an adventure in the woods
an adventure in the woods
kyuhyun/donghae; g; crack, fluff; 2815 w
kyuhyun doesn't really like donghae, but a series of (un)fortunate events occur and kyuhyun grudgingly changes his mind. kid!suju AU.
for bonomanic as a happy-birthday-and-i-love-you kind of thing.
Kyuhyun doesn’t really like Donghae. He messed up all the crayons in kindergarten and got the red finger paint in the blue (so Kyuhyun had had to paint the sky purple, and he hadn’t liked that at all), and he always got first dibs at the chocolate pudding because Ms. Lee liked him. And he was friends with Hyukjae, who was loud and annoying. At least Kyuhyun was friends with Jongwoon, who was weird at best, but quiet, and Ryeowook who had the voice of a mouse’s. In other words, perfect candidates for friends.
Yes, it was very okay to say that Kyuhyun doesn’t really like Donghae.
So when his mother volunteers him to help out at Donghae’s parents’ farm down the road from their grocery store, he naturally isn’t beside himself with joy at the thought.
“Get out of the house, play with some more people your age,” his mother says.
“I play with Jongwoon and Ryeowook,” Kyuhyun points out.
“Yeah, what, you guys stare at each other?” Sungmin, his older brother, pipes up, and is rewarded with a kick on the shin.
“You spend too much time indoors on the computer, Kyuhyun-ah, it’s not healthy. Little boys should be outside playing in the sun, look at how tanned and nice Donghae looks,” his mother shoos him out of the store, and Kyuhyun finds himself on Donghae’s doorstep before he can counter the (very obviously) flawed argument. His mother exchanges flowery greetings with Donghae’s - oh, just look at Kyuhyun, he’s such a big boy now - yes, how is Donghae? - for a full ten minutes, not even kidding, before he blinks to find Donghae all up in his face grinning like a puppy.
“HI!” Donghae yells, even though Kyuhyun is maybe two point five centimetres away. At most.
“Um. Hi.” Kyuhyun returns the greeting in a much, much flatter tone. His enthusiasm really shows, so his mother shoots lasers at him, a look that clearly says, “play nice, or I’m making you sleep in Sungmin’s room tonight,” so Kyuhyun tries to rearrange his features into something that might be construed as excitement (it turns out much more like a look of constipation, but his mother doesn’t notice).
“Thanks for helping out, Kyuhyunnie,” Donghae’s mother smiles down at him, and Kyuhyun is a well-mannered boy, so he smiles back and allows Donghae to lead him to the back of his house, yards and yards of lettuce seedlings and several cows in the nearby pasture. He can hear chickens in the barn next to the house and he can see apple trees waving their fruit around; it is actually a very pretty place like his mother promised. Loads prettier than the wooden walls of his house and the rows of processed food in their store, anyway.
He decides within the first five minutes that Donghae’s brain moves too fast for comfort, and definitely much too fast for his mouth, because Donghae rattles off a mile a minute changing topics at breakneck speed. Their conversation is somewhat stilted as a result, but it doesn’t matter because Donghae talks enough for the both of them anyway.
“This is what I do for the lettuce, Daddy says that you must get the weeds out because the weeds are bad guys, and the apples are really ripe now so Mommy can make apple pie really soon, oh what did you have for lunch today?” Donghae pauses here to take a breath, but before Kyuhyun can interject with “peanut butter and jelly sandwich, I eat that everyday”, Donghae is off on a roll again.
“I had really yummy kimchi fried rice and my mommy’s special eggs, because we got loads of eggs today! And mommy made me that hard candy that you make over the stove with a ladle, you know that one? But she got mad at me because I took Jonghyun’s share and she said hyungs should always share with their dongsaengs so I had to give Jonghyun’s piece back.” Donghae pouts. “Do you have a dongsaeng? They’re annoying, Jonghyun always follows me around when I’m playing soccer with Hyukjae and then when we put him on my team we always lose.”
“I have a hyung,” Kyuhyun replies on automatic mode, because his mind shuts off a little in awe at Donghae’s ability to speak a million words a minute.
“Ooooooh, I know, Sungmin-hyung, right? I saw him kissing a girl that day,” Donghae looks appropriately scandalized, because even touching girls gives you cooties, this was a rule. Kyuhyun’s brain reboots very quickly to make a mental note so he can blackmail his brother when the need arises, and he silently ticks off a checkbox in the list in his head, titled: Appropriate Behavior for Friends, and subtitled: Lee Donghae. Donghae officially meets the first, most important criteria, so Kyuhyun is okay with spending time with him.
Donghae, however, manages to promptly fail two other categories with astonishing aptitude, Not Putting Me In Embarrassing Situations by turning around too quickly and knocking into Kyuhyun, causing Kyuhyun to plant his face in the mud (even though nobody else was looking, but whatever), as well as Not Doing Embarrassing Things, by talking to the lettuce (“See, this is Aiden. Hello, Aiden! You look so green today!”). He rationalises as he pulls weeds out, though, that Jongwoon does things much worse than that, and he’s still Kyuhyun’s friend, so maybe Donghae isn’t that much of a hopeless case.
Donghae shows him pretty cool stuff too, like how to shoot milk fresh from a cow’s udder straight into your mouth (the milk is gloriously creamy and good), and how to pick the sweetest peaches (the ones with shallower indentations), and how to hit the apple tree the right way so the apples fall (getting Hyukjae to climb up works too). They change the hens’ hay, weed the lettuce patch, fill two buckets of milk, and pick chillies, and by the end of the afternoon Kyuhyun is slightly warmed up to Donghae. Even the rambling isn’t that offensive anymore.
Donghae’s mother rewards him with fresh-from-the-oven, heavenly smelling chocolate chip cookies, a few pints of milk to take home and the best ddeokbokki he has ever tasted in his life. Kyuhyun decides that helping out at Donghae’s isn’t that bad after all.
---
Kyuhyun finds a little skip in his step when he walks to Donghae’s house the second time he goes to help out at the farm. It’s a nice little skip and he decides he rather likes it. It’s a pretty long walk to Donghae’s house, but the trees are pretty and green and the birds are singing and Kyuhyun thinks the summer breeze on his face is rather enjoyable. He doesn’t know why he’d missed out on all of this before, staying behind the counter at their grocery store and using the computer. Computers were nice and all, but they didn’t even have smells. Or the feel of the wind on your cheek. Or out-of-this-world chocolate chip cookies (he’d polished off a good half of the batch Donghae’s mother had given him on the way back).
He is walking along a stretch of Donghae’s farm when he hears his name, and he turns to see Donghae on an old wooden swing. Kyuhyun is a little afraid of swings, having fallen off one and knocked out his one of his milk teeth two years ago, but obviously it wouldn’t do to look like he was afraid of swings in front of Donghae - in front of anyone, really - so he marches up to Donghae with an expression that would probably be taken as a smile if you don’t look too closely.
“HEY KYUHYUN! What did you today? Do you want to come play on the swings? Mommy says we don’t have to pick the apples today and I already milked the cows with Jonghyun so we just have to rake hay and weed the lettuce patch and that takes like a second. So we can play for a bit first!” Donghae grins his toothy grin at Kyuhyun and Kyuhyun has to strain his face muscles considerably to keep his smile on.
Before he knows it he is on the swing and Donghae is rambling again about how he’ll push and he’s the best pusher, Hyukjae says so and every time he pushes Jonghyun refuses to get off so he has to get Mommy to yell at him, don’t you just hate little brothers, but Kyuhyun can’t really hear anything because his heart is going dugeun dugeun and feels like it’s about to jump into his mouth. (Which would actually be kind of cool, because he’s always wanted to see what a heart really looks like, but still. He probably needed his heart in his chest.) He opens his mouth to protest, but nothing comes out and a blob of spit chokes him just as Donghae pushes and Kyuhyun feels himself lifted airborne. His hands grab on for dear life on the swing in some kind of survival reflex and he chokes the rest of his scream past the blob of spit, “AAAAHHHHHHHHH!”
Donghae stops pushing and steadies the swing, and Kyuhyun feels his feet touch the ground, good solid reliable best-friend earth and his heart stops threatening to explode. “What’s wrong, Kyuhyun?” Donghae asks, and he turns around to look at Donghae, “I don’t really like swings.”
Donghae’s eyes become very thoughtful as he contemplates this absurdity for a while, then he says with a tone of affirmation, “I won’t let you fall!”
Kyuhyun doesn’t know what it is, maybe the beautiful shades of green behind Donghae or Donghae’s lips set into assurance or maybe even just Donghae’s very big eyes, but “okay” slips out of his mouth before he knows it and Donghae is pushing him again. He squeezes his eyes shut, but Donghae takes it easy this time, and he is comfortably raised slightly above the ground before swinging back again, and his heart is slowing considerably. A few more swings, then Kyuhyun feels secure enough to open his eyes.
“That wasn’t so bad, right?” Donghae grins at Kyuhyun, and Kyuhyun has to grudgingly nod in reply. “I told you I was the best pusher!” Donghae beams wider, grabbing Kyuhyun’s hand to get off the swing and they make their way towards the field. Kyuhyun doesn’t really hold anyone’s hand other than his mother’s, but it’s kind of okay because Donghae’s hand is warm and rather nice in Kyuhyun’s.
“Can I tell you a secret?” Donghae whispers conspiratorially, even though there is no one within fifty metres of them, let alone within earshot, but Kyuhyun loves secrets, so he dips his head close to Donghae’s. “There’s a really pretty bird in the woods over there,” Donghae points, an army of trees yonder looking dark and kind of evil.
“There aren’t any birds,” Kyuhyun says, “we don’t have birds here.” Donghae wrinkles his nose in disagreement, “I saw it! It’s huge, and it has all the colours of the rainbow and it sings really nicely, I named it Jieun, because it’s a pretty name.” The woods are a little way off Donghae’s farm, at the very end of their village and Kyuhyun never, ever goes there because he’s heard stories from Sungmin-hyung about it being haunted and things like that.
“There aren’t any birds,” Kyuhyun says with much less conviction, because Jieun sounds beautiful and he does kind of want to see a big colourful bird to show off to Jongwoon and Ryeowook.
“Do you want to go check it out?” Donghae asks, and Kyuhyun can’t - won’t - let himself go down as a scaredy cat. “Okay,” he agrees, sounding a lot braver than he feels. The two link hands and they make their way to the woods; each step Kyuhyun takes makes his heart fling itself faster against his ribcage and he’s pretty sure Donghae can hear his heart beating.
They reach the woods quickly - too quickly, in fact - and Kyuhyun gulps down another blob of spit that seems to be choking his airways. Donghae is striding on with some sort of determined march deep into the woods and calling, “Heyyyyyyyy, Jieun, here,” making clicking noises with his tongue. Kyuhyun isn’t a scaredy cat, no he isn’t, but, you know, what if there’s a monster in the woods?
In any case, Donghae pulls Kyuhyun into the woods, and they slip through the trees and push past bushes to look for flashes of colour against green. Kyuhyun thinks it isn’t that scary now that he’s in the woods, and the trees aren’t really that tall anyway so the sunlight shines through the foliage and it’s pretty bright inside the little forest, so it’s okay. Picking up the search for Jieun more enthusiastically, Kyuhyun and Donghae psst their way deeper into the woods before they hear a rustle to their left. A rustle very, very close by.
Donghae screams, and the two run blindly through leaves and branches till they tumble out into a small clearing. Donghae looks at Kyuhyun, and Kyuhyun can practically hear the ‘Jaws’ soundtrack playing in his head as they stare at each other because they are, quite possibly, lost. All the trees surrounding the clearing look exactly the same, and Kyuhyun isn’t even sure where they’d come from to reach the clearing, and they are so dead.
Donghae circles the perimeter of the clearing before stopping, “I think we came from here.” Kyuhyun throws him a skeptical look, before the leaves about a metre deep into the direction Donghae is pointing at crackle very ominously and Donghae throws his body next to Kyuhyun’s. They huddle together, Kyuhyun finding enough breath in him to whisper, “what was that?”
Donghae doesn’t answer, and Kyuhyun thinks he can see a pair of bright eyes blinking at him through the foliage. He is literally scared witless, and his heart is going dugeun dugeun fifty times faster than it does when he’s on a swing or when Soyeon from the next class smiles at him. It is an eternity of bated breath and scary music and almost-peeing pants before something comes bounding out of the trees, and he huddles into a ball with Donghae, screaming his lungs out.
The Something doesn’t chomp on him with big, scary sharp teeth. The Something doesn’t grab him up and take him somewhere scary either. All he can hear is The Something’s panting and he can feel The Something swiping wet across his arm.
Kyuhyun looks up to see a puppy staring at him (licking him, actually).
“Wow!” Donghae yells in apparent joy, bounding up and stroking the golden retriever. “Look! Kyuhyun, look, we found a dog! Let’s bring him back! Mommy will let me keep him, we can play with him and throw Frisbees for him to catch and we can have him pull our sled during winter! Wow!”
Kyuhyun is actually secretly pretty fond of dogs, except that his mother has an allergy so they can’t have a puppy, so he is also really overjoyed about this dog that has practically fallen from the heavens. “Let’s bring him home!” Kyuhyun nods at Donghae, and he stands up to realise that they don’t even have to carry the puppy; it never leaves their feet.
The trio navigate their way out of the woods, making many unnecessary turns and Donghae keeps insisting that they’ve passed by the same tree several times, though Kyuhyun is skeptical because they all look the same anyway, and they make a small detour the one time Donghae thought he saw a flash of Jieun’s blue and purple and orange feathers (not really). It is by some miraculous turn of events and probably a lot of good karma that they finally, finally break out of the woods - Kyuhyun thinks Donghae’s house has never looked more inviting. The skies have already turned dark and Donghae’s mother gives them a good lecture about never to disappear again, we’ve been worried sick, you’re grounded for a week, but is fairly humoured when Donghae explains about the puppy and asks if they can keep it. The puppy does a very convincing act of looking like it needs a home, and between Donghae’s pleads and Kyuhyun’s persuasions the puppy is allowed to stay.
The puppy’s mouth is too small to hold a Frisbee and is definitely too weak to pull a sled, but Kyuhyun and Donghae have loads of fun with it anyway. Donghae also rises to the ranks of being one of Kyuhyun’s friends, because even though he does Embarrassing Things and Talks Too Much, there’re some things that just make friends of two people, so Kyuhyun fills “Having an Adventure in the woods” in the “Other” section for Donghae’s Appropriate Behavior for Friends checklist with a flourish, and gets ready to have a go on the swing (Donghae pushing, of course).
kyuhyun/donghae; g; crack, fluff; 2815 w
kyuhyun doesn't really like donghae, but a series of (un)fortunate events occur and kyuhyun grudgingly changes his mind. kid!suju AU.
for bonomanic as a happy-birthday-and-i-love-you kind of thing.
Kyuhyun doesn’t really like Donghae. He messed up all the crayons in kindergarten and got the red finger paint in the blue (so Kyuhyun had had to paint the sky purple, and he hadn’t liked that at all), and he always got first dibs at the chocolate pudding because Ms. Lee liked him. And he was friends with Hyukjae, who was loud and annoying. At least Kyuhyun was friends with Jongwoon, who was weird at best, but quiet, and Ryeowook who had the voice of a mouse’s. In other words, perfect candidates for friends.
Yes, it was very okay to say that Kyuhyun doesn’t really like Donghae.
So when his mother volunteers him to help out at Donghae’s parents’ farm down the road from their grocery store, he naturally isn’t beside himself with joy at the thought.
“Get out of the house, play with some more people your age,” his mother says.
“I play with Jongwoon and Ryeowook,” Kyuhyun points out.
“Yeah, what, you guys stare at each other?” Sungmin, his older brother, pipes up, and is rewarded with a kick on the shin.
“You spend too much time indoors on the computer, Kyuhyun-ah, it’s not healthy. Little boys should be outside playing in the sun, look at how tanned and nice Donghae looks,” his mother shoos him out of the store, and Kyuhyun finds himself on Donghae’s doorstep before he can counter the (very obviously) flawed argument. His mother exchanges flowery greetings with Donghae’s - oh, just look at Kyuhyun, he’s such a big boy now - yes, how is Donghae? - for a full ten minutes, not even kidding, before he blinks to find Donghae all up in his face grinning like a puppy.
“HI!” Donghae yells, even though Kyuhyun is maybe two point five centimetres away. At most.
“Um. Hi.” Kyuhyun returns the greeting in a much, much flatter tone. His enthusiasm really shows, so his mother shoots lasers at him, a look that clearly says, “play nice, or I’m making you sleep in Sungmin’s room tonight,” so Kyuhyun tries to rearrange his features into something that might be construed as excitement (it turns out much more like a look of constipation, but his mother doesn’t notice).
“Thanks for helping out, Kyuhyunnie,” Donghae’s mother smiles down at him, and Kyuhyun is a well-mannered boy, so he smiles back and allows Donghae to lead him to the back of his house, yards and yards of lettuce seedlings and several cows in the nearby pasture. He can hear chickens in the barn next to the house and he can see apple trees waving their fruit around; it is actually a very pretty place like his mother promised. Loads prettier than the wooden walls of his house and the rows of processed food in their store, anyway.
He decides within the first five minutes that Donghae’s brain moves too fast for comfort, and definitely much too fast for his mouth, because Donghae rattles off a mile a minute changing topics at breakneck speed. Their conversation is somewhat stilted as a result, but it doesn’t matter because Donghae talks enough for the both of them anyway.
“This is what I do for the lettuce, Daddy says that you must get the weeds out because the weeds are bad guys, and the apples are really ripe now so Mommy can make apple pie really soon, oh what did you have for lunch today?” Donghae pauses here to take a breath, but before Kyuhyun can interject with “peanut butter and jelly sandwich, I eat that everyday”, Donghae is off on a roll again.
“I had really yummy kimchi fried rice and my mommy’s special eggs, because we got loads of eggs today! And mommy made me that hard candy that you make over the stove with a ladle, you know that one? But she got mad at me because I took Jonghyun’s share and she said hyungs should always share with their dongsaengs so I had to give Jonghyun’s piece back.” Donghae pouts. “Do you have a dongsaeng? They’re annoying, Jonghyun always follows me around when I’m playing soccer with Hyukjae and then when we put him on my team we always lose.”
“I have a hyung,” Kyuhyun replies on automatic mode, because his mind shuts off a little in awe at Donghae’s ability to speak a million words a minute.
“Ooooooh, I know, Sungmin-hyung, right? I saw him kissing a girl that day,” Donghae looks appropriately scandalized, because even touching girls gives you cooties, this was a rule. Kyuhyun’s brain reboots very quickly to make a mental note so he can blackmail his brother when the need arises, and he silently ticks off a checkbox in the list in his head, titled: Appropriate Behavior for Friends, and subtitled: Lee Donghae. Donghae officially meets the first, most important criteria, so Kyuhyun is okay with spending time with him.
Donghae, however, manages to promptly fail two other categories with astonishing aptitude, Not Putting Me In Embarrassing Situations by turning around too quickly and knocking into Kyuhyun, causing Kyuhyun to plant his face in the mud (even though nobody else was looking, but whatever), as well as Not Doing Embarrassing Things, by talking to the lettuce (“See, this is Aiden. Hello, Aiden! You look so green today!”). He rationalises as he pulls weeds out, though, that Jongwoon does things much worse than that, and he’s still Kyuhyun’s friend, so maybe Donghae isn’t that much of a hopeless case.
Donghae shows him pretty cool stuff too, like how to shoot milk fresh from a cow’s udder straight into your mouth (the milk is gloriously creamy and good), and how to pick the sweetest peaches (the ones with shallower indentations), and how to hit the apple tree the right way so the apples fall (getting Hyukjae to climb up works too). They change the hens’ hay, weed the lettuce patch, fill two buckets of milk, and pick chillies, and by the end of the afternoon Kyuhyun is slightly warmed up to Donghae. Even the rambling isn’t that offensive anymore.
Donghae’s mother rewards him with fresh-from-the-oven, heavenly smelling chocolate chip cookies, a few pints of milk to take home and the best ddeokbokki he has ever tasted in his life. Kyuhyun decides that helping out at Donghae’s isn’t that bad after all.
---
Kyuhyun finds a little skip in his step when he walks to Donghae’s house the second time he goes to help out at the farm. It’s a nice little skip and he decides he rather likes it. It’s a pretty long walk to Donghae’s house, but the trees are pretty and green and the birds are singing and Kyuhyun thinks the summer breeze on his face is rather enjoyable. He doesn’t know why he’d missed out on all of this before, staying behind the counter at their grocery store and using the computer. Computers were nice and all, but they didn’t even have smells. Or the feel of the wind on your cheek. Or out-of-this-world chocolate chip cookies (he’d polished off a good half of the batch Donghae’s mother had given him on the way back).
He is walking along a stretch of Donghae’s farm when he hears his name, and he turns to see Donghae on an old wooden swing. Kyuhyun is a little afraid of swings, having fallen off one and knocked out his one of his milk teeth two years ago, but obviously it wouldn’t do to look like he was afraid of swings in front of Donghae - in front of anyone, really - so he marches up to Donghae with an expression that would probably be taken as a smile if you don’t look too closely.
“HEY KYUHYUN! What did you today? Do you want to come play on the swings? Mommy says we don’t have to pick the apples today and I already milked the cows with Jonghyun so we just have to rake hay and weed the lettuce patch and that takes like a second. So we can play for a bit first!” Donghae grins his toothy grin at Kyuhyun and Kyuhyun has to strain his face muscles considerably to keep his smile on.
Before he knows it he is on the swing and Donghae is rambling again about how he’ll push and he’s the best pusher, Hyukjae says so and every time he pushes Jonghyun refuses to get off so he has to get Mommy to yell at him, don’t you just hate little brothers, but Kyuhyun can’t really hear anything because his heart is going dugeun dugeun and feels like it’s about to jump into his mouth. (Which would actually be kind of cool, because he’s always wanted to see what a heart really looks like, but still. He probably needed his heart in his chest.) He opens his mouth to protest, but nothing comes out and a blob of spit chokes him just as Donghae pushes and Kyuhyun feels himself lifted airborne. His hands grab on for dear life on the swing in some kind of survival reflex and he chokes the rest of his scream past the blob of spit, “AAAAHHHHHHHHH!”
Donghae stops pushing and steadies the swing, and Kyuhyun feels his feet touch the ground, good solid reliable best-friend earth and his heart stops threatening to explode. “What’s wrong, Kyuhyun?” Donghae asks, and he turns around to look at Donghae, “I don’t really like swings.”
Donghae’s eyes become very thoughtful as he contemplates this absurdity for a while, then he says with a tone of affirmation, “I won’t let you fall!”
Kyuhyun doesn’t know what it is, maybe the beautiful shades of green behind Donghae or Donghae’s lips set into assurance or maybe even just Donghae’s very big eyes, but “okay” slips out of his mouth before he knows it and Donghae is pushing him again. He squeezes his eyes shut, but Donghae takes it easy this time, and he is comfortably raised slightly above the ground before swinging back again, and his heart is slowing considerably. A few more swings, then Kyuhyun feels secure enough to open his eyes.
“That wasn’t so bad, right?” Donghae grins at Kyuhyun, and Kyuhyun has to grudgingly nod in reply. “I told you I was the best pusher!” Donghae beams wider, grabbing Kyuhyun’s hand to get off the swing and they make their way towards the field. Kyuhyun doesn’t really hold anyone’s hand other than his mother’s, but it’s kind of okay because Donghae’s hand is warm and rather nice in Kyuhyun’s.
“Can I tell you a secret?” Donghae whispers conspiratorially, even though there is no one within fifty metres of them, let alone within earshot, but Kyuhyun loves secrets, so he dips his head close to Donghae’s. “There’s a really pretty bird in the woods over there,” Donghae points, an army of trees yonder looking dark and kind of evil.
“There aren’t any birds,” Kyuhyun says, “we don’t have birds here.” Donghae wrinkles his nose in disagreement, “I saw it! It’s huge, and it has all the colours of the rainbow and it sings really nicely, I named it Jieun, because it’s a pretty name.” The woods are a little way off Donghae’s farm, at the very end of their village and Kyuhyun never, ever goes there because he’s heard stories from Sungmin-hyung about it being haunted and things like that.
“There aren’t any birds,” Kyuhyun says with much less conviction, because Jieun sounds beautiful and he does kind of want to see a big colourful bird to show off to Jongwoon and Ryeowook.
“Do you want to go check it out?” Donghae asks, and Kyuhyun can’t - won’t - let himself go down as a scaredy cat. “Okay,” he agrees, sounding a lot braver than he feels. The two link hands and they make their way to the woods; each step Kyuhyun takes makes his heart fling itself faster against his ribcage and he’s pretty sure Donghae can hear his heart beating.
They reach the woods quickly - too quickly, in fact - and Kyuhyun gulps down another blob of spit that seems to be choking his airways. Donghae is striding on with some sort of determined march deep into the woods and calling, “Heyyyyyyyy, Jieun, here,” making clicking noises with his tongue. Kyuhyun isn’t a scaredy cat, no he isn’t, but, you know, what if there’s a monster in the woods?
In any case, Donghae pulls Kyuhyun into the woods, and they slip through the trees and push past bushes to look for flashes of colour against green. Kyuhyun thinks it isn’t that scary now that he’s in the woods, and the trees aren’t really that tall anyway so the sunlight shines through the foliage and it’s pretty bright inside the little forest, so it’s okay. Picking up the search for Jieun more enthusiastically, Kyuhyun and Donghae psst their way deeper into the woods before they hear a rustle to their left. A rustle very, very close by.
Donghae screams, and the two run blindly through leaves and branches till they tumble out into a small clearing. Donghae looks at Kyuhyun, and Kyuhyun can practically hear the ‘Jaws’ soundtrack playing in his head as they stare at each other because they are, quite possibly, lost. All the trees surrounding the clearing look exactly the same, and Kyuhyun isn’t even sure where they’d come from to reach the clearing, and they are so dead.
Donghae circles the perimeter of the clearing before stopping, “I think we came from here.” Kyuhyun throws him a skeptical look, before the leaves about a metre deep into the direction Donghae is pointing at crackle very ominously and Donghae throws his body next to Kyuhyun’s. They huddle together, Kyuhyun finding enough breath in him to whisper, “what was that?”
Donghae doesn’t answer, and Kyuhyun thinks he can see a pair of bright eyes blinking at him through the foliage. He is literally scared witless, and his heart is going dugeun dugeun fifty times faster than it does when he’s on a swing or when Soyeon from the next class smiles at him. It is an eternity of bated breath and scary music and almost-peeing pants before something comes bounding out of the trees, and he huddles into a ball with Donghae, screaming his lungs out.
The Something doesn’t chomp on him with big, scary sharp teeth. The Something doesn’t grab him up and take him somewhere scary either. All he can hear is The Something’s panting and he can feel The Something swiping wet across his arm.
Kyuhyun looks up to see a puppy staring at him (licking him, actually).
“Wow!” Donghae yells in apparent joy, bounding up and stroking the golden retriever. “Look! Kyuhyun, look, we found a dog! Let’s bring him back! Mommy will let me keep him, we can play with him and throw Frisbees for him to catch and we can have him pull our sled during winter! Wow!”
Kyuhyun is actually secretly pretty fond of dogs, except that his mother has an allergy so they can’t have a puppy, so he is also really overjoyed about this dog that has practically fallen from the heavens. “Let’s bring him home!” Kyuhyun nods at Donghae, and he stands up to realise that they don’t even have to carry the puppy; it never leaves their feet.
The trio navigate their way out of the woods, making many unnecessary turns and Donghae keeps insisting that they’ve passed by the same tree several times, though Kyuhyun is skeptical because they all look the same anyway, and they make a small detour the one time Donghae thought he saw a flash of Jieun’s blue and purple and orange feathers (not really). It is by some miraculous turn of events and probably a lot of good karma that they finally, finally break out of the woods - Kyuhyun thinks Donghae’s house has never looked more inviting. The skies have already turned dark and Donghae’s mother gives them a good lecture about never to disappear again, we’ve been worried sick, you’re grounded for a week, but is fairly humoured when Donghae explains about the puppy and asks if they can keep it. The puppy does a very convincing act of looking like it needs a home, and between Donghae’s pleads and Kyuhyun’s persuasions the puppy is allowed to stay.
The puppy’s mouth is too small to hold a Frisbee and is definitely too weak to pull a sled, but Kyuhyun and Donghae have loads of fun with it anyway. Donghae also rises to the ranks of being one of Kyuhyun’s friends, because even though he does Embarrassing Things and Talks Too Much, there’re some things that just make friends of two people, so Kyuhyun fills “Having an Adventure in the woods” in the “Other” section for Donghae’s Appropriate Behavior for Friends checklist with a flourish, and gets ready to have a go on the swing (Donghae pushing, of course).