(II) HI GUYS THE SECOND PART IS UP, I ATTACHED IT AT THE BOTTOM. I HOPE YOU LIKE THE CHAPTER AND BE WARNED THERE IS MILD VIOLENCE AND HOMOPHOBIC SLUR. BTW HAPPY NEW YEAR :_)))

(I)

Mingyu swore he had never heard something more ridiculous. The only other occasions in which he found himself so stupefied he felt like laughing were when Wonwoo told him he found a girlfriend and when Wonwoo confessed, so this here was a pretty big deal.

“You’re kidding, right?” Mingyu looked at Seokmin suddenly in a new light; one that shone too brightly on his friend, almost like stage spotlights.  

“Seriously, what? It’s rational, is all.”
He stared at Seokmin like his friend was a toad. “Why would I even do that?”

Seokmin rolled his eyes. “You’re not seriously in love, are you? So why would you risk it for some third-rate chap?”

“You mean Wonwoo,” Mingyu bit back, and gradually he found himself sitting on the fence regarding his feelings toward this newer Seokmin.

Seokmin sighed theatrically - looked like he wasn’t getting that second scoop for Seungkwan, then. He stood up, knowing he had done his part and it didn’t seem like Mingyu would budge. “Well, then, I’ll get going now, but if you change your mind, you know where to find Seungkwan.”

Mingyu switched on his computer, one of those older ones that were colossal like a pyramid flipped sideways compared to the modern day and age models.

He squinted at the screen, at the email he received from Boo Seungkwan: a request to view the article Kim Mingyu graciously starred in. He snorted. It wasn’t like Seungkwan to sabotage -yes, note the choice of vocabulary: sabotage- his own friends, Mingyu knew, but somehow when it revolved the topic of homouality his loyalty dropped to absolute zero.

It was difficult to imagine how Wonwoo was taking it in. Mingyu envisioned something like blankly staring at his equally old computer, his whole body the living embodiment of languor and ugh, Boo Seungkwan, you in’ piece of titan meat, karma is going to bite you in the someday.

Or perhaps he didn’t really care, like he’d kept reiterating when Mingyu was concerned, sipping on breakfast tea and joking about it to his acid, caustic mother who’d snicker back sinisterly. She’d say something like: the whole town’s a bunch of cows, anyway, they were born to get slaughtered and eaten, well-done.

Or he could, just a hunch, be sweating profusely, not quite sure if it was okay to call Mingyu, biting off the dry skin on his lips out of anxiety spilling out of him like beer spilled out of mugs in Germany.

Whichever scenario Mingyu seemed to vision didn’t quite suffice, like he was certain Wonwoo would be acting in a way he didn’t imagine, so out of plain curiosity and care, he slipped into the shower and prepared himself to go see his best friend.

The seagulls were screeching, and this was the one sound of doom Mingyu was confident he’d never miss if he ever left the town. It was one of those jarring noises that kept you on edge; like the feeling of dragging your nails down glass.

They pecked at you like they could see what was coming for you, like sibyls soaring the skies with sharp eyesight. Mingyu wanted to strangle them; it was one of those brutal thoughts of wanting to twist its neck and tell it to stop ing shrieking, for the sixth thousand, two hundred and fifth time.

“Wonwoo, Mingyu’s here,” Wonwoo’s mother called out, her clarion, obstinate voice ringing throughout the empty house, and Mingyu remembered why Wonwoo woke up so early all the time. There was a silence between the molecules, and before Mingyu could excuse himself to quietly (and urgently) knock on his best friend's door, Wonwoo’s mother had beat him to it.

“Wonwoo, the guy who gives you wet dreams is here, aren’t you going to welcome him in?”

Oh, was she quick to hear.

Her voice had an edge of vexation, clear and pristine in conveying the fact that she wanted none in their romantic activities.

Mingyu stood rooted, and if his mother wasn’t staring at his face like she was one of the seagulls who could see everything, he’d drop his jaw, second time of the day stupefied.

The door swung open, with Wonwoo’s towel draped around his shoulders and his face flushed or polished. His mouth was agape, and the two stared at each other, wide-eyed, Mingyu looking at his best friend’s , dripping torso while Wonwoo looked at Mingyu’s disgusting, dreadful attire. Wonwoo breathed out, peeved and through his teeth, “mom, I was in the shower. Was that necessary?”

His mother gave him that duh look, clicking her tongue. “Yeah, because you would’ve told me three thousand years later.”

Wonwoo grabbed Mingyu’s hand to pull him into the room and exasperatedly tried closing the door in his mother’s face. He couldn’t even heave a sigh of relief before his mother yelled again: “no wonder you never liked those mags your father bought for you, he should’ve gotten you pictures of Mingyu looking cool instead.”

Mingyu couldn’t help but laugh; it was funny, especially when Wonwoo groaned aggravatedly and slid down the door onto the carpeted floor.

“Stop laughing,” Wonwoo glared, “she’s such a cow.”

Mingyu took in the sight of Wonwoo’s room, a threshold he hadn’t visited in quite a while, or at least in his memories. As usual, the table was cluttered with junk Wonwoo didn’t exactly need. There was a demitasse with rings of dried coffee inside sitting on his bedside drawer, and non-fiction books on volcanoes sprawled on the floor like six people had come to have a geeky book-reading session. His walls were embellished with those free posters that came with magazines, except they were all from scientific subscriptions, like the National Geographic or the Smithsonian.

“Say, does your whole family resort to using the animal cow as an insult?”

Wonwoo poured a fresh set of coffee into two cups - why Mingyu’s best friend stored cutlery in his room would remain a mystery for as long as they lived. He handed one to Mingyu, and gulped down his own almost like you drank water after days of dehydration in the desert. “Yeah, I guess, my mom used it a lot, so then my dad picked it up too, and finally I just began calling idiots cows.”

Mingyu scrunched up his nose as he pushed away the books on the floor so he could walk comfortably and snuggled himself on a sofa chair. “That’s not nice, you know, to actual cows.”

“Says the person who likes eating beef?” Wonwoo raised his eyebrow, smug when Mingyu made a face.

“Oh and by the way, your room is awful, I don’t know why I never noticed this place was such a mess.” Mingyu looked at his surroundings again - he could count all the flaws in this place, like how there were unwashed cups, scraps of paper, a pillow on the floor, toothbrush somehow on the bed rather than the sink, shirts piled high like mount Fuji, colour-coded.

Wonwoo rolled his eyes. “Whatever, not everyone cleans their room every single day, like you.” He insecurely picked up some books, closed them, and put them back on the shelf.

Ah, Mingyu thought, so this was what they meant when they said men took off their shirts more often in summer.

It wasn’t that Mingyu was ually attracted, or anything of the sort, but even his straight had to admit Wonwoo’s torso looked good with beads of perspiration or water from the shower running down.

Mingyu claimed it was just coincidence, but it was definitely imagination, like in sappy romcoms when the guy bares his upper body and the sun so happens to shine on him, so amazingly enough, his body is literally scintillating with embarrassingly patent editing of sparkles and crap - but you get the gist. He was cringing, but it wasn’t like he was looking anywhere else, either. Wonwoo was setting up his computer, and Mingyu had to snap himself out of it thrice - damn, why was he so all the time?

His best friend didn’t necessarily have a great body, no abs or chiselled torso, and to be honest if he did Mingyu would cringe even harder. It really, really wasn’t that his best friend’s body looked alluring -there he goes again- after all, it was just another man’s body.

But, granted, these were hormones Mingyu was dealing with, and there was that blasted sun with its effulgence beating down on Wonwoo’s being (there really wasn’t, though, it was all in Mingyu’s head) and those ing water drops, smirking at Mingyu like they knew he wanted his fingers there in place of them.

“What?”
Mingyu closed his eyes and pinched the bridge of his nose. Again, ‘it’s like you’re stupid as and can’t control your drive’ springs in his head like a damned song lyric.

“Nothing, do you think I should see a doctor about my drive?”

After Mingyu established that Wonwoo didn’t seem to mind the article, with tedious questioning and getting harsh responses, he headed for the diner, where he probably could find Jihoon in piles of music sheets.

“Jihoon,” Mingyu hissed, quietly, as he scowled at the hundred pairs of eyes drilling holes in his back. The smaller of the two glanced up, previously unaware of the cowering silence that engulfed the diner the minute Kim Mingyu stepped in, and he slid down his headphones. “What?”

Mingyu felt like hammering someone, f’real, if nobody was going to realise that their whispering amplified in the whole enclosed area. “Don’t what me, Lee Jihoon, I’m going to toss all your music sheets into the bin if you don’t make space for me.”

Jihoon couldn’t feel smaller; he was already small, , but it felt strangely like being dressed as an insecure stripper and shoved on stage. He had intentionally taken one of the booths slightly away from the public eye and attention so he could focus on his work, but suddenly he felt like retching - it was bad enough the scrutiny had made his head blur with smothering heat, but now that Kim Mingyu, town’s newest circus act, was talking to him like they were best friends, he could detect the milk he swallowed down earlier jump up his oesophagus.

Time was dragging, seriously, those eyes weren’t letting up, and so wasn't Mingyu, who stood glowering.

God, he should’ve stalked Boo Seungkwan home and tied his hands to a bedpost. He bit down on his lip hard, scrawling something on a piece of paper, which he slid across the table to where Mingyu stood. He was grateful Mingyu was such a giant, and his figure obscured the view of his table.

He sighed, taking a deep, thorough breath. “L-look, could we not talk now?”

His voice was soft, and Jihoon hated that he had to act this way to Mingyu, who glimpsed at the paper and thankfully enough, backed off. He noticed Mingyu made a confident stride to the door, where he made sure his swinging was grand enough. If those eyes weren’t still looking his way, he would’ve chuckled at that pompous behavior; it was very like Kim Mingyu to act like a king.

If Jihoon had assumed that the attention stopped then, he was wrong. Out went the circus act, but in came the church fanatic, who narrowed his eyes and made a beeline for him. He found himself looking down at his work again, his mind repeating an endless string of ignore ignore ignore.

“I told you he was going to write that ing article, what the are we going to do now?” Jisoo hissed, too, in a hushed tone. It seemed odd that now that the group of friends found themselves in quicksand, the roles had reversed - Jihoon used to be the one cursing in every sentence, not ever genteel Jisoo. He sighed, again, but he collected himself and shifted his belongings for his friend to sit.

The taller sat down, but he wasn’t done with the profanities. “Where the is Boo Seungkwan? We’re going to find him, slap him, and then tell him to release another article that says it was a huge joke that we forced them to do.”

“Calm down, Jisoo, I told Mingyu we’ll meet him at his house later,” Jihoon tried to pacify Jisoo, who looked like he hadn’t gone to Sunday Mass for weeks and desperately needed to.

Jisoo scowled and clasped his hands on the table. “I’m going to kill him. I’m going to commit a sin, but I’ll do it anyway.”

Jihoon continued looking down, as if it wasn’t obvious that people were still staring.

“The minute I came out of my house I saw Chwe Hansol, and then I felt like slapping Seungkwan so hard he can’t remember how to write an article.” Jisoo was rambling, by then, and Jihoon wanted his friend to just shut up, because all attention focused on them like someone tried to focus the sun’s rays on an ant through a magnifying glass.

“Did he do anything?” Jihoon muttered in response softly.

Jisoo gave him the are you kidding me look, eyes wide and all, “I’m not the one who confessed my gay relationship with my childhood friend in front of Seungkwan, was I?”

Jihoon felt weary; like during the examination period, when he chugged down four cups of caffeine at night to study until one in the morning. Or more accurately, when he sat for his oral examination and couldn’t think of an answer, especially with the examiner’s bored eyes perforating him. Jisoo was obviously scared - he’d never seen Jisoo so upset since his girlfriend cheated on him with a biker months ago, and this reaction topped that time he found them ing in the classroom.

“Relax, Jisoo, we can work something out.” Although Jihoon found himself as affrighted as Jisoo, he had to suppress it, if not for the public or for being Jisoo’s pillar.

Jisoo looked at him frantically, but Jihoon knew anything that brimmed in his friend’s eyes consisted of anger, rage, and frustation.

“Let’s get out of here. We should go to Seokmin’s,” Jihoon began to pack his belongings, and he noticed that even the mere action of standing up caused a flinch amongst their audience.

Wonwoo couldn’t fight, he couldn’t, but he was smart, and all his life he depended on his intelligence to scarper if he needed to. However, after seventeen years, it finally dawned on him that his smarts were useless; he had to think up a different weapon,