[exo] nightcall
nightcall | sekai (side layhan) | pg13 | angst, fantasy, nightmare(?) au
“hello,” the boy had said, voice echoing on the wind, carried through the air like particles of sand, and jongin had started screaming.
a/n: originally written for aideshou's 4th challenge.
i pulled this together in a little under 4 hours, and it probably shows, but i hope you all enjoy some sekai from me with no character death! thanks so much to aude for helping me out by encouraging me to write this and emmi for cheerleading! you guys are the best ♥
the title of this comes from a song by Kavinsky.
best if read while listening to All I Need by Clams Casino.
warnings: mentions of graphic blood and nightmarish imagery
Nightcall
It’s been five years since Jongin has been inside a therapist’s office and while he’s never been in this exact one before, the whole thing seems exactly the same.
The chair he is sitting in is meant to be comfortable, to put him at ease, one of several scattered around the room, along with a large wooden desk and bookshelves stacked high along two of the walls. The bindings of the books are all different, titles in Korean and Chinese and other languages Jongin doesn’t know and tilting his head to side as he tries to read them hurts his neck, so he has to satisfy himself with trying to count how many of them have green bindings instead.
“So, Jongin.” The woman, his new therapist, had moved out from behind her desk when he came in and asked Jongin to call her Jaeri. She’s young and very pretty, Jongin supposes - if you were into that kind of thing; legs pale and slim under her skirt as she crosses her ankles and taps her pen on the notepad in her lap. Jongin can’t quite tell if she’s a pretentious bitch or not. “You said on the phone that you’ve been to see a regular psychologist before?”
Jongin nods. The sound of her pen against the pad is irritating, the tattoo of it starting to grate at the space behind his eyes.
“And were you seeing someone for any particular reason?”
“Well, my mother sent me to a shrink when I was six because of the nightmares.”
Jaeri’s mouth tightens at his use of the word “shrink” and Jongin puts a point in the Pretentious Bitch column. “Nightmares?”
Jongin could swear her tapping is getting louder and he rubs at the bridge of his nose to try and distract himself. “Yeah. I had a recurring one and I guess she finally got sick of being woken up by my screaming.”
“Okay,” Jaeri says, making a note. It’s in that same stupid shorthand all his therapists have used and Jongin chalks another few lines into the Bitch column for good measure.
At least she’s stopped tapping to write, he thinks. The space behind his eyes is still crawling with irritation but he knows that probably has less to do with whether or not his new psychiatrist is a bitch and more because of sleep deprivation.
She sits back again and from this new angle, she doesn’t seem so pretty, eyes a bit too big for her face, lips too pink. It’s kind of unnerving, the way the whites of them show a bit too much. Jongin decides that maybe if she wore glasses, it might help things look more proportional.
He almost tells Jaeri that he thinks she looks a bit like a gerbil but before he can open his mouth, she asks him, “Would you like to tell me a bit about these dreams?”
Instead of her pen tapping, Jongin can hear his own pulse, the plugging of his heart pushing blood around his body, and his palms feel clammy.
God, he doesn’t want to be here.
Jaeri is waiting for him to answer and the point of irritation has intensified so that Jongin can feel it pricking at the back of his eyes. It makes him think of what it must be like to cry tears of blood and the idea makes him sick. It’s too soon to think about this - he never wants to think about this. His stomach is twisting painfully and he wants to teleport away from this stuffy room and never come back.
“No,” he says finally, peeling his tongue off the dry roof of his mouth. “I don’t.”
That first time it happened had been something caught between a nightmare and a living dream.
Jongin was six and the storm raging outside had been terrifying. He had never liked loud noises (all the neighborhood boys had pointed and laughed at him when he had been frightened by the noise of fireworks, running to hide behind his mother’s legs until she had almost tripped and shooed him away) and the crashes of thunder following the lightning had made him feel like the sky was trying to tear itself apart.
He had curled up underneath his blankets, arms wrapped around himself as if that might hold the world together, and tried not to think about what would happen if the storm tore a hole in the sky; whether the rainclouds would be able to patch it up, fill the gap with water, or if he would just be left alone, floating in space.
The rain had pelted the glass of the windows, making them rattle and another roar of thunder had Jongin jumping, tears streaming down his cheeks.
His mother’s room was just down the hall, but he knew she didn’t like to be disturbed and he had just wished he was somewhere quiet and warm and dry, somewhere with light.
The sound of the rain had gotten even louder and Jongin held onto himself tightly, closing his eyes and wishing, anywhere, anywhere but here, please.
A lightning bolt ripped through the sky and the electricity had scraped across his skin, almost like peeling a piece of tape off. The light had flashed white behind his eyes, ears going hollow and then suddenly -
It was quiet.
Jongin had uncurled his fingers from their grasp around his calves and opened his eyes. His bedroom was gone, the soft surface of his blanket replaced by sand, caked and baked by the hot sun until it cracked and the air was so dry that Jongin had to lick his lips.
Standing up, he had looked around, taking in the way the empty horizon was hazy in the distance, and as he turned, he came face-to-face with a boy.
He was probably about Jongin’s age, hair light like the brown of the sand around them, eyes wide and curious.
“Hello,” the boy had said, voice echoing on the wind, carried through the air like particles of sand, and Jongin had started screaming.
The next moment he was in his bedroom, the sound of his cries loud in the small space as he had trashed in his bed. He rolled too far, over the edge, and his mother had thrown open the door just in time to see him fall, catching the corner of the table with his forehead.
Blood had welled from the cut, trailing down his face, into his eyes, the palm of his small hand crimson with blood as he tried to wipe it away, and his mother had gathered him up into her arms, screaming for his father to get the car.
After that, he’d had the dream often, each more terrifying than the last.
Once, the boy had had no eyeballs, empty black sockets looking back at Jongin as his head tilted curiously as though he could still see, and in another, the boy’s skin had been charred grey, flaking away from his fingertips and the edges of his lips in the wind, and when he said, hello, the word was withered and ghostly, like stale wisps of smoke. In the dream, Jongin had breathed it in, choking, and the word had been bitter on his tongue.
By the time his stitches had healed, his mother had decided to send him to therapy. The dark circles he had developed under his eyes were nothing to the bruises on his psyche, and that, plus the divorce, had made Jongin a prime patient for one of Seoul’s leading child psychologists.
And while they could make Jongin talk about his dreams and tell him what they meant or discuss with his mother the repression of emotional stress, by the time Jongin was ten-years-old, he realized that no one would ever understand that the terrifying part wasn’t the blood or blackened skin, it was how that dream, that first dream, had seemed so incredibly real.
Jongin is so late to meet Luhan for coffee that when he finally gets there, the cup the other man had gotten for him has gone cold.
“I don’t understand how you can be this late when you can teleport,” Luhan says, not looking up from his phone. “You don’t even have to take travel time into account!”
Jongin slides into the seat across from him and scowls. The problem with going out in public with Luhan is that his voice only has two levels: loud and screaming.
“Could you maybe not shout that out to the whole coffee shop, thanks.” He takes a sip from the cup in front of him. “Oh my god, this is lukewarm and disgusting. I can’t drink this.” Pulling off his sunglasses, Jongin decides nothing could be worse than his morning before getting here and takes another sip.
“It’s not like you’re the only one that can do something cool, you know.” Luhan smirks, finally putting his mobile down onto the table. “Especially since now it’s not just us.”
Jongin feels himself roll his eyes. “For the last time, your stupid boyfriend is not a healer - “
“He’s not stupid,” Luhan snaps back at him, holding out his palm. “He fixed where I burned myself on the stove last night.” He points to a completely ordinary-looking patch of skin. “It was just here, and now it’s fine.”
Jongin mumbles something about how he’ll believe it when he sees it himself and Luhan takes his hand back. “He doesn’t have anything to prove to you. Anyway, Yixing says you’re hurt in ways he can’t fix.”
His grip tightens around the cup in his hand. “That’s probably why I go to a therapist. Wow, your boyfriend is a genius.”
Jongin knows he shouldn’t be acting like this and he almost feels bad. Luhan seems happy, skin all glowy and eyes sparkling, and Jongin thinks that maybe, Yixing might be the one to tie a serial dater like Luhan down.
It’s just -
Jongin doesn’t have very many friends. In fact, he can count the number of them on one hand, and now that Luhan is all happy and shiny and perfect in his relationship, it’s like he doesn’t need Jongin around anymore.
It’s just that Jongin is suddenly so lonely.
“Anyway,” Luhan says, cutting into Jongin’s thoughts, “that’s not what I wanted to talk about.”
He leans forward a little, looking excited, and Jongin can’t even find it in himself to look interested.
“You know how I’ve bee practicing, um, reading people I don’t know?” Jongin nods, remembering how, a few years ago, Luhan had leaned across a table at this same coffee shop and told Jongin that he could read people’s minds.
(“It’s not really that simple,” he had tried to explain, “It’s more that I can see them in my head if I think about them, even when they’re not there. And I can hear what they’re thinking. Sort of. Sometimes.”
Jongin hadn’t been impressed until Luhan had given him a blow-by-blow account of Jongin’s hook-up the night before.
Then, he had been horrified.)
Luhan licks his lips, as though he’s nervous. “This thing has been happening a lot lately, like when I’m almost asleep, and I can - I think I can hear people, see people in my head - “
“How is that any different - “
“Not like before!” Luhan exclaims, cheeks going pink. “This is different. It feels different, like I’m seeing things through a glass window, me on one side and them on the other. And I think… don’t laugh, but I think it might be in another dimension.”
Jongin chokes on a laugh, inhaling a lungful of coffee, and the coughing fit brings tears to his eyes.
Luhan makes no move to help him, crossing his arms and looking offended. “You said you wouldn’t laugh!”
Jongin wants to say that he didn’t, Luhan had just asked him not to, but he’s still trying to catch his breath. When he finally does, he clears his throat and says, “Do you know how crazy that sounds?”
“Crazier than you being able to teleport and me being able to read people’s minds? Or Yixing being able to heal - “
“I swear to god Luhan, he is not a healer - “
“Fine.” Luhan stands up, chair scraping loudly against the floor. He looks angry and something in Jongin’s gut clutches. “I guess you don’t really care.”
He picks up his bag, slinging it over his shoulder and turning to walk out of the shop.
“Luhan, wait!” Jongin calls after him. “I didn’t - “
The door swings shut behind Luhan and Jongin is left alone, staring down at his disgusting coffee.
He can feel the eyes of the shop patrons on him and grits his teeth, standing and flipping down his sunglasses. On his way out, he throws the cardboard cup away and the cold coffee splashing against the plastic trash bag isn’t even close to satisfying.
Jongin was around eighteen when the nightmares pretty much stopped.
He had moved away from home for college, away from his childhood bedroom, and had started styling his hair so that when he looked in the mirror, he couldn’t see the scar from when he had hit his head on the bedside table.
They had been decreasing in frequency ever since he had become a teenager, but sometimes he would still wake up, a scream trapped in his throat and the image of the little boy, looking at him, palms out as if in greeting, on the flesh of his hands had been torn away, leaving only bloody muscle and bone, still printed on the back of his eyelids.
He felt freer at school, lighter somehow, the work of his classes keeping his mind busy, and Jongin had made friends with his roommate, a Chinese exchange student named Luhan.
It was almost a relief when, midway through their second year, Luhan had leaned across the table that day in the coffee shop and told him about “this weird thing he could do”, because Jongin had discovered something weird about himself too.
He had explained it to Luhan, telling him about the first time he had done it, when he was late for class, stuck on the bus and panicking because, oh god, his professor was going to be so angry, he had a presentation to give that day - and he had shut his eyes, picturing his stop, just a few steps from the building his class was in, and willed the bus to get there faster.
And suddenly, he had opened his eyes, and he was there.
Luhan had chattered away at him about it, calling it teleportation and asking Jongin about how he had tested it, how far he could go, but Jongin hadn’t told him about what it had felt like.
How it was as if he turned himself transparent, peeling his own essence out of the air and pasting himself somewhere new, jumping through space and solid objects and time as if they were simple squares in a child’s hopscotch game.
He hadn’t told Luhan that he wasn’t completely positive that that time on the bus was really the first time.
After their fight, Luhan doesn’t call.
This isn’t so unusual for the first few days. Luhan’s temper runs hot, but cools fairly quickly and their’s has always been a friendship of casual apologies.
The fourth day rolls around, though, and Jongin starts to worry. Maybe he should call this time, he wonders. Maybe Luhan is busy, or sick or has been hit by a bus -
Or maybe he’s just sick of Jongin and now that he has Yixing, Luhan has decided he doesn’t need a friend like him anymore.
Jongin is lying on his bed, turning his cell phone over and over in his hands, wishing it would ring, and going through he and Luhan’s argument in his mind.
What Luhan had been saying was ridiculous. Alternate dimensions and seeing people through panes of glass - it was all nonsense.
And yet… something about it was bothering him. It almost reminded him of a feeling he had once had, of electricity scraping across his skin, air peeling away like a strip of tape…
It wasn’t possible, Jongin told himself, but he couldn’t seem to forget it.
As Jongin had tried to perfect his new found talent, he had found out something else. It seemed that the more he teleported, the more nightmares he started having again.
They were just like he remembered, the air of the desert heated and oppressive, and the little boy always there, waiting for him.
It took a year, but finally, after waking up from one where he had turned around and the boy had looked up at him, voice scraping out a sob, and he had been crying tears of blood, Jongin had sought out another therapist, the first one he had been willing to go and see for five years.
That hadn’t stopped the terrors though.
One night, a week after his fight with Luhan, the little boy is there again, alone in the desert, but his skin is so pale, chalky white against the golden brown of the sand, and when he tries to say hello, he chokes, hand moving up to cover the cough. His palm comes away bloody, a red droplet slipping down the side of the boy’s mouth, and Jongin cries out, sitting up in his bed.
He fumbles for the light, knocking over a picture frame instead and slicing open his wrist on the broken glass. There is so much blood, trailing out of the cut hotly, and Jongin does the only think he can think of, and teleports to Luhan’s.
His friend comes out of his bedroom when he calls loudly, voice breaking in the middle of Luhan’s name.
“Jongin, what - “ He catches sight of his bloody arm and gasps.
“I didn’t know - please say Yixing is here, say that he can fix this.” Jongin feels frantic, like his heart is beating double-time to make up for the blood dripping out of his body.
Yixing comes out the bedroom at that moment, as though he knows he’s needed, and kneels on the ground next to Jongin, holding his wrist in small hands.
“What were you thinking?” Luhan cries hysterically as Yixing cleans off the cut with a cloth he’s grabbed from somewhere, and Jongin tries to explain.
“It’s not like that! I had a nightmare and reached for the light but the glass broke and - “
Yixing runs his palm over the cut, pressing down with the flat of his hand hard, making Jongin grit his teeth as he squeezes. The pain is white-hot and fresh, making saliva pool in the back of his mouth, awful and acidic, and just when Jongin thinks he might cry out, it stops and Yixing takes his hand away.
He looks down, and while his skin is still bloody, there’s no cut.
Yixing is over at the sink, wetting a rag and then bringing back over to clean the blood off, and Jongin stares at him with wide eyes.
“Thank you,” he manages.
Yixing smiles, cheek dimpling as he runs the cool cloth over the newly repaired skin. “Thank yourself. You wouldn’t have come here unless you really believed I could do it.”
“I - yeah.” Jongin looks over at Luhan. His friend still looks a little startled, lips pale and body small in the oversized shirt he likes to sleep in. “And I’m sorry, Luhan. I believe you about the - the other thing too.”
Luhan nods and then Jongin takes himself away, back to the darkness of his apartment.
After that, it’s really only a matter of time before the curiosity overpowers him.
Jongin has spent hours thinking about it, thinking of the way the caked ground of the desert had felt beneath him, how hazy the horizon had been, how bright the sun had been on the boy’s sandy hair - but he’s not thinking of the dreams this time. Jongin is trying to remember that first one, the one from the storm.
The one he thinks might not have been a dream at all.
When he’s finally sure, so sure of that spot in the desert that he can almost taste the dust in the air, Jongin does it.
He feels himself go transparent, but this time is different. It’s less like the rip of velcro and more like the tear of his very existence out of the air, and then he’s jumping through space and time and solid objects and something shimmery, like the glass of an old window -
And then he’s on the other side.
The desert is the same as before and Jongin lets out a breath he couldn’t help but hold.
He knew this was real, even if none of the other parts were.
Jongin is turning, taking in the smokey line of the horizon in the distance, when he turns and sees the boy.
For a moment, he wants to scream, wants to go back, until he realizes that it’s not a boy after all, it’s a man. But the hair is still sandy, eyes dark and framed by a rim of dark eyelashes.
This time, Jongin is the one to speak first. “Hello,” he says, and then feels incredibly stupid.
The man smiles though, eyes lighting up, and Jongin is sure he doesn’t remember those lips being such a pretty shape before. “You’re back.”
The voice is still grainy, but the syllables seem to glitter in the air, like flecs of sand. Jongin thinks he might like the sound.
“Yes. I’m finally back.”
Then man steps closer. They’re almost the same height and Jongin wants to touch his skin to see if it’s as soft as it looks. “I’ve been waiting for you. You left so quickly before.”
He remembers how he had screamed when he was here the first time and cringes. “Sorry.”
They’re standing even nearer now, so that Jongin can almost feel the man’s breath on his cheeks.
“Are you going again now?” the man asks, the line of his jaw catching the sunlight in a way that makes Jongin think he might be sad. When Jongin doesn’t respond, he goes on, “I’m so lonely here. Can I go with you?”
The request startles Jongin. He had never really thought past getting here, where he might go next or who he would want to be with.
I’ve been waiting for you, he realizes the man had said. How long had he been waiting? How long has he been stuck here in the desert alone?
The dark eyes are still looking at him and Jongin swallows. “Sure. Where do you want to go, uh …”
The man catches on, slipping warm fingers into one of Jongin’s hands and smiling. “Sehun. My name is Sehun.”
“Jongin,” he says, by way of introduction, and something inside him feels so light, he thinks he might just dissolve into thin air.
“Can we go to the ocean, Jongin?” Sehun says, leaning into his shoulder. “I’m so tired of the desert.”
Jongin thinks of the seashore, damp air and clouds floating across the sun, and tightens his grip on Sehun’s hand. “Yeah, me too.”
started 8/18/12
finished 8/19/12
“hello,” the boy had said, voice echoing on the wind, carried through the air like particles of sand, and jongin had started screaming.
a/n: originally written for aideshou's 4th challenge.
i pulled this together in a little under 4 hours, and it probably shows, but i hope you all enjoy some sekai from me with no character death! thanks so much to aude for helping me out by encouraging me to write this and emmi for cheerleading! you guys are the best ♥
the title of this comes from a song by Kavinsky.
best if read while listening to All I Need by Clams Casino.
warnings: mentions of graphic blood and nightmarish imagery
Nightcall
It’s been five years since Jongin has been inside a therapist’s office and while he’s never been in this exact one before, the whole thing seems exactly the same.
The chair he is sitting in is meant to be comfortable, to put him at ease, one of several scattered around the room, along with a large wooden desk and bookshelves stacked high along two of the walls. The bindings of the books are all different, titles in Korean and Chinese and other languages Jongin doesn’t know and tilting his head to side as he tries to read them hurts his neck, so he has to satisfy himself with trying to count how many of them have green bindings instead.
“So, Jongin.” The woman, his new therapist, had moved out from behind her desk when he came in and asked Jongin to call her Jaeri. She’s young and very pretty, Jongin supposes - if you were into that kind of thing; legs pale and slim under her skirt as she crosses her ankles and taps her pen on the notepad in her lap. Jongin can’t quite tell if she’s a pretentious bitch or not. “You said on the phone that you’ve been to see a regular psychologist before?”
Jongin nods. The sound of her pen against the pad is irritating, the tattoo of it starting to grate at the space behind his eyes.
“And were you seeing someone for any particular reason?”
“Well, my mother sent me to a shrink when I was six because of the nightmares.”
Jaeri’s mouth tightens at his use of the word “shrink” and Jongin puts a point in the Pretentious Bitch column. “Nightmares?”
Jongin could swear her tapping is getting louder and he rubs at the bridge of his nose to try and distract himself. “Yeah. I had a recurring one and I guess she finally got sick of being woken up by my screaming.”
“Okay,” Jaeri says, making a note. It’s in that same stupid shorthand all his therapists have used and Jongin chalks another few lines into the Bitch column for good measure.
At least she’s stopped tapping to write, he thinks. The space behind his eyes is still crawling with irritation but he knows that probably has less to do with whether or not his new psychiatrist is a bitch and more because of sleep deprivation.
She sits back again and from this new angle, she doesn’t seem so pretty, eyes a bit too big for her face, lips too pink. It’s kind of unnerving, the way the whites of them show a bit too much. Jongin decides that maybe if she wore glasses, it might help things look more proportional.
He almost tells Jaeri that he thinks she looks a bit like a gerbil but before he can open his mouth, she asks him, “Would you like to tell me a bit about these dreams?”
Instead of her pen tapping, Jongin can hear his own pulse, the plugging of his heart pushing blood around his body, and his palms feel clammy.
God, he doesn’t want to be here.
Jaeri is waiting for him to answer and the point of irritation has intensified so that Jongin can feel it pricking at the back of his eyes. It makes him think of what it must be like to cry tears of blood and the idea makes him sick. It’s too soon to think about this - he never wants to think about this. His stomach is twisting painfully and he wants to teleport away from this stuffy room and never come back.
“No,” he says finally, peeling his tongue off the dry roof of his mouth. “I don’t.”
That first time it happened had been something caught between a nightmare and a living dream.
Jongin was six and the storm raging outside had been terrifying. He had never liked loud noises (all the neighborhood boys had pointed and laughed at him when he had been frightened by the noise of fireworks, running to hide behind his mother’s legs until she had almost tripped and shooed him away) and the crashes of thunder following the lightning had made him feel like the sky was trying to tear itself apart.
He had curled up underneath his blankets, arms wrapped around himself as if that might hold the world together, and tried not to think about what would happen if the storm tore a hole in the sky; whether the rainclouds would be able to patch it up, fill the gap with water, or if he would just be left alone, floating in space.
The rain had pelted the glass of the windows, making them rattle and another roar of thunder had Jongin jumping, tears streaming down his cheeks.
His mother’s room was just down the hall, but he knew she didn’t like to be disturbed and he had just wished he was somewhere quiet and warm and dry, somewhere with light.
The sound of the rain had gotten even louder and Jongin held onto himself tightly, closing his eyes and wishing, anywhere, anywhere but here, please.
A lightning bolt ripped through the sky and the electricity had scraped across his skin, almost like peeling a piece of tape off. The light had flashed white behind his eyes, ears going hollow and then suddenly -
It was quiet.
Jongin had uncurled his fingers from their grasp around his calves and opened his eyes. His bedroom was gone, the soft surface of his blanket replaced by sand, caked and baked by the hot sun until it cracked and the air was so dry that Jongin had to lick his lips.
Standing up, he had looked around, taking in the way the empty horizon was hazy in the distance, and as he turned, he came face-to-face with a boy.
He was probably about Jongin’s age, hair light like the brown of the sand around them, eyes wide and curious.
“Hello,” the boy had said, voice echoing on the wind, carried through the air like particles of sand, and Jongin had started screaming.
The next moment he was in his bedroom, the sound of his cries loud in the small space as he had trashed in his bed. He rolled too far, over the edge, and his mother had thrown open the door just in time to see him fall, catching the corner of the table with his forehead.
Blood had welled from the cut, trailing down his face, into his eyes, the palm of his small hand crimson with blood as he tried to wipe it away, and his mother had gathered him up into her arms, screaming for his father to get the car.
After that, he’d had the dream often, each more terrifying than the last.
Once, the boy had had no eyeballs, empty black sockets looking back at Jongin as his head tilted curiously as though he could still see, and in another, the boy’s skin had been charred grey, flaking away from his fingertips and the edges of his lips in the wind, and when he said, hello, the word was withered and ghostly, like stale wisps of smoke. In the dream, Jongin had breathed it in, choking, and the word had been bitter on his tongue.
By the time his stitches had healed, his mother had decided to send him to therapy. The dark circles he had developed under his eyes were nothing to the bruises on his psyche, and that, plus the divorce, had made Jongin a prime patient for one of Seoul’s leading child psychologists.
And while they could make Jongin talk about his dreams and tell him what they meant or discuss with his mother the repression of emotional stress, by the time Jongin was ten-years-old, he realized that no one would ever understand that the terrifying part wasn’t the blood or blackened skin, it was how that dream, that first dream, had seemed so incredibly real.
Jongin is so late to meet Luhan for coffee that when he finally gets there, the cup the other man had gotten for him has gone cold.
“I don’t understand how you can be this late when you can teleport,” Luhan says, not looking up from his phone. “You don’t even have to take travel time into account!”
Jongin slides into the seat across from him and scowls. The problem with going out in public with Luhan is that his voice only has two levels: loud and screaming.
“Could you maybe not shout that out to the whole coffee shop, thanks.” He takes a sip from the cup in front of him. “Oh my god, this is lukewarm and disgusting. I can’t drink this.” Pulling off his sunglasses, Jongin decides nothing could be worse than his morning before getting here and takes another sip.
“It’s not like you’re the only one that can do something cool, you know.” Luhan smirks, finally putting his mobile down onto the table. “Especially since now it’s not just us.”
Jongin feels himself roll his eyes. “For the last time, your stupid boyfriend is not a healer - “
“He’s not stupid,” Luhan snaps back at him, holding out his palm. “He fixed where I burned myself on the stove last night.” He points to a completely ordinary-looking patch of skin. “It was just here, and now it’s fine.”
Jongin mumbles something about how he’ll believe it when he sees it himself and Luhan takes his hand back. “He doesn’t have anything to prove to you. Anyway, Yixing says you’re hurt in ways he can’t fix.”
His grip tightens around the cup in his hand. “That’s probably why I go to a therapist. Wow, your boyfriend is a genius.”
Jongin knows he shouldn’t be acting like this and he almost feels bad. Luhan seems happy, skin all glowy and eyes sparkling, and Jongin thinks that maybe, Yixing might be the one to tie a serial dater like Luhan down.
It’s just -
Jongin doesn’t have very many friends. In fact, he can count the number of them on one hand, and now that Luhan is all happy and shiny and perfect in his relationship, it’s like he doesn’t need Jongin around anymore.
It’s just that Jongin is suddenly so lonely.
“Anyway,” Luhan says, cutting into Jongin’s thoughts, “that’s not what I wanted to talk about.”
He leans forward a little, looking excited, and Jongin can’t even find it in himself to look interested.
“You know how I’ve bee practicing, um, reading people I don’t know?” Jongin nods, remembering how, a few years ago, Luhan had leaned across a table at this same coffee shop and told Jongin that he could read people’s minds.
(“It’s not really that simple,” he had tried to explain, “It’s more that I can see them in my head if I think about them, even when they’re not there. And I can hear what they’re thinking. Sort of. Sometimes.”
Jongin hadn’t been impressed until Luhan had given him a blow-by-blow account of Jongin’s hook-up the night before.
Then, he had been horrified.)
Luhan licks his lips, as though he’s nervous. “This thing has been happening a lot lately, like when I’m almost asleep, and I can - I think I can hear people, see people in my head - “
“How is that any different - “
“Not like before!” Luhan exclaims, cheeks going pink. “This is different. It feels different, like I’m seeing things through a glass window, me on one side and them on the other. And I think… don’t laugh, but I think it might be in another dimension.”
Jongin chokes on a laugh, inhaling a lungful of coffee, and the coughing fit brings tears to his eyes.
Luhan makes no move to help him, crossing his arms and looking offended. “You said you wouldn’t laugh!”
Jongin wants to say that he didn’t, Luhan had just asked him not to, but he’s still trying to catch his breath. When he finally does, he clears his throat and says, “Do you know how crazy that sounds?”
“Crazier than you being able to teleport and me being able to read people’s minds? Or Yixing being able to heal - “
“I swear to god Luhan, he is not a healer - “
“Fine.” Luhan stands up, chair scraping loudly against the floor. He looks angry and something in Jongin’s gut clutches. “I guess you don’t really care.”
He picks up his bag, slinging it over his shoulder and turning to walk out of the shop.
“Luhan, wait!” Jongin calls after him. “I didn’t - “
The door swings shut behind Luhan and Jongin is left alone, staring down at his disgusting coffee.
He can feel the eyes of the shop patrons on him and grits his teeth, standing and flipping down his sunglasses. On his way out, he throws the cardboard cup away and the cold coffee splashing against the plastic trash bag isn’t even close to satisfying.
Jongin was around eighteen when the nightmares pretty much stopped.
He had moved away from home for college, away from his childhood bedroom, and had started styling his hair so that when he looked in the mirror, he couldn’t see the scar from when he had hit his head on the bedside table.
They had been decreasing in frequency ever since he had become a teenager, but sometimes he would still wake up, a scream trapped in his throat and the image of the little boy, looking at him, palms out as if in greeting, on the flesh of his hands had been torn away, leaving only bloody muscle and bone, still printed on the back of his eyelids.
He felt freer at school, lighter somehow, the work of his classes keeping his mind busy, and Jongin had made friends with his roommate, a Chinese exchange student named Luhan.
It was almost a relief when, midway through their second year, Luhan had leaned across the table that day in the coffee shop and told him about “this weird thing he could do”, because Jongin had discovered something weird about himself too.
He had explained it to Luhan, telling him about the first time he had done it, when he was late for class, stuck on the bus and panicking because, oh god, his professor was going to be so angry, he had a presentation to give that day - and he had shut his eyes, picturing his stop, just a few steps from the building his class was in, and willed the bus to get there faster.
And suddenly, he had opened his eyes, and he was there.
Luhan had chattered away at him about it, calling it teleportation and asking Jongin about how he had tested it, how far he could go, but Jongin hadn’t told him about what it had felt like.
How it was as if he turned himself transparent, peeling his own essence out of the air and pasting himself somewhere new, jumping through space and solid objects and time as if they were simple squares in a child’s hopscotch game.
He hadn’t told Luhan that he wasn’t completely positive that that time on the bus was really the first time.
After their fight, Luhan doesn’t call.
This isn’t so unusual for the first few days. Luhan’s temper runs hot, but cools fairly quickly and their’s has always been a friendship of casual apologies.
The fourth day rolls around, though, and Jongin starts to worry. Maybe he should call this time, he wonders. Maybe Luhan is busy, or sick or has been hit by a bus -
Or maybe he’s just sick of Jongin and now that he has Yixing, Luhan has decided he doesn’t need a friend like him anymore.
Jongin is lying on his bed, turning his cell phone over and over in his hands, wishing it would ring, and going through he and Luhan’s argument in his mind.
What Luhan had been saying was ridiculous. Alternate dimensions and seeing people through panes of glass - it was all nonsense.
And yet… something about it was bothering him. It almost reminded him of a feeling he had once had, of electricity scraping across his skin, air peeling away like a strip of tape…
It wasn’t possible, Jongin told himself, but he couldn’t seem to forget it.
As Jongin had tried to perfect his new found talent, he had found out something else. It seemed that the more he teleported, the more nightmares he started having again.
They were just like he remembered, the air of the desert heated and oppressive, and the little boy always there, waiting for him.
It took a year, but finally, after waking up from one where he had turned around and the boy had looked up at him, voice scraping out a sob, and he had been crying tears of blood, Jongin had sought out another therapist, the first one he had been willing to go and see for five years.
That hadn’t stopped the terrors though.
One night, a week after his fight with Luhan, the little boy is there again, alone in the desert, but his skin is so pale, chalky white against the golden brown of the sand, and when he tries to say hello, he chokes, hand moving up to cover the cough. His palm comes away bloody, a red droplet slipping down the side of the boy’s mouth, and Jongin cries out, sitting up in his bed.
He fumbles for the light, knocking over a picture frame instead and slicing open his wrist on the broken glass. There is so much blood, trailing out of the cut hotly, and Jongin does the only think he can think of, and teleports to Luhan’s.
His friend comes out of his bedroom when he calls loudly, voice breaking in the middle of Luhan’s name.
“Jongin, what - “ He catches sight of his bloody arm and gasps.
“I didn’t know - please say Yixing is here, say that he can fix this.” Jongin feels frantic, like his heart is beating double-time to make up for the blood dripping out of his body.
Yixing comes out the bedroom at that moment, as though he knows he’s needed, and kneels on the ground next to Jongin, holding his wrist in small hands.
“What were you thinking?” Luhan cries hysterically as Yixing cleans off the cut with a cloth he’s grabbed from somewhere, and Jongin tries to explain.
“It’s not like that! I had a nightmare and reached for the light but the glass broke and - “
Yixing runs his palm over the cut, pressing down with the flat of his hand hard, making Jongin grit his teeth as he squeezes. The pain is white-hot and fresh, making saliva pool in the back of his mouth, awful and acidic, and just when Jongin thinks he might cry out, it stops and Yixing takes his hand away.
He looks down, and while his skin is still bloody, there’s no cut.
Yixing is over at the sink, wetting a rag and then bringing back over to clean the blood off, and Jongin stares at him with wide eyes.
“Thank you,” he manages.
Yixing smiles, cheek dimpling as he runs the cool cloth over the newly repaired skin. “Thank yourself. You wouldn’t have come here unless you really believed I could do it.”
“I - yeah.” Jongin looks over at Luhan. His friend still looks a little startled, lips pale and body small in the oversized shirt he likes to sleep in. “And I’m sorry, Luhan. I believe you about the - the other thing too.”
Luhan nods and then Jongin takes himself away, back to the darkness of his apartment.
After that, it’s really only a matter of time before the curiosity overpowers him.
Jongin has spent hours thinking about it, thinking of the way the caked ground of the desert had felt beneath him, how hazy the horizon had been, how bright the sun had been on the boy’s sandy hair - but he’s not thinking of the dreams this time. Jongin is trying to remember that first one, the one from the storm.
The one he thinks might not have been a dream at all.
When he’s finally sure, so sure of that spot in the desert that he can almost taste the dust in the air, Jongin does it.
He feels himself go transparent, but this time is different. It’s less like the rip of velcro and more like the tear of his very existence out of the air, and then he’s jumping through space and time and solid objects and something shimmery, like the glass of an old window -
And then he’s on the other side.
The desert is the same as before and Jongin lets out a breath he couldn’t help but hold.
He knew this was real, even if none of the other parts were.
Jongin is turning, taking in the smokey line of the horizon in the distance, when he turns and sees the boy.
For a moment, he wants to scream, wants to go back, until he realizes that it’s not a boy after all, it’s a man. But the hair is still sandy, eyes dark and framed by a rim of dark eyelashes.
This time, Jongin is the one to speak first. “Hello,” he says, and then feels incredibly stupid.
The man smiles though, eyes lighting up, and Jongin is sure he doesn’t remember those lips being such a pretty shape before. “You’re back.”
The voice is still grainy, but the syllables seem to glitter in the air, like flecs of sand. Jongin thinks he might like the sound.
“Yes. I’m finally back.”
Then man steps closer. They’re almost the same height and Jongin wants to touch his skin to see if it’s as soft as it looks. “I’ve been waiting for you. You left so quickly before.”
He remembers how he had screamed when he was here the first time and cringes. “Sorry.”
They’re standing even nearer now, so that Jongin can almost feel the man’s breath on his cheeks.
“Are you going again now?” the man asks, the line of his jaw catching the sunlight in a way that makes Jongin think he might be sad. When Jongin doesn’t respond, he goes on, “I’m so lonely here. Can I go with you?”
The request startles Jongin. He had never really thought past getting here, where he might go next or who he would want to be with.
I’ve been waiting for you, he realizes the man had said. How long had he been waiting? How long has he been stuck here in the desert alone?
The dark eyes are still looking at him and Jongin swallows. “Sure. Where do you want to go, uh …”
The man catches on, slipping warm fingers into one of Jongin’s hands and smiling. “Sehun. My name is Sehun.”
“Jongin,” he says, by way of introduction, and something inside him feels so light, he thinks he might just dissolve into thin air.
“Can we go to the ocean, Jongin?” Sehun says, leaning into his shoulder. “I’m so tired of the desert.”
Jongin thinks of the seashore, damp air and clouds floating across the sun, and tightens his grip on Sehun’s hand. “Yeah, me too.”
started 8/18/12
finished 8/19/12