Kyuhyun realized a long time ago that it wasn’t possible to please everyone. There was always going to be someone who would purse their lips at you and judgingly stare when you said or did something that they thought was wrong. There was a picture book that Kyuhyun’s mom used to read aloud to him, something about a hat shop owner trying to find a shop logo that everyone liked – but finding out that everyone had different preferences.

            That was the thought that was going through his mind as a stiff girl walked up to their table. Her flat-ironed hair swayed out of beat with her walking rhythm. She made a straight bee-line to the table, eyes flashing.

            “…Yes?” Kyuhyun said. She brushed his words off like they were wisps of smoke. Her fists were propped on her hips.

            “Excuse me,” she said. The students passing by slowed down to stare in curiosity. Next to Kyuhyun, Jongwoon looked up from his duty of slurping noodles. He had somehow wormed his way into Kyuhyun’s lunch schedule because the people he could’ve sat with were either a) too rabid (frothing at the mouth at the mere sight of Yesung) or b) just plain strange. Kyuhyun had gave him the weirdest expression he could muster up because, hello? He himself was the definition of strange. Jongwoon just gave him a twitchy smile and said that he would’ve sat with Kyuhyun either way. Kyuhyun’s previous wish to be not interact with Jongwoon in public, just like that, crumbled into tiny pieces.

            He didn’t know why, but it was hard to say no to Jongwoon’s liquid dark eyes when he looked all hopeful like that.

            They usually just sat outside in this picnic table situated in the east corner of the campus. It was too stuffy in the cafeteria, after all. Too many crowded students and wide inquisitive stares.

            That didn’t stop students from approaching Jongwoon and nervously asking for his autograph, though. Kyuhyun eyed the girl who was disrupting his lunch distastefully, assuming that she was one of those delusional fangirls who was going to ask Jongwoon to be her girlfriend/wife.

            “Excuse me,” she said again even though Jongwoon’s attention was already on her. “I just want to let you know that my Jaejoong oppa is a lot better than you. You’re stealing the rightful recognition he should get. I don’t get why you even have fans. Your music is pretty terrible, to be honest, and – “

            “You try singing then,” Kyuhyun cut in, skin prickling from the lashing words and the carefully blank expression on Jongwoon’s face. It was obvious that he had encountered anti-fans like this before, but that didn’t seem to stop Jongwoon’s hand from curling around the bench, almost digging into it painfully. “I’d bet you would sound like a dying hyena.”

            She looked taken aback. Her tongue seemed to fumble for awhile, probably because her carefully prepared speech was cut off and she didn’t know how to improvise. “And you can?” She shot back. “That’s not even the point. Who are you, anyway?”

            “Does that matter? You’re very rude for interrupting our lunch like that. You lack basic human manners.” Kyuhyun made a tutting sound from the base of his throat. From his peripheral vision, he was hyper aware of the shuttered expression on Jongwoon’s face and his clenched jaw. Kyuhyun shifted his leg and pressed it to the side of Jongwoon’s left leg. The pressure made Jongwoon look over at him in surprise but made him relax a little.

            “Whatever,” the girl sniffed and tried to do a hair-toss, but made it look like she was going to have a seizure instead.

            Kyuhyun muttered at her back as she walked away: “I could’ve done a better hair-flip than you can, Mean Girls-style.”

            He twitched in surprise when he felt fingers curled around the seams of his sweatshirt. Jongwoon’s eyes were formed into crescents as he radiated this general air of amusement.

            “Thanks.” It was a quiet utterance, but made its journey into Kyuhyun’s ear, into his brain, and straight around his ribs. The pressure of Jongwoon’s fingers against his skin made Kyuhyun hear an incessant pounding against his eardrums.

            “What are friends for,” Kyuhyun said around a dry throat, squinting at his lunch. Where was Boa, ohmygod.

            That encounter made Kyuhyun wonder about the other unpleasant aspects of idol life. All of these mountains of pressure, of being constantly stared at and judged for each breath – each inhale, each exhale; it sounded so tiring. Was that why Jongwoon was taking a small break from it all? There were still some things that he could not escape, though, like that annoying girl who just pranced away.

            Kyuhyun felt a sudden gratefulness for his normal life, or as normal as it could get, really.

            “Missed me?” Boa dumped her handbag on the table, radiating a bright smile. Jongwoon’s hand retreated from Kyuhyun’s personal bubble.

            “Of course not.” Kyuhyun made sure to add in sarcastic sweetness to his smile. “I got to eat all of the shrimp on my plate before you could steal it.”       

            Boa gave him this (scary, scary) pout. “What the hell. If I didn’t have that photography project to do, I would’ve totally taken them all. My favorite seafood, Kui Xian. Why do you deprive me? Why?”

            Seeing Jongwoon grin at their overdramatics made Kyuhyun feel a little lightheaded.

            “Oh, I don’t know,” he retorted. “Maybe because you eat like, half of my lunch, and leave me to starve?”

            “It’s fine. You could stand to lose some fat.” She looked critically at him over those butterfly-engraved glasses that she wore whenever she needed to read the blackboard.

            “Oh no you didn’t. That was my weak spot and you knew it.” He jabbed chopsticks at Boa’s direction. She grinned at him, looking the opposite of the devious devil he knew she was.

            “I thought your weak spot was your Pikachu plushie,” Jongwoon said. Kyuhyun looked at him almost incredulously.

            “I thought you were on my side!” Kyuhyun wailed. Boa was busy wiping off tears of laughter from the corners of her eyes to even make fun of the gaping expression that Kyuhyun had on. Jongwoon almost choked on his egg roll because there was something really comical about Kyuhyun’s whining.

            “How do you know what’s truth and what’s not?” Kyuhyun asked that night as he set the glass of coffee down on the wooden table. Jongwoon tilted his head a little to look at Kyuhyun as he towered over the sides of the piano. The headphones that connected to the electric piano were resting on his neck. Jongwoon had been staring in front of him at the white-washed walls, almost in a daze, for the past half an hour until Kyuhyun decided to stomp his way into the living room.

            “It’s night, and you’re drinking coffee,” Jongwoon said. He was looking at the coffee as if it was going to come alive and do a merengue.

            “Coffee makes me sleepy,” Kyuhyun explained. “What? Why are you staring at me like that?”

            Blinking like he was coming out of a dream, Jongwoon shook his head slowly. “It’s just, sometimes, I feel like you come from a different planet.”

            “I should be offended, but sadly, I have had that thought before. If I were to come from an outer space planet, it has to be somewhere cool, though, right?” Kyuhyun made a ‘hmm’ noise at the same time that he was taking a noisy sip of his coffee. “Maybe from EXO planet.”

            Kyuhyun caught a flash of Jongwoon’s tongue poking out as he laughed. “You know that’s not a real planet, right?”

            “You just crushed all of my hopes and dreams,” Kyunhyun said. He watched as Jongwoon poked and prodded random black and white keys on the keyboard.

            “And I don’t think you can tell,” Jongwoon said after a fat period of silence. “I guess you just have to have enough trust to believe that it’s true.”

            Kyuhyun shook himself out of his stupor (from gazing at the angles and grooves of Jongwoon’s wrist) and said, “What?”    

            “In response to your earlier question,” Jongwoon said, blinking owlishly up at him. “About how to tell what is truth and what is not.”       

            “That was just a random philosophical icebreaker.”

            “I know.” Kyuhyun kind of liked the way Jongwoon’s eyes crinkled when he smiled.

            “Can I hear? At what you’re working on?”

            Jongwoon paused in the sporadic dance of his fingers across the black and white surfaces. “I’m not really working on anything particular.”

            “What do you have so far?” At Jongwoon’s hesitant expression, Kyuhyun scowled. “Don’t make me do aegyo at you.”

            Jongwoon laughed. “Please don’t. That last time was terrifying enough.”

            Under his breath, Kyuhyun defended his aegyo skills: “I’m very cute when I want to be.”

            Carefully, Jongwoon unplugged the headsets from the piano. The plink of the C flat key bounced off the walls as he pressed it down.

            “I’m waiting,” Kyuhyun drawled. “Any day now.”

            The blond cleared his throat, a slight tint of pink running across his neck. “You’re making me feel self-conscious.”

            “Says the one who’s been on stage for millions of times already. In front of thousands of people.”

            At that prompt, Jongwoon set his fingers on the keyboard and let his fingers press the beginnings of a slow melody. It was like a different person had settled into Jongwoon’s skin, and Kyuhyun could see almost a mixture of Jongwoon and Yesung on his face. There was the love for music being nudged out through his fingers, but there was also that charisma of an idol. The composition was still shaky at some parts, wavering in uncertainty, but the notes rang out true and struck some parts of his heart, especially at the soft parts.          

            Jongwoon’s fingers stopped dancing after a bridge. “I’ve only gotten this far.” He looked up, almost expectantly.

            Kyuhyun chewed at the bottom of his lips, not noticing the flickering of Jongwoon’s eyes at the action. “Well,” he said. “I really liked the basic melody. It sounded a little melancholy, maybe bittersweet? It’s definitely missing something though. More depth? It’s a little lonely. The sound of it all, I mean.”

            “Huh.” Jongwoon dragged his fingers across the front of his jeans. “I never thought about it that way.”           

            “That part where it went like,” here Kyuhyun tried to hum the notes, “it felt flat. Like maybe you should’ve gone a little more up on the scale?” Then Kyuhyun quickly flushed. “Not that I would know, really, you’re the professional.”

            “I appreciate the advice,” Jongwoon said, and then patted the space next to him on the chair. “Show me.”

            Kyuhyun sat gingerly down, and then pressed a few notes. “I haven’t played in awhile,” he said. Jongwoon shifted next to him, leaning closer to him. Kyuhyun fought to keep his fingers steady as Jongwoon’s hand circled around Kyuhyun’s arm to keep himself from falling off the edge of the seat. Kyuhyun had found out, through the past couple of weeks, that Jongwoon was naturally clingy. He liked to drape himself around Kyuhyun and dig his chin into his shoulder sometimes. Kyuhyun found that human contact relaxed, no, almost reassured, Jongwoon. Well, not just human contact. Kyuhyun saw Jongwoon hugging his Pikachu a few times, too, when he was distracted enough to let his plushie be stolen from the sanctity of his room.

            “How did the melody go again?” Kyuhyun asked. Jongwoon leaned and with his right hand, replayed the simple version of his unfinished composition.

            Kyuhyun followed along haltingly on the higher end of the scale. He stopped on a note. “This part,” he said. “Maybe you could go like…”

            He tapped out a dissonant set of sounds, which faltered at the end. “Something like that. Wow, that was terrible.”

            Jongwoon was silent, though, and just raised his eyebrows as if he was actually thinking. Then his fingers moved again, and a similar yet pleasing to the ear set of notes followed.

            “Uh, I have no idea how I helped you there, but yeah, that sounded a lot better.” Kyuhyun did a fail version of what Jongwoon just played, and just ended up playing ‘Twinkle Twinkle Little Star’ instead. He grinned when Jongwoon playfully joined him.

            “Thank you,” Jongwoon said, and then hummed. “Oh, I said that a lot today, didn’t I?”

            “Only twice,” Kyuhyun said.

            “I like that you’re truthful. You just say whatever’s on your mind.”

            Kyuhyun twisted his lips. “People usually don’t like that. I’m a little too blunt, usually.”

            There were many times when he had blatantly expressed his opinions and gotten -slapped for it (he should really learn not to criticize a girl’s fashion). Many regarded him as rude, someone who purposely tried to rile up others by saying insulting, almost sarcastic things.

            “I like that,” Jongwoon said, almost quietly. There was no need for him to speak loudly anyway, since his mouth was practically next to Kyuhyun’s ear. “I don’t know that many honest people. It’s kind of hard to tell when they’re praising me just to kiss up to me or being sincere.”

            Kyuhyun felt a small shiver vibrating up and down his spine.

            “Good thing you’re fine with it,” Kyuhyun tried to say lightly. “Or else you wouldn’t be able to stand living with me. I should… Sleep now. Well, shower first. You should too. Isn’t your class earlier than mine?”

            “Not sleepy yet.” Jongwoon plugged the headphones back in as Kyuhyun scootched out of the seat.

            “Good night.” Kyuhyun suppressed a yawn.

            “Good night, Kyukyu.”

            It was a testament to how he was so used to the nickname that he didn’t even twitch an eyebrow. Kyuhyun picked up his empty glass and allowed himself a glance at Jongwoon’s profile, with his blond wisps of hair hanging over his forehead and rolled up sleeves, before padding out of the living room.

Omfg I'm sososo sorry that I haven't updated in awhile >A< real life was getting in the way

(i hope this extra long chapter made it up to you)