untouched
Untouched
Junsu-centric, Junsu/Everybody
PG-13
Time stops, except for them.
one.
On the back of his hands are maps. Thousands and thousands of paths leading to and from his head and heart and everywhere else.
Junsu sits in an empty practice room, brushing his fingers over the wooden lid of the piano pushed up against the wall, feeling flustered for no reason at all. A few wrong keys echo, clanging. He’s not quite focused, too many thoughts of I’m still young, I still have hope elsewhere fluttering through his veins.
He bites his lip, pulls the jacket that doesn’t fit him quite right closer. He thinks of how his voice is still raw and scratchy but kind of nice now, if only he could find the right harmony to hum along to.
The hinges squeak open. Junsu looks up to see himself in someone else standing in the doorway and the highways built across his knuckles explode; bombs, flying car parts, finding out if God really loves you.
two.
When Junsu looks out the window Monday morning, it’s not raining for the first time in weeks. He smooths down the sides of his hair in the glass reflection, straightens his collar, and barely has time to revel in the clear skies before he realizes it’s almost rush hour. The commute from his apartment to downtown Seoul is an hour at eight o’clock, when the traffic is bad.
Mondays are always the worst. There are people who still have hangovers from Saturday, and love affairs from the week before, cramming onto the train cars. Junsu always steps off the platform smelling of hurry and too much hope and twenty different kinds of cologne that aren’t his.
“Approaching…Seoul Station. Thank you for riding with us. Have a nice day.”
Junsu pushes his way out of the crowd just before the train doors start hissing shut again. The toe of his shoe barely touches the yellow warning line on the platform when the air rushing past his ears suddenly screeches, scratches like a record, and stills. He turns to the person that had been walking past him (hey, did you hear that or was it just me?). The man ‘s face is stuck in a half-smile meant for the pretty girl behind Junsu.
The train hasn’t moved. The green ‘go’ light is still on. The crowd has paused with limbs at awkward angles.
Slowly, Junsu steps off the train, stepping around the frozen hustle-bustle on the stairs. The cold sunlight hits him, bright and astounding and left alone by the unmoving clouds and makes him wince. Maybe this is a dream. He tries to rub what seems like sleep from his eyes. He hopes to God that this is a dream. The phantom faces, lips forming letters mid-sentence, half-closed eyes-he doesn’t know whether to laugh, or cry and hide in the station bathroom until this mess fixes itself.
It’s silly to try to become part of the background when you’re the only one left who can move. But that’s exactly what Junsu’s doing: pressing himself against the glass and brick and concrete of the buildings, flitting in and out of other peoples’ shadows. Almost like a ghost.
Clumsy in his haze of disbelief, he bumps into shoulders, knocks hats off heads, trips over viciously pointy high heels and cracks in the sidewalk. The people (mannequins, really) bow in whichever direction they’re accidentally pushed.
He staggers over the toe of a worn leather boot before finally giving up, curling up with his head in his knees-
“Hey, you over there!” Junsu looks up to see someone weaving his way in and out of the human maze towards him. The guy (the faded words markered on his torn shirt collar says Kim Jaejoong) stops to hold out his arm, riddled with goosebumps from the chill, and out of breath, half-gasps, “Pinch me. Tell me this isn’t my imagination.”
Junsu pinches him hard enough to leave a mark.
“It’s not, is it?” says the blond with the beautiful dark eyes, sounding relieved. Junsu doesn’t know what to do other than stare, but he somehow manages a tiny shake of his head. Every bit as rebellious as he looks, Jaejoong snatches a cigarette and a lighter from a businessman’s back pocket and lights up.
“Wanna go bend these people out of shape?” Jaejoong asks after a moment. To make a point, he shifts a school girl closer to the boy she’s walking with. Hesitantly Junsu nods and chases after Jaejoong, who’s already at the end of the street, creating chaos in his wake.
They run down the street, pushing and pulling people apart. A little kid doesn’t have to get by the distracted taxi driver. Someone’s grandma gets to keep their wallet out of reach from a not-so-sneaky-anymore pickpocket. They’re creating romance, Junsu thinks (after all, love makes the world go ‘round). Soon enough, everybody is kissing everybody, holding hands with everybody in a circle; looking alive.
Dry, cool lips suddenly press against Junsu’s cheek, those beautiful dark eyes up in his face; he hears time start again and Jaejoong becomes just another tragedy on the subway.
three.
“Thank you. Please come back soon!” Junsu chirps, slamming the cash register shut.
Except his group of high school friends never quite make it out the door. The air tornadoes, knocking Junsu into the wall, and veils everybody and everything from the ticking of the stopped clock.
I’m fourth-dimensional and it’s attacking me, Junsu mutters inwardly. After pushing himself up off the tile, he gently maneuvers the stiff bodies of his friends away from the door so he can leave for a breath of fresh air. From the second floor, the city looks delicate, covered in a thin sheen of sleet.
Slumping over the edge of the balcony, Junsu traces the shapes the people below form with his finger in the air. Waves, smiles, waits half-heartedly. Maybe Jaejoong would swing by and ask to be pinched again.
A sudden jingling noise startles Junsu out of his daydream. Out from the neighboring soda shoppe steps a lanky high schooler, waiter uniform somehow still impeccable except for a crooked bowtie. He brushes the hair from his eyes and raises an eyebrow at Junsu.
“You’re not the idiot who just stopped time, are you?”
“No, but you’re gigantic,” Junsu blurts out.
“And your face is crooked,” the boy snaps back, crossing his arms and glaring. They stand face to face, frowns matching, for a moment before Junsu notices that even though they’re both breathing kind of angrily, it doesn’t cloud white in the cold. He reaches over and presses his hand under the other boy’s ribcage. Right under where a shiny gold nametag says Shim Changmin.
There’s no heartbeat. No rise and fall of air.
Junsu hastily presses his fingers to the side of his own neck.
“What? Why are you so worried?” Changmin asks, smiling. “Nothing bad can happen if we can’t die. See, I can stand up on his ledge”-which he does, shoes slipping a little on the ice and stealing a skip of what would have been Junsu’s heart-“and scream at everybody below and jump off and nobody will classify me as a mental patient.” He holds out a hand to Junsu, grinning.
Tentatively Junsu climbs up, imaginary heart hammering in his chest as he’s on top of the world, side by side with Changmin, and cups his hands over his mouth.
“I want to be able to-“
Changmin shifts all his weight to one foot, wavering a few moments to mumble his own wish, and steps off the edge. Junsu dives into the pavement after him, laughing and swimming in oxygen.
And then Changmin’s back to serving Italian sodas and earning seven-fifty an hour; Junsu behind the counter bidding goodbye to his friends.
four.
It’s snowing perfect little snowflakes when Junsu leaves his father’s pizza shop. They’re soft and all-white and polka-dot his otherwise black overcoat with the tiniest of circles. The snow squeaks under his boots.
He steps on a crack in the sidewalk and the air starts to rush backwards, squealing in his ears, and then all of Seoul becomes a screenshot.
The third time around is much easier. A Junsu-shaped gap makes it way through the stationary snow-flurry; it’s kind of like swimming through snowflakes and it piles up higher and higher on his shoulders. He loves the way it wraps around him like a blanket you’ve had since you were born, worn thin, spun with love, never gets quite as old as it is. Smiling to himself, he walks right through a cloud of smoke that smells like red bean pastries, the kind his mother used to have set out on the dining table after school.
Junsu wipes the smoke away from his eyes and a scene that looks like it’s fallen right out of a drama: a little pastry stand sitting out beside traffic, a boy with a face he hasn’t quite grown into yet (and clothes that are from seventies) leaning against it and moving the snowflakes out of line. The boy catches sight of Junsu from the corner of his eye.
“Hi, I’m Yunho,” he says, grinning with crooked, missing teeth like a grade schooler and motioning cheerfully for Junsu to come closer.
Up close, Junsu can see the constellations drawn in the air.
Immediately, Yunho traces one with the tip of his finger and tells him, “This is Orion.” Traces another one, two- “Big Dipper, Little Dipper”-three. “Cassiopeia.” Junsu doesn’t hear anything after this, too caught up in patterns that don’t quite look like what they’re called. After a minute, Yunho stops talking.
Slowly, Junsu grasps one snowflake and forms a lopsided heart-shaped hole in the air. Yunho grins at him again, makes Junsu’s own heart bleed a little from the country naivety that seems to choke up the air, as he fumbles to push a wrapped red bean pastry into Junsu’s hands.
“Here, have one on the house. They’re awesome.”
It tastes every bit as delicious as Junsu thought it would: sweet but not too sweet. He swallows, the paper wrapper crinkling in his palms. “I’m Junsu,” he says, introduction long overdue.
“Nice to meet you!”
Suddenly Yunho’s features blur, become a part of everything else, snowflake hearts and constellations melting and cascading to the sidewalk in front of Junsu, who is left staring at the half-eaten pastry in his hands.
five.
On a sunny Thursday morning in late May, time stops quietly. It doesn’t rush, letting Junsu watch as everything becomes a second out of step, like crappy action movie slow-mo, and halts. Trippy, he thinks.
The lack of car horns and bicycle bells and chatter makes Junsu nervous, his own footsteps too loud in his ears, and he grips the side of the pizza box he’s deliverying so hard that it dents.
And from the yellow taxicab on the main road comes: “It goes like this, the fourth, the fifth, the minor fall, the major lift. The baffled king composing hallelujah-“ A car door slams shut, Junsu sees a black beanie poking over a car from the other side of the road, the singing continues through the sound of flip-flops and suitcase wheels against asphalt.
Without even thinking, Junsu hums along. He doesn’t know the words or the tune but he guesses.
“You know this song?”
Junsu immediately stops making noise to look up. There’s a bit of a foreign accent in the other man’s voice, giant headphones slung around his neck, eyes wild and warm when he takes off his aviators, and Junsu’s reminded of Jaejoong. The man clears his throat, hooking his sunglasses into the collar of his gray v-neck tee.
“I guess you don’t,” he answers his own question, and sits down besides Junsu on the park bench with a shrug. “I’m Yoochun, by the way. Just flew in from Virginia.”
“Birginia?”
“America.”
“Oh. I’m Junsu. Sorry about this time stop thing.”
Yoochun gives him an odd look. “You can make time stop? Why would you do that?”
“I don’t know. It just stops a lot and I meet random people that I don’t remember the faces of afterwards,” Junsu says. “You don’t have to believe me.” He measures Yoochun’s face from one side to the other with his thumb and pinky in the air, trying to memorize the details in between. Yoochun only awkwardly half-smiles back (kind of precious). “So what’s America like? Is it pretty?”
“Only in pictures, just like every other place. It’s ugly if you don’t know what to do and it does ugly things to people,” Yoochun replies. Pauses. “Most of the time anyways.”
A memory flickers across his eyes, bright like it happened yesterday, and Junsu knows that it wasn’t as bad as Yoochun says it was. He wants to ask what happened, why Yoochun was in Seoul with what looked like his life packed into a suitcase and his heart on his sleeve, the eyes of a child, but he knows better. To fill the blank space, Junsu starts humming the same song Yoochun had been singing. The rhythm runs down to his fingertips against the metal edge of the bench.
Yoochun hums along for a good minute before turning to Junsu with a quiet voice, “Do you want me to teach you the words?”
“Okay.”
Half an hour later, while Junsu’s still stumbling backwards and forwards through love is not a victory march, he turns to yell at Yoochun for laughing and finds himself yelling at a vacant seat. An old man hobbles over with a cane. “I don’t know what you’re so surprised about, son, but I’d close your mouth before flies get in it. Care if I sit?”
Junsu bites his tongue and shakes his head.
six.
Junsu somehow feels like he knows these people: boys with lively gazes and wicked mouths and clenched fingers meant to bring thousands and thousands of people forward and together. Dreams plucked straight off cloud nine crowd up the room. They’re left alone by their manager to warm up for dance practice when introductions are done.
The window Jaejoong’s face is pressed against fogs up with every breath. He traces their initials in the condensation over and over until he’s left oily marks on the glass that even Changmin can see from across the room.
Yoochun’s leg is pressed against Junsu’s, side by side on the piano bench. Yunho smiles at them and Junsu looks down to see the roads on the back of his hands rebuilding, rearranging. He can feel his mother’s hands cupping his chin, her soft encouragement holding him in one piece (show me what I’m looking for).
The world runs like clockwork now, tick-tocking its way along without anymore hitches. Junsu almost misses the surprise. But when they’re out one night on the town, having a round of one a.m. lattes at a hole-in-the-wall café that him and Hyukjae used to always go to, everything becomes part of a diorama again. Jaejoong grins. Changmin fiddles with the cup handle and his feigned innocence. Yunho is sitting rigid like a soldier, head up, shoulders back, trying to be brave for no reason at all.
Yoochun’s the one who holds out a hand to Junsu as he bursts into tears in the middle of a smile and winks. Sips his mocha. Numbers his days, wishes, coffee breaks like this. Casually steals some hearts. Speaks.
“Baby, you’ll be famous.”
______________
notes: the last line is totally jacked from lady gaga's 'paparazzi," i'll admit it. kind of a "the sun will always shine tomorrow" story because it will. i tried to make this special but it's taken weeks and now it's 2:04 a.m. and i just hope it's okay lol.
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