when we were friends
alexander/kevin
fluff
pg13
2200 words
Tuesday night. Kevin comes home hanging off Kibum’s arm for support, face flushed from the alcohol and possibly something else. “Xanderrrr,” he slurs a little the moment you open the door. He’s sitting on the doorstep, body angled sideways so that Kibum can help pull his shoes off.
“Xander we’re back~”
“Well obviously,” you deadpan and Kevin laughs, Kibum turning his face up at you a little at the sound of English just before midnight.
Left foot, right foot. Sneakers laid haphazard by the shoe cupboard with laces all undone and Kibum pulls Kevin up, now sock-clad and laughing. He flounders about in the hallway for a while, pulling you into a clumsy late night waltz in socks and bare feet (“Had a good night?” “Yeah.” “Tried drinking?” “Tried is the key word.”) while Kibum ambles by, obviously tired out from earlier shenigans. “Save me a spot on the couch,” Kevin calls over your shoulder and suddenly he’s spun out of your arms as if he’d never been in them at all, running into the living room to fall into a messy heap with Kibum, head in the latter’s lap so they can watch reruns of talk shows together.
“I told you to save me a spot!”
“Just sit on the floor, will you?”
You pass them on your way to the kitchen and they’re wrestling on the carpet, couch quite forgotten for the moment. Kevin has a fistful of Kibum’s hair and Kibum is groaning something awful, kicking and shoving and calling things to a tie. Tumbling easy the way they do on good nights with no one around to interrupt. There’s still a pile of dirty dishes in the sink from when Dongho lost at kaibaibo earlier and they mock you as you move from cupboard to water dispenser to kitchen table.
Somewhere outside, Kevin is laughing at some joke on the television, shouting at Kibum to not change the channel, he was watching that. Whatever else he says next is lost in the noise of a new scuffle for the remote control, thuds and sounds of cushions being messily displaced. The television blares on and you exhale. Pick up a dishrag.
You’re scrubbing the underside of a pot covered with Soohyun’s cooking mistakes when Kevin walks into the kitchen, proclaiming that Kibum is no fun anymore now that he’s asleep. The TV still emits sudden bursts of canned applause every now and then but save for that, the house is quiet. Even Dongho is asleep, head probably resting on some barely read textbook open to the middle.
“Still washing up?”
“Mm.”
It’s an obvious answer but you’re glad of some sound in the kitchen, anything besides the drone of tap water and rough scratch of new sponges. Kevin meanders around making a general nuisance of himself and there he goes, drinking from your untouched cup, rearranging the wet plates you’ve set aside to dry. “You should come out with us next time,” he says once you start washing the chopsticks, voice soft enough for you to know he’s not as buzzed as you think he is.
“To chaperone the both of you? No thanks.” You squeeze more soap onto your sponge and though you can’t see it now, you’re sure that Kevin is pouting.
“No one said anything about chaperoning.”
“Right,” you drawl and you’re done with the chopsticks, starting on a rice bowl next, holding it under warm water for a while. “But I’ll take you up on the offer anyways, to y’know. Peel your face off the pavement when you faceplant yourself there.” Rice grains are hard to get out after they’ve dried.
Behind you, Kevin has playfully caught hold of your shoulders, hands steady as he steers you this way and that. It’s hard to wash the dishes like this but you’re not one to complain, not when Kevin has pressed himself up against you, standing on the tips of his toes so he can drape his arms over your shoulders.
“What makes you think we need chaperoning?” he says close to your ear and you shrug the best you can. He stays like that for a while, sighing, and you can feel his chest heave against your back. He flicks one finger against one shock of hair you have tied up to keep out of your face.
“Maybe the fact that fangirls will be all over you if they find you passed out drunk in some dark alleyway?”
“Then Kibum can snarl at them and fend them off while you peel my face off the pavement.”
“Oh really now. Then that means I’ll have to be there to chaperone you.”
Kevin tugs at your hair now, hard. “Darn,” he says a little deflatedly. “Forgot about that bit.”
The conversation is diving into inane territories, the way conversations tend to go when it’s too late at night.
“Go to bed, Kevin.”
“Hm? No. You’re still washing up.”
“And up to my elbows in soap.”
You reach behind you to smear soap suds on his nose, the way you used to do in earlier days when U-Kiss still had the time to do things like this, yelling and shouting and making a mess bigger than the one you’ve started out to clean. The plate you’re holding has a chip in it’s side, probably from one of the kitchen wars you used to have.
“Go to bed,” you say again and Kevin mumbles something back in half agreement, a goodnight pressed against your skin as he kisses your neck for the briefest of moments, warm breath beside your ear. Maybe you’ve imagined it, maybe you didn’t. He stumbles away then and you don’t need to look back to know he’s already on his way to the living room to wake Kibum up in ways only known to them. “Wake up, Kibummie,” says the Kevin in your head, clingy when tired.
Somewhere in the apartment, someone bumps against something, laughing in response. The TV is silent and you’re still holding on to that last plate, floral pattern half obscured by soapy water. Bare feet and sock clad ones are padding on the floorboards, Kevin talking in a low voice and Kibum answering him likewise, words only sounds before there’s nothing at all, Kibum closing the door behind them both, arms probably around Kevin’s waist. Touching, pulling in the dark to share soju tinged kisses, crawling into bed.
“Wake up,” says the Kevin in your head, curled in Kibum’s arms and the plate slips from your hands.
You start the first few minutes of Wednesday morning with a broken dish in the sink and a shallow gash down the side of your palm, not bleeding too much but enough to make you fumble around for tissues. “Fuck,” you say out loud and it feels like a liberation, no one around to hear you. There’s a red smear down the side of the kitchen cabinet from when you tried to get the first aid kit, only to give up after seeing the amount of half expired food packets you’d need to clear out of the way to get it. Tissues will have to do for now.
“Did you break something?”
“The fuck-”
Kevin makes a tsk-ing noise and makes you sit down at the table while he goes to rummage for the ever elusive first aid kit, all while saying something about needing to set up a swear jar fund. “We’ll buy ice cream with the money,” he says and clambers back to you, bearing bandages, a pack of forgotten gummy bears in the other hand. “Good ice cream, like the ones we had in Singapore.”
“It was yogurt.”
“Oh?”
Kevin shrugs and makes you hold out your hand, moving the tissues out of the way.
“There’s something a little wrong with this scene, don’t you think? Like you should be the one bandaging me or something.”
“So you’re implying you should be the one washing the dishes, right?”
He makes as if to flick you on your cut but you pull away, laughing, bandage trailing behind your hand because Kevin is messy at things like this. You’ll probably have to redo it yourself later but it’s okay, Kevin laughing right along with you and opening the pack of gummy bears. They’re a bit squashed but you suppose they taste alright.
“I thought I told you to go to bed,” you say around a mouthful of something that the packet proclaims to be a banana flavoured bear. It tastes of cheap sweetener. “Or is Kibum snoring too loud?”
Kevin shrugs again and reaches for a green bear. “Can’t sleep, it’s too hot, Kibum has stolen all my pillows and locked me out of the room, I want to eat gummy bears. Take your pick.”
“And here I was thinking it was because you wanted to keep me company.” Red bear. Strawberry? Cherry? You swallow without tasting it, it’s that horrendous.
“Tch, no marks for stating the obvious, Xander.”
He grins at you then, eyes bright from under a messy fringe with candy colouring on the tips of his fingers.
“Dibs on the last bear,” he continues and reaches for it, an orange, possibly the only one out of the pack that tastes good. “Or do you want to split?”
You let him have the last bear because that’s what friends do and Kevin splits it anyway, carefully bites off the top of the head and hands you the body.
“Because that’s what friends do,” he whispers, like it’s a secret and something flutters in your chest, hurting all the while. This is what friends do, they wait up for you till three in the morning and help you bandage cuts (albeit really messily). They start stupid conversations and dance with you in their socks, pull your hair and give you chaste kisses on your neck because they know it won’t mean anything the next morning.
“Nice to know you’re one,” you say despite yourself and Kevin beams like sunshine.
He falls asleep on the kitchen table later, much later after you’ve both had weak coffee with too much sugar in chipped mugs and you don’t have it in you to wake him up. Kibum would, of course, but you’re not Kibum. Never will be, for the record, so you pull up your chair closer to him. Push the hair out of his eyes and let the strands fall back down, he can’t see you like this so maybe it’ll be okay. You can always hide it under the guise of it being payback for that neck thing earlier so it’ll be okay, it won’t-
“What the hell are you doing?”
Kevin is suddenly watching you with sleep lidded eyes and this is when you kiss him, soft and tasting faintly of coffee and sugar, one heartbeat two three before he kisses you back, one hand coming round your head. It’s an awkward position to be doing this but you manage somehow, chair legs skittering over the kitchen floor before you almost fall over from the entire thing, sliding off the chair in time. Kevin laughs and joins you sitting confused on the floor.
“Was that payback?” he asks, voice still a little rough around the edges of words from sleep.
“Yeah,” you manage. “Yeah.”
“I didn’t say it because I thought it was obvious too,” he muses out loud and you stare at him, still confused. He sighs and lays his head in your lap, the way he does with Kibum. “I’m talking about the whole ‘why I’m not in bed thing’ just in case you were wondering.”
Kevin shifts in your lap and you think he’s just about crazy enough to go to sleep there but he reaches up for you and pulls you down, kissing you for the second, third time tonight. “I wanted to do this as well.” He lays down again and now he really is going to sleep, hair falling over his eyes.
“Didn’t you think I made a good show about being drunk earlier? Damn, I should have it then, eh?”
“Swear jar,” you find yourself mumbling, just because there doesn’t seem to be any other appropriate thing to say. Kevin makes an exasperated sound and this is what friends don’t normally do, sleeping in each other’s laps at two in the morning, kissing each other without knowing whether it’ll mean anything later.
“I’ll buy you ice cream if you let this one slide.”
“Don’t you want to move to the couch? Chocolate ice cream.”
“If you move with me and okay, deal.”
And this is the part where you give up trying to figure out where the borders between both start because Kevin is already pulling you to your feet, stepping on your feet in sleepy hurry (“Why are you still wearing your socks?” “They're my feet, don’t spoil the mood.”), pulling at your hair when you’re too slow. Kevin will be whatever he wants to be and as long as you’re informed every now and then (Kevin doesn’t fight you for the couch, just somehow squishes the both of you onto it and uses your chest as a pillow), it doesn’t matter.
end.
AN- I uh. What. So this is the first time I'm trying out U-Kiss. Sorry if I butchered everyone's characterizations :/ Why are they so hard to write ;___; !
Also:
omg why so presh
fluff
pg13
2200 words
Tuesday night. Kevin comes home hanging off Kibum’s arm for support, face flushed from the alcohol and possibly something else. “Xanderrrr,” he slurs a little the moment you open the door. He’s sitting on the doorstep, body angled sideways so that Kibum can help pull his shoes off.
“Xander we’re back~”
“Well obviously,” you deadpan and Kevin laughs, Kibum turning his face up at you a little at the sound of English just before midnight.
Left foot, right foot. Sneakers laid haphazard by the shoe cupboard with laces all undone and Kibum pulls Kevin up, now sock-clad and laughing. He flounders about in the hallway for a while, pulling you into a clumsy late night waltz in socks and bare feet (“Had a good night?” “Yeah.” “Tried drinking?” “Tried is the key word.”) while Kibum ambles by, obviously tired out from earlier shenigans. “Save me a spot on the couch,” Kevin calls over your shoulder and suddenly he’s spun out of your arms as if he’d never been in them at all, running into the living room to fall into a messy heap with Kibum, head in the latter’s lap so they can watch reruns of talk shows together.
“I told you to save me a spot!”
“Just sit on the floor, will you?”
You pass them on your way to the kitchen and they’re wrestling on the carpet, couch quite forgotten for the moment. Kevin has a fistful of Kibum’s hair and Kibum is groaning something awful, kicking and shoving and calling things to a tie. Tumbling easy the way they do on good nights with no one around to interrupt. There’s still a pile of dirty dishes in the sink from when Dongho lost at kaibaibo earlier and they mock you as you move from cupboard to water dispenser to kitchen table.
Somewhere outside, Kevin is laughing at some joke on the television, shouting at Kibum to not change the channel, he was watching that. Whatever else he says next is lost in the noise of a new scuffle for the remote control, thuds and sounds of cushions being messily displaced. The television blares on and you exhale. Pick up a dishrag.
You’re scrubbing the underside of a pot covered with Soohyun’s cooking mistakes when Kevin walks into the kitchen, proclaiming that Kibum is no fun anymore now that he’s asleep. The TV still emits sudden bursts of canned applause every now and then but save for that, the house is quiet. Even Dongho is asleep, head probably resting on some barely read textbook open to the middle.
“Still washing up?”
“Mm.”
It’s an obvious answer but you’re glad of some sound in the kitchen, anything besides the drone of tap water and rough scratch of new sponges. Kevin meanders around making a general nuisance of himself and there he goes, drinking from your untouched cup, rearranging the wet plates you’ve set aside to dry. “You should come out with us next time,” he says once you start washing the chopsticks, voice soft enough for you to know he’s not as buzzed as you think he is.
“To chaperone the both of you? No thanks.” You squeeze more soap onto your sponge and though you can’t see it now, you’re sure that Kevin is pouting.
“No one said anything about chaperoning.”
“Right,” you drawl and you’re done with the chopsticks, starting on a rice bowl next, holding it under warm water for a while. “But I’ll take you up on the offer anyways, to y’know. Peel your face off the pavement when you faceplant yourself there.” Rice grains are hard to get out after they’ve dried.
Behind you, Kevin has playfully caught hold of your shoulders, hands steady as he steers you this way and that. It’s hard to wash the dishes like this but you’re not one to complain, not when Kevin has pressed himself up against you, standing on the tips of his toes so he can drape his arms over your shoulders.
“What makes you think we need chaperoning?” he says close to your ear and you shrug the best you can. He stays like that for a while, sighing, and you can feel his chest heave against your back. He flicks one finger against one shock of hair you have tied up to keep out of your face.
“Maybe the fact that fangirls will be all over you if they find you passed out drunk in some dark alleyway?”
“Then Kibum can snarl at them and fend them off while you peel my face off the pavement.”
“Oh really now. Then that means I’ll have to be there to chaperone you.”
Kevin tugs at your hair now, hard. “Darn,” he says a little deflatedly. “Forgot about that bit.”
The conversation is diving into inane territories, the way conversations tend to go when it’s too late at night.
“Go to bed, Kevin.”
“Hm? No. You’re still washing up.”
“And up to my elbows in soap.”
You reach behind you to smear soap suds on his nose, the way you used to do in earlier days when U-Kiss still had the time to do things like this, yelling and shouting and making a mess bigger than the one you’ve started out to clean. The plate you’re holding has a chip in it’s side, probably from one of the kitchen wars you used to have.
“Go to bed,” you say again and Kevin mumbles something back in half agreement, a goodnight pressed against your skin as he kisses your neck for the briefest of moments, warm breath beside your ear. Maybe you’ve imagined it, maybe you didn’t. He stumbles away then and you don’t need to look back to know he’s already on his way to the living room to wake Kibum up in ways only known to them. “Wake up, Kibummie,” says the Kevin in your head, clingy when tired.
Somewhere in the apartment, someone bumps against something, laughing in response. The TV is silent and you’re still holding on to that last plate, floral pattern half obscured by soapy water. Bare feet and sock clad ones are padding on the floorboards, Kevin talking in a low voice and Kibum answering him likewise, words only sounds before there’s nothing at all, Kibum closing the door behind them both, arms probably around Kevin’s waist. Touching, pulling in the dark to share soju tinged kisses, crawling into bed.
“Wake up,” says the Kevin in your head, curled in Kibum’s arms and the plate slips from your hands.
You start the first few minutes of Wednesday morning with a broken dish in the sink and a shallow gash down the side of your palm, not bleeding too much but enough to make you fumble around for tissues. “Fuck,” you say out loud and it feels like a liberation, no one around to hear you. There’s a red smear down the side of the kitchen cabinet from when you tried to get the first aid kit, only to give up after seeing the amount of half expired food packets you’d need to clear out of the way to get it. Tissues will have to do for now.
“Did you break something?”
“The fuck-”
Kevin makes a tsk-ing noise and makes you sit down at the table while he goes to rummage for the ever elusive first aid kit, all while saying something about needing to set up a swear jar fund. “We’ll buy ice cream with the money,” he says and clambers back to you, bearing bandages, a pack of forgotten gummy bears in the other hand. “Good ice cream, like the ones we had in Singapore.”
“It was yogurt.”
“Oh?”
Kevin shrugs and makes you hold out your hand, moving the tissues out of the way.
“There’s something a little wrong with this scene, don’t you think? Like you should be the one bandaging me or something.”
“So you’re implying you should be the one washing the dishes, right?”
He makes as if to flick you on your cut but you pull away, laughing, bandage trailing behind your hand because Kevin is messy at things like this. You’ll probably have to redo it yourself later but it’s okay, Kevin laughing right along with you and opening the pack of gummy bears. They’re a bit squashed but you suppose they taste alright.
“I thought I told you to go to bed,” you say around a mouthful of something that the packet proclaims to be a banana flavoured bear. It tastes of cheap sweetener. “Or is Kibum snoring too loud?”
Kevin shrugs again and reaches for a green bear. “Can’t sleep, it’s too hot, Kibum has stolen all my pillows and locked me out of the room, I want to eat gummy bears. Take your pick.”
“And here I was thinking it was because you wanted to keep me company.” Red bear. Strawberry? Cherry? You swallow without tasting it, it’s that horrendous.
“Tch, no marks for stating the obvious, Xander.”
He grins at you then, eyes bright from under a messy fringe with candy colouring on the tips of his fingers.
“Dibs on the last bear,” he continues and reaches for it, an orange, possibly the only one out of the pack that tastes good. “Or do you want to split?”
You let him have the last bear because that’s what friends do and Kevin splits it anyway, carefully bites off the top of the head and hands you the body.
“Because that’s what friends do,” he whispers, like it’s a secret and something flutters in your chest, hurting all the while. This is what friends do, they wait up for you till three in the morning and help you bandage cuts (albeit really messily). They start stupid conversations and dance with you in their socks, pull your hair and give you chaste kisses on your neck because they know it won’t mean anything the next morning.
“Nice to know you’re one,” you say despite yourself and Kevin beams like sunshine.
He falls asleep on the kitchen table later, much later after you’ve both had weak coffee with too much sugar in chipped mugs and you don’t have it in you to wake him up. Kibum would, of course, but you’re not Kibum. Never will be, for the record, so you pull up your chair closer to him. Push the hair out of his eyes and let the strands fall back down, he can’t see you like this so maybe it’ll be okay. You can always hide it under the guise of it being payback for that neck thing earlier so it’ll be okay, it won’t-
“What the hell are you doing?”
Kevin is suddenly watching you with sleep lidded eyes and this is when you kiss him, soft and tasting faintly of coffee and sugar, one heartbeat two three before he kisses you back, one hand coming round your head. It’s an awkward position to be doing this but you manage somehow, chair legs skittering over the kitchen floor before you almost fall over from the entire thing, sliding off the chair in time. Kevin laughs and joins you sitting confused on the floor.
“Was that payback?” he asks, voice still a little rough around the edges of words from sleep.
“Yeah,” you manage. “Yeah.”
“I didn’t say it because I thought it was obvious too,” he muses out loud and you stare at him, still confused. He sighs and lays his head in your lap, the way he does with Kibum. “I’m talking about the whole ‘why I’m not in bed thing’ just in case you were wondering.”
Kevin shifts in your lap and you think he’s just about crazy enough to go to sleep there but he reaches up for you and pulls you down, kissing you for the second, third time tonight. “I wanted to do this as well.” He lays down again and now he really is going to sleep, hair falling over his eyes.
“Didn’t you think I made a good show about being drunk earlier? Damn, I should have it then, eh?”
“Swear jar,” you find yourself mumbling, just because there doesn’t seem to be any other appropriate thing to say. Kevin makes an exasperated sound and this is what friends don’t normally do, sleeping in each other’s laps at two in the morning, kissing each other without knowing whether it’ll mean anything later.
“I’ll buy you ice cream if you let this one slide.”
“Don’t you want to move to the couch? Chocolate ice cream.”
“If you move with me and okay, deal.”
And this is the part where you give up trying to figure out where the borders between both start because Kevin is already pulling you to your feet, stepping on your feet in sleepy hurry (“Why are you still wearing your socks?” “They're my feet, don’t spoil the mood.”), pulling at your hair when you’re too slow. Kevin will be whatever he wants to be and as long as you’re informed every now and then (Kevin doesn’t fight you for the couch, just somehow squishes the both of you onto it and uses your chest as a pillow), it doesn’t matter.
end.
AN- I uh. What. So this is the first time I'm trying out U-Kiss. Sorry if I butchered everyone's characterizations :/ Why are they so hard to write ;___; !
Also:
omg why so presh