a fleeting moment of intense emotion
a/n: three ficlets i posted on my AFF last year. i didn't like them enough back then to share them here, but i've edited them a bit and now they're slightly better (i hope! lol).
middle people
868w; pg (fei/lay)
those who left, and those who were left behind.
a/n: vaguely about the Kris situation. set in 2014, before Luhan left.
It must be hard. Nothing challenging, not really prodding. It must be hard. It’s a statement.
He looks at her. It is. She looks at him. He betrays nothing but exhaustion.
She can’t say she’s totally surprised when the news breaks out. Jia says something along the lines of “oh.” “It must be hard,” Fei supplies in their momentary silence. Jia nods.
A couple days later, they’re talking over the phone. “Tao’s really upset,” Jia tells her. Fei doesn’t really know why but she snaps. “What am I supposed to do about that?” She hears Jia mutter something about I don’t know, nothing? It’s not our problem, really, is it? before hanging up.
They don’t really talk about it after that.
She sees him on one of their days off, not long after, when all of them don’t have homes in Korea to go to. They’re all being noisy, rusty Mandarin filling the Chinese restaurant who’s food doesn’t quite taste like home, but is close enough to be settled for, except for him. He’s always been one of the more quiet ones, smiling and laughing along when appropriate, joining in only when he has something to add, so it’s not like anything’s out of the ordinary.
She catches him turning his head to the right at some point during the night, as if he expects someone to be there, before turning back just as quickly. He laughs at the next funny story Zhoumi tells. She swallows, throat so dry she might choke. It’s not like anything’s out of the ordinary.
“That’s relentless,” Cao Lu says one day when they pass by an ad for EXO's recent concert. The way the image is cropped makes the poster looks off-center. Jia shoots the older girl this look, we don’t talk about this, it speaks. Cao Lu frowns.
They don’t really talk about it after that.
“Why do you say things just to say them?” he asks her the next time there’s a get-together. They’re walking behind the others, someone’s gotten drunk to the point of singing a montage of children’s songs, the late night turning her fingers blue, citrus yellow under the street lamps they pass. She stops for a moment. “What?” His eyes are tired, but then again, hers probably do too. “What do you mean?”
“It’s always been hard.” His sneakers make this scraping sound against the sidewalk and it startles her. “It’s always hard for all of us, is what you should’ve said.” The bridge of his nose remains blue even under the street lamps. The darkness pools underneath his eyes, trickling down the contours of his cheekbones, dribbling down to his chin. Fei suddenly remembers that poster, eleven looming figures instead of twelve, and begins to feel sick.
Jia keeps looking at her one day in the van. They’re sitting in the backseat, Suzy in the middle, fast asleep, Min shotgun, on her phone. “What?” Fei asks when she remains silent.
“You’ve thought about it, haven’t you?” Jia says. Fei shrugs, averting her eyes to the ceiling. “I know you have,” she goes on.
She sighs. “Doesn’t everyone?” Jia looks at her, cautiously this time. “But you’ve been thinking about it more ever since he left, right?”
“Let’s not talk about this anymore,” Fei interrupts but Jia keeps going. “It’s ok, I have too, you know? But we’re not like him, Fei, I mean he was just really.” She pauses. “Unhappy. And it’s not like we aren’t sometimes but not like that, not to that extent.”
Fei closes her eyes. Suzy stirs in front of them. “I don’t know, would you even have the guts to do something like that?”
Jia clicks her tongue. “Maybe the reason we’re still here is because we’re cowards.” Fei laughs a little. It’s meant to be a joke, but it turns out rather profound.
He shows up at her door one night when she’s alone. “My flight leaves at six,” he explains, but it doesn’t sound like an explanation. She lets him in, anyway.
“Going home?” she asks in between offering him leftovers and ramen. He rejects both. “Yeah,” he smiles. “We have a little vacation.”
They’re sitting on the couch watching some black and white film on the American movie channel when she just says it. “Aren’t you afraid you’ll never want to come back?”
His eyes remain focused on the screen, silence other than the English coming through the television set. He glances over at her when the commercial break begins. “Even though it’s hard, I still love what I do.” The commercial for some skin product reflects in his eyes. “That’s why most of us are still here, isn’t it?”
She blinks. Thinks about that. “Yeah.” He smiles, reaches for her hand, clutches it like it will lead him out of some kind of dark pit, until she can feel his pulse, fluttering against her fingertips. She looks at him.
He’s holding it even after the credits roll.
You’ll be back. It’s a statement, and she whispers it because she’s falling asleep.
He looks at her. Yeah. His heart, beating, warm hand letting go of hers, human, so human, betrays everything. I will.
I’ll see you again.
vegetable birds and their patterns of migration
1,246w; pg-13 (mark/wendy)
and just like those hollow hearts that work out of the brain's accord, everything keeps going.
a/n: originally titled the biophilia hypothesis when i posted this on AFF, but i like this title better!
It’s coded into their DNA:
He was always gonna meet her,
but she was always gonna leave.
The first time he sees her, she’s standing in the rain, make-up wiped off onto the sleeve of her soaked hoodie, drops like tears sliding down her cheeks. She could be crying. He covers her with his umbrella, his jacket beginning to soak at the shoulders instead.
“Are you ok?” he asks. She shrugs. Here, she’s up close, more high definition than the TV screens and internet could show, more real than any music program or variety show could make her seem.
The drops collect at her tear ducts, release - he’s watching too closely but his jacket is beginning to stick to his skin - slide down her face, curve around the chin, disappearing from sight. She exhales and it’s just steam between them. When it clears, her eyes are hard and dry again. “Are you?” she replies.
“That’s not an answer.” Some part of him didn’t expect one. (In)human machines aren’t supposed to be standing out in the rain after their performances, aren’t supposed to be soaked to the bone, aren’t supposed to feel.
She exhales again. “Well, that wasn’t a question.” And it’s just them, the rain, umbrella covering her and the front of his body, and the steam, the steam between them.
To each other, they’re just Mark, just Wendy. There’s no attempt of intimacy, no Seungwan’s or Yi-en’s - they’re both from North America, that’s good enough, no need to push it. She smiles and he smiles back, and it’s just an attempt to pretend to have someone else there, to pretend that they’re friends, maybe, the term loosely associated with their disconcerted discourse.
Sometimes the industry is just too much to take in, factory fumes churning them out. At some point, they meet up in September and she won’t even talk to him because her voice is tired from exertion and dieting and over exhaustion, just lays her head on his shoulder and it reminds him of his jacket, like a second skin, from their first encounter. They sit there, listen to each other breathe. It’s strangely personal, yet a touch removed, as if they are going through the motions with a filter, like they are so used to. Sometimes the filter breaks down and he knows her shoulders are shaking because the wrong words came out of her mouth - and oh well, can’t take those back, but she’s still hurting, regretting. They’re homesick and homeless, no amount of Skype calls and text messages can amend time passing and holidays spent at the dorm, alone.
It’s disconcerted discourse, he convinces himself, when he’s crying in front of her because he’s tired, just let me have a little time to be ungrateful, and she takes his face in her hands and thumbs away the tears. It’s ok, Mark - that is his name, it’s not impersonal, far from it. It’s ok, Mark, and she presses her lips against his, chaste.
Convinces himself as he reaches back, tears still streaming down his face, and kisses her again.
It never lingers. Some days, it is a brief brush of the fingers passing by the hallway but never eye contact, or a longing glance over the shoulder. It makes him feel hollow, going through the motions but creating empty actions. But what is fullness anymore? He tries not to half-ass his performances, his routines, but then there’s them - and there exists no criteria, no one to please, no one to pretend to. It feels startlingly real when he holds her in his arms and she holds him in hers, strange dyes in their hair and foundation shading all the cracks in their facades into the shadows, pretending that they don’t exist. But they do.
He thinks that they take advantage of that fact - occasional one-sided rendezvous becoming more frequent, watery words into each other’s ears because they won’t listen otherwise, falling asleep on each other. Even when he tries and she tries to keep it together, keep it full, it is as if it is the inevitable way to go about things is in a state of empathetic lethargy. They can’t help it - it’s biological, as biological as a stolen kiss here and there, almost-more-than-whispers harshly grating against each other’s eardrums, the ears pressed against backs as they drape their bodies together like forgotten but washed linens, listening to hollow hearts empty and fill themselves repeatedly to keep everything going.
And just like those hollow hearts that work out of the brain’s accord, everything keeps going.
They’re lying beside each other one day, dawn beginning to break and flushing color into the monochrome of night. His eyes drift between completely shut and half-open, according to how hard she squeezes his hand. He ends up falling asleep by the time they have to go, anyway.
When he opens his eyes, his left hand is empty. Cold. The air around him smells like dew, morning, beginnings. Inhales, exhales. Her scent does not linger. The absence of her hand in his reminds him of the one time his brother let go of his hand as he was running around with him in circles. They both ended up with bruises, his brother with a cast on his right wrist. The thought, the emptiness, lingers, unlike her.
It’s just hard. You know? Mark.
Yeah. (exhales) It’s hard.
(the phones shifts) I know we feel the same way - we’re tired, we’re homesick, we’re both trying to figure out how we fit into this entertainment world - it’s just, I don’t know if I can keep doing this. This is just hard
(a thought occurs to him) I’ve never heard your voice over the phone before.
(pause) You’re changing the subject.
Isn’t that what this is? Changing the subject?
(silence).
Maybe they’re both just husks, beginning to be spooned out, spoon-fed carefully to the public. Maybe there exists no fullness, and maybe it is ok to know that you will not be full like you were before. They probably weren’t meant to be - she was not embedded with the patience to maintain such discourse, he was not born without the romanticist fatality to believe it would all work out in the end - they are both too hollow to make two full wholes.
Maybe two wholes isn’t the point of all this. they aren’t the same people as they were when they entered the business - filters attached, smiles for every performance stitched on meticulously - emptied out just enough to create a void for the other. A purposeful emptiness.
Maybe that’s what fullness is, for them, now.
This time, the unreliable penultimate time, she sees him, standing in the rain. They could be crying, but there is nothing to cry about, nothing to cry over. Here, they’re up close, more high definition than the TV screens or internet could show, more real without the foundation shading the cracks into the oblivion of the shadows.
She holds the umbrella over his head. The raindrops scintillate off the surface, collecting into puddles at their feet. Disconcerted discourse, he thinks when he meets her eyes, hard and dry. Her lips part, posing a question, and he, in anticipation, exhales - and it’s just them, the rain, umbrella covering them, and the steam, the steam between them.
It’s coded into their DNA:
He was always gonna meet her,
but she was always gonna leave.
They were always going to end up back together
(but not really.)
applied romanticism
400w; g (mark/wendy)
displacement, deixis, maybe they're pointing at each other.
Sometimes, Mark just imagines he’s a point in the far off distance and listens. He’s not here, not really. He’s just a pair of eyes, some ears, maybe a forehead, maybe a face. Just a mind suspended in time and space. Just listening.
I don’t get it, she tells him, honest, trying to get it. She, Wendy, is sentences and syntax and words, so many words - strung together and chopped up, diced in a blender, but they still slide off her tongue like something sticky but languid in its stickiness. Honey, he would say if he was in the mood to be one of those cliché poetic types. Today, he’s not.
Also today: she is trying to get it, get him. There are just some things you will never get, no matter how broken down the idea becomes, no matter how spelled-out it is. Sentences, syntax, and words won’t obey this conjecture, won’t obey the silence.
Wendy's always revising - her chopped up, strung together, diced-in-a-blender words - threading the needle a stitch more then pulling the entire patchwork apart. Then she works on it once more, over and over, until she thinks it makes sense.
"Do you ever get tired of listening?" she asks him after telling a lengthy story about the blue stain on her beat-up sneakers that he spent the previous hour staring at. Berry blue Kool-Aid packets in leaky water bottles. Mark never would have guessed.
Shrugs. He likes to listen, it's the basic part of him underlying it all, the foundation, the part of him he just knows exists in his bones and flesh though the process is highly cognitive. Like romanticism, the American kind, when people thought about thinking with their feelings, and that became their truth. Romanticism - he thinks it but doesn't say it - doesn't know why he made the connection in the first place but the needle threads that stitch, and there, he's there, part of the patchwork. Her patchwork.
Maybe tomorrow: sticky but languid in its stickiness. The remaining adhesion when you rip off a band aid, he might say, fancying himself a point in the far off distance in relation to her. Displacement, deixis, maybe they’re pointing at each other. Just a moment suspended in time and space, just the faded background noises in the static of an unprofessionally-shot video.
Just a hand, her hand, keeps him here.
middle people
868w; pg (fei/lay)
those who left, and those who were left behind.
a/n: vaguely about the Kris situation. set in 2014, before Luhan left.
It must be hard. Nothing challenging, not really prodding. It must be hard. It’s a statement.
He looks at her. It is. She looks at him. He betrays nothing but exhaustion.
She can’t say she’s totally surprised when the news breaks out. Jia says something along the lines of “oh.” “It must be hard,” Fei supplies in their momentary silence. Jia nods.
A couple days later, they’re talking over the phone. “Tao’s really upset,” Jia tells her. Fei doesn’t really know why but she snaps. “What am I supposed to do about that?” She hears Jia mutter something about I don’t know, nothing? It’s not our problem, really, is it? before hanging up.
They don’t really talk about it after that.
She sees him on one of their days off, not long after, when all of them don’t have homes in Korea to go to. They’re all being noisy, rusty Mandarin filling the Chinese restaurant who’s food doesn’t quite taste like home, but is close enough to be settled for, except for him. He’s always been one of the more quiet ones, smiling and laughing along when appropriate, joining in only when he has something to add, so it’s not like anything’s out of the ordinary.
She catches him turning his head to the right at some point during the night, as if he expects someone to be there, before turning back just as quickly. He laughs at the next funny story Zhoumi tells. She swallows, throat so dry she might choke. It’s not like anything’s out of the ordinary.
“That’s relentless,” Cao Lu says one day when they pass by an ad for EXO's recent concert. The way the image is cropped makes the poster looks off-center. Jia shoots the older girl this look, we don’t talk about this, it speaks. Cao Lu frowns.
They don’t really talk about it after that.
“Why do you say things just to say them?” he asks her the next time there’s a get-together. They’re walking behind the others, someone’s gotten drunk to the point of singing a montage of children’s songs, the late night turning her fingers blue, citrus yellow under the street lamps they pass. She stops for a moment. “What?” His eyes are tired, but then again, hers probably do too. “What do you mean?”
“It’s always been hard.” His sneakers make this scraping sound against the sidewalk and it startles her. “It’s always hard for all of us, is what you should’ve said.” The bridge of his nose remains blue even under the street lamps. The darkness pools underneath his eyes, trickling down the contours of his cheekbones, dribbling down to his chin. Fei suddenly remembers that poster, eleven looming figures instead of twelve, and begins to feel sick.
Jia keeps looking at her one day in the van. They’re sitting in the backseat, Suzy in the middle, fast asleep, Min shotgun, on her phone. “What?” Fei asks when she remains silent.
“You’ve thought about it, haven’t you?” Jia says. Fei shrugs, averting her eyes to the ceiling. “I know you have,” she goes on.
She sighs. “Doesn’t everyone?” Jia looks at her, cautiously this time. “But you’ve been thinking about it more ever since he left, right?”
“Let’s not talk about this anymore,” Fei interrupts but Jia keeps going. “It’s ok, I have too, you know? But we’re not like him, Fei, I mean he was just really.” She pauses. “Unhappy. And it’s not like we aren’t sometimes but not like that, not to that extent.”
Fei closes her eyes. Suzy stirs in front of them. “I don’t know, would you even have the guts to do something like that?”
Jia clicks her tongue. “Maybe the reason we’re still here is because we’re cowards.” Fei laughs a little. It’s meant to be a joke, but it turns out rather profound.
He shows up at her door one night when she’s alone. “My flight leaves at six,” he explains, but it doesn’t sound like an explanation. She lets him in, anyway.
“Going home?” she asks in between offering him leftovers and ramen. He rejects both. “Yeah,” he smiles. “We have a little vacation.”
They’re sitting on the couch watching some black and white film on the American movie channel when she just says it. “Aren’t you afraid you’ll never want to come back?”
His eyes remain focused on the screen, silence other than the English coming through the television set. He glances over at her when the commercial break begins. “Even though it’s hard, I still love what I do.” The commercial for some skin product reflects in his eyes. “That’s why most of us are still here, isn’t it?”
She blinks. Thinks about that. “Yeah.” He smiles, reaches for her hand, clutches it like it will lead him out of some kind of dark pit, until she can feel his pulse, fluttering against her fingertips. She looks at him.
He’s holding it even after the credits roll.
You’ll be back. It’s a statement, and she whispers it because she’s falling asleep.
He looks at her. Yeah. His heart, beating, warm hand letting go of hers, human, so human, betrays everything. I will.
I’ll see you again.
vegetable birds and their patterns of migration
1,246w; pg-13 (mark/wendy)
and just like those hollow hearts that work out of the brain's accord, everything keeps going.
a/n: originally titled the biophilia hypothesis when i posted this on AFF, but i like this title better!
It’s coded into their DNA:
He was always gonna meet her,
but she was always gonna leave.
The first time he sees her, she’s standing in the rain, make-up wiped off onto the sleeve of her soaked hoodie, drops like tears sliding down her cheeks. She could be crying. He covers her with his umbrella, his jacket beginning to soak at the shoulders instead.
“Are you ok?” he asks. She shrugs. Here, she’s up close, more high definition than the TV screens and internet could show, more real than any music program or variety show could make her seem.
The drops collect at her tear ducts, release - he’s watching too closely but his jacket is beginning to stick to his skin - slide down her face, curve around the chin, disappearing from sight. She exhales and it’s just steam between them. When it clears, her eyes are hard and dry again. “Are you?” she replies.
“That’s not an answer.” Some part of him didn’t expect one. (In)human machines aren’t supposed to be standing out in the rain after their performances, aren’t supposed to be soaked to the bone, aren’t supposed to feel.
She exhales again. “Well, that wasn’t a question.” And it’s just them, the rain, umbrella covering her and the front of his body, and the steam, the steam between them.
To each other, they’re just Mark, just Wendy. There’s no attempt of intimacy, no Seungwan’s or Yi-en’s - they’re both from North America, that’s good enough, no need to push it. She smiles and he smiles back, and it’s just an attempt to pretend to have someone else there, to pretend that they’re friends, maybe, the term loosely associated with their disconcerted discourse.
Sometimes the industry is just too much to take in, factory fumes churning them out. At some point, they meet up in September and she won’t even talk to him because her voice is tired from exertion and dieting and over exhaustion, just lays her head on his shoulder and it reminds him of his jacket, like a second skin, from their first encounter. They sit there, listen to each other breathe. It’s strangely personal, yet a touch removed, as if they are going through the motions with a filter, like they are so used to. Sometimes the filter breaks down and he knows her shoulders are shaking because the wrong words came out of her mouth - and oh well, can’t take those back, but she’s still hurting, regretting. They’re homesick and homeless, no amount of Skype calls and text messages can amend time passing and holidays spent at the dorm, alone.
It’s disconcerted discourse, he convinces himself, when he’s crying in front of her because he’s tired, just let me have a little time to be ungrateful, and she takes his face in her hands and thumbs away the tears. It’s ok, Mark - that is his name, it’s not impersonal, far from it. It’s ok, Mark, and she presses her lips against his, chaste.
Convinces himself as he reaches back, tears still streaming down his face, and kisses her again.
It never lingers. Some days, it is a brief brush of the fingers passing by the hallway but never eye contact, or a longing glance over the shoulder. It makes him feel hollow, going through the motions but creating empty actions. But what is fullness anymore? He tries not to half-ass his performances, his routines, but then there’s them - and there exists no criteria, no one to please, no one to pretend to. It feels startlingly real when he holds her in his arms and she holds him in hers, strange dyes in their hair and foundation shading all the cracks in their facades into the shadows, pretending that they don’t exist. But they do.
He thinks that they take advantage of that fact - occasional one-sided rendezvous becoming more frequent, watery words into each other’s ears because they won’t listen otherwise, falling asleep on each other. Even when he tries and she tries to keep it together, keep it full, it is as if it is the inevitable way to go about things is in a state of empathetic lethargy. They can’t help it - it’s biological, as biological as a stolen kiss here and there, almost-more-than-whispers harshly grating against each other’s eardrums, the ears pressed against backs as they drape their bodies together like forgotten but washed linens, listening to hollow hearts empty and fill themselves repeatedly to keep everything going.
And just like those hollow hearts that work out of the brain’s accord, everything keeps going.
They’re lying beside each other one day, dawn beginning to break and flushing color into the monochrome of night. His eyes drift between completely shut and half-open, according to how hard she squeezes his hand. He ends up falling asleep by the time they have to go, anyway.
When he opens his eyes, his left hand is empty. Cold. The air around him smells like dew, morning, beginnings. Inhales, exhales. Her scent does not linger. The absence of her hand in his reminds him of the one time his brother let go of his hand as he was running around with him in circles. They both ended up with bruises, his brother with a cast on his right wrist. The thought, the emptiness, lingers, unlike her.
It’s just hard. You know? Mark.
Yeah. (exhales) It’s hard.
(the phones shifts) I know we feel the same way - we’re tired, we’re homesick, we’re both trying to figure out how we fit into this entertainment world - it’s just, I don’t know if I can keep doing this. This is just hard
(a thought occurs to him) I’ve never heard your voice over the phone before.
(pause) You’re changing the subject.
Isn’t that what this is? Changing the subject?
(silence).
Maybe they’re both just husks, beginning to be spooned out, spoon-fed carefully to the public. Maybe there exists no fullness, and maybe it is ok to know that you will not be full like you were before. They probably weren’t meant to be - she was not embedded with the patience to maintain such discourse, he was not born without the romanticist fatality to believe it would all work out in the end - they are both too hollow to make two full wholes.
Maybe two wholes isn’t the point of all this. they aren’t the same people as they were when they entered the business - filters attached, smiles for every performance stitched on meticulously - emptied out just enough to create a void for the other. A purposeful emptiness.
Maybe that’s what fullness is, for them, now.
This time, the unreliable penultimate time, she sees him, standing in the rain. They could be crying, but there is nothing to cry about, nothing to cry over. Here, they’re up close, more high definition than the TV screens or internet could show, more real without the foundation shading the cracks into the oblivion of the shadows.
She holds the umbrella over his head. The raindrops scintillate off the surface, collecting into puddles at their feet. Disconcerted discourse, he thinks when he meets her eyes, hard and dry. Her lips part, posing a question, and he, in anticipation, exhales - and it’s just them, the rain, umbrella covering them, and the steam, the steam between them.
It’s coded into their DNA:
He was always gonna meet her,
but she was always gonna leave.
They were always going to end up back together
(but not really.)
applied romanticism
400w; g (mark/wendy)
displacement, deixis, maybe they're pointing at each other.
Sometimes, Mark just imagines he’s a point in the far off distance and listens. He’s not here, not really. He’s just a pair of eyes, some ears, maybe a forehead, maybe a face. Just a mind suspended in time and space. Just listening.
I don’t get it, she tells him, honest, trying to get it. She, Wendy, is sentences and syntax and words, so many words - strung together and chopped up, diced in a blender, but they still slide off her tongue like something sticky but languid in its stickiness. Honey, he would say if he was in the mood to be one of those cliché poetic types. Today, he’s not.
Also today: she is trying to get it, get him. There are just some things you will never get, no matter how broken down the idea becomes, no matter how spelled-out it is. Sentences, syntax, and words won’t obey this conjecture, won’t obey the silence.
Wendy's always revising - her chopped up, strung together, diced-in-a-blender words - threading the needle a stitch more then pulling the entire patchwork apart. Then she works on it once more, over and over, until she thinks it makes sense.
"Do you ever get tired of listening?" she asks him after telling a lengthy story about the blue stain on her beat-up sneakers that he spent the previous hour staring at. Berry blue Kool-Aid packets in leaky water bottles. Mark never would have guessed.
Shrugs. He likes to listen, it's the basic part of him underlying it all, the foundation, the part of him he just knows exists in his bones and flesh though the process is highly cognitive. Like romanticism, the American kind, when people thought about thinking with their feelings, and that became their truth. Romanticism - he thinks it but doesn't say it - doesn't know why he made the connection in the first place but the needle threads that stitch, and there, he's there, part of the patchwork. Her patchwork.
Maybe tomorrow: sticky but languid in its stickiness. The remaining adhesion when you rip off a band aid, he might say, fancying himself a point in the far off distance in relation to her. Displacement, deixis, maybe they’re pointing at each other. Just a moment suspended in time and space, just the faded background noises in the static of an unprofessionally-shot video.
Just a hand, her hand, keeps him here.