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dainuhsoar) wrote2013-04-04 12:32 pm
I'll keep my eyes fixed on the sun
title: I'll keep my eyes fixed on the sun
rating: r
pairing: woohyun x sunggyu
wordcount: 11,000~
summary: A Disney's 'Tangled'-inspired fic. Woohyun wants to save his mother and Sunggyu has uh, magical blood that heals people.
notes: The title is from Cage The Elephant's Shake Me Down. This fic is inspired by Disney's 'Tangled' but lots of things have been changed e.g. Rapunzel's hair --> Sunggyu's blood. It's the longest fic I've written and has like fluctuating genres. One moment it's fluff and the next moment it's angst. There's a lot of emotional crap and like words hahaha I don't know how to describe it but some parts can be boring and tiring I think. I don't know, I still hope you guys will like it though. :)
Wee bit of non-graphic sex near the end, just a heads-up. And slight dongwoo/hoya.
*
what in actual hell is that?
it's just lying there like it's dead or something. it's a human body. but sunggyu is pretty sure whoever it is isn't dead. he should climb down the tree to check but that takes moving his ass and he plans to stay in the tree to finish his sketch before moving anything. maybe he should just dump the water in his moleskin pouch down to see if the body really is dead or not, the water should reach the body but sunggyu doesn't want to risk wasting precious water.
he goes for the method that needs the least effort, it's admittedly also the least effective, but whatever, as long as sunggyu doesn't have to move. he shouts from his position 8 meters above the body.
"HEY, YOU THERE, ARE YOU OKAY?"
the body doesn't move. maybe it really is dead. well then there's no helping it if it's really dead. not even sunggyu's magical blood will revive the dead, after all. sunggyu shrugs and goes back to his sketching. after about 10 minutes, his concentration is interrupted by a loud "FUCK!" he starts and his hand skips too far to the right, drawing a line out of... line. his eyebrow twitches in irritation and he looks down again.
the supposedly lifeless body isn't lifeless, after all. it's stiff, of course, but steady enough to stand and kick sunggyu's tree.
"HEY, STOP KICKING MY TREE!"
the person jumps like a mile and he looks around before looking up and finding sunggyu glaring at him. his eyes are wide with shock and he waves at sunggyu tentatively. his head is bleeding and so is his hand. he must have tripped on some rock, friction-burned his hand so badly that it bled and hit his forehead on another piece of rock or something. maybe he's gone stupid. sunggyu gives him the middle finger.
"I PREFERRED YOU WHEN YOU WERE DEAD!" sunggyu shouts. "YOU JUST MADE ME DRAW OUT OF LINE, JERK!" he doesn't need to shout this loudly, really, but he just feels like it because his line is out of place and he doesn't have an eraser because he forgot (stupid) and he'd just wasted 1 and a half hours of his life with a numb butt and he can't really feel his legs.
the boy beneath him looks offended and he screams back, "SORRY BUT YOU DON'T HAVE TO BE A BITCH ABOUT IT!" he then touches his forehead, grimaces at the blood and hollers, "I'M BLEEDING! CAN YOU HELP ME?"
well, the most shameless person award definitely goes to that guy down there.
"NO, PLEASE DIE!" sunggyu yells back. he tears a page out of his sketchbook, crunches it into a paper ball and tosses it forcefully at the boy. it misses the boy by like 5 miles.
the boy raises his eyebrows judgingly. "THAT WAS PATHETIC! I'LL SHOW YOU HOW TO THROW PROPERLY IF YOU HELP ME!"
sunggyu sighs and rolls up his parchment, tucks it into his messenger pouch and then slides off the thick branch he was sitting on. the boy on the ground swears again as he tries to estimate where sunggyu will land and hops about stupidly from one spot to another, waving his arms about, preparing to catch the boy who's apparently trying to commit suicide. sunggyu lands about one meter away from the boy, whose arms are still flapping about, face flat and leg making an awful cracking sound. sunggyu blacks out for a moment and when he wakes up the next second, a strike of pain shooting up his leg and his head numb with an ache, the first thing he hears is, "WHAT THE FUCK?!"
sunggyu is turned over onto his back. before the stranger can even check if he's still breathing, he slams a palm into the boy's face and furiously pushes him backwards.
"YOU'RE STILL ALIVE?"
sunggyu rolls his eyes, stands up and dusts himself off. he stretches his legs and tests out the leg that broke on his fall. it's fine, he can even jog without an ache, not even an itch. his head is clearing too. he raises his eyebrows at the boy staring at him with bugged-out eyes and his mouth open like a cave for flies.
"STOP SHOUTING!" sunggyu shouts at him. he clears his throat. "you still want help with that hand and head?"
the boy continues staring from where he sits in the spaces between the legs of the stump of the tree, slowly closing his mouth and swallowing his saliva. sunggyu can practically see the gears in the boy's head, he's thinking what he should do – run, scream or attack. sunggyu would not recommend attack because he's kind of immortal and can only die when his blood runs out; not scream because that's really just completely useless and will attract the witch's attention and she'll most likely kill him, then again, she's not around so maybe it's safe to scream- what a headache it gives to sunggyu though; he should definitely run away, definitely just run away and bleed to death.
sunggyu would take that option too if he had a choice.
the boy, surprisingly, takes none of those options. he actually nods and holds his hand out hesitantly, palm angry red and bleeding profusely. sunggyu snorts like he thinks it's ridiculous how anyone can fall down and hurt themselves like that; like bleeding from the hand and forehead is child's play; like this boy is stupid even before he knocked his head on a rock because who is stupid enough to come out to the woods alone, especially venturing this deep?
"you know you're really deep into the woods, right?" sunggyu asks, squatting down in front of the boy and taking his hand. "people don't come here unless they're brought by my mother."
the boy frowns, confused. "you live around here?"
"yeah, our cabin's about... 10 meters away, in a clearing. it's well hidden. i mean, witches like to hide, y'know?"
"but you're not a witch, are you?" he gazes at sunggyu speculatively.
sunggyu purposefully presses into the wound on the boy's palm, causing him to yelp out in pain and withdraw his hand hastily. he glares at sunggyu as sunggyu laughs at him.
sunggyu takes out a knife he keeps in his bag and makes a cut on his fingertip, digging in deep enough to bleed. he keeps the knife and without bothering to explain, he grabs the back of the boy's head to stop him from jerking back and shoves his bleeding finger into his mouth when he opens it to protest. sunggyu is pushed away and he grimaces at the coat of saliva on his finger.
"gross." sunggyu comments, taking a corner of the boy's cheap vest and wiping his finger thoroughly. he decides it's not enough and takes out the moleskin pouch in his bag. he opens it and pours the water to wash his finger, all the while putting on a disgusted grimace.
"what the fuck did you do that for?" the boy demands, wiping his mouth and spitting. "fuck, i can taste your blood!" he looks like he's going to puke.
"will you calm the fuck down and check your injuries already?" sunggyu rolls his eyes as he flaps his hand out and spraying water at the boy.
the stranger glares at sunggyu and then looks at his hand, realizing only then that it has healed. he touches his forehead; it has healed too. he gazes at sunggyu, amazed. he's not sure whether or not to thank sunggyu. on one hand, it's like he was poisoned by blood and on the other hand, he has somehow completely stopped bleeding and it's like he hadn't even fallen down. maybe the blood and cuts were a trick of his mind.
"you weren't just imagining your cuts, dumbass." sunggyu rolls his eyes, knowing exactly what the boy is thinking. his face is like an open book. sunggyu can read people pretty well but this boy doesn't even need a proper psychic to read. "i'm immortal and i have magical blood that heals people, okay?" he wriggles his fingers spookily.
"but you're not a witch, are you?"
sunggyu gives him a flat look as he stands and dusts himself off. he caps his moleskin pouch and tucks it into his bag. "i'm not. my mother is and she'll disembowel you then serve your brains to guests because that's apparently the best part. but i doubt your brains will be nutritious or delicious at all since it's empty." he pats his stomach. "empty calories." and nods knowingly even though he has never eaten brains before, they look disgusting.
he's seen his mother drop a whole brain, soggy and disgustingly bloody, into her black cauldron before. she even made him stir the mixture every 30 minutes while she went out. he remembers the nauseous smell the mixture gave off like acidic fumes and he even threw up into the cauldron just to spite her. obviously the potion didn't sell because it didn't work. sunggyu doesn't know what it's supposed to do, actually.
the boy is trying to guess if sunggyu is joking or not.
"i'm joking, god, you're really stupid." sunggyu groans loudly. "anyway, go on and run home now please. my mother will be back soon... in about 13 minutes."
"you can heal people with your blood?" he's not going on and running home. sunggyu questions why he helped this prick.
"yes, i can heal people. that's where most of my mother's revenue comes from." he feels like he's trying to explain 1 plus 1 equals to 2, not 11 and definitely not marriage, to a 5-year-old.
"can you help me? i live in town and my mother's sick. i was trying to find some miracle herb- um," he gestures helplessly to the spilled and crushed herb leaves underfoot. "i'd bring her here but- but she's not strong enough. she caught a disease two years ago. i don't know what disease it is and we can't afford a doctor and uh, will you help me please?" he throws his hands out like in surrender. desperation and helplessness and guilty resignation in his eyes; and although sunggyu has healed the bloody graze on the boy's palm, he couldn't fix the rough lines and blister scars.
sunggyu heals physical wounds easily but he can never heal emotional ones, he can't even patch his own feelings, how can he for others? sunggyu studies the pain and the exhaustion grooved into the too-many lines on the boy's too-young face; the furious desperation in the quirk of his lips when he tries to stop his bottom lip from trembling; and the guilt in the hopelessness of his eyes-
the boy's mother is dying and he doesn't want to admit it but he has already admitted defeat. it's really just crooked and weird. he needs emotional healing more than his mother needs physical healing. but his mother dying is kind of like a stopper to his emotional healing, like he has to overcome "my mother is dying" before he can have any sense of relief. it's crooked and weird because the thing that tore him apart and choked up all his feelings and thoughts and senses is "my mother is dying".
the easiest way to overcome that, really, is to just let her die.
then he'll move on.
sunggyu feels cruel and angry and it doesn't feel like his bones moving when he shrugs, it doesn't sound like his voice saying, "bring her to our cabin and then maybe i'll help." what he really meant to say was, "i want to help you but to help you, i can't help your mother."
the word 'help' is becoming foreign to sunggyu's mind.
*
sunggyu knows the stranger has lost his mind when he suddenly lunges and grabs his hand.
"let go of me!" sunggyu struggles against the boy's grip but it's really tight, probably trained from years of not letting go... you know, figuratively.
he yanks sunggyu to him so suddenly that sunggyu doesn't even have time to catch his breath when he feels a paw brush against his back. he yelps and that's all the time he has for a reaction because they're running and running now. he turns back to see the huge black bear get on all fours and chase after them roaring. sunggyu yelps again and a voice in his head tells him not to worry because he can't die but another voice named instinct is screaming at him to fucking run till his feet bleed because a fucking carnivorous bear is going to catch up in like 3 pounces more.
sunggyu is suddenly yanked to the side and they crouch down behind a dark-barked tree. the tree trunk is fat enough to hide both of them and there's like some kind of beast poop beneath their feet, that hides their scents and made squelching noises when sunggyu realized and started stamping. the other boy slaps his knee and presses a finger to his lips furiously. sunggyu holds his breath, lips in a tight line.
the poop stinks and feels horrible and sick under sunggyu's bare feet. bare feet. he can feel the soles of his feet bleeding and the leaves and sticks that have stuck on when he was running, they're itchy and shit, there must be insects all over his legs. he sniffs and regrets it not because it might attract the bear's hearing but because he caught a whiff of the poop.
sunggyu tries to concentrate on listening to the rustling of leaves as the bear sniffs here and there for them. he can hear it growling and pausing, growling and pausing.
they had to hide for an agonizing 15 minutes before the boy wearing shoes declares the coast clear.
sunggyu quickly straightens, pins and needles jab at his legs, making him wince as he steps out of the pile of poop.
"my feet are bleeding and bare." sunggyu informs, sniffing sadly and then glaring angrily.
"would you rather be torn apart and eaten?" the other boy says, smirking slightly at sunggyu's state.
"what part of immortal do you not understand?" sunggyu huffs. "i lose a hand and grow it back." and before the other boy can sneer at him and ask how he knows, he snaps, "i know because i've tried."
that shuts him up. he doesn't look as sorry as he should be because honestly, sunggyu is a huge jerk.
sunggyu knows he's an asshole, a defence mechanism he cultivated over years of being snippy to a mother who pumps blood out of him every four months since he was 12 so she can sell it to vampires or people desperate to cure themselves of whatever sexually-transmitted disease they contracted (she'll then proceed to have sex with them and give them a whole new disease so they have to come back and buy another pinky-sized vial). she calls his blood the elixir of life.
it hurts, of course it hurts, to literally bleed out almost three-quarters of the blood in his body. she lets him have that sweet lick of death and then bandages him up and then leaves his body to take four months to recover because "aren't you a special one, sunggyu? you're such a good boy. you can't die on me, okay? i need you." and after the four months of recovery, it's back to bleeding out.
his whole purpose in life is to serve as a blood bank. it should make him feel good that he's saving people but the people he saves don't deserve a new life as much as woohyun's mother probably does. it makes him feel more useless than anything.
he had tried chopping his hand off, just cleanly slicing it off his wrist and he bathed in the sweet pain and he could see all the people he couldn't save but should've saved beckoning him into the light and then he woke up and found a hand where it should be. he thought it was a mirage at first, the almost-death experience. so he tried cutting himself again and again and again and realized no, he can grow limbs back, they're like fucking parasites.
sunggyu feels like he has all the right to be snippy and bitchy to woohyun but his reasons aren't secure enough to stop him from feeling bad anyway.
"what's your name?" sunggyu mutters as he splashes his feet with water. they're at the river, sitting on a river bank, dipping feet into the shallow water. "i'm sunggyu."
"woohyun."
"well, woohyun," sunggyu says his name like he was forced to. "i don't know how to get back."
woohyun perks up. sunggyu immediately knows woohyun plans to lie that he knows the way back to sunggyu's cabin and will then lead sunggyu all the way to his mother on her almost-death bed.
"i can show you the way back."
woohyun lies poorly. he blinks too much and his bottom lip is trembling nervously as he tries to grin confidently. his smile slips and then he gathers it up again like a child trying not to cry. what a horrible liar, he would do good to take lessons from sunggyu, who's used to lying to his mother about going into the woods to catch worms for her potions when he's actually going to sketch flowers and animals and trees.
"we sell vials of my blood back at home but don't expect me to give you any for free when you bring me back." sunggyu says, not even calling out on woohyun's lie.
*
sunggyu, woohyun notices, is too thin and too pale. he gets tired easily and is always demanding to stop to take a rest. but their breaks last about 30 minutes each time because sunggyu is always taking his notebook out and sketching things. woohyun doesn't mean to rush him, but his mother is dying and he'll really appreciate it if they can get her healed within the day.
but sunggyu doesn't exactly look like the type who's immortal and have magical blood that cures people of whatever diseases. sunggyu is skinny like he hasn't eaten in days and pale like he doesn't have enough blood, which is ironic, really. his black hair is unruly and was cut messily, looking like it's chopped off instead of using scissors; and the jet-blackness of his hair accentuates how pale his skin is, yellowish in some lights. his lips are dry and chapped and this deathly-grey-purplish colour like he's cold even when there are beads of sweat on his forehead. for someone who's immortal, sunggyu looks like he's dying.
and it's really quite sad and pitiful and woohyun wonders if sunggyu has been abused by the witch he claims to be his mother. he's still a huge jerk though.
woohyun leads them all the way to the bar at the edge of the woods, just about 1 and a half miles away from the town. it's near 7 in the evening and considering how they started their journey at 9 in the morning, they've taken a pretty damn long time to walk the 5 miles from the river to here. woohyun tries to avoid going into the run-down bar as best as he can because he knows it's sungjong's shift tonight and sungjong absolutely loves talking to people and sunggyu will definitely want to take a long rest at the bar.
unfortunately sunggyu spots the smoke rising above the trees from half a mile away and insists they check out who or what it is. woohyun wants to say, "we can't, we have to get back to my mother!" but he bites his tongue because sunggyu doesn't know and sunggyu can't know because he'll want to go back and then woohyun will have to knock sunggyu out and carry him all the way back to his mother instead, and that'll slow him down. a lot of trouble, really.
so woohyun trudges behind sunggyu, trying to convince sunggyu that it's bad idea and it's probably witches having a cookout or something. sunggyu laughs and says witches don't have random cookouts in woods, they hide in their cottages so they can throw human sacrifices into their cauldrons without worrying about being caught.
they reach the source of the smoke, a run-down shack with windows, a roof and a door that kind of sag towards the ground, as if a giant used it as a stool. there's a river running behind the bar, that leads into the woods, and the pipe attached to the side of the bar spits out dirty water into the river. that river is probably the one that runs behind sunggyu's cabin too and he gags, realizing he's been drinking filthy water.
woohyun sighs when sunggyu's face brightens as he suggests they stop by. sunggyu frowns disapprovingly at him when he sighs.
"what are you sighing about?" sunggyu asks him as they walk down the path to the bar, sunggyu walks with an excited skip in his step and woohyun just sort of slugs after him.
"well, what if there are witches in there?" woohyun says, even though he knows the people who hang out at this bar are mostly men with arm muscles too large to fit into the sleeves of their shirts and muscular legs that are too big to fit into proper trousers. most of them look like they're wearing tights, honestly.
sunggyu glances at a man in a too-tight green shirt and too-tight black pants stumble out of the bar, subsequently breaking the wooden door down, with a shining dagger stuck in the belt of his pants and a heavy wooden mug in his hand. he looks drunk and smells like spoiled cheese. he laughs heartily at the broken door and then raises his mug to sunggyu and woohyun as he sashays, unsteadily, away.
"witches don't like hanging out at bars with too many men." sunggyu assures woohyun, patting him confidently on the shoulder.
woohyun leads them to the counter at the front of the bar, sunggyu walks into his back every few steps because he's distracted by all the activity around them. he's grinning widely and his eyes can't stop darting about as he tries to take in everything and everyone around him. he's so excited, it's like he's never been among so many people or he's never heard music before. and it hits woohyun that sunggyu probably has never gone further than the clearing they met at.
just as they take seats on the stools at the bar, sungjong zips over to them, slamming mugs down onto the counter top. sungjong is young with a pretty face and big cat-like eyes. he has black hair that covers one eye and shines even in the dim lighting in the bar. his hands are nice and small and his fingernails are neatly cut. he has this overall wholesome and pretty look that doesn't belong behind a grimy counter and surrounded by sweaty loud men.
"who's this?" he stares at sunggyu curiously, eyes wide and bright. "new friend, woohyun?"
"you know each other?" sunggyu asks, surprised because woohyun acted like he'd never seen this bar before.
"yeah, woohyun used to be a regular customer!" sungjong explains. "how's your mother, woohyun?"
they're even close enough friends for sungjong to know about woohyun's mother's illness. sunggyu glares at woohyun for lying to him about not knowing this place.
"she's bad." woohyun says, avoiding sunggyu's glare. "uh this is sunggyu."
"hi, sunggyu," sungjong smiles at sunggyu. "what can i get for you?"
"does your water come from the river?"
"yep."
"can i have beer?"
"sure."
"what? no, no beer for you." woohyun says, stopping sungjong. "you can't drink beer, sunggyu, it's not good for your blood."
both sungjong and sunggyu raise their eyebrows.
"it's going to be fine." sunggyu rolls his eyes. "don't be so uptight."
"no, you're not going to drink. we have to-" woohyun almost spills his plan out. he licks his lips when sungjong and sunggyu stare at him curiously. "we have to get you home quickly, before sundown."
"i'm sure we're almost there, aren't we?"
"no, quite a few miles more."
"well then, why don't you bring him back to your house first? town is only about 20 minutes away." sungjong suggests. "then you can bring him home tomorrow."
"town is only 20 minutes away?" sunggyu repeats. he makes a show of being angry even though he had known woohyun was lying from the very beginning. "you've been leading me further and further away from home, haven't you?"
"oh, fuck." woohyun groans out dejectedly. he crosses his arms on the countertop and buries his head in them. "we were just 20 minutes away from my mother." he whines under his breath.
"whoa, why do you want him to see your mother?"
"i can help his mother get better." it's not an outright lie and there isn't a need to tell the truth either. sunggyu doesn't need anyone else to know about his magical blood (he winces at just calling his blood magical because it's so goddamn cheesy-sounding, isn't it?) and even though he usually disagrees with his mother, he has to agree with her when she told him most people will just lock him up and use him for themselves if they knew about his uh, magical blood. that's what she is doing, after all.
"uh, okay..." sungjong looks unsure. "anyway, that beer?"
sunggyu glances at woohyun, who still has his head buried in his arms.
"we'll pass for now. i think we have to hurry if we want to get her better by tonight."
woohyun looks up. sungjong shrugs and tells woohyun he hopes his mother really gets better soon and leaves them to refill more mugs, and woohyun is still staring at sunggyu. sunggyu laughs and pats his shoulder.
"you're not half-bad since you put up with all my long breaks without saying anything." sunggyu says. "i accept your request, son." he laughs and then pulls out his notebook. "we'll go after i do a quick sketch of this place, okay?"
the grateful grin on woohyun's face slips. "oh, come on! we're losing daylight here!"
"hey, i forgave you for lying to me and i promise to help your mother and you're complaining?" sunggyu shakes his head in light disappointment. "you should be kissing my feet in gratefulness."
"you knew i was lying and you know how desperate i am to get to her and you were a jackass!"
"just 10 minutes." sunggyu answers, hand not leaving paper.
but before the 10 minutes sunggyu needs to finish his sketch of the bar is up, a sudden gigantic wave crashes down on the roof and really, sunggyu wanted to record the happy picture of brothers knocking their heavy brown mugs together till their frothy dark beer splashes out and stains the floorboards as they sing, arms on each other's shoulders, to the fast-paced dizzying too-loud rhythm the pianist jams out, as drunk as all of them are. because it's the first time sunggyu has seen emotions like this, happiness and togetherness and life like this, and he really really wanted it to be kept forever, you know?
but the memory he gets is the last thing he sees – horror and their pain disguised behind mugs of their personal brand of elixir that doesn't really give them life at all.
sunggyu looks to woohyun and he'd much rather the picture he thought would be his last memory of the place be stuck in his head than the look of complete and raw defeat on woohyun's face as he's swept away by the wave.
*
sunggyu knows he's not going to die but it doesn't stop himself from feeling the struggle and panic whenever his head is forced under fresh tides of murky water. he blacks out once or twice from the lack of oxygen. every time he opens his mouth, a surge of water flows in, forcing him to cough and spit and ultimately rendering him helpless.
sunggyu has been swept into the river by the huge flood and he can see the river banks but he can barely lift his arms in the direction of the banks because of the force of the currents. sunggyu's swimming lessons when he was younger consisted of being thrown into the river by his witch mother and then forced to kick his legs and move his arms in ways that he didn't know how to and still doesn't know how to. he's just squirming about, trying to keep his head above water and he thinks he blacks out every few seconds, to be honest.
sunggyu thinks he should just let the water carry him. he estimates he'll die in 10 minutes that way instead of the 5 minutes if he doesn't stop thrashing about. his limbs are useless and he finally just lets go, letting himself get pushed around by the strong currents. it's not like he'll stay dead forever anyway. he'll wake up and be alive.
"sunggyu!" shit, not now, mother, i'm trying to drown myself, the four months aren't up yet.
it's his mother calling for him, standing near the edge of the outer bank a few meters away from sunggyu. he tries to wave to her but the currents pin his arm down to his side. it then occurs to him that she was probably the one who made the wave, probably waved her wand and tried to kill everyone in the bar because she's an insane motherfucker like that. so he tries to raise his arm to give her the middle finger instead.
the witch is gorgeous, tall and slender, she has thick black hair that falls perfectly in waves and her eyes are big and lined with kohl. her lips are plush and red. this is the image she has to have when she sells her potions. and sunggyu wonders if she touched up her make-up before creating that tsunami wave because she wants to be that kind of show-stopper. she's waving her thin stick of a wand, trying to draw sunggyu out of the water with her magic but she's always been a sucky witch, she keeps lifting the water around sunggyu instead. the water dances around sunggyu but never touching him. he tries very hard to give her the middle finger.
"can you stay still?" she demands, voice shrill over the roar of the currents, which, by the way, is deafening. sunggyu can hardly hear himself swear in his head. she lets out a frustrated cry and then stretches her arm out desperately as she flattens herself on the edge of the bank. the sleeve of her moss-green dress is getting really wet. "grab my hand!"
if sunggyu could even raise his arm, he'd think twice about grabbing her hand. he'd rather flow off somewhere and be free of her for a few days. this is her doing, anyway, her trying to be a smartass and trying to kill everyone. sunggyu realizes he's way too calm to be someone who doesn't know how to swim and is drowning in a river.
not being able to breathe is painful, it makes sunggyu's head want to burst and he thinks his lungs have already given up. it makes it harder for him to curse his mother in his head, is what he's most concerned about.
"SUNGGYU!"
woohyun is about 50 meters off, on his hands and knees on the edge of the inner bank, arm stretched out and ready for sunggyu to catch. he can't see sunggyu's mother, who's desperately waving her arm so her sleeve won't get wet, she's hidden by trees where the river bends. she doesn't even give a fuck about getting sunggyu out of the water.
woohyun, on the other hand, is shivering and drenched and worn out but he's still trying to save sunggyu even though he knows sunggyu is an actual immortal. but maybe all he cares about is if he doesn't catch sunggyu, his one and an only chance to save his mother may be washed away too.
"SUNGGYU, GRAB MY HAND!" he yells.
"sunggyu, over here!" sunggyu's mother orders, stern look on her face.
sunggyu does a desperate yank and his arm finally surfaces. he throws his arm out towards his mother and gives her the middle finger. he lets the currents push him off and he regrets not being able to see her face as he passes her swiftly. he sees woohyun coming closer and closer and he throws himself in the direction of woohyun, fighting the currents desperately.
sunggyu thinks it's bound to be a wasteful effort, really, and he has just shortened his life span to 2 minutes but miraculously, woohyun catches his wrist. it slips a little and woohyun yelps sharply and quickly yanks sunggyu out of the water, his knees sliding down the slope of the bank a little himself.
when sunggyu is safely in his arms, woohyun quickly skids back away from the edge, holding sunggyu tightly.
their breaths are harsh and hearts hammer against their chests. sunggyu's muscles and bones are aching and he's never wanted to die more... well, he has, but still, his body is aching like a bitch because of how much he was pounded by the currents. even out of the water, he's still finding it hard to breathe, like his lungs are trying to make up for the breaths that sunggyu skipped taking because uh, water and drowning.
sunggyu is freezing and his hair is itching his eyes and he can't see because the water is making his vision blur. it's so damn uncomfortable yet comfortable because he's in woohyun's arms and god, he's never been hugged like this- um, held, he's never been held like this and it just feels nice, right? to be in someone else's arms, someone who you know doesn't have the intention to bleed you out nice and dry. even though sunggyu would kill to be dry right now.
when sunggyu has finally stabilized his heart and breaths to manage talking, he shouts out, "FUCK, THAT WAS SCARY!"
and he hears a hoarse bark of laughter from woohyun accompanied by a slight squeeze of woohyun's arm around his waist.
*
woohyun wants to get up and go even though he's soaked to the skin and he's shivering, he can't walk, can't even crawl. sunggyu rolls his eyes and suggests they rest for a bit before walking again because in the first place, he can't feel his legs or his arms. woohyun gives up trying to get sunggyu to move and the fire that sunggyu builds is too warm to resist.
"how did you learn how to make a fire?" woohyun asks, sitting down next to sunggyu and as close to the fire as is safe.
"my mother taught me. she needs someone to make the fire for her cauldron."
"so she's really a witch, huh?"
"yeah, and she probably created that sudden flood. and when she finds me, she'll find you and then kill you. i mean, she has no problems about destroying a bar filled with people- oh god, sungjong was a beautiful boy..."
woohyun winces. "they're fine, most of us, sungjong included, managed to swim out of the water because you know, we can swim. anyway, if she's going to kill me, all the more reason we should get going now."
"shut up, she never taught me how to swim, okay? and will you relax? if she comes by, we'll just push her into the fire." although sunggyu really doubts that will kill her.
"is she really your mother? i mean, she's a witch and even though you're not like a normal human being, you're not a witch... isn't it supposed to be hereditary? witch powers?" woohyun glances at sunggyu like he's ashamed of asking.
sunggyu shrugs. "i don't think she's my mother but she's been taking care of me since i could remember so it doesn't matter really." he throws more sticks into the fire and rubs his hands together. he stuffs them under his armpits before continuing, "to be honest, i don't think i even have a mother. my earliest memory is when i was 12 years old, and it's of waking up screaming because there's a huge cut on my chest and i was bleeding into a fucking bathtub. i was literally bathing in my own shallow pool of blood." woohyun looks horrified. and sunggyu doesn't feel like stopping, "every four months, she does that to me. she cuts me up somewhere and lets me bleed into a tub. i almost die and then she patches me up and lets me rest. i take four months to recover every time. it also takes four months for the supply the run out. you get the circle of life for me, right?"
woohyun nods numbly. he has pity in his eyes and he looks like he wants to reach over and pat sunggyu or something. and sunggyu is a proud one, he knows he's kind of scrawny and weak and he doesn't know how to protect himself because he never had the need to and he lets a witch sell his blood and stuff, but he has pride because he's proud of what his blood can do, how his blood can help people. and he doesn't mean to brag, but his self-taught drawing skills are pretty good too. sunggyu is a proud one but he drinks in woohyun's pity and attention like a pet dog to its owner. sunggyu feels like a pet dog but he doesn't exactly give a fuck right now because he feels like shit at the same time.
sunggyu can't find a better reference for his feelings than the river that flooded and couldn't stop.
"well, since we're sharing feelings here..." woohyun says. he looks wistful and sunggyu prepares reactions for a long and sad confession about how tired he is and how he just really wants his mother to let go soon. "i think you're an asshole." he grins when he sees sunggyu's incredulous look. "but i've always known you're not an asshole on purpose."
the sun is setting somewhere behind them and sunggyu watches their shadows grow longer and slant sideways. he reaches one hand behind woohyun's head and makes a peace sign, laughing when the shadow reflects it as woohyun having one bunny ear on the top of his head. woohyun laughs too and pushes him away lightly.
woohyun is tanned and the sun creates dark warm shadows on his arms. he's just a little shorter than sunggyu but his shoulders are broader. his eyes disappear and his shallow dimples appear when he smiles. his cheeks bones are high and his jaw is sharp. and sunggyu thinks woohyun is just gorgeous, too gorgeous to be sitting next to.
sunggyu, though, is pale so the shadows on his arms have a greater contrast on his skin thank on woohyun's skin. sunggyu stretches his hand towards the fire and he can feel the heat licking his palm. he pays attention to the way the orange sunlight lines his fingers but throws a dark shadow on the back of his hand.
woohyun wants to say something but he finds the words stuck in his throat before he can say it. he's not sure what he wanted to say but he knows it's kind of important for sunggyu to know and his stomach flips with the need to say it.
"the sick thing about everything is," sunggyu's voice drops to a whisper that competes with the crackling of the fire to be heard. "i kind of want to give her what she wants from me sometimes." he sighs in this entirely broken way and pulls his hand back. his voice is tight and small and, yeah, broken when he continues, "sometimes customers come in and they see me- i mean, all of them see me because i'm right there in the shop helping out with bringing out the bottles of my own blood and stuff... anyway, some of them look at me and ask her, 'he yours?' and she'll look at me with these set of eyes like- like- like she's proud of me or something and say 'yes, he is'." he runs a hand through his hair in frustration, grips his hair and doesn't let go as his voice becomes choked and rough and distressed. "she treats me like a child, right? like when parents give their children candy when they behave the way the parents want. my candy is her approving looks and smiles even though i hate her and shouldn't want her stupid approval."
sunggyu looks hard into the fire, anywhere but at woohyun. woohyun isn't sure he wants sunggyu to look at him, anyway. if sunggyu is as broken as he sounds, woohyun doesn't really want to know what sunggyu looks like right now.
"i just want to know if i'm doing something right." sunggyu finally turns to look at woohyun.
woohyun curses in his head and turns away quickly to avoid the inevitable heart-breaking look on sunggyu's face. even sunggyu's voice is giving his heart major clenches and aches, there's no way woohyun can hold his own tears in if he sees sunggyu's face.
"you're doing good." he says instead, throwing dead leaves into the fire distractedly.
it's not quite what he wants to say and woohyun swears he hears sunggyu sob beside him.
*
"i hope your mother isn't as sucky as mine." sunggyu half-laughs after ten minutes of silence between them.
woohyun smiles at the fire, still afraid of looking at sunggyu. "she's a good mother."
"she must be if you love her so much."
"yeah, if only she loves me as much." fuck, woohyun did not just say that. he can see sunggyu turning to give him a questioning look in the corner of his eyes. he doesn't look back at sunggyu, doesn't elaborate on that suggestively-depressing statement.
"i kind of poured my heart out just now and i'm a jerk but you should pour yours out too so i don't look like the loser." sunggyu says.
woohyun grimaces. he finally turns to sunggyu and he sees the noticeable red-rimmed eyes, sunggyu's skin is so pale, it's kind of hard to miss the redness. he still looks kind of broken and... shit, he looks all kinds of beautiful and woohyun is finding it hard to remember that this boy swears like a sailor.
woohyun shrugs. "she just fell in love with the wrong man and can't forget about him." woohyun takes another moment to rethink his words. and then he looks back into the fire, listens to the crackling instead of how sunggyu's breath catches quietly.
"even when she's on her death bed, she's still moaning about wishing he were here. he's the one who got her pregnant, her first love, her last love... growing up, she kept telling me i'm so much like him – i have his eyes, his chin, his nose – whatever. i told her i don't want to be like him and she had beaten me because why the fuck don't i want to be like the most brilliant man in the world?"
woohyun snorts as an attempt to laugh. he's not going to cry, he won't cry because he has thought this over in his head before. he's not going to cry. "uh, he made her pregnant and then left her, yeah, i don't think that's what a brilliant person does. he didn't just leave her, he left us. i grew up without a father and neighbours gossiped about my mother but she didn't care and you know how unfair that is? i cared that she was gossiped about. why the fuck should i even care? but i did, anyway, like i needed to protect her virtue or something. i grew up being haunted by rude whispers and- shit, my childhood sucked. i mean yours was worse but-"
sunggyu pats his hand comfortingly and woohyun looks down at his own hand to find droplets of tears slipping down the back. he's crying and he doesn't know when he started.
"and i just... i just wish she'll let go of him so she can let go of herself. she's only hanging on because she really believes he'll show up, like he'll magically know she's dying and decide to use the last of his morality to visit her. but he won't. and she's in so much pain for him, just for him. not because she's terribly sad that she'll never see me again but because she's terribly sad that she'll never see him again." woohyun flaps his hand so his tears fly off in invisible drops.
sunggyu moves closer to woohyun tentatively and puts an arm around his shoulders, patting him lightly. he's not sure what kind of reaction to give, how he should comfort someone, because he's never done it before, and he hopes he's doing right so far. woohyun didn't move over to pat him on the shoulder but maybe woohyun doesn't know how to comfort people too.
"you know, i had a lot of time to think about life and shit and why people want to live longer because i sure don't, but anyway," sunggyu says unsurely. "i've always believed that people are scared of either not having a meaning to life or they're scared of death. if they're scared of having no meaning to life, then they choose death as the easy way out. also, if they don't have a meaning in the first place, then they also choose death, right? but if it's death they're scared of then they desperately find a reason to live. your mother desperately found a meaning to life in the man that poured words of love into her and she reciprocated by giving him her life. and then he took it away with him. she lost her reason to live and she wants it back because she's scared of death. so it's not like you're more important than him to her, it's just that she's selfish and doesn't want to die."
hearing it out loud, sunggyu thinks he sounds like a huge jerk who tried too hard to comfort someone. like he tried too hard to understand human feelings when he's not a human himself. but woohyun half-laughs and takes sunggyu's hand and kisses the back of it in thanks.
"what about you? what are you afraid of?" woohyun's crying and sunggyu can feel woohyun's tears on his hand.
"i don't know." sunggyu shrugs. "i have a meaning to life but it makes me want to die."
woohyun looks at him for a long time. he then smiles and pushes a wet lock of hair behind sunggyu's ear. "i think i found a meaning to life that makes me sort of want to survive?"
and no, that's still not what woohyun wants to say. but it's nearly there.
*
woohyun and sunggyu reach town two hours to midnight, hair dry but clothes still damp. doors to bars are popped open and lively music and loud cheers flow out. the light from the bars are the only lights on the street. sunggyu wonders if the men from the bar at the woods are in there, recovered and ready to drink more. how the hell did they swim out of the water if they were drunk? then again, most of them had muscles that were as big as sunggyu's head.
"our house is at the other edge of town." woohyun says, pointing further up the street.
the street is empty, save for women and a few men in little clothing and other men in rich clothing prowling for these women and men. sunggyu does his best to keep up with woohyun's quick pace but he watches the people with wary eyes. they watch him back. and he gulps and wishes he still has his notebook so he can sketch them because even though he feels like he's being stripped by their eyes, it's all so wonderful and will make a brilliant sketch.
eventually, woohyun has to grab sunggyu's hand and drag him off.
*
it makes woohyun gag and he can almost feel the knife slice through his own skin as he watches it slice through sunggyu's palm. he quickly pushes the cup under sunggyu's hand and sunggyu squeezes his hand so the blood flows faster. woohyun whispers choked apologies and "you're doing good, sunggyu, thank you so much." without actually looking at sunggyu.
if woohyun thought the dark shadows the sun made on sunggyu's skin had really great contrast, he was wrong. because sunggyu's blood is deep red and stands out so much against his pale (and getting paler) skin.
when the cup is half-filled, woohyun says it's enough and helps to bandage sunggyu's hand. he kisses sunggyu's hand and moves away to feed his mother, who's lying in bed and deliriously calling out for someone who sunggyu guesses is the man who left them behind.
she's a lovely-looking woman, hair an initially dark brown, greyed out by age and sickness. her face isn't etched with wrinkles but her cheekbones are sunken. she's emaciated, pale and honestly, she looks like a corpse that spasms every few seconds. but she still retains the loveliness in her soft eyes when they flutter open to look at sunggyu, receiving his presence but not unable to tell the difference between him and her own son, which probably gave a punch to woohyun's stomach when she reached out for sunggyu and called him woohyun.
"who took care of her when you were gone?" sunggyu asks when woohyun returns to the kitchen.
woohyun washes the cup and his hands, grimacing at the sharp metallic smell. sunggyu's blood smells like everyone else's blood, magical or not.
"dongwoo, he's a friend." woohyun answers. "he's really nice. maybe tomorrow i'll bring you over to see him." he smiles warmly at sunggyu as he sits down on opposite from him at the table.
sunggyu laughs. "tomorrow, you'll bring me home."
"you don't want to wait till my mother gets better?"
"why? afraid she won't and you'll have to use me again?" his tone is too sharp, too personal. and he winces at it when woohyun's face drops into horror.
"no, of course not! i'm not going to use you like that," woohyun says quickly, taking sunggyu's bandaged hand. "i just want you to stick around, you know?"
sunggyu smiles and withdraws his hand. "according to the calendar back home, tomorrow is bleeding day for me."
"you don't have to go back if you don't want to, right?" woohyun asks. "i mean, why would you want to go back?"
"i don't want to but i don't have a choice. she'll find me anyway. she'll kill you. maybe she'll kill your mother if she doesn't feel feministic."
"but i don't want you to go back. i don't-" woohyun bites his lip, sighs and leans back in this entirely too tired way. "just stay for a couple of days, maybe she won't find you."
"she will."
woohyun still has the desperation, anxiety, helplessness and guilty resignation in his eyes. but sunggyu can't help but feel it's all for an entirely different reason now.
he stays anyway.
*
the first day sunggyu stays, he meets dongwoo. dongwoo is cheerful and he bakes yummy treats and gives sunggyu a whole batch for free because he thinks sunggyu is too thin. he keeps them away from woohyun but sunggyu gives some of his to woohyun after he sees the pout on woohyun's lips. dongwoo has a nice laugh and nice hair and he's just so nice, like his cookies. the first thing he asks woohyun is how his mother is and he's completely serious. his face when he's serious looks like it can't belong to a man who wears a frilly sunflower apron and has a laughter that people come into the bakery just to hear.
the second day sunggyu stays, they meet up with sungjong and sunggyu is introduced to sungyeol, who's in an eternally drunk state. he plays the piano at the bar sungjong found new work at. he's tall and thin and likes to shout, maybe because he's so used to shouting over the music he plays. but he's loads of fun and he teaches sunggyu some tunes and gives sunggyu some of his beer. he puts his arm around sunggyu's shoulders easily and teases woohyun about his shortness and he basically takes sunggyu away from woohyun until woohyun gets tired of having an empty space beside him and goes over to drag sunggyu away.
the third day sunggyu stays, woohyun's mother is well enough to stand up, well enough to differentiate her son from his lover. the first thing she says to woohyun is "oh, love, i thought you were him." woohyun looks at sunggyu but it's kind of not of sadness, it's of amusement and a light teasing like, "i told you so." sunggyu spends the day learning how to knit from woohyun's mother and listening to stories about woohyun's childhood. she describes woohyun as a fun-loving, carefree idiot when sunggyu wants to tell her he looks like a broken person with the weight of the world on his shoulders.
the fourth day sunggyu stays, woohyun's mother is well enough to cook for them. so woohyun and sunggyu go out to buy ingredients. the market is crowded and hot and noisy and sunggyu has to stick to woohyun's side even though they're both sweaty and sticky but woohyun grins at sunggyu and sunggyu grins back anyway. they meet myungsoo, who sells chilli peppers. sungyeol is sitting next to him on a stool while myungsoo himself squats. sungyeol happens to play the flute too, which he waves about when he sees woohyun and sunggyu. myungsoo is indifferent to sungyeol's liveliness but he has a nice smile and he has dimples and he's far too handsome for his job but sungyeol says his face is good for attracting all the wives to buy goods from him. myungsoo just shrugs and laughs when sungyeol carries on playing his flute.
they buy bread from dongwoo for lunch and dongwoo recommends they go to the diner just across his bakery to get stew from howon, who he shares a flat with. they go over and howon is a quiet man whose eyes kind of sparkle when dongwoo is mentioned. woohyun has met and talked to howon before but even so, howon is reserved towards woohyun. dongwoo comes over and howon is like a totally different person, chatting and asking dongwoo a million questions fit into two minutes. howon lets sunggyu and woohyun have the stew for free.
woohyun, sunggyu and woohyun's mother have bread and stew for lunch. but for dinner, woohyun's mother makes some peppery-sour soup with soft cabbage and rice. it's a small meal but sunggyu loves it.
that night, woohyun asks sunggyu if there's any way to get the magic out of his blood. sunggyu laughs and says it's already a miracle that his mother hasn't found them yet. and that quietens the both of them.
but as woohyun kisses sunggyu and pins him to the blanket they laid over the hard barn floor, as their bodies slide together and breaths mix, woohyun can hear every hitch of sunggyu's gasps as he cries softly into the side of woohyun's neck.
*
sunggyu wakes up to butterfly kisses on the side of his neck. he wriggles in woohyun's hold and laughs, careless and happy.
"sunggyu, i think i know a way to get rid of your curse."
sunggyu stills but he laughs good-naturedly. "my mother calls it a gift."
"whatever it is, i just know a way to change it."
"woohyun, i want to stay with you too but i don't think-"
"no, listen to me. what if your blood isn't pure?"
"you want to give me a sexually-transmitted disease?" sunggyu gasps. "do you have-"
"no, shit, i don't." woohyun says impatiently, grip tightening around sunggyu's waist. "what if i transfer some of my blood into yours? will your blood fight it off?"
"i-" sunggyu wriggles out of woohyun's hold and sits up. he shivers when the cold air hits his bare chest. "i don't know and i wish you'd drop it, woohyun."
"but if it works-"
"it won't and she's going to find us. and you'll die even if i don't want you to and i'll go back to being a blood bank for the rest of my life with the happy memories from these days, okay? i want to be happy for as long as possible and i know this is her plan. she wants me to be have a taste of freedom and happiness and then she'll trap me and never let me have it again because she knows that's torture. i know her plan and fuck if it isn't working." sunggyu says breathlessly because his heart is beating way too fast and there's a sharp noise in his ears and maybe it's his voice.
woohyun seems convinced though. sad, but convinced. he kisses sunggyu and they taste each other's sorrow.
*
woohyun and sunggyu spend the day with woohyun's mother. she tells sunggyu more stories about woohyun and cooks lunch for them. and sunggyu sketches the both of them and gives it to woohyun's mother, who looks at it for a long time, smiles and says sunggyu drew woohyun too handsomely before folding the paper neatly and tucking it into her breast pocket.
woohyun grins at sunggyu and tries drawing sunggyu only to fail horribly because he draws sunggyu with a crooked nose and too big teeth. they laugh and sunggyu keeps the portrait anyway.
woohyun and sunggyu goes to the bar sungjong and sungyeol work at in the night. the bar is loud like sungyeol and chatty like sungjong. sungjong gives them beer and sungyeol pulls sunggyu to play the piano with him. they clang out rubbish tunes the drunk customers sing to anyway.
sungjong talks to woohyun about how his mother is, about the new policy the king passed, about sunggyu. and sungjong comments that woohyun talks about sunggyu like he's known him since forever; woohyun talks about sunggyu with a brightness in his grins; woohyun is way too greasy about sunggyu and he either needs to get over there and pull sunggyu away from sungyeol before sungyeol gets him dead drunk or shoot himself because he's way too sickly sweet. so woohyun laughs and he goes over and pulls sunggyu away from sungyeol before sunggyu can get drunk.
but maybe sunggyu is drunk already because he's laughing and crying at the same time as he arches his body into woohyun's that night, among the soft hay. he's laughing as woohyun peppers kisses all over his face, down his neck and down his torso. but then he's crying as woohyun presses deeper into him and woohyun's afraid sunggyu's hurt or getting hurt and he pulls out only to have sunggyu cry harder and whisper, "no, please, no, don't leave." and snap his hips to meet woohyun's.
and then sunggyu feels a sharp pain in his neck but his eyes are closed and woohyun is wrecking his body with so much pleasure that the pain is a mere passing thought.
sunggyu falls into deep sleep after that, warm and tingly and so fucking happy, you know? because he's never been loved like this before- because he's never been loved before.
*
it's so cliched but all good things come to an end and honestly, it has all been too good to be true. two fucking clichés in one fucking sentence. that's two middle fingers up sunggyu's one life.
he wakes up because woohyun isn't holding him anymore. he hates himself for becoming so used to woohyun's embrace so easily that he can't even sleep. the barn doors are open and woohyun's body lies in an unmoving heap. it's dark but the moonlight serves enough brightness for sunggyu to see the hay under and around woohyun's body stain with a dark redness and the diameter of the redness gets larger and larger. who said "let there be light" and thought it was clever? sunggyu would rather there be no light at all so he doesn't have to see this.
sunggyu hates how his blood runs cold and how he can't hear anything or feel anything as he bends over woohyun's body and tries for his life to stop crying.
"love, won't you cover up and stop that crying?"
sunggyu's mother stands over them, one hand clutching her side. her knees buckle suddenly and she's lying on her side, next to woohyun, trying hard to get up on her hands and knees. but her legs are wobbly and so are her arms.
"give me some of your blood now, i'm dying." her voice is strained and she's reaching out desperately to make a cut on sunggyu's arm.
sunggyu doesn't care what she's doing and he gives less of a shit whether she's dying. he just wants woohyun to wake up or jerk or something, something alive. sunggyu feels like he can't breathe, as bad as the time he was drowning in the river or maybe even worse. he's crying all over woohyun's face, dripping ugly tears and then desperately wiping them away. woohyun's eyes are closed, his face unstrained, heart unmoving.
and this is the closest sunggyu's been to death, he thinks. physical pain sucks but emotional pain- fuck. sunggyu thought he could get over this, he had thought about it before, he's not naive, he knew his mother will come and kill woohyun eventually. he thought he would cry for a little bit and then be fine. and he's so wrong that it hurts too.
"why isn't it working?"
sunggyu's mother has come over to him and dragged him away from woohyun. he scrabbles to get back to woohyun but she nails a heel into his shoulder and he cries out in pain.
"why isn't your blood working?" she demands, falling to her knees again. she clutches her side and sunggyu sees her blood for the first time, kind of black like her heart. her hair is messy and all over her shoulders, scraping the barn floor. the side of her green dress grows darker and darker. she's lovely but all that loveliness is wasted. "sunggyu, why isn't it?" she's desperate and terrified.
sunggyu is as confused as she is. "i don't know." he says.
but sunggyu remembers the pain in his neck, the thin and narrow pain like a needle. and yeah, he knows. he knows what woohyun did. and he remembers woohyun whispering, "i'm sorry i took your reason to live away." and sunggyu was wondering what the fuck he was talking about because his meaning to life was right there, right here- his meaning to life or whatever- is woohyun. but woohyun had taken the magic out of his blood and he had just taken sunggyu's meaning to life away.
the difference between sunggyu and woohyun's mother is that there's a miniscule possibility that her meaning may come back but there's no fucking chance that sunggyu's will.
the witch spasms, shrieks at sunggyu something he doesn't register and then dies. just like that. sunggyu kind of wishes she had a worst death, an uglier one, not like this with blood gushing out of her side, it's still too mild.
sunggyu crawls over to woohyun and kisses woohyun's mouth softly. woohyun is stabbed squarely in the chest, right where his heart is. blood continues to flow out and sunggyu stains his hand with woohyun's blood as he gives woohyun's body an awkward hug. he kind of wants to stay like that forever. maybe he should just kill himself. then they'd be found like this and then separated. so, no, he won't kill himself. maybe he'll drag woohyun's body somewhere and then kill himself and then they'll be together forever.
fuck, that's sick. woohyun won't like that. sunggyu should probably run. two people are dead and who else is around besides him? all fingers point to him and he has blood on his hands.
and sunggyu is thinking about all of this as he lies beside woohyun's body, closing his eyes and feeling his tears continuously flow out- ugh, he hates crying. woohyun probably hates it too because he seems to be always trying to kiss his tears away when he cries. thinking about that makes sunggyu cry harder.
"hey, i think your mother is dead."
sunggyu opens his eyes and woohyun is staring at him with wide eyes and a smile dancing on his face.
"what the fuck? are you alive?"
woohyun laughs and he pulls sunggyu on top of him and they really shouldn't because a grotesque body is right next to them and woohyun just fucking revived, they have to get that checked out first, shouldn't they? but they kiss and kiss, and sunggyu becomes breathless like that time in the river or that time when he was crying over woohyun's body.
*
epilogue or the one where i explain things and woogyu lives domestically, jolly good fun
sunggyu puts his drawing skills, the only thing he prides himself in after losing the magic in his blood, to good use, he paints and sells them to rich people who don't really know the difference between good art and bad art but pretend they do. it's not that sunggyu's painting is bad, it's that he's not famous but with a little bit of lying and a little bit of misinterpretation on the buyer's part, they manage to sell quite a few of sunggyu's works.
woohyun works at the medicinal shop, that was how he managed to keep his mother alive for two years while she was wrecked with disease in the first place. he urged sunggyu to cry again and see if sunggyu's tears can really revive people because there's no other explanation on how he revived, really. sunggyu cries after woohyun bites him too harshly on the shoulder one night and but when they test his tears on a dead cat, the cat doesn't come back alive. and sunggyu snorts and says he never liked cats anyway. woohyun then throws him a devastated look and said he wanted to start a family with a cat as their lovechild.
they meet up with their friends regularly. sungjong doesn't give them free beer anymore. sometimes myungsoo comes to the bar and plays the piano while sungyeol plays the flute. dongwoo plays the violin so he'll join them if he stops by. and when dongwoo is around, howon is usually around too. it's plain to see, really, that howon has quite a bit of a crush on dongwoo and dongwoo remains happily oblivious.
sunggyu and woohyun move into a bigger townhouse in town so woohyun's mother (who is well enough to do shopping by herself, to gossip with other housewives in the market and to cook for them, in fact she has colour in her cheeks and she's putting on weight really quickly) can have a room to herself and more importantly, sunggyu and woohyun can have a proper bed.
sunggyu still can't sleep without woohyun's arms around him.
he wakes up one morning just as woohyun is clambering over him, pinning him to the bed. he's peppering kisses over sunggyu's face and then giving sunggyu a long hard kiss before pulling away breathlessly, eyelids fluttering and lips splitting into a huge grin.
"i love you." he whispers, like he wants it to be kept between their lips only, like he doesn't want the words to be said anywhere else.
sunggyu smiles and replies, "that's nice." and kisses woohyun softly.
woohyun pouts. "you're supposed to say it back."
"i don't want to."
woohyun whines and kisses sunggyu's neck and along his jaw until sunggyu is laughing and trying to roll away from him.
he grabs woohyun's head in his hands and looks him straight in the eyes, "i can't say i love you because i love the clouds, i love drawing, i love your mother's cooking. i don't love you because it's more than that. it's more like i need you or i'd die and that feels like an understatement too. so i can never say i love you."
woohyun flushes a happy shade of red. he kisses sunggyu hungrily, like sunggyu himself is the elixir. "that makes me look bad, love." he laughs.
sunggyu smiles till his eyes disappear the way woohyun loves it. "well, you've always been the stupider one."
"i don't think i love you anymore."
"good."
they grin at each other and kiss again.
kiss is a word that's becoming foreign in sunggyu's mind.
*
A/N: So... what did you think??! Tweet me if you like me? ;w;
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And I kind of guess it’s because they did the deed when Sunggyu still had the magical blood, that Woohyun survived or was it really because of Sunggyu’s tears o.o
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(Anonymous) 2022-01-07 07:04 pm (UTC)(link)