Part One

*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*I*Don’t*Wanna*Cry*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*

There were four of them. Yunho barely wanted one, and now he finds out that there’s four teenage boys standing on his doorstep. He damn near slams the door in their faces. ‘Sorry, no can do. I am not ready to be a parent to any one of you.’

But, he is soft hearted and his conscience won’t allow him to do so. Plus the social worker is standing right behind them and he’s pretty sure she won’t be happy if he turns them away now. So Yunho stands back and lets the boys in. They stick together like Velcro, shuffling inside like some kind of mutated multi-limbed organism. The one on the right is tall and lanky, with messy hair and a wide face, the total opposite of the one on the left who is shorter and sleeker, with a narrow face and large eyes. The one in the middle though is stunning; almost too pretty to be a boy. His eyes are impossibly large, his skin flawless and hair silky in the light. The smallest boy clings to the middle one like a koala, eyes darting around as though he expects Freddy Krueger to jump out from behind one of the potted plants and behead him.

The social worker comes over and shakes Yunho’s hand, giving him a warm smile. She’s about forty, has lanky brown hair and smells like cabbage. Her hands are sweaty, too. “It’s so lovely and kind of you to take them in,” she says demurely. “They’re so grateful to you.” At once she whirls around, giving the foursome a sharp look. The little one looks like he wants to evaporate. “Say thank you to Mr. Jung.”

The pretty one looks at him fleetingly before his eyes darted away again. “Thank you,” he mumbles. The other three nod enthusiastically, but don’t look at him.

The social worker looks a bit put off and opens , but Yunho speaks before she can say anything, thus sparing the boys from what he is sure is a good scolding. “I’m sorry, I really don’t know your names,” he says apologetically. He speaking to the boys, but the social worker is the one who answers. She introduces the pretty one as Jaejoong, the lanky one as Yoochun, the sleek one as Junsu and the little one as Changmin.

“Changmin is fourteen, Junsu is fifteen, Yoochun and Jaejoong are both sixteen.”

Yunho nods at her and then suddenly gives the four a suspicious look. “Where are your bags?”

They each have one backpack slung over their shoulders and nothing else, but they point to the packs.

“That’s all you brought? Didn’t my father buy you anything?” he asks incredulously. The backpacks aren’t that big, don’t they have clothes or personal items?

But Jaejoong shakes his head. “This is all that we need,” he says quietly.

Yunho is starting to see that Jaejoong is the spokesperson of the four, as he’s the only one who’s spoken at all.

“Are you sure?” He asks, doubting that they’ve brought enough with them. “The movers haven’t taken anything away yet, and I can drive you back over to the house tomorrow if you want to pick up some more of your things.”

It’s like he suggested they cut off their own hands and feed them to piranhas. Their eyes go wide and they seem to shrink in size.

“Really, we don’t need anything more,” Jaejoong says, tightening his grip on the koala-child, who buries his face in Jaejoong’s shirt.

Choosing to ignore their reactions for the time being, Yunho offers to show them their rooms and give them time to settle in. they nod and trail after him as he leads them up the stairs. He’d originally bought this house thinking of his future family, and there are enough guest bedrooms for each boy to have their own room. They are sparsely furnished though, and Yunho makes a note to take them shopping for some furniture in the near future. Once they’ve each been directed to a room, Yunho and the social worker – He can’t remember her first name, but he thinks her last name is Lee- go back downstairs to finalized the adoption.

Miss Lee pulls a thick folder out of her bag. “These are all their papers,” she says, and Yunho feels like he’s just adopted four dogs instead of four teenagers. “I just need you to sign one for each of them…” she leafs through the folder and pulls out four identical papers. Yunho recognizes them as final drafts of the ones his lawyer drew up the previous week, and he doesn’t give them more than a cursory skim before he signs each one of them. Just like that, he’s become the father of four.

“Pleasure meeting you,” Miss Lee says. He shakes her hand again, wishes her a good day and shows her out the door. The moment she’s gone Yunho makes a beeline for his kitchen and personal bar, pouring himself a scotch and downing it in less than a minute.

He didn’t want to be a parent, hell he isn’t even old enough to be a parent- he’s only 23, for Christ’s sake! Not only that, he’s a busy person, too- he was going to have his hands full running the Law firm that his father had left him, never mind the children. He didn’t trust himself to keep a cat alive for more than three days, he’s insane if he thinks he can handle this.

“Aish, appa,” He mutters into his second glass. “What were you thinking, adopting all these kids and not telling me?”

Hell, what had he been thinking?! The last thing he’d expected when he showed up for his estranged father’s funeral last month had been the discovery that the old coot had taken in orphans. And though nobody was forcing Yunho to adopt them, his father’s will did not specify any arrangements for their care- the house, law firm and money the old man left behind had been divided between Yunho and his sister, who was still in college and even less capable of taking care of the young boys than he was. So with no options left for them, Yunho had been informed that they would go back into foster care unless someone came forward to take them. In his defense, he hadn’t known at the time that there were four of them; he’d been under the impression that there would be two at most…serves him right for not checking ahead of time.

Damn his bleeding heart.

Someone behind him clears their throat and he turns around to see one of the maids standing in the doorway.

“Dinner is ready,” she informs him. “Should I go and get the children?”

Yunho shakes his head. “That won’t be necessary, I’ll take care of it,” And he slouches off to get his new charges.

Rather than go to the trouble of knocking on each one of their doors, Yunho merely stands in the hallway outside their rooms and says (in a loud voice) that it’s time to eat. The four of them appear at once, all rushing out of one room (he couldn’t remember who’s, but he was betting on Jaejoong’s) and he leads them to the dining room.

“I don’t know what you’re used to eating,” Yunho says as they take their seats. Or rather, he takes a seat. The boys just stand there awkwardly and look at the floor. Yunho paused and gave them a puzzled look.

“Well, sit down,” he prompts.

“Where?” The tall one- Yoochun, was it?- asks quietly.

Yunho resists the urge to roll his eyes. “In a chair,” he says, gesturing towards the remaining five empty ones (he was now glad that he had gone with the six piece dining set). Still they don’t move.

“Look, this isn’t school,” Yunho says tiredly. “You don’t have assigned seats, you can sit where ever you want.”

This must have been the cue that they were waiting for, because they all move at once.

Yunho tell them to serve themselves- which they do seemingly reluctantly- and finds himself marveling at their precision. They didn’t spill anything or drop a single crumb on the table and they ate slowly, although he could tell that they were starving and it killed them. He is also shocked by the small portions that they take; it hadn’t been that long since he was a teenager and he could remember being constantly hungry. Surely what they have wouldn’t be enough.

“You can take more than that,” Yunho tells them. “There’s enough to go around.”

They glance around nervously and Yunho notices Jaejoong shrug almost imperceptibly. As though afraid that if they moved too fast they would explode, each one takes a little more.

“So, I’m sure that you have some questions,” Yunho prompts after a few moments of listening to the sounds of silverware scraping and slow chewing. Jaejoong flicks his eyes in Yunho’s direction.

“Not really, sir,” he says honestly.

“Please, you don’t need to call me sir,” Yunho says quickly. “I’m only 23.”

“Well then, what should we call you?” The sleek haired one-Jaesu? No, that isn’t right- asks, and Yunho is caught off guard.

“Um…I guess just ‘Yunho’ would be alright,” he says after a few seconds of thought.

They all nod and silence follows.

“You guys honestly have nothing to say?” Yunho asks incredulously. If he’d just been adopted by a stranger he’d be up the wall with questions, but all they do is thank him again for taking them in, even though that is not what he was talking about at all. He can feel a headache forming behind his eyes and when they ask to be excused he waves them off wearily, already deciding that he needs another drink.

*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*I*Don’t*Wanna*Cry*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*

Several days pass in this manner. For a group of teenagers- boys, at that- they are virtually invisible, and occasionally Yunho forgets that they are even in his house. Hell, they might even be less obtrusive than his staff! He never hears them and they only appear when it’s time to eat, and even then Yunho figures that if he let them, they’d eat in their rooms. They still won’t look at him and the little one- Changmin- acts like Yunho is going to eat him. He has no idea what they think of him, and he figures they wouldn’t tell him even if he asked.

But Yunho tries- oh, does he try- to get somewhere, to make a connection to them, to get them to say something- anything! Even if it’s just to tell him to shut up. He’ll use any excuse to tell them a personal story, hoping that they’ll realize that he is indeed human. He’ll see a picture of a horse and tell them about how he once got motion sick on a merry-go-round, or comment on how nice the day is an it reminds him of the time he did whatever with whoever, but aside from cool smiles and nods he gets no reaction. He even takes them to a movie, hoping to jog some kind of positive reaction. The movie isn’t scary at all, but through the whole thing they cling to each other, eyes darting around the theater suspiciously. They don’t talk at all, and  from the corner of his eye he sees them throw popcorn on the floor when they think he’s not looking to make it seem like they ate it.

One night, about a week after they came to live with him, he wakes up thinking he heard a scream. He listens but hears nothing else, and even if it wasn’t 1:34 in the morning he wouldn’t be able to tell which one it was because he really doesn’t know what their voices sound like. The next morning he asks casually if one of them had a nightmare. He knows that they’re lying when they say no, because their eyes go wide and they look like rabbits about to bolt. He decides that these boys either need to tell the truth, or get better poker faces.

Frustrated, he calls his good friend, Jessica. They’ve known each other since high school and Jessica has a younger sister- Krystal- whom she has taken care of ever since the death of their parents two years ago, and who is also close to the age of his adoptees.

“It’s like pulling teeth,” Yunho complains. “No, pulling teeth would be easier than trying to get one of them to talk.”

“This is a bad thing?” Jessica teases.

Yunho sighs dramatically and runs his fingers through his hair in aggravation, something he’s been doing a lot lately. “I just want to know more about them, you know…I’ve got two of them for at least another 2 years and the youngest for at least 4…it would be nice to not feel like I’m living with strangers for that time.”

“Didn’t the social worker give you a bunch of papers on them? Why don’t you just read those?”

It’s a reasonable question, one that Yunho has pondered for a while, but he has his reasons. “You and I both know how easy it is to manipulate a piece of paper so that it reads only what you want it to, we are lawyers after all.”

“Touché,” she responds.

“I would rather hear it from them, you know? But they look at me like I’m the Anti-Christ or something. I don’t know why though, I haven’t done anything!”

“Maybe that’s the problem,” she reasons. “You never visited your father during the time that they lived with him, and now all of a sudden they’ve been dropped into your house. You are a complete stranger to them. Hell, maybe they’re grieving over your father. Come to think of it do you know anything about their lives with your dad? I thought you said he was a huge jerk to you and your sister.”

Yunho feels his blood run cold. “Oh my god. Do you think he did something to them?”

“You tell me. You’re his son, I never met the man.”

Yunho is swallowed up in dark possibilities. He knows his father was a mean drunk and had been suspicious around his sister for a long time, but this was years ago, surely he hadn’t... but oh god, what if he had-?

“And it doesn’t just have to be your dad, either,” Jessica continues, interrupting his waking nightmare. “How long do you think they’ve been in the system for? Even if it isn’t that long, being taken away from your family- no matter how crappy they were- can be a traumatic experience- the poor babies are probably scarred for life. I wonder if any of them have siblings…oh boy, can you imagine?”

He could. He really could.

“Jess, I have to go. But thank you, this was very enlightening for me.”

*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*I*Don’t*Wanna*Cry*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*

He makes several attempts to wring some kind of information out of the boys and even shrugs his morals aside long enough to leaf through their papers, but finds nothing and gets nowhere…although he now knows all of their names, first and last since apparently his father never had them changed when he adopted them.

But he is now desperate to know if his father has ever harmed these children, and the more he thinks about it the more he realizes that it is highly possible. Memories he had blocked come back to his mind- how his father would hit him hard enough to leave bruises, how his sister would wear sweaters during the summer to hide the marks that he would leave on her arms. He never thought that it would happen again though; he thought that his father’s adoption of these boys was a good thing- that the old man was trying to redeem himself for the mistakes in his past. But what if Yunho is wrong? What if Jaejoong, Yoochun, Junsu and Changmin were only meant to be punching bags, easy targets to take a swing at? It is imperative that he speak to these boys about this matter.

However, he quickly realizes that it’s almost pointless to try talking to them all together. He needs to focus on individual reactions and push the right buttons to get them to talk, and he can’t do that for all four at once, but he doesn’t want to separate them because he feels like they’ll clam up even more. By the time school starts he still hasn’t thought of a plan of action nor does he seem to be getting anywhere with them and he’s ready to give up. in a last ditch effort, he wakes up with them on their first day and cooks breakfast and drives them all to school himself. It’s not necessary, he has a personal chef and chauffer who are both more than capable of doing the jobs, yet he wants to try to create some kind of family atmosphere, hoping that maybe something will finally click.

As it turns out, he strikes gold in Changmin.

It happens after he drops Jaejoong, Yoochun and Junsu off at their high school. Changmin is to attend a middle school a few miles away, and once the older ones have vacated the car Changmin moves up into the empty passenger seat, pulling his knees up to his chin and staring straight out the window. As they are driving off he hears Changmin mumble unintelligibly, yet it more sound than has come out of him in the last week and Yunho nearly crashes the car in shock.

“Sorry, didn’t catch that,” Yunho says, hardly daring to hope for a repeat.

“Jung-ajusshi never made us breakfast.”

Yunho’s jaw drops for a brief second and then he recovers, shaking his head a bit. Changmin is staring determinedly ahead and notices nothing.

“Yeah, I do remember that he wasn’t the type to cook,” he says shakily.

“He didn’t drive us to school either. Actually, we didn’t go to school. He taught us himself.”

Yunho actually pulls over because he really can’t concentrate on the road anymore; he’s too focused on the young boy beside him.

“Did he really now? I can’t imagine that he was a very good teacher.”

Changmin shrugs. “I’ve never gone to school before,” he admits.

“Ever?” Yunho asks wonderingly.

“Never. Before Jung-ajusshi adopted me I lived in an orphanage, and they taught us there, so it wasn’t really a proper school.”

“No, I suppose it wouldn’t be.” At this point Yunho really has no idea what he’s saying as all he can think is ‘OMG he speaks! He can talk!’

But if he delays much longer than Changmin will be late, and so he drives away. Once again the boy lapses into silence, but Yunho doesn’t even care at this point because Changmin talked to him!! He wants to make a memo of it on the calendar.

Just as they pull up to the school, Changmin turns to him and looks him in the eye for the first time. “You’re not like your father at all,” he informs Yunho in a straightforward tone, which Yunho doesn’t quite know how to react to.

“Um, is that a good thing?” He asks nervously.

Changmin tilts his head to the side and Yunho has to bite his tongue so he doesn’t squeal at how cute the boy is. After a second of consideration, Changmin nods.

“Yeah, it’s a good thing.”

And then- miracles do happen!- Changmin leans over an hugs him.

It lasts less than a second and Yunho doesn’t even have time to react before Changmin is out the door and running to the building. Yunho sits in the car for a solid five minutes processing what happened before it hits him that OMG Changmin hugged him! He made bodily contact! He showed affection!

He actually screams with joy.