[infinite] smart bomb (6/7)
smart bomb
infinite, hoya/sungyeol
pg-13; ongoing
ao3 mirror
you got an answer (january 2009)
There’s one minute left in English class and six minutes until 4:35. Sungyeol’s left knee won’t stop bouncing as he looks back and forth between the clock above the blackboard and the scrap of notebook paper on his desk, creased neatly into sixteen sections across the scribbly handwriting: 4:35 south gym. Shall we meet? He had found it folded up inside his locker at lunch, and he’d been carrying it around the rest of the day, unable to resist peeking at it whenever he got the chance. It makes him feel somewhere between receiving a wrapped-up present and the time he failed a geometry test in middle school and threw up on the way home with it still in his hand.
Kim Jiwoong next to him elbows him pointedly in the ribs and Sungyeol starts and glares at him. Jiwoong points at the teacher, then at his own eyes, so Sungyeol resumes mouthing along with the rest of the class’s recitation, rubbing the soreness out of his side. If he knew Jiwoong better, he’d show him the note and say, What do you think of this? Who do you think it is? and they’d talk about it: the girls they hoped it was, the girls they hoped it wasn’t. Sungyeol would bring up that time just after the school festival when three second-years brought him a carton of chocolate milk but didn’t give him their names before they ran away. That was easily the most popular period of his life, and he’d talked about the incident over and over until Hoya stuck a piece of kimbap in his mouth so he’d shut up. He and Hoya were still friends, then.
Sungyeol thinks for a second about showing the note to Jiwoong anyway - maybe that’s how they could become better friends - but then the bell goes and Jiwoong immediately turns away and packs up his bag. Sungyeol stays where he is for a moment. He could just ignore the note, he thinks. He could let the clock on the wall tick past 4:35, 4:36, and never get up.
He stretches out his anticipation as much as he can. He takes his time on the stairs down to the first floor and then in the hallway towards the gym. The folded-up piece of paper softens in his hand from the sweat. Outside the gym, he can hear music playing and the occasional squeak of sneakers on the waxed floor. The sound reminds him of something, but he forces the suspicion down.
He checks his watch: 4:35 and 12 seconds. He pushes open the door, and the moment he sees Hoya the bubble of suspicion in his chest rises and bursts, filling him with disappointment and nerves all at once. He shoves the door and it bangs against the wall, then slams behind him. Hoya doesn’t stop dancing, staring at the wall in front of him as he waves his arms and swings his feet to the beat, faster than Sungyeol can comprehend.
“Stop,” Sungyeol says. Hoya doesn’t look at him. “Stop,” he says, louder, and then he stomps over to the boom box by the wall and turns it all the way up at first, then off.
Hoya continues dancing anyway, finishing the sequence he’d started, and only then he straightens and turns to Sungyeol. The sleeves of his uniform shirt are rolled up and he’s wearing track pants instead of his uniform. “Welcome,” he says.
Sungyeol clenches his fist and the paper crumples. “You wrote this?” he says. “What is it, then?”
“What? You’re the one who walked in.” Hoya raises his eyebrows and rests his hands on his back. “You here to join the dance club, finally?”
Sungyeol shakes the paper in his fist at Hoya. “You wrote this,” he says again. Hoya doesn’t say anything, but Sungyeol can see the lines of his face stiffen, and it’s enough. “What’s wrong with you? You can’t just talk to me in class like a normal person? You have to slip me a note like some... some girl?”
“As if you’re a normal person,” Hoya says. He starts walking towards Sungyeol and Sungyeol jumps in his shoes, the back of his neck prickling, but Hoya only picks up his backpack from beside the boom box. “And I’m not a girl.”
“That’s the problem, isn’t it?” says Sungyeol, and he regrets it even before Hoya whirls around on his feet.
“What’s that supposed to mean?” His voice is dangerously level. Sungyeol’s head starts heating up, like it’s glowing red.
But he keeps talking. He can’t stop talking. “Isn’t that why you called me here?” he says. “You know, I only heard about your breakup from some stupid second-year. She came up to me and asked if Howon oppa broke up with his girlfriend and I couldn’t even answer her.” Hoya stares at him. “Weren’t we supposed to be friends? Isn’t that what your weird little pact or whatever was about? Instead I haven’t seen you since... since...”
He trails off, but Hoya only continues staring at him, and stands straight, still carrying his backpack in front of him with one hand. Sungyeol groans. “Are you really going to make me say it? Since the new year.”
Hoya shrugs one shoulder. “I’m sorry,” he says.
“You’re sorry?” Sungyeol repeats, voice cracking into a screech. “Sorry for what? For not talking to me? For ruining my year? You know I only applied to one university, because of you, and I hope to God I get in, or else my entire future is dogshit.”
Hoya scoffs, looking down at his shoes as he scuffs the toes along the floor. “You’re gonna blame me for your shitty grades? You wanted to be an actor. You chose this.”
“I said that so you’d stop bothering me. And look how well that turned out.”
There’s silence for a few moments, as Sungyeol’s last words reverberate off the high gym ceiling. The paper is still in his hand, dampening in his clenched fist.
“Hoya,” he says, and his voice echoes some more, “why did you break up with Yoonhye?”
Hoya drags his toe along the ground a few more times, and then stops. “How do you know I’m the one who broke up with her?”
“Hoya,” Sungyeol says again, breathing so heavily that he can feel his ribs opening and closing, “why did you break up with her? Huh? Tell me.” Hoya’s silent. “Tell me.” Sungyeol heaves once, twice. “Is it because you like men?”
His voice ricochets around the room, a thousand repeats of the accusation, each one making his stomach tighten more. He waits for Hoya to turn on him, to tear his throat out with his pointed teeth, but he only laughs. “I’m not going to have this conversation with you.”
“Then who are you going to have it with?” The words rush out of his mouth like water out of a broken pipe, too easy, too much. “Your parents? Your girlfriend? Ex-girlfriend?”
“So what then, do you?” says Hoya. The gym is fully lit, but Sungyeol can’t see his eyes when he looks up.
He grips his fist, and he can feel the softening paper in his palm. The confession note. “I don’t know,” he says.
Hoya snorts and looks away. He stands straight as always, but there’s something unbalanced about his pose. “How do you not know? You either do or you don’t.”
Sungyeol doesn’t want to do this. He wants to receive a confession from a pretty girl with long hair and be her handsome sunbae boyfriend and visit her from Seoul every weekend when he goes to university. Somehow it feels too late for that. He had his 18, and now it’s gone, and he’s here with Hoya.
“Why do you... Stop doing this.” Hoya looks up at him, and his expression is flat and unreadable as usual. Sungyeol’s cheeks get hot anyways. He tenses his face so he won’t cry. “You always act like you know all the answers, but then it’s like you’re too good to share them with me or something. Like I’m not good enough for you. Why did you even talk to me?” Someone’s footsteps stop in the hallway and Hoya’s eyes dart sideways. Sungyeol doesn’t care. “That first week of school. Were you just scared because you’re new? God, if you wanted to be a bully, you could’ve just made me give you money or buy you bread or something normal. Not this weird shit where you make me promise you crap and you...”
“Kiss you?” says Hoya. His voice is so much quieter than Sungyeol’s and it punches into Sungyeol’s gut, slow and jagged. His gaze is level, but he’s shaking, too, his nostrils flaring. “Why don’t you tell me what the answer is, then?”
Sungyeol steps forward. He takes a good look at Hoya, for the first time in a while: his dark eyes, their strength flickering; the acne along his chin; the downward curve of his lips. Fuck it, Sungyeol thinks, or says it out loud, and he bends forward and kisses Hoya, holding their mouths together for a count of ten. It doesn’t feel like anything, so he leans back, but as soon as he does and he sees Hoya’s face up close, eyes closed and lips slightly parted, his stomach drops and he falls forward again.
This time Hoya opens his mouth and pulls Sungyeol in by the collar of his uniform jacket, so hard they both stumble towards the wall until Hoya’s backpack crunches into it. Their teeth scrape and hit each other Sungyeol’s heart feels like it’s going to eject out of his mouth at any moment. Hoya pulls him in so close he can feel his body heat, the sweat from dancing and from kissing. Their legs fold and weave together like they already know where to go, and when Sungyeol shifts and rubs against Hoya’s cock he can feel Hoya melt momentarily under him.
When Sungyeol finally surfaces for air, he feels raw and shivery, like he’d been in some protective case that’s gone now. “Fuck,” he gasps, just for something to say. Hoya’s panting too, looking back at Sungyeol from under heavy eyelids, and for the first time he looks uncertain, vulnerable. Sungyeol’s hands twitch from wrist to cuticle, flexed against the wall on either side of Hoya’s head. He wants this, he realizes, so much that he can’t think about anything else right now. Every time their knees touched under the table in class, that time they walked home from the pool together soaking wet, every time they waited for each other at the bus stop: it’s all been because of this, because they both wanted this. “But what is this?” he mumbles.
The gym door bangs open and they both jump. Sungyeol’s entire torso lights up, but whoever opens the door only looks in momentarily before letting it slam closed again. It’s enough for Sungyeol. He slides down the wall next to Hoya and presses his face against his knees. His head hurts again, but it’s a different kind of hurt from before, in a different place. He hears Hoya sit down next to him, and they sit in silence for a while.
“I’m going to Seoul,” Hoya says at last. Sungyeol doesn’t reply, listening to his own breaths slowly expanding to normal again. “After graduation. I’m joining my crew there.”
“You told me about them,” Sungyeol says.
“Yeah, so don’t tell me that I never tell you anything.” There’s no bitterness in Hoya’s voice, but he sounds hollow without it. “What about you?”
“Am I joining your crew?”
Hoya snorts. “You know what I mean.” Then, after a moment, he says, “You’re going to be there, right?”
“I’m trying.” Sungyeol turns his head, expecting to meet Hoya’s dead-on stare, but Hoya is staring somewhere just in front of him. He’s lost too. “Hoya, I can’t date you. Not right now.”
He can see Hoya’s spine relax, like he’d been waiting for the answer, even though he’d never asked the question. “Are you sure?”
“Yes, for once, I’m fucking sure.” Sungyeol stares across the gym. There’s windows higher up towards the ceiling, and he can see the apartment buildings by the school in the distance. One of them is his family’s. “You just broke up with a girl, and I...”
Hoya looks at him, finally. “You?”
Sungyeol thinks about kissing him again; he thinks about never seeing him for the rest of their lives. I’m not gay; I’m too scared; I don’t know what I want.
“I need to figure it out,” is what he says. “So let me do that, for once. Give me time to catch up to you. Okay?”
Outside the windows, the sun is already going down. Hoya stares at him, and Sungyeol wonders, for the third time, if they’re going to kiss again. But Hoya stands up, and shrugs his backpack up over his shoulders.
“I’m tired of fighting for you,” he says. Then he walks away, stopping to give a half-hearted wave before he goes out through the door. Sungyeol watches him go, too full of emotions to get up or even feel what any of them are. It’s 5:05 and 24 seconds when he finally staggers to his feet.
All during the bus ride home he replays their conversation, but he can’t think of how it might have gone differently, except to end in even worse disaster. When it comes down to it, he thinks, looking at his reflection in the window, isn’t he the same as he was when he was 17? He could start over at 19, return to a normal life, and no one would ever ask him how he spent his third year of high school. Just the words are comforting: a normal life. But when he thinks about telling Hoya this, in the darkening gym or at the bus stop or in the cafeteria on the first day of school, it doesn’t feel like the right answer, either.
<<
infinite, hoya/sungyeol
pg-13; ongoing
ao3 mirror
you got an answer (january 2009)
There’s one minute left in English class and six minutes until 4:35. Sungyeol’s left knee won’t stop bouncing as he looks back and forth between the clock above the blackboard and the scrap of notebook paper on his desk, creased neatly into sixteen sections across the scribbly handwriting: 4:35 south gym. Shall we meet? He had found it folded up inside his locker at lunch, and he’d been carrying it around the rest of the day, unable to resist peeking at it whenever he got the chance. It makes him feel somewhere between receiving a wrapped-up present and the time he failed a geometry test in middle school and threw up on the way home with it still in his hand.
Kim Jiwoong next to him elbows him pointedly in the ribs and Sungyeol starts and glares at him. Jiwoong points at the teacher, then at his own eyes, so Sungyeol resumes mouthing along with the rest of the class’s recitation, rubbing the soreness out of his side. If he knew Jiwoong better, he’d show him the note and say, What do you think of this? Who do you think it is? and they’d talk about it: the girls they hoped it was, the girls they hoped it wasn’t. Sungyeol would bring up that time just after the school festival when three second-years brought him a carton of chocolate milk but didn’t give him their names before they ran away. That was easily the most popular period of his life, and he’d talked about the incident over and over until Hoya stuck a piece of kimbap in his mouth so he’d shut up. He and Hoya were still friends, then.
Sungyeol thinks for a second about showing the note to Jiwoong anyway - maybe that’s how they could become better friends - but then the bell goes and Jiwoong immediately turns away and packs up his bag. Sungyeol stays where he is for a moment. He could just ignore the note, he thinks. He could let the clock on the wall tick past 4:35, 4:36, and never get up.
He stretches out his anticipation as much as he can. He takes his time on the stairs down to the first floor and then in the hallway towards the gym. The folded-up piece of paper softens in his hand from the sweat. Outside the gym, he can hear music playing and the occasional squeak of sneakers on the waxed floor. The sound reminds him of something, but he forces the suspicion down.
He checks his watch: 4:35 and 12 seconds. He pushes open the door, and the moment he sees Hoya the bubble of suspicion in his chest rises and bursts, filling him with disappointment and nerves all at once. He shoves the door and it bangs against the wall, then slams behind him. Hoya doesn’t stop dancing, staring at the wall in front of him as he waves his arms and swings his feet to the beat, faster than Sungyeol can comprehend.
“Stop,” Sungyeol says. Hoya doesn’t look at him. “Stop,” he says, louder, and then he stomps over to the boom box by the wall and turns it all the way up at first, then off.
Hoya continues dancing anyway, finishing the sequence he’d started, and only then he straightens and turns to Sungyeol. The sleeves of his uniform shirt are rolled up and he’s wearing track pants instead of his uniform. “Welcome,” he says.
Sungyeol clenches his fist and the paper crumples. “You wrote this?” he says. “What is it, then?”
“What? You’re the one who walked in.” Hoya raises his eyebrows and rests his hands on his back. “You here to join the dance club, finally?”
Sungyeol shakes the paper in his fist at Hoya. “You wrote this,” he says again. Hoya doesn’t say anything, but Sungyeol can see the lines of his face stiffen, and it’s enough. “What’s wrong with you? You can’t just talk to me in class like a normal person? You have to slip me a note like some... some girl?”
“As if you’re a normal person,” Hoya says. He starts walking towards Sungyeol and Sungyeol jumps in his shoes, the back of his neck prickling, but Hoya only picks up his backpack from beside the boom box. “And I’m not a girl.”
“That’s the problem, isn’t it?” says Sungyeol, and he regrets it even before Hoya whirls around on his feet.
“What’s that supposed to mean?” His voice is dangerously level. Sungyeol’s head starts heating up, like it’s glowing red.
But he keeps talking. He can’t stop talking. “Isn’t that why you called me here?” he says. “You know, I only heard about your breakup from some stupid second-year. She came up to me and asked if Howon oppa broke up with his girlfriend and I couldn’t even answer her.” Hoya stares at him. “Weren’t we supposed to be friends? Isn’t that what your weird little pact or whatever was about? Instead I haven’t seen you since... since...”
He trails off, but Hoya only continues staring at him, and stands straight, still carrying his backpack in front of him with one hand. Sungyeol groans. “Are you really going to make me say it? Since the new year.”
Hoya shrugs one shoulder. “I’m sorry,” he says.
“You’re sorry?” Sungyeol repeats, voice cracking into a screech. “Sorry for what? For not talking to me? For ruining my year? You know I only applied to one university, because of you, and I hope to God I get in, or else my entire future is dogshit.”
Hoya scoffs, looking down at his shoes as he scuffs the toes along the floor. “You’re gonna blame me for your shitty grades? You wanted to be an actor. You chose this.”
“I said that so you’d stop bothering me. And look how well that turned out.”
There’s silence for a few moments, as Sungyeol’s last words reverberate off the high gym ceiling. The paper is still in his hand, dampening in his clenched fist.
“Hoya,” he says, and his voice echoes some more, “why did you break up with Yoonhye?”
Hoya drags his toe along the ground a few more times, and then stops. “How do you know I’m the one who broke up with her?”
“Hoya,” Sungyeol says again, breathing so heavily that he can feel his ribs opening and closing, “why did you break up with her? Huh? Tell me.” Hoya’s silent. “Tell me.” Sungyeol heaves once, twice. “Is it because you like men?”
His voice ricochets around the room, a thousand repeats of the accusation, each one making his stomach tighten more. He waits for Hoya to turn on him, to tear his throat out with his pointed teeth, but he only laughs. “I’m not going to have this conversation with you.”
“Then who are you going to have it with?” The words rush out of his mouth like water out of a broken pipe, too easy, too much. “Your parents? Your girlfriend? Ex-girlfriend?”
“So what then, do you?” says Hoya. The gym is fully lit, but Sungyeol can’t see his eyes when he looks up.
He grips his fist, and he can feel the softening paper in his palm. The confession note. “I don’t know,” he says.
Hoya snorts and looks away. He stands straight as always, but there’s something unbalanced about his pose. “How do you not know? You either do or you don’t.”
Sungyeol doesn’t want to do this. He wants to receive a confession from a pretty girl with long hair and be her handsome sunbae boyfriend and visit her from Seoul every weekend when he goes to university. Somehow it feels too late for that. He had his 18, and now it’s gone, and he’s here with Hoya.
“Why do you... Stop doing this.” Hoya looks up at him, and his expression is flat and unreadable as usual. Sungyeol’s cheeks get hot anyways. He tenses his face so he won’t cry. “You always act like you know all the answers, but then it’s like you’re too good to share them with me or something. Like I’m not good enough for you. Why did you even talk to me?” Someone’s footsteps stop in the hallway and Hoya’s eyes dart sideways. Sungyeol doesn’t care. “That first week of school. Were you just scared because you’re new? God, if you wanted to be a bully, you could’ve just made me give you money or buy you bread or something normal. Not this weird shit where you make me promise you crap and you...”
“Kiss you?” says Hoya. His voice is so much quieter than Sungyeol’s and it punches into Sungyeol’s gut, slow and jagged. His gaze is level, but he’s shaking, too, his nostrils flaring. “Why don’t you tell me what the answer is, then?”
Sungyeol steps forward. He takes a good look at Hoya, for the first time in a while: his dark eyes, their strength flickering; the acne along his chin; the downward curve of his lips. Fuck it, Sungyeol thinks, or says it out loud, and he bends forward and kisses Hoya, holding their mouths together for a count of ten. It doesn’t feel like anything, so he leans back, but as soon as he does and he sees Hoya’s face up close, eyes closed and lips slightly parted, his stomach drops and he falls forward again.
This time Hoya opens his mouth and pulls Sungyeol in by the collar of his uniform jacket, so hard they both stumble towards the wall until Hoya’s backpack crunches into it. Their teeth scrape and hit each other Sungyeol’s heart feels like it’s going to eject out of his mouth at any moment. Hoya pulls him in so close he can feel his body heat, the sweat from dancing and from kissing. Their legs fold and weave together like they already know where to go, and when Sungyeol shifts and rubs against Hoya’s cock he can feel Hoya melt momentarily under him.
When Sungyeol finally surfaces for air, he feels raw and shivery, like he’d been in some protective case that’s gone now. “Fuck,” he gasps, just for something to say. Hoya’s panting too, looking back at Sungyeol from under heavy eyelids, and for the first time he looks uncertain, vulnerable. Sungyeol’s hands twitch from wrist to cuticle, flexed against the wall on either side of Hoya’s head. He wants this, he realizes, so much that he can’t think about anything else right now. Every time their knees touched under the table in class, that time they walked home from the pool together soaking wet, every time they waited for each other at the bus stop: it’s all been because of this, because they both wanted this. “But what is this?” he mumbles.
The gym door bangs open and they both jump. Sungyeol’s entire torso lights up, but whoever opens the door only looks in momentarily before letting it slam closed again. It’s enough for Sungyeol. He slides down the wall next to Hoya and presses his face against his knees. His head hurts again, but it’s a different kind of hurt from before, in a different place. He hears Hoya sit down next to him, and they sit in silence for a while.
“I’m going to Seoul,” Hoya says at last. Sungyeol doesn’t reply, listening to his own breaths slowly expanding to normal again. “After graduation. I’m joining my crew there.”
“You told me about them,” Sungyeol says.
“Yeah, so don’t tell me that I never tell you anything.” There’s no bitterness in Hoya’s voice, but he sounds hollow without it. “What about you?”
“Am I joining your crew?”
Hoya snorts. “You know what I mean.” Then, after a moment, he says, “You’re going to be there, right?”
“I’m trying.” Sungyeol turns his head, expecting to meet Hoya’s dead-on stare, but Hoya is staring somewhere just in front of him. He’s lost too. “Hoya, I can’t date you. Not right now.”
He can see Hoya’s spine relax, like he’d been waiting for the answer, even though he’d never asked the question. “Are you sure?”
“Yes, for once, I’m fucking sure.” Sungyeol stares across the gym. There’s windows higher up towards the ceiling, and he can see the apartment buildings by the school in the distance. One of them is his family’s. “You just broke up with a girl, and I...”
Hoya looks at him, finally. “You?”
Sungyeol thinks about kissing him again; he thinks about never seeing him for the rest of their lives. I’m not gay; I’m too scared; I don’t know what I want.
“I need to figure it out,” is what he says. “So let me do that, for once. Give me time to catch up to you. Okay?”
Outside the windows, the sun is already going down. Hoya stares at him, and Sungyeol wonders, for the third time, if they’re going to kiss again. But Hoya stands up, and shrugs his backpack up over his shoulders.
“I’m tired of fighting for you,” he says. Then he walks away, stopping to give a half-hearted wave before he goes out through the door. Sungyeol watches him go, too full of emotions to get up or even feel what any of them are. It’s 5:05 and 24 seconds when he finally staggers to his feet.
All during the bus ride home he replays their conversation, but he can’t think of how it might have gone differently, except to end in even worse disaster. When it comes down to it, he thinks, looking at his reflection in the window, isn’t he the same as he was when he was 17? He could start over at 19, return to a normal life, and no one would ever ask him how he spent his third year of high school. Just the words are comforting: a normal life. But when he thinks about telling Hoya this, in the darkening gym or at the bus stop or in the cafeteria on the first day of school, it doesn’t feel like the right answer, either.
<<