Shadowplay (1/2)
Title: Shadowplay
Pairing: Sehun/Kai
Rating: NC-17
Length: 10,301
Genre: angst, au
Summary: Jongin is invisible and Sehun is unforgettable.
Warning: character death
Shadowplay
When Kim Jongin is eighteen, his parents pick up the family and move to a new neighborhood. After that, Jongin becomes invisible.
He has the vague idea that he should be doing something, whatever it is visible people do with their young adult lives. Perhaps he should be going to college, or finding a job. But Jongin is invisible, and it’s hard for invisible people to do those things. No one wants to hire an invisible man.
Sometimes, Jongin tries to talk to his parents, ask them what he should be doing with his life, but they ignore him, muttering to each other about his older sister’s families or their frustrating bosses at work. Eventually Jongin stops trying.
What he does instead is start going out every day, wandering the streets of the city. He doesn’t have to worry about avoiding the dank alleyways and sketchy side-streets that normal people, with their briefcases and shopping bags and children, take care to avoid. If Jongin is invisible to normal people, he’s mostly transparent to the petty thieves and wanted criminals that roam those dark, winding back alleys. Lawbreakers need only be a little more observant than their law-abiding prey.
This is how Jongin first finds the park. It’s a lovely little park, situated at the end of a particularly dark and smelly backstreet. It’s fairly small-about ten meters long and eleven meters wide, Jongin measures one day, taking small, even steps around and around the edges until he’s decided on an average width and length. But the space is bursting with greenery. From the line where the concrete sidewalk meets the soft grass there rises a nearly solid wall of vegetation-trees, vines, shrubs, flowers, bushes all twining, swarming, crawling over each other in an effort to take up more space, suck up more sunlight and tainted rainwater dripping off nearby roofs. But not a single leaf or twig passes the line marking the barrier between the park and the city-it’s as if the park is enclosed in an invisible box. Maybe that’s why Jongin likes it so much. He knows what it feels like to be invisible.
There are two benches in the park. There’s one on either side of the small space, placed directly opposite each other. Jongin likes these benches, too. They’re clean and sturdy, made of some smooth yellow-brown wood that always feels sun-warmed, even on cloudy winter days. They lack any of the distinguishing features of the regular city benches Jongin passes every day. Absent are the ornately mass-produced iron railings around their edges, as well as the vulgar plaques professing soulless gratitude to some rich, dead person. Jongin likes these benches. They seem sincere.
Every day, Jongin walks the half-mile to the park and sits down on the bench on the right-hand side of the park. He sits, and then he watches. Sometimes people pass by, rushing across the plush grass carpet so quickly it’s almost as if they don’t notice the wild garden rearing up on either side of them or the boy sitting on the bench, watching them. But most of the time Jongin is left alone, the sole human being in the park, watching the plants and animals live their small, intricate lives.
Jongin watches the squirrels leap tentatively over the grass, stopping every once in a while to snuffle at a nut or seed left in their path. He watches mother birds fly out and back, out and back, each time bringing more pieces of straw and newspaper and yarn to pad their nests. He watches fat bumblebees, drunk with pollen, swoosh and swerve through the warm summer air, dipping into one flower after another like ancient Roman politicians at a feast.
He usually spends all day at the park, not moving an inch from morning till night. Since he became invisible, he’s needed to eat a lot less, and his skin seems impermeable to light or shade-he never gets burned, even after sitting all day in full view of the hot sun, and the coldest winter gale has yet to raise goosebumps on his skin.
So he simply sits and observes, content to watch the seasons pass and the life of the park swell, decay, then grow again with the rotation of the earth around the sun. He does this for what seems like decades, eons of sitting on the same sun-slicked bench breathing in the scent of pollen and rusting iron and dew-wet grass, but is actually more like two years according to his parents one day when they actually speak to him, warning him that they aren’t going to support him for much longer.
In all that time, Jongin is alone in the park, enjoying the fact that his solitude allows him to better hear the thrumming of bees and warbling of sparrows, better feel each individual sunbeam warming his skin. When he gets lonely he talks to himself, and he finds he makes much better company than anyone else he’s met.
Then, one day, there’s someone sitting on the bench across the park.
The boy’s name is Oh Sehun, Jongin learns after a few days. That first day, that first moment when Jongin looks up and realizes he is not alone, is the day he begins to question the depth of his invisibility. Because the boy, Sehun, can see him.
“What do you do here?” Sehun asks that first day, and it takes Jongin a few moments to respond, vocal chords twisting and loosening after months of disuse. He uses the time to inspect this Sehun, this boy who has come into Jongin’s park and is staring right at him as if he were not invisible, as if he was as solid as any normal person. Sehun’s eyes are dark, and they seem to soak up the sunlight rather than reflecting it. His skin is pale, Jongin might describe it as porcelain if he were feeling poetic, and so delicate Jongin feels like he can almost see the veins and arteries that lie beneath it, dutifully pumping blood back and forth, up and down, keeping Sehun alive.
“I watch,” Jongin finally says, and Sehun’s eyes narrow, as if he is displeased with the response. The sunlight pouring down gets tangled in his hair, turning it black-brown-gold. Jongin likes the way Sehun’s lips, pale pink and as delicately shaped as a willow bough, turn up or down at the edges depending on his mood.
“But what do you watch?” Sehun presses, and Jongin has to stop and think for a while before coming up with an answer. When he looks up again, Sehun’s hair has released the golden sunshine it held only to snare the orange-pink glow of evening. Jongin thinks he is beautiful.
“Life,” Jongin says slowly, and as he says it he realizes how true the words are, how round and smooth they feel in his mouth. “I watch things grow and I watch things die.”
“But why?” Sehun asks, and Jongin smiles to see that downward quirk of puzzlement in his lips.
“Because that’s the most interesting thing for an invisible person to do,” Jongin admits, folding his hands serenely in his lap. He leans back to admire the play of shadows across the face of the large silver moon, almost missing Sehun’s final whispered question.
“But how can you be invisible if I can see you?”
When Sehun comes to the park the next day, and then again the next, Jongin realizes that he’s not planning to go away any time soon. This is when he decides to ask for his name.
“Oh Sehun,” Sehun says promptly, a hint of pride sneaking into his voice.
“It’s a very nice name,” Jongin offers, trying to please Sehun, whose moods seem as variable as the breezes that play across Jongin’s skin, sending flower petals swirling past him in a soft, lilac-white spray.
“Thank you,” Sehun mutters shyly before quickly returning the favor. “And what’s your name?”
“Kim Jongin,” Jongin says, and he can almost hear the echo of Sehun’s pride in his own voice, until he remembers that names are of little use to an invisible man.
“Jongin,” Sehun repeats, rolling the word around on his tongue like the tapioca balls in the tea he sometimes brings with him. Jongin never drinks his, content to simply watch the way the color of the tea changes with each new slant of sun and feel the heat leach out of his skin into the cold liquid until gradually they reach the same temperature, uneasy equilibrium.
“I’m not sure why you can see me,” Jongin says, plucking a stem of grass near his feet and gently peeling it in half, right down the middle. “Maybe you’re invisible too.”
“No,” Sehun says decisively, shaking his head. The sunlight trapped in his hair sways smoothly back and forth, fracturing and refracting as it tries to escape its delicate cage.
“You’re sure,” Jongin wonders, but as he glances over at Sehun he regrets his disbelieving tone. Sehun’s dark, dark eyes are staring directly at him, as if trying to bore right through his invisible body, and Jongin thinks he looks like some ancient Greek deity, lightning crowning his head and stars winking deceptively in the depths of his pupils.
“I’m sure,” Sehun says, and then he hesitates slightly before continuing. “I’m not invisible. I’m unforgettable.”
Jongin laughs, a soft, languid sound reminiscent of falling water and the hum of the bees he’s spent so long watching. And Sehun smiles at the sound, lips bowing upwards in the way Jongin likes best. But he’s quick to repeat his claim, quick to make sure Jongin knows he’s serious.
“I’m a boy that no one can forget. Once they’ve seen me, they always remember.”
“How strange that you and I should meet,” Jongin marvels. “One of us is invisible and the other unforgettable.”
“Maybe that’s why we met,” Sehun reasons, leaning back against the wood of the bench, gazing up at the midday sun directly over their heads. Jongin wonders how he can do that without having to shade his eyes, without having to squint to block out the too-bright rays.
“Maybe,” Jongin says, watching a patch of daffodils sway in the spring air. “Maybe it is.”
He doesn’t see Sehun every day. Sehun seems to come completely randomly, just when Jongin thinks he’s established a pattern Sehun completely destroys it, going missing for weeks at a time or coming every day for a month.
Jongin asks Sehun once where he goes, what he does when he leaves Jongin and his park behind. Sehun’s eyes had gone hard and sharp, and Jongin had found himself wincing in pain, as if he’d been cut.
“I do what I have to,” Sehun had said, ripping up a handful of grass and letting the bits of root and dirt fall back through his fingers. “When you’re unforgettable, you have to do what you can to survive.”
He’d left soon after that, grass flattening under his sneakers as he walked out of the park, and his footprints had lasted for several days, pressed into the soft earth like astronaut prints on the dust of the moon. Jongin tries putting his feet in the prints, following Sehun’s exact path out of the park, but the prints are too small to fit Jongin’s large feet and when he reaches the dark concrete on the other side he finds himself at a loss. He doesn’t know which way to go from here. He turns and steps back into the thick cocoon of the park, with its light and its soft rain and its sweet flowery scents.
The city is no place for an invisible boy anyway.
“You should come back with me today,” Sehun says suddenly, and Jongin is so surprised he nearly drops the daisy he’s preparing to thread onto his ever-growing chain. He’s hoping to make it long enough that it will wrap all the way around the park-a flowery reminder of the invisible barrier between the beauty of the garden and the desolation of the city, a flowery reminder, Jongin likes to think, that he exists.
“Back where?” he asks, and he likes the way Sehun reacts to his voice, likes the way Sehun swallows Jongin’s words like they’re honey, slipping down his throat to settle in his stomach where he can carry them away, another reminder that Jongin is more than just an invisible boy.
“Back…into the city. With me,” Sehun says, and he seems more hesitant this time, as if he wants Jongin to say yes almost as much as he wants him to say no.
Jongin hasn’t been back into the city in…well, a while. He can’t quite remember when he stopped going home at the end of the day, when he started building his own nest in a protected thicket of briars, finding a patch of moss to serve as a pillow, covering his skin with old blankets simply for the sake of nostalgia, not because he feels the cold. He thinks of leaving the park, of going out into the city where everything is glass and steel and motion, and his head starts spinning so fast he thinks he might be sick.
But Sehun is staring at him with those dark, dark eyes and Jongin wants to go with him, wants it more than he wants to stay in the peace and safety of his own garden.
“I’ll come with you,” he says, smile slow and warm as sunshine, and Sehun grins back, taking Jongin’s hand in his own and pulling him towards the edge of the park.
When Jongin looks back one last time before they turn into the alleyway, he sees only one set of footprints crossing the soft green grass.
Sehun takes them to a club, somewhere the music is loud and demanding, pulsing in Jongin’s ears like well-timed thunderclaps. The lights shine in his eyes, blinding him, and people shove past him, bump into him, curse their fellow revelers for being in the way, and Jongin thinks that this is no place for an invisible boy.
But then Sehun is grabbing his hands, spinning him around until his back is pressed against Sehun’s chest, and suddenly Jongin can’t breathe for other reasons, Sehun’s body rubbing against his in all the right ways and Jongin hasn’t felt this way in a long time, if ever.
Jongin can’t remember how they end up outside in the alley but he’s fairly certain it’s Sehun’s doing, since few drunken dancers would stand aside for someone they couldn’t see. But he doesn’t have much time to think about that before Sehun is kissing him, lips crushing roughly against his own, and his stomach feels full of the curious worms he sees poking out of the ground on warm days at the end of the rains, swaying back and forth as they try to ascertain the way back underground.
Jongin’s not sure what to do with his hands, so he settles for wrapping them around Sehun’s hips, pulling them flush against each other, so close he can feel Sehun’s heart beating faster and faster and his cock getting hard against Jongin’s leg.
“You’re beautiful,” Sehun gasps between kisses, and he slips a thigh between Jongin’s legs and rubs gently, leaving Jongin breathless and panting. But even though Sehun is gazing into his eyes, hands twisted roughly in Jongin’s hair, tongue slipping in between Jongin’s teeth, touching and tasting greedily, Jongin can’t shake the feeling that Sehun isn’t really seeing him, just a shadow bathed in reflected moonlight.
After this, Jongin starts going out with Sehun more often, and spending time in the park becomes too full of anticipation to be peaceful.
One day Sehun takes him to an arboretum and Jongin spends hours entranced, wandering the carefully tended pathways, marveling at the giant trees and ethereal blossoms, feeling the feathery softness of petals between the pads of his fingers and breathing in the woody scent of pine and maple. Sehun follows him from tree to tree, nearly bursting with excitement at having made Jongin so happy.
The sun is hot on the back of their necks as they wander the smooth gravel paths, Jongin stopping every few feet to exclaim over some new herb or examine some tenacious succulent, and Sehun gets horribly burnt, his glassy-pale skin tinged as pink as the tulips Jongin points out growing next to a hedge, laughing when Sehun playfully shoves him into the arms of a carefully pruned shrub for finding amusement in his pain.
They find a fountain hidden deep in the recesses of what Sehun insists is a maze but Jongin is sure is just a pleasant, circular path, and Jongin bathes some of Sehun’s skin-now an angry red-in the cool water. Sehun shivers deliciously under his fingers and maybe this is why they end up absorbed in each other, tongues twisting and twining together, hands slipping stealthily under shirts, until Jongin realizes with a start that it’s already evening, Sehun’s hair glittering brightly with the steadily dying light.
When Sehun starts to unbutton his jeans, brushing a hand lightly against his underwear, Jongin has to fight the urge to jump back, to shy away from this foreign feeling that leaves him disoriented and lightheaded, not sure whether the pleasure he’s feeling has overflowed into piercing pain.
But this is Sehun, the boy no one can forget, and so Jongin lets him press him back against the smooth stones of the fountain, lets him pull his cock out of his underwear and smooth his hand along Jongin’s length in a way that makes Jongin feel as if his whole body is submerged in a field of thistles.
Sehun’s good, Jongin can tell this much, this isn’t his first time doing something like this. The way he gazes up at Jongin with hooded eyes as he replaces his hand with his mouth and sucks, everything speaks of experience, of practice makes perfect, and Jongin aches to think of Sehun on his knees in front of some other boy, someone more perfect, more visible, than Jongin.
When Jongin comes, so hard he sees spots dancing at the edges of his vision, he’s quick to pull Sehun into his lap, kissing him roughly so he can taste himself in Sehun’s mouth, pressing a hand teasingly against Sehun’s zipper. And maybe Jongin’s never done this before but he’s a quick study, and in a matter of minutes he’s realized that Sehun like it rough, he likes Jongin to take him in hand and twist, dragging the tip of his finger over his slit before replacing his finger with his tongue, sucking on the underside of Sehun’s cock until he’s almost at the edge then letting go, sliding him out of his mouth for a few desperate seconds before taking him back in, letting Sehun fill his throat as he comes, eyes squeezed shut, breath shuddering in and out like the leaves of a tree shivering in a strong breeze.
When Jongin returns to the park, hair stuck to his forehead with sweat, heart full to bursting, limbs weak and tired, he finds he’s missed the first blooms of the season. He cups his hands around a large yellow-pink rose growing above his bench, ignoring the trickles of silver, moonlit blood that run down his hands at the prick of the thorns, and lets the velvet petals absorb the warm salt of his tears.
After that day in the arboretum, it’s several weeks before Jongin sees Sehun again. In the intervening days, Jongin sits on his bench and worries, wondering if he’s done something wrong, if Sehun has decided to find someone more interesting, someone who can love him more fully, more sincerely, than an invisible man can.
But after a few days of worrying, Jongin realizes that the jasmine have started to bloom, filling the air with the heady scent of forgetting, and even if he can never forget Sehun, the darkness of his eyes and the shimmer of his hair and the small sounds he makes when they kiss, Jongin can forget himself as easily as everyone else can, and realizing this is strangely calming. He spends an entire day watching small yellow-green leaves unfurl little by little on a dark branch, opening gratefully to the light of the sun.
When Sehun comes back, he brings a muffled roar and the glare of sun on metal and the acrid scent of exhaust with him. He smiles excitedly at Jongin, and Jongin tries to remember how to smile back, though the smell of gasoline mixing with jasmine clogs his throat and turns his stomach.
They both climb into the car, and Sehun shoots off down the too-small alleyway, whooping with glee as they cut into traffic, swerving around anyone going slower than the speed of their heartbeats. It doesn’t take long for them to leave the confines of the city, to find a wide, open road where the speed of the car creates a breeze strong enough to tear the sunlight from Sehun’s hair and the fear from Jongin’s fingers, and soon he feels brave and strong and bright, just like Sehun, and he yells with joy at the sunshine pouring over his skin and the warmth of Sehun’s hand on his thigh.
Sehun stops the car when they reach the edge of a cliff overlooking the ocean, and they both climb awkwardly out of their seats, limbs stiff with sitting, voices hoarse from shouting into the wind. Jongin sits on the ground, feeling safer the closer he is to the sandy soil, and Sehun sits beside him, leaning his head on Jongin’s shoulder. Together they contemplate the blue-green waves that wobble back and forth along the horizon, every once in a while gathering enough strength to smash against the rocks and explode upwards in a glittering spray of white-tipped foam.
“I love the ocean,” Sehun says, finger tracing a series of concentric circles in the dirt. “It reminds me of everything I want to be, everywhere I want to go. You have to be brave to go out onto the ocean. I want to be brave.”
“You are brave,” Jongin replies, using a small twig to draw a series of zigzagging lines on the ground next to his foot. A maze, maybe.
“Not that brave,” Sehun mutters, resting his head on his knees. The sunlight is back, and Jongin can feel it clinging to his fingers as he runs them through Sehun’s hair.
“Braver than me,” Jongin says. “I’d never be able to go out on the ocean. It’s too big and too bright and too fast. It would swallow me up. The ocean is no place for an invisible boy.”
“But you’re not invisible to me,” Sehun says, grabbing Jongin’s wrist and tugging until Jongin turns to look at him, hair falling over his eyes. “If you went with me you would be all right.”
“Maybe,” Jongin says, turning back to watch the sun falling ever closer to the navy surface of the water. “Or maybe once we got out on the ocean you would lose me in the blue water and the hot sun and the crashing of the waves. Maybe you would forget all about me.”
“I could never forget about you,” Sehun says, gripping Jongin’s wrist harder, hard enough to bruise. “To me, you are unforgettable.”
On the way back to the city, Sehun drives too fast and Jongin says nothing, simply watching the trees and buildings speed past, blurring into one long green-black strand of motion that reminds Jongin of the little snakes he sometimes sees sliding through the grass in the park, their backs shining in the sun, heating their cold blood until it pumps hot and slick through their veins, letting them slip smoothly out of sight.
Sehun drops him off at the entrance to the alleyway leading to his park, and gives him a worried look as he gazes into the darkness.
“Are you sure it’s safe for you to be staying here?” he asks, voice tinged with worry.
“I’m sure,” Jongin says with a smile. “It’s hard to hurt an invisible boy.”
One day, Sehun comes and spends nearly an entire day at the park-something he hasn’t done in a while. It makes Jongin happy, seeing Sehun on his knees watching a line of ants march steadily across the grass or trying to sneak up on a butterfly, giggling like a boy half his age when it suddenly takes flight, drifting unsteadily through the air as if drugged with the same sweet poison as the bumbling honeybees.
Sehun is lying on the grass, letting Jongin braid cherry blossoms into the sunshine coating his hair, when he says, “I can see why you love it here.”
“It’s beautiful and peaceful,” Jongin says simply, sitting back on his heels to admire his handiwork. Sehun looks beautiful and peaceful like this. He looks like an angel in a tapestry, surrounded by a halo of light and pure white blossoms, eyes closed as if in celestial reverie.
“No, it’s more than that,” Sehun says without opening his eyes. “It’s almost as if…time stops in here. Whenever I come here I feel as if I’m fading into the background, as if everything becomes less important. I feel like if there was any place I could be forgotten, it would be here.”
“Maybe you’re right,” Jongin says thoughtfully, brushing his hair out of his eyes. He likes the way it’s darker than Sehun’s honey-colored mop, the way it mimics the color of the cool soil after a hard rain. “Maybe that’s why I like it here so much. Because it feels like this is the one place where I become completely solid, where I’m not invisible anymore. This place makes me feel whole.”
Sehun doesn’t respond, and Jongin thinks he may have fallen asleep. Slowly, Jongin steps past him towards a stand of slender white lilies growing in a slightly marshy corner of the park. Plucking one of the largest blossoms, he walks back and places it gently on Sehun’s chest. It completes the image in a strange way, he thinks. It makes Sehun look even more delicate, even more pure. Timeless.
“I want you to come with me,” Sehun says, and Jongin nods, quickly opening the car door and climbing inside. It’s been several days since he last saw Sehun, and the boy doesn’t look quite healthy. His skin seems paler than usual and Jongin notices him wince as he twists his neck to check that Jongin’s safely inside the car.
Jongin knows better than to ask where they’re going, and even if Sehun told him the likelihood is that he wouldn’t know the place anyway. Sehun is his only connection to the outside world, and a tenuous one at that.
They roar down crowded city streets, Sehun grunting in frustration every time they have to stop for a red light or a pedestrian, foot already slamming down on the gas pedal the instant the light changes or the person steps foot on the other side of the street. They stop in front of one of the largest buildings Jongin’s ever seen.
“Come on, get out,” Sehun orders, and Jongin is quickly to comply, hopping out of the car and watching quietly as Sehun hands his keys to a man in a black-and-white uniform-a valet, some part of Jongin’s mind supplies-and motions for Jongin to follow him.
Inside, the building is even grander, all cream-colored couches and crystal-clear, one-way windows opening out onto the rest of the city. Jongin stands awestruck in the middle of the enormous entryway, gazing at the polished, grey-pink granite covering the floor-enough for a small mountain, Jongin thinks-as Sehun gets a keycard from a foreign-looking man at the front desk and presses the button for the elevator.
Jongin spends the first half of the elevator ride with his nose pressed firmly against the glass, watching the ground drop swiftly away from his feet, and the second half huddled in a ball on the ground near Sehun’s legs, trying to pretend to himself that he’s not in a glass cage, that he’s back with his lilies and his butterflies, somewhere safe and warm and not eighty stories up. Sehun smiles slightly at his distress, ruffling his hair affectionately as Jongin tries to control his heavy breathing and offering his hand to help him up and out of the elevator when they reach their floor.
“Welcome,” Sehun says with a grin before grandly throwing open the door to a room at the end of the hallway. “It’s all ours for the day. What do you think?”
What he thinks, Jongin wants to say, is that they have fallen inside of a calla lily. Everything is a creamy, eggshell white, from the plump comforter covering the bed to the thick, soft carpet to the fluffy towels Jongin can see hanging outside what he assumes is the bathroom. He gingerly steps into the room, afraid that the mere touch of his skin will soil the whiteness, will pollute the crisp air he can almost feel blowing past the enormous windows.
“Well?” Sehun asks, stepping inside as well and closing the door behind him. This time his voice sounds a little desperate, as if he’s worried he’s made a mistake, and Jongin whirls around, closing the distance between them with a few quick steps.
“I love it,” he purrs, grabbing the silk tie Sehun is wearing and using it to pull him in for a kiss.
When they fuck, it doesn’t happen quite the way Jongin had expected. He knows by now that Sehun doesn’t believe in being gentle, doesn’t want to be treated like a flower, to be reminded that he is as fragile as he is beautiful. But nothing can prepare him for the fire in Sehun’s dark eyes as he slides in and out, picking up speed with each of Jongin’s gasping moans, until he’s slamming into him, pushing Jongin’s limp body a little farther up the bed with each thrust until the room goes white and Sehun collapses on top of him, arms wrapped so tightly around Jongin’s body that Jongin feels like a tree being engulfed by poison ivy.
In the fading light Jongin can see the purple bruises stark against the pale skin of Sehun’s hips, his upper arms, his ribs, and he traces them with a finger so lightly Sehun doesn’t even stir. But Jongin’s heart aches and he knows that, in some ways at least, he’ll always be invisible to Sehun.
The next time he sees Sehun it’s autumn, the air has a bit of a chill that catches playfully in Jongin’s throat, distracting him momentarily from his work as he covers some of the flowers and shrubs with old newspaper, trying to keep them whole, unfrozen, for just a little while longer in the hope that Sehun will come back and be able to see them.
But when Sehun does come, he’s not looking at the flowers.
“Jongin. I. Need-” and then Sehun is falling, Jongin rushing forward to catch him before he hits the ground, lowering him onto the brittle grass with a crunch reminiscent of broken glass. It grates on Jongin’s ears as he hovers worriedly around Sehun, lifting his shirt to confirm that the bruises are back, that he’s having trouble getting his lungs to inflate, that one of his ankles is twisted at an angle that makes Jongin shiver.
A trickle of silver, moonlit blood trails out of Sehun’s mouth and Jongin thinks that he looks beautiful like this, too, lying pale and broken on the dark grass. The moonlight is too clever to get caught in his hair-instead, it dances over the top of it, making it shine with an unearthly radiance.
As Jongin scrabbles through Sehun’s pockets, looking for a phone so he can call for help, he notices that Sehun’s eyes are open, that he’s watching him. And then Jongin stops dead, phone in hand, blood frozen in terror. Because Sehun’s eyes no longer absorb the light. They’re reflecting it-glowing a brilliant silver-and Jongin can barely breathe but he somehow manages to press the small numbers and give a street address before hanging up and lifting Sehun into his arms, staggering slightly as he carries him down the empty alleyway, listening carefully for each harsh breath, each pained grunt when Jongin jostles him slightly.
“It’s going to be okay,” Jongin whispers breathlessly, whether for his own sake or for Sehun’s he doesn’t know. “You’re going to be just fine, the hospital will fix you right up and then everything will go back to the way it was, you’ll see, it’ll be just the way it was.”
“Jongin,” Sehun whispers just as they reach the street, and Jongin almost misses the half-sighed word as he cranes his neck looking for an ambulance. By the time he looks back at the boy in his arms, Sehun’s eyes are tightly shut and he’s breathing so shallowly Jongin’s afraid he’s going to shiver apart right there in his arms, shatter into a thousand tiny pieces.
In the hospital, they ask Jongin for so many answers he doesn’t have. They ask for his name-that he can give them-but then they ask for an address, a phone number, a relationship to the injured man, a reason for the injury, and Jongin can’t help them, the words get caught in his throat, and all he can do is hold onto Sehun’s hand, knowing that Sehun is the only thing preventing him from becoming invisible.
It’s a kindly female paramedic who finally manages to convince him that Sehun is going to be fine, he managed to bring him in just in time, if he could just go sit in the waiting room they’ll be out with news shortly. So Jongin lets go, and he disappears.
He slips silently through the quiet halls of the hospital, listening to tired doctors discuss diagnoses and chatty night-shift nurses discuss treatments, until he finds a bench half-hidden by a large potted fern where he curls up for the night, watching the moonlight form strange, unfamiliar patterns on the cold tile floor, straining to hear the sound of crickets or running water but hearing instead only the steady ticking of a nearby clock.
The sound makes him sick.
Part 2
Pairing: Sehun/Kai
Rating: NC-17
Length: 10,301
Genre: angst, au
Summary: Jongin is invisible and Sehun is unforgettable.
Warning: character death
Shadowplay
When Kim Jongin is eighteen, his parents pick up the family and move to a new neighborhood. After that, Jongin becomes invisible.
He has the vague idea that he should be doing something, whatever it is visible people do with their young adult lives. Perhaps he should be going to college, or finding a job. But Jongin is invisible, and it’s hard for invisible people to do those things. No one wants to hire an invisible man.
Sometimes, Jongin tries to talk to his parents, ask them what he should be doing with his life, but they ignore him, muttering to each other about his older sister’s families or their frustrating bosses at work. Eventually Jongin stops trying.
What he does instead is start going out every day, wandering the streets of the city. He doesn’t have to worry about avoiding the dank alleyways and sketchy side-streets that normal people, with their briefcases and shopping bags and children, take care to avoid. If Jongin is invisible to normal people, he’s mostly transparent to the petty thieves and wanted criminals that roam those dark, winding back alleys. Lawbreakers need only be a little more observant than their law-abiding prey.
This is how Jongin first finds the park. It’s a lovely little park, situated at the end of a particularly dark and smelly backstreet. It’s fairly small-about ten meters long and eleven meters wide, Jongin measures one day, taking small, even steps around and around the edges until he’s decided on an average width and length. But the space is bursting with greenery. From the line where the concrete sidewalk meets the soft grass there rises a nearly solid wall of vegetation-trees, vines, shrubs, flowers, bushes all twining, swarming, crawling over each other in an effort to take up more space, suck up more sunlight and tainted rainwater dripping off nearby roofs. But not a single leaf or twig passes the line marking the barrier between the park and the city-it’s as if the park is enclosed in an invisible box. Maybe that’s why Jongin likes it so much. He knows what it feels like to be invisible.
There are two benches in the park. There’s one on either side of the small space, placed directly opposite each other. Jongin likes these benches, too. They’re clean and sturdy, made of some smooth yellow-brown wood that always feels sun-warmed, even on cloudy winter days. They lack any of the distinguishing features of the regular city benches Jongin passes every day. Absent are the ornately mass-produced iron railings around their edges, as well as the vulgar plaques professing soulless gratitude to some rich, dead person. Jongin likes these benches. They seem sincere.
Every day, Jongin walks the half-mile to the park and sits down on the bench on the right-hand side of the park. He sits, and then he watches. Sometimes people pass by, rushing across the plush grass carpet so quickly it’s almost as if they don’t notice the wild garden rearing up on either side of them or the boy sitting on the bench, watching them. But most of the time Jongin is left alone, the sole human being in the park, watching the plants and animals live their small, intricate lives.
Jongin watches the squirrels leap tentatively over the grass, stopping every once in a while to snuffle at a nut or seed left in their path. He watches mother birds fly out and back, out and back, each time bringing more pieces of straw and newspaper and yarn to pad their nests. He watches fat bumblebees, drunk with pollen, swoosh and swerve through the warm summer air, dipping into one flower after another like ancient Roman politicians at a feast.
He usually spends all day at the park, not moving an inch from morning till night. Since he became invisible, he’s needed to eat a lot less, and his skin seems impermeable to light or shade-he never gets burned, even after sitting all day in full view of the hot sun, and the coldest winter gale has yet to raise goosebumps on his skin.
So he simply sits and observes, content to watch the seasons pass and the life of the park swell, decay, then grow again with the rotation of the earth around the sun. He does this for what seems like decades, eons of sitting on the same sun-slicked bench breathing in the scent of pollen and rusting iron and dew-wet grass, but is actually more like two years according to his parents one day when they actually speak to him, warning him that they aren’t going to support him for much longer.
In all that time, Jongin is alone in the park, enjoying the fact that his solitude allows him to better hear the thrumming of bees and warbling of sparrows, better feel each individual sunbeam warming his skin. When he gets lonely he talks to himself, and he finds he makes much better company than anyone else he’s met.
Then, one day, there’s someone sitting on the bench across the park.
The boy’s name is Oh Sehun, Jongin learns after a few days. That first day, that first moment when Jongin looks up and realizes he is not alone, is the day he begins to question the depth of his invisibility. Because the boy, Sehun, can see him.
“What do you do here?” Sehun asks that first day, and it takes Jongin a few moments to respond, vocal chords twisting and loosening after months of disuse. He uses the time to inspect this Sehun, this boy who has come into Jongin’s park and is staring right at him as if he were not invisible, as if he was as solid as any normal person. Sehun’s eyes are dark, and they seem to soak up the sunlight rather than reflecting it. His skin is pale, Jongin might describe it as porcelain if he were feeling poetic, and so delicate Jongin feels like he can almost see the veins and arteries that lie beneath it, dutifully pumping blood back and forth, up and down, keeping Sehun alive.
“I watch,” Jongin finally says, and Sehun’s eyes narrow, as if he is displeased with the response. The sunlight pouring down gets tangled in his hair, turning it black-brown-gold. Jongin likes the way Sehun’s lips, pale pink and as delicately shaped as a willow bough, turn up or down at the edges depending on his mood.
“But what do you watch?” Sehun presses, and Jongin has to stop and think for a while before coming up with an answer. When he looks up again, Sehun’s hair has released the golden sunshine it held only to snare the orange-pink glow of evening. Jongin thinks he is beautiful.
“Life,” Jongin says slowly, and as he says it he realizes how true the words are, how round and smooth they feel in his mouth. “I watch things grow and I watch things die.”
“But why?” Sehun asks, and Jongin smiles to see that downward quirk of puzzlement in his lips.
“Because that’s the most interesting thing for an invisible person to do,” Jongin admits, folding his hands serenely in his lap. He leans back to admire the play of shadows across the face of the large silver moon, almost missing Sehun’s final whispered question.
“But how can you be invisible if I can see you?”
When Sehun comes to the park the next day, and then again the next, Jongin realizes that he’s not planning to go away any time soon. This is when he decides to ask for his name.
“Oh Sehun,” Sehun says promptly, a hint of pride sneaking into his voice.
“It’s a very nice name,” Jongin offers, trying to please Sehun, whose moods seem as variable as the breezes that play across Jongin’s skin, sending flower petals swirling past him in a soft, lilac-white spray.
“Thank you,” Sehun mutters shyly before quickly returning the favor. “And what’s your name?”
“Kim Jongin,” Jongin says, and he can almost hear the echo of Sehun’s pride in his own voice, until he remembers that names are of little use to an invisible man.
“Jongin,” Sehun repeats, rolling the word around on his tongue like the tapioca balls in the tea he sometimes brings with him. Jongin never drinks his, content to simply watch the way the color of the tea changes with each new slant of sun and feel the heat leach out of his skin into the cold liquid until gradually they reach the same temperature, uneasy equilibrium.
“I’m not sure why you can see me,” Jongin says, plucking a stem of grass near his feet and gently peeling it in half, right down the middle. “Maybe you’re invisible too.”
“No,” Sehun says decisively, shaking his head. The sunlight trapped in his hair sways smoothly back and forth, fracturing and refracting as it tries to escape its delicate cage.
“You’re sure,” Jongin wonders, but as he glances over at Sehun he regrets his disbelieving tone. Sehun’s dark, dark eyes are staring directly at him, as if trying to bore right through his invisible body, and Jongin thinks he looks like some ancient Greek deity, lightning crowning his head and stars winking deceptively in the depths of his pupils.
“I’m sure,” Sehun says, and then he hesitates slightly before continuing. “I’m not invisible. I’m unforgettable.”
Jongin laughs, a soft, languid sound reminiscent of falling water and the hum of the bees he’s spent so long watching. And Sehun smiles at the sound, lips bowing upwards in the way Jongin likes best. But he’s quick to repeat his claim, quick to make sure Jongin knows he’s serious.
“I’m a boy that no one can forget. Once they’ve seen me, they always remember.”
“How strange that you and I should meet,” Jongin marvels. “One of us is invisible and the other unforgettable.”
“Maybe that’s why we met,” Sehun reasons, leaning back against the wood of the bench, gazing up at the midday sun directly over their heads. Jongin wonders how he can do that without having to shade his eyes, without having to squint to block out the too-bright rays.
“Maybe,” Jongin says, watching a patch of daffodils sway in the spring air. “Maybe it is.”
He doesn’t see Sehun every day. Sehun seems to come completely randomly, just when Jongin thinks he’s established a pattern Sehun completely destroys it, going missing for weeks at a time or coming every day for a month.
Jongin asks Sehun once where he goes, what he does when he leaves Jongin and his park behind. Sehun’s eyes had gone hard and sharp, and Jongin had found himself wincing in pain, as if he’d been cut.
“I do what I have to,” Sehun had said, ripping up a handful of grass and letting the bits of root and dirt fall back through his fingers. “When you’re unforgettable, you have to do what you can to survive.”
He’d left soon after that, grass flattening under his sneakers as he walked out of the park, and his footprints had lasted for several days, pressed into the soft earth like astronaut prints on the dust of the moon. Jongin tries putting his feet in the prints, following Sehun’s exact path out of the park, but the prints are too small to fit Jongin’s large feet and when he reaches the dark concrete on the other side he finds himself at a loss. He doesn’t know which way to go from here. He turns and steps back into the thick cocoon of the park, with its light and its soft rain and its sweet flowery scents.
The city is no place for an invisible boy anyway.
“You should come back with me today,” Sehun says suddenly, and Jongin is so surprised he nearly drops the daisy he’s preparing to thread onto his ever-growing chain. He’s hoping to make it long enough that it will wrap all the way around the park-a flowery reminder of the invisible barrier between the beauty of the garden and the desolation of the city, a flowery reminder, Jongin likes to think, that he exists.
“Back where?” he asks, and he likes the way Sehun reacts to his voice, likes the way Sehun swallows Jongin’s words like they’re honey, slipping down his throat to settle in his stomach where he can carry them away, another reminder that Jongin is more than just an invisible boy.
“Back…into the city. With me,” Sehun says, and he seems more hesitant this time, as if he wants Jongin to say yes almost as much as he wants him to say no.
Jongin hasn’t been back into the city in…well, a while. He can’t quite remember when he stopped going home at the end of the day, when he started building his own nest in a protected thicket of briars, finding a patch of moss to serve as a pillow, covering his skin with old blankets simply for the sake of nostalgia, not because he feels the cold. He thinks of leaving the park, of going out into the city where everything is glass and steel and motion, and his head starts spinning so fast he thinks he might be sick.
But Sehun is staring at him with those dark, dark eyes and Jongin wants to go with him, wants it more than he wants to stay in the peace and safety of his own garden.
“I’ll come with you,” he says, smile slow and warm as sunshine, and Sehun grins back, taking Jongin’s hand in his own and pulling him towards the edge of the park.
When Jongin looks back one last time before they turn into the alleyway, he sees only one set of footprints crossing the soft green grass.
Sehun takes them to a club, somewhere the music is loud and demanding, pulsing in Jongin’s ears like well-timed thunderclaps. The lights shine in his eyes, blinding him, and people shove past him, bump into him, curse their fellow revelers for being in the way, and Jongin thinks that this is no place for an invisible boy.
But then Sehun is grabbing his hands, spinning him around until his back is pressed against Sehun’s chest, and suddenly Jongin can’t breathe for other reasons, Sehun’s body rubbing against his in all the right ways and Jongin hasn’t felt this way in a long time, if ever.
Jongin can’t remember how they end up outside in the alley but he’s fairly certain it’s Sehun’s doing, since few drunken dancers would stand aside for someone they couldn’t see. But he doesn’t have much time to think about that before Sehun is kissing him, lips crushing roughly against his own, and his stomach feels full of the curious worms he sees poking out of the ground on warm days at the end of the rains, swaying back and forth as they try to ascertain the way back underground.
Jongin’s not sure what to do with his hands, so he settles for wrapping them around Sehun’s hips, pulling them flush against each other, so close he can feel Sehun’s heart beating faster and faster and his cock getting hard against Jongin’s leg.
“You’re beautiful,” Sehun gasps between kisses, and he slips a thigh between Jongin’s legs and rubs gently, leaving Jongin breathless and panting. But even though Sehun is gazing into his eyes, hands twisted roughly in Jongin’s hair, tongue slipping in between Jongin’s teeth, touching and tasting greedily, Jongin can’t shake the feeling that Sehun isn’t really seeing him, just a shadow bathed in reflected moonlight.
After this, Jongin starts going out with Sehun more often, and spending time in the park becomes too full of anticipation to be peaceful.
One day Sehun takes him to an arboretum and Jongin spends hours entranced, wandering the carefully tended pathways, marveling at the giant trees and ethereal blossoms, feeling the feathery softness of petals between the pads of his fingers and breathing in the woody scent of pine and maple. Sehun follows him from tree to tree, nearly bursting with excitement at having made Jongin so happy.
The sun is hot on the back of their necks as they wander the smooth gravel paths, Jongin stopping every few feet to exclaim over some new herb or examine some tenacious succulent, and Sehun gets horribly burnt, his glassy-pale skin tinged as pink as the tulips Jongin points out growing next to a hedge, laughing when Sehun playfully shoves him into the arms of a carefully pruned shrub for finding amusement in his pain.
They find a fountain hidden deep in the recesses of what Sehun insists is a maze but Jongin is sure is just a pleasant, circular path, and Jongin bathes some of Sehun’s skin-now an angry red-in the cool water. Sehun shivers deliciously under his fingers and maybe this is why they end up absorbed in each other, tongues twisting and twining together, hands slipping stealthily under shirts, until Jongin realizes with a start that it’s already evening, Sehun’s hair glittering brightly with the steadily dying light.
When Sehun starts to unbutton his jeans, brushing a hand lightly against his underwear, Jongin has to fight the urge to jump back, to shy away from this foreign feeling that leaves him disoriented and lightheaded, not sure whether the pleasure he’s feeling has overflowed into piercing pain.
But this is Sehun, the boy no one can forget, and so Jongin lets him press him back against the smooth stones of the fountain, lets him pull his cock out of his underwear and smooth his hand along Jongin’s length in a way that makes Jongin feel as if his whole body is submerged in a field of thistles.
Sehun’s good, Jongin can tell this much, this isn’t his first time doing something like this. The way he gazes up at Jongin with hooded eyes as he replaces his hand with his mouth and sucks, everything speaks of experience, of practice makes perfect, and Jongin aches to think of Sehun on his knees in front of some other boy, someone more perfect, more visible, than Jongin.
When Jongin comes, so hard he sees spots dancing at the edges of his vision, he’s quick to pull Sehun into his lap, kissing him roughly so he can taste himself in Sehun’s mouth, pressing a hand teasingly against Sehun’s zipper. And maybe Jongin’s never done this before but he’s a quick study, and in a matter of minutes he’s realized that Sehun like it rough, he likes Jongin to take him in hand and twist, dragging the tip of his finger over his slit before replacing his finger with his tongue, sucking on the underside of Sehun’s cock until he’s almost at the edge then letting go, sliding him out of his mouth for a few desperate seconds before taking him back in, letting Sehun fill his throat as he comes, eyes squeezed shut, breath shuddering in and out like the leaves of a tree shivering in a strong breeze.
When Jongin returns to the park, hair stuck to his forehead with sweat, heart full to bursting, limbs weak and tired, he finds he’s missed the first blooms of the season. He cups his hands around a large yellow-pink rose growing above his bench, ignoring the trickles of silver, moonlit blood that run down his hands at the prick of the thorns, and lets the velvet petals absorb the warm salt of his tears.
After that day in the arboretum, it’s several weeks before Jongin sees Sehun again. In the intervening days, Jongin sits on his bench and worries, wondering if he’s done something wrong, if Sehun has decided to find someone more interesting, someone who can love him more fully, more sincerely, than an invisible man can.
But after a few days of worrying, Jongin realizes that the jasmine have started to bloom, filling the air with the heady scent of forgetting, and even if he can never forget Sehun, the darkness of his eyes and the shimmer of his hair and the small sounds he makes when they kiss, Jongin can forget himself as easily as everyone else can, and realizing this is strangely calming. He spends an entire day watching small yellow-green leaves unfurl little by little on a dark branch, opening gratefully to the light of the sun.
When Sehun comes back, he brings a muffled roar and the glare of sun on metal and the acrid scent of exhaust with him. He smiles excitedly at Jongin, and Jongin tries to remember how to smile back, though the smell of gasoline mixing with jasmine clogs his throat and turns his stomach.
They both climb into the car, and Sehun shoots off down the too-small alleyway, whooping with glee as they cut into traffic, swerving around anyone going slower than the speed of their heartbeats. It doesn’t take long for them to leave the confines of the city, to find a wide, open road where the speed of the car creates a breeze strong enough to tear the sunlight from Sehun’s hair and the fear from Jongin’s fingers, and soon he feels brave and strong and bright, just like Sehun, and he yells with joy at the sunshine pouring over his skin and the warmth of Sehun’s hand on his thigh.
Sehun stops the car when they reach the edge of a cliff overlooking the ocean, and they both climb awkwardly out of their seats, limbs stiff with sitting, voices hoarse from shouting into the wind. Jongin sits on the ground, feeling safer the closer he is to the sandy soil, and Sehun sits beside him, leaning his head on Jongin’s shoulder. Together they contemplate the blue-green waves that wobble back and forth along the horizon, every once in a while gathering enough strength to smash against the rocks and explode upwards in a glittering spray of white-tipped foam.
“I love the ocean,” Sehun says, finger tracing a series of concentric circles in the dirt. “It reminds me of everything I want to be, everywhere I want to go. You have to be brave to go out onto the ocean. I want to be brave.”
“You are brave,” Jongin replies, using a small twig to draw a series of zigzagging lines on the ground next to his foot. A maze, maybe.
“Not that brave,” Sehun mutters, resting his head on his knees. The sunlight is back, and Jongin can feel it clinging to his fingers as he runs them through Sehun’s hair.
“Braver than me,” Jongin says. “I’d never be able to go out on the ocean. It’s too big and too bright and too fast. It would swallow me up. The ocean is no place for an invisible boy.”
“But you’re not invisible to me,” Sehun says, grabbing Jongin’s wrist and tugging until Jongin turns to look at him, hair falling over his eyes. “If you went with me you would be all right.”
“Maybe,” Jongin says, turning back to watch the sun falling ever closer to the navy surface of the water. “Or maybe once we got out on the ocean you would lose me in the blue water and the hot sun and the crashing of the waves. Maybe you would forget all about me.”
“I could never forget about you,” Sehun says, gripping Jongin’s wrist harder, hard enough to bruise. “To me, you are unforgettable.”
On the way back to the city, Sehun drives too fast and Jongin says nothing, simply watching the trees and buildings speed past, blurring into one long green-black strand of motion that reminds Jongin of the little snakes he sometimes sees sliding through the grass in the park, their backs shining in the sun, heating their cold blood until it pumps hot and slick through their veins, letting them slip smoothly out of sight.
Sehun drops him off at the entrance to the alleyway leading to his park, and gives him a worried look as he gazes into the darkness.
“Are you sure it’s safe for you to be staying here?” he asks, voice tinged with worry.
“I’m sure,” Jongin says with a smile. “It’s hard to hurt an invisible boy.”
One day, Sehun comes and spends nearly an entire day at the park-something he hasn’t done in a while. It makes Jongin happy, seeing Sehun on his knees watching a line of ants march steadily across the grass or trying to sneak up on a butterfly, giggling like a boy half his age when it suddenly takes flight, drifting unsteadily through the air as if drugged with the same sweet poison as the bumbling honeybees.
Sehun is lying on the grass, letting Jongin braid cherry blossoms into the sunshine coating his hair, when he says, “I can see why you love it here.”
“It’s beautiful and peaceful,” Jongin says simply, sitting back on his heels to admire his handiwork. Sehun looks beautiful and peaceful like this. He looks like an angel in a tapestry, surrounded by a halo of light and pure white blossoms, eyes closed as if in celestial reverie.
“No, it’s more than that,” Sehun says without opening his eyes. “It’s almost as if…time stops in here. Whenever I come here I feel as if I’m fading into the background, as if everything becomes less important. I feel like if there was any place I could be forgotten, it would be here.”
“Maybe you’re right,” Jongin says thoughtfully, brushing his hair out of his eyes. He likes the way it’s darker than Sehun’s honey-colored mop, the way it mimics the color of the cool soil after a hard rain. “Maybe that’s why I like it here so much. Because it feels like this is the one place where I become completely solid, where I’m not invisible anymore. This place makes me feel whole.”
Sehun doesn’t respond, and Jongin thinks he may have fallen asleep. Slowly, Jongin steps past him towards a stand of slender white lilies growing in a slightly marshy corner of the park. Plucking one of the largest blossoms, he walks back and places it gently on Sehun’s chest. It completes the image in a strange way, he thinks. It makes Sehun look even more delicate, even more pure. Timeless.
“I want you to come with me,” Sehun says, and Jongin nods, quickly opening the car door and climbing inside. It’s been several days since he last saw Sehun, and the boy doesn’t look quite healthy. His skin seems paler than usual and Jongin notices him wince as he twists his neck to check that Jongin’s safely inside the car.
Jongin knows better than to ask where they’re going, and even if Sehun told him the likelihood is that he wouldn’t know the place anyway. Sehun is his only connection to the outside world, and a tenuous one at that.
They roar down crowded city streets, Sehun grunting in frustration every time they have to stop for a red light or a pedestrian, foot already slamming down on the gas pedal the instant the light changes or the person steps foot on the other side of the street. They stop in front of one of the largest buildings Jongin’s ever seen.
“Come on, get out,” Sehun orders, and Jongin is quickly to comply, hopping out of the car and watching quietly as Sehun hands his keys to a man in a black-and-white uniform-a valet, some part of Jongin’s mind supplies-and motions for Jongin to follow him.
Inside, the building is even grander, all cream-colored couches and crystal-clear, one-way windows opening out onto the rest of the city. Jongin stands awestruck in the middle of the enormous entryway, gazing at the polished, grey-pink granite covering the floor-enough for a small mountain, Jongin thinks-as Sehun gets a keycard from a foreign-looking man at the front desk and presses the button for the elevator.
Jongin spends the first half of the elevator ride with his nose pressed firmly against the glass, watching the ground drop swiftly away from his feet, and the second half huddled in a ball on the ground near Sehun’s legs, trying to pretend to himself that he’s not in a glass cage, that he’s back with his lilies and his butterflies, somewhere safe and warm and not eighty stories up. Sehun smiles slightly at his distress, ruffling his hair affectionately as Jongin tries to control his heavy breathing and offering his hand to help him up and out of the elevator when they reach their floor.
“Welcome,” Sehun says with a grin before grandly throwing open the door to a room at the end of the hallway. “It’s all ours for the day. What do you think?”
What he thinks, Jongin wants to say, is that they have fallen inside of a calla lily. Everything is a creamy, eggshell white, from the plump comforter covering the bed to the thick, soft carpet to the fluffy towels Jongin can see hanging outside what he assumes is the bathroom. He gingerly steps into the room, afraid that the mere touch of his skin will soil the whiteness, will pollute the crisp air he can almost feel blowing past the enormous windows.
“Well?” Sehun asks, stepping inside as well and closing the door behind him. This time his voice sounds a little desperate, as if he’s worried he’s made a mistake, and Jongin whirls around, closing the distance between them with a few quick steps.
“I love it,” he purrs, grabbing the silk tie Sehun is wearing and using it to pull him in for a kiss.
When they fuck, it doesn’t happen quite the way Jongin had expected. He knows by now that Sehun doesn’t believe in being gentle, doesn’t want to be treated like a flower, to be reminded that he is as fragile as he is beautiful. But nothing can prepare him for the fire in Sehun’s dark eyes as he slides in and out, picking up speed with each of Jongin’s gasping moans, until he’s slamming into him, pushing Jongin’s limp body a little farther up the bed with each thrust until the room goes white and Sehun collapses on top of him, arms wrapped so tightly around Jongin’s body that Jongin feels like a tree being engulfed by poison ivy.
In the fading light Jongin can see the purple bruises stark against the pale skin of Sehun’s hips, his upper arms, his ribs, and he traces them with a finger so lightly Sehun doesn’t even stir. But Jongin’s heart aches and he knows that, in some ways at least, he’ll always be invisible to Sehun.
The next time he sees Sehun it’s autumn, the air has a bit of a chill that catches playfully in Jongin’s throat, distracting him momentarily from his work as he covers some of the flowers and shrubs with old newspaper, trying to keep them whole, unfrozen, for just a little while longer in the hope that Sehun will come back and be able to see them.
But when Sehun does come, he’s not looking at the flowers.
“Jongin. I. Need-” and then Sehun is falling, Jongin rushing forward to catch him before he hits the ground, lowering him onto the brittle grass with a crunch reminiscent of broken glass. It grates on Jongin’s ears as he hovers worriedly around Sehun, lifting his shirt to confirm that the bruises are back, that he’s having trouble getting his lungs to inflate, that one of his ankles is twisted at an angle that makes Jongin shiver.
A trickle of silver, moonlit blood trails out of Sehun’s mouth and Jongin thinks that he looks beautiful like this, too, lying pale and broken on the dark grass. The moonlight is too clever to get caught in his hair-instead, it dances over the top of it, making it shine with an unearthly radiance.
As Jongin scrabbles through Sehun’s pockets, looking for a phone so he can call for help, he notices that Sehun’s eyes are open, that he’s watching him. And then Jongin stops dead, phone in hand, blood frozen in terror. Because Sehun’s eyes no longer absorb the light. They’re reflecting it-glowing a brilliant silver-and Jongin can barely breathe but he somehow manages to press the small numbers and give a street address before hanging up and lifting Sehun into his arms, staggering slightly as he carries him down the empty alleyway, listening carefully for each harsh breath, each pained grunt when Jongin jostles him slightly.
“It’s going to be okay,” Jongin whispers breathlessly, whether for his own sake or for Sehun’s he doesn’t know. “You’re going to be just fine, the hospital will fix you right up and then everything will go back to the way it was, you’ll see, it’ll be just the way it was.”
“Jongin,” Sehun whispers just as they reach the street, and Jongin almost misses the half-sighed word as he cranes his neck looking for an ambulance. By the time he looks back at the boy in his arms, Sehun’s eyes are tightly shut and he’s breathing so shallowly Jongin’s afraid he’s going to shiver apart right there in his arms, shatter into a thousand tiny pieces.
In the hospital, they ask Jongin for so many answers he doesn’t have. They ask for his name-that he can give them-but then they ask for an address, a phone number, a relationship to the injured man, a reason for the injury, and Jongin can’t help them, the words get caught in his throat, and all he can do is hold onto Sehun’s hand, knowing that Sehun is the only thing preventing him from becoming invisible.
It’s a kindly female paramedic who finally manages to convince him that Sehun is going to be fine, he managed to bring him in just in time, if he could just go sit in the waiting room they’ll be out with news shortly. So Jongin lets go, and he disappears.
He slips silently through the quiet halls of the hospital, listening to tired doctors discuss diagnoses and chatty night-shift nurses discuss treatments, until he finds a bench half-hidden by a large potted fern where he curls up for the night, watching the moonlight form strange, unfamiliar patterns on the cold tile floor, straining to hear the sound of crickets or running water but hearing instead only the steady ticking of a nearby clock.
The sound makes him sick.
Part 2