Super Junior AU; Various Pairings; Love/War
Title: Love/War (12/?)
Fandom: Super Junior AU (Mafia)
Pairings: Siwon/Hankyung/Heechul (Hankyung/Heechul), Kyuhyun/Zhou Mi, Kibum/Donghae, Yehsung/Ryeowook, Kangin/Eeteuk, Tablo/Eunhyuk
Pairings in Chapter: Kyuhyun/Zhou Mi, Siwon/Hankyung(/Heechul)
Word Count: 3,705
Rating: PG-13
Summary: The Kim family and the Choi family are the two oldest families in Seoul: where other families have been born, grown, and then fell apart, they remain strong. Unfortunately, they are mortal enemies, and where one lives alongside the law, the other is beyond any control. It's up to the new generation of members to destroy the violence between them - even if it means destroying one family in the process.
A/N: Last update before Christmas :DDD I hope you have a good holiday :D
This was where I hit 40,000 and I was writing the Kyuhyun backstory at midnight and just about died XD
Chapter 1 / Chapter 2 / Chapter 3 / Chapter 4 / Chapter 5 / Chapter 6 / Chapter 7 / Chapter 8 / Chapter 9 / Chapter 10 / Chapter 11 / Chapter 12
“Something is going on between Sungmin and Eunhyuk,” said Zhou Mi thoughtfully, looking into the mirror in order to get his tie right. “I just can’t find out what.”
“Well,” said Kyuhyun with a grin, but Zhou Mi interrupted him.
“It’s probably not what you’re thinking of. They’re arguing. About something big. Wouldn’t that be incest, anyway?”
“I think its okay for cousins?” Kyuhyun shrugged, and pulled Zhou Mi’s hands off his tie and replaced them with his own. “How long have you been doing this, and you still can’t fasten a tie?”
“My fingers are cold,” said Zhou Mi sadly. “They don’t work when they’re cold.”
“Cold?” asked Kyuhyun, and then yelped as Zhou Mi slid his hand under his shirt and splayed his fingers against his back. He twisted around to get free, and Zhou Mi laughed and pulled him closer. “I hate you,” mumbled Kyuhyun against his shoulder.
“Thank you for fastening my tie,” trilled Zhou Mi, before he kissed him quickly and released his hold. “My hands are warm now, too,” he said with a grin.
“My back’s cold,” grumbled Kyuhyun, and then slapped his hand over Zhou Mi’s mouth, who had opened it to say something, his eyes flashing with amusement. “I’m fairly certain that whatever you were going to suggest in order to warm my back up is something that I don’t want to know about when I’ve got-” - he checked his watch - “ten minutes before I leave.”
“You are no fun,” said Zhou Mi. “Besides, we could totally attempt it in ten minutes. You’d just have to be quick.”
“Shut up,” said Kyuhyun. “Don’t tempt me.”
“It’s this tie, isn’t it?” Kyuhyun reflected that the most aggravating thing in the world must be the sight of Zhou Mi grinning and preening and aware that he was perfectly right. “You want to wrap it around my wrists and-”
“Shut up,” snarled Kyuhyun, and kissed him roughly, using the tie that was haunting him to pull Zhou Mi closer. “What are you doing today?” he asked quietly when they pulled apart.
“So you don’t want to have sex,” said Zhou Mi with a pout. “I’m beginning to feel unloved, Kyuhyun.”
“I’ll make it up to you,” said Kyuhyun. “With flowers and chocolates - and it’s our day off tomorrow, fuck off! You’ll get your sex then. You are so demanding.”
“I’m out with Heechul today,” said Zhou Mi. “Hankyung’s giving Henry some lessons in martial arts and Heechul needs someone to go with him to that nightclub that had the fight a couple of nights ago.”
“Fun,” said Kyuhyun dryly. “Going out with Heechul when he feels abandoned. Take ear plugs, or otherwise you’ll go mad from the complaining.”
“Nah, he loves me,” said Zhou Mi, grinning. “I think he prefers going out with me.”
“God only knows why,” muttered Kyuhyun. Zhou Mi frowned at him; he had heard the muttering but not the words. Kyuhyun smiled winningly.
“What are you doing today?” asked Zhou Mi.
“Going with Shindong to see if our information was correct and if the auction on Saturday was actually selling slaves.” Kyuhyun casually pulled his jacket on, aware that Zhou Mi was frowning. “We’re going to go look around the auction hall.”
“Oh,” said Zhou Mi. “Be-”
“Careful?”
“Please.”
“I know,” murmured Kyuhyun, touching his hand to his ribs where the scar still remained. “I’ll be fine, you’ll see.”
Zhou Mi smiled, a little sadly. There was nothing he could do anyway.
***
Kyuhyun had been with the family for seven months when they allowed him to go out on his first family business; to begin with, it was because of his health, and then afterwards, because he was working on paperwork and looking after Sungmin, who had arrived a month earlier. They had been fed information which pointed to an auction of uncertain merchandise taking place just outside the neutral center - unfortunately in Choi territory, but they couldn’t let that stop them. They had reason to believe that the things on sale were actually men and women shipped in from Vietnam, courtesy of a family that the Choi family had connections with; the Kim family had found out from a Vietnamese family they themselves had connections with. After the initial exasperation and disbelief over how obvious the Choi family was being, they began to put a plan together, and Kyuhyun was allowed to go.
It was a trap - their connections had been fed purposely wrong information. The Choi family had grown sick of the Kim family constantly being on their trail, and their attempts at stopping their greatest income revenue. They lay in wait in the building, and when Kyuhyun came carefully into the room, it became awfully obvious why the ‘auction’ was being held in Choi territory instead of the center, as was usual.
Kyuhyun entered first because he was young enough to look harmless in amongst the men who were supposed to be there - they shot him in the leg. He heard Shindong yell out, and then a sharp pain in his chest, where another bullet smashed through his ribs. It was like numbness, as he lay there, bullets whizzing over his head and knocking chunks out of the door frame, so that Eunhyuk and Shindong were unable to get at him. He was unable to lift his arm to shield his face from the splinters that stabbed his face. He could hear yelling. Eeteuk’s voice was cut off suddenly. He coughed. There was metal in his mouth and red on the floor in front of him. He blacked out.
He woke in the hospital. They told him that he was lucky to still be alive - the bullet had punctured his lung, a bone in his leg had been shattered by the impact of the other. He had almost died on the operating table, they said.
He couldn’t talk - he didn’t feel lucky.
Eeteuk had been shot in the side, Kangin told him when he came to visit. Eunhyuk and Shindong had suffered superficial wounds. All three were fine. Kyuhyun had been there for a week already.
People came and went - visitors visited and then left again - Kyuhyun stayed. He hated the hospital so much that sometimes he thought about maybe just sneaking out his bed at night and burning the place down, but he was unable to get out of bed anyway. He was sick of the same four white walls, could feel himself going slowly insane with boredom. Was this supposed to be lucky? he asked himself. He understand that he should be thankful for being alive still, but it was hard when everything ached; when he couldn’t move.
Zhou Mi came one day, after Kyuhyun had been there for three days; he crept into the room and hovered over the bed anxiously, as if fearful that if he breathed wrong, he would injure Kyuhyun some more. Kyuhyun tutted at him, made him sit down - felt honestly alive for the first time since the attack.
Zhou Mi’s fingers fluttered over the palm of his hand. They had been on the verge of something before Kyuhyun had been wounded, eyes falling on each other for just a slight second more than they should have done, fingers brushing for longer than they should have done. Kyuhyun sighed and lay back in his bed, as he let Zhou Mi fuss around him and bring him things. He enjoyed that treatment, but only from Zhou Mi. He hated being made into a china doll by anyone else.
Sungmin visited him with Shindong. While Zhou Mi held his hand, Sungmin poked at his shoulder and told him to hurry up and recover, because Kangin had decided that they should work together most of the time, and what was he supposed to do with a partner missing in action? And Kyuhyun had laughed, and relished the laughter.
Heechul came and took one look at him and announced that he was just a faker and that if it had been him, he’d have been up and about by then. And Heechul had made the hospital give him crutches to use, and Zhou Mi had helped him out of bed and helped him with the crutches and helped him, period.
Slowly, he recovered, though it was a long, hard process, and even when Henry came, he didn’t think that he was truly over what had happened. The attack seemed to slow everything down; the way the family was run, his general life, his relationship with Zhou Mi. They had been in the cliff edge beforehand - now they were back to basically the beginning, although instead of the language barrier, now it was simple shyness in the face of almost losing it.
Kyuhyun - he wasn’t so shy. He had almost died. It had hit him one day when Donghae came to visit - Donghae knew what it was like to almost die, Donghae knew things that Kyuhyun couldn’t possibly imagine, but Donghae also knew what it was like to almost die, and Kyuhyun remembered watching Donghae lay out on the path, and thought that was like me, and he got it. And so, he considered life to be too insubstantial and fleeting to mess around with jumping and skirting the subject.
They took him home after three weeks. Zhou Mi came up to make sure that he was fine before he slept, and Kyuhyun lay in his bed and pulled Zhou Mi down by his shirt and kissed him hard. It was a knock to the heart, that - sudden roaring in his ears, numbness in his fingertips - and then pain in his chest where Zhou Mi rested his hand.
“Fuck,” he yelped, wrenching his head away to hiss and touch his fingers tenderly to his bandaged wound. It took a couple of seconds for Zhou Mi to flip from “completely stunned beyond belief” to “nurse-in-training”, but when he did, Kyuhyun wished that he had never bothered making any noise - he preferred Zhou Mi when he wasn’t make any noise, that much had to be said.
Nowadays, Zhou Mi’s fingers always seem to brush over the small round scar on Kyuhyun’s chest. It’s a reminder, although neither are too sure what it reminds them of - or if they even want to be reminded of it.
***
Siwon set his briefcase down on coffee table and, rather proudly, drew a thin box out from it. Hankyung squinted at him from across the room. “Is that a DVD?” he asked, slightly confused.
“It’s that one I was telling you about,” said Siwon with a smile. “The one that my father first brought back from China. I was wondering if you’d - watch it, with me?”
“Me?” asked Hankyung, with some shock. “You want to watch it with me?”
“Well, I wasn’t going to ask Heechul,” said Siwon wryly. “I want to try it without the subtitles, and I’m unsure as to whether I’d manage it by myself.”
“Oh,” said Hankyung in great understanding. “So you just want a translator.”
“Yes,” said Siwon, deadpan. “Yes, I did.”
“Fine,” said Hankyung, waving his hand casually in his direction. “You know where the DVD player is. Start setting it up, I’ll be over when I’ve finished this report.”
Hankyung changed his outfit as the opening credits of the film began, changing his expensive suit for a pair of jeans and a t-shirt. He could feel Siwon’s eyes on his, but he was used to much more obvious stares from Heechul and so was able to just ignore it - though he grinned at the way Siwon turned resolutely back to the screen when Hankyung turned around, acting like he hadn’t been looking.
“So what’s this about?” asked Hankyung as he sat down on the sofa next to Siwon, stretching his legs out in front of him as he tried to get comfortable - hours of being hunched over the desk had caused his back to become stiff.
“It’s about a knight of the old court,” said Siwon, taking his jacket off to drape over the arm of the chair as the dialogue started. “He falls in love with the only daughter of the King. It’s about their attempts at keeping their romance secret.”
“It sounds like something Zhou Mi would like,” muttered Hankyung.
“There’s some spectacular fight scenes,” said Siwon with a grin.
“Okay,” said Hankyung, and put his finger on Siwon’s mouth to stop him from talking any longer - they were missing the film. Siwon’s smile grew wider, but he became silent. He reached up and took Hankyung’s hand from his face and threaded their fingers together.
After forty minutes of the film, Hankyung got up and switched the light off; it was better that way. It was getting dark outside, anyway. As he came back to the sofa, a thought struck him. “You haven’t asked any questions,” he said.
“I understand it all,” said Siwon quietly in Chinese. Hankyung sighed and sat back down.
“I wish you wouldn’t speak Chinese,” he said.
“Why?” asked Siwon. “Because it hurts? It’s always going to hurt if you don’t let yourself grow used to it.”
“It’s difficult,” said Hankyung calmly. “You wouldn’t understand what it’s like - I’m not proud of betraying my father. He was a monster, but he was still my father.”
“I think I understand a little,” said Siwon quietly. “You have to decide between what you think is right, and what everyone else seems to think is right.”
“I miss China,” said Hankyung softly. “It’s like having something ripped away from me. This isn’t like a holiday. This is serious. I can never go back; and China had everything that I knew. I can’t - I can’t pay my respects to my mother or visit her grave. I’ve lost all my friends.”
“But you-”
“I have my friends here,” said Hankyung with a nod. “They’re brothers to me, that’s true. I don’t regret that, and I certainly don’t regret Heechul - or you. But my friends in China - some of them consider me a traitor for another reason. I left them when I was found out, and I ran, purely for the sake of surviving.” He smiled wryly. “Not my finest hour, I’ll be honest.”
“I think I’d do the same,” said Siwon, eyes on the television screen but not focusing. “If I was found out, I would run. Surviving is human instinct.”
“You’re going to miss the film,” said Hankyung.
“I don’t care,” said Siwon, glancing over and looking him straight in the eye. “I’ve seen it before.”
Hankyung laughed weakly. “And you don’t know my past,” he said. “I see.”
“There’s so much in this family that I don’t know,” said Siwon eagerly. “I want to know everything about everyone. Only then can I be a real part of it.”
Hankyung sighed and leant forward, hands on his knees, neck stiff now from hours over the desk and watching the film. “What do you want to know?” he asked.
“I’d like to know about you and Heechul,” said Siwon.
Hankyung tipped his head to the side and grinned up at him. “Oh, I can tell you that,” he said. “It reflects badly on Heechul, I’ll tell you that.”
“I’m not sure I want to know, in that case,” said Siwon. “What if he turns up halfway through and smites us?”
“He’s not God,” said Hankyung.
“He’s not?” Siwon raised an eyebrow. “So you mean I don’t have to everything he says?”
“You do if you want to keep your dashing good looks,” said Hankyung. Siwon grinned.
“You think I have dashing good looks?”
“As dashing as the knight on the television screen,” said Hankyung. He pointed to the woman. “And look, there’s Heechul.”
Siwon jolted forward with laughter and almost fell off the sofa; the sight of it made Hankyung collapse into laughter, so that he almost fell off too. “I have the horrible feeling that Heechul is going to come in now and want to know what we’re laughing at,” he said as he tried to haul Siwon back up.
“It would be your fault,” said Siwon through his tears of laughter.
Hankyung chuckled, and after a glance at the door, he said, “That’s how we started off. That sort of teasing; I would pretend he was a girl and he’d pretend to not understand what I was saying.”
Hankyung smiled wryly, bringing one leg up onto the sofa. “Heechul understands me better than anyone else in Korea, but I didn’t know it at the time. Honestly, I thought that he couldn’t understand me at all. I thought he didn’t even like me. He’d just sit there and talk to Zhou Mi like I didn’t even exist, even though Zhou Mi didn’t understand a single word he was saying.”
“He’d only speak to me to tell me to do something, or to tell me that I’d gone wrong somewhere. He would snap at me and shout at me and hit me, and god, it was annoying. But I was new to the family, and I was foreign and they’d taken me in - I wasn’t going to fall out with the heir.”
“Kibum told me that all Heechul wanted was for me to say something back to him. He took pity on me, I think, or else he knew that I was at boiling point. I had my pride too.” He laughed slightly. “I had been an heir too. So one day, when Heechul made a comment about my hair, I asked if he had a haircut due some time soon; he just frowned at me. ‘It’s looking a bit of a mess’, I said. ‘Are you sure that’s called style?’ He hit me.”
“I’m not surprised,” said Siwon with a short laugh.
“Have you ever been in that situation where you just seem to be skirting the issue?” Hankyung placed his chin thoughtfully on his knee. “Everyone said that Heechul liked me from the way he looked at me, and I - I wanted him so much, in a way that was less about lust and probably more akin to love than I wanted to admit at that point in time. I just wanted some part of him, and I didn’t even care what.”
“Do you think that, even now, you have him?” Siwon asked doubtfully. Heechul struck him as being very much his own agent most of the time.
“Well, now I share him with you,” said Hankyung, laughing. “But - I don’t share him, I suppose. Heechul allows us to have him. He deigns to give us that privilege.”
“He does love you,” said Siwon quietly. Hankyung nodded. For all that Heechul sniped and snapped, it was obvious that he loved Hankyung - it was simply that he wasn’t likely to say that.
“I think he loves you too,” said Hankyung with a shrug.
“I’m the new boy,” said Siwon with a grin. “New opportunities and all that.”
“We were like an old married couple even before we were a couple,” said Hankyung with a wry smile. “He used to blame me for everything - well, no change there, actually. He was - god, he still is - fucking fantastic.”
“He never says sorry,” began Siwon, the sentence finished by Hankyung.
“Because it is never actually his fault. How brilliant is that? You can’t apologise for something you don’t think is your fault.”
“I think you are brilliant too,” said Siwon, rather suddenly. “Just - the way that you did what you thought was right, even when you knew that it would eventually ruin you. It gives me strength.”
“Strength?” Hankyung frowned, slightly confused.
“It helps me realise that what I’m doing is right,” said Siwon. “If I feel it is right, then it is.”
“That’s something Heechul would say,” said Hankyung. “I didn’t make that decision lightly.”
“I know.”
“What decision did you make?” asked Hankyung. “I don’t under-”
“We’re missing the film,” said Siwon, and turned back to the screen, the light from it flickering across his features. Hankyung got the sense that the conversation had been dropped. He sighed; one the one hand he wanted to know what Siwon was talking about, but on the other, Siwon had a right to his privacy, just like the one that Hankyung had always claimed.
Hankyung never got to see the end of the film (although Siwon later told him that the two lovers killed themselves, to which Heechul snorted and asked what the fuck kind of a girly film they had been watching) as he fell asleep soon after, head falling onto Siwon’s shoulder. Siwon said that he fell asleep too, soon after, so that the film drew to a close without any audience of any kind. Heechul said that the television was still on when he came in from his dinner with the police chief, although the DVD player had switched itself off.
All Hankyung knew was that Heechul shook him awake roughly, clearly taking his chance to do so while he could. “You both look ridiculous,” he said smugly. Siwon moaned slightly - Heechul had clearly woken him up first. “If you’re going to sleep, do it on a bed.”
“Go away,” moaned Hankyung, attempting to bury his head in the sofa. “I’ve woken into a nightmare.”
“Well,” said Heechul, folding his arms and raising an eyebrow. “I’ll just take myself over to my nice warm bed with the soft mattress and the pretty cover and be by myself, shall I?”
Siwon forced himself to his feet, struggled over to the bed, and then sprawled down on it. Hankyung, seeing that he had moved, also got to his feet - he only just made it to the bed before he crashed down, drifting off and then coming to in order to hear Heechul say in an amused voice to Siwon; “This isn’t your bedroom.”
“Hyung,” groaned Siwon, eyes closed. Heechul laughed gleefully, and then climbed onto the bed with him, lying next to him. Hankyung crawled up to bury his head in Heechul’s neck. Heechul laughed softly, fingers of one hand threaded through Hankyung’s hair, the other against Siwon’s hip.
“God,” muttered Hankyung, a little incoherent. “You really do get everything you want.”
“You gave it to me,” said Heechul softly.
Fandom: Super Junior AU (Mafia)
Pairings: Siwon/Hankyung/Heechul (Hankyung/Heechul), Kyuhyun/Zhou Mi, Kibum/Donghae, Yehsung/Ryeowook, Kangin/Eeteuk, Tablo/Eunhyuk
Pairings in Chapter: Kyuhyun/Zhou Mi, Siwon/Hankyung(/Heechul)
Word Count: 3,705
Rating: PG-13
Summary: The Kim family and the Choi family are the two oldest families in Seoul: where other families have been born, grown, and then fell apart, they remain strong. Unfortunately, they are mortal enemies, and where one lives alongside the law, the other is beyond any control. It's up to the new generation of members to destroy the violence between them - even if it means destroying one family in the process.
A/N: Last update before Christmas :DDD I hope you have a good holiday :D
This was where I hit 40,000 and I was writing the Kyuhyun backstory at midnight and just about died XD
Chapter 1 / Chapter 2 / Chapter 3 / Chapter 4 / Chapter 5 / Chapter 6 / Chapter 7 / Chapter 8 / Chapter 9 / Chapter 10 / Chapter 11 / Chapter 12
“Something is going on between Sungmin and Eunhyuk,” said Zhou Mi thoughtfully, looking into the mirror in order to get his tie right. “I just can’t find out what.”
“Well,” said Kyuhyun with a grin, but Zhou Mi interrupted him.
“It’s probably not what you’re thinking of. They’re arguing. About something big. Wouldn’t that be incest, anyway?”
“I think its okay for cousins?” Kyuhyun shrugged, and pulled Zhou Mi’s hands off his tie and replaced them with his own. “How long have you been doing this, and you still can’t fasten a tie?”
“My fingers are cold,” said Zhou Mi sadly. “They don’t work when they’re cold.”
“Cold?” asked Kyuhyun, and then yelped as Zhou Mi slid his hand under his shirt and splayed his fingers against his back. He twisted around to get free, and Zhou Mi laughed and pulled him closer. “I hate you,” mumbled Kyuhyun against his shoulder.
“Thank you for fastening my tie,” trilled Zhou Mi, before he kissed him quickly and released his hold. “My hands are warm now, too,” he said with a grin.
“My back’s cold,” grumbled Kyuhyun, and then slapped his hand over Zhou Mi’s mouth, who had opened it to say something, his eyes flashing with amusement. “I’m fairly certain that whatever you were going to suggest in order to warm my back up is something that I don’t want to know about when I’ve got-” - he checked his watch - “ten minutes before I leave.”
“You are no fun,” said Zhou Mi. “Besides, we could totally attempt it in ten minutes. You’d just have to be quick.”
“Shut up,” said Kyuhyun. “Don’t tempt me.”
“It’s this tie, isn’t it?” Kyuhyun reflected that the most aggravating thing in the world must be the sight of Zhou Mi grinning and preening and aware that he was perfectly right. “You want to wrap it around my wrists and-”
“Shut up,” snarled Kyuhyun, and kissed him roughly, using the tie that was haunting him to pull Zhou Mi closer. “What are you doing today?” he asked quietly when they pulled apart.
“So you don’t want to have sex,” said Zhou Mi with a pout. “I’m beginning to feel unloved, Kyuhyun.”
“I’ll make it up to you,” said Kyuhyun. “With flowers and chocolates - and it’s our day off tomorrow, fuck off! You’ll get your sex then. You are so demanding.”
“I’m out with Heechul today,” said Zhou Mi. “Hankyung’s giving Henry some lessons in martial arts and Heechul needs someone to go with him to that nightclub that had the fight a couple of nights ago.”
“Fun,” said Kyuhyun dryly. “Going out with Heechul when he feels abandoned. Take ear plugs, or otherwise you’ll go mad from the complaining.”
“Nah, he loves me,” said Zhou Mi, grinning. “I think he prefers going out with me.”
“God only knows why,” muttered Kyuhyun. Zhou Mi frowned at him; he had heard the muttering but not the words. Kyuhyun smiled winningly.
“What are you doing today?” asked Zhou Mi.
“Going with Shindong to see if our information was correct and if the auction on Saturday was actually selling slaves.” Kyuhyun casually pulled his jacket on, aware that Zhou Mi was frowning. “We’re going to go look around the auction hall.”
“Oh,” said Zhou Mi. “Be-”
“Careful?”
“Please.”
“I know,” murmured Kyuhyun, touching his hand to his ribs where the scar still remained. “I’ll be fine, you’ll see.”
Zhou Mi smiled, a little sadly. There was nothing he could do anyway.
***
Kyuhyun had been with the family for seven months when they allowed him to go out on his first family business; to begin with, it was because of his health, and then afterwards, because he was working on paperwork and looking after Sungmin, who had arrived a month earlier. They had been fed information which pointed to an auction of uncertain merchandise taking place just outside the neutral center - unfortunately in Choi territory, but they couldn’t let that stop them. They had reason to believe that the things on sale were actually men and women shipped in from Vietnam, courtesy of a family that the Choi family had connections with; the Kim family had found out from a Vietnamese family they themselves had connections with. After the initial exasperation and disbelief over how obvious the Choi family was being, they began to put a plan together, and Kyuhyun was allowed to go.
It was a trap - their connections had been fed purposely wrong information. The Choi family had grown sick of the Kim family constantly being on their trail, and their attempts at stopping their greatest income revenue. They lay in wait in the building, and when Kyuhyun came carefully into the room, it became awfully obvious why the ‘auction’ was being held in Choi territory instead of the center, as was usual.
Kyuhyun entered first because he was young enough to look harmless in amongst the men who were supposed to be there - they shot him in the leg. He heard Shindong yell out, and then a sharp pain in his chest, where another bullet smashed through his ribs. It was like numbness, as he lay there, bullets whizzing over his head and knocking chunks out of the door frame, so that Eunhyuk and Shindong were unable to get at him. He was unable to lift his arm to shield his face from the splinters that stabbed his face. He could hear yelling. Eeteuk’s voice was cut off suddenly. He coughed. There was metal in his mouth and red on the floor in front of him. He blacked out.
He woke in the hospital. They told him that he was lucky to still be alive - the bullet had punctured his lung, a bone in his leg had been shattered by the impact of the other. He had almost died on the operating table, they said.
He couldn’t talk - he didn’t feel lucky.
Eeteuk had been shot in the side, Kangin told him when he came to visit. Eunhyuk and Shindong had suffered superficial wounds. All three were fine. Kyuhyun had been there for a week already.
People came and went - visitors visited and then left again - Kyuhyun stayed. He hated the hospital so much that sometimes he thought about maybe just sneaking out his bed at night and burning the place down, but he was unable to get out of bed anyway. He was sick of the same four white walls, could feel himself going slowly insane with boredom. Was this supposed to be lucky? he asked himself. He understand that he should be thankful for being alive still, but it was hard when everything ached; when he couldn’t move.
Zhou Mi came one day, after Kyuhyun had been there for three days; he crept into the room and hovered over the bed anxiously, as if fearful that if he breathed wrong, he would injure Kyuhyun some more. Kyuhyun tutted at him, made him sit down - felt honestly alive for the first time since the attack.
Zhou Mi’s fingers fluttered over the palm of his hand. They had been on the verge of something before Kyuhyun had been wounded, eyes falling on each other for just a slight second more than they should have done, fingers brushing for longer than they should have done. Kyuhyun sighed and lay back in his bed, as he let Zhou Mi fuss around him and bring him things. He enjoyed that treatment, but only from Zhou Mi. He hated being made into a china doll by anyone else.
Sungmin visited him with Shindong. While Zhou Mi held his hand, Sungmin poked at his shoulder and told him to hurry up and recover, because Kangin had decided that they should work together most of the time, and what was he supposed to do with a partner missing in action? And Kyuhyun had laughed, and relished the laughter.
Heechul came and took one look at him and announced that he was just a faker and that if it had been him, he’d have been up and about by then. And Heechul had made the hospital give him crutches to use, and Zhou Mi had helped him out of bed and helped him with the crutches and helped him, period.
Slowly, he recovered, though it was a long, hard process, and even when Henry came, he didn’t think that he was truly over what had happened. The attack seemed to slow everything down; the way the family was run, his general life, his relationship with Zhou Mi. They had been in the cliff edge beforehand - now they were back to basically the beginning, although instead of the language barrier, now it was simple shyness in the face of almost losing it.
Kyuhyun - he wasn’t so shy. He had almost died. It had hit him one day when Donghae came to visit - Donghae knew what it was like to almost die, Donghae knew things that Kyuhyun couldn’t possibly imagine, but Donghae also knew what it was like to almost die, and Kyuhyun remembered watching Donghae lay out on the path, and thought that was like me, and he got it. And so, he considered life to be too insubstantial and fleeting to mess around with jumping and skirting the subject.
They took him home after three weeks. Zhou Mi came up to make sure that he was fine before he slept, and Kyuhyun lay in his bed and pulled Zhou Mi down by his shirt and kissed him hard. It was a knock to the heart, that - sudden roaring in his ears, numbness in his fingertips - and then pain in his chest where Zhou Mi rested his hand.
“Fuck,” he yelped, wrenching his head away to hiss and touch his fingers tenderly to his bandaged wound. It took a couple of seconds for Zhou Mi to flip from “completely stunned beyond belief” to “nurse-in-training”, but when he did, Kyuhyun wished that he had never bothered making any noise - he preferred Zhou Mi when he wasn’t make any noise, that much had to be said.
Nowadays, Zhou Mi’s fingers always seem to brush over the small round scar on Kyuhyun’s chest. It’s a reminder, although neither are too sure what it reminds them of - or if they even want to be reminded of it.
***
Siwon set his briefcase down on coffee table and, rather proudly, drew a thin box out from it. Hankyung squinted at him from across the room. “Is that a DVD?” he asked, slightly confused.
“It’s that one I was telling you about,” said Siwon with a smile. “The one that my father first brought back from China. I was wondering if you’d - watch it, with me?”
“Me?” asked Hankyung, with some shock. “You want to watch it with me?”
“Well, I wasn’t going to ask Heechul,” said Siwon wryly. “I want to try it without the subtitles, and I’m unsure as to whether I’d manage it by myself.”
“Oh,” said Hankyung in great understanding. “So you just want a translator.”
“Yes,” said Siwon, deadpan. “Yes, I did.”
“Fine,” said Hankyung, waving his hand casually in his direction. “You know where the DVD player is. Start setting it up, I’ll be over when I’ve finished this report.”
Hankyung changed his outfit as the opening credits of the film began, changing his expensive suit for a pair of jeans and a t-shirt. He could feel Siwon’s eyes on his, but he was used to much more obvious stares from Heechul and so was able to just ignore it - though he grinned at the way Siwon turned resolutely back to the screen when Hankyung turned around, acting like he hadn’t been looking.
“So what’s this about?” asked Hankyung as he sat down on the sofa next to Siwon, stretching his legs out in front of him as he tried to get comfortable - hours of being hunched over the desk had caused his back to become stiff.
“It’s about a knight of the old court,” said Siwon, taking his jacket off to drape over the arm of the chair as the dialogue started. “He falls in love with the only daughter of the King. It’s about their attempts at keeping their romance secret.”
“It sounds like something Zhou Mi would like,” muttered Hankyung.
“There’s some spectacular fight scenes,” said Siwon with a grin.
“Okay,” said Hankyung, and put his finger on Siwon’s mouth to stop him from talking any longer - they were missing the film. Siwon’s smile grew wider, but he became silent. He reached up and took Hankyung’s hand from his face and threaded their fingers together.
After forty minutes of the film, Hankyung got up and switched the light off; it was better that way. It was getting dark outside, anyway. As he came back to the sofa, a thought struck him. “You haven’t asked any questions,” he said.
“I understand it all,” said Siwon quietly in Chinese. Hankyung sighed and sat back down.
“I wish you wouldn’t speak Chinese,” he said.
“Why?” asked Siwon. “Because it hurts? It’s always going to hurt if you don’t let yourself grow used to it.”
“It’s difficult,” said Hankyung calmly. “You wouldn’t understand what it’s like - I’m not proud of betraying my father. He was a monster, but he was still my father.”
“I think I understand a little,” said Siwon quietly. “You have to decide between what you think is right, and what everyone else seems to think is right.”
“I miss China,” said Hankyung softly. “It’s like having something ripped away from me. This isn’t like a holiday. This is serious. I can never go back; and China had everything that I knew. I can’t - I can’t pay my respects to my mother or visit her grave. I’ve lost all my friends.”
“But you-”
“I have my friends here,” said Hankyung with a nod. “They’re brothers to me, that’s true. I don’t regret that, and I certainly don’t regret Heechul - or you. But my friends in China - some of them consider me a traitor for another reason. I left them when I was found out, and I ran, purely for the sake of surviving.” He smiled wryly. “Not my finest hour, I’ll be honest.”
“I think I’d do the same,” said Siwon, eyes on the television screen but not focusing. “If I was found out, I would run. Surviving is human instinct.”
“You’re going to miss the film,” said Hankyung.
“I don’t care,” said Siwon, glancing over and looking him straight in the eye. “I’ve seen it before.”
Hankyung laughed weakly. “And you don’t know my past,” he said. “I see.”
“There’s so much in this family that I don’t know,” said Siwon eagerly. “I want to know everything about everyone. Only then can I be a real part of it.”
Hankyung sighed and leant forward, hands on his knees, neck stiff now from hours over the desk and watching the film. “What do you want to know?” he asked.
“I’d like to know about you and Heechul,” said Siwon.
Hankyung tipped his head to the side and grinned up at him. “Oh, I can tell you that,” he said. “It reflects badly on Heechul, I’ll tell you that.”
“I’m not sure I want to know, in that case,” said Siwon. “What if he turns up halfway through and smites us?”
“He’s not God,” said Hankyung.
“He’s not?” Siwon raised an eyebrow. “So you mean I don’t have to everything he says?”
“You do if you want to keep your dashing good looks,” said Hankyung. Siwon grinned.
“You think I have dashing good looks?”
“As dashing as the knight on the television screen,” said Hankyung. He pointed to the woman. “And look, there’s Heechul.”
Siwon jolted forward with laughter and almost fell off the sofa; the sight of it made Hankyung collapse into laughter, so that he almost fell off too. “I have the horrible feeling that Heechul is going to come in now and want to know what we’re laughing at,” he said as he tried to haul Siwon back up.
“It would be your fault,” said Siwon through his tears of laughter.
Hankyung chuckled, and after a glance at the door, he said, “That’s how we started off. That sort of teasing; I would pretend he was a girl and he’d pretend to not understand what I was saying.”
Hankyung smiled wryly, bringing one leg up onto the sofa. “Heechul understands me better than anyone else in Korea, but I didn’t know it at the time. Honestly, I thought that he couldn’t understand me at all. I thought he didn’t even like me. He’d just sit there and talk to Zhou Mi like I didn’t even exist, even though Zhou Mi didn’t understand a single word he was saying.”
“He’d only speak to me to tell me to do something, or to tell me that I’d gone wrong somewhere. He would snap at me and shout at me and hit me, and god, it was annoying. But I was new to the family, and I was foreign and they’d taken me in - I wasn’t going to fall out with the heir.”
“Kibum told me that all Heechul wanted was for me to say something back to him. He took pity on me, I think, or else he knew that I was at boiling point. I had my pride too.” He laughed slightly. “I had been an heir too. So one day, when Heechul made a comment about my hair, I asked if he had a haircut due some time soon; he just frowned at me. ‘It’s looking a bit of a mess’, I said. ‘Are you sure that’s called style?’ He hit me.”
“I’m not surprised,” said Siwon with a short laugh.
“Have you ever been in that situation where you just seem to be skirting the issue?” Hankyung placed his chin thoughtfully on his knee. “Everyone said that Heechul liked me from the way he looked at me, and I - I wanted him so much, in a way that was less about lust and probably more akin to love than I wanted to admit at that point in time. I just wanted some part of him, and I didn’t even care what.”
“Do you think that, even now, you have him?” Siwon asked doubtfully. Heechul struck him as being very much his own agent most of the time.
“Well, now I share him with you,” said Hankyung, laughing. “But - I don’t share him, I suppose. Heechul allows us to have him. He deigns to give us that privilege.”
“He does love you,” said Siwon quietly. Hankyung nodded. For all that Heechul sniped and snapped, it was obvious that he loved Hankyung - it was simply that he wasn’t likely to say that.
“I think he loves you too,” said Hankyung with a shrug.
“I’m the new boy,” said Siwon with a grin. “New opportunities and all that.”
“We were like an old married couple even before we were a couple,” said Hankyung with a wry smile. “He used to blame me for everything - well, no change there, actually. He was - god, he still is - fucking fantastic.”
“He never says sorry,” began Siwon, the sentence finished by Hankyung.
“Because it is never actually his fault. How brilliant is that? You can’t apologise for something you don’t think is your fault.”
“I think you are brilliant too,” said Siwon, rather suddenly. “Just - the way that you did what you thought was right, even when you knew that it would eventually ruin you. It gives me strength.”
“Strength?” Hankyung frowned, slightly confused.
“It helps me realise that what I’m doing is right,” said Siwon. “If I feel it is right, then it is.”
“That’s something Heechul would say,” said Hankyung. “I didn’t make that decision lightly.”
“I know.”
“What decision did you make?” asked Hankyung. “I don’t under-”
“We’re missing the film,” said Siwon, and turned back to the screen, the light from it flickering across his features. Hankyung got the sense that the conversation had been dropped. He sighed; one the one hand he wanted to know what Siwon was talking about, but on the other, Siwon had a right to his privacy, just like the one that Hankyung had always claimed.
Hankyung never got to see the end of the film (although Siwon later told him that the two lovers killed themselves, to which Heechul snorted and asked what the fuck kind of a girly film they had been watching) as he fell asleep soon after, head falling onto Siwon’s shoulder. Siwon said that he fell asleep too, soon after, so that the film drew to a close without any audience of any kind. Heechul said that the television was still on when he came in from his dinner with the police chief, although the DVD player had switched itself off.
All Hankyung knew was that Heechul shook him awake roughly, clearly taking his chance to do so while he could. “You both look ridiculous,” he said smugly. Siwon moaned slightly - Heechul had clearly woken him up first. “If you’re going to sleep, do it on a bed.”
“Go away,” moaned Hankyung, attempting to bury his head in the sofa. “I’ve woken into a nightmare.”
“Well,” said Heechul, folding his arms and raising an eyebrow. “I’ll just take myself over to my nice warm bed with the soft mattress and the pretty cover and be by myself, shall I?”
Siwon forced himself to his feet, struggled over to the bed, and then sprawled down on it. Hankyung, seeing that he had moved, also got to his feet - he only just made it to the bed before he crashed down, drifting off and then coming to in order to hear Heechul say in an amused voice to Siwon; “This isn’t your bedroom.”
“Hyung,” groaned Siwon, eyes closed. Heechul laughed gleefully, and then climbed onto the bed with him, lying next to him. Hankyung crawled up to bury his head in Heechul’s neck. Heechul laughed softly, fingers of one hand threaded through Hankyung’s hair, the other against Siwon’s hip.
“God,” muttered Hankyung, a little incoherent. “You really do get everything you want.”
“You gave it to me,” said Heechul softly.