#yoooooo this au is getting angstier by the second

[onewfantaesy]

Step Family AU

“So what do you talk to your therapist about?” Kibum asks that Sunday morning, leaning against Taemin’s doorframe. Taemin only rolls over on his bed and groans.

“Go away.”

“What do you talk about?” Kibum presses, stepping into the room.

“What do you care?”

“Do you talk about me?”

Taemin looks at him with the only eye that’s visible from beneath his blankets and pillows. Kibum can barely see the kid’s face, but the way his eye moves tells him enough.

“Get out!”

“What, what do you tell her?” Kibum asks, moving even closer. Then he continues in a high, snotty voice, “He’s the meanest big step-brother ever, I hate him, he’s so mean to me.”

“Get! Out!”

Taemin pushes off his blankets and rolls out of bed to shove Kibum away.

“Kibum is so mean all the time! I wish I was an only child! Wah wah wah!”

“Leave me alone!” Taemin shouts, and he shoves Kibum hard enough to get him out of the room and then slam the door.

It puts them both in a bad mood all day. By three o’clock, Kibum is texting his mom relentlessly to come pick him up.

Two months later, it’s the fifth time Kibum is forced to sit in the therapist’s waiting room while Taemin has his dumb session. He thought this was only a few sessions, that Taemin would be done with it by now. He’s apparently on session number nine or ten, how many of these does he need?

“If you’re gonna keep bringing him to the crazy doctor, can you not just let Mom pick me up from school instead?” Kibum snaps when they walk in. Taemin’s head ducks down, and it gives Kibum a weird satisfaction to see him so embarrassed, but Jinki looks livid.

“Stop it,” he says carefully. “Be nice. It’s one hour, it won’t kill you to wait.”

Taemin practically runs into the back when he’s called in. Kibum rolls his eyes.

“You know,” Jinki says, his voice tight, “it might benefit you to see someone as well. Your mother and I were talking about it just yesterday.”

“I’m not some lunatic like he is,” Kibum hisses. “I don’t need to go spew my feelings to someone like that little emo freak.”

“Cool it,” Jinki warns him. “Do not talk about him like that. Do you understand?”

“Whatever.”

Taemin’s eyes are rimmed red when he comes back out an hour later, and Kibum wants to make fun of him for being a crybaby, but the look from Jinki tells him he’d be getting more than just grounded if he started making fun of the loser. When Jinki tries to put a hand on Taemin’s shoulder, Taemin shrugs it off violently and stomps away to go to the car.

Dinner that night is tense, and it’s more than just Taemin and Kibum making faces at each other when their parents aren’t looking. There’s something obviously wrong, but Kibum can’t pinpoint what it is. Minjung had started filling all of their plates before dinner the last few times Kibum was over, which was unusual. She usually just put everything in the middle and let you grab whatever you wanted. Taemin looked angry, and for a moment, Kibum swore he looked scared. He also was mostly pushing his food around his plate, enough for Minjung to whisper softly for him to stop.

“I’m not hungry,” Taemin mumbles.

“Taemin, please,” Minjung says softly. “Just a few more bites.”

“I’m not hungry,” he whines.

“Oh my God, stop being such a crybaby,” Kibum snaps. “Just eat it.”

“Shut up!” Taemin screams at him, and he flings his whole plate ate Kibum before bolting to his bedroom.

“What the fuck is his problem!” Kibum shouts.

“Kibum-”

“You’re gonna let him just do that shit to me? That’s so unfair!”

“Maybe it’s best if you went back to your mother’s,” Jinki says gently.

“What, now it’s my fault he’s a psycho?”

“No, it’s just - now isn’t the best time-”

“Oh, so you don’t have time for me anymore? That’s real nice.”

“Kibum, that’s not-”

“Whatever, I’m gonna go call Mom. I don’t wanna be here anyway.”

Kibum stomps down the hall to go to his room. When he passes by the bathroom he and Taemin share, he can hear the kid gagging from inside. Kibum thinks he’s just being a drama queen.

Boa picks him up twenty minutes later. Kibum doesn’t miss the way all the adults look behind exhausted, but he convinced himself he doesn’t care. He just wants to go home.

“They’re going through a lot right now,” Boa says softly on the drive home. “With Taemin. It’s - a very delicate situation.”

“Because Taemin is so gentle, right?” Kibum says with a snort.

“Kibum,” she says, her voice still soft and edged with worry.

“Don’t tell me you’re falling for his bullshit too?” Kibum whines. “Did you not hear what Dad said to me? They don’t have time for me! That’s fucked up!”

“It’s not that they don’t care about you,” she tells him. “But this is something very serious, and it needs to be taken care of as quickly and carefully as possible. To get you mixed in with everything wouldn’t be good for you.”

“What is so wrong with him?” Kibum snaps. “Is he finally going psychotic? I could have told you he was a little asshole lunatic years ago!”

“That’s also why getting you involved wouldn’t be good - for anyone,” she says, her voice flat. “You can be very antagonistic towards him. I wish I knew why, so I could help you, but it’s not good for either of you to be so mean to each other all time.”

“Whatever.”

“You might not go to your dad’s much for a little while,” Boa says. “But we’ll still see them. They’re still family, and we all still love each other very much.”

“Sure we do.”

Boa sighs, but she doesn’t say anything else on the matter.

The next Monday, there’s talk at lunch about how a seventh grader apparently fainted during gym class. Sure enough, Kibum sees Minjung’s car pull up and watches her rush into the main office, only to bring out a very pale, very annoyed looking Taemin a few minutes later. He’s got two big, red scrapes: one on his right arm, and the other on his right leg. Kibum has heard he fainted while running laps on the asphalt. It wasn’t even hot out. What a drama queen.

“Isn’t that Taemin?” Woohyun asks. “Do you think he’s the kid who fainted?”

“Probably,” Kibum snorts, turning back to his lunch. “Probably just doing it for attention.”

Woohyun looks at him, but doesn’t say anything else.

That Wednesday, there’s a rumor that a different seventh grader fainted during gym. During his lunch period, Kibum sees Kai going home with his own mother. That’s odd. Maybe they just both got sick or something?

Kibum puts the fainting thing out of his head. It had to be for attention. Taemin and Kai both take dance class together, they probably thought it up together as some weird prank or something. They’re both losers. That’s all.

A month later, Kibum is waiting after school for his mom to pick him up. He hasn’t been back to his dad’s at all in the last few weeks, but they have had dinner together as one big annoying blended family a couple times. Taemin hardly ate anything either time, and when any of the adults tried to coax him into eating more, it would just set him off and make him start arguing with them. He never got in trouble for it, that Kibum could tell. What a double standard.

But then as Kibum is walking along with Woohyun, he sees Taemin sway a bit next to Kai. His hand his holding on tight to Kai’s arm, but then his eyes roll back and he’s hurtling towards the ground and Kibum’s breath hitches. Taemin passes out right there, on the cement, the only reason he doesn’t crack his head open is because Kai held him and lowered him down as gently as he could.

“Taemin? Taemin!” Kai calls, panicking and lightly tapping Taemin’s cheeks.

Kibum doesn’t know why, but he rushes over to check on the kid. He even kneels down and puts his backpack down so he can get a better look, even takes his sweatshirt off to put it under Taemin’s head.

“Hey, loser, wake up,” Kibum says, his voice shaking. Then he snaps his head up at Kai. “What happened?”

Kai just shakes his head, his lips trembling.

“We have dance after school,” is all Kai says, his voice shaking.

“So what?” Kibum snaps.

“Kibum? Kibum, is that Taemin?” Boa calls, and she gets out of her car after parking it on the side and rushes over. “Kibum, call Minjung and ask her who’s picking Taemin up today, and if it’s her then tell her to come right here. If it’s your dad, call him instead.”

A small crowd is forming, but the fact that a parent is there seems to be keeping most people at bay. Taemin groans just as Kibum tells Minjung what happened, and he blinks a few times and looks at Boa with a very confused look on his face.

“Taemin? Hi Taeminnie, it’s Auntie Boa,” she says gently, holding his hand. Then she asks in a very soft voice, and Kibum can hardly hear her, “Can you tell me what you ate today?”

“I have dance today,” is all Taemin says, and he sits up even though Boa tells him not to rush. Kibum can’t figure out what dance class has to do with any of this, but it’s starting to piss him off that he can’t put it together.

Minjung rushes over quickly, and she looks frantic and worried and like she might cry.

“You’re not going to dance today,” she says as she brings Taemin to the car.

“No, Mom, I have to!”

“Taemin, you’re passing out! Do you not see what this is doing to you?”

“I have to!”

They’re already too far away for Kibum to hear anything else, and Boa just tells him quietly to get in the car.

“What does dance have to do with him passing out?” Kibum snaps. “What is going on? Or you just gonna keep telling me I can’t know?”

Boa sends him a look; it’s soft and full of worry and exhaustion. Whatever’s going on is making all of Kibum’s parents freak out, and he’d like to know now. He’s tired of being kept in the dark.

“You cannot use this against him,” she warns him as she starts driving towards the elementary school to pick up Sehun and Yeri. “I’m serious, Kibum. I don’t even want you saying anything to him about it, so you understand?”

“Okay, okay,” he scoffs. “Will you just tell me what’s going on?”

Boa sighs, and her grip on the steering wheel is so tight her knuckles turn white.

“Taemin and his friend Kai, they’re both in the same dance class. You know that.”

“Okay, yeah, so?”

“They’ve been having - issues,” she says gently. “The dance world can be very cruel. Very harsh. It’s part of the reason we pulled Yeri out of it last year.”

“I thought she just didn’t like it anymore?”

“Well, that too.”

“So what’s so harsh that has him fainting at the drop of a hat?” Kibum scoffs. Then he snorts, “What’s he doing, starving himself?”

The way Boa’s breath catches sends a pang in Kibum’s chest.

“Taemin loves dancing,” she says, her voice shaking. “You know that. He’s such a perfectionist about everything, and then a few other kids said some things to him and Kai. They’re getting older, their bodies are changing, they’re boys. I don’t know all the details, but the two of them have apparently been trying to become very, very thin. They think it will make their dancing better. That they’ll be better if they’re thinner. And poor Taemin - he was already so skinny, I can’t imagine what’s going on in that head of his.”

“When did this all start?” Kibum asks, his voice quiet.

“We’re not quite sure,” she admits. “But it came out when Taemin started seeing this therapist for those poems. Turns out it apparently had nothing to do with his father, but I’m not sure if that ever got completely solved. The eating became the new focus, since it was more concerning.”

Kibum doesn’t know how to feel. He doesn’t know what to do. What to say. But then they’re picking up Sehun and Yeri, and it’s not a conversation they’d have around the little ones anyway.

When Kibum is walking to class the next day, he sees Taemin leaving his lunch period and throwing out a whole, full brown bag of food. He and Kai both. Kibum doesn’t know what to do.