Super Junior {Hankyung/Heechul ; Timeless (5/5)}
Title: Timeless (5/5)
Fandom: Super Junior (AU, !future)
Pairing: Hankyung/Heechul
Word count: 3,425
Rating: R
Summary: Heechul has just had the worst day ever, in the world. Honestly, he doesn't think that it could possibly get worse than this. That, however, is something that he'll come to regret articulating when he ends up a long way from home, in a world where life is a fight for survival.
A/N: THE END. Like with most of my multi-chaptered fics, I always think that the ~finale~ never quite matches everyone's expectations, so I'm sorry if that's the case XDDD One day I'll write something epic and it won't have a happy ending and you'll all be like WTF WHO ARE YOU AND WHAT HAVE YOU DONE WITH GOOSE? and I'll be like AHA I KNEW I COULD DO IT. But this is not that time. (SCARAMOUCHE, SCARAMOUCHE, WILL YOU DO THE FANDANGO?)
Timeless (5/5)
When Heechul woke up, he was in his bed in his apartment. He rolled over, half-expecting Hankyung's body to be there, and when it wasn't, he sat up, startled, throwing the covers from him and staring around, wide-eyed at the surroundings which had become so unfamiliar in the months that he had spent with Hankyung. Thinking Hankyung's name made him let his legs straighten out and his head fall back down onto the pillow to look at the cracks of the ceiling. Hankyung hadn't come back to his time.
He brought his hands up to rub at his face, and frowned, noticing that he no longer had a tan. That was odd. His skin was as pale as it had been before he had ended up in Hankyung's time. He clambered out of bed and looked in the full length mirror on the inside door of his wardrobe: pale skin, short hair, no sign of months spent in the desert.
"What the fuck," he said flatly.
He turned and pulled his tank top up at the back, craning to look over his shoulder. No scar where he had been wounded on that second day. "What the fuck, what the fuck, whatthefuck," he said frantically, and snatched up his phone. Checked the date. It was the day after he had left. The day after Hwanghi had dumped him. He hadn't been away at all.
He stared at his phone for a second, ignoring the messages that had built up, biting his lip. It had just been a dream, then? What a fucking cop out that was! Simply a highly realistic dream, no doubt brought out by being completely smashed and depressed to boot. He'd thought up that world, made it up in his sub-conscious and had thought it was real.
But surely, if it was a dream, the pain of the blistering skin and the knife against his back and the dust in his wound wouldn't have hurt. You didn't feel pain in dreams, and those things, it had been painful, some of the worst pain of his life. How could they be explained away as mere figments of his imagination? How could Hankyung be explained away, and the night before--
He sat down heavily on the bed. Hankyung wasn't here, Hankyung would be waking up in that lost world alone once more. He would never know where Heechul had gone, like he had never known where Heechul had come from. Hankyung would think that he'd been abandoned. Heechul frowned so hard that he almost expected Hankyung to touch his neck in comfort, could almost feel it -- although, of course, he wasn't. Hankyung wasn't here, or had never been real in the first place.
To distract himself from the ache building in his chest, Heechul listened to the messages on his phone. The first was from his boss, demanding to know where he was -- he checked the clock and winced as he saw it was after 12pm. The second was from Hwanghi, asking to meet him at some point, to "talk about last night". Normally, Heechul would have refused, would have given Hwanghi the silent treatment, but right now he needed proof that it really had only been a night that had passed. He rang work and claimed sickness, and then sent a text to Hwanghi, telling him he'd meet him in a coffee shop on the corner of Heechul's street.
Hwanghi, it turned out, had spent last night thinking and had decided that he'd been a bit too rash in his decision to break up. "Because you know, Heechul, you're wonderful," he said, and maybe so, Heechul was wonderful, but Heechul suddenly didn't care about anything he had to say. They'd just been using each other, and Hwanghi had come to see, remarkably quickly, how much use he could get out of Heechul. Heechul didn't care about that anymore. Suddenly all he wanted was Hankyung there, so he could bury his face in his stomach.
"I'm not interested, Hwanghi," he said quietly, playing with his cup and interrupting Hwanghi in the middle of a spiel about how good they had been together. Heechul looked up, seeing only that Hwanghi wasn't as good looking as Heechul had always assumed, and shrugged. "I don't want to get back with you."
That knocked the wind from Hwanghi's sails, if nothing else did. He had probably never been told that before. "Huh?"
Heechul shrugged again. "I don't want to get back with you."
"But you -- last night -- what?"
"You don't even love me, Hwanghi."
"What does that have to do with anything?"
What, indeed? It had never seemed important to Heechul before, whether you loved the person you were with or not. Now, however, his mind was too focused on Hankyung, on the thought of what Hankyung might be doing now, how he might be feeling, if he was even real, to explain to Hwanghi why it was important.
"I don't love you," he merely said, and stood up, and walked out of the cafe. He went home, pulled a couple of suitcases from his wardrobe, and then rang Siwon at work. "Siwon, you know how you were always bugging me to just move in with you to save on rent?"
Heechul knew that Siwon was worried about him. Heechul had turned up at his apartment that very night, two cases in hands, to stay with him, and for the first few days it felt like a never ending sleepover, staying up until 3am to watch made-for-television movies on the sofa together, falling asleep like that and walking up with cricks in their necks. Eventually, though, Heechul settled in. He found a route from his new apartment to the office that he worked in. He and Siwon worked out a routine in the morning almost without thinking about it. They did things together and did things separately. Siwon went out on dates; Heechul never did.
Siwon thought that it was because of Hwanghi. No matter what Heechul told him, Siwon didn't believe that he'd never really loved the other man, thought that he was pining or something, only he never said that out loud because he understood Heechul wouldn't stand for it. It was slightly ironic that yes, Heechul did consider himself heartbroken, but not over the guy that everyone seemed to think. Heechul could never do things the easy way: no, he had to be heartbroken over someone who had possibly never existed.
Time passed, a lot slower than it had seemed to pass when he was with Hankyung, and eventually it neared six months since that night. Heechul wouldn't have said that it was getting any easier, but he was managing it. Sometimes, while he slept, sprawled out on his front against the sofa or on his bed, he could still feel Hankyung's fingers resting against the back of his neck. Sometimes he thought he could feel Hankyung's arm over his waist. Sometimes he dreamt that he was back. That was when it was the worst, the one time when he thought that it was real, watching as Hankyung was set upon by the other people, unable to do anything as he was ripped apart, screaming until he woke up in a sweat. That was a nightmare that he was lucky to keep from Siwon, a nightmare that had seemed too real for Heechul; a nightmare that played on his mind too much for far too long before he pushed it away as merely a dream.
"Hey, hyung," said Siwon, one night as they ate dinner, take-out Chinese on a tray on their lap while they watched one of the dramas that Heechul watched obsessively. "I need to ask you something."
"I'm not marrying you," said Heechul, and slurped up some noodles.
"Damn," said Siwon, and was silent for a moment, a smile on his lips. "No, I really do have something to ask you. You remember when I went to Beijing?"
Heechul only tensed a little at the name of the city, only had a momentary flashback to peeling letters on an airport sign. "Yeah?" he said, neutrally.
"I made a friend while I was there. He's a dancer, he's coming to Korea on Saturday for a year to perform in a production here, but he hasn't managed to find an apartment just yet. I was wondering if you'd be okay with him staying here for a while until he found something."
"He won't be here the full year, will he?"
"No," said Siwon. "He should be able to find somewhere else pretty soon when he's here and can look in person."
"Eh, whatever," said Heechul, not really caring too much. "Sure, he can stay."
"Great! I'll let him know tomorrow. It'll be a weight off his mind."
Heechul stood up to go into the kitchen area to dump his dishes, but paused in the archway. "So he's a dancer, then."
"Yeah," said Siwon, who wouldn't know an innuendo from a hole in the floor. "His name is Han Geng."
Heechul dropped the dishes with a louder bang than he had anticipation, so they clattered into the sink and almost smashed. "What?" He spun around to stare, wide-eyed, at Siwon, who hadn't noticed. "What was his name?"
"Hmm?" Siwon glanced at him, more engrossed in Heechul's favourite drama than Heechul himself. "Han Geng."
Heechul convinced himself, in the four days between that conversation and "Han Geng" arriving, that it was just a coincidence, that Siwon knew someone who had the same name and was from the same city but was not the same person. It was easy enough to do, because the whole thing was just stupidly bizarre: how could Siwon's friend that he had known for years possibly be the same person that Heechul had encountered in a dystopic view of the world that he had possibly dreamt up? It was insane to think it.
Not so insane, however, once they were at the airport, Heechul going for 'moral support' but really only because he was curious, and the one called Han Geng stepped through the arrivals and was enveloped into a hug by Siwon. There was no mistaking it. It was the same Han Geng, the same Hankyung, that Heechul had known. His hair was different, cut stylishly, and his clothes were different, but it was the same Hankyung. He had filled out a little, looking like life had been easier on him in this time. Hankyung glanced away from Siwon to look at Heechul, the stranger standing in the black polo neck jumper, and his eyes passed over without recognition, though his brow furrowed.
"Ge, this is Heechul," said Siwon, motioning warmly towards Heechul. "Hyung, this is --"
"Hankyung," said Heechul, before he could stop himself.
A blink of confusion, so fucking familiar. "Han Geng," corrected Hankyung.
"No," said Heechul, a playful smile on his lips. "Hankyung."
Hankyung glanced at Siwon, who looked like he didn't know whether to laugh at Heechul being completely himself, or be annoyed that being himself meant that Heechul was being kind of a douchebag. He settled for a sigh and a shrug. Hankyung turned back to Heechul.
"I'm pleased to meet you," he said, clearly choosing to overlook Heechul's supposed mistake with his name. "Siwon has told me a lot about you."
"He's in love with me," said Heechul breezily, "but I try to not let it get to me."
Hankyung laughed, looking surprised at doing so, like he hadn't expected to be amused by something Siwon's strange friend had said. Heechul wanted to touch him. He could see, from where he was standing, a scar above his right eyebrow, a scar that the Hankyung he had known had not possessed. "I always thought Siwon loved me," said Hankyung. "Now I see I've been mistaken."
Heechul suddenly remembered all those thoughts he'd had of wondering what Hankyung would sound like in Korean. None of the fantasies had come close to the real thing, a tentative, unsure stammer and mispronunciation that made Heechul's whole body ache with remembrance of flowing Mandarin. Strange how, confronted like this with the exact double, he missed Hankyung more than ever. The whole situation was enough to drive anyone mad, which was what he felt himself going over the next few days, as Hankyung settled in.
There was so much familiarity in Hankyung's mannerisms and gestures, the way he laughed and the way he smiled. It was like a torture that would never end, and Heechul came to regret saying that Hankyung could stay there with them. How was he supposed to deal with this? Coming home from work each day, having forgotten, and finding the man that he had thought he had lost sitting in his living room, watching his television, but not knowing him. It was becoming too much for Heechul. He retreated. Spent time in his bedroom. Barely spoke.
"Your friend doesn't like me?"
Heechul was walking through to the bathroom when he overheard Hankyung's voice from the kitchen. The question no doubt referred to him; Siwon didn't have any other friends who would be a dick to his Chinese friend. Siwon's laugh was uncomfortable. "Heechul-hyung just takes a while to get used to people," he said. "I'm sure it's not that he doesn't like you."
"Perhaps I offended him."
"I'm always offended," said Heechul breezily, sweeping into the room. "It's my greatest quality." Hankyung stared at him, without comprehension. "It's not you," said Heechul softly, except it was Hankyung. It was just that Heechul couldn't explain why it was Hankyung without sounding like a madman.
A couple of nights later, he woke up with a blinding pain in his head. For a short while, he tried to ignore it, but then stood up to grab some painkillers from the cabinet in the bathroom. Standing up left him dizzy, caused beads of sweat to pop up along his brow as he stumbled along the hallway and flicked the light on, before falling to his knees and retching into the toilet. Throwing up left him weak at the best of times, but he felt like he was dying, freezing cold then boiling hot, pain constant behind his eyes.
He had been there a couple of minutes, head still bent over the toilet seat, when he felt cool fingers pulling his hair back, then a touch, fluttering and comforting, against the back of his neck. The familiarity of it made him want to weep, tears already in the corners of his eyes from being sick. "Hankyung?" he managed to gasp out.
Hankyung paused before answering. "How did you know?"
"Lucky guess," and then he was gone again, fingers gripping at the porcelain. Hankyung was murmuring something from behind, something in Chinese. Once Heechul's stomach had settled enough, he rested his head against the rim, and listened to it, comforted both by that and the touch still against his neck.
A couple of moments passed like that, before Hankyung asked, "Are you okay now?"
"I feel like shit," muttered Heechul. Hankyung pulled him back, so that he slumped down against the bathtub, and lay a hand against his forehead.
"You have a fever," he said. "You should get back into bed."
Hankyung had to help him, as Heechul could barely move. Being helpless left him bitchy, but this Hankyung understood his words, and gave it back, snapping back retorts with no thought to Heechul being ill. He half-expected to just be thrown on the bed and left, but instead Hankyung lay him carefully down and tucked the blankets in around him. Then he left to get some water and some painkillers. When he came back, Heechul stared at him for a moment or two and then said, "My god, you look so much like him."
"Like who?"
"Hankyung."
"I...am Hankyung."
"No, you aren't," said Heechul, because this Hankyung wasn't Hankyung. "You look like him and even act like him, but you aren't Hankyung."
"You're feverish, you don't know what you're talking about."
"Maybe so," said Heechul softly. "He didn't know what I was talking about either."
"Here," said Hankyung with a sigh, helping him to sit up and holding a glass of water to his lips. "Drink this." Heechul took a sip.
"The Hankyung I knew," he said, after being released, "he lived in a different world. He lived in a world destroyed by war, a world with no food supply, a world of never ending danger, but he -- he was the gentlest person I ever met. He was -- he was you."
"I don't understand you."
"I loved him. I never got to tell him, but I loved him. He was you and I--" Heechul flopped back at the shocked look on Hankyung's face. "Never mind."
"Um, okay." Hankyung, standing by the side of the bed, suddenly swooped down and pushed his hair from his face, fingers resting against his forehead. Heechul's eyes fluttered shut. "You seem -- familiar to me," said Hankyung quietly.
"You've been living here for two weeks now," said Heechul, eyes still closed.
"No, I noticed it when I first met you. I feel like I've met you before. It's like deja vu, whenever I'm around you."
Heechul began to laugh, almost hysterically, unable to stop himself. "That's not right," he gasped, almost crying. "You haven't met me yet! That can't work!" Hankyung just stared at him in complete confusion, even looking a little hurt, until Heechul had calmed down enough to say, "Don't worry. I'm ill, remember? I don't know what I'm talking about."
"I'll let you sleep," said Hankyung, sounding so offended that Heechul reached out and grabbed his wrist.
"I'm glad you're here," he said.
"O-okay," said Hankyung.
"It's a little weird, but I'm glad you're finally here."
"Are you sure this is the fever, and you don't just make this amount of sense normally?"
"Leave me alone," said Heechul sleepily, already fading back into sleep. "You're the one who made me wait."
He woke the next morning recovered, and when he entered the kitchen, he said a cheerful "good morning" to Hankyung who was sitting eating cereal. He could feel Hankyung's eyes on him as he grabbed a bowl from a shelf and got his own cereal from a cupboard. He had sat down, however, before Hankyung said anything.
"How are you?"
"Fine," said Heechul. "Hungry, but I guess that's what happens when you puke your guts up in the middle of the night."
Hankyung winced at the word choice but chose not to comment on it. "I'm glad," he said.
"Hey, so," said Heechul, around a mouthful of cereal. "Tell me about your performance. Where's it being held?"
Hankyung, though a little surprised about Heechul seeming interested in him, was happy enough to talk about his dance show. It was clear that he was proud of being part of it; he told Heechul everything he could in the most animated tone that Heechul couldn't even find it in himself to correct his pronunciation anymore after the fifth time. He found that he could make out what Hankyung was saying anyway: he'd had plenty of practise reading Hankyung's facial expressions and hand gestures to know what he was saying.
"Why are you smiling?" Hankyung asked suddenly, looking unsure. Heechul smirked at him.
"You're excited."
Hankyung grinned. "It'll be my biggest show of my career so far. If I do well, it'll open up more opportunities for me, both here and in China. I'm -- yeah, I guess you could say I'm excited."
"You're cute," said Heechul, standing up and putting his dish in the sink. "Maybe I should come see it."
"You should," said Hankyung, "I'd like that," and he reached out and took his wrist as he went past, held Heechul in place as he stood up. "Listen, Heechul, do you -- you said that it wasn't that you disliked me, right?"
"Right. I don't dislike you." Understatement of the century, that was.
"So I was wondering if --"
"Spit it out."
"Would you go out with me sometime?"
Heechul laughed, a little incredulously, and Hankyung's face fell. "My god, do you know how long I've been waiting for you to ask that?"
Hankyung brightened up again. "Is that a yes?"
"Of course it's a yes, you moron."
Hankyung smiled, and it was the most beautiful, most perfectly familiar thing Heechul had ever seen, and he was completely and hopelessly in love with it.
Fandom: Super Junior (AU, !future)
Pairing: Hankyung/Heechul
Word count: 3,425
Rating: R
Summary: Heechul has just had the worst day ever, in the world. Honestly, he doesn't think that it could possibly get worse than this. That, however, is something that he'll come to regret articulating when he ends up a long way from home, in a world where life is a fight for survival.
A/N: THE END. Like with most of my multi-chaptered fics, I always think that the ~finale~ never quite matches everyone's expectations, so I'm sorry if that's the case XDDD One day I'll write something epic and it won't have a happy ending and you'll all be like WTF WHO ARE YOU AND WHAT HAVE YOU DONE WITH GOOSE? and I'll be like AHA I KNEW I COULD DO IT. But this is not that time. (SCARAMOUCHE, SCARAMOUCHE, WILL YOU DO THE FANDANGO?)
Timeless (5/5)
When Heechul woke up, he was in his bed in his apartment. He rolled over, half-expecting Hankyung's body to be there, and when it wasn't, he sat up, startled, throwing the covers from him and staring around, wide-eyed at the surroundings which had become so unfamiliar in the months that he had spent with Hankyung. Thinking Hankyung's name made him let his legs straighten out and his head fall back down onto the pillow to look at the cracks of the ceiling. Hankyung hadn't come back to his time.
He brought his hands up to rub at his face, and frowned, noticing that he no longer had a tan. That was odd. His skin was as pale as it had been before he had ended up in Hankyung's time. He clambered out of bed and looked in the full length mirror on the inside door of his wardrobe: pale skin, short hair, no sign of months spent in the desert.
"What the fuck," he said flatly.
He turned and pulled his tank top up at the back, craning to look over his shoulder. No scar where he had been wounded on that second day. "What the fuck, what the fuck, whatthefuck," he said frantically, and snatched up his phone. Checked the date. It was the day after he had left. The day after Hwanghi had dumped him. He hadn't been away at all.
He stared at his phone for a second, ignoring the messages that had built up, biting his lip. It had just been a dream, then? What a fucking cop out that was! Simply a highly realistic dream, no doubt brought out by being completely smashed and depressed to boot. He'd thought up that world, made it up in his sub-conscious and had thought it was real.
But surely, if it was a dream, the pain of the blistering skin and the knife against his back and the dust in his wound wouldn't have hurt. You didn't feel pain in dreams, and those things, it had been painful, some of the worst pain of his life. How could they be explained away as mere figments of his imagination? How could Hankyung be explained away, and the night before--
He sat down heavily on the bed. Hankyung wasn't here, Hankyung would be waking up in that lost world alone once more. He would never know where Heechul had gone, like he had never known where Heechul had come from. Hankyung would think that he'd been abandoned. Heechul frowned so hard that he almost expected Hankyung to touch his neck in comfort, could almost feel it -- although, of course, he wasn't. Hankyung wasn't here, or had never been real in the first place.
To distract himself from the ache building in his chest, Heechul listened to the messages on his phone. The first was from his boss, demanding to know where he was -- he checked the clock and winced as he saw it was after 12pm. The second was from Hwanghi, asking to meet him at some point, to "talk about last night". Normally, Heechul would have refused, would have given Hwanghi the silent treatment, but right now he needed proof that it really had only been a night that had passed. He rang work and claimed sickness, and then sent a text to Hwanghi, telling him he'd meet him in a coffee shop on the corner of Heechul's street.
Hwanghi, it turned out, had spent last night thinking and had decided that he'd been a bit too rash in his decision to break up. "Because you know, Heechul, you're wonderful," he said, and maybe so, Heechul was wonderful, but Heechul suddenly didn't care about anything he had to say. They'd just been using each other, and Hwanghi had come to see, remarkably quickly, how much use he could get out of Heechul. Heechul didn't care about that anymore. Suddenly all he wanted was Hankyung there, so he could bury his face in his stomach.
"I'm not interested, Hwanghi," he said quietly, playing with his cup and interrupting Hwanghi in the middle of a spiel about how good they had been together. Heechul looked up, seeing only that Hwanghi wasn't as good looking as Heechul had always assumed, and shrugged. "I don't want to get back with you."
That knocked the wind from Hwanghi's sails, if nothing else did. He had probably never been told that before. "Huh?"
Heechul shrugged again. "I don't want to get back with you."
"But you -- last night -- what?"
"You don't even love me, Hwanghi."
"What does that have to do with anything?"
What, indeed? It had never seemed important to Heechul before, whether you loved the person you were with or not. Now, however, his mind was too focused on Hankyung, on the thought of what Hankyung might be doing now, how he might be feeling, if he was even real, to explain to Hwanghi why it was important.
"I don't love you," he merely said, and stood up, and walked out of the cafe. He went home, pulled a couple of suitcases from his wardrobe, and then rang Siwon at work. "Siwon, you know how you were always bugging me to just move in with you to save on rent?"
Heechul knew that Siwon was worried about him. Heechul had turned up at his apartment that very night, two cases in hands, to stay with him, and for the first few days it felt like a never ending sleepover, staying up until 3am to watch made-for-television movies on the sofa together, falling asleep like that and walking up with cricks in their necks. Eventually, though, Heechul settled in. He found a route from his new apartment to the office that he worked in. He and Siwon worked out a routine in the morning almost without thinking about it. They did things together and did things separately. Siwon went out on dates; Heechul never did.
Siwon thought that it was because of Hwanghi. No matter what Heechul told him, Siwon didn't believe that he'd never really loved the other man, thought that he was pining or something, only he never said that out loud because he understood Heechul wouldn't stand for it. It was slightly ironic that yes, Heechul did consider himself heartbroken, but not over the guy that everyone seemed to think. Heechul could never do things the easy way: no, he had to be heartbroken over someone who had possibly never existed.
Time passed, a lot slower than it had seemed to pass when he was with Hankyung, and eventually it neared six months since that night. Heechul wouldn't have said that it was getting any easier, but he was managing it. Sometimes, while he slept, sprawled out on his front against the sofa or on his bed, he could still feel Hankyung's fingers resting against the back of his neck. Sometimes he thought he could feel Hankyung's arm over his waist. Sometimes he dreamt that he was back. That was when it was the worst, the one time when he thought that it was real, watching as Hankyung was set upon by the other people, unable to do anything as he was ripped apart, screaming until he woke up in a sweat. That was a nightmare that he was lucky to keep from Siwon, a nightmare that had seemed too real for Heechul; a nightmare that played on his mind too much for far too long before he pushed it away as merely a dream.
"Hey, hyung," said Siwon, one night as they ate dinner, take-out Chinese on a tray on their lap while they watched one of the dramas that Heechul watched obsessively. "I need to ask you something."
"I'm not marrying you," said Heechul, and slurped up some noodles.
"Damn," said Siwon, and was silent for a moment, a smile on his lips. "No, I really do have something to ask you. You remember when I went to Beijing?"
Heechul only tensed a little at the name of the city, only had a momentary flashback to peeling letters on an airport sign. "Yeah?" he said, neutrally.
"I made a friend while I was there. He's a dancer, he's coming to Korea on Saturday for a year to perform in a production here, but he hasn't managed to find an apartment just yet. I was wondering if you'd be okay with him staying here for a while until he found something."
"He won't be here the full year, will he?"
"No," said Siwon. "He should be able to find somewhere else pretty soon when he's here and can look in person."
"Eh, whatever," said Heechul, not really caring too much. "Sure, he can stay."
"Great! I'll let him know tomorrow. It'll be a weight off his mind."
Heechul stood up to go into the kitchen area to dump his dishes, but paused in the archway. "So he's a dancer, then."
"Yeah," said Siwon, who wouldn't know an innuendo from a hole in the floor. "His name is Han Geng."
Heechul dropped the dishes with a louder bang than he had anticipation, so they clattered into the sink and almost smashed. "What?" He spun around to stare, wide-eyed, at Siwon, who hadn't noticed. "What was his name?"
"Hmm?" Siwon glanced at him, more engrossed in Heechul's favourite drama than Heechul himself. "Han Geng."
Heechul convinced himself, in the four days between that conversation and "Han Geng" arriving, that it was just a coincidence, that Siwon knew someone who had the same name and was from the same city but was not the same person. It was easy enough to do, because the whole thing was just stupidly bizarre: how could Siwon's friend that he had known for years possibly be the same person that Heechul had encountered in a dystopic view of the world that he had possibly dreamt up? It was insane to think it.
Not so insane, however, once they were at the airport, Heechul going for 'moral support' but really only because he was curious, and the one called Han Geng stepped through the arrivals and was enveloped into a hug by Siwon. There was no mistaking it. It was the same Han Geng, the same Hankyung, that Heechul had known. His hair was different, cut stylishly, and his clothes were different, but it was the same Hankyung. He had filled out a little, looking like life had been easier on him in this time. Hankyung glanced away from Siwon to look at Heechul, the stranger standing in the black polo neck jumper, and his eyes passed over without recognition, though his brow furrowed.
"Ge, this is Heechul," said Siwon, motioning warmly towards Heechul. "Hyung, this is --"
"Hankyung," said Heechul, before he could stop himself.
A blink of confusion, so fucking familiar. "Han Geng," corrected Hankyung.
"No," said Heechul, a playful smile on his lips. "Hankyung."
Hankyung glanced at Siwon, who looked like he didn't know whether to laugh at Heechul being completely himself, or be annoyed that being himself meant that Heechul was being kind of a douchebag. He settled for a sigh and a shrug. Hankyung turned back to Heechul.
"I'm pleased to meet you," he said, clearly choosing to overlook Heechul's supposed mistake with his name. "Siwon has told me a lot about you."
"He's in love with me," said Heechul breezily, "but I try to not let it get to me."
Hankyung laughed, looking surprised at doing so, like he hadn't expected to be amused by something Siwon's strange friend had said. Heechul wanted to touch him. He could see, from where he was standing, a scar above his right eyebrow, a scar that the Hankyung he had known had not possessed. "I always thought Siwon loved me," said Hankyung. "Now I see I've been mistaken."
Heechul suddenly remembered all those thoughts he'd had of wondering what Hankyung would sound like in Korean. None of the fantasies had come close to the real thing, a tentative, unsure stammer and mispronunciation that made Heechul's whole body ache with remembrance of flowing Mandarin. Strange how, confronted like this with the exact double, he missed Hankyung more than ever. The whole situation was enough to drive anyone mad, which was what he felt himself going over the next few days, as Hankyung settled in.
There was so much familiarity in Hankyung's mannerisms and gestures, the way he laughed and the way he smiled. It was like a torture that would never end, and Heechul came to regret saying that Hankyung could stay there with them. How was he supposed to deal with this? Coming home from work each day, having forgotten, and finding the man that he had thought he had lost sitting in his living room, watching his television, but not knowing him. It was becoming too much for Heechul. He retreated. Spent time in his bedroom. Barely spoke.
"Your friend doesn't like me?"
Heechul was walking through to the bathroom when he overheard Hankyung's voice from the kitchen. The question no doubt referred to him; Siwon didn't have any other friends who would be a dick to his Chinese friend. Siwon's laugh was uncomfortable. "Heechul-hyung just takes a while to get used to people," he said. "I'm sure it's not that he doesn't like you."
"Perhaps I offended him."
"I'm always offended," said Heechul breezily, sweeping into the room. "It's my greatest quality." Hankyung stared at him, without comprehension. "It's not you," said Heechul softly, except it was Hankyung. It was just that Heechul couldn't explain why it was Hankyung without sounding like a madman.
A couple of nights later, he woke up with a blinding pain in his head. For a short while, he tried to ignore it, but then stood up to grab some painkillers from the cabinet in the bathroom. Standing up left him dizzy, caused beads of sweat to pop up along his brow as he stumbled along the hallway and flicked the light on, before falling to his knees and retching into the toilet. Throwing up left him weak at the best of times, but he felt like he was dying, freezing cold then boiling hot, pain constant behind his eyes.
He had been there a couple of minutes, head still bent over the toilet seat, when he felt cool fingers pulling his hair back, then a touch, fluttering and comforting, against the back of his neck. The familiarity of it made him want to weep, tears already in the corners of his eyes from being sick. "Hankyung?" he managed to gasp out.
Hankyung paused before answering. "How did you know?"
"Lucky guess," and then he was gone again, fingers gripping at the porcelain. Hankyung was murmuring something from behind, something in Chinese. Once Heechul's stomach had settled enough, he rested his head against the rim, and listened to it, comforted both by that and the touch still against his neck.
A couple of moments passed like that, before Hankyung asked, "Are you okay now?"
"I feel like shit," muttered Heechul. Hankyung pulled him back, so that he slumped down against the bathtub, and lay a hand against his forehead.
"You have a fever," he said. "You should get back into bed."
Hankyung had to help him, as Heechul could barely move. Being helpless left him bitchy, but this Hankyung understood his words, and gave it back, snapping back retorts with no thought to Heechul being ill. He half-expected to just be thrown on the bed and left, but instead Hankyung lay him carefully down and tucked the blankets in around him. Then he left to get some water and some painkillers. When he came back, Heechul stared at him for a moment or two and then said, "My god, you look so much like him."
"Like who?"
"Hankyung."
"I...am Hankyung."
"No, you aren't," said Heechul, because this Hankyung wasn't Hankyung. "You look like him and even act like him, but you aren't Hankyung."
"You're feverish, you don't know what you're talking about."
"Maybe so," said Heechul softly. "He didn't know what I was talking about either."
"Here," said Hankyung with a sigh, helping him to sit up and holding a glass of water to his lips. "Drink this." Heechul took a sip.
"The Hankyung I knew," he said, after being released, "he lived in a different world. He lived in a world destroyed by war, a world with no food supply, a world of never ending danger, but he -- he was the gentlest person I ever met. He was -- he was you."
"I don't understand you."
"I loved him. I never got to tell him, but I loved him. He was you and I--" Heechul flopped back at the shocked look on Hankyung's face. "Never mind."
"Um, okay." Hankyung, standing by the side of the bed, suddenly swooped down and pushed his hair from his face, fingers resting against his forehead. Heechul's eyes fluttered shut. "You seem -- familiar to me," said Hankyung quietly.
"You've been living here for two weeks now," said Heechul, eyes still closed.
"No, I noticed it when I first met you. I feel like I've met you before. It's like deja vu, whenever I'm around you."
Heechul began to laugh, almost hysterically, unable to stop himself. "That's not right," he gasped, almost crying. "You haven't met me yet! That can't work!" Hankyung just stared at him in complete confusion, even looking a little hurt, until Heechul had calmed down enough to say, "Don't worry. I'm ill, remember? I don't know what I'm talking about."
"I'll let you sleep," said Hankyung, sounding so offended that Heechul reached out and grabbed his wrist.
"I'm glad you're here," he said.
"O-okay," said Hankyung.
"It's a little weird, but I'm glad you're finally here."
"Are you sure this is the fever, and you don't just make this amount of sense normally?"
"Leave me alone," said Heechul sleepily, already fading back into sleep. "You're the one who made me wait."
He woke the next morning recovered, and when he entered the kitchen, he said a cheerful "good morning" to Hankyung who was sitting eating cereal. He could feel Hankyung's eyes on him as he grabbed a bowl from a shelf and got his own cereal from a cupboard. He had sat down, however, before Hankyung said anything.
"How are you?"
"Fine," said Heechul. "Hungry, but I guess that's what happens when you puke your guts up in the middle of the night."
Hankyung winced at the word choice but chose not to comment on it. "I'm glad," he said.
"Hey, so," said Heechul, around a mouthful of cereal. "Tell me about your performance. Where's it being held?"
Hankyung, though a little surprised about Heechul seeming interested in him, was happy enough to talk about his dance show. It was clear that he was proud of being part of it; he told Heechul everything he could in the most animated tone that Heechul couldn't even find it in himself to correct his pronunciation anymore after the fifth time. He found that he could make out what Hankyung was saying anyway: he'd had plenty of practise reading Hankyung's facial expressions and hand gestures to know what he was saying.
"Why are you smiling?" Hankyung asked suddenly, looking unsure. Heechul smirked at him.
"You're excited."
Hankyung grinned. "It'll be my biggest show of my career so far. If I do well, it'll open up more opportunities for me, both here and in China. I'm -- yeah, I guess you could say I'm excited."
"You're cute," said Heechul, standing up and putting his dish in the sink. "Maybe I should come see it."
"You should," said Hankyung, "I'd like that," and he reached out and took his wrist as he went past, held Heechul in place as he stood up. "Listen, Heechul, do you -- you said that it wasn't that you disliked me, right?"
"Right. I don't dislike you." Understatement of the century, that was.
"So I was wondering if --"
"Spit it out."
"Would you go out with me sometime?"
Heechul laughed, a little incredulously, and Hankyung's face fell. "My god, do you know how long I've been waiting for you to ask that?"
Hankyung brightened up again. "Is that a yes?"
"Of course it's a yes, you moron."
Hankyung smiled, and it was the most beautiful, most perfectly familiar thing Heechul had ever seen, and he was completely and hopelessly in love with it.