slow, fast, wait & see
Slow, Fast, Wait & See
Yoochun/Junsu
PG-13
Yoochun leaves his kind of perfect life behind on a whim.
Beta-ed by daynah_bo [ thank you *kisses* ].
Seoul is a big city but it isn’t big enough for Park Yoochun.
The day he leaves, it’s still kind of sunny, the sky a kind of pretty blue, and traffic is kind of moving again on the highway.
With his entire apartment shoved into a single suitcase and his heart pinned to his sleeve, Yoochun clambers into the back of a taxicab that smells of cigarettes and faded perfume. He’s going to miss the way things were. A nine-to-five job at the most successful accounting firm downtown, going out for drinks after work, clubbing on weekends, taking the girl he had hooked up with to lunch the day after and hoping for a second date (it’d worked out about four times at least)-it had all been just fine for the last eight years. And then he handed in his two-week notice.
“Why?” His boss had looked perplexed and pissed off at the same time. Yoochun had almost wanted to invite him for a drink after work to laugh it off (nobody’s too bad after a couple shots), but decided against it.
He’d shrugged, smiling. “Because.”
(And the granny next door who liked to wake him up at three in the morning to tell him her shelves were crooked? Yea, he is, unfortunately, going to miss her too).
The driver clears his throat loudly and looks at Yoochun expectantly. Pulling out a thin fold of bills from his coat pocket and setting it on the front seat, Yoochun replies in his usual quiet manner, “As far as you can take me for this much.” It isn’t going to be terribly far, but it will be okay. It will be enough.
A sudden jerk of tires and an unappreciative curse from both parties later, the taxi peels out of the parking lot onto main street. The radio crackles a bit from the static (sixty-percent chance of a thunderstorm) in the air outside. He fiddles with a blank square of paper crumpled between his palms. One by one, the streetlamps and strip malls fall away.
When Yoochun looks out the back window a few minutes later, he can no longer see his old neighborhood.
The taxicab stops in the loading zone of the airport terminal three. Yoochun glances at the meter with a raised brow. It is over the amount he had given the driver and he isn’t about to fork over any more without a good explanation.
“Couldn’t very well kick you out in the middle of the freeway, could I?” the driver says and pops the trunk. “The extra couple dollars is on me. Good luck with whatever you’re doing.”
Nodding thank you, Yoochun climbs out of the car and grabs his luggage from the back. The taxicab blinks its lights, disappearing into one-way traffic. Yoochun pulls his scarf a little tighter and looks away from the street up at the building, suddenly feeling very small, and trudges through the automatic doors with a fluttering feeling in his stomach. He honestly has no idea what he is doing.
The bright lights inside only make him feel even more light-headed. Reading the list of departures makes him go cross-eyed and so does the crowd of people pushing past him, hurrying to wherever. Eventually, he gives up and finds an empty seat at a café on the second floor.
“Cappuccino,” he tells the waitress. She smiles and he makes a mental note to tip her later because she seems nice.
Airport coffee was some disgusting stuff, Yoochun discovers a burnt tongue later. It was grainy, pretty much iced, and he pushes the cup away and leans back in his seat just to get a little farther away from it. Definitely not worth the five-thousand won. And neither is the elevator music playing from a speaker overhead.
He vaguely wonders if there is better coffee in Tokyo (or, at least, better elevator music). Maybe he’ll go to Japan to see all the cherry blossom trees and make a stupid wish on a plank of wood at the temple and then go stuff himself with sushi until he has to buy two seats for the plane ride back-
Somebody whistles in his ear.
“Dude, what is your problem-“ Yoochun begins angrily, clapping a hand over his ear and glaring at the blond standing beside his table.
“So, do you believe in love at first sight or should I walk by again?”
If Yoochun had been drinking his coffee, he would have spit it out onto that perfectly white sweater. The other man just grins, waving like they’re old friends who need to catch up. His smile grows lopsided, more mischievous, and when the blond sits down in the empty chair across from him and casually orders a cup of chai, Yoochun can tell this situation is going into the gutter at speeds reserved for space rockets.
“E-excuse me, but do I know you?” Yoochun splutters once he recovers from choking on air instead.
“I’m Kim Junsu. Now you know me but I don’t know you,” comes the witty reply. This Kim Junsu character keeps on smiling at him, bangs falling in front of his eyes when he tilts his head to the side.
“Park Yoochun, I guess.”
A witty remark-I guess you’re having an identity crisis?-lingers on both their tongues after, but Junsu patiently waits for his chai and taps his fingers against the shaky table. “Where are you going?” he asks, taking a tiny sip of his drink when it comes.
Squaring his shoulders, Yoochun stares hard at the innocent face waiting for his answer, searching any sign of an ulterior motive, before finally starting to relax into Junsu’s presence. “Uhm, I have no idea,” he admits in defeat. He can spend a couple hours pouring out his life story to a complete stranger who is probably just as bored as he is.
Junsu stirs a sugar cube into his tea. “Do you need a place to stay?”
Yoochun shakes his head. “No.”
“A place to go?”
“Preferably.”
Over the rim of his teacup, Junsu looks at him with raised eyebrows and Yoochun can tell he’s grinning behind the porcelain. “I’ve got just the place.”
He winks, lower lip pushed out ever so slightly, and Yoochun thinks it is kind of cute.
Within five minutes of standing in line for plane tickets with Junsu, Yoochun finds it harder to swallow. Somehow he had just been convinced to let Junsu come with him to Wherever, World for whatever amount of days. There are five reasons why:
1. Junsu’s nose is crooked in a hot kind of way.
2. So are his eyes.
3. And lips.
4. He has a habit of fiddling with the pocket zipper on his jacket and Yoochun can see that strip of skin between the hem of his tank top and his jeans when he does that.
5. Their knuckles have been brushing for the past ten minutes.
Junsu points at something ambiguous, laughs, and rambles on about a nondescript topic. Mumbling in mock-agreement, Yoochun tries to move his arm away as discreetly as he can, but his fingers decide that it’s going to be funny to grab the other man’s hand, which shuts Junsu up right away, and pull him one step too close.
Avoid eye-contact at all costs. Avoid eye-contact at all costs. Avoid eye-contact-
“Yoochun?”
Fuck, even Kim Junsu’s sweater is smiling at him.
“T-this is going to sound stupid and I swear I am not drunk or stoned or whatever you think I do for fun in my free time,” he stutters for the second time that day, gripping Junsu’s fingers so hard they might just accidentally break in his grasp. “I know I’ve known you for, like, an hour, but I think I’m madly in love you.”
The surprise that should’ve colored Junsu’s face is a knowing smile instead. He leans in, all nonchalant and easygoing, and snatches the heart, silver safety pin and all, right off Yoochun’s sleeve with a flick of his wrist.
“Obviously. I’m pretty adorable,” he answers cheekily. Yoochun wants to sucker-punch him in the face, but Junsu beats him to it with his mouth.
Three-hundred fifty-seven dollars (but only six-hundred for two) for plane tickets and fifty dollars for a taxi to a little town in the middle of nowhere. Gasoline is seriously expensive nowadays. Either that, or Yoochun is seriously getting ripped off. Because he’s the cynical type, he assumes the latter, but does nothing about it because Junsu is holding his hand and cutting the circulation off to his brain.
From the way Junsu walks in front of him, Yoochun can tell that he had been here many times before. There is no hesitation in his step as he easily ambles over the splinters of wood and gravel through the broken part of town until they reach the next street.
Laundry is hung out on every balcony. They drape white and black, nude against the bright pink, yellow, teal, green paint of the buildings. The place is rundown, but at least it looks happy. Junsu’s fingers tickle his cheek and Yoochun breaks into a smile that reaches all the way into Junsu’s eyes. He dashes rashly forward, tripping over a cable wire running across the street in his excitement and falls face first into the cobblestone.
“Yoochun-“ Junsu rushes forward in concern, hoping that he will be fine and knowing it might not be that way. He rolls Yoochun over, expecting the worst. “Are you okay?”
Even with his cheeks and nose scraped up, Yoochun grabs Junsu’s hand, puts it over his thumping heart, and laughs. And Junsu laughs along like nothing is wrong (well, there really isn’t anything wrong after he sticks some band-aids over the scrapes).
In fact, they laugh the entire way to a hole-in-the-wall motel, which is actually just the top floor of one of the apartment buildings. Junsu asks for a double room in a language Yoochun doesn’t recognize. A key is pushed across the desk at him, heavy and silver in his palm, and turns in the lock of room 426 easily.
The room is dusty and kind of small but it doesn’t disappoint. It’s cute with its low ceiling and whitewashed walls and, through the huge window, Yoochun can see the cloudy sky from the doorway. Junsu is more amused by the mini-fridge.
“That wasn’t here last time,” he muses and busies himself familiarizing with it.
“When was the last time you were here?” Yoochun asks, shutting the door with his foot after dragging his dirty suitcase in (it had lost a wheel over the rocks and he had to carry it up the stairs).
Junsu’s voice comes from somewhere inside the refrigerator in choppy phrases, clipped to the point that it makes Yoochun flinch. “A while ago. Vacation with my college friends. I’m surprised this place is still here.”
“That’s cool,” Yoochun lamely says in return. He joins Junsu in the kitchenette, poking at the oven that has words he doesn’t know, and wonders for the first time since getting off the plane, “Where are we exactly anyways?” They’re definitely not in Korea (Kansas) anymore. Junsu pulls his head out from the fridge.
“We’re in China,” he announces, straightening up proudly. At the shocked look on Yoochun’s face, he pulls out a little souvenir flag from his pocket and waves it around in surrender. “It’s just Dan Dong. We’re really not that far away from Seoul. Half the people here speak Korean.” Shrugging, he sticks the flag into the collar of Yoochun’s shirt.
It was uncharacteristically silent for a second. Nervously, Junsu quirks his lips to one side. Yoochun doesn’t quite know what to do with the flag down his shirt so he takes it out and sticks it down the back of Junsu’s.
“So what’s there to see in this seaport town?” he asks curiously.
“Mostly just Kim Junsu.”
“Did your mother teach you to be this arrogant?”
“She wasn’t Miss Korea for nothing.”
Yoochun chuckles at the smug look on Junsu’s face. They move to sit down on the edge of the bed near the window, Junsu slumped over the ledge to watch people toting carts of fruit and sweets below them. He looks like dreams and a lone nimbus in the otherwise empty sky. Tugging on Junsu’s sleeve, Yoochun opens his mouth to speak, but then a thick cloud of dust rises from where Junsu’s elbow hits the curtain and ruins the mood.
“Oh. Uhm, it’s nothing.”
The bus picks them up and drops them off the next morning. Yoochun’s only awake from the citrus smell of Junsu’s cologne and a half-full thermos of crappy motel coffee. Junsu’s awake from the nerves. He’s wearing Yoochun’s clothes-a huge checkered scarf over a polo and skinnies-since he didn’t have any time to go home and pack the day before, and they feel oddly like his own.
They wander along the edge of the concrete where there are stairs leading into the murky river water and Junsu steps onto the only step that is above water.
Not thinking, Yoochun pushes on Junsu’s shoulder when he sees a crepe stand up ahead and points at it excitedly. There’s a shriek as Junsu loses his footing, his flailing hands missing Yoochun’s jacket, and topples into the cold water.
For the next half hour, a screaming, soaked from head-to-toe Junsu furiously chases a giggling Yoochun from one side of the harbor to the other.
Yoochun apologizes for it by giving Junsu his jacket. But one apology isn’t enough and Junsu pesters him until he buys them lemon tea from a wharf side café. Holding hands, they take a walk down a pedestrian bridge that ends in the middle of the sea, Junsu trailing alongside the balustrade and Yoochun making sure he doesn’t go over.
“Are you always scared of silly things like that?” Junsu asks, all cute with his hair pinned back and glasses crooked on his nose.
“Yes. If you fall into the sea, how am I going to find my way back to the motel?” Yoochun points out sternly. The wind billows out Junsu’s loose clothing so much that it looks like he might become a balloon any time now and start floating up into the sky. He secretly admires the way the blond pulls him along, untroubled.
Their already measured pace slows to a stop when Junsu decides to lean over the edge, arching his neck to see something that Yoochun couldn’t.
“What is it?” Yoochun doesn’t move from where he feels the safest.
“Come see for yourself,” Junsu dares him with a playful smile that’s steadily becoming a trademark on his soft features. When Yoochun seems hesitant, he rolls his eyes and gently tugs the other man a couple steps forward until he relents and steps up onto the same ledge, clinging to the railing like it’s a lifeboat and he’s drowning. Yoochun’s such a drama queen, Junsu thinks to himself.
“What is it?” Yoochun asks again.
Frowning, Junsu points at a little patch of beach where the ocean is perfectly clear over a smooth yellow shore. It’s untouched, a bit of a waste. It’s missing children laughing, making sandcastles that melt because they’re too close to the waves, and hermit crabs sinking in and out of the sand. There’s not even a single footprint, and Junsu wants to jump, swim over to it-oh, let the border guards shoot at him all they want, it’ll just hit the sand anyways-just to mess it up. The fingers laced in Yoochun’s tighten.
Squinting, Yoochun tries to find what Junsu is so fascinated by. But all he sees is dark blue waves running to the edge of the horizon and the high noon sun bouncing off the bridge of Junsu’s nose.
“That’s…a lot of blue,” is all Yoochun can muster out of his inner-poet.
Grabbing the other man’s head by the ears, Junsu attempts to find a sign that Yoochun was just being stupid. Only, the dark eyes looking back at him are completely serious. “You’re impossible,” he scoffs, watching Yoochun’s lower lip stick out a little. “But I still like you.” The light makes Junsu’s hair seem more yellow than it is, his cheeks paler, (why is that in the right light, at the right time, someone can be ridiculously perfect?) and Yoochun doesn’t even have time to close his eyes before that too-pink mouth touches his.
Neither of them move after that. The kiss stiffens and Junsu awkwardly pulls away first, gingerly picking up his styrofoam cup from where he left it on the railing. Embarrassed, Yoochun glances in the opposite direction.
“So, uhm, how do you feel about chocolate cake?” he asks the bridge suspension.
The bridge suspension doesn’t even creak in return so Junsu figures he’s supposed to answer for it. “As long as it’s German and has about ten cups of frosting on it.” His hand slips back into Yoochun’s, not-so-small and warm. A pair of tiny smiles and Junsu is pulling him along again, back into the city and away from the ocean that could swallow them.
“Hey-“ Yoochun begins (he’s always just beginning).
“Everybody knows the first kiss never counts,” Junsu interrupts with a wink over his shoulder.
That’s when Yoochun decides he must have not been born a part of this ‘everybody’ business because he definitely thought it was the exact opposite. His next thought lingered somewhere between a second kiss and if it would count. He holds back a frown.
Half a day later, they’re watching some after midnight cartoon on the fuzzy motel television, each lounging on their separate beds, hands folded and legs crossed. Out of the corner of his eye, Yoochun can tell that Junsu is dozing off. Which is good because Junsu has been acting a little miffed about something ever since he got out of the shower. The glass of cheap red wine in his pale fingers is slowly angling towards the sandy-colored carpet and asking for an expensive steam clean.
Setting his own glass down on the nightstand, Yoochun takes the one step between their beds and kneels on the edge of Junsu’s. “Hey, you,” he mutters. “Don’t spill wine everywhere just ‘cos you’re stupid.”
Junsu mumbles something like “’m not stupid. Go back to your bed” and rolls over onto his side. Wine almost sloshes onto the standard white sheets. Almost delicately, Yoochun leans over the other man’s curved body, one hand balanced near Junsu’s stomach, and the other trying to pry the glass away.
“Is something wrong?” Yoochun asks once he has the glass next to his on the nightstand.
“No.” But Junsu rolls over into the dip Yoochun’s knee makes and looks up at him, all nervous like a schoolgirl confessing to her first love. “You’re not going to die, right?”
If Yoochun had been drinking his wine, he would have spit it out all over Junsu’s perfectly white sweater (oh, how déjà vu).
“W-what? Are you planning to murder me in my sleep or something? ‘Cos then I can just go jump out that window, voluntarily, if you’d like-“ Yoochun is trying to ramble and stop choking on air at the same time.
Quietly, Junsu pulls out a tiny square of paper from underneath his pillow. “I just found this on the bathroom counter and I guess…I guess I misunderstood,” he stammers, pushing it into Yoochun’s hand. For the first time since Yoochun’s seen him, he looks totally humiliated and it’s kind of heartbreaking.
Carefully smoothing out of the paper crinkles, Yoochun stares, hard. It’s the napkin he had scribbled all over on the plane while Junsu was sleeping on his shoulder. Black and now crooked, his own familiar handwriting speaks for itself: “Bucket List/10 Things to Do before I Die.”
Junsu steals tiny glances at him from behind the sheets. Yoochun nudges his shoulder, pulling the fabric away, and says ‘it’s okay’ with his eyes.
“That’s good because now I can tell you that your to-do list sucks,” he immediately deadpans.
Yoochun hits him in the head with the television remote for being so snarky. “Well, excuse me. I wasn’t the one reading other people’s private letters to self and assuming they had a tragic illness.”
“I’m just saying! None of those ten things even sounded impossible to do. Nothing’s fun unless it’s impossible. You could have at least put ‘going to Pluto’ or something immature like that, but no, it’s ‘bungee jumping’ and ‘having sex with twenty people in one night’,” Junsu rattles on, ticking off each nonsensical point on a finger until he runs out of appendages. “And mister, we have got to have a talk about that-“
“Yes, that’s great. Can I have my second kiss now?”
Junsu doesn’t even hesitate for one second, despite that he was cut off mid-sentence, and their lips are crashing, meshing together and Junsu’s bottom lip fits right in between Yoochun’s. It hurts, when their teeth clack together. He can’t really tell if he’s still on the bed or on the floor. All he knows is that he loves the way Junsu pulls away, flushed, pressing their foreheads together.
“’Puh-lease! Bungee jumping was so eighties’,” Yoochun mimicks, the words sounding airy because he’s still catching his breath. “You are so impossible.”
“At least I’m fun,” Junsu retorts. If there was supposed to be another kiss, it’s a laugh now. Since the bed is too small for the both of them, Yoochun retreats to his own, going back to watching the movie and drinking wine that tastes almost like water, and looking at Junsu looking back.
They go back to the same bridge the next morning. The weather’s graying and all Yoochun sees is still blue, even when Junsu leads them all the way to where they stopped building the bridge. There’s a little photography shop, windows pasted full of different people against the same exact scenery, and Yoochun wonders if they’re all unclaimed pictures.
Junsu stands on his toes to kiss Yoochun’s cheek over the telescope that’s not accepting coins anymore because someone stuck gum in its mechanics. “Do you see it now, pabo-yah?” he asks, even though he knows Yoochun has eyes for nothing else.
“Yea I guess,” Yoochun mumbles to hide his obvious lie. “By the way, that second kiss counted right?”
The owners of the photography shop come flying out of the doors, cameras flashing like paparazzi and yelling at them to ‘buy pictures of this precious moment’ in a language only Junsu knows (“No, no thank you, we’re quite fine and we’ve really got to be going now-”). Yoochun repeats himself over the arguing. Junsu smiles, dragging him up the steps and down the bridge and never gives him the answer. But it’s not like Kim Junsu has ever given Park Yoochun a proper answer.
The bed next to Junsu’s is empty when he rolls out of bed sometime after noon that same day. It’s made up, but the comforter is wrinkled in a way that tells the world somebody slept on it more than enough hours. He’s bending down to tie his shoes when he notices half the room is missing. There’s no black suitcase open in the corner of the room next to the television, no toothbrushes in the bathroom, no note on the mini-fridge saying “see you later.”
Junsu staggers out of the room (the door locks behind him and Yoochun already took the key) and thinks of all the things he said that were wrong. The old man who owns the motel nods farewell to him as he falls down the stairs.
He’s still wearing all of Yoochun’s clothes. The smell of being forgotten follows him, wrapped up around his neck in gray and white plaid, and he almost breaks open the rusty gate at the bottom. That stupid guy with the big stupid eyes and the big stupid mouth, he shouldn’t have fallen in lo-
“Hey, Kim Junsu. Where are you going?”
Waving hello like some hapless romantic on the curb outside the entrance is Yoochun, two hearts pinned to his sleeve. To summarize, Junsu’s blood starts to backflow into his heart until he feels like little baby hearts are going to explode from it, singing “I fucking hate you, Park Yoochun, but if you kiss me, things might be okay between us.” But Yoochun only keeps on waving at him.
Not knowing how to really react to that appropriately (meaning without shaking Yoochun within an inch of his life), Junsu sits down on the curb next to him. The suitcase acts like a table. Yoochun pushes a mug of chai latte across it at him and leans back on his hands, his own coffee already gone.
“So.”
Shoulders heaving, Junsu sets the tea down on the sidewalk and sighs, “So.”
“I was thinking that we’ve already seen everything there is to see here,” Yoochun starts, putting a finger against Junsu’s lips to keep him quiet, and pulls out two matching rectangles of paper from his pocket. They’re tickets. This time, it’s Junsu who can’t read the location. He suddenly realizes that Yoochun mixed up their belts and is wearing his.
Taking one of the tickets, Junsu runs his fingers over the text and burns his tongue swallowing the rest of his chai. He thinks of how much money it’s going to cost him to have Junho pack and ship all his things to wherever from the apartment they share.
There were a million reasons for Park Yoochun to have left on the first day, to go back to Korea and pretend that he never met Kim Junsu, but Kim Junsu smiled that sad, playful smile and gave him a reason to stay.
And so, now Kim Junsu has to say yes to Park Yoochun. Or at least a half-hearted okay to hide the fact that he wants to shout it. Yoochun watches, amused, as Junsu fights with himself, his face somewhere between I am not in love with someone who has hair like yours and thank you for letting me. A taxicab pulls into the parking lot. Yoochun points at the ticket.
“So how about here?"
__________________
notes: Yes, Junsu did just use a pick-up line on Yoochun and it worked. Also, Dan Dong is a real place.
This story might possibly be the prequel to a roadtrip!cop-chase!Yoosu I'm working on right now.
And "kind of" has become one of my favorite phrases as of late so I used it a lot here. I hope that didn't annoy anybody.
Review, please? ♥