[Guest Writer: Takenoko] – To Meet the Height of Birds (3/?) – A SKKS fanfic

Title: To Meet the Height of Birds (Episodes #3-4)
Genre: General, Romance
Characters: Jae Shin, Yoon Hee
Words: 976
Summary: The words in my mind are not displaced yet…

o.o0o.o

The morning after, he wakes to warm rays of sun settling across his face and finds himself the only one still in the room. The bedding is all neatly rolled up and put away, and for a short moment Jae Shin feels aggrieved that his roommates didn’t bother to wake him up for breakfast. Then he remembers that he is the one who kicked them out of the room in the first place.

As he stretches languorously, he tries to justify why he’d let himself fall asleep with two strangers in the room. Never, in all his years at Sungkyunkwan, had Jae Shin ever had a roommate. Usually it only took one candle length’s time for him to terrorize the prospective person or persons into fleeing to another dorm room for the rest of the semester. Those who gathered up enough courage to actually go to bed the first night were quickly apprised of their mistake when the “sleeping” Geol Oh started to issue ominous threats or wrestle with imaginary foes dangerously close to their bodies. The night before, though, he’d been utterly exhausted from all the running and jumping around as the Hong Byuk Seo, and his already poor mood was only aggravated by Lee Sun Joon’s witty yet insulting twist of logic. All he had wanted was for the talking to stop so he could get some much-needed shut-eye. And seeing as how the shorter of the two men in the room was clearly the very same individual who’d saved his butt earlier by lying to the royal guards, and the other was a Noron pansy with a stick up his butt, Moon Jae Shin had felt that further harassment of the freshmen could wait until morning.

After kicking the whimpering pretty boy into the middle spot as a buffer between himself and the Noron punk, Jae Shin had let his mind drift, waiting until he could be sure that the two posed no threat. He’d meant to work on composing a new message for his next midnight outing, but as Kim Yoon Shik’s hyperventilation gradually slowed into deep, even breath sounds, he had found it harder and harder to follow a steady train of thought. And so it was that amidst the placid hush of wind-blown leaves and the autumn-wood scent of the boy sleeping next to him, Jae Shin had let his guard down and slipped into a dreamless sleep.

o.o0o.o

After catching Lee Sun Joon leaving the Analects of Confucius class and giving the arrogant fool a piece of his mind, Jae Shin walks around the corner and runs straight into Kim Yoon Shik, who is accompanied by the three students who’d been antagonizing Lee Sun Joon just a moment ago.

“Sa-hyung!” Kim Yoon Shik has the same open-mouthed expression of nervous surprise that Jae Shin’s seen him wearing every time he’s ever bumped into the fellow. Jae Shin wonders if he doesn’t mind being manhandled, and glances at Ahn Do Hyun, who has an arm slung around the kid’s shoulders, out of the corner of his eye. The brief eye contact is enough to make the older man flinch and drop his arm precipitously.

“U-uhm, we’re headed to Banchon for some drinks. Want to come with?” Yoon Shik looks sincerely hopeful, albeit still likely to faint at any moment.

“Hey! I told you, not the old guys, just us fresh-“ Ahn Do Hyun’s blustering is cut off abruptly when Jae Shin takes a single step forward and lifts his head slowly to glare at him.

“Oy…Get. Lost.” Each word is punctuated deliberately with another step closer to the three trembling freshmen, and suddenly their group bravado cracks and they’re stumbling backwards, leaving Kim Yoon Shik staring after the cloud of dust they leave in their wake. The fading sound of their panicked voices travels back up the hill: “We’ll meet you there, Daemul!”

Said “Big Shot” turns to look at Jae Shin reproachfully. “I don’t know how to get to the village bar.”

He sighs inwardly. Newbies.

“Walk with me,” he says, jerking his head for the younger boy to follow as he leads the way to the entrance gate. This will be the perfect opportunity to figure out if Kim Yoon Shik suspected anything after coming face to face with the Hong Byuk Seo last night.

They match each other’s pace perfectly as they walk across the school grounds, Kim Yook Shik staring intently at his own feet, while Jae Shin looks everywhere except directly to the right of him. He clears his throat and begins, casually, “About last night…”

Kim Yoon Shik’s head shoots up like a startled wren. “Ah, yes. Did you sleep well, Sa-hyung?” Jae Shin pauses and turns to look carefully at Yoon Shik, who slowly turns scarlet under his scrutiny. He wonders what the other is thinking of when his eyes drift ever so slightly to the side and widen as if in remembrance…

“Why do you ask?” he returns. (But in answer to his question, the truth is, he’d never slept better).

“Well, you kind of,” -here, a painfully embarrassed gesture, “rolled over onto to me while you were sleeping. I thought maybe you had a bad dream?” Yoon Shik peers up at him from underneath ridiculously long, dark lashes, and he freezes. All thoughts of interrogation have flown the way of the migrating geese, completely emptied out of his head as he feels his own cheeks start to burn. What had possessed him last night? He can’t imagine what it must have looked like to the poor kid, crushed by some crazy upperclassman on his first night at Sungkyunkwan.

Jae Shin shakes his head to clear some unwelcome images from his brain. “I slept fine,” he replies gruffly. “Next time, wake me up for breakfast.”

In the future, you’ll sleep here. Forever.

o.o0o.o

This drabble is a combination of two snapshots in time- the first being my favorite scene from episode 3, when Moon Jae Shin bullies poor Yoon Hee into sleeping in between himself and Lee Sun Joon (though I wouldn’t mind if he kicked me into the spot right next to him, not at all! ^^;) – and the second being a product of my imagination: how would the legendary Geol Oh react to his new sleeping arrangements “the morning after”? The fact of the matter is, he was probably so comfortable sleeping next to Yoon Hee, he wasn’t able to issue a single complaint!