electric heart (1/2); r; minho/kibum
electric heart (1/2)
minho/kibum, others; r; ~4,400
he doesn’t have a heart.
A/N: my first twoshot omg i feel very overwhelmed lol. this has actually stayed in my wip folder because i got into a writer’s block and can’t seem to decide the ending, and to be honest? i still can’t orz. i have something in mind, where do i want to bring this, but oh well. we’ll see how it goes.
+
When he opens his eyes for the first time, it’s to see a man’s smiling eyes staring down at him with a big smile which turns his lips crooked into a pleasant curve. He blinks as he feels a sour taste at the back of his throat, dry and scratching up the wall, makes him want to cough. He finds himself unable to though, so he frowns and sticks out his tongue, licking his dry lips. The man keeps smiling down at him.
“Hey,” the man speaks far too cheerfully, and it rings in his ear, turning his head. “How do you feel?”
He wonders what he feels. He tries to move his fingertips, but it feels stiff and they are aching, so he closes his eyes for a while, partly tired, partly frustration. Can he even breath, he thinks, “Thirsty.”
The man seems satisfied with his answer as he claps and grins widely, pats his stomach before he goes away, humming some foreign tunes. He shifts, turns his head to the side, to the door where the man goes, and he sees the other pulls out a glass from the bathroom cabinet and fills it with tap water. His stomach grumbles in protest, maybe disgusted, but it sounds more like a clank. He scrunches his nose when the man pushes a straw from the glass to the front of his face.
The man laughs, too loud. “It’s clean, don’t worry,” he assures, and he grips his elbow to help him sits up. He feels his stomach muscles contract painfully, scratches against each other, and he winces in his mind. “Might taste weird for the first time, but you’ll get used to it.”
Who are you, he wants to ask, who am I? But his throat is burning, and it starts to tears up his eyes, so he lifts his hand and leans closer to the straw, sips carefully. He can sense the water goes down his throat, wipes down the fire slowly, and it feels cold and comfortable. He sighs, pleased, and sips again, more eager. The man looks at him fondly, eyes soft.
He gulps down the last drip of water, a little disappointment crawls its way to his chest. He looks around then, lets the man bring the glass back to the bathroom and washes it carefully as he squints his eyes at the room. The room is small, with a single bed which he occupies, a sheets tangled around his lower limbs. There’s a small table beside the bed, a red liquid light on it. It seems like the only color there, because the rest of the room; wall, ceiling, tiles of the floor, the big wardrobe at the corner of the room, the doors to the room outside and the bathroom, the curtains; are white. It looks like a hospital. Is he in a hospital?
“Is this a hospital?” His lips are chapped when he opens it again, asks the question carefully when the man sits beside him gently, not making a contact except for their eyes. The man chuckles.
“No,” he sounds like he’s holding back a laugh and he can’t help but to think what’s so funny about him. Maybe he has something on his face, so he rubs his cheek softly, tries not to cringe when hears a creak from his joints. The man stares at him with serious eyes then, though it’s still bright with care. “This is my house.” He waits for more, but then the man just smiles, no teeth or crinkle or eye-smile; a simple smile, yet it makes him worried, his chest constricts.
“Sleep,” the man tells him eventually, commands. He stands up from his place and walks to the door, not looking at him. “You’ll need lots of it.”
He doesn’t remember closing his eyes, but he is unsure because he can’t remember anything after that either.
+
His name is Minho. It’s craved on the left side of his waist, curving words written by black ink, tattooed. He touches it with the tip of his fingers, follows the pattern as he tries to listen to Jinki, the man who claims to be his father.
“You can just call my name though,” Jinki says, and Minho looks up from his waist, pulls down his white t-shirt.
The man is probably twenty-one years old, give or take one year, and even though Minho can’t remember anything at all, not a single thing, he still has his common sense and logic. “Aren’t you a little too young to be my father,” because he has seen his reflection on the mirror in front of the wardrobe, and he looks like he’s at least past seventeen. He could be old-looking, but he rather thinks that he is past seventeen.
Jinki gives him an amused smile. “Yeah,” he answers solemnly, and the silent stretched after that is quite long and terrifying. Minho cannot hear his heartbeat. “Too young.” Jinki sends him to his room then, ignoring Minho’s wondering eyes and questions.
He presses a hand to his chest when he settles on the bed, throws the sheet to the side, and he touches the place where he thinks his heart is supposed to be. Presses harder when he can’t feel anything, any thump. His skin feels cold, and it smells like copper, like blood, so he just stares at his laps as he searches for a beat, beats, they are inexistent. The joints around his elbows and knees and necks creaks, bumps against each other, makes a loud metallic sounds, when he wraps his long arms around his pulled up legs, buries his face to his knees. He smells like irons.
+
Jinki teaches him how to read and write, alphabets in Korean and international letters. He learns a to z in two days, and studies how to write them in a day, his hand shakes slightly from the foreign feeling of it, but he finds his handwriting pretty. He tucks the books where he practices his handwriting neatly under his pillow, because he has nothing to do anyway, so the first and last thing he does after and before he sleeps in writing. Jinki seems happy that his ‘son’ is a diligent boy.
Korean is harder. The curves and circles and lines, they are all mixed up in his mind and turn into something that doesn’t even exist. He can memorize the words and their meaning quite easily though, because he knows the words from the monotone voice on the computer, repeating ‘안녕하세요’ thousands times to his face he almost punches the monitor when the machine lady starts talking again; but he’s pretty sure he’s failing in reading and writing them, It’s weird, he thinks-considering the Korean words taste normal and slip easily from his mouth, that he can talk in Korean fluently-to hear and repeat the words given by the computer and try to remember them and their definition. When he tells Jinki this, the older man smiles brightly.
“Oh great,” he says, “Your logic is better than my expectation. You might be able to progress faster than I thought.” Minho keeps his mouth shut and turns to his computer, clicks the start button to begin his lesson for that day. He hates it when Jinki talks about him to him like he is a thing. Though he is a thing.
“I don’t understand,” he says a few days later, when Jinki pats his back gently and gives him some water when he bangs his head to the computer keyboard in frustration, “if you made me, why don’t you make me smart or a genius or something? Or, I don’t know, install some Korean software to my brain so I don’t need to learn it? I can speak it anyway, why don’t you make me able to write and read them too?”
Jinki pauses his hand on his shoulder and frowns. “Human needs to think in order to live.”
This is ridiculous, he thinks. “I’m not even a human,” Minho says, a little annoyed.
Jinki opens his mouth, a small understanding ‘ah’ escapes his lips as his eyes crinkle into the eye smiles. Minho wants to roll his eyes, but is too afraid that there will be a cranky sound. The older man stares at him for a moment, and he stares back, unable to break the eye contact, doesn’t want to break it, but then Jinki chuckles and pushes the glass of water to his hand and tells him to drink. Minho blinks hesitantly before he lifts the glass against his lips, hearing the water trilling down the wall of his throat, moisten it.
“You will be,” Jinki finally says as he eyes him carefully, and he is grateful that he doesn’t choke. He just continues to swallow, the water, his feeling, the words at the tip of his tongue, the questions, everything. “Just wait and see, Minho.”
Minho doesn’t sleep that night, cannot close his eyes, Jinki’s words echo throughout his brain. He touches his chest, moves his hand down and down to the side of his waist, the tattooed side, and he shuts off his mind. I’m not even a human, and it’s not like he is that wooden doll which turns into a human after the maker prays wholeheartedly like in the movie he caught on the television another day. This isn’t a movie.
+
He shifts uncomfortably on the chair, keeps pulling the hem of his shirt awkwardly, his shoe soles creak loudly against the polished floor. He wonders where his nervous feeling comes from, remembering that he doesn’t have a heart. He wonders if Jinki puts a software called emotion in his system. He wonders why the head master takes so long in reading his profile, fake profile, because he’s sweating from the heat-doesn’t this room have an air-conditioner or something?-and if he takes more time, the back of his shirt would be wet and disgusting and smelly. He doesn’t want to be smelly.
“Calm down,” Jinki whispers to him, his eyes does not leave the magazine on his laps. Minho squeezes his kneecaps before he takes a water bottle from the bag beside his legs and drinks until he cannot breathe.
“I don’t want to be smelly,” he says, screwing the bottle cap tightly, frowning. Jinki turns a page.
“You won’t,” he tells him patiently, and Minho closes his eyes with the back of his palm, feeling like crying. Why is it so hot, his eyes are so dry. “Now stop moving.”
That’s when the door is opened by the blonde receptionist he saw earlier, and she is smiling brightly, grinning from ear to ear. It doesn’t split her face apart, he thinks. She looks like Jinki. But her eyes are too big to be Jinki. He looks up to the older man and follows him, stands up after he slings his bag to one shoulder. The blonde receptionist opens his mouth, and her voice makes his toes curled, his mind cringe. From her voice and, or from the things she says. “Mr. Cho wants to see you now. You can go in.” Now he thanks Jinki mentally to not give him a heart, because he is sure that it would explode by now if he has one.
The talk is short, and the head master’s room is almost freezing, but it means his sweat would be dried off. He won’t be stink. He is too engrossed in his own mind-the head master’s blonde hair, is it school’s uniform? Does he need to dye his hair blonde too? He hopes he doesn’t have to, it looks unflattering. Are they-so he doesn’t hear the other two conversation, and when his mind snaps back, it’s caused by the loud friction noise from the chair and the floor, and Jinki is grinning, shaking his hand with the head master. He finds himself in a black uniform a week later, standing at the front of a class with pairs and pairs of eyes shooting him curious looks.
“This is Choi Minho,” the man besides him says loudly when he holds his breath, “and he’s new here. Be good to him.” And that’s it. Is it his turn to talk? Is he supposed to take one step forward and starts introducing himself like he has practiced in front of a laughing Jinki before? Will the sea of people, thirty or so of them, laugh like Jinki did? So much for a dad, thanks for crushing my confidence, he thinks bitterly. The man besides him clears his throat after a long stretched silence. “Minho, please.”
Oh, okay. He takes a step. “My name is Choi Minho, as you have heard and I’m,” he counts mentally in his mind, “seventeen years old.” He pauses, blinks, breathes, “I’m seventeen this year and. Um, I used to be homeschooled before,” what is that term oh my God, “but my parents thought that I need to socialize, or something,” he tells them his memorizes script with a shrug, and a couple of students at the back of the room laugh quietly, not meanly, so he lets out an easy smile. He hears some girls at the front sigh happily, giggling and gossiping to each other and he stops. Breathe. “Let’s get along.”
The man besides him claps, followed by the class, and then puts a hand on his shoulder. He stills himself, awkward. “That’s great, Choi,” he tells him, and he nods politely, stopping himself from shrugging the hand away. Move, Sir. “Now go sit over there so we can start the lesson.”
“Yes, Sir,” he says automatically, glad to be untouched. The warmth feels weird, and Jinki’s hands are always so cold. He walks down the aisle of desks towards the desk the teacher pointed at, lifts the edge of his lips to a small smile every time someone throws him a grin or a greeting. Someone even high-fives his palm, the heat shots straight to every wires in his body. Strange. Somehow he’s glad that the seat beside him is empty, because. He keeps his mouth shut.
+
It is the third period. The teacher is just leaving, and the class is chattering loudly as they wait for the next subject’s teacher to come, and he is stretching his hand slowly, careful as not to make a too loud noise. It is the third period, and a bag is hitting him on the head.
Fuck, he screws his eyes shut tightly when he feels some wires are bent and scratches against each other, his head turns dizzy and his ears buzz loudly from the inside. “Uh,” he mutters uselessly as he looks up, staring back to a pair of eyes glaring at him. Not glaring; maybe trying to crush his brain with his stare. The boy is tall, his skin is pale white, and his brown hair falls gracefully and covers his forehead. His orbs eyes are sharp as daggers, and his eyebrows don’t help at all. His high cheekbones and pouty lips just bold the arrogance glowing from his expression.
“Uh,” he repeats. The boy doesn’t falter; he points to the edge of his desk instead. Minho bends down, tilts his head a little, and read the white words, written by a correction fluid.
Kim Kibum.
Minho looks up again to the boy’s uniform, the boy’s chest, catches a sight of his nametag and sighs. “The teacher told me to sit here.”
Kibum gives him a death glare, his hand almost white from gripping the strap of his bag tightly, more and more, as his eyebrows frown. Minho feels himself sinking to his seat, to the wooden chair, and he doesn’t even realize that the class has stopped chattering, stop breathing. Waiting, holding, and Minho gets ready to lift his arms as a protection just in case. The clock is ticking, louder and louder, and he wishes the teacher can come like, right now. The other boy is still standing still.
A second later though, he throws his bag to the desk beside him, and pulls the chair out roughly. He doesn’t sit down; he places a foot on it and ties his shoelaces in a blink, almost ripping them in Minho’s opinion, before he zips his bag open and takes out an MP3 player and a box. He kicks the chair forward, almost makes it fall, and the wood clanks loudly against the desk, which moves and pinches a patch of Minho’s skin and makes him winces when he feels his skin being ripped, blood trickling down his arm. He has blood, his mind questions for a moment, and when he looks to the direction of the boy, it’s to see the door being slammed loudly. The class is silent, before a blonde haired boy (what’s up with this color, seriously) jumps out his seat and runs outside, following Kibum.
Minho touches his scar, eyes not leaving the opened door. No teacher comes until the fourth period bell rings loudly, but neither of the boys come back to the class. He finds himself keep throwing a glance to the door, his notes empty and clean.
When he is sitting on the floor to do his homework on the coffee table in front of the television, he calls out from his spot on the living room. “Jinki,” he calls distractedly, and the older man hums from the kitchen where he cleans the dishes, “I bled.”
The sound of running water stops abruptly, and there’s no sound except for the sound of his pen moving against the white papers. A minute passes, and, “Really,” Jinki says. Minho stares at the question on his book. -x2 - (k + 7)x + 8 = -(x - 2)(x - 4).
“Yeah, at school,” he answers, his head pounding as he tries to write. His hand is shaking, and he doesn’t know why. Why is his hand shaking? Find the k. “Am I supposed to bleed?”
Jinki doesn’t answer, and he doesn’t persist, doesn’t continue. Find the k. He can feel, rather than hear, Jinki steps closer and closer to him, approaches him, and he doesn’t jump when the older boy massages the back of his neck.
“Sleep, Minho,” he tells him, almost pleas, and it sounds different from the usual tone he uses to make him do something. Jinki links his fingers with his and grips his hand, makes him drop the pen, and he just notices how stiff and painful his hand is. It’s never that aching after writing. “Go to bed.”
“But I need to,” he starts, though he doubts he should continue when he sees Jinki’s eyes. There’s something, and he cannot grasp it, maybe not understanding. He doesn’t understand a lot. “I need to find the k.” Find the k.
“I’ll do it,” Jinki answers sharply, and the fragile tone is gone, replaced by authority. “Just rest, you need to go to school tomorrow.” So Minho nods, stands up, and walks silently to his room. He can feel Jinki’s gaze on his back, but he is too afraid to look back.
+
Kibum is sitting on his seat, his fingers playing with a lighter. The blonde boy is chattering on the seat beside him, doesn’t look upset the slightest by the other’s ignorance attitude. Minho wants to go back to his bed. Wants to do his homework on the coffee table, find the k. He wants to run away, because Kibum has that kind of effect on people. Intimidating, yet he draws you in, so he finds himself walking up to their place. “It’s my seat,” he says, and some heads are turned to them before they turn back when Kibum lets his lighter scatters loudly against the desk. The blonde looks up at him and grins.
“Hey, Minho,” he greets him. “Have you done the Math homework?”
But, he wants to say, but, “Yeah.”
“I knew it from the start,” the blonde huffs miserably, staring downwards to his shoes, bright red and yellow with white laces. Huh, he thinks. “I knew it. You look smart and diligent, and you’re good looking too. This is so unfair. Right Kibum?”
The other boy just stares at his lighter, shining silver against dark brown of wood, and it’s all kind of blinding. Okay? “Thanks,” he says awkwardly, and the blonde grins again. Minho realizes that he is the one high-fiving him. Familiar nostril and teeth, he wonders why he remembers the rarest thing. It’s a good thing, in a way. “I want to sit down.” It is directed to the brown haired boy.
He doesn’t move though, not even a millimeter, and in the end the blonde chuckles as he stands up and kisses the back of Kibum’s neck. Minho almost chokes, but he keeps his lips straight. Kibum rolls his eyes and the blond laughs loudly as he passes him. He is short, almost reaching his eyes. The blonde is not blonde; it’s triple colored with brown, light, and yellow. It’s gross in theory, but the way they blend on his hair is pretty. Beautiful, but he can’t say it out loud. “The seat’s all yours,” he grins, punches his upper arm lightly-Minho hopes he doesn’t break any fingers, but he keeps his face bright. “I’m Jonghyun.”
Before Minho opens his mouth, Kibum is kicking the desk as he stands up, and the chair is banging loudly against the floor, deafening. He snatches the lighter and a box from the opened bag, and storms away. Jonghyun sighs loudly, understanding. “Oh well,” he shrugs, and at Minho’s stare he hits his chest. He wanders to a group of boys then, talking loudly, and is laughing a second later. Minho is frozen, mouth closed, chair on the floor, his desk is in a strange position, sympathetic glances thrown at him. He needs some water.
+
“Oh,” he says dumbly, almost drops the water bottle in his hand.
Kibum looks down from his place where he is listening to his MP3, a cigarette dangling off his long fingers, a puff of smoke makes its way out of the small gap between his lips, pale from the cold. Minho wonders how he can hear him, before he sees that the pale boy is not actually wearing his headphones; it is left around his neck, though the loud music blasters from them is more than enough. It sounds sugary and sweet, the song, with lots of piano and acoustic guitar sound. He holds his water bottle tightly.
“You,” he starts, and he wants to say are you ditching class or how do you even get there because the place where he is sitting right now is even higher than the rooftop, can only be reached if he jumps there or flies. Can you fly, he almost says, but grits his teeth so he doesn’t look stupid. “You’re smoking,” he settles with, and that sounds even more idiotic than his mind.
Kibum throws his face away from him, doesn’t answer. He shakes the stick and drops the ashes to his side, grey and dusty flies in the air, carried by the wind and when it reaches the ground, it falls near the tip of his shoes. He steps on it and crushes it, makes them disappear, and he breathes in. The air smells a little minty and somehow, it makes his eyes tearing.
He doesn’t know why, doesn’t know how, but most importantly, he doesn’t know what he’s doing, when he puts the water bottle down on the floor, and runs to the wall where Kibum is sitting on. He kicks the ground when he almost crash to it, sends his body flying up, air slapping his face like it’s waking him up, but he is jumping and he presses his palm to the flat surface on the wall, the knees of his uniform pants slides smoothly and balance his body. Kibum is crushing his cigarette in his palm when he looks up, eyes not leaving his face. He feels the gaze at his eyes, down to his nose, philtrum, mouth, chin, jaw, Adam’s apple, collar bone, and he shivers from the intensity of it. His palms are cold, yet sweaty.
He breaks the eye contact first. He turns his head and sits down carefully, cautiously, so as not to touch the other. He can hear the music from his headphones from that distance, an arm length away, and since Kibum doesn’t say anything, doesn’t push him off of the wall, he settles down and plants his heels to the ground, his palms behind his back, leaning backwards to see at the scenery. It is slightly raining, little droplets that are almost nonexistent, but they are reflecting the rays from the sun, and he can almost see little rainbows everywhere. He can see the scattered buildings which fill Seoul up, makes it hot and cramping, but from his place, from their spot, the mess of buildings look like mosaic, artistic and gorgeous, colorful and vibrant.
The silent stretched between them is not as uncomfortable as he thinks it would be. In fact, the cold feeling from the left side of his shoulder is calming, too calming that he find himself asleep not three minutes later.
He wakes up to an empty spot beside him, an empty can of hot coffee filled with sticks of cigarettes inside it and the tin is still warm. His water bottle, the one he left below when he jumps up the wall, is laid beside him, no water inside, even though it is half filled when he last drank from it. Beside it is a lighter, silvery and full of scratches, yet still manage to look grand and unusual. He flips the lighter open and the fire comes out, almost burn his finger, almost too hot for his comfort, but the heat near the skin of his finger makes him smile.
He sleeps again, only wakes up when orange beams lay across the horizon.
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