[fic] claustrophobic. joon/thunder
Author: sesame_seed
Genre: General
Character(s)/Pairing(s): Joon/Thunder-ish
Rating: PG
Claustrophobic
The room is too small.
Clothes, widescreen TV, futon on the floor, and there's barely room for anything else. There are times when Sanghyun doesn't mind, when it's enough to have a warm nest to burrow into at night, when he and Joon talk in whispers after the lights are out, and it's so nice to have company and not be alone in the midst of all the storm and stress that comes with the job.
There are also times when the lack of space is like a vise, squeezing him out. Tonight, the feeling is acute.
Joon is back ahead of him, a rare enough occurrence nowadays, and barely lifts his head when Sanghyun enters. Their schedules are out of sync. He's gotten used to jerking awake as the lights turn on in the middle of the night, hearing Joon's muttered "Sorry, sorry," and drifting back to sleep, reassured. He's not entirely sure anymore how to deal with Joon awake and present but not dialed up to 100 for the cameras. It would be easier with Mir around to jolly up the atmosphere, Seungho and G.O. to provide some meaningful distraction, but the rest of the members are still out at dinner; Sanghyun had left early, pleading an upset stomach. It's a good enough excuse for whenever he prefers to be alone.
He's not alone, though, and Joon is filling up the space more than the rest of them combined would have been able to do. It's impossible to sit around in the room and not feel oppressed by the silence, but it's even more impossible to ask what's wrong: speech wouldn't be welcome, and he's never been good at intruding where he's not wanted, presuming affection where it isn't completely obvious. He's been called shy, distant; in reality, he's just a coward about putting himself out for rejection.
Still, he can't stay here. "Are you -- I'm getting water. Do you want something to drink?"
The offer is strategic: it's difficult to object to politeness, it might actually open up a decent, human conversation, and at the very least, it'll get him out of the room.
"I'm good. Thanks."
Joon's voice is a little raspy, and Sanghyun thinks that water would actually do him good, but there's no point in pushing after he's refused. Sanghyun drops his bag at the foot of the futon and toes it into the corner, out of sight and unobtrusive. Then he escapes.
It's chillier outside, but goosebumps, he thinks, are infinitely preferable to stifling. Hunching a little against the cold, he grabs two glasses from the kitchen and fills them, then brings both over to the living room table and sets them down. Maybe Joon will change his mind. He climbs onto the sofa and gathers all the cushions around him like a kind of makeshift blanket, lets his eyes slide shut, thinks. Something had happened last year, during the summer. Sanghyun thinks that he ought to know what it was -- he was right here, after all, the proverbial scene of the crime -- but all he knows is that one day he realized Joon wasn't smiling as much, wasn't goofing off when the cameras weren't rolling, and he didn't even know when it had started. He's so self-centered that it was a couple of weeks before he realized it wasn't aimed at him in particular.
He'd asked Mir about it -- Mir's the only one he's comfortable asking, who won't think he's overstepping his bounds or prying, because Mir will go a lot further in the name of prying -- but Mir didn't know, either. "Just leave him for a bit," he'd said knowledgeably. "He'll snap out of it."
He's not you, Sanghyun had thought. He was smart enough not to say it, at least.
Seungho's the most likely among them to know what's going on, but for the same reasons that Sanghyun flinches from questioning him. He's the eldest, the leader, and he hears things from the management that he doesn't always pass on. Sanghyun has caught him and Joon with their heads close together in the living room, talking in hushed voices until they realize his presence; then Joon will lean back and prop his legs on the table and Seungho will get up to mess around in the kitchen, and Sanghyun will feel, again, like the new member shoehorned in 15 days before the debut, accepted only nominally, still on the outside looking in.
Joon had been the one to break through that.
Now the thought of Joon's dark, unhappy face does something to his insides; the room's too small, he thinks again. It's squeezing the breath out of him. Tomorrow, he'll petition Jihoon-hyung for a bigger dorm.
(Of course, if he had the courage to ask for that, he'd also have the courage to ask Joon what the damned matter was, and maybe, all those years ago, he'd have had the courage to ask his father what the hell he thought he was doing, what he expected his family to -- in any case, he's not that person.)
He dozes off, thinking of what it means to be helpless.
***
They were happy, very long ago, and then they were poor, and then Sandara became famous, and then. He didn't understand why it was happening, but couldn't ask: it could make things worse. It could make them angry. His mother walked around with tight lips. Sandara and Durami told him not to worry. There was nothing wrong, there was nothing wrong, just the weight of the house crushing down on them, destroying the space and filling it with shadows.
Afterwards -- long afterwards, far past the point of relevance -- he asked, and his mother responded in tears; he reached up as far as he could and hugged her, still not knowing what had happened, but hoping it would help, if only for a little bit.
***
It's the sense of not being alone rather than the weight of the blanket that alerts him. He struggles awake in time to see Joon heading back into their room through the sharp, angular shadows thrown by the lights, already on the verge of disappearing. He's so thin, a wraith against the whitewashed walls. It is impossible that one person can take up so much space.
"Wait." Sanghyun stretches out a hand, blurts it out without thinking. If Joon continues, he'll shut the door behind him, and at the moment, with dream and reality tangled in a knot, it seems the most natural thing in the world that that cannot be allowed to happen. Death by suffocation, death by drowning; his subconscious isn't very imaginative.
Joon turns after a hitch. He even manufactures a smile out of somewhere.
"Whoa, you're awake. Did you want bedtime stories? Seungho-hyung's much better at those than I am." He sounds completely normal, but if the fangirls saw him now, they wouldn't recognize him. Sanghyun has often envied that ability to set a firm demarcation line between work and reality, but he doesn't envy it now, the exhaustion involved in maintaining it and the blurring of other lines, the more important ones.
He says, "I got you water," and points to it on the table. He feels a little bit like a puppy offering up a ragged bone: one infinitessimal service, not even wanted, apparently the only kind of help he can give to other people. His face burns.
There's a flicker in Joon's expression that he can't read it. He's never been very good at social cues.
He'll take it as a positive sign, though, when Joon smiles again, brighter and longer; the brackets appear on either side of his lips, remaining as he returns to pick up the glass Sanghyun had filled for him. "You're such a good kid," he says, sounding fond, and it's ridiculous how special that makes Sanghyun feel, ridiculous that such a small thing means so much. A puppy waiting for a pat on the head. "Don't stay up too late -- you babies need your sleep."
Joon pads through the doorway again, and the door shuts. Sanghyun hugs his knees. It's a lot warmer with the blanket. The cushions have scattered to make a little fort around him, and he pokes at one of them, watches the dent in it form and disappear.
Maybe he builds up little barricades of space around himself, but they give way easily to friends; he feels awkward bridging those spaces, but he never minds when others make the effort. Fundamentally, he's invulnerable, because in the end he keeps himself back. His pride and self-worth are rarely at risk. Joon is different; with Joon, there are no barricades until he's hurt, and then the barricades are thorns -- like a porcupine, bristling. A rose that forgets its defenses until each new advance from a predator. Sanghyun has never had trouble reaching out to soothe Joon's physical and mental injuries before, but Joon has always welcomed it before. The thorns are up now, and it's antithetical to Sanghyun's nature to impale himself on them.
It could hurt.
The crushing wave of shame rises in him like a blush; he can feel the blood flooding his cheeks again. He wonders if it is possible to die of shame.
Tomorrow, he thinks, trying to ignore the insubstantiality of that word. Tomorrow, he'll go to Joon in the evening, and wrap his arms around him, hug him tight, because the room is too small, but maybe if there is less space between them the rest of the room will seem bigger. And he'll ask what's the matter, but even if there's no response, or if the response is one that he doesn't understand (because he thinks that a lot of the things that trouble Joon are things he can't understand), it might help a little.
Or maybe he won't, because he's not that person.
But maybe he will.
End
Note re: names -- I have no idea what they call each other in private, so just sticking to their stage names for now. I remember Joon and Thunder forgetting each other's stage names not long after their debut, which seems to imply that they called each other by real names then, but it also doesn't seem beyond the realm of possibility that they started calling each other by their stage names to prevent further such hiccups. They refer to Mir as Cheolyong pretty often, so it's likely that that's what they call him off-camera, but Mir's cell phone entry for Thunder is 'Doong Doong-ie hyung', which suggests that at least Mir thinks of him as Cheondoong? WHY IS THIS SO DIFFICULT.
Genre: General
Character(s)/Pairing(s): Joon/Thunder-ish
Rating: PG
Claustrophobic
The room is too small.
Clothes, widescreen TV, futon on the floor, and there's barely room for anything else. There are times when Sanghyun doesn't mind, when it's enough to have a warm nest to burrow into at night, when he and Joon talk in whispers after the lights are out, and it's so nice to have company and not be alone in the midst of all the storm and stress that comes with the job.
There are also times when the lack of space is like a vise, squeezing him out. Tonight, the feeling is acute.
Joon is back ahead of him, a rare enough occurrence nowadays, and barely lifts his head when Sanghyun enters. Their schedules are out of sync. He's gotten used to jerking awake as the lights turn on in the middle of the night, hearing Joon's muttered "Sorry, sorry," and drifting back to sleep, reassured. He's not entirely sure anymore how to deal with Joon awake and present but not dialed up to 100 for the cameras. It would be easier with Mir around to jolly up the atmosphere, Seungho and G.O. to provide some meaningful distraction, but the rest of the members are still out at dinner; Sanghyun had left early, pleading an upset stomach. It's a good enough excuse for whenever he prefers to be alone.
He's not alone, though, and Joon is filling up the space more than the rest of them combined would have been able to do. It's impossible to sit around in the room and not feel oppressed by the silence, but it's even more impossible to ask what's wrong: speech wouldn't be welcome, and he's never been good at intruding where he's not wanted, presuming affection where it isn't completely obvious. He's been called shy, distant; in reality, he's just a coward about putting himself out for rejection.
Still, he can't stay here. "Are you -- I'm getting water. Do you want something to drink?"
The offer is strategic: it's difficult to object to politeness, it might actually open up a decent, human conversation, and at the very least, it'll get him out of the room.
"I'm good. Thanks."
Joon's voice is a little raspy, and Sanghyun thinks that water would actually do him good, but there's no point in pushing after he's refused. Sanghyun drops his bag at the foot of the futon and toes it into the corner, out of sight and unobtrusive. Then he escapes.
It's chillier outside, but goosebumps, he thinks, are infinitely preferable to stifling. Hunching a little against the cold, he grabs two glasses from the kitchen and fills them, then brings both over to the living room table and sets them down. Maybe Joon will change his mind. He climbs onto the sofa and gathers all the cushions around him like a kind of makeshift blanket, lets his eyes slide shut, thinks. Something had happened last year, during the summer. Sanghyun thinks that he ought to know what it was -- he was right here, after all, the proverbial scene of the crime -- but all he knows is that one day he realized Joon wasn't smiling as much, wasn't goofing off when the cameras weren't rolling, and he didn't even know when it had started. He's so self-centered that it was a couple of weeks before he realized it wasn't aimed at him in particular.
He'd asked Mir about it -- Mir's the only one he's comfortable asking, who won't think he's overstepping his bounds or prying, because Mir will go a lot further in the name of prying -- but Mir didn't know, either. "Just leave him for a bit," he'd said knowledgeably. "He'll snap out of it."
He's not you, Sanghyun had thought. He was smart enough not to say it, at least.
Seungho's the most likely among them to know what's going on, but for the same reasons that Sanghyun flinches from questioning him. He's the eldest, the leader, and he hears things from the management that he doesn't always pass on. Sanghyun has caught him and Joon with their heads close together in the living room, talking in hushed voices until they realize his presence; then Joon will lean back and prop his legs on the table and Seungho will get up to mess around in the kitchen, and Sanghyun will feel, again, like the new member shoehorned in 15 days before the debut, accepted only nominally, still on the outside looking in.
Joon had been the one to break through that.
Now the thought of Joon's dark, unhappy face does something to his insides; the room's too small, he thinks again. It's squeezing the breath out of him. Tomorrow, he'll petition Jihoon-hyung for a bigger dorm.
(Of course, if he had the courage to ask for that, he'd also have the courage to ask Joon what the damned matter was, and maybe, all those years ago, he'd have had the courage to ask his father what the hell he thought he was doing, what he expected his family to -- in any case, he's not that person.)
He dozes off, thinking of what it means to be helpless.
***
They were happy, very long ago, and then they were poor, and then Sandara became famous, and then. He didn't understand why it was happening, but couldn't ask: it could make things worse. It could make them angry. His mother walked around with tight lips. Sandara and Durami told him not to worry. There was nothing wrong, there was nothing wrong, just the weight of the house crushing down on them, destroying the space and filling it with shadows.
Afterwards -- long afterwards, far past the point of relevance -- he asked, and his mother responded in tears; he reached up as far as he could and hugged her, still not knowing what had happened, but hoping it would help, if only for a little bit.
***
It's the sense of not being alone rather than the weight of the blanket that alerts him. He struggles awake in time to see Joon heading back into their room through the sharp, angular shadows thrown by the lights, already on the verge of disappearing. He's so thin, a wraith against the whitewashed walls. It is impossible that one person can take up so much space.
"Wait." Sanghyun stretches out a hand, blurts it out without thinking. If Joon continues, he'll shut the door behind him, and at the moment, with dream and reality tangled in a knot, it seems the most natural thing in the world that that cannot be allowed to happen. Death by suffocation, death by drowning; his subconscious isn't very imaginative.
Joon turns after a hitch. He even manufactures a smile out of somewhere.
"Whoa, you're awake. Did you want bedtime stories? Seungho-hyung's much better at those than I am." He sounds completely normal, but if the fangirls saw him now, they wouldn't recognize him. Sanghyun has often envied that ability to set a firm demarcation line between work and reality, but he doesn't envy it now, the exhaustion involved in maintaining it and the blurring of other lines, the more important ones.
He says, "I got you water," and points to it on the table. He feels a little bit like a puppy offering up a ragged bone: one infinitessimal service, not even wanted, apparently the only kind of help he can give to other people. His face burns.
There's a flicker in Joon's expression that he can't read it. He's never been very good at social cues.
He'll take it as a positive sign, though, when Joon smiles again, brighter and longer; the brackets appear on either side of his lips, remaining as he returns to pick up the glass Sanghyun had filled for him. "You're such a good kid," he says, sounding fond, and it's ridiculous how special that makes Sanghyun feel, ridiculous that such a small thing means so much. A puppy waiting for a pat on the head. "Don't stay up too late -- you babies need your sleep."
Joon pads through the doorway again, and the door shuts. Sanghyun hugs his knees. It's a lot warmer with the blanket. The cushions have scattered to make a little fort around him, and he pokes at one of them, watches the dent in it form and disappear.
Maybe he builds up little barricades of space around himself, but they give way easily to friends; he feels awkward bridging those spaces, but he never minds when others make the effort. Fundamentally, he's invulnerable, because in the end he keeps himself back. His pride and self-worth are rarely at risk. Joon is different; with Joon, there are no barricades until he's hurt, and then the barricades are thorns -- like a porcupine, bristling. A rose that forgets its defenses until each new advance from a predator. Sanghyun has never had trouble reaching out to soothe Joon's physical and mental injuries before, but Joon has always welcomed it before. The thorns are up now, and it's antithetical to Sanghyun's nature to impale himself on them.
It could hurt.
The crushing wave of shame rises in him like a blush; he can feel the blood flooding his cheeks again. He wonders if it is possible to die of shame.
Tomorrow, he thinks, trying to ignore the insubstantiality of that word. Tomorrow, he'll go to Joon in the evening, and wrap his arms around him, hug him tight, because the room is too small, but maybe if there is less space between them the rest of the room will seem bigger. And he'll ask what's the matter, but even if there's no response, or if the response is one that he doesn't understand (because he thinks that a lot of the things that trouble Joon are things he can't understand), it might help a little.
Or maybe he won't, because he's not that person.
But maybe he will.
End
Note re: names -- I have no idea what they call each other in private, so just sticking to their stage names for now. I remember Joon and Thunder forgetting each other's stage names not long after their debut, which seems to imply that they called each other by real names then, but it also doesn't seem beyond the realm of possibility that they started calling each other by their stage names to prevent further such hiccups. They refer to Mir as Cheolyong pretty often, so it's likely that that's what they call him off-camera, but Mir's cell phone entry for Thunder is 'Doong Doong-ie hyung', which suggests that at least Mir thinks of him as Cheondoong? WHY IS THIS SO DIFFICULT.