DAY 4: Gravitation
Title: Gravitation
Written by: changdictator
Pairing: Kris/Chanyeol
Rating: PG
Warnings: None
Summary: Kris directs a romance flick. Chanyeol gets into character. Chen joins a clique.
"So you're young, right?" Kris says, "You're twenty-three and totally shell-shocked. She's the only girl you've ever loved. She's the only stable thing you've got, and now you've lost her."
Chanyeol agrees so hard his hair flops, "Yeah."
"I feel this divorce means more to your character than heartbreak. It's much more than that. It's losing a part of your identity, like your whole world realigning. How do you feel?"
"I feel like my character is really sad?" Chanyeol blinks, "Since his wife didn't show up at the concert right?"
Well okay. It can be worse.
Kris rubs the wrinkles out of his face, sighing through his nose, "What do you think love is?"
"Really nice?" Chanyeol wiggles in his seat.
Kris wants to set something on fire.
By the second week of filming, they're already a whole day behind schedule and Kris dampens the blow by throwing out scenes and apologizing to anyone on the other end of the phone line. So far it's working, miffed writers and the towering pile of necessary edits notwithstanding. Kris thinks that the crisis is manageable. All he has to do is maintain the correct attitude.
He walks into the staff room with the best attitude.
"Jesus Christ," Lay chokes on his lunch, spraying rice everywhere, "What happened to your face."
Kris tries not to strain his cheeks.
"I'm smiling," he explains, lifting a sushi out of Lay's bento. Next to him the sound team inconspicuously shifts an inch to the right.
Lay peers at him in that sorry, conflicted way that cinematographers are frequently fond of peering, and feeds Kris a piece of pink ginger before donning a faux-wise aura, "Whatever your problem, murder is seldom the only solution."
"I'm not murdering anyone," Kris explains, almost offended.
"Not even Chanyeol?" Lay asks, suspicious. To the side, Tao snorts into his coke.
Kris exhales.
"You know sometimes," Lay suggests, "It's hard to act when the director looks like he's going to make sashimi out of you. Try, say, narrowing your eyes more."
"What if I joined a boy-band," Kris groans, dropping into the seat beside him to conveniently steal another piece of sushi.
"There, there," Lay's hand is reassuring on his arm, though Kris can practically hear the splitting grin in his voice, "Chanyeol's a good actor. He just needs more advice."
They're on set again at some murderous hour in the morning. Half the crew hasn't had two hours of sleep, the other none at all. Due to scheduling limitations, production now wants them to shoot one of the last scenes first, despite the alarming disconnect between Chanyeol and his character.
More like Chanyeol and the whole movie, but Lay's right. Kris is here to advise Chanyeol, even though he can only zen with so much shit in his way.
"What is love? Think about it," He prompts, taking the script away from Chanyeol's hand, nudging him to focus.
"Um," Chanyeol draws a blank. He says something, replaced by a microphone squealing behind them. The production crew shouts over one another, a mob of anonymous voices under Chen's autocratic reign over the megaphone, Minseok stop hogging the coffee, Second Unit your matching pajamas suck. Tao is shooting another reel of Behind the Scenes, which Kris imagines will be released over his dead body.
Kris scoots closer, enough to see Chanyeol's concealer not quite blending in. He rephrases, loudly, in Korean this time, "Just, microexpressions. Don't walk in perfectly straight lines. Relax."
"I," Chanyeol starts, Chinese cracking and wavering in his throat.
"Jia's on set," Tao pops up, Behind the Scenes camera slung over his shoulder, ready to lead Kris away, "Lay says you need to talk camera lenses before we start rolling."
Which is when, without warning, Chanyeol grabs Kris's wrist. They both stare at his knuckles whitening, surprised.
"I'll work hard," he barks abruptly, ridiculous with his scrunched and lips pressed, except he's completely serious. His eyes are focused, and certain, albeit swollen and bloodshot. For some reason Kris can't peel away. He just kind of stands there, not like they're both a head or two above the rest of the staff and everyone is staring at them, at all.
After Chanyeol lets go with this awkward bow thing, Kris is still rooted to the ground. It's nearly funny how he can't feel his face.
Tao waves a confused hand in front of him, "Hello? Camera lenses?"
"Did you eat a hanger?" Jia quips later, while they're talking through her scene.
During filming, everything is a hurricane of bits and pieces, a hundred people scrambling at once, Luhan's sixty odd reminders on voicemail about budgets and economical downturns. Kris's job isn't to calm the waters or smooth everything out into a coherent, smooth whole. At least not yet. For now he just needs to shoot the right takes with the right cameras and actors and hope that he is leading them in some semblance of the right direction. This, he's good at. Pushing the tides, visualizing the big picture, a human sieve filtering out a set of bones and tissue for the editors to break down and rebuild.
But that doesn't mean he's not bothered by the small things. There is Chanyeol's eye twitch when he laughs out of character, his running across the set unaware of all the things he could trip over, staring everyone flat in the eye, terrifyingly earnest. These things run parallel to the storm and, like a small itch beneath the eyelid, their marks stay long after they've gone, phantom debris caught in memory. Unconsciously Kris collects them into an insignificant pile in the back of his head, and there they erode, harden, into a new layer of earth.
The fortieth scene wraps up on day twenty-four. Kris is in his office, scrutinizing storyboards, reforming connections between panels.
The storyline is simple. A drummer, Chanyeol, prioritizes divorce and music. There are 113 scenes of the guy figuring out if he really loves his wife, Jia, or if he just thinks he does. Finally he lets go of his failing marriage, finds himself musically, and years later comes to peace with his ex-wife. He is now more competent and understanding. Cue rainbows and acoustic guitar soundtracks.
Across from him, Chanyeol chews on a pen. Kris had called him in earlier to work out his character motivations, circling back on their What Is Love discussion. But for some reason Chanyeol is still slumped there, forehead on the table, blending into wall décor.
"Do you need something?" Kris asks.
Chanyeol doesn't move. Something like a snore creeps into the air.
Well okay.
Kris tries to remember any film school training he's had for dealing with sleepy actors.
Nope.
Out of curiosity, Kris dislodges the script from under Chanyeol's head. The margins are filled with scribbles, mainly comments Kris remembers telling Chanyeol and some of Chanyeol's own, littered here and there in Korean. There is half a paragraph with dictionary definitions of microexpressions, which if Kris is honest to himself, he finds surprising because he'd never thought of Chanyeol as someone to go out of the way.
Kris is half-way through the third page when Chanyeol jerks awake, a pink patch imprinted into his face, mascara smeared, drool shining on his chin, "Ah, did I-"
"Drool, yeah," Kris says, and attempting looking indifferent so hard that his face ages backwards because honestly, Chanyeol looks epically shit.
"Sorry," Chanyeol mumbles. The drool is off, but now his mascara's smudged down the side of his face and into his palms.
Kris hides behind the script, wheezing, and when he refocuses, Chanyeol is actually blushing.
For a split second, Kris forgets how to breathe. He quickly clears his throat and grabs a pen, spreading Chanyeol's script between them, "What aspect of your character do you think grows the most?"
The eighteenth take passes midnight and Kris realizes that it's not going to work. Everyone is tired. Tao, despite an hour spent yelling that he's fully awake and a soldier to the bones, is sleeping standing. At Tao's feet, Minseok is not even bothering to stand. Kris steps out behind the camera and, instinctively, Chanyeol hurries to follow.
"No, stay there," Kris orders, shouting over silence, "Chanyeol, you are in love."
Chanyeol's brows furrow and relax.
"Chanyeol, I am Jia, look at me like you love me. Don't look at me like you're in love. Look at me like you love me. I am here, you can almost touch me, and you need to, so you take a single step forward," Chanyeol staggers, knees shaky, and Kris urges him forward, both hands extended, "but I am always a step too far, and I'm not seeing the same thing you do," and Chanyeol's expression is perfect.
They put Jia back in position, nail it by the nineteenth.
Next morning Chen has changed his megaphone commentary to Look at duizhang like you love him.
Anyone can tell Chanyeol is not a natural actor. Only a few know, however, that what he lacks in talent, he makes up with effort. He's the only cast member to stay as late as the crew, scrutinizing lines, consulting Jia and Minseok on breathing techniques, committing every detail to memory, cat-napping on his Chinese-Korean dictionary.
Unconsciously, Kris finds himself slipping to his side, lending him a hand, replacing the dictionary with a folded towel.
Over the course of days, Chanyeol begins staying in character even off-camera.
"Hey man, you're a great bro," he says, slinging an arm over Kris's shoulder, "But you gotta stop asking me about love, man."
It takes Kris some self-control not to jump out of his own skin because no one has ever done that before, if only due to his height. But he manages perhaps because, long after Chanyeol had slunk away, the weight of his arm remains, like an anchor, holding him down, unmoving, hyper-aware.
When they're filming on location in Pusan, Chanyeol, Futon, Pillow & Co. collectively infiltrate his room.
"I can't sleep," Chanyeol explains, cocooning into the blankets.
It's 7:30PM.
Kris inspects the pile of storyboards stacked up to his knee and shoots Chanyeol a glare over his Ray-Bans, "How may I help."
"Tell me a story?" Chanyeol peers up at Kris from inside his futon fortress, "About the brilliant zit on your jaw."
Very kindly, Kris picks up a corner of the futon and drags it out the door.
Five hours later the door slides open and Kris notices a lump of cotton surreptitiously worming its way into the room.
"What are you doing?" he asks.
The lump of cotton rolls over, playing dead. Kris scoffs, more so when the dead lump begins scrunching up to stifle its own giggles. Then they're howling like they're dying, and Tao, one floor down, bangs on his ceiling with a broomstick or something to that effect, shouting about dark circles and health insurance and what are you doing at this hour.
Kris wonders, too, but he chooses not to think about it.
"I am," Chanyeol declares, voice static over the phone, "chasing you."
Kris doesn't get it.
The static says, "I will catch you."
Maybe it's some kind of method-acting, but Chanyeol doesn't take off his make-up at the end of the day, and Kris is bothered enough to drag him to one of the deserted corners and do it himself.
"Look you just pour some solution onto a cotton pad," Kris demonstrates, taking the stool across from Chanyeol, "And hold it over your eye. Wait for it to dissolve," and he swipes it over Chanyeol's eyelid, by the corner of his eye, over the lashes," during which point Chanyeol begins snickering and shaking.
"Sorry," Chanyeol clears his throat, nodding apologetically.
"Hold still," Kris says, using another pad to wipe off the foundation. Chanyeol obeys, except then somehow they've become really close, and Chanyeol just, eyes closed, leans in, and Kris is breathing so heavily he can't hear anything but the air whistling past his teeth.
His blood spikes.
"Chanyeol," he says.
Chanyeol gives a subdued little whine.
With an odd tug on his heart, Kris realizes he's fallen asleep and inhales, slowly, bringing his hands down and capping the make-up solution. He maneuvers them so that they're leaning against the counter, and closes his eyes for maybe the first time in days.
He dreams of a field smelling of something sweet.
Then a voice thunders down.
"Is this a clique, and if so may I join it," is what Kris wakes to.
Chen is towering over them, face pressed into theirs.
Kris flips out of his stool so fast his stool goes sailing a meter, "What clique?"
"I'm the assistant director, I'm well-connected, I have a megaphone and," Chen offers thoughtfully, "I will happily sacrifice Minseok's firstborn. You want me in your circle."
Kris doesn't entirely get it, but Chanyeol immediately says, "Nope sorry," and that's that.
"What if we do a dollying shot here following Jia," Lay suggests, shifting onto one leg. The storyboard is lined up before them, new with the latest set of color-coordinated notes à la House of Taozi, "to bring in the chaotic feel?"
"Chaotic feel," Kris parrots mindlessly.
Lay narrows his eyes.
"Did you like, not," Lay swipes a finger down the bridge of Kris's nose, "Holy shit, what happened to your BB cream?"
Kris readjusts his attention to the task at hand, muttering.
Just then, Chanyeol enters looking very… fresh.
They keep their smiles to themselves.
On top of his portable high chair, Chen snorts into the megaphone, "Clique bitches."
Something tingles in Kris's fingers. The day breezes by too fast. That night he gives Chanyeol a lift back to his hotel. Chanyeol tells him to wait downstairs, and returns with two giant suitcases.
Kris isn't sure how to react when Chanyeol checks into the room across from his, but he figures it can't be bad. Especially not when Chanyeol shares his taste in music and they waste whole nights in front of a laptop, digging through Youtube, so that in the morning they show up within minutes to each other, shoulders pressed dangerously close, sporting matching Ray Bans and dark circles.
The risk in directing a romance is the intimacy. Unlike crime or action flicks, most people have lived through romances, so they attend the screenings expecting some echo of their memories through film.
And truth is though Kris might be good enough a director to pirate the feelings and pick the right angles to pull them over the tidal wave, he doesn't understand all of what he's doing.
Sure, he's learnt theories, been in relationships. There was a senior in film school, Zhou Mi, who'd taught him how to fuck in bathrooms without getting caught. Then there was the thing with Baekhyun that had felt like free-fall, or frankly a catastrophe rolling on wine corks. Only he wasn't in love, because love can't be so easy. Love isn't just two people fucking each other apart, two people holding hands, reading a book together, sharing a smoke. It has to be something stronger. Something less definite. Not an intersection of affection and curiosity and dependence but the area just outside their union. In Kris's imagination, it is the thin, plasma skin holding in these separate orbits, intangible yet real.
It'll be something instantly recognizable, like gravity. At least theoretically.
So when Lay broaches the question, "Is something going on between you two?" Kris says, "No," unthinkingly, because he's honest. Although his skin warms when Chanyeol looks at him, although he finds himself guiding Chanyeol on instinct more than obligation, inexplicably waiting for Chanyeol to follow and expecting that he will, he knows this. This is affection. Lukewarm. Easy, natural.
So easy and natural, in fact, that Chanyeol kind of just, kisses him, when they're compiling a mixtape on Kris's laptop the day before the last, music blasting through shared earbuds. It's no big deal. Kris has seen Chanyeol kiss Jia this way dozens of times through the past few months. He's taught Chanyeol how to kiss at this angle, how to keep his eyes hooded. He knows how this works. He created this.
Still, in the blink of an eye, Kris is swept up into the storm.
He doesn't sleep a wink that night.
One of the executive producers, Luhan, surprise bombs the production team with an on-site inspection on the last day, as if it weren't hectic enough already. The cuter ones are always sadistic anyway. Chen is immediately on his side, escorting him through the trenches. Tao has four cappuccinos balanced on one hand and a clipboard of scene minutes in the other, two assistant cameras tottering after him, clappers in hand. Lay is powering through it and Kris holds onto him, out of habit, between scenes.
"Scene 113, take one," someone claps. Kris snaps back into focus, out of the distant buzz of movement, the stress, the endless negotiations, and distills himself down to a single line, bare minimum stretching from behind the camera to in front of the lens.
Ahead of him, Chanyeol is sitting on a step in the back alley, a mess in his beaten leather jacket, head in his hands, knees jutting out gangly and awkward. The rear of the jib lowers, camera sweeping from a low shot to a high one, zooming out. As they discussed, Chanyeol stands with his hands on his knees, stamping out his cigarette like he's unwinding out of a long dream.
Jia is at the other end of the alley. Swinging a guitar case over his shoulder, Chanyeol picks his way towards her in a slow, wobbly line, but not hesitant. The scene is perfect in the way that everyone knows it is. Even Luhan, who has bullied Tao into submission, lets on a wicked grin.
In playback the light hits the side of his face and Chanyeol is good, perfect even.
With the weight of the team grating down on him, waiting, straining, and the blood pounding through his ears, Kris can barely decipher his own words, "And that's a wrap."
"What is love?" He asks Chanyeol.
The gang had split up after a celebratory dinner. For some reason Chanyeol ended up in Kris's car, and they gunned it rolling down a hill, their mixtape pounding into the marrow. But then they're looking down at the city murmuring beneath them, and Kris is wondering.
"What if," Chanyeol switches into Korean, "hypothetically, it's what I feel?"
Kris studies their hands, the way Chanyeol's pinky is brushing against his own. The world is all quiet around them. It's strange to be with Chanyeol without four monitors playing back at them simultaneously, production managers echoing through phone receivers. In some ways this silence is disconcerting, like a wall expanding, irreversibly pushing them apart.
"Maybe," Kris says softly, "that's not the right answer."
He is suddenly so exhausted.
Chanyeol just, kind of, disappears.
Which is what usually happens during post-production. Kris's done this enough time to know.
But still, he hangs onto his phone, waiting.
For what, though, he has no idea.
Life settles during post-production. Kris reviews the film with the editors and sound team, cutting and pasting and resizing, and every time he sees Chanyeol on screen, something shifts within him, like tectonic plates realigning, subducting, protruding and sinking away, slow and inevitable.
Someone links him to an uncut reel of Behind the Scenes. On screen Kris is leaning on Chanyeol's shoulder, sleeping, a bottle of something and a cotton pad in his hand. Chanyeol makes a face at the camera. Kris feels his face warm like it's been a decade, or like it was yesterday.
"You look tired," Lay says.
Kris looks up from the sheet of paper in his hand. There is one line down the middle. What love is, and what draws him towards Chanyeol. Both sides are empty. Etched across the center is one word.
Gravitation.
And yeah.
None of it makes sense. Kris isn't sure if he wants to laugh or cry so instead he calls Chen and invites him to a clique.
"To make up for the delay, you don't have to sacrifice Minseok's first-born. Or anyone's," Kris says.
"Oh," Chen's voice is muffled on the other end, "So like, what do we do in a clique?"
With Chen's network of underground connections, they snoop out Chanyeol's new role. It's a cameo on a low-budget arthouse project with Sehun, one of his juniors fresh out of film school. The team is filming on location to the suburban backdrops of Seoul, a small crowd mounding around them. Kris catches him mid-afternoon, while the team is already packing to go. In the corner, Chanyeol is talking to a shorter, mildly offended looking actor, waving his arm around and finally, walking in a semi-loop.
Kris feels a tug on his lips as he pulls out his phone. He finishes dialing the number he has started too many times over the past months.
"Chanyeol," Kris says.
"What are you doing," Chen frowns next to him, confused.
Chanyeol jumps around, attention latching onto Kris's car, "Oh."
"Hi," Kris laughs. He has no idea why he's breathless.
"No really," Chen continues, voice flat as realization dawns, "You're not doing this."
Kris says, stomach flipping, suddenly aware of how sweaty his hand is, "So, you've caught me."
The slightest smile stretches across Chanyeol's face.
"Please, no," Chen turns frantically between the two of them, begging, "YOU SAID THIS WAS COOL."
"Huh," Chanyeol says, the single word making sense like all sentences without verbs or subjects do.
Miraculously, Kris understands.
And Chen bolts out of the car, retching.
Chanyeol is seated beside him during the premiere. Kris always has some nagging insecurity watching his own work, the possible improvements significantly more apparent with two hundred pairs of eyes scrutinizing it. There is the opening scene with Chanyeol waking up hungover, sun piercingly bright, where Kris thinks perhaps they could have done a mid-shot instead. There is the fight, where maybe they got the wrong guys for the soundtrack.
Then there is, finally, Chanyeol and Jia, standing in the living room. Chanyeol takes one step forward, quavering, eyes wide. Kris can almost hear himself saying, Chanyeol, I am Jia. Chanyeol, look at me like you love me, somewhere in the depths of his memory, and that's the only thing he can hear, his words, Chanyeol's breathing, the little tremors in Chanyeol's knee as he staggers forward.
Even now if someone were to ask Kris what is love, Kris wouldn't have a definite answer. But he would probably point to this moment in the film, to the way Chanyeol is looking at Jia, and he would say, yeah, something like this.
And maybe he would also say the same for the silhouette reflected in Chanyeol's eyes. Maybe love is something that can settle on you, gradually, without your knowing it. Maybe it's not anything tidal, big-screen or cathartic. You could recognize it instantly, or you can deny it for lifetimes. Sometimes it won't make a good movie. Sometimes it's just two people doing regular things, sort of existing in parallel, both waiting and chasing at once. They will shift and realign, like the debris after a storm, or the continental plates in large-scale calamities.
In the end, they will lean into each other, as if gravitational, and they do.
Kris thinks that Chanyeol smells like a dream.
Written by: changdictator
Pairing: Kris/Chanyeol
Rating: PG
Warnings: None
Summary: Kris directs a romance flick. Chanyeol gets into character. Chen joins a clique.
"So you're young, right?" Kris says, "You're twenty-three and totally shell-shocked. She's the only girl you've ever loved. She's the only stable thing you've got, and now you've lost her."
Chanyeol agrees so hard his hair flops, "Yeah."
"I feel this divorce means more to your character than heartbreak. It's much more than that. It's losing a part of your identity, like your whole world realigning. How do you feel?"
"I feel like my character is really sad?" Chanyeol blinks, "Since his wife didn't show up at the concert right?"
Well okay. It can be worse.
Kris rubs the wrinkles out of his face, sighing through his nose, "What do you think love is?"
"Really nice?" Chanyeol wiggles in his seat.
Kris wants to set something on fire.
By the second week of filming, they're already a whole day behind schedule and Kris dampens the blow by throwing out scenes and apologizing to anyone on the other end of the phone line. So far it's working, miffed writers and the towering pile of necessary edits notwithstanding. Kris thinks that the crisis is manageable. All he has to do is maintain the correct attitude.
He walks into the staff room with the best attitude.
"Jesus Christ," Lay chokes on his lunch, spraying rice everywhere, "What happened to your face."
Kris tries not to strain his cheeks.
"I'm smiling," he explains, lifting a sushi out of Lay's bento. Next to him the sound team inconspicuously shifts an inch to the right.
Lay peers at him in that sorry, conflicted way that cinematographers are frequently fond of peering, and feeds Kris a piece of pink ginger before donning a faux-wise aura, "Whatever your problem, murder is seldom the only solution."
"I'm not murdering anyone," Kris explains, almost offended.
"Not even Chanyeol?" Lay asks, suspicious. To the side, Tao snorts into his coke.
Kris exhales.
"You know sometimes," Lay suggests, "It's hard to act when the director looks like he's going to make sashimi out of you. Try, say, narrowing your eyes more."
"What if I joined a boy-band," Kris groans, dropping into the seat beside him to conveniently steal another piece of sushi.
"There, there," Lay's hand is reassuring on his arm, though Kris can practically hear the splitting grin in his voice, "Chanyeol's a good actor. He just needs more advice."
They're on set again at some murderous hour in the morning. Half the crew hasn't had two hours of sleep, the other none at all. Due to scheduling limitations, production now wants them to shoot one of the last scenes first, despite the alarming disconnect between Chanyeol and his character.
More like Chanyeol and the whole movie, but Lay's right. Kris is here to advise Chanyeol, even though he can only zen with so much shit in his way.
"What is love? Think about it," He prompts, taking the script away from Chanyeol's hand, nudging him to focus.
"Um," Chanyeol draws a blank. He says something, replaced by a microphone squealing behind them. The production crew shouts over one another, a mob of anonymous voices under Chen's autocratic reign over the megaphone, Minseok stop hogging the coffee, Second Unit your matching pajamas suck. Tao is shooting another reel of Behind the Scenes, which Kris imagines will be released over his dead body.
Kris scoots closer, enough to see Chanyeol's concealer not quite blending in. He rephrases, loudly, in Korean this time, "Just, microexpressions. Don't walk in perfectly straight lines. Relax."
"I," Chanyeol starts, Chinese cracking and wavering in his throat.
"Jia's on set," Tao pops up, Behind the Scenes camera slung over his shoulder, ready to lead Kris away, "Lay says you need to talk camera lenses before we start rolling."
Which is when, without warning, Chanyeol grabs Kris's wrist. They both stare at his knuckles whitening, surprised.
"I'll work hard," he barks abruptly, ridiculous with his scrunched and lips pressed, except he's completely serious. His eyes are focused, and certain, albeit swollen and bloodshot. For some reason Kris can't peel away. He just kind of stands there, not like they're both a head or two above the rest of the staff and everyone is staring at them, at all.
After Chanyeol lets go with this awkward bow thing, Kris is still rooted to the ground. It's nearly funny how he can't feel his face.
Tao waves a confused hand in front of him, "Hello? Camera lenses?"
"Did you eat a hanger?" Jia quips later, while they're talking through her scene.
During filming, everything is a hurricane of bits and pieces, a hundred people scrambling at once, Luhan's sixty odd reminders on voicemail about budgets and economical downturns. Kris's job isn't to calm the waters or smooth everything out into a coherent, smooth whole. At least not yet. For now he just needs to shoot the right takes with the right cameras and actors and hope that he is leading them in some semblance of the right direction. This, he's good at. Pushing the tides, visualizing the big picture, a human sieve filtering out a set of bones and tissue for the editors to break down and rebuild.
But that doesn't mean he's not bothered by the small things. There is Chanyeol's eye twitch when he laughs out of character, his running across the set unaware of all the things he could trip over, staring everyone flat in the eye, terrifyingly earnest. These things run parallel to the storm and, like a small itch beneath the eyelid, their marks stay long after they've gone, phantom debris caught in memory. Unconsciously Kris collects them into an insignificant pile in the back of his head, and there they erode, harden, into a new layer of earth.
The fortieth scene wraps up on day twenty-four. Kris is in his office, scrutinizing storyboards, reforming connections between panels.
The storyline is simple. A drummer, Chanyeol, prioritizes divorce and music. There are 113 scenes of the guy figuring out if he really loves his wife, Jia, or if he just thinks he does. Finally he lets go of his failing marriage, finds himself musically, and years later comes to peace with his ex-wife. He is now more competent and understanding. Cue rainbows and acoustic guitar soundtracks.
Across from him, Chanyeol chews on a pen. Kris had called him in earlier to work out his character motivations, circling back on their What Is Love discussion. But for some reason Chanyeol is still slumped there, forehead on the table, blending into wall décor.
"Do you need something?" Kris asks.
Chanyeol doesn't move. Something like a snore creeps into the air.
Well okay.
Kris tries to remember any film school training he's had for dealing with sleepy actors.
Nope.
Out of curiosity, Kris dislodges the script from under Chanyeol's head. The margins are filled with scribbles, mainly comments Kris remembers telling Chanyeol and some of Chanyeol's own, littered here and there in Korean. There is half a paragraph with dictionary definitions of microexpressions, which if Kris is honest to himself, he finds surprising because he'd never thought of Chanyeol as someone to go out of the way.
Kris is half-way through the third page when Chanyeol jerks awake, a pink patch imprinted into his face, mascara smeared, drool shining on his chin, "Ah, did I-"
"Drool, yeah," Kris says, and attempting looking indifferent so hard that his face ages backwards because honestly, Chanyeol looks epically shit.
"Sorry," Chanyeol mumbles. The drool is off, but now his mascara's smudged down the side of his face and into his palms.
Kris hides behind the script, wheezing, and when he refocuses, Chanyeol is actually blushing.
For a split second, Kris forgets how to breathe. He quickly clears his throat and grabs a pen, spreading Chanyeol's script between them, "What aspect of your character do you think grows the most?"
The eighteenth take passes midnight and Kris realizes that it's not going to work. Everyone is tired. Tao, despite an hour spent yelling that he's fully awake and a soldier to the bones, is sleeping standing. At Tao's feet, Minseok is not even bothering to stand. Kris steps out behind the camera and, instinctively, Chanyeol hurries to follow.
"No, stay there," Kris orders, shouting over silence, "Chanyeol, you are in love."
Chanyeol's brows furrow and relax.
"Chanyeol, I am Jia, look at me like you love me. Don't look at me like you're in love. Look at me like you love me. I am here, you can almost touch me, and you need to, so you take a single step forward," Chanyeol staggers, knees shaky, and Kris urges him forward, both hands extended, "but I am always a step too far, and I'm not seeing the same thing you do," and Chanyeol's expression is perfect.
They put Jia back in position, nail it by the nineteenth.
Next morning Chen has changed his megaphone commentary to Look at duizhang like you love him.
Anyone can tell Chanyeol is not a natural actor. Only a few know, however, that what he lacks in talent, he makes up with effort. He's the only cast member to stay as late as the crew, scrutinizing lines, consulting Jia and Minseok on breathing techniques, committing every detail to memory, cat-napping on his Chinese-Korean dictionary.
Unconsciously, Kris finds himself slipping to his side, lending him a hand, replacing the dictionary with a folded towel.
Over the course of days, Chanyeol begins staying in character even off-camera.
"Hey man, you're a great bro," he says, slinging an arm over Kris's shoulder, "But you gotta stop asking me about love, man."
It takes Kris some self-control not to jump out of his own skin because no one has ever done that before, if only due to his height. But he manages perhaps because, long after Chanyeol had slunk away, the weight of his arm remains, like an anchor, holding him down, unmoving, hyper-aware.
When they're filming on location in Pusan, Chanyeol, Futon, Pillow & Co. collectively infiltrate his room.
"I can't sleep," Chanyeol explains, cocooning into the blankets.
It's 7:30PM.
Kris inspects the pile of storyboards stacked up to his knee and shoots Chanyeol a glare over his Ray-Bans, "How may I help."
"Tell me a story?" Chanyeol peers up at Kris from inside his futon fortress, "About the brilliant zit on your jaw."
Very kindly, Kris picks up a corner of the futon and drags it out the door.
Five hours later the door slides open and Kris notices a lump of cotton surreptitiously worming its way into the room.
"What are you doing?" he asks.
The lump of cotton rolls over, playing dead. Kris scoffs, more so when the dead lump begins scrunching up to stifle its own giggles. Then they're howling like they're dying, and Tao, one floor down, bangs on his ceiling with a broomstick or something to that effect, shouting about dark circles and health insurance and what are you doing at this hour.
Kris wonders, too, but he chooses not to think about it.
"I am," Chanyeol declares, voice static over the phone, "chasing you."
Kris doesn't get it.
The static says, "I will catch you."
Maybe it's some kind of method-acting, but Chanyeol doesn't take off his make-up at the end of the day, and Kris is bothered enough to drag him to one of the deserted corners and do it himself.
"Look you just pour some solution onto a cotton pad," Kris demonstrates, taking the stool across from Chanyeol, "And hold it over your eye. Wait for it to dissolve," and he swipes it over Chanyeol's eyelid, by the corner of his eye, over the lashes," during which point Chanyeol begins snickering and shaking.
"Sorry," Chanyeol clears his throat, nodding apologetically.
"Hold still," Kris says, using another pad to wipe off the foundation. Chanyeol obeys, except then somehow they've become really close, and Chanyeol just, eyes closed, leans in, and Kris is breathing so heavily he can't hear anything but the air whistling past his teeth.
His blood spikes.
"Chanyeol," he says.
Chanyeol gives a subdued little whine.
With an odd tug on his heart, Kris realizes he's fallen asleep and inhales, slowly, bringing his hands down and capping the make-up solution. He maneuvers them so that they're leaning against the counter, and closes his eyes for maybe the first time in days.
He dreams of a field smelling of something sweet.
Then a voice thunders down.
"Is this a clique, and if so may I join it," is what Kris wakes to.
Chen is towering over them, face pressed into theirs.
Kris flips out of his stool so fast his stool goes sailing a meter, "What clique?"
"I'm the assistant director, I'm well-connected, I have a megaphone and," Chen offers thoughtfully, "I will happily sacrifice Minseok's firstborn. You want me in your circle."
Kris doesn't entirely get it, but Chanyeol immediately says, "Nope sorry," and that's that.
"What if we do a dollying shot here following Jia," Lay suggests, shifting onto one leg. The storyboard is lined up before them, new with the latest set of color-coordinated notes à la House of Taozi, "to bring in the chaotic feel?"
"Chaotic feel," Kris parrots mindlessly.
Lay narrows his eyes.
"Did you like, not," Lay swipes a finger down the bridge of Kris's nose, "Holy shit, what happened to your BB cream?"
Kris readjusts his attention to the task at hand, muttering.
Just then, Chanyeol enters looking very… fresh.
They keep their smiles to themselves.
On top of his portable high chair, Chen snorts into the megaphone, "Clique bitches."
Something tingles in Kris's fingers. The day breezes by too fast. That night he gives Chanyeol a lift back to his hotel. Chanyeol tells him to wait downstairs, and returns with two giant suitcases.
Kris isn't sure how to react when Chanyeol checks into the room across from his, but he figures it can't be bad. Especially not when Chanyeol shares his taste in music and they waste whole nights in front of a laptop, digging through Youtube, so that in the morning they show up within minutes to each other, shoulders pressed dangerously close, sporting matching Ray Bans and dark circles.
The risk in directing a romance is the intimacy. Unlike crime or action flicks, most people have lived through romances, so they attend the screenings expecting some echo of their memories through film.
And truth is though Kris might be good enough a director to pirate the feelings and pick the right angles to pull them over the tidal wave, he doesn't understand all of what he's doing.
Sure, he's learnt theories, been in relationships. There was a senior in film school, Zhou Mi, who'd taught him how to fuck in bathrooms without getting caught. Then there was the thing with Baekhyun that had felt like free-fall, or frankly a catastrophe rolling on wine corks. Only he wasn't in love, because love can't be so easy. Love isn't just two people fucking each other apart, two people holding hands, reading a book together, sharing a smoke. It has to be something stronger. Something less definite. Not an intersection of affection and curiosity and dependence but the area just outside their union. In Kris's imagination, it is the thin, plasma skin holding in these separate orbits, intangible yet real.
It'll be something instantly recognizable, like gravity. At least theoretically.
So when Lay broaches the question, "Is something going on between you two?" Kris says, "No," unthinkingly, because he's honest. Although his skin warms when Chanyeol looks at him, although he finds himself guiding Chanyeol on instinct more than obligation, inexplicably waiting for Chanyeol to follow and expecting that he will, he knows this. This is affection. Lukewarm. Easy, natural.
So easy and natural, in fact, that Chanyeol kind of just, kisses him, when they're compiling a mixtape on Kris's laptop the day before the last, music blasting through shared earbuds. It's no big deal. Kris has seen Chanyeol kiss Jia this way dozens of times through the past few months. He's taught Chanyeol how to kiss at this angle, how to keep his eyes hooded. He knows how this works. He created this.
Still, in the blink of an eye, Kris is swept up into the storm.
He doesn't sleep a wink that night.
One of the executive producers, Luhan, surprise bombs the production team with an on-site inspection on the last day, as if it weren't hectic enough already. The cuter ones are always sadistic anyway. Chen is immediately on his side, escorting him through the trenches. Tao has four cappuccinos balanced on one hand and a clipboard of scene minutes in the other, two assistant cameras tottering after him, clappers in hand. Lay is powering through it and Kris holds onto him, out of habit, between scenes.
"Scene 113, take one," someone claps. Kris snaps back into focus, out of the distant buzz of movement, the stress, the endless negotiations, and distills himself down to a single line, bare minimum stretching from behind the camera to in front of the lens.
Ahead of him, Chanyeol is sitting on a step in the back alley, a mess in his beaten leather jacket, head in his hands, knees jutting out gangly and awkward. The rear of the jib lowers, camera sweeping from a low shot to a high one, zooming out. As they discussed, Chanyeol stands with his hands on his knees, stamping out his cigarette like he's unwinding out of a long dream.
Jia is at the other end of the alley. Swinging a guitar case over his shoulder, Chanyeol picks his way towards her in a slow, wobbly line, but not hesitant. The scene is perfect in the way that everyone knows it is. Even Luhan, who has bullied Tao into submission, lets on a wicked grin.
In playback the light hits the side of his face and Chanyeol is good, perfect even.
With the weight of the team grating down on him, waiting, straining, and the blood pounding through his ears, Kris can barely decipher his own words, "And that's a wrap."
"What is love?" He asks Chanyeol.
The gang had split up after a celebratory dinner. For some reason Chanyeol ended up in Kris's car, and they gunned it rolling down a hill, their mixtape pounding into the marrow. But then they're looking down at the city murmuring beneath them, and Kris is wondering.
"What if," Chanyeol switches into Korean, "hypothetically, it's what I feel?"
Kris studies their hands, the way Chanyeol's pinky is brushing against his own. The world is all quiet around them. It's strange to be with Chanyeol without four monitors playing back at them simultaneously, production managers echoing through phone receivers. In some ways this silence is disconcerting, like a wall expanding, irreversibly pushing them apart.
"Maybe," Kris says softly, "that's not the right answer."
He is suddenly so exhausted.
Chanyeol just, kind of, disappears.
Which is what usually happens during post-production. Kris's done this enough time to know.
But still, he hangs onto his phone, waiting.
For what, though, he has no idea.
Life settles during post-production. Kris reviews the film with the editors and sound team, cutting and pasting and resizing, and every time he sees Chanyeol on screen, something shifts within him, like tectonic plates realigning, subducting, protruding and sinking away, slow and inevitable.
Someone links him to an uncut reel of Behind the Scenes. On screen Kris is leaning on Chanyeol's shoulder, sleeping, a bottle of something and a cotton pad in his hand. Chanyeol makes a face at the camera. Kris feels his face warm like it's been a decade, or like it was yesterday.
"You look tired," Lay says.
Kris looks up from the sheet of paper in his hand. There is one line down the middle. What love is, and what draws him towards Chanyeol. Both sides are empty. Etched across the center is one word.
Gravitation.
And yeah.
None of it makes sense. Kris isn't sure if he wants to laugh or cry so instead he calls Chen and invites him to a clique.
"To make up for the delay, you don't have to sacrifice Minseok's first-born. Or anyone's," Kris says.
"Oh," Chen's voice is muffled on the other end, "So like, what do we do in a clique?"
With Chen's network of underground connections, they snoop out Chanyeol's new role. It's a cameo on a low-budget arthouse project with Sehun, one of his juniors fresh out of film school. The team is filming on location to the suburban backdrops of Seoul, a small crowd mounding around them. Kris catches him mid-afternoon, while the team is already packing to go. In the corner, Chanyeol is talking to a shorter, mildly offended looking actor, waving his arm around and finally, walking in a semi-loop.
Kris feels a tug on his lips as he pulls out his phone. He finishes dialing the number he has started too many times over the past months.
"Chanyeol," Kris says.
"What are you doing," Chen frowns next to him, confused.
Chanyeol jumps around, attention latching onto Kris's car, "Oh."
"Hi," Kris laughs. He has no idea why he's breathless.
"No really," Chen continues, voice flat as realization dawns, "You're not doing this."
Kris says, stomach flipping, suddenly aware of how sweaty his hand is, "So, you've caught me."
The slightest smile stretches across Chanyeol's face.
"Please, no," Chen turns frantically between the two of them, begging, "YOU SAID THIS WAS COOL."
"Huh," Chanyeol says, the single word making sense like all sentences without verbs or subjects do.
Miraculously, Kris understands.
And Chen bolts out of the car, retching.
Chanyeol is seated beside him during the premiere. Kris always has some nagging insecurity watching his own work, the possible improvements significantly more apparent with two hundred pairs of eyes scrutinizing it. There is the opening scene with Chanyeol waking up hungover, sun piercingly bright, where Kris thinks perhaps they could have done a mid-shot instead. There is the fight, where maybe they got the wrong guys for the soundtrack.
Then there is, finally, Chanyeol and Jia, standing in the living room. Chanyeol takes one step forward, quavering, eyes wide. Kris can almost hear himself saying, Chanyeol, I am Jia. Chanyeol, look at me like you love me, somewhere in the depths of his memory, and that's the only thing he can hear, his words, Chanyeol's breathing, the little tremors in Chanyeol's knee as he staggers forward.
Even now if someone were to ask Kris what is love, Kris wouldn't have a definite answer. But he would probably point to this moment in the film, to the way Chanyeol is looking at Jia, and he would say, yeah, something like this.
And maybe he would also say the same for the silhouette reflected in Chanyeol's eyes. Maybe love is something that can settle on you, gradually, without your knowing it. Maybe it's not anything tidal, big-screen or cathartic. You could recognize it instantly, or you can deny it for lifetimes. Sometimes it won't make a good movie. Sometimes it's just two people doing regular things, sort of existing in parallel, both waiting and chasing at once. They will shift and realign, like the debris after a storm, or the continental plates in large-scale calamities.
In the end, they will lean into each other, as if gravitational, and they do.
Kris thinks that Chanyeol smells like a dream.