Archive of Our Own

Demigod abilities were supposed to be blessings, but Jungsu’s had only ever felt like a curse.

It first manifested when he was nine years old, during school choir.

Jungsu had always loved to sing, loved to repeat back the tunes he heard on the radio, loved to join his voice with others in harmony. Choir was the only part of school he really enjoyed. But then one day, as Jungsu began to warm up his voice before the teacher arrived, something strange happened.

One by one, the other kids stopped what they were doing and turned to look at him as he sang his scales, all of them wearing blank-eyed expressions of adoration.

The second Jungsu noticed, he stopped singing, uncomfortable with the attention—usually, no one paid him much mind at all, considering him too weird and too problem-riddled to be worth the effort of befriending. But as soon as he stopped, the glassiness faded from the other kids’ eyes. They looked around for a moment, confused, before going back to what they were doing, ignoring Jungsu as if they hadn’t just been openly staring at him.

It scared Jungsu. It scared him even more when the teacher arrived and choir practice began, and within the first few lines, Jungsu noticed with a jolt that everyone else had stopped singing and the teacher had stopped conducting. They were all staring at him with that unnervingly adoring expression. And as soon as he fell silent, they blinked and looked away, and everything resumed as if nothing had happened.

But Jungsu was too frightened to keep singing. He mouthed the words but didn’t make a peep.

He couldn’t help but think of how his stepmother always told him to never sing where she or Jungsu’s two half-sisters could hear. Did she know something? Some secret his dad had told her before he died? Maybe something to do with his mother?

It was a few days before Jungsu worked up the nerve to sing again. He waited until his stepmother and half-sisters had gone out grocery shopping and snuck out into the back yard, breathing deep of the fresh air and listening to the sparrows tittering in the trees.

Cautiously, he began to sing: “Frère Jacques, frère Jacques. Dormez-vous? Dormez vous? Sonnez les matines, sonnez les matines! Ding, dang, dong! Ding, dang, dong!”

As he sang, the sparrows stopped their own songs—but Jungsu didn’t notice until they fluttered down from the tree to land on his arms and shoulders, their eyes fixed on him, their little heads tilted curiously.

As soon as he finished the song, they flew away again.

Awe and fear fought for dominance over his heart, and in the end, they came to a truce. Jungsu quit choir and vowed never to sing in front of a living human ever again, but whenever he got a chance to be alone in nature, he would serenade the birds and snails and squirrels and enjoy their company for a little while.

When he was twelve, he ran away from home. He wasn’t running very long before a satyr caught up with him and explained that he was a half-blood, a demigod. His mother was a goddess. It should have been hard to believe, but somehow, it made perfect sense.

The satyr led Jungsu and another demigod he’d rescued—Jiseok, a wide-eyed but feisty eleven-year-old—to Camp Half-Blood, where Jungsu learned that he was a son of Aphrodite, the goddess of love; where he was told he had a form of charmspeak, the ability to make people do what he wanted just by telling them to.

But it didn’t work like that for him. And no matter how he tried, he couldn’t stop it or control it.

When Jungsu sang, people listened. But they couldn’t hear.

There were a lot of secluded places around camp, so it was easy enough for Jungsu to find places to sing. He often wondered to himself why he didn’t just give up singing completely, but even the idea felt akin to that of cutting off his own hands. He simply loved it too much.

Jungsu tried a lot of different singing spots. It was harder during the summer, when the cabins were filled to bursting with kids in orange T-shirts, but for the other nine months of the year, when it was just himself and Jiseok and the handful of other year-rounders with nowhere else to go, it wasn’t too difficult.

Still—the valley tended to echo, and Jungsu was almost always found by someone, in the end.

It wasn’t until after the summer of his third year at camp that he worked up the nerve to go into the forest alone. One of the dryads had given him a tip about a secluded clearing. He found it easily enough, and it became his new singing spot. At least once a week he’d make the trek over and sit in the grass and sing his heart out and watch as all the birds and critters came to witness. A couple of times, he even saw wild boars watching him from the treeline.

Inevitably, however, a fellow demigod stumbled upon his hiding spot.

Jungsu cut off abruptly when he heard the snap of a twig behind him, the birds and animals fleeing with a great rustle of leaves and undergrowth. He whipped around to see an orange camp T-shirt and a pair of startled eyes. Jungsu recognised the head counsellor of Hephaestus cabin—Gunil. He was a year older than Jungsu, a fellow year-rounder; they’d spoken a couple times, but never at length.

“S-sorry,” Gunil stuttered. “I didn’t mean to disturb you! I just… I was looking for a rogue automaton, and I heard singing, and I, well, I wondered who was out here… um, you’re a great singer, by the way!” He swallowed hard and nodded. “You have a beautiful voice. Do you have a power that makes all the animals listen? That’s really cool, you know, you’re like a real-life Disney princess. Except, you’re a boy, but… that doesn’t really matter, right?”

Jungsu stared blankly as Gunil rambled.

“You…” he began, “you actually… heard me?”

Gunil raised an eyebrow in what was almost a look of offence. “Well, yeah.”

Jungsu scrambled to his feet. “N-no, I mean… you heard me and you weren’t…” He gestured generally at Gunil. “Hypnotised?”

“Was I supposed to be?”

“Yes!” Jungsu exclaimed. “You saw all the birds and stuff, right? But, I mean… you shouldn’t have! You shouldn’t even remember how you got here.”

Gunil was looking more puzzled by the second. “I’m sorry,” he said.

“Don’t apologise! You—” Jungsu cut himself off, shaking his head. There was only one way to be sure what was really going on here, so rather than continuing to interrogate Gunil, Jungsu cleared his throat and began to sing:

“It’s a damn cold night… Trying to figure out this life… Won’t you take me by the hand take me somewhere new? I don’t know who you are, but I… I’m with you… I’m with you…”

He watched Gunil’s face the whole time, especially his eyes—they remained fixed on Jungsu as he sang, his lips parting in surprise, but there was no blank stare, no glassy adoration. Genuine awe crossed his face as all the birds within earshot gathered around Jungsu, landing near him, on him. And when Jungsu stopped singing and the birds flapped away, Gunil raised his hands and clapped.

“That’s an Avril Lavigne song, right?” he asked. “I love Avril.”

Jungsu just stared. “How?” he breathed. “How are you able to resist it?”

“Resist what?”

“The—the charmspeak! Whenever I sing, people go into this… trance,” Jungsu confessed, gripping his elbows self-consciously, “and they can’t remember anything afterwards. But it doesn’t work on you?”

“Oh…” Gunil frowned, then reached into his ear and extracted something resembling a bronze earplug. “Um… I don’t know if this would have anything to do with it, but I’m almost completely deaf without these, so… maybe that’s why? They’re celestial bronze hearing aids.”

Hearing aids. Gunil was hard of hearing. Jungsu could hardly believe that it could be that simple. But at the same time, a sort of excitement started to fizzle in his stomach.

Someone could hear him.

His eyes welled up with tears.

“Whoa!” Gunil yelped, shoving the hearing aid back in his ear and approaching with his hands held out. “Are—are you okay? I’m so sorry, I didn’t mean to offend you or anything, I just—”

“No,” Jungsu sobbed, lurching forward to seize Gunil’s arms. “I’m not offended, I’m—” He sobbed again. “Can—can I sing for you? There’s no one else who can resist the charmspeak—no one else!” He ducked his head to hide his face as his tears spilled over.

Gunil didn’t respond for a moment, then slowly reached out and patted Jungsu’s head. “I’d be, um, honoured. To be your audience,” he said. “Yours is the most beautiful voice I’ve ever heard.”

Jungsu looked up at him, and even through tear-blurred vision, the warm smile on Gunil’s face made his chest feel oddly tight.

It didn’t quite become a routine, more a habit of running into each other in the woods when Jungsu went to sing. Gunil listened, and he applauded, and he requested songs. A couple of times, he even brought Hephaestus cabin’s mechanical music maker, and they made up silly little songs and laughed until they couldn’t breathe. Sometimes, they even sang together, Gunil’s voice a husky baritone counterpoint to Jungsu’s clear tenor.

They became friends. They talked to each other, hung out around camp, even trained together. When Jiseok grew sulky that there was someone else taking Jungsu’s attention, Jungsu introduced the two, and they quickly bonded over a mutual interest in robotics.

A year passed, and Jungsu became the head counsellor of Aphrodite cabin, but he still found the time to make the hike out into the woods so that he could sing and Gunil could hear.

As a child of Aphrodite, Jungsu was well aware of what was happening. He saw the look in Gunil’s eyes as he listened to Jungsu sing and knew exactly what it was. He felt the kick in his own chest whenever Gunil laughed his goofy laugh and knew exactly what it was.

But above everything, he felt doubt. He felt fear. Because maybe it seemed like Gunil’s hearing aids made him somehow immune to Jungsu’s charmspeak, but what if overexposure was having a long-term effect? Or what if Jungsu was unknowingly working some other kind of love magic on him?

What if none of it was real?

The first week after the summer campers left was always so quiet. Sometimes it was a good quiet, other times a lonely one. It was certainly lonely for poor Jiseok, consigned to a long-distance relationship with his brand-new boyfriend for the next nine months. Since seeing Jooyeon off at the camp boundary, he’d spent most of his time moping in his cabin, so, at breakfast one morning, Jungsu invited him strawberry picking in the afternoon just to get him out and about.

It wasn’t peak strawberry season, but thanks to the magic of the satyrs and nymphs, there were strawberries year-round. Jungsu waited at the edge of the fields, but when he finally heard footsteps coming towards him across the grass, he could tell immediately by their weight who was approaching—and it wasn’t Jiseok.

He whipped around to meet Gunil’s startled eye, experiencing an abrupt sense of déjà vu.

Gunil blinked at him, then chuckled, lifting a hand in a wave. “It wasn’t me you were expecting, was it?”

“Not that I’m not happy to see you,” Jungsu said, “but I thought I was waiting for Jiseok.”

“That’s interesting,” said Gunil, glancing over towards the cabins, “because Jiseok told me you were waiting for me.”

“Of course he did,” Jungsu muttered. Jiseok, ever-shrewd, had been needling Jungsu about asking Gunil out for months. It was only surprising that it had taken this long for him to start scheming.

Gunil smiled. “I guess he needs more time to sulk. But if you still want someone to pick strawberries with…?” He held up the basket in his hand in a silent offer.

And, well, Jungsu could control neither the grin that came to his face nor the warmth that blossomed in his chest.

As they filled their baskets with strawberries, they settled into a comfortable quiet, broken by the occasional comment or joke. It was a warm day, but not too warm, the sun flitting in and out of view between fast-moving clouds like sparrows in the trees.

“Oh, this one’s perfect!” Gunil exclaimed out of nowhere. “Jungsu, look!” He came to his feet, holding up a perfectly red, perfectly ripe, perfectly plump strawberry.

Jungsu couldn’t help but laugh. “It’s just a strawberry, there are a hundred just like it out here.”

“No, no!” Gunil insisted. “This one’s different, trust me. Here, you have to eat it.” He nearly tripped as he rushed over to Jungsu, holding the strawberry towards his mouth with a sparkle in his eye. “Come on, open up! Here comes airplane!”

Honestly, Jungsu couldn’t see what was so special about this strawberry, but Gunil seemed excited about it, so he laughed and obligingly opened his mouth. He bit down when Gunil placed the strawberry beyond his teeth, and the sweet, sun-warmed juice burst across his tongue.

Gunil’s eyes were fixed on his, a fond smile on his face, and he was standing so close, and there was no one else around, and Jungsu’s heart was beating so hard he could scarcely breathe.

“Perfect, right?” Gunil whispered, tossing away the stalk without looking.

Jungsu swallowed the strawberry, feeling its sweetness every inch of the way down his throat and into his stomach. “Hyung,” he said, unable to keep the break out of his voice. “Take out your hearing aids.”

A look of puzzlement crossed Gunil’s face, but he didn’t ask why. He reached up and slipped the discreet bronze earplugs out of his ears, never breaking eye contact for a second.

And Jungsu couldn’t handle it anymore: he leaned down and kissed him.

For a brief, suspended moment, he felt his stomach plummet as Gunil didn’t react. But then a hand found his neck and Gunil was kissing him back, and Jungsu no longer felt like he was falling—rather, he was flying.

He felt tears come to his eyes as he pulled away.

“It’s real, isn’t it?” he asked shakily. “This? Us?”

Having read his lips, Gunil’s face crumpled into sympathy. “Yes, Jungsu,” he breathed. “It’s real. I—” He swallowed, hard, then put his hearing aids back in. “I should be asking that question. Is it real that a child of Hephaestus’ feelings for a child of Aphrodite can be anything but unrequited?”

The confession was indirect, but it made Jungsu’s head spin nonetheless.

“We’re not our parents,” Jungsu said fiercely. “Our hearts are our own.”

Gunil smiled and caressed Jungsu’s face in his hand. “You’re right,” he said. “I guess… I was just afraid of how much I like you.”

He pulled Jungsu in for another kiss, before Jungsu had the chance to say that he’d been afraid of the same thing: afraid of his own feelings, afraid of Gunil’s feelings, and afraid of either or both being nothing more than a charmspoken illusion.

But with Gunil’s lips on his, the lingering taste of strawberry on his tongue, and the smell of the ocean on the breeze, Jungsu wasn’t afraid anymore.

And he wouldn’t let himself be afraid ever again.