Title: the superhero effect
Pairing: Sunggyu/Woohyun
Rating: G
the superhero effect
His balcony overlooks an intersection, and in the middle of the night, he can hear the faint tick-tick-ticking from the pedestrian crossing meter.
It’s close to twelve and it is a warm night and Sunggyu does not understand the purpose of balconies. No one admires the stars these days and most agree that smoking is a counterproductive habit. From this height, the roads are quiet and the streetlights are bright and Sunggyu hooks his fingers around the metal bar and continues looking at nothing. Occasionally, the meter ticks.
There are taxis and the some cars and then there is a bus, moving too slowly and Sunggyu can see from an angle that it is almost empty. There is also a lone figure, making its way on the sidewalk. The person approaches the crossing and the bus continues to move forward.
The meter is not ticking.
Suddenly, Sunggyu’s palms are slick. Under the light, he can see the person is a boy, no older than him. There are headphones plugged in his ear. You idiot, Sunggyu thinks, his mind racing but there is no use. He has never been telepathic.
The boy steps off the sidewalk and there is nothing he can do but push himself over the edge: it's almost automatic. Sunggyu has to close his eyes, because the ground is rushing upwards and his heart is sinking and it’s almost absurd that he’s scared of heights. The moment he feels his feet touch solid asphalt, he is running, running towards the boy but the bus threatens to reach him first.
In a split second: he jumps and pushes the boy down and flings his arms outwards. There is a thud and the sickening crunch of metal. The broken windshield rains glass all over him.
Surprisingly, the bus shudders to a halt and Sunggyu looks up to see that the airbag has been deployed - the driver is out cold. No one stirs inside, and Sunggyu thinks with wild relief that there are no witnesses.
He shakes glass off his shirt and Sunggyu pulls the bus carefully onto the curb. He dents the traffic light and there, things actually look like an accident. The adrenaline rushes through him and this, all this, is almost a letdown; it's too easy. There is a groan and Sunggyu looks back to find the boy, headphones pooled around his feet. Shit, one witness.
There is a clean cut across his forehead, blood starting to stain the front of his shirt, but he’s looking at Sunggyu with steady eyes. “You saved me.”
“I shouldn’t have needed to. You’re an idiot.”
And the boy breaks into a wide grin as the faraway sirens start. His gaze begins to turn glassy - the wound is a surface one, but the night is cool and he could lose a lot of blood and. Well. If he’s going to save a person like how they do it in those stupid movies, he might as well do it right.
Sunggyu exhales.
Sunggyu wakes up to the sound of pans clanging and cutlery on plates and he shoots up from the couch. Fuck I shouldn’t have fallen asleep the last thing I need is a dead body in my apartment with no explanation and-
“Good morning. I found bandages in your bathroom cabinet; I hope you don’t mind,” the boy says, gesturing to the strip of white bandaged around his head. He’s still poking at something in the pan with his spatula. Sunggyu cannot remember when his apartment had smelled so good.
“You’re not dead.”
His eyes widen. “Right, about that. Thank yo-”
Sunggyu shakes his head and the boy stops talking. “Who are you?”
He turns around and when he turns back, there is a stack of thick pancakes on a plate in his hand. “I’m Nam Woohyun. I work at a diner nearby. You know the one with famous pancakes and cheap coffee?”
Sunggyu shakes his head again. “So you’re a chef.”
He laughs brightly. “I wish. I'm just a cook. Anyway, breakfast is the least I could make for you. Even if uh, the eggs and flour and milk are yours.”
They eat in silence and the pancakes are fluffy and actually really, really good and Woohyun tries to make small talk (“Your place is really nice” and “That’s a nice guitar”) as Sunggyu watches Woohyun for the telltale questions in his eyes.
The more Sunggyu can’t find any, the harder he looks.
“...Is there something on my face? Flour? Maple syrup?”
Sunggyu blinks quickly. “No, it’s nothing.” He tries to laugh for good measure, but it comes out sounding shaky and hollow.
Woohyun stands. “I’ll return this shirt to you after I wash it. Thanks for...everything.”
Sunggyu stands as well and makes his way to the door, the relief and confusion and curiosity clouding his vision as he watches Woohyun make his way out the door.
“Do you remember anything,” Sunggyu asks quickly, because curiosity overpowers the other two and he flinches in spite of himself.
“Yes.” Woohyun stops immediately and licks his lips, looking almost as uncomfortable as Sunggyu. “You stopped the bus with your bare hands. You saved me. You moved the bus and you dented the streetlight to make it look like an accident.”
“It was a traffic light, not a streetlight.”
Woohyun blinks slowly at him. “You’re not denying anything.”
Slam the door in his face; you’ll never need to see this boy ever again. But it’s too late. “I’m Kim Sunggyu.”
Sunggyu’s first memory is when he is four years old and his sister had brought out her dollhouse to show him the tiny rooms, with its cloth curtains and occupants with their movable limbs and painted on smiles.
The roof is a brilliant red, and Sunggyu reaches out to poke it. It splinters over his sister’s hand effortlessly and he can still hear her shrill screams, all these years later.
The most likely scenario is that the driver lost control of the bus, crashing it into the traffic light at the intersection, the newsreader says. The driver was treated for a sprained wrist and none of the other five passengers were hurt.
There’s a knock on the front of his door, and Sunggyu turns down the volume before he rises from the couch.
It’s Woohyun, sans headphones and in a vivid white uniform. The bandage across his head has been replaced by a neat plaster. He hands Sunggyu a folded shirt, and smiles easily.
“Did you see the news?”
“About the crash?”
Sunggyu nods.
“They got it wrong, though.” Sunggyu frowns at him. There are no neighbours around, but still he steps to the side and Woohyun walks in. “I brought dinner,” Woohyun continues inside, placing a plastic bag onto the counter and drawing out containers of rice, mixed vegetables and meat.
“That's presumptuous of you.”
“Can’t you tell the future? Anticipate my actions?”
“I’m not- ”
“But you’re a superhero.”
Sunggyu laughs humourlessly; people always think of the grand and fictional. “I’m not a hero. I don’t spend my time listening to police scanners or tracking the newspapers for whereabouts of suspected murderers.”
Woohyun reaches for two bowls from the top left cupboard.
“How did you know that’s where the plates are kept?”
“You are a deep sleeper,” Woohyun replies with a shrug. “And it doesn’t really matter how you define it, you are super.”
Super is a nice way of putting it.
Sunggyu grows up with a talent for destroying things: tables when he presses down on too hard, tiles on the floor of his house when his father comes home late again and his mother keeps telling him Soon, friendships when the other boys shun him because he always wins at tag and arm wrestling.
Growing up, he does have a friend though, a boy who doesn’t get angry when Sunggyu desperately tries to lose at games but still wins anyway, who laughs when Sunggyu wins their daily race home from school. Someone who doesn’t tease him for his eyes; someone who does not have a sister who is afraid of him but sisters who pinch his cheeks and give him sticks of pepero.
Jang Dongwoo moves to Canada a year before high school and Sunggyu crushes the railing at the airport as he waves goodbye with one hand, the other gripped tightly around the cold metal divider.
Woohyun even brings dessert: chocolate cake with chocolate sauce he warms up in the microwave and Sunggyu keeps the balcony door closed because sound travels and words are sounds.
“What was so important on your music player? It’s such a stupid thing to do, listening to music when you’re walking on the road and it’s late at night.”
Woohyun eats rather obscenely, because the chocolate sauce drips off his spoon and his tongue has to dart over the metal. “The song is important to me.”
“Worth your life?”
“I really like singing,” Woohyun replies, but the knot between his eyebrow makes him look regretful. “How about you? Do you work?”
“I came to Seoul looking for a job.”
“Oh?”
“I haven’t found one yet.”
“There’s a vacancy at the diner,” Woohyun says. “They’re in dire need of a waiter.”
“Not my calling,” Sunggyu replies. “I’m auditioning.”
Woohyun stops licking his spoon. “Acting?”
“Singing. I want to be a singer.”
He laughs. “That's funny. The song I was listening to? I was perfecting it, because I want to be a singer as well.”
“A fireman? That way when you break down doors, it would be natural. Expected,” his mother says.
“A doctor?” his father offers. “You get to-”
“-save lives the normal way, yeah.” Sunggyu stops twirling his high school certificate in his hands. The national admission examinations are two weeks away. He has sat through variations of this conversation his entire life. “I don’t want to rely on my abilities.”
“We’re more concerned with protecting you, Sunggyu,” his mother sighs and Sunggyu bites back a bitter smile. It’s funny, what he’s expected to do versus how he’s expected to act. There are only two choices: he is either saving lives or destroying his own.
“I think I want to be a singer.”
His parents look at him as though he there is nothing he wants more in life than to go by another name and dress in a mask and neon tights: a textbook superhero broadcasting his unusual abilities.
“Singing,” his father starts and Sunggyu cuts him off.
“Singing is a talent as well. It’s an ability I don’t have to be hide or be afraid of. That other people don’t have to be afraid of. Maybe then Nayoung-noona would visit us sometimes.”
The ‘Why My Sister is Never Around’ card is the last one Sunggyu wants to use on his parents, but it works perfectly because three days later, he’s on his way to Seoul with a myriad of songs playing in his head and not enough time to sing them all.
“Do I have chocolate on my face, because you’re starting to stare again.”
You have a really nice tongue, Sunggyu thinks but that is only part of the point. “I’m surprised you took this entire thing so well.”
“It’s only been three days. I might still be in shock. And I have to ask - have you actually saved a person before?”
Perhaps that’s the reason why he always goes out onto the balcony when he can’t sleep. Perhaps that is why he lies awake in bed, listening to the distant ticking, hoping to hear something else instead - a shrill scream, the whine of burning rubber. Perhaps that is why balconies are built, for people like him to watch and wait. “I’ve never actually thought about it,” Sunggyu says and it’s mostly the truth. “You’re the first.”
Dongwoo does not leave him because he chooses to, and in some ways, when Sunggyu looks back at it, he could have stopped Dongwoo. The car could have broken down and Dongwoo could have missed his flight or all of Dongwoo's bags could have broken zips and ruined wheels; even the road itself could be ruined, if Sunggyu puts his mind to it, making the journey to the airport impossible.
As the days lead to Dongwoo's departure, thoughts like Dongwoo with a broken ankle or arm or back crosses his mind and Sunggyu understands why his sister is so terrified, why his parents are so cautious, why Dongwoo deserves to live in another continent and timezone.
Excitement had pooled at the base of his stomach and there was a thrill that coursed through his blood, but Nam Woohyun would be the last.
Woohyun leaves Sunggyu his number at the end of that dinner he had brought over, and there’s only so long Sunggyu can continue to play his guitar and be rejected from another audition and stare out from the balcony.
The diner is deserted, but it's almost one in the morning.
“Hi, welcome to-oh, hi.” Woohyun says, placing the faded menu down in front of Sunggyu. The plaster is gone and his forehead is perfect. It is as though nothing had happened.
“You’re here.” Sunggyu can’t keep the surprise from his voice.
“Well, I work here. During night shifts, I even double as the waiter.”
“No, I mean you’re still here, you haven’t disappeared like them,” Stop, he wills his mouth and the words and the problems, "like Nayoung-noona or Dongwoo-" He finally has himself under control when a long, clean crack spreads across the table. Sunggyu closes his eyes. “I’m sorry.”
“For what?”
“The broken table. The short monologue.”
“Drunk teenagers break things in here all the time. After throwing up everywhere, too. And I don’t know, you’re kind of...interesting.”
“My very obvious issues, interesting?” Sunggyu edges out of the long seat, but Woohyun moves closer and he stops moving.
“That you actually have issues.”
“Why wouldn’t I have problems,” Sunggyu asks, confused.
“Cause you’re a superhero-”
“Woohyun,” Sunggyu grits past clenched teeth, “I am not a superhero.”
“That someone with superhuman powers,” Woohyun corrects himself with a sigh, “can have just as many problems as any other ordinary person. That just because you can fly doesn’t mean you’re less troubled. And you can’t deny that I can refer to you as a superhero, since you did save me.”
Sunggyu is not going to deny Woohyun’s last point, not on the grounds of logic because it is well, nice and almost embarrassingly sentimental. “I can’t fly,” he says instead. “I can’t stop time. I can’t teleport.”
Woohyun leans forward, quickly. Too quickly for him to know what Woohyun’s about to do but slow enough for him to move to the side - most things in this world are slow enough for him to avoid, but Sunggyu does not move. Their lips meet briefly and a different kind of excitement pools in Sunggyu’s stomach.
“And you obviously can’t read minds,” Woohyun finishes as he pulls away, cheeks flushed.
+ formspring+ concrit