Unlikely Circumstances
» Unlikely Circumstances - 1/2. Kyuhyun/Zhou Mi. 2,765 words.
They meet in the wrong place at the wrong time, and yet somehow it's right.
wtf kind of a summary is that omg just shoot me
A/N: This is not one of my longer fics, it's simply something to crack my writer's block.
________
They met in the wrong place at the absolutely wrong time, which happened to be in the grocery store at 8:30 on a Sunday night in April. Heechul had sent him shopping for food, since their mini-fridge was barren and cafeteria food was unthinkable. He was grabbing anything that could be made in less than ten minutes - instant ramen, oatmeal, cereal, and the like - and throwing them in the carriage without a second glance. He was too tired to care what was being purchased or how much it cost, but that was only because it was Heechul’s turn to pay for groceries.
He was a little surprised when the wall of boxed food next to him wobbled a little bit, accompanied by the sound of irritated voices, one male and the other female. The voices were familiar, although he wasn’t sure if it was the voices themselves that were familiar or the aggravated tone.
“You are so ridiculous.” The girl who speaks first, an accent hanging off her voice that clearly noted that Korean was not her first language.
“Oh, come on, Tiff,” The male retorts. “I was just kidding!”
“Well, it wasn’t funny,” The girl snaps, the sound of high heels clicking on the linoleum floor. There is the shuffle of sneakers, then silence.
“Come on,” The guy coos. “I didn’t mean it. Really.”
“I’m going home,” The girl snaps once more, the click of her shoes starting up again. She storms past Zhou Mi’s aisle in a huff, quickly followed by the guy.
“Babe, come on, I--!”
“DON’T,” The girl snaps, spinning around and pointing a manicured finger in his face. “Call me that.” And with a small hmph, she turns around and storms off.
“Tif-Tiffany!” He calls after her, standing practically right in front of Zhou Mi. He stands there stupidly for a few seconds, staring off after her, utterly defeated. He sighs heavily and hangs his head, and something in the back of Zhou Mi’s mind screams that he knows this guy, although he wasn’t exactly sure from where.
The guy looks up at him and smiles in a way that made Zhou Mi’s brain falter. “She’s a winner, huh.”
“Uh,” Zhou Mi suddenly forgets how to speak Korean. “Yeah?”
The guy narrows his eyes at Zhou Mi and put his hand on his chin. “Do I know you?” He tilts his head in confusion; Zhou Mi notes how his hair resembles a mix of a mop and a poodle.
Zhou Mi probes his brain for several seconds, trying to analyze his face to place where they had met - not through work, nor mutual friends, not through any other chance happening aside from the one they were currently in.
“Oh,” The guy cries suddenly, straightening up and smiling. “I know you. You go to Kyunghee University, right?” Zhou Mi nods. “I do too. And I work in the library - um, I think I’ve seen you there.”
“Oh!” Zhou Mi gasps, realizing he was right - he was always at the library when Zhou Mi was. Zhou Mi always assumed they simply had similar studying patterns.
“Yeah,” The guy holds his hand out to Zhou Mi, who shakes it gingerly. “I’m Kyuhyun - Cho Kyuhyun.”
“Zhou Mi,” He says, putting his hand down to his side. They stand there awkwardly for mere minutes that feel like hours, until they both sort of nod awkwardly to each other and move on; however, Zhou Mi, who was just grabbing four boxes of Cheerios, turns back to Kyuhyun when there was a sudden harsh whisper of -
“That fucking bitch!”
“I’m sorry?” Zhou Mi asks, staring at Kyuhyun like a deer in the headlights as he patted down his entire body. Kyuhyun looks up at him, a small, yet extremely agitated, smile playing on his lips, and sighs.
“Tiffany - my girlfr-well, probably ex-girlfriend now - er, girl! I was with?” He asks awkwardly, wondering to himself seconds later why it came out as a question and not a statement. “She has the keys to our apartment.”
“Oh!” Zhou Mi cries, throwing the boxes of cereal haphazardly on top of cases of highly-caffeinated soda. “You don’t...live on campus?”
“Well, I mean-okay,” Kyuhyun sighs, leaning, defeated, against the carriage. “I had a dorm - well, have, I guess - with this kid, Changmin. We’re, like, really tight, like best friends, bros, whatever it is you call it. Anyway. He got a girlfriend and wanted her to live in my dorm - obviously not allowed officially - but, to help them, I moved into Tiffany’s apartment three months ago, although officially I’m still living in the dorm. But I can’t move back in because I don’t want to have to deal with them fucking every night and I’m not going to sleep on a couch, and I don’t know why I’m talking so much but you’re not Korean, are you?”
Zhou Mi blinks a few times, attempting to process the jumble of words that were just projected in his face into actual sentences with meaning, and then shakes his head gently. “No, I’m not...”
Kyuhyun nods. “Sorry. I kind of...just blurted all my problems there.”
“Don’t worry about it!” Zhou Mi feels his mouth turn at the corners, although he isn’t sure why. He watches as the other man smiles awkwardly, turns around and begins walking away, and something in Zhou Mi kind of snapped, and he could feel himself wandering into risky territory. “Wait.”
Kyuhyun turns around and hikes an eyebrow. “Uh...yeah?”
“Do you...need a place to stay?”
________
Once coming into contact with Kyuhyun, Zhou Mi wonders why he didn’t recognize him right away in the grocery store - the kid was everywhere in his daily life. They had an English class together, in which Kyuhyun sat in the middle of the room while Zhou Mi was normally closer to the back (Zhou Mi began making a habit of watching Kyuhyun play Starcraft over his shoulder), they normally ate lunch around the same time (Zhou Mi learned that Kyuhyun was friends with Sungmin, Yesung, and Ryeowook, who were all acquaintances of Heechul’s), and whenever Zhou Mi made his way to the library, he is always organizing the shelves or playing on the computer. Sometimes they make small talk - “How’s your Korean coming along?” “Better than your Mandarin, no doubt.” - and maybe, just maybe, Zhou Mi actually enjoys his presence - even if he is slightly (okay...extremely) sarcastic at times.
Heechul is completely convinced that Kyuhyun was the one for Zhou Mi - “I can tell just by looking at him,” Heechul says one day in the library, carefully watching Kyuhyun’s every movement from behind a year-old copy of Vogue magazine. “He’s everything you need. Stupid. Dorky. Cute, but not cute enough to make you look like the ugly one in the relationship. Absolutely perfect.” - and feels the need to tell him this every time Kyuhyun came into sight. After being thoroughly embarrassed the night he brought Kyuhyun home (“Seasoning! Since when were you fucking the librarian? I thoroughly approve,”) he begins acquiring a new talent, which he abruptly titles “IGNORING HEECHUL.” And besides, relationships are not number one on Zhou Mi’s list of priorities; not when he has classes to attend, essays to write, and a language (or two, if his English class is included) to learn.
Regardless of this fact, Zhou Mi visits the library every single day and learns Kyuhyun’s work schedule - works Mondays, Wednesday and Thursdays from five o’clock to ten, Fridays and Saturdays from three to nine, and has Tuesdays and Sundays off. Zhou Mi tries to make it to the library as often as he can when Kyuhyun works; however, there’s only so much time he can take off from his part-time stint at Starbucks to watch a stupid library assistant that looks like a Great Dane puppy organize shelves.
________
“I can feel your brain throbbing from across the room.”
It’s been two months since the grocery store incident, and Zhou Mi is seated in the back corner of the library with his Algebra 2 textbooks sprawled over the table as he tries to master the art of the quadratic formula, Hangul-y blobs that say words like degree, variable, discriminant and coefficient causing him to practically curl into himself and sob in the corner. Kyuhyun is standing over him, analyzing the splayed papers and textbooks carefully.
“Quadratic formula?” He asks, picking up Zhou Mi’s homework and reading it over carefully. “This is so easy. Why are you taking an Algebra 2 course?”
“I failed it my senior year,” Zhou Mi chirps, ignoring the look of utter shock that morphs Kyuhyun’s features.
“How did you graduate?” Kyuhyun asks, but instead of waiting for an answer, continues talking. “The quadratic formula is so simple. I could do it in my sleep.”
“Well, excuse me, Einstein,” Zhou Mi snaps, snatching the paper back and waving his hand at Kyuhyun. “If you’re going to be rude, you can leave me alone and let me finish this in peace.”
“Shut up, I’m going to help you,” Kyuhyun pulls a chair next to Zhou Mi and takes a seat. “Okay, so this is your equation: x-squared minus four-x minus eight equals zero.”
“Right.”
“So,” Kyuhyun takes the pencil out of Zhou Mi’s hand and circles the quadratic formula. “See this? You need to find A, B and C from your original equation, plug it into the formula, and then solve.”
Zhou Mi blinks at him, his mind completely fried; Kyuhyun sighs. “Okay. In any quadratic equation, the x-squared term will always be A. In this case, it’s just x-squared, so you’re A term would simply be one.”
“Oh,” Zhou Mi stares at the paper. “So B would be negative four and C would be eight?”
Kyuhyun grins. “Right. So basically, you plug those into the equation and solve.”
Zhou Mi takes the pencil and the paper and prepares to completely shred his brain to pieces, but he realizes half-way through doing the problem, that the way Kyuhyun had explained it made complete sense and didn’t really hurt his brain at all.
“Well?” Kyuhyun asks after a few minutes, crossing his arms casually and propping his legs up on the table. Zhou Mi re-reads his answer and the process a few times before speaking.
“X equals two plus or minus two square-root of three?”
Kyuhyun grins, patting Zhou Mi on the shoulder and leaning his body weight on Zhou Mi to help himself up. “See? It’s easy!”
Zhou Mi sits there for five minutes after, staring at the paper in front of him and realizing that his shoulder was kind of tingly.
________
In the beginning, it was just a crush. Even though he was kind of an asshole and only cared about his video games, something about him (Heechul swears it’s his crooked smile) made Zhou Mi’s heart race like a rabbit’s and his mouth tingle and his brain short-circuit; but that was okay, because he was only in like with Kyuhyun and not in love, and as long as things stayed that way, he could think Kyuhyun was cute all he wanted.
But as summer break approaches, Zhou Mi realizes he’s panicking at the thought of going back to China for the summer and Kyuhyun staying in Seoul -- they wouldn’t have contact, what if Kyuhyun finds someone else to be a jerk to? He begins to think of ways around it, although none of them were very plausible: he couldn’t afford an apartment on his own, he was not staying with Heechul for the summer, Kyuhyun would be staying with his parents (and come on, that would be awkward) and it wasn’t like he could just wander up to Kyuhyun’s ex and be like, “hi, I like your ex-boyfriend but need a place to stay for the summer, can I chill here?"
“Jesus Christ, Seasoning,” Heechul says on the day they begin packing their things into boxes. “It’s only two months, not a fucking decade. Stop making it seem like you’re never going to see him again, it’s not like he’ll forget you that quickly.”
“How do you know?” Zhou Mi asks as he attempts to shove a blanket into a box that is probably two times too small. “We’ve only known each other for two months; surely he can forget me in that amount of time.”
Heechul tapes his box shut, then sighs heavily before saying, “Trust me. If what Sungmin is telling me is true, he won’t forget you.”
A few days later, Kyuhyun is helping Zhou Mi pack his stuff into a taxi - the one that would be bringing him to the airport - when he pulls out a piece of paper with his phone number and email on it. No words are exchanged, because none are needed - Kyuhyun simply pulls Zhou Mi into a hug, ignoring the inch-or-so height difference and whispers something in his ear about keeping in contact, because a Mi-less two months was going to be really difficult otherwise.
Instead of being irrationally upset like he had expected, Zhou Mi spends the entire plane ride home smelling his shirt and thinking about Heechul’s comment about not forgetting him, and realizing that he already misses being at school and seeing Kyuhyun’s stupid smirk.
________
Zhou Mi routinely checks his email once a day - although it’s normally filled with nothing but credit card offers and ads for singles’ sites - just because of the slight possibility that maybe Kyuhyun decided to email him today; usually though, he just sees emails screaming at him to join match.com, leaving him feeling like an idiot. It doesn’t dawn on him until mid-July that Kyuhyun hasn’t contacted him simply because he was never given Zhou Mi’s email or phone number.
Dear Kyuhyun,
I’m going to start calling you Kui Xian, is that okay? It can be your Chinese name.
How’s life in Korea? China is still terribly boring, especially since I have summer math homework but no Einstein to help me. :(
He erases this because this doesn’t sound right; it sounds like he’s trying too hard to grasp for a foothold on something to say, instead of just saying whatever pops into his brain like a normal person would.
Dear Kyuhyun,
I miss you. China almost doesn’t feel like home.
Good lord, no, Zhou Mi thinks as he erases this sentence; the last thing he needed was to sound desperate.
So he sighs to himself, forgetting the premise of trying to start a conversation, and simply writes:
Dear Kyuhyun,
How’s your summer going? Sorry it took so long to send you an email; I was waiting for you to send one first, but then I realized that you didn’t have my email.
Hope you’re well,
Zhou Mi.
A few days later, his inbox reads (12) New Messages - six are credit card offers, one that’s offering free hemorrhoid cream, three offers for Victoria’s Secret underwear, an ad for plentyoffish.com, and one from an unknown sender that simply says, 觅.
Dear Zhou Mi,
My summer is miserable. It’s gross and hot and lonely. I wish you were here so I could at least torture you with some pre-calc to prepare you for class next year, hah.
I was getting to the point where I thought you had forgotten I existed. Did you get a boyfriend or something to distract you? Hahaha.
See you when school starts?
Kyuhyun.
Zhou Mi's mind malfunctions as he stares at the email, specifically at the line “Did you get a boyfriend or something to distract you?” because he knows, he knows he never told Kyuhyun he was gay. Instead of replying to the email, however, he lets it go - that subject was not something he feels like elaborating on (at least, not through email) and figures that, at least Kyuhyun was missing him, and that's good enough.
A few weeks later - just before school starts - he receives another email; from Heechul this time:
Seasoning,
I have a surprise for you on the first day of school. No, I won’t tell you what it is, it’s a surprise, god dammit. You’ll thank me later though.
end of part 1
They meet in the wrong place at the wrong time, and yet somehow it's right.
wtf kind of a summary is that omg just shoot me
A/N: This is not one of my longer fics, it's simply something to crack my writer's block.
________
They met in the wrong place at the absolutely wrong time, which happened to be in the grocery store at 8:30 on a Sunday night in April. Heechul had sent him shopping for food, since their mini-fridge was barren and cafeteria food was unthinkable. He was grabbing anything that could be made in less than ten minutes - instant ramen, oatmeal, cereal, and the like - and throwing them in the carriage without a second glance. He was too tired to care what was being purchased or how much it cost, but that was only because it was Heechul’s turn to pay for groceries.
He was a little surprised when the wall of boxed food next to him wobbled a little bit, accompanied by the sound of irritated voices, one male and the other female. The voices were familiar, although he wasn’t sure if it was the voices themselves that were familiar or the aggravated tone.
“You are so ridiculous.” The girl who speaks first, an accent hanging off her voice that clearly noted that Korean was not her first language.
“Oh, come on, Tiff,” The male retorts. “I was just kidding!”
“Well, it wasn’t funny,” The girl snaps, the sound of high heels clicking on the linoleum floor. There is the shuffle of sneakers, then silence.
“Come on,” The guy coos. “I didn’t mean it. Really.”
“I’m going home,” The girl snaps once more, the click of her shoes starting up again. She storms past Zhou Mi’s aisle in a huff, quickly followed by the guy.
“Babe, come on, I--!”
“DON’T,” The girl snaps, spinning around and pointing a manicured finger in his face. “Call me that.” And with a small hmph, she turns around and storms off.
“Tif-Tiffany!” He calls after her, standing practically right in front of Zhou Mi. He stands there stupidly for a few seconds, staring off after her, utterly defeated. He sighs heavily and hangs his head, and something in the back of Zhou Mi’s mind screams that he knows this guy, although he wasn’t exactly sure from where.
The guy looks up at him and smiles in a way that made Zhou Mi’s brain falter. “She’s a winner, huh.”
“Uh,” Zhou Mi suddenly forgets how to speak Korean. “Yeah?”
The guy narrows his eyes at Zhou Mi and put his hand on his chin. “Do I know you?” He tilts his head in confusion; Zhou Mi notes how his hair resembles a mix of a mop and a poodle.
Zhou Mi probes his brain for several seconds, trying to analyze his face to place where they had met - not through work, nor mutual friends, not through any other chance happening aside from the one they were currently in.
“Oh,” The guy cries suddenly, straightening up and smiling. “I know you. You go to Kyunghee University, right?” Zhou Mi nods. “I do too. And I work in the library - um, I think I’ve seen you there.”
“Oh!” Zhou Mi gasps, realizing he was right - he was always at the library when Zhou Mi was. Zhou Mi always assumed they simply had similar studying patterns.
“Yeah,” The guy holds his hand out to Zhou Mi, who shakes it gingerly. “I’m Kyuhyun - Cho Kyuhyun.”
“Zhou Mi,” He says, putting his hand down to his side. They stand there awkwardly for mere minutes that feel like hours, until they both sort of nod awkwardly to each other and move on; however, Zhou Mi, who was just grabbing four boxes of Cheerios, turns back to Kyuhyun when there was a sudden harsh whisper of -
“That fucking bitch!”
“I’m sorry?” Zhou Mi asks, staring at Kyuhyun like a deer in the headlights as he patted down his entire body. Kyuhyun looks up at him, a small, yet extremely agitated, smile playing on his lips, and sighs.
“Tiffany - my girlfr-well, probably ex-girlfriend now - er, girl! I was with?” He asks awkwardly, wondering to himself seconds later why it came out as a question and not a statement. “She has the keys to our apartment.”
“Oh!” Zhou Mi cries, throwing the boxes of cereal haphazardly on top of cases of highly-caffeinated soda. “You don’t...live on campus?”
“Well, I mean-okay,” Kyuhyun sighs, leaning, defeated, against the carriage. “I had a dorm - well, have, I guess - with this kid, Changmin. We’re, like, really tight, like best friends, bros, whatever it is you call it. Anyway. He got a girlfriend and wanted her to live in my dorm - obviously not allowed officially - but, to help them, I moved into Tiffany’s apartment three months ago, although officially I’m still living in the dorm. But I can’t move back in because I don’t want to have to deal with them fucking every night and I’m not going to sleep on a couch, and I don’t know why I’m talking so much but you’re not Korean, are you?”
Zhou Mi blinks a few times, attempting to process the jumble of words that were just projected in his face into actual sentences with meaning, and then shakes his head gently. “No, I’m not...”
Kyuhyun nods. “Sorry. I kind of...just blurted all my problems there.”
“Don’t worry about it!” Zhou Mi feels his mouth turn at the corners, although he isn’t sure why. He watches as the other man smiles awkwardly, turns around and begins walking away, and something in Zhou Mi kind of snapped, and he could feel himself wandering into risky territory. “Wait.”
Kyuhyun turns around and hikes an eyebrow. “Uh...yeah?”
“Do you...need a place to stay?”
________
Once coming into contact with Kyuhyun, Zhou Mi wonders why he didn’t recognize him right away in the grocery store - the kid was everywhere in his daily life. They had an English class together, in which Kyuhyun sat in the middle of the room while Zhou Mi was normally closer to the back (Zhou Mi began making a habit of watching Kyuhyun play Starcraft over his shoulder), they normally ate lunch around the same time (Zhou Mi learned that Kyuhyun was friends with Sungmin, Yesung, and Ryeowook, who were all acquaintances of Heechul’s), and whenever Zhou Mi made his way to the library, he is always organizing the shelves or playing on the computer. Sometimes they make small talk - “How’s your Korean coming along?” “Better than your Mandarin, no doubt.” - and maybe, just maybe, Zhou Mi actually enjoys his presence - even if he is slightly (okay...extremely) sarcastic at times.
Heechul is completely convinced that Kyuhyun was the one for Zhou Mi - “I can tell just by looking at him,” Heechul says one day in the library, carefully watching Kyuhyun’s every movement from behind a year-old copy of Vogue magazine. “He’s everything you need. Stupid. Dorky. Cute, but not cute enough to make you look like the ugly one in the relationship. Absolutely perfect.” - and feels the need to tell him this every time Kyuhyun came into sight. After being thoroughly embarrassed the night he brought Kyuhyun home (“Seasoning! Since when were you fucking the librarian? I thoroughly approve,”) he begins acquiring a new talent, which he abruptly titles “IGNORING HEECHUL.” And besides, relationships are not number one on Zhou Mi’s list of priorities; not when he has classes to attend, essays to write, and a language (or two, if his English class is included) to learn.
Regardless of this fact, Zhou Mi visits the library every single day and learns Kyuhyun’s work schedule - works Mondays, Wednesday and Thursdays from five o’clock to ten, Fridays and Saturdays from three to nine, and has Tuesdays and Sundays off. Zhou Mi tries to make it to the library as often as he can when Kyuhyun works; however, there’s only so much time he can take off from his part-time stint at Starbucks to watch a stupid library assistant that looks like a Great Dane puppy organize shelves.
________
“I can feel your brain throbbing from across the room.”
It’s been two months since the grocery store incident, and Zhou Mi is seated in the back corner of the library with his Algebra 2 textbooks sprawled over the table as he tries to master the art of the quadratic formula, Hangul-y blobs that say words like degree, variable, discriminant and coefficient causing him to practically curl into himself and sob in the corner. Kyuhyun is standing over him, analyzing the splayed papers and textbooks carefully.
“Quadratic formula?” He asks, picking up Zhou Mi’s homework and reading it over carefully. “This is so easy. Why are you taking an Algebra 2 course?”
“I failed it my senior year,” Zhou Mi chirps, ignoring the look of utter shock that morphs Kyuhyun’s features.
“How did you graduate?” Kyuhyun asks, but instead of waiting for an answer, continues talking. “The quadratic formula is so simple. I could do it in my sleep.”
“Well, excuse me, Einstein,” Zhou Mi snaps, snatching the paper back and waving his hand at Kyuhyun. “If you’re going to be rude, you can leave me alone and let me finish this in peace.”
“Shut up, I’m going to help you,” Kyuhyun pulls a chair next to Zhou Mi and takes a seat. “Okay, so this is your equation: x-squared minus four-x minus eight equals zero.”
“Right.”
“So,” Kyuhyun takes the pencil out of Zhou Mi’s hand and circles the quadratic formula. “See this? You need to find A, B and C from your original equation, plug it into the formula, and then solve.”
Zhou Mi blinks at him, his mind completely fried; Kyuhyun sighs. “Okay. In any quadratic equation, the x-squared term will always be A. In this case, it’s just x-squared, so you’re A term would simply be one.”
“Oh,” Zhou Mi stares at the paper. “So B would be negative four and C would be eight?”
Kyuhyun grins. “Right. So basically, you plug those into the equation and solve.”
Zhou Mi takes the pencil and the paper and prepares to completely shred his brain to pieces, but he realizes half-way through doing the problem, that the way Kyuhyun had explained it made complete sense and didn’t really hurt his brain at all.
“Well?” Kyuhyun asks after a few minutes, crossing his arms casually and propping his legs up on the table. Zhou Mi re-reads his answer and the process a few times before speaking.
“X equals two plus or minus two square-root of three?”
Kyuhyun grins, patting Zhou Mi on the shoulder and leaning his body weight on Zhou Mi to help himself up. “See? It’s easy!”
Zhou Mi sits there for five minutes after, staring at the paper in front of him and realizing that his shoulder was kind of tingly.
________
In the beginning, it was just a crush. Even though he was kind of an asshole and only cared about his video games, something about him (Heechul swears it’s his crooked smile) made Zhou Mi’s heart race like a rabbit’s and his mouth tingle and his brain short-circuit; but that was okay, because he was only in like with Kyuhyun and not in love, and as long as things stayed that way, he could think Kyuhyun was cute all he wanted.
But as summer break approaches, Zhou Mi realizes he’s panicking at the thought of going back to China for the summer and Kyuhyun staying in Seoul -- they wouldn’t have contact, what if Kyuhyun finds someone else to be a jerk to? He begins to think of ways around it, although none of them were very plausible: he couldn’t afford an apartment on his own, he was not staying with Heechul for the summer, Kyuhyun would be staying with his parents (and come on, that would be awkward) and it wasn’t like he could just wander up to Kyuhyun’s ex and be like, “hi, I like your ex-boyfriend but need a place to stay for the summer, can I chill here?"
“Jesus Christ, Seasoning,” Heechul says on the day they begin packing their things into boxes. “It’s only two months, not a fucking decade. Stop making it seem like you’re never going to see him again, it’s not like he’ll forget you that quickly.”
“How do you know?” Zhou Mi asks as he attempts to shove a blanket into a box that is probably two times too small. “We’ve only known each other for two months; surely he can forget me in that amount of time.”
Heechul tapes his box shut, then sighs heavily before saying, “Trust me. If what Sungmin is telling me is true, he won’t forget you.”
A few days later, Kyuhyun is helping Zhou Mi pack his stuff into a taxi - the one that would be bringing him to the airport - when he pulls out a piece of paper with his phone number and email on it. No words are exchanged, because none are needed - Kyuhyun simply pulls Zhou Mi into a hug, ignoring the inch-or-so height difference and whispers something in his ear about keeping in contact, because a Mi-less two months was going to be really difficult otherwise.
Instead of being irrationally upset like he had expected, Zhou Mi spends the entire plane ride home smelling his shirt and thinking about Heechul’s comment about not forgetting him, and realizing that he already misses being at school and seeing Kyuhyun’s stupid smirk.
________
Zhou Mi routinely checks his email once a day - although it’s normally filled with nothing but credit card offers and ads for singles’ sites - just because of the slight possibility that maybe Kyuhyun decided to email him today; usually though, he just sees emails screaming at him to join match.com, leaving him feeling like an idiot. It doesn’t dawn on him until mid-July that Kyuhyun hasn’t contacted him simply because he was never given Zhou Mi’s email or phone number.
Dear Kyuhyun,
I’m going to start calling you Kui Xian, is that okay? It can be your Chinese name.
How’s life in Korea? China is still terribly boring, especially since I have summer math homework but no Einstein to help me. :(
He erases this because this doesn’t sound right; it sounds like he’s trying too hard to grasp for a foothold on something to say, instead of just saying whatever pops into his brain like a normal person would.
Dear Kyuhyun,
I miss you. China almost doesn’t feel like home.
Good lord, no, Zhou Mi thinks as he erases this sentence; the last thing he needed was to sound desperate.
So he sighs to himself, forgetting the premise of trying to start a conversation, and simply writes:
Dear Kyuhyun,
How’s your summer going? Sorry it took so long to send you an email; I was waiting for you to send one first, but then I realized that you didn’t have my email.
Hope you’re well,
Zhou Mi.
A few days later, his inbox reads (12) New Messages - six are credit card offers, one that’s offering free hemorrhoid cream, three offers for Victoria’s Secret underwear, an ad for plentyoffish.com, and one from an unknown sender that simply says, 觅.
Dear Zhou Mi,
My summer is miserable. It’s gross and hot and lonely. I wish you were here so I could at least torture you with some pre-calc to prepare you for class next year, hah.
I was getting to the point where I thought you had forgotten I existed. Did you get a boyfriend or something to distract you? Hahaha.
See you when school starts?
Kyuhyun.
Zhou Mi's mind malfunctions as he stares at the email, specifically at the line “Did you get a boyfriend or something to distract you?” because he knows, he knows he never told Kyuhyun he was gay. Instead of replying to the email, however, he lets it go - that subject was not something he feels like elaborating on (at least, not through email) and figures that, at least Kyuhyun was missing him, and that's good enough.
A few weeks later - just before school starts - he receives another email; from Heechul this time:
Seasoning,
I have a surprise for you on the first day of school. No, I won’t tell you what it is, it’s a surprise, god dammit. You’ll thank me later though.
end of part 1