Title: i have a feelin'
Pairings: hunhan
Genre: au, fluff?? (to be determined)
Rating: PG-13 for language and 0.00037 seconds of naughty naughty
Summary: it occurs to Sehun that Luhan probably needed a lot of band-aids.
Author's Note: this?? was supposed to be fluff???¿?¿¿?¿¿¿??¿? idk anymore i tried i think i'm losing my touch but it's sTILL KIND OF FLUFF HOPEFULLY
also i have not read nearly as much hunhan fanfics as i have kaisoo so if someone has done something similar to this already i am so so sorry
this is jenni's birthday present because jenni is friend who sends me delicious kyungsoo gifs and checks up on me to see how i'm doing and will forever be filed on my blog and in my mind as "unnie". happy birthday hun, hope you enjoy this even just a little bit :)
“Sehun.” A nose nuzzling through his hair, tracing aimless shapes in the back of his head. His brown locks are still a little too short for his taste, and some patches are a bit thicker than others, but, hey, at least he has hair. “Hey, Sehun.”
“Mmph.”
“You awake?”
“No.”
A soft chuckle. “Well, then...” The nose starts moving down, and then a pair of lips are brushing along the back of his neck, just below the hairline. Luhan presses the lightest kiss imaginable to the spot where he knows Sehun’s ticklish, and then mouths against his skin, “Hurry and wake up already.”
Sehun’s kind of wondering what Luhan’s up to, because as much of an early riser as he is Luhan never wakes Sehun up unless they have somewhere they need to be, which they don’t. He’s still half-asleep, though, and tired beyond comprehension, mostly due to the fact that he stayed up until three in the morning battling frustration and betrayal over several games of Mario Kart with Chanyeol, so he groans in response with his face still fully buried in his pillow.
“Don’t want to,” Sehun grunts.
“I said-” Luhan suddenly throws one leg over his hip and grinds down, one forceful roll of his hips against Sehun’s ass. “Get up.”
Sehun immediately turns over and flips onto his back beneath Luhan. “I’m up.”
A pillow hits him across the face at that. “You’re such a pig,” Luhan says, climbing off of Sehun again and clambering out of bed.
“Wow, that was so low-oh come on, can’t we just make it really quick-” Sehun whines, sitting up as Luhan leaves the room.
“Hurry up and shower, we’re going out in an hour.”
“I don’t remember you mentioning this yesterday,” Sehun calls after him.
“Yeah, well, it wasn’t worth mentioning yesterday. Go on already, I’ll make pancakes for you if you make this quick,” Luhan calls back from the kitchen.
“But where are we going?”
A series of loud clanging noises from kitchenware banging together starts up. “I can’t hear you over the sound of me making you pancakes,” Luhan yells.
“Assface,” Sehun grumbles as he clumsily staggers out of bed.
“You still haven’t told me what we’re doing.”
“Well, coincidentally, if I tell you, it kills like half the fun of us actually getting there,” Luhan says, leading Sehun down the street with their hands linked together.
“Yeah, and it raises the suspicion by like ten thousand percent.”
“Don’t worry, we’re five minutes away now.”
Sehun looks around. They’re in one of the busiest downtown shopping districts, one distinctly known for its nightlife, although it’s still pretty impressive during daylight hours. It’s also a neighbourhood that Sehun knows particularly well, for one very specific reason in particular.
“Isn’t this...”
“Shush. Stop talking.”
Sure enough, to Sehun’s surprise, they end up in front of the building where his old dance studio used to be, which was sold out a year or two ago and converted into a small art gallery. He’s extremely curious now, and almost nervous in the weirdest way, the excited kind of nervous. This is very, very out of sorts for Luhan-he’s normally terrible at organizing special events and surprises, and whenever he tries he always gets too excited and ends up blowing it halfway through, so all this straight-faced mystery and secrecy occurs about as often as Dean Winchester eats salads.
“It’s not my birthday,” Sehun tries, as they take the stairs up to the fourth floor.
“I think after four years of you complaining about the birthday presents I give you I would know that.”
“Sassy today, aren’t we?” Sehun mutters under his breath.
“Shut up, prissy.” Despite the unforgiving deliverance of the insult, Luhan’s watching Sehun’s face carefully as they keep climbing the stairs, to check if he gets pale or sweaty, or something. In all honesty, they’re going at a leisurely enough pace that the stairs are definitely not a problem, but Sehun would like to think that the concern was unnecessary regardless of how quickly they’re moving up. He’s mostly convinced himself of that, anyhow.
They reach the fourth floor, and Luhan stops them in front of the door to the gallery, the frosted glass of the window preventing Sehun from seeing inside. “Okay, well,” Luhan says, and Sehun realizes for the first time that Luhan’s palm is sweating in his. “You ready?”
Sehun’s heart starts thumping a little faster. “Ready as ever.”
Luhan smiles, and when he turns the handle and opens the door, Sehun all but sticks his head through as soon as the crack in the doorway is big enough for him to fit, hardly able to contain himself.
What he sees makes his eyes go wide.
He’s never gone to see this place after it got turned into the gallery, so to begin with the fresh wooden floorboards and the spotless white walls jump out at him, still looking brand-new and recently renovated. The large window that makes up the entirety of the left wall is still there, so that there’s plenty of sunlight streaming inside, and what it catches is the strings of hundreds of paper cranes, all different colours, strung up on thin translucent wire and hanging down from the ceiling. There’s tons of them everywhere, just filling up every available inch of space within the large gallery. Without a single other object inside of the room, the bright colours and careful arrangement of the dangling cranes make them the grand centerpiece of the room.
“Wow,” Sehun breathes, stepping inside and carefully making his way between the strings of cranes. He reaches out and touches one in awe, a vibrant, sun-pressed yellow crane, each edge and fold perfect and pristine. It feels a lot like he’s walking through those purple spirit trees from that Avatar movie (or those ice-covered trees from Frozen, but he’s so damn sick of hearing about that movie that he refuses to acknowledge it as the first example that comes to him).
“Is the gallery having one of those paper crane exhibits?” Sehun asks, still moving forward and taking the cranes in slowly.
“Yeah, sort of.”
The weird tone in Luhan’s voice makes Sehun turn around to look at him. Luhan’s hanging back just where the cranes start falling, a nervous sort of smile playing on his lips. “Look at the back wall,” he says.
Sehun does, turning around, and at first he thinks he sees it wrong, blinking several times and wondering if his eyes are playing tricks. But then he realizes what it is, and he unconsciously takes a few steps forward, stunned, moving just close enough to assure himself that he’s right. The back wall’s all mirror, and there’s a wooden ballet barre screwed in along it, just like there was when he was dancing here as a kid.
“I don’t get it,” Sehun calls uncertainly. Had the gallery fallen through? Had this place remained a dance studio after all?
“You can go and look.” Luhan’s footsteps echo across the floorboards, and then there’s a hand on Sehun’s back, steady and reassuring. “It’s okay.”
Sehun lets Luhan gently lead him forward, and when they’re about ten feet away from the mirror Sehun notices, for the first time, something printed in neat white writing across the top of the mirror, as if straight from a typewriter, now unobstructed by the cranes. He reads the uppermost script, the two biggest words...
And his heart instantly jams itself in its throat.
“‘Oh Sehun, 2014,’” Luhan reads aloud, sensing Sehun’s speechlessness. “‘Light and reflection on mirror. In the late 1990s, Oh discovered his passion for dancing, and expanded on that passion in taking up hip-hop and jazz fusion. Here Oh shows the ongoing chronicles of his perusal in a life and career in dancing in the very room that he began to take it up formerly, each routine a spectacle of emotion and sound without language that’s different from the last. With nothing but his amazing talent and absolute dedication, he both creates and beautifully realizes the art of movement and storytelling in ways that make viewers fall in love anew every time.’”
“It’s a description of me?” Sehun says, dazed. “Like in a...”
“Gallery exhibit, yeah.” Luhan moved to stand next to him, his hand still on Sehun’s back as they look at their reflections. “Originally it was gonna talk about the cranes, but...I wanted to make this about you.”
Sehun looks at Luhan through their reflections. “What about the cranes?”
Luhan chews on his lower lip. For a few seconds he can’t speak. “They’re, uh. They’re yours, in a way, and mine. I folded them for you when you were sick.”
Sehun turns to stare at Luhan full-on next to him.
“I don’t know if I was serious about it at first,” Luhan says, turning back to look at all of the cranes in the room. “But at some point I started, well, counting. And then it turned into this thing where I was constantly folding these things everywhere I went, anytime I could get my hands on a scrap of paper. They’re not all the same, if you look carefully.” His eyes scan them all, looking. “Some of them I made from old calculus notes when I was cleaning out my desk, or pages of newspaper when I was in a coffee shop or something. There’s a few...I folded the notes you sent me in high school, and the tickets you printed out for our first concert, and, um...”
Luhan’s voice shakes on this last bit, and he swallows, trying to compose himself. “Some of them are like thoughts, or letters,” he says, “cause sometimes I went to see you and you were so sick, you weren’t...and I was scared and I went home and I couldn’t tell anyone, so I would write down whatever was going through my head and fold it into a crane, and I just-I counted them all, every last one, and sometimes I’d spend whole days at home just folding cranes, those days when you were in the ICU and-”
“Luhan,” Sehun says, his voice starting to shake a little too, “are you saying you folded one thousand of these?”
Luhan rubs his nose. “It’s, um. It’s one thousand one hundred and twenty-nine, actually.” He smiles a bit. “I kinda kept going after one thousand. It was therapeutic.”
Sehun’s eyes start prickling and his nose starts tingling, and he doesn’t want to cry, dammit. “Luhan.”
“I don’t know if you remembered, or if you really care, but today’s nine months since you went into remission, and almost a year and a half since the doctors told your parents you didn’t have long. And I thought I’d do something for it, and I really wanted to show you these, because I look at them now and...I want to believe they had something to do with it.”
“You did not fold a thousand cranes so you could wish for me to get better,” Sehun says in a thick voice. His eyes are definitely watering now and he can feel his face getting all blotchy.
Luhan shrugs. “Desperate times call for desperate measures,” he says, trying to smile again, but at his own words a flash of something comes over his eyes and Sehun sees, for the first time in his life, a glimpse of the crippling fear and despair that wracked Luhan’s insides the entire time that Sehun was sick. Luhan had been fairly good at putting on a strong front and staying optimistic after Sehun was first hospitalized, and he looked so self-assured that sometimes it actually made Sehun believe that Luhan really did know for certain that he was going to get better. But now he sees it, how much it was actually eating at Luhan, and his heart and stomach feel like they’re trying to converge inside of his body.
Sehun steps forward and throws his arms around Luhan to pull him into a tight hug, letting the sound of their bodies colliding cover up the single, strangled sob that escapes from his throat. He presses his lips together tightly and buries his face in Luhan’s shoulder. “I love you,” he says into the fabric of his shirt, fists gripping tightly at the back of it.
“I love you too,” Luhan whispers. He kisses the spot in front of Sehun’s ear and presses their cheeks together. “And I can tell you that that’s written on at least three hundred of these.”
“Three hundred?” Sehun echoes, sniffling. “That’s all the ‘I love you’s I get out of one thousand?”
“Shut up, you fucking dickweed, stop ruining the moment.”
Sehun laughs, and it’s this weird half-crying version of his laugh cause he’s still really emotional, and he thinks ten thousand cranes wouldn’t be enough for all the “I love you”s he wants to say to Luhan.
“Hey. Do me a favor?” Luhan asks, pulling back a little bit so they could look at each other.
“What is it?” Sehun asks, wiping his nose on his sleeve.
Luhan reaches up with his sleeve, too, carefully wiping away the tear tracks on his left cheek. “Dance a little? It doesn’t have to be anything too strenuous, but I thought it’d be nice to, you know. Bring the whole exhibit thing to life.”
Sehun smiles. A year ago he wasn’t even sure if he’d ever leave the hospital again, let alone dance. If Luhan spent his day one year ago folding his way to a thousand paper cranes for him, he thinks he can do this much. “Yeah, of course.”
Luhan’s face breaks out into a smile so wide and joyous that Sehun’s almost taken aback, and he finds himself blushing a little. “Okay, just hold on a quick sec,” Luhan says, breaking from the hug and quickly running into the corner, where there’s a stereo inside of a built-in shelf on the wall.
Sehun quickly takes his jacket off and walks into the clear space free of cranes in front of the mirror as he waits for Luhan to turn the stereo. Then a blast of saxophones and trumpets fills the room, and Sehun can’t help but give that half-laugh half-cry again, because he’s immensely grateful that Luhan didn’t pick some sappy moving ballad that would’ve had him bawling instead of dancing for sure. Instead it’s a catchy, upbeat, fun jazz number that has Sehun’s feet moving of their own accord in seconds, and soon he’s completely lost in the music, prancing around and twirling on a whim, all of those old jazz lessons quickly coming back to him. He tap-dances, he skips around, he throws his arms out, and the entire time Luhan leans up against the dance barre and watches him, a massive grin on his face that makes Sehun believe he’d never need puppies again for as long as he lived if he got to see that smile every day. And luckily, he now has the luxury of making it happen.
When the song finishes, Sehun strikes an ending pose with a flourish and a bow, and Luhan claps loudly and puts two fingers in his mouth to give a piercing wolf whistle. Sehun straightens up, a huge grin of his own now tugging on his lips. “You’re so gay,” he says.
“No fucking shit,” Luhan says, walking over, and when he throws his arms around Sehun’s neck and kisses him it’s almost like Sehun can still see and feel every one of those cranes around him, even with his eyes closed, and it’s so amazing he’s not sure if he can ever enjoy a proper art exhibit ever again.
Luhan gives a content little hum into the kiss just before their lips part, and when their eyes open his expression is one of absolute peace and adoration. He runs his hand through Sehun’s rough hair with a sweet smile. “Congrats on making it to nine months,” he says softly.
“Thanks for helping me get there,” Sehun says, intertwining their hands, and when Luhan wrinkles his nose and goes “Who’s the gay one now?” he’s too giddy to even try and punch him in the stomach like he normally would’ve, and just ends up hoisting Luhan into his arms instead.