RADIOACTIVE for JEBALSARANGHAE
For: jebalsaranghae
Title: Radioactive
Pairing(s): Chanyeol/Suho
Rating: PG
Warning(s): pseudo-science
Length: 8.7k
Summary: Chanyeol’s just trying to keep afloat in life, when a bite from a mutant spider drags him right under the water.
Author's note: I hope you enjoy this glimpse of a universe ;;;;
“Is everything all right?” Joonmyun asks, staring at Chanyeol from over the rims of his designer glasses. “You’ve been weird lately.”
He says it quietly because they’re in the library, working on the reading for their one shared class. The teenagers at the table behind them don’t seem to have any such qualms, noisy and laughing and making Joonmyun tap his pencil on the edge of the table anxiously, his mouth curling down in a dangerous frown. He taps the pencil harder when one snorts, and the sound echoes.
The sound of the pencil is magnified in Chanyeol’s ears.
He’s really been hearing everything too clearly lately, even whispered conversations in other rooms, and it’s starting to freak him out. He would like to talk to someone about it, but… Well, Baekhyun would probably laugh if Chanyeol told him, making some joke about Chanyeol’s ears looking and working like a bat’s. Joonmyun would probably take it as a sign of the coming apocalypse, and sentence Chanyeol to bed rest.
Either way, Chanyeol’s keeping it to himself.
One of the teenagers behind them throws a balled up paper at another one, and it misses, hitting the side of Joonmyun and Chanyeol’s table. Joonmyun’s knuckles go white around the pencil, and Chanyeol might have misjudged how close Joonmyun to his breaking point.
Chanyeol hopes the high schoolers leave soon, because Joonmyun is meek and mild-mannered right up until the moment he snaps, and Chanyeol doesn’t want to have to help sweep up their hypothetical remains from the floor of the public library when Joonmyun’s through with them.
“Have I?” Chanyeol asks. His voice feels rough. His head also still feels light. “I didn’t notice.”
“You don’t notice your own health all the time,” says Joonmyun. “It’s my job to notice.”
“Are they not giving you enough homework?” Chanyeol jokes. He pulls on his sweatshirt. It’s from high school, and the sleeves are a bit too short, but it’s his warmest one. And he’s felt like he’s flashing between hot and cold all day, so the familiar fabric is good against his skin when he’s cold, and bearable when he’s hot. “You need something else to do.”
“Are you still sick?” asks Joonmyun. “Because if you’re still sick, you should have stayed home." His pencil has stopped its steady beat against the edge of the table, now, and Chanyeol rubs wearily at his eyes before pinning Joonmyun with an exasperated look.
"I'm not sick anymore, okay?" Chanyeol runs a hand through his hair. "I'm just... I don't know. I'm just tired. You don't have to worry."
Joonmyun is always worried. He's been worrying about Chanyeol since they were nine, and now that they're nineteen, it's like Joonmyun's naturally overbearing instincts have been honed into a fine art.
Chanyeol doesn't really mind it, because he sort of likes the way Joonmyun always looks out for him. After all, most people are surprised Joonmyun and Chanyeol are even friends, what with all the differences between them, and sometimes Chanyeol really wonders what he has to offer someone like Joonmyun. But he never really doubts that Joonmyun cares about him, and that's why the nagging and the protectiveness aren’t so bad.
"You know I'm always worried," Joonmyun says, speaking quietly. "You're too good at putting on cheerful faces when you feel like crap." He huffs a quiet, Joonmyun laugh, the kind that had made him seem like an old man caught in a kids body when they were in middle school, and now just makes him seem like an old man trapped in a college student’s body.
The kids at the table behind them start chortling again, and Joonmyun’s eyebrow twitches dangerously, which has Chanyeol smothering a little laugh of his own. The pounding in Chanyeol’s head gets worse, though, and he slumps slightly in his seat and cups one of his hands at the back of his neck. The skin feels clammy, and little pieces of hair get trapped between his fingers. Maybe he is still sick, but he can’t say that to Joonmyun, or he’ll never be allowed to go to his internship tonight, because Joonmyun will have him home and in bed under his aunt’s watchful eye before he can count to ten.
Chanyeol sighs. "I don't feel wonderful," he admits, "but definitely not bad enough to miss another day of lectures or internship. I can't let my grades slip, or I'll lose my scholarship."
Unsaid is that Chanyeol isn't Joonmyun, and if he loses his scholarship, that's it. Chanyeol can't afford college without it, and he'd never ask his aunt and uncle to take out loans, not when it's all they can really do to feed and clothe him. He helps out, of course, but with his classes and his internship, he's had to cut back on hours at the restaurant, too, and neither of them begrudge him but he feels guilty all the same.
Shaking his head to clear those kinds of thoughts, Chanyeol looks back down at his textbook and tries to focus. He'd somehow managed to get into a class with Joonmyun this semester, a class on robotics that fulfills Chanyeol's math core and is a necessary one for Joonmyun's major, and they'd both been relieved after last semester, when they'd barely had time to see each other outside of dinner and stolen late night study hours. It had been hard, because even when Chanyeol had still been in high school, Joonmyun having graduated a year before him, he still saw his best friend six out of the seven days a week. It's kind of better this semester, and next year, Chanyeol's going to try to convince Joonmyun to take fewer evening classes so they can cook dinner in Joonmyun’s fancy kitchen more often, Chanyeol dropping by with ingredients from the store to pay for his side of the meal.
Joonmyun sets his pencil down, now, and then reaches across the table to rest his fingertips on Chanyeol's forearm. "You work so hard," he says. "Maybe if you slept more..." There's teasing in it, but he also means it, and it makes Chanyeol bristle. His stomach lurches.
"I don't have time," Chanyeol snaps, and then feels guilty when Joonmyun pouts at him, his glasses slipping lower on his nose. "I'm already taking minimal hours at my internship and at the store, and the homework load is..." Chanyeol swallows. “Anyway, I’m sleeping when I can. It’s just going to have to be this way for a while.”
This is the only time when he wishes he had a best friend who'd grown up with a little less. Joonmyun has never really had to go without anything but his father’s attention, what with his dad owning one of the largest tech businesses in the country. Joonmyun’s got everything all laid out for him, already, in way that has Chanyeol alternating between jealous and relieved. Jealous, because Joonmyun will never have to worry about next semester's tuition or what he'll be doing after graduation, but relieved because Chanyeol himself will be able to choose where he goes and what he does after all of this work. Still, it means Joonmyun can’t understand Chanyeol’s worry about money.
"I know," Joonmyun says, and then he hesitates briefly, before tightening his hand on Chanyeol's arm, his thumb coming to rub at the bone in Chanyeol's wrist. "You know that if you ever needed..." Chanyeol prepares himself to interrupt, knowing that Joonmyun is going to offer money or something else, like he has before, even though he knows Chanyeol would never, ever accept it, but Joonmyun stops and narrows his eyes at Chanyeol instead. "Chanyeol, you're running really hot. You still have a fever."
"No, I don't," replies Chanyeol. "My aunt checked this morning, before she even let me out of the apartment." She’d cornered him at the door, arm stretched across it like a toll gate, and said: ”Not so fast, mister.” Chanyeol had laughed at her, because she’d looked so much, right then, like his mom used to look. Or maybe Chanyeol’s forgetting what his mom looked like. He can barely remember Seoul, or his sister and dad, either. “Do you think she would’ve let me go if I had a fever.”
“These things can come back, Chanyeol. It’s not all or nothing.” Joonmyun's hand lifts from his arm, stretching out as if to touch Chanyeol's forehead, but there's too much table between them, and Joonmyun isn't long-limbed enough to reach. "You definitely have a fever, Chanyeol Park," Joonmyun accuses. "And it's winter in New York, you silly kid."
“Well, I promise to sleep when I get home,” Chanyeol says. He starts to stack up his books, frowning as he moves to close the open one and realizes he still has at least fifty pages of reading left. Joonmyun won’t know if he fudges the truth a little.
“I will be calling to check on you,” says Joonmyun. “And checking your instagram and twitter favorites.”
“Don’t be a creep, Joon,” replies Chanyeol, zipping his backpack closed and pulling on his winter hat. His body decides it’s time for a full involuntary shiver, and it has Joonmyun’s brows crushing together in the center of his forehead with consternation. “I’ll sleep, okay?”
“Chanyeol…” Joonmyun sighs, getting up from his own seat and walking around the table to zip up Chanyeol’s coat. He pulls on the sleeves until they cover Chanyeol’s wrists, and then makes sure the zipper is all the way up to Chanyeol’s chin. “I’ll see you tomorrow, all right?”
“Got ya, bud,” Chanyeol replies, feeling his ears going red as the teenagers at the table behind them make lewd noises. It’s not the first time Joonmyun’s actions have caused a misunderstanding, but Chanyeol’s still not used to it. “Let go, before it looks weird.”
“There’s nothing weird about me taking care of you,” Joonmyun says firmly, reaching up while standing on his toes to fix Chanyeol’s hair where it sticks out of his hat. “Stay warm.”
“Right,” says Chanyeol, swallowing. He can hear Joonmyun’s heart beating really loudly, even though he doesn’t see anything on Joonmyun’s face, and he takes a step back, adjusting his backpack. “Tomorrow.” He waves with his whole hand, fingers wiggling. “Don’t kill the high schoolers.”
“I’ll try,” Joonmyun says wryly, already sitting down again with one hand on the bridge of his glasses to hold them in place as he reads.
He walks out of the library and down the steps, toward the backside of campus, where the science buildings cluster together. It takes the whole six minute walk for his nerves to settle, and he’s glad the wind is so strong so he has an excuse for his red face.
“Feeling better?” asks Han, when he walks in, and Chanyeol smiles at him wanly, unzipping his coat and hanging it by the door before approaching the grad student with both hands in his pockets. “I thought maybe you’d died.”
“No reason to break in a new undergraduate,” Chanyeol replies, laughing as he pulls on his coat.
“I thought maybe the spider bite might have scared you off,” Han says. “It wouldn’t be the first time we lost a freshman to some other bio-lab. No one wants to work with spiders.”
“I do,” Chanyeol says, reaching for a pair of work gloves. “What’s on tap for today?”
Chanyeol had thought he’d end up as a vet or something. When he’d first moved to New York City, after his family had died, it had been his aunt and uncle’s dog that had really kept him from being lonely as he struggled through picking up enough English to survive school. And he’s always had a fondness for pets of all kinds. He’d entertained thoughts of veterinary school and dog walking and running a pet store, and he thinks that none of those occupations would have surprised anyone at all.
What had surprised everyone was him falling in love with genetics, instead. Senior year of high school had found him doing internships involving spiders, which had made Baekhyun laugh forever. ”You’re a dumbass,” Baekhyun had told him, ”aren’t you afraid of bugs?”
Chanyeol just pretends that bugs are like tiny, eight-legged dogs, but that would probably make Joonmyun really upset so it’s another thing that Chanyeol keeps to himself.
“Seriously, though,” Han says, stopping Chanyeol’s mind from wandering too far away from the moment, “are you feeling up to this? It can be scary when…”
Chanyeol grins at him. “Really, it’s fine. I was just careless. I should remember that the little guys aren’t as attached to me as I am to them.”
“Spoken with the grace of a man who has been bitten by a lot of wild animals.” Han shakes his bright red hair out of his face. He doesn’t look like an entomologist. Chanyeol… kind of does look like an entomologist. “Anyway, we’re just going to run these gene sequences again today and see if anything’s changed from the new radiation doses.”
“And see if our spiders have gone Super-Saiyan yet?” Chanyeol asks, and Han gives him two raised brows.
“What’s that mean?”
“Ahh,” Chanyeol says, “never mind. It’s just an… well, an anime thing. The person I liked in high school was super into anime so…”
“Cute,” Han says, before coming over to check on Chanyeol’s gloves. “Looks good this time. Go ahead and take one out. Do try not to get bitten.”
Chanyeol surveys the glass terrariums and finally comes to a stop in front of the biggest, meanest looking tarantula in their collection. It’s the one that had bitten him last week, and Chanyeol figures it would be best to start here first.
It hadn’t been a terrible bite, really. Chanyeol’s been bitten by dogs, cats, and four different types of rodents, so in the scheme of things, a spider bite from a non-venomous breed shouldn’t be a big deal. But it had become swollen and tender before he’d even left the lab, and Han had insisted on wrapping it up in gauze while muttering something about Chanyeol’s tetanus shots.
Taking the volatile spider out of its terrarium and moving over to the testing area, Chanyeol gingerly bites his lip. There’s a little thrill of fear as the spider crawls from the palm of his head to the tips of his fingers before skittering onto the table.
He feels woozy for a minute, his head pounding again, and his skin feels sticky with sweat. Sliding his gaze over to Han, he gulps, letting his hands steady before looking back at 004. “Just you and me again, little guy.”
Chanyeol draws blood for sequencing as Han talks to him about this and that-an upcoming conference they’re expected to attend with Dr. Lee, and how their experiments are being lauded as revolutionary by the other researchers that visited last week.
“Wouldn’t it be cool,” Han says, “if our super spiders could significantly advance medicine?”
“It would,” Chanyeol agrees. He feels happy and optimistic, even though he’s not surrounded by puppies, or grooming cats. “Very cool.”
He gets home way too late, after riding on the subway with a bunch of drunk students who’d struggled to keep their balance at every stop. His aunt is still awake, sitting at the kitchen table with a cup of tea in hand as she reads through the newsletter she publishes for church.
“Sorry,” Chanyeol says, “if you were waiting up for me.”
“It’s fine. How was your internship?” Chanyeol flexes his hand. The bite is long gone, but he can still feel it. He can still feel something off with his body.
“It was good,” he says.
As he slides under the covers, he checks his phone. One text from Joonmyun, and it just says “Go to bed, silly,” and Chanyeol smiles at it before giving one last glance at his textbook and closing his eyes.
Joonmyun’s furrowed eyebrows, chiding him, are the last thing he thinks about before he sleeps.
*
Chanyeol knows he’s not sick. The truth is, that bite from the spider at the lab has made Chanyeol… a little more than he used to be. A little stronger, a little faster, and with senses that are much, much sharper.
Sharp enough that he can hear Baekhyun’s cackling long before he gets to lunch.
Chanyeol had met Baekhyun his senior year of high school. He was a transfer, and he’d made it easier for Chanyeol after Joonmyun had graduated. They’re nothing alike, Baekhyun and Joonmyun, but that’s all right. More than one friend like either of them would probably be the death of him.
“Have you been working out?” Baekhyun asks, over lunch, and Chanyeol hedges.
“Not really,” he says. “I guess, uh, I’m just hitting a growth spurt.”
“El Oh El,” Baekhyun says. “Chanyeol, puberty is over, just admit you’ve been hitting the gym to impress chicks. Or Kai Kim. You know I’ll never judge you for your tastes even if you want to blow the guy who was anime club president in high school.”
“It was just a crush,” Chanyeol says, taking a huge bite of his sandwich. He’s hungrier lately, too.
Chanyeol guess it takes a lot of energy to turn into a Super Saiyan. Or whatever he’s turning into, considering he is now capable of lifting his bed with one hand and shooting sticky webbing out of his wrists, just like… like a spider.
“Oh, then maybe you’re trying to seduce someone else with that new buff body. Maybe you’ve finally realized how you feel about Joonmyun-“
“When are you going to get it? It’s not like that.” Chanyeol sets down his fork. “Joonmyun is… He’s my best friend.”
“Who texts you at two in the morning to make sure you’ve gone to bed,” replies Baekhyun, and Chanyeol gulps, thinking about Joonmyun’s hands up by his chin, curled around the zipper of his coat.
“Yeah,” Chanyeol says, picking up his can of orange Fanta and taking a sip. “Not everyone spends all their time making their friends miserable.”
“I don’t make people miserable,” says Baekhyun. “You’re just weak.”
Chanyeol crushes the can in his hand, since it’s empty. “Not really,” says Chanyeol, before he catches sight of the time on his phone. “I’d better go.”
Baekhyun is staring with a gaping mouth at Chanyeol’s crushed can. “You did that so easily,” he says, and Chanyeol shrugs.
“It’s not like it’s hard,” he says, and he picks up his trash and walks to the garbage to throw it out, tuning out Baekhyun’s crowing “you’ve totally been working out!” as he adjusts his backpack and heads to class.
“You look better,” Joonmyun says, when Chanyeol slips into the seat next to him. “More well-rested.”
Chanyeol’s not sure that’s true. But he hasn’t needed to sleep as much, lately. He wonders if it’s another side effect. He wishes he had someone to talk to all of this about, but it seems impossible that anyone would believe him, and he really doesn’t want the research they’re doing to come under fire while he’s still trying to figure everything out.
Besides, it’s… kind of cool. Chanyeol’s never really been cool, in his whole life, not even after is brief stint in a band. To find out that he’s got some kind of super power, or whatever, out of nowhere… well, it’s maybe the first thing in his life that isn’t mundane. He can lift more boxes at the grocery store and he can stay up later to study and as scary as it is, that all these things are happening to him, it’s also a weight off of his shoulders.
“I’m glad I pass your inspection,” says Chanyeol, laughing as he unpacks his binder. “Did you finish the reading?”
“Did you?” Joonmyun asks lightly, moving his pens around on his desk so that they are aligned perfectly with the edge of his notebook paper. He’s anal like that, but Chanyeol’s used to it, even if the guy on Joonmyun’s other side keeps giving him the side-eye.
“Not all of it,” Chanyeol replies. “I worked late at my internship last night and had to help open this morning at the store.”
“Sleep is more important,” says Joonmyun. “You’ll be able to catch up on the reading. It wasn’t too bad.” He yawns as he says it, and Chanyeol looks more carefully at Joonmyun.
“Did you sleep?” He reaches out and rests his hand on Joonmyun’s thigh, feeling the heat of it through Joonmyun’s jeans.
“My father…” Joonmyun frowns. “He had me looking over some stuff for the company.” Joonmyun’s hair is soft and unstyled today, and he’s got a blemish on his chin. He only gets those when he’s exhausted. “I don’t know why, it’s not like I’ll be getting involved with it for another six years, you know?”
“Gotta get that MBA, Mr. Kim,” Chanyeol teases, and Joonmyun gives him a waxy smile that turns more genuine when Chanyeol squeezes at his thigh.
“I know,” Joonmyun says. “I won’t disappoint.” He says it with assuredness, and then focuses his gaze forward as the teacher comes in.
“Of course you won’t,” Chanyeol says, reclaiming his hand, and Joonmyun’s eyes shutter halfway in acknowledgement that he’d heard Chanyeol.
After class, Joonmyun has to hurry to get to his next class. It’s like that on Tuesdays, because Joonmyun has discussion for his Business Japanese class or something, so Chanyeol meanders out to the lawn in front of the library to relax. He sits in one of the black iron benches, feeling the cold immediately seep through his pants and into the skin on the back of his thighs, and he sighs. The metal feels odd beneath his fingertips, extra smooth, and Chanyeol stares down at his hands in wonderment. He feels like he could stick to the metal, if he wanted to, and that’s… well, that’s cool, too, maybe.
“Aren’t you gonna freeze like that, Chanyeol?” Chanyeol looks up, blinking, and finds a familiar face looking down at him, nonchalantly. Black hair falls into a handsome face, and full lips are in their usual pout. “Who the hell takes a nap outside in the winter?”
“Jongin?” Chanyeol, reflexively, moves to fix his hair, before remembering he has a hat on. Then he chuckles to himself, which makes Jongin look at him oddly. “I’m not taking a nap. I was just thinking about, I don’t know, life.”
“It’s Kai,” Jongin corrects, and Chanyeol grins at him, unrepentant. “No one call me Jongin but my parents. And maybe Joonmyun, but he’s basically like a parent.”
Chanyeol feels like he should defend Joonmyun on that front, but in Jongin’s case, it’s probably true. “Don’t high school kids have to go to high school?” Not that he wants Jongin to be somewhere else, of course, it’s just that he’s confused. It’s February, almost March, and spring break isn’t for another few weeks.
“College visits,” Jongin replies succinctly, and Chanyeol hums. “Getting a couple out of the way today since they’re so close. Decisions don’t come out for another few weeks, though.” He shrugs, then gestures to the boy with him. Chanyeol had barely noticed him, but when he does turn his gaze to the stranger, he wonders how, when the stranger is so tall and has such broad shoulders. “This is Sehun, by the way. My year.”
“Hey,” Chanyeol says. “I’m-“
“I know who you are,” the boy replies lazily. His hair, a frosty blond, is pushed back from his forehead, and it just makes him look all the more sleepy. “I’ve heard about you. The kid who won the science fair last year. Kai says you’re smart.”
“I did not,” Jongin corrects, flushing. “I said you weren’t dumb.”
“That’s basically gushing praise,” Sehun says. “I’m getting used to your dysfunction.”
Chanyeol laughs, and resists the urge to ruffle Jongin’s hair as he stands up. “I have to go to class,” Chanyeol says. “Let me know if you get in here, though.” He puffs out his chest. “Your upperclassman will show you around.”
“I’ll just ask Joonmyun,” Jongin replies, belying the words with that hiccupping laugh of his, and Chanyeol beams at him before rushing off, careful not to slip as he jogs towards his Orgo class.
“Saw Jongin today,” he texts Joonmyun later that night. ”He’s still so cute.”
”Go to bed,” Joonmyun replies, and Chanyeol frowns because Joonmyun always gets weird when Chanyeol talks about Jongin. Always gets weird when Chanyeol talks about guys in general, in a way he doesn’t when other men they know do. Maybe it’s because Chanyeol’s slept in Joonmyun’s bed, or something, and Joonmyun’s too nice to tell Chanyeol it really bothers him.
The thought has Chanyeol playing with his webs and making sad ceiling drapery for an extra forty minutes of his life.
*
It’s three Tuesdays later when Chanyeol is walking home late from his internship and sees a mugging taking place before his eyes.
“Hey, pretty boy,” one of the muggers says. “That’s an expensive jacket you’ve got there.”
It’s Jongin’s sleepy looking friend, Sehun, Chanyeol realizes, and though he’d have reacted either way, it’s always easier when he can put a name with a face to know the right thing to do.
Chanyeol acts before he thinks, running over to them and stepping between Sehun and the muggers without even losing his breath. “Leave him alone.”
One of the muggers pulls a gun. ”Another pretty boy coming to help?”
“You don’t want to mess with me,” Chanyeol says. He can’t believe how cocky he sounds, but he feels it, can feel it in his bones that he’s stronger than these guys.
The biggest mugger has a lean, angry face, and Chanyeol memorizes as the man takes of the safety. “I’ll kill you.”
Chanyeol pushes Sehun aside and shoots one of his webs, grabbing the gun and pulling it out of the man’s hand so fast he’s sure the man can’t see it. It skitters down next to Sehun, and Sehun picks it up with uneasy hands, pointing it at him as the other two muggers produce weapons tucked into their belts.
Chanyeol steals another gun and smirks. “Leave him alone, or I’ll shoot,” he says.
“You don’t have the guts,” the first mugger says, and he’s right, he’s totally right, but Sehun doesn’t seem to have the same problem, shooting the man in the arm with a gun that quivers in his hand, and then dropping it. Chanyeol gapes at the situation for a moment, and then grabs Sehun’s hand and starts running.
They end up at a 24/7 Chinese place near Chanyeol’s apartment building, that only serves three types of Americanized Chinese food that Baekhyun swears has drugs or something else addicting in it, sharing fried rice as Sehun shakes and shivers into a cup of hot tea. “Are you okay?” Chanyeol asks, and Sehun nods.
“Thanks to you,” Sehun says. He frowns at Chanyeol. “How did you…” He stops, and then he sighs, his face losing that haunted look and fading back to that vacant one that Chanyeol thinks makes him look five seconds from a nap. “I should get home.”
“How are you even out so late, high schooler?” Chanyeol tries to joke, but I comes out flat, since he’s still a little bit hazy about the whole evening. It feels surreal.
In the end, though, it’s kind of… amazing, Chanyeol thinks, as he walks the short distance to home, that he was able to help Sehun like that. Before the whole spider bite thing, Chanyeol never would have had the confidence or the ability.
Chanyeol can help people, like the heroes in Jongin’s manga, or whatever, and that’s… really… awesome.
He finds it hard to go to sleep that night. He doesn’t know if he’s waiting for the police to show up or what, but in the end, he drifts off to the thought of wearing a cape and soaring from a rooftop to rescue Jongin from a burning building. Jongin turns into Joonmyun when Chanyeol gathers him up into his arms, and then Chanyeol can’t remember the rest of it.
Sehun is waiting outside his internship, hands in his pockets and looking to the side like he’d rather be anywhere else. “Can we talk?”
“Sure,” Chanyeol says, and he gets the urge to ruffle Sehun’s hair like he does with Jongin. “But not for too long, I’ve got plans for dinner.” He always has Thursday plans, because he and Joonmyun have eaten together every Thursday since Joonmyun started college, save for those three weeks Joonmyun was in Beijing last year with his father meeting investors.
“I want to talk about the white sticky stuff,” Sehun blurts out, and Chanyeol’s knees feel wobbly. If he were Baekhyun, he’d make a perverted joke about masturbation, but Chanyeol’s not that smooth, and he can’t deliver naughty jokes with the shamelessness that comes so easily to Baekhyun.
Chanyeol didn’t expect the first person he told about his secret to be some random friend of Jongin’s, but it looks like he doesn’t have a choice.
He sits down with Sehun at a close-by Jamba Juice, and after they order smoothies, Sehun kicks him under the table. “I didn’t notice until I got home, but my hands were covered in these thin strings, from the gun.” He shivers. “And I want to know if that’s something you did, and if so, how?”
Chanyeol stares at Sehun for a few moments, then sighs, and calls Joonmyun. “Hey, I have to cancel for tonight,” he says, looking at Sehun across the table, slurping on his milkshake. “Something came up.”
“Okay,” Joonmyun says, after an awkward pause. “That’s… fine.”
It’s not until Chanyeol hangs up that he realizes that he’s maybe never cancelled plans with Joonmyun on a Thursday without notice before, and he vows to make it up to him.
“Well,” Chanyeol says to Sehun, who stops his loud monotonous sucking on the straw to listen, “it all started with a spider bite.”
Chanyeol finds himself spending a lot of time with Sehun after he’s told him his secret. At first it’s because Sehun is so surprisingly interested-Interested in Chanyeol’s powers and in Chanyeol himself, and Chanyeol likes that someone is interested in him. And then it’s because Chanyeol doesn’t have to tell quiet little white lies to Sehun, like the ones he tells to his aunt when he gets home late after interfering with a convenience store robbery, or the ones he tells to Joonmyun about his black eye the next day.
Joonmyun just gives him a tiny disapproving look, and then smiles when Chanyeol bats his eyelashes at him and asks him not to be mad. “I’m not mad,” he says. “Just frustrated. What are you up to lately?”
“Nothing much,” Chanyeol says. “This and that. Work.”
“I’ve been working a lot too,” Joonmyun says. “My father hasn’t been feeling well lately.”
“Really?” The way Joonmyun says it has Chanyeol setting down his pen and giving Joonmyun his whole focus. Joonmyun’s not particularly close to his father. He’d adored his mother, but she’d disappeared over a year ago after a trip out on the family lot, and Joonmyun’s father had held a funeral with no body. “How so?”
“Heart problems,” says Joonmyun. “Although I could have told you his heart didn’t work years ago.” He offers up a brittle little smile that Chanyeol thinks he inherited from the man they’re talking about, but he doesn’t get the chance to follow up on it because their professor comes in, already yelling about remote control cars and how they’re constructed before she even gets to the front desk.
It goes on like that-aborted conversations with Joonmyun and increasingly long ones with Sehun, who isn’t as quiet as he’d seemed.
”I feel like I never see you,” Joonmyun texts him, and Chanyeol’s hands shake as he tries to reply. He’s exhausted-there’d been a robbery down in Brooklyn, and Chanyeol had pulled on all black and gone to help. ”Is something wrong?”
”Everything’s good,” Chanyeol answers, when his hands finally steady. It is, really. He’s passing all his classes with As and Bs, he’s putting in enough time at the store, and things are going really great at the lab, too. Han seems enthusiastic about what they’re finding, and Dr. Lee has kept showering his grad and undergrad with copious amounts of praise that Chanyeol finds thrilling.
His aunt has told him she’s “so glad he’s finding himself in college,” and he wants to tell her as much as he wants to tell Joonmyun, but something keeps holding him back. It’s fear, that Joonmyun will insist on doctors and scientists, and Chanyeol won’t be allowed to help strangers anymore, strangers like Sehun, who’d ended up being a pretty okay dude, even if he’s super weird. Maybe more than that, it’s that he knows his aunt’s tendency to stay up and wait for Chanyeol to come home would be a hundred times worse if she knew what he got up to in the evenings now, and he doesn’t want that to happen.
He knows Joonmyun would never get any of his own work done, either, and Joonmyun already looks as pale a piece of computer paper, and stretched nearly as thin.
So keeping secrets is Chanyeol’s own way of worrying.
It’ll do, for now.
“Ah, I have plans with Sehun,” Chanyeol says, when Joonmyun asks what he’s doing on Saturday. “Going to see that new Marvel movie.” He laughs to himself about it, since he’s only seeing it with Sehun as a joke.
“Sehun? Again?” Joonmyun seems surprised. “You’ve spent a lot of time with him lately.”
“He’s okay,” Chanyeol says. “I guess.”
“He sees you more than I do,” Joonmyun adds, and Chanyeol feels a knot of guilt in his belly until he remembers that Joonmyun’s been working more and more lately, his own version of a killer internship.
“Maybe if you weren’t trying to become the world’s first twenty-one year old CEO?” Chanyeol replies, and Joonmyun flushes, the vein in his neck sticking out with frustration.
Chanyeol hadn’t meant to hit a nerve, and he’s going to say so until Joonmyun says, harshly: “Some of us don’t get to choose our futures.”
“Am I supposed to feel sorry for you?” Chanyeol replies. “You like the robots and stuff.”
“Do I?” Joonmyun asks, and it’s with that knot still tight in his gut that he lets the conversation drop.
“Trouble in Paradise?” Baekhyun asks at lunch. “Who are you fighting with, your aunt or Joonmyun?”
“Neither,” Chanyeol retorts immediately, then caves under Baekhyun’s wilting stare. “Joonmyun. How do you know?”
“You’ve got a particularly downcast look to you. It’s different from the Jongin rejection look.”
“I don’t know if we’re fighting. He just seems… I don’t know. Tense. Weird.”
“I heard his father is really sick,” Baekhyun says. “I say ‘I heard’ but I mean, it was on the news.”
“The news?” Chanyeol doesn’t watch TV. He wouldn’t know. But that means it’s worse than Joonmyun had implied.
He tries to call Joonmyun that night, after he gets home from putting out a fire at a local elementary school, and Joonmyun answers, but their conversation is short and clipped and ultimately, Joonmyun has to go because he has “real work to do.”
It all comes to a head when he and Sehun come out of the movies and see Jongin and Joonmyun waiting to go in.
Jongin looks really surprised to see Sehun and Chanyeol, his lips parting prettily and his hair flopping happily across his forehead.
“What a coincidence,” he says, and Joonmyun smiles vaguely, in their general direction but not at them. Chanyeol tries to catch Joonmyun’s gaze but Joonmyun is deftly avoiding it.
“I thought you were busy this weekend,” Chanyeol says, the words tumbling out, and Joonmyun frowns his “noisy teenagers in the library” frown Chanyeol’s way but still doesn’t look at him. “With work.”
“I had some free time, but you’d already made plans.” He grins at Jongin, with all his teeth. It’s ugly and fake and Chanyeol hates it. “So I made plans too.”
”Are you punishing me?” Chanyeol texts, and Joonmyun texts him back at two in the morning on the dot, with ”Go to bed, silly.”
Chanyeol goes out prowling that night instead, and manages to send a group of three bloodthirsty frat boys back in the direction of their campus while picking up a shivering, lanky looking guy with broken glasses from the sidewalk.
“Thanks,” the guy says, and Chanyeol remembers why he does this. Why he puts on the mask and the outfit and looks around for crimes to stop. It’s because these are people, and Chanyeol wants to help as many of them as he can.
His dad, Chanyeol remembers all of a sudden, had loved superheroes. Really loved them. Chanyeol treasures the memory, holding it close to his heart.
He finds out Sehun has been kidnapped when he gets a text on his phone. There’s no demand for ransom, just an address, and it’s with a sinking heart that Chanyeol looks at the two attached photographs, one of Sehun tied up and one of Chanyeol from his high school yearbook. We know your secret the message says. Come and get the pretty boy before time runs out.
It’s a mess when he finds him. It’s those muggers, from before, only this time they’d beaten Sehun up pretty bad. Their leader’s arm is in a sling, from that shot to the shoulder, and Chanyeol feels a pool of rage inside of him so big that it scares him.
“Why couldn’t you just leave it alone,” Chanyeol asks, voice rough and full of vitriol. He feels sick with how angry he is, that these people think they’re entitled to an eye for an eye when all Chanyeol had done was help Sehun protect himself from an attack.
“You think you’re a hero or something?” One of the guys asks, as he sets a fire right at Sehun’s feet. “Well, thanks to you, we almost go caught by the cops.”
“Almost,” Chanyeol says. “You’re going to kill him for almost?”
“I’m going to kill both of you for almost,” says the mugger in the sling. “Because you shot me.”
“You deserved it,” Chanyeol says, and then everything’s a blur. Shots ring out, and two of them strike him, right in the arm. The fire starts to burn, and Sehun starts to scream. Then there’s smoke, and flames.
The fire burns, licks at Chanyeol’s skin and hair, and Chanyeol is bleeding from his left shoulder and bicep, unable to free Sehun from the knotted rope. Finally, he pulls Sehun out from his chair and out of the building, flinging them both across to the roof just across with his webs supporting his weight. As the whole thing goes up in flames, Chanyeol finally starts to breathe again, his lungs burning just like that building, and Sehun melty hot in his arms.
He wonders if the muggers are safe. He hopes they aren’t and feels terrible about it but not terrible enough to unthink it.
“Are you all right?” Sehun asks, and for a moment, he sounds just like Joonmyun, and all Chanyeol can think about is how glad he was that they didn’t know about his and Joonmyun’s friendship. That he hadn’t had to rescue Joonmyun from a burning building because he’d carelessly given up his secret.
He gets it now, why the heroes always have alter egos.
“Yeah,” Chanyeol says, digging out both bullet slugs with his fingers and then watching the wounds start to heal. This is something else he can do. Regenerate quickly. It had just stared recently, and Chanyeol had only noticed because he’d sliced his hand open on an apple crate and then watching it knit closed with stunned eyes.
He feels surprisingly human and mortal as his body does inhuman and immortal things, and he wants to see Joonmyun.
“Thank you for saving me twice,” Sehun says solemnly. “Are you sure you’re all right?”
“I’m fine,” Chanyeol says. “Maybe.”
The answering machine is taking all of the calls Chanyeol makes to the apartment, and Joonmyun won’t answer his cell phone at all.
He still feels frantic and pumped up on adrenaline, and he doesn’t know how to calm down except maybe hearing Joonmyun’s voice.
“He’s never been like this,” Chanyeol says to his aunt. “It’s like I don’t know him anymore.”
Chanyeol’s skin is sticky and gross. Fear is still making his heart beat too fast. He could have died. He almost did die, and Sehun had almost died too. Maybe it’s that ‘almost-death’ that has Chanyeol realizing things can’t stay as they are now, in this purgatory of missing and wanting and wondering if he can ever really be happy again.
He’d give anything to go back to before he was bitten, back when his most frightening truths were the ones he’d left back in Korea and where the most exciting thing he had to look forward to was escaping Joonmyun to get to his internship without getting sent to bed.
He knows he can’t go back, that more people will recognize him if he continues to try and help, but he can still have some things. He can still have his best friend, can’t he?
“Well,” Chanyeol’s aunt says, “he might be feeling a bit abandoned, Chanyeollie.”
“Abandoned?”
“You’ve been distant with everyone, lately. Something’s changed you, and you’ve become this person we can’t connect with.”
He hugs his aunt and kisses her cheek. He wonders if she can smell the fire on him, in his hair and on his skin. “I’m sorry,” he says. “I’ll do better.”
“I know,” she says. “You’re a good boy, Chanyeol.” He pulls back and studies her. She looks so much older now, but Chanyeol can still see the light in her eyes. “So I know you’ll do better.”
“What should I do?” Chanyeol asks. “About Joonmyun? I can’t imagine my life without him in it.”
She looks up at him carefully. “Then you’d better tell him that, don’t you think? He’s lost a lot, lately, Chanyeol, and he’s not experienced at it like you are.” Chanyeol thinks about Joonmyun’s tired, tired eyes and achy-breaky smile, and his insides feel like they’ve been tossed by a tornado.
“Okay,” Chanyeol says, curling his hands into fists. He can still smell the smoke, so strong and pungent.
It’s been a month since he’s been here, to Joonmyun’s apartment building. The door guard’s eyes widen when he sees him. “Chanyeol? Long time no see.”
“I need to see Joonmyun,” Chanyeol says.
“I’m under strict instructions not to let anyone up,” the guard says apologetically. “Sorry, Chanyeol, not even you.”
“I need to see him,” Chanyeol says. “And I might be able to… unknot him. Maybe.”
“He’s been… scary, this week. I forget, you know, how scary he can be, because he’s usually so…” Chanyeol knows. “He’s been coming home really late, too. I think he’s basically running things at Kim Enterprises these days.”
“Let me go talk to him, please.” Chanyeol clenches his hands into fists, and then relaxes them again, meeting the guard’s eyes. “I really… I just need to.”
The guard sighs and puts his hands on the edge of his desk, pushing himself up. “I’m going to the bathroom. I will be back in five minutes.” Chanyeol blinks at him, and the guard nods his head toward the elevator behind him. “I expect you to have, uh, gone home by the time I get back.”
Chanyeol doesn’t wait for the guard to even get around the corner before he’s pushing the up button on his elevator.
The doors open to Joonmyun standing by his desk, back hunched as he looks through a report or something on one of his computers. He’d gone to his dad’s office today. Chanyeol can see the anger and distress written in every line of his body, and he wonders how it’s gotten to this.
He remembers the pencil tapping on the edge of the table, and thinks this is just like that. Joonmyun looks ready to snap.
“Joonmyun,” he says softly, tugging at his own hair, catching the strands in an anxious tug.
He looks up, gaze fixing immediately on Chanyeol before his face morphs into a harsh frown. “How did you get up here?”
He considers lying, but there are security cameras. “The guard let me up,” Chanyeol replies. “Don’t fire him.”
“I don’t have to listen to you,” Joonmyun says. “I specifically asked not to be disturbed. He disobeyed me.”
“He’s worried about you. I am too.”
“Oh, so now you’re worried about me?” Joonmyun pushes back from his desk, straightening his back. He looks drawn and tired.
“What?” Chanyeol exhales heavily. “Joonmyun, I know I haven’t been the greatest friend, lately, but I have my reasons.” He steps forward. “I swear, it’s not because I don’t want to be around for you.”
Joonmyun crosses his arms, with a distant smile, and that’s… that’s the Joonmyun everyone else knows, not Chanyeol’s Joonmyun. He hates it. “I’m too busy running a company to play student with you, anyway.”
“Not too busy to hang out with Jongin, though, right?” It slips out, and Chanyeol regrets it at soon as he says it.
“What’s it to you?” Joonmyun is so… he’s so jagged, and Chanyeol had missed him breaking or he would never have let him fall apart.
He’s thinking about Joonmyun letting Chanyeol cry on his shoulder before his first day of high school. He’s thinking about Joonmyun bringing Chanyeol lunch at his lab because he knows Chanyeol won’t stop to get food. He’s thinking about Joonmyun staying up until two in the morning just to make sure Chanyeol goes to bed when he needs to.
There’s all that, and there’s the way Joonmyun’s face gets, sometimes, when Chanyeol pulls away, and better, easier, the way it looks when Chanyeol doesn’t.
“I was going on a date with Jongin,” Joonmyun says, after a silence that seems to stretch forever. “You don’t like him anymore, right?”
There’s something about the way Joonmyun says it that has Chanyeol pushing a balled up fist into his own stomach. It reminds him of the way Joonmyun talked to him on the phone last week, all cold and hard and tinged with something mean. He doesn’t like this side of Joonmyun, that lashes out with calculated cruelty. “Joonmyun, did I…?” He licks his lips. “Are you too mad at me to fix?”
“Why would I be mad at you?” Joonmyun asks. “Have you done something that would make me mad?” He looks every inch the icy heir of a corporation as he adjusts his tie, and Chanyeol finds himself longing for the boy who adjusts his hat in the winter and texts Chanyeol before bed.
“I don’t know,” Chanyeol says. “I just… I miss my best friend.” He reaches out and grabs Joonmyun’s wrist. It fits nicely in his hand, and he pulls him close enough that he can smell Joonmyun’s aftershave and see the dark circles under Joonmyun’s eyes. “I just want you to want to be around me again.”
“Chanyeol…” Joonmyun says, and then he lightly lets his head fall to Chanyeol’s chest. Hesitantly, Chanyeol brings his hand up to cup the back of Joonmyun’s head, mindful of his neatly styled hair and expensive suit. He wonders how it looks, Joonmyun all dressed up and Chanyeol in his old high school sweatshirt. But they’re alone in the living room, on the top floor of his building, and the only person ever home is Joonmyun. “It’s you who doesn’t want to be around me, isn’t it?”
“How could you think that?” Chanyeol asks. “Don’t you know that…” Chanyeol closes his eyes, and then buries his nose in Joonmyun’s hair. He tightens his hand around Joonmyun’s wrist, in case Joonmyun is thinking about pulling away. “You’re one of the most important people in my life. You and my aunt and uncle, you know?”
“What about Sehun?” Joonmyun asks. “Every time I called, it was always Sehun.” Joonmyun clutches at a handful of Chanyeol’s sweatshirt. “Aren’t you dating him? Shouldn’t he be on your list?”
“Dating…?” Chanyeol opens his eyes again, peeling Joonmyun off of him so he can look into Joonmyun’s eyes. “You’d know if I was dating someone. I’d tell you first.”
“Would you?” Joonmyun doesn’t look cold or hard, right now. He looks lost and wistful, like he’d looked at his mom’s sham of a funeral last year, trying to keep himself from crying. Chanyeol doesn’t want Joonmyun to cry. Joonmyun has to be hurting really badly to cry, because Joonmyun is the toughest person Chanyeol knows, made of steel. Chanyeol especially doesn’t want Joonmyun to cry because of him, since Joonmyun has forever done his best to keep Chanyeol’s tears at bay.
“Sehun’s helping me with a project,” Chanyeol says. He doesn’t want to talk about the spider thing. Not yet, because he hasn’t had a chance to figure out what he’s going to do about it yet, and Joonmyun will worry himself to death. “That’s all. It’s not… He’s not my best friend.” Because Sehun might know Chanyeol’s secret, but he doesn’t know Chanyeol’s heart.
Something makes Chanyeol let go of Joonmyun’s wrist and bring that hand up to cradle his cheek. He slides his thumb across Joonmyun’s smooth lips and wonders what it might be like to kiss him before he slams the thought down.
That’s for later. Maybe when he tells Joonmyun everything, he can tell him that, too.
“I wasn’t really going on a date with Jongin,” Joonmyun says, over coffee at the Starbucks across the street from his apartment building. Everyone’s wearing expensive, tailored clothing, but Joonmyun doesn’t seem to mind Chanyeol’s clothes at all. Joonmyun’s never minded the differences. Chanyeol smiles into his latte. “He’s just got to do an interview for his econ class and he’s afraid of strangers.”
“That’s good to know,” Chanyeol says, letting his hand fall to Joonmyun’s shoulder. “But I really don’t like Jongin anymore. You know that, right?”
“You have to like someone,” chides Joonmyun. “You’re a sophomore in college.”
“Maybe,” teases Chanyeol, reaching across the table to wipe the foam off of Joonmyun’s nose. His arms are long enough to cross the distance. “I’ll tell you sometime, if you’re really nice to me.”
“I’m always nice to you,” says Joonmyun, wiping at his mouth with slightly red cheeks. “Aren’t I?”
Chanyeol looks at Joonmyun, warm and gentle, and tugs on his tie. “Don’t you have a homework to do?”
“Yes,” Joonmyun says. “But I’m free for dinner.” Joonmyun swallows. “It’s Thursday.”
Chanyeol stares down at his latte thoughtfully, and cups his hands around the cardboard cup. “It’s a date,” Chanyeol says, softening it with a grin as he looks up to meet Joonmyun’s gaze.
“Oh,” Joonmyun asks, as he stands up and pushes in his chair. “By the way, have you heard about that vigilante? It seems like something you’d be into. My father is really interested.”
“Vigilante?” Chanyeol asks, his heart skipping a beat. “What vigilante?”
“The one helping the police while wearing a ski mask like a common criminal.”
“What,” Chanyeol drawls, “do you think he needs a super suit or something?” Joonmyun reaches out for Chanyeol’s hand.
“Yes,” Joonmyun says. “And maybe a name.”
“A name,” Chanyeol thinks, and there’s something on the tip of his tongue. He squeezes Joonmyun’s hand. “Maybe he’s just waiting for a good one.”
Final author's note: and then no one lived happily ever after because the spiderman universe is so sad ;;;; but maybe in chanyeol spiderman he and joonmyun live happily ever after~
Title: Radioactive
Pairing(s): Chanyeol/Suho
Rating: PG
Warning(s): pseudo-science
Length: 8.7k
Summary: Chanyeol’s just trying to keep afloat in life, when a bite from a mutant spider drags him right under the water.
Author's note: I hope you enjoy this glimpse of a universe ;;;;
“Is everything all right?” Joonmyun asks, staring at Chanyeol from over the rims of his designer glasses. “You’ve been weird lately.”
He says it quietly because they’re in the library, working on the reading for their one shared class. The teenagers at the table behind them don’t seem to have any such qualms, noisy and laughing and making Joonmyun tap his pencil on the edge of the table anxiously, his mouth curling down in a dangerous frown. He taps the pencil harder when one snorts, and the sound echoes.
The sound of the pencil is magnified in Chanyeol’s ears.
He’s really been hearing everything too clearly lately, even whispered conversations in other rooms, and it’s starting to freak him out. He would like to talk to someone about it, but… Well, Baekhyun would probably laugh if Chanyeol told him, making some joke about Chanyeol’s ears looking and working like a bat’s. Joonmyun would probably take it as a sign of the coming apocalypse, and sentence Chanyeol to bed rest.
Either way, Chanyeol’s keeping it to himself.
One of the teenagers behind them throws a balled up paper at another one, and it misses, hitting the side of Joonmyun and Chanyeol’s table. Joonmyun’s knuckles go white around the pencil, and Chanyeol might have misjudged how close Joonmyun to his breaking point.
Chanyeol hopes the high schoolers leave soon, because Joonmyun is meek and mild-mannered right up until the moment he snaps, and Chanyeol doesn’t want to have to help sweep up their hypothetical remains from the floor of the public library when Joonmyun’s through with them.
“Have I?” Chanyeol asks. His voice feels rough. His head also still feels light. “I didn’t notice.”
“You don’t notice your own health all the time,” says Joonmyun. “It’s my job to notice.”
“Are they not giving you enough homework?” Chanyeol jokes. He pulls on his sweatshirt. It’s from high school, and the sleeves are a bit too short, but it’s his warmest one. And he’s felt like he’s flashing between hot and cold all day, so the familiar fabric is good against his skin when he’s cold, and bearable when he’s hot. “You need something else to do.”
“Are you still sick?” asks Joonmyun. “Because if you’re still sick, you should have stayed home." His pencil has stopped its steady beat against the edge of the table, now, and Chanyeol rubs wearily at his eyes before pinning Joonmyun with an exasperated look.
"I'm not sick anymore, okay?" Chanyeol runs a hand through his hair. "I'm just... I don't know. I'm just tired. You don't have to worry."
Joonmyun is always worried. He's been worrying about Chanyeol since they were nine, and now that they're nineteen, it's like Joonmyun's naturally overbearing instincts have been honed into a fine art.
Chanyeol doesn't really mind it, because he sort of likes the way Joonmyun always looks out for him. After all, most people are surprised Joonmyun and Chanyeol are even friends, what with all the differences between them, and sometimes Chanyeol really wonders what he has to offer someone like Joonmyun. But he never really doubts that Joonmyun cares about him, and that's why the nagging and the protectiveness aren’t so bad.
"You know I'm always worried," Joonmyun says, speaking quietly. "You're too good at putting on cheerful faces when you feel like crap." He huffs a quiet, Joonmyun laugh, the kind that had made him seem like an old man caught in a kids body when they were in middle school, and now just makes him seem like an old man trapped in a college student’s body.
The kids at the table behind them start chortling again, and Joonmyun’s eyebrow twitches dangerously, which has Chanyeol smothering a little laugh of his own. The pounding in Chanyeol’s head gets worse, though, and he slumps slightly in his seat and cups one of his hands at the back of his neck. The skin feels clammy, and little pieces of hair get trapped between his fingers. Maybe he is still sick, but he can’t say that to Joonmyun, or he’ll never be allowed to go to his internship tonight, because Joonmyun will have him home and in bed under his aunt’s watchful eye before he can count to ten.
Chanyeol sighs. "I don't feel wonderful," he admits, "but definitely not bad enough to miss another day of lectures or internship. I can't let my grades slip, or I'll lose my scholarship."
Unsaid is that Chanyeol isn't Joonmyun, and if he loses his scholarship, that's it. Chanyeol can't afford college without it, and he'd never ask his aunt and uncle to take out loans, not when it's all they can really do to feed and clothe him. He helps out, of course, but with his classes and his internship, he's had to cut back on hours at the restaurant, too, and neither of them begrudge him but he feels guilty all the same.
Shaking his head to clear those kinds of thoughts, Chanyeol looks back down at his textbook and tries to focus. He'd somehow managed to get into a class with Joonmyun this semester, a class on robotics that fulfills Chanyeol's math core and is a necessary one for Joonmyun's major, and they'd both been relieved after last semester, when they'd barely had time to see each other outside of dinner and stolen late night study hours. It had been hard, because even when Chanyeol had still been in high school, Joonmyun having graduated a year before him, he still saw his best friend six out of the seven days a week. It's kind of better this semester, and next year, Chanyeol's going to try to convince Joonmyun to take fewer evening classes so they can cook dinner in Joonmyun’s fancy kitchen more often, Chanyeol dropping by with ingredients from the store to pay for his side of the meal.
Joonmyun sets his pencil down, now, and then reaches across the table to rest his fingertips on Chanyeol's forearm. "You work so hard," he says. "Maybe if you slept more..." There's teasing in it, but he also means it, and it makes Chanyeol bristle. His stomach lurches.
"I don't have time," Chanyeol snaps, and then feels guilty when Joonmyun pouts at him, his glasses slipping lower on his nose. "I'm already taking minimal hours at my internship and at the store, and the homework load is..." Chanyeol swallows. “Anyway, I’m sleeping when I can. It’s just going to have to be this way for a while.”
This is the only time when he wishes he had a best friend who'd grown up with a little less. Joonmyun has never really had to go without anything but his father’s attention, what with his dad owning one of the largest tech businesses in the country. Joonmyun’s got everything all laid out for him, already, in way that has Chanyeol alternating between jealous and relieved. Jealous, because Joonmyun will never have to worry about next semester's tuition or what he'll be doing after graduation, but relieved because Chanyeol himself will be able to choose where he goes and what he does after all of this work. Still, it means Joonmyun can’t understand Chanyeol’s worry about money.
"I know," Joonmyun says, and then he hesitates briefly, before tightening his hand on Chanyeol's arm, his thumb coming to rub at the bone in Chanyeol's wrist. "You know that if you ever needed..." Chanyeol prepares himself to interrupt, knowing that Joonmyun is going to offer money or something else, like he has before, even though he knows Chanyeol would never, ever accept it, but Joonmyun stops and narrows his eyes at Chanyeol instead. "Chanyeol, you're running really hot. You still have a fever."
"No, I don't," replies Chanyeol. "My aunt checked this morning, before she even let me out of the apartment." She’d cornered him at the door, arm stretched across it like a toll gate, and said: ”Not so fast, mister.” Chanyeol had laughed at her, because she’d looked so much, right then, like his mom used to look. Or maybe Chanyeol’s forgetting what his mom looked like. He can barely remember Seoul, or his sister and dad, either. “Do you think she would’ve let me go if I had a fever.”
“These things can come back, Chanyeol. It’s not all or nothing.” Joonmyun's hand lifts from his arm, stretching out as if to touch Chanyeol's forehead, but there's too much table between them, and Joonmyun isn't long-limbed enough to reach. "You definitely have a fever, Chanyeol Park," Joonmyun accuses. "And it's winter in New York, you silly kid."
“Well, I promise to sleep when I get home,” Chanyeol says. He starts to stack up his books, frowning as he moves to close the open one and realizes he still has at least fifty pages of reading left. Joonmyun won’t know if he fudges the truth a little.
“I will be calling to check on you,” says Joonmyun. “And checking your instagram and twitter favorites.”
“Don’t be a creep, Joon,” replies Chanyeol, zipping his backpack closed and pulling on his winter hat. His body decides it’s time for a full involuntary shiver, and it has Joonmyun’s brows crushing together in the center of his forehead with consternation. “I’ll sleep, okay?”
“Chanyeol…” Joonmyun sighs, getting up from his own seat and walking around the table to zip up Chanyeol’s coat. He pulls on the sleeves until they cover Chanyeol’s wrists, and then makes sure the zipper is all the way up to Chanyeol’s chin. “I’ll see you tomorrow, all right?”
“Got ya, bud,” Chanyeol replies, feeling his ears going red as the teenagers at the table behind them make lewd noises. It’s not the first time Joonmyun’s actions have caused a misunderstanding, but Chanyeol’s still not used to it. “Let go, before it looks weird.”
“There’s nothing weird about me taking care of you,” Joonmyun says firmly, reaching up while standing on his toes to fix Chanyeol’s hair where it sticks out of his hat. “Stay warm.”
“Right,” says Chanyeol, swallowing. He can hear Joonmyun’s heart beating really loudly, even though he doesn’t see anything on Joonmyun’s face, and he takes a step back, adjusting his backpack. “Tomorrow.” He waves with his whole hand, fingers wiggling. “Don’t kill the high schoolers.”
“I’ll try,” Joonmyun says wryly, already sitting down again with one hand on the bridge of his glasses to hold them in place as he reads.
He walks out of the library and down the steps, toward the backside of campus, where the science buildings cluster together. It takes the whole six minute walk for his nerves to settle, and he’s glad the wind is so strong so he has an excuse for his red face.
“Feeling better?” asks Han, when he walks in, and Chanyeol smiles at him wanly, unzipping his coat and hanging it by the door before approaching the grad student with both hands in his pockets. “I thought maybe you’d died.”
“No reason to break in a new undergraduate,” Chanyeol replies, laughing as he pulls on his coat.
“I thought maybe the spider bite might have scared you off,” Han says. “It wouldn’t be the first time we lost a freshman to some other bio-lab. No one wants to work with spiders.”
“I do,” Chanyeol says, reaching for a pair of work gloves. “What’s on tap for today?”
Chanyeol had thought he’d end up as a vet or something. When he’d first moved to New York City, after his family had died, it had been his aunt and uncle’s dog that had really kept him from being lonely as he struggled through picking up enough English to survive school. And he’s always had a fondness for pets of all kinds. He’d entertained thoughts of veterinary school and dog walking and running a pet store, and he thinks that none of those occupations would have surprised anyone at all.
What had surprised everyone was him falling in love with genetics, instead. Senior year of high school had found him doing internships involving spiders, which had made Baekhyun laugh forever. ”You’re a dumbass,” Baekhyun had told him, ”aren’t you afraid of bugs?”
Chanyeol just pretends that bugs are like tiny, eight-legged dogs, but that would probably make Joonmyun really upset so it’s another thing that Chanyeol keeps to himself.
“Seriously, though,” Han says, stopping Chanyeol’s mind from wandering too far away from the moment, “are you feeling up to this? It can be scary when…”
Chanyeol grins at him. “Really, it’s fine. I was just careless. I should remember that the little guys aren’t as attached to me as I am to them.”
“Spoken with the grace of a man who has been bitten by a lot of wild animals.” Han shakes his bright red hair out of his face. He doesn’t look like an entomologist. Chanyeol… kind of does look like an entomologist. “Anyway, we’re just going to run these gene sequences again today and see if anything’s changed from the new radiation doses.”
“And see if our spiders have gone Super-Saiyan yet?” Chanyeol asks, and Han gives him two raised brows.
“What’s that mean?”
“Ahh,” Chanyeol says, “never mind. It’s just an… well, an anime thing. The person I liked in high school was super into anime so…”
“Cute,” Han says, before coming over to check on Chanyeol’s gloves. “Looks good this time. Go ahead and take one out. Do try not to get bitten.”
Chanyeol surveys the glass terrariums and finally comes to a stop in front of the biggest, meanest looking tarantula in their collection. It’s the one that had bitten him last week, and Chanyeol figures it would be best to start here first.
It hadn’t been a terrible bite, really. Chanyeol’s been bitten by dogs, cats, and four different types of rodents, so in the scheme of things, a spider bite from a non-venomous breed shouldn’t be a big deal. But it had become swollen and tender before he’d even left the lab, and Han had insisted on wrapping it up in gauze while muttering something about Chanyeol’s tetanus shots.
Taking the volatile spider out of its terrarium and moving over to the testing area, Chanyeol gingerly bites his lip. There’s a little thrill of fear as the spider crawls from the palm of his head to the tips of his fingers before skittering onto the table.
He feels woozy for a minute, his head pounding again, and his skin feels sticky with sweat. Sliding his gaze over to Han, he gulps, letting his hands steady before looking back at 004. “Just you and me again, little guy.”
Chanyeol draws blood for sequencing as Han talks to him about this and that-an upcoming conference they’re expected to attend with Dr. Lee, and how their experiments are being lauded as revolutionary by the other researchers that visited last week.
“Wouldn’t it be cool,” Han says, “if our super spiders could significantly advance medicine?”
“It would,” Chanyeol agrees. He feels happy and optimistic, even though he’s not surrounded by puppies, or grooming cats. “Very cool.”
He gets home way too late, after riding on the subway with a bunch of drunk students who’d struggled to keep their balance at every stop. His aunt is still awake, sitting at the kitchen table with a cup of tea in hand as she reads through the newsletter she publishes for church.
“Sorry,” Chanyeol says, “if you were waiting up for me.”
“It’s fine. How was your internship?” Chanyeol flexes his hand. The bite is long gone, but he can still feel it. He can still feel something off with his body.
“It was good,” he says.
As he slides under the covers, he checks his phone. One text from Joonmyun, and it just says “Go to bed, silly,” and Chanyeol smiles at it before giving one last glance at his textbook and closing his eyes.
Joonmyun’s furrowed eyebrows, chiding him, are the last thing he thinks about before he sleeps.
*
Chanyeol knows he’s not sick. The truth is, that bite from the spider at the lab has made Chanyeol… a little more than he used to be. A little stronger, a little faster, and with senses that are much, much sharper.
Sharp enough that he can hear Baekhyun’s cackling long before he gets to lunch.
Chanyeol had met Baekhyun his senior year of high school. He was a transfer, and he’d made it easier for Chanyeol after Joonmyun had graduated. They’re nothing alike, Baekhyun and Joonmyun, but that’s all right. More than one friend like either of them would probably be the death of him.
“Have you been working out?” Baekhyun asks, over lunch, and Chanyeol hedges.
“Not really,” he says. “I guess, uh, I’m just hitting a growth spurt.”
“El Oh El,” Baekhyun says. “Chanyeol, puberty is over, just admit you’ve been hitting the gym to impress chicks. Or Kai Kim. You know I’ll never judge you for your tastes even if you want to blow the guy who was anime club president in high school.”
“It was just a crush,” Chanyeol says, taking a huge bite of his sandwich. He’s hungrier lately, too.
Chanyeol guess it takes a lot of energy to turn into a Super Saiyan. Or whatever he’s turning into, considering he is now capable of lifting his bed with one hand and shooting sticky webbing out of his wrists, just like… like a spider.
“Oh, then maybe you’re trying to seduce someone else with that new buff body. Maybe you’ve finally realized how you feel about Joonmyun-“
“When are you going to get it? It’s not like that.” Chanyeol sets down his fork. “Joonmyun is… He’s my best friend.”
“Who texts you at two in the morning to make sure you’ve gone to bed,” replies Baekhyun, and Chanyeol gulps, thinking about Joonmyun’s hands up by his chin, curled around the zipper of his coat.
“Yeah,” Chanyeol says, picking up his can of orange Fanta and taking a sip. “Not everyone spends all their time making their friends miserable.”
“I don’t make people miserable,” says Baekhyun. “You’re just weak.”
Chanyeol crushes the can in his hand, since it’s empty. “Not really,” says Chanyeol, before he catches sight of the time on his phone. “I’d better go.”
Baekhyun is staring with a gaping mouth at Chanyeol’s crushed can. “You did that so easily,” he says, and Chanyeol shrugs.
“It’s not like it’s hard,” he says, and he picks up his trash and walks to the garbage to throw it out, tuning out Baekhyun’s crowing “you’ve totally been working out!” as he adjusts his backpack and heads to class.
“You look better,” Joonmyun says, when Chanyeol slips into the seat next to him. “More well-rested.”
Chanyeol’s not sure that’s true. But he hasn’t needed to sleep as much, lately. He wonders if it’s another side effect. He wishes he had someone to talk to all of this about, but it seems impossible that anyone would believe him, and he really doesn’t want the research they’re doing to come under fire while he’s still trying to figure everything out.
Besides, it’s… kind of cool. Chanyeol’s never really been cool, in his whole life, not even after is brief stint in a band. To find out that he’s got some kind of super power, or whatever, out of nowhere… well, it’s maybe the first thing in his life that isn’t mundane. He can lift more boxes at the grocery store and he can stay up later to study and as scary as it is, that all these things are happening to him, it’s also a weight off of his shoulders.
“I’m glad I pass your inspection,” says Chanyeol, laughing as he unpacks his binder. “Did you finish the reading?”
“Did you?” Joonmyun asks lightly, moving his pens around on his desk so that they are aligned perfectly with the edge of his notebook paper. He’s anal like that, but Chanyeol’s used to it, even if the guy on Joonmyun’s other side keeps giving him the side-eye.
“Not all of it,” Chanyeol replies. “I worked late at my internship last night and had to help open this morning at the store.”
“Sleep is more important,” says Joonmyun. “You’ll be able to catch up on the reading. It wasn’t too bad.” He yawns as he says it, and Chanyeol looks more carefully at Joonmyun.
“Did you sleep?” He reaches out and rests his hand on Joonmyun’s thigh, feeling the heat of it through Joonmyun’s jeans.
“My father…” Joonmyun frowns. “He had me looking over some stuff for the company.” Joonmyun’s hair is soft and unstyled today, and he’s got a blemish on his chin. He only gets those when he’s exhausted. “I don’t know why, it’s not like I’ll be getting involved with it for another six years, you know?”
“Gotta get that MBA, Mr. Kim,” Chanyeol teases, and Joonmyun gives him a waxy smile that turns more genuine when Chanyeol squeezes at his thigh.
“I know,” Joonmyun says. “I won’t disappoint.” He says it with assuredness, and then focuses his gaze forward as the teacher comes in.
“Of course you won’t,” Chanyeol says, reclaiming his hand, and Joonmyun’s eyes shutter halfway in acknowledgement that he’d heard Chanyeol.
After class, Joonmyun has to hurry to get to his next class. It’s like that on Tuesdays, because Joonmyun has discussion for his Business Japanese class or something, so Chanyeol meanders out to the lawn in front of the library to relax. He sits in one of the black iron benches, feeling the cold immediately seep through his pants and into the skin on the back of his thighs, and he sighs. The metal feels odd beneath his fingertips, extra smooth, and Chanyeol stares down at his hands in wonderment. He feels like he could stick to the metal, if he wanted to, and that’s… well, that’s cool, too, maybe.
“Aren’t you gonna freeze like that, Chanyeol?” Chanyeol looks up, blinking, and finds a familiar face looking down at him, nonchalantly. Black hair falls into a handsome face, and full lips are in their usual pout. “Who the hell takes a nap outside in the winter?”
“Jongin?” Chanyeol, reflexively, moves to fix his hair, before remembering he has a hat on. Then he chuckles to himself, which makes Jongin look at him oddly. “I’m not taking a nap. I was just thinking about, I don’t know, life.”
“It’s Kai,” Jongin corrects, and Chanyeol grins at him, unrepentant. “No one call me Jongin but my parents. And maybe Joonmyun, but he’s basically like a parent.”
Chanyeol feels like he should defend Joonmyun on that front, but in Jongin’s case, it’s probably true. “Don’t high school kids have to go to high school?” Not that he wants Jongin to be somewhere else, of course, it’s just that he’s confused. It’s February, almost March, and spring break isn’t for another few weeks.
“College visits,” Jongin replies succinctly, and Chanyeol hums. “Getting a couple out of the way today since they’re so close. Decisions don’t come out for another few weeks, though.” He shrugs, then gestures to the boy with him. Chanyeol had barely noticed him, but when he does turn his gaze to the stranger, he wonders how, when the stranger is so tall and has such broad shoulders. “This is Sehun, by the way. My year.”
“Hey,” Chanyeol says. “I’m-“
“I know who you are,” the boy replies lazily. His hair, a frosty blond, is pushed back from his forehead, and it just makes him look all the more sleepy. “I’ve heard about you. The kid who won the science fair last year. Kai says you’re smart.”
“I did not,” Jongin corrects, flushing. “I said you weren’t dumb.”
“That’s basically gushing praise,” Sehun says. “I’m getting used to your dysfunction.”
Chanyeol laughs, and resists the urge to ruffle Jongin’s hair as he stands up. “I have to go to class,” Chanyeol says. “Let me know if you get in here, though.” He puffs out his chest. “Your upperclassman will show you around.”
“I’ll just ask Joonmyun,” Jongin replies, belying the words with that hiccupping laugh of his, and Chanyeol beams at him before rushing off, careful not to slip as he jogs towards his Orgo class.
“Saw Jongin today,” he texts Joonmyun later that night. ”He’s still so cute.”
”Go to bed,” Joonmyun replies, and Chanyeol frowns because Joonmyun always gets weird when Chanyeol talks about Jongin. Always gets weird when Chanyeol talks about guys in general, in a way he doesn’t when other men they know do. Maybe it’s because Chanyeol’s slept in Joonmyun’s bed, or something, and Joonmyun’s too nice to tell Chanyeol it really bothers him.
The thought has Chanyeol playing with his webs and making sad ceiling drapery for an extra forty minutes of his life.
*
It’s three Tuesdays later when Chanyeol is walking home late from his internship and sees a mugging taking place before his eyes.
“Hey, pretty boy,” one of the muggers says. “That’s an expensive jacket you’ve got there.”
It’s Jongin’s sleepy looking friend, Sehun, Chanyeol realizes, and though he’d have reacted either way, it’s always easier when he can put a name with a face to know the right thing to do.
Chanyeol acts before he thinks, running over to them and stepping between Sehun and the muggers without even losing his breath. “Leave him alone.”
One of the muggers pulls a gun. ”Another pretty boy coming to help?”
“You don’t want to mess with me,” Chanyeol says. He can’t believe how cocky he sounds, but he feels it, can feel it in his bones that he’s stronger than these guys.
The biggest mugger has a lean, angry face, and Chanyeol memorizes as the man takes of the safety. “I’ll kill you.”
Chanyeol pushes Sehun aside and shoots one of his webs, grabbing the gun and pulling it out of the man’s hand so fast he’s sure the man can’t see it. It skitters down next to Sehun, and Sehun picks it up with uneasy hands, pointing it at him as the other two muggers produce weapons tucked into their belts.
Chanyeol steals another gun and smirks. “Leave him alone, or I’ll shoot,” he says.
“You don’t have the guts,” the first mugger says, and he’s right, he’s totally right, but Sehun doesn’t seem to have the same problem, shooting the man in the arm with a gun that quivers in his hand, and then dropping it. Chanyeol gapes at the situation for a moment, and then grabs Sehun’s hand and starts running.
They end up at a 24/7 Chinese place near Chanyeol’s apartment building, that only serves three types of Americanized Chinese food that Baekhyun swears has drugs or something else addicting in it, sharing fried rice as Sehun shakes and shivers into a cup of hot tea. “Are you okay?” Chanyeol asks, and Sehun nods.
“Thanks to you,” Sehun says. He frowns at Chanyeol. “How did you…” He stops, and then he sighs, his face losing that haunted look and fading back to that vacant one that Chanyeol thinks makes him look five seconds from a nap. “I should get home.”
“How are you even out so late, high schooler?” Chanyeol tries to joke, but I comes out flat, since he’s still a little bit hazy about the whole evening. It feels surreal.
In the end, though, it’s kind of… amazing, Chanyeol thinks, as he walks the short distance to home, that he was able to help Sehun like that. Before the whole spider bite thing, Chanyeol never would have had the confidence or the ability.
Chanyeol can help people, like the heroes in Jongin’s manga, or whatever, and that’s… really… awesome.
He finds it hard to go to sleep that night. He doesn’t know if he’s waiting for the police to show up or what, but in the end, he drifts off to the thought of wearing a cape and soaring from a rooftop to rescue Jongin from a burning building. Jongin turns into Joonmyun when Chanyeol gathers him up into his arms, and then Chanyeol can’t remember the rest of it.
Sehun is waiting outside his internship, hands in his pockets and looking to the side like he’d rather be anywhere else. “Can we talk?”
“Sure,” Chanyeol says, and he gets the urge to ruffle Sehun’s hair like he does with Jongin. “But not for too long, I’ve got plans for dinner.” He always has Thursday plans, because he and Joonmyun have eaten together every Thursday since Joonmyun started college, save for those three weeks Joonmyun was in Beijing last year with his father meeting investors.
“I want to talk about the white sticky stuff,” Sehun blurts out, and Chanyeol’s knees feel wobbly. If he were Baekhyun, he’d make a perverted joke about masturbation, but Chanyeol’s not that smooth, and he can’t deliver naughty jokes with the shamelessness that comes so easily to Baekhyun.
Chanyeol didn’t expect the first person he told about his secret to be some random friend of Jongin’s, but it looks like he doesn’t have a choice.
He sits down with Sehun at a close-by Jamba Juice, and after they order smoothies, Sehun kicks him under the table. “I didn’t notice until I got home, but my hands were covered in these thin strings, from the gun.” He shivers. “And I want to know if that’s something you did, and if so, how?”
Chanyeol stares at Sehun for a few moments, then sighs, and calls Joonmyun. “Hey, I have to cancel for tonight,” he says, looking at Sehun across the table, slurping on his milkshake. “Something came up.”
“Okay,” Joonmyun says, after an awkward pause. “That’s… fine.”
It’s not until Chanyeol hangs up that he realizes that he’s maybe never cancelled plans with Joonmyun on a Thursday without notice before, and he vows to make it up to him.
“Well,” Chanyeol says to Sehun, who stops his loud monotonous sucking on the straw to listen, “it all started with a spider bite.”
Chanyeol finds himself spending a lot of time with Sehun after he’s told him his secret. At first it’s because Sehun is so surprisingly interested-Interested in Chanyeol’s powers and in Chanyeol himself, and Chanyeol likes that someone is interested in him. And then it’s because Chanyeol doesn’t have to tell quiet little white lies to Sehun, like the ones he tells to his aunt when he gets home late after interfering with a convenience store robbery, or the ones he tells to Joonmyun about his black eye the next day.
Joonmyun just gives him a tiny disapproving look, and then smiles when Chanyeol bats his eyelashes at him and asks him not to be mad. “I’m not mad,” he says. “Just frustrated. What are you up to lately?”
“Nothing much,” Chanyeol says. “This and that. Work.”
“I’ve been working a lot too,” Joonmyun says. “My father hasn’t been feeling well lately.”
“Really?” The way Joonmyun says it has Chanyeol setting down his pen and giving Joonmyun his whole focus. Joonmyun’s not particularly close to his father. He’d adored his mother, but she’d disappeared over a year ago after a trip out on the family lot, and Joonmyun’s father had held a funeral with no body. “How so?”
“Heart problems,” says Joonmyun. “Although I could have told you his heart didn’t work years ago.” He offers up a brittle little smile that Chanyeol thinks he inherited from the man they’re talking about, but he doesn’t get the chance to follow up on it because their professor comes in, already yelling about remote control cars and how they’re constructed before she even gets to the front desk.
It goes on like that-aborted conversations with Joonmyun and increasingly long ones with Sehun, who isn’t as quiet as he’d seemed.
”I feel like I never see you,” Joonmyun texts him, and Chanyeol’s hands shake as he tries to reply. He’s exhausted-there’d been a robbery down in Brooklyn, and Chanyeol had pulled on all black and gone to help. ”Is something wrong?”
”Everything’s good,” Chanyeol answers, when his hands finally steady. It is, really. He’s passing all his classes with As and Bs, he’s putting in enough time at the store, and things are going really great at the lab, too. Han seems enthusiastic about what they’re finding, and Dr. Lee has kept showering his grad and undergrad with copious amounts of praise that Chanyeol finds thrilling.
His aunt has told him she’s “so glad he’s finding himself in college,” and he wants to tell her as much as he wants to tell Joonmyun, but something keeps holding him back. It’s fear, that Joonmyun will insist on doctors and scientists, and Chanyeol won’t be allowed to help strangers anymore, strangers like Sehun, who’d ended up being a pretty okay dude, even if he’s super weird. Maybe more than that, it’s that he knows his aunt’s tendency to stay up and wait for Chanyeol to come home would be a hundred times worse if she knew what he got up to in the evenings now, and he doesn’t want that to happen.
He knows Joonmyun would never get any of his own work done, either, and Joonmyun already looks as pale a piece of computer paper, and stretched nearly as thin.
So keeping secrets is Chanyeol’s own way of worrying.
It’ll do, for now.
“Ah, I have plans with Sehun,” Chanyeol says, when Joonmyun asks what he’s doing on Saturday. “Going to see that new Marvel movie.” He laughs to himself about it, since he’s only seeing it with Sehun as a joke.
“Sehun? Again?” Joonmyun seems surprised. “You’ve spent a lot of time with him lately.”
“He’s okay,” Chanyeol says. “I guess.”
“He sees you more than I do,” Joonmyun adds, and Chanyeol feels a knot of guilt in his belly until he remembers that Joonmyun’s been working more and more lately, his own version of a killer internship.
“Maybe if you weren’t trying to become the world’s first twenty-one year old CEO?” Chanyeol replies, and Joonmyun flushes, the vein in his neck sticking out with frustration.
Chanyeol hadn’t meant to hit a nerve, and he’s going to say so until Joonmyun says, harshly: “Some of us don’t get to choose our futures.”
“Am I supposed to feel sorry for you?” Chanyeol replies. “You like the robots and stuff.”
“Do I?” Joonmyun asks, and it’s with that knot still tight in his gut that he lets the conversation drop.
“Trouble in Paradise?” Baekhyun asks at lunch. “Who are you fighting with, your aunt or Joonmyun?”
“Neither,” Chanyeol retorts immediately, then caves under Baekhyun’s wilting stare. “Joonmyun. How do you know?”
“You’ve got a particularly downcast look to you. It’s different from the Jongin rejection look.”
“I don’t know if we’re fighting. He just seems… I don’t know. Tense. Weird.”
“I heard his father is really sick,” Baekhyun says. “I say ‘I heard’ but I mean, it was on the news.”
“The news?” Chanyeol doesn’t watch TV. He wouldn’t know. But that means it’s worse than Joonmyun had implied.
He tries to call Joonmyun that night, after he gets home from putting out a fire at a local elementary school, and Joonmyun answers, but their conversation is short and clipped and ultimately, Joonmyun has to go because he has “real work to do.”
It all comes to a head when he and Sehun come out of the movies and see Jongin and Joonmyun waiting to go in.
Jongin looks really surprised to see Sehun and Chanyeol, his lips parting prettily and his hair flopping happily across his forehead.
“What a coincidence,” he says, and Joonmyun smiles vaguely, in their general direction but not at them. Chanyeol tries to catch Joonmyun’s gaze but Joonmyun is deftly avoiding it.
“I thought you were busy this weekend,” Chanyeol says, the words tumbling out, and Joonmyun frowns his “noisy teenagers in the library” frown Chanyeol’s way but still doesn’t look at him. “With work.”
“I had some free time, but you’d already made plans.” He grins at Jongin, with all his teeth. It’s ugly and fake and Chanyeol hates it. “So I made plans too.”
”Are you punishing me?” Chanyeol texts, and Joonmyun texts him back at two in the morning on the dot, with ”Go to bed, silly.”
Chanyeol goes out prowling that night instead, and manages to send a group of three bloodthirsty frat boys back in the direction of their campus while picking up a shivering, lanky looking guy with broken glasses from the sidewalk.
“Thanks,” the guy says, and Chanyeol remembers why he does this. Why he puts on the mask and the outfit and looks around for crimes to stop. It’s because these are people, and Chanyeol wants to help as many of them as he can.
His dad, Chanyeol remembers all of a sudden, had loved superheroes. Really loved them. Chanyeol treasures the memory, holding it close to his heart.
He finds out Sehun has been kidnapped when he gets a text on his phone. There’s no demand for ransom, just an address, and it’s with a sinking heart that Chanyeol looks at the two attached photographs, one of Sehun tied up and one of Chanyeol from his high school yearbook. We know your secret the message says. Come and get the pretty boy before time runs out.
It’s a mess when he finds him. It’s those muggers, from before, only this time they’d beaten Sehun up pretty bad. Their leader’s arm is in a sling, from that shot to the shoulder, and Chanyeol feels a pool of rage inside of him so big that it scares him.
“Why couldn’t you just leave it alone,” Chanyeol asks, voice rough and full of vitriol. He feels sick with how angry he is, that these people think they’re entitled to an eye for an eye when all Chanyeol had done was help Sehun protect himself from an attack.
“You think you’re a hero or something?” One of the guys asks, as he sets a fire right at Sehun’s feet. “Well, thanks to you, we almost go caught by the cops.”
“Almost,” Chanyeol says. “You’re going to kill him for almost?”
“I’m going to kill both of you for almost,” says the mugger in the sling. “Because you shot me.”
“You deserved it,” Chanyeol says, and then everything’s a blur. Shots ring out, and two of them strike him, right in the arm. The fire starts to burn, and Sehun starts to scream. Then there’s smoke, and flames.
The fire burns, licks at Chanyeol’s skin and hair, and Chanyeol is bleeding from his left shoulder and bicep, unable to free Sehun from the knotted rope. Finally, he pulls Sehun out from his chair and out of the building, flinging them both across to the roof just across with his webs supporting his weight. As the whole thing goes up in flames, Chanyeol finally starts to breathe again, his lungs burning just like that building, and Sehun melty hot in his arms.
He wonders if the muggers are safe. He hopes they aren’t and feels terrible about it but not terrible enough to unthink it.
“Are you all right?” Sehun asks, and for a moment, he sounds just like Joonmyun, and all Chanyeol can think about is how glad he was that they didn’t know about his and Joonmyun’s friendship. That he hadn’t had to rescue Joonmyun from a burning building because he’d carelessly given up his secret.
He gets it now, why the heroes always have alter egos.
“Yeah,” Chanyeol says, digging out both bullet slugs with his fingers and then watching the wounds start to heal. This is something else he can do. Regenerate quickly. It had just stared recently, and Chanyeol had only noticed because he’d sliced his hand open on an apple crate and then watching it knit closed with stunned eyes.
He feels surprisingly human and mortal as his body does inhuman and immortal things, and he wants to see Joonmyun.
“Thank you for saving me twice,” Sehun says solemnly. “Are you sure you’re all right?”
“I’m fine,” Chanyeol says. “Maybe.”
The answering machine is taking all of the calls Chanyeol makes to the apartment, and Joonmyun won’t answer his cell phone at all.
He still feels frantic and pumped up on adrenaline, and he doesn’t know how to calm down except maybe hearing Joonmyun’s voice.
“He’s never been like this,” Chanyeol says to his aunt. “It’s like I don’t know him anymore.”
Chanyeol’s skin is sticky and gross. Fear is still making his heart beat too fast. He could have died. He almost did die, and Sehun had almost died too. Maybe it’s that ‘almost-death’ that has Chanyeol realizing things can’t stay as they are now, in this purgatory of missing and wanting and wondering if he can ever really be happy again.
He’d give anything to go back to before he was bitten, back when his most frightening truths were the ones he’d left back in Korea and where the most exciting thing he had to look forward to was escaping Joonmyun to get to his internship without getting sent to bed.
He knows he can’t go back, that more people will recognize him if he continues to try and help, but he can still have some things. He can still have his best friend, can’t he?
“Well,” Chanyeol’s aunt says, “he might be feeling a bit abandoned, Chanyeollie.”
“Abandoned?”
“You’ve been distant with everyone, lately. Something’s changed you, and you’ve become this person we can’t connect with.”
He hugs his aunt and kisses her cheek. He wonders if she can smell the fire on him, in his hair and on his skin. “I’m sorry,” he says. “I’ll do better.”
“I know,” she says. “You’re a good boy, Chanyeol.” He pulls back and studies her. She looks so much older now, but Chanyeol can still see the light in her eyes. “So I know you’ll do better.”
“What should I do?” Chanyeol asks. “About Joonmyun? I can’t imagine my life without him in it.”
She looks up at him carefully. “Then you’d better tell him that, don’t you think? He’s lost a lot, lately, Chanyeol, and he’s not experienced at it like you are.” Chanyeol thinks about Joonmyun’s tired, tired eyes and achy-breaky smile, and his insides feel like they’ve been tossed by a tornado.
“Okay,” Chanyeol says, curling his hands into fists. He can still smell the smoke, so strong and pungent.
It’s been a month since he’s been here, to Joonmyun’s apartment building. The door guard’s eyes widen when he sees him. “Chanyeol? Long time no see.”
“I need to see Joonmyun,” Chanyeol says.
“I’m under strict instructions not to let anyone up,” the guard says apologetically. “Sorry, Chanyeol, not even you.”
“I need to see him,” Chanyeol says. “And I might be able to… unknot him. Maybe.”
“He’s been… scary, this week. I forget, you know, how scary he can be, because he’s usually so…” Chanyeol knows. “He’s been coming home really late, too. I think he’s basically running things at Kim Enterprises these days.”
“Let me go talk to him, please.” Chanyeol clenches his hands into fists, and then relaxes them again, meeting the guard’s eyes. “I really… I just need to.”
The guard sighs and puts his hands on the edge of his desk, pushing himself up. “I’m going to the bathroom. I will be back in five minutes.” Chanyeol blinks at him, and the guard nods his head toward the elevator behind him. “I expect you to have, uh, gone home by the time I get back.”
Chanyeol doesn’t wait for the guard to even get around the corner before he’s pushing the up button on his elevator.
The doors open to Joonmyun standing by his desk, back hunched as he looks through a report or something on one of his computers. He’d gone to his dad’s office today. Chanyeol can see the anger and distress written in every line of his body, and he wonders how it’s gotten to this.
He remembers the pencil tapping on the edge of the table, and thinks this is just like that. Joonmyun looks ready to snap.
“Joonmyun,” he says softly, tugging at his own hair, catching the strands in an anxious tug.
He looks up, gaze fixing immediately on Chanyeol before his face morphs into a harsh frown. “How did you get up here?”
He considers lying, but there are security cameras. “The guard let me up,” Chanyeol replies. “Don’t fire him.”
“I don’t have to listen to you,” Joonmyun says. “I specifically asked not to be disturbed. He disobeyed me.”
“He’s worried about you. I am too.”
“Oh, so now you’re worried about me?” Joonmyun pushes back from his desk, straightening his back. He looks drawn and tired.
“What?” Chanyeol exhales heavily. “Joonmyun, I know I haven’t been the greatest friend, lately, but I have my reasons.” He steps forward. “I swear, it’s not because I don’t want to be around for you.”
Joonmyun crosses his arms, with a distant smile, and that’s… that’s the Joonmyun everyone else knows, not Chanyeol’s Joonmyun. He hates it. “I’m too busy running a company to play student with you, anyway.”
“Not too busy to hang out with Jongin, though, right?” It slips out, and Chanyeol regrets it at soon as he says it.
“What’s it to you?” Joonmyun is so… he’s so jagged, and Chanyeol had missed him breaking or he would never have let him fall apart.
He’s thinking about Joonmyun letting Chanyeol cry on his shoulder before his first day of high school. He’s thinking about Joonmyun bringing Chanyeol lunch at his lab because he knows Chanyeol won’t stop to get food. He’s thinking about Joonmyun staying up until two in the morning just to make sure Chanyeol goes to bed when he needs to.
There’s all that, and there’s the way Joonmyun’s face gets, sometimes, when Chanyeol pulls away, and better, easier, the way it looks when Chanyeol doesn’t.
“I was going on a date with Jongin,” Joonmyun says, after a silence that seems to stretch forever. “You don’t like him anymore, right?”
There’s something about the way Joonmyun says it that has Chanyeol pushing a balled up fist into his own stomach. It reminds him of the way Joonmyun talked to him on the phone last week, all cold and hard and tinged with something mean. He doesn’t like this side of Joonmyun, that lashes out with calculated cruelty. “Joonmyun, did I…?” He licks his lips. “Are you too mad at me to fix?”
“Why would I be mad at you?” Joonmyun asks. “Have you done something that would make me mad?” He looks every inch the icy heir of a corporation as he adjusts his tie, and Chanyeol finds himself longing for the boy who adjusts his hat in the winter and texts Chanyeol before bed.
“I don’t know,” Chanyeol says. “I just… I miss my best friend.” He reaches out and grabs Joonmyun’s wrist. It fits nicely in his hand, and he pulls him close enough that he can smell Joonmyun’s aftershave and see the dark circles under Joonmyun’s eyes. “I just want you to want to be around me again.”
“Chanyeol…” Joonmyun says, and then he lightly lets his head fall to Chanyeol’s chest. Hesitantly, Chanyeol brings his hand up to cup the back of Joonmyun’s head, mindful of his neatly styled hair and expensive suit. He wonders how it looks, Joonmyun all dressed up and Chanyeol in his old high school sweatshirt. But they’re alone in the living room, on the top floor of his building, and the only person ever home is Joonmyun. “It’s you who doesn’t want to be around me, isn’t it?”
“How could you think that?” Chanyeol asks. “Don’t you know that…” Chanyeol closes his eyes, and then buries his nose in Joonmyun’s hair. He tightens his hand around Joonmyun’s wrist, in case Joonmyun is thinking about pulling away. “You’re one of the most important people in my life. You and my aunt and uncle, you know?”
“What about Sehun?” Joonmyun asks. “Every time I called, it was always Sehun.” Joonmyun clutches at a handful of Chanyeol’s sweatshirt. “Aren’t you dating him? Shouldn’t he be on your list?”
“Dating…?” Chanyeol opens his eyes again, peeling Joonmyun off of him so he can look into Joonmyun’s eyes. “You’d know if I was dating someone. I’d tell you first.”
“Would you?” Joonmyun doesn’t look cold or hard, right now. He looks lost and wistful, like he’d looked at his mom’s sham of a funeral last year, trying to keep himself from crying. Chanyeol doesn’t want Joonmyun to cry. Joonmyun has to be hurting really badly to cry, because Joonmyun is the toughest person Chanyeol knows, made of steel. Chanyeol especially doesn’t want Joonmyun to cry because of him, since Joonmyun has forever done his best to keep Chanyeol’s tears at bay.
“Sehun’s helping me with a project,” Chanyeol says. He doesn’t want to talk about the spider thing. Not yet, because he hasn’t had a chance to figure out what he’s going to do about it yet, and Joonmyun will worry himself to death. “That’s all. It’s not… He’s not my best friend.” Because Sehun might know Chanyeol’s secret, but he doesn’t know Chanyeol’s heart.
Something makes Chanyeol let go of Joonmyun’s wrist and bring that hand up to cradle his cheek. He slides his thumb across Joonmyun’s smooth lips and wonders what it might be like to kiss him before he slams the thought down.
That’s for later. Maybe when he tells Joonmyun everything, he can tell him that, too.
“I wasn’t really going on a date with Jongin,” Joonmyun says, over coffee at the Starbucks across the street from his apartment building. Everyone’s wearing expensive, tailored clothing, but Joonmyun doesn’t seem to mind Chanyeol’s clothes at all. Joonmyun’s never minded the differences. Chanyeol smiles into his latte. “He’s just got to do an interview for his econ class and he’s afraid of strangers.”
“That’s good to know,” Chanyeol says, letting his hand fall to Joonmyun’s shoulder. “But I really don’t like Jongin anymore. You know that, right?”
“You have to like someone,” chides Joonmyun. “You’re a sophomore in college.”
“Maybe,” teases Chanyeol, reaching across the table to wipe the foam off of Joonmyun’s nose. His arms are long enough to cross the distance. “I’ll tell you sometime, if you’re really nice to me.”
“I’m always nice to you,” says Joonmyun, wiping at his mouth with slightly red cheeks. “Aren’t I?”
Chanyeol looks at Joonmyun, warm and gentle, and tugs on his tie. “Don’t you have a homework to do?”
“Yes,” Joonmyun says. “But I’m free for dinner.” Joonmyun swallows. “It’s Thursday.”
Chanyeol stares down at his latte thoughtfully, and cups his hands around the cardboard cup. “It’s a date,” Chanyeol says, softening it with a grin as he looks up to meet Joonmyun’s gaze.
“Oh,” Joonmyun asks, as he stands up and pushes in his chair. “By the way, have you heard about that vigilante? It seems like something you’d be into. My father is really interested.”
“Vigilante?” Chanyeol asks, his heart skipping a beat. “What vigilante?”
“The one helping the police while wearing a ski mask like a common criminal.”
“What,” Chanyeol drawls, “do you think he needs a super suit or something?” Joonmyun reaches out for Chanyeol’s hand.
“Yes,” Joonmyun says. “And maybe a name.”
“A name,” Chanyeol thinks, and there’s something on the tip of his tongue. He squeezes Joonmyun’s hand. “Maybe he’s just waiting for a good one.”
Final author's note: and then no one lived happily ever after because the spiderman universe is so sad ;;;; but maybe in chanyeol spiderman he and joonmyun live happily ever after~