The Yellow Letters (6/9)
TITLE : THE YELLOW LETTERS (6/9)
PAIRING : KRISHAN
RATING : PG/ PG-13
WORD COUNT : 24K
Guangzhou airport turns out to be just like Swarnabhumi - the only difference being the fact that thing time there is no Luhan getting pushed and pulled along with him by the crowd. He doesn’t need a translator for the China Love Big Concert so Luhan had stayed back to work on his album with Kyungsoo.
Kris had popped in to see him in the recording studio that morning because the thought of going for seven days without seeing Luhan had made him uneasy. Luhan had smiled at him, tapping his fingers to the beat of the music, as if he knew Kris would come before he left but also as if he hadn’t been so sure of this.
“Off to Guangzhou then?”
“Yup. Seven days of promotions before I get a break for my comeback prep.”
“Aww look at you all grown up and going off to conquer the world without a translator in tow. Soon you are not going to need me at all.” There’s a teasing tone in Luhan’s voice that Kris doesn’t really believe. He doesn’t know how it will be possible to ever look at someone like Luhan and not need them.
“Where’s Kyungsoo?” he asks instead of replying to the comment.
“He went to murder somebody or other for stealing his lunch box?”
Kris winces at this. “That would be Tao - he never learns. Last time this happened Soo took away his Wushu stick. Tao had to cry and beg on his knees for a week to get it back.”
Luhan laughs, his eyes crinkling into what Yixing calls the “Old Man” look. “Soo is pretty strong for his tiny size.”
“Don’t let him hear you call him ‘tiny’. You are one of the few people left on his good books here.”
“Mmmm, true.”
Silence descends on the room as the music comes to a stop. The track had been called ‘the star’ - a song about liking someone as bright and unreachable as the star on top of a Christmas tree. Kris looks at Luhan - he has never been that good at words. Luhan looks back at him and for once he looks as if words have failed him too. He opens and closes his lips quite a few times before he looks down to fiddle with the zipper of his hoodie.
“Be- be safe. Don’t let anybody- just.. at the airport - and everywhere- just don’t let it all get to you. You will be okay.” He looks up as he says the last part and Kris sees something in his eyes that he usually sees only in the middle of the night, in a dim dance studio with a broken A/C vent and cracks on the ceiling and the smell of coffee wafting about.
The door slams open and Kyungsoo strides in, adamantly slamming the door in the face of a tearing Tao. The moment is gone and both Kris and Luhan look away from each other hastily. Tao bangs on the door his voice muffled but desperate. Kyungsoo just nods to Kris and starts drawing ugly bunny faces with a black permanent marker on the Wushu stick he is carrying his hands. “I warned him! I warned him- he said never again- dumbass” he mutters under his breath maniacally as Tao sobs outside. Kris takes this as his hint to leave and he tiptoes backwards to the other exit - but not before he pats Luhan on the head affectionately. Luhan swivels around in his chair and watches him until the door closes behind Kris.
Seven days in Guangzhou had lead him right back to the recording room for some additional correctional work on the tracks for his next album the minute he landed back in Korea. Kris is exhausted and missing someone bright (and something blue) but he has a dance rehearsal to get to before he is allowed to go home. All he can do is put on a bright smile, take on a light voice and wonder silently why a certain someone with shinning eyes has not been around to see him yet.
“Kris, really? Really? Really? ” Yixing looks like he is ready to bang his head against the table. “What gave you the idea that it’s ok to call yourself Kriscasso on national tv? What?”
Kris grins at him and wriggles his eyebrows. “It’s my new thing.” Confidence, especially when it’s newly found, can be so addictive.
“That thing you drew was in so much pain when he saw it that its ancestors felt it.” Kyungsoo deadpans as he fixes an off high-note in the bridge of a new song that they are working on. His fingers are small but nimble and sure on the multitude of knobs and buttons of the mixing console.
“Hey!” Kris says indignantly. “It was an alpaca and it was freaking cute. CUTE. Even the fans said so- I saw it on weibo. You are just jealous you can never be that cute.” He finishes lamely.
Kyungsoo merely fixes him with a dead-eyed stare as if to dare him to really declare that his owl eyes and fluffy hair and bowed-lips are anything but cute. Kris throws his hands up in the air in submission. “Fine! You are cuter than my cute alpaca. I admit it. You will always be cuter than anything cute that I can ever draw.” Kyungsoo shrugs and turns back to his many buttons and knobs but there is a little pleased grin on his lips. Kris pats him affectionately on the head and the grin immediately turns to a ferocious growl.
Yixing snorts at them. “Your weird brand of love-hate crap is really getting old now. And also where on earth did you even learn to violate alpacas like that?”
“My alpaca was BEAUTIFUL. Just shut up and teach me how to dance, lăoshī. ”
“I don’t think it’s possible but let’s go try. I can at least laugh sadistically at your attempts to do sexy hip thrusts.”
Kris lets Yixing lead him to the dance practice rooms, bickering and poking at each other, as he thinks of the little sketch of an alpaca at the corner of every yellow letter he has ever got with a small smile.
The minute he gets home he sighs in relief. Luhan had not even come to the company that day, Yixing had told him, but there is a yellow letter on his coffee table that makes him feel like he will have at least one reprieve that day. The contented feeling changes the second he rips open the envelope.
The letter is so short at first glance that a panicked hand of anxiety immediately clutches at his chest even before he reads it. The shortest letter he ever got had been 2 sides of a large letter pad paper. But this one is barely one paragraph.
“I didn’t know. I really didn’t think. I didn’t even imagine. But I the moment I saw you draw my alpaca on China Love Big Concert for the whole world to see, I knew. I knew that you had been reading my letters all along. And it scared me so much. Because it was for us, for you. Only you. Because you were something like that alpaca : awkward and strange but more endearing the more you see it. It was not for the eyes of MCs who want higher ratings for their shows or the girls who hang on to your arms in the airport. It was only for you. But I realize now, you will never have anything that you can call all yours, nothing can just be for you, and for me and for us. Everything about your life will end up as public property. But I was selfish, and foolish, enough all this time to believe that maybe, maybe I could be the exception to the rule.”
A wave of regret and fear crashes over him as he frantically searches the envelope for more. His eyes are hungry for new stories about that ajhumma at the vegetable stand and his pet cat Chen’s latest antiques. His eyes are hungry for aimless ramblings, smudged ink and normalcy in round Chinese characters. But there is nothing but that one dreadful paragraph and empty lines that makes his heart clench with dread and guilt.
Luhan doesn’t come to work the next day or the next. His calls go to voicemail a little too many times until Eunhyuk hyung takes the phone away from his desperate fingers gently and tells his Luhan has gone to visit his sick aunt in Busan for a couple of days so he might be busy.
“No need to panic. Your next round of promotions will be in China so you don’t need a translator anyway.”
Kris wants to say that he doesn’t give a damn about having a translator - he just wants his yellow letters back, he just wants Luhan back but the words get stuck in his throat and he thinks this is what happens when he gets too greedy and wants too much. He ends up losing it all.
With words stuck in his chest and head heavy with too many thoughts he spends all his time either in front of floor length mirrors till his legs give away in exhaustion or in a recording studio singing softly but deeply till his voice gives away.
The next week Luhan passes by him as he rushes to get to the album photo book shoot and he comes to an abrupt halt because he hadn’t even known that Luhan was back in the company let alone back from Busan. Yixing, who had been walking behind him, crashes in to his back and swears. Luhan looks tired and his hair flops about his face in an unusually doefeated way. He smiles slightly and bows to Yixing but when his eyes turn to Kris they look conflicted and sad.
Kris opens his mouth in greeting but his ‘ni hao’ disappears into thin air as Luhan brushes past them hurriedly and vanishes into the elevator. Something sits heavy on his chest as he watches the elevator doors close and the red numbers next to the door change - Level 3…4….5….6…taking Luhan further and further away from him.
Yixing is watching him with furrowed brows. Then he shrugs and says “eh, must be PMS”, patting Kris on his back. Somehow Kris can’t get himself to muster up a smile at this.
Two days later Eunhyuk hyung comes down with the flu while Yixing is in China visiting his parents. Luhan gets the responsibility of escorting Kris to his occasional schedules, mostly just photo shoots for magazines that have pre-booked him during the hype of the news of his upcoming comeback album. Luhan is unusually silent and withdrawn and Kris isn’t quite sure how to breach that invincible, hard bubble he has drawn over himself, retreating within it so far that Kris thinks he might actually disappear from sight. Luhan doesn’t give him many chances to ask him what is wrong and even the few he gets Luhan manages to bluff his way out of, giving answers about being tired that are really not answers at all.
He thinks of all the times Luhan had made him feel like it was worth not giving up, made him feel like there are still things in this world that could make him smile. But Luhan is hurting, Luhan is giving up (on what, he can't tell) and Kris doesn't know how to help him. The thought makes his heart ache in new ways he thinks that aren't possible. Longing for the yellow letters seem a bit distant when Luhan is standing next to him, unsmiling and cold.
That week Kris learns that nothing can really compare to the feeling of deeply missing someone who is right there beside you but not really there.
He had known it in a corner of his heart but he had hoped against hope that he was wrong. But one week passes and then two, then three with no yellow envelope on his coffee table among the still numerous fan mail. His comeback rehearsals are many and his excuses to see Luhan at least for five minutes (even a quiet and distant Luhan) are not so many.
And as he stands in a dressing room during a break between in the shoot for Ivy Club’s Winter collection he admits to himself for the first time that maybe, maybe he might never see a yellow letter ever again. It is not an easy thing to admit to himself when he misses having late night coffee and dance lessons with the one person, except for the yellow letters, who made Kris feel like he was worthy of loving someone. The last thing he had seen before he had escaped into this dressing room had been Luhan’s small hands curled around his forehead, head bowed and eyes closed, sitting amidst the chaos of the shoot in a corner by himself. The last thing Kris had seen before he left his apartment this morning had been a table strewn with a mess of yellow letters that he had stayed up re-reading late last night.
These images make him crumble like no other hurtfully critical comment from a seonbae or a fan following him with one of their DSLR camera to a men’s washroom for the umpteenth time had.
Luhan finds him like that : curled up on the cold floor of the room against a mirror, eyes hollow, nails digging into his palm and his chest drowning under tears he can’t shed because he has been trained not to ruin his makeup. He is in the middle of a shoot but he suddenly can’t get himself to care that he is supposed to smile politely at everyone and pose like he is asked to and be professional. He can’t care that any moment one of the assistants or makeup artists or cameraman might find him like this: torn open, laid bare and vulnerable.
Luhan walks out of the room again quietly and Kris barely notices that 10 minutes pass before he walks back in. his fingers are gentle on Kris’ forearms and his voice is soft as always. “Up you get. Come on, Kris.”
Kris resists. He can’t even imagine standingin front of camera at that moment. He can’t think about contracts and obligations and professionalism. He can’t think about being a trained robot and pretenses and harsh words he will hear about this from the management later.
Luhan seems to understand. “I’m not taking you back to the shoot. I told them you are very sick and apologized for it. They were kind enough to postpone the rest of the shoot to next weekend- they have enough photos for the teasers and the first catalogue release anyway. The driver is waiting for us at the back entrance. ” this is the most Luhan had said to him ever since he got back from Guangzhou.
As Kris looks up at Luhan with gratitude he thinks that Luhan’s serene voice is a little bit like a calm patch of yellow. The thought gives him enough energy to clamber to his feet and let Luhan lead him to bow briefly to the staff in apology and hurry out of the building.
In the car back to his apartment Kris is feeling so defeated that he forgets that Luhan is not really talking to him anymore, he forgets that their friendship had always been something for the dead of the night not broad daylight with cameras and so many people around. He forgets it all and leans a heavy heart and a painfully numb head against Luhan. And Luhan sighs as he lays a careful hand over Kris' limp one and lets him.