Chapter Text
A little boy in grade three with black hair and crooked teeth crouches in a sandbox at after-school daycare with a stick, idly drawing patterns into the yellow grain, even as the kids around him goof around the playground with their friends. One of the daycare teachers whispers to another about how he seems lonely, but he thinks to himself that he prefers it that way—he finds it hard to make friends. Out of nowhere, a slightly shorter boy with fluffy hair and chubby cheeks taps him twice on the shoulder, startling him so bad that he falls into the sand. This boy wears a cheeky grin as he watches the one he surprised fall.
“Wanna be friends?” he asks as he sticks his hand out for the other to shake. “My name is Choi Wooje.”
“...Moon Hyunjoon,” Hyunjoon says as he reaches up to shake Wooje’s hand from his spot on the ground. “Sure, we can be friends,” he continues. Wooje gives him a large smile as he crouches down into the sandbox with Hyunjoon, and promptly begins to dig a hole.
“Let's build,” he says as he uses his hands to scoop wet sand into a pile, so Hyunjoon follows suit, scooping wet sand into his hands and adding to the pile. When they're done, the pile reaches up to their knees, and Wooje has found a thin stick to plunge into the top of it, officially marking the completion of their castle. He raises his hands up to high-five Hyunjoon, but a second after they do, a group of kids older than them run up to the castle and the tallest one uses his foot to kick it down.
“Dumb deaf boy!” he taunts as he stamps the sand down harder. His entourage laughs as Wooje stares at the flattened pile of sand with an inscrutable expression. They all scatter away immediately after, giggling as one of the teachers speed walks towards them, but doesn't make any effort to rectify their behaviour. Hyunjoon stares at them as they run away, shocked, before quickly turning towards Wooje, who is crouching near the sand with a pout on his face, re-piling it into a mound, little stick by his side.
“You're deaf?” he asks Wooje, but Wooje doesn't respond, too focused on the sand. Hyunjoon huffs out a breath and waves his hand in front of Wooje's face, forcing him to turn his attention. “You're deaf?” he asks again, somewhat unsure if Wooje would be able to understand him.
“Only kind of,” he mumbles sheepishly as he hugs his knees to his chest. “It's okay if you don't wanna be friends anymore,” he continues, even as Hyunjoon can see tears well up in his eyes. “You can leave.”
Hyunjoon takes a second to deliberate, but there's no reason to stop being Wooje’s friend and the other kids are kind of mean, so instead he crouches next to Wooje and starts piling sand onto the mound again, rebuilding their little castle step by step. Wooje’s face splits into a wide grin as he realises Hyunjoon is staying.
“If you're deaf, how do you understand me? Do you know sign language?” Hyunjoon wonders as he scoops sand into his hand and dumps it on the top of the mound. Wooje tilts his head sideways and leans down further so he can see Hyunjoon’s lips, much to the confusion of the other. Hyunjoon leans backwards just a bit to get further away from Wooje’s face. “What’re you doing?”
“I can’t see you talk,” Wooje says, pointing at his lips. “I need to see you talk to understand.”
Hyunjoon makes an o with his mouth, still a little confused. “Is it like, you’re reading my lips?”
Wooje nods, a proud smile on his face. “I can only kind of understand but…try saying something without like, saying stuff,” he suggests.
Hyunjoon stares for a second, thinking about what to say, and then mouths the words ‘Moon Hyunjoon’.
“Moon Hyunjoon?” Wooje repeats back. “Your name?”
“Ooh!” Hyunjoon exclaims. "That’s so cool!”
He points to the teachers far off in the corner, discussing something amongst themselves, and then turns to Wooje. “Can you understand what they’re saying?”
“Can I understand what they’re saying?” Wooje repeats, confirming what Hyunjoon said. He squints at them, focusing to the best of his ability. “G…la…d…glad that…that…something about being glad about something,” he says, stuttering his way through the words. “They’re too far away.” Hyunjoon nods in understanding, and then remembers that he had a second question he never got the answer to.
“Do you know sign language?”
“Yeah, you wanna learn?”
He nods enthusiastically. “Please teach me.”
“What d'you wanna learn?”
Hyunjoon thinks it over for a moment, frowning in concentration. “I wanna learn pabo.” Immediately, Wooje starts laughing.
“Pabo?” he repeats, a smile on his face. Hyunjoon nods in confirmation and watches as Wooje puts a hand in the air and makes two signs, which Hyunjoon then tries to copy with no success.
“No!” Wooje giggles as he takes a step closer to Hyunjoon. “It’s like this!”
Hyunjoon moves his hand in the air again, awkwardly trying to copy Wooje’s movement. With a grin, Wooje grabs Hyunjoon’s hands and moves his fingers, making the signs for him.
“Like this,” he says as he morphs Hyunjoon’s hands from one sign to another. “Pa-bo.”
He lets go of Hyunjoon’s hands and waits for him to try one more time, clapping excitedly when he does it successfully. Then, almost immediately, he points at Hyunjoon and signs ‘pabo’, mouthing the word at the same time, before running away laughing. Hyunjoon yells at him and starts chasing him down, catching up in no time—he’s much faster than Wooje.
At the end of the day, when daycare is over and cars start piling into the parking lot, Wooje and Hyunjoon have become the best of friends, spending the entire rest of daycare playing with each other. They say goodbye that day with the promise to play together again tomorrow, and Wooje walks to his father, who grabs his hand and leads him towards their car. Hyunjoon runs to his mom, who is sporting a curious look on her face—Hyunjoon doesn’t usually have a friend with him.
“Who’s your new friend?” she asks as she opens the door to the car for Hyunjoon, holding it open until he plops into his seat.
“His name’s Wooje, he’s deaf,” he says in response as his mother ducks into the car, settling into her seat. The car engine rumbles to life as she turns the ignition and gets ready to leave, shifting the gears to reverse.
“Really?” she says as the car begins to back up, “how did you guys become friends?”
“We made a sand castle together,” Hyunjoon says, omitting just a bit of information. He pauses for a second, watching the blobs of buildings pass by through the window before he turns to face the driver’s seat again. “Mom, can I learn sign language?”
His mom raises her eyebrows, surprised at her son’s maturity. “Of course you can, we can learn together,” she answers proudly.
The next day, when Hyunjoon sees Wooje at before school daycare, he immediately makes the sign for greetings, and watches as a giddy smile spreads on Wooje’s face while he rapidly returns the sign back to him.
“You learned!” he exclaims as Hyunjoon runs next to Wooje’s seat on the carpet. Hyunjoon’s heart swells with some sort of pride, and he takes a seat next to Wooje, ignoring the weird look one of his peers gives him.
“I learned this yesterday with my mom!” he says happily as he signs it again. Wooje’s eyes sparkle as he looks at Hyunjoon with cheerful, crescent moon eyes.
“My parents don’t even speak sign language!” he exclaims. “Only my brother speaks it!”
Hyunjoon tilts his head, confused. “Your parents don’t know sign language? Aren’t they supposed to?”
Wooje shrugs and reaches across the carpet to pull a toy bin full of cars out of a shelf, and Hyunjoon is left with the thought that Wooje’s parents are a bit mean for that.
The first time Wooje meets Hyunjoon’s parents, it's a week after they meet, because Hyunjoon’s mother invited Wooje to their house. After asking his own parents for permission, Wooje agreed giddily and was dropped off at Hyunjoon’s house on a Saturday morning. As Wooje walks into the house, he bows and greets Hyunjoon’s parents politely.
“Thank you for having me!” he says as he takes his shoes off and puts them on the shoe storage. Hyunjoon’s dad and mom greet him back, and Hyunjoon’s mom stops to think for a second before she signs a greeting. Immediately, Wooje’s eyes go wide in surprise, but a smile follows and soon he's greeting them back enthusiastically.
They move past introductions fast, and Hyunjoon tugs Wooje by the hand towards his room to show him the new toys he got when his family went to the mall. They spend the day running around the house playing tag, pretending to be adventurers and sneaking under tables and around furniture, and watching TV shows with dinosaur shaped fruits that Hyunjoon’s mother cut out for them.
After dinner, when Wooje’s mother calls to let them know that they're coming to pick Wooje up, Wooje pouts sullenly, clearly opposed to the idea.
“I don't wanna go home…” he mutters as he grabs a piece of melon from the plate of fruit Hyunjoon’s mother prepared for them. “I'm having so much fun…”
Hyunjoon’s mother smiles and pats his head reassuringly as she passes by, before setting a mug of water down on the table. “It's okay Wooje,” she says warmly, making sure to face Wooje. “You can come over whenever you want!”
Wooje perks up at that, and he smiles at Hyunjoon’s mom excitedly. “Even tomorrow? And tomorrow tomorrow?”
Hyunjoon’s mom laughs, smile lines wrinkling around her eyes. “If your parents say yes, of course! We're always open for Hyunjoon’s friends!”
And with that open invitation, a routine is set—almost every Saturday, Wooje heads to Hyunjoon’s house to hang out for a day, whether to play with toys or do homework or watch a movie. There's rarely a Saturday in which Wooje is not at Hyunjoon’s house. Throughout this time, Hyunjoon learns that he's a year older than Wooje, and that Wooje is particularly interested in art stuff. He learns that Wooje is also very smart for his age—he's helped Hyunjoon with his math on numerous occasions.
The first time Hyunjoon goes to Wooje’s house it’s when he's in grade four and Wooje is in grade three. His mom drops him off at Wooje’s house on a Saturday and they have the entire house to themselves, spending their time in Wooje’s room building the Lego set Hyunjoon brought over because Wooje wanted to build it with him.
Wooje's room is surprisingly boring, his bed is white, and the blanket is navy blue with a pattern of yellow stars. The walls are light blue and all the surrounding furniture comes in either white, or a shade of brown. For a fourth grader's room, there’s a distinct lack of decoration—no competition certificates, no posters on the walls, no toy figurines, and only two family photos, which he finds especially odd considering the amount of photos there are around the house. Instead of decorations, scattered around the room are various textbooks on subjects above Wooje’s grade level, and a couple non-fictions that Hyunjoon assumes he reads for fun. The only item of note is a huge, fluffy, stuffed duck whose yellow colour sticks out against the monotony of its surroundings. When he leaves to use the washroom, he passes by a different bedroom, assumedly Wooje’s brother’s, and peers into it out of curiosity.
This bedroom has much more in it—the layout is the same, but there are so many more colours and so many more decorations. A framed certificate for a math competition is nailed to the wall at the top of the headboard, followed by a myriad of different photos of birthdays, chuseoks, and Halloween festivals. The shelves are decorated with mini-figurines of popular video game characters and there's a couple English competition awards nailed above them.
Does Wooje not like that type of stuff? Hyunjoon wonders as he starts walking to the washroom again. When he gets back to Wooje’s room, Wooje is sitting cross-legged, waiting patiently for Hyunjoon to return.
“You don't like decorations?” he signs, nodding towards the shelves. “I saw a bunch of figurines on your brother's shelves.”
Hyunjoon can see a frown flit onto Wooje’s face for a second as he takes a seat across from him. The expression dissolves fast, leaving way for indifference.
“My parents don't know what I like, so they don't buy me anything,” he signs back, hands stiff. “I don't usually go out with them when they celebrate stuff either, so I don't have any photos to put on my walls.”
“Why don't you go out with them?”
Wooje presses his lips into a line, avoiding Hyunjoon’s eye contact.
“They don't wanna deal with the fact that I'm deaf,” he answers, movement deflated. His eyes flit over to the family photos momentarily as he signs, before quickly returning to the Lego on the ground. Hyunjoon follows his gaze and takes a second to really look at the photos—one is of Wooje’s birthday, his family sitting behind a table with a birthday cake in the middle, and the other is a Christmas celebration, a candid photo of him and his brother opening presents. When he turns back, Wooje is putting together two Lego pieces and checking over the instruction manual again. He waves a hand in front of Wooje before signing.
“You don't do…” he pauses as he tries to remember the correct signs. “Competitions either?” he continues, referencing the awards the other room had. Wooje sighs and gets up from his spot on the floor to walk to one of his shelves.
“I used to do competitions,” he says as he pulls open a drawer and fishes a sheet of paper out of it. “I won first in a math competition once, but mom and dad don't really care, so I just put all my awards in here.”
Hyunjoon gets up to follow Wooje, walking towards the drawer. He peers inside of it and sees that there are multiple math awards, and even a medal for a science fair. Hyunjoon grabs the medal and stares at it, amazed—it’s actual metal, cold and heavy in his hand.
“You can have it if you want,” Wooje says as he registers Hyunjoon’s expression. “It's not like I need it for anything.”
Hyunjoon snaps his attention to Wooje, a huge smile on his face. “Really? You'd give me this?”
“Yeah,” Wooje answers, a little shy. “You can have it.”
“That’s so cool,” Hyunjoon says as he hangs the medal around his neck. “Thank you!”
Hyunjoon takes a step forward to give Wooje a hug, much to the surprise of the other. It lasts for a total of a second, but Hyunjoon can feel Wooje’s reluctance to let go when he pulls back.
That day, on the car ride back home, Hyunjoon decides that he wants to get a Polaroid camera—he wants to give Wooje photos he can put on his wall.