[fic: kyuhyun/zhoumi] that man, part 1/4ish
so this is not earth-shatteringly good, or even particularly good at all, but it is something. and something is something, lately.
title: that man (based on this song from the secret garden soundtrack, and slightly inspired by said drama)
pairing: qmi
rating: pg-13?
summary: kyuhyun is a foreign exchange student in china, hating life. zhoumi is a beautiful creeper. they are wildly incompatible just like in real life. do not stone me.
Kyuhyun has only been in China for about four days when he starts to seriously contemplate giving up and moving back to Korea. He’d had no delusions that spending his second year of college as an exchange student would be easy - he just didn't quite get how inexplicably terrible it would be. He arrives about a week before classes start, has the dorm to himself for about two days, during which he is ashamed to admit he never actually gets up the nerve to leave the room. He talks to both Ryeowook and Sungmin for about an hour each day, and while neither of his best friends come right out and say it, it is abundantly clear to everyone that his situation is grim.
For example, no one had bothered to inform him that all the Chinese he had diligently learned in the previous year would turn out to be completely useless. That all the vocabulary words he had spent hours memorizing would elude him when he actually needed them, and be utterly unrecognizable when they spilled from the lips of strangers, usually in an irritated tone. His Chinese professors might also have done him the favor of informing him that his pronunciation was so lousy that even the simplest of tasks would prove impossible. But it is only when the woman behind the counter at the convenience store responds to his price inquiry with "I don't speak English" that he realizes how screwed he actually is. He spends most of his time perplexed by everyone's refusal to speak as slowly and clearly as the voices on his textbook's practice CD.
It was still pretty unclear to everyone who knew him exactly why he, a math major, was studying abroad, when as his roommate Sungmin helpfully pointed out, 'We can fucking do math just fine in Korean.' To be fair, Kyuhyun didn't really know either, but when he'd seen the announcement about the scholarship hanging in his Chinese classroom, he took the slip. The online application only took about twenty minutes, and Dr. Park was all too happy to write him a glowing letter of recommendation. He didn't really think anything of it after pressing submit, and when he got the phone call a few months later while he was out bowling, it took him a few seconds to figure out what they were saying. It didn't help that he had already had a few beers.
He waited until the end of the second game to tell Ryeowook and Sungmin, and they regarded him with remarkably similar expressions. Ryeowook recovered and spoke first. "You're doing what?"
Kyuhyun sat back, took another long swig of beer. "I'm studying for a year in China. Math and Chinese."
Sungmin, as their major senior, didn't usually bother much with tact. "You barely even leave your room. I literally had to drag you out tonight, but you're going to live in a foreign country?"
Kyuhyun assured himself it was the ill-advised nachos roiling in his stomach, not paralyzing fear of the unknown. "I appreciate the vote of confidence, hyung. Really."
Still, it hadn't been real yet. Not then, not during winter break when he spent eight hours a day in the library hunched over his Chinese textbooks. Not even the night before he left, when he was trying to get up the courage to pack. Sungmin walked in around midnight with a bottle of wine and found Kyuhyun staring at the empty suitcase.
"You're terrified, aren't you?"
Kyuhyun didn't bother answering, just dug his semi-discolored wine glass out from behind his laptop.
Sungmin poured them both glasses, then started packing. It only took him about 15 minutes, and then they stayed up drinking for four more hours. It was better, really, because he was far too hungover the next morning to freak out properly when Sungmin and Ryeowook drove him to the airport.
He even managed to work up a little excitement on the plane as he flicked through the materials the school had sent him. He felt a pang of homesickness already when he found the notes they had tucked in his laptop case, but as the aspirin began to kick in, he started to feel cautiously optimistic. He even found a taxi and got to the dormitory without too much trouble, but it mostly went downhill from there.
His Chinese class is proving far more challenging than any he's done before, and while he finds following the professors' work fairly easy in his math classes, he barely understands a word that is said. Not just by the professor, but anyone. They were right - he's never been a particularly social person, isn't the type to chat up strangers sitting next to him in lecture hall - but in China he doesn't even have the option of social interaction. He is cut off from the world, invisible, except when he is exasperating someone by butchering their language.
He shows up at the student center on Wednesday afternoon after class for the exchange student orientation. People gather in cliques by language, the hysterical rise and fall of English, the tittering of a group of Japanese girls, but even when he spots a group of people chatting in Korean, he hangs back. It shouldn't be so hard, just to go up and introduce himself, but that just... isn't him. He hadn't really realized how much he'd relied on Sungmin to nurture his social life until now, so he ends up sitting in the back of the auditorium by himself, pretending to check his phone every few minutes until the presentation starts.
After a video of smiling, happy people loving life at their new university, they give out some actually useful information, and he is dismissed to the "Global Lounge" to meet his helper, a university student who is, apparently, going to receive course credit for being Kyuhyun's friend and assisting him with anything he might possibly need. He questions the motives and mental state of anyone who would sign up for such a position, then decides that is uncharitable, conceding that unless the person turns out to be a murderer, it probably couldn't make his life any worse.
title: that man (based on this song from the secret garden soundtrack, and slightly inspired by said drama)
pairing: qmi
rating: pg-13?
summary: kyuhyun is a foreign exchange student in china, hating life. zhoumi is a beautiful creeper. they are wildly incompatible just like in real life. do not stone me.
Kyuhyun has only been in China for about four days when he starts to seriously contemplate giving up and moving back to Korea. He’d had no delusions that spending his second year of college as an exchange student would be easy - he just didn't quite get how inexplicably terrible it would be. He arrives about a week before classes start, has the dorm to himself for about two days, during which he is ashamed to admit he never actually gets up the nerve to leave the room. He talks to both Ryeowook and Sungmin for about an hour each day, and while neither of his best friends come right out and say it, it is abundantly clear to everyone that his situation is grim.
For example, no one had bothered to inform him that all the Chinese he had diligently learned in the previous year would turn out to be completely useless. That all the vocabulary words he had spent hours memorizing would elude him when he actually needed them, and be utterly unrecognizable when they spilled from the lips of strangers, usually in an irritated tone. His Chinese professors might also have done him the favor of informing him that his pronunciation was so lousy that even the simplest of tasks would prove impossible. But it is only when the woman behind the counter at the convenience store responds to his price inquiry with "I don't speak English" that he realizes how screwed he actually is. He spends most of his time perplexed by everyone's refusal to speak as slowly and clearly as the voices on his textbook's practice CD.
It was still pretty unclear to everyone who knew him exactly why he, a math major, was studying abroad, when as his roommate Sungmin helpfully pointed out, 'We can fucking do math just fine in Korean.' To be fair, Kyuhyun didn't really know either, but when he'd seen the announcement about the scholarship hanging in his Chinese classroom, he took the slip. The online application only took about twenty minutes, and Dr. Park was all too happy to write him a glowing letter of recommendation. He didn't really think anything of it after pressing submit, and when he got the phone call a few months later while he was out bowling, it took him a few seconds to figure out what they were saying. It didn't help that he had already had a few beers.
He waited until the end of the second game to tell Ryeowook and Sungmin, and they regarded him with remarkably similar expressions. Ryeowook recovered and spoke first. "You're doing what?"
Kyuhyun sat back, took another long swig of beer. "I'm studying for a year in China. Math and Chinese."
Sungmin, as their major senior, didn't usually bother much with tact. "You barely even leave your room. I literally had to drag you out tonight, but you're going to live in a foreign country?"
Kyuhyun assured himself it was the ill-advised nachos roiling in his stomach, not paralyzing fear of the unknown. "I appreciate the vote of confidence, hyung. Really."
Still, it hadn't been real yet. Not then, not during winter break when he spent eight hours a day in the library hunched over his Chinese textbooks. Not even the night before he left, when he was trying to get up the courage to pack. Sungmin walked in around midnight with a bottle of wine and found Kyuhyun staring at the empty suitcase.
"You're terrified, aren't you?"
Kyuhyun didn't bother answering, just dug his semi-discolored wine glass out from behind his laptop.
Sungmin poured them both glasses, then started packing. It only took him about 15 minutes, and then they stayed up drinking for four more hours. It was better, really, because he was far too hungover the next morning to freak out properly when Sungmin and Ryeowook drove him to the airport.
He even managed to work up a little excitement on the plane as he flicked through the materials the school had sent him. He felt a pang of homesickness already when he found the notes they had tucked in his laptop case, but as the aspirin began to kick in, he started to feel cautiously optimistic. He even found a taxi and got to the dormitory without too much trouble, but it mostly went downhill from there.
His Chinese class is proving far more challenging than any he's done before, and while he finds following the professors' work fairly easy in his math classes, he barely understands a word that is said. Not just by the professor, but anyone. They were right - he's never been a particularly social person, isn't the type to chat up strangers sitting next to him in lecture hall - but in China he doesn't even have the option of social interaction. He is cut off from the world, invisible, except when he is exasperating someone by butchering their language.
He shows up at the student center on Wednesday afternoon after class for the exchange student orientation. People gather in cliques by language, the hysterical rise and fall of English, the tittering of a group of Japanese girls, but even when he spots a group of people chatting in Korean, he hangs back. It shouldn't be so hard, just to go up and introduce himself, but that just... isn't him. He hadn't really realized how much he'd relied on Sungmin to nurture his social life until now, so he ends up sitting in the back of the auditorium by himself, pretending to check his phone every few minutes until the presentation starts.
After a video of smiling, happy people loving life at their new university, they give out some actually useful information, and he is dismissed to the "Global Lounge" to meet his helper, a university student who is, apparently, going to receive course credit for being Kyuhyun's friend and assisting him with anything he might possibly need. He questions the motives and mental state of anyone who would sign up for such a position, then decides that is uncharitable, conceding that unless the person turns out to be a murderer, it probably couldn't make his life any worse.