Chapter 13

After hearing that Yifan and Joonmyeon have been dating since Zitao came, he felt very annoyed. If he had contacted Yifan sooner, he could have known Jongdae sooner and got to know him better and everything, instead of meeting him by creeping on him while he sang. Not exactly the best first impression to Zitao.

He sighed. “Of course coincidences like this happen to me of all people.”

Yifan patted his shoulder. “If you had told me you were coming to Korea, I would have let you stay with me and you would have met Joonie and eventually Jongdae-ah.”

“S-shut up…” Zitao mumbled. “I was too busy trying to learn Korean and enter a good fine arts university to think about friends at that time…and then I was too busy with school.”

“Well, at least you didn’t find a bad Korean tutor.” Yifan said. “But even if you didn’t, if I happened to run into you, I would’ve helped you.”

Zitao shrugged. He didn’t see how that mattered, nor did he think he was even that good at Korean anyways. Sehun was constantly correcting him with his pronunciation, etc. According to Sehun, he also tended to mix up words.

“I agree,” Jongdae suddenly jumped in. “Your Korean isn’t that bad. Plus, your accent is cute.”

Zitao bit his lip, feeling his face heat up. He quickly tried to change the topic. “W-well…maybe Yifan-hyung and I should go… I’d rather not be late for class with my good attendance reputation.”

Yifan laughed incredulously, his lanky arms almost slapping his boyfriend (who had got out of his car to explain his relationship with Yifan) in the face accidentally. “You’re kidding me, right, Zitao? You have a good attendance reputation? What are you going to tell me next? That you’re ahead of the class, too?”

Zitao nodded. “Actually, hyung, yes; I am ahead of the class. And I am not kidding about having a good attendance reputation. I enjoy music, therefore, I have no reason to slack off like in high school and elementary.”

Jongdae seemed visually impressed by Zitao’s statement, but stayed silent. Yifan just looked even more incredulous. Zitao met his incredulous look with a look that said ‘yes, I’m a good boy now. Problem?’ After a short staring contest between the two, Yifan finally sighed.

“Okay, fine.” He said. “I’ll take you back to the school.”

Jongdae, who was at first very amused and whatever was going on, even though he couldn’t physically see it, now seemed to frown in disappointment after hearing that Zitao would be leaving. The latter noticed this and laughed slightly, patting Jongdae’s head.

“I’ll see you again, don’t worry.” He said. “You can have Joonmyeon-hyung call me whenever you want.”

Jongdae used that opportunity to pull Zitao into a tight hug, now that he knew approximately where the taller was. Zitao was taken off guard momentarily by the abrupt hug and blushed slightly in embarrassment. He managed to hug the shorter slightly awkwardly, earning an unnoticed smirk from Yifan and a knowing smile from Joonmyeon.

Finally, Jongdae pulled away from Zitao—who had tried pulling away sooner, but somehow, Jongdae was stronger than him—and looked up at him. Zitao looked back, even though Jongdae couldn’t tell. Yifan and Joonmyeon let them have a moment.

“Talk to you later then, Tao-yah.” Jongdae said finally. “Bye-bye~”

Zitao laughed. “See you, hyung.”

With that, Yifan and Zitao turned away and made their way to Yifan’s car.

They arrived at the school literally minutes before the end of lunch, thankfully for Zitao. He found Sehun by his locker standing incredibly close to Jongin. Zitao laughed in amusement and decided to be a real douchebag by crashing their two person party.

“Excuse me, coming through!” Zitao said loudly, crashing through Sehun and Jongin purposely to break them apart.

Sehun groaned. “God dammit, Zitao-hyung! I thought you were going to be gone.”

“I was.” Zitao said, joining Jongin and Sehun again. “Yifan-hyung just dropped me off literally a minute ago. Thought I’d chill with you two until the bell rang.”

“I don’t see what Sehun-ah’s problem is.” Jongin said, throwing a look at Sehun. “Nice to see you, Zitao-hyung. Sehun-ah’s talked a lot about you.”

“I hope he wasn’t back-talking me.” Zitao said, shooting the other tall blond male a glare.

“I wasn’t!” Sehun held his hands up in surrender. “T-tell him, Jongin!”

Jongin laughed. “He wasn’t talking bad about you. Quite frankly, he talked very highly of you.”

“J-Jongin!” Sehun stammered. “I didn’t mean that much.”

“Awe, Sehun-ah!” Zitao threw himself at Sehun. “I think highly of you, too~”

Sehun struggled to get Zitao off of him. “Ew, Zitao-hyung, get off me!”

The bell rang and Zitao let go immediately and went off to his class as if nothing happened. Sehun sighed and grabbed his books out of his locker. Jongin was already laughing his head off and Sehun wanted to punch the slightly older. He refrained; punching someone he could possibly like was not a good idea.

“Your relationship with Zitao-hyung amuses me.” Jongin commented. “We need to hang out with him more often.”

“I swear we’re just friends.” Sehun mumbled. “He just annoys me like an older brother does to his younger brother.”

“I can see that.” Jongin said. “But he seems like he’d make a good boyfriend.”

Sehun had to do a double take before he was dragged to his class by Jongin as if nothing happened. He sighed and kind of hoped Zitao did get with Jongdae. Just in case Jongin had eyes for Zitao and not him. Wait, why was he even thinking about this? He sighed and looked over at Zitao. It was very convenient, yet inconvenient having Zitao in all of his classes.

Meanwhile, Zitao was too occupied with his thoughts to pay attention. Luckily, he had already been through this lesson and was working on something completely different, so he didn’t really need to pay much attention. No matter what, his thoughts kept leading to one person; Jongdae.

Zitao’s main priority was to find a way to get Jongdae’s vision. He had done a lot of thinking, considering that maybe Yifan would somehow know someone who could help. Of course, the probability of that happening was low, so he tossed the thought aside. He picked up his phone, originally to change the song he was listening to, and realized something.

Why he didn’t think to look up someone who could heal anything on the internet was beyond him. Regardless of his stupidity, he quickly went to his search engine and looked for the keywords ‘healer’, ‘blindness’, and ‘Korea’.

Almost automatically, he found a link about some guy who was known to be the ‘Jesus of Modern Times’. He read through the article. The guy had done some very major things. Cured someone with cancer, just by touching the person; fixed someone with a broken leg; healed a maimed person. The list went on, but Zitao skipped over it until something piqued his interest.

‘He has yet to cure someone with blindness, but is apparently confident in his ability to do so, claiming that ‘If I can cure someone who was otherwise paralyzed, or give someone who was deaf, hearing, I can give someone blind, sight.’ With such prophetic words, it’s no wonder he’s so confident. Maybe one day, someone will come along, asking to cure someone’s blindness. And when that happens, we will be the first place to know about it.’

Zitao was 100% positive that he needed to find this person. Obviously, he had to be in Korea, since that was one of the keywords Zitao had entered into the search bar. But the main question was if he was in Seoul, Busan, Jeju, or in any of the other provinces in Korea. For all Zitao knew, this person could be in the North. But no matter what, he needed to find this ‘Modern Jesus’ as the article put it.

First, though, he needed to learn more about this person. What he looked like, how old he was, where he was born. Everything; there was something about this miracle worker that was very familiar. Maybe it was his name. Or even just the idea of a modern Jesus. Zitao was sure that somewhere, there were articles about many different ‘modern Jesus’s’. Maybe he had read those somewhere. Either way, he needed to do a lot of research on healers and everything else related to this person.

Oh, right. School was going on now, though. He probably shouldn’t look things up in the middle of class. There would be no point in being ahead of he just used it as an excuse to not do his work. So he finished his assignment, and went up to the teacher to see if he had anything else for him to do. Not having anything else for Zitao, the teacher just told Zitao that he could go to the library until school ended. Zitao mentally celebrated and made a sprint to the library, teasing Sehun about being so slow at working, as he left the classroom. Oh, the joys of being ahead of the rest of the class.

By the end of school, Zitao had learned quite a bit about the ‘art of healing’ as one article put it, and especially about the healer Zitao had been looking for. Including a blog he ran and owned that wasn’t even relating to his healing powers at all, but mainly just about food, and some show about ponies that Zitao had never heard about, but apparently other people loved. Now all Zitao needed to do was call Yifan and ask him why the hell this guy seemed so damned familiar to him.

Word Count: 1,626

EDIT: Sorry about that Sehun talking to Sehun thing. I could've sworn I had Jongin down before. I guess it happened when I lost my original file (didn't save it OTL) and had to re-write it.

A/N: Sorry if it looks...weird? For some reason, I have to physically write out the HMTL things for bolding, fonts, etc. on Chrome, and I can't fix it.

Hmm...who do you think will be Jongdae's 'life saver'? It's actually pretty obvious haha. Also, idk why I compared the person to Jesus. xD But it works, so shh.

To be honest I've had this completed and posted on AFF for a week or so. But apparently, I accidentally set it to hidden. OTL