always there. But the first time I acknowledged it was when we first danced together. We just fit, you know?”
“You’re lucky. I found out that I was in love with Kyuhyun the second I called him a faggot face and told him to never show his face in front of me.”
“Faggot face, huh? Sounds familiar.”
Zhou Mi hung his head. “I know. I’m sorry about that.”
“Not your fault,” Donghae brushed it off. “Eunhyuk and I were used to that sort of behaviour. Your father was definitely not the worst, trust me.”
“I could have defended you. Or been nicer to you afterwards, at least saying hi once in a while.”
“You were only a kid. A closeted kid living with a homophobic father. It must have been terrifying.”
Zhou Mi sniffed, voice taking on a contemptuous tone. “I tried really hard-so goddamn hard-to gain his approval. Then I finally become the man he wanted me to be, and guess where that got me?”
Donghae wrapped his arm around the younger’s quivering shoulders. “Young couples fight all the time. You should have seen me and Eunhyuk when we first met: we absolutely hated each other. We were rivals on the dance team, after all. But then, you know, things happened. My girlfriend dumped me, Eunhyuk’s sympathetic side came out when he saw me crying in the studio, and for once we had an argument-free conversation. Six years later, I find myself marrying this guy, wanting to build a whole life with him.”
“Alright, say you gave Eunhyuk the worst rejection speech in the Guinness Book of World Records. On top of that, pretend that your father pretty much disowns you over the phone. What do you do then?”
Donghae thought for a grand total of one minute and then his face brightened. “Dance!” He pushed himself onto his feet and expertly spun on his heel.
“Dance?” Zhou Mi quirked an eyebrow doubtfully. “Seriously?”
“Just trust me!” the dancer grabbed Zhou Mi’s hand and hoisted him up. “After all, I plan on keeping the promise I made to you eight years ago. Alright, put your hand around the small of my back and just listen to the music.”
“There is no music.”
“What a bright time, it’s the right time to rock the night away,” Donghae sang suavely, winking as he rocked his hips to the beat. “Now there is.”
Zhou Mi laughed. “Jingle bell time is a swell time.”
“To go gliding in a one-horse sleigh!.”
Giddy-up jingle horse, pick up your feet
Jingle around the clock
Mix and a-mingle in the jingling feet
That’s the jingle bell
That’s the jingle bell
Zhou Mi woke up to the sound of the radio and the smell of used dental floss. He groaned at the dizzy flash that rushed into his head.
There was nervous shuffling on his right. “Zhou Mi? Oh my god, Zhou Mi!”
The hospitalized man felt warm fingers curl around his limp palm. “K-Kyuhyun?”
“Hey.”
Zhou Mi pried his eyelids open and took in the red-rimmed eyes and slightly parted chapped lips. He breathed in slowly and tightened his hold on Kyuhyun’s hand. “Hey.” And then he smiled, slowly and deliberately-the first true smile of happiness that he had in a long time.
That’s the jingle bell rock!
The funeral procession for Zhou Mi’s father was a bittersweet event. Zhou Mi cried, many others cried, but deep down inside he cried because he felt ashamed for being the slightest bit relieved that his father was dead. Kyuhyun held his hand the whole time, and though there were stares and whispers behind muffling hands, Zhou Mi forced himself to ignore them.
Baby steps, baby steps.
Hospital food tasted like armpit hair, but Kyuhyun’s cooking tasted like sweaty armpit hair, so Zhou Mi was almost grateful that his roommate?boyfriend?lover? did not even try to play househusband for him. Kyuhyun did, however, visit every day for the next four days he was hospitalized, and each visit made Zhou Mi fall a little deeper in love.
Despite everything, Zhou Mi regretted never having the chance to introduce Kyuhyun to his father. Maybe Mr. Zhou would have liked Kyuhyun’s sarcasm, or the straightforward way in which he approached things. Maybe he would have been impressed with Kyuhyun’s all-encompassing knowledge about amoebas. Maybe they would have hit it off immediately with their mutual love for newspaper Sudoku puzzles. Maybe, just maybe, he would have eventually accepted their relationship as something more than friendship.
So he worked with what he had and stood above his father’s open casket. “Father, I would like you to meet Kyuhyun,” he motioned to the man beside him. “Kyuhyun, meet my father.”
“A pleasure to meet you, sir,” Kyuhyun bowed ever so slightly, eyes never leaving the pale unmoving corpse.
The two celebrated Christmas Eve in their dorm snuggling on Kyuhyun’s bed, drinking store-bought eggnog and watching the 1964 animated version of Rudolph The Red-Nosed Reindeer on the mini-television that Zhou Mi got as a birthday present when he was seventeen. Zhou Mi’s arm was about to lose all feeling from the position they were in, but he ignored it in favour of keeping Kyuhyun’s head nestled in the curve of his neck. That was what love was about, after all-sacrificing smaller details for the big picture.
He wondered about what would have happened if Kyuhyun had not been assigned his roommate. Would he still have dated Victoria? Probably, he liked her enough-kind, beautiful, lithe, intelligent, the perfect girl. Would he have married her eventually? With the whole four-carat diamond ring and everything? Would they have developed a happy marriage, or would it have gone as Kyuhyun had imagined-Zhou Mi continuing to suppress his homosexuality while fucking his hot married next-door neighbour on the side? Or would he have eventually loved Victoria like he had always hoped he would?
“Stop thinking about other girls when you are with me,” Kyuhyun’s dry voice snapped Zhou Mi out of his reflective reverie.
“How would you know if I was thinking of other girls?”
“I’m psychic.”
“Right. I forgot.”
“What were you thinking about?”
“I thought you were psychic,” Zhou Mi teased, already anticipating the vindictive whack on the head. “I was thinking about us. About what would have happened to me if there was no us.”
“You would have stayed in the closet, locked the door, and swallowed the key, that’s for sure.”
“And I would have named my future stray cat Phoebe Buffay.”
“That too.”
They chuckled, and stared as the credits rolled up the tiny television screen, the theme song crackling through the old worn-out speakers.
Rudolph the red-nosed reindeer
Had a very shiny nose
And if you ever saw him
You would even say it glows.
Zhou Mi nudged Kyuhyun’s head with his shoulder, earning a grunt of annoyance. “Hey, get up.”
“Why?” Kyuhyun whined.
“Just trust me!” Zhou Mi grabbed his boyfriend’s hand and hoisted him onto his bare feet. “Alright, put your hand around the small of my back.”
Then one foggy Christmas Eve
Santa came to say:
“Rudolph with your nose so bright,
Won’t you guide my sleigh tonight?”
“Okay, now what?” Kyuhyun raised an eyebrow.
“Now,” Zhou Mi waggled his eyebrows, grinning as he swung his hips and twirled his dance partner. “We dance and sing along! Then all the reindeer loved him as they shouted out with glee.”
Rudolph the red-nosed reindeer
You’ll go down in history!
They continued to laugh and dance and sing even as the soundtrack from the movie came to an end, each revelling in the other’s mirth and happiness as Christmas day dawned upon them.
Zhou Mi might have been the biggest idiot in the world and the biggest asshole in the whole damn planet. And he might have been the biggest coward ever to walk the earth. And while Zhou Mi had regrets, almost as many as there were snowflakes in the night sky, he was going to make sure that his love for Kyuhyun was not one of them.
end.
Pairing(s): QMi, side!EunHae, slight!Victoria/Zhou Mi
Genre(s): Romance, angst, college!AU
Length: 6017 words
Rating: PG-13, self-harm!warning, homophobia!warning
Summary: In which Zhou Mi’s life does not go the way he wanted it to.
Author's Notes: Wow, I was planning on posting this a long time ago but never got to it. Written for yuefeng for the Super Junior Christmas Fic Exchange. Original post here. Beta: Thank you, quixotic_notes!
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Zhou Mi was probably the biggest idiot in the world. The biggest idiot as well as the biggest asshole on the whole damn planet. He fell in love, which in itself was ten different kinds of stupid, making him a complete idiot. Then he ran away from said love, which was fifteen different kinds of heartless, making him a complete asshole.
The worst, however, was that he was the biggest coward to ever walk the earth. The knowledge hurt him, because only cowards asked what if? and only cowards cried for things that might have been.
Zhou Mi had regrets, almost as many as there were snowflakes in the night sky. Most had something to do with a boy named Cho Kyuhyun.
They met in college, and they absolutely hated each other’s guts. Unfortunately, they were each other’s roommate assignments for the next four years, and the minute the two of them looked at each other they knew that they were not going to get along. There was a gap in the social spectrum, after all.
Zhou Mi majored in voice performance; Kyuhyun studied biology. Zhou Mi was the gentleman who pasted on that fake yet effective smile all of his day; Kyuhyun was the loner who treated the world with such brutal honesty. Zhou Mi was from an upper middle-class family who had enough money not to be frugal; Kyuhyun came straight from the streets, the son of a drug addict and a prostitute, both deceased. Among those who knew him, Zhou Mi was respected and admired and loved. No one paid attention to Kyuhyun, and those who spared him a glance took in the cynical gaze and the slouched posture before turning away without another thought.
Their first argument occurred in their second week living together. Zhou Mi’s master plan was to get through his four years by ignoring his roommate, and it had been going quite nicely until his girlfriend of two months, Victoria, came to help him settle in. Victoria was a dance major, gorgeous without even trying. She tidied things up, washed the dirty dishes, and left with a wave of her thin fingers and a dazzling smile on her face.
People on campus thought that they were the perfect couple that would eventually grow up and get married and raise a litter of rug rats. But Kyuhyun, he spun around on his rolling chair, brought his even gaze towards Zhou Mi, and spoke for the first time since moving in: “Does she know that you’re homosexual?”
Zhou Mi’s eyes flashed and he threw the nearest lamp in his roommate’s direction with all his strength, missing by a mere inch. He was not sure if the crash of glass and porcelain alleviated or fuelled his anger, nor was he sure if he was happy to see the look of muted horror on Kyuhyun’s face. He only knew that he was angry, so angry-not at his roommate’s words, but rather at his own reaction. Because the first thought that flashed through his mind was not how dare you say something like that! or I am not a fucking faggot!.
It was how did you know?
Standing on the snowy roof of a twenty-story building really put things into perspective. At least it did for Zhou Mi. If things were different, he would have laughed and spread his arms wide and yelled I am the king of the world! at the top of his lungs. But reality had its way of reminding him that no, things are not different, you are still stuck in the same big shithole you were in yesterday and the day before.
Needless to say, Zhou Mi hated reality.
He took in the buildings around him, all decorated with red and green lights. One billboard had a picture of Cindy Lou from the 2000 live-action version of the Grinch Who Stole Christmas: “Nobody should be alone on Christmas!”
And Zhou Mi had to laugh at the irony.
Things were tense between them, so tense that the uneasiness between them was almost tangible. But while the tension did not go away, both eventually got used to it.
Zhou Mi promptly broke up with Victoria over an expensive dinner at a five-star restaurant, and stuck to the basic Break-Up Spiel: I think you are a great person but I don’t see a future with you […] it’s not you it’s me […] one day I promise you will find somebody who is perfect for you and you alone. Victoria went home believing that Zhou Mi was a kind and warm-hearted person-“The Perfect Gentleman”-which was exactly what Zhou Mi wanted.
He arrived at the dormitory with less weight on his shoulders, but then from the corner of his eye he saw Kyuhyun take one scrutinizing look at him and scoff. Zhou Mi’s blood boiled, and he resisted the urge to throw another lamp, this time without missing. After all, he hardly broke up with Victoria for selfless reasons.
Perhaps the reason why he hated Kyuhyun so much was because the latter was able to see him as he was, not as he wanted to be seen.
It was cold. And snow fell from the sky, transparent and pure and honest and white. White, the color found behind any other color-the true face behind the mask.
Zhou Mi absolutely loathed the snow.
During finals season, Zhou Mi went back to the dormitory at three o’clock in the morning. Not from studying, though. Unlike most rich kids, he hardly ever stayed out late; the only times were when his father phoned. Which was what happened that night.
And the last thing Zhou Mi wanted to deal with was that smug I-know-what-you-did look on Kyuhyun’s face.
“Mind your own business!” he bellowed, his patience running thin as Kyuhyun quirked an amused eyebrow.
“I said nothing.”
“Then shut the hell up!”
“Do you want to talk about it?”
“Not with you!”
Kyuhyun crossed his arms across his chest. “Then with who, huh?”
Zhou Mi glared. “Unlike you, Kyuhyun, I have friends!”
“Do you now?”
“Fuck you! Fuck you!”
“You wish you could,” the biology major sneered.
With that, Zhou Mi lunged, hell bent on strangling his roommate to death and then dumping the body into the nearest river. He grabbed hold of Kyuhyun’s shirt collar and easily lifted him a centimeter above the floor, his free fist held up menacingly. “What did you say?”
“I said you wish you could fuck me,” the reply came without hesitation or fright.
“Say that again,” Zhou Mi growled, voice dangerously low. “I dare you to say that again!”
“What will you do, huh? Punch me? Beat me? Kill me?”
A drop of water fell onto Kyuhyun’s cheek, and Zhou Mi recoiled in horror, the pad of his third finger brushing over his lower eyelid to find it wet. “Stay away from me,” he ordered, desperately covering his face as he staggered backwards. He was not going to cry, not in front of Kyuhyun of all people. “Stay away from me!”
“Zhou Mi,” came the suddenly sympathetic voice.
“Get the fuck away from me!”
“You’re only hurting yourself more by doing this.”
By that time, Zhou Mi had already lost control of his tear ducts and was sobbing openly. “Go away,” he wept brokenly, collapsing onto the floor, humiliated. “Please, just go away.”
But Kyuhyun did nothing of the sort. Instead, he grabbed a pack of dry ramen noodles from the cupboards and arranged himself on the ground beside his distressed roommate, careful to leave a wide enough gap between them. “There’s no need to hide your face, Zhou Mi; I knew that you’ve been crying this whole time.”
Kyuhyun tore the package open and broke off a little piece of the MSG-filled snack to hand to Zhou Mi, who hesitantly accepted it. They ate in silence, Zhou Mi’s hiccups and the crunching of dry noodles the only sounds in the room.
They say that honesty is the key for any relationship to work, for any relationship to continue. Zhou Mi smiled bitterly. “Is that why ours didn’t?” he shouted out into the vastness of the snowy city. “Answer me, you motherfucker! Goddammit, answer me! Answer me!”
There was no response save for the apathetic whistling of the wind.
Zhou Mi’s lip curled. “Typical.”
”Why do you study biology?
“Because I got a scholarship.”
“Is that the only reason?”
“Pretty much.”
“Seriously?”
Kyuhyun looked up from page three hundred and six of his textbook on Darwin, scowling. “If you are expecting me to make up some flowery bullshit answer about how biology has always been my one and only passion in life, you can go fuck yourself.”
“No, I was just curious. I mean, I got a scholarship in political science but I decided on voice performance because I knew that I would like it better.”
“Not that many people have that privilege.”
The performance major frowned. “It was a choice, not a privilege.”
“A choice is a privilege.”
“Not the choice I had,” Zhou Mi muttered. “My father wanted me to follow in his footsteps, study law, and become a persecutor like he did. He said that if I went into voice performance, he would stop supporting me. He calls every other week to try and change my mind.”
“You made a foolish choice going into voice performance, then.”
Zhou Mi quirked a smile. “Foolish. But certainly worth it.”
Kyuhyun laughed dryly, and Zhou Mi found himself analyzing its sound waves and trying to identify its pitches.
“Silent night, holy night,” Zhou Mi sang into the open, just because he wanted to sing. “All is calm, all is bright.” (Kyuhyun always pretended to hate Christmas carols but Zhou Mi had good ears and always caught him humming along to the radio.) “Round yon Virgin Mother and Child, Holy Infant so tender and mild.”
He thought back to the nights they spent together, the tense words and conversations, the equally tense atmosphere both of them endured in the darkness of their dormitories, the tense lien of understanding they had between them. But all that is wound is bound to be unwound eventually.
“Sleep in heavenly peace,” he sang, voice faltering as a tear slipped down his cheek. “Sleep in heavenly peace.”
Zhou Mi had always hoped that falling in love felt like being embraced by a nice pink cashmere blanket. He had always imagined it to be soft, comforting, warm, and above all secure, filled with pink fluff and smelling like ironed shirts fresh from the dryer.
Falling in love with Kyuhyun felt absolutely nothing like being embraced by a nice pink cashmere blanket. It felt more like running on a never-ending treadmill with his worst nightmare trailing after him-absolutely terrifying.
The worst part was looking over his shoulder and realizing that his worst nightmare was having absolutely no trouble catching up.
Homosexuality was a forbidden land never to be treaded on. Zhou Mi knew that. His father made sure he knew it. Mr. Zhou was a conservative man who believed that girls wore dresses, that boys played sports, and that women who were not stay-at-home wives and mothers were freelance whores. Divorced three times, all due to the forceful nature of his personality, he was a hard-headed man who knew what he wanted and knew how to get it.
One time when Zhou Mi was thirteen, an openly gay couple moved into the house right across the street. They were friendly people-a skinny man with a gummy smile named Eunhyuk and his handsome idealistic partner Donghae-and Zhou Mi warmed up to them immediately. He was especially fond of Donghae, who promised to teach him how to dance (“Like a pro,” he had promised, winking). Zhou Mi remembered seeing them walk towards his house, remembered racing down the stairs only to find that his father had beat him to the door.
“Hello, I’m Eunhyuk and this is Donghae,” Eunhyuk greeted cheerfully. “We just moved in. We’re hosting a housewarming party on Sunday evening if you are free at around six. You can also drop by later if you want. We would love to have you over and get to know you better. We have already met your son Zhou Mi, in fact.”
“He’s wonderful,” Donghae added with that handsome smile of his. “Very bright child.”
Mr. Zhou looked them up and down, and his face contorted into an expression that Zhou Mi never wanted to see again.
“You are disgusting. Get your faggot faces out of my sight,” he sneered before slamming the door in their faces.
The next day, when Zhou Mi walked out the door to go to school, Donghae was tending the flowers in his garden. From the corner of his eye, Donghae caught sight of him, and he beamed and waved. This gesture left Zhou Mi with a dilemma. He was so tempted to respond-he wanted to, really badly-but remembering his father’s words, the thirteen-year-old could do nothing but turn his head, and as a result he never learned how to dance like a pro.
Zhou Mi had always known, really. It was not a huge surprise when he finally acknowledged the fact that he was a bit different from the rest of the guys he knew. It was stupidly obvious, like painfully hitting the top of his forehead against the top doorframe when walking out of his bedroom in the morning, because, goddammit, he knew it was there the whole time.
While it was not exactly the hugest surprise, it was certainly the largest blow. He had already failed his father’s expectations too many times to count-not being able to catch a ball, crying every time Leonardo diCaprio died in Titanic, having a tomboy as a best friend, losing every game of one-on-one basketball to said tomboy best friend, joining the Musical Theatre Club-and on top of that, he realized that he would never be able to marry a nice girl and have children with her without a whole thirty years’ dose of flunitrazepam.
So he dumped himself into the dating pool and hoped to God that there would be some woman-any woman-that he could at least learn to fall in love with. He had many girlfriends, enough to be considered popular, but not enough to be considered a player. It was a sad cycle where he would start seeking reasons for an imminent breakup the moment they started dating. He hated being the one to end relationships, but not only because he hated causing the disappointed expressions on his girlfriends’ faces.
He just hated being a coward, that’s all, a coward that ran away when things got tough.
And yet every time he brought home a girl for his father to meet, Mr. Zhou would smile and clap his son on the back. “This one is a keeper,” he would always say.
And every time, Zhou Mi pasted on that fake cheery smile that everybody loved to see.
It was a long way down to the bottom. The cars below looked like little white pill bugs. Zhou Mi let out a deep sigh and wondered if it was physically possible to die from regret.
Two years passed, and while Kyuhyun and Zhou Mi were still apprehensive around each other, at least they were on fairly civil terms.
“So what kind of girl do you like?” Kyuhyun mocked bitterly one normal afternoon during their third year after finding out that he still refused to open the closet door. “Tall? Nice curves? Petite? Cute? Hmm, I don’t know, male?”
“Shut up, Kyuhyun,” Zhou Mi barked without venom, having long gotten used to his roommate’s snide remarks.
“You’re an absolute terrible heterosexual, Zhou Mi.”
“That’s what you think.”
“What are you afraid of?”
“Spiders, but you already know that.” Indeed Kyuhyun did, having once walked in on Zhou Mi pressed up against a corner of the wall, eyes fixated upon a tiny eight-legged insect on the other side of the room.
Kyuhyun snickered. “You’re afraid of spiders. And you’re afraid of being gay.”
“I’m not afraid of being gay.”
“You are afraid of becoming a cock-sucking faggot.”
Zhou Mi directed an icy glare at the other student, secretly checking to see that their dorm door was closed and locked. He knew what was coming, after all. “Kyuhyun, stop it.”
“You are afraid of becoming the queer fairy that your daddy always made fun of.”
“Dammit, Kyuhyun, could you just shut up with the-”
“No, I can’t just shut up!” Kyuhyun bolted out of his rolling chair, ears a furious shade of dark red. “You honestly don’t get it, do you? One day, you will wake up and realize that you’re tired of ruining your life!”
“And what’s it to you?” Zhou Mi challenged. “I ruin my life, fine, it’s my life!”
“Okay fine. I just want to make sure of something, just out of curiosity. You will grow up trying to make your asshole of a homophobic father proud by marrying the first girl you have finally brainwashed yourself into liking. Then, god forbid, once the newly-wedded couple finally decides on an apartment, you will fuck her doggy style so that you could at least pretend that you’re fucking your wife’s best friend’s husband. Then, nine months later, you get a child that you pour your heart and soul into to forget about your worthless status as a closet case until he turns eighteen and decides that his dad is not cool enough to meet his girlfriend and thus he elopes with her to Vegas and you never see him again. Meanwhile, you are becoming really close to your hot next-door neighbour, and on some cruddy Friday evening you have one too many tequila shots and find yourself in bed with this guy, and the next morning you are inelegantly ambushed by your hot next-door neighbour’s wife and just barely manage to jump out the window in your half-naked state and get a bone fracture you never fully recover from. Then once you get over your initial homophobic panic you heatedly persuade your wife to move across the state, and after you finally forget all about your gay fling with your hot next-door neighbour-or after your asshole of a homophobic father dies, whichever comes first-you will wake up from that conditioned stupor of yours, and find out that hey sorry, wife-of-ten-or-more-years, it just, oh I don’t know, slipped my mind that I’ve been gay ever since I remember, hope this tiny bit of information doesn’t change anything between us. But by then, even after a messy divorce, failed child custody and enough gay bar cruising to be pathetic, you’d be too old and cynical to get any guy to even talk to you not to mention go home with you. Then you’d grow old and walk on the streets with a cane, picking up any stray cat you see and naming them all eight of them after characters from Friends. So on the track of consciously trying to ruin your life, you’d might as well abuse your sexual fantasies on some random girl’s boyfriend, permanently break your hip jumping out of your hot neighbour’s window, screw your wife and kid over, and damn a poor unfortunate feline to a life as Phoebe Buffay. And you’re telling me you don’t care?”
Zhou Mi stared at his irate roommate for what seemed like hours. He just stared and stared and stared, unblinkingly. Then in some magical moment, it just came together. “You love me,” he deadpanned, realizing the full meaning of the words just as they escaped his voice box. “You love me.”
Kyuhyun started. His empty silence was answer enough.
Ignoring every instinct to do otherwise, Zhou Mi’s expression hardened. “You are disgusting. I never want to see your faggot face again.”
As expected from him, Kyuhyun nodded blankly, grabbed his coat, slipped on his shoes, and calmly walked out the door. Once the footsteps down the hall faded, Zhou Mi’s cold expression melted into one of grief, and he buried his face into his hands.
Zhou Mi never really thought of himself as weak. Sure, he was thin and had next to no muscle mass, but he did not run with his arms flailing and he never cried over a broken nail. So it was almost shocking how much he felt so goddamn fragile just looking over the building ledge and finally acknowledging the fact that he had a goddamn fear of heights.
He screamed in frustration and threw his hands up into the frosty air. “Ugh, why does it have to be this hard? Goddammit, why did you have to die?!”
Kyuhyun did not return back to the dormitory for a week and a half, a week and a half during which Zhou Mi almost drove himself insane. He knew that Kyuhyun was strong-well, hopefully, strong enough in the sense that he would eventually recover from the ruthless gunshot to the heart that Zhou Mi gave him. Zhou Mi spent that week and a half in a semi-crazed state, switching back and forth between severely depressed to maniacally guilt-ridden.
This resulted in a whole life’s worth of self-loathing compressed into ten days. He hated himself, not only because he treated Kyuhyun, the boy who loved him and took him as is, like utter shit. He hated himself because no matter how much he tried, he could not bring himself to hate Kyuhyun, the “faggot face” that was supposed to repulse him.
He just could not hate Kyuhyun, not anymore.
B-because he lov-
Zhou Mi looked over the ledge once more, heart thumping so hard that it made the blood rush into his head. “You died on purpose, didn’t you?” he yelled into the sky. “The perfect revenge on me. Spot-on. Immaculate. Couldn’t have done it better! Is that what you wanted to hear, you asshole? That you won? And I lost?” Zhou Mi wiped the stray tear from his eyelash and glared at his feet. “Fine, I concede. I hold up the white flag. You win.”
Probably the last thing he expected was a phone call, and one look at the caller ID made Zhou Mi’s blood run cold. He pressed the talk button and took a shaky breath. “Hello father.”
“So then, have you transferred degrees yet? I sent you the application and filled out everything for you already; all you had to do was sign it and file it.”
“No, father, I haven’t.”
“This is your last chance, Zhou Mi. I mean it this time.”
“I know,” Zhou Mi sighed, rubbing his temples. “But father, I don’t want to study law. I love singing.”
“And I love bacon strips. You can sing whenever. You can’t make money whenever.”
“I want to believe that life isn’t all about money.”
“Where do you think your college fund is coming from? The roof above your head? The food you eat? Where do you think all that comes from, Zhou Mi?”
“Father, I’m gay!” Zhou Mi blurted.
“Be serious, Zhou Mi, this is no time for-”
Zhou Mi smiled bitterly. “I’m not joking. I’m gay. I’m in love with my roommate. I’ve mentioned him to you a couple times already. His name is Kyuhyun.”
There was the sound of a wine glass breaking and a muffled curse on the other end of the telephone line. Seconds passed at an agonizingly slow pace. “You’re confused. You must be confused. Most boys are at your age are confused. All you need is a good girl and-”
“Well, I hate to break it to you, dad, but no girl can help me because I’ve known that I was gay ever since my sophomore year in high school.”
“You’ve had girlfriends!”
“Well now you know why I’ve always broken up with them in the end.”
“What about Victoria?”
“We’ve long stopped dating since first year.” Zhou Mi could hear his father’s heavy breathing through the phone, and he gulped.
“You are never to see tha-that boy again, do you understand me?” Mr. Zhou spluttered. “It is because of him, he is the bad influence here! That boy has contaminated your mind!”
Zhou Mi’s eyes flashed. “Father, if it were not for that boy, I would still be wallowing in self-denial, so don’t you tell me that he is a bad influence or a contamination when all along he was the only person who helped me come to terms with who I am!”
“So you believe that boy? You believe that you are a faggot?”
“Yes Dad, I am a faggot.”
“I refuse to have a queer son.”
Zhou Mi swallowed, voice wavering as it dropped two octaves. “If you don’t accept me as a queer son, then you won’t have a son.”
“So be it,” his father gritted out before promptly hanging up on him.
Never in his life had Zhou Mi ever imagined that words could sting.
Zhou Mi loathed the snow. Its beauty and pureness only reminded him of how fake his life was. He faked loving Victoria (and all of his girlfriends prior to her), he faked being that Perfect Gentleman Mimi that everybody expected from him, he faked next to all of the smiles he had to paste on in order to uphold his pleasant image, he faked being a noble heterosexual for his father.
And, as he painfully reflected, he realized that he had involuntarily faked hating Kyuhyun. If he thought about it hard enough, it was actually quite pathetic.
He expected himself to be braver, but once again he failed to meet the expectations placed upon him. So he backed away from the building ledge and took the elevator down to the ground floor. He walked back to the college campus, entered the dormitory kitchen, locked the doors, grabbed the nearest knife, and slit his wrists before he could have any second thoughts.
“Zhou Mi? Zhou Mi? Can you hear me? Open your eyes, Zhou Mi.”
A groan resonated from his body, and Zhou Mi felt lightheaded as he squinted, trying to adjust to the brightness. Another groan: “Where am I?”
“You’re here,” the cheerful voice answered.
“No shit, Sherlock. Where’s here?”
“Here is here. There is there. You just happen to be here and not there.”
Zhou Mi let out an exasperated sigh and pried his eyes open. White. All white. Like he was floating in the dimensions of a blank sheet of pristine white paper. “Am I dead?” he slurred.
“No, you aren’t.”
“Dammit.”
“Don’t be so cynical. You should be happy you lived.”
Zhou Mi looked up and his eyes widened. “Donghae?”
A bright and handsome smile greeted him. “Long time no see.”
“No kidding!” Zhou Mi picked himself off the floor and threw his long arms around the man’s neck.
“You’ve gotten big!” Donghae laughed, noticing the effects of the growth spurt Zhou Mi had when he was sixteen. “You used to barely look over my shoulder.”
Zhou Mi allowed a small smile at that. “So, where is this?”
“It doesn’t matter. What matters is that we meet again and that we make the best of the time we have together.” Donghae beamed, and sat down with his legs crossed. “So how are things with you?”
Following his gesture, Zhou Mi’s face fell.
Donghae nodded. “I see. Family, girlfriend, or school?”
“None of the above, unfortunately.” Zhou Mi sighed. “His name is Kyuhyun.”
“Oh, boyfriend! What’s he like? Kind? Adorable? Makes you laugh?”
“None of the above. He’s rude, he has massive acne problems, and he never says anything that doesn’t hurt. But fuck it, I love him all the more for it.” Zhou Mi chewed on his bottom lip and exhaled sharply. “Donghae, how did you know you were in love with Eunhyuk?”
Donghae smiled fondly. “I always knew, silly! It was always there. But the first time I acknowledged it was when we first danced together. We just fit, you know?”
“You’re lucky. I found out that I was in love with Kyuhyun the second I called him a faggot face and told him to never show his face in front of me.”
“Faggot face, huh? Sounds familiar.”
Zhou Mi hung his head. “I know. I’m sorry about that.”
“Not your fault,” Donghae brushed it off. “Eunhyuk and I were used to that sort of behaviour. Your father was definitely not the worst, trust me.”
“I could have defended you. Or been nicer to you afterwards, at least saying hi once in a while.”
“You were only a kid. A closeted kid living with a homophobic father. It must have been terrifying.”
Zhou Mi sniffed, voice taking on a contemptuous tone. “I tried really hard-so goddamn hard-to gain his approval. Then I finally become the man he wanted me to be, and guess where that got me?”
Donghae wrapped his arm around the younger’s quivering shoulders. “Young couples fight all the time. You should have seen me and Eunhyuk when we first met: we absolutely hated each other. We were rivals on the dance team, after all. But then, you know, things happened. My girlfriend dumped me, Eunhyuk’s sympathetic side came out when he saw me crying in the studio, and for once we had an argument-free conversation. Six years later, I find myself marrying this guy, wanting to build a whole life with him.”
“Alright, say you gave Eunhyuk the worst rejection speech in the Guinness Book of World Records. On top of that, pretend that your father pretty much disowns you over the phone. What do you do then?”
Donghae thought for a grand total of one minute and then his face brightened. “Dance!” He pushed himself onto his feet and expertly spun on his heel.
“Dance?” Zhou Mi quirked an eyebrow doubtfully. “Seriously?”
“Just trust me!” the dancer grabbed Zhou Mi’s hand and hoisted him up. “After all, I plan on keeping the promise I made to you eight years ago. Alright, put your hand around the small of my back and just listen to the music.”
“There is no music.”
“What a bright time, it’s the right time to rock the night away,” Donghae sang suavely, winking as he rocked his hips to the beat. “Now there is.”
Zhou Mi laughed. “Jingle bell time is a swell time.”
“To go gliding in a one-horse sleigh!.”
Giddy-up jingle horse, pick up your feet
Jingle around the clock
Mix and a-mingle in the jingling feet
That’s the jingle bell
That’s the jingle bell
Zhou Mi woke up to the sound of the radio and the smell of used dental floss. He groaned at the dizzy flash that rushed into his head.
There was nervous shuffling on his right. “Zhou Mi? Oh my god, Zhou Mi!”
The hospitalized man felt warm fingers curl around his limp palm. “K-Kyuhyun?”
“Hey.”
Zhou Mi pried his eyelids open and took in the red-rimmed eyes and slightly parted chapped lips. He breathed in slowly and tightened his hold on Kyuhyun’s hand. “Hey.” And then he smiled, slowly and deliberately-the first true smile of happiness that he had in a long time.
That’s the jingle bell rock!
The funeral procession for Zhou Mi’s father was a bittersweet event. Zhou Mi cried, many others cried, but deep down inside he cried because he felt ashamed for being the slightest bit relieved that his father was dead. Kyuhyun held his hand the whole time, and though there were stares and whispers behind muffling hands, Zhou Mi forced himself to ignore them.
Baby steps, baby steps.
Hospital food tasted like armpit hair, but Kyuhyun’s cooking tasted like sweaty armpit hair, so Zhou Mi was almost grateful that his roommate?boyfriend?lover? did not even try to play househusband for him. Kyuhyun did, however, visit every day for the next four days he was hospitalized, and each visit made Zhou Mi fall a little deeper in love.
Despite everything, Zhou Mi regretted never having the chance to introduce Kyuhyun to his father. Maybe Mr. Zhou would have liked Kyuhyun’s sarcasm, or the straightforward way in which he approached things. Maybe he would have been impressed with Kyuhyun’s all-encompassing knowledge about amoebas. Maybe they would have hit it off immediately with their mutual love for newspaper Sudoku puzzles. Maybe, just maybe, he would have eventually accepted their relationship as something more than friendship.
So he worked with what he had and stood above his father’s open casket. “Father, I would like you to meet Kyuhyun,” he motioned to the man beside him. “Kyuhyun, meet my father.”
“A pleasure to meet you, sir,” Kyuhyun bowed ever so slightly, eyes never leaving the pale unmoving corpse.
The two celebrated Christmas Eve in their dorm snuggling on Kyuhyun’s bed, drinking store-bought eggnog and watching the 1964 animated version of Rudolph The Red-Nosed Reindeer on the mini-television that Zhou Mi got as a birthday present when he was seventeen. Zhou Mi’s arm was about to lose all feeling from the position they were in, but he ignored it in favour of keeping Kyuhyun’s head nestled in the curve of his neck. That was what love was about, after all-sacrificing smaller details for the big picture.
He wondered about what would have happened if Kyuhyun had not been assigned his roommate. Would he still have dated Victoria? Probably, he liked her enough-kind, beautiful, lithe, intelligent, the perfect girl. Would he have married her eventually? With the whole four-carat diamond ring and everything? Would they have developed a happy marriage, or would it have gone as Kyuhyun had imagined-Zhou Mi continuing to suppress his homosexuality while fucking his hot married next-door neighbour on the side? Or would he have eventually loved Victoria like he had always hoped he would?
“Stop thinking about other girls when you are with me,” Kyuhyun’s dry voice snapped Zhou Mi out of his reflective reverie.
“How would you know if I was thinking of other girls?”
“I’m psychic.”
“Right. I forgot.”
“What were you thinking about?”
“I thought you were psychic,” Zhou Mi teased, already anticipating the vindictive whack on the head. “I was thinking about us. About what would have happened to me if there was no us.”
“You would have stayed in the closet, locked the door, and swallowed the key, that’s for sure.”
“And I would have named my future stray cat Phoebe Buffay.”
“That too.”
They chuckled, and stared as the credits rolled up the tiny television screen, the theme song crackling through the old worn-out speakers.
Rudolph the red-nosed reindeer
Had a very shiny nose
And if you ever saw him
You would even say it glows.
Zhou Mi nudged Kyuhyun’s head with his shoulder, earning a grunt of annoyance. “Hey, get up.”
“Why?” Kyuhyun whined.
“Just trust me!” Zhou Mi grabbed his boyfriend’s hand and hoisted him onto his bare feet. “Alright, put your hand around the small of my back.”
Then one foggy Christmas Eve
Santa came to say:
“Rudolph with your nose so bright,
Won’t you guide my sleigh tonight?”
“Okay, now what?” Kyuhyun raised an eyebrow.
“Now,” Zhou Mi waggled his eyebrows, grinning as he swung his hips and twirled his dance partner. “We dance and sing along! Then all the reindeer loved him as they shouted out with glee.”
Rudolph the red-nosed reindeer
You’ll go down in history!
They continued to laugh and dance and sing even as the soundtrack from the movie came to an end, each revelling in the other’s mirth and happiness as Christmas day dawned upon them.
Zhou Mi might have been the biggest idiot in the world and the biggest asshole in the whole damn planet. And he might have been the biggest coward ever to walk the earth. And while Zhou Mi had regrets, almost as many as there were snowflakes in the night sky, he was going to make sure that his love for Kyuhyun was not one of them.
end.