Fiction (2/2)
Title: Fiction
Chapter: Part 2/2
Author: frolickings
Rating: PG-13
Warnings: Sexual implications, language
Author's Note: The last part! Enjoy!
(Part One)
When he’s 16 years old, Hyunseung learns the significantly helpful art of using his body against others. He has grown up far prettier then anybody would have really liked and he is well on his way down the path of slim and curvy instead of the normal thick ropes of muscle and square chinned, testosterone-laden body of a boy. He learns that if he cocks his hip that way, tilts his head the other, and breathes out a soft, “Mr. Lee, I’m worried I won’t get an A on my paper…” then there will be a thick, almost overeager A across the sheet when he gets it back. If he looks up through lashes and asks for something in a voice so simpering that it almost tastes disgusting, he will get it without second questions and leave before they have a chance to come to their senses.
His mother doesn’t come home any longer, knowing now that he has crossed the double digit line and therefore, rendering this thought in her mind, that he can fend for himself. If there is money in the bank account and a credit card readily available, then she supposes he will be okay the rest of his life and she no longer feels the need to dirty her hands with the whole business of mothering and affection and such. There is an ever present staleness to the air at home, as if he knows he has breathed this air before many times and there is no one to share it with, either then Junhyung, laying next to him with his chest rising and falling in slow, smooth rhythms.
Hyunseung has always wondered, with a childlike sense of curiosity (the dangerous kind that usually ends up slaughtering the cat along the way), if he has any effect on Junhyung. Certainly, the prince couldn’t have missed the whole blossoming process that took place over the summer, where his jeans turned less fitted and more glued-to-the-skin and he took any chance to show off the pale plains of his collarbones, jutting out and made up of clean cut bone and shadows. There isn’t a way that he could have possibly missed it, as it felt much like he’d woken up one day and shed off the skin of another person, exchanged his old features for the delicate, porcelain structure of girls who were plastered on magazine covers. Because Junhyung is not oblivious enough to look at him and still see a seven year old boy, black hair and chubby cheeks and all. He must admire him now, of course, so Hyunseung turns on his side and places his fingers on Junhyung’s hand.
Junhyung has not aged a day since he materialized, not a single line embedding itself on the clean slate of his face. It doesn’t even wrinkle when at age 11, Hyunseung made it extremely clear that he would no longer be reading aloud anymore and then proceeded to make him get rid of the elephant he had magicked onto the front lawn. It took him quite a while to realize that Junhyung was also quite young, not the expected forty, but a very handsome medium of 20. It’s quite funny how he can stand by and wait as Hyunseung grows, the single anchor that never changes as the rest of the world swirls around them at the briskest pace it can go.
“Junhyung.” Hyunseung mutters as he leans himself back on his elbows, scratching at his leg with his toe to coax him from sleep. “Wake up, I need to ask you something.”
Junhyung lets out a small keening noise, eyes ghosting from Hyunseung’s sleepy gaze to his delicate fingers scratching softly at the sensitive, calloused inside of his palm. “…what?”
He sucks in a breath and stabilizes himself to make some sort of grand, eloquent speech but it all spills out, breaking the flood gates with a single sentence. “Why don’t you think I’m pretty?”
Junhyung eyes him warily, before slumping back down and turning on his side, obviously put off with the whole waking-up-for-a-dumb-question routine although he should be perfectly used to it now. He receives, for this treatment, a rough shove that almost topples him off the bed and a shriek of, “I’M BEING SERIOUS!”, voice cracking along the way because although Hyunseung has adjusted to this body well enough, the whole puberty thing has yet to work its magic on his throat.
“What do you mean by pretty?” Junhyung seems uncomfortable with the whole idea, fidgeting slightly, as if somebody just asked him if he found his little brother sexually attractive. His eyes have lost the hooded puffiness of sleep and proceed to darken slightly around the irises, an action that makes Hyunseung’s next question die a little bit in his chest, the spark of curiosity extinguished and he feels a lot like he’s choking on water. It’s mortifying, embarrassing but the emotions confuse themselves and begin to build up some sort of protective wall of rage as his fingers dig into the sheets and make crescent-moon shaped wrinkles, running his tongue over the front of his teeth.
“It’s whatever.” His voice lowers, hurt and shaking and still repeating what do you mean by pretty through his head like a mantra, sharp as a whip and just as painful. “It’s - God, you know what, this is so dumb… I shouldn’t hav-you’re a bastard, Junhyung.”
“Wait!”
Junhyung’s fingers wrap, slowly, lethargically around his wrist, a simple pull till he could feel their chests inhaling and exhaling in unison, heartbeats matched up. “Hyunseung, I... just -- fuck, you caught me off guard and... Jesus, you know you’re gorgeous--“
It has always amazed him how tiny he is compared to Junhyung, practically blown up in comparison to Hyunseung, who is reed thin and small and fragile, built with glass bones and paper skin. They shouldn’t fit -- in fact, they should break each other, one overpowering and the other crushed, snapped in half, broken into pieces but they don’t.
As it turns out, with Junhyung’s lips suddenly pushed against his own and his hands that trace that jutting curve of his spine through the thin fabric of his shirt, everything is perfectly aligned and Junhyung’s fingers slip perfectly into the curved empty spaces of his body. He is already so acquainted with it; Hyunseung mildly wonders if he has had some practice because not even he knows the swoops and turns of his limbs that well and oh, he wasn’t even aware of that sensitive brush of skin on the side of his hip.
He makes the mistake of letting a tiny mewl slip through his lip which stops Junhyung’s hands where they are, halfway through pushing the hem of his shirt up and they graze the side of his body, lowering themselves against the folds of the sheets. They both look guilty, rightfully so, caught in the middle of taboo and he can suddenly feel the weight of everything, the hard press of warm fingers on his skin and how Junhyung shifts over him, chest pushed against each other and it is like he has just lit a fire that trails into some sort of warehouse full of explosives. Despite practically inhaling books, Hyunseung cannot create a good metaphor for the life of him but it will all go to hell anyway because the point is that he definitely wants Junhyung now and there will be no stopping for anybody who intends on getting in his way.
“Hyunseung.” He can tell Junhyung is trying to restrain himself from leaping into things head first, from that slight narrow of his right eye and how he is struggling to pin down a more then willingly and quite wiggly Hyunseung. “Wait, shouldn’t we talk... about... I mean, you’re 16 and I--“
“-- answered my question.” He pushes his finger against Junhyung’s lips. “I mean, I think everything you just did essentially cemented your point. Unless that’s not how they do things in where-ever-you’re-from.”
“Did you plan this, you little wench?” It’s not really a question because Junhyung looks at him with his voice slightly tired and apathetic, the kind of voice of a man stopping himself from taking advantage of the situation. But there is something, a friction that burns because he wants to move against him and smash their lips together again and Hyunseung swears that his seven year old would be absolutely aghast to see how the whole entire let’s-read-a-wonderful-prince-out-of-a-book situation would turn out in the future.
“Can we just...” Junhyung swallows, brushing the hair from Hyunseung’s face in a way that makes him relax back, spine curling against the soft push of the mattress and he likes how he props himself up, elbows on either side of his waist, making him feel much more delicate then before. “...maybe... just lie down? Can I hold you?”
Apparently, chivalry wasn’t dead or wherever he was from, they had good morals pounded into their head at birth -- or perhaps, his father had just sat him down and told him that if a 16 year old boy threw himself at him, he probably shouldn’t jump him until he was legal. As much as he wanted to amuse himself with the possibilities, he curled into the crook of Junhyung’s body, pushed his face against his shirt and practically ate up the scent on him, leather and old books and the faint perfume that was too exotic to pinpoint down.
It didn’t really mean much that Mr. Lee thinks he’s pretty enough to throw legitimate grading scales out the window or that boys will do unbelievably stupid things with a dull hope that with his beauty, he is almost outrageously easy. It just matters here, inside the tuck of Junhyung’s arm, where everything is fiction and it’s all going to be alright.
Junhyung doesn’t much like to be fiction. Fiction cannot protect Hyunseung from the monsters of this world; had it been dragons, wizards, magical things of that sort then perhaps he could have had a fair chance. But with a change of universe came a change in challenges and suddenly, he was stricken and invisible and absolutely fiction.
The monsters were the ones whose hands pressed for too long on Hyunseung’s skin, the classmates that ran their fingers through the rust-colored curls, the ones that breathed too close and pushed themselves too close and murmured little words that made him slightly red in the cheeks. He had stopped accompanying him to school, stopped sitting in the back of the class, stopped trying to integrate himself into a life where he clearly didn’t belong because there wasn’t a life if only Hyunseung could see him.
So at times it felt greatly as if he belonged here, belonged wherever Hyunseung was and belonged where he could kiss him, touch him, protect him because he had learned to breathe with him and learned that his heart wasn’t much good unless it beat the same as his. But most of his time was spent wanting, wishing, fluttering through the pages of the book he’d slipped out of, wondering why there wasn’t a fiction where they could both be together. It sounded awfully melancholic and even more melodramatic but he was strung up of written words and emotions, somewhat made to be a mess of adjectives practically spit out of a thesaurus.
He just waited and watched and tried to avert his eyes when Hyunseung slipped further away, given up on trying to claw him back but it was too selfish of him. He was fiction and Hyunseung was real, had a real life to live and real people who wanted to do real things to him and he was trying to live a life in a world that never truly belonged to him.
All good things must come to an end, he once learned, but Hyunseung was the best thing that had ever happened to him -- so the end must come sooner, wasn’t that how it worked?
Life was supposed to be a fairytale, not unfair.
When Hyunseung is 18, he comes to a somewhat mildly upsetting conclusion that he is about as naïve as a twelve year old girl sneaking peaks at his mother’s Cosmo and is determined to end this for good. While the rest of the world is off taking full advantage of their legality and the fact that they are young, full of life, fast and untouchable, he is... well, not. There is something very odd, a kind of burning feeling, when you are happy with yourself but the rest of the world isn’t and you can’t figure out exactly what you’ve done to alienate yourself like that. It stung each day, low in his throat, lining his stomach, his heart, his brain, until he ached all over and wondered quietly what he did to make himself a bystander of life instead of throwing himself into it with eyes wide open and no regrets.
It is a quiet sort of haunting too. It creeps up on him, cold and watery and smothers him down when Junhyung isn’t there to press his curls down gently, kiss his chin and miss the mark of his lips, tell him that he is just fine. Absolutely fine. It weighs him down on the shoulders, heavily burdened, and he knows that no amount of reassurance will ever make him completely boring and normally teenager like he is supposed to be. He has hobbies, nice hobbies; reading, dancing, academics. He has a steady boyfriend who was fictional but that wasn’t really the point, so he likes to nicely ghost over it.
So he coils up tight against Junhyung, their hands overlapping on a book, quietly turning pages. “...and they lived happily ever after. The end. I love happy endings, don’t you?”
He can feel Junhyung’s laugh vibrate against his back, low and musical, his lips ghosting against his temple and trailing down to the crook of his neck. His fingers tangle through his hairs, those unruly orange curls that cling to his forehead with a thin black headband, his jaw tilts upwards to allow Junhyung’s mouth more access to the rest of his spread of soft skin. They are in an awkward position, he admits, his back pressed against Junhyung’s stomach and his t-shirt is riding up a bit and he is sure he looks a little bit slutty right now, rest assured.
He tries to turn, kind of falls chest forward against Junhyung, knees on either side and their lips are almost touching. These are the kind of things, with his eyes shut and he can feel their breath coursing through them, that make his stomach turn in that tickling good way and he props himself up with his elbows, hovering -- hesitating -- waiting.
Hyunseung can realize, easily, by the wild look in their eyes and the way his breath labors, that Junhyung wants something from him that he hasn’t ever asked for before. Now it’s his decision if he’s going to let him have it, just like that, or dangle it over him with the prospect of teasing and controlling. But he notices how Junhyung’s hands slip up, ever so slightly, pushing the shirt up from the curve of his back, sliding down to brush his navel, helping it off his head and arms. It is quite odd to be confident and then suddenly be reduced to lack of self conscious, his stomach seeming pale and lacking and his arms thin with bones jutting out everywhere.
But Junhyung lets out a quiet sigh of God, you’re beautiful before gripping Hyunseung’s chin, pulling him down for a sharp kiss that leaves a lot to be said and a lot, especially, to be done. He is nervous, scared, his hands fumble and it hurts -- Jesus, it hurts -- but after it is done, there is no trust that he doesn’t give to Junhyung because, as of now, he has given him everything. Darkness has already settled, the sheets are clinging to him with sweat, and he doesn’t very much feel like a fairy tale because his body aches like a nightmare.
Everything is asleep, lurking and waiting for early sunshine to burst to life, and it’s oddly lonely to be awake, as his eyes narrow and his cheek presses against the warm skin of Junhyung’s stomach, heaving with heavy breaths of sleep. It’s going to be hard to roll out of bed in a few hours with everything throbbing but there is the mindless pride of finally doing something about that childishness that accompanied his beauty.
He is happy with himself because he is in love and he is grown up and he owes it all to fiction. His lips find their way to trail a kiss up Junhyung’s jawline, pushing himself up weakly with his hands and suddenly, Junhyung is holding him up, sitting up in bed, tucking his hair behind his ear.
“I love you.”
Their heads tilt, their lips meet, and he can hear happily ever after echo in his head before swatting it away. “I love you too.”
Hyunseung is in love with fiction and fiction loves him back. It is so fleeting that it passes like fireworks but it’s burned into his eyes forever.
When Hyunseung is still 18, still waiting to creep closer to 19 years old, his mother decides in a burst of spontaneous motherly guilt to visit home and he comes home from school, fingers clasped with Junhyung’s, to find her crouched over the kitchen counter. His first concerns were most likely did grandpa die? and then Jesus, did she call first? Oh God, I forgot to clean the living room then lastly how the fuck do I get her out of my house? There is the reassuring brush of lazy circles, the work of Junhyung’s thumb against his wrist and he takes his breaths two at a time, forcing out a weak crack of, “Mom.”
“Hyunseung.”
There is something wrong, so wrong about that voice. It is betrayed and scared and upset and panicked and every emotion she has lacked for years stuffing itself into one word -- his name -- and it makes his stomach turn upside down. The crinkle of paper, coming from her fingers, fills up the empty space between them and suddenly, he can feel the 18 years of tension riding down on his back and forcing him into the ground.
“Hyunseung.” She repeats, lower this time but the fear still quivers, empty and frozen. “Who is Junhyung?”
Then he suddenly realizes where the sound of crushed pages is, as it’s accompanied by the sharp sound of ripping paper and he watches his own personal journal (normally so well hidden in his room but he had gotten careless and left it on the table today) tear itself apart within his mother’s hands. There is no noise but the orchestra that bellows out from the sound of a book being murdered, destroyed, torn apart into pieces and he chokes a little bit, his own writing falling apart in front of him. He wants to reach forward but Junhyung holds him back in that quiet way of his, that way that says stay calm and everything will work itself out but even he can feel the shaky breath of watching something equivalent to a large train swerve off the tracks and crash into a canyon. It’s a disaster and they just sit and watch.
“I said -- who the fuck is Junhyung?” Her hair is loose everywhere and she grapples for a piece of paper, anywhere, her lipstick feathering away at her cracked skin. “--and we slept together again. I’m getting used to it now, this idea of having a lover, especially when Junhyung's fingers don't press hard--“
It’s too late to stop it now, broken fingernails scratching for more entries to tear apart with her voice, falling apart with hysterics. “--nobody can see him but I can and I know he’s real. He leaves bruises, like little pale flower petals, when we're done and they last till the next day and his mouth leaves marks and I know people can see them, so why can’t they see him?”
Her nose flares and her mouth flattens into a tight line, pale and white. This must obviously be the equivalent of an atom bomb -- hello, your son is gay, in a sexual relationship, and his boyfriend may or may not be a figment of an imagination, would you like some medicine for that growing headache? Graying fingers tug for a cigarette lighter but she doesn’t light up a cigarette, she lights up the papers in front of them and watches them curl in and collapse upon themselves like a disaster zone in slow motion. He’s crying now but he didn’t notice until he realized the loud screams had to be coming from somewhere and his mother’s mouth was laced tightly shut so... oh, that’s me, he thinks faintly. Junhyung tugs him back, trying to yell over everything but it gets to the point where there is too much noise and he just folds over himself, clutching his stomach and swallowing the bitter taste in this throat like medicine, acidic and playing with his mind.
“Was it because I was never here?!” She screams over his terrified grappling for what remains left of the journal, which is just a few pages with crispy corners and the sad leather binding and his hand burns against the flames. “You made this... this thing up because I was never here for you?”
“He’s real!” The fire leaps up a bit and he watches it grow, expand, eat up everything else on the table till the tears follow the path down his jaw and down his shirt and he realizes that his life is burning in front of him. Junhyung holds him back, flames reflected in his irises and everything is so loud but the sudden quiet envelopes the air, the fire sucked away almost through a black hole, having nothing left to destroy and seemingly collapsing upon itself. The only semblance of the fire remains in a pile of his broken thoughts, dark ash and ember. His life has made a magical transformation from the written word to chalky, smearing ash in a matter of seconds and it is nothing but a metaphor that reflects itself in reality. He is breaking down -- correction: already broken -- and nobody can save him from the cliff he’s thrown himself off of.
“Junhyung.” Now the word tastes foreign on his tongue and he claws at Junhyung, desperate and scared and in tatters. “You have to show her. Throw something. Hit me. Do anything, please.”
The air is still thick with rolling, congealing smoke and he thinks that it clouds his vision, but he can see Junhyung step back, a quiet mutter of, “It’s not in my place... to deal with this. This is between you and your mother.”
“Fuck you!” He’s not exactly sure who he is yelling at now and his head pounds, smoke creeping through his mouth and scratching at the inside of his throat. “Fuck you, mom! Why the fuck do you care now? You never cared and you k-- fuck, I don’t want your goddamn sympathy! And you know what, Junhyung? Fuck you too. Fuck all of you! I hate fiction and I hate you, mom, and... and... fuck-- ”
A finger pushes sharply against Junhyung’s chest, slamming him against the wall and he finally exhales every breath, matching eyes with Hyunseung (who is terrified and confused and angry), rage building momentum by the minute. He curls back from his own strength and realizes, with the set of eyes that pour onto his back, that his mother has just witnessed him screeching at a wall but the framed picture hung up, their family portrait that is so sterile and white, crashes to the ground with the force of it and everything stops moving. Now his mother has seen the metaphor of their family life smash like a disaster that has taken 18 years to destroy them; saw the picture fall but Hyunseung never touched wall, wasn't the reason it glittered in pieces and she feels slightly sick in the way of my son has gone crazy and now it's my turn.
He takes the moment to let his gaze, crazed and somewhat feral, flicker from the broken glass, the burned pages of his diary with the pages still glowing with embers, Junhyung’s eyes squeezed shut with frustration, and his mother. She sits there, face buried in her hands and her shoulders shaking and her hair unraveling and suddenly, he realizes she has finally broken. Much to nobody’s surprise, he doesn’t even care anymore. It has taken him much too long to realize that he just has forgotten how to.
“You know what?” Hyunseung’s head tilts, his smile flutters up and he turns back to Junhyung, who holds his breath.
"I hate you the most, Junhyung."
He comes home a few hours later, where the lights are all off and the house smells greatly of smoke and he is just tired. Hyunseung has grown up with a lot of thoughts and a lot of anger and mostly a lot of neglect, but he’s quite good at keeping things all bottled up. Overall, he is just ashamed of himself and the weight of those words, much heavier then I love you and a thousand times more devastating, makes him want to say so many things because he is beyond apologies. There is a reason, he assures himself, that Junhyung couldn’t do anything and it is a reason he is obviously not understanding.
“Hello?” His voice is weak, watery and it quivers like that last note of a song before it cripples into empty silence. “Junhyung?”
There is nothing but rain on the windows, the creak of staircases as if the house breathes and knows what has happened but judges silently. He climbs the stairs one half at a time, stuttering with his steps, almost unsure if he even wants to return here. He wants to go back in time, as every person in moments of regret wishes, wants to hide the journal and smile through his teeth at his mother and let Junhyung have his way with him. That was the way things were supposed to be but he decides he could have the next best thing; some quality time in a strait jacket and fresh thoughts force fed to him with pills and enough brainwashing for a whole country.
He isn’t crazy. He’s just a boy with fiction tagging along and it’s real, it’s there, tangible under his fingers. He isn’t concerned with the future but he is concerned with the now, with how he has broken them in two with just three words. A relationship built upon phrases passed by mouth and he has delivered the final, sickening blow.
Hyunseung knocks on his own door before remembering that it is room, but he still retains the fact that Junhyung is probably angry, offended or a deliciously terrible mix of both. “Junhyung, can I...”
“Come in.”
There he is in full glory, except full is not as realistically correct as semi because -- Hyunseung’s body shakes and his hand flies to his mouth out of instinct, to keep himself held together -- Junhyung is... transparent.
He wishes, desperately, that he is being metaphorical and he can go back to the normal routine of banter and love making between the two that comes as easily as breathing. However, Junhyung is but a shimmer of a person, the stars outside glittering through his body and the landscape through the window almost clear through where his torso should be. He is fading away, as if Hyunseung had left him to drain the color in the sun, the vibrant shades that used to make him up like brush strokes melting away like watercolors.
“What...” Hyunseung trails off but clutches against the smooth surface of the wall, trying to grapple onto some part of reality but it’s all falling away into pieces in his hand, “....Junhyung, what’s happening to you?”
Junhyung is not one who smiles often but there is only something worse then that and it’s when he’s faking it. His smile stretches unevenly, as if he hasn’t spread it across the way it’s supposed to be, bumps and cracks visible. Overall, he looks broken and not the kind of face where one knows they can fix it, that the pieces can mend themselves together and he will fall back into place over time. He has the face of a man doomed to death, already walking down death row, and it’s diluted like the opaque glimmer of what used to be his solid shape.
“Hyunseung, honey, don’t...” He trails off, mouth set in a line when tears start, unwanted, down Hyunseung’s cheeks and he reaches to wipe them away with his thumb till he realizes that it’s already faded off his hand, “...don’t be scared. I was supposed to leave sometime. As much as we both wanted me to stay, I’m fiction. I don’t belong here.”
“What does that mean?!” He is brash and angry because Junhyung was never going to leave; he just assumed he was there forever, that thing that had one foot in the past as the world throttled forward to the future. “Why are you leaving?”
“You hate me.”
Simple as that. Their breath catches in both their throats, words caught between threading themselves in their heads and actually make their way out. “No... Junhyung, no... I didn’t mean it, you know I didn’t...”
“I know.” Junhyung is oddly faint now, as if he is speaking underwater and he sounds just as remorseful because he knows that despite the begging and the crying, tears will not bring him back any faster. “But you, of all people, should know how powerful words can be.”
Hyunseung reaches forward, wants something in return -- a kiss, a brush of skin, to feel their tears running down his fingers before Junhyung shimmers slightly, opening his mouth weakly. “Hyunseung, I want you to know that I was truly happy and I will always find a way back to you, even if you know it or not.”
He reaches forward, tries to grasp what’s left of Junhyung but he falls apart, to dust, sweeping away and melting into the surface.
Suddenly, he is alone. And he realizes how silent a moment can truly be.
Hyunseung is even still 18 years old when he figures out that you are nothing when you build your life up on something that will only disappoint. His books find their way scattered amongst bonfires and trashcans and church rummage sales, his mother leaves the country with what he assumes is no attempt to come back, he is alone in an old house with himself and his thoughts and that one book. Jam smeared in the corner, aunt’s writing on the title page, unread past that story and even that story isn’t finished.
It takes a lot of bravery, he thinks, to open that story up. He almost wishes that it is filled with heroic rescues and princesses that throw themselves as daintily as possible at Junhyung’s feet, so he can reassure himself that, yes, Junhyung is still happy. He is able to live without Hyunseung but the same cannot be said in reverse. He wishes that he was not so dependent but truthfully, he thrived upon him his whole life and now he is faded back into a book, back where he belongs.
And it hurts deeply.
The pages burn his fingers as he carefully treads his way forward till the title swirls on top of the chapter and he begins reading, begins to spit out his heart with the words and begins to cry halfway through because nothing will work anymore. Junhyung will not come out again and nothing will come out of the books anymore, no matter how much effort he puts in. He no longer has the want, the need to read things out unless it’s him and now that the possibility has collapsed in upon itself, he has no other needs at all.
Hyunseung reads further although he fears he might just die right there, shrivel up and go with the same fate as Junhyung but he just can’t. He can’t because as he reads onwards, the story is nothing as he recalls. There are no princesses locked away in tall towers, no spectacular spur-of-the-moment weddings and there is no happily ever after.
He reads it and leans back and slowly, minute by minute and second by second, tries to piece his life and his heart back together.
Once upon a time, there lived a prince named Junhyung in a castle far, far away. When he
grew old enough, he realized that the world was not as it seemed to be. There was no happy endings, no true love, no adventures. He set out to prove himself wrong and that he could, in fact, find hope in the world.
He travelled on horseback through mountains, over rivers, frozen in snow storms, trekked onwards through the heat. He met with fairies, who were evil little creatures and stumbled upon witches, who were not mean and exciting but instead lonely, hollow things.
The prince continued onward, even though his stomach rumbled with hunger and he missed his family greatly and he was just as lonely as the witches. Only until he was near death did he stumble upon, not a wise sage’s hut or a magician’s cave, but a simple person’s home buried in thistles of woodland. It was a person who had lived with love and their heart guiding their life, a person who was wise in the ways that they did not expect much out of life and let it surprise them on its own.
When he saw how happy the young person was, he begged for the secret. But there was no secret -- the person merely responded that when he found what he was looking for in life, he would know because he would finally be happy. And once he found that happiness, he would always find a way back.
The prince thanked the wise but young person and continued onward, letting life take him wherever and accepting whatever gifts it gave, large or small.
Only when he found what he was looking for, the missing part in his life, could he be truly happy. He travels to this day, knowing that he will always find his way back to what gave him the ending he wanted.
He lived happily ever after, chasing the thing he loved most in the world.
Hyunseung is 20 years old and doing fine, thank you, moving on and taping pieces together as they wedge themselves apart. He has not talked to his mother in years, lives in a little dorm outside campus and works a job in the library, stamping things in the quiet corner where the fairy tales sit and nobody ever visits. He has had other boyfriends, one that made him smile and made him happy but it always fades. There is Kikwang, who protects him and is just a little bit dumb, he admits, but they drift apart slowly until they just stop calling and he stops visiting. Dongwoon comes after, strange and foreign looking, younger then him but more mature to the point that it makes him a tad bit uncomfortable. They come and go in waves, patterns, only needed when he feels the hole gape open a little bit more.
If he keeps filling it up, he will never have to deal with it again. He convinces himself this and continues on with his life. Life goes on, he says -- stamps a book, listens to the quiet murmur of the library -- life goes on without Junhyung.
This is his punishment for falling in love with fiction. Fiction does not last -- the rumors of the past die eventually, those fantastic fictions, until nobody remembers. How stupid of him to think that Junhyung would carry on to the future, but he only leaves a haunt of I was truly happy and even Hyunseung knows that those words will die in time when he does. He falls in love with a fairy tale prince and he pays the consequences; that is the lesson he learns and he refuses to go down that path again. But there is something so passionate about fiction and he will revel in the taste of it, how it filled him up, how it clutched his hipbones and made little bruises, how it lined kisses up his neck and whispered you’re beautiful more times then he could count.
Hyunseung tips his head back and looks at the fluorescent lights flicker once, twice, three times before hunching back over the desk. One red stamp to the inside of the book, slide it to the side, revel in the silence with a breath from the side of his mouth, repeat the process.
The padding of feet across the carpet makes him straighten his back out of instinct, the fluid grace and natural habit of a dancer, of somebody eager to interact outside of books, find a person that wasn’t made of leather and yellowed pages.
And there he is, but it must be a lie and an illusion and a fucking tease. He trails around the bookshelves, to the small nook where Hyunseung’s desk sits, headphones half in and half out, fingers trailing across the book spines. Dark hair cut across his forehead, head tilted to one side, backpack hanging off one side.
“Hey.” There’s that voice, low and gravelly, those fingers tapping the desk to get Hyunseung’s attention although it’s try to focus elsewhere, trying to figure out if he’s fallen asleep and dreaming those terribly wonderful dreams again. “Do you know any good suggestions for fiction?”
They make eye contact, because Hyunseung finally swallows and looks up, and it’s like watching him walk across the playground all over again and fireworks going off and a crack of thunder and he can feel his heart give out right there. It’s that wow factor and the boy’s eyes widen, brighten, look alive before settling warmly, the same fingers brushing against Hyunseung’s. The fireworks go off again, the delightful feeling burns in his veins and he lets out a little gasping breath. Fiction is materialized in front of him and touches his hand again, just like when he was seven and sixteen and eighteen and now he’s here.
Believe it or not, it has found its way back again, as promised.
Their hands are locked, fingers intertwining, nervous and scared and ready to take a jump neither of them were prepared for when they had woken up. “I’m Junhyung.”
It is not the same Junhyung, he knows. He realizes that he will have to build a new life, not live and build upon the last one he shared but this is it. This is love and life and eternity in front of him, solidified in something he can grasp and something that belongs in this world. He lived his whole life thinking that fiction belonged to him but it never occurred that fiction would find its way into reality, find a way to make him happy. But it truly had found its way back, as promised, two boys who existed on separate planes that slam together in sudden, frantic passion, the lines of years of fiction cut between them and he is here. He is now and he is no longer dragging behind the rest.
He exhales again after realizing that he’s been holding his breath and finally turns the next page in his life, releasing his past with a shared smile between them. “I’m Hyunseung.”
With every ending, a new beginning will always find a way, even if it must cross universes and book pages and bring fiction to life.
a/n: insert age old excuse of I SWEAR IT LOOKED LONGER ON MICROSOFT WORD here. AHA YES I'M DONE! okay, you guys are allowed to hate me now. this as happy as the ending is going to get -- but, eh, i think it's pretty damn happy, right? anyway, thanks for reading and dealing with my metaphorical fairy tale bullshit story. i really appreciate it! if you liked it, let me know. :-) if you want to have my writing banned from the face of the earth then :-( okay.
love, jie.
Chapter: Part 2/2
Author: frolickings
Rating: PG-13
Warnings: Sexual implications, language
Author's Note: The last part! Enjoy!
(Part One)
When he’s 16 years old, Hyunseung learns the significantly helpful art of using his body against others. He has grown up far prettier then anybody would have really liked and he is well on his way down the path of slim and curvy instead of the normal thick ropes of muscle and square chinned, testosterone-laden body of a boy. He learns that if he cocks his hip that way, tilts his head the other, and breathes out a soft, “Mr. Lee, I’m worried I won’t get an A on my paper…” then there will be a thick, almost overeager A across the sheet when he gets it back. If he looks up through lashes and asks for something in a voice so simpering that it almost tastes disgusting, he will get it without second questions and leave before they have a chance to come to their senses.
His mother doesn’t come home any longer, knowing now that he has crossed the double digit line and therefore, rendering this thought in her mind, that he can fend for himself. If there is money in the bank account and a credit card readily available, then she supposes he will be okay the rest of his life and she no longer feels the need to dirty her hands with the whole business of mothering and affection and such. There is an ever present staleness to the air at home, as if he knows he has breathed this air before many times and there is no one to share it with, either then Junhyung, laying next to him with his chest rising and falling in slow, smooth rhythms.
Hyunseung has always wondered, with a childlike sense of curiosity (the dangerous kind that usually ends up slaughtering the cat along the way), if he has any effect on Junhyung. Certainly, the prince couldn’t have missed the whole blossoming process that took place over the summer, where his jeans turned less fitted and more glued-to-the-skin and he took any chance to show off the pale plains of his collarbones, jutting out and made up of clean cut bone and shadows. There isn’t a way that he could have possibly missed it, as it felt much like he’d woken up one day and shed off the skin of another person, exchanged his old features for the delicate, porcelain structure of girls who were plastered on magazine covers. Because Junhyung is not oblivious enough to look at him and still see a seven year old boy, black hair and chubby cheeks and all. He must admire him now, of course, so Hyunseung turns on his side and places his fingers on Junhyung’s hand.
Junhyung has not aged a day since he materialized, not a single line embedding itself on the clean slate of his face. It doesn’t even wrinkle when at age 11, Hyunseung made it extremely clear that he would no longer be reading aloud anymore and then proceeded to make him get rid of the elephant he had magicked onto the front lawn. It took him quite a while to realize that Junhyung was also quite young, not the expected forty, but a very handsome medium of 20. It’s quite funny how he can stand by and wait as Hyunseung grows, the single anchor that never changes as the rest of the world swirls around them at the briskest pace it can go.
“Junhyung.” Hyunseung mutters as he leans himself back on his elbows, scratching at his leg with his toe to coax him from sleep. “Wake up, I need to ask you something.”
Junhyung lets out a small keening noise, eyes ghosting from Hyunseung’s sleepy gaze to his delicate fingers scratching softly at the sensitive, calloused inside of his palm. “…what?”
He sucks in a breath and stabilizes himself to make some sort of grand, eloquent speech but it all spills out, breaking the flood gates with a single sentence. “Why don’t you think I’m pretty?”
Junhyung eyes him warily, before slumping back down and turning on his side, obviously put off with the whole waking-up-for-a-dumb-question routine although he should be perfectly used to it now. He receives, for this treatment, a rough shove that almost topples him off the bed and a shriek of, “I’M BEING SERIOUS!”, voice cracking along the way because although Hyunseung has adjusted to this body well enough, the whole puberty thing has yet to work its magic on his throat.
“What do you mean by pretty?” Junhyung seems uncomfortable with the whole idea, fidgeting slightly, as if somebody just asked him if he found his little brother sexually attractive. His eyes have lost the hooded puffiness of sleep and proceed to darken slightly around the irises, an action that makes Hyunseung’s next question die a little bit in his chest, the spark of curiosity extinguished and he feels a lot like he’s choking on water. It’s mortifying, embarrassing but the emotions confuse themselves and begin to build up some sort of protective wall of rage as his fingers dig into the sheets and make crescent-moon shaped wrinkles, running his tongue over the front of his teeth.
“It’s whatever.” His voice lowers, hurt and shaking and still repeating what do you mean by pretty through his head like a mantra, sharp as a whip and just as painful. “It’s - God, you know what, this is so dumb… I shouldn’t hav-you’re a bastard, Junhyung.”
“Wait!”
Junhyung’s fingers wrap, slowly, lethargically around his wrist, a simple pull till he could feel their chests inhaling and exhaling in unison, heartbeats matched up. “Hyunseung, I... just -- fuck, you caught me off guard and... Jesus, you know you’re gorgeous--“
It has always amazed him how tiny he is compared to Junhyung, practically blown up in comparison to Hyunseung, who is reed thin and small and fragile, built with glass bones and paper skin. They shouldn’t fit -- in fact, they should break each other, one overpowering and the other crushed, snapped in half, broken into pieces but they don’t.
As it turns out, with Junhyung’s lips suddenly pushed against his own and his hands that trace that jutting curve of his spine through the thin fabric of his shirt, everything is perfectly aligned and Junhyung’s fingers slip perfectly into the curved empty spaces of his body. He is already so acquainted with it; Hyunseung mildly wonders if he has had some practice because not even he knows the swoops and turns of his limbs that well and oh, he wasn’t even aware of that sensitive brush of skin on the side of his hip.
He makes the mistake of letting a tiny mewl slip through his lip which stops Junhyung’s hands where they are, halfway through pushing the hem of his shirt up and they graze the side of his body, lowering themselves against the folds of the sheets. They both look guilty, rightfully so, caught in the middle of taboo and he can suddenly feel the weight of everything, the hard press of warm fingers on his skin and how Junhyung shifts over him, chest pushed against each other and it is like he has just lit a fire that trails into some sort of warehouse full of explosives. Despite practically inhaling books, Hyunseung cannot create a good metaphor for the life of him but it will all go to hell anyway because the point is that he definitely wants Junhyung now and there will be no stopping for anybody who intends on getting in his way.
“Hyunseung.” He can tell Junhyung is trying to restrain himself from leaping into things head first, from that slight narrow of his right eye and how he is struggling to pin down a more then willingly and quite wiggly Hyunseung. “Wait, shouldn’t we talk... about... I mean, you’re 16 and I--“
“-- answered my question.” He pushes his finger against Junhyung’s lips. “I mean, I think everything you just did essentially cemented your point. Unless that’s not how they do things in where-ever-you’re-from.”
“Did you plan this, you little wench?” It’s not really a question because Junhyung looks at him with his voice slightly tired and apathetic, the kind of voice of a man stopping himself from taking advantage of the situation. But there is something, a friction that burns because he wants to move against him and smash their lips together again and Hyunseung swears that his seven year old would be absolutely aghast to see how the whole entire let’s-read-a-wonderful-prince-out-of-a-book situation would turn out in the future.
“Can we just...” Junhyung swallows, brushing the hair from Hyunseung’s face in a way that makes him relax back, spine curling against the soft push of the mattress and he likes how he props himself up, elbows on either side of his waist, making him feel much more delicate then before. “...maybe... just lie down? Can I hold you?”
Apparently, chivalry wasn’t dead or wherever he was from, they had good morals pounded into their head at birth -- or perhaps, his father had just sat him down and told him that if a 16 year old boy threw himself at him, he probably shouldn’t jump him until he was legal. As much as he wanted to amuse himself with the possibilities, he curled into the crook of Junhyung’s body, pushed his face against his shirt and practically ate up the scent on him, leather and old books and the faint perfume that was too exotic to pinpoint down.
It didn’t really mean much that Mr. Lee thinks he’s pretty enough to throw legitimate grading scales out the window or that boys will do unbelievably stupid things with a dull hope that with his beauty, he is almost outrageously easy. It just matters here, inside the tuck of Junhyung’s arm, where everything is fiction and it’s all going to be alright.
Junhyung doesn’t much like to be fiction. Fiction cannot protect Hyunseung from the monsters of this world; had it been dragons, wizards, magical things of that sort then perhaps he could have had a fair chance. But with a change of universe came a change in challenges and suddenly, he was stricken and invisible and absolutely fiction.
The monsters were the ones whose hands pressed for too long on Hyunseung’s skin, the classmates that ran their fingers through the rust-colored curls, the ones that breathed too close and pushed themselves too close and murmured little words that made him slightly red in the cheeks. He had stopped accompanying him to school, stopped sitting in the back of the class, stopped trying to integrate himself into a life where he clearly didn’t belong because there wasn’t a life if only Hyunseung could see him.
So at times it felt greatly as if he belonged here, belonged wherever Hyunseung was and belonged where he could kiss him, touch him, protect him because he had learned to breathe with him and learned that his heart wasn’t much good unless it beat the same as his. But most of his time was spent wanting, wishing, fluttering through the pages of the book he’d slipped out of, wondering why there wasn’t a fiction where they could both be together. It sounded awfully melancholic and even more melodramatic but he was strung up of written words and emotions, somewhat made to be a mess of adjectives practically spit out of a thesaurus.
He just waited and watched and tried to avert his eyes when Hyunseung slipped further away, given up on trying to claw him back but it was too selfish of him. He was fiction and Hyunseung was real, had a real life to live and real people who wanted to do real things to him and he was trying to live a life in a world that never truly belonged to him.
All good things must come to an end, he once learned, but Hyunseung was the best thing that had ever happened to him -- so the end must come sooner, wasn’t that how it worked?
Life was supposed to be a fairytale, not unfair.
When Hyunseung is 18, he comes to a somewhat mildly upsetting conclusion that he is about as naïve as a twelve year old girl sneaking peaks at his mother’s Cosmo and is determined to end this for good. While the rest of the world is off taking full advantage of their legality and the fact that they are young, full of life, fast and untouchable, he is... well, not. There is something very odd, a kind of burning feeling, when you are happy with yourself but the rest of the world isn’t and you can’t figure out exactly what you’ve done to alienate yourself like that. It stung each day, low in his throat, lining his stomach, his heart, his brain, until he ached all over and wondered quietly what he did to make himself a bystander of life instead of throwing himself into it with eyes wide open and no regrets.
It is a quiet sort of haunting too. It creeps up on him, cold and watery and smothers him down when Junhyung isn’t there to press his curls down gently, kiss his chin and miss the mark of his lips, tell him that he is just fine. Absolutely fine. It weighs him down on the shoulders, heavily burdened, and he knows that no amount of reassurance will ever make him completely boring and normally teenager like he is supposed to be. He has hobbies, nice hobbies; reading, dancing, academics. He has a steady boyfriend who was fictional but that wasn’t really the point, so he likes to nicely ghost over it.
So he coils up tight against Junhyung, their hands overlapping on a book, quietly turning pages. “...and they lived happily ever after. The end. I love happy endings, don’t you?”
He can feel Junhyung’s laugh vibrate against his back, low and musical, his lips ghosting against his temple and trailing down to the crook of his neck. His fingers tangle through his hairs, those unruly orange curls that cling to his forehead with a thin black headband, his jaw tilts upwards to allow Junhyung’s mouth more access to the rest of his spread of soft skin. They are in an awkward position, he admits, his back pressed against Junhyung’s stomach and his t-shirt is riding up a bit and he is sure he looks a little bit slutty right now, rest assured.
He tries to turn, kind of falls chest forward against Junhyung, knees on either side and their lips are almost touching. These are the kind of things, with his eyes shut and he can feel their breath coursing through them, that make his stomach turn in that tickling good way and he props himself up with his elbows, hovering -- hesitating -- waiting.
Hyunseung can realize, easily, by the wild look in their eyes and the way his breath labors, that Junhyung wants something from him that he hasn’t ever asked for before. Now it’s his decision if he’s going to let him have it, just like that, or dangle it over him with the prospect of teasing and controlling. But he notices how Junhyung’s hands slip up, ever so slightly, pushing the shirt up from the curve of his back, sliding down to brush his navel, helping it off his head and arms. It is quite odd to be confident and then suddenly be reduced to lack of self conscious, his stomach seeming pale and lacking and his arms thin with bones jutting out everywhere.
But Junhyung lets out a quiet sigh of God, you’re beautiful before gripping Hyunseung’s chin, pulling him down for a sharp kiss that leaves a lot to be said and a lot, especially, to be done. He is nervous, scared, his hands fumble and it hurts -- Jesus, it hurts -- but after it is done, there is no trust that he doesn’t give to Junhyung because, as of now, he has given him everything. Darkness has already settled, the sheets are clinging to him with sweat, and he doesn’t very much feel like a fairy tale because his body aches like a nightmare.
Everything is asleep, lurking and waiting for early sunshine to burst to life, and it’s oddly lonely to be awake, as his eyes narrow and his cheek presses against the warm skin of Junhyung’s stomach, heaving with heavy breaths of sleep. It’s going to be hard to roll out of bed in a few hours with everything throbbing but there is the mindless pride of finally doing something about that childishness that accompanied his beauty.
He is happy with himself because he is in love and he is grown up and he owes it all to fiction. His lips find their way to trail a kiss up Junhyung’s jawline, pushing himself up weakly with his hands and suddenly, Junhyung is holding him up, sitting up in bed, tucking his hair behind his ear.
“I love you.”
Their heads tilt, their lips meet, and he can hear happily ever after echo in his head before swatting it away. “I love you too.”
Hyunseung is in love with fiction and fiction loves him back. It is so fleeting that it passes like fireworks but it’s burned into his eyes forever.
When Hyunseung is still 18, still waiting to creep closer to 19 years old, his mother decides in a burst of spontaneous motherly guilt to visit home and he comes home from school, fingers clasped with Junhyung’s, to find her crouched over the kitchen counter. His first concerns were most likely did grandpa die? and then Jesus, did she call first? Oh God, I forgot to clean the living room then lastly how the fuck do I get her out of my house? There is the reassuring brush of lazy circles, the work of Junhyung’s thumb against his wrist and he takes his breaths two at a time, forcing out a weak crack of, “Mom.”
“Hyunseung.”
There is something wrong, so wrong about that voice. It is betrayed and scared and upset and panicked and every emotion she has lacked for years stuffing itself into one word -- his name -- and it makes his stomach turn upside down. The crinkle of paper, coming from her fingers, fills up the empty space between them and suddenly, he can feel the 18 years of tension riding down on his back and forcing him into the ground.
“Hyunseung.” She repeats, lower this time but the fear still quivers, empty and frozen. “Who is Junhyung?”
Then he suddenly realizes where the sound of crushed pages is, as it’s accompanied by the sharp sound of ripping paper and he watches his own personal journal (normally so well hidden in his room but he had gotten careless and left it on the table today) tear itself apart within his mother’s hands. There is no noise but the orchestra that bellows out from the sound of a book being murdered, destroyed, torn apart into pieces and he chokes a little bit, his own writing falling apart in front of him. He wants to reach forward but Junhyung holds him back in that quiet way of his, that way that says stay calm and everything will work itself out but even he can feel the shaky breath of watching something equivalent to a large train swerve off the tracks and crash into a canyon. It’s a disaster and they just sit and watch.
“I said -- who the fuck is Junhyung?” Her hair is loose everywhere and she grapples for a piece of paper, anywhere, her lipstick feathering away at her cracked skin. “--and we slept together again. I’m getting used to it now, this idea of having a lover, especially when Junhyung's fingers don't press hard--“
It’s too late to stop it now, broken fingernails scratching for more entries to tear apart with her voice, falling apart with hysterics. “--nobody can see him but I can and I know he’s real. He leaves bruises, like little pale flower petals, when we're done and they last till the next day and his mouth leaves marks and I know people can see them, so why can’t they see him?”
Her nose flares and her mouth flattens into a tight line, pale and white. This must obviously be the equivalent of an atom bomb -- hello, your son is gay, in a sexual relationship, and his boyfriend may or may not be a figment of an imagination, would you like some medicine for that growing headache? Graying fingers tug for a cigarette lighter but she doesn’t light up a cigarette, she lights up the papers in front of them and watches them curl in and collapse upon themselves like a disaster zone in slow motion. He’s crying now but he didn’t notice until he realized the loud screams had to be coming from somewhere and his mother’s mouth was laced tightly shut so... oh, that’s me, he thinks faintly. Junhyung tugs him back, trying to yell over everything but it gets to the point where there is too much noise and he just folds over himself, clutching his stomach and swallowing the bitter taste in this throat like medicine, acidic and playing with his mind.
“Was it because I was never here?!” She screams over his terrified grappling for what remains left of the journal, which is just a few pages with crispy corners and the sad leather binding and his hand burns against the flames. “You made this... this thing up because I was never here for you?”
“He’s real!” The fire leaps up a bit and he watches it grow, expand, eat up everything else on the table till the tears follow the path down his jaw and down his shirt and he realizes that his life is burning in front of him. Junhyung holds him back, flames reflected in his irises and everything is so loud but the sudden quiet envelopes the air, the fire sucked away almost through a black hole, having nothing left to destroy and seemingly collapsing upon itself. The only semblance of the fire remains in a pile of his broken thoughts, dark ash and ember. His life has made a magical transformation from the written word to chalky, smearing ash in a matter of seconds and it is nothing but a metaphor that reflects itself in reality. He is breaking down -- correction: already broken -- and nobody can save him from the cliff he’s thrown himself off of.
“Junhyung.” Now the word tastes foreign on his tongue and he claws at Junhyung, desperate and scared and in tatters. “You have to show her. Throw something. Hit me. Do anything, please.”
The air is still thick with rolling, congealing smoke and he thinks that it clouds his vision, but he can see Junhyung step back, a quiet mutter of, “It’s not in my place... to deal with this. This is between you and your mother.”
“Fuck you!” He’s not exactly sure who he is yelling at now and his head pounds, smoke creeping through his mouth and scratching at the inside of his throat. “Fuck you, mom! Why the fuck do you care now? You never cared and you k-- fuck, I don’t want your goddamn sympathy! And you know what, Junhyung? Fuck you too. Fuck all of you! I hate fiction and I hate you, mom, and... and... fuck-- ”
A finger pushes sharply against Junhyung’s chest, slamming him against the wall and he finally exhales every breath, matching eyes with Hyunseung (who is terrified and confused and angry), rage building momentum by the minute. He curls back from his own strength and realizes, with the set of eyes that pour onto his back, that his mother has just witnessed him screeching at a wall but the framed picture hung up, their family portrait that is so sterile and white, crashes to the ground with the force of it and everything stops moving. Now his mother has seen the metaphor of their family life smash like a disaster that has taken 18 years to destroy them; saw the picture fall but Hyunseung never touched wall, wasn't the reason it glittered in pieces and she feels slightly sick in the way of my son has gone crazy and now it's my turn.
He takes the moment to let his gaze, crazed and somewhat feral, flicker from the broken glass, the burned pages of his diary with the pages still glowing with embers, Junhyung’s eyes squeezed shut with frustration, and his mother. She sits there, face buried in her hands and her shoulders shaking and her hair unraveling and suddenly, he realizes she has finally broken. Much to nobody’s surprise, he doesn’t even care anymore. It has taken him much too long to realize that he just has forgotten how to.
“You know what?” Hyunseung’s head tilts, his smile flutters up and he turns back to Junhyung, who holds his breath.
"I hate you the most, Junhyung."
He comes home a few hours later, where the lights are all off and the house smells greatly of smoke and he is just tired. Hyunseung has grown up with a lot of thoughts and a lot of anger and mostly a lot of neglect, but he’s quite good at keeping things all bottled up. Overall, he is just ashamed of himself and the weight of those words, much heavier then I love you and a thousand times more devastating, makes him want to say so many things because he is beyond apologies. There is a reason, he assures himself, that Junhyung couldn’t do anything and it is a reason he is obviously not understanding.
“Hello?” His voice is weak, watery and it quivers like that last note of a song before it cripples into empty silence. “Junhyung?”
There is nothing but rain on the windows, the creak of staircases as if the house breathes and knows what has happened but judges silently. He climbs the stairs one half at a time, stuttering with his steps, almost unsure if he even wants to return here. He wants to go back in time, as every person in moments of regret wishes, wants to hide the journal and smile through his teeth at his mother and let Junhyung have his way with him. That was the way things were supposed to be but he decides he could have the next best thing; some quality time in a strait jacket and fresh thoughts force fed to him with pills and enough brainwashing for a whole country.
He isn’t crazy. He’s just a boy with fiction tagging along and it’s real, it’s there, tangible under his fingers. He isn’t concerned with the future but he is concerned with the now, with how he has broken them in two with just three words. A relationship built upon phrases passed by mouth and he has delivered the final, sickening blow.
Hyunseung knocks on his own door before remembering that it is room, but he still retains the fact that Junhyung is probably angry, offended or a deliciously terrible mix of both. “Junhyung, can I...”
“Come in.”
There he is in full glory, except full is not as realistically correct as semi because -- Hyunseung’s body shakes and his hand flies to his mouth out of instinct, to keep himself held together -- Junhyung is... transparent.
He wishes, desperately, that he is being metaphorical and he can go back to the normal routine of banter and love making between the two that comes as easily as breathing. However, Junhyung is but a shimmer of a person, the stars outside glittering through his body and the landscape through the window almost clear through where his torso should be. He is fading away, as if Hyunseung had left him to drain the color in the sun, the vibrant shades that used to make him up like brush strokes melting away like watercolors.
“What...” Hyunseung trails off but clutches against the smooth surface of the wall, trying to grapple onto some part of reality but it’s all falling away into pieces in his hand, “....Junhyung, what’s happening to you?”
Junhyung is not one who smiles often but there is only something worse then that and it’s when he’s faking it. His smile stretches unevenly, as if he hasn’t spread it across the way it’s supposed to be, bumps and cracks visible. Overall, he looks broken and not the kind of face where one knows they can fix it, that the pieces can mend themselves together and he will fall back into place over time. He has the face of a man doomed to death, already walking down death row, and it’s diluted like the opaque glimmer of what used to be his solid shape.
“Hyunseung, honey, don’t...” He trails off, mouth set in a line when tears start, unwanted, down Hyunseung’s cheeks and he reaches to wipe them away with his thumb till he realizes that it’s already faded off his hand, “...don’t be scared. I was supposed to leave sometime. As much as we both wanted me to stay, I’m fiction. I don’t belong here.”
“What does that mean?!” He is brash and angry because Junhyung was never going to leave; he just assumed he was there forever, that thing that had one foot in the past as the world throttled forward to the future. “Why are you leaving?”
“You hate me.”
Simple as that. Their breath catches in both their throats, words caught between threading themselves in their heads and actually make their way out. “No... Junhyung, no... I didn’t mean it, you know I didn’t...”
“I know.” Junhyung is oddly faint now, as if he is speaking underwater and he sounds just as remorseful because he knows that despite the begging and the crying, tears will not bring him back any faster. “But you, of all people, should know how powerful words can be.”
Hyunseung reaches forward, wants something in return -- a kiss, a brush of skin, to feel their tears running down his fingers before Junhyung shimmers slightly, opening his mouth weakly. “Hyunseung, I want you to know that I was truly happy and I will always find a way back to you, even if you know it or not.”
He reaches forward, tries to grasp what’s left of Junhyung but he falls apart, to dust, sweeping away and melting into the surface.
Suddenly, he is alone. And he realizes how silent a moment can truly be.
Hyunseung is even still 18 years old when he figures out that you are nothing when you build your life up on something that will only disappoint. His books find their way scattered amongst bonfires and trashcans and church rummage sales, his mother leaves the country with what he assumes is no attempt to come back, he is alone in an old house with himself and his thoughts and that one book. Jam smeared in the corner, aunt’s writing on the title page, unread past that story and even that story isn’t finished.
It takes a lot of bravery, he thinks, to open that story up. He almost wishes that it is filled with heroic rescues and princesses that throw themselves as daintily as possible at Junhyung’s feet, so he can reassure himself that, yes, Junhyung is still happy. He is able to live without Hyunseung but the same cannot be said in reverse. He wishes that he was not so dependent but truthfully, he thrived upon him his whole life and now he is faded back into a book, back where he belongs.
And it hurts deeply.
The pages burn his fingers as he carefully treads his way forward till the title swirls on top of the chapter and he begins reading, begins to spit out his heart with the words and begins to cry halfway through because nothing will work anymore. Junhyung will not come out again and nothing will come out of the books anymore, no matter how much effort he puts in. He no longer has the want, the need to read things out unless it’s him and now that the possibility has collapsed in upon itself, he has no other needs at all.
Hyunseung reads further although he fears he might just die right there, shrivel up and go with the same fate as Junhyung but he just can’t. He can’t because as he reads onwards, the story is nothing as he recalls. There are no princesses locked away in tall towers, no spectacular spur-of-the-moment weddings and there is no happily ever after.
He reads it and leans back and slowly, minute by minute and second by second, tries to piece his life and his heart back together.
Once upon a time, there lived a prince named Junhyung in a castle far, far away. When he
grew old enough, he realized that the world was not as it seemed to be. There was no happy endings, no true love, no adventures. He set out to prove himself wrong and that he could, in fact, find hope in the world.
He travelled on horseback through mountains, over rivers, frozen in snow storms, trekked onwards through the heat. He met with fairies, who were evil little creatures and stumbled upon witches, who were not mean and exciting but instead lonely, hollow things.
The prince continued onward, even though his stomach rumbled with hunger and he missed his family greatly and he was just as lonely as the witches. Only until he was near death did he stumble upon, not a wise sage’s hut or a magician’s cave, but a simple person’s home buried in thistles of woodland. It was a person who had lived with love and their heart guiding their life, a person who was wise in the ways that they did not expect much out of life and let it surprise them on its own.
When he saw how happy the young person was, he begged for the secret. But there was no secret -- the person merely responded that when he found what he was looking for in life, he would know because he would finally be happy. And once he found that happiness, he would always find a way back.
The prince thanked the wise but young person and continued onward, letting life take him wherever and accepting whatever gifts it gave, large or small.
Only when he found what he was looking for, the missing part in his life, could he be truly happy. He travels to this day, knowing that he will always find his way back to what gave him the ending he wanted.
He lived happily ever after, chasing the thing he loved most in the world.
Hyunseung is 20 years old and doing fine, thank you, moving on and taping pieces together as they wedge themselves apart. He has not talked to his mother in years, lives in a little dorm outside campus and works a job in the library, stamping things in the quiet corner where the fairy tales sit and nobody ever visits. He has had other boyfriends, one that made him smile and made him happy but it always fades. There is Kikwang, who protects him and is just a little bit dumb, he admits, but they drift apart slowly until they just stop calling and he stops visiting. Dongwoon comes after, strange and foreign looking, younger then him but more mature to the point that it makes him a tad bit uncomfortable. They come and go in waves, patterns, only needed when he feels the hole gape open a little bit more.
If he keeps filling it up, he will never have to deal with it again. He convinces himself this and continues on with his life. Life goes on, he says -- stamps a book, listens to the quiet murmur of the library -- life goes on without Junhyung.
This is his punishment for falling in love with fiction. Fiction does not last -- the rumors of the past die eventually, those fantastic fictions, until nobody remembers. How stupid of him to think that Junhyung would carry on to the future, but he only leaves a haunt of I was truly happy and even Hyunseung knows that those words will die in time when he does. He falls in love with a fairy tale prince and he pays the consequences; that is the lesson he learns and he refuses to go down that path again. But there is something so passionate about fiction and he will revel in the taste of it, how it filled him up, how it clutched his hipbones and made little bruises, how it lined kisses up his neck and whispered you’re beautiful more times then he could count.
Hyunseung tips his head back and looks at the fluorescent lights flicker once, twice, three times before hunching back over the desk. One red stamp to the inside of the book, slide it to the side, revel in the silence with a breath from the side of his mouth, repeat the process.
The padding of feet across the carpet makes him straighten his back out of instinct, the fluid grace and natural habit of a dancer, of somebody eager to interact outside of books, find a person that wasn’t made of leather and yellowed pages.
And there he is, but it must be a lie and an illusion and a fucking tease. He trails around the bookshelves, to the small nook where Hyunseung’s desk sits, headphones half in and half out, fingers trailing across the book spines. Dark hair cut across his forehead, head tilted to one side, backpack hanging off one side.
“Hey.” There’s that voice, low and gravelly, those fingers tapping the desk to get Hyunseung’s attention although it’s try to focus elsewhere, trying to figure out if he’s fallen asleep and dreaming those terribly wonderful dreams again. “Do you know any good suggestions for fiction?”
They make eye contact, because Hyunseung finally swallows and looks up, and it’s like watching him walk across the playground all over again and fireworks going off and a crack of thunder and he can feel his heart give out right there. It’s that wow factor and the boy’s eyes widen, brighten, look alive before settling warmly, the same fingers brushing against Hyunseung’s. The fireworks go off again, the delightful feeling burns in his veins and he lets out a little gasping breath. Fiction is materialized in front of him and touches his hand again, just like when he was seven and sixteen and eighteen and now he’s here.
Believe it or not, it has found its way back again, as promised.
Their hands are locked, fingers intertwining, nervous and scared and ready to take a jump neither of them were prepared for when they had woken up. “I’m Junhyung.”
It is not the same Junhyung, he knows. He realizes that he will have to build a new life, not live and build upon the last one he shared but this is it. This is love and life and eternity in front of him, solidified in something he can grasp and something that belongs in this world. He lived his whole life thinking that fiction belonged to him but it never occurred that fiction would find its way into reality, find a way to make him happy. But it truly had found its way back, as promised, two boys who existed on separate planes that slam together in sudden, frantic passion, the lines of years of fiction cut between them and he is here. He is now and he is no longer dragging behind the rest.
He exhales again after realizing that he’s been holding his breath and finally turns the next page in his life, releasing his past with a shared smile between them. “I’m Hyunseung.”
With every ending, a new beginning will always find a way, even if it must cross universes and book pages and bring fiction to life.
a/n: insert age old excuse of I SWEAR IT LOOKED LONGER ON MICROSOFT WORD here. AHA YES I'M DONE! okay, you guys are allowed to hate me now. this as happy as the ending is going to get -- but, eh, i think it's pretty damn happy, right? anyway, thanks for reading and dealing with my metaphorical fairy tale bullshit story. i really appreciate it! if you liked it, let me know. :-) if you want to have my writing banned from the face of the earth then :-( okay.
love, jie.