Psychedelic

[2] Heartstrings

Pairing: Kyuhyun x Sunny

Genre: Friendship, slice of life, bittersweet

Pinboo’s spazzing on Kyuhyun/Sunny:

To be honest, I don’t feel any spark from this pairing, but I’m totally eager to make a fanfiction about them since I saw that ‘Catch Me if You Can’ performance’s photo (the one where Sunny was wearing the pink dress and she was on Kyuhyun’s bed or something). The gleam on Kyu’s eyes when he looked at Sunny there was just…. Asdfaskdf.  But that was it, really. I’ve never felt any kind of romantic spark between the two, but I think they’d do quite well as best friends.

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They said you would learn to love something because you grew accustomed to it, and Kyuhyun supposed that the saying seemed befitting to him. At least a part of it.  He had always been such a picky kid, even ever since he was much younger, and among these things that revolved around his life (that had been his life), he could name some that he learned to like due to their continuous presence: the way he sterile scent of medication, the cloud blue wall (the hospital management finally decided to add some color to the wall that had been white since Kyuhyun was registered into it), the macaroni that became his hospital lunch menu (which only came on the second Wednesday each month), and of course… her.

The girl visited her in his spacious hospital room nearly thrice more often than his parents did. He did not want people to get the wrong impression on his parents though. His parents did not neglect him, never did. It was just that the hospital fee for a boy judged to have weak heart since birth was…well, higher than his parents had expected it to be. His parents worked hard every day, sometimes on weekend, to ensure that he would still be given another chance (another day) to live. Ah, he depended on those annoying machines a little bit too much lately.

“The snow comes rather late this year,” she mused as she let her round eyes stared longer to the long-awaited white snow that was now resting on his hospital’s room’s windowsill. “But they’re pretty, eh?”

He flipped his game magazine closed and delivered his usual smile to his best friend. “Yeah, pretty, indeed. But you should not get too close to the window, Sunny. It can be too cold for your body.”

A beam befitting of her nickname was displayed on the girl’s face. Nearly hopping, she made her way to the bed where the only other occupant of the room was resting and dragged the wheeled chair next to his bed. Sitting on the wheeled chair, she then extended both of her arms on top of his legs that were covered by the hospital’s blanket. A sigh escaped her lips. “I wish we can go play in the snow.”

Kyuhyun allowed a small smile to be formed on his face. “Yeah, I wish we could.”

He was 19, while she was only a year and 3 months younger than he was. But both of them had not been granted with much privilege to wander around like the kids they should have been –what with their weak bodies. Hospital was their playground, the strict nurses were their laugh stocks, and each other was an irreplaceable friend to the other.

(They were both racing with time, betting with death, and if anything, it made them value everything that they could hold within their grasp)

He felt the slightest, feather-like cold touch on his cheek. Sunny placed both of her palms on his cheeks, and contrary to her cold hands, her smile was as warm as the sunlight. “My hands. Just like the snow, eh?”

He softened up again, he always did. Moving his big hand to the top of her head, he mused, “As long as you don’t disappear like the snow.”

“Snow will always come back. They only momentarily disappear,” she told him.

“But don’t disappear. Don’t disappear at all.”

To this, Sunny only cast a small smile and retracted her cold hands from his cheek. Yet, her words conveyed the promised, “I won’t leave your side, Kyu.”

Nonetheless, he still felt strangely colder without the touch of her cold hands.

“You have to find yourself a girlfriend, you know. You’re old enough for one.”

She came to his hospital room again, and that time, she chose to sit on the chair located below the window. She folded her knees to her chest and rested her head on the caps of her knees, her eyes lazily gazed at the blue-colored wall of his hospital room.

“Girls are troublesome,” he quickly responded.

“Girls are not,” Sunny said with a soft laugh, musing to herself of how Kyuhyun acted more like a grade school kid than someone his age. “Do you find me troublesome too?”

“You’re not troublesome,” he told her. “Because you don’t act like one.”

She laughed again, despite his hidden insult. She didn’t consider his words as insult anyway. Due to her petite frame, high-pitched voice, and overall feminine aura she always let out, Sunny was often dubbed as the ‘little doll-like girl’. She was, at heart, more of a tomboy. And Kyuhyun was the one who saw it easily through her fragile looking feature and girlish laughter.

She appreciated that more.

“Thanks.”

She muttered it so soft and he didn’t hear it. But she was content. Him, being able to hear her alone had been more than enough. She couldn’t ask for anything more than that.

His heart had always been weak since birth, and there were some points where he thought he would be used already to the pain whenever he had a heart attack.

But damn it, the pain never seemed to numb his senses, never seemed to made it an easy struggle for him.

He had just passed another borderline safe fight against his disease. The doctors had left him to take some sleep and his parents had just come home. Kyuhyun closed his eyes, tried to manage his breathing more to help him sleep better, but he was still restless.

“Hey.”

He slowly opened his eyes, and in the dimness of his room, he could see her paying a visit again.

“Sunny…”

She sat on his bed and placed her hands on his forehead. His condition had nothing to do with fever, but he didn’t want to tell her that. The feel of her cool hand on his forehead was nice, and he did not want it to disappear so soon.

“You’re feeling better now?” she asked casually, trying to hide the concern and worry she had felt since she heard him undergoing another hard night.

“…I suppose so.”

She was not convinced. Slowly, Sunny trailed her fingers down from his forehead, to his face, to his neck, before finally her fingers stopped at the spot on his left chest. His heartbeats had always been calm, nearly to the point of being vaguely not existing. In the silence of the night, she could feel his heartbeat: steady, slow…

…dying.

She tore her gaze away. “You should have accepted that offer.”

He knew what she was referring at. The past few weeks, the doctor had come to him and his parents to bring them the supposedly good news. A donor was found, someone was willing to give him the heart he needed for the heart transplantation that was projected to permanently cure his disease. Kyuhyun’s parents had welcomed the idea eagerly, but Kyuhyun, to anyone’s surprise, was rejecting the offer without any hesitation.

He looked up at the ceiling of his hospital room. “I wouldn’t. I couldn’t. You know I couldn’t.”

“Yes, you could…” Sunny said, her voice dropped an octave, delivered in a long, nearly frustrated drag. “It’s not too late. The doctors are still reserving that donor for you. You just need to talk to your parents and –“

“I won’t and that’s final.”

The hand that was rested on his chest was dragged away. Sunny stood up from his bed, looked down at him in suppressed anger. “Do you realize how ungrateful you are right now?”

He didn’t understand why she had to sound that mad. Well, perhaps he did. He knew that this might sound like a mockery to Sunny. Kyuhyun was given a chance to survive and he had the intention to throw the rare opportunity away. Sunny might not even have had that opportunity to begin with. He knew he must have seemed like an arrogant man to her now, but hey, it was not without a cause.

“You know I can’t,” Kyuhyun stressed out.

Sunny, he knew through the nearly 10-years friendship he had formed with her, was equally (if not more) as headstrong as he was. “You’re stupid, Cho Kyuhyun. If I were you, if God has given me this kind of chance, I wouldn’t –“

“If I take this chance, then who would be by your side, Sunny?” Kyuhyun retorted. He felt a twinge of pain on his heart, but he supposed it had nothing to do with his disease.

Her eyes turned cold. “Don’t claim you’