three percent, part i [krystal/myungsoo/sungyeol]
three percent
Krystal/Myungsoo/Sungyeol
PG, 2,084 words
It's important to remember. It helps him through the confusion.
a/n: it's been a while! ah, school, keeping me so busy. but I'll be done with school in about a week, and right now I'm in a end-of-school-year-related bliss I guess? projects are over and all I need to do is study for finals next week. and I've been thinking about writing fic again. this is something I wrote a while ago, back in November, but I'm posting this now so I can persuade myself to post up the next two parts. there are three parts to this. Myungsoo, then the other two. tbh, I have no idea where this ot3 came from?? maybe that advertisement that f(x) and Infinite did together forever ago, haha
i. kim myungsoo
Krystal’s sister is looking down at all of them. And looking down on them. She thinks she’s better than us. Then again, she probably is. The three of them are sprawled on the floor, and Krystal has her legs crossed over Sungyeol’s chest. It’s five minutes from midnight. Myungsoo forgets Krystal’s sister’s name for a minute until he remembers that he used to think she was the most beautiful creature to ever walk the planet when he was in junior high. He wrote a secret poem about her in creative writing but never turned it in (he’d compared her to a mermaid), but Krystal found it and burned it in the backyard on New Year’s Eve. Myungsoo hadn’t had a clue where it’d gone until Krystal had pulled it out. The weird thing is, though, that Krystal never said anything. Just burned it.
“I really, really want milk right now,” Krystal muses, rubbing Myungsoo’s hand. He hadn’t realized she’d been holding his wrist until she started moving.
Jessica barks something at her in English that neither he nor Sungyeol really get, but she sounds angry.
“No!” Krystal shouts back, sitting up. Sungyeol coughs loudly underneath the shift in weight against his chest. She sighs angrily and moves her legs, standing up. “Let’s go.” She’s talking to Myungsoo and Sungyeol, who’s rubbing his chest, pouting at her.
“Don’t stay out too late,” says Jessica, resigned.
“We won’t,” Krystal replies.
They’re halfway down the hall when Sungyeol mumbles. “Yeah we will,” sounding just as resigned as Jessica. Myungsoo can’t help but smile and clap him on the back.
There’s a convenience store a few blocks away from Krystal’s house. Technically, it’s Jessica’s house. Technically, it’s also their mother’s house. Jessica couldn’t pay the bills with just her modeling gigs, and Krystal didn’t want to live at home with mom anymore. Myungsoo logs all this information in his head, on a day-to-day basis, reminding himself. He’s known Krystal since she was five. He’s know Sungyeol since he was three. Myungsoo doesn’t remember that meeting very well; he was only two back then. His parents said he wouldn’t talk to anyone usually, but sometimes he’d say nonsense to Sungyeol. Myungsoo always thinks of Sungyeol as someone special. Krystal is special, too.
“How late is too late, exactly?” Sungyeol asks. For some reason, Krystal’s making them get on a bus. It’s not like they have to do what she says. They just end up doing it, anyway.
She’s holding onto one of the bars, even though there are seemingly thousands of open seats and both Myungsoo and Sungyeol are sitting down now. She’s so thin it seems like she’s dangling, barely hanging on. One pothole and she’ll go flying. Myungsoo feels the need to grab onto her, strap her down between him and Sungyeol, save her. That’s what he’s always been doing, really. Saving her from the world; from herself, even.
“Doesn’t matter,” she shrugs, smiling a little.
“Yah, Jessica-noona will eat you alive,” he scolds. Myungsoo laughs.
Krystal rolls her eyes. “Maybe she’ll gain some weight, then.” She’s so loose it seems like she wants to climb the bar she’s holding onto, like a monkey.
“You’re the one who needs to gain weight,” Sungyeol objects. It’s then that Myungsoo realizes he hasn’t spoken in almost an hour. He continues his silence. He’ll wait for one of them to point it out. They probably won’t. Not until later, when he and Sungyeol are walking home at 3am. Myungsoo is going to assume that they aren’t going to get home until then.
He thinks, they’re talking about cannibalism like it’s a diet plan, and almost laughs. But he doesn’t feel like making noise right now. Every time he shifts, or crosses a leg over the other, he does it carefully, silently. Blending into the bus seats. Myungsoo is invisible. Or at least, he would be, were Krystal not glancing at him every five seconds mid-conversation/argument with Sungyeol, and were Sungyeol’s thigh not placed right next to his. He’s warm. The bus’ endoskeleton is cold. November is also cold most of the time, and Myungsoo didn’t wear a very warm jacket today.
He almost opens his mouth then, but he finds he has nothing to say.
The lights in the convenience store are giving him a budding headache. He blinks a few times and focuses on Sungyeol’s back. Itaewon Freedom is quietly playing in the background, accentuated by Sungyeol singing along. He doesn’t know most of the words; he fumbles through them. Krystal laughs a few times, louder than she probably means to. She’s making a beeline for the refrigerators in the back, and they’re both following.
Somewhere between winding through cereal and paper towel aisles, Sungyeol put his arm around Krystal’s shoulder, and her arm found its way to his waist. Myungsoo doesn’t care, he just notices things; notices that they look like a couple. He makes a note and continues on. He has this habit of watching them interact from time to time, observing, not interfering.
Myungsoo stops walking when he realizes that Krystal has knocked over part of a tower of toilet paper. She and Sungyeol are laughing and before an employee can rush over to the scene, Krystal grabs Myungsoo by the hand and drags him along. “Come on,” she says. He does.
“There’s so much milk,” says Krystal, once they’ve gone into the refrigerated zone. She seems out of her element. This place is unlike other convenience stores she’s been to. Myungsoo isn’t even sure she knows how to get back home from here. “I don’t even know which one to get.”
“Fat free,” suggests Sungyeol.
Pouting involuntarily, “You’re the one who’s always telling me to gain weight,” she mumbles. She’s still holding onto Myungsoo’s hand. He likes it when she does this, holding on and then forgetting but subconsciously wanting to stay latched onto him. Reminds him that he’s still important to her.
“Two percent.” New idea, brought to them by Sungyeol.
“Hm . . .”
“Three percent!”
“That doesn’t exist,” she objects.
“Well, how do you know?” Sungyeol argues.
“Because you never see it.”
“Just because you never see it doesn’t mean it can’t exist.”
Myungsoo smiles at this; at his friend for saying it. He feels Krystal’s grip loosen on his hand as she reaches for the two percent with her free one. He doesn’t mean to squeeze hers, it just happens. “What?” she asks.
He only shrugs. Nothing, he means to say, but she gets that from his face. Sometimes just looking at him is all it takes to understand. When she smiles, both boys smile back at her. She’s theirs, maybe even the center of their universe, even though the link between Sungyeol and Krystal was made when Myungsoo introduced them back in the day. She wedged her way, slowly, into both their hearts. She can be eccentric and a brat from time to time, but they still love her.
She breaks contact with his hand and roughs up his hair, pausing to tangle her fingers in it and when she lets go, walking toward the counter, he doesn’t smooth it back down.
Myungsoo follows Sungyeol to the cereal aisle. He picks up some Fruit Loops, glancing over at Myungsoo several times within ten seconds. Five. Myungsoo counts. Six. “You haven’t spoken all night.”
Not true. I just haven’t spoken for an hour and a half, he corrects in his head, but Sungyeol can’t read his mind, not all the time. He just pretends to now and then. They’re close enough.
“And you aren’t speaking now.”
Myungsoo nods.
Sungyeol starts to laugh. “Remember that time when you didn’t speak for almost a year?”
He nods again. How could he forget?
His laughing fades. “Just . . . don’t do it again, okay?”
Myungsoo lets the words fall out of his mouth. “I promise.” He has a smug smile on his face. Sungyeol won’t be able to tell if he’s being seriously just by that face, but the words are sincere. This, they both know. They can’t lie to each other.
Almost 2am. Krystal is sitting down on the bus this time. The three of them are in the back, Sungyeol and Krystal seated side-by-side. Sungyeol is throwing different colored pieces of cereal at Myungsoo, who catches them in his mouth. He hasn’t missed one yet. They keep checking to see if the bus driver notices. He doesn’t.
“I feel nauseous.”
Myungsoo pauses, mouth only half open, and a fruit loop hits him in the nose. He watches Krystal double over, starts feeling himself rise out of his seat.
“You shouldn’t have chugged half that milk and then gotten on a bus,” Sungyeol half-scolds. Seemingly on cue, the bus jerks a little from a pothole, and Myungsoo has to hold onto something before he goes flying. Krystal groans. Sungyeol has a point.
“Okay, okay, I think I’m okay,” she says, hands on her knees, sitting up straight. Her face is twisted a little, until she looks at Myungsoo. “What’s wrong with you?”
“What do you mean what’s wrong with you? You scared him,” Sungyeol elbows her.
Krystal rubs her stomach. “It’s not like I’m dying.” She’s missing the point. Myungsoo drops his expression. There’s no use in his concern unless she cares, and right now it’s clear she doesn’t. He watches her, arms folded around her midsection, leaning her forehead against the window.
Sungyeol leans over the aisle and picks the stray fruit loop from Myungsoo’s lap. “Got it.”
A silence passes over all of them. It’s thick and oppressive and Myungsoo knows it’s his fault. More than anything, he wants to be invisible again.
By the time they’ve completed their mission as friends to walk her back to her house, they’ve returned to their earlier routine: Sungyeol and Krystal interact, and Myungsoo looks on. But when they say goodnight, Krystal stares, for an unnervingly long amount of time, at Myungsoo. Just stares, then disappears behind the front door. They listen to her lock up, and then walk away.
Myungsoo walks home in a daze with Sungyeol’s arm slung casually around his shoulders. She’s always been strange. Tonight shouldn’t be any different, and it almost isn’t. Friendship shouldn’t be like this, and it shouldn’t feel like this, either. But Krystal does as Krystal has done her whole life. Myungsoo knows. Sungyeol knows. Everyone and their aunt knows.
“You stopped talking again,” says Sungyeol when they reach their apartment building. The words make him sound like he knows more than he actually does. “Thought I’d point that out.” They take the stairs, still attached.
They reach the fifth floor when Myungsoo points out, “Where’d your cereal go?”
Sungyeol takes a step back, searching himself as if he’d be able to hide a box on his person without knowing it. The act itself gets a chuckle out of Myungsoo, but he doesn’t seem to notice. “Bus, probably.”
“Bus driver might be pretty happy about that.”
“Who wouldn’t want free cereal?”
Sungyeol hums in happy agreement. “Remember that time when they gave out free cereal and milk at school for lunch?”
“Yeah.” He feels as though he’s been doing a lot of remembering tonight. It’s important to remember. It helps him through the confusion, leaving notes behind in his brain like clues. Sungyeol has always been your best friend, Krystal can’t make up her mind. Don’t forget. “Good times.”
Sungyeol doesn’t make it to his own bed. He flops down on Myungsoo’s, like he’s forgotten which one is his, but Myungsoo could care less. When they were kids, they shared beds and futons and sleeping bags all the time. Today is another day of sharing things with Sungyeol, and he doesn’t bother changing into his pajamas.
There’s no need for a blanket. He has a thin jacket and Sungyeol throwing an arm over his chest in his sleep. Outside, the moon hangs in the sky, shining on the other bed in the room, the empty one. It casts a blue light against his semi-made sheets and blankets. The owner of that bed snores lightly, mumbles something incoherent, and goes back to light, controlled breathing. Myungsoo closes his eyes, head rolling so that his cheek rests against the top of his best friend’s head. He breathes in, he breathes out. He sleeps.
He dreams of Krystal; of a little girl named Soojung hiding behind her big sister’s skirt. They say you can control what you dream about, but that’s-quite frankly-a lie.
Krystal/Myungsoo/Sungyeol
PG, 2,084 words
It's important to remember. It helps him through the confusion.
a/n: it's been a while! ah, school, keeping me so busy. but I'll be done with school in about a week, and right now I'm in a end-of-school-year-related bliss I guess? projects are over and all I need to do is study for finals next week. and I've been thinking about writing fic again. this is something I wrote a while ago, back in November, but I'm posting this now so I can persuade myself to post up the next two parts. there are three parts to this. Myungsoo, then the other two. tbh, I have no idea where this ot3 came from?? maybe that advertisement that f(x) and Infinite did together forever ago, haha
i. kim myungsoo
Krystal’s sister is looking down at all of them. And looking down on them. She thinks she’s better than us. Then again, she probably is. The three of them are sprawled on the floor, and Krystal has her legs crossed over Sungyeol’s chest. It’s five minutes from midnight. Myungsoo forgets Krystal’s sister’s name for a minute until he remembers that he used to think she was the most beautiful creature to ever walk the planet when he was in junior high. He wrote a secret poem about her in creative writing but never turned it in (he’d compared her to a mermaid), but Krystal found it and burned it in the backyard on New Year’s Eve. Myungsoo hadn’t had a clue where it’d gone until Krystal had pulled it out. The weird thing is, though, that Krystal never said anything. Just burned it.
“I really, really want milk right now,” Krystal muses, rubbing Myungsoo’s hand. He hadn’t realized she’d been holding his wrist until she started moving.
Jessica barks something at her in English that neither he nor Sungyeol really get, but she sounds angry.
“No!” Krystal shouts back, sitting up. Sungyeol coughs loudly underneath the shift in weight against his chest. She sighs angrily and moves her legs, standing up. “Let’s go.” She’s talking to Myungsoo and Sungyeol, who’s rubbing his chest, pouting at her.
“Don’t stay out too late,” says Jessica, resigned.
“We won’t,” Krystal replies.
They’re halfway down the hall when Sungyeol mumbles. “Yeah we will,” sounding just as resigned as Jessica. Myungsoo can’t help but smile and clap him on the back.
There’s a convenience store a few blocks away from Krystal’s house. Technically, it’s Jessica’s house. Technically, it’s also their mother’s house. Jessica couldn’t pay the bills with just her modeling gigs, and Krystal didn’t want to live at home with mom anymore. Myungsoo logs all this information in his head, on a day-to-day basis, reminding himself. He’s known Krystal since she was five. He’s know Sungyeol since he was three. Myungsoo doesn’t remember that meeting very well; he was only two back then. His parents said he wouldn’t talk to anyone usually, but sometimes he’d say nonsense to Sungyeol. Myungsoo always thinks of Sungyeol as someone special. Krystal is special, too.
“How late is too late, exactly?” Sungyeol asks. For some reason, Krystal’s making them get on a bus. It’s not like they have to do what she says. They just end up doing it, anyway.
She’s holding onto one of the bars, even though there are seemingly thousands of open seats and both Myungsoo and Sungyeol are sitting down now. She’s so thin it seems like she’s dangling, barely hanging on. One pothole and she’ll go flying. Myungsoo feels the need to grab onto her, strap her down between him and Sungyeol, save her. That’s what he’s always been doing, really. Saving her from the world; from herself, even.
“Doesn’t matter,” she shrugs, smiling a little.
“Yah, Jessica-noona will eat you alive,” he scolds. Myungsoo laughs.
Krystal rolls her eyes. “Maybe she’ll gain some weight, then.” She’s so loose it seems like she wants to climb the bar she’s holding onto, like a monkey.
“You’re the one who needs to gain weight,” Sungyeol objects. It’s then that Myungsoo realizes he hasn’t spoken in almost an hour. He continues his silence. He’ll wait for one of them to point it out. They probably won’t. Not until later, when he and Sungyeol are walking home at 3am. Myungsoo is going to assume that they aren’t going to get home until then.
He thinks, they’re talking about cannibalism like it’s a diet plan, and almost laughs. But he doesn’t feel like making noise right now. Every time he shifts, or crosses a leg over the other, he does it carefully, silently. Blending into the bus seats. Myungsoo is invisible. Or at least, he would be, were Krystal not glancing at him every five seconds mid-conversation/argument with Sungyeol, and were Sungyeol’s thigh not placed right next to his. He’s warm. The bus’ endoskeleton is cold. November is also cold most of the time, and Myungsoo didn’t wear a very warm jacket today.
He almost opens his mouth then, but he finds he has nothing to say.
The lights in the convenience store are giving him a budding headache. He blinks a few times and focuses on Sungyeol’s back. Itaewon Freedom is quietly playing in the background, accentuated by Sungyeol singing along. He doesn’t know most of the words; he fumbles through them. Krystal laughs a few times, louder than she probably means to. She’s making a beeline for the refrigerators in the back, and they’re both following.
Somewhere between winding through cereal and paper towel aisles, Sungyeol put his arm around Krystal’s shoulder, and her arm found its way to his waist. Myungsoo doesn’t care, he just notices things; notices that they look like a couple. He makes a note and continues on. He has this habit of watching them interact from time to time, observing, not interfering.
Myungsoo stops walking when he realizes that Krystal has knocked over part of a tower of toilet paper. She and Sungyeol are laughing and before an employee can rush over to the scene, Krystal grabs Myungsoo by the hand and drags him along. “Come on,” she says. He does.
“There’s so much milk,” says Krystal, once they’ve gone into the refrigerated zone. She seems out of her element. This place is unlike other convenience stores she’s been to. Myungsoo isn’t even sure she knows how to get back home from here. “I don’t even know which one to get.”
“Fat free,” suggests Sungyeol.
Pouting involuntarily, “You’re the one who’s always telling me to gain weight,” she mumbles. She’s still holding onto Myungsoo’s hand. He likes it when she does this, holding on and then forgetting but subconsciously wanting to stay latched onto him. Reminds him that he’s still important to her.
“Two percent.” New idea, brought to them by Sungyeol.
“Hm . . .”
“Three percent!”
“That doesn’t exist,” she objects.
“Well, how do you know?” Sungyeol argues.
“Because you never see it.”
“Just because you never see it doesn’t mean it can’t exist.”
Myungsoo smiles at this; at his friend for saying it. He feels Krystal’s grip loosen on his hand as she reaches for the two percent with her free one. He doesn’t mean to squeeze hers, it just happens. “What?” she asks.
He only shrugs. Nothing, he means to say, but she gets that from his face. Sometimes just looking at him is all it takes to understand. When she smiles, both boys smile back at her. She’s theirs, maybe even the center of their universe, even though the link between Sungyeol and Krystal was made when Myungsoo introduced them back in the day. She wedged her way, slowly, into both their hearts. She can be eccentric and a brat from time to time, but they still love her.
She breaks contact with his hand and roughs up his hair, pausing to tangle her fingers in it and when she lets go, walking toward the counter, he doesn’t smooth it back down.
Myungsoo follows Sungyeol to the cereal aisle. He picks up some Fruit Loops, glancing over at Myungsoo several times within ten seconds. Five. Myungsoo counts. Six. “You haven’t spoken all night.”
Not true. I just haven’t spoken for an hour and a half, he corrects in his head, but Sungyeol can’t read his mind, not all the time. He just pretends to now and then. They’re close enough.
“And you aren’t speaking now.”
Myungsoo nods.
Sungyeol starts to laugh. “Remember that time when you didn’t speak for almost a year?”
He nods again. How could he forget?
His laughing fades. “Just . . . don’t do it again, okay?”
Myungsoo lets the words fall out of his mouth. “I promise.” He has a smug smile on his face. Sungyeol won’t be able to tell if he’s being seriously just by that face, but the words are sincere. This, they both know. They can’t lie to each other.
Almost 2am. Krystal is sitting down on the bus this time. The three of them are in the back, Sungyeol and Krystal seated side-by-side. Sungyeol is throwing different colored pieces of cereal at Myungsoo, who catches them in his mouth. He hasn’t missed one yet. They keep checking to see if the bus driver notices. He doesn’t.
“I feel nauseous.”
Myungsoo pauses, mouth only half open, and a fruit loop hits him in the nose. He watches Krystal double over, starts feeling himself rise out of his seat.
“You shouldn’t have chugged half that milk and then gotten on a bus,” Sungyeol half-scolds. Seemingly on cue, the bus jerks a little from a pothole, and Myungsoo has to hold onto something before he goes flying. Krystal groans. Sungyeol has a point.
“Okay, okay, I think I’m okay,” she says, hands on her knees, sitting up straight. Her face is twisted a little, until she looks at Myungsoo. “What’s wrong with you?”
“What do you mean what’s wrong with you? You scared him,” Sungyeol elbows her.
Krystal rubs her stomach. “It’s not like I’m dying.” She’s missing the point. Myungsoo drops his expression. There’s no use in his concern unless she cares, and right now it’s clear she doesn’t. He watches her, arms folded around her midsection, leaning her forehead against the window.
Sungyeol leans over the aisle and picks the stray fruit loop from Myungsoo’s lap. “Got it.”
A silence passes over all of them. It’s thick and oppressive and Myungsoo knows it’s his fault. More than anything, he wants to be invisible again.
By the time they’ve completed their mission as friends to walk her back to her house, they’ve returned to their earlier routine: Sungyeol and Krystal interact, and Myungsoo looks on. But when they say goodnight, Krystal stares, for an unnervingly long amount of time, at Myungsoo. Just stares, then disappears behind the front door. They listen to her lock up, and then walk away.
Myungsoo walks home in a daze with Sungyeol’s arm slung casually around his shoulders. She’s always been strange. Tonight shouldn’t be any different, and it almost isn’t. Friendship shouldn’t be like this, and it shouldn’t feel like this, either. But Krystal does as Krystal has done her whole life. Myungsoo knows. Sungyeol knows. Everyone and their aunt knows.
“You stopped talking again,” says Sungyeol when they reach their apartment building. The words make him sound like he knows more than he actually does. “Thought I’d point that out.” They take the stairs, still attached.
They reach the fifth floor when Myungsoo points out, “Where’d your cereal go?”
Sungyeol takes a step back, searching himself as if he’d be able to hide a box on his person without knowing it. The act itself gets a chuckle out of Myungsoo, but he doesn’t seem to notice. “Bus, probably.”
“Bus driver might be pretty happy about that.”
“Who wouldn’t want free cereal?”
Sungyeol hums in happy agreement. “Remember that time when they gave out free cereal and milk at school for lunch?”
“Yeah.” He feels as though he’s been doing a lot of remembering tonight. It’s important to remember. It helps him through the confusion, leaving notes behind in his brain like clues. Sungyeol has always been your best friend, Krystal can’t make up her mind. Don’t forget. “Good times.”
Sungyeol doesn’t make it to his own bed. He flops down on Myungsoo’s, like he’s forgotten which one is his, but Myungsoo could care less. When they were kids, they shared beds and futons and sleeping bags all the time. Today is another day of sharing things with Sungyeol, and he doesn’t bother changing into his pajamas.
There’s no need for a blanket. He has a thin jacket and Sungyeol throwing an arm over his chest in his sleep. Outside, the moon hangs in the sky, shining on the other bed in the room, the empty one. It casts a blue light against his semi-made sheets and blankets. The owner of that bed snores lightly, mumbles something incoherent, and goes back to light, controlled breathing. Myungsoo closes his eyes, head rolling so that his cheek rests against the top of his best friend’s head. He breathes in, he breathes out. He sleeps.
He dreams of Krystal; of a little girl named Soojung hiding behind her big sister’s skirt. They say you can control what you dream about, but that’s-quite frankly-a lie.