one summer day
“You’re late.”
“I know. Sorry,” Hankyung sits down. The bench creaks just a tiny bit. “Are you mad?”
Heechul shrugs and rolls his eyes to the side, avoiding the ones that are staring into him. “No”
“And by ‘no’, you mean, not about me being late, right?”
“You being late doesn’t ever bother me unless it’s a life or death situation,” Heechul pauses. “Which it rarely is, but that’s not the point.”
“Then what is the point?”
“What’s wrong?”
Hankyung swats a mosquito away. “Huh?” his eyelids are heavy from summer sweat-he did run all the way here, just so he wouldn’t be any more than eleven minutes late. Heechul should give him a little credit, no?
“Why’d I have find out through Zhou Mi?” Heechul crosses his arms over his chest. He stares at the train schedule that’s posted behind Hankyung’s head, on the square post of the station.
“Find what out through Zhou Mi?” playing dumb is always a good card, especially with that gentle smile that graces his lips. But when people play dumb with Heechul, it almost never works. Unless your name is Lee Donghae, for some reason. Hankyung would never understand their weird bond, but at the same time, no one would understand his own weird bond with Heechul. Most of the time, it was just the strangest.
“Your problems,” Heechul shrugs. Hankyung reaches over to brush a bit of sweat-laced, salty hair from Heechul’s brow, but there’s a glare telling him not to make another move.
“Problems?” Hankyung laughs and pretends nothing ever happened as he puts his hand back against his side and leans against the wooden wall behind him. “What problems?”
“You’re so ridiculous sometimes, you know that?”
“Come again?”
“Why are you so retarded when it comes to your feelings?” Heechul sort of rephrases what he’d wanted to say. Maybe it comes out right this time. “Why can’t you share them with me? I’ll listen. We’re called best friends for a reason, you asshole.”
“I don’t want you to worry,” Hankyung admits into the breeze.
“Worry? Jesus, Kyung, the fact that I have to find out that my best friend is this angst-ridden at two every morning without me makes me worry more than anything else. Face it. You suck when it comes to your feelings.”
“Sorry…I’m just not good at coming across sad to you. I don’t want you to worry,” he says it once more, with more feeling. It’s true: he has a hard time telling Heechul about these things.
He could spend an hour on the phone with Zhou Mi, spilling everything like falling glass. Zhou Mi was built to worry; he can put that emotion into the depths of his heart so that it won’t hurt him too much. Hankyung is pretty sure that Heechul wasn’t built to worry. It’d damage him, and that’s what Hankyung fears.
“The fact that you’re keeping these things from me is what makes me worry,” Heechul nudges him out of his reverie. “So don’t do this again.”
“Do what?”
“Be an angsty teenager in the body of a twenty-something man, that’s what I mean.”
Hankyung chuckles, like puffs of clouds. “I can’t ever?”
“Well, you can,” the other man nods slowly. “You just have to make sure to tell me, when you’re near me. Got it?”
“And if you aren’t?”
“Tell me all about it when we’re together again. Details. Or else I’ll murder you.”
“Gotcha.”
They smile out at the empty train tracks. They like being alone like this, away from the rest of the world, yet still together, and still attached to what’s around them.
Yeah, they do that ‘being together’ thing best.
// …
I love writing dialogue between these two.
-