Chapter Text
The school bell rang and there was a collective sigh of relief from Hyunjin’s class. It was finally lunch. Once the teacher left the room, many kids in the class hurried out behind her, eager to enjoy convenience store lunches in the sun.
Hyunjin turned around in his seat, leaning his elbows on the desk behind him—a desk that belonged to his best friend Hajun.
“Why are you looking at me like that?” Hajun asked as he packed his books away.
“I was just wondering if my wonderful, amazing, incredible best friend would like to be ever so kind and buy me an onigiri from the convenience store so I don’t starve.” Hyunjin made an effort to bat his eyelashes and give Hajun the biggest puppy eyes he could muster.
“You’re gonna make him broke one day,” the girl sitting across from Hajun tutted, pushing Hyunjin off of the desk.
“Yumi, he has a job, I think his bank account will be fine,” Hyunjin grumbled as he ran his fingers through his hair. He cringed slightly at the short locks, trying to play with it to make it look even slightly acceptable. Yumi just rolled her eyes, a faint smile on her lips as she went back to packing up her things.
The school had made Hyunjin cut his hair not that long ago because it “wasn’t proper or tidy for boys to have long hair” and he hated it. When he had his long hair back, he was able to do so many things with it to make it look acceptable, now there was barely enough hair on his head for him to run his fingers through, let alone play with.
The three desk mates left the classroom not long after, heading outside towards the nearby convenience store. It was always flooded with students at lunch, which made it almost impossible to go more than a foot without bumping into someone.
Eventually, they managed to purchase their items, Hyunjin successfully using his epic charisma skills to get Hajun to buy him a kimchi onigiri and a drink, and the three of them headed back towards the main school building.
They didn’t go inside, however, instead walking around to the back of the building to a much quieter area of the grounds. Hyunjin and his friends had discovered this spot last year, wanting to hide away from the loud courts out the front, and it was now their designated lunch spot. There were a couple of trees that provided shelter from the sun and sometimes fruit in the summer months. There had been a couple of times when Jisung and his friends had tried to also sit under some of the trees out the back, but Hyunjin had kicked them out pretty fast.
Hyunjin flopped down onto the grass and took a big gulp of his drink with a content sigh. Yumi gave him another one of her signature judgy looks before taking a sip of her own drink, Hajun sitting down to complete the circle.
And that was how they spent their lunch hour, just sitting under the sun and chatting.
“I’m not ready for the English test next period,” Hajun groaned. Hyunjin stared at him.
“The what?” Hajun frowned.
“The end of topic English test? Ms Kim told us about it ages ago, don’t tell me you forgot.” Hyunjin swore under his breath and scrambled to his feet, almost forgetting to pick up his rubbish.
“Have fun studying!” Yumi called after him, cackling.
“I hate you!” Hyunjin called over his shoulder as he turned the corner.
Hyunjin took the stairs two at a time, hurrying into his classroom and practically throwing himself at his desk. There were a couple of girls still sitting in the room who shot him some odd looks, but he didn’t care. He just pulled out his English book and hunched over it, scanning each of the words.
God damn it, why hadn’t he asked Felix to help him with this unit? None of the words on the page made any sense to him. It didn’t help that the girls sitting on the other side of the classroom were giggling loudly as they flicked their long hair around, touching up each other’s makeup. Hyunjin rolled his eyes as he felt a twinge of jealousy. These girls had hair down to their waists, all sleek and shiny, why was his shoulder-length hair so offensive to the school?
He shook his head, trying to focus, but it didn’t work very well.
Before he knew it, the bell signalling the end of lunch was ringing. Great, time to fail the test.
To make his already bad mood worse, the girls in the classroom with him made a big scene out of packing up their makeup and hair things. Hyunjin noticed every flick of hair over their shoulders, every click of an eyeshadow pallet, and it was driving him mad. Why did they have to make such a spectacle of it anyway? It was almost as if they were showing off that they could do all these girly things and he couldn’t.
It wasn’t that he was jealous, though, don’t get the wrong impression here. The sound was just distracting, that's all.
As predicted, the English went absolutely terribly. Hyunjin held up his paper to show Hajun and Yumi his below 50%, internally kicking himself. It shouldn’t have been a hard test but he still failed. It was at moments like this when he was glad that Appa wasn’t super strict about getting perfect grades.
Hyunjin found it really hard to concentrate for the last two classes of the day, probably due to his terrible mark on the English test. There was a girl sitting at the desk in front of Hyunjin, Choi Jina he thought her name was, and she arguably had the longest hair out of anyone in their class. Now, this wouldn’t usually be a problem, but today Jina was constantly moving her hair back and forth, flicking it so it covered the page he was trying to write on, and just overall being extremely irritating. It took everything in Hyunjin to not break the silence of the working class and tell Jina to stop playing with her damn hair.
Finally, at 4:30 the bell signalling the end of the day rang through the school building.
A collective sigh of relief was heard across the classroom as the students began to pack their bags. Hyunjin didn’t have anything after school today and he was secretly grateful. He had been in a bad mood ever since lunch and he wasn’t exactly sure why. Every little thing was annoying him.
Hyunjin walked with Yumi and Hajun to the front of the school where he usually met his brothers to get the train home. He waved goodbye to his friends who headed in the same direction home and pulled out his phone to scroll idly as he waited for the others.
“Hyung!” came a familiar voice a few minutes later. Looking up, he saw Jeongin walking towards him. He waved to his brother as he approached, trying to ignore an uncomfortable twinge in his stomach.
“Lix and Jisung are gonna be a bit late, I think Jisung had to talk to his homeroom teacher about something,” Jeongin explained, leaning against the entrance gate next to Hyunjin. Hyunjin just hummed in response, going back to scrolling on his phone.
Once all of them had arrived, Jisung and Felix hurrying up to the group a whole 15 minutes late, they were finally able to head towards the train station. They didn’t technically all have to get the same train home, but it had become a little routine that none of them wanted to break.
It was about a 10-minute walk to the station and then another 20 minutes until they got to the stop nearest to their house. It was definitely a little bit of a trek but it gave all of them time to catch up before hiding away in their rooms for the rest of the evening.
“Oh, Hyu—hyung,” Hyunjin stammered as he turned to Changbin.“Have you seen my chemistry book? I couldn’t find it this morning.” There was something about the word “hyung” that his mouth couldn’t quite wrap itself around. It felt clunky and hard to say and triggered the odd sensation in his stomach once more.
“Have you developed a stutter or something?” Changbin teased, bumping Hyunjin with his elbow. “I think I saw it in the living room, did you not look on the couch?”
“I thought I did, I’ll look again when we get home.”
The group of them met up with Minho at the train station, the boy already waiting for them when they arrived. Minho’s high school was in the opposite direction to the middle school from the train station, so he didn’t walk with them anymore. There were days when he waited for them, others he didn’t, but Hyunjin always liked when he decided to wait. It was nice to see his older brother before dinner.
On the train, Hyunjin plugged his headphones into his phone and began playing music. It wasn’t that he didn’t want to talk to his brothers, he just felt like he needed a little time to think.
Why had the word “hyung” made him feel so…gross? It hadn’t really been an issue before. Sure, there had been the occasional time where he specifically hated being called hyung but that was just when he was in a bad mood and Jisung or Seungmin, even though they were only a couple of months younger than him, used it on him with the purpose of annoying him. This was probably just the same thing. He hadn’t had the best of afternoons, after all.
As soon as he stepped through the front door, Hyunjin briefly greeted his father before heading straight for his bedroom, muttering something along the lines of “homework”. It wasn’t entirely untrue, he did have a pile of homework that he had been putting off for a couple of days, but that was something that Hyunjin didn’t really want to tackle at the moment.
Even so, he eventually dragged himself to his desk and pulled out some of his books, letting out a big sigh before finally putting pen to paper.
It was much more effort than you would expect to write out each of the answers. The relatively short paragraph that he was supposed to be analysing was making absolutely no sense at all. It was almost as if the words were getting scrambled somewhere between his eyes and his brain. His mind was much too focused on the fact that “hyung” made him feel so repulsed. It was such a normal word being used in a normal way on a normal day, what was wrong with him?
After 30 minutes, Hyunjin had only managed to answer four questions. It was a pathetic attempt at his 15-question worksheet but it was the best he could do right now.
Knowing nothing else productive was going to get done, Hyunjin closed his books, picked up his phone, and buried himself in his blankets. Surely a little mindless scrolling through social media would cure his brain.
Hyunjin opened TikTok, arguably his favourite app, and began to scroll.
His feed was all the usual stuff, a couple of edits of his favourite musicians, a few funny clips from variety shows, and a couple of makeup or hair videos here and there. Hyunjin really enjoyed watching makeup tutorials, admiring the art form, and sometimes he had saved hairstyles he wanted to try when he had long hair. Sure, he was a little salty whenever he saw a hairstyle he definitely could have done before he cut his hair, but he still saved them as inspiration for later on.
Without realising it, Hyunjin had been lying on his bed for multiple hours and his entire feed had become makeup and hair videos. It had started with him liking a couple of videos and eventually, it had taken over.
The more he watched people do all kinds of creative makeup looks, the more Hyunjin wanted to try it himself. He already did art as a hobby, makeup was just art on your face, wasn’t it? There had been a couple of times where he had tried to braid his hair, attempting to imitate the hairstyle Halmeoni had done on him a couple of times when they were in Australia, but quickly found that hairstyling wasn’t for him. But it seemed like makeup could be.
Hyunjin was snapped out of his scrolling rabbit hole by a sharp knock on his door.
“Dinner’s ready,” came Minho’s voice, slightly muffled due to the wood between them.
“Right,” Hyunjin replied, his voice sounding awful to his ears. There was something wrong but he couldn’t quite pinpoint it.
Deciding to ignore it for now, he shrugged the thought off and pulled on a hoodie before heading out into the kitchen.
He was met with Appa placing the last steaming dish onto the table. He smiled at Hyunjin, who smiled back as he took his regular seat at the table next to Minho.
“How was school?” Appa asked him as he took his own seat. Hyunjin shrugged.
“It was alright. I completely forgot about an English test I had fifth period.”
“Oh, yeah? How did that go?” Appa chuckled.
“Oops,” was all Hyunjin could say.
“That’s alright, you can just study hard for the next one.” Hyunjin smiled, humming in response.
As the rest of his brothers appeared at the table, Hyunjin was getting a little impatient. The food in front of them looked so delicious, plates of various noodles and vegetables and banchan galore. It was definitely difficult to not snap at Jisung and tell him to sit his ass down so they could eat. Hyunjin loved his brothers but, my god, sometimes they could be slow.
“Thank you for the food,” they all chorussed as each person dived at their favourite plate. Appa always made sure to cook for an army so each of the seven kids was happy. Their dining table was certainly full at meal times, but it was just how Hyunjin liked it. There was constantly someone talking as they ate, usually multiple, and being all squished up with his brothers around the table was somewhat nostalgic. When they had been little, the eight of them had easily fit around the table, but now they were more grown up, it was getting more and more difficult, especially for Hyunjin himself. He had recently gone through a growth spurt, which meant that his legs were quite a bit longer than his brothers’. He was now taller than Changbin, which Hyunjin would never stop rubbing in the elder’s face.
As much as Hyunjin loved the noise and chaos of their house, sometimes it was just a little too much for his over-tired brain and he had to take his hearing aids out. Sure, it didn’t cancel out the sound completely since he still had some hearing left, especially in his left ear, but it did help to muffle everything to a more bearable level. And this was one of those moments where Hyunjin just quietly slipped out his hearing aids and put them on the edge of his chair to pick up later. Seungmin often said he was jealous that Hyunjin could just naturally block out most noise and, he had to admit, it was pretty cool.
Soon enough, the plates were cleared and the conversation dulled to a low rumble.
“Alrighty, let’s get this cleaned up, shall we?” Appa said, getting to his feet. Seungmin and Jeongin groaned. It was their turn on dishes duty.
While the two youngest helped Appa clean up the mess from dinner, Hyunjin and the others stayed at the kitchen table, just chatting idly with each other. Hyunjin and the twins were comparing where their different homeroom classes were in their Korean unit while Minho and Changbin were talking about some robotics thing or other Changbin was working on.
Before they could all disappear back into their rooms, Appa made a suggestion.
“Hey, how about we watch a movie together tonight? Surely you’ve all done your homework by now, it’d be nice to spend some time together.” There was a general murmur of agreement and the eight of them made their way over to the couch.
Hyunjin rolled over the back of the couch and spread his long body out as much as he could in order to take up almost all of the room on the couch.
“Hey, move over,” Felix complained, hitting Hyunjin’s leg.
“What if I don’t want to,” Hyunjin replied sassily.
“Then I’ll just sit on you,” butted in Changbin, who, true to his word, proceeded to sit all of his weight right on Hyunjin’s newly-full belly.
Hyunjin let out a groan as he tried his best to push off his brother with hits and shoves.
“Move, you twat, you’re gonna made me throw up,” the crushed boy complained.
“That’s hyung to you, whatever happened to respect your elders?” Changbin asked, smirking down at Hyunjin.
“Yeah, alright, got it, now get off.”
“Not until you say the word.”
“Please!”
“Not it.” Hyunjin groaned, wanting to smack that shit-eating grin off his brother’s face.
“Hyung,” he said with all the energy he could muster. “Now will you get off?”
Thankfully, Changbin did actually release Hyunjin from his misery. The boy sat up, coughing as he leaned against the back of the couch, Changbin taking the seat to his right. On his left sat Jeongin, which Hyunjin immediately took advantage of. He wrapped his arm around Jeongin’s neck and pulled him close, rumpling up his brother’s hair as much as he could with his free hand. Jeongin squirmed and squealed as he tried to escape, but Hyunjin had done his damage. Jeongin’s hair was now thoroughly messed up, sticking up in about five different directions.
Before anyone could make any more attacks, Appa joined them on the couch, the TV remote in his hand.
Since there were so many of them with such a wide range of interests, it was always difficult to choose a group movie to watch. Therefore, they usually settled on a good old Ghibli movie. They had been watching them since they were little and the movies were usually nice and relaxing to watch.
Tonight’s pick was Howl’s Moving Castle (Hyunjin’s personal favourite purely because of the aesthetics).
As the movie progressed, Hyunjin cuddled himself into Changbin’s side, wrapping his body around the boy’s arm. He and Changbin had pretty much been cuddle buddies since day one, and they both loved it. When he had first come to live with Appa and his brothers, Hyunjin had snuck up into Changbin’s room when he couldn’t sleep, slipping under the covers and enjoying the comforting feeling of his brother’s arms wrapping around him. He would always leave by the morning so Appa never found out, but Hyunjin liked it being their little secret. Sometimes, if he was really upset about something or couldn’t sleep, he would still sneak upstairs into Changbin’s room. Changbin never questioned it, never forced Hyunjin to talk about it, just hugged his brother until he was okay to be by himself again.
Once the film was finished, everyone slowly retreated back into their rooms, Hyunjin included. He was getting a little sleepy anyway, what was the harm in going to bed early? Plus, if he slept now, he could wake up extra early and try to get at least some of his homework done the next morning.
However, this didn’t go quite as planned.
Hyunjin went to bed, sure, but sleep? That was a little bit of a stretch. He lay tossing and turning as the hours ticked by ever so slowly. His body was tired, he desperately wanted to sleep, but his brain wouldn’t shut up.
Thoughts were running at a thousand miles an hour, going in every which direction, not allowing him to focus on one for more than a few seconds.
He didn’t like being seen as a boy, he had managed to reach that conclusion. It was the only reasonable explanation for the sickly feeling in his stomach every time he was called hyung…or was it? Maybe he was just overthinking it and making assumptions over a couple of bad experiences.
No, he definitely didn’t like being a boy. He wanted to be able to play with his long hair again and experiment with makeup, those weren’t things that boys did. His brothers didn’t do those things, he was the odd one out here.
…But did that mean that he wanted to be a girl?
No! He definitely didn’t want to be a girl, but there—there wasn’t anything other than boy or girl, why did it feel like both options were bad? He needed to be one or the other but the thought of being either made him feel sick.
He didn’t want to be a girl! He wasn’t a girl!
But he wasn’t a boy either…
Hyunjin picked up his phone and frantically began googling.
Why don’t I want to be a boy?
Can boys like girly things and still be a boy?
Boys doing hair and makeup
Boys doing hair and makeup not drag
What does it mean if I don’t want to be a boy or a girl?
Not boy or girl
Boys doing girly things
Is boys doing girly things normal?
Am I a boy?
Does liking makeup make you gay?
Difference between being a boy and girl in your head
Can you be neither a boy or a girl in your head?
What if I don’t want to be a boy or girl?
Do I really want to be a girl?
Really don’t like being seen as a boy
Do I just want to be a pretty boy?
Hyunjin’s hands shook as he clicked on multiple websites, reading article after article on genders he never even knew existed. Some of them were so incomprehensible that he barely understood them even after reading pages and pages about them.
Finally, he clicked on a website with a little image of white, purple, yellow, and black stripes on it.
NON-BINARY — WHAT DOES IT MEAN?
A non-binary person is someone who identifies as neither a boy nor a girl, just somewhere in between. They may identify as an intermediate gender, multiple genders, no gender, or even have a fluctuating gender identity. Although it can be used as a gender identity term, non-binary is also an umbrella term for genders outside of the male/female binary.
Hyunjin let out a shaky breath. Was this it? Was this who he was? Was he non-binary? It seemed to fit.
As he kept reading, everything seemed to slide into place. He was finally being given words for feelings that he had been experiencing for months on end but never understood. But why didn’t he feel happy?
The more he read, the larger the pit in his stomach seemed to grow. Yes, it was freeing to finally understand who he was and what he was feeling, but this also meant he would have to tell people. That thought was scarier than any other.
He had stumbled across multiple people telling stories of how they were disowned by their families, kicked out of friend groups, assaulted in the streets, just because they identified as a different gender. It was terrifying. And Hyunjin didn’t know what to do.
For now, he just promised himself to keep it a secret—something he just kept to himself until he figured it out, then he could tell people if, and only if, he was ready.
——
A couple of weeks had passed and Hyunjin had kept his promise. He hadn’t said a word to anyone, not so much as slipped up once, and he was proud of himself for that. He kept his interest in makeup to himself too, only watching tutorials alone in his room once the sun had long set.
Hyunjin had developed an interest in fashion as well, which he also kept a secret. Fashion design was a girly thing, he couldn’t expose himself like that. Instead, he hid his doodles of clothes in a sketchbook he never took outside of his bedroom.
And just like that, his secret was practically watertight.
There had been a couple of times when Hyunjin had secretly a little salty he didn’t have a mum or older sister in the house he could steal makeup from in the dead of night. It was only a fleeting thought and he was never actually upset about it, but he did think that that would’ve made things much easier for him.
Why doesn’t he just go out and buy his own makeup, you ask? Well, although makeup was pretty normalised for guys in Korea, it would definitely attract some odd looks if a 14-year-old boy was buying a glittery and colourful eyeshadow palette. That was something he desperately wanted to avoid. Plus, he couldn’t risk his brothers snooping in his room and finding makeup in one of his drawers. The fashion sketchbook could be explained by Yumi leaving it at their house one time and him just forgetting to give it back, but makeup? That would lead to unnecessary questions and dating questions he really didn’t want to answer.
If he was being completely honest with himself, Hyunjin still didn’t want to fully accept it. There were times when he wished he could go back to before he googled all of those questions that night. Then things wouldn’t be so complicated and he could go back to normal.
Instead, he just threw himself into his studies in an attempt to distract himself.
It didn’t work, though. Studying for hours may make his body tired but it didn’t make his brain magically turn off when he got into bed. The thoughts would always come back. What if he was faking it for attention? Maybe he had just made this whole thing up and he was actually completely okay with being a boy, there was something about him that just needed to have something special about him.
But no matter how much he wished this all could be fake, just a figment of his imagination, he knew deep down that it wasn’t. He was non-binary but didn’t want to accept it. Was it out of fear? Maybe. Maybe he just wanted so desperately to fly under the radar that at night he begged a god he didn’t even believe in to fix him. That’s what one of his old foster mothers would’ve made him do.
Old habits die hard, I guess.
Despite this, Hyunjin began to grow his hair out again. It wasn’t to the point where he could get in trouble with his school again, but just enough to make him smile when he felt the back of his hair brush against the collar of his school shirt.
It was a good feeling, one that he wanted to feel all the time. His belly did a little happy somersault each time he looked in the mirror and saw his fringe creep closer and closer to his eyes.
Maybe being different wasn’t all that bad.
It was a Sunday night and the house was quiet, Appa having gone to bed and all the kids hiding in their respective rooms. And Hyunjin was no different. He was lying on his bed, staring at the ceiling as he contemplated having to get up for school the next morning. His phone was somewhere on his desk, he could vaguely hear it dinging, but he didn’t really want to get up and read the notifications.
Instead, Hyunjin got to his feet and walked out of his room.
He wasn’t exactly sure where he was going but just followed his feet as they took step after step up to the second floor. He thought originally that he might be habitually heading to Changbin’s room for one of their occasional late-night cuddle sessions, but instead, he found himself walking towards Minho’s bedroom door.
Something in his subconscious needed his eldest brother right now.
He knocked gently on the door. He wasn’t even sure it had made a noise at first as he had taken his hearing aids out a couple of hours ago, but there was a mumbled reply on the other side of the door that Hyunjin assumed was a signal to come in.
Pushing open the door, Hyunjin saw Minho sitting at his desk, hunched over a maths book with a slight frown on his face.
“Oh, it’s you,” he said when he briefly laid eyes on Hyunjin before turning back to his book. “What is it?” Hyunjin didn’t respond, instead closed the door and silently walked over to his brother’s bed, lying down and staring blankly at the ceiling once more. He saw Minho glance back over at him for a moment before shaking his head and returning to his homework once and for all.
The two of them sat in silence like that for a while, Minho slowly working through his homework while Hyunjin lay on his bed, both lost in thought.
After however many minutes, Hyunjin wasn’t counting, the silence was finally broken.
“Minho.” Minho hummed in response, indicating that he was listening.
“I’m…I’m not a guy.” But before Minho could respond, Hyunjin spoke again. “But I’m not a girl either.” Hyunjin was staring determinately at the ceiling so they didn’t have to see Minho’s reaction. Honestly, as soon as the words had left their mouth, they regretted them.
They had broken their promise.
A couple of seconds passed in complete silence, Hyunjin overwhelmed by the feeling of blood pumping through their ears. But before they could say anything else, take back what they had said, tell their brother it was all a stupid prank, a joke, two hands were placed on their shoulders, pulling them into a sitting position before hugging them tightly. Hyunjin stayed frozen for a few moments before melting into the hug, wrapping their arms around Minho in return.
The two of them stayed like that for a long time, neither acknowledging what had been said, just sending unspoken messages through their touch.
Eventually, Minho pulled away first, placing his hands gently on Hyunjin’s wet cheeks and looking at them with warm eyes.
“It’s okay. You must’ve been scared, but it’s okay. I still love you, as stupid as you are.” Hyunjin let out a wet chuckle, sniffing as Minho wiped a stray tear from their cheek. “What’s your name?” Hyunjin shrugged.
“It’s still Hyunjin, but can you just not call me he anymore? I’m not a boy.” Minho smiled.
“Why would I call you something that you’re not?” Hyunjin smiled too.
“You should go to bed, you look tired,” Minho said after a little while.
“You have no idea,” Hyunjin chuckled, getting to their feet and heading towards the door. But they paused with their hand above the door handle.
“Minho,” they said. Minho hummed, looking over at Hyunjin. “Thanks.”
“‘Course. Goodnight.” Minho smiled, winking.
“Night.”
Hyunjin collapsed into their bed the second they entered their room, letting out a relieved sigh.
They had done it. They had finally admitted they were different, told someone, and everything was okay.
Being different wasn’t that bad after all.