Sehun-centric
Continuity—Chapter 2/4

#4: Static

When Sehun was very young, he had a reputation for being quiet, and that suited him just fine. The problem was that because he was so quiet, people tended to assume he was stupid, or just that he had nothing to say. Neither of those things were true. Sehun was a very bright little boy and he had quite a lot that he would have liked to say (particularly to those who assumed he was stupid), really Sehun’s problem was his mouth. It never seemed to work the way he wanted it to, and the things he thought in his brain got lost on their way to his mouth and came out garbled or awkward. By the time he was four, he gave up trying, and his parents never made him speak.

Then when Sehun was four and a half, the Matrons came to his home. As they had done with all the other Guardians up to that point, they looked at the mark on his chest and gave him an affinity test, and of course he passed and was taken to the Northern Sanctuary. The Matrons and Teachers knew there was no way Sehun could be as empty minded as the people from his town had made him out to be, and one of Sehun’s first memories of the Sanctuary was of a Matron who looked him over and said, “I bet you have all kinds of things you could tell us.”

All Sehun needed was a way to communicate, and since speech was out the Teachers devoted themselves to teaching Sehun how to write. He’d only learned a few letters in school before he’d been pulled out, and he was far behind other children his age, but within six months he managed to catch up. Sehun really had Suho to thank for his unbelievable progress. The fact that he was a Guardian and therefore more adapted to fast learning helped, as did The Teachers, but it was Suho who really pushed Sehun. From the moment Sehun had arrived, Suho had latched onto him and made it his mission to somehow communicate with ‘the baby,’ as everyone took to calling him. Suho would sit with him even after the teachers had left and go over letters and punctuation with him, gently correcting his mistakes and remaining unfailingly positive and optimistic about his progress.

Once Sehun learned to write, he made it very clear that he was just as smart as the other boys at the Sanctuary, and he was not to be treated as a dimwit anymore. The downside to that was that people started deciding it was time for Sehun to speak. If he was going to be a Guardian then he would need to be able to communicate with the people of the planet, not all of whom could read. Once the Healers determined that there was nothing physically wrong with Sehun—his vocal cords worked, his brain was functional, he had all the facilities necessary for speech—he started working with special Teachers who trained to help people with speech problems. They decided the best thing to do was start small, with simple phrases like ‘Please’ and ‘Thank you,’ and even simple requests such as ‘I need help.’

Sehun struggled with these orders. He didn’t want to speak, he didn’t think he should have to. But the Healers and Teachers were adamant, and eventually they got the other Guardians-to-be in on it. “Use your words” became their mantra.

“Use your words, Sehun.”

He would come to dread that command. Even then he decided to try, partially to get everyone to back off of him, and partially because he knew Suho and Jongin and the rest of his brothers wanted to hear him talk.

But that problem with his mouth just would not go away. “Can you help me?” got turned into “I help you,” something Sehun had heard his whole life. ‘Sehun, I’ll help you tie your shoes,’ ‘Sehun, I’ll help you cut your food.’

“Suho, I help you,” Sehun would say, holding up whatever he needed help with.

The first time he said that, Sehun cried. He knew it wasn’t right, he knew exactly what he had to say but for the life of him he could not make it sound right, and it was frustrating, embarrassing and he was sick of it. Of course right away Suho hugged him and told him it was fine, totally fine—a mistake was better than nothing, after all. It didn’t matter, Sehun hated himself for it. He spoke as infrequently as he could, and whenever he could get away with silence he took advantage of it.

This went on until Sehun was almost six, when one day he tripped over a tree root and broke his finger. It would have healed faster than was usual, but even then Sehun needed a splint for a few days, and being minus one finger suddenly meant he needed a lot of help. At one point his shoelace came untied and he had to go to Suho for help with it.

Sehun had pulled on Suho’s sleeve and pointed at his shoe.

“Use your words,” Suho had told him.

Sehun refused, and he shook Suho’s arm and nudged him with his foot.

“I’m not going to help you until you ask for it,” Suho said flatly.

Sehun had stood in front of Suho and stared him down for a whole minute. At first he was angry, but he forced himself to calm down because talking was easier when he was calm. Finally he opened his mouth.

“My shoe broke.”

It was so far from what he’d wanted to say that for a second Sehun even confused himself. He clapped his hands over his mouth and stared at Suho wide-eyed.

“Okay,” Suho said. “That’s okay.”

‘No,’ Sehun had thought to himself, ‘It isn’t okay.’ And he’d fallen to his knees sobbing hysterically. Suho rushed to comfort him, but Sehun threw him off and ran away to his room, where he wedged a chair under the door so nobody could come in. Then he hid under his bed and cried for the rest of the day. Didn’t anyone see how humiliating this was for him? He sounded like the idiot he’d always been assumed to be, and he was so sick of being patronized. He knew it was wrong and he knew he wasn’t okay, and yet everyone insisted on treating him like he was.

Suho broke his door down late in the evening. From under his bed Sehun had heard the door splintering, but at that point he hadn’t cared if anyone came in or not. When he finally got in Sehun expected Suho to yell at him, or to at least look disappointed at how he was behaving. He crawled out from under the bed and sat with his knees pulled up, waiting to be scolded. Instead, Suho hugged him and apologized.

“All this time I’ve been forcing you to do something you can’t do. Or that you can’t do yet.” Suho cupped Sehun’s face in his hands and kissed his forehead. “I won’t do that anymore. From now on you can choose to talk when you feel like it. Nobody’s going to force you to talk anymore, baby, I promise.”

Suho kept his word, and “Use your words” became a thing of the past. Sehun was permitted to talk when he saw fit, and once he stopped being coerced and outright demanded, he was actually more inclined to say a few words. It wasn’t until Lu Han came along though that he actually started to speak in full sentences.

From the moment Sehun saw Lu Han standing in the doorway of the Headmaster’s office, still in his traveling clothes, shivering and worried, from that moment Sehun just knew that he wanted to be friends with Lu Han. He could tell that this boy was made to be his friend, but the problem was he hadn’t known Sehun long enough to decode his mixed up words and body language, and so Sehun was determined to make it so that Lu Han and he could communicate. And if Lu Han couldn’t learn his language, Sehun would learn Lu Han’s.

When she was a baby, my cousin used to say "I help you" when she needed something, because she was parroting what we all said to her. It was so adorable for her because she was two, but as you can see, for Sehun it's really frustration because he does know better. Yes I got inspired by this because of his lisp, but really I imagine that any speech problem would be very frustrating and embarassing to deal with.