F*CKAGE
Title: F*CKAGE
Pairing: Jin/Joonmyun
Rating: PG
Warnings: unbeta'd angst, alternate canon
Disclaimer: I own nothing, written just for fun.
Summary: They were never supposed to debut together. In fact, Joonmyun was never supposed to debut at all.
A/N: Inspired by BANDAGE, specifically the beach scene with Asako and Yukiya, and these photos.
aka, 2k of angsty reflection on a beach, written for bluedreaming Thanks for listening to my obscure ideas, and Merry Christmas! <3
Late Autumn 2012
They weren’t supposed to debut together. Jin is the tumble of silky hair, the disarming blink of long lashes that extend like black rays of sun. Jin is sharp laughter and social ease and too much sake sucked down til his eyes glitter, til everything glitters.
Nothing should be glittering right now, on a deserted beach in the damp sand and drift litter, shivering to the cold pound of waves under an empty, starless sky. Somehow Jin manages to shine even here, in the elegant flicker of his wrist as he shakes a cigarette from a crumpled pack, in the swagger of his scuffed boots across the dirty sand. Jin never stops moving, even in his sleep, even when it’s dark and quiet and Joonmyun should not be watching him from the other hotel bed.
Joonmyun ends up watching more often than not, in the back, on the sidelines, and it only makes sense. He is the kouhai, the wide-eyed foreigner in a strange, strange land, the shy and sweet and sensitive one. Can you look a little cuter, Jun, hunch your shoulders more. No eyeliner for the kid, that’s Jin’s territory. If you mess up your Japanese a bit, then blush all embarrassed, the older female fans will eat it up. Yes, that’s it, Akanishi-san’s-partner, bite your lip and open your eyes. Wider! Perfect.
Half the photographers and stylists and talk hosts they’ve worked with in the past six months can’t remember his name, not even the truncated stage version. Nevermind that “Jun” is a Japanese name, too. It makes it all the more easy for Joonmyun to recede into the background as Jin’s polite Korean shadow, the blonde haired blank eyed angel to Jin’s smirky, sexy devil.
“Fuck.” Jin fumbles his lighter and almost drops his open pack in the wet sand. Joonmyun reaches up to catch it as Jin’s fingers snatch at the crinkled plastic wrapping, only half torn away. Their fingers brush, cold against cold, and Jin swears again, stepping back.
Jin swears often, carelessly, without impact. At first it caught Joonmyun off guard, the harsh trill of words he recognized from watching anime raws, but now it’s faded into one more Jin Thing cluttering the dull backdrop of Joonmyun’s existence. Joonmyun notices everything about Jin.
It would be hard not to. Jin is a star, and Joonmyun never expected to debut at all. Seven years of hard work as a trainee, of being passed over for brighter, sassier, taller, sexier, more talented dongsaengs--that took a lot out of him, shaved down his ego and flattened his expectations into maybes.
Then came the numb pain, the bright humiliation of being designated leader of The Boy Group That Fell Through. EXO (code name M1 and M2) exploded in the brilliance of too many scandals before half of the members’ teasers were even released. The remaining trailers were leaked to the internet and speculated over by vicious and sympathetic netizens alike, but the public never found out the majority of the underlying mismanagement disasters that catalyzed their burn out.
EXO, twelve bright sparks too 4D to capture the hearts of the average young girls in their target fanbase, such a shame. At least that’s what the managers told them when they handed back their provisional contracts, VOID stamped in red across the signatures. All twelve dismissed in one three minute meeting.
When he walked out of the conference room, liquid knees and brittle spine functioning on auto pilot to propel him across the floor, Joonmyun knew he was done. Done with SM, done with his absent parents that wouldn’t find out til they returned from Oslo the next week, done with the disappointing husk of himself that was left.
He is what management’s been molding him into for the past 7.5 years, so they’ve only themselves to blame for his failure, their failure. Joonmyun is only one of twelve, all suffocated out of emotional capabilities before they ever took to the stage or opened their first fanmail. Twelve scandal-ridden, soul-suppressed boys who were stamped failures before they even met the crowds of idealistic school girls panting for a safe, impersonal version of the boy next door, a false sense of intimacy to hang on their locker doors and tape to the corners of their desks.
Joonmyun is bitter but he doesn’t blame them, any of them. He wouldn’t want to buy stickers of his dead eyes, ghostly complexion, plastic smile either.
Jin is a shell himself, as Joonmyun has discovered in lapse of months piling up on their joint career. Not just a mask on for the public and off again at home, he’s a hollow chassis with layers of rotating skins, morphing and changing so quickly without warning that Joonmyun’s not sure if there’s anything real underneath. If there is, if he’s glimpsed it, it was camouflaged too well for Joonmyun to catch on.
Jin can tease a show host on air about her pretty pink lips and stroll out of the filming studio muttering about the ugly bitch and how much her waxy makeup made him want to puke, can you please go get me a Pocari Sweat now, hurry up Jun.
Jin always remembers his name, his full name, though he uses “Jun” most often for convenience. Sometimes he hums Joonmyun’s name as he drops a starbucks from the konbini in his lap. A sugary caramel something and not the americano Joonmyun always orders, but at least it’s coffee, at least he remembers Joonmyun exists.
Jin is only cruel because he’s careless, and as much as Joonmyun hopes against hope that it isn’t, that’s probably the only reason he’s kind to a nobody like Joonmyun. A vague responsibility, someone to grudgingly look after on his bad days, a bland and boring coworker to bestow an obliging smile and wink to when he’s feeling generous--that is all Joonmyun is to Jin.
Joonmyun still wants, though. He wants to crack open Jin’s shell til his emptiness of secrets and undirected anger belongs, in part, to Joonmyun as well. Joonmyun knows better than to want though, watching Jin corner a sound tech with his smooth smiles and rough laugh and sugary caramel coffees on Monday and walk by without a hello on Thursday. He knows better than better, but Joonmyun has been aching to trace the corrugated plush of Jin’s chapped lips since Day Six, and the heart perforating ache of his longing grows along with his disappointment with every teasing wink Jin throws at him, throws past him.
Jin is an elaborately camouflaged empty shell, and maybe Joonmyun is the machine his SM managers declared him: cold, hard, heartless, lifeless, lighter than any human with a heart full of love and hope should be. He knows better than anyone how mechanical his life feels as he trudges through the motions, from bed to sink to studio to recording booth to studio. Then back to bed for a few hours when he’s lucky, or to the back seat of a van or a lobby floor when he’s not. (He’s usually not.)
Sleep, wash, dance, sing, dance and stretch, sleep--or try to. These days, Joonmyun lies awake in the dark and wonders if maybe he’s forgotten how to sleep, if it’s possible for the human body to erase muscle memory for innate, involuntary functions. Maybe one day he’ll wake up and have forgotten how to breathe, heart frozen mid-pump, and he’ll continue to exist as no more than a company machine, exactly what they wanted from him in the first place.
Joonmyun wonders if he’ll still hurt then, if he’ll ache with the dull emptiness that echoes inside him, that echoes Jin’s hollow spaces. These are the things he daydreams about, these days.
Jin didn’t want Joonmyun’s pretty face, vapid smile, bleached blonde on the jacket of what was supposed to be his solo album. Jin had been promised he could go his own way, write his own style when he left his original group. And then he got stuck with Joonmyun, the talented misfit, the cynical dreamer.
They didn’t want his pretty ballad songs, the lyrics scribbled on the backs of convenience store receipts. When he was younger Joonmyun’s pen spewed love and longing for love as fast as he could gulp down his cheap burnt coffee. He sketched dreams for a future he suspected he’d never experience, knows now he’s unable to enjoy if he ever does. Joonmyun is caught in the gears of the idol producing machine, and will be for another 12.5 more years.
He’ll have wrinkles then, deeper creases around his eyes, deeper creases criscrossing his heart, especially if he’s subjected daily to the professional and charming torture that is Jin’s smile. Jin’s fingers digging into Joonmyun’s hip during photoshoots. Jin’s fingers pressed to the side seams of his own threadbare jeans as he bows out of the dressing room at the end of the day without a backward glance.
Joonmyun hates himself for it, dropping hardened pebbles of self-loathing through the slats of his ribs with every meaningless smile and hair ruffle til they pile up like coins in the piggy bank Jin bought for his baby daughter. She’s three months old now, likes dogs and dolls and the color purple. Joonmyun is her favorite doll when Meisa brings her to the green room for a good luck kiss before their concerts.
Theia tugs on his hair, gurgles at his nose, screws up her face and screams when Joonmyun’s eyes are ugly red with tears or fatigue. Toys are supposed to be beautiful and never cry, or else you throw them away. Joonmyun is a porcelain doll to Jin’s charming boyish sleaze, and he hopes to God he won’t have to break open to extract the weight of self-hatred and acid want he’s been cacheing for months. Because the day Joonmyun breaks, he’ll be useless.
Joonmyun hates himself for it, his useless weakness, but here they are, day after day, Jin & Jun and with their song smiles and their cheery tunes taking over the charts and the TV ads and the spreads in Potato. It’s an unexplainable phenomenon really, because Koreans (with one exception) don’t take the charts by storm in Japan, and Joonmyun is no Tohoshinki.
So really, Joonmyun shouldn’t have debuted at all, he shouldn’t be here. But after seven years, six months, and thirteen days of following orders and diets and schedules, he handed over his passport without question. He dusted off the suitcase he hadn’t used since middle school, the blue one with the broken handle and a curling Spongebob sticker on the front of the expensive leather. Now it’s back in a closet, this time in his tiny one room apartment on the outskirts of Tokyo.
The sticker could have easily been removed with a bit of rubbing alcohol, but Joonmyun didn’t touch it. The sticker is from London, the first vacation his parents actually took him and his brother along on, and the last one before Joonmyun threw himself into the frenzied limbo of training.
Debut is exhausting, but as lonely as Joonmyun’s hotel bed is he doesn’t particularly long for home, for the cold company lobby or the sprawling house his parents hardly live in. When Joonmyun gets homesick--late at night in the scalding shower, or sitting off to the side with his bento at lunch--it’s always for a place he can never get back to. The kindergarten class where his teacher, a pretty young woman with soft angora sweaters and softer curves, held him when he cried til he smelled of her violet perfume.
The first dance studio he set foot in, where turns and leaps made him feel like flying and not like shaky exhaustion and the lactic burn of not enough carbs, not enough oxygen. The largest noraebang of the shitty joint behind the dorms, where friends and rivals gathered after practice to drink and sing themselves raw, where Joonmyun kissed boys and a few girls, but never the ones he ached too.
That’s called nostalgia, Jin tells him, natsukashii, and Joonmyun’s heard that word often enough to know there’s no direct translation to Korean so he just nods along. Feelings, though, feelings don’t need translations when you have fingers and lips and tears to speak through, and, at times, music. Music is the only thing Joonmyun shares with Jin right now, so he wrings out all his misery and discards his crumpled up dreams through the notes. Night after night, Joonmyun sings and shines.
You see, Joonmyun wanted to be a star, his fair skin glowing on lit up ads at intersections, his voice blaring from loudspeakers outside phone stores, the very roots of his bleached hair adored by adolescents across the nation.
You see, once Joonmyun was finally a star his parents would be forced to look at him, to hear him, never mind that he’d be singing and spouting the words someone else predetermined for him based on maximum marketability, in clothes too flashy for his classic good looks. He was convinced that if his parents could just see him from another point of view they would start to listen.
What he didn’t factor in was the possibility they would see him from another side but not the one he wanted--a side that wasn’t truly Joonmyun anymore--and not recognize even a hair of him.
“What are you thinking about?” Jin’s finger knocks the cigarette in his hand, tap tap. A flick of ash, a splash of foam, the stinging spray of sand against his ankles--Joonmyun’s brain registers his surroundings in snapshots, disjointed glimpses of the scene around him.
He aches for a taste, a lick of bitter ash, a scrape of wind chapped lips. The wind corrodes his resolve, tears at his hairline and each hair of his waxed eyebrows. Joonmyun curls forward, rocking in the sheets of harsh air that rip tears from his eyes and dry them before they have the chance to fall.
“I dunno,” Joonmyun says, even though his Japanese is getting better, good enough for a real answer. Even though it’s rude to brush Jin off like that.
Jin laughs, a high rasp that rips into a phlegmy cough. And Joonmyun really can’t afford to be rude to Jin. Jin is his chance, his last chance before Joonmyun gives up on himself, never mind the demands of the world and the noose of contracts tying him to life.
Jin is his chance, and doubtlessly the reason their debut track was a hit single, and their current release is topping Oricon for the second week in a row. Jin and Jun, fallen star and rising angel--there’s something so pitifully endearing about their concept that even the most skeptical audience can’t help weep through their ballads. Jin and Jun, jaded popstar and the most caring leader that never was--the entertainment syndicate finally found a way to perpetually capitalize on their ruination by scandal.
And tomorrow they’ll be in Osaka, and the day after that Miyagi, and the week after that back to the outskirts of Tokyo for a brief reprieve; a shower, a cigarette, and a steamer of limp vegetables eaten alone on a cold balcony. Joonmyun endures because he is steel, he glints and never tarnishes.
You see, Joonmyun wanted to be a star and now he has become one, just not on the same orbit that he always supposed he would follow. He gives interviews on NHK instead of KBS, his face is on Pocky ads instead of Pepero boxes. Joonmyun is brilliant, a rising star, and his parents who only vacation in Europe will never notice. And if Jin hasn’t already, Joonmyun doubts he ever will.
Pairing: Jin/Joonmyun
Rating: PG
Warnings: unbeta'd angst, alternate canon
Disclaimer: I own nothing, written just for fun.
Summary: They were never supposed to debut together. In fact, Joonmyun was never supposed to debut at all.
A/N: Inspired by BANDAGE, specifically the beach scene with Asako and Yukiya, and these photos.
aka, 2k of angsty reflection on a beach, written for bluedreaming Thanks for listening to my obscure ideas, and Merry Christmas! <3
Late Autumn 2012
They weren’t supposed to debut together. Jin is the tumble of silky hair, the disarming blink of long lashes that extend like black rays of sun. Jin is sharp laughter and social ease and too much sake sucked down til his eyes glitter, til everything glitters.
Nothing should be glittering right now, on a deserted beach in the damp sand and drift litter, shivering to the cold pound of waves under an empty, starless sky. Somehow Jin manages to shine even here, in the elegant flicker of his wrist as he shakes a cigarette from a crumpled pack, in the swagger of his scuffed boots across the dirty sand. Jin never stops moving, even in his sleep, even when it’s dark and quiet and Joonmyun should not be watching him from the other hotel bed.
Joonmyun ends up watching more often than not, in the back, on the sidelines, and it only makes sense. He is the kouhai, the wide-eyed foreigner in a strange, strange land, the shy and sweet and sensitive one. Can you look a little cuter, Jun, hunch your shoulders more. No eyeliner for the kid, that’s Jin’s territory. If you mess up your Japanese a bit, then blush all embarrassed, the older female fans will eat it up. Yes, that’s it, Akanishi-san’s-partner, bite your lip and open your eyes. Wider! Perfect.
Half the photographers and stylists and talk hosts they’ve worked with in the past six months can’t remember his name, not even the truncated stage version. Nevermind that “Jun” is a Japanese name, too. It makes it all the more easy for Joonmyun to recede into the background as Jin’s polite Korean shadow, the blonde haired blank eyed angel to Jin’s smirky, sexy devil.
“Fuck.” Jin fumbles his lighter and almost drops his open pack in the wet sand. Joonmyun reaches up to catch it as Jin’s fingers snatch at the crinkled plastic wrapping, only half torn away. Their fingers brush, cold against cold, and Jin swears again, stepping back.
Jin swears often, carelessly, without impact. At first it caught Joonmyun off guard, the harsh trill of words he recognized from watching anime raws, but now it’s faded into one more Jin Thing cluttering the dull backdrop of Joonmyun’s existence. Joonmyun notices everything about Jin.
It would be hard not to. Jin is a star, and Joonmyun never expected to debut at all. Seven years of hard work as a trainee, of being passed over for brighter, sassier, taller, sexier, more talented dongsaengs--that took a lot out of him, shaved down his ego and flattened his expectations into maybes.
Then came the numb pain, the bright humiliation of being designated leader of The Boy Group That Fell Through. EXO (code name M1 and M2) exploded in the brilliance of too many scandals before half of the members’ teasers were even released. The remaining trailers were leaked to the internet and speculated over by vicious and sympathetic netizens alike, but the public never found out the majority of the underlying mismanagement disasters that catalyzed their burn out.
EXO, twelve bright sparks too 4D to capture the hearts of the average young girls in their target fanbase, such a shame. At least that’s what the managers told them when they handed back their provisional contracts, VOID stamped in red across the signatures. All twelve dismissed in one three minute meeting.
When he walked out of the conference room, liquid knees and brittle spine functioning on auto pilot to propel him across the floor, Joonmyun knew he was done. Done with SM, done with his absent parents that wouldn’t find out til they returned from Oslo the next week, done with the disappointing husk of himself that was left.
He is what management’s been molding him into for the past 7.5 years, so they’ve only themselves to blame for his failure, their failure. Joonmyun is only one of twelve, all suffocated out of emotional capabilities before they ever took to the stage or opened their first fanmail. Twelve scandal-ridden, soul-suppressed boys who were stamped failures before they even met the crowds of idealistic school girls panting for a safe, impersonal version of the boy next door, a false sense of intimacy to hang on their locker doors and tape to the corners of their desks.
Joonmyun is bitter but he doesn’t blame them, any of them. He wouldn’t want to buy stickers of his dead eyes, ghostly complexion, plastic smile either.
Jin is a shell himself, as Joonmyun has discovered in lapse of months piling up on their joint career. Not just a mask on for the public and off again at home, he’s a hollow chassis with layers of rotating skins, morphing and changing so quickly without warning that Joonmyun’s not sure if there’s anything real underneath. If there is, if he’s glimpsed it, it was camouflaged too well for Joonmyun to catch on.
Jin can tease a show host on air about her pretty pink lips and stroll out of the filming studio muttering about the ugly bitch and how much her waxy makeup made him want to puke, can you please go get me a Pocari Sweat now, hurry up Jun.
Jin always remembers his name, his full name, though he uses “Jun” most often for convenience. Sometimes he hums Joonmyun’s name as he drops a starbucks from the konbini in his lap. A sugary caramel something and not the americano Joonmyun always orders, but at least it’s coffee, at least he remembers Joonmyun exists.
Jin is only cruel because he’s careless, and as much as Joonmyun hopes against hope that it isn’t, that’s probably the only reason he’s kind to a nobody like Joonmyun. A vague responsibility, someone to grudgingly look after on his bad days, a bland and boring coworker to bestow an obliging smile and wink to when he’s feeling generous--that is all Joonmyun is to Jin.
Joonmyun still wants, though. He wants to crack open Jin’s shell til his emptiness of secrets and undirected anger belongs, in part, to Joonmyun as well. Joonmyun knows better than to want though, watching Jin corner a sound tech with his smooth smiles and rough laugh and sugary caramel coffees on Monday and walk by without a hello on Thursday. He knows better than better, but Joonmyun has been aching to trace the corrugated plush of Jin’s chapped lips since Day Six, and the heart perforating ache of his longing grows along with his disappointment with every teasing wink Jin throws at him, throws past him.
Jin is an elaborately camouflaged empty shell, and maybe Joonmyun is the machine his SM managers declared him: cold, hard, heartless, lifeless, lighter than any human with a heart full of love and hope should be. He knows better than anyone how mechanical his life feels as he trudges through the motions, from bed to sink to studio to recording booth to studio. Then back to bed for a few hours when he’s lucky, or to the back seat of a van or a lobby floor when he’s not. (He’s usually not.)
Sleep, wash, dance, sing, dance and stretch, sleep--or try to. These days, Joonmyun lies awake in the dark and wonders if maybe he’s forgotten how to sleep, if it’s possible for the human body to erase muscle memory for innate, involuntary functions. Maybe one day he’ll wake up and have forgotten how to breathe, heart frozen mid-pump, and he’ll continue to exist as no more than a company machine, exactly what they wanted from him in the first place.
Joonmyun wonders if he’ll still hurt then, if he’ll ache with the dull emptiness that echoes inside him, that echoes Jin’s hollow spaces. These are the things he daydreams about, these days.
Jin didn’t want Joonmyun’s pretty face, vapid smile, bleached blonde on the jacket of what was supposed to be his solo album. Jin had been promised he could go his own way, write his own style when he left his original group. And then he got stuck with Joonmyun, the talented misfit, the cynical dreamer.
They didn’t want his pretty ballad songs, the lyrics scribbled on the backs of convenience store receipts. When he was younger Joonmyun’s pen spewed love and longing for love as fast as he could gulp down his cheap burnt coffee. He sketched dreams for a future he suspected he’d never experience, knows now he’s unable to enjoy if he ever does. Joonmyun is caught in the gears of the idol producing machine, and will be for another 12.5 more years.
He’ll have wrinkles then, deeper creases around his eyes, deeper creases criscrossing his heart, especially if he’s subjected daily to the professional and charming torture that is Jin’s smile. Jin’s fingers digging into Joonmyun’s hip during photoshoots. Jin’s fingers pressed to the side seams of his own threadbare jeans as he bows out of the dressing room at the end of the day without a backward glance.
Joonmyun hates himself for it, dropping hardened pebbles of self-loathing through the slats of his ribs with every meaningless smile and hair ruffle til they pile up like coins in the piggy bank Jin bought for his baby daughter. She’s three months old now, likes dogs and dolls and the color purple. Joonmyun is her favorite doll when Meisa brings her to the green room for a good luck kiss before their concerts.
Theia tugs on his hair, gurgles at his nose, screws up her face and screams when Joonmyun’s eyes are ugly red with tears or fatigue. Toys are supposed to be beautiful and never cry, or else you throw them away. Joonmyun is a porcelain doll to Jin’s charming boyish sleaze, and he hopes to God he won’t have to break open to extract the weight of self-hatred and acid want he’s been cacheing for months. Because the day Joonmyun breaks, he’ll be useless.
Joonmyun hates himself for it, his useless weakness, but here they are, day after day, Jin & Jun and with their song smiles and their cheery tunes taking over the charts and the TV ads and the spreads in Potato. It’s an unexplainable phenomenon really, because Koreans (with one exception) don’t take the charts by storm in Japan, and Joonmyun is no Tohoshinki.
So really, Joonmyun shouldn’t have debuted at all, he shouldn’t be here. But after seven years, six months, and thirteen days of following orders and diets and schedules, he handed over his passport without question. He dusted off the suitcase he hadn’t used since middle school, the blue one with the broken handle and a curling Spongebob sticker on the front of the expensive leather. Now it’s back in a closet, this time in his tiny one room apartment on the outskirts of Tokyo.
The sticker could have easily been removed with a bit of rubbing alcohol, but Joonmyun didn’t touch it. The sticker is from London, the first vacation his parents actually took him and his brother along on, and the last one before Joonmyun threw himself into the frenzied limbo of training.
Debut is exhausting, but as lonely as Joonmyun’s hotel bed is he doesn’t particularly long for home, for the cold company lobby or the sprawling house his parents hardly live in. When Joonmyun gets homesick--late at night in the scalding shower, or sitting off to the side with his bento at lunch--it’s always for a place he can never get back to. The kindergarten class where his teacher, a pretty young woman with soft angora sweaters and softer curves, held him when he cried til he smelled of her violet perfume.
The first dance studio he set foot in, where turns and leaps made him feel like flying and not like shaky exhaustion and the lactic burn of not enough carbs, not enough oxygen. The largest noraebang of the shitty joint behind the dorms, where friends and rivals gathered after practice to drink and sing themselves raw, where Joonmyun kissed boys and a few girls, but never the ones he ached too.
That’s called nostalgia, Jin tells him, natsukashii, and Joonmyun’s heard that word often enough to know there’s no direct translation to Korean so he just nods along. Feelings, though, feelings don’t need translations when you have fingers and lips and tears to speak through, and, at times, music. Music is the only thing Joonmyun shares with Jin right now, so he wrings out all his misery and discards his crumpled up dreams through the notes. Night after night, Joonmyun sings and shines.
You see, Joonmyun wanted to be a star, his fair skin glowing on lit up ads at intersections, his voice blaring from loudspeakers outside phone stores, the very roots of his bleached hair adored by adolescents across the nation.
You see, once Joonmyun was finally a star his parents would be forced to look at him, to hear him, never mind that he’d be singing and spouting the words someone else predetermined for him based on maximum marketability, in clothes too flashy for his classic good looks. He was convinced that if his parents could just see him from another point of view they would start to listen.
What he didn’t factor in was the possibility they would see him from another side but not the one he wanted--a side that wasn’t truly Joonmyun anymore--and not recognize even a hair of him.
“What are you thinking about?” Jin’s finger knocks the cigarette in his hand, tap tap. A flick of ash, a splash of foam, the stinging spray of sand against his ankles--Joonmyun’s brain registers his surroundings in snapshots, disjointed glimpses of the scene around him.
He aches for a taste, a lick of bitter ash, a scrape of wind chapped lips. The wind corrodes his resolve, tears at his hairline and each hair of his waxed eyebrows. Joonmyun curls forward, rocking in the sheets of harsh air that rip tears from his eyes and dry them before they have the chance to fall.
“I dunno,” Joonmyun says, even though his Japanese is getting better, good enough for a real answer. Even though it’s rude to brush Jin off like that.
Jin laughs, a high rasp that rips into a phlegmy cough. And Joonmyun really can’t afford to be rude to Jin. Jin is his chance, his last chance before Joonmyun gives up on himself, never mind the demands of the world and the noose of contracts tying him to life.
Jin is his chance, and doubtlessly the reason their debut track was a hit single, and their current release is topping Oricon for the second week in a row. Jin and Jun, fallen star and rising angel--there’s something so pitifully endearing about their concept that even the most skeptical audience can’t help weep through their ballads. Jin and Jun, jaded popstar and the most caring leader that never was--the entertainment syndicate finally found a way to perpetually capitalize on their ruination by scandal.
And tomorrow they’ll be in Osaka, and the day after that Miyagi, and the week after that back to the outskirts of Tokyo for a brief reprieve; a shower, a cigarette, and a steamer of limp vegetables eaten alone on a cold balcony. Joonmyun endures because he is steel, he glints and never tarnishes.
You see, Joonmyun wanted to be a star and now he has become one, just not on the same orbit that he always supposed he would follow. He gives interviews on NHK instead of KBS, his face is on Pocky ads instead of Pepero boxes. Joonmyun is brilliant, a rising star, and his parents who only vacation in Europe will never notice. And if Jin hasn’t already, Joonmyun doubts he ever will.