rock rock fashion baby [ fic ]

[lovelyable]

cover and spread
cl/seungri | r, 3946 words, ar
seungri's on a sinking ship.

your skin is so white underneath the black night
your voice calls out for the coup de grace
when the lights go out will there be a trace
SILVIA/MIIKE SNOW



She's already dying when Seungri meets her. There is a bigger picture, and she's just a smaller part contributing to it, hoping to change something, to mean something. Like one of those sacrifices in a colony of ants when they have to make it over an obstacle and some of them have to sacrifice themselves so the other ones can get across.

Or at least, it's what's written all over her face two seconds after Seungri says hi backstage at the Christian Lacroix show. "You're really not trying to pick me up on the job, are you?" She grimaces, though it may be because one of the many assistants bustling around her is lacing her into a corset. "Because that's really tacky." The assistant shouts into her ear to suck in, suck your stomach in. She holds her breath. Seungri sees too many ribs.

"I just want to know where the bathroom is," Seungri says.

"My name's Chaerin."

"No," Seungri says, and raises his voice, slows it down. "The bathroom."

"I'm nineteen." Chaerin smiles, cat-like, then turns her lips down again when makeup artist number thirty-four shouts at her to stop talking so she can fix her lips, god, she only has fifteen seconds per model and Chaerin is existing too much.

"No, I dont - what? I just, no, I want the bathroom," Seungri repeats, louder still, leaning in and annoyed and feeling like a fool and thinking maybe he should just find it himself. "The bathroom."

"I live in Hongdae, and I'm a model. But," she says, and leans in the rest of the way, a hand coming in through the chaos to slide down Seungri's arm to rest on his wrist, "you already know that part."

Seungri pauses, taken aback by how close she is for a second. "I was just--"

"We don't have any bathrooms back here," she says. "I heard you. Nobody eats or drinks shit at least twelve hours before a show."

Her grip is strong for someone so slender, for someone whose bones Seungri can count from here. Seungri is losing circulation in his hand by the time Chaerin lets him go to hand her arms off to the assistants who wrap them in black leather.

"Okay, sorry I bothered you," he mutters, and turns on his heel, but then Chaerin is sliding past him, hair slicked back and smelling like smoke and the free champagne they hand out by the bottle that nobody actually drinks until later.

"You didn't." She gets in line behind a procession of bones and couture, all like her, all pale, and when she smiles again, it looks out of place against so many blank stares. "I hope you do it again at the after party." Her voice is a little too hopeful behind the disdain, and it's why - it becomes the reason why, always - Seungri stays.



Chaerin says the best part of Seungri is that he doesn't try to change her. Says she's had way too many of those, those girls and boys who said they loved her just the way she was and then always tried to fit her in a space where she didn't fit. Seungri takes it as a forewarning, seeing as this comes right after he tells Chaerin that her cigarettes are killing her.

"Please, tell it to someone who cares," she scoffs, propped up against the metal railings of his balcony with her hands stretched towards the ground. "Everything is killing me."

"Maybe if you'd stop smoking so much you'd get there a lot slower," Seungri tries, but Chaerin will never have it. Chaerin just pats his cheek and tells him he's cute and goes back to posing in her three-thousand dollar Dolce and Gabbana underwear even though there are no agents here.

Practice, she says. "You don't know who's watching. Live life like it's a big fucking stage."

These quotes are always spouted at him in a slightly broken manner, colorful expletives added in where she can't remember the exact phrasing because she dropped out of school who knows how long ago.

"You're nineteen," Seungri says. He feels like a hypocrite because the sun shines when he tells her these things after he's skipped another day of class to watch her in his apartment. But at least he's enrolled. "You can go back to school. They have these programs where you can get your degree. I looked it up online."

"I don't want my degree," Chaerin says; she kicks a magazine cutout at her feet towards where he is standing at the edge of the balcony, between indoor and outdoor, and points to it with her lacquered toe. "I'm in Vogue. What the fuck do I need a piece of paper telling me I'm smart for?" The smoke streams from the corners of her mouth; when she sneezes, it turns into a cough.

"See," Seungri says. "It's killing you."

Chaerin closes the distance between them until Seungri can smell last night's hairspray and champagne after-party on her collarbones. Her shirt is too big for her (but it says Alexander Wang on a tiny cut-out square in the back which is what matters), and he can see the faint outline of her breasts pressed against the thin fabric when she stands on her tiptoes and tilts her face towards his so their noses touch.

There's a new freckle on her face, right below her eye. Chaerin licks her lips, deliberately takes a long drag of her Marlboro Slim, and then presses their lips together, fistful of Seungri's collar.

His mouth automatically opens as he drinks her in, searching for her taste like he knows too much of already - but this time it's all smoke, smoke and gray and fog streaming down his throat into his lungs instead of her--

He tears himself away and collapses against the sliding door frame to hack for ten minutes straight while she laughs at him, while she brushes a hand affectionately through his hair and pats his back to help get the coughs out.

"There," she says. The triumph is obvious in her voice. "Now it's killing you, too."



Chaerin has four tattoos. Seungri discovers the first when he's behind her getting dressed one morning and she ties her hair up. The Chanel symbol inked black on the back of her neck stands out like a brand burn, and after a second, he realizes that it's nothing less.

The second and third are identical: Christian on one ankle, Dior on the other, seen when he takes her shoes and socks off for her when she's too tired after a Stella McCartney show.

"Why do you materialize yourself like that?" He asks. He's sitting on the toilet seat with his knees pulled up to his chest, listening to her shower behind the plastic curtain. "You're not a sweater, or a pair of pants."

When Chaerin laughs, the broken sound bounces off the tile. "I guess you won't want to see the other one, then."

"What other one?"

She sticks her head out of the bath tub, hair matted to her face and only halfway free of shampoo, and she grins at him before sticking her foot out too that spreads puddles on his floor. Her hand comes to rest against her right leg, index finger pointing at a smudge of ink on her inner thigh.

"It's... a barcode." Seungri blinks. "Really?"

Chaerin shrugs before disappearing back behind the curtain again. "Maybe she's born with it," she sings.

Chaerin books a job walking a tribute show for Alexander McQueen. If she's nervous she doesn't say anything, but her palms feel a little too dry when she lets Seungri take her hand for a second, right before they turn the corner to the dressing room and she lets go to take her model pass instead.

He takes her scarf, and her huge Audrey Hepburn-esque sunglasses, and her genuine leather Fendi bag she spent half her savings on, and hands her back her Starbucks before he sits on a couch with the other spectators to watch.

It's a circus. Seungri's been in the middle of a mob stampede, been in a mosh pit at a gothica concert and stood high above the stands in the nosebleed section right after their baseball team pulled off a regionwide championship, but he thinks that maybe all the waif-thin girls and their noisy assistants could give all of them a run for their money. It goes so quickly he thinks they're on fast forward, or he's in slow motion, watching hair pulling and dress-stitching and eye-shadowing. He wonders how they manage it, all of it.

Chaerin transforms into something he doesn't recognize. The next time she reappears out of the crowd, she is five inches taller and can barely open her eyes with how tight her hair has been pulled back. her skin is dusted over with a fine coat of white powder over a voluminous white dress, and nothing except her eyebrows are touched with a faint gray color.

She holds her name board with her polaroids in her hands; Seungri thinks she looks a little like an ice queen lining up for mug shots.

"Product of a big fucking fashion house," she says, sticking her arms out like a Barbie doll. He does his best to smile at her and tell her she looks beautiful, and the frown she gives him tells him it might not be what she wanted to hear.

Which may ring a little ironic, when he wakes up in the middle of the night to a crack of light streaming from his bathroom door, and stumbles towards it to push it open and see her sniffing a line of white up her nose. She catches him staring and wipes at her nostrils with two fingers.

"I'm on a diet," she tells him.

Seungri jerks backward, knocks his shin against the door. As he's clutching his leg against the backdrop of her laughing lazily at how clumsy he is, he surges forward and knocks the rest of the powder - the razor, baggie, small hand mirror, all of it - into the toilet.

Chaerin screams, jumping upright and dropping the tiny plastic straw onto the ground tile. The sound seems magnified as both of them stare, horrified, at the contents of her buzz sinking gently to the bottom of the porcelain bowl, powder diffusing into a cloudy white.

"What the fuck do you think you're doing!" She grabs his arm, shakes him hard, her eyes flashing more furious than he's ever seen her look in her life. "You fucking piece of shit, do you know how goddamn much that fucking cost me!" Another scream, guttural and raw; her bitten nails dig into his skin and he flinches.

"It's dangerous," he grits his teeth, not meeting her eyes. "It's not good for you, Chaerin! I'm trying to help - please, Chaerin, please, let me,"

"I don't need your motherfucking help you naive little bastard!" Her face scares him, eyes rimmed with red and lips flecked with red and voice red. "What gives you the right--"

"It was killing you," he says again, and her nails dig in harder.

"EVERYTHING IS KILLING ME!" She flings his arm away, fingers coming up to tear at her face and hair instead as she paces around the small room. It isn't until she starts to gasp little sobs that he realizes she's crying.

"Chaerin," He says. His voice echoes around the room and comes back to him in the silence. She doesn't answer, and he tries again, stretching forward to pat her timidly on the shoulder, smoothing awkwardly onto her back as far as he dares to go, "Chaerin, Chaerin. Chaerin-ah."

"Just get out." The same quiver in her voice strays to Seungri's legs as he stumbles backwards out of the flourescence all the way back to bed.



Their fights are more or less the same, and in between, Seungri always has battle wounds to nurse. He's considered telling his friends at school about how he got them, but thinks again that maybe he should take them to witness backstage at a fashion event themselves before he decides to sport 'a supermodel bit/hit/punched/kicked/otherwise hurt me' proudly on his chest.

Sometimes, Chaerin will stay away - where, Seungri would rather not think about - for months on end, and sometimes, she'll come back, sliding between the sheets to reach for him blindly in the half-light when he should be in class.

And no matter how at odds they are, Seungri always thinks that there is something right and contradictory to all the bad things in the way Chaerin's too-thin body fits neatly underneath his. In how she'll let him kiss her slow and gasping, tongues tangling halfway in between their mouths as she sighs and shudders, her hands smoothing the dark circles from under his eyes away. How their breaths match when he's clutching at her hip and she's mouthing wet at his neck and panting his name, Seungri, Seungri, Seungri, how she clenches around him and grinds up into his body until it's all white heat and he doesn't know where he ends and she begins.

Afterwards, she lets him see her, just her, stripped clean and naked from all the powerhouse brands she wears on a daily basis. She's never shy, even tugs Seungri's hands to press against her flat stomach, down the curve of her hip and and up again to smooth over her breasts as he flushes a dull pink.

"You're not a disney prince, Seungri," she says. "You can't save me."

But at the end of the day he likes to think he can. Because she may tell him different, but the way she leans into his every touch and lets her eyes flutter closed says she's begging to be swept away.

The thought expands, maybe, when she tells him just why she's not going to the house party on his college campus with him.

She is sitting in her Prada dress, in a heap on the floor of the stairwell staining it charcoal gray, and he's on the steps below her in his pressed shirt and jeans, and all her makeup has run off her face. Her Louboutin shoes are somewhere behind him from when she threw them at his head. She's muttering to the ground about how she used to lust after Hermes, but didn't have enough money until Changbae said he did - so she asked him how she could borrow some money and he said he'd have to have her do something for her - so then she's down on her knees with his cock in her mouth and she's crying and shes fourteen years old as he hands her fifty thousand won - and the next thing she knows it's seven months later and she's fucking some girl she used to be lab partners with from fifth period science class as Changbae and his friends hoot and holler and throw won at her face and - stuff it into her bra and - the room closes on her - and she just--

By now, her face is pressed into the palm of her hand, and the other hangs limp in Seungri's as she shakes her head.

"That was what school was for me," she says.

Seungri changes into a t-shirt.

He takes her to a small samgyupsul place around the corner because she says she needs to get drunk and he doesn't even have beer in his fridge. The manager brings them two bottles of soju to start off with and Chaerin tips hers back, head tilted towards the ceiling until it's all gone. Seungri is still holding her hand when she finishes her fifth bottle. He helps her wipe away a stripe of liquor on her chin, keeping his fingers light on her skin.

Afterwards he grills some meat and she plays with the strings of onion that come with their order, bending two back until the purple-edged skins make the Chanel symbol. She shows him.

"Do you always think about that stuff?" He says.

When she leans forward to grip at the hair at the back of his head and kiss him sloppy at the corner of his mouth, she tastes like alcohol and smoke. "I'm thinking about you right now," she slurs, then stops short. "Stop looking at me like that."

"I'm not." He's not sure what he's denying.

"Yea you are. You think this means something." She narrows her eyes at him. "This isn't Pretty Woman, okay?"

"Okay, because I don't have a million dollars, anyway." When it earns him one of her crumbled laughs, he tells her she's drunk but likes how warm her touch is on his knee.

They go to bed and she doesn't say anything of her usual manner, except to tell him goodnight and thank you, and to kiss his his nose, her eyelashes fluttering against his cheek.



Seungri comes home from class one afternoon to find Chaerin throwing up in the bathroom.

"Are you sick?" His mind turns to panic, wondering what he's missed over the past few weeks, the used condoms in his trash can. "Oh my god - are you - are you pr--"

"Relax. I'm fine. And I'm definitely not having your fucking child." Chaerin sits back on the white linoleum floor, one arm draped across the seat as the other roughly wipes at her mouth and nose. The bags under her eyes are darker than his own.

The first of his guilt alleviated, he feels his brow knit. "Then... what?"

She sighs, staring up at him from underneath her eyelashes like she doesn't want to tell him. "I ate too much," she says.

"Oh," he replies, relieved, and then the muscles in his arms tense. "But I don't have any food in the house. Did you go out and buy some?"

Her gaze is unwavering, steady, stark in the aftermath of puking her guts out in a toilet not her own. "I ate too much," she repeats. Simple.

The individual vertebrae of her spine leads directly up to the double back-to-back c's at her neck, cutting, harsh, and it makes her look almost alien to him as he realizes just what - as he stares at her ribs - as he drops his backpack and sits on the lip of the bath tub a long time after she has flushed the toilet and gargled into the sink and left, the sour after-smell a rather sick realization of what his life is now.

"Jesus, can you look any more surprised," she says, a roll of her eyes right before she gets up.

(And he tries to tell her, he does, but all he gets back is, "I told you not to try and change me.")

The last Seungri sees of Chaerin is at the afterparty of a Max Azria show when he comes by to drop off the last of her things. She looks a little yellowed around the edges but he guesses it's just the makeup, or the lighting of the bar, maybe, with her downing shot after shot in a game with a few other models and a bartender.

She barely looks at him when he sets her things down on the floor by her feet, but when he straightens up to leave she catches him by the wrist.

"You should stay a while," she says. "I'll buy you that fizzy soda shit you like."

Seungri shrugs, avoiding Chaerin's glassy, unfocused eyes. "You probably don't want to. I'm sorry, I have a paper to work on."

"Paper?" Chaerin's head cocks to the side. "As in school? You're actually going to class now?"

He nods. There's a moment of uncomfortable silence between them, Seungri staring at Chaerin's fingers still clamped around his wrist. It's broken by a burst of laughter from the models sitting behind her after the bartender tells them a joke, and Chaerin seems to jerk out of a trance before she drops his hand with a snort, bony fingers slipping past his before they're back on the bar top.

"So I'll ... I'll go," Seungri says. He takes a step backwards.

"Okay."

Seungri thinks she looks a little sad as she opens and closes her mouth, out of things and couplets and advice to spout for once, and then he turns and walks away.

A few years later he sees a vague mention of her in a television report as one of the youngest South Korean models ever to walk in Venice fashion week, and he turns the volume up to see a girl with sharp cheek-and-shoulderbones strut down a catwalk swathed in million dollar fabric, looking like she's about three seconds away from crumbling to dust. Her eyes are huge against her gaunt face; the biggest part of her arms are her wristbones.

She is translucent, the veins of her body standing out an ugly green against beige.

Seungri has to change the channel.



The Christian Lacroix show on that first night is when Seungri stands lost and Chaerin is the first person who will make eye contact with him. Before he knows what he's doing, he's asking her where the bathroom is and she's telling him there is none back here, silly boy, and to stay for the after-party.

Which he does, feeling fantastically out of place at her side amongst the People Who Mean Something and the hors d'oeuvres that probably cost more than a month's rent. She blows a stream of smoke from her mouth and grins at him, Cheshire beneath a face scrubbed clean of makeup.

Seungri thinks he's never seen anybody this beautiful. Maybe there is something to dating supermodels.

"You sure you don't want one?" Seungri shakes his head at the pack of cigarettes she offers with a wrinkled nose, and she laughs. "God, you really don't belong here. How the hell did you get backstage, anyway?"

He shows her his press pass. "I work on our campus web blog and um, I'm doing an article on materialism and how it dehumanizes people, so. So they said I could come watch." Actually, this probably isn't the best thing to be telling somebody like Chaerin, he thinks. "I'm Seungri," he adds hopefully, maybe as an attempt to change the subject.

Her eyes stay amused. "Deep," she says. "So, Seungri. Did you finally get to pee?" And when he looks at her blankly, she snorts and shakes her head, looking past him at something over his shoulder. "I knew you really didn't have to go to the bathroom. What a terrible line to use, really."

Seungri feels the color rush to his cheeks, and before he can let himself subside to shame and slinking away with his tail between his legs, he reminds himself that she still wants him here. "I want to see you again," he says.

That snaps her attention back to him, cigarette poised in her fingers halfway to her mouth. "You." Her tone is condescending, but a glint in her eyes says maybe she's not one-hundred percent blowing him off yet.

"Yes." He fidgets under her stare. "Please."

And then she leans in, and he breathes (and she smells like new leather seats and silk charmeuse, like thousand-dollar perfume and factory smoke). There are a few freckles scattered around her cheeks, he notes; they make her human. "You probably can't handle me, you know."

It's after she kisses him, cold, by the curb, with the parties and the lights behind them and the goosebumps rising on his neck that he has a surefire answer for her. "I can take it," he says.

note: cl/seungri, what am i doing ;~;