in the shallows
krystal/kai
pg-13 / 2.3k
soojung feels him for the first time as she slips into the icy hollow depths of the han river.
*
Soojung feels him for the first time as she slips into the icy hollow depths of the Han River. At first she is content to watch the lights of the city above her head grow dimmer, to say her silent goodbyes to a life not worth living as she sinks deeper into the dark shadows of her soul, but then there is a splash in the surface that does not belong to her and the panic sets in. She kicks out a leg, thrashes an arm, but there was a reason she never took to swimming, though she can’t quite remember now.
She thinks it might have something to do with the fact that she can’t swim.
Something grabs her wrist and she lets out a muffled, voiceless shriek, air bubbles bursting forth as she catches sight of the pale face before hers. His skin is painted blue in the dim light as he tugs her to him and kicks upwards to the surface.
His grip around her is warm in comparison to the blood frozen in her veins and as their heads break the surface he turns to her with a look of disbelief and incredulity.
“You’re a special sort of crazy,” he tells her as she coughs up murky water and the rest of her suicidal plans. His voice is not that of Prince Charming, not golden but bronze, but Soojung feels that after all that has disappointed her in life she could be happy with bronze.
She could be very happy with bronze.
He hurries her back through the frozen streets and judging stares to his small apartment two blocks away from her jump, just as the fictional heroes in her favourite stories would to aid the poor damsel in distress. He orders her to take a hot shower and dump her clothes in the dryer as he throws a bath robe at her, which is nothing a fictional hero would do. She obeys him anyway. She doesn’t really understand what is happening anymore; whether this is reality or fiction or if this is a dream she’ll wake up from soon or if she’s just dead.
He smiles at her when she emerges from his bathroom in a haze of steam and wet stringy hair, handing her a mug of something hot as she settles opposite him at the kitchen counter.
“Next time I recommend you try the bathtub,” he tells her and she raises questioning eyes to his. “You don’t know what goes into that damned river.”
His voice might be bronze, Soojung thinks, but his smile is definitely made of pure gold.
His name is Kai, she finds out later on, and he is a photographer fresh out of college. He asks her where she lives, and she tells him she no longer has a home. He nods and says he understands, then points at the worn couch behind her.
“It’s no bed fit for a queen, but it’s good enough for a princess,” he winks and smirks, and she almost rolls her eyes. “By the way, what’s your name?”
Soojung hesitates, and her hands clench around her empty mug. “Krystal,” she whispers through numb lips. Krystal is the name she bestowed upon herself to hide her insecurities, to hide Soojung from the world. Krystal is everything Soojung is not. Krystal is the one who jumped, but it was Soojung who wanted to drown.
Kai nods again. “It’s a pretty name,” he gets up and takes the cup from her, telling her that tomorrow they’ll go over to her place to get some clothes.
Soojung wonders how he manages to see through all her white lies, and she looks away. Her eyes roam around the room and catches sight of herself in the mirror beside the door. It is only then that she realizes that she’s smiling.
They begin an uneasy sort of relationship as Soojung’s stay at his apartment turns into days, then weeks, then two months. It is not uneasy in the way that it usually is when two strangers are suddenly thrown together without warning; Soojung simply finds herself uneasy at how easily she let Kai insert himself into her life and made her a part of his.
He goes out on jobs most days, leaving her to an empty apartment and a note stuck to her forehead when she wakes up. The note is always on the same yellow post-it, and his handwriting is always scrawled in with a fat black marker, but the content is never the same. Soojung keeps every note in a box that she stows under the couch; he would never have to look there because she only agreed to stay on after he agreed to let her clean the apartment in exchange.
Most days she questions why she stays. Kai was a stranger when she met him, and still remained as a mystery. Most days he seemed lively and warm, always ready with a smile or a joke, always finding ways to make her laugh and yet… there was something about him that she couldn’t quite put her finger on.
She decides that it must be the slightly deadened look behind his eyes.
Soojung had noticed it from the very start when they resurfaced in the Han River, had seen it in the rare moments when he wasn’t smiling at her. She doesn’t know why exactly she chooses to ignore it, but Krystal finds that it is easier to stay with Kai when he remains a stranger to her. Soojung is simply confused.
He takes her to his studio one day, a small sliver of an office hidden away from chattering voices and car horns.
Soojung falls in love with it a first sight.
“Did you really take this?” she asks him as her fingers trace the glossy surface of a black and white photograph, one of the many strung up along the wall. She turns and finds his eyes trained on the photo behind her, his expression unreadable. He takes a step towards her, and Soojung can feel her pulse inexplicably begin to race. His gaze shifts to her face, and he is so close she can see herself reflected in his eyes; can see the cracks in his lips where they are too dry.
“Do you like it?” he lifts a hand and places it beside her head.
Soojung nods, too frightened that he might hear her heart thumping against its ribcage prison if she opens her mouth. He nods back, then deftly removes the pin beneath his fingers, and hands the photograph to her. Their fingers brush as she dumbly takes a hold of it, her eyes watching his face as he watches her fingers. “It’s yours,” he mumbles, then turns away.
Soojung feels as she did when he first pulled her out of the river; like a fish out of water flopping pathetically along the concrete in a desperate attempt to breathe.
She keeps the photo in the box under the couch along with his notes and figures that although she still can’t figure him out, she’s probably in love with Kai.
She finds the room unintentionally when he leaves to buy lunch for both of them after a successful shoot. Kai’s fashion designer friend Sulli had asked him to shoot her collection, and though Soojung had at first been unwilling to play model, Kai had convinced her that it would be fine because she wouldn’t look like herself and no one would recognize her anyway.
Soojung doesn’t know if she should feel hurt or relieved that he understands how much she wants to remain anonymous.
She waves her legs around on the stool as she waits, feeling bored already. She catches sight of herself in the mirror and doesn’t recognize the creature staring back at her. Her lips are vermillion red, her eyes are alluring and her hair is too silky. She’s beautiful. With a start, Soojung realizes that she’s staring at Krystal. Krystal cocks her head to one side and smiles at her, and she turns and hurries into the small room that Kai has told her not to go into because it is full of chemicals that could kill her if she wasn't protected.
Soojung now knows that he was lying.
Photographs are strung up in every direction possible, glossy in the dim light of the room. She peers around her, disbelief etched into her heart; they are all photos of her. There she is, a clear face among a crowd of blurred people. There she is, gazing into the display of a dress shop, her fingers touching the glass and a wistful expression on her face. Soojung looks around her; in none of the photographs is she smiling.
In none of the photographs is she Krystal.
She stops as she comes face to face with a photo. There she is, with her hands in her pockets and her hair over her face as she sits on the safety rail of the Han River. There she is, falling in. Soojung gasps as she replays the moment over and over again in her mind, hears the distant splash as she hits the water and sinks like a stone.
“Krystal?”
She stiffens, panic suddenly creeping in as it did when she realized she was drowning, when Kai grabbed on to her and kept her alive.
“Krystal?” He appears in the doorway, and freezes. “Oh. No. I…” He closes the door behind him and takes hurried steps towards her, fingers closing around her wrist. “It’s not what it looks like,” he says quickly. “I’m not a stalker.”
“Am I a princess or a queen?” she demands.
He blinks, confusion etched into his face. “What?”
She repeats the question, gaze flitting to one of the photos beside his head. His eyes follow her, and she thinks he understands her. He always seems to understand her even when she doesn't understand herself.
“You’re a princess…” he says slowly, then reaches out and touches the picture before looking back at her. “But she’s a queen.”
“Soojung,” she breathes as his hands trail around her waist, her lips staining his crimson. “My name is Soojung.”
He smiles.
That night they fall asleep in the same bed, and when she awakes there is no note but he’s still there.
Soojung thinks she is genuinely happy until she spies Kai walking along the street with Sulli from the apartment window. She watches as he presses a kiss to her cheek, as they head on down the sidewalk arm in arm.
Soojung packs up her things in fifteen minutes flat, wonders how she could have gotten it so wrong, and leaves the first note he ever wrote to her on the kitchen counter;
Leave all troubles in the Han.
This is why she doesn’t spill her guts to people, she thinks. In the end she is the one who ends up slipping in them.
She comes back a month later when she realizes that she had left the box under the couch. She had agonized over whether to leave it there, but then decides that it is also part of her stuff and she has a right to keep it. She lets herself in with the key hidden under the doormat, and enters the still apartment.
It feels different already.
There is an air of regret and the skeletal remains of their relationship strewn about the room, and as she retrieves the box from under the couch she wonders if she should have demanded an explanation instead of just leaving.
(He had explained though, gone over to her place several times to tell her that Sulli had won the competition, it was a congratulatory kiss and nothing else, but she always refused to answer and cried to herself behind the door).
She shakes her head instead, and turns to go, pausing when she hears running water coming from the bathroom. She glances towards the door, where his shoes usually are when he’s home; they’re not there. And yet who else could be in the house?
Against her better judgment Soojung sets down the box and inches towards the bathroom, slowly turning the doorknob. She is greeted by water flooding over the side of the bathtub and a pale face and deadened eyes beneath its churning surface.
Soojung shrieks, and this time it is loud and clear in the small room.
Next time I recommend you try the bathtub. You don’t know what goes into that damned river.
She plunges her arms into the watery folds and drags him upwards, surprised when he moves beneath her fingers, choking and spluttering as she falls in beside him, weak with relief that he is alive and not dead, that she is alive and not dead, that he is still warm in the cold water as she wraps her arms around him.
“You’re a special sort of crazy,” she tells him as he stares at her as if he can’t quite believe she’s there. “Kai.”
“Jongin,” he tells her. “My real name is Jongin.”
Soojung smiles.
She moves back into Jongin’s apartment the day after. Everything is it was, and yet everything is different because they are not Kai and Krystal anymore, but Jongin and Soojung. She understands now why he understood her so well, why he didn’t think she was crazy, why he took her in and didn’t let her leave; it was because they were the same. They both wanted death by water, and they were both reborn by water.
She wakes up one morning to a familiar note stuck to her forehead and Jongin sleeping soundly beside her.
Leave all troubles in the Han.
Soojung thinks that she doesn’t need to because she has already left all her troubles with Kai in the bathtub.
pg-13 / 2.3k
soojung feels him for the first time as she slips into the icy hollow depths of the han river.
*
Soojung feels him for the first time as she slips into the icy hollow depths of the Han River. At first she is content to watch the lights of the city above her head grow dimmer, to say her silent goodbyes to a life not worth living as she sinks deeper into the dark shadows of her soul, but then there is a splash in the surface that does not belong to her and the panic sets in. She kicks out a leg, thrashes an arm, but there was a reason she never took to swimming, though she can’t quite remember now.
She thinks it might have something to do with the fact that she can’t swim.
Something grabs her wrist and she lets out a muffled, voiceless shriek, air bubbles bursting forth as she catches sight of the pale face before hers. His skin is painted blue in the dim light as he tugs her to him and kicks upwards to the surface.
His grip around her is warm in comparison to the blood frozen in her veins and as their heads break the surface he turns to her with a look of disbelief and incredulity.
“You’re a special sort of crazy,” he tells her as she coughs up murky water and the rest of her suicidal plans. His voice is not that of Prince Charming, not golden but bronze, but Soojung feels that after all that has disappointed her in life she could be happy with bronze.
She could be very happy with bronze.
He hurries her back through the frozen streets and judging stares to his small apartment two blocks away from her jump, just as the fictional heroes in her favourite stories would to aid the poor damsel in distress. He orders her to take a hot shower and dump her clothes in the dryer as he throws a bath robe at her, which is nothing a fictional hero would do. She obeys him anyway. She doesn’t really understand what is happening anymore; whether this is reality or fiction or if this is a dream she’ll wake up from soon or if she’s just dead.
He smiles at her when she emerges from his bathroom in a haze of steam and wet stringy hair, handing her a mug of something hot as she settles opposite him at the kitchen counter.
“Next time I recommend you try the bathtub,” he tells her and she raises questioning eyes to his. “You don’t know what goes into that damned river.”
His voice might be bronze, Soojung thinks, but his smile is definitely made of pure gold.
His name is Kai, she finds out later on, and he is a photographer fresh out of college. He asks her where she lives, and she tells him she no longer has a home. He nods and says he understands, then points at the worn couch behind her.
“It’s no bed fit for a queen, but it’s good enough for a princess,” he winks and smirks, and she almost rolls her eyes. “By the way, what’s your name?”
Soojung hesitates, and her hands clench around her empty mug. “Krystal,” she whispers through numb lips. Krystal is the name she bestowed upon herself to hide her insecurities, to hide Soojung from the world. Krystal is everything Soojung is not. Krystal is the one who jumped, but it was Soojung who wanted to drown.
Kai nods again. “It’s a pretty name,” he gets up and takes the cup from her, telling her that tomorrow they’ll go over to her place to get some clothes.
Soojung wonders how he manages to see through all her white lies, and she looks away. Her eyes roam around the room and catches sight of herself in the mirror beside the door. It is only then that she realizes that she’s smiling.
They begin an uneasy sort of relationship as Soojung’s stay at his apartment turns into days, then weeks, then two months. It is not uneasy in the way that it usually is when two strangers are suddenly thrown together without warning; Soojung simply finds herself uneasy at how easily she let Kai insert himself into her life and made her a part of his.
He goes out on jobs most days, leaving her to an empty apartment and a note stuck to her forehead when she wakes up. The note is always on the same yellow post-it, and his handwriting is always scrawled in with a fat black marker, but the content is never the same. Soojung keeps every note in a box that she stows under the couch; he would never have to look there because she only agreed to stay on after he agreed to let her clean the apartment in exchange.
Most days she questions why she stays. Kai was a stranger when she met him, and still remained as a mystery. Most days he seemed lively and warm, always ready with a smile or a joke, always finding ways to make her laugh and yet… there was something about him that she couldn’t quite put her finger on.
She decides that it must be the slightly deadened look behind his eyes.
Soojung had noticed it from the very start when they resurfaced in the Han River, had seen it in the rare moments when he wasn’t smiling at her. She doesn’t know why exactly she chooses to ignore it, but Krystal finds that it is easier to stay with Kai when he remains a stranger to her. Soojung is simply confused.
He takes her to his studio one day, a small sliver of an office hidden away from chattering voices and car horns.
Soojung falls in love with it a first sight.
“Did you really take this?” she asks him as her fingers trace the glossy surface of a black and white photograph, one of the many strung up along the wall. She turns and finds his eyes trained on the photo behind her, his expression unreadable. He takes a step towards her, and Soojung can feel her pulse inexplicably begin to race. His gaze shifts to her face, and he is so close she can see herself reflected in his eyes; can see the cracks in his lips where they are too dry.
“Do you like it?” he lifts a hand and places it beside her head.
Soojung nods, too frightened that he might hear her heart thumping against its ribcage prison if she opens her mouth. He nods back, then deftly removes the pin beneath his fingers, and hands the photograph to her. Their fingers brush as she dumbly takes a hold of it, her eyes watching his face as he watches her fingers. “It’s yours,” he mumbles, then turns away.
Soojung feels as she did when he first pulled her out of the river; like a fish out of water flopping pathetically along the concrete in a desperate attempt to breathe.
She keeps the photo in the box under the couch along with his notes and figures that although she still can’t figure him out, she’s probably in love with Kai.
She finds the room unintentionally when he leaves to buy lunch for both of them after a successful shoot. Kai’s fashion designer friend Sulli had asked him to shoot her collection, and though Soojung had at first been unwilling to play model, Kai had convinced her that it would be fine because she wouldn’t look like herself and no one would recognize her anyway.
Soojung doesn’t know if she should feel hurt or relieved that he understands how much she wants to remain anonymous.
She waves her legs around on the stool as she waits, feeling bored already. She catches sight of herself in the mirror and doesn’t recognize the creature staring back at her. Her lips are vermillion red, her eyes are alluring and her hair is too silky. She’s beautiful. With a start, Soojung realizes that she’s staring at Krystal. Krystal cocks her head to one side and smiles at her, and she turns and hurries into the small room that Kai has told her not to go into because it is full of chemicals that could kill her if she wasn't protected.
Soojung now knows that he was lying.
Photographs are strung up in every direction possible, glossy in the dim light of the room. She peers around her, disbelief etched into her heart; they are all photos of her. There she is, a clear face among a crowd of blurred people. There she is, gazing into the display of a dress shop, her fingers touching the glass and a wistful expression on her face. Soojung looks around her; in none of the photographs is she smiling.
In none of the photographs is she Krystal.
She stops as she comes face to face with a photo. There she is, with her hands in her pockets and her hair over her face as she sits on the safety rail of the Han River. There she is, falling in. Soojung gasps as she replays the moment over and over again in her mind, hears the distant splash as she hits the water and sinks like a stone.
“Krystal?”
She stiffens, panic suddenly creeping in as it did when she realized she was drowning, when Kai grabbed on to her and kept her alive.
“Krystal?” He appears in the doorway, and freezes. “Oh. No. I…” He closes the door behind him and takes hurried steps towards her, fingers closing around her wrist. “It’s not what it looks like,” he says quickly. “I’m not a stalker.”
“Am I a princess or a queen?” she demands.
He blinks, confusion etched into his face. “What?”
She repeats the question, gaze flitting to one of the photos beside his head. His eyes follow her, and she thinks he understands her. He always seems to understand her even when she doesn't understand herself.
“You’re a princess…” he says slowly, then reaches out and touches the picture before looking back at her. “But she’s a queen.”
“Soojung,” she breathes as his hands trail around her waist, her lips staining his crimson. “My name is Soojung.”
He smiles.
That night they fall asleep in the same bed, and when she awakes there is no note but he’s still there.
Soojung thinks she is genuinely happy until she spies Kai walking along the street with Sulli from the apartment window. She watches as he presses a kiss to her cheek, as they head on down the sidewalk arm in arm.
Soojung packs up her things in fifteen minutes flat, wonders how she could have gotten it so wrong, and leaves the first note he ever wrote to her on the kitchen counter;
Leave all troubles in the Han.
This is why she doesn’t spill her guts to people, she thinks. In the end she is the one who ends up slipping in them.
She comes back a month later when she realizes that she had left the box under the couch. She had agonized over whether to leave it there, but then decides that it is also part of her stuff and she has a right to keep it. She lets herself in with the key hidden under the doormat, and enters the still apartment.
It feels different already.
There is an air of regret and the skeletal remains of their relationship strewn about the room, and as she retrieves the box from under the couch she wonders if she should have demanded an explanation instead of just leaving.
(He had explained though, gone over to her place several times to tell her that Sulli had won the competition, it was a congratulatory kiss and nothing else, but she always refused to answer and cried to herself behind the door).
She shakes her head instead, and turns to go, pausing when she hears running water coming from the bathroom. She glances towards the door, where his shoes usually are when he’s home; they’re not there. And yet who else could be in the house?
Against her better judgment Soojung sets down the box and inches towards the bathroom, slowly turning the doorknob. She is greeted by water flooding over the side of the bathtub and a pale face and deadened eyes beneath its churning surface.
Soojung shrieks, and this time it is loud and clear in the small room.
Next time I recommend you try the bathtub. You don’t know what goes into that damned river.
She plunges her arms into the watery folds and drags him upwards, surprised when he moves beneath her fingers, choking and spluttering as she falls in beside him, weak with relief that he is alive and not dead, that she is alive and not dead, that he is still warm in the cold water as she wraps her arms around him.
“You’re a special sort of crazy,” she tells him as he stares at her as if he can’t quite believe she’s there. “Kai.”
“Jongin,” he tells her. “My real name is Jongin.”
Soojung smiles.
She moves back into Jongin’s apartment the day after. Everything is it was, and yet everything is different because they are not Kai and Krystal anymore, but Jongin and Soojung. She understands now why he understood her so well, why he didn’t think she was crazy, why he took her in and didn’t let her leave; it was because they were the same. They both wanted death by water, and they were both reborn by water.
She wakes up one morning to a familiar note stuck to her forehead and Jongin sleeping soundly beside her.
Leave all troubles in the Han.
Soojung thinks that she doesn’t need to because she has already left all her troubles with Kai in the bathtub.