Work Text:
☁
1997
The kitchen was hot chaos as Johnny dropped a hot saucepan lid onto the tiles and yelped from the pain it caused his fingertips. The smoke alarm was blaring like a siren and the dumb spatula was no use to the blackening pasta stuck to the bottom of the pan. The male pushed it from the hot ring and turned the hobs off in an angered rage. Johnny slammed the oven glove onto the floor in a moment of sheer anger before staring at the disaster in front of him.
“I miss Mom,” Jungwoo’s voice was quiet amongst the noise.
Johnny closed his eyes as he tried to calm down. He opened them when the smoke alarm stopped beeping and glanced to the eleven-year-old who was wafting a tea towel round the room to clear it. Things had been hard for him and his little brother this last year. The alpha knew how to be a big brother, being a big brother was fun, plenty of rough and tumble, with a pinch of sentimentality every so often.
Trying to fill the boots of their late Mother? That was hard.
He couldn’t cook, he didn’t know how to clean and laundry was…well, rocket science was easier than that. Being a big brother had only gotten him so far, breakfasts were okay, a bowl of cereal worked a treat if he remembered to buy milk and helping Jungwoo with his homework wasn’t too tricky. He could drive Jungwoo to school, or his friends’ houses, and the grocery shop wasn’t too fathoming if he remembered to bring a list, but things piled up quick.
Johnny almost had a breakdown when Jungwoo caught a stomach bug. The last three days had felt like a long, draining onslaught of ruined bed sheets and endless sick bowls. In all his life, he’d never seen Jungwoo so sick before, the boy couldn’t keep anything down and was losing his complexion by the day. The doctors kept saying it was normal for kids to get sick, hell, Johnny knew he’d had countless flu’s and stomach bugs as a kid too, but he’d spent the last few months tending to his Mother in the same way and watching her fade day by day.
Having to do it all over again for his baby brother, the last slither of family he had, almost sent him crazy. All he’d wanted to do was make something for Jungwoo to eat now his appetite was returning and he couldn’t even do that. Johnny met eyes with the eleven-year-old and observed the glassiness behind them, his pink from-the-cold feet and jaggedly cut black hair because Johnny had had to do it himself. His throat felt tickly and tight when a whisper in the back of his mind told him that they’d tried their best here.
Echor wasn’t the same as Red River. They’d had to move there for the last year so their Mom could be closer to hospitals, clinics and dedicated professionals that could give her the time and medicines she needed on tap. There was plenty of work for him to pick up round here, waiting tables, stocking shelves, serving tills even dabbling with a few temporary months of human resources and the schools were great for Jungwoo. He and Jungwoo would have good opportunities here and they’d really, really tried to fit in and adapt, but it just wasn’t working anymore.
“I wanna go home,” Jungwoo’s voice was quiet once more.
His small hands practically wringed out the tea towel he was holding and when the boy sniffled Johnny knew it was more than being sick, or just having a bad day. They’d had a bad fucking year. Johnny glanced across the small kitchen, the pots piled in the sink, the burnt pasta on the hob, the lingering smoke from it still whirling around them.
“Yeah,” Johnny admitted to himself, “Me too.”
He called Jungwoo’s school that night to tell them they were relocating. They packed their bags and boxes, and even when Johnny’s head felt heavy and Jungwoo had fallen asleep on Johnny’s large winter coat, he kept going. He wrapped his kid brother up in warm clothes and carried him to the truck; eleven-year-olds shouldn’t be this easy to simply scoop up but both brothers had lost weight in their Mother’s passing.
Johnny drove through the night with Jungwoo’s sleeping head on his lap. He knew it was unsafe to drive like this but he needed it, he needed the reassurance of his brother’s warmth. Dawn came and dark skies turned to that strange grey-blue hue that breaks bright the other side of seven-thirty. Johnny parked up by the dock and watched the sun come over the horizon, and cried in relief at the sight. After their long year in Echor, they needed Red River more than ever.
☁
They didn’t move back into their childhood home for a collection of reasons. First of all, without their Mom there it didn’t feel like their family home. It looked and felt too big and seemed too alien now, but most importantly, another family was living there. They’d painted over the front door and pulled down the bothersome tree at the side that his Mom always moaned about and had made it their own. Johnny thought Jungwoo might have been upset about the change but the past year had matured the child ever so. He kept talking about fresh starts being a good thing, and Johnny agreed.
Head alpha Minho had been restoring some of the worse for wear houses in town so he gave the smallest single storey to the brothers in exchange for Johnny’s loyalty in the building progress. Jungwoo was back at his old school, with his old friends, and Johnny was working with his old familiar faces, and at the end of the day they had their own very pokey home to return to. It was an easy enough routine to fall into.
When they’d unpacked the last of their belongings and sat together on the front porch to watch the sky turn orange from dusk, Johnny looked at his brother, really observed him. Jungwoo made an overnight recovery from his stomach bug and the colour was back in his cheeks and he kept smiling, even when Johnny made him do his homework instead of TV. Red River had welcomed them back in the never-changing Red River way the moment his truck was spotted outside Minho’s place. Their fridge was full of dishes everyone had cooked for them with handwritten post-it notes about how long to cook or reheat them for and Jungwoo was given a basket of hand-me-down clothes to grow into.
Even Chanyeol’s Halmeoni had practically banged their door down to present their freshly washed bedding that Johnny didn’t even know she removed from the house to wash.
But Jungwoo looked great, and healthy. Luckily, the new family living in their old house hadn’t gotten rid of the contents of their shed so Jungwoo had his bike back, and Johnny once again owned a mini-fridge stash of beers and his portable radio that never gave out. Fuck, it felt good to kick back on his favourite rickety deck chair, sip beer and listen to crackly rock music with a Bud in his hand. Spring was here, the warm kind of spring that feels more like summer, and Johnny was content even if Jungwoo kept whizzing by him on his bike.
“Would you rather,” Jungwoo’s voice was in and out as he peddled round his brother like a shark, “Eat a dead squirrel but you don’t know how long it’s been dead for,” another pause as the boy circles him once more, “Or eat those weird forest berries that make you shit for weeks.”
“Don’t say shit,” Johnny huffed as the sun’s rays kissed at his face, “But a dead squirrel can make you shit just as bad. At least you know where you stand with the berries.”
Jungwoo’s bike brakes screeched and he blocked the sun with a playful grin on his face. Johnny peeked an eye open and peered at him from behind his shades.
“What other gross stuff have you eaten as a wolf?”
“Hmm, nothing too adventurous, but we dared Sehun to eat a frog once and he was throwing up chunks for days, in both forms, the dummy,” Johnny chuckled.
He and his friends used to get up to so much stupid shit, not just in wolf form, and he couldn’t help but wonder if Jungwoo would do the same. Johnny always used to be the first one to step up to a dare or a challenge, but he couldn’t imagine Jungwoo stealing old Ahjussi Kim’s fishing boat to joyride round the lake and return it two days later, drunk and sunburnt. Jungwoo had always been the stereotypically good, obedient sibling. The teachers at his school loved Jungwoo a lot more than they’d enjoyed his endless wisecracks and hand-fart noises.
“Cool,” Jungwoo grinned with a mischievous smile.
He peddled off again, one circle, two and then went back to his little track around the house.
“Hey,” Johnny called as Jungwoo did some cool skid on his bike, “You never told me which one you’d eat.”
His kid brother did another circle around the house, obviously thinking his choices over before peddling across to Johnny. He hit the brakes so the wheels made that horrendous screech sound which had Johnny convulsing a little. He sipped his beer and glanced across Jungwoo’s face, ready for his verdict.
“I can hide the berries under my tongue and spit them out when everyone’s not looking, so yeah, berries.”
Johnny watched as Jungwoo peddled off again, this time making a little circuit around the back yard, slaloming the few trees there, wondering why the hell he’d never thought of that. It would have saved him three days of toilet-sitting when he was fourteen. And twenty-two.
☁
The sound of a car door opening and closing floated through the open windows. Johnny plodded in from the bathroom with nothing but a towel around his waist even though the shower hadn’t done much to cool his skin in this stupid heat wave. He forgot how hot it got out here by the water. He lazily stumbled to the fridge, opening it purely to sigh against the cold feeling, and relished in it as Jungwoo’s cartoons on the TV played quietly as ambience.
“Oh shit,” Jungwoo cursed across the room.
“Don’t say shit,” Johnny grumbled then glanced to his brother, who was now stood at the window, staring out of it as his hands twisted together.
The male shut the fridge, immediately missing the cool air, and made his way to the window to join the eleven-year-old, droplets of water still falling from his wet hair. He frowned at the sight of the unfamiliar car, a small hatchback in a pale green colour, and the rather flustered looking male tumbling from it. Johnny opened his mouth to query his brother but Jungwoo grabbed hold of his arm with an apologetic look in his eyes.
“I forgot to tell you…”
“Tell me what?” Johnny quizzed as the man locked his car and walked toward their front door, somehow unaware of the two brothers staring at him from the front window.
“Mr Qian said he was going to hand deliver our end of term student reports. I forgot that was today…” Jungwoo confessed, looking up at Johnny with those big eyes of his.
Meanwhile, Johnny’s bulged in their sockets.
“Mr Qian like, your teacher Mr Qian! Your teacher is coming here to meet me and you just forgot to tell me?!” Johnny glanced at the chaos that was their house, “Oh shit!”
Jungwoo made a whiny noise as he rushed to the coffee table to grab at all the used and crushed coke cans both brothers had been piling up as Mr Qian knocked on the door. Johnny gripped the front of his towel, sending a daggered look to his kid brother, a scowl on his face.
“I’m going to physically eat one of your plushies, I swear to god, Seo Jungwoo!” Johnny hissed as the teacher knocked eagerly again.
“Then I’ll eat one of your Playboy magazines!” Jungwoo hissed back with his foot in the trash can to squash the rubbish down.
The two boys weren’t necessarily messy, as such, but in hot weather like this all they wanted to do was sprawl and relax. Who wanted to sort the trash into recycling and mixed when you could watch Spanish soap operas with the fan in front of your face?
Jungwoo pushed an empty pizza box under the sofa and Johnny couldn’t help but think highly of his creativity before he finally swung the door open. The sun blasted him for a hot minute, he shaded his eyes to greet Jungwoo’s impromptu teacher, only to realise said teacher was a lot younger than he first imagined.
“Mr Seo-oh!” Mr Qian blurted.
The way the porch step aligned with the front door, meant that Mr Qian was currently face-to-face with Johnny’s wet, rippling abs and the teacher immediately took a step back in surprise. Johnny, never one to shy away, barely blinked an eye at first. Then he too realised that he – Jungwoo’s primary guardian – had just greeted his brother’s teacher in nothing but a damn towel. He really was going to eat Jungwoo’s damn plushie collection, he swore on it, vowed with rage in his eyes.
“Hi Mr Qian!” Jungwoo greeted as he popped up beside Johnny with a grin.
“Jungwoo!” Mr Qian sighed in relief, “I was worried this might have been the wrong house. I hope you were expecting me, Mr Seo, I left a few voicemails on your house phone.”
“Of course you did,” Johnny breezed with an absolute lie of a smile, “Please, come in out of the heat. Jungwoo will make you a cold drink and I will get dressed. That seems like a good idea.”
“Very,” Mr Qian agreed, even if both his tone and smile screamed awkward.
Johnny excused himself to his bedroom to change, trying to figure out what the hell he should wear and which dumb beanie baby of Jungwoo’s he was going to eat first – probably the emerald green one that always looked judgemental – and went for his loose slacks. He could hear Jungwoo chatting happily to his teacher and offering a cold coke from the fridge as he pulled on a large t-shirt, hoping it would look smart casual enough for this impromptu meeting. He left his room and was glad that Mr Qian was sat on the comfiest armchair in the house when he joined Jungwoo on the sofa.
Johnny blanched at the sight of Mr Qian.
The young male pulled the sunglasses from his eyes and hooked them over the top of his button down, a light green cardigan wrapped around his neck, brunette hair perfectly tousled to one side. His eyes were almost the same colour of his hair, if not darker, but his lips were a pretty colour of pink and even his dainty wrists were pretty as he flickered through a satchel.
Mr Qian was stupidly hot.
“I like to deliver summer homework directly so I can make sure parents and guardians know about it, I can talk about summer goals, and how you can help Jungwoo in his studies,” Mr Qian expressed as he pulled a pastel blue folder from the satchel with a smile and offered it toward Jungwoo, “Plus, it gives us a chance to meet, Mr Seo, I’ve heard a lot about you but I understand it’s been a rather busy time for you.”
“Somewhat,” Johnny answered staring off at the beauty mark beneath Mr Qian’s eyebrow.
Jungwoo glanced up at his brother wondering why his stupidly chatty brother seemed tongue-tied until he saw the expression on his face and inwardly screamed. Of course, Johnny tended to go for anything with a pulse so his teacher was no exception.
“Well, Jungwoo’s a wonderful reader so I’ve written some good book suggestions for him to read over summer, his sums are great but division definitely needs some practise, nothing to be concerned about though,” Mr Qian continued with a happy smile toward Jungwoo, “Do you help Jungwoo with his homework?”
“Johnny flunked high school,” Jungwoo blurted with a side glance to his brother.
“I did not flunk high school, I just,” Johnny paused, “Decided to go in another direction.”
“He flunked high school,” Jungwoo reiterated.
Johnny stared down at his younger brother, wondering whether throwing him over his shoulder and throwing him into the lake would be appropriate in front of Jungwoo’s sexy teacher. Mr Qian sent him a smile and shrugged a little as if the comment didn’t faze him.
“You could always look into a summer tutor, it would be a great way to prepare Jungwoo for the next school year, I’m sure I could put you in touch with some great tutors. If you want, that is,” Mr Qian offered.
The elder brother simply nodded because if sexy Mr Qian told him to paraglide off the town bakery Johnny would strap himself into the machinery in seconds. Plus, no kid wanted a tutor over summer so it would probably give him blackmail points whenever Jungwoo acted up.
“There’s also a summer project and I’m hoping that you’ll both enjoy it, I figured building a volcano would be kinda fun for a couple of guys,” Mr Qian chuckled.
“Oh hell yeah, now we’re talking!” Johnny blurted, snatching the folder of summer homework from his brother to snoop through.
“That brings me to something else,” Mr Qian then said, his tone changing, “Jungwoo has a slight problem with the occasional cussing.”
“Are you saying shit at school?!” Johnny hissed as if it didn’t leave his own mouth all day every day, staring at Jungwoo with blazing eyes.
Two beanie babies will lose their life by the time the sun sets, Johnny growled to himself, Jungwoo smiling innocently. Johnny leaned in close to his kid brother and fake smiled with his whole face.
“Go sit in your room so I can talk to Mr Qian privately.”
“But Johnny,” Jungwoo pouted.
“I will just keep beheading beanie babies,” Johnny swore under his breath like a knight pledging to nothing but violence on a quest.
“I’ve seen what’s in your third drawer,” the child whispered with a devious smile and Johnny felt his whole body seize up.
Even with the brothers in a stalemate, Jungwoo shuffled off the couch and went to his bedroom, sending Johnny one last sneaky glance before closing his bedroom door. Johnny huffed and sent an apologetic look toward Mr Qian but the teacher surprised him, grinning, covering his lips as if trying not to laugh. Johnny felt his dumb wolf, alpha ego swelling at the sight and couldn’t help but smirk.
“He’s a great kid, huh?”
“I know it’s wrong to have favourites but,” Mr Qian too smiled, leaning in close and nodding, “He’s definitely up there. Jungwoo’s a great student and you’ve done really well. That was one of the reasons I wanted to especially pay a visit here, actually.”
The comment was lost on Johnny and the teacher could tell by his face.
“Grief can be hard on kids and I like to keep checking up on Jungwoo every so often, he told me that you guys struggled for a while in Echor,” Mr Qian glanced to his satchel as if he were about to say something unprofessional, “I was just curious if you were coping, at all, really.”
That surprised Johnny.
“Small towns like this must be a god-send because you won’t have to explain your situation every other day, but at the same time, I suppose it can stop you from talking about it,” the teacher stopped, caught himself even, his face going back to the professional teacher expression that just made Johnny wanna act up, “How are you?”
He acted it so simply as if it were such a uncomplicated question, and it would have been if they were friends that had bumped into each other on the street, but Mr Qian peeled open a band-aid that Johnny was trying earnestly to forget was there. He was taken back but nodded like one of those wobble-head dog figurines.
“I’m a much better brother than parent,” Johnny confessed but it made his tongue feel too heavy in his mouth to say much else.
“That’s good, Jungwoo needs a big brother, and I’ve never been worried or concerned about his welfare even if he can eat like a starved animal,” Mr Qian confessed with a slight laugh.
“You can say that again,” Johnny scoffed as he leant against the sofa and met the teacher’s eyes, “I appreciate that though, thank you. I’m glad you’re Jungwoo’s teacher. And I guess I better start a swear jar, huh?”
“Yes,” Mr Qian conceded with importance.
He rummaged through his satchel again, even his elbows were kinda cute under his button up, the sleeves pushed up from the obvious heat. He fished out a business card and offered it toward Johnny with both hands, before those pretty lips moved as he let out a low sweet ‘oh!’ of realisation. The satchel rummage started again but this time a book emerged and was pointed in Johnny’s direction once again.
“Jungwoo might have said something about,” they both glanced at the beginners cookbook in Johnny’s hands, “Well, I thought this might be useful. I swear by it.”
“I could use a divine intervention when it comes to cooking but I’m willing to try this too,” Johnny blurted with a laugh, “Thank you again, Mr Qian.”
“Kun, Kun’s fine,” the teacher insisted with a sweet smile.
“Then I’m happy with Johnny.”
He offered his hand, as sweaty and clammy as it was from the damn heat in this boiler of a house and shook Qian Kun’s nevertheless, smiling like a dumbass. He called for Jungwoo to say goodbye and felt a bit gooey when his kid brother hugged Kun’s middle with a smile. The teacher patted his head like it was a regular occurrence.
“Bye Mr Qian!” Jungwoo waved from the porch as the teacher climbed back into his car.
Qian Kun gave another wave that Johnny too reciprocated. He closed the car and in a swift u-turn was driving back up the road leaving only dust behind him. The brothers stood for a moment and watched it disappear until Jungwoo slowly glanced up at his brother inquisitively.
“Well,” Johnny began his verdict, leaning on the front door as the sun shone on his face, “Your teacher is a hell of a mega-babe. In fact, I think he’s probably up there as the ultimate babe. Absolute best babe material.”
Jungwoo immediately groaned and gave no remorse as he kicked his brother’s leg and walked back into the house to plonk himself down in front of the forgotten cartoons. Johnny hobbled inside, closing the front door and grinned as he pushed his bare foot into the side of Jungwoo’s face, who yelped and hit at him in defence. They tussled for a moment, Johnny moaning at Jungwoo for cussing at school, Jungwoo grumbling about his brother flirting with his teacher until the elder stripped off once again with sweet relief. He threw himself at the sofa, gave a long, lazy yawn, then stared at the back of his brother’s head.
“Hey, Woo,” Johnny started as his brother turned to blink at him, “Do we really have a home phone?”
“Yeah, we made that voicemail message, remember? I said ‘We’re not home right now so answer your phone after the’ and then you farted. It’s hilarious!” Jungwoo grinned with devious eyes.
Johnny immediately burst into laughter and clapped at himself, because of course he’d have come up with something so brilliant, even if he didn’t know where the hell it actually was.
☁