JE/NEWS+SPN- "Tiny Brain, Big Heart"
Wow I am clearly out of practice yo. But I owe a lot of stuff, so hopefully I will get back in the swing of things quickly. Reborn, more JE, and possibly ES21 yet to come. <3
Title: Tiny Brain, Big Heart
Universe: NEWS, Supernatural ( JE+SPN AU)
Theme/Topic: N/A
Rating: PG
Character/Pairing/s: lightly Koyapi
Spoilers: None, really.
Word Count: 2,055
SummaryP finds that adjusting to his new humanity means forgetting all the things he knew and learning all the things he didn’t.
Dedication: For mousapelli! Kick ass on your test this weekend! Then eat the candy I sent you afterwards. Hopefully it will get there quickly LOL
A/N: So this is the first of the fics I owe for people who bought Crown Royale. I really meant for this to be funny but it failed and ended up being schmoopy instead.
Disclaimer: No harm or infringement intended.
The human brain isn’t meant to hold very much knowledge. This is because humans aren’t evolutionarily advanced enough to comprehend the universe in its entirety yet; in fact, humans are actually physically incapable of surviving the impact that the sheer number of synaptic connections necessary to understand the world would have on their personal well being. As such, they will never be capable of knowing all the things that angels know. Humans barely use 10% of their brains to function even at their highest level; P understands that just using that mere 10% can actually be rather be harrowing for a great many of them sometimes.
In Heaven, most of his brothers had held humanity in contempt because of this slow evolutionary development; mankind was scoffed at for their tiny brains, their backwards ways, their meager understanding of the glorious world around them. They did not deserve the paradise created by a Father because they could never fully appreciate it.
P understands that perspective in some ways. He had known once, all the things the angels had known. He could communicate with the universe on a grand and molecular scale, could traverse the laws of physics as easily as the spoken word, could command and manipulate every atom of it to do his bidding. Once, he could speak all the tongues of man and all the languages of animals too, could defy sound and gravity and light, could exist as a liquid, a solid, a gas, a particle, and a wave all at once. Those had all been the kinds of things at his fingertips, things humans would never be able to comprehend for a very long time, if ever.
He had known all those things, once upon a time.
But P finds that as his Grace and Tomohisa’s soul continue to merge- as his awareness fades from the power and the glory of Heaven- that he is forgetting these things.
He is functionally human now, physically and mentally, and some days, when he wakes from slumber (still an odd sensation to him, waking, and so he avoids sleep as often as possible), he finds that he has suddenly forgotten how to say inertia in French or what the speed of light is down to the one thousandth of a second. He will frown and think about them and think about them, and more often than not, will find that he cannot, for the life of him, recall anything at all about objects in motion in any Romance language or remember exactly how long a ray of sunlight takes to reach the surface of the planet during a particular arc in Earth’s orbit. Instead, more often than not, he finds that his stomach will growl, his breath will taste sour, and his eyes will be gummy.
His human body does not care about laws of physics or about space and time. When it wakes, all it wants is breakfast.
This-these limitations- he finds frustrating, because to know everything one day and then to suddenly not is jarring and often makes him feel useless, stupid, and irredeemably mortal.
In the grand scheme of things he knows that he would not trade his new place in the world for anything, knows that the freedom of humanity far outweighs the emotionless, will-less drone of celestial existence, but sometimes, particularly at moments like this, he finds that he wishes the human brain wasn’t so unfailingly stupid.
He glares at the menu in front of him. It is in Korean. He’d known Korean once, as easily as he’d known the exact ratio of water to land on this entire planet.
The symbols look round and mysterious to him now though, and his furrows his brow, telling himself to think, because surely this is one of those things that humans are able to retain; there are many people in this world who know up to four languages, after all.
From across the table, Koyama looks a bit worried, a bit amused. He patiently waits a moment longer, before he asks Yamapi, “Do you know what you want?”
P scowls and shuts his menu. “I can’t read this.”
Koyama hmmms in understanding. “It’s difficult. But that’s how we know it’s an authentic restaurant, ne.”
Yamapi’s eyes narrow slightly, this time at his groupmate. “You can read this.”
Koyama looks sheepish. “Most of it. Not everything. I’m still learning some of the more complicated things.”
Yamapi understands that he is probably being irrational, but that is just another consequence of this weighty humanity. Emotions are far easier to drum up than thought. “Why can you read it when I can’t?”
It is petty and stupid, and he feels that immediately after saying it; he wonders why he’d said it at all.
Koyama just chuckles and seems to understand, and that’s the one advantage he has, from being reborn on this earth, growing and living amongst humanity for an entire quarter of a human lifetime. He understands. “I can read it because I’ve been studying Korean, leader,” Koyama says simply, and sips his cup of barely tea with both hands. “Humans have to study things to keep them in their brains, ne. It isn’t just always there.”
“I understand that,” P feels the need to clarify. “But it had always been there before. Why won’t it just stay there afterward? What’s the purpose of losing it?”
Koyama makes sympathetic noises and when the waitress approaches, orders for both of them; they get double orders of kalbi and beer to cheer the former angel up. “That’s the difference between humans and angels, I guess,” Koyama begins philosophically, once the waitress is out of earshot again. “Angels just know. Humans get to choose what they want to know. Everyone knows a different mix of things that way.”
Pi frowns; he understands on principle, but the fact that he can no longer even count to seven in Dog just grates at him. It’s like the obnoxious little Chihuahua sitting in the bag of the woman whose booth is across from theirs is judging him, somehow. Either that or staring at the raw beef appetizer on the table beside his elbow. “It’s limiting,” he admits, squirming a bit uncomfortably in his chair. He finds himself irrationally hoping that the Chihuahua doesn’t attempt to strike up conversation.
Koyama’s eyes are indulgent at that, warm in the dim light of the Korean restaurant. “Think of it as another perk of free will. You get to pick what you want to know, and because you can’t know everything, then what you pick has to be really important to you, because it’s going to take up space in your brain, and that means something else can’t take up that space at the same time.”
It’s an optimistic view on things; one of the things P does know is that Koyama is optimistic. Just like he knows that Koyama would laugh at him if he explained the judgmental Chihuahua (but not in a mean way), just like he knows Koyama will be the one cooking the meat at the table and putting the best bits on P’s plate because he enjoys the sight of his friends enjoying themselves more than the taste of the food itself.
Koyama, not knowing the current bent of P’s thoughts, continues trying to be comforting. “So it means that whatever you do still know now, is definitely more important than the Korean you forgot, right? The things you still know must be more precious than what you lost. Then you can concentrate more on those precious things.”
P blinks as Koyama reaches out for the pitcher on their table and fills his beer glass to the brim for him, as he gestures to the waitress for more potato salad and isn’t ashamed when he realizes he used the wrong honorific to address her by. He apologizes, they both laugh-she’s utterly charmed of course-and later, she won’t end up charging them for that second pitcher of Hite.
It is an easy, optimistic, comforting dinner between friends, between two people who had once been brothers and lost all the things that made them that way, but ended up being more to each other in the end for it anyway.
For a moment, P thinks Koyama’s laughter outshines the Heavenly Chorus. Mostly because he has forgotten what the Heavenly Chorus sounds like. He is sure he won’t ever forget the sound of Koyama’s laughter.
Belatedly, that is the moment when P realizes that this is what Koyama had meant by choosing your knowledge; these are the things that won’t ever leave him because they matter too much. These are the things that, even on the mornings when he wakes up and doesn’t know all of the digits of Pi, or that, on the days when he’s walking down the street and an American tourist asks him for directions to a place with words he can no longer understand, he will never forget. He woke up this morning and found that he had forgotten the sound of negative ions in a stream, but when he opened his eyes he had recalled that Koyama is always optimistic, that Koyama likes to laugh at you and tease you but never in a way that makes you feel bad, and that Koyama loves, more than anything, when the people who matter to him are happy. When P had woken up today he still knew that Koyama goes around speaking freely to people and acting like the entire world is full of strangers who just aren’t his friends yet. The world usually ends up agreeing anyway, and in the end, everyone is better for it.
Koyama’s birthday is May 1st, 1984. He’s 177cm tall, his shoe size is 27.5. His mother owns a ramen shop, his sister has two sons, his best friend is Shige, and he is NEWS’s biggest fan. P knows that Koyama bought Tegoshi a dog blanket for Skull-chan for his birthday this year, that he’s studying Korean, that he’s certified in sign language, and that he cries when he watches TV shows about reunions or documentaries about destitute children half a world away. He goes to every one of the other members’ stage plays and movies, records their dramas on DVD-R, and watches them at home with a cat that he spoils rotten.
It is a heavy, specific stream of knowledge, not unlike conversing in binary, and even still, Yamapi has a difficult time imagining that he could ever forget any of it.
“Leader?” Koyama asks after a beat, when he sees the way P’s eyes go glassy and distantly thoughtful. “Is everything okay?”
Yamapi blinks and looks at his friend; he sees the concern, the curiosity, the marquee thoughts of “Is it too warm in here? Is Yamapi feeling okay?” flashing uncensored across Koyama’s expressive face. P feels his lips twitch upward when he realizes, as he looks at the older idol’s wondering expression, that if this is what remains in his mind the end-if this is all that remains- then maybe Korean, Dog, the first hundred digits of Pi, the speed of light, the speed of sound, and all the Romance languages combined aren’t nearly as important as he’d initially thought they were.
“I’m fine,” he answers eventually, when Koyama looks like he wants to put his chopsticks down and touch his palm to his groupmate’s head to search for potential fever.
Koyama remains uncertain for a moment, but P smiles in as reassuring a way as he knows how, and that seems to relax Koyama enough that his chopsticks stay in his fingers and his hands stay across the table.
P drinks his beer then, and relaxes into the smoky atmosphere of the restaurant. He thinks that if a person’s knowledge is a matter of free will, that if what he knows and what he always knows is a measure of what is important to him because of how limited it is, then these are the things that he will never let leave him, even if everything else ultimately does.
That evening, over overpriced pitchers of Hite and sizzling pieces of short rib, P realizes that maybe the human brain is a pretty amazing thing after all.
Even if it is kind of small.
END
Title: Tiny Brain, Big Heart
Universe: NEWS, Supernatural ( JE+SPN AU)
Theme/Topic: N/A
Rating: PG
Character/Pairing/s: lightly Koyapi
Spoilers: None, really.
Word Count: 2,055
SummaryP finds that adjusting to his new humanity means forgetting all the things he knew and learning all the things he didn’t.
Dedication: For mousapelli! Kick ass on your test this weekend! Then eat the candy I sent you afterwards. Hopefully it will get there quickly LOL
A/N: So this is the first of the fics I owe for people who bought Crown Royale. I really meant for this to be funny but it failed and ended up being schmoopy instead.
Disclaimer: No harm or infringement intended.
The human brain isn’t meant to hold very much knowledge. This is because humans aren’t evolutionarily advanced enough to comprehend the universe in its entirety yet; in fact, humans are actually physically incapable of surviving the impact that the sheer number of synaptic connections necessary to understand the world would have on their personal well being. As such, they will never be capable of knowing all the things that angels know. Humans barely use 10% of their brains to function even at their highest level; P understands that just using that mere 10% can actually be rather be harrowing for a great many of them sometimes.
In Heaven, most of his brothers had held humanity in contempt because of this slow evolutionary development; mankind was scoffed at for their tiny brains, their backwards ways, their meager understanding of the glorious world around them. They did not deserve the paradise created by a Father because they could never fully appreciate it.
P understands that perspective in some ways. He had known once, all the things the angels had known. He could communicate with the universe on a grand and molecular scale, could traverse the laws of physics as easily as the spoken word, could command and manipulate every atom of it to do his bidding. Once, he could speak all the tongues of man and all the languages of animals too, could defy sound and gravity and light, could exist as a liquid, a solid, a gas, a particle, and a wave all at once. Those had all been the kinds of things at his fingertips, things humans would never be able to comprehend for a very long time, if ever.
He had known all those things, once upon a time.
But P finds that as his Grace and Tomohisa’s soul continue to merge- as his awareness fades from the power and the glory of Heaven- that he is forgetting these things.
He is functionally human now, physically and mentally, and some days, when he wakes from slumber (still an odd sensation to him, waking, and so he avoids sleep as often as possible), he finds that he has suddenly forgotten how to say inertia in French or what the speed of light is down to the one thousandth of a second. He will frown and think about them and think about them, and more often than not, will find that he cannot, for the life of him, recall anything at all about objects in motion in any Romance language or remember exactly how long a ray of sunlight takes to reach the surface of the planet during a particular arc in Earth’s orbit. Instead, more often than not, he finds that his stomach will growl, his breath will taste sour, and his eyes will be gummy.
His human body does not care about laws of physics or about space and time. When it wakes, all it wants is breakfast.
This-these limitations- he finds frustrating, because to know everything one day and then to suddenly not is jarring and often makes him feel useless, stupid, and irredeemably mortal.
In the grand scheme of things he knows that he would not trade his new place in the world for anything, knows that the freedom of humanity far outweighs the emotionless, will-less drone of celestial existence, but sometimes, particularly at moments like this, he finds that he wishes the human brain wasn’t so unfailingly stupid.
He glares at the menu in front of him. It is in Korean. He’d known Korean once, as easily as he’d known the exact ratio of water to land on this entire planet.
The symbols look round and mysterious to him now though, and his furrows his brow, telling himself to think, because surely this is one of those things that humans are able to retain; there are many people in this world who know up to four languages, after all.
From across the table, Koyama looks a bit worried, a bit amused. He patiently waits a moment longer, before he asks Yamapi, “Do you know what you want?”
P scowls and shuts his menu. “I can’t read this.”
Koyama hmmms in understanding. “It’s difficult. But that’s how we know it’s an authentic restaurant, ne.”
Yamapi’s eyes narrow slightly, this time at his groupmate. “You can read this.”
Koyama looks sheepish. “Most of it. Not everything. I’m still learning some of the more complicated things.”
Yamapi understands that he is probably being irrational, but that is just another consequence of this weighty humanity. Emotions are far easier to drum up than thought. “Why can you read it when I can’t?”
It is petty and stupid, and he feels that immediately after saying it; he wonders why he’d said it at all.
Koyama just chuckles and seems to understand, and that’s the one advantage he has, from being reborn on this earth, growing and living amongst humanity for an entire quarter of a human lifetime. He understands. “I can read it because I’ve been studying Korean, leader,” Koyama says simply, and sips his cup of barely tea with both hands. “Humans have to study things to keep them in their brains, ne. It isn’t just always there.”
“I understand that,” P feels the need to clarify. “But it had always been there before. Why won’t it just stay there afterward? What’s the purpose of losing it?”
Koyama makes sympathetic noises and when the waitress approaches, orders for both of them; they get double orders of kalbi and beer to cheer the former angel up. “That’s the difference between humans and angels, I guess,” Koyama begins philosophically, once the waitress is out of earshot again. “Angels just know. Humans get to choose what they want to know. Everyone knows a different mix of things that way.”
Pi frowns; he understands on principle, but the fact that he can no longer even count to seven in Dog just grates at him. It’s like the obnoxious little Chihuahua sitting in the bag of the woman whose booth is across from theirs is judging him, somehow. Either that or staring at the raw beef appetizer on the table beside his elbow. “It’s limiting,” he admits, squirming a bit uncomfortably in his chair. He finds himself irrationally hoping that the Chihuahua doesn’t attempt to strike up conversation.
Koyama’s eyes are indulgent at that, warm in the dim light of the Korean restaurant. “Think of it as another perk of free will. You get to pick what you want to know, and because you can’t know everything, then what you pick has to be really important to you, because it’s going to take up space in your brain, and that means something else can’t take up that space at the same time.”
It’s an optimistic view on things; one of the things P does know is that Koyama is optimistic. Just like he knows that Koyama would laugh at him if he explained the judgmental Chihuahua (but not in a mean way), just like he knows Koyama will be the one cooking the meat at the table and putting the best bits on P’s plate because he enjoys the sight of his friends enjoying themselves more than the taste of the food itself.
Koyama, not knowing the current bent of P’s thoughts, continues trying to be comforting. “So it means that whatever you do still know now, is definitely more important than the Korean you forgot, right? The things you still know must be more precious than what you lost. Then you can concentrate more on those precious things.”
P blinks as Koyama reaches out for the pitcher on their table and fills his beer glass to the brim for him, as he gestures to the waitress for more potato salad and isn’t ashamed when he realizes he used the wrong honorific to address her by. He apologizes, they both laugh-she’s utterly charmed of course-and later, she won’t end up charging them for that second pitcher of Hite.
It is an easy, optimistic, comforting dinner between friends, between two people who had once been brothers and lost all the things that made them that way, but ended up being more to each other in the end for it anyway.
For a moment, P thinks Koyama’s laughter outshines the Heavenly Chorus. Mostly because he has forgotten what the Heavenly Chorus sounds like. He is sure he won’t ever forget the sound of Koyama’s laughter.
Belatedly, that is the moment when P realizes that this is what Koyama had meant by choosing your knowledge; these are the things that won’t ever leave him because they matter too much. These are the things that, even on the mornings when he wakes up and doesn’t know all of the digits of Pi, or that, on the days when he’s walking down the street and an American tourist asks him for directions to a place with words he can no longer understand, he will never forget. He woke up this morning and found that he had forgotten the sound of negative ions in a stream, but when he opened his eyes he had recalled that Koyama is always optimistic, that Koyama likes to laugh at you and tease you but never in a way that makes you feel bad, and that Koyama loves, more than anything, when the people who matter to him are happy. When P had woken up today he still knew that Koyama goes around speaking freely to people and acting like the entire world is full of strangers who just aren’t his friends yet. The world usually ends up agreeing anyway, and in the end, everyone is better for it.
Koyama’s birthday is May 1st, 1984. He’s 177cm tall, his shoe size is 27.5. His mother owns a ramen shop, his sister has two sons, his best friend is Shige, and he is NEWS’s biggest fan. P knows that Koyama bought Tegoshi a dog blanket for Skull-chan for his birthday this year, that he’s studying Korean, that he’s certified in sign language, and that he cries when he watches TV shows about reunions or documentaries about destitute children half a world away. He goes to every one of the other members’ stage plays and movies, records their dramas on DVD-R, and watches them at home with a cat that he spoils rotten.
It is a heavy, specific stream of knowledge, not unlike conversing in binary, and even still, Yamapi has a difficult time imagining that he could ever forget any of it.
“Leader?” Koyama asks after a beat, when he sees the way P’s eyes go glassy and distantly thoughtful. “Is everything okay?”
Yamapi blinks and looks at his friend; he sees the concern, the curiosity, the marquee thoughts of “Is it too warm in here? Is Yamapi feeling okay?” flashing uncensored across Koyama’s expressive face. P feels his lips twitch upward when he realizes, as he looks at the older idol’s wondering expression, that if this is what remains in his mind the end-if this is all that remains- then maybe Korean, Dog, the first hundred digits of Pi, the speed of light, the speed of sound, and all the Romance languages combined aren’t nearly as important as he’d initially thought they were.
“I’m fine,” he answers eventually, when Koyama looks like he wants to put his chopsticks down and touch his palm to his groupmate’s head to search for potential fever.
Koyama remains uncertain for a moment, but P smiles in as reassuring a way as he knows how, and that seems to relax Koyama enough that his chopsticks stay in his fingers and his hands stay across the table.
P drinks his beer then, and relaxes into the smoky atmosphere of the restaurant. He thinks that if a person’s knowledge is a matter of free will, that if what he knows and what he always knows is a measure of what is important to him because of how limited it is, then these are the things that he will never let leave him, even if everything else ultimately does.
That evening, over overpriced pitchers of Hite and sizzling pieces of short rib, P realizes that maybe the human brain is a pretty amazing thing after all.
Even if it is kind of small.
END