Of Monsters And Angels
Fandom: SM Town + Xiah Junsu
Pairing: Hyukjae/Donghae + others
Rating: NC-17
AU: clones
Warnings: sex, religious references, violence
Length: 2800+
At Lee Hyukjae’s birth, the surgery lasts a few hours, and the only proofs that it was conducted are the tiny scars at the corners of his eyes like crinkles of laughter. Then he’s handed back to his mother and falls asleep in her arms, suckling contentedly.
At Hyuk0.2’s birth, he’s connected to wires and immersed in nutritive liquid. The electrodes taped to his skull are wired to the cameras implanted in Hyukjae’s irises. He falls asleep in artificial warmth, the electronic bliss of his mother’s embrace.
Hyukjae grows up in a house neighboring Kim Junsu’s. They play football together, and fight, and Hyukjae listens to Junsu sing. He calls him a fucking fairy even if he doesn’t really know what it means - it’s something his dad says - and Junsu goes home crying.
Hyuk0.2 would have liked to keep listening to Junsu. That night, while Hyukjae sleeps and dreams of winning the MIP trophy, Hyuk0.2 slips out of his bed and throws pebbles against Junsu’s window, mouthing ‘I’m sorry’ over and over, but Junsu doesn’t show up.
Once, they decide to build a tree house in the maple growing in the back of Junsu’s yard. Hyukjae brings over a hammer, a saw, and a bag of nails. Together they manage to assemble a floor made of large planks, and Hyukjae stands up at the edge of it to yell ‘I’m the king of the world!’ with his arms spread wide, like an angel. He hears Junsu scream and sees the ground get closer really fast but none of it really computes until there is blood dripping down his face.
Hyuk0.2 gasps as the scalpel’s blade splits the skin of his forehead open and then a needle stiches the wound close.
There will be a scar there for the rest of his life.
Junsu moves away when Hyukjae is thirteen. They hug in an awkward, boyish adolescent embrace and later Hyukjae kicks his now useless soccer ball against the dumpsters in the back alley behind their houses, dismayed at being alone, stupid in his dismay.
Hyuk0.2 feels tears rolling down his cheeks as the ball bounces back and he doesn’t quite know what to make of them. He keeps kicking and kicking but it never fills up the void in his chest.
Another family settles in Junsu’s house. Hyukjae spies on them from the window of his bedroom, hidden behind the curtain, and sees a woman and a boy who must be around his age and has longish hair. His mother doesn’t like it.
“He looks like a girl,” she says.
“Boys should have short hair,” Hyukjae’s father agrees.
“They say her husband left,” his mother adds.
“Must be why the kid is poorly educated,” his father concludes.
When Hyuk0.2 sees the electronic reflection of Donghae through Hyukjae’s eyes, his heart skips a beat, or two, and the monitor he’s connected to lags for an instant.
Hyukjae and Donghae become friends because it’s expected of them: they’re neighbors, they attend to the same school, and Hyukjae’s parents dislike Donghae. It’s the perfect combination. Donghae is rebellious enough that Hyukjae feels validated in sneaking out at night to meet him, and tame enough that he’s not really threatening.
At each puff of smoke inhaled from the cigarettes they share, Hyuk0.2 only feels Donghae’s lips on his and revels in the indirect kisses.
Each Sunday, the neighborhood gathers in the Church to listen to the sermon and pray together. Hyukjae is restless and winks at Kim Hyoyeon from across the aisle. Donghae is always, always, sitting on the first row.
Hyuk0.2 stares for a long time at his neck, fervently bowed, and absently wishes he could put his mouth there while he says ‘Amen’.
Hyukjae jerks off for the first time to the image of Hyoyeon dancing and her breasts and her legs and the curve of her butt and how she could - would? - get down on her knees and wrap her lips around his cock and how awesome it would feel.
Hyuk0.2 feels his hand going up and down his cock, almost at its own volition, and can’t help but see a bright grin and floppy hair curling down a neck, and comes with a whimper of Donghae’s name.
Later it’s not the same feeling at all, really not, when Hyoyeon’s legs are wrapped around Hyukjae’s waist and her hands are around his chin, framing him and anchoring him when he’s ready to lose control and lose himself, deep into her.
Hyuk0.2 presses tears against her skin when it’s over and he wonders whether or not she can feel them, while her hands stroke his damp hair and she murmurs words of comfort in his ear.
“My dad died,” Donghae says all of a sudden. They’re eating lunch, just the two of them, like they’ve been doing since Hyoyeon broke up with him. Hyukjae’s kimbap falls from his hand and rice stays stuck on his lips.
“Why didn’t you tell me before?” he asks.
Hyuk0.2 wants to hug Donghae, but somehow he can’t.
“I thought you wouldn’t get it,” Donghae answers, shrugging.
‘I do,’ Hyuk0.2’s mind screams, ‘I really do.’
It’s just another excuse to argue with his parents, really, and when the screaming escalates to the point where neighbors are yelling at them to shut the fuck up, Hyukjae slams to door and starts up his moped, uncaring of the noise it makes in the night, uncaring of Donghae’s wide eyes while he stands on his doorstep.
Hyuk0.2 feels wind blowing on his face and the rush of adrenaline as he speeds up, but it feels weird, surreal, disconnected.
The doctor’s smile is tense and awkward.
“So, there have been some complications,” he tells Hyukjae’s mother, wringing his hands. “We, err. We have to replace the body.”
“Replace the body?”
The doctor nods, leading Hyukjae’s parents to a glass window. Behind, the bodies of two teenagers are resting.
“It will still be your son,” the doctor explains. “Only, new and improved.” When he grins, you can see he’s missing a tooth.
While Hyukjae’s cardiogram flattens, the connection is broken and Hyuk0.2 awakes with a gasp. His arms are pierced with multiple needle holes he doesn’t recall having before.
“We had to give you a blood transfusion,” a nurse explains to him.
Hyuk0.2 - Hyukjae, his name is Hyukjae, and his mother repeats it over and over again, hugging him to her chest, Hyukjae, my baby, my baby, and there’s a surge of emotion Hyuk thinks he’s never known before.
“Let’s go home,” she says, stroking his face. Her thumbs linger at the corner of his eyes, trace over laughter wrinkles Hyuk knows by heart, from countless mirror reflections.
They say home is where the heart is, but Lee Hyukjae’s heart has stopped beating a few hours ago.
He sees Donghae on the next morning and there’s wariness mixed with relief in his half-hug, but Hyuk thinks nothing of it and squeezes him tight against his chest, suddenly relieved of an unknown weight.
“So,” Donghae says after an awkward pause. “You’re not wounded?”
Hyuk’s smile freezes. “No. Why? Should I be?”
Donghae frowns. “Hyuk, you crashed your moped and spent the entire night at the hospital, but you’re not wounded.”
Hyuk shrugs. “I don’t know what to tell you.”
And he really, really doesn’t.
Life takes an odd turn for him. It’s like he feels out of his own skin in everything he does, because his mother’s eyes are colder than before when they look at him and his father now plain avoids him.
Donghae is still the same, though, and that’s good. That’s better than good, though Hyuk doesn’t know the word for it. He relishes every smile and every glance makes him warm up all over.
“I know what you are.”
It makes Hyuk’s heart stop and the hairs on his arms rise. Donghae knows. He’s seen and he’s guessed, and now he knows, and it’s all over.
But his voice is still soft.
“I’ve researched, a bit, and it makes sense, Hyuk.”
Researched?
“You’re a clone.”
Hyuk spends the night vomiting in Donghae’s bathroom, crying in disgust as his bruised wrists testify of the truth, crying with relief because Donghae doesn’t know about the other thing. When morning comes the tears have stopped but it still hurts.
It hurts, more than it should by any means, when in school he walks in on Donghae kissing Jessica like she is the only one in his world and the rest of the universe doesn’t matter as long as their lips stayed locked together.
It hurts and Hyuk knows it’s wrong, but he can’t help it, can’t help the disgusting sobs that wrack through him as he replays the scene, over and over, thanks to his sick imagination.
Out of habit he walks to the church and kneels down in front of the statue of the crucified man, flagstones cold under his knees. Hyuk joins his hands together and tries, so hard, to pray. He wants his memory wiped out. He wants his mind cleared. He wants to be someone else.
God created man in his image, but Hyuk was created in the image of another boy.
These words echoing in his head, Hyuk walks away from the church and on a road that won’t lead him to anywhere good. Won’t lead him ‘home’.
The boys there are like him because their bodies belong to others and they bear the same needle holes on the inside of their arms; their embrace is welcoming, and warm, and they can soothe the ache in his body.
Hyukjae stays with Sungmin and Heechul. During the night, he listens to them fucking strangers, and during the day, he listens to them making love to each other.
Sometimes they’ll drag him along and play him like he’s a beautiful instrument between their bodies, and he archs and twists to please them both.
“We should dye your hair,” Heechul murmurs to him. “It would be beautiful.”
Sungmin sits him in front of a mirror, tells him to close his eyes until it’s done, and when Hyuk opens them again he sees a foreign, unearthly creature staring back, with hollow cheeks, hollow eyes, and pale skin to match his hair.
“I’m going home,” he whispers - his voice cracks.
Donghae opens the door even though it’s three in the morning and anyone else than him would have pulled out a gun. He opens the door to Hyuk crying in the night and drags him inside, upstairs in his bedroom.
“Where have you been?” he asks hurriedly, and then his mouth falls open when Hyuk tugs his hat off.
There’s an instant suspended in time, when they’re both unable to do anything else than breathe and look at each other, heart pounding; it’s broken when Donghae reaches a hand to touch, fingers sliding in Hyuk’s whitish blond hair.
The contact is soft and reverent and Hyuk curves his neck to lean into it, hungry for anything that Donghae has to offer, and is rewarded when the fingers tighten gently in his hair to tug him forward until his lips are pressed against Donghae’s, parting when his tongue probes at them. Hyuk, eyes closed, lets him taste his teeth, and his tongue, and the inside of his cheeks; their trembling hands are locked together and their palms burning, and their skins seem to ignite with the proximity of each other.
“I’ve never done this with a guy before,” Donghae confesses when they’re both cocooned under the covers in a world that’s theirs only.
So Hyuk shows him, uses whatever knowledge he has so that in the end, it’s Donghae inside of him and panting in his mouth, and its hurts so good it’s entirely worth it, when Donghae calls him an angel, so beautiful like an angel.
Donghae’s mother finds them in the morning, tangled together naked on his bed. She tells Hyuk to go home, very calmly, and waits until he’s closed the door behind him to yell at her son.
Hyuk slips inside of his house by the backdoor but his mother catches him anyway, and her already stern expression turns into extreme distaste as soon as she sees the dyed hair.
“You’re not my son,” she whispers, voice strained but calm. “Get out of my house, you monster.”
“I’m not your son,” Hyuk agrees and tears threaten to spill in his voice. “You’ll never see me again.”
Deep down he feels sorry for this woman who thought she could cheat death only to find out that she lost her only child. But Hyuk can’t bring himself to care, not when he’s choking on tears and packing clothes in a suitcase.
“I need to see him,” Hyuk repeats to Donghae’s mother.
“He doesn’t want to see you,” she answers. “And frankly? Neither do I.”
She looks sorry for him the way you’d feel sorry for a particularly repugnant toad that would have just been ran over by a car.
“I haven’t done anything wrong,” Hyuk says. “Can I at least talk to him?”
Reluctantly, she lets him climb up the stairs, but the door to Donghae’s room is locked and won’t open, and he thinks he can hear muffled sobbing behind.
Heechul and Sungmin welcome him back with lazy grins and greedy bodies, and for a while Hyuk indulges in their contact, but soon it becomes not enough and he tries to find solace in an other kind of pleasure, he’s not too sure which - he spends his nights walking through the deserted streets, looking for a sign, and during the day he sleeps.
There’s a neon-red cross looming every night over his old neighborhood and at first he thinks it’s a figment of his imagination, a vision of his crucified love, but as he walks nearer the mirage doesn’t faint and Hyuk understands that it’s the church he used to go to.
The heavy wooden doors are wide open for anyone to come in so Hyuk does, and his footsteps’ echo is loud when it bounces off the walls like an old football against dumpsters. Inside it’s cold and blissfully empty.
He remembers falling to his knees in front of the altar and snorts, but does it again for old times’ sake. (Un)surprisingly, he feels nothing at all.
“Is everything alright?”
The young cleric’s name is Choi Siwon and his eyes are full of mirth and brimming with unshakable conviction, like he believes in every single human being, absolutely and unconditionally. He wants to tell Hyuk that God is there, God hasn’t left him, and Hyuk laughs.
“God wasn’t with me to begin with,” he says, turning back on his heels.
“Where are you going?” Siwon asks desperately.
“Home.” Hyuk answers.
He hears the church boy follow him around in seamy streets that reek of piss and sperm. Through the curtain of his hair Hyuk sees the world streaked in white so he lets Siwon walk behind him, after all, if this is what he wants.
The scene he walks in on makes him both stop dead in his tracks and laugh, because he hears Siwon come through a screeching halt behind him and mutter ‘Jesus’, and, come on, Jesus has nothing to do with this. Nothing at all.
Heechul and Sungmin are naked and writhing together on the bed. When Heechul looks up, a trail of sticky fluid running down his lips, it’s from the wide arrow of Sungmin’s spread legs; and as far as Hyuk can tell Sungmin is busy at the other end, sucking Heechul off with hungry little moans.
“You brought company,” Heechul says slowly.
Monster, Hyukjae thinks, trying to see his own reflection in a puddle of muddy water, but everything he sees is a distorted gargoyle. He’s a monster. Broken cries from inside of the house.
He managed to defile the single islet of purity in an ocean of sin.
The same crowd goes to church every Sunday, but they have lost their angel.
“Hyuk?”
He knows that voice. He knows it too well. The beautiful blond hair is streaked with black, greasy roots but Donghae still runs his fingers through it like it’s pure gold.
“Hyuk, come with me. Let’s go home.”
Home, Hyuk remembers, is where the heart is, and his has never been pounding that hard in his chest.
The needle has been sterilized in the flame of Donghae’s zippo but it’s cold when he touches the tip to Hyukjae’s ear.
“Do it,” he whispers, reaching for Donghae’s free hand.
It slides in with nothing more than a slight sting and then Donghae gently pushes the shank of the piercing in.
“There,” he says. “You’re Silver Hyuk.”
“Eun-hyuk,” Hyuk says, rolling the name on his tongue.
“Eunhyuk,” Donghae agrees, picking it up with his lips.
Pairing: Hyukjae/Donghae + others
Rating: NC-17
AU: clones
Warnings: sex, religious references, violence
Length: 2800+
At Lee Hyukjae’s birth, the surgery lasts a few hours, and the only proofs that it was conducted are the tiny scars at the corners of his eyes like crinkles of laughter. Then he’s handed back to his mother and falls asleep in her arms, suckling contentedly.
At Hyuk0.2’s birth, he’s connected to wires and immersed in nutritive liquid. The electrodes taped to his skull are wired to the cameras implanted in Hyukjae’s irises. He falls asleep in artificial warmth, the electronic bliss of his mother’s embrace.
Hyukjae grows up in a house neighboring Kim Junsu’s. They play football together, and fight, and Hyukjae listens to Junsu sing. He calls him a fucking fairy even if he doesn’t really know what it means - it’s something his dad says - and Junsu goes home crying.
Hyuk0.2 would have liked to keep listening to Junsu. That night, while Hyukjae sleeps and dreams of winning the MIP trophy, Hyuk0.2 slips out of his bed and throws pebbles against Junsu’s window, mouthing ‘I’m sorry’ over and over, but Junsu doesn’t show up.
Once, they decide to build a tree house in the maple growing in the back of Junsu’s yard. Hyukjae brings over a hammer, a saw, and a bag of nails. Together they manage to assemble a floor made of large planks, and Hyukjae stands up at the edge of it to yell ‘I’m the king of the world!’ with his arms spread wide, like an angel. He hears Junsu scream and sees the ground get closer really fast but none of it really computes until there is blood dripping down his face.
Hyuk0.2 gasps as the scalpel’s blade splits the skin of his forehead open and then a needle stiches the wound close.
There will be a scar there for the rest of his life.
Junsu moves away when Hyukjae is thirteen. They hug in an awkward, boyish adolescent embrace and later Hyukjae kicks his now useless soccer ball against the dumpsters in the back alley behind their houses, dismayed at being alone, stupid in his dismay.
Hyuk0.2 feels tears rolling down his cheeks as the ball bounces back and he doesn’t quite know what to make of them. He keeps kicking and kicking but it never fills up the void in his chest.
Another family settles in Junsu’s house. Hyukjae spies on them from the window of his bedroom, hidden behind the curtain, and sees a woman and a boy who must be around his age and has longish hair. His mother doesn’t like it.
“He looks like a girl,” she says.
“Boys should have short hair,” Hyukjae’s father agrees.
“They say her husband left,” his mother adds.
“Must be why the kid is poorly educated,” his father concludes.
When Hyuk0.2 sees the electronic reflection of Donghae through Hyukjae’s eyes, his heart skips a beat, or two, and the monitor he’s connected to lags for an instant.
Hyukjae and Donghae become friends because it’s expected of them: they’re neighbors, they attend to the same school, and Hyukjae’s parents dislike Donghae. It’s the perfect combination. Donghae is rebellious enough that Hyukjae feels validated in sneaking out at night to meet him, and tame enough that he’s not really threatening.
At each puff of smoke inhaled from the cigarettes they share, Hyuk0.2 only feels Donghae’s lips on his and revels in the indirect kisses.
Each Sunday, the neighborhood gathers in the Church to listen to the sermon and pray together. Hyukjae is restless and winks at Kim Hyoyeon from across the aisle. Donghae is always, always, sitting on the first row.
Hyuk0.2 stares for a long time at his neck, fervently bowed, and absently wishes he could put his mouth there while he says ‘Amen’.
Hyukjae jerks off for the first time to the image of Hyoyeon dancing and her breasts and her legs and the curve of her butt and how she could - would? - get down on her knees and wrap her lips around his cock and how awesome it would feel.
Hyuk0.2 feels his hand going up and down his cock, almost at its own volition, and can’t help but see a bright grin and floppy hair curling down a neck, and comes with a whimper of Donghae’s name.
Later it’s not the same feeling at all, really not, when Hyoyeon’s legs are wrapped around Hyukjae’s waist and her hands are around his chin, framing him and anchoring him when he’s ready to lose control and lose himself, deep into her.
Hyuk0.2 presses tears against her skin when it’s over and he wonders whether or not she can feel them, while her hands stroke his damp hair and she murmurs words of comfort in his ear.
“My dad died,” Donghae says all of a sudden. They’re eating lunch, just the two of them, like they’ve been doing since Hyoyeon broke up with him. Hyukjae’s kimbap falls from his hand and rice stays stuck on his lips.
“Why didn’t you tell me before?” he asks.
Hyuk0.2 wants to hug Donghae, but somehow he can’t.
“I thought you wouldn’t get it,” Donghae answers, shrugging.
‘I do,’ Hyuk0.2’s mind screams, ‘I really do.’
It’s just another excuse to argue with his parents, really, and when the screaming escalates to the point where neighbors are yelling at them to shut the fuck up, Hyukjae slams to door and starts up his moped, uncaring of the noise it makes in the night, uncaring of Donghae’s wide eyes while he stands on his doorstep.
Hyuk0.2 feels wind blowing on his face and the rush of adrenaline as he speeds up, but it feels weird, surreal, disconnected.
The doctor’s smile is tense and awkward.
“So, there have been some complications,” he tells Hyukjae’s mother, wringing his hands. “We, err. We have to replace the body.”
“Replace the body?”
The doctor nods, leading Hyukjae’s parents to a glass window. Behind, the bodies of two teenagers are resting.
“It will still be your son,” the doctor explains. “Only, new and improved.” When he grins, you can see he’s missing a tooth.
While Hyukjae’s cardiogram flattens, the connection is broken and Hyuk0.2 awakes with a gasp. His arms are pierced with multiple needle holes he doesn’t recall having before.
“We had to give you a blood transfusion,” a nurse explains to him.
Hyuk0.2 - Hyukjae, his name is Hyukjae, and his mother repeats it over and over again, hugging him to her chest, Hyukjae, my baby, my baby, and there’s a surge of emotion Hyuk thinks he’s never known before.
“Let’s go home,” she says, stroking his face. Her thumbs linger at the corner of his eyes, trace over laughter wrinkles Hyuk knows by heart, from countless mirror reflections.
They say home is where the heart is, but Lee Hyukjae’s heart has stopped beating a few hours ago.
He sees Donghae on the next morning and there’s wariness mixed with relief in his half-hug, but Hyuk thinks nothing of it and squeezes him tight against his chest, suddenly relieved of an unknown weight.
“So,” Donghae says after an awkward pause. “You’re not wounded?”
Hyuk’s smile freezes. “No. Why? Should I be?”
Donghae frowns. “Hyuk, you crashed your moped and spent the entire night at the hospital, but you’re not wounded.”
Hyuk shrugs. “I don’t know what to tell you.”
And he really, really doesn’t.
Life takes an odd turn for him. It’s like he feels out of his own skin in everything he does, because his mother’s eyes are colder than before when they look at him and his father now plain avoids him.
Donghae is still the same, though, and that’s good. That’s better than good, though Hyuk doesn’t know the word for it. He relishes every smile and every glance makes him warm up all over.
“I know what you are.”
It makes Hyuk’s heart stop and the hairs on his arms rise. Donghae knows. He’s seen and he’s guessed, and now he knows, and it’s all over.
But his voice is still soft.
“I’ve researched, a bit, and it makes sense, Hyuk.”
Researched?
“You’re a clone.”
Hyuk spends the night vomiting in Donghae’s bathroom, crying in disgust as his bruised wrists testify of the truth, crying with relief because Donghae doesn’t know about the other thing. When morning comes the tears have stopped but it still hurts.
It hurts, more than it should by any means, when in school he walks in on Donghae kissing Jessica like she is the only one in his world and the rest of the universe doesn’t matter as long as their lips stayed locked together.
It hurts and Hyuk knows it’s wrong, but he can’t help it, can’t help the disgusting sobs that wrack through him as he replays the scene, over and over, thanks to his sick imagination.
Out of habit he walks to the church and kneels down in front of the statue of the crucified man, flagstones cold under his knees. Hyuk joins his hands together and tries, so hard, to pray. He wants his memory wiped out. He wants his mind cleared. He wants to be someone else.
God created man in his image, but Hyuk was created in the image of another boy.
These words echoing in his head, Hyuk walks away from the church and on a road that won’t lead him to anywhere good. Won’t lead him ‘home’.
The boys there are like him because their bodies belong to others and they bear the same needle holes on the inside of their arms; their embrace is welcoming, and warm, and they can soothe the ache in his body.
Hyukjae stays with Sungmin and Heechul. During the night, he listens to them fucking strangers, and during the day, he listens to them making love to each other.
Sometimes they’ll drag him along and play him like he’s a beautiful instrument between their bodies, and he archs and twists to please them both.
“We should dye your hair,” Heechul murmurs to him. “It would be beautiful.”
Sungmin sits him in front of a mirror, tells him to close his eyes until it’s done, and when Hyuk opens them again he sees a foreign, unearthly creature staring back, with hollow cheeks, hollow eyes, and pale skin to match his hair.
“I’m going home,” he whispers - his voice cracks.
Donghae opens the door even though it’s three in the morning and anyone else than him would have pulled out a gun. He opens the door to Hyuk crying in the night and drags him inside, upstairs in his bedroom.
“Where have you been?” he asks hurriedly, and then his mouth falls open when Hyuk tugs his hat off.
There’s an instant suspended in time, when they’re both unable to do anything else than breathe and look at each other, heart pounding; it’s broken when Donghae reaches a hand to touch, fingers sliding in Hyuk’s whitish blond hair.
The contact is soft and reverent and Hyuk curves his neck to lean into it, hungry for anything that Donghae has to offer, and is rewarded when the fingers tighten gently in his hair to tug him forward until his lips are pressed against Donghae’s, parting when his tongue probes at them. Hyuk, eyes closed, lets him taste his teeth, and his tongue, and the inside of his cheeks; their trembling hands are locked together and their palms burning, and their skins seem to ignite with the proximity of each other.
“I’ve never done this with a guy before,” Donghae confesses when they’re both cocooned under the covers in a world that’s theirs only.
So Hyuk shows him, uses whatever knowledge he has so that in the end, it’s Donghae inside of him and panting in his mouth, and its hurts so good it’s entirely worth it, when Donghae calls him an angel, so beautiful like an angel.
Donghae’s mother finds them in the morning, tangled together naked on his bed. She tells Hyuk to go home, very calmly, and waits until he’s closed the door behind him to yell at her son.
Hyuk slips inside of his house by the backdoor but his mother catches him anyway, and her already stern expression turns into extreme distaste as soon as she sees the dyed hair.
“You’re not my son,” she whispers, voice strained but calm. “Get out of my house, you monster.”
“I’m not your son,” Hyuk agrees and tears threaten to spill in his voice. “You’ll never see me again.”
Deep down he feels sorry for this woman who thought she could cheat death only to find out that she lost her only child. But Hyuk can’t bring himself to care, not when he’s choking on tears and packing clothes in a suitcase.
“I need to see him,” Hyuk repeats to Donghae’s mother.
“He doesn’t want to see you,” she answers. “And frankly? Neither do I.”
She looks sorry for him the way you’d feel sorry for a particularly repugnant toad that would have just been ran over by a car.
“I haven’t done anything wrong,” Hyuk says. “Can I at least talk to him?”
Reluctantly, she lets him climb up the stairs, but the door to Donghae’s room is locked and won’t open, and he thinks he can hear muffled sobbing behind.
Heechul and Sungmin welcome him back with lazy grins and greedy bodies, and for a while Hyuk indulges in their contact, but soon it becomes not enough and he tries to find solace in an other kind of pleasure, he’s not too sure which - he spends his nights walking through the deserted streets, looking for a sign, and during the day he sleeps.
There’s a neon-red cross looming every night over his old neighborhood and at first he thinks it’s a figment of his imagination, a vision of his crucified love, but as he walks nearer the mirage doesn’t faint and Hyuk understands that it’s the church he used to go to.
The heavy wooden doors are wide open for anyone to come in so Hyuk does, and his footsteps’ echo is loud when it bounces off the walls like an old football against dumpsters. Inside it’s cold and blissfully empty.
He remembers falling to his knees in front of the altar and snorts, but does it again for old times’ sake. (Un)surprisingly, he feels nothing at all.
“Is everything alright?”
The young cleric’s name is Choi Siwon and his eyes are full of mirth and brimming with unshakable conviction, like he believes in every single human being, absolutely and unconditionally. He wants to tell Hyuk that God is there, God hasn’t left him, and Hyuk laughs.
“God wasn’t with me to begin with,” he says, turning back on his heels.
“Where are you going?” Siwon asks desperately.
“Home.” Hyuk answers.
He hears the church boy follow him around in seamy streets that reek of piss and sperm. Through the curtain of his hair Hyuk sees the world streaked in white so he lets Siwon walk behind him, after all, if this is what he wants.
The scene he walks in on makes him both stop dead in his tracks and laugh, because he hears Siwon come through a screeching halt behind him and mutter ‘Jesus’, and, come on, Jesus has nothing to do with this. Nothing at all.
Heechul and Sungmin are naked and writhing together on the bed. When Heechul looks up, a trail of sticky fluid running down his lips, it’s from the wide arrow of Sungmin’s spread legs; and as far as Hyuk can tell Sungmin is busy at the other end, sucking Heechul off with hungry little moans.
“You brought company,” Heechul says slowly.
Monster, Hyukjae thinks, trying to see his own reflection in a puddle of muddy water, but everything he sees is a distorted gargoyle. He’s a monster. Broken cries from inside of the house.
He managed to defile the single islet of purity in an ocean of sin.
The same crowd goes to church every Sunday, but they have lost their angel.
“Hyuk?”
He knows that voice. He knows it too well. The beautiful blond hair is streaked with black, greasy roots but Donghae still runs his fingers through it like it’s pure gold.
“Hyuk, come with me. Let’s go home.”
Home, Hyuk remembers, is where the heart is, and his has never been pounding that hard in his chest.
The needle has been sterilized in the flame of Donghae’s zippo but it’s cold when he touches the tip to Hyukjae’s ear.
“Do it,” he whispers, reaching for Donghae’s free hand.
It slides in with nothing more than a slight sting and then Donghae gently pushes the shank of the piercing in.
“There,” he says. “You’re Silver Hyuk.”
“Eun-hyuk,” Hyuk says, rolling the name on his tongue.
“Eunhyuk,” Donghae agrees, picking it up with his lips.