[fic] Noona-Verse: Origins (17)
title: In which Dongwoo has an interesting night and there is more talk of ice cream
fandom: Buffy, Infinite, Miss A, Supernatural
characters: Dongwoo/Sungyeol(/Woohyun), Infinite, Miss A, Winchesters, Faith/Ruby
word count: ~3500/33000*
summary: One doesn’t grow up the sister of a warrior without learning a little bit about knowing who needs protection. One doesn’t grow up surrounded by knights of old without wanting a cause worth fighting for. This is a Dongwoo-centric chapter.
a/n: I am so sorry my updates are so sporadic. You are all troopers and lovely humans for sticking with me forever laughing at my inability to be a real person
warnings: potentially triggery details of child abuse
ao3 link
[prepare yourself for angst. seriously.]It felt to Dongwoo like he had been standing on the side of a busy street for several long minutes, waiting for the perfect moment to step off the edge and cross, only right when he turned back to walk a little further down, the traffic slowed just enough and he wasn’t ready, he missed the moment, and he’s now left staring at the flow pick up again; stuck longing for the clarity and freedom that slipped him by.
It didn’t help that he had been left alone with Suji, Min, and Myungsoo - who all seemed to be doing their very best to keep him busy and anxious, without relief. There was a knot appearing between his shoulders at the base of his neck, causing his head to throb oddly. He needed aspirin or a stiff drink… or sleep.
He bit back an uncharacteristic curse, wrapped it in a smile, and somehow answered Min’s insistent questions (that he couldn’t answer) while Myungsoo and Suji stared silently and wide-eyed at him from the couch.
They hadn’t let the other out of their sight since they saw Dawn collapse; heads bent close but unspeaking, in a silent vigil. Hoya couldn’t even separate the two of them at night, opting to just set them up in the living room with Min in Myungsoo’s bed until Fei and Jia returned home - which was starting to feel like a more distant timetable with every passing hour. He looked down at them and nearly shuddered - in contrast to Min’s hyper-inquisitiveness, their blank, open eyes quietly watching him were downright creepy.
Dongwoo rubbed his hand through his hair and grasped at something to do, something to occupy them all so that they wouldn’t have to notice the emptiness of the apartment, the deafening silence that was Dongwoo’s cell phone.
Hoya had left about an hour before - and he couldn’t really blame Sungyeol for going along.
Dongwoo had been distant and strange since they arrived home from the performance. Once Hoya had settled everyone in and given him a reassuring glance, Dongwoo had escaped to his room, surprised to find Sungyeol’s long limbs sprawled over the bed.
Which wasn’t really fair.
Dawn had become a second skin to Sungyeol, someone that helped him walk around in the world outside of the cocoon Woohyun and Myungsoo sometimes forced him into - with all the best and all the most selfish intentions. Dawn was a calm influence on all of them, she took their extremes and tamed them beneath her steady gaze. But her friendship with Sungyeol would always be the strongest… or so they had always thought until her collapse. Until it became clear that she was tied up in a supernatural world that threatened to either drown them or leave them all adrift without her. It was perfectly reasonable that Sungyeol would want company on the night that his best friend became something she wasn’t.
But to be perfectly frank, Sungyeol was not the cuddling type.
Physical affection for Sungyeol - real, deep affection, not just sex - was something he only afforded to those who loved him when he felt completely and utterly whole. He wasn’t willing to give out a half-thing. He spent most nights alone, away from the grasping, asking, searching bodies of Woohyun and Dongoo.
They loved him for it. They loved him for all of him - the broken pieces and the shards that would never heal and the pieces that shone.
Generally speaking, Woohyun and Dongwoo held onto each other the hardest when they were feeling vulnerable, when they needed the other person to piece them back together as if the other’s body was a glue they could apply to any wound.
Sungyeol needed to heal in his own space.
Which was most of the time.
(Sometimes Dongwoo felt like the huge fights Sungyeol and Woohyun had were sometimes part of the process and he tried not to be resentful or feel that they were partaking in something that he would… could never truly join. But if there was a truth about their relationship, it was that Sungyeol might admit to needing Woohyun in his darkest places in the darkest ways, but he kept Dongwoo at arm’s length - kept him in the light and wouldn’t let him see the scars that they knew ran deep in them all.)
Which is why Dongwoo wasn’t expecting him to be waiting on the bed, numbly staring at the ceiling, waiting for him.
Sungyeol never waited for him. He demanded attention when he needed it, crashed into spaces, took what he needed in ways that left Dongwoo breathless, more likely hard, unsatisfied, and confused than anything else.
Waiting wasn’t what they meant to each other.
They were crashing, colliding bodies catching glimpses of something more but always lost in the heat and the blood thumping all around them. They were the silence and the comfort in the spaces between healing and war. They were the playful, teasing; they were the good without all the bad and the ugly. They were passion without consequence. They were the heat without flame.
They weren’t the waiting up at night with worry lines and restless fingers part.
“I think Woohyun is staying with Sunggyu until there’s a change,” Dongwoo offered hesitantly, urging his sore mind not to throw in the now get the fuck off my bed because I’m exhausted and my head is killing me part.
Sungyeol didn’t move, just continued to stare at the ceiling.
Dongwoo had stared at him for a moment, willing him to move, to emote, to leave. The world was hazy on the edges and Woohyun had left them to stand vigil with Sunggyu and Spike without a word or a glance behind.
Dongwoo had always loved Woohyun’s devotion to Sunggyu - it was a bond that nothing could break and he had never felt jealous or threatened or betrayed by it. But that night he was resentful, Woohyun had left and now Sungyeol was acting very uncharacteristically and he just needed sleep.
Waiting was for Sunggyu and Woohyun, not for them. Waiting was for Fei and schedules were for Hoya and practicalities and spare blankets were for Sungjong and withdrawal was for Myungsoo and questions were for Min and silent support was for Suji.
Dongwoo wasn’t really sure what he and Sungyeol were good for. And he wasn’t interested in puzzling it out tonight.
With a sigh, Dongwoo shucked off his sweaty clothes - never having had the chance to change after his performance - and flopped down on the bed, closing his eyes to the raw need in Sungyeol’s body beside him.
He’d make it through the night, if he just stayed very still and very silent, adrenaline pumped in his ears and his muscles felt so tight he genuinely worried that if anyone touched him he might snap in two.
So of course the next thing he was conscious of was Sungyeol’s hesitant palm on his back, “Something happened tonight.”
Dongwoo couldn’t hold back the snort. Thankfully it was muffled by the bed pressed into his face.
Sungyeol chuckled wryly. “You were just thinking that you were glad I couldn’t hear that, weren’t you?” The hand on Dongwoo’s bare skin slid to his side and pushed him over onto his side. Sungyeol shifted down on the bed so that his eyes were level with Dongwoo’s. “I see you, you know. Even if you think that I don’t.”
Dongwoo focused steadily on the thin collarbone poking out over Sungyeol’s threadbare, saying nothing.
Sungyeol’s fingers started lightly tracing circles and swirls on Dongwoo’s skin, the touch pulling on Dongwoo’s frayed nerves like a kite on a string. He felt a low ache in his chest and his hands began to shake. He closed his eyes and willed himself to keep a breathing deep and even.
“What happened tonight?” Sungyeol’s voice was as hard in his ear as his calloused palm passing over Dongwoo’s nipples were soft.
Dongwoo’s breath hitched and he thought wildly to himself that he should stand up and walk away. Now.
But it was too late - he was swept back in the tide and his clarity was gone.
* * * * * * *
“So you’re telling me that seven of you live in the same apartment?” Faith’s voice was incredulous.
“Technically it’s a duplex,” Sungjong said, his attention for the most part fixed on his phone, Ruby leaning into him as they scrolled through what Hoya assumed were pictures of models or starlets in designer clothes - although from their comments they could have just as likely been looking at gifs of kittens or a catalogue of very nasty archaic demons.
“Seven of you?!” Faith wasn’t letting it go, it had been nearly an hour since Sungyeol had explained their living arrangements to her, but she was stuck on it. Hoya couldn’t tell if it was nerves - something to distract her from the upcoming “Scooby meeting” as she kept referring to it - or if she really was as interested as she seemed.
Sungyeol nodded, his patience never wavering, “All seven of us.”
“How did you all end up… I mean. You don’t have parents, do you?” Sam’s question was put forth in that soft way that he had when he was talking to victims of something particularly nasty. Faith put her hand on his knee and squeezed. It wasn’t necessarily a halfway house for orphans of a demon war. There could be a perfectly reasonable explanation. (She made a mental note to check on that group of orphan-teen demon fighters she had stumbled on in Stockton after this whole mess was over.)
Sungyeol cleared his throat and looked to Hoya for assistance, who grimaced a bit. Usually they didn’t share all the sordid personal histories and depended on the fact that they were obviously foreign to explain their lack of families. “Most of us are … it’s all different. But we all met in Seoul first. Woohyun and Sunggyu had been on their own for a while. So was Dongwoo. Most of though… our grandparents all knew each other. Or teachers. They sent us here…” Hoya was being careful with his words, but he still faltered.
Sungjong looked Dean straight in the eye, “They sent us here because they said we’d be safest here.”
“Here - in Sunnydale?” Dean asked through a mouthful of chocolate peanut butter crunch ice cream and french-fries.
“That was the most important part,” Sungyeol said softly.
“You have to understand,” Hoya interjected. “Here, what you all do… what you are isn’t really known. Where we’re from it’s the same and it’s not.”
“There are more who still practice the old ways,” Ruby said thoughtfully. “It’s been a long time since I’ve been off this continent, but I spent a lot of time in Korea during the late 50’s and - there were more who still believed in the Ancients than anywhere else I’ve ever been.” She chewed on her lip, “More magic, too.”
“The Ancients?” Sam asked with a raised eyebrow, looking as though he was sorting through a mental card catalogue.
“Yeah,” Sungjong said with the impervious superiority that only a teenager can truly produce. “What came before the demons.”
“Nothing came before the demons,” Dean shot back.
“You sure about that?” Sungjong asked disdainfully.
Hoya had been on the receiving end of that facial expression a total of two times in his entire life and he didn’t envy Dean at that moment at all.
Especially since the poor chap didn’t seem to have a clue that there was chocolate dripping in a steady stream down his chin.
* * * * * * *
Dancing on that stage that night had felt like nothing he had ever experienced before. He could tell the minute they landed in Sunnydale that there was something… different about this town, that he would be able to dance and dance here.
And it felt more right than it ever had.
Raw, red memories of dancing as a child sometimes crept into his mind like waking nightmares. A soft shuffle of his feet was enough to prompt red hot iron brands on his bare soles. His feet still bore some of the scars.
He pushed them aside as quickly as he could, focusing on the present - on his new life.
A life away from the beating and the screaming and the dark, dark trunk he had spent sometimes weeks at a time locked in. A pleading, harsh, tearful voice cautioning him not to dance, never to dance, and only when his sobs stopped was he let.
A life away from hiding and stealing and starving and sleeping in alleys, the scars on his legs and back and feet keeping anyone from helping him. Branded, a child thrown to the world with no reason given and hardly a will to live.
Sometimes it had felt as though he wasn’t allowed to die. That while his birth had been - as had been pounded into his mind so often - blasphemous, his death would be all that more of a stain on his own soul.
But in Sunnydale, he had found a place where he could dance and dance.
Sungjong’s grandmother had found him asleep on her doorstep. The first person in over a decade that took pity on him, fed him, allowed him inside her house. She nursed him back to something resembling health. He spent the next four years rehabilitating, learning for the first time how to be human rather than a cringing, frightened feral thing.
Once she asked him when he ran away.
On his seventh birthday. It was the one day that stood in stark clearness against the wavering edges of his memory. He knew it was his seventh birthday because the woman with the long, dark hair and too-bright smile had tattooed the number on his naked thigh. It took several hours and he cried as he never cried before. But she had only hushed him, telling him that this would save him, that he would finally be free.
Beneath her manic optimism was a lingering threat. If it didn’t work, if this last thing didn’t cure him, then she would have to kill him. She cried as she said it. As if she hadn’t been working up to this place for a long while.
“She wasn’t your mother.” He was kneeling on the floor, repairing an old chair when she had suddenly appeared and said it. He looked up at her in shock. “She wasn’t.”
“Because mothers never hurt their children,” he had intoned with only the slightest edge of bitterness.
“Because the stamp of your mother on your aura doesn’t match that of the woman who marked your body.”
“And it took you three years to figure that out?”
The old woman shrugged. “And it took you three years to show me.”
When he was introduced to Sunggyu and Woohyun with a single knapsack of possessions slung on his shoulder, he was just the orphan boy an old auntie had taken in who needed to a place to stay. He wasn’t the feral cat she had found in the gutter. And she had cleaned him of all of his scars… except a few on his feet and the tattoo on his thigh that was now stretched nearly out of recognition.
There were some things that needed to be remembered.
It wasn’t until he had been living with the two other boys for a few months that he even really knew what dancing was. Woohyun dragged him out to a club one night and it was like the world now shone in different colors. The music, the rhythm, the way the whole crowd seemed to move as one, though he could still see individual bodies as clear as day.
He asked her later if it had been the dancing that he was being punished for, but the familiar old eyes only wrinkled further as she said, “Someday you’ll see.”
He began to study, noticing very little else in the world but his pursuit of dance. Woohyun complained under soft kisses that he was getting lost - but the fire in his dark eyes when he walked in on Dongwoo in the practice room one night only fueled Dongwoo’s need to keep dancing.
The decision to move to Sunnydale was sudden. One minute they were happily wooing Sungyeol on the weekends, studying and working and living their lives, the next they were on a plane.
It took sixth months to get to their destination. Fei and Woohyun guessed that the Elders planned it that way so that they would all learn to rely on each other as their environment changed rapidly again and again.
It worked, they arrived in Sunnydale a well-oiled machine of a family. The only thing that seemed to have been missing was Dawn - but she was found quickly enough all things considered - and then their lives went back to normal.
Well… as normal as they could be.
Because Dongwoo was starting to notice something about his dancing. Something he couldn’t quite put his finger on. Something that was simultaneously disconcerting and invigorating at the same time.
When he danced in front of the crowd, it was as if he could tap into the whole world and the entire universe was fueling his movements. His senses opened in ways he knew were not entirely normal - not just the sounds and scents, but the emotions and dreams and hopes and pasts of the people around him were pulled into his dancing, tingling in his body each time he moved.
The longer he danced, the stronger and more alive he felt.
It had always been that way. Even when he didn’t know when dancing was. Even when dancing meant being beat and screamed at.
But this was different - this was stronger than anything he had ever felt.
He was elated.
He was worried.
He had been contemplating how to talk it over with Woohyun and Fei when he leaped off the stage but then…
Then he had seen it.
He had been standing in a pile of rotting corpses and all around him was dust.
He could hear Dawn screaming, but he couldn’t get to her and all around him was death and destruction and the idle effects of time.
Only it was all broken the minute Dawn collapsed and he was left standing in a too bright, too harsh, too overwhelming reality.
The after effects of dancing didn’t fade or wear away, he felt the world pulsing under his fingertips, felt the swirling emotions and fears of each person close to him.
He wanted to call the old grandmother. He wanted to block the world away. He wanted to stop the adrenaline pounding in his ears. He wanted answers.
But most importantly, he wanted rest.
Because as long as he was awake, his mind kept going back to the woman with the dark hair and long nails; he touched the tattoo on his leg and nearly sobbed with want.
Maybe she had really known what he was.
Maybe she was trying to protect him from himself.
“I see you, you know. Even if you think that I don’t.” Sungyeol whispered into his ear. “What happened tonight?”
Dongwoo had never before followed that kite string to its logical conclusion, had always swallowed down the longing in his chest, but tonight he no longer had the energy to ignore it.
See me now his unspoken words trapped in his screaming mind lashed against Sungyeol’s body.
In moments, he was straddling the taller man and had his hands pinned over his head. Sungyeol’s eyes widened and then darkened as they reached for each other.
And for the first time they exposed their wounds proudly.
Sungyeol hadn’t been the only one closing himself off.
They bit and tear at the edges of each other’s fragility and drove into the scars that lined their bodies and their minds. There was nothing left unturned or unseen in the frenzy of their bodies crashing and colliding in the abyss they had so long tried to keep hidden from each other.
Dongwoo had woken bruised and sore, but the pounding in his head had ceased. He seemed to have gotten control of all his normal faculties again. His vision wasn’t blurred and he no longer could smell Sungyeol’s frantic worry and fear like musk surrounding him like a cloak. In the dawn light, it was more like a window that Dongwoo could choose to close if he chose - still translucent and never fully going away, but there was a choice there in how much he could see and know.
People deserved their privacy.
They returned to normal as if the day was normal and now he was standing in the living room, alone with three teens who were as tired of being left out of the goings-on as he was emotionally raw.
Just when he felt as though he might just lose his resolve and surrender to the desire to lock himself in his room and sleep the rest of the day when his phone buzzed.
“Finally!” Min exclaimed, dancing around the living room.
Dongwoo looked down at the phone and then up at the three of them all staring at him, still and always waiting for him to tell them what to do.
“Ice cream?”
* not sure what to do about the fact that this verse is over 30,000 words now and I'm still painfully keeping you in the dark about a lot of things. I've never written anything remotely this long or huge and may be slightly ~freaking out about the whole thing. So. Thanks again for reading. I'm gonna go curl up in a corner and contemplate words for a while.
fandom: Buffy, Infinite, Miss A, Supernatural
characters: Dongwoo/Sungyeol(/Woohyun), Infinite, Miss A, Winchesters, Faith/Ruby
word count: ~3500/33000*
summary: One doesn’t grow up the sister of a warrior without learning a little bit about knowing who needs protection. One doesn’t grow up surrounded by knights of old without wanting a cause worth fighting for. This is a Dongwoo-centric chapter.
a/n: I am so sorry my updates are so sporadic. You are all troopers and lovely humans for sticking with me forever laughing at my inability to be a real person
warnings: potentially triggery details of child abuse
ao3 link
[prepare yourself for angst. seriously.]It felt to Dongwoo like he had been standing on the side of a busy street for several long minutes, waiting for the perfect moment to step off the edge and cross, only right when he turned back to walk a little further down, the traffic slowed just enough and he wasn’t ready, he missed the moment, and he’s now left staring at the flow pick up again; stuck longing for the clarity and freedom that slipped him by.
It didn’t help that he had been left alone with Suji, Min, and Myungsoo - who all seemed to be doing their very best to keep him busy and anxious, without relief. There was a knot appearing between his shoulders at the base of his neck, causing his head to throb oddly. He needed aspirin or a stiff drink… or sleep.
He bit back an uncharacteristic curse, wrapped it in a smile, and somehow answered Min’s insistent questions (that he couldn’t answer) while Myungsoo and Suji stared silently and wide-eyed at him from the couch.
They hadn’t let the other out of their sight since they saw Dawn collapse; heads bent close but unspeaking, in a silent vigil. Hoya couldn’t even separate the two of them at night, opting to just set them up in the living room with Min in Myungsoo’s bed until Fei and Jia returned home - which was starting to feel like a more distant timetable with every passing hour. He looked down at them and nearly shuddered - in contrast to Min’s hyper-inquisitiveness, their blank, open eyes quietly watching him were downright creepy.
Dongwoo rubbed his hand through his hair and grasped at something to do, something to occupy them all so that they wouldn’t have to notice the emptiness of the apartment, the deafening silence that was Dongwoo’s cell phone.
Hoya had left about an hour before - and he couldn’t really blame Sungyeol for going along.
Dongwoo had been distant and strange since they arrived home from the performance. Once Hoya had settled everyone in and given him a reassuring glance, Dongwoo had escaped to his room, surprised to find Sungyeol’s long limbs sprawled over the bed.
Which wasn’t really fair.
Dawn had become a second skin to Sungyeol, someone that helped him walk around in the world outside of the cocoon Woohyun and Myungsoo sometimes forced him into - with all the best and all the most selfish intentions. Dawn was a calm influence on all of them, she took their extremes and tamed them beneath her steady gaze. But her friendship with Sungyeol would always be the strongest… or so they had always thought until her collapse. Until it became clear that she was tied up in a supernatural world that threatened to either drown them or leave them all adrift without her. It was perfectly reasonable that Sungyeol would want company on the night that his best friend became something she wasn’t.
But to be perfectly frank, Sungyeol was not the cuddling type.
Physical affection for Sungyeol - real, deep affection, not just sex - was something he only afforded to those who loved him when he felt completely and utterly whole. He wasn’t willing to give out a half-thing. He spent most nights alone, away from the grasping, asking, searching bodies of Woohyun and Dongoo.
They loved him for it. They loved him for all of him - the broken pieces and the shards that would never heal and the pieces that shone.
Generally speaking, Woohyun and Dongwoo held onto each other the hardest when they were feeling vulnerable, when they needed the other person to piece them back together as if the other’s body was a glue they could apply to any wound.
Sungyeol needed to heal in his own space.
Which was most of the time.
(Sometimes Dongwoo felt like the huge fights Sungyeol and Woohyun had were sometimes part of the process and he tried not to be resentful or feel that they were partaking in something that he would… could never truly join. But if there was a truth about their relationship, it was that Sungyeol might admit to needing Woohyun in his darkest places in the darkest ways, but he kept Dongwoo at arm’s length - kept him in the light and wouldn’t let him see the scars that they knew ran deep in them all.)
Which is why Dongwoo wasn’t expecting him to be waiting on the bed, numbly staring at the ceiling, waiting for him.
Sungyeol never waited for him. He demanded attention when he needed it, crashed into spaces, took what he needed in ways that left Dongwoo breathless, more likely hard, unsatisfied, and confused than anything else.
Waiting wasn’t what they meant to each other.
They were crashing, colliding bodies catching glimpses of something more but always lost in the heat and the blood thumping all around them. They were the silence and the comfort in the spaces between healing and war. They were the playful, teasing; they were the good without all the bad and the ugly. They were passion without consequence. They were the heat without flame.
They weren’t the waiting up at night with worry lines and restless fingers part.
“I think Woohyun is staying with Sunggyu until there’s a change,” Dongwoo offered hesitantly, urging his sore mind not to throw in the now get the fuck off my bed because I’m exhausted and my head is killing me part.
Sungyeol didn’t move, just continued to stare at the ceiling.
Dongwoo had stared at him for a moment, willing him to move, to emote, to leave. The world was hazy on the edges and Woohyun had left them to stand vigil with Sunggyu and Spike without a word or a glance behind.
Dongwoo had always loved Woohyun’s devotion to Sunggyu - it was a bond that nothing could break and he had never felt jealous or threatened or betrayed by it. But that night he was resentful, Woohyun had left and now Sungyeol was acting very uncharacteristically and he just needed sleep.
Waiting was for Sunggyu and Woohyun, not for them. Waiting was for Fei and schedules were for Hoya and practicalities and spare blankets were for Sungjong and withdrawal was for Myungsoo and questions were for Min and silent support was for Suji.
Dongwoo wasn’t really sure what he and Sungyeol were good for. And he wasn’t interested in puzzling it out tonight.
With a sigh, Dongwoo shucked off his sweaty clothes - never having had the chance to change after his performance - and flopped down on the bed, closing his eyes to the raw need in Sungyeol’s body beside him.
He’d make it through the night, if he just stayed very still and very silent, adrenaline pumped in his ears and his muscles felt so tight he genuinely worried that if anyone touched him he might snap in two.
So of course the next thing he was conscious of was Sungyeol’s hesitant palm on his back, “Something happened tonight.”
Dongwoo couldn’t hold back the snort. Thankfully it was muffled by the bed pressed into his face.
Sungyeol chuckled wryly. “You were just thinking that you were glad I couldn’t hear that, weren’t you?” The hand on Dongwoo’s bare skin slid to his side and pushed him over onto his side. Sungyeol shifted down on the bed so that his eyes were level with Dongwoo’s. “I see you, you know. Even if you think that I don’t.”
Dongwoo focused steadily on the thin collarbone poking out over Sungyeol’s threadbare, saying nothing.
Sungyeol’s fingers started lightly tracing circles and swirls on Dongwoo’s skin, the touch pulling on Dongwoo’s frayed nerves like a kite on a string. He felt a low ache in his chest and his hands began to shake. He closed his eyes and willed himself to keep a breathing deep and even.
“What happened tonight?” Sungyeol’s voice was as hard in his ear as his calloused palm passing over Dongwoo’s nipples were soft.
Dongwoo’s breath hitched and he thought wildly to himself that he should stand up and walk away. Now.
But it was too late - he was swept back in the tide and his clarity was gone.
* * * * * * *
“So you’re telling me that seven of you live in the same apartment?” Faith’s voice was incredulous.
“Technically it’s a duplex,” Sungjong said, his attention for the most part fixed on his phone, Ruby leaning into him as they scrolled through what Hoya assumed were pictures of models or starlets in designer clothes - although from their comments they could have just as likely been looking at gifs of kittens or a catalogue of very nasty archaic demons.
“Seven of you?!” Faith wasn’t letting it go, it had been nearly an hour since Sungyeol had explained their living arrangements to her, but she was stuck on it. Hoya couldn’t tell if it was nerves - something to distract her from the upcoming “Scooby meeting” as she kept referring to it - or if she really was as interested as she seemed.
Sungyeol nodded, his patience never wavering, “All seven of us.”
“How did you all end up… I mean. You don’t have parents, do you?” Sam’s question was put forth in that soft way that he had when he was talking to victims of something particularly nasty. Faith put her hand on his knee and squeezed. It wasn’t necessarily a halfway house for orphans of a demon war. There could be a perfectly reasonable explanation. (She made a mental note to check on that group of orphan-teen demon fighters she had stumbled on in Stockton after this whole mess was over.)
Sungyeol cleared his throat and looked to Hoya for assistance, who grimaced a bit. Usually they didn’t share all the sordid personal histories and depended on the fact that they were obviously foreign to explain their lack of families. “Most of us are … it’s all different. But we all met in Seoul first. Woohyun and Sunggyu had been on their own for a while. So was Dongwoo. Most of though… our grandparents all knew each other. Or teachers. They sent us here…” Hoya was being careful with his words, but he still faltered.
Sungjong looked Dean straight in the eye, “They sent us here because they said we’d be safest here.”
“Here - in Sunnydale?” Dean asked through a mouthful of chocolate peanut butter crunch ice cream and french-fries.
“That was the most important part,” Sungyeol said softly.
“You have to understand,” Hoya interjected. “Here, what you all do… what you are isn’t really known. Where we’re from it’s the same and it’s not.”
“There are more who still practice the old ways,” Ruby said thoughtfully. “It’s been a long time since I’ve been off this continent, but I spent a lot of time in Korea during the late 50’s and - there were more who still believed in the Ancients than anywhere else I’ve ever been.” She chewed on her lip, “More magic, too.”
“The Ancients?” Sam asked with a raised eyebrow, looking as though he was sorting through a mental card catalogue.
“Yeah,” Sungjong said with the impervious superiority that only a teenager can truly produce. “What came before the demons.”
“Nothing came before the demons,” Dean shot back.
“You sure about that?” Sungjong asked disdainfully.
Hoya had been on the receiving end of that facial expression a total of two times in his entire life and he didn’t envy Dean at that moment at all.
Especially since the poor chap didn’t seem to have a clue that there was chocolate dripping in a steady stream down his chin.
* * * * * * *
Dancing on that stage that night had felt like nothing he had ever experienced before. He could tell the minute they landed in Sunnydale that there was something… different about this town, that he would be able to dance and dance here.
And it felt more right than it ever had.
Raw, red memories of dancing as a child sometimes crept into his mind like waking nightmares. A soft shuffle of his feet was enough to prompt red hot iron brands on his bare soles. His feet still bore some of the scars.
He pushed them aside as quickly as he could, focusing on the present - on his new life.
A life away from the beating and the screaming and the dark, dark trunk he had spent sometimes weeks at a time locked in. A pleading, harsh, tearful voice cautioning him not to dance, never to dance, and only when his sobs stopped was he let.
A life away from hiding and stealing and starving and sleeping in alleys, the scars on his legs and back and feet keeping anyone from helping him. Branded, a child thrown to the world with no reason given and hardly a will to live.
Sometimes it had felt as though he wasn’t allowed to die. That while his birth had been - as had been pounded into his mind so often - blasphemous, his death would be all that more of a stain on his own soul.
But in Sunnydale, he had found a place where he could dance and dance.
Sungjong’s grandmother had found him asleep on her doorstep. The first person in over a decade that took pity on him, fed him, allowed him inside her house. She nursed him back to something resembling health. He spent the next four years rehabilitating, learning for the first time how to be human rather than a cringing, frightened feral thing.
Once she asked him when he ran away.
On his seventh birthday. It was the one day that stood in stark clearness against the wavering edges of his memory. He knew it was his seventh birthday because the woman with the long, dark hair and too-bright smile had tattooed the number on his naked thigh. It took several hours and he cried as he never cried before. But she had only hushed him, telling him that this would save him, that he would finally be free.
Beneath her manic optimism was a lingering threat. If it didn’t work, if this last thing didn’t cure him, then she would have to kill him. She cried as she said it. As if she hadn’t been working up to this place for a long while.
“She wasn’t your mother.” He was kneeling on the floor, repairing an old chair when she had suddenly appeared and said it. He looked up at her in shock. “She wasn’t.”
“Because mothers never hurt their children,” he had intoned with only the slightest edge of bitterness.
“Because the stamp of your mother on your aura doesn’t match that of the woman who marked your body.”
“And it took you three years to figure that out?”
The old woman shrugged. “And it took you three years to show me.”
When he was introduced to Sunggyu and Woohyun with a single knapsack of possessions slung on his shoulder, he was just the orphan boy an old auntie had taken in who needed to a place to stay. He wasn’t the feral cat she had found in the gutter. And she had cleaned him of all of his scars… except a few on his feet and the tattoo on his thigh that was now stretched nearly out of recognition.
There were some things that needed to be remembered.
It wasn’t until he had been living with the two other boys for a few months that he even really knew what dancing was. Woohyun dragged him out to a club one night and it was like the world now shone in different colors. The music, the rhythm, the way the whole crowd seemed to move as one, though he could still see individual bodies as clear as day.
He asked her later if it had been the dancing that he was being punished for, but the familiar old eyes only wrinkled further as she said, “Someday you’ll see.”
He began to study, noticing very little else in the world but his pursuit of dance. Woohyun complained under soft kisses that he was getting lost - but the fire in his dark eyes when he walked in on Dongwoo in the practice room one night only fueled Dongwoo’s need to keep dancing.
The decision to move to Sunnydale was sudden. One minute they were happily wooing Sungyeol on the weekends, studying and working and living their lives, the next they were on a plane.
It took sixth months to get to their destination. Fei and Woohyun guessed that the Elders planned it that way so that they would all learn to rely on each other as their environment changed rapidly again and again.
It worked, they arrived in Sunnydale a well-oiled machine of a family. The only thing that seemed to have been missing was Dawn - but she was found quickly enough all things considered - and then their lives went back to normal.
Well… as normal as they could be.
Because Dongwoo was starting to notice something about his dancing. Something he couldn’t quite put his finger on. Something that was simultaneously disconcerting and invigorating at the same time.
When he danced in front of the crowd, it was as if he could tap into the whole world and the entire universe was fueling his movements. His senses opened in ways he knew were not entirely normal - not just the sounds and scents, but the emotions and dreams and hopes and pasts of the people around him were pulled into his dancing, tingling in his body each time he moved.
The longer he danced, the stronger and more alive he felt.
It had always been that way. Even when he didn’t know when dancing was. Even when dancing meant being beat and screamed at.
But this was different - this was stronger than anything he had ever felt.
He was elated.
He was worried.
He had been contemplating how to talk it over with Woohyun and Fei when he leaped off the stage but then…
Then he had seen it.
He had been standing in a pile of rotting corpses and all around him was dust.
He could hear Dawn screaming, but he couldn’t get to her and all around him was death and destruction and the idle effects of time.
Only it was all broken the minute Dawn collapsed and he was left standing in a too bright, too harsh, too overwhelming reality.
The after effects of dancing didn’t fade or wear away, he felt the world pulsing under his fingertips, felt the swirling emotions and fears of each person close to him.
He wanted to call the old grandmother. He wanted to block the world away. He wanted to stop the adrenaline pounding in his ears. He wanted answers.
But most importantly, he wanted rest.
Because as long as he was awake, his mind kept going back to the woman with the dark hair and long nails; he touched the tattoo on his leg and nearly sobbed with want.
Maybe she had really known what he was.
Maybe she was trying to protect him from himself.
“I see you, you know. Even if you think that I don’t.” Sungyeol whispered into his ear. “What happened tonight?”
Dongwoo had never before followed that kite string to its logical conclusion, had always swallowed down the longing in his chest, but tonight he no longer had the energy to ignore it.
See me now his unspoken words trapped in his screaming mind lashed against Sungyeol’s body.
In moments, he was straddling the taller man and had his hands pinned over his head. Sungyeol’s eyes widened and then darkened as they reached for each other.
And for the first time they exposed their wounds proudly.
Sungyeol hadn’t been the only one closing himself off.
They bit and tear at the edges of each other’s fragility and drove into the scars that lined their bodies and their minds. There was nothing left unturned or unseen in the frenzy of their bodies crashing and colliding in the abyss they had so long tried to keep hidden from each other.
Dongwoo had woken bruised and sore, but the pounding in his head had ceased. He seemed to have gotten control of all his normal faculties again. His vision wasn’t blurred and he no longer could smell Sungyeol’s frantic worry and fear like musk surrounding him like a cloak. In the dawn light, it was more like a window that Dongwoo could choose to close if he chose - still translucent and never fully going away, but there was a choice there in how much he could see and know.
People deserved their privacy.
They returned to normal as if the day was normal and now he was standing in the living room, alone with three teens who were as tired of being left out of the goings-on as he was emotionally raw.
Just when he felt as though he might just lose his resolve and surrender to the desire to lock himself in his room and sleep the rest of the day when his phone buzzed.
“Finally!” Min exclaimed, dancing around the living room.
Dongwoo looked down at the phone and then up at the three of them all staring at him, still and always waiting for him to tell them what to do.
“Ice cream?”
* not sure what to do about the fact that this verse is over 30,000 words now and I'm still painfully keeping you in the dark about a lot of things. I've never written anything remotely this long or huge and may be slightly ~freaking out about the whole thing. So. Thanks again for reading. I'm gonna go curl up in a corner and contemplate words for a while.