[SHINee, EXO] Travel Logs (1/1); [SHINee] The Breadth of Your Strength (1/1)
Travel Logs
They’d done this before- from Beijing to Taipei to London to L.A and back to Seoul. Except this time, Taemin is not the only one flying away. Suddenly he is afraid that with both Jongin and himself on the move, they may never find the way back to each other again. Taemin/Kai. G. SHINee, EXO
By the time Onew walks out of the conference room, suppressing a sleepy yawn as he looks around, Minho is nowhere to be seen. Taemin suspects that he’s already in the elevator, heading right for the recording room where some of the Super Junior sunbae-nim are situated.
Key just looks at Taemin, eyes slowly slipping closed as his head settles on the crook of Jonghyun’s shoulders. “Well?” Key asks Taemin. “You look like you have somewhere to go too.”
Taemin gives them a small wave, feet already carrying him down the hallway. He knows their manager will have to find Minho before he can grab Taemin. Between the two of them and the endless row of rehearsal rooms and studio space in this building, finding either one takes as much effort as rerouting a river to their doorsteps.
Then again, it’s not exactly hard to guess Taemin’s destination. He’s turning a corner on the fourth floor when he bumps into an excited Jongin, who pulls him quickly into the nearest empty music room. Excitement is dancing in Jongin’s eyes as he grins, one hand on Taemin’s wrist as he says, “I heard SHINee was in the conference room- I just thought that-”
Taemin laughs, ignoring the soreness in his neck. “Yeah, yeah. I missed you too.” Taemin lets Jongin run a hand through the tips of his extensions. Jongin’s fingers seem more slender, but Taemin knows it’s highly unlikely for them to have grown since their last encounter. Then again, it has been seventeen days. Taemin almost loses count on day thirteen until Jongin sends him a SMS reminder.
Jongin was unexpectedly thoughtful like that, eyes serious but his smile friendly.
“Don’t,” Taemin says as Jongin begins to tug at his ponytail. “Don’t say it.”
Jongin just looks at him, head tilting slightly, before smiling. “You look very nice.” Jongin is not bad himself, the sleeves of his hoodie rolled to his elbows as the hem of his track pants skids on the floor. Jongin is wearing his puma suedes, the matching ones they had bought after Taemin’s first trip to Taiwan.
“Did you sneak out of rehearsal?”
“Mmm,” Jongin hums, setting his head on the edge of Taemin’s shoulder, breathing in the after scent of Taemin’s hairspray. His hand trails off Taemin’s wrist and slips into Taemin’s own. “I actually have something for you.”
Taemin moves slightly away, grinning when Jongin makes a small noise of complaint. “Really? What is it?”
“I’ll give it to you Tuesday night.” Jongin grins sheepishly, cutting Taemin off before he can protest. “I know you have that night off.” That shuts Taemin up fast enough, and Taemin has to wonder which noona Jongin has bribed this time to get his schedule. “Don’t cancel on me again,” Jongin says, nodding seriously at Taemin and turning towards the door.
Taemin thinks this is hardly fair, but suddenly Jongin is coming back towards him as if he has forgotten something important. His kiss stops Taemin’s train of thought, Jongin setting one hand on Taemin’s right arm and the other on the small of Taemin’s back.
“Bye,” Jongin whispers before rushing away.
Taemin just laughs after him. He grins to himself the entire car ride back, watching Onew and Key’s heads loll in slumber.
On Tuesday night, Taemin slips out of the apartment after Gyeongshik-hyung drives Key to his musical rehearsal. He finds Jongin standing under the street lamps two blocks away, hands tucked into the pocket of his jeans. They spend a minute grinning at each other before Taemin leads him to the nearest PC bang. The only café open nearby is manned by a bored looking teenage boy, who makes Taemin’s ice coffee rather quickly before going back to reading his manhwa.
Jongin snatches Taemin’s drink before Taemin gets a chance, and huddles by the aisle of condiments with his back turned to Taemin. “This is a secret recipe I’ve developed,” he says, handing the coffee over, Taemin’s straw placed delicately in the cup. Jongin looks older now, the lines near his eyes sharper when he smiles.
Taemin just grins while sipping his drink, listening to Jongin talk about EXO’s last minute Chinese lessons and how Lu Han still laughs uncontrollably whenever Sehun tries to introduce himself in Chinese. It takes Taemin a while to notice something stuck to his straw, and he has to shake his drink to realize that Jongin has put crystallized sugar into his coffee. The sugar now sits at the bottom of his cup, but when Taemin stirs his straw at the right angle, he can inhale just the right mouthful of sweetness. It boggles Taemin that even after spending so much time apart, Jongin still knows exactly what he likes.
In the PC bang, they sit in the back of the room and roll around in their chairs. When they finally settle down, Taemin brushing bangs out of his eyes, Jongin looks over and says, “We’re flying to Beijing soon.”
Taemin pauses, hastily pulling the rest of his hair into a ponytail, the base of his extensions tugging at his scalp. “When?”
Jongin grins sheepishly at him. “Tomorrow.”
Taemin just stares, the aftertaste of sugar oddly nauseating in his mouth. They’d done this before- from Beijing to Taipei to London to L.A and back to Seoul. Except this time, Taemin is not the only one flying away. Suddenly he is afraid that with both Jongin and himself on the move, they may never find the way back to each other again.
Taemin doesn’t tell Jongin this. Instead, he asks, “How in the world did you sneak out, then?”
“Sehun owes me from covering for him.” Jongin looks slightly abashed as he turns around, setting his messenger bag on his lap as he digs through the pockets. He pauses upon handing Taemin a box wrapped in newspaper. “For you.”
Taemin half snorts when he catches the headlines on the paper, carefully tearing along the edges. Inside, he finds an autographed copy of EXO’s debut CD. “How much can I sell this on gmarket?” He smiles winningly when Jongin makes a face at him.
“Keep going,” Jongin insists, and Taemin sets the CD aside to find a photo of the first time Jongin brought him back to his house. They’re lying on Jongin’s floor, sharing a plate of kimbaps Jongin’s mother had made. Taemin only has one sock on while Jongin sports a large baseball cap, waving frantically at the camera, trying to shoo his mother out as she snaps the photo. Taemin thinks he must have been thirteen then, straight bangs cut conveniently above his eyes as he laughs at Jongin inside the frame. He barely remembers the sound of Jongin’s voice back then, the years blending into each other until suddenly, they’re both eighteen and Jongin is going to China.
“Stop looking so sad,” Jongin says suddenly.
“I’m not sad,” Taemin tells him. “I just have a stomach ache from your drink.”
“You’re a terrible liar,” Jongin replies, grinning.
They leave shortly after, walking side by side, Jongin’s shoulder knocking into Taemin’s. The street is oddly busy for this time of the night, the March air unexpectedly warm. “I have a recording in a few hours,” Taemin says.
“I have to be on a plane in a few hours,” Jongin replies, hovering at the staircase to the next subway station. He looks at Taemin, eyes unreadable.
It’s always like this between them, Taemin’s words catching at the back of his throat. Taemin can’t do farewells, can’t discern the proper thing to say. At the most crucial of times, everything that comes to his mind is wildly inadequate. For all that he is - dancer, actor, idol, wonder boy magnae of SHINee- Taemin still feels so lost in front of Jongin, as if Jongin is the only one he cannot command with a simple smile.
Sometimes Taemin thinks he left a part of himself in that room, caught between mouthfuls of kimbap as he shared rumors about sunbaes with Jongin, their laughter still ringing in Taemin’s ear. Then he realizes that all they have is the present, with Jongin waiting patiently for him to say something.
Taemin is about to open his mouth when a car honks in the distance. They both turn towards the intersection, but the situation diffuses itself quickly. In the distance, Taemin spots something familiar on the nearest billboard and tugs at the other boy. Jongin pauses when he catches sight of the EXO poster, his expression shifting into a half smile.
“Everything we wanted is coming true,” Jongin says. “Where does that leave us?”
Taemin understands the odd feeling of displacement in the abrupt shift from trainee to idol. He knows exactly what Jongin is trying to say. What is left when everything you’ve dreamed of has come true? “I don’t know,” Taemin responds at last, grabbing at Jongin’s hand. “But no matter what happens and how famous we get, I’ll always be here, Jongin-ah.”
Jongin doesn’t reply, but his smile says enough.
On the way to his recording, Taemin listens to Jongin’s CD. They’ve been dancing around each other for so long, time passing like a hand waving from a train Taemin wanted to be on. Yet, Taemin has faith that they can always return to that room, back to a time when forever seemed possible.
Breadth of Your Strength
SHINee retrieves their lost leader. Onew-centric. G. SHINee.
It always starts the same way, that’s how Onew knows it’s coming. He’s standing somewhere he recognizes, the pang of familiarity dawning on him when the stranger enters. The stranger is a little different every time, but one thing consistent in every dream is his smile, and he’s oh so happy. Sometimes Onew is sitting on the subway across from him, headphones plugged in as he stares into the distance. Sometimes Onew is walking back from school, still glad in his academy uniform when he sees him crossing the street. One thing, however, is for sure. The stranger always notices him, his smile confused with an approaching frown, and that’s when Onew realizes that he is staring at Lee Jinki.
“Do you always dream about chasing yourself?” Joon asks one night, with Onew curled into rug on MBLAQ’s bathroom dorm. When Onew doesn’t reply, Joon runs soothing circles down Onew’s back, his sighs small.
He sleeps on Joon’s bed that night. When he wakes up, Joon is leaning against the railing and throwing Onew his phone. “It’s been ringing like crazy. I’m pretty sure you’re getting disowned from your group.” He stops when Onew doesn’t reply. “For fuck’s sake, stop drooling on my pillow.”
“I want to go home,” Onew says after Joon tugs him upright, his head still spinning from too many shots of yakju.
Joon looks at him. “Then go.”
“No,” Onew says before pulling Joon’s blankets over his head. “I want to go home.”
“Oh,” Joon replies. “Oh.”
Onew stops dreaming about himself because he stops sleeping altogether in February, the hours stretching across the length of his ceiling as he counts the ticking of the second hand. In the mornings, Taemin blinks sleepily at him and asks what’s wrong, hyung? Key makes him tea, but swallowing it is jarring rather than soothing, Onew feeling the hair on his arms stand up as he inhales chamomile and jasmine. At night, Onew flips through old notebooks tucked under his bed, tracing careful scribbles of double integrals and derivations of wind velocity on a contained area modeled over wing spans. He loses track of days and hours- the only thing he knows are numbers and the familiar dryness in his throat just before he hits that high C in the recording studio.
They take him to the hospital, but the only plausible diagnosis is stress. It’s high likely, because lately Onew has been thinking about everything. Everything yet nothing. Their managers ask if he wants to take some time off, and Onew says yes, yes, yes.
Minho is furious when he comes home to find Onew’s bags in the living room, but Onew thinks he hardly has any say in the matter. Minho hasn’t been around in weeks, too busy being chaperoned on location shoots and memorizing scripts to notice Onew’s slow and agonizing death.
He hears them whisper outside of his door at night, Jonghyun going, don’t we have some sleeping pills in the drug cabinet? Key just hisses something in return about not trusting Onew with it.
This is the ultimate form of escapism, Minho says. We can’t just let him leave when everything is hanging by a thread. We still- the routines and promotions are-
Someone tells him to shut up, and Onew stops breathing when he realizes that it’s Taemin. He stops breathing for thirty-three seconds until the room settles back into that familiar, lulling dimness.
I’m afraid he won’t come back, someone says at last, and that’s when Onew stops listening.
At home, he eats chicken and play with his cousins. A few high school friends come to visit, grinning as they share stories of college and work and mutual friends in the army. Onew plays video games and helps his parents with chores, pausing when he sees the collection of SHINee CDs his mother displays proudly on their coffee table.
Some days he’s full of ambition, thinking today will be better. Other days, he can’t be bothered to sleep, eat, or breathe. He feels displaced- The Lost Leader of SHINee, disappearing always, forever fading away and receding farther and farther into the background. There is an insidious ache inside of him, compounding daily, and it seems almost impossible to ever see the end.
On his third day home, Onew dreams about spotlights and the sharpness of Key’s cheeks. He dreams about Jonghyun’s eyes, mischievous yet kind. He dreams about Taemin’s smile, always warm, always safe. He dreams about Minho and how he brings the back of his hand to his face when laughing. On his third day home, Onew sleeps.
He’s coming back from the store one day when he notices four familiar pairs of shoes in the entry way. The other boys are sitting by the dinning table, eyes wide when Onew comes in. His mother is hovering in the background, but Jonghyun is the one who stands up and says, “hyung, hyung you have to come back.”
Onew just pauses, watching the anxious expression on their faces.
“Hyung,” Taemin adds, and Onew can imagine them huddled together in the living room of their apartment, rehearsing this speech. “Please don’t give up. Things do matter. We matter.”
“You matter,” Minho finishes.
They’re crowded around him, a million words left unsaid at arm’s length. Onew thinks that’s all he really needs- a small spark of hope speaks volumes. Five pair of hands linked together under the spotlight and four pairs of arms wrapped around him. The possibility of happiness perches on his shoulders, singing a tune wordlessly.
Suddenly, it’s as if Onew has never stopped singing at all.
a/n: I've been reading too much Emily Dickinson, Jonathan Safran Foer, and Elizabeth Wurtzel. I've also been talking to a few people about Onew's physical withdraw lately. But, you know, fiction is ... well, fictional. The Kaimin piece was my own attempt of tackling the inadequacy of goodbyes. Both were supposed to be drabbles, but Aeris has kindly informed me that neither qualify anymore, length-wise. TLDR; I WRITE TOO MUCH.
Have some happy Onew
Love it? Hate it? Please leave some feedback, even if it may be a little late. You can also join the community, since I'll be locking up NC17 fics.
They’d done this before- from Beijing to Taipei to London to L.A and back to Seoul. Except this time, Taemin is not the only one flying away. Suddenly he is afraid that with both Jongin and himself on the move, they may never find the way back to each other again. Taemin/Kai. G. SHINee, EXO
By the time Onew walks out of the conference room, suppressing a sleepy yawn as he looks around, Minho is nowhere to be seen. Taemin suspects that he’s already in the elevator, heading right for the recording room where some of the Super Junior sunbae-nim are situated.
Key just looks at Taemin, eyes slowly slipping closed as his head settles on the crook of Jonghyun’s shoulders. “Well?” Key asks Taemin. “You look like you have somewhere to go too.”
Taemin gives them a small wave, feet already carrying him down the hallway. He knows their manager will have to find Minho before he can grab Taemin. Between the two of them and the endless row of rehearsal rooms and studio space in this building, finding either one takes as much effort as rerouting a river to their doorsteps.
Then again, it’s not exactly hard to guess Taemin’s destination. He’s turning a corner on the fourth floor when he bumps into an excited Jongin, who pulls him quickly into the nearest empty music room. Excitement is dancing in Jongin’s eyes as he grins, one hand on Taemin’s wrist as he says, “I heard SHINee was in the conference room- I just thought that-”
Taemin laughs, ignoring the soreness in his neck. “Yeah, yeah. I missed you too.” Taemin lets Jongin run a hand through the tips of his extensions. Jongin’s fingers seem more slender, but Taemin knows it’s highly unlikely for them to have grown since their last encounter. Then again, it has been seventeen days. Taemin almost loses count on day thirteen until Jongin sends him a SMS reminder.
Jongin was unexpectedly thoughtful like that, eyes serious but his smile friendly.
“Don’t,” Taemin says as Jongin begins to tug at his ponytail. “Don’t say it.”
Jongin just looks at him, head tilting slightly, before smiling. “You look very nice.” Jongin is not bad himself, the sleeves of his hoodie rolled to his elbows as the hem of his track pants skids on the floor. Jongin is wearing his puma suedes, the matching ones they had bought after Taemin’s first trip to Taiwan.
“Did you sneak out of rehearsal?”
“Mmm,” Jongin hums, setting his head on the edge of Taemin’s shoulder, breathing in the after scent of Taemin’s hairspray. His hand trails off Taemin’s wrist and slips into Taemin’s own. “I actually have something for you.”
Taemin moves slightly away, grinning when Jongin makes a small noise of complaint. “Really? What is it?”
“I’ll give it to you Tuesday night.” Jongin grins sheepishly, cutting Taemin off before he can protest. “I know you have that night off.” That shuts Taemin up fast enough, and Taemin has to wonder which noona Jongin has bribed this time to get his schedule. “Don’t cancel on me again,” Jongin says, nodding seriously at Taemin and turning towards the door.
Taemin thinks this is hardly fair, but suddenly Jongin is coming back towards him as if he has forgotten something important. His kiss stops Taemin’s train of thought, Jongin setting one hand on Taemin’s right arm and the other on the small of Taemin’s back.
“Bye,” Jongin whispers before rushing away.
Taemin just laughs after him. He grins to himself the entire car ride back, watching Onew and Key’s heads loll in slumber.
On Tuesday night, Taemin slips out of the apartment after Gyeongshik-hyung drives Key to his musical rehearsal. He finds Jongin standing under the street lamps two blocks away, hands tucked into the pocket of his jeans. They spend a minute grinning at each other before Taemin leads him to the nearest PC bang. The only café open nearby is manned by a bored looking teenage boy, who makes Taemin’s ice coffee rather quickly before going back to reading his manhwa.
Jongin snatches Taemin’s drink before Taemin gets a chance, and huddles by the aisle of condiments with his back turned to Taemin. “This is a secret recipe I’ve developed,” he says, handing the coffee over, Taemin’s straw placed delicately in the cup. Jongin looks older now, the lines near his eyes sharper when he smiles.
Taemin just grins while sipping his drink, listening to Jongin talk about EXO’s last minute Chinese lessons and how Lu Han still laughs uncontrollably whenever Sehun tries to introduce himself in Chinese. It takes Taemin a while to notice something stuck to his straw, and he has to shake his drink to realize that Jongin has put crystallized sugar into his coffee. The sugar now sits at the bottom of his cup, but when Taemin stirs his straw at the right angle, he can inhale just the right mouthful of sweetness. It boggles Taemin that even after spending so much time apart, Jongin still knows exactly what he likes.
In the PC bang, they sit in the back of the room and roll around in their chairs. When they finally settle down, Taemin brushing bangs out of his eyes, Jongin looks over and says, “We’re flying to Beijing soon.”
Taemin pauses, hastily pulling the rest of his hair into a ponytail, the base of his extensions tugging at his scalp. “When?”
Jongin grins sheepishly at him. “Tomorrow.”
Taemin just stares, the aftertaste of sugar oddly nauseating in his mouth. They’d done this before- from Beijing to Taipei to London to L.A and back to Seoul. Except this time, Taemin is not the only one flying away. Suddenly he is afraid that with both Jongin and himself on the move, they may never find the way back to each other again.
Taemin doesn’t tell Jongin this. Instead, he asks, “How in the world did you sneak out, then?”
“Sehun owes me from covering for him.” Jongin looks slightly abashed as he turns around, setting his messenger bag on his lap as he digs through the pockets. He pauses upon handing Taemin a box wrapped in newspaper. “For you.”
Taemin half snorts when he catches the headlines on the paper, carefully tearing along the edges. Inside, he finds an autographed copy of EXO’s debut CD. “How much can I sell this on gmarket?” He smiles winningly when Jongin makes a face at him.
“Keep going,” Jongin insists, and Taemin sets the CD aside to find a photo of the first time Jongin brought him back to his house. They’re lying on Jongin’s floor, sharing a plate of kimbaps Jongin’s mother had made. Taemin only has one sock on while Jongin sports a large baseball cap, waving frantically at the camera, trying to shoo his mother out as she snaps the photo. Taemin thinks he must have been thirteen then, straight bangs cut conveniently above his eyes as he laughs at Jongin inside the frame. He barely remembers the sound of Jongin’s voice back then, the years blending into each other until suddenly, they’re both eighteen and Jongin is going to China.
“Stop looking so sad,” Jongin says suddenly.
“I’m not sad,” Taemin tells him. “I just have a stomach ache from your drink.”
“You’re a terrible liar,” Jongin replies, grinning.
They leave shortly after, walking side by side, Jongin’s shoulder knocking into Taemin’s. The street is oddly busy for this time of the night, the March air unexpectedly warm. “I have a recording in a few hours,” Taemin says.
“I have to be on a plane in a few hours,” Jongin replies, hovering at the staircase to the next subway station. He looks at Taemin, eyes unreadable.
It’s always like this between them, Taemin’s words catching at the back of his throat. Taemin can’t do farewells, can’t discern the proper thing to say. At the most crucial of times, everything that comes to his mind is wildly inadequate. For all that he is - dancer, actor, idol, wonder boy magnae of SHINee- Taemin still feels so lost in front of Jongin, as if Jongin is the only one he cannot command with a simple smile.
Sometimes Taemin thinks he left a part of himself in that room, caught between mouthfuls of kimbap as he shared rumors about sunbaes with Jongin, their laughter still ringing in Taemin’s ear. Then he realizes that all they have is the present, with Jongin waiting patiently for him to say something.
Taemin is about to open his mouth when a car honks in the distance. They both turn towards the intersection, but the situation diffuses itself quickly. In the distance, Taemin spots something familiar on the nearest billboard and tugs at the other boy. Jongin pauses when he catches sight of the EXO poster, his expression shifting into a half smile.
“Everything we wanted is coming true,” Jongin says. “Where does that leave us?”
Taemin understands the odd feeling of displacement in the abrupt shift from trainee to idol. He knows exactly what Jongin is trying to say. What is left when everything you’ve dreamed of has come true? “I don’t know,” Taemin responds at last, grabbing at Jongin’s hand. “But no matter what happens and how famous we get, I’ll always be here, Jongin-ah.”
Jongin doesn’t reply, but his smile says enough.
On the way to his recording, Taemin listens to Jongin’s CD. They’ve been dancing around each other for so long, time passing like a hand waving from a train Taemin wanted to be on. Yet, Taemin has faith that they can always return to that room, back to a time when forever seemed possible.
Breadth of Your Strength
SHINee retrieves their lost leader. Onew-centric. G. SHINee.
It always starts the same way, that’s how Onew knows it’s coming. He’s standing somewhere he recognizes, the pang of familiarity dawning on him when the stranger enters. The stranger is a little different every time, but one thing consistent in every dream is his smile, and he’s oh so happy. Sometimes Onew is sitting on the subway across from him, headphones plugged in as he stares into the distance. Sometimes Onew is walking back from school, still glad in his academy uniform when he sees him crossing the street. One thing, however, is for sure. The stranger always notices him, his smile confused with an approaching frown, and that’s when Onew realizes that he is staring at Lee Jinki.
“Do you always dream about chasing yourself?” Joon asks one night, with Onew curled into rug on MBLAQ’s bathroom dorm. When Onew doesn’t reply, Joon runs soothing circles down Onew’s back, his sighs small.
He sleeps on Joon’s bed that night. When he wakes up, Joon is leaning against the railing and throwing Onew his phone. “It’s been ringing like crazy. I’m pretty sure you’re getting disowned from your group.” He stops when Onew doesn’t reply. “For fuck’s sake, stop drooling on my pillow.”
“I want to go home,” Onew says after Joon tugs him upright, his head still spinning from too many shots of yakju.
Joon looks at him. “Then go.”
“No,” Onew says before pulling Joon’s blankets over his head. “I want to go home.”
“Oh,” Joon replies. “Oh.”
Onew stops dreaming about himself because he stops sleeping altogether in February, the hours stretching across the length of his ceiling as he counts the ticking of the second hand. In the mornings, Taemin blinks sleepily at him and asks what’s wrong, hyung? Key makes him tea, but swallowing it is jarring rather than soothing, Onew feeling the hair on his arms stand up as he inhales chamomile and jasmine. At night, Onew flips through old notebooks tucked under his bed, tracing careful scribbles of double integrals and derivations of wind velocity on a contained area modeled over wing spans. He loses track of days and hours- the only thing he knows are numbers and the familiar dryness in his throat just before he hits that high C in the recording studio.
They take him to the hospital, but the only plausible diagnosis is stress. It’s high likely, because lately Onew has been thinking about everything. Everything yet nothing. Their managers ask if he wants to take some time off, and Onew says yes, yes, yes.
Minho is furious when he comes home to find Onew’s bags in the living room, but Onew thinks he hardly has any say in the matter. Minho hasn’t been around in weeks, too busy being chaperoned on location shoots and memorizing scripts to notice Onew’s slow and agonizing death.
He hears them whisper outside of his door at night, Jonghyun going, don’t we have some sleeping pills in the drug cabinet? Key just hisses something in return about not trusting Onew with it.
This is the ultimate form of escapism, Minho says. We can’t just let him leave when everything is hanging by a thread. We still- the routines and promotions are-
Someone tells him to shut up, and Onew stops breathing when he realizes that it’s Taemin. He stops breathing for thirty-three seconds until the room settles back into that familiar, lulling dimness.
I’m afraid he won’t come back, someone says at last, and that’s when Onew stops listening.
At home, he eats chicken and play with his cousins. A few high school friends come to visit, grinning as they share stories of college and work and mutual friends in the army. Onew plays video games and helps his parents with chores, pausing when he sees the collection of SHINee CDs his mother displays proudly on their coffee table.
Some days he’s full of ambition, thinking today will be better. Other days, he can’t be bothered to sleep, eat, or breathe. He feels displaced- The Lost Leader of SHINee, disappearing always, forever fading away and receding farther and farther into the background. There is an insidious ache inside of him, compounding daily, and it seems almost impossible to ever see the end.
On his third day home, Onew dreams about spotlights and the sharpness of Key’s cheeks. He dreams about Jonghyun’s eyes, mischievous yet kind. He dreams about Taemin’s smile, always warm, always safe. He dreams about Minho and how he brings the back of his hand to his face when laughing. On his third day home, Onew sleeps.
He’s coming back from the store one day when he notices four familiar pairs of shoes in the entry way. The other boys are sitting by the dinning table, eyes wide when Onew comes in. His mother is hovering in the background, but Jonghyun is the one who stands up and says, “hyung, hyung you have to come back.”
Onew just pauses, watching the anxious expression on their faces.
“Hyung,” Taemin adds, and Onew can imagine them huddled together in the living room of their apartment, rehearsing this speech. “Please don’t give up. Things do matter. We matter.”
“You matter,” Minho finishes.
They’re crowded around him, a million words left unsaid at arm’s length. Onew thinks that’s all he really needs- a small spark of hope speaks volumes. Five pair of hands linked together under the spotlight and four pairs of arms wrapped around him. The possibility of happiness perches on his shoulders, singing a tune wordlessly.
Suddenly, it’s as if Onew has never stopped singing at all.
a/n: I've been reading too much Emily Dickinson, Jonathan Safran Foer, and Elizabeth Wurtzel. I've also been talking to a few people about Onew's physical withdraw lately. But, you know, fiction is ... well, fictional. The Kaimin piece was my own attempt of tackling the inadequacy of goodbyes. Both were supposed to be drabbles, but Aeris has kindly informed me that neither qualify anymore, length-wise. TLDR; I WRITE TOO MUCH.
Have some happy Onew
Love it? Hate it? Please leave some feedback, even if it may be a little late. You can also join the community, since I'll be locking up NC17 fics.