Couvade
Title: Couvade
Pairing: KyuChul (Kyuhyun x Heechul)
Genre: crack, au
Rating: PG-13
Summary: Heechul found it hilarious. Kyuhyun, not so much.
Roommates
For the past twenty-two years of their lives, the story of Kim Heechul and Cho Kyuhyun had been relatively unremarkable. The two had lived down the street from each other forever, it seemed. Heechul remembered when his neighbors brought home a noisy, ugly, pink bundle that squealed and cried and puked smelly white stuff onto his favorite shirt.
Despite the less than stellar start to the relationship, the creature that his parents had called a baby (they had to have been lying - babies were supposed to be cute) piqued the young Heechul’s curiosity and after that, almost all of his free time was spent observing his neighbor’s new child. Eventually Kyuhyun did become cute - though he still smelled funny - and Heechul would race home from school so that he could play with the baby or read brightly colored picture books about dinosaurs and dragons and princes rescuing princesses before nap time or food time, at which point he was always told to return home, though at the time he had never understood why. ("And yes, you can come back after dinner.")
Heechul was around for Kyuhyun’s first steps (of course he was walking towards his hyung), his first words ("Come on, you’re almost there. You can say Heenim, can’t you?" "N . . . nim!"), and essetially every other important milestone. Even as a teenager, when it was decidedly less cool to have a nine year old following you around everywhere, Kyuhyun was chasing him around playgrounds and ambushing him with squirtguns and running over after school to ask if he had finished his homework and if they could please, please go get ice cream.
(There were points were he had entertained the idea of training Kyuhyun to do his algebra homework, but he wasn’t good enough at forging handwriting at that point, so they worked on that first.
"You copy signatures upside-down," Heechul said. "That way you copy the lines and not just the words."
The next day the school recieved a note that said Kyuhyun was home sick with spanish influenza, and which point Heechul had to teach Kyuhyun how to lie believably. Still, the forgery business was short lived.)
It wasn’t like Kyuhyun was his only friend. That would be weird, and a little creepy. There was the foreign exchange student from China that had lived with his family for more than a year, and the bible kid down the street, and the boy that Heechul didn’t know was a boy because his sisters always dressed him up like a princess and paraded him around the neighborhood. Those were his friends, but Kyuhyun was like the little brother he never had. If he was annoyed, he was there. If he was upset, he was still there. When he was happy, Kyuhyun was usually laughing his innocent little kid laugh somewhere nearby.
That changed, of course, when Heechul left for college. They saw each other every once in a while, of course, but when Heechul showed up at Kyuhyun’s high school graduation party, the metamorphosis from a giggly youth who still hadn’t lost all of his baby fat to a handsome man was all the more pronounced.
"What are you majoring in?"
"Music education."
And that’s it, Heechul thought. Their relationship as brothers was pretty much over. He had dropped piano, finding his one true love in applied psychology. He was halfway though his master’s thesis and already looking for his doctorate. Though he told Kyuhyun that he would always be there if he ever had a problem, any kind of problem, he never really expected the othe rman (he was a man now, but Heechul kept having to remind himself that Kyuhyun was no longer the little kid that would bring home crayon-drawn family portraits that always included his Heenim).
He did what seemed most appropriate at the time - he went to his apartment, curled up on the couch, and watched reruns of old dramas until he noticed that the light flooding into his apartment was not from a streetlamp, and that he had class in a few hours.
For all he knew he hallucinated the lecture on psychosomatic illnesses. It may have never actually happened, but Heechul already knew the effects the mind could have on the endocrine system, so he didn’t really think to double-check his notes.
A few months passed, and then came the call. Kyuhyun’s voice, nervous, panicking, asking if Heechul could come and please, please help him look for his wallet. "Please, hyung, my ID, everything’s in there. . . ."
"Of course."
That was what started it the second time around. It was only small favors at first (foot in the door technique, Heechul thought to himself as he scanned his notes) but they accumulated over time to the point where it was more natural for Kyuhyun to move in with him after college, as he set about searching for a job.
"It’ll only be a little while, hyung. I’ll be able to rent my own place before too long."
"Teachers have horrible salaries," was Heechul’s only reply. An unsaid invitation to stay as long as he needed to.
---
It’s just a stomach virus.
Anchovies. Heechul’s eyes narrowed. The entire house smelled of anchovies. It had for several weeks, starting in the kitchen, where Kyuhyun was banished whenever he had a craving for the rancid smelling fish, and migrating to the living room when the younger man was taken abed with the flu, and eventually down the hall to the bathroom, where Kyuhyun had started sleeping as the symptoms of his illness persisted. Heechul didn’t think it was entirely healthy, for a sick person to be sleeping on the floor, but Kyuhyun insisted that it was comfortable enough, and Heechul had let it go.
Actually, he hadn’t quite been able to tell what his roommate was saying, buried in blankets as he was, but the illness seemed to make Kyuhyun alternately snappish and cuddly. Heechul had no desire to awaken either monster.
But now, as he stood in front of his apartment, the smell of the fish was drifting out from under the door. Or something. Heechul sighed, turned his key in the lock, and opened the door, unsure of what he would find.
Kyuhyun was sitting in front of the television on the fold-out couch, watching the weather report with a piece of pizza hanging out of his mouth. Anchovie pizza. And . . . pinapple? "Do you ever wonder if your eating habits are what’s making you sick?"
"It hasn’t done anything like this before. Seriously, hyung, it’s probably just a stomach virus." Kyuhyun set the box of pizza aside, apparently satisfied with his feast. "I might be getting better, anyways. This is the first time I’ve actually wanted to eat anything for days."
"And the first thing you get is anchovie and pinapple pizza." Heechul wrinkled his nose and walked off into the kitchen. "I thought I trained you better than that."
"College kids, you know."
Heechul made a noncommittal noise in reply, opening his refrigorator to find something that wouldn’t make him gag with the smell. Curry. Rice. Beer. It sounded good enough for him. He grabbed another bottle of beer as an afterthought, walking to the living room and handing it to Kyuhyun as he waited for the microwave to finish with his meal.
Kyuhyun nodded in thanks, his eyes still glued to the TV. He might have been resting for the past week, but he certainly didn’t look like it. There were dark circles under his eyes, and he still looked pale - too pale. His hands shook a little from the effort of getting the bottle open as he raised it to his lips - and promptly jerked it away, making a face. "Ugh, what is this stuff?" he asked, covering his face.
Heechul gingerly took the bottle from the other man and lifted it to his nose. "It’s just as I suspected," he sighed. "The anchovies have made you lose your sense of smell." He took a short swig from the bottle. "It tastes fine. Maybe you just have a bad head cold and it’s messing with you."
Kyuhyun groaned, leaning back against the couch. "I hate being sick."
---
It’s not just a stomach virus.
"Mr. Cho, your blood work has come in. I want you to come in as soon as possible to discuss it - I’ve cleared a spot in my schedule at nine-thirty tomorrow morning. Call if you need to reschedule."
Heechul had been the one to check the answering machine, to tell Kyuhyun about the appointment, and to drag him out of bed that morning so that he wouldn’t be late. The moment the other man stood up, however, he was running for the bathroom. Heechul listened to the sound of Kyuhyun emptying his stomach, biting his lip in worry.
Why couldn’t he just have some sort of deep-seated, psychological trauma? Heechul knew how to deal with those, and hopefully free his patients of them. But this sickness thing left him completely helpless. He couldn’t do anything to help the one person he had promised to protect since before he knew there was anything worse in the world than scraped knees and thunderstorms.
What do you tell your patients? You can’t control everything, you can’t be responsible for someone else’s every move, and you most certainly cannot protect anyone from all the dangers the world has to offer. This is probably just the flu. At worst, walking pneumonia. Be thankful for that much.
Emotionally grounded in at least some sense, he bundled Kyuhyun into the car and drove him to the doctor’s office himself.
---
"It’s essentially a psychosomatic illness - there’s nothing physically wrong with you."
"Nothing-" Whatever outburst Kyuhyun had intended to make disappeared as his face paled. Heechul watched with poorly veiled interest. Nausea again? The younger man took a deep breath, and continued. "I have been puking my guts up every day for the past few weeks.
Heechul bit the insides of his cheek to keep from laughing. He was a professional now. He couldn’t laugh at other people’s problems, especially in front of other professionals. He could, however, laugh at Kyuhyun when the finally left. He could control himself until then. Hopefully.
It wasn’t walking pneumonia. Thank ever diety that Heechul never believed in, it wasn’t any sickness at all. It was actually something that he did know how to deal with. He had never seen it himself, in his relatively new professional career, but he knew it happened.
A little lie here and there got him a quick glance at the chart the doctor brought in before they told Kyuhyun. Heightened levels of prolactin, cortisol, and estradiol. Lower levels of testosterone. Yes, doctor, I would have diagnosed it that way, too.
"It’s called a couvade." Kyuhyun’s expression was blank at the unfamiliar French term. The doctor looked just as uncomfortable explaining it as Kyuhyun would be the moment he understood just what was going on. "You know how, if you watch someone fall off of a bike and break their arm, your arm sort of throbs?"
"Like a sympathy pain?"
"Exactly like that."
"So what am I having sympathy pains for?"
"Your friend is a psychologist, so I’m sure he could explain it better." At this point, Heechul couldn’t supress the wide grin that flashed across his face. "But Couvade Syndrom has another name - phantom pregnancy."
Kyuhyun was silent for a moment. "I don’t follow."
"Any women in your life, are any of them expecting?"
"Oh." Kyuhyun’s eyes widened at the realization. "Oh. Nonononononononononononono. . . ." The doctor looked to Heechul for help. He wouldn’t be getting any. If Kyuhyun was in this sort of mood, it was probably best to just let it run its course.
Especially with his now wildly fluxuating hormones. "No, you see, no. There’s no way this is possible. Heechul, did you set this up? There has to be a camera here somewhere." Kyuhyun started going through the supply drawers in the examination room, and taking the pictures off of the wall. "There has to be one somewhere. Like you can outsmart me."
Heechul had no doubt that he could outsmart anyone, but he let Kyuhyun stew in his delusion. It was a good idea, anyways. Maybe he could get back at some of his college roommates by convincing them that they were pregnant. He had no doubt he would lose his license and be banned from the field, but no one had to know, right?
But this had gone on long enough. "Kyuhyunnie-"
"I am calm!"
"Kyuhyunnie, you didn’t let me finish," Heechul sighed. "And who said you could drop the ‘hyung?’"
"I . . . I . . . ." At that point, Kyuhyun dissolved into tears.
Heechul put an arm around his shoulders and guided him out of the room. "I can take it from here, doc."
---
Kyuhyun spent the rest of the day crying into Heechul’s shoulder and eating pickles dipped in strawberry icecream, alternating between how much he hated his god and how much his god obviously hated him and telling his life story, which Heechul was already well aware of. But it was good to finally know who had been stealing his socks all those years, though he was certain he never wanted to know why.
He had already cancelled all of his sessions today so he could focus on calming Kyuhyun down and getting him to come to terms with what was happening, but there wasn’t much he could say besides, "Shhh, it’ll be ok," and then add, "I’ll take full responsibility."
He was punched in the gut for that one. And though Kyuhyun mumbled, "Sorry, hyung," he was still doubled over in pain for a good minute. The boy had quite an arm.
"I have a job, a life, I can’t put it on hold for some freak illness!" Apparently it was ranting time now. Heechul settled in against the back of the couch, his legs stretched out on the fold-out mattress. He squeezed Kyuhyun’s shoulder, allowing the younger man to continue. "I know you said that it usually only happens in fathers to be, but I swear I haven’t gotten anyone pregnant! I mean, I’m still a virgin!" he hissed, as though it was some kind of crime.
(Maybe not a crime, but an undesireable state of being that Heechul could find some way to fix.)
"It’s the immaculate conception-ow! Ok, no more tasteless jokes at your expense, all you have to do is stop punching me! Aish . . . ."
"You would be the worst therapist in the history of Psychology."
"That’s just the hormones talking. You know I got better grades than you did." Heechul paused, stroking Kyuhyun’s hair as he thought. "But all joking aside, you know you can come to me if you’re having any problems, right? I’ll listen to you, I’ll do whatever I have to to make you comfortable. I have some vacation time coming up soon, if you want to-"
"You don’t have to," Kyuhyun sighed. His eyes were closed, and he looked like he might fall asleep soon. "As long as you never say you’ll ‘take responsibility’ ever again."
"Well, see, now I don’t have to." It earned him another punch, but also the first real smile he had seen out of Kyuhyun is a couple of days. He figured the trade was worth it.
---
A/N: Your new prompt is this: The pitiful things that ex-lovers do . . . .