I don't care, no I wouldn't dare to fix the twist in you
Title: Compound Fracture
Fandom: Super Junior
Rating: G
Pairing: Qmi
Summary: The value of saying what you mean, and meaning what you say. ( laundromat au aside)
A/N: /sigh I swear I was writing porn for 太完美, then I made the mistake of listening to the rest of the mini ;; and as usual, thank you to blahnicity for helping me fine tune ♥
His week had sucked so thoroughly that Kyuhyun had wanted nothing more than to collapse into bed at the end of each day; which could be eleven pm, two am or whenever he finished enough work to be able to justify stretching his creaky joints and unfolding himself from in front of his computer. Half the time he didn’t even bother with dinner, simply crawling under the covers and sleeping almost too deeply to feel rested at all.
Towards the end of the week, Zhou Mi had stopped hovering, careful suggestions of food and mental-health breaks abandoned. He waved a hand when Zhou Mi told him he was leaving for class, grunted when Zhou Mi said he’d be going to bed in a few minutes, nodding and offering a quiet thanks when Zhou Mi wordlessly set a bowl of noodles beside him and sighing as apologetically as possible with all sorts of numbers running in and out of his head when Zhou Mi collected the untouched dish a little while later.
He’d been at this problem for a solid three hours, trying to remind himself that extra credit was never optional. He rubbed at a stray lash in his eye, fingers stumbling across the keys accidentally and then everything was suddenly highlighted in blue and then just as quickly it was all gone. He yanked his hand back from the keyboard with a panicked gasp, trying to calm himself into believing that the undo option would bring it all back, that there had to be an auto-save. But no matter what he tried, it kept coming back down to the fact that all his effort had just been obliterated.
He could feel the scream crawling up the back of his throat, accompanied by a fierce pounding behind his eyelids.
“Um, Kui Xian? I know you’re busy but-”
A deep breath would have been a great idea, but upon opening his mouth to inhale, accidental words flew out instead, “No, whatever it is, no. I’m clearly trying to get this work finished and if you keep interrupting me, that will never happen.”
Zhou Mi’s posture went rigid and Kyuhyun’s anger bled right out of him at the sight. He fumbled for words as Zhou Mi took a few steps closer, setting a mug of tea down on the table, blinking at the floor, teeth biting his bottom lip white before he nodded and disappeared up the stairs.
Kyuhyun muttered a curse into his hands, rubbing at his face as his stomach rolled with shame, regret washing over him. That was so entirely uncalled for. He knew if he went upstairs Zhou Mi would just tell him it was alright, smile pulled tight as he tried to make himself understand why Kyuhyun was a royal prick, somehow finding a way to love him at his worst. And Kyuhyun would only end up yelling again, telling Zhou Mi that it wasn’t alright, that he shouldn’t be so accepting of bad treatment. Zhou Mi’s smile would waver just enough for Kyuhyun to curl his fists and wonder how it was that Zhou Mi’s apologies always managed to make him feel like the scum of the Earth. And he’d kick himself for not being able to just apologise like a normal person without making things escalate so much further than they ever needed to go.
He slapped a hand across his forehead and sort of felt like he deserved the answering throb of pain that pinged from temple to temple. He glanced back at the tea Zhou Mi had left, finally noticing the two pain pills resting next to it.
It didn’t take much to convince himself that he’d earned every agonizing minute of the two and a half hours it took him to re-do the problem. But after he’d shut his laptop down (double checking his save first), he glanced at the couch and couldn’t really keep on with the belief that punishing himself was going to make Zhou Mi feel better. He dragged his feet on the stairs, pausing outside the door and hating himself for sort of wishing that Zhou Mi would already be asleep.
He wasn’t completely relieved to find Zhou Mi snoring lightly, squished so far onto his side of the bed, Kyuhyun was a little afraid that if he shifted a hair in his sleep, he’d end up on the floor. He changed into pajama pants and carefully lay down in the gigantic space left for him. The two or three seconds he lasted should have made it into a record book somewhere. He huffed and circled an arm around Zhou Mi’s waist, tugging him away from the edge of the mattress, “So apparently you only have good balance when you’re asleep.”
When no answer was forthcoming, he sank under the blankets and pressed his nose to the nape of Zhou Mi’s neck, his throat tight as he whispered, “Sorry, okay?”
That he was utterly exhausted was his first thought as he came back into consciousness, ceiling coming into focus above him, the light cast over it was coming from the wrong direction for it to be sunlight. So what was he doing awake? He sighed and flung an arm out to the side- of course. He yawned and sat up, squinting in the dim lamp light, “Zhou Mi?”
The sting of a permanent marker hit his nose as he edged towards the end of the bed and found Zhou Mi seated on the floor with a pile of socks beside him. He looked up from the last marker stroke of Kyuhyun’s name on the inside of the sock in his hand. “Oh, I didn’t mean to wake you up.”
“What are you doing?” he asked, trying to ignore the puffiness around Zhou Mi’s eyes.
“Nothing, you should go back to sleep, I’ll be done in a little while.”
Kyuhyun took the marker from Zhou Mi and capped it, tossing away the sock in his other hand and pulling Zhou Mi bodily back onto the bed. “If it’s nothing then it can wait until tomorrow.”
A negative shake of Zhou Mi's head and then he was back to biting the color out of his lip, eyes scanning the bedspread as Kyuhyun settled beside him, back against the headboard. Zhou Mi’s adam’s apple bobbed before he continued, “Just trying to make it easier for you to tell your things from mine. Socks are- I just thought it might be a good idea.”
Kyuhyun neglected to remind him that they’d been washing their clothing together for quite some time now and it was likely all mixed up in the process. But Zhou Mi simply sat up on his knees, hand hesitating over Kyuhyun’s thigh, “If you wanted, you never know, you might-”
“Might what? Wake up in the middle of the night and decide to go through the apartment and- and-” oh God, it was way too late (early?) to be trying to follow Zhou Mi’s logic. He let out a frustrated sound that Zhou Mi seemed to flinch at, fingers still hovering awkwardly. Kyuhyun grabbed him by the wrist and pushed his hand down onto his leg, tired of watching Zhou Mi struggle with something between them that didn’t even exist.
Zhou Mi looked towards the dresser, top-most drawer pulled open haphazardly. “If you decided this wasn’t for you, then at least-”
Kyuhyun could see the rest of the sentence in Zhou Mi’s posture, then at least you wouldn’t leave anything behind. A clean break. Like always, Zhou Mi was just trying to make it easier on him.
He picked up Zhou Mi’s hand, thumbs pressed to his palm, kneading little circles while he tried to think of the right thing to say. He thought back to signing the lease together, Zhou Mi beaming at him as he wrote his name in letters almost too big for the line, leaving just enough room for Kyuhyun’s own messy scrawl.
There was their first trip to the laundromat together, dirty clothing squished into one laundry bag because Kyuhyun’s didn’t seem to have made the move with him. He’d pulled clothing out of the dryer, one eye on Zhou Mi, toying with a figurine at the register while Elizabeth alternated between patting his shoulder and sending Kyuhyun pointed glances.
Kyuhyun hadn’t bothered separating anything, simply folding and repacking whatever he grabbed. It wasn’t until the next day when he shrugged into a sweatshirt, half asleep and mourning that his commute had been extended a subway stop, he’d even realised he could smell the faint scent of his usual detergent and underneath that, Zhou Mi.
He couldn’t imagine it, packing up his things, walking out and then later on the bitter ache of finding one of Zhou Mi’s books mixed in with his, all sorts of memories steeped in a shirt he wasn’t entirely sure belonged to him after all. Just the idea of finding a new laundromat to wash the smell of them out of every fabric item he owned.
“Ow.” Zhou Mi admitted.
Kyuhyun blinked and dropped Zhou Mi's hand, realising he’d been digging his fingers into his palm accidentally, “Ah, sorry.”
Well. Apparently it didn’t have to be so hard.
“If you look through this apartment- I don’t even know what’s mine anymore, it would take forever to label everything and-”
Zhou Mi interrupted in a quiet voice, “I could help.”
He took another fortifying breath, shaking his head and staring at Zhou Mi’s socks, thinking they just might have been his. “Do you remember waking up and deciding that your towels and my towels should be kept on opposite sides of the linen closet? Or that we should put your brand of cereal and mine on separate shelves in the pantry? I didn’t keep my things in boxes and neither did you.”
“I know, but we could-”
“-No, Zhou Mi, we can’t. That’s not how it works. My shoes are mixed in with yours, I have no idea who owns these bedsheets, there’s something in the tinfoil in the fridge downstairs that I’m not entirely sure belongs to either of us-”
“Come to think of it, that’s been there a while...”
“Focus.” Kyuhyun reached over blindly for his hand, gripping it tightly once more and hoping they’d come far enough for Zhou Mi to at least ignore his sweaty palms, “Zhou Mi, I like accidentally using your shampoo or pouring myself coffee in your mug, I like tasting my toothpaste when I kiss you, I like it when you wear my shirts and insist they belong to you-”
“Okay, but the green one really does because that color on you-”
“-Brings out my eyes and my sarcastic streak. But the point is, when you’re with someone you don’t try to draw lines like that, you can’t. Everything just, it all gets messed up together. It’s not mine or yours, it’s ours, okay?”
Kyuhyun sucked in a breath and tried to beat down the little voice in the back of his head telling him he might as well have put on a skirt to make that speech. But if a skirt was what it would take to get at least a corner of Zhou Mi’s mouth to turn up, then he might have considered the matching high heels.
“So,” Zhou Mi started, fingers curling loosely over the back of Kyuhyun’s hand, “Those dishes in the sink...”
“The ones you left from lunch?” Kyuhyun blew out a breath and squeezed Zhou Mi’s hand tighter, pulling him to sprawl across his chest, “Ours.”
Head tucked against his neck, mouth over his collarbone, Kyuhyun could feel Zhou Mi’s grin, “So you’ll wash them?”
“Sure, and then you can dry them.” He left it for a moment, feeling almost settled except for the fact that he’d done his best to reassure Zhou Mi with everything outside of what he probably deserved to hear the most. “I’m a jerk and I’m sorry.”
Zhou Mi patted his side comfortingly, “I know.”
“That I’m a jerk or that I’m sorry?”
A hot puff of laughter caught in the crook of his neck as Zhou Mi hummed, “Both.”
“Well. Yeah, okay fine.” He deflated back against the pillows with a grin.
With the heat of Zhou Mi’s body against him, he didn’t feel the need to tug the blankets up from the end of the bed or to reach over and switch the lamp off. Both of those things would require movement, and his hands were already occupied with either a) being tangled with Zhou Mi’s, or b) combing through the short hair at the back of Zhou Mi’s head.
He figured it could wait until morning and gave himself permission to slip back into the near coma he’d been calling rest for the past week. The fingers in his tightened momentarily and he tried to get the signal from brain to fingers to squeeze back, but the heavy languidness of near sleep kept him still even as Zhou Mi threw a leg over his mumbling warmly into his chest, “Everything can be ours, but Kui Xian, I want to stay just yours.”
A/N II: So I sat down and listened to My All Is in You and basically clawed at my face and bawled over the fucking ad libs in that shit. And then somehow all of that freaking out translated into me writing this in less than an hour when my original intention was to sit down and write the final bit for the qmi porn that's taken me the better part of two weeks to get to even the most basic level of completion /headdesk I GIVE UP. YOU WIN, SJM.
Fandom: Super Junior
Rating: G
Pairing: Qmi
Summary: The value of saying what you mean, and meaning what you say. ( laundromat au aside)
A/N: /sigh I swear I was writing porn for 太完美, then I made the mistake of listening to the rest of the mini ;; and as usual, thank you to blahnicity for helping me fine tune ♥
His week had sucked so thoroughly that Kyuhyun had wanted nothing more than to collapse into bed at the end of each day; which could be eleven pm, two am or whenever he finished enough work to be able to justify stretching his creaky joints and unfolding himself from in front of his computer. Half the time he didn’t even bother with dinner, simply crawling under the covers and sleeping almost too deeply to feel rested at all.
Towards the end of the week, Zhou Mi had stopped hovering, careful suggestions of food and mental-health breaks abandoned. He waved a hand when Zhou Mi told him he was leaving for class, grunted when Zhou Mi said he’d be going to bed in a few minutes, nodding and offering a quiet thanks when Zhou Mi wordlessly set a bowl of noodles beside him and sighing as apologetically as possible with all sorts of numbers running in and out of his head when Zhou Mi collected the untouched dish a little while later.
He’d been at this problem for a solid three hours, trying to remind himself that extra credit was never optional. He rubbed at a stray lash in his eye, fingers stumbling across the keys accidentally and then everything was suddenly highlighted in blue and then just as quickly it was all gone. He yanked his hand back from the keyboard with a panicked gasp, trying to calm himself into believing that the undo option would bring it all back, that there had to be an auto-save. But no matter what he tried, it kept coming back down to the fact that all his effort had just been obliterated.
He could feel the scream crawling up the back of his throat, accompanied by a fierce pounding behind his eyelids.
“Um, Kui Xian? I know you’re busy but-”
A deep breath would have been a great idea, but upon opening his mouth to inhale, accidental words flew out instead, “No, whatever it is, no. I’m clearly trying to get this work finished and if you keep interrupting me, that will never happen.”
Zhou Mi’s posture went rigid and Kyuhyun’s anger bled right out of him at the sight. He fumbled for words as Zhou Mi took a few steps closer, setting a mug of tea down on the table, blinking at the floor, teeth biting his bottom lip white before he nodded and disappeared up the stairs.
Kyuhyun muttered a curse into his hands, rubbing at his face as his stomach rolled with shame, regret washing over him. That was so entirely uncalled for. He knew if he went upstairs Zhou Mi would just tell him it was alright, smile pulled tight as he tried to make himself understand why Kyuhyun was a royal prick, somehow finding a way to love him at his worst. And Kyuhyun would only end up yelling again, telling Zhou Mi that it wasn’t alright, that he shouldn’t be so accepting of bad treatment. Zhou Mi’s smile would waver just enough for Kyuhyun to curl his fists and wonder how it was that Zhou Mi’s apologies always managed to make him feel like the scum of the Earth. And he’d kick himself for not being able to just apologise like a normal person without making things escalate so much further than they ever needed to go.
He slapped a hand across his forehead and sort of felt like he deserved the answering throb of pain that pinged from temple to temple. He glanced back at the tea Zhou Mi had left, finally noticing the two pain pills resting next to it.
It didn’t take much to convince himself that he’d earned every agonizing minute of the two and a half hours it took him to re-do the problem. But after he’d shut his laptop down (double checking his save first), he glanced at the couch and couldn’t really keep on with the belief that punishing himself was going to make Zhou Mi feel better. He dragged his feet on the stairs, pausing outside the door and hating himself for sort of wishing that Zhou Mi would already be asleep.
He wasn’t completely relieved to find Zhou Mi snoring lightly, squished so far onto his side of the bed, Kyuhyun was a little afraid that if he shifted a hair in his sleep, he’d end up on the floor. He changed into pajama pants and carefully lay down in the gigantic space left for him. The two or three seconds he lasted should have made it into a record book somewhere. He huffed and circled an arm around Zhou Mi’s waist, tugging him away from the edge of the mattress, “So apparently you only have good balance when you’re asleep.”
When no answer was forthcoming, he sank under the blankets and pressed his nose to the nape of Zhou Mi’s neck, his throat tight as he whispered, “Sorry, okay?”
That he was utterly exhausted was his first thought as he came back into consciousness, ceiling coming into focus above him, the light cast over it was coming from the wrong direction for it to be sunlight. So what was he doing awake? He sighed and flung an arm out to the side- of course. He yawned and sat up, squinting in the dim lamp light, “Zhou Mi?”
The sting of a permanent marker hit his nose as he edged towards the end of the bed and found Zhou Mi seated on the floor with a pile of socks beside him. He looked up from the last marker stroke of Kyuhyun’s name on the inside of the sock in his hand. “Oh, I didn’t mean to wake you up.”
“What are you doing?” he asked, trying to ignore the puffiness around Zhou Mi’s eyes.
“Nothing, you should go back to sleep, I’ll be done in a little while.”
Kyuhyun took the marker from Zhou Mi and capped it, tossing away the sock in his other hand and pulling Zhou Mi bodily back onto the bed. “If it’s nothing then it can wait until tomorrow.”
A negative shake of Zhou Mi's head and then he was back to biting the color out of his lip, eyes scanning the bedspread as Kyuhyun settled beside him, back against the headboard. Zhou Mi’s adam’s apple bobbed before he continued, “Just trying to make it easier for you to tell your things from mine. Socks are- I just thought it might be a good idea.”
Kyuhyun neglected to remind him that they’d been washing their clothing together for quite some time now and it was likely all mixed up in the process. But Zhou Mi simply sat up on his knees, hand hesitating over Kyuhyun’s thigh, “If you wanted, you never know, you might-”
“Might what? Wake up in the middle of the night and decide to go through the apartment and- and-” oh God, it was way too late (early?) to be trying to follow Zhou Mi’s logic. He let out a frustrated sound that Zhou Mi seemed to flinch at, fingers still hovering awkwardly. Kyuhyun grabbed him by the wrist and pushed his hand down onto his leg, tired of watching Zhou Mi struggle with something between them that didn’t even exist.
Zhou Mi looked towards the dresser, top-most drawer pulled open haphazardly. “If you decided this wasn’t for you, then at least-”
Kyuhyun could see the rest of the sentence in Zhou Mi’s posture, then at least you wouldn’t leave anything behind. A clean break. Like always, Zhou Mi was just trying to make it easier on him.
He picked up Zhou Mi’s hand, thumbs pressed to his palm, kneading little circles while he tried to think of the right thing to say. He thought back to signing the lease together, Zhou Mi beaming at him as he wrote his name in letters almost too big for the line, leaving just enough room for Kyuhyun’s own messy scrawl.
There was their first trip to the laundromat together, dirty clothing squished into one laundry bag because Kyuhyun’s didn’t seem to have made the move with him. He’d pulled clothing out of the dryer, one eye on Zhou Mi, toying with a figurine at the register while Elizabeth alternated between patting his shoulder and sending Kyuhyun pointed glances.
Kyuhyun hadn’t bothered separating anything, simply folding and repacking whatever he grabbed. It wasn’t until the next day when he shrugged into a sweatshirt, half asleep and mourning that his commute had been extended a subway stop, he’d even realised he could smell the faint scent of his usual detergent and underneath that, Zhou Mi.
He couldn’t imagine it, packing up his things, walking out and then later on the bitter ache of finding one of Zhou Mi’s books mixed in with his, all sorts of memories steeped in a shirt he wasn’t entirely sure belonged to him after all. Just the idea of finding a new laundromat to wash the smell of them out of every fabric item he owned.
“Ow.” Zhou Mi admitted.
Kyuhyun blinked and dropped Zhou Mi's hand, realising he’d been digging his fingers into his palm accidentally, “Ah, sorry.”
Well. Apparently it didn’t have to be so hard.
“If you look through this apartment- I don’t even know what’s mine anymore, it would take forever to label everything and-”
Zhou Mi interrupted in a quiet voice, “I could help.”
He took another fortifying breath, shaking his head and staring at Zhou Mi’s socks, thinking they just might have been his. “Do you remember waking up and deciding that your towels and my towels should be kept on opposite sides of the linen closet? Or that we should put your brand of cereal and mine on separate shelves in the pantry? I didn’t keep my things in boxes and neither did you.”
“I know, but we could-”
“-No, Zhou Mi, we can’t. That’s not how it works. My shoes are mixed in with yours, I have no idea who owns these bedsheets, there’s something in the tinfoil in the fridge downstairs that I’m not entirely sure belongs to either of us-”
“Come to think of it, that’s been there a while...”
“Focus.” Kyuhyun reached over blindly for his hand, gripping it tightly once more and hoping they’d come far enough for Zhou Mi to at least ignore his sweaty palms, “Zhou Mi, I like accidentally using your shampoo or pouring myself coffee in your mug, I like tasting my toothpaste when I kiss you, I like it when you wear my shirts and insist they belong to you-”
“Okay, but the green one really does because that color on you-”
“-Brings out my eyes and my sarcastic streak. But the point is, when you’re with someone you don’t try to draw lines like that, you can’t. Everything just, it all gets messed up together. It’s not mine or yours, it’s ours, okay?”
Kyuhyun sucked in a breath and tried to beat down the little voice in the back of his head telling him he might as well have put on a skirt to make that speech. But if a skirt was what it would take to get at least a corner of Zhou Mi’s mouth to turn up, then he might have considered the matching high heels.
“So,” Zhou Mi started, fingers curling loosely over the back of Kyuhyun’s hand, “Those dishes in the sink...”
“The ones you left from lunch?” Kyuhyun blew out a breath and squeezed Zhou Mi’s hand tighter, pulling him to sprawl across his chest, “Ours.”
Head tucked against his neck, mouth over his collarbone, Kyuhyun could feel Zhou Mi’s grin, “So you’ll wash them?”
“Sure, and then you can dry them.” He left it for a moment, feeling almost settled except for the fact that he’d done his best to reassure Zhou Mi with everything outside of what he probably deserved to hear the most. “I’m a jerk and I’m sorry.”
Zhou Mi patted his side comfortingly, “I know.”
“That I’m a jerk or that I’m sorry?”
A hot puff of laughter caught in the crook of his neck as Zhou Mi hummed, “Both.”
“Well. Yeah, okay fine.” He deflated back against the pillows with a grin.
With the heat of Zhou Mi’s body against him, he didn’t feel the need to tug the blankets up from the end of the bed or to reach over and switch the lamp off. Both of those things would require movement, and his hands were already occupied with either a) being tangled with Zhou Mi’s, or b) combing through the short hair at the back of Zhou Mi’s head.
He figured it could wait until morning and gave himself permission to slip back into the near coma he’d been calling rest for the past week. The fingers in his tightened momentarily and he tried to get the signal from brain to fingers to squeeze back, but the heavy languidness of near sleep kept him still even as Zhou Mi threw a leg over his mumbling warmly into his chest, “Everything can be ours, but Kui Xian, I want to stay just yours.”
A/N II: So I sat down and listened to My All Is in You and basically clawed at my face and bawled over the fucking ad libs in that shit. And then somehow all of that freaking out translated into me writing this in less than an hour when my original intention was to sit down and write the final bit for the qmi porn that's taken me the better part of two weeks to get to even the most basic level of completion /headdesk I GIVE UP. YOU WIN, SJM.