You'll never be her only

[dainuhsoar]

title: You'll never be her only
rating: for this part, pg13 for language
pairing: woohyun x sunggyu
wordcount: 1.595

summary: set in a bar-slash-stripclub in the year 3061, woohyun meets (and falls in love) with a hologram sunggyu-soldier from the 1950s.

a/n: is lengthy and below cut.

i might be a little rusty when writing, please bear with me. ;; enrique iglesias ft. usher, lil wayne – dirty dancer au, trashy as heck but you know me, (no you don't if you don't follow my #twitter. im a pro at shameless plugs) i'm trashy as hell. also, i've already written a dirty-dancer-au before, it's a junseung and because i'm a master at procrastinating at ideas i should write out, i'm reusing the au. i love this au a lot. i mean, the mv... au... if you watch the mv... r.i.p. me, congrats sunggyu and hyunseung on the solos!!

(don't write a meaningful fic inspired by meaningful lyrics. write a fic inspired by songs that has lyrics like “this is for the dirty girls all around the world”)

You'll never be her only

it's the year 3061 and woohyun thinks he has seen everything. it has been five years since he's graduated from college, and he has jumped from a desk job to a back-up dancer, to a private tutor, to a small-time flirtatious bar boy. he thinks he has met all kinds of people and flirted with all kinds of danger. after all, it's the year 3061 so everyone is liberal, there is nothing woohyun is too afraid to try.

woohyun likes his stint at the bar. he can rake up lots of tips at the end of the day just by winking a little bit and paying a little more attention to lonely hearts. and it helps that everyone there thinks he's the cutest imp ever. the customers love him, the other boys love him and his manager pats his head every time he arrives at work. woohyun may be too old to like being taken care of, but who cares? give him all the tender-loving care other twenty-five-year-olds reject, he adores being adored, hell yeah.

and it's because he's so adored that only after three months of working at the bar, the manager pulls him to the backroom and tells him a position in the back back room of the bar has opened, and asks him if he wants to take it up.

the backroom of the bar is essentially the locker room, where the employees change into and out of their uniform. the locker room has two doors. one door leads to the front of the bar. the front of the bar looks like a regular place, two bar counters along the sides, a dancefloor in between and a raised platform-stage with a pole in the center for special occasions.

the second door of the locker room leads to the back backroom. woohyun doesn't know what goes on in the back backroom, can't even pick up a hint of sound when someone enters or exits it. he was curious during his first two weeks, then he saw one of the back backroom employees returning to the locker room in a wrecked state, cursing about “stupid loud-mouthed delusional motherfuckers and their damn repressed homosexuality!” woohyun became wary, not more curious. he doesn't know what goes on there but he sure as hell doesn't want to.

the one big difference between the boys working in the front of the bar and the men working in the back backroom is exactly that – their ages. the men working in the back backroom are older, the youngest couldn't be younger than thirty-seven-years-old. they all have some kind of light stubble going on and crow's feet at their eyes. they're all very handsome and matured, but to suddenly be offered a position in the back backroom still makes woohyun a little defensive about his looks.

“i'm... very young, though?” is the first thing woohyun says. he needs to confirm he still looks like a cutie-boy.

the manager rolls his eyes and pats woohyun's head ('yes! validation.'), “sure, woohyun.” ('what.')

woohyun tries not to pout. “i like it at the front of the bar.” which is true.

“the pay is better in the back,” the manager insists. “why don't you see what it's like before you make up your mind, woohyun?”

the manager knows woohyun well, because woohyun has pretty much already made up his mind to stick to the front of the bar. he is eighty-nine per cent sure something illegal goes on behind the second locker room door, and he has his fresh young maknae image to protect. woohyun begins to make some excuse like he has to go wipe the bar down.

“hoya and dongwoo are closing up for the day, we have time to take a look at the back backroom.” the manager drags woohyun to the dreaded door.

woohyun sighs heavily, but follows obediently. the manager scans his thumbprint, the door slides open and he bows playfully as woohyun passes through. woohyun takes his first step through the door, the door slides close after the manager automatically with a soft swish. he distractedly thinks that he likes that sound. it's a modern, space-age sound; he should be used to it given it literally is the goddamn space-age but it's still cool.

the lighting in the back backroom is exactly the same as the lighting in the front of the bar – dim, warm, mellow, and yellow. it's a hallway, with five doors along each parallel wall, and then a bend in the hallway to the right. woohyun guesses there will be more doors down that hallway. the doors are situated directly across each other, identical deep-scarlet padding. the doors are plain, no window, no knob, just a number in gold plates indicating which number door they are. the last door, closest to woohyun, is number 374. above each door is an old-fashioned occupied or vacant sign, something woohyun would find on a 1990s gas station restroom door. all the ten doors in this first hallway had a red occupied sign.

the hallway is eerily silent, and as soon as woohyun realizes that, he makes an attempt to exit.

“whoa, let's take a walk, okay?” the manager blocks woohyun with an arm.

“no, i've seen everything. i'm not interested.” woohyun shakes his head.

“come on, i promise you it's nothing you haven't seen before.” the manager says. “nothing you're too afraid to try, i promise.”

woohyun takes a deep breath. “nothing illegal is going on? like no illegal drugs or... orgies?”

“none of that, i promise you. only one customer per room.”

woohyun nods. “lead the way.”

the manager brightens up and he begins to explain as they walk down the corridor, and past the bend. woohyun thinks the door to the back backroom may be the entrance, but past the bend is where it all really starts. “the back backroom is open twenty-four hours, so that's why we're short on staff right now. the limit of doors has been reached, three hundred and seventy-four, as you saw just now. each worker monitors forty rooms. if you agree to work here, then each worker has to monitor thirty rooms, which i hope is more manageable. we monitor the rooms to make sure everything is smooth sailing and everyone is having a good time, and when we are called, we attend to the customer. but usually they never call on us. and when half an hour is up – half an hour is the time limit of each session – we shut the programme off. then the customer leaves. if he or she doesn't, we will go down to the room to politely ask them to. that's the job scope. simple, right?”

the manager is purposely avoiding telling woohyun what exactly goes behind each door. and if that's not reason enough to say nope-nope-nopity-no, the long walk down to room 027 that has woohyun's legs slightly sore and his head slightly spinning definitely is reason enough.

“this one is vacant.” the manager points out, gesturing the green vacant sign above the door. “the rooms are almost always occupied. they don't require, um, much maintenance, just a short fifteen-minute wipe down of the booths and... stage.”

“hell, no.” woohyun says in half-disgust, half-understanding as the manager taps a code into the holographic keypad on the door.

door 27 sinks in and swish-es to the side to allow access. the manager and woohyun enter and the door closes behind them. a ping sound marks its security. the room within is simple. the wallpaper is deep-red, lined with white at the bottom. the floor is a marble-black, that makes tap-tap sounds as they step towards the 'stage', a disk-shaped platform with a pole in its middle. the platform is made of cold glass, so is the pole. around the platform, arranged in a semi-circle facing the door, is a booth with plush purple cushions. there's a white bar-shaped control on the swivel table attached to the side of the booth.

“you're running a whore house, brilliant.” woohyun has half the mind to just totally resign now. “no illegal shit, huh?”

the manager looks uncomfortable. “it's not a real brothel...” he picks up the controller and woohyun is about to protest, conjuring up picket-signs and the works. the manager presses the big red start/stop button at the top and-

it's the year 3061, so woohyun thinks he's seen everything. be it on the internet or in real life.

but never...

has

he

seen

a

man

as...

traditional.

the black-haired serious-faced at-attention cutie on the glass platform is wearing a thick green padded jacket, buttoned-up, and matching green pants, black boots and a thick hat with the ear flaps pinned up. the label on his jacket says 김성규.

kim sunggyu.

a name that sits just perfectly on woohyun's tongue. the man sees the both of them and his face relaxes but doesn't lose its seriousness. his eyes are alert as he steps down from the platform. he looks from the manager, salutes him casually then stares at woohyun.

sunggyu continues to stare at woohyun as the manager passes a hand through him, and the wuhng sound is really like a pin dropping. it cold-heartedly slices through the dreamy love-at-first-sight reverie woohyun is in. woohyun thinks he is a fool who thought he has seen everything, because he is sure now that all that he has seen has just been building up to this moment, to flip his stomach inside-out and- oh what the fuck- sunggyu is everything.

- pt. 1 fin -

end note: i do fic updates on my tumblr. i have a new aff. ask me questions here.