#[in her own head] Not Even Han Yoohyun Himself.

[wovenstarlight]

I love thinking abt yoohyun & yerim. in ageswap they're each other's staunchest allies but also always 3 seconds from killing each other violently because yerim keeps telling him that if yoohyun fucks up with yoojin any more she's stealing him and not letting yoohyun near him ever again and hearing this always fills yoohyun with blackout homicidal rage because that's HIS brother but also he VERY GRUDGINGLY appreciates knowing there's someone else looking out for yoojin

[yersina]

👀 How about an AU where Han Yoojin was a sugar baby in order to make enough money to feed and house teenager Yoohyun (before Yoohyun became a S ranked hunter) while also having a flexible enough schedule to be able to spend so much time with his brother. From here, there's so many different ways this can go. Do we have Yoohyun who leaves his older brother behind, so Yoojin returns to sugaring - and he has a very rich and powerful sugar daddy? Yoohyun discovering & freaking out?

((sldkjfjsd the amount of actual sugar baby content in this is minimal, but uh, the spirit of it is kinda there??))

~~~

If Yoojin told anyone that he knew pro-tennis player Moon Hyuna, absolutely zero people would believe him, least of all himself. But the world is smaller than anyone would think, and when one of Yoojin’s high school friends hears that he’s in some financial trouble after his parents leave the moment he becomes of age, he points Yoojin in her direction with a shrug and says something to the effect of, “She’s nice, mostly, when you get to know her.”

A ringing endorsement.

Still, he’s starting to get desperate, and there’s only so much that a high school graduate with no time to earn a college degree and a teenager to support can do on his own. So he calls her, arranges a meeting, and heads to the restaurant that she suggests in the nicest shirt that he owns.

“So, Yoojin-ssi,” she says, collecting water droplets from her cup on her fingers and flicking them onto the tablecloth in the way that people do when they’re quite bored at a restaurant. “You need a few hundred more a month to help support yourself and your brother?”

It’s uncomfortable, having it put in stark terms like that, but he nods. “Just until he’s out of high school.” He should have enough by then to put Yoohyun through college.

Hyuna hums consideringly and takes a drink of her water. Yoojin watches her swallow apprehensively. “Okay,” she says decisively, setting the glass down on the table. “You said he just started high school, right?” Yoojin nods again. “I can do that. There are worse spending habits for an athlete to have,” she says, grinning.

The tension in Yoojin’s shoulders slowly relaxes. It’s not a contract or anything, he doesn’t know how long this promise will last, or even if Hyuna will change her mind as soon as they leave the restaurant, but. It’s something. “Does Hyuna-ssi want anything in return?” he offers. “It’d be very unfair, otherwise.” He’s a little concerned about what she might suggest, but Hyuna has been very generous so far, and she’s not… unattractive, and—

Hyuna grins and leans in. “I’ve been thinking about this for a while, and I think I have an idea. Yoojin-ssi, would you be comfortable pretending to be my boyfriend?”

Yoojin is already opening his mouth to agree when he actually processes what she says. “‘Pretend’?”

Hyuna waves a hand. “I’m at the age where my parents keep hounding me to start dating,” she says with a grimace, “but I’m not very interested in the idea. Never have been. And even if I was, you’re not my type. In any way.”

Oh.

Hyuna raises an eyebrow at him pointedly.

Oh. 

Well, that’s good.

“I think that’ll be fine,” he says, not bothering to hide his relief. It doesn’t even feel that embarrassing when Hyuna laughs. 

“So, Yoojin-ah,” she says, propping her head up on a hand and looking at him through half-lidded eyes. Yoojin is starting to get the strong sense that he’s going to have to start growing some more backbone in this relationship if he doesn’t want Hyuna to just bulldoze over him. “Now that we’re dating, should you call me noona?”

“Hyuna… noona,” he says, and winces when she laughs at him again. 

“It’s okay, we’ll work up to that one,” she says brightly. “Now, what do you want to order?”

-

To his surprise, Hyuna sends him a contract a few days later with some more details on what their agreement will actually entail, written in surprisingly formal and official-sounding language. “You might want to get it looked at by a lawyer or something,” she suggests seriously. “Especially since it involves money.”

Yoojin doesn’t have the guts to take something like this to a lawyer, especially since it has section titles like ‘Duties of the Pretend Relationship’ and ‘Physical Boundaries of Relationship’, but he does look it over carefully himself and makes sure to bring up any questions that he has with her. 

“Why is there a clause in the section about the pretend relationship about cooking?” he asks one weekend, balancing his phone between his ear and his shoulder as he slices a mushroom.

Hyuna groans, loud enough that it crackles over the connection. “My mom is one of those old fashioned people who thinks I should take care of all the housework and do all of the cooking, so whenever she sees us together, you should always mention my food or let me cook.”

“Oh.” Come to think of it, his own mother had always been the one to cook in his family too, even if Yoojin was convinced that his father was better at it. “If you ever want me to cook, I can cook for you.”

Hyuna laughs. “We’re not actually dating, Yoojin-ah, I think you’ll be fine.”

“Right.”

Just as Yoojin starts to flounder for another topic of conversation, Yoohyun pops his head into the room. “Hyung, who are you talking to? Hyung, how many times have I told you that you’re going to get a cramp if you keep trying to talk on the phone in that position?”

“Is that your brother?”

Yoohyun jogs over and tugs the phone from between Yoojin’s ear and shoulder, putting it on speakerphone and setting it on the counter. “Thanks, Yoohyun-ah,” he says, ruffling Yoohyun’s hair, before answering Hyuna. “Yeah, this is Yoohyun. Say hi.”

“Hi,” Yoohyun says, sounding confused.

“Hi, Yoojin’s brother!” Hyuna chirps.

“...who are you?” he asks hesitantly. Yoojin has approximately half of a second to recognize the impending doom, and then he’s rushing to push him out of the kitchen.

“I’m your brother’s—”

“Oh, look, Yoohyun-ah, you’re still not done with your homework!” Yoojin shouts loudly over whatever lies Hyuna is telling over the phone. “You should get back to that!”

Yoohyun, visibly confused, still obediently returns to his room. He pauses at the entrance to his room, though, one hand on the doorframe. “Does hyung like her?” he asks, and there’s a gravitas in the question that makes Yoojin consider the question carefully. 

“She likes to joke around a lot, but she’s a good person,” he says after a pause. He’s not sure if the pretend aspect of their relationship should extend to his own family too. Maybe that should be added to the contract. “Yoohyun doesn’t need to worry about her.”

Satisfied with that, Yoohyun turns back to his homework and Yoojin returns to the kitchen. Hyuna, shockingly, is still on the call. “Yah, Yoojin-ah, you better not leave me alone again next time,” she squawks when Yoojin greets her. Yoojin goes through the motions of promising not to do that again, but he thinks that deciding to stay on the line speaks more than her words.

-

Hyuna sends him two payments before she asks him to attend a family dinner with her. “I just brought it up with my family for the first time, so they want to meet you,” she complains over a bowl of jjajangmyeon. 

Yoojin swallows a bite of his own jjamppong before replying. “It’s just a dinner, right?”

“Yeah. It’ll be my mom and dad, and maybe my younger sister if she decides to come. I’ll let you know what her decision is later.” Hyuna suddenly slaps a hand on her thigh. “I just remembered—what do you do for a living? My parents will ask and I don’t want to be caught off-guard.”

Yoojin bites his lip. “I… work a few jobs right now,” he hedges, not quite wanting to come out and say it.

Hyuna cocks her head to the side, like a hawk intent on catching its prey. Yoojin avoids her gaze and takes another bite of his noodles. Hyuna is the person that Yoojin is probably the most vulnerable with—out of necessity, by their agreement, but it still feels painful to try to reveal that part of himself purposefully. “I can send you more money, you know.”

Yoojin jerks his head up. “Noona!”

She shrugs. “I earn enough that it’s really not too big of a burden to me. I have brand deals during the tournament off season, and I’m still a high-ranking championship player.” She grins at him unabashedly. “Seriously. Let me know if you need more.” She doesn’t insist after that, just leaves the offer open, and that’s what makes Yoojin stop and consider.

“Not right now, but… maybe later,” he says slowly. If he takes more money, then he can work less and spend more time with Yoohyun. 

Later. He’ll think about it later. 

“Okay.” Hyuna takes a bite of her lunch and turns the conversation back in the direction of her family’s dinner. Yoojin once again lets out tension that he didn’t know he was holding, and wonders if this is something like trust.

The dinner ends up going fine.

-

“Did you know that your sister calls me for homework advice now?” Yoojin calls to where Hyuna is sitting on her couch, scrolling through Netflix for the movie that she insisted on showing Yoojin. 

“Really?”

“She called me last night to ask about how to solve quadratic equations.” Yoojin grabs another set of chopsticks from Hyuna’s utensil drawer and heads over to the living room with the pot of ramyeon. “She’s your sister, why isn’t she calling you about this?”

“Hey, the two years between us is a long time to spend forgetting about math you did seven years ago,” Hyuna protests. “I didn’t even learn it that well when I was in school myself.”

“Noona is a true jock, huh?”

Hyuna grabs a throw pillow off of the couch and swats Yoojin in the head with it. “Hey, don’t be a brat.” Yoojin is still gracious enough after this to offer her the extra pair of chopsticks and sit down next to her on the couch. “Okay, have you watched any of the other movies in this series?”

“No,” Yoojin tells her truthfully. Hyuna stares at him. “What? I haven’t!”

“Ooookay,” she says slowly, exiting the title screen of the movie and selecting a different one. “We’re starting from the beginning then.”

“Why can’t we just watch the other one?”

“And miss all of the context?”

“I looked up the reviews before coming over and the consensus seems to be that it’s just a mediocre action movie.”

“So? It can still have context.”

Yoojin snorts, but he’s sitting on Hyuna’s couch in Hyuna’s apartment, eating Hyuna’s ramen from Hyuna’s pot with Hyuna’s chopsticks, so he figures that he doesn’t really have a leg to stand on. If she really wants to watch a mediocre action movie so badly, well, he has enough experience doing that with Yoohyun.

It’s different though, he finds about twenty minutes into the movie. Yoohyun likes to watch movies quietly, in a movie theater if possible, and hates it when anyone talks during them. Hyuna, on the other hand, talks to the characters as if they can hear her, has entire conversations with Yoojin after which they have to hastily rewind the video, and comments on Yoojin’s cooking ability loudly while eating the ramyeon. 

Hyuna is a friend, he realizes all at once while he’s watching her shout at the TV. A friend who is a professional tennis player and sends him money every month and tells her family that she’s dating him. 

It’s not a bad feeling.

-

Hyuna is the first person that he thinks to contact after he watches Yoohyun break a table by stumbling into it and walk right out of the door without listening to anything that Yoojin tried to say to him. 

“Hey, Yoojin-ah,” she says when she picks up, voice… odd. “Not that I don’t like getting calls from you, but this better be important.”

Fuck. He gives in to the urge to curl up towards his knees where he’s sitting on his bed. “Noona,” he says shakily. 

“Oh, Yoojin,” she says, soft in a way that she rarely ever is, even around him, and Yoojin feels the unstable foundation holding him up unravel just a tiny bit more. “What’s wrong?”

“He—” is all he manages to get out before his throat closes up and refuses to let anything out. He’s not sure that he even has anything to say concretely. All he can do is replay that moment that Yoojin begged Yoohyun to stop and explain what was going on, and all Yoohyun did was leave. 

Hyuna lets the pause linger for a long time. Longer, Yoojin is sure, than is polite. Than most people would. Yoojin still can’t make himself say anything. “Yoojin-ah,” she says, and she sounds tired. Yoojin feels awful—she must’ve had a long night or something, and he’s making it worse. “I’ve got—you caught me at a really bad time. It’s… a miracle I managed to pick up the phone, actually.” He catches her muttering something like literally, but it’s hard to tell over the connection. “I can come over later?”

Yoojin inhales a shaky breath and hates himself a little bit for feeling like he’s going to fall apart over such a little thing. He shouldn’t need Hyuna to put aside time for him, right? He should just be able to accept that Yoohyun just… needed to go, right? He should be used to people leaving him, right? He can accept that. He can. He should. “Yeah,” he says quietly instead, because he’s talked to Hyuna about this before, and tries to let himself feel relieved about it. “Yeah, that would be—please. Do you know… when?”

Hyuna groans quietly. “Not really,” she says. Yoojin can hear the unspoken apology in her voice. “I’ll explain it later, but I, uh, probably shouldn’t be around anyone right now. I’ll let you know as soon as I can go over, though, okay?”

“Is there anything I can do to help?” Yoojin asks, now concerned. “If your thing is more important—”

“I don’t think either of our things is more important, really,” Hyuna interrupts. “But my thing is keeping me from helping you with your thing, so I gotta deal with it first.”

It seems so simple, when she puts it like that. “Okay,” Yoojin says. He knows this is the point in the conversation when he should hang up, but he can’t bring himself to say the words.

“Yoojin-ah,” she says, fond, and Yoojin feels like he has an actual older sister when she takes that tone with him. “I’ll see you soon.”

“Bye, noona,” he croaks, and makes himself press the end call button. 

He’s not really sure what happens after that, but at some point, he gets a text from Hyuna. Gonna take longer than expected, sorry, it says. 

That’s okay, he tells himself. 

It still doesn’t stop him from being overly aware of how the apartment is quiet again after five years. 

-

In the end, it’s better that she takes two days to come over, Yoojin decides. It takes a while for everything to sink in, anyway, and to realize that Yoohyun really isn’t coming back. He left a few—a lot, really—messages on Yoohyun’s phone, but he doesn’t get any calls or texts back, even though Yoohyun’s never done that before. 

“Yo,” she says when Yoojin opens the door. “You look different,” she immediately adds, frowning at him. Yoojin is too busy trying to figure out if there’s something different about her too. Something feels different, but he’s not sure what. “Bad,” she clarifies after a moment. “You look bad.”

“Thanks,” Yoojin deadpans, and lets her into the apartment. “What was the thing that you had to take care of?”

She ignores his question in favor of asking her own after glancing around. “Hey, where’s Yoohyun? I thought he’d be with you.”

And right at that moment, Yoojin abruptly realizes that he is less okay with what is going on than he thought he was approximately two seconds ago. “Yoohyun… He, uh. He’s not here,” is what he manages to say, because admitting that Yoohyun left feels like admitting that Yoojin still thinks about the way his back looked as he let the door close behind him.

“Yeah, that’s what I just said,” Hyuna says, turning around to give Yoojin a weird look before doing a double take as soon as she sees his face. “Whoa, okay. Did something happen to Yoohyun?”

Yoojin doesn’t know, and that’s the worst part. “I’m not sure,” he says, and he just feels… exhausted, now. That’s not even why he made Hyuna come over, and he already feels scooped hollow. “I don’t think I can talk about this right now, noona. What happened while you were on the call with me?”

She gives him a look that says she knows what he’s doing and very deliberately allowing it. “You wouldn’t believe me,” she says and continues regardless. “Look at this.” And then she reaches over and bends Yoojin’s lamp into a coil.

Yoojin’s ability to comprehend any of what’s going on is practically non-existent, so he sets aside the disbelief that weakly raises its head and instead points at the lamp. “I bought that lamp myself, don’t hurt it,” he protests nonsensically. Hyuna carefully untangles the stand and sets it back down on its base, though her handprints are still twisted into the metal. 

He makes sure to carefully listen through the rest of her explanation, her description of her skills and stats and everything that sounds like it’s out of a manhwa or a webnovel. Part of him, though, is still devoted to thinking about the fingerprints that Yoohyun left dented into his bedroom door and the table that still lies broken next to the window. 

-

“Hey, Yoojin-ah.”

“Yeah?”

“Your brother’s a hunter.”

-

“Noona.”

“Your brother’s an idiot, Yoojin-ah.”

“Are the headlines true?”

“Yeah. He’s calling it Haeyeon.”

***

Hyuna likes to think of herself as an easygoing person, generally. Straightforward, at least, if she can’t manage easygoing. It’s why she likes Yoojin: even if the start of their relationship couldn’t be called conventional by any standard, it was straightforward and easy to understand, and Yoojin has never complicated anything about it. 

She even liked his brother for a while, though they never really ran into each other. They were united by their fondness for Yoojin, and that made it simple enough to get along. 

Now, though, Hyuna kind of wants to rip his face off.

“Moon Hyuna-ssi,” he says coldly. She doesn’t know how she ever thought he could be cute. “Breaker Guild may have the most members, but that doesn’t automatically entitle you to the most dungeons.”

“Doesn’t it?” She leans back in her chair and kicks up her feet because she knows that it pisses him off to no end. “More people means I can handle more dungeons, which means better safety for the people of Seoul. Or did you forget that we’re here to protect people, Haeyeon Guild Leader?” 

Yoohyun grinds his teeth, but he knows that she’s got him there. The Hunter’s Association still acts as the tiebreaker in any guild disputes, and with that defense, he doesn’t have any way of refuting. 

The meeting ends shortly after, but Yoohyun hangs back and gestures for Hyuna to do the same. She debates flipping him off and leaving anyway, which usually puts her in a good mood, but she’s about to head to lunch with Yoojin, and looking at him after she does anything mean to his brother always makes her feel guilty. “What do you want, Haeyeon Guild Leader?” she sighs. She hopes Yoojin appreciates this, even though she’ll never tell him about it.

He glares. “Explain why you’re always the last person to continue protesting any of Haeyeon’s activities. Even when everyone else agrees, I can trust that you’ll disagree.”

“Hm.” She taps a finger to her chin. “Maybe I just really want to piss you off. Have you thought about that?”

He growls and goes for his sword, which is exactly why all of them have stopped bringing their weapons to these meetings. When his hand grasps air, he clenches his hands into fists instead. “We barely even know each other,” he says. Hyuna almost laughs in his face. “Why does it matter to you so much?”

“‘Why?’” She leans in closer and sends a silent apology to Yoojin for what she’s about to say. Let’s just not involve him, he’d said tiredly after she’d finally managed to pry the very short story out of him. She knows there’s more there, more in their past that Yoojin refuses to talk about, but Yoohyun’s involvement in it was brief. Yoohyun… he can do what he wants, but we can stay friends, right? “Yoohyun-ah,” she coos, and enjoys watching him coil backwards in disgust. “Listen to me, okay? I’m about to go have lunch with your lovely brother, who misses you very much. He doesn’t really talk about you anymore, but he likes it when I give him updates on how you’re doing sometimes. Actually, not much of our conversation revolves around you nowadays, but I can tell you hurt him a lot, Yoohyun-ah.”

She takes a great amount of petty pleasure in watching him flinch. He believes her, of course. There’s no reason not to when he knows that she’s been Yoojin’s friend for years now. “You have lunch?” he asks. There’s a lost note to his confusion, like he genuinely can’t understand how she’s managed to do that.

She nods. “At least twice a week when I’m not in a dungeon.” 

“Doesn’t he have work?”

Hyuna doesn't know how much Yoojin had chosen to reveal to Yoohyun back when their arrangement had first started, but she’s guessing the answer is not much. That part of their past isn’t her place to reveal, but now— “Yoohyun-ah, you know as much as I do that the salary of an S-Rank is more than enough to support one extra person.”

He bares his teeth at her like a cornered cat. “Stop calling me that.”

This conversation is over, anyway. “Yoohyun-ah,” she says, because seeing Yoohyun angry at her makes up just a little bit for the way Yoojin still looks at Yoohyun’s bedroom door when he thinks she isn’t paying attention. “Get your head out of your ass.”

And then she leaves, because it’s not her job to help Yoohyun realize that his brother still loves him in spite of everything.