Why Couldn't I Have Met You First?
Title: Why Couldn’t I Have Met You First?
Pairing: Kyuhyun x Heechul [KyuChul] past! Hangeng x Heechul [HanChul] appearances and mentioning of Zhou Mi, Sungmin, Donghae, past! (brief) Siwon x Heechul [SiChul]
Genre: angst, romance, melodrama
Word count: twelve pages of plot, six pages of smut, 7,725 words
Rating: NC-17 (angst sex)
Summary: If I never met you, I wouldn't like you. If I didn't like you, I wouldn't love you. If I didn't love you, I wouldn't miss you. But I did, I do, and I will. Kyuhyun fell in love with Kim Heechul without ever seeing his face.
---
When Kyuhyun was 19, he moved to Seoul.
Kyuhyun placed his suitcase in the living room and breathed in the stagnant air of the apartment. He filled his lungs and resisted the urge to cough. This was the smell of freedom, and he would revel in it as long as he could.
“As long as he could” amounted to around three minutes. By the time he made it to the bedroom the air felt so thick he suspected he could eat it. He simply leaned his laptop case against the wall and climbed atop the bed to reach the window.
The mattress creaked and for a moment he wondered if it would hold. The groaning of springs faded and Kyuhyun leaned forward, opening the window. Cool air flooded inside and he breathed in deeply, smiling to himself.
This was it.
The blaring of a car horn pulled him out of his moment of victory. He blinked, before remembering that he needed to get all of his things out of the moving truck before they decided to dump all of his possessions on the sidewalk and drive off.
He got off of the bed and his foot caught on the edge of the bed frame and he fell. He hit the ground with a grunt, cursing as he pushed himself up off of the dusty floor. He coughed, trying not to breathe and brushing dirt and dust bunnies from his jacket. He looked back at the bed and paused.
It wasn’t the bed frame he’d tripped over, but a box. It was a shoe box, size 42. He brushed off a layer of dust and sneezed before opening the lid. The box was filled with letters. His fingers traveled along the faded, bent corner of the envelope at the top of the stack when the honking outside his window became louder.
He dropped the box and stumbled to his feet, cursing as he made sure his keys were in his jacket pocket before heading out the front door.
He ran into his neighbor two doors down while trying to get to the elevator. The man was tall, all arms and legs and smiles, with a big nose. Kyuhyun wouldn’t have noticed the nose except that the man was smiling so brightly, and a pair of zebra print glasses were perched atop it.
“Ah, sorry!” Kyuhyun mumbled, but the other man simply continued to smile, shaking his head.
“It’s alright.” He said in accented Korean. “You must be my new neighbor.” He looked over at Kyuhyun’s apartment number. He turned back, the smile never leaving his face, “I’m Zhou Mi.”
---
Kyuhyun forgot about the shoe box.
It had been pushed back under the bed, unimportant, as Kyuhyun spent the next week cleaning, unpacking, and rearranging his apartment. There was also the matter of finding a job to help pay for his college tuition.
The little time he did spend at his new apartment consisted mostly of him sitting on the floor in his living room, eating ramen and looking for job openings at nearby stores. He still didn’t have a couch.
But as he was reaching under his bed for his clarinet case-a moment of musical inspiration had struck around 3am, and his clarinet was the closest instrument to his bed-he grabbed the shoe box instead. He was rather intent on putting it back. After all, it wasn’t his. If he hadn’t been too paranoid that the original owner might come back looking for them, he probably would have thrown the box away.
Instead, he opened the lid and pulled out one of the envelopes. He leaned back against his pillows, flicking on his bedside lamp as he slid the letter out. Three pages, all written in small, stylized Hangul.
Hangeng,
I still haven’t received those steamed buns you promised me. They should have been in the mail three days ago. They’re probably out there somewhere, rotting…or being eaten by a postal worker. I hope you’re proud of yourself. Here I am, starving, while you eat those heavenly homemade steamed buns.
If I don’t get them soon, I will drive to Seoul and force you to make me enough to last the rest of the year.
Actually, we should do that anyway.
I’ve been meaning to tell you, your Korean hasn’t improved at all since you began writing me. I grabbed a Chinese dictionary at the bookstore the other day, so feel free to actually throw in some vocabulary other than describing how hot your coffee was and what the weather was like.
Kyuhyun snorted, looking over the page. Three pages filled with sarcastic commentaries. Whoever the person was, they were amusing. His eyes fell on the last page, at the signature placed there with a small cartoon.
Write back or face the consequences,
Heechul
Kyuhyun looked at the date on the top of the page. That was at the beginning of last year. Whoever had lived here couldn’t have moved out too long ago. Hangeng…was that Chinese? Kyuhyun didn’t know, he simply leaned back and pulled out another letter.
---
Kyuhyun didn’t know when he began to fall in love with Kim Heechul, but he assumed it was around letter twenty five, the one where Heechul wrote Hangeng a poem about homesickness.
He’d spent the rest of that first night reading them. They were lengthy-Heechul seemed to enjoy writing and having other people read what he wrote (Kyuhyun suspected he was the type that loved to hear himself talk)-so he’d only gotten through a few of them before he’d finally decided to sleep for an hour or two before he went out job hunting.
After that, he’d limited himself to one a day, simply because he wasn’t sure what he would do when he finally finished reading them.
He got a job at a coffee shop a few blocks from his apartment. The hours were nice, and they were flexible with his class schedule. Sometimes he would bring in a letter to read during his break, but after Sungmin had asked him what he was reading once he’d stopped doing so.
Heechul’s letters were for him to read and no one else.
He learned a lot about Heechul through them. Each letter divulged some new hint, some new piece of his personality that, when Kyuhyun pieced it all together, became someone Kyuhyun could only dream existed.
Heechul loved cats, and he had two of them. He’d had a third, but she hadn’t gotten along with his first one, so he’d had to give her to a neighbor. He was older than Kyuhyun, and double majoring in art and literature. He played the drums and the piano and the violin. He drew cartoons and caricatures. He sent them to Hangeng often to cheer him up when he knew Hangeng was missing his mother and father back in China.
He was witty, and sarcastic, with an underlying fragility. He was beautiful-or at least he seemed to think so-and he told people so. He taunted and flirted and was altogether malicious when it came to pranks.
He dyed his hair so frequently that Hangeng was worried it would all fall out one day. Kyuhyun learned that it had been bright red once, and blonde. He seemed to enjoy blonde, though it was currently black again.
Kyuhyun learned about his family. About his favorite dongsaeng named Donghae who was a dance student at a nearby university in Seoul. He learned about Heejin, who was a nurse and the only person that could boss Heechul around. He learned about Boa, Heechul’s best friend and female counterpart.
He learned about Hangeng…the man that Heechul loved. The Chinese dancer who came to Seoul to make it big and ended up slipping on some ice and falling into Heechul’s lap at a bus stop. They’d met on January 12th three years ago.
He learned that Heechul liked Beijing Fried rice-but only if Hangeng cooked it-and drinking soju early into the morning. He liked writing fairytales and playing video games.
He seemed surreal.
He became an obsession.
Kyuhyun hadn’t known how he could become so addicted to reading someone else’s letters.
Most of all, Kyuhyun wondered why Hangeng had left the letters in the apartment in the first place. He knew from the letters that they were lovers. It wasn’t ever blatantly said, but he could feel it. It was in the way Heechul wrote, in the things he said.
Kyuhyun had come to believe that he understood Heechul quite well after reading so much about him. He inferred things and planted an image in his head of Heechul.
A faceless image, but an image nonetheless.
Sometimes Kyuhyun forgot that Heechul wasn’t writing to him. He’d open up a letter and laugh to himself as he read about Heechul’s day, about the bird that Heebum had caught and Heechul had tried to nurse back to health-it had died and he’d cried about it, even though he’d known all along that it wouldn’t make it-and then Kyuhyun was brought back to the reality that he was not Hangeng.
He was not Heechul’s lover.
These letters weren’t meant for him.
The warmth that had kept the stress of classes and homesickness away left and he’d sit on his bed and ask himself the same question he did every night.
Why couldn’t he have met Heechul first?
Kyuhyun couldn’t understand why Hangeng stopped writing…or why Heechul stopped writing back. Did they have a fight? The last letter that Heechul had sent sounded fine. Nothing was wrong. It was something that plagued Kyuhyun every day.
The logical part of him told him that it was probably because Hangeng had moved. He probably still wrote letters and Heechul probably still wrote back. The things that Kyuhyun was reading were just a small moment in time.
But the letters were folded so lovingly, and the creases were fragile with ware from being opened and closed countless times. These were not things that Hangeng would have left here. They were something he would have come back for if he’d forgotten them.
Kyuhyun knew he would have.
After he’d finished the last letter, placed it at the bottom of the box and stared at all the memories-they weren’t his, but he coveted them anyway-he felt empty.
And so Kyuhyun did the stupidest thing he’d ever done in his life.
He sat down and wrote a letter.
Heechul,
I’m sorry I haven’t written in a while. Work has been hectic, and I’ve been doing late night shifts to help pay off the lease on my mom’s restaurant.
I miss you.
Kyuhyun paused. Would Hangeng have said that? Was Hangeng as hopeless a romantic as Kyuhyun felt, or as Heechul painted him to be? Kyuhyun stared down at the few sentences he’d written and wondered and swallowed-because his throat was suddenly, horribly dry-but continued onward.
It’s muggy. I really hate summers here. The air conditioner is broken again and I don’t have the money to fix it. The landlady said that she’d look into finding a repairman soon. Heechul had said that Hangeng hated the humid summers. Safe. He was safe so far. When are you coming to visit? He crumpled up the piece of paper and threw it in the trash before rewriting the first few lines, leaving out the last sentence. Stupid, why would anyone ever say something like that, especially after not writing in so long?
During practice at the studio, I think I twisted my ankle. I put it under ice and all I could think about was you nagging me about not wearing my brace. I’ve kept off of it for a while, so I’ll be going back in a week or so. Hangeng had a weak ankle. Heechul had bought him an ankle brace to help with dancing. It had been an offhanded gift; he’d mentioned sending it with a letter once.
Has your school schedule changed? You were complaining about that literature class you were taking. What was it called again? I can’t remember. Did you drop it or not? Heechul had mentioned the literature class several times in his letters, but he’d never mentioned what the class was called. It was always referred to as, “that class” or “satan’s literature”. He’d found the last comment amusing, because Heechul was a rather vehement atheist.
I know I haven’t written in a while. I really am sorry. I miss you. Kyuhyun stared down at the letter, wanting to write more. But Hangeng’s letters were always short, Heechul complained about that. Despite everything he wanted to say-what Kyuhyun wanted to say-Hangeng wouldn’t say it, because Heechul already knew how Hangeng felt.
He didn’t need to profess his love because Heechul knew that Hangeng loved him.
He just didn’t know that Kyuhyun loved him too.
Cinderalla, wo ai ni
At the end of the letter he accidently signed it Kyuhyun and had to rewrite the entire thing over again.
He was stupid. Why did he write in the first place? Just because the letters were there didn’t mean that Hangeng had stopped writing. Maybe Hangeng had stopped writing because he and Heechul were now living together. Maybe he’d moved to Heonseong with him, or they’d gotten a better apartment in Seoul. Hell, maybe they’d moved back to Beijing to be with Hangeng’s family.
It was stupid of him to assume that just because his last letter from Heechul was seven months ago that Heechul and Hangeng had stopped communicating.
It was stupid to write back, to assume the identity of Hangeng…but he did. He knew enough about Hangeng from Heechul’s letters to make it perfect. That didn’t change the fact that he’d become so desperate to get another letter that he was pretending to be someone else.
He spent the entire next week worrying about what was going to happen. Would Heechul respond? Would he get a nasty phone call? Would someone arrest him for impersonating someone else? Would Hangeng come and beat him up? He knew from Heechul’s letters that Hangeng took martial arts. The only fighting that Kyuhyun had ever done was in the form of Mortal Kombat.
Every unfamiliar person he passed was suddenly Hangeng, and being alone in Seoul and knowing about ten or so people by name, that meant there were a lot of people he was now terrified of. Anytime he got on the bus to go to the university, he imagined that Hangeng was there, watching him, waiting to kick his ass.
He’d become jumpy at work. Unfamiliar customers were all out to shove boiling hot coffee in his face in revenge, he was certain. Sungmin had begun to get worried and had sent Kyuhyun to the back of the shop to check inventory after Kyuhyun had almost fainted when a customer asked for a cinnamon dolce latte.
It was Hangeng’s favorite drink.
Once, when he’d been going up to his apartment, Zhou Mi had been unlocking his own door after going to the store. He’d greeted him with his usual greeting, a cheerful Nihao, Kui Xian! The Chinese greeting had made Kyuhyun’s blood run cold and he’d locked himself in his apartment for the rest of the day, afraid to go outside.
He didn’t sleep. He barely ate. He stared at his door and at the box of letters at the foot of his bed and wondered when Hangeng was going to come and kill him.
So when he went to get his mail and found a letter hidden between his electricity bill and a credit card offer, he almost yelled. He grabbed the letter and headed up to his apartment, barely registering that the lady at the front desk was staring at him like he’d grown a second head.
He locked the front door behind him and barely made it to his bedroom before he tore the envelope open with trembling fingers. He took a moment to revel in the fact that there was no restraining order inside, but four pieces of paper, in the handwriting that Kyuhyun immediately recognized as Heechul’s.
Hangeng the soon to be dead man,
Not writing in a while is an understatement of the fucking century. How does seven months sound? If I remember correctly, even if the months have a different name in Chinese, the number of days stays the same. How the hell could you think that seven months was only a short amount of time?
Kyuhyun swallowed. Heechul had addressed the letter to Hangeng. To Hangeng. Not to Hangeng’s impersonator that was going to die in a matter of moments. Heechul had threatened him with death, but he’d threatened him as Hangeng.
Were you shitface drunk when you wrote this, because your handwriting looks nothing like it usually does. This is an improvement. At least your grammar is a little better. I’d say you asked Siwon to write it for you, but I don’t think you’ve let go of your pride enough to do so. You wouldn’t want him reading you being all sickeningly sweet to his ex-boyfriend, right?
You found some kind of online translator, didn’t you?
God, why hadn’t Kyuhyun realized that his handwriting wasn’t the same? Stupid. Stupid.
It doesn’t matter. If an online translator gets you to write more often then use it, although I miss your random Chinese. You’re getting so Korean now, I can barely tell you’re the Chinaman I know and love. And by love I mean I want to punch your face in for making me wait so long for this letter.
I’m almost tempted to switch to e-mail. We really should consider it. Or, you know, talking on the phone. Hearing your voice every once and a while is a nice reminder that you’re actually alive. And let’s not have another conversation about the price of phone calls, alright? If I have to buy you a cell phone, I will. At least then I can text you until you finally call me back.
Kyuhyun paled. E-mail…e-mail he could do. But phones? Heechul would know right away. Wait, was he actually considering writing back? He shouldn’t. It was wrong, all of this was wrong. The only letter he should be sending Heechul was an apology note asking for forgiveness for doing something so stupid.
But Heechul wrote back.
He thought Hangeng lived here.
He didn’t know Hangeng was gone.
How could he not know? How could Kyuhyun have ever thought for a moment that any of this was plausible?
Of course my schedule has changed. It’s been SEVEN MONTHS. I passed that damned class, but it took several all nighters and my amazing genius to pull it off. I’m rather certain I was the only one that did without sleeping with the professor.
He was old and balding. I wouldn’t have gone for him if my PHD depended on it.
Kyuhyun wanted to laugh, but the entire situation was surreal. He couldn’t believe this was happening.
Aish, Hannie, what did I tell you about that damned brace? I didn’t get it for you as a fashion statement. That’s what those leather knee-high boots are for. Seriously, as much as you tell me to take care of myself, you’re doing a poor job of it. Don’t you dare go back to the studio until you’re fully healed. Tell Seasonings that he has to watch out for you and make sure you don’t overdo it, got it?
Speaking of Seasonings, how is he doing? You had better be taking care of him. If I found out you weren’t, there will be hell to pay.
Seasonings was someone that Heechul mentioned often, but Kyuhyun had no idea who they were. He assumed that he was a friend. Kyuhyun didn't care. All Kyuhyun could do was stare down at the letter in shock.
Heechul had written back.
---
“Going home already?”
Kyuhyun looked up and grinned at Sungmin’s quizzical glance, “Yeah. My shift ended.”
“Usually you stay a bit longer on the weekends.”
“I’m expecting a package. I have to get home.” Kyuhyun grabbed his bag, hanging his apron up in the back before he practically danced out of the coffee shop, ignoring Sungmin’s continued confusion. He couldn’t help the grin that was plastered on his face, a grin that didn’t fade as he rode the bus home.
It had been exactly four months since Kyuhyun had sent Heechul the first letter and gotten a reply back. Four months since Kyuhyun had taken on the role of Hangeng. Four months and Kyuhyun’s guilt at lying had been pushed far away, ignored.
The person he loved was talking to him, loved him back. It didn’t matter that Heechul didn’t know who he was. Somewhere out there, Heechul was reading his letters and thinking, this was written by the person I love and Kyuhyun was content with the knowledge that it was him who’d written it. HIM who made Heechul smile now.
He lived in constant fear of being discovered. After the first letter, after he’d changed up his handwriting and tried his hardest to search for any descriptions Heechul may have made about Hangeng’s handwriting, he’d poured everything into making the letters perfect.
It wasn’t difficult to do. He had drank in every single letter Heechul had sent, had memorized several of them. To become the man that Heechul loved was not difficult to do, not when Kyuhyun was so desperate to please.
There were times when Heechul would ask him things he didn’t know, and then Kyuhyun would panic. Usually he just didn’t answer the question, would brush it off. He would hide that unanswered question among queries of his own.
He feared the day that Heechul would ask to come visit, or to call. He knew he should stop, but he couldn’t help it. Every letter had him falling more and more in love. His addiction grew, and sometimes he couldn’t remember if he was Kyuhyun or Hangeng.
He couldn’t remember anymore if he liked eating steamed buns before reading Heechul’s letters or after, or when his favorite movie became The Lion King.
Sometimes he would lie awake at night and seriously contemplate whether he should seek some kind of mental help. He was going crazy. He knew it was unhealthy, he knew that he had a problem, but he couldn’t find it in him to stop.
He reached the apartment building fifteen minutes after leaving the coffee shop. The woman at the front counter smiled brightly at him, holding out a box. Kyuhyun’s smile stretched as he took it from her. It was heavier than he’d expected.
“Thanks.” He managed, before heading to the elevator.
The box held a bottle of wine-from my mom’s store, it’s a good vintage, don’t drink it all at once!-enough bungeoppang to feed an army, and a letter. Kyuhyun opened the envelope and was surprised at the fact that there was only one page inside, and there were only a few lines.
It’s been three years to the day since the first time we kissed. It’s been 8 months since the last time. Your lips had better have been abstinent since then. I’m your last, first kiss, right?
That night, Kyuhyun drank the entire bottle of wine. He ended up spending the rest of the night bent over the toilet, vomiting up bungeoppang and dukboki and sobbing. This was wrong. All of it was wrong. He hated himself and a part of him wanted to hate Heechul for not loving him first, but he couldn’t. Heechul didn’t know, after all.
He’d never been kissed before.
---
Kyuhyun cried himself to sleep most nights after that. It got worse after a new letter would arrive. But with the tears came a sliver of happiness, the feeling of being loved, and Kyuhyun would hold the new letter to his chest as he sobbed.
Sometimes he would press his face against his pillows and scream. The muffled “whys” never made it past his bedroom door.
He’d begun to hate Hangeng with every new letter. Why him? Why couldn’t Kyuhyun have been the one to meet Heechul that day at the bus stop? Why couldn’t it have been him cuddled up on the banks of the Naerincheon river in February, looking like an idiot in a ridiculously bright pink scarf and sipping cinnamon dolces?
Why?
Kyuhyun wondered if he’d ever get an answer, or if fate was just too cruel to give him any semblance of happiness.
He made his way down to the post office, both dreading and anticipating a new letter. Surely one would come today. He needed it to come. He grabbed the mail from his box and began sifting through it, glancing over bills distastefully until he came across a familiar envelope.
“Nihao Kui Xian!” Zhou Mi stepped past him to open his own mail box. He paused as he noticed the letter in Kyuhyun’s hands. “Oh,” Zhou Mi’s smile dimmed, something that Kyuhyun had never seen before. “…the letters are still coming? I thought they had stopped.”
Kyuhyun froze. Letters? How did Zhou Mi know about the letters? Panic and paranoia and a million other emotions gripped him as he swallowed, “What do you mean?”
“From Heechul ge.” Zhou Mi’s smile was strained. “An old letter. Sometimes old ones end up being sent here. Heechul ge and Hangeng ge used to send letters to each other all the time. But after the accident, I guess some of them were caught up in the post somewhere. They show up from time to time.”
“…accident?” Kyuhyun didn’t understand. What was Zhou Mi talking about? How did Zhou Mi know Heechul and Hangeng? What accident!?
Zhou Mi nodded. “Hangeng ge died early last year. In a car accident.”
Kyuhyun felt sick. He dropped the letters, paling. Zhou Mi bent down to pick them up, “Kui Xian? Are you-”
Kyuhyun had already ran down the hallway to the elevator, frantically pressing the up arrow. He didn’t know what he was running away from: Zhou Mi or the letter at the top of the pile, waiting to be opened.
Hangeng was dead.
Hangeng had died.
Kyuhyun had been pretending to be a dead man to gain the love of a man he’d never even met before.
He was fucked up. He was a sick, disgusting person.
Kyuhyun fell into the elevator, sliding down the wall as he reached up a hand to press his floor number. He swallowed, closing his eyes as tears slowly began to fall. “Oh god,” he whispered hoarsely. “…oh god.”
He threw up in the elevator.
---
Smut is this way! --- >