in the full moon's light
in the full moon's light
2300 words | pg-13
snsd + exo-m ; hyoyeon & kris
do you always act this way around strangers you've kissed?
✎ I'm always coming up with strange pairings no one else ships, and I've been listening to the Twilight soundtrack (the music's amazing, no judging) and 'Full Moon' by The Black Ghosts came on, and I was writing a HyoRis story anyway, and it morphed into this. Warning: this is terrible. Unbeta'd-ish.
The atmosphere's a drastic change from the party the two of them had left behind, on Tiffany's orders. She's feeling uncharacteristically awkward as she spews out whatever comes to mind, and he seems to be zoning in and out of the conversation she's trying to uphold, only offering her a hum of agreement or distaste whenever he got enough snippets of her sentences to make sense of what she was saying.
And then all of a sudden, she's silenced and held in a tight and unfamiliar embrace, his lips pressed against hers and her hands fumbling to get a proper hold on his denim jacket.
For a moment, she's unknowingly carrying the weight of his sufferings within her hands, his worn and tired heart upon his sleeve as he offered her lips his soul's remains. His fingers are cold against the small of her back, his lips are just as chilling, she realizes, when she feels a shiver shoot down her spine. There's a hoarse whimper that leaves the back of her throat when he pulls himself away from her, shoving his hands back into his jean pockets and taking a step back.
There are darkening clouds of lust in her eyes and a striking hollowness colors his gaze. She wants, she needs, and he cannot bring himself to try and give his all. It seems as though an infinity passes as they stare at one another, before he offers a slight up-turn of one of the corners of his lips and wordlessly nods his farewell, leaving her under the snow covered trees.
She watches as his figure walks back in the direction they came, listening as his boots slosh in the white under his feet, leaving a trail of footprints she dares not follow. And when he's out of sight, back inside with the rest of the twenty somethings celebrating their friend's twenty-third birthday, she slouches back against the tree's trunk with a heavy sigh that had been settled in her chest from the moment she had first set her eyes on him that night.
It's the first time she takes notice of the winter breeze causing her hair to blow in an easterly direction, covering her eyes in the process. It's not as cold as she thought it would be. It's nothing compared to him.
x
Stubbornly, she's holding his bag hostage behind her back, dodging and ducking whenever he tries to make a reach for it from his place behind the tree truck. She walked five blocks away from her house to get the backpack for him, and she isn't handing it over until she gets answers. His moves are swift and well calculated and she suspects that if they weren't in the position they currently were, he would have gotten hold of his bag by now.
His face has flashes through various emotions over this entire exchange: annoyance was the first, anger was the second, and for a while now, his eyes have been glistening under the moon's light with amusement, humored by her antics. Her face has been varying in the intensity of her blush, from a deep red, to a faint red that has now faded into a warm pink, a combination of the cold biting at her nose and her inevitably taking in the sight of his condition whenever he gave her the chance to catch her breath.
"Do you always act this way around strangers you've kissed?"
He has some nerve asking her this, seeing as he's the one who had thrown rocks up to her bedroom window, hidden behind a tree, urging her to come out. She honestly didn't mind that much at first, seeing as she was already awake, listening to her father's snoring a couple of rooms down. She needed an excuse to run away from it all for a while, the boredom and the thoughts in her head that wouldn't disappear, and the torture that she had labelled the Kim Snore Symphony, and if that meant stealthily leaving the house to see a boy she had only met once while slightly intoxicated and hardly knew, so be it.
"Well, do you?"
"Do you always kiss girls and walk away, and then visit them two days later and ask them to bring you your clothes because you're stranded and stark naked in front of their house?"
"You're actually the fifth girl that's done this for me, now would you please return my bag."
She scoffed in annoyance at his sarcastic retort and pursed her lips together, shoving the backpack into his arms before turning away and giving him some privacy to get changed. There's a rushed shuffling of fabric as he pulls his clothing out of the bag, and she shuffles in place with her arms folded as she tries to distract herself from thinking of anything to do with the boy behind her.
There are the obvious questions running through her mind that keep her from forgetting he exists, like why is he standing here like this in the first place and why did he have to come me of all people and I wonder if I should have tried to sneak in one more peak before I turned around.
She stands there silently as she tries and puts answers to all of these questions, and each theory she comes up with sounds more illogical than the next. When she registers the fact that there's no sound of frantic movement behind her any longer, she turns on her heel to meet his eyes again. Her eyebrows furrow at the sight of him in his short-sleeved button up shirt, in contrast to her bundled up in a puffy red coat and the fresh snow that had fallen the night before surrounding the two of them.
"Aren't you cold?"
He takes notice of her concern but doesn't say a word, only shaking his head as he kicked at the snow on the ground until he noticed a few patches of brown peeking through, sitting down when he was satisfied and patting the space next to him, gesturing for her to join him.
Reluctantly, she sits down next to him, shivering at the cold seeping through the warmth of her knee-length coat. They're both leaning back against the tree he was hiding behind, in a comfortable kind of silence, until he decides to cut through it and mumble a sincere thanks.
She has a lot of pressing questions she should be asking him, but she can't find it in herself to do so when he's staring at the snow with that blank expression on his face, cracks of pain and vulnerability on his mask visible to her eyes and her eyes alone. So she settles for something lighter, something to get both of their minds off things.
"How did you know where-"
"Tiffany." Of course, Hyoyeon thinks. "Is playing match maker something she usually does?"
"Far too frequently, without any good results."
Kris nods again, and Hyoyeon has a suspicion that if he had to live the rest of his life in absolute silence, he wouldn't really mind at all. He bends his legs and pulls them closer to his chest, leaning the side of his face against his knees as he closed his eyes as he spoke again.
"She might have lucked out this time."
She mirrors his position, hugging her knees to her chest with her hair curtaining her face from his view. They fall into a silence again, and the two stare out at the glowing shadows the streetlights have cast upon the road. He catches her absentminded smile, and he feels like he can finally breath again, the burning fire in his chest slowly subsiding and turning into a soft yet insistent pounding.
His heart's fallen into a steady rhythm, matching hers without his knowing.
x
"May I take your picture?"
It's the first time she's heard any words roll off his tongue in English in the three weeks that she's known him, and it takes a few seconds for her to recover from the short trip she's unintentionally taken to the forbidden quarters of her thoughts. It sounds nice, she decides. Nice is a light and dull word that isn't heavily connected to any strings, emotional, physical, or otherwise. Nice is safe. She needs some sense of security when he's around, no matter how weak that sense may be, or she gets too carried away with herself. That wouldn't be good for either of them. She hasn't been told so, but she just knows.
He feels the need to clarify the reasons for his request when she forgets to reply, her tongue dried out and her eyes looking off at something in the far distance over his right shoulder, lost in her thoughts. "I'd like something to remember you by when I leave this place," he says casually, having returned to speaking in his companion's native tongue, looking down at the digital camera he held in his hands.
"You're leaving?"
She thinks that she might have just seen him smile, a genuine smile, but whatever it was is gone before she gets a chance to really see it and he turns his back on her again, pushing open the restaurant's door. "I'll wait for you in the car," he informs her, glancing at her over his shoulder, eyes darting down to read the time off his watch. "You said your shift ended at two, right?" He doesn't linger around for her answer, walking out of the eating establishment without another word.
x
"You're not...dangerous, are you?" Her voice sounds foreign to her ears, timid and cautious.
He doesn't remove his eyes from the small screen on the back of his camera. He's skimming through the photos he had taken of her at the abandoned park in the middle of town because everyone else was too sensible to spend time outside willingly, wondering how she had managed to twist his arm and convince him to take a couple of shots of the two of them.
Hyoyeon holding a peace sign in front of her right cheek, smiling. Hyoyeon sitting down on one of the park benches, staring off into space, unaware of the fact that her picture was being taken, still smiling, albeit just barely. Kris and Hyoyeon, Hyoyeon's cheeks puffed up and her lips pursed, her eyes wide open and her head rested on his shoulder, while he had his head rested upon the top of hers, no smile in sight; but there was happiness in his eyes, clear for all to see. Hyoyeon, Hyoyeon, Kris and Hyoyeon, Hyoyeon, Kris, Kris and Hyoyeon.
He continued to scroll through the images, seemingly not bothered by her question. He suspects she's figured him out, and he's thankful he doesn't need to go about explaining everything to her just as yet. "Not around you, no."
"And everyone else?"
"Eunhyuk's starting to grind on my nerves with all his questions about you. But other than that, I'm as harmless as a puppy."
She breathes out a laugh. "You are a puppy, a jealous puppy."
"I'm yours, aren't I? I have every right to be jealous about someone else vying for your attention. It's the way of the loyal."
His words catch her off guard and when he doesn't hear anything from her side of the wooden table, he looks up from the camera screen and pushes the silver gadget over to her, folding his arms across the park table's cool surface.
"You're taking this whole werewolf thing better than I thought you would."
"How so?" She asks, having snapped out of her momentary daze, taking a look at the images they had taken earlier.
"I thought you would have had my shirt off by now."
She narrows her eyes at him in a glare, reaching up and flicking her finger against his forehead, causing him to burst out laughing as he covered his forehead with his hands and leaned off to the side to try and avoid getting hit again. His laugh is incredibly infectious, she realizes, when all of her feigned annoyance instantly dissolves into laughter too.
x
He's sprawled out on his bed with his phone pressed to his ear, Hyoyeon animatedly chatting to him on the other end about the madness that spring has been. He honestly can't wipe the smile off his face. He's been having trouble doing so since their first meeting two months before. He can't say he minds the burning effect smiling for an hour-long phone call has on his cheeks. It's worth it, she's worth it.
"How's Canada treating you?"
"Would you like a corny declaration about how I miss you, or a weather report?"
"I was thinking something more along the lines of the more animalistic side of things, but now that you mention it, a weather report sounds heavenly."
"Tomorrow; you should be sleeping." He informs her as he sits up and leans back against the wall, looking down at the rays of morning light falling in from his open windows and onto his bed sheets. "Sleep well, I'm hanging up now."
"Kris Wu, if you end this call I swear I will-"
Beep.
'You'll miss me? I'll miss you too. Sweet dreams.'
She reads over his text message before rolling her eyes and putting her phone aside, turning off the lamp on her bedside table and scooting further into her bed covers. She can't wipe the smile off her lips, not that she's ever tried. She's always been that way, or so people say, but it's different when he's the cause, it's different when she's smiling because he's given her reason to and not because she feels like she has to. He makes it worth it, he's worth it.
2300 words | pg-13
snsd + exo-m ; hyoyeon & kris
do you always act this way around strangers you've kissed?
✎ I'm always coming up with strange pairings no one else ships, and I've been listening to the Twilight soundtrack (the music's amazing, no judging) and 'Full Moon' by The Black Ghosts came on, and I was writing a HyoRis story anyway, and it morphed into this. Warning: this is terrible. Unbeta'd-ish.
The atmosphere's a drastic change from the party the two of them had left behind, on Tiffany's orders. She's feeling uncharacteristically awkward as she spews out whatever comes to mind, and he seems to be zoning in and out of the conversation she's trying to uphold, only offering her a hum of agreement or distaste whenever he got enough snippets of her sentences to make sense of what she was saying.
And then all of a sudden, she's silenced and held in a tight and unfamiliar embrace, his lips pressed against hers and her hands fumbling to get a proper hold on his denim jacket.
For a moment, she's unknowingly carrying the weight of his sufferings within her hands, his worn and tired heart upon his sleeve as he offered her lips his soul's remains. His fingers are cold against the small of her back, his lips are just as chilling, she realizes, when she feels a shiver shoot down her spine. There's a hoarse whimper that leaves the back of her throat when he pulls himself away from her, shoving his hands back into his jean pockets and taking a step back.
There are darkening clouds of lust in her eyes and a striking hollowness colors his gaze. She wants, she needs, and he cannot bring himself to try and give his all. It seems as though an infinity passes as they stare at one another, before he offers a slight up-turn of one of the corners of his lips and wordlessly nods his farewell, leaving her under the snow covered trees.
She watches as his figure walks back in the direction they came, listening as his boots slosh in the white under his feet, leaving a trail of footprints she dares not follow. And when he's out of sight, back inside with the rest of the twenty somethings celebrating their friend's twenty-third birthday, she slouches back against the tree's trunk with a heavy sigh that had been settled in her chest from the moment she had first set her eyes on him that night.
It's the first time she takes notice of the winter breeze causing her hair to blow in an easterly direction, covering her eyes in the process. It's not as cold as she thought it would be. It's nothing compared to him.
x
Stubbornly, she's holding his bag hostage behind her back, dodging and ducking whenever he tries to make a reach for it from his place behind the tree truck. She walked five blocks away from her house to get the backpack for him, and she isn't handing it over until she gets answers. His moves are swift and well calculated and she suspects that if they weren't in the position they currently were, he would have gotten hold of his bag by now.
His face has flashes through various emotions over this entire exchange: annoyance was the first, anger was the second, and for a while now, his eyes have been glistening under the moon's light with amusement, humored by her antics. Her face has been varying in the intensity of her blush, from a deep red, to a faint red that has now faded into a warm pink, a combination of the cold biting at her nose and her inevitably taking in the sight of his condition whenever he gave her the chance to catch her breath.
"Do you always act this way around strangers you've kissed?"
He has some nerve asking her this, seeing as he's the one who had thrown rocks up to her bedroom window, hidden behind a tree, urging her to come out. She honestly didn't mind that much at first, seeing as she was already awake, listening to her father's snoring a couple of rooms down. She needed an excuse to run away from it all for a while, the boredom and the thoughts in her head that wouldn't disappear, and the torture that she had labelled the Kim Snore Symphony, and if that meant stealthily leaving the house to see a boy she had only met once while slightly intoxicated and hardly knew, so be it.
"Well, do you?"
"Do you always kiss girls and walk away, and then visit them two days later and ask them to bring you your clothes because you're stranded and stark naked in front of their house?"
"You're actually the fifth girl that's done this for me, now would you please return my bag."
She scoffed in annoyance at his sarcastic retort and pursed her lips together, shoving the backpack into his arms before turning away and giving him some privacy to get changed. There's a rushed shuffling of fabric as he pulls his clothing out of the bag, and she shuffles in place with her arms folded as she tries to distract herself from thinking of anything to do with the boy behind her.
There are the obvious questions running through her mind that keep her from forgetting he exists, like why is he standing here like this in the first place and why did he have to come me of all people and I wonder if I should have tried to sneak in one more peak before I turned around.
She stands there silently as she tries and puts answers to all of these questions, and each theory she comes up with sounds more illogical than the next. When she registers the fact that there's no sound of frantic movement behind her any longer, she turns on her heel to meet his eyes again. Her eyebrows furrow at the sight of him in his short-sleeved button up shirt, in contrast to her bundled up in a puffy red coat and the fresh snow that had fallen the night before surrounding the two of them.
"Aren't you cold?"
He takes notice of her concern but doesn't say a word, only shaking his head as he kicked at the snow on the ground until he noticed a few patches of brown peeking through, sitting down when he was satisfied and patting the space next to him, gesturing for her to join him.
Reluctantly, she sits down next to him, shivering at the cold seeping through the warmth of her knee-length coat. They're both leaning back against the tree he was hiding behind, in a comfortable kind of silence, until he decides to cut through it and mumble a sincere thanks.
She has a lot of pressing questions she should be asking him, but she can't find it in herself to do so when he's staring at the snow with that blank expression on his face, cracks of pain and vulnerability on his mask visible to her eyes and her eyes alone. So she settles for something lighter, something to get both of their minds off things.
"How did you know where-"
"Tiffany." Of course, Hyoyeon thinks. "Is playing match maker something she usually does?"
"Far too frequently, without any good results."
Kris nods again, and Hyoyeon has a suspicion that if he had to live the rest of his life in absolute silence, he wouldn't really mind at all. He bends his legs and pulls them closer to his chest, leaning the side of his face against his knees as he closed his eyes as he spoke again.
"She might have lucked out this time."
She mirrors his position, hugging her knees to her chest with her hair curtaining her face from his view. They fall into a silence again, and the two stare out at the glowing shadows the streetlights have cast upon the road. He catches her absentminded smile, and he feels like he can finally breath again, the burning fire in his chest slowly subsiding and turning into a soft yet insistent pounding.
His heart's fallen into a steady rhythm, matching hers without his knowing.
x
"May I take your picture?"
It's the first time she's heard any words roll off his tongue in English in the three weeks that she's known him, and it takes a few seconds for her to recover from the short trip she's unintentionally taken to the forbidden quarters of her thoughts. It sounds nice, she decides. Nice is a light and dull word that isn't heavily connected to any strings, emotional, physical, or otherwise. Nice is safe. She needs some sense of security when he's around, no matter how weak that sense may be, or she gets too carried away with herself. That wouldn't be good for either of them. She hasn't been told so, but she just knows.
He feels the need to clarify the reasons for his request when she forgets to reply, her tongue dried out and her eyes looking off at something in the far distance over his right shoulder, lost in her thoughts. "I'd like something to remember you by when I leave this place," he says casually, having returned to speaking in his companion's native tongue, looking down at the digital camera he held in his hands.
"You're leaving?"
She thinks that she might have just seen him smile, a genuine smile, but whatever it was is gone before she gets a chance to really see it and he turns his back on her again, pushing open the restaurant's door. "I'll wait for you in the car," he informs her, glancing at her over his shoulder, eyes darting down to read the time off his watch. "You said your shift ended at two, right?" He doesn't linger around for her answer, walking out of the eating establishment without another word.
x
"You're not...dangerous, are you?" Her voice sounds foreign to her ears, timid and cautious.
He doesn't remove his eyes from the small screen on the back of his camera. He's skimming through the photos he had taken of her at the abandoned park in the middle of town because everyone else was too sensible to spend time outside willingly, wondering how she had managed to twist his arm and convince him to take a couple of shots of the two of them.
Hyoyeon holding a peace sign in front of her right cheek, smiling. Hyoyeon sitting down on one of the park benches, staring off into space, unaware of the fact that her picture was being taken, still smiling, albeit just barely. Kris and Hyoyeon, Hyoyeon's cheeks puffed up and her lips pursed, her eyes wide open and her head rested on his shoulder, while he had his head rested upon the top of hers, no smile in sight; but there was happiness in his eyes, clear for all to see. Hyoyeon, Hyoyeon, Kris and Hyoyeon, Hyoyeon, Kris, Kris and Hyoyeon.
He continued to scroll through the images, seemingly not bothered by her question. He suspects she's figured him out, and he's thankful he doesn't need to go about explaining everything to her just as yet. "Not around you, no."
"And everyone else?"
"Eunhyuk's starting to grind on my nerves with all his questions about you. But other than that, I'm as harmless as a puppy."
She breathes out a laugh. "You are a puppy, a jealous puppy."
"I'm yours, aren't I? I have every right to be jealous about someone else vying for your attention. It's the way of the loyal."
His words catch her off guard and when he doesn't hear anything from her side of the wooden table, he looks up from the camera screen and pushes the silver gadget over to her, folding his arms across the park table's cool surface.
"You're taking this whole werewolf thing better than I thought you would."
"How so?" She asks, having snapped out of her momentary daze, taking a look at the images they had taken earlier.
"I thought you would have had my shirt off by now."
She narrows her eyes at him in a glare, reaching up and flicking her finger against his forehead, causing him to burst out laughing as he covered his forehead with his hands and leaned off to the side to try and avoid getting hit again. His laugh is incredibly infectious, she realizes, when all of her feigned annoyance instantly dissolves into laughter too.
x
He's sprawled out on his bed with his phone pressed to his ear, Hyoyeon animatedly chatting to him on the other end about the madness that spring has been. He honestly can't wipe the smile off his face. He's been having trouble doing so since their first meeting two months before. He can't say he minds the burning effect smiling for an hour-long phone call has on his cheeks. It's worth it, she's worth it.
"How's Canada treating you?"
"Would you like a corny declaration about how I miss you, or a weather report?"
"I was thinking something more along the lines of the more animalistic side of things, but now that you mention it, a weather report sounds heavenly."
"Tomorrow; you should be sleeping." He informs her as he sits up and leans back against the wall, looking down at the rays of morning light falling in from his open windows and onto his bed sheets. "Sleep well, I'm hanging up now."
"Kris Wu, if you end this call I swear I will-"
Beep.
'You'll miss me? I'll miss you too. Sweet dreams.'
She reads over his text message before rolling her eyes and putting her phone aside, turning off the lamp on her bedside table and scooting further into her bed covers. She can't wipe the smile off her lips, not that she's ever tried. She's always been that way, or so people say, but it's different when he's the cause, it's different when she's smiling because he's given her reason to and not because she feels like she has to. He makes it worth it, he's worth it.