Shades of Loneliness
Pairing / focus: Chaerin, Chaerin / Jiyong (friendship), with several pairings (het and slash) involving Big Bang, 2NE1 and Teddy (1TYM)
Rating: PG-15 (drinking, cursing, smoking joints - i know, right)
Genre: slice-of-life AU
Summary: Chaerin's youth is a mashup of hardships and wonders.
(i'm getting better at this. no?)
When Chaerin and Jiyong meet for the first time, she’s twelve and he’s fifteen. Chaerin is still on the threshold of adolescence, and her tank-top falls awkwardly on her chest, flat save for tiny, pale-pink nubs that refuse to grow. She’s knotted the straps of the top, but one keeps falling loose so she has to pull it up.
Her family just moved here ‘cause of her dad’s work. It’s smaller than the town where they lived before, but her mom said here they could have a garden and a swimming-pool, so Chaerin is happy. It’s a new life for her that tastes like the cherry bubble-gum she’s chewing on.
Jiyong looks barely older than her, but he’s got a scowl and a nonchalant slouch, and anyway at twelve, never kissed before, Chaerin isn’t too difficult. Her crush blooms easily, and it requires all the effort and the skill she possesses to pop her chewing-gum arrogantly and cock her (inexistent) hip to a side.
“Wassup?” she greets him.
He’s just been rejected, though Chaerin doesn’t know that yet, and Jiyong feels half-mortified and half-relieved. He’s teetering on the edge of his sexuality, and somehow that kid with a cocky crooked grin and no aggressive curves, is less frightening than all the girls he’s ever seen before.
It’s the only reason why he answers:
“Cool,” he nods. “You?”
So Chaerin, ecstatic, gets to latch onto Jiyong for life.
At fourteen Chaerin decides she hates her body, her face, her skin, and her mom. She still has the hugest crush on Jiyong, though. He’s seventeen and desperately trying to turn the thin whiskers on his upper lip into a badass moustache.
Chaerin knows that all in all, the crush is a bad idea, so she decides to fall in love with Jiyong’s best friend Youngbae instead, because Youngbae looks nice and reliable in a way Jiyong doesn’t.
She makes a big show of giggling whenever he says something and stays up late on the phone with Bom, discussing this Saturday’s party and wondering what’s the best plan, inviting Youngbae to dance or waiting for him to make the first move.
“You’re a winner, Chaerin-ah,” Bom says. “Go, invite him!”
It turns out Youngbae isn’t interested in Chaerin at all, but he finds Bom’s conversation to be deeply fascinating.
“lol sry hp u dn mnd,” she texts Chaerin. They’re doing this thing where they try not to type any vowels, because vowels suck.
Chaerin gets out the garage that has been morphed into a nightclub for the evening, her heavy makeup smudging around her eyes and the cotton she stuffed into her bra poking out. She wants to cry until she dies from too much tears.
Instead, outside, she finds Jiyong leaning against a phone-pole. He’s recently taken up smoking and Chaerin thinks it’s sexy on him.
“Hey,” she says, and she stands awkwardly next to him, kind of hoping he’ll notice she’s crying and he’ll say something.
He doesn’t. He’s looking down at his feet with a frown and he’s stopped puffing on his cigarette, Chaerin notices.
“Well… Good night…” she says, and she tries to go back inside, except at this moment he grabs her forearm and presses his lips to hers.
Chaerin is disappointed because it’s nothing like the first kiss she imagined. There’s just the dry, chapped texture of Jiyong’s lips, and the bitter smell of smoke, and no fireworks at all, and he doesn’t try to open her mouth with his tongue or anything.
The Internet was lying after all, she thinks. Plus the elongated contact quickly turns awkward and after five seconds of Chaerin pondering whether she ought to initiate something or not, Jiyong finally pulls back.
“Hum,” Chaerin says. “Okay?”
Because she thinks that was his way of asking her out, and Jiyong is seventeen while she’s fourteen, so this is gold to her. This is her elevator to high-school fame.
Only two days later when she asks Jiyong if he’ll go to the cinema with her and her friends, he replies with a short, dry: “lol no why”, and then she texts him: “cuz u my bf?” and then Jiyong proceeds to break her heart with a devastating: “…no sry”
So Chaerin chalks up his crappy kiss as not-her-first-kiss, because first kisses are supposed to be with a guy you’re really in love with, and they’re supposed to have tongues and butterflies coming in the package.
Plus Kwon Jiyong is a sad loser.
They see each other again two years later. She’s sixteen and he’s nineteen. Jiyong has graduated the previous summer and from the window of her bedroom, she watched him load a truck with his stuff, heading for the big city.
Now Chaerin’s only dream is to get out of that town and become someone. She feels like she’s suffocating in high-school and everyone is tying her down.
Anyway it’s winter break and she’s walking down the street with friends, and it can’t be anyone else than Jiyong, leaning against a wall and smoking idly. He nods with a light smile when they pass by.
Chaerin grabs the arm of her boyfriend and makes a show of kissing him then and there, pushing her tongue into his mouth and looking surreptitiously in Jiyong’s direction. When she pulls back he’s got a vaguely amused look on and her boyfriend is all but flabbergasted. Amongst her friends catcalling, Chaerin feels almost bad about herself, which doesn’t stop her from rolling her hips as they walk away.
The day of her graduation, a big party has been planned in the school gymnasium and Chaerin is supposed to go and then have a sleepover at Bom’s with everyone. It’s also the Big Night with her boyfriend, since she decided it would be cool to get rid of both high-school and her virginity on the same day. Kill two birds with one stone, that sort of thing. At eighteen years old, she’s practical, and she wants to become an auxiliary nurse for old people.
Only on the steps of the school, there’s Jiyong with a bunch of friends and he grins at her, saying they’re taking the graduates to party like adults now. Chaerin slips her hand out of her boyfriend’s and hops on someone’s car, feeling lighter than ever.
The music is loud and it seems like she never stops drinking.
“Hey,” someone says in Chaerin’s ear.
The man looks older and he’s got a nice face, and that’s more than enough.
“I’m Teddy,” he says, “Wanna dance?”
It turns out, Teddy is a friend of Jiyong’s; Chaerin hesitates for a long time before storing that into the ‘good’ category. He’s also a music composer, definitely older than her and he has his own flat in the big city.
That night, Chaerin does get rid of her virginity, but she’s also not going to nurse school anymore.
She’s in love, she’s taking photography at the university and she moves in with Teddy over the summer.
Jiyong helps them unpack, with several other friends, and over a beer he says to Chaerin:
“Just so you know, this is a bad idea, and I don’t want you coming at my door whenever you have a problem.”
She shrugs, and casually tells him to fuck off.
He’s right, though. On the eve of her nineteenth birthday, Chaerin gets into a huge fight with Teddy, about that girl she knows he’s been seeing at work. Words are exchanged and after he finally says: “You’re pulling me down!”, Chaerin grabs everything of hers she can reach and stuffs it into a duffel bag. It seems like tears can’t stop rolling down her cheeks, and it feels much more real than back when she was just a kid and fooling around with Jiyong’s friends.
Teddy tries to make her stay but she won’t listen, and she steps in the night of the big city with all of her most prized belongings: laptop, camera and her mom’s gold earrings, and Jiyong’s address scribbled on a Post-it.
“No,” he says when he opens the door.
“Please,” Chaerin begs. She doesn’t care that her makeup is ruined or her hair is a mess. She just wants a place to stay the night.
“No,” Jiyong repeats.
“Oppa,” she tries, and that’s her trump card, that’s the Joker she never dared use on him.
Jiyong visibly tenses before reluctantly stepping aside and letting her in.
“The couch,” he says. “And you’re gone before my roommate wakes up.”
“Deal,” she answers. “Thanks.”
Chaerin slips away like a thief at six in the morning and waits in a café for her first class. Her hair is dirty and her clothes rumpled; most of all her heart is just broken.
She comes home for Christmas. The train is crowed with students carrying similar luggage and it’s only after a few stops that she finally gets a seat. Her compartment is empty: Chaerin stretches out, props on her Doc Martens-clad feet on the windowsill.
At the station she has to take a bus back home, and just her luck, the only other bastard waiting under the bus shelter is Jiyong, earplugs scratching. He nods once when he sees her and tries a smile that she refuses to catch.
Her parents are unhappy about her whole situation: her life isn’t exactly sorted out, even if it’s not as bad as it used to be. Chaerin is back to living at Teddy’s, though she tries not to stand in his way so much. So maybe they spend most of their time avoiding each other, still. At least she has a place to come back to.
Her parents never approved of Teddy to begin with. They loudly and frequently voice their dissatisfaction and at one point Chaerin slams the door of the house, her coat still unbuttoned.
She storms off to the kids’ playground where she used to hang out with her friends.
It’s freezing outside and her breath comes out in rapid puffs of white; Chaerin buttons up her coat with nimble fingers. The playground is deserted, but there are still the same cigarette buds emerging from the thin layer of snow, and the same empty bottles lying against the fence.
With a gut-clenching sense of desperation, she wonders how she survived six years in that place.
Chaerin sits on the old rusty roundabout that creaks familiarly, and slowly rocks left and right, like she used to do when she was sixteen and smoking the tobacco of teenage rebellion.
There are footsteps on the frozen road, and it’s Jiyong, wearing a fur cap and an old army coat. He smiles hesitantly when he sees Chaerin and comes to sit by her on the roundabout. In his hand, between tacky rhinestones, the shivering light of a joint. He holds it to her mouth wordlessly and when Chaerin takes a drag, her lips brush against warm metal.
Teddy breaks up with her less than a year later. He tells her she can stay at the apartment as long as she needs to get her life back on track, but he’d like her to do it soon, that as much is clear.
Chaerin is choking on tears when she presses the green call button, and for a while she can only sniffle and sob. At the other end of the line, Jiyong stays calm and repeats: “It’s okay, it’s okay,” for a long time before she manages to shake herself from her stupor.
Then he says she can stay at his place: his roommate is on a self-searching trip in Hawaii, there’s a free room.
Chaerin thanks him and zips her suitcase closed; Teddy has left a while ago and she starts crying again when she leaves her keys in the mailbox.
Jiyong opens the door before she rings; Chaerin doesn’t leave him the time to say anything before she hugs him tight. The dam gives and she mumbles: “thank you”, a lot of times. He pats her back awkwardly.
Then someone clears their throat and Chaerin realizes they’re not alone. Vaguely embarrassed, she pulls away. Jiyong is a little bit red behind the ears; he introduces her to ‘Seunghyun’ in quick mumble.
Chaerin stays at Jiyong’s for a long, long time. It’s closer to the university and it seems no-one minds her presence there: Jiyong is living in a comfortable routine and he pays her the same amount of attention than if she was a goldfish: food, clean water, a smile.
It suits her.
Her nineteenth year ends like that.
For her twentieth birthday, Jiyong takes her to the cinema because he’s a gentleman. Seunghyun is here too, as a chaperon Jiyong says, and they both treat her to respectively popcorn and a Coke. Later in the evening they eat at a MacDonald’s. It feels more like she’s out with her parents; Chaerin laughs and they’re watching her closely.
Back home Seunghyun mixes cocktails of whatever he finds while Jiyong sits Chaerin down on the couch and proceeds to cut her hair with careful nips of scissors.
When Chaerin falls asleep the tears are pure emotion.
She opens her eyes to a ray of sunlight tickling her nose; there is a weird guy staring at her like she’s an alien or something. She stretches and his eyes follow the movement, and usually she would snap at him, only he’s wordlessly handing her a steaming mug of tea, with a small bow and an attempt at a smile.
Seungri is twenty-one, he’s got sunburn on his neck, and he’s just found the girl of his dreams.
Chaerin smiles back and says: “Thanks.” Her voice rasps from sleep; he blinks and says: “You’re welcome”, very politely.
“I’m Chaerin,” she says. “Jiyong told me I could stay, I hope you don’t mind.”
He grins, a bit crooked, hurries to say: “No! Not at all!” and then adds, as an afterthought: “I’m Seungri.”
“Nice to meet you,” Chaerin says.
“Yes, you too,” Seungri replies.
He sits down gingerly next to her and asks if Chaerin minds him taking a picture of her. She doesn’t, she answers. She’s too busy looking at the way his hair is all ruffled and looks soft above his ears.
A year later, Chaerin and Seungri ask Jiyong if he can help them move Seungri’s stuff into Chaerin’s apartment.
“You’ve got to be kidding me,” he answers.
Jiyong is twenty-five; he’s finally sure about being in love and inwardly he’s happy Chaerin has finally found someone else to annoy.
Rating: PG-15 (drinking, cursing, smoking joints - i know, right)
Genre: slice-of-life AU
Summary: Chaerin's youth is a mashup of hardships and wonders.
(i'm getting better at this. no?)
When Chaerin and Jiyong meet for the first time, she’s twelve and he’s fifteen. Chaerin is still on the threshold of adolescence, and her tank-top falls awkwardly on her chest, flat save for tiny, pale-pink nubs that refuse to grow. She’s knotted the straps of the top, but one keeps falling loose so she has to pull it up.
Her family just moved here ‘cause of her dad’s work. It’s smaller than the town where they lived before, but her mom said here they could have a garden and a swimming-pool, so Chaerin is happy. It’s a new life for her that tastes like the cherry bubble-gum she’s chewing on.
Jiyong looks barely older than her, but he’s got a scowl and a nonchalant slouch, and anyway at twelve, never kissed before, Chaerin isn’t too difficult. Her crush blooms easily, and it requires all the effort and the skill she possesses to pop her chewing-gum arrogantly and cock her (inexistent) hip to a side.
“Wassup?” she greets him.
He’s just been rejected, though Chaerin doesn’t know that yet, and Jiyong feels half-mortified and half-relieved. He’s teetering on the edge of his sexuality, and somehow that kid with a cocky crooked grin and no aggressive curves, is less frightening than all the girls he’s ever seen before.
It’s the only reason why he answers:
“Cool,” he nods. “You?”
So Chaerin, ecstatic, gets to latch onto Jiyong for life.
At fourteen Chaerin decides she hates her body, her face, her skin, and her mom. She still has the hugest crush on Jiyong, though. He’s seventeen and desperately trying to turn the thin whiskers on his upper lip into a badass moustache.
Chaerin knows that all in all, the crush is a bad idea, so she decides to fall in love with Jiyong’s best friend Youngbae instead, because Youngbae looks nice and reliable in a way Jiyong doesn’t.
She makes a big show of giggling whenever he says something and stays up late on the phone with Bom, discussing this Saturday’s party and wondering what’s the best plan, inviting Youngbae to dance or waiting for him to make the first move.
“You’re a winner, Chaerin-ah,” Bom says. “Go, invite him!”
It turns out Youngbae isn’t interested in Chaerin at all, but he finds Bom’s conversation to be deeply fascinating.
“lol sry hp u dn mnd,” she texts Chaerin. They’re doing this thing where they try not to type any vowels, because vowels suck.
Chaerin gets out the garage that has been morphed into a nightclub for the evening, her heavy makeup smudging around her eyes and the cotton she stuffed into her bra poking out. She wants to cry until she dies from too much tears.
Instead, outside, she finds Jiyong leaning against a phone-pole. He’s recently taken up smoking and Chaerin thinks it’s sexy on him.
“Hey,” she says, and she stands awkwardly next to him, kind of hoping he’ll notice she’s crying and he’ll say something.
He doesn’t. He’s looking down at his feet with a frown and he’s stopped puffing on his cigarette, Chaerin notices.
“Well… Good night…” she says, and she tries to go back inside, except at this moment he grabs her forearm and presses his lips to hers.
Chaerin is disappointed because it’s nothing like the first kiss she imagined. There’s just the dry, chapped texture of Jiyong’s lips, and the bitter smell of smoke, and no fireworks at all, and he doesn’t try to open her mouth with his tongue or anything.
The Internet was lying after all, she thinks. Plus the elongated contact quickly turns awkward and after five seconds of Chaerin pondering whether she ought to initiate something or not, Jiyong finally pulls back.
“Hum,” Chaerin says. “Okay?”
Because she thinks that was his way of asking her out, and Jiyong is seventeen while she’s fourteen, so this is gold to her. This is her elevator to high-school fame.
Only two days later when she asks Jiyong if he’ll go to the cinema with her and her friends, he replies with a short, dry: “lol no why”, and then she texts him: “cuz u my bf?” and then Jiyong proceeds to break her heart with a devastating: “…no sry”
So Chaerin chalks up his crappy kiss as not-her-first-kiss, because first kisses are supposed to be with a guy you’re really in love with, and they’re supposed to have tongues and butterflies coming in the package.
Plus Kwon Jiyong is a sad loser.
They see each other again two years later. She’s sixteen and he’s nineteen. Jiyong has graduated the previous summer and from the window of her bedroom, she watched him load a truck with his stuff, heading for the big city.
Now Chaerin’s only dream is to get out of that town and become someone. She feels like she’s suffocating in high-school and everyone is tying her down.
Anyway it’s winter break and she’s walking down the street with friends, and it can’t be anyone else than Jiyong, leaning against a wall and smoking idly. He nods with a light smile when they pass by.
Chaerin grabs the arm of her boyfriend and makes a show of kissing him then and there, pushing her tongue into his mouth and looking surreptitiously in Jiyong’s direction. When she pulls back he’s got a vaguely amused look on and her boyfriend is all but flabbergasted. Amongst her friends catcalling, Chaerin feels almost bad about herself, which doesn’t stop her from rolling her hips as they walk away.
The day of her graduation, a big party has been planned in the school gymnasium and Chaerin is supposed to go and then have a sleepover at Bom’s with everyone. It’s also the Big Night with her boyfriend, since she decided it would be cool to get rid of both high-school and her virginity on the same day. Kill two birds with one stone, that sort of thing. At eighteen years old, she’s practical, and she wants to become an auxiliary nurse for old people.
Only on the steps of the school, there’s Jiyong with a bunch of friends and he grins at her, saying they’re taking the graduates to party like adults now. Chaerin slips her hand out of her boyfriend’s and hops on someone’s car, feeling lighter than ever.
The music is loud and it seems like she never stops drinking.
“Hey,” someone says in Chaerin’s ear.
The man looks older and he’s got a nice face, and that’s more than enough.
“I’m Teddy,” he says, “Wanna dance?”
It turns out, Teddy is a friend of Jiyong’s; Chaerin hesitates for a long time before storing that into the ‘good’ category. He’s also a music composer, definitely older than her and he has his own flat in the big city.
That night, Chaerin does get rid of her virginity, but she’s also not going to nurse school anymore.
She’s in love, she’s taking photography at the university and she moves in with Teddy over the summer.
Jiyong helps them unpack, with several other friends, and over a beer he says to Chaerin:
“Just so you know, this is a bad idea, and I don’t want you coming at my door whenever you have a problem.”
She shrugs, and casually tells him to fuck off.
He’s right, though. On the eve of her nineteenth birthday, Chaerin gets into a huge fight with Teddy, about that girl she knows he’s been seeing at work. Words are exchanged and after he finally says: “You’re pulling me down!”, Chaerin grabs everything of hers she can reach and stuffs it into a duffel bag. It seems like tears can’t stop rolling down her cheeks, and it feels much more real than back when she was just a kid and fooling around with Jiyong’s friends.
Teddy tries to make her stay but she won’t listen, and she steps in the night of the big city with all of her most prized belongings: laptop, camera and her mom’s gold earrings, and Jiyong’s address scribbled on a Post-it.
“No,” he says when he opens the door.
“Please,” Chaerin begs. She doesn’t care that her makeup is ruined or her hair is a mess. She just wants a place to stay the night.
“No,” Jiyong repeats.
“Oppa,” she tries, and that’s her trump card, that’s the Joker she never dared use on him.
Jiyong visibly tenses before reluctantly stepping aside and letting her in.
“The couch,” he says. “And you’re gone before my roommate wakes up.”
“Deal,” she answers. “Thanks.”
Chaerin slips away like a thief at six in the morning and waits in a café for her first class. Her hair is dirty and her clothes rumpled; most of all her heart is just broken.
She comes home for Christmas. The train is crowed with students carrying similar luggage and it’s only after a few stops that she finally gets a seat. Her compartment is empty: Chaerin stretches out, props on her Doc Martens-clad feet on the windowsill.
At the station she has to take a bus back home, and just her luck, the only other bastard waiting under the bus shelter is Jiyong, earplugs scratching. He nods once when he sees her and tries a smile that she refuses to catch.
Her parents are unhappy about her whole situation: her life isn’t exactly sorted out, even if it’s not as bad as it used to be. Chaerin is back to living at Teddy’s, though she tries not to stand in his way so much. So maybe they spend most of their time avoiding each other, still. At least she has a place to come back to.
Her parents never approved of Teddy to begin with. They loudly and frequently voice their dissatisfaction and at one point Chaerin slams the door of the house, her coat still unbuttoned.
She storms off to the kids’ playground where she used to hang out with her friends.
It’s freezing outside and her breath comes out in rapid puffs of white; Chaerin buttons up her coat with nimble fingers. The playground is deserted, but there are still the same cigarette buds emerging from the thin layer of snow, and the same empty bottles lying against the fence.
With a gut-clenching sense of desperation, she wonders how she survived six years in that place.
Chaerin sits on the old rusty roundabout that creaks familiarly, and slowly rocks left and right, like she used to do when she was sixteen and smoking the tobacco of teenage rebellion.
There are footsteps on the frozen road, and it’s Jiyong, wearing a fur cap and an old army coat. He smiles hesitantly when he sees Chaerin and comes to sit by her on the roundabout. In his hand, between tacky rhinestones, the shivering light of a joint. He holds it to her mouth wordlessly and when Chaerin takes a drag, her lips brush against warm metal.
Teddy breaks up with her less than a year later. He tells her she can stay at the apartment as long as she needs to get her life back on track, but he’d like her to do it soon, that as much is clear.
Chaerin is choking on tears when she presses the green call button, and for a while she can only sniffle and sob. At the other end of the line, Jiyong stays calm and repeats: “It’s okay, it’s okay,” for a long time before she manages to shake herself from her stupor.
Then he says she can stay at his place: his roommate is on a self-searching trip in Hawaii, there’s a free room.
Chaerin thanks him and zips her suitcase closed; Teddy has left a while ago and she starts crying again when she leaves her keys in the mailbox.
Jiyong opens the door before she rings; Chaerin doesn’t leave him the time to say anything before she hugs him tight. The dam gives and she mumbles: “thank you”, a lot of times. He pats her back awkwardly.
Then someone clears their throat and Chaerin realizes they’re not alone. Vaguely embarrassed, she pulls away. Jiyong is a little bit red behind the ears; he introduces her to ‘Seunghyun’ in quick mumble.
Chaerin stays at Jiyong’s for a long, long time. It’s closer to the university and it seems no-one minds her presence there: Jiyong is living in a comfortable routine and he pays her the same amount of attention than if she was a goldfish: food, clean water, a smile.
It suits her.
Her nineteenth year ends like that.
For her twentieth birthday, Jiyong takes her to the cinema because he’s a gentleman. Seunghyun is here too, as a chaperon Jiyong says, and they both treat her to respectively popcorn and a Coke. Later in the evening they eat at a MacDonald’s. It feels more like she’s out with her parents; Chaerin laughs and they’re watching her closely.
Back home Seunghyun mixes cocktails of whatever he finds while Jiyong sits Chaerin down on the couch and proceeds to cut her hair with careful nips of scissors.
When Chaerin falls asleep the tears are pure emotion.
She opens her eyes to a ray of sunlight tickling her nose; there is a weird guy staring at her like she’s an alien or something. She stretches and his eyes follow the movement, and usually she would snap at him, only he’s wordlessly handing her a steaming mug of tea, with a small bow and an attempt at a smile.
Seungri is twenty-one, he’s got sunburn on his neck, and he’s just found the girl of his dreams.
Chaerin smiles back and says: “Thanks.” Her voice rasps from sleep; he blinks and says: “You’re welcome”, very politely.
“I’m Chaerin,” she says. “Jiyong told me I could stay, I hope you don’t mind.”
He grins, a bit crooked, hurries to say: “No! Not at all!” and then adds, as an afterthought: “I’m Seungri.”
“Nice to meet you,” Chaerin says.
“Yes, you too,” Seungri replies.
He sits down gingerly next to her and asks if Chaerin minds him taking a picture of her. She doesn’t, she answers. She’s too busy looking at the way his hair is all ruffled and looks soft above his ears.
A year later, Chaerin and Seungri ask Jiyong if he can help them move Seungri’s stuff into Chaerin’s apartment.
“You’ve got to be kidding me,” he answers.
Jiyong is twenty-five; he’s finally sure about being in love and inwardly he’s happy Chaerin has finally found someone else to annoy.