Giants (Hankyung/Siwon)

[pregnantcigar]

Pairing: Hankyung/Siwon
Rating: PG
A/N: Assume Infernal Affairs 'verse, except with the leads both alive at the end.

Giants

They walked like they were heroes, lived like rejects. Their shadows tracked their moods. Siwon would stay unshaven for weeks, the room littered with stale towels and crumpled post-its. “Inspire me,” he said, and Hankyung would come up with a Chinese riddle. Maidens and lanes, boats and oars. “I’ve heard this one before,” Siwon would say, and he’d think of something else, and something after that. He lay on the bed naked, and when he breathed in his back would touch the mattress. When he couldn’t sleep he imagined existing in the center of a belly button, the otherwise uselessness of it but for that one mother-child connection. He wondered if his mother was still alive briefly before falling asleep.

“The next story I write will be ours,” Siwon said. Hankyung saw the grief there, plain, when he looked. People dealt differently. There was no reason to it. This wasn’t a phase. Hankyung hated that word, because it looked too far off into the distance. It downplayed this very second, the piece of lint between his thumb and forefinger, the drag of a pencil across recycled lined paper. The final spasm of a bug’s wing before it gave up the futile fight. Hankyung wasn’t looking ahead; he was looking down. Around. Inwards. A luxury he could now afford.

Once a week they would walk up the long avenues and dress themselves. Imagine I’m a cowboy. Siwon in snakeskin boots, tight around the ankles. Suddenly he was a ballet dancer, tiptoeing up and down the dressing room corridor. Your smoldering stare doesn’t work on me. I’ve had my immunizations. They played this tireless game, but they had never touched. The past tied them together. Remembrances. The desire to forget.

Well, I could’ve killed you, Siwon always said at the end of an argument. His go-to line. The remorse that regenerated itself, like an earthworm. But you didn’t, Hankyung said. I was the one with the gun, remember?

It could’ve ended differently.

It didn’t. End, I mean. It hasn’t ended.

But it could’ve.

Holding his face, closing the formidable distance. Siwon lived amidst possibilities, plagues of the past. He chased them out with ink, but they found their way home, like he was all they knew. Mother at first sight, on the abstract level. But he slept well, his face away, toward the window. He liked the light that streamed in every morning, nudging their foreheads awake. He needed the reminder that he’d gotten out of the dark.

Hankyung was the insomniac, the one listening for the ticking of clock hands in this digital age. His least favorite color was neon, neon anything. Anything that glowed in the dark and read numbers. When his body finally accepted the numbing, his hands were the last to relax. He slept with a clenched fist, but not like a child. Like a prisoner. He felt for the trigger, waited for the right moment to pull. The perfect breeze to raise a sail. He woke up to the back of Siwon’s head. The drops of sweat that formed at the nape of his neck right below his curling hair. Clumped together with overnight grease and perspiration. Early sunlight a sheen of gold across the landscape of his arm, walking on water. He might’ve been dead, he looked so peaceful.

Some suffer in their sleep. Some from lack of it. Some, like they’re getting paid.

For Hankyung, it wasn’t worse. It was a subtle variation of the past. Hiding for the right reasons. Now there was someone to remember him.