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Kim Gyuvin's daily routine, at fifteen-almost-sixteen, consists of something like this:
Wake up an hour before everyone else, get showered and dressed, grab breakfast, and go around waking up all of his little siblings for school (and in the case of his youngest brother, pre-school), make the oldest one keep everyone awake while he shakes the littlest one awake with much more gentleness than any of the others. Then get him and the second youngest ready while his sister gets dressed herself.
Then he distracts them, keeps an eye on them, while his parents wake and start their day—their mother beginning breakfast while his father gets ready before anything else, and then when he's out she'll go shower while Gyuvin and his father wrangle the kids into eating breakfast properly. They're never done before she emerges and she has to coax the youngest, sleepy and whiny, into eating through the power of promises and a lot of patience.
Then they lock up the house and run, barely on time. The kids pile into the car with their parents and Gyuvin runs three blocks to his best friend's house, where he'll be waiting with a raised eyebrow and a "you're nearly late," every day, without fail. His parents or older brother, whoever is driving them to school that day, will stifle a snort and order them into the car.
Inside the car, Gyuvin and Ricky bicker back and forth endlessly while their designated driver of the day rolls their eyes but smiles fondly in the way Gyuvin knows Ricky notices but pretends not to. Usually, it's Hao, his older brother, who chides them for having so much energy so early in the morning.
Today, Gyuvin says, "it's not our fault you're already old."
He's barely twenty, still young, but Gyuvin is also sixteen and kind of a brat. Okay, a lot of a brat, but you won't hear him admitting it out loud.
Hao glares at them in the rearview mirror with fake heat. He can never really be angry at them, either of them. Or anyone, really. It's one of those things that make him kind of a pushover in the sense that it's hard to get him to do what he really needs to do. "First Quanrui being an ass this morning, now you?"
"What did Quanrui do?" Gyuvin asks, butchering the pronunciation again. Ricky hits his arm and demands that he not say the Chinese name at all if he can't pronounce it right.
"Okay, Richard," Gyuvin says, still looking at Hao. Ricky hits him again.
"Why do I agree to drive you two."
"Then don't," Ricky says immediately.
"And that is what he was being an ass about," Hao sighs. It's kind of funny that he's never been reserved about swearing in front of them. "Gyuvin, do you agree with him that you two can walk alone to school?"
Gyuvin blinks. "Uh, sure?"
"See," Ricky leans forward to rest his weight on the driver's seat, "he agrees, too! We're perfectly old enough to go to school by ourselves!"
Hao rubs his temples. "You are sixteen. The school isn't that close."
"But it's not that far away either!" Ricky insists. "You walked to school alone!"
"I had Kuanjui with me," Hao says wearily. "It's different."
"How different is it if I have him with me?!" Gyuvin ducks to avoid Ricky's hand slamming into his forehead. Ricky doesn't notice. "Come on, ge, don't be so—" he starts ranting in Mandarin, none of which Gyuvin understands (the most he ever learned is how to say Hao is a simp, both in standard Mandarin and in Fujianese, the time last summer when he went to Fujian with Ricky's family; he also taught Ricky the same in Korean—Hao had been not amused), so he just stares.
Hao replies a bit sharply and Ricky snaps back angrily. Gyuvin catches the word "child" in that sentence and feels like he shouldn't let them argue right before they're separated for over seven hours, so he raises a hand and says, "I don't mind walking with him to school."
Both brothers snap their heads to him.
"Gyuvin, please don't encourage—" Hao begins, forced to look back at the road.
"Thank you!" Ricky exclaims.
"I really don't see a problem," Gyuvin says. He knows Hao won't get mad at him for saying it how he sees it. It's what Hao himself does, after all. "I mean, we're sixteen, we can walk there and back just fine. It's not like we're too far from home. And we have our phones on us all the time. It's not like it's unsafe."
"See, he agrees!" Ricky whirls to Hao, eyes wide and pleading, no more anger evident. "Please, ge," and then something in a confusing mix of both languages.
Ricky doesn't often mix up English and Mandarin, despite speaking Mandarin almost exclusively at home, but when he gets emotional, it happens, the same way Gyuvin blubbers through Korean and English when he gets emotional. Gyuvin thinks it's cute when Ricky does it, and he hopes Ricky thinks the same.
Although that feels a little delusional.
"Alright, alright," Hao groans. "I give up. I'll talk to Mama and Dad about it, but I suppose they'll agree, you spoiled brat. But," he says firmly, "you will not be walking home, together or otherwise, after dark. So, complain all you like, but someone will pick you up if it's dark. Just for today I'll come to get you, no arguments. Understood?"
"Crystal clear," Ricky grins. Gyuvin pats his arm in congratulations.
Hao drops them off at school with a sigh of, have a good day, little gremlins, despite the fact that they're both beginning to catch up to him in height.
The rest of Gyuvin's routine goes like this: he and Ricky separate for their first three hours of lessons in separate classes, find each other again for break, and then separate again before meeting up outside the gates, waiting for Hao to pick them up. Then, they usually hang out for a few hours at either of their places.
Today, they head to Ricky's place. Hao and Ricky's mother greets them both with hugs and a kiss to the cheek each, and their father gives them hair-ruffles—Gyuvin doesn't mind and neither does Ricky, because his meticulously-styled hair is already a mess at the end of a school day, but he makes a fuss anyway—and then they disappear up to Ricky's room.
Their little routine inside Ricky's room consists of struggling over their homework for an hour before they give up and start playing video games or watch stupid videos on YouTube. Today, they give up and collapse onto Ricky's bed—one that fits the two of them comfortably, like Gyuvin's; family money, and all that—and Gyuvin has an idea.
He pulls up cute cat videos, which Ricky raises an eyebrow at, and then starts comparing everything the cats do to Ricky, who flushes redder and redder by the minute.
"See, that's exactly like you," Gyuvin says as they watch a baby kitten practically fly across a room in terror when their owner drops a plate and it shatters, curling into the corner with the most precious wide, scared-shitless eyes that Gyuvin has definitely seen before. "It just emulates you so well, you know?"
"Shut up," Ricky whines, hitting Gyuvin in the chest repeatedly. Gyuvin is pretty sure he's have a questionable bruise by the end of this, but he also doesn't care, not when Ricky's being so. Cute. "Stop comparing me to cats!"
"That one is a kitten," Gyuvin corrects.
"Well, stop comparing me to kittens, too!" Ricky glares.
"Awh, but I know you love it," Gyuvin drops the phone onto his chest and reaches out to poke his best friend in the cheeks. It's hard to label the overwhelming affection in his chest. To know that he wants moments like these forever. Sixteen is an age where a crush is nothing elementary—it's probably a rather easy emotion to identify, at this point—but sixteen is also an age where, when you have a crush on someone you care about so, so deeply, it's difficult to figure out where the feelings begin or end.
Gyuvin's always been an affectionate person. His mother talks all the time about how he's so affectionate and warm, she used to worry about the fact he had no concept of stranger danger as a young child. Up until he was about five or six, Gyuvin would go and hug and converse excitedly with people he literally just met while his parents looked on in despair, discouraging him a lost cause.
It's how he met Ricky, actually. Walked right up and looped his arm through the shy Chinese kid who had just started at their elementary school. He's lucky Ricky is a nice person because most kids start yelling and pushing Gyuvin away, because Ricky just looked at him and shrugged, carrying on with his tasks like Gyuvin being attached to his arm just made sense.
Of course, Gyuvin has also learned that Hao took to attaching himself to Ricky's side with a relentless fervor for months after he'd been adopted into the Zhang family, clearly pushing himself out of his comfort zone for his new little brother, so little Ricky's brain just registered that as normal.
An older Ricky would have probably kicked him in the shin and told him to fuck off.
"No, I don't," Ricky grumbles, "and I like you touching my face even less."
Translated from Ricky-speak: this is annoying, but I can tolerate it for you.
Gyuvin likes him so much. He may just explode.
"You would have threatened to bite my nose off or something by now," Gyuvin notes, over Ricky's sputtering protests that for fuck's sake, Kim Gyuvin, I'm not a fucking cat. "Something wrong? You were kind of keyed up when you argued with Hao today."
Ricky frowns at him, pulling Gyuvin's hands away from his face but not releasing them. "Is it so hard to believe that I was just tired of him and my parents babying me all the time?"
"Well, I don't doubt you are," Gyuvin says, "but can you blame them?"
He plays with Gyuvin's fingers. "Is that a jab at me or being honest?"
"Both. You know what Hao always says, you deserve to be babied."
"Doesn't mean I want it." Ricky sighs. "Just 'cause life sucked before they took me in doesn't mean I have to be treated like I'm Han Yujin, all the time. He's ten. I'm sixteen."
"What's really wrong?" Gyuvin asks, spreading his fingers so Ricky can tug individually on each one. Maybe it's kind of a childish habit, but Gyuvin has come up with a lot creative ways to let Ricky fiddle with him instead of picking at his palm like he does when he's stressed, and surprisingly, more than half those strategies are stuff he comes up with when he needs his little siblings to stop crying.
"It's nothing," and when Gyuvin just looks at him, "I mean, it's really nothing, nothing actually happened."
"But you're thinking about something," Gyuvin says.
"I guess," Ricky hesitates. Gyuvin waits patiently, lets Ricky form the words in English because he knows Mandarin comes to him first even having lived for almost all his life in Oregon, and he needs time to voice complicated thoughts out loud. "You know how my mom and I visit the orphanage I lived in every once in a while?"
Gyuvin nods; he's familiar with those visits. Ricky's early childhood was a bit of a mess, to put it lightly, but his time at the orphanage wasn't all too bad. The staff there were nice and Ricky had friends who stood up for him when he got bullied, who cried when Ricky left to live with Hao and his parents. He knows it's a precious place to Ricky.
"Well, when we were there, one of the staff, she told me that I look happier than ever these days," he says. Gyuvin hums, acknowledging that a sixteen-year-old Ricky is much happier than every other version of Ricky throughout the years. "And I told her that Hao-ge and my parents, they make me happy. She kind of laughed when I told her about you, but it wasn't mean. She just looked—happy, I guess. Glad that I'm living a normal life now."
Heat flushes Gyuvin's neck, but he makes no move to let Ricky know. He likes hearing that Ricky talked about him to someone who will likely never meet Gyuvin (unless he gets enough courage to ask Ricky to let him tag along). He likes that he's that important to Ricky.
"And she, uh." Ricky pauses. "She said I remind her of my...my mother." When Gyuvin blinks at him, he clarifies, "my biological mother."
"Oh. Oh." Gyuvin doesn't quite know what to say to that. "How'd she know her?"
"Remember the friend who told my mom about me?" Gyuvin notes that he calls Mrs. Zhang 'mom' and his birth-giver 'mother,' and files the difference away in his head. "And how that's why I ended up getting adopted? The staff, that's her. So."
"The one who knew your bio mom," Gyuvin remembers. "Interesting."
"She said I'm a lot like her, when she was younger," Ricky closes his eyes, doesn't stop fiddling with Gyuvin's fingers. "Of course, she didn't know my mother until they were both like, eighteen or something, closer to Hao-ge's age. But we're similar, she said."
"How so?" Gyuvin isn't thinking when he lifts his hand to Ricky's hair, cards his fingers through it, lightly massages Ricky's scalp as he does so. He always does this with his siblings when they're in distress, so it's more instinctive to do it than anything.
"The way I talk and hold myself," Ricky recites, like he's been trying to repeat them out loud for a while. "The way I act colder than I am, or something. The warmth I emit when I look at my friends. Just—stuff like that."
"She was right when she described you like that. The world's cutest kitten."
"Shut it," Ricky huffs, pushing him in the chest. "The point is, when I heard that, I—I didn't know how to feel, not really. Mostly a sense of dread."
"Why?" Gyuvin doesn't hesitate to ask. Somehow, he and Ricky just know each other's boundaries now. It's hard to overstep because they know when to pull back instinctively.
"Because..." Ricky sighs. "I don't remember all of my childhood anymore, but some of the parts I remember, they aren't nice. She...she sucked at parenting, at being a good person to a literal child, in general. And she resented me. Because now I was an unwanted number in the equation she had set out for her life, you know?"
"Oh, Ricky." A gentler stroke, tugging the hair with less force.
"It's—fine," Ricky says, voice steady, and Gyuvin knows it's not, because he knows Ricky still has nightmares about those half-forgotten memories, because he knows Ricky as a younger kid used to seek out Hao in the middle of the night and now seeks Gyuvin out through text and doesn't always say why he's texting at three in the morning but Gyuvin always knows.
But he also knows that it's not his place to intrude on things that Ricky has just barely allowed him to know, so he doesn't say anything to dispute Ricky's lie.
"It's just that—I'm a lot like her, supposedly." A pause. "How easy will it be for me to turn bitter like her?"
And there's what he was so worried about.
"You're not her," Gyuvin says. "You're Ricky. Not her."
"But I am a product of her," Ricky says, voice quiet and trembly. He rarely gets like this, and as soft and kitten-like as he is, Gyuvin can count the number of times on both hands that he has seen Ricky cry, and most of that was from when they were so much younger. But right now, his eyes are teary, voice threatening to break. "I am her child, no matter what."
"So? Hao isn't like your parents, either, and that doesn't make him not their kid."
"But parents and children do carry similarities," Ricky insists.
"Richard, I don't know what you learned in bio class, but genetic similarities don't mean the ability to be a bitch to your kid," Gyuvin says, a little sharper than he intended, because this side of Ricky is scaring him.
Ricky shrinks back a bit. "I...I just mean..."
Gyuvin sighs. "I'm sorry," he apologizes. "I didn't mean that. This is about you, not me."
"It's okay," Ricky chews on his lip. Gyuvin would stop him, but he's speaking again. "I just, I mean, isn't it—I remember enough of what she was like. I would always be asking my friends if I could go over to their places after school just so I wouldn't have to deal with her for longer than I had to. And it's not like I had a dad in the picture. So, when social services found out, I—I was happier than anything. Even if I didn't know what to do. She accused me of telling the teachers or something like that, but really, it was my crying that tipped the neighbors off."
"Ricky," Gyuvin softens his voice more. He puts an arm around Ricky's trembling shoulders. "It's okay. I'm sorry you had to deal with that so young."
"I'm fine now, that's what matters," Ricky says, voice stronger. He doesn't push Gyuvin away, though, so he counts it as a win. "I'm just saying...people loved her before she had me. I know that much. She was a good person."
"Can't have been that good of a person if she hurt you."
"That's what I'm saying," he cries out, "that I don't know what it'll take for me to become that! I don't want to be bitter and angry like she was. My life sucked back then and it's taking so much effort to not let it get the better of me and to be miserable because I've had so many good years now, because I have one nightmare and I just—I want to hide forever. Do you get it?"
Gyuvin doesn't, not really, because though he and Ricky have loving families, the difference between them is that Gyuvin has always grown up surrounded by so much love. A family that supports his crazy dream of trying to be an idol once he finishes high school, at least. A family that lets him dance on off-days, though Gyuvin is seriously beginning to consider asking Hanbin if he can join his cover-dance crew, or at least take classes with him at the studio.
The difference is that Ricky hasn't always had this and though Ricky is used to all the love now, he still stumbles sometimes. Gyuvin's heart aches for him.
"Not really," he answers honestly, "but I'm trying to."
Ricky sags fully against him. "I'm just scared I might become someone like her," he mutters. "I don't ever want to be like that. I don't think it's likely, not when I have all the support she didn't and it's not like I'm going to go and end up with a kid—" it shouldn't be funny, but Gyuvin releases a snort of laughter, anyway "—but I'm scared anyway."
"Fear is illogical," Gyuvin says. "Don't you worry, Ricky. I know you would never grow up to be like that. You're a great person and anyway, technically you have models of what to be and what not to be, right?"
Ricky hums. "I guess," he says doubtfully. "My mom would beat my ass if I ever did."
There's what Gyuvin has been waiting for—Ricky to make light of the situation, diffuse the heaviness of the atmosphere. A sign that maybe things are not okay right now, but Ricky will try and make it okay, even if it means doing the thing he despises, asking for help.
Gyuvin isn't sure when he started to pick up on that, or when Ricky started to make an effort to try and make things okay himself instead of ignoring the things that plague him, letting all the bad overwhelm him until he can't deal with it anymore. Maybe when he turned fourteen, and it was kind of like a realization that effort is required to get better. That he has people who will help him through his ugliest moments.
"Maybe call her mama like Hao does," Gyuvin suggests. "That would soften her."
Ricky snorts. "No way. He's crazy territorial about that. Once I called her mama as a joke and he looked at me with the eyes that were more aggressive than I ever thought he could be. Besides, it's just not my thing."
"Awh, man. Guess you can't magically become an asshole."
Ricky groans. "Don't even joke about that," and Gyuvin knows he isn't offended at all. "I'm hungry from all of that emotional talk now."
As if on cue, "oi, brats! Get down here for dinner!" Hao calls.
It's with a start that Gyuvin realizes the violin music that has been resonating through the house for a good hour has stopped. He's so used to hearing Hao practice relentlessly on that thing that it's become the norm, at this point. Sometimes, he'll be wrapped up in homework absently humming along to it.
"Coming!" Ricky yells back, and to Gyuvin, "thanks for that, though. Listening to my bullshit without complaining."
"Hey, it's not bullshit," Gyuvin chides. "You're fine, don't worry. What are best friends for?"
Ricky makes a face, but he swings out of bed with Gyuvin's hand still in his own. "Let's just go eat," he says, deflecting emotional talk in that way of his.
Gyuvin laughs, and allows himself to be pulled along.