area 7

seven.

A long sigh was all that could be heard in the room as Yugyeom shoved the last of his pajamas into the biggest suitcase he could find. His brother, Euigyeom, was the one who had let it out. Had Yugyeom bothered to turn and look at him, he might have felt guilty to see his brother as bedraggled as one of his dogs' toys.

That reminded him... "Vanilla and Choco. You'll have to take them with you. If they're even really dogs, that is."

Eui let out an indiginant noise. "Oh, you think the dogs are fake too? Is that what this has come to?" He pushed himself away from the corner and approached Yugyeom, who still hadn't turned to look him in the eye.

"Everything I did, I did for you. Don't you know that? Can't you see this hurts me?"

Yugyeom began to hum a tune- a foreign, unfamiliar tune. "I'm leaving tomorrow." He zipped the suitcase up and patted it with some sense of certainty, as much as he could muster. "I'm going to go get some books I left in my locker and..." he hesitated, before finishing, "and turn in the papers that say I'm dropping out. I'm old enough."

Euigyeom didn't say anything.

"What was my real name, I wonder?" Yugyeom mused aloud, as he left his now bare bedroom behind him.

"You never had a name. If you did, we would have called you that. We wouldn't have wanted to make any unnecessary changes like that." Euigyeom followed him, the door slamming shut in his wake.

Bambam was sitting on the couch in the living room, an unreadable expression on his multicolored eyes.

Yugyeom disregarded him, too. He had opened himself up once to Bambam's world of lies and emotional manipulation, and he wouldn't make that mistake again. He could feel both Bambam and Euigyeom's eyes leave him, where they had been trained, and divert to each other's eyes with cold-blooded contempt.

Had he the energy left to care, Yugyeom would have tried to separate them before a fight broke out.

After he had closed the front door  behind him, Yugyeom waited in front of the door momentarily. Sure enough, crashes and indescribable shouting could be heard easily through the door. He worried that someone would call the cops, until he realized that the cops couldn't follow him to space.

Space. It was a foreign, abstract concept to Yugyeom for the longest time. He mused over the reality of it as he loaded into his delicate, old car and skittered down the road to the school.

His brother had revealed the truth to him two days ago; the truth being that he, Kim Yugyeom, wasn't really a Kim at all. Or a Yugyeom. Or even human. Euigyeom had hesitated then- stopped just momentarily in his confession, and Bambam had jumped in to explain the rest.

He was sent away by his family for protection many years ago. His family, of course, being the now long-gone royal family of Justinia, an ancient alien civilization that had been ranshacked by space bandits 18 years ago.

He felt sick thinking about it. He hated sci-fi stories, and he hated cheesy situations like this. They weren't realistic; the 'lost prince' trope was overused. This was why he had liked to pretend that Bambam was using this part of the story just to convince him to come home. "Home" being wherever Bambam would take him, seeing as Justinia had blown up shortly after the raid.

Or at least, that was what Bambam had said.

He had shown up in a capsule moving at inconcievable speeds in Euigyeom's parents backyard. Space agents followed shortly after, promising good compensation (Yugyeom felt sick trying to decipher if his parents care for him was ever real) for watching over Yugyeom on Earth until he should be called upon.

And he had been called upon, by the prince of some planet he couldn't bother to recall the name of. Bambam had called it a utopian society, for its prosperity.

Why had he been called? That was above Bambam's clearance level.

He brushed it away from his mind- in about a months time, according to Bambam, they would arrive at Utopia. There he would find joy and love. This is what Bambam had promised him. Yugyeom didn't believe a word of it.

Pulling in to a parking space, he let out a characteristic sigh and prepared himself for the next grueling 20 minutes.

He knew, of course, that the school would fuss with him when he tried to drop out. Dropping out was much better than disappearing off of the face of the Earth- even though that was precisely what he was doing. He didn't want to be unable to come back. All of his ties needed to be cut.

He was both right and wrong. The secretaries who helped him unenroll were upset, but the main expression he saw from them was pity. It sickened him.

Yugyeom tried to get everything else done as quickly as possible. He dropped books off and said his goodbyes to the few people he talked with. He was lucky enough that day that he had no issues with that certain group of very homophobic boys that he'd commonly had dealings with. He wouldn't miss them.

He visited a few places on the way home. He told people he knew would remember that he was moving off the grid.

"I've come to realize that electricity is limiting what I can do. I want to host a survival show one day- like that "Naked and Afraid" show, so I have to practice." he told an elderly woman. Old Ms. Lee just smiled at him in a way that made Yugyeom crave to hug her and call her grandma, and told him that she would tell the other ladies. The unspoken words that passed between them were obvious.

Cover for me.

When Yugyeom arrived home, nothing was noticably broken. Bambam was sitting on the couch adjacent to Euigyeom, and the two were caught in a desperate and rabid game of Mario Cart.

"You suck at this!" Eui proclaimed. Pride oozed from his voice like chocolate.

Bambam was noticably behind Eui, but his face was expressionless amongst Euigyeom's various insults. While Yugyeom tried to tune them out, he found his brothers ability to insult Bambam's family, personality, appearance, and intellegence all in one phrase amazing.

Bambam hadn't shown Yugyeom much of anything after the first day. Once he had explained the true reason for his arrival in Yugyeom's backyard, he had begged and begged relentlessly for Yugyeom to hear him out for his heart. I wanted to tell you. I wanted you to know. I didn't want to scare you. I can't reject orders from the prince. Among other various excuses, Yugyeom knew he'd heard almost all that Bambam had to offer.

He understood Bambam's perspective. As Yugyeom pulled the covers up on himself for the last time in his childhood home, he realized the undeniable truth to all of Bambam's excuses. He wasn't mad at Bambam. Hurt, instead, filled every part of his heart and tore away at him like a disease.

As he slept, he tried not to think about Bambam at all, really. The alien entertained his every thought anyways. He wanted Bambam to want him. He wanted to feel the assurance that Bambam cared about him. Above all, he wanted Bambam to view him as so much more than his latest mission, as a person he dropped off and moved on from.

This he knew was to good to be true; and it had haunted him every night since that day. Bambam had told him as much the day before- that he didn't have a choice. That he would just drop him off at Utopia and Yugyeom could be rid of him.

Yugyeom didn't want to be ridden of him at all. He wanted him in every sense of the word.

It might have been unhealthy to want someone who would kidnap you if it came down to it.

It might have been wrong of him to want to see Bambam upset that Yugyeom was being cold to him, rather than just brushing it off.

It might have been stupid of him to love the one person who turned his simple life upside down.

He couldn't help any of it. Nor, he realised with a jolt, did he want the warm and fuzzy feeling that Bambam gave him to go away.

He never even considered that Bambam, just a wall away, was curled in a blanket thinking the exact same thing.

uwu here you go. Not proofread and not much action but a lot of feelings and explanation. I promise that there will be many happy emotions soon!!! You just gotta soldier through a pile of utter betrayal, sadness, and lies to get to it!