the memoir he didn't write; nichkhun/wooyoung
the memoir he didn’t write
nichkhun/wooyoung, pg, 2610w
they think his life is perfect, but they can’t see the fine lines only he can see.
a remix of a fool's memoir is recommended to be read first before proceeding)
A/N: fo mychocotango, whom I had the previledge to be assigned to for ficmix but ended up butchering her story to pieces T__T Keep forgetting to post this e.e
They say we don't get to choose who we fall in love with.
They say that love chooses us.
Like a script written conspired by fate, or destiny, twisted to the brink for the amusement of the gods. Handed down to men/mortals/humans/him, to act out on this stage they call life, and Nichkhun realized everything too late. Perhaps Fate is too fixated on the beautiful angst that comes from late realization, missed chances and human regrets. Destiny is no help either, even when everyone always says that she is the nicer one of them both. Nichkhun always thought that humans are capable of determining their own destiny; is it just a feeble attempt to gain control of Fate? They say Destiny gives you a chance to make things right -- Nichkhun doesn’t know what is true anymore.
They say ..
Nichkhun shuts his eyes closed, his image burning through the back of his eyelids. Everything is still spiraling out of control and Nichkhun isn’t sure how to deal with everything, lost chances, lost friendships, and too many goodbyes before hellos even started. Too little too late, too much too soon.
He said he is letting go.
Noises are evading his senses; sirens, high-pitched screams, and the sound of a car honking are polluting the quiet night. More than that, it’s his voice that keeps running over and over Nichkhun’s mind. Those few words that have been giving Nichkhun sleepless nights ever since that night.
I’m letting go, hyung. I’m letting go.
They say we don't get to choose who we fall in love with.
They say that love chooses us.
He tries to drown the voices with the thoughts rumbling in his head, thrumming silently, a few beats faster than his own heartbeat.
(This time, he doesn’t listen to those voices; this time, he succeeds in blocking them out completely, and finally this time, he feels at peace, but just for now.)
Nichkhun has always been taught to abide the law, to listen to what people say, to uphold moral codes like they’re his lifeline. It doesn’t help that his family is affluent enough to be the talk of the town once he takes the wrong step.
He grew up listening to others, letting others dictate what was expected of him. He is their family’s perfect trophy son, the one who always makes his parents happy and proud, the one who sets the example for all his other siblings to follow suit. It was hard not to be; he is handsome, well-respected, and always has praises coming his way. It’s hard to not do what society tells him, the smiles in his parents’ faces are always hard to erase.
“You can’t be selfish and think just of yourself, there are things bigger in this world than just you,” his father always tells him, with a gentle smile adorning his lips and the twinkle in his eyes that always convinces Nichkhun that he is right. That yes, not everything is about him, and the bigger picture is what is important.
They say, therefore I am.
In the end, he is a product of the society, made and molded into perfection according to what society thinks is appropriate. Not once he questions them, because if everyone thinks so, it is bound to be good for you, isn’t it?
They say ‘Your life is perfect’.
They say to his parents ‘Your son is perfect, you must be proud’ and then his parents will beam brighter than ever, and Nichkhun feels a little at ease, because yes, this is how it is meant to be.
They say ‘You must be happy’.
Nichkhun thinks he has it all, he thinks he is happy, and he should be, he tells himself, he is engaged to a beautiful girl, and he is set up for a perfect future.
‘Such wonderful future for a couple made for each other’, they say, and Nichkhun tries, constantly tries really hard to shut his own doubts out and drown himself in those words from others. That yes, his life is perfect, she’s beautiful, she is happy, they are happy together. Yes, he is happy.
But who is he kidding?
Such bright and dazzling future so perfect no one could say otherwise. No one but Nichkhun himself. Ironically all Nichkhun wants to do right now is to throw it all away for something uncertain.
(They say ‘your life is perfect’.
They say ‘you must be happy’
But they don’t know the fine lines that only Nichkhun can see. Doubt, like poison, is spreading in his mind, and the only thing that can chase it away is the bright gleam of the memory of his smile.)
She wasn’t his childhood sweetheart everyone thinks she was. She was a friend, a dear friend that recently lost someone really important to her. It was at the brink of her desperation that Nichkhun came and helped her fix her life back in order.
“You are the only one that could make her happy,” her mother said to him one day. She told him that her daughter liked him more than a friend, and to please please don’t break her poor fragile heart.
A few days later Nichkhun proposed to her, simply because it was the right thing to do. That it was what society expected him to do; she was a friend, and he couldn’t reject her and make her suffer another loss, not when she had just rebuilt her life from ashes. She was over the moon, their family was elated, everyone congratulated them sincerely, and she is now his fiancee, but there is a dull clenching in the pit of Nichkhun’s stomach that he can’t explain even to himself.
Nichkhun thought that he would be happy if she was happy. After all, making people happy is among the things that he is actually good at. For a moment he is content of that happiness, until he realizes that the one person that always makes him happy is actually slipping through his fingers.
I've proposed her, he had said to Wooyoung. We're having the wedding this autumn, he continued. It’s amazing, isn't it? he had to add, more to convince himself than anyone.
Then Nichkhun saw the look on Wooyoung’s face, the look that stayed in his head for days, and even until this moment, the gaze of Wooyoung’s orbs burns itself in the back of Nichkhun’s mind, the image is the only clear thing in his cloudy mind.
(The moment she gets her smile back is the moment Nichkhun realizes someone else is losing theirs. He has been making her happy at the expense of someone else.
Nichkhun has done a lot of mistakes in the course of his life, but this one might be his biggest one yet.)
Wooyoung is so different from Nichkhun, complete polar opposites when it comes to personalities and values. It is what probably draws Nichkhun to him, his carefree personality that doesn’t succumb to peer pressure and turns into someone else just to accommodate others’. He is an individual, free and unconstricted. He laughs when he likes to, frowns when he is unhappy, glares when angry, and not tied down to people’s expectations of him. He is practical, and Nichkhun admires that in him.
Nichkhun realizes that Wooyoung is everything he isn’t, but strangely he is everything that Nichkhun wishes he himself could be.
Wooyoung is unpredictable and until this day he is still a mystery to Nichkhun. Sometimes warm, sometimes icy cold, sometimes harsh and unrelenting, and sometimes malleable and soft. He is very cold towards strangers, but to his friends he is one of the most caring people Nichkhun knows. But even with their extreme closeness (‘attached at the hip’ - everyone always says), Nichkhun still can’t read Wooyoung at all. There are moments where he is genuinely happy around Nichkhun and responds to everything with a smile, but there are also moments where he would respond to Nichkhun’s smile with a glare and a just leave me alone, Hyung. Everyone always says that it is just his mood swings, but Nichkhun knows that it is not quite that simple.
Wooyoung starts to avoid Nichkhun after the news of his engagement come out, and Nichkhun notices the distance between them more than ever. Wooyoung used to be his only solace when people’s expectations got too much, the only place he could be himself and free from expectations. Around Wooyoung, Nichkhun isn’t a successful man with a bright gleaming future, but just a lost soul who wants things that he shouldn’t, who reaches for things that he knows forbidden and frowned upon by everyone.
Everyone but Wooyoung.
Wooyoung accepts him for who he is, and welcomes him even when he has find out that Nichkhun is nowhere close to that perfect image he always projects to everyone else. That like anyone else, Nichkhun has his own demons to fight, his own ugly scars from the past he never let anyone see, and his flaws that he hides with layers and layers of things that aren’t him.
Nichkhun hates the distance, he hates seeing Wooyoung but not being able to talk to him because he would exit the room with all sorts of excuses when Nichkhun comes in. It’s only when their interaction dwindles down next to nonexistent that Nichkhun starts noticing how much he actually enjoys Wooyoung’s company. How much he misses the times they would spend together talking about everything and nothing, the morning smiles (which Wooyoung usually responds with a grunt because he is not a morning person), the teasing, and sometimes just something as trivial as the way Wooyoung readily hugs him back when he slings his arm around Wooyoung’s shoulder. And how much, just how much he just misses the way his world lights up when Wooyoung smiles.
Sometimes Nichkhun thinks life would be less complicated without Wooyoung, but he knows he wouldn’t even dare to imagine life without him.
(They always say that it is distance that makes the heart grow fonder.
Nichkhun thinks distance makes you realize things you take for granted, and for him, it’s Wooyoung.)
He is on the way back home when the phone call interrupts him.
“Hyung, we can’t find Wooyoung,” Junho says, worry latching into his words. Nichkhun can’t think straight, and Junho’s words are jumbled in his ears. “-been drinking every night” “-what to do” “-girl troubles.”
“Girl troubles?” he repeats, not realizing he is saying it out loud.
“That’s what everyone thinks, Chansung and Taec hyung are out searching, you should too.”
Who is this girl, Nichkhun really wants to ask, but this is not the time to feed his curiosity, the urgency in Junho’s voice tells him that the top priority should be finding Wooyoung. Questions can be reserved for later, so he hurriedly assures Junho that he will find Wooyoung and sets off searching with questions in his head that refuses to go away no matter how many times he tells them to.
Wooyoung used to tell him everything. What happened to him, what happened to them?
(“Hyung, Taecyeon hyung found Wooyoung,” the second call has been as short as that, but the effect of those few words is unimaginable.
Instead of relief he should get from the news Junho has just relayed to him, it is disappointment, and at the back of Nichkhun’s mind he keeps asking, why couldn’t it be him that found Wooyoung.
Funny, Nichkhun thinks, he used to be able to find Wooyoung whenever he was lost, he was always the one that found him whenever everyone else couldn’t. What happened to them, does that mean this time he doesn’t want Nichkhun to find him?
And without noticing it, Wooyoung slips away from his fingers, and this isn’t the first time.)
He knows he shouldn’t bother Wooyoung, when the boy is trying to nurse his hangover and actually needs sleep, but Nichkhun just needs reassurance that Wooyoung is okay. The worries he gets in his mind are reaching a point where he is unable to think of anything else, and he might be selfish for wanting to know right then and there, but something in his mind tells him that this is urgent. It’s now or never.
So he knocks softly on Wooyoung’s door, and enters the room anyway even when his knocks aren’t answered.
He thinks that maybe knowing the truth would put his mind at ease.
(And oh, how wrong he was.)
They say we don't get to choose who we fall in love with.
They say that love chooses us.
They can all be damned. Nichkhun can choose to block out all the voices of society, expectations and moral codes, what society think is right and what they think it’s wrong, but there is one thing he can't block from his own mind. Neither the perfect velvet voice whispering such sinful words nor the image of those perfect cherry lips, with words that slip through them like daggers aiming straight at Nichkhun.
I'm letting go hyung he says, the rest of his words are only a faint buzz in Nichkhun’s ears as his mind repeats it over and over. I’m letting go hyung. I’m letting go. Letting go.
He feels his heart constrict, and then the facts are as clear as glass, as if he has been living through a fog and now everything is cleared. Now all he can see is Wooyoung, the boy that has been plaguing his mind for reasons that are only clear to him now.
It is all sorts of ironic that the moment it takes Wooyoung to let go is the moment that Nichkhun realizes that he cares for Wooyoung, much much more than he thinks and he knows he does.
It is meant to be his turn to be a fool for Wooyoung, but even that chance Wooyoung cannot grant him.
His minds is clouded with so many thoughts that he doesn’t even realize Wooyoung has slipped away again from his very hands, with the door shut tight, leaving Nichkhun alone in a room that is full of Wooyoung’s presence, but not Wooyoung himself.
They say you can’t lose what you never had.
They say it’s the dream ending that hurts rather than the love lost.
But how can it end when "they" haven't even started, how can he lose something that he never had to begin with? And why oh dear God WHY does it hurt this much ?
Is it late realization? All the ‘if’s and ‘could be’s? All the moments that they could’ve done to save both of them the heartache?
This is the first time Nichkhun realizes this, therefore it isn’t meant to hurt this much. But it does.
Is it because Nichkhun has actually loved him all along? Was Nichkhun too dense and stupid to realize his own feelings?
But nothing matters anymore, Wooyoung has let Nichkhun go, before Nichkhun could even get a hold on him.
They say we don't get to choose who we fall in love with.
They say that love chooses us.
Nichkhun doesn’t care anymore what they say, but he says he is letting go, and Nichkhun doesn’t get a say.
♥
A/N: hope you liked them, been a little slow with updates these days, I'm sorry :(
nichkhun/wooyoung, pg, 2610w
they think his life is perfect, but they can’t see the fine lines only he can see.
a remix of a fool's memoir is recommended to be read first before proceeding)
A/N: fo mychocotango, whom I had the previledge to be assigned to for ficmix but ended up butchering her story to pieces T__T Keep forgetting to post this e.e
They say we don't get to choose who we fall in love with.
They say that love chooses us.
Like a script written conspired by fate, or destiny, twisted to the brink for the amusement of the gods. Handed down to men/mortals/humans/him, to act out on this stage they call life, and Nichkhun realized everything too late. Perhaps Fate is too fixated on the beautiful angst that comes from late realization, missed chances and human regrets. Destiny is no help either, even when everyone always says that she is the nicer one of them both. Nichkhun always thought that humans are capable of determining their own destiny; is it just a feeble attempt to gain control of Fate? They say Destiny gives you a chance to make things right -- Nichkhun doesn’t know what is true anymore.
They say ..
Nichkhun shuts his eyes closed, his image burning through the back of his eyelids. Everything is still spiraling out of control and Nichkhun isn’t sure how to deal with everything, lost chances, lost friendships, and too many goodbyes before hellos even started. Too little too late, too much too soon.
He said he is letting go.
Noises are evading his senses; sirens, high-pitched screams, and the sound of a car honking are polluting the quiet night. More than that, it’s his voice that keeps running over and over Nichkhun’s mind. Those few words that have been giving Nichkhun sleepless nights ever since that night.
I’m letting go, hyung. I’m letting go.
They say we don't get to choose who we fall in love with.
They say that love chooses us.
He tries to drown the voices with the thoughts rumbling in his head, thrumming silently, a few beats faster than his own heartbeat.
(This time, he doesn’t listen to those voices; this time, he succeeds in blocking them out completely, and finally this time, he feels at peace, but just for now.)
Nichkhun has always been taught to abide the law, to listen to what people say, to uphold moral codes like they’re his lifeline. It doesn’t help that his family is affluent enough to be the talk of the town once he takes the wrong step.
He grew up listening to others, letting others dictate what was expected of him. He is their family’s perfect trophy son, the one who always makes his parents happy and proud, the one who sets the example for all his other siblings to follow suit. It was hard not to be; he is handsome, well-respected, and always has praises coming his way. It’s hard to not do what society tells him, the smiles in his parents’ faces are always hard to erase.
“You can’t be selfish and think just of yourself, there are things bigger in this world than just you,” his father always tells him, with a gentle smile adorning his lips and the twinkle in his eyes that always convinces Nichkhun that he is right. That yes, not everything is about him, and the bigger picture is what is important.
They say, therefore I am.
In the end, he is a product of the society, made and molded into perfection according to what society thinks is appropriate. Not once he questions them, because if everyone thinks so, it is bound to be good for you, isn’t it?
They say ‘Your life is perfect’.
They say to his parents ‘Your son is perfect, you must be proud’ and then his parents will beam brighter than ever, and Nichkhun feels a little at ease, because yes, this is how it is meant to be.
They say ‘You must be happy’.
Nichkhun thinks he has it all, he thinks he is happy, and he should be, he tells himself, he is engaged to a beautiful girl, and he is set up for a perfect future.
‘Such wonderful future for a couple made for each other’, they say, and Nichkhun tries, constantly tries really hard to shut his own doubts out and drown himself in those words from others. That yes, his life is perfect, she’s beautiful, she is happy, they are happy together. Yes, he is happy.
But who is he kidding?
Such bright and dazzling future so perfect no one could say otherwise. No one but Nichkhun himself. Ironically all Nichkhun wants to do right now is to throw it all away for something uncertain.
(They say ‘your life is perfect’.
They say ‘you must be happy’
But they don’t know the fine lines that only Nichkhun can see. Doubt, like poison, is spreading in his mind, and the only thing that can chase it away is the bright gleam of the memory of his smile.)
She wasn’t his childhood sweetheart everyone thinks she was. She was a friend, a dear friend that recently lost someone really important to her. It was at the brink of her desperation that Nichkhun came and helped her fix her life back in order.
“You are the only one that could make her happy,” her mother said to him one day. She told him that her daughter liked him more than a friend, and to please please don’t break her poor fragile heart.
A few days later Nichkhun proposed to her, simply because it was the right thing to do. That it was what society expected him to do; she was a friend, and he couldn’t reject her and make her suffer another loss, not when she had just rebuilt her life from ashes. She was over the moon, their family was elated, everyone congratulated them sincerely, and she is now his fiancee, but there is a dull clenching in the pit of Nichkhun’s stomach that he can’t explain even to himself.
Nichkhun thought that he would be happy if she was happy. After all, making people happy is among the things that he is actually good at. For a moment he is content of that happiness, until he realizes that the one person that always makes him happy is actually slipping through his fingers.
I've proposed her, he had said to Wooyoung. We're having the wedding this autumn, he continued. It’s amazing, isn't it? he had to add, more to convince himself than anyone.
Then Nichkhun saw the look on Wooyoung’s face, the look that stayed in his head for days, and even until this moment, the gaze of Wooyoung’s orbs burns itself in the back of Nichkhun’s mind, the image is the only clear thing in his cloudy mind.
(The moment she gets her smile back is the moment Nichkhun realizes someone else is losing theirs. He has been making her happy at the expense of someone else.
Nichkhun has done a lot of mistakes in the course of his life, but this one might be his biggest one yet.)
Wooyoung is so different from Nichkhun, complete polar opposites when it comes to personalities and values. It is what probably draws Nichkhun to him, his carefree personality that doesn’t succumb to peer pressure and turns into someone else just to accommodate others’. He is an individual, free and unconstricted. He laughs when he likes to, frowns when he is unhappy, glares when angry, and not tied down to people’s expectations of him. He is practical, and Nichkhun admires that in him.
Nichkhun realizes that Wooyoung is everything he isn’t, but strangely he is everything that Nichkhun wishes he himself could be.
Wooyoung is unpredictable and until this day he is still a mystery to Nichkhun. Sometimes warm, sometimes icy cold, sometimes harsh and unrelenting, and sometimes malleable and soft. He is very cold towards strangers, but to his friends he is one of the most caring people Nichkhun knows. But even with their extreme closeness (‘attached at the hip’ - everyone always says), Nichkhun still can’t read Wooyoung at all. There are moments where he is genuinely happy around Nichkhun and responds to everything with a smile, but there are also moments where he would respond to Nichkhun’s smile with a glare and a just leave me alone, Hyung. Everyone always says that it is just his mood swings, but Nichkhun knows that it is not quite that simple.
Wooyoung starts to avoid Nichkhun after the news of his engagement come out, and Nichkhun notices the distance between them more than ever. Wooyoung used to be his only solace when people’s expectations got too much, the only place he could be himself and free from expectations. Around Wooyoung, Nichkhun isn’t a successful man with a bright gleaming future, but just a lost soul who wants things that he shouldn’t, who reaches for things that he knows forbidden and frowned upon by everyone.
Everyone but Wooyoung.
Wooyoung accepts him for who he is, and welcomes him even when he has find out that Nichkhun is nowhere close to that perfect image he always projects to everyone else. That like anyone else, Nichkhun has his own demons to fight, his own ugly scars from the past he never let anyone see, and his flaws that he hides with layers and layers of things that aren’t him.
Nichkhun hates the distance, he hates seeing Wooyoung but not being able to talk to him because he would exit the room with all sorts of excuses when Nichkhun comes in. It’s only when their interaction dwindles down next to nonexistent that Nichkhun starts noticing how much he actually enjoys Wooyoung’s company. How much he misses the times they would spend together talking about everything and nothing, the morning smiles (which Wooyoung usually responds with a grunt because he is not a morning person), the teasing, and sometimes just something as trivial as the way Wooyoung readily hugs him back when he slings his arm around Wooyoung’s shoulder. And how much, just how much he just misses the way his world lights up when Wooyoung smiles.
Sometimes Nichkhun thinks life would be less complicated without Wooyoung, but he knows he wouldn’t even dare to imagine life without him.
(They always say that it is distance that makes the heart grow fonder.
Nichkhun thinks distance makes you realize things you take for granted, and for him, it’s Wooyoung.)
He is on the way back home when the phone call interrupts him.
“Hyung, we can’t find Wooyoung,” Junho says, worry latching into his words. Nichkhun can’t think straight, and Junho’s words are jumbled in his ears. “-been drinking every night” “-what to do” “-girl troubles.”
“Girl troubles?” he repeats, not realizing he is saying it out loud.
“That’s what everyone thinks, Chansung and Taec hyung are out searching, you should too.”
Who is this girl, Nichkhun really wants to ask, but this is not the time to feed his curiosity, the urgency in Junho’s voice tells him that the top priority should be finding Wooyoung. Questions can be reserved for later, so he hurriedly assures Junho that he will find Wooyoung and sets off searching with questions in his head that refuses to go away no matter how many times he tells them to.
Wooyoung used to tell him everything. What happened to him, what happened to them?
(“Hyung, Taecyeon hyung found Wooyoung,” the second call has been as short as that, but the effect of those few words is unimaginable.
Instead of relief he should get from the news Junho has just relayed to him, it is disappointment, and at the back of Nichkhun’s mind he keeps asking, why couldn’t it be him that found Wooyoung.
Funny, Nichkhun thinks, he used to be able to find Wooyoung whenever he was lost, he was always the one that found him whenever everyone else couldn’t. What happened to them, does that mean this time he doesn’t want Nichkhun to find him?
And without noticing it, Wooyoung slips away from his fingers, and this isn’t the first time.)
He knows he shouldn’t bother Wooyoung, when the boy is trying to nurse his hangover and actually needs sleep, but Nichkhun just needs reassurance that Wooyoung is okay. The worries he gets in his mind are reaching a point where he is unable to think of anything else, and he might be selfish for wanting to know right then and there, but something in his mind tells him that this is urgent. It’s now or never.
So he knocks softly on Wooyoung’s door, and enters the room anyway even when his knocks aren’t answered.
He thinks that maybe knowing the truth would put his mind at ease.
(And oh, how wrong he was.)
They say we don't get to choose who we fall in love with.
They say that love chooses us.
They can all be damned. Nichkhun can choose to block out all the voices of society, expectations and moral codes, what society think is right and what they think it’s wrong, but there is one thing he can't block from his own mind. Neither the perfect velvet voice whispering such sinful words nor the image of those perfect cherry lips, with words that slip through them like daggers aiming straight at Nichkhun.
I'm letting go hyung he says, the rest of his words are only a faint buzz in Nichkhun’s ears as his mind repeats it over and over. I’m letting go hyung. I’m letting go. Letting go.
He feels his heart constrict, and then the facts are as clear as glass, as if he has been living through a fog and now everything is cleared. Now all he can see is Wooyoung, the boy that has been plaguing his mind for reasons that are only clear to him now.
It is all sorts of ironic that the moment it takes Wooyoung to let go is the moment that Nichkhun realizes that he cares for Wooyoung, much much more than he thinks and he knows he does.
It is meant to be his turn to be a fool for Wooyoung, but even that chance Wooyoung cannot grant him.
His minds is clouded with so many thoughts that he doesn’t even realize Wooyoung has slipped away again from his very hands, with the door shut tight, leaving Nichkhun alone in a room that is full of Wooyoung’s presence, but not Wooyoung himself.
They say you can’t lose what you never had.
They say it’s the dream ending that hurts rather than the love lost.
But how can it end when "they" haven't even started, how can he lose something that he never had to begin with? And why oh dear God WHY does it hurt this much ?
Is it late realization? All the ‘if’s and ‘could be’s? All the moments that they could’ve done to save both of them the heartache?
This is the first time Nichkhun realizes this, therefore it isn’t meant to hurt this much. But it does.
Is it because Nichkhun has actually loved him all along? Was Nichkhun too dense and stupid to realize his own feelings?
But nothing matters anymore, Wooyoung has let Nichkhun go, before Nichkhun could even get a hold on him.
They say we don't get to choose who we fall in love with.
They say that love chooses us.
Nichkhun doesn’t care anymore what they say, but he says he is letting go, and Nichkhun doesn’t get a say.
♥
A/N: hope you liked them, been a little slow with updates these days, I'm sorry :(