Chapter Text
hello!
really quick - this story is completely fictional and meant for entertainment purposes only!
everything is entirely made up, and the real-life people that the characters are named after have nothing to do with how they really are. i wrote this solely for your enjoyment (hopefully!) and for me to have something to pass the time with.
please have fun with this, and thank you for everything!
- mandi
~❁~
Congenital analgesia.
It was probably the weirdest thing that’s ever left Choi San’s mouth with every person he’s told.
Genital? Anal? Come on.
Okay, maybe not so much the weirdest. But it was a close tie between that and trying to wrap his head around the fact that injury was one of the most important things in the world. Without it, there would be nobody that he could really call his own, yet he couldn’t feel pain and never knew where the injuries came from.
Every hospital visit always had him wondering just how screwed he was as he waited for the doctor to fix him again.
San also didn’t really know if he wanted anyone to call his own, anyway. But it was a nice thought.
He’s learned to dumb it down into phrases that sounded halfway decent based on how he’s feeling over the past few years especially. Sometimes, he liked to freak people out, and say that 90% of his skeleton was shattered and he couldn’t feel it. Other times, he was honest and told people that he just couldn’t feel pain, never knew how a hot shower felt, had to set reminders to pee and eat, as if it was ordinary. And it often resulted in bizarre looks from strangers that made San want to rip his tongue out and flatten it with his heel against the ground so that he wouldn’t be able to explain anything to anyone ever again, and he could’ve, but…
He had his reasons.
And there were many reasons for many things, like the one behind him having this thing. His mother told it to him in the best way she could when he was old enough to understand, that he was born with a mutated gene that made him insensitive to pain.
That’s all it was. Simple.
And then she had to tell him that he can’t go around hitting other kids because only he had the weird gene and not his friends from school (and because she was receiving more calls from his kindergarten teacher than she would’ve been okay with for one year).
It was middle school when he started to understand, and began telling his friends about it, particularly to a kid with braces that seemed to never come off, ever, who had a daring look in his eye when he did things like eat lunch and run around on the field for PE.
On top of that, he barely spoke.
San had always thought he was dangerous and unsuspecting, just like the movies, with his wiry auburn hair that grew too long over his forehead and the light freckles that sat across his nose like a a patch of daisies. San had built up the courage to talk to him one time during recess, and it was after their game of tag, after they were breathless and waiting for each other to finish drinking from the fountain, is when he asked.
“So if I punched you in the face right now, you wouldn’t feel it?”
And that’s how he became best friends with Kang Yeosang, surprisingly powerful punch-in-the-facer and one of the people who he treasured most in the entire world, in a weird, yet destined whim of fate.
That’s also how they both ended up in the clinic and very confused with each other that same day, considering that they were supposed to be soulmates after Yeosang was ready to pour his entire shitty day across San’s face when the opportunity rose, sharing pain literally, in a way that made Yeosang think twice, and then a third time about punching anyone else in the face, for any reason.
Not even if they let him.
And San vowed to hate Yeosang forever because just what right did he have to punch him in the face like that on a Wednesday afternoon during lunch?
Then, when Yeosang asked if they were supposed to get married to each other after that, after San wanted to beat his face to mush just to see if he felt anything (and for hitting him first), San wanted to die.
That memory meant a lot to San, often going back to it whenever he spaced out from time to time.
He pilots himself out of the muddled greys and pitch blacks of his thoughts to sink back down into reality, remembering that he was in his favorite sub shop, sat at one of the tables with chairs that screamed way too loudly when you pulled them out, across from Yeosang himself and trying to find the rest of his trickling appetite in the hums of the drink stand at the back of the shop.
He glances at his half-eaten sub sandwich, and then to the tomato slices he’d taken out as they sat beside it, discarded on the wrapper it came in. They laid right beside the onions he’d pulled out first, and as he stared at them, in their isolation and solitude, he couldn’t help but kind of feel bad for them.
Tomatoes didn’t deserve this kind of hate. They were versatile, complementary, even. San didn’t care so much about the onions, though.
He picks a tomato up after the last thought slots through his head and shoves it into his mouth before he has a chance to think about it some more.
“What the hell was that?”
Yeosang’s voice was so soft and so loud compared to the hollow ideas in his head as he chews on the tomato, remnants of vinegar and the flavor of the salami slices on his tongue, and as his stomach churned at the taste, he remembers that he was on a time-crunched date with him until he had class again in half an hour.
San is quiet, a slight pressure in the corner of his eye making him blink harshly once, before he pressed the home button of his phone beside his melting soda, seeing the memory of him, Yunho, and Yeosang in the photograph of his lock screen, smiling together in a hospital room after Yeosang had broken both his and San’s arm after falling off of his skateboard, and Yunho being generous enough to drive them there as the clock neared midnight.
The sudden change of brightness makes him squint a little, even if it was the heart of daytime and the first blush hours of the afternoon were slowly creeping into his personal clock.
He should feel more awake by now.
He glances at the time again before the screen shuts off, staining his head just as black while his soul goes out, too.
Make that twenty-eight minutes. Less time to spend with Yeosang.
“I didn’t wanna waste the tomato,” San tells him, meeting Yeosang’s eyes, and there was something in the way the usual, pretty shade of autumn leaves had darkened with a mix of confusion and an are you serious? that made San almost want to laugh.
Almost.
He really doesn’t know if he wants to eat the other tomato.
Yeosang shakes his head once with a sigh that San’s heard way too often. They go through this every time they go out to eat lunch together — San orders something new against Yeosang’s scarily convincing arguments that he wouldn’t like it and would waste his dwindling, college student money on, and he ends up despising it just as Yeosang had said, and Yeosang ends up eating most of San’s discarded food because he had a talent for having a bottomless stomach in times like those and the flavor of food that someone else didn’t want is irreplaceable (Kang Yeosang, verbatim).
And as if on cue, he reaches over, picking up the second tomato from beside San’s leftovers and eating it, and San thinks that tomatoes shouldn’t be eaten that delicately as Yeosang takes small bites from it, his eyes trained on the textbook in front of him, opened to the middle. There were post-its and pieces of notebook paper stashed in between random glossy pages, too many diagrams and words in it for San to even be remotely interested.
But he does take a moment to appreciate him while he’s open and not paying attention to him, vulnerable to San’s crosshairs.
As unadorned sunlight filters in through the window beside them, curtaining the table they sat at in a dewy crepuscular and highlighting the small bits of dust sprinkled around them from the sill like dwarf stars, San thinks Yeosang looks wonderful painted in a soft corona that gave prominence to his honey-kissed skin from the days he spends at the skate park, lightening his blonde hair even more than it was already.
San thought that Yeosang making the decision to let his blonde hair grow was a good one, as it draped over his eyes and his dark brown roots peeked out from where he liked to tuck it behind his ears.
It was a very, very good decision.
And San never thought Yeosang made good decisions, like choosing to study biology in university, but he definitely got behind that.
Yeosang was always there for him, was always ready to listen and be in his company and be that much of a good friend that San sometimes wondered when Yeosang would get sick of him and replace him with someone who deserved him. He was endless, his smiles almost reaching infinity when he was talking about something he loved, and the way he looked at him sometimes, like he was a continuum and had all the love to look at him with and San didn’t have to worry because he was so unlimited for him.
He was endless in the way he seemed to have an adoration that never slept for whoever he cared for, took a piece of his heart and gave it away, like it was nothing.
He was always a good student, too. Even now, when his next exam was two weeks from today, he was studying as if it was during his next period, as if the day had put the world on hold just for San to marvel at his soulmate and the way he made college look so cliche and desirable, nailed down all by the way he was staring into his textbook.
And he was literally just eating a tomato on top of that.
“Stop staring at me, weirdo.”
Yeosang’s voice reminded San of hopscotch drawn in colored soft chalk, his tone being the concern of scraping your knee against the hot pavement if you lost your footing at the right time, telling him he had gotten him shy without even saying anything to him, and daring him with his asphalt eyes to keep going, pink soft chalk dusted on the apples of his cheeks.
“I’m sorry. I just really like looking at you.” San says, and he wasn’t lying, but there was enough banter in his voice for it not to mean so much. “You are my soulmate, aren’t you?”
Yeosang looks at him, the kind that made Seonghwa purse his lips and brush his hand over his hair sometimes to get rid of it, and the type that was like those gag prizes that San finds in a bag of cracker jacks.
They were fun to look at, and rare to come by.
“Could you stop being gay for like, three seconds?” Yeosang stops chewing on the tomato, and in that instance, he really tastes it, and then he realizes why San had discarded them so quickly.
He makes a face.
“Dude, these tomatoes are fucking gross.”
San lightly clicks his tongue on the roof of his mouth with the beginnings of sarcasm, pulling his red sweater sleeves over his hands in an attempt to combat the air conditioning in here, seeping into his skin like a plague.
“No shit?”
He shifts in his seat a little, a pinch from his jeans on his waist and he was too lazy to really move and adjust his pants. That and, he had an irrational fear of embarrassment in public places, the sub shop being the perfect set up. He knew that as soon as he reached into his pants, the guy who made his sandwich would see him from behind the glass while getting rid of the stray lettuce on the counter and doing his job, and he would die on the spot, right in front of Yeosang with his hand in his pants.
He shifts again while Yeosang sighs, reaching for San’s other tomato as he finishes chewing on the last one. “I’m gonna tell Seonghwa that you keep looking at me. Then, he’ll beat you up.”
“Lies. And I like looking at Seonghwa, too.”
“Yeah, so do I.” Yeosang hitches his eyebrow once in warning, like police tape, his eyes going back to the textbook, and for a moment, San misses peering into them, admiring how the sunlight blew them into a light amber and dressed them up as if they were made for being looked into.
And sometimes, San thought that Yeosang was made for being looked into. Like right now, when San could make up the wildest comparisons to flowers and constellations about how Yeosang smiled and find more ways to beautify him as the middle of his forehead creased, his eyebrows coming together to concentrate on his work.
“Do you have to ruin everything?” Is what San says instead.
Yeosang sighs again, tiredly, if San thought about it, looking up from his book. His mouth was stretched into a thin line, and San sees the gloss from his favorite pineapple mint chapstick (that he misplaced way too much for someone so afraid of dry lips).
“Stop distracting me, would you?”
“What are you even studying for? Pay attention to me, we’re supposed to be on a date!” San’s eyebrows come together, and he feels the slight dryness in the middle of his forehead and sets a mental reminder to put on more moisturizer tonight.
He relaxes his face.
“A study date, in which you have yet to pull out your laptop and do your comp assignments.” San’s skin feels sensitive as Yeosang lectures against him, his voice like a grater, and he knows he didn’t really mean it and that it shouldn’t hold as much weight as it did. He doesn’t let Yeosang see it, but he would much rather listen to the silence again. “And it’s stat, what else?”
“Aren’t you a bio major?”
“Stat is mandatory.” Yeosang put a little more stress on that last bit, and that somehow pierced into San’s worst memories and brought up the nights he would spend studying and figuring out problems only to fail every single exam he got. He purses his lips, focusing instead on Yeosang now going for the onion slices, pushing the disgust he had for them into the back of his head as Yeosang speaks.
“You don’t have to worry about it, because you aced your stat test in AP. Still don’t know how you pulled it off.”
“It sounds like you’re calling me dumb. And you’re really gross for eating those onions.” San comments, remembering his many other comments on telling Yeosang just how gross he was for eating raw onions on a different occasion.
“Not dumb. But definitely suspicious. And these onions cost at least three cents. You’re gonna let them go to waste, let capitalism win?” Yeosang asks, but San was already thinking about what he’d mentioned about his stupid stat class rather than coming up with something to say to humor him.
San was kind of a slacker, so he couldn’t even get mad at him for saying that, anyway. And quite honestly, he was expecting to go out with no credit for that class back when he was a senior, and mentally prepared himself for the lowest score possible on that exam when they came out in the summer, so when he passed with one of the highest scores in his class, he was suspicious, too.
Just his brain doing miracles, whatever.
“I aced it for my programming expertise.” San watches Yeosang roll his eyes again, and San shakes his head. “How the hell are we even soulmates? You bully me all the time.” He says, and the word sounded so unfamiliar and far out, like how sand feels between your teeth after the beach or the tanginess of orange juice on your tongue after you rinse with alcoholic mouthwash.
It was weird and San didn’t like it.
Not at all.
“Exactly. I can’t bully a regular friend or else I’d drive them away.” San was the one to roll his eyes this time. “And I don’t know, we just are. How are you and Yunho soulmates? How are me and Seonghwa soulmates? I’m not god, San.” Yeosang rests his arm on the table, in between his textbook and himself, his black bomber jacket muffling the sunlight that had glossed over the cherries and vines painted onto the surface of the table underneath them, turning a strip of his sleeve into an ashy grey, a couple of dwarf stars settled on it.
“Isn’t it weird how we have multiple soulmates? Who even invented the fact that we have to hurt each other to figure that shit out? Why couldn't have had, like…tattoos or something cooler? Injury? What the hell is that about?” San asks, and this takes him on the journey to the center of his earth, having almost too many questions about it and how everything came to be and soon, as Yeosang’s looking at him with one of those crackerjack prize faces, he’s questioning his entire existence.
“San, stop asking me impossible questions. It’s just how it is.”
When Yeosang tells him that, San has another question like a matchstick flame on his tongue, searing and filling him with smoke. He needs to get it out quickly.
“What if-” And it’s burning his cities down in napalm skies as he gasps, his head working too fast. “What if we were meant to be lovers?”
“What is wrong with you?” Yeosang blinks once at San, then twice, and he’s got that light pink chalk on his cheeks again but San has to keep going.
“No, seriously. What if Seonghwa is your platonic and I’m your romantic? And you ruined the script of the universe and now everyone is all messed up? What if you’re the reason why I can’t feel pain?”
Yeosang sighs through his nose, and San notices how bored he looked as his autumn eyes were dim and shining through his eyelashes.
“Will you shut up?”
“Are you saying that you don’t wanna be my lover?” At this point, San was just talking to hear his own voice, embarrassing himself in front of the fruit sodas in the drink stand and the onion slices and the guy who made his sandwich behind the glass if he listened hard enough, digging through his bag of cracker jacks for another prize from Yeosang.
Chances were slim, but not zero.
“In your dreams.”
“I can’t believe you friend-zoned me in the middle of a sub shop.” San slumps and feigns hurt for a moment, just for Yeosang to sigh for what seemed like the nth time this afternoon with him.
San smiles delicately, like cherry blossoms when they fall from trees, silently putting up white flags for him.
Only for now.
“That’s just the way things are, man. We all have soulmates.”
“Okay, but…” San blinks and imagines the veneer on the textbook melting off and evaporating into the air as he thinks a little too much about this next question, “how will I know when I get mine?”
Yeosang shrugs, going back to his textbook, but the aftertaste of onions and the receding timeline of their break catching up to them made him lose his appetite to study any more. He shuts the book and wipes off the little wet smudge he made on the shiny front cover from his fingertip with the sleeve of his bomber.
“I dunno. You can’t feel pain, but you still get the injuries. Where do you think the mystery scrapes and sprained fingers come from, especially now that you live with two of your soulmates? There’s another one out there. Maybe they’re your romantic.” Yeosang tells him, as if it was a normal thing to tell your best friend, that it was normal to not feel pain and it was normal to have injury-soulmates.
Mind you, the only reason why San knew they were best friends was from when he punched him in the face back in middle school.
San wants to know what the fuck is up with that.
“I’m doomed to be alone forever.” San feels like a tire with a nail in it when he thinks, slowly deflating as he has the weight of his entire future planned out, seeing himself alone and growing old with a little dying cactus he kept from his apartment from college, collecting dust on a bookshelf with exactly three and a half novels on it.
Jeez.
“Oh, please. You don’t have to date your soulmate. I’m sure you’ve dated a lot of boys before. They weren’t your soulmate, right?” Yeosang’s voice is colored with that inky reassurance, where San wanted to believe him, but he was constantly raining showers over him and washing away all the hopscotch boxes of hope and optimism and kicking over all of Yeosang’s half-full glasses the more he tried.
He knew it wasn’t that serious, but he kind of wanted to have a romantic soulmate of his own now that he’s speaking it into existence, and he was a little bummed knowing that he didn’t meet one, yet.
He thinks about Yeosang and Seonghwa, then Mingi and Yunho, and another bout of rain washes away Yeosang’s yellow hopscotch boxes, next to his shattered glass, for knowing exactly who his soulmates were.
“I guess. Everyone around me has one.” And San knew he was whining and that Yeosang wasn’t studying to figure out which ear was best for him to listen to San complain into, so he drops it once Yeosang shrugs and shakes his head again, looking into the glassy cherries of the table.
“I dunno, Sannie. Just…don't worry about it too much. Maybe the next soulmate will be your romantic, who knows?”
“Or another platonic.”
“Aren’t we only limited to two platonics?”
“I don’t know!”
San looks at his red sweater sleeves over his hands, at the pleated trim lightly hugging around his thumb and fingers, trying to find his thoughts in the white stitches and drowning his worries in the suffocating colors. Yeosang was right. He was still so young, barely hitting twenty about three months ago. He still had time, right?
Right?
San wonders how the cactus in his bedroom is doing.
Yeosang abruptly stands up, ripping up San’s thin, tissue paper sentiments as the chair screeches across the frosted tile beneath them, light scuff marks a few centimeters away from the first leg of Yeosang’s chair and telling San that this was the go-to spot for two dining in here.
They were a prime example of it.
“Come on. We have thirteen minutes before my class starts. I wanna grab a seat next to Joong.” Yeosang says, wrapping the rest of San’s sandwich up in front of him and throwing the ball of wet onions and dried up bread in the bin beside the drink stand.
Hongjoong.
San registers Hongjoong in his head as if he’d just seen him yesterday. And he did, considering he was one of Yeosang’s good friends and Jongho’s platonic soulmate, so he was always around. The distant, faint memory of his heavily striking red hair and the pretty dangly silver he liked to wear in one ear, like chandeliers or windchimes on doorsteps, made San smile a bit.
He would make sure to see him again today, at least once.
“Oh, yeah. Let’s go, he’ll be upset if he has to sit beside someone else. Plus, I wanna see him, too.” San braces himself as he pushes his chair out, and despite the mental fortress he’d created to block out that terrible sound, it still made him cringe and stop halfway through, waddling out awkwardly through the small space in between the table and the chair.
He grabs his phone, glancing at the flash of his lock screen and thinking about what Yeosang told him. As he leads him out of the sub shop and into the quiet and beautifully flowery afternoon of their small town, he tries to remember even the slightest bit of pain back then, trying to find the feeling in the chipped paint of the crosswalk beneath their feet and the way the trees billowed in the sluggish breeze that tangled through his hair and kissed his cheeks.
He tries to remember it when he saw part of his arm darken into a bruise with Yunho running into a wall that one time, but got nothing. He tries when he saw Yeosang in his cast after falling off of his board, but got nothing. He tries when he remembers the little hehetmons Yeosang would draw on his cast after taking him to the same hospital that day, and got nothing. He tries to remember it when he watched Yunho accidentally ram his forehead into a particularly low door frame, and when the welts began to swell up and Yunho was freaking out on the way to the doctor and San held ice to his own skin, and got nothing. He tries to remember when Yeosang spent the night at Seonghwa’s and people were giving San weird looks the next morning when he took off his pullover in his warmest class.
He got nothing.
There had always been nothing.
There was nothing when he bit the inside of his lip a little harsher than he should’ve on the way to their university, there was nothing when he slipped his hand out of his sweater sleeve and held it in the way of the sun massaging heat waves into his back, there was nothing when he lightly popped a knuckle as he followed Yeosang into the building, the soft crack like the blow of a 9mm Kurtz in his ears but he never felt the shot and he never bled.
It still somehow scared him all the same.
And it’s like Yeosang could hear his thoughts, because he glanced over his shoulder at San once they got to the open door of his science class, the room half empty with no sign of his professor anywhere, typically.
He gives him a look that makes him stop thinking so hard, just for now.
Yeosang peeks inside of the classroom, San watching his face fall a little and his eyes perch up at the top row for a moment, before he leans against the wall right in front of the door frame, his black backpack slung over one shoulder while his textbook’s in the other hand. He looked like a real college student again, the kind you’d find against the lockers of an all too familiar and terribly unrealistic teen movie. He looked like he had tons of friends and too many dates to go on and San almost wants to get jealous.
Almost.
“Hey, did you hear about that new transfer student? Hoseok’s little brother?” Yeosang asks, and he swallows as his eyebrows come together a bi, focusing on San, and despite him being used to it, San didn’t like being too easy to read, as if he was made of scriptures and scrolls and Yeosang had found him on a pedestal in the middle of a spotlight. It made ants crawl under his skin.
Can Yeosang just stop knowing all the time? It was killing him.
San registers exactly what Yeosang said and looks at him, a newfound interest in the black-haired boy with his voice of trumpets from his infotech class as his heart picks up a little at the interest. He feels a bit sick. “Hoseok? H-he has a brother?”
Yeosang nods, and just by concentrating on San, he tastes the linger of the onions on his tongue when he opens his mouth to speak again and he really wished that he hadn’t convinced himself it would be a good idea to eat those.
He thinks back to the front pocket of his backpack and tries to remember if he had any mints left.
“Uh…yeah. His name is Wooseok, I think. He transferred here, or is gonna. I don’t know. I don’t really care.”
San blinks. “So why bring him up?”
“Because you looked worried and I know you’re tripping over what we talked about in the sub shop,” Yeosang says matter of factly, his voice reminding him of the scarlet color in stop signs, or the slippery puddles on bustling streets after a rainstorm.
He was wary of it, too. He didn’t know why.
And when Yeosang looked at him without saying anything else, silent except for his eyes that held accusations, San felt like ants again.
“Ugh, shut up. It’s fine, I’m not worried. What does Wooseok look like?”
Yeosang shrugs, and that tiny movement somehow possessed a small breeze to wash over them from one of the many air conditioners scattered around this hallway alone, caressing San’s face in an unexpected cold and letting Yeosang’s blonde hair fall over his eyes. He brushes it out of his face with his free hand, leaning up off of the wall and silently reminding San that he had to spend the next two hours alone, unless Yunho spontaneously got laid off from work or Jongho’s first half of classes suddenly got canceled.
He feels deflated again, more nails in his tires than he remembered.
“I don’t know.” He tells him, shouldering his backpack and holding onto it with the hand that moved his hair from his face, and San could swear he felt his heart break in his chest.
He sighs, but Yeosang thinks it’s because he gave him a brick wall of an answer about the mysterious Jung Wooseok that he cared so little yet too much about. News of new students never piqued anyone’s interest, especially not San’s because he knew he would never make the effort to go talk to people he didn’t know. Maybe he harbored on it because though they really didn’t like each other, he kind of sort of interacted with Hoseok a bit, whenever he asked for a pencil or something, so he was connected to him, right? He should know all about him, right?
He doesn’t know.
“Hey, you should stop at the drugstore and get some band-aids,” Yeosang tells him, his eyes trained on his shoulder and then checking his entire arm, and there was a slight pitfall in San’s chest when he thinks of Yunho getting hurt somewhere underneath the comfort of Yeosang looking out for him if he had.
“Why?”
“Yunho might have fallen or something. Check your shoulder. That sweater was really cute, too.”
San hooks a finger in the collar of his sweater and pulls, seeing a small splotch of blood like crimson acrylic, and he sighs, the sight not really alarming him as much as it was irritating.
What a waste of his favorite sweater.
His problem was gone as quickly as it came once he saw Hongjoong jog up to them, his cherry red hair curled and curtained over his forehead as he haloed San in his notable and unwavering Hongjoong-esque excitement to see him after so long. He watches Yeosang wave goodbye to him and walk into his class with Hongjoong, feeling alone again.
As he left and monitored just how hot it was by the shadows he was casting on the ground as he stepped over cracks in the sidewalk and avoided the dried up dog poop by the stop sign on the way home, and as he greeted absolutely nobody in his shared apartment as the afternoon melted into early evening, he couldn’t help but wonder about Jung Wooseok.
He was a menace.