We'll Build in Sonnets Pretty Rooms - Aaron/Ji Yeon
Title: We'll Build in Sonnets Pretty Rooms
Fandom: Lost
Character(s)/Pairing(s): Aaron/Ji Yeon
Word Count: 4,281
Rating: PG
Summary: “You’re homesick,” she says, as the conversation comes full circle. Aaron leans forward, his forehead pressing against hers. “My home is here with you.” His eyes are closed, but he can feel the muscles in her forehead twisting as she smiles
A/N: Written for challenge #78 over at lostfichallenge, the next generation. Title taken from John Donne's "The Canonization."
Thanks to janietangerine for the banner
We can die by it, if not live by love,
And if unfit for tomb or hearse
Our legend be, it will be fit for verse ;
And if no piece of chronicle we prove,
We'll build in sonnets pretty rooms
When she told him, he didn’t stick around to hear the details. He just packed his bags and tried his best to tune out her pleas for him to stay, begging him to understand.
He couldn’t stay. He knew her well, knew that if he stopped moving, started listening, she’d dig her claws in. She’d manipulate him into thinking what she did was right and fair. She’d make him buy into her logic. He’d seen her do it to plenty of men who came before him.
He knows her well. He knows she’ll be okay on her own, maybe even happier.
He will keep moving, ignore the chasm that is building in his heart, tearing him to pieces. He’ll ignore the idea that he was just a pawn, a child ripped away from its real mother to be seen as sympathetic. And isn’t this just like her to use men to her advantage.
Free flying has never seemed like such a blessing until the day she tells him he’s not her son.
I’m not your real mother.
Those five words haunt him. They wake him up from dead sleeps, drenched in sweat and tears. They keep him up at night, hands rubbing over tired eyes as he wonders how long he can run before the words stop hurting. A good run can solve anything.
He learned this from mommy dearest.
---
“Where are you?”
He ignores the question, stabbing the cigarette out on the cement block beneath his toes.
“Hey Jack. How are you?” Aaron mutters.
“Your mother is worried sick.”
“Not my mother. Not my problem.”
There is silence, and then Jack sighs. “Aaron you have to understand…”
“Namsan Park,” Aaron says cutting him off.
There is a pause where Jack is doing his best to pull out where that is. “Korea?”
It’s a guess. A good guess.
“South Korea to be exact.”
“I’m coming to get you.”
“Jack, this is one thing you can’t fix.” He flips the phone closed, and shakes his head. He pulls out another cigarette, but before he can light it, he catches a woman glaring at him from across the park.
She’s a pretty girl, thick black hair and big brown eyes. In the blur of faces she stands out. Maybe because she’s so beautiful, or maybe because she’s the only one to glare at him. She nods to her left, and Aaron’s eyes focus on the large no smoking sign there.
“Sorry,” he yells to her in his best Korean, tucking the cigarette back in his pocket. She looks at him with furrowed eyebrows, and he wonders briefly if maybe he just told her “happy birthday” instead. She approaches him, slowly, standing at the bottom of the steps he’s sitting on.
“You speak Korean?” she says in perfect English.
“You speak English?”
She rolls her eyes, as if saying no shit, Sherlock. “A lot of Koreans do.”
“Huh,” he nods.
“How’d you learn Korean?” she asks.
“I was an international business major,” Aaron says, “How’d you learn English?”
“My mother spoke it.”
They banter for awhile over which is harder to learn, English or Korean before the buzzing of her pager jars them from their conversation. She glances down at the number and groans.
“Anything important?” he inquires.
“Work.”
“Ignore it and come sightseeing with me,” Aaron says boldly. He ignores the voice in the back of his head, the one that sounds like his mother, which says he’s just doing this because he’s lonely and hurting and this banter with her is the most he’s spoken to anyone in at least a week.
She smiles. “Some of us actually have jobs.”
Aaron scoffs, “How do you know I don’t have job?”
“You’re a tourist. If you weren’t, you’d have known about the smoking ban.”
“Touché.”
“I should go,” she says, extending her hand, “It was nice meeting you…” She trails off, trying to remember if he’s told her his name.
“Aaron,” he supplies, shaking her hand, “Nice meeting you…”
“Ji Yeon.”
He looks at her blankly, “That sounds like something I’d order for take-out.”
She rolls her eyes and retracts her hand slowly. “Ignorant American.”
“I aim to please.”
She can’t help but smile at him. There’s a moment where she puts the jacket she’s had slung over her elbow back on, adjusting the collar. He watches her carefully, her grace leaving him in awe. She looks at him again, the same pensive look she had when he first spotted her in the park.
“Have dinner with me tonight?”
“I’d like that.”
---
“So what are you really doing in Seoul?”
This is their seventh dinner together in twelve days.
Whirlwind romances are nothing new for him. Unfortunately, this isn’t what would qualify as a romance. They haven’t done much more than have dinner together and tour some of Seoul’s greatest attractions. They banter, but neither of them have reached deep into personal territory.
There are moments though where the laughter dies down, they catch each other’s eye, and something just…clicks. But then one of them chickens out, or outside elements break the trance, and they’re back to being two strangers straddling the line between friendship and something more.
During the past seven dinners, he’s given her a different excuse each time for why he’s in Seoul, all of them false.
“Truthfully?” he asks, debating whether to crack another joke, or level with her.
“You don’t think I deserve the truth by now?”
He pauses, forefinger and thumb pinching at the stem of his wine glass, hoping it will break to buy him more time.
“I ran away from home,” he says quietly. He looks up and sees no pity on her face. Instead there’s something softer, something he can’t place. “I found out my mother’s not really my mother.”
He doesn’t know why he adds that on, but it might have something to do with the way her eyes are burning into the side of his face with that unplaced emotion. It feels good admitting it out loud, saying it to someone who didn’t already know.
“I’m sorry, Aaron,” she says, placing her slim fingers over his.
“Not your fault,” he says.
“I can see why you’d want to get away.” Her words are cautious, and she bites her lip before continuing, “Still, why Seoul?”
He lets out a breath, relieved at the slight topic change. “Honestly, it’s the first place that popped in my head.”
“Seoul?” Ji Yeon laughs, “That’s crazy.”
“I’ve indulged in crazier things,” he says, waggling his eyebrows comically to take the sting off of a comment chalked full of implications.
Later in the evening, he walks her home, another part of their routine. Half way there, it starts to rain buckets, and they find themselves running down side alleys just to make time. He ducks under the awning of her flat while she searches her purse for her keys.
“Do you want to come in?” she asks over the pounding of the rain, “At least until the rain passes.”
He shakes his head, “It’s only a five minute walk to the hotel.”
She looks at him like he’s insane, “You’re going to catch a cold.”
“You’re going to have to do better than possible illness to convince me to come inside,” he flirts, and it’s no different than a hundred other comments he’s thrown her way before.
But, maybe she’s tired of tiptoeing on that line, or maybe she’s just a little buzzed from the wine, but she leans forward and presses her lips against his. Her hands land on either side of his neck, and he can feel the outline of the key pressed into the side of his neck, but right now he’s more focused on parting her lips with his tongue.
Ten minutes later, the rain stops.
Neither Ji Yeon nor Aaron notices.
---
After the first kiss, Aaron loses count of how many dates they’ve been on. The days melt together, building speed like a train going downhill, until it’s been one month.
If he thinks there’s anything weird about moving in with someone he just met five weeks ago, he doesn’t say. Rather, he checks out of his hotel with the few items that hadn’t migrated to her flat already, and settles into life next to her.
She makes him forget, and that is all he wanted out of this trip. He wanted to be able to close his eyes and not think of the first twenty-six years of his life; to ignore all the lies that had made him who he was.
He was supposed to meet her, he thinks. She was meant to fill the void, build and shape him into a new person.
He was never a romantic, but with her, he could write a thousand lines of poetry and still not tap into what it was that made them work. Most people just wouldn’t understand it, the whole love at first sight, trust without history. He’s not in the businesses of making people understand.
But if he had to, he’d say it’s this funny feeling in his stomach, a sort of pull towards her, even when she’s lying right next to him. He’ll turn his head and her lips will brush his, like they were thinking the same thing at the same time. Ji Yeon whispers against his chest that she feels it too, and he wonders if he asked that question aloud or not.
But as much as they’ve grown together, there will always be doubts, little worries lingering at the back of their minds. Things they can’t voice, fearing they’ll shatter the perfect world they’re living in. She wonders if he longs for L.A., misses what he tore himself away from. He wonders if she feels crowded by his sudden presence in her life.
“You’re going to have to go back eventually, aren’t you?” she asks quietly one night after a particularly rough day at work. She’s a doctor, an intern at the largest hospital in Seoul. In her short residence so far, she’s witnessed plenty of death, but today she watched a young woman cry over her fiancé’s dead body.
“No,” Aaron says plainly.
“Your mother has to be worried.”
“She’s not my mother.”
“What about everything you left back L.A.?” she asks ignoring his previous remark.
“I didn’t have anything in L.A.”
“So you really didn’t have a job?”
“No. I was set for life before I even took my first breath.” After he says it, he frowns. Who knows if that’s the truth anymore?
Ji Yeon misinterprets his frown to be something born of shame. “Well, so was I.”
He shifts in bed, turning his body so that he’s on his side facing her, “Then why do you work?”
“Because I enjoy saving lives. It’s the type of job that gives more than it takes.”
“My godfather’s a doctor. All it’s given him is a never ending headache and a lifetime membership to Alcoholics Anonymous.”
“Aaron!”
“Oh sorry. I forgot it the whole ‘Anonymous’ part.”
“You’re terrible,” she giggles, and he takes advantage of the moment, leaning over and placing a small kiss on her parted lips.
“Is it a family business?” he asks as he pulls back.
“What?” She’s still slightly dazed from the sign of affection.
“Being a doctor.”
“Oh,” she says, “No.”
They lapse into silence, watching the rain patter against the bedroom windows. Ji Yeon curls against his chest, her hair tickling his shoulders and her lips brushing against his pulse with each breath he takes.
“What are your parents like?” he asks because just now he realized it hadn’t been addressed before.
“All my mother does is work. I maybe see her once every six months, and my father died before I was born.”
“I’m sorry,” Aaron says, and Ji Yeon knows he means he’s sorry for both.
“It used to be better when I was younger. But I guess now that I’m an adult it’s okay for her to go trekking across the globe, chasing ghosts with her boyfriend.”
“Chasing ghosts?” Aaron asks, quirking his eyebrow.
“It’s not important,” Ji Yeon says, “My mother’s not like yours.”
Aaron snorts, “That’s an understatement.”
“I meant that we’re not close. Her business isn’t mine.”
“And my mother’s is?”
Ji Yeon smiles sadly, “Every story you’ve told me tells me yes.”
“That’s because I was the only person she could trust,” Aaron says firmly, and he feels a pang in his heart knowing that it’s the truth. Despite the fact that he wasn’t her son, she had built her entire world around him.
“You’re homesick,” Ji Yeon says, as the conversation comes full circle. Aaron leans his forward, his forehead pressing against hers.
“My home is here with you.” His eyes are closed, but he can feel the muscles in her forehead twisting as she smiles.
“Will it always be like that?” Ji Yeon whispers in her native tongue, and Aaron wonders briefly if she forgot he spoke it too, if the words were meant to fall on deaf ears.
“Always,” he whispers back in Korean, and when his eyes open, he knows she meant for him to hear her in the first place.
Part Two
Fandom: Lost
Character(s)/Pairing(s): Aaron/Ji Yeon
Word Count: 4,281
Rating: PG
Summary: “You’re homesick,” she says, as the conversation comes full circle. Aaron leans forward, his forehead pressing against hers. “My home is here with you.” His eyes are closed, but he can feel the muscles in her forehead twisting as she smiles
A/N: Written for challenge #78 over at lostfichallenge, the next generation. Title taken from John Donne's "The Canonization."
Thanks to janietangerine for the banner
We can die by it, if not live by love,
And if unfit for tomb or hearse
Our legend be, it will be fit for verse ;
And if no piece of chronicle we prove,
We'll build in sonnets pretty rooms
When she told him, he didn’t stick around to hear the details. He just packed his bags and tried his best to tune out her pleas for him to stay, begging him to understand.
He couldn’t stay. He knew her well, knew that if he stopped moving, started listening, she’d dig her claws in. She’d manipulate him into thinking what she did was right and fair. She’d make him buy into her logic. He’d seen her do it to plenty of men who came before him.
He knows her well. He knows she’ll be okay on her own, maybe even happier.
He will keep moving, ignore the chasm that is building in his heart, tearing him to pieces. He’ll ignore the idea that he was just a pawn, a child ripped away from its real mother to be seen as sympathetic. And isn’t this just like her to use men to her advantage.
Free flying has never seemed like such a blessing until the day she tells him he’s not her son.
I’m not your real mother.
Those five words haunt him. They wake him up from dead sleeps, drenched in sweat and tears. They keep him up at night, hands rubbing over tired eyes as he wonders how long he can run before the words stop hurting. A good run can solve anything.
He learned this from mommy dearest.
---
“Where are you?”
He ignores the question, stabbing the cigarette out on the cement block beneath his toes.
“Hey Jack. How are you?” Aaron mutters.
“Your mother is worried sick.”
“Not my mother. Not my problem.”
There is silence, and then Jack sighs. “Aaron you have to understand…”
“Namsan Park,” Aaron says cutting him off.
There is a pause where Jack is doing his best to pull out where that is. “Korea?”
It’s a guess. A good guess.
“South Korea to be exact.”
“I’m coming to get you.”
“Jack, this is one thing you can’t fix.” He flips the phone closed, and shakes his head. He pulls out another cigarette, but before he can light it, he catches a woman glaring at him from across the park.
She’s a pretty girl, thick black hair and big brown eyes. In the blur of faces she stands out. Maybe because she’s so beautiful, or maybe because she’s the only one to glare at him. She nods to her left, and Aaron’s eyes focus on the large no smoking sign there.
“Sorry,” he yells to her in his best Korean, tucking the cigarette back in his pocket. She looks at him with furrowed eyebrows, and he wonders briefly if maybe he just told her “happy birthday” instead. She approaches him, slowly, standing at the bottom of the steps he’s sitting on.
“You speak Korean?” she says in perfect English.
“You speak English?”
She rolls her eyes, as if saying no shit, Sherlock. “A lot of Koreans do.”
“Huh,” he nods.
“How’d you learn Korean?” she asks.
“I was an international business major,” Aaron says, “How’d you learn English?”
“My mother spoke it.”
They banter for awhile over which is harder to learn, English or Korean before the buzzing of her pager jars them from their conversation. She glances down at the number and groans.
“Anything important?” he inquires.
“Work.”
“Ignore it and come sightseeing with me,” Aaron says boldly. He ignores the voice in the back of his head, the one that sounds like his mother, which says he’s just doing this because he’s lonely and hurting and this banter with her is the most he’s spoken to anyone in at least a week.
She smiles. “Some of us actually have jobs.”
Aaron scoffs, “How do you know I don’t have job?”
“You’re a tourist. If you weren’t, you’d have known about the smoking ban.”
“Touché.”
“I should go,” she says, extending her hand, “It was nice meeting you…” She trails off, trying to remember if he’s told her his name.
“Aaron,” he supplies, shaking her hand, “Nice meeting you…”
“Ji Yeon.”
He looks at her blankly, “That sounds like something I’d order for take-out.”
She rolls her eyes and retracts her hand slowly. “Ignorant American.”
“I aim to please.”
She can’t help but smile at him. There’s a moment where she puts the jacket she’s had slung over her elbow back on, adjusting the collar. He watches her carefully, her grace leaving him in awe. She looks at him again, the same pensive look she had when he first spotted her in the park.
“Have dinner with me tonight?”
“I’d like that.”
---
“So what are you really doing in Seoul?”
This is their seventh dinner together in twelve days.
Whirlwind romances are nothing new for him. Unfortunately, this isn’t what would qualify as a romance. They haven’t done much more than have dinner together and tour some of Seoul’s greatest attractions. They banter, but neither of them have reached deep into personal territory.
There are moments though where the laughter dies down, they catch each other’s eye, and something just…clicks. But then one of them chickens out, or outside elements break the trance, and they’re back to being two strangers straddling the line between friendship and something more.
During the past seven dinners, he’s given her a different excuse each time for why he’s in Seoul, all of them false.
“Truthfully?” he asks, debating whether to crack another joke, or level with her.
“You don’t think I deserve the truth by now?”
He pauses, forefinger and thumb pinching at the stem of his wine glass, hoping it will break to buy him more time.
“I ran away from home,” he says quietly. He looks up and sees no pity on her face. Instead there’s something softer, something he can’t place. “I found out my mother’s not really my mother.”
He doesn’t know why he adds that on, but it might have something to do with the way her eyes are burning into the side of his face with that unplaced emotion. It feels good admitting it out loud, saying it to someone who didn’t already know.
“I’m sorry, Aaron,” she says, placing her slim fingers over his.
“Not your fault,” he says.
“I can see why you’d want to get away.” Her words are cautious, and she bites her lip before continuing, “Still, why Seoul?”
He lets out a breath, relieved at the slight topic change. “Honestly, it’s the first place that popped in my head.”
“Seoul?” Ji Yeon laughs, “That’s crazy.”
“I’ve indulged in crazier things,” he says, waggling his eyebrows comically to take the sting off of a comment chalked full of implications.
Later in the evening, he walks her home, another part of their routine. Half way there, it starts to rain buckets, and they find themselves running down side alleys just to make time. He ducks under the awning of her flat while she searches her purse for her keys.
“Do you want to come in?” she asks over the pounding of the rain, “At least until the rain passes.”
He shakes his head, “It’s only a five minute walk to the hotel.”
She looks at him like he’s insane, “You’re going to catch a cold.”
“You’re going to have to do better than possible illness to convince me to come inside,” he flirts, and it’s no different than a hundred other comments he’s thrown her way before.
But, maybe she’s tired of tiptoeing on that line, or maybe she’s just a little buzzed from the wine, but she leans forward and presses her lips against his. Her hands land on either side of his neck, and he can feel the outline of the key pressed into the side of his neck, but right now he’s more focused on parting her lips with his tongue.
Ten minutes later, the rain stops.
Neither Ji Yeon nor Aaron notices.
---
After the first kiss, Aaron loses count of how many dates they’ve been on. The days melt together, building speed like a train going downhill, until it’s been one month.
If he thinks there’s anything weird about moving in with someone he just met five weeks ago, he doesn’t say. Rather, he checks out of his hotel with the few items that hadn’t migrated to her flat already, and settles into life next to her.
She makes him forget, and that is all he wanted out of this trip. He wanted to be able to close his eyes and not think of the first twenty-six years of his life; to ignore all the lies that had made him who he was.
He was supposed to meet her, he thinks. She was meant to fill the void, build and shape him into a new person.
He was never a romantic, but with her, he could write a thousand lines of poetry and still not tap into what it was that made them work. Most people just wouldn’t understand it, the whole love at first sight, trust without history. He’s not in the businesses of making people understand.
But if he had to, he’d say it’s this funny feeling in his stomach, a sort of pull towards her, even when she’s lying right next to him. He’ll turn his head and her lips will brush his, like they were thinking the same thing at the same time. Ji Yeon whispers against his chest that she feels it too, and he wonders if he asked that question aloud or not.
But as much as they’ve grown together, there will always be doubts, little worries lingering at the back of their minds. Things they can’t voice, fearing they’ll shatter the perfect world they’re living in. She wonders if he longs for L.A., misses what he tore himself away from. He wonders if she feels crowded by his sudden presence in her life.
“You’re going to have to go back eventually, aren’t you?” she asks quietly one night after a particularly rough day at work. She’s a doctor, an intern at the largest hospital in Seoul. In her short residence so far, she’s witnessed plenty of death, but today she watched a young woman cry over her fiancé’s dead body.
“No,” Aaron says plainly.
“Your mother has to be worried.”
“She’s not my mother.”
“What about everything you left back L.A.?” she asks ignoring his previous remark.
“I didn’t have anything in L.A.”
“So you really didn’t have a job?”
“No. I was set for life before I even took my first breath.” After he says it, he frowns. Who knows if that’s the truth anymore?
Ji Yeon misinterprets his frown to be something born of shame. “Well, so was I.”
He shifts in bed, turning his body so that he’s on his side facing her, “Then why do you work?”
“Because I enjoy saving lives. It’s the type of job that gives more than it takes.”
“My godfather’s a doctor. All it’s given him is a never ending headache and a lifetime membership to Alcoholics Anonymous.”
“Aaron!”
“Oh sorry. I forgot it the whole ‘Anonymous’ part.”
“You’re terrible,” she giggles, and he takes advantage of the moment, leaning over and placing a small kiss on her parted lips.
“Is it a family business?” he asks as he pulls back.
“What?” She’s still slightly dazed from the sign of affection.
“Being a doctor.”
“Oh,” she says, “No.”
They lapse into silence, watching the rain patter against the bedroom windows. Ji Yeon curls against his chest, her hair tickling his shoulders and her lips brushing against his pulse with each breath he takes.
“What are your parents like?” he asks because just now he realized it hadn’t been addressed before.
“All my mother does is work. I maybe see her once every six months, and my father died before I was born.”
“I’m sorry,” Aaron says, and Ji Yeon knows he means he’s sorry for both.
“It used to be better when I was younger. But I guess now that I’m an adult it’s okay for her to go trekking across the globe, chasing ghosts with her boyfriend.”
“Chasing ghosts?” Aaron asks, quirking his eyebrow.
“It’s not important,” Ji Yeon says, “My mother’s not like yours.”
Aaron snorts, “That’s an understatement.”
“I meant that we’re not close. Her business isn’t mine.”
“And my mother’s is?”
Ji Yeon smiles sadly, “Every story you’ve told me tells me yes.”
“That’s because I was the only person she could trust,” Aaron says firmly, and he feels a pang in his heart knowing that it’s the truth. Despite the fact that he wasn’t her son, she had built her entire world around him.
“You’re homesick,” Ji Yeon says, as the conversation comes full circle. Aaron leans his forward, his forehead pressing against hers.
“My home is here with you.” His eyes are closed, but he can feel the muscles in her forehead twisting as she smiles.
“Will it always be like that?” Ji Yeon whispers in her native tongue, and Aaron wonders briefly if she forgot he spoke it too, if the words were meant to fall on deaf ears.
“Always,” he whispers back in Korean, and when his eyes open, he knows she meant for him to hear her in the first place.
Part Two