Believe, Chapter 5
Title: Believe 5/?
Pairing: JaeMin
Rating: R
Genre: fantasy/romance/a wee bit of angst.
Length: chaptered
For: anihimesama
Summary: Jaejoong's just working a job, clearing a forest for a new city to be built. But what he finds is more than just the tranquility of nature; what happens when he's pulled into a world that he's been helping destroy? If it sounds sort of like Fern Gully.....it's sort of because that's where I got the idea :)
A/N: So I'm sick and this is unbeta'd....please forgive me for any mistakes/point them out if you see any?
And two--so the music video for Keep Your Head Down demonstrates really well the sort of light/power Changmin uses later in this chapter. It's just a good excuse to watch the sex that is that video again :)
Though an entire group of riled Fae stare him down, angry murmurs flowing past him like wind through a field of wheat, all Jaejoong can see is Changmin, the strong set of his jaw, the firm cross of arms. His body is rigid, unyielding. He is here to fight, to win. But though the man's anger rushes at Jaejoong, darts at his skin like a snake's forked tongue, he can't help but notice the icy beauty of the other man. His pupils are ringed by a silver glow, as if he were staring into a bright light, one that casts a dying night-light glow over his high cheekbones, the gold satin of his muscular limbs.
“You've betrayed us, Ki,” Changmin asserts, taking a step forward. Though he is surrounded in light, bathed by its fair hand, there's a darkness in him. Jaejoong feels it like winter's chill as it curls around bones and slices through muscle, leaving only trembling scraps in its wake. “You've given him a taste of our magic. An outsider. An interloper.”
“An interloper you saved, Changmin. An outsider you brought back to us.” The brush of comfort, of soft sheets dappled by a half-blocked sun wells within Jaejoong. It's a crescendo of jumbled senses, touch intertwining with sound, jerking his mind in directions it's never been pulled before. Ki's shoulder brushes his and the angry crash of fried synapses and cells tones down, mimicking the placid glass surface of resting water. The weight of her seemingly hollow-boned frame is strange; she feels sturdy where he is all holes, solid where his insides have been sanded away.
“After,” Ki continues, her hand alighting on Jaejoong's shoulder like the most careful of birds. Her nails brush his collarbone, a protective grip without the caged feeling he'd come to associate with touch, with intimacy and all its glittering promises, words that always turned out to be the cracked shards of broken mirrors and empty reflections. “You'd almost killed him. Tell me, Changmin,” she says his name gently, but the prickle of underlying thorns curve sharply, obvious. “Was he an outsider then, when you begged me to keep him alive? What was he then?”
The muscles of Changmin's jaw, tightened into a teeth-gritting grimace, twitch, pulling at his cheek. He's been pierced by the loaded words, the implications fastened to desperate actions.
“I don't like to take life,” the weight of Changmin's gaze nails Jaejoong to the ground. Disdain floods his irises, curls his lip into a sneer that should be ugly, the screwed-up face of anger and hate, but it simply displays the perfection of the man's face from even more severe angles. “Even if it does belong to a human and they don't return that same courtesy.” He shrugs, nonchalance dripping of the hitch of muscles in his shoulder and back. “But what does it matter, Ki? He's human. He's not our kind. He doesn't belong here.”
The air around Jaejoong shifts as Ki breathes it in between her teeth to speak again, to parry with Changmin's attack. But he beats her to the punch, thrusts himself forward, grappling for control, for a foothold to lift himself with.
“How about,” he smiles, shows the slick of his teeth to the crowd, a feral grin to give them what they want, the savage, evil human. “You talk to the filthy animal directly? That's what I am, right? Just a human.” A flick of muscles and his own lip snaps up, mimicking Changmin. “But I have no ties to humanity. I have no kin, no place. I belong to no one.” His hands flex of their own free will, curling back to the palms hard enough to crack the joints. “And no one belongs to me. But I'm not your enemy. I didn't know what I was doing, that I was hurting you.”
There’s nothing more to say, and the swirling chafe of conflict, the confusion of sympathy and still-ripe anger from the Fae makes him feel feverish, unsteady like the ground underfoot could drop away at any moment, leaving him to look into the gaping maw of nothingness before dropping away into it. Empathy is something he’s always been good at, understanding why people feel the way they do, where they’re coming from. It had kept him on the good graces of some, taught him how to act when in need of favors. A smile here, an innocent look up through lashes, a blush of shame-he’d mastered it all, could slip into a facade without a second thought. But now he can’t control it, can’t turn the ability off and just take stock of his own too-tight mind, the thoughts he knows must be ripping at the seams. He has to get away from their shock of emotion, the churn of fearcuriousityanger.
Running away again isn't an option now; Jaejoong knows that, at least. Whatever Ki's done to him, whatever door she's pushed open in him doesn't look like it's being shut anytime soon. But he can't stay here, not so close to the eclipse of Changmin's presence, the way he pushes against Jaejoong's consciousness, trying to slip in, dig under. So he takes a step forward, sturdy though the proximity makes his hair stand on end, the taller man's animosity spiking as he closes the distance between them. He walks by, through the crowd, laying himself out for inspection, for them to press in and read the words of his soul, the scrawl of truth he's written into his voice, his intentions. He means no harm. And they need to know that, to see that, if he's to survive at all. He slips by bodies, presses skin to skin and tries not to react when more than one set of wings draws idly across his cheek or arm, a kiss like that of a flower-petal reaching out to investigate him further. Their eyes follow him, hot and heavy on his empty, wingless back, just another glaring difference between them.
It's not until he's out of their sight range that he realizes he has no idea where they'd put him when he was sleeping, no memory of how to get back. The thick muscles of his stomach clench, rolling in the acid he can almost hear hissing, eating through the tissue to pour into his bloodstream, to heat it though it boils already. Frustration's long nails draw red scratches down his back, lines of pain and sharp-breaths, the quickening that comes before tears. But he won't let them collect, can't break during this test. Besides, the blossom of bile and anger propel him, allow him to slip quickly into the edge of forest, between trees that stretch to brush their long limbs in the blue haze of the sky though they'll never reach. Even if he's out of sight, noise will give him away, and though screams tear at his throat they're contained, held in by a snarl of clamped teeth.
The cold wash of his words pulls at him, wrings him like a dishrag between determined hands. He's alone. He has no one, nothing. And he belongs nowhere, is a speck carried to a fro by an uncaring wind, moving about in an apathetic world. It's a fact that never used to bother him, rolled off him like a bead of water off a duck's back. But now it means something, hurts in a new way, though the way his fingers dig into the ground, shoving dirt under his nails, tearing at the beds and cuticles until red spreads on skin and earth helps a little, distracts from the black hole inside of him, the roar of his past as it rises to swallow him whole.
But you don't feel anything, remember? A part of him questions snidely, one he buried so long ago he thought it would have been snuffed out by now. You're untouchable.
God, can't breathe. Mouth open, mouth closed, air isn't coming, not when he can't remember how to work his throat, when his body is captured by his mind and a memory, his worst memory, loads like a film on a reel.
He's twelve. It's a week after his mother's funeral, a thin-bodied husk shoved into the ground, the cancer-ravaged remainder of a woman, a mother, a person. Here and gone. His father has swam up from under the ocean of alcohol he uses to cloud his mind, to forget as best he can. But the person looking down at him through the unfocused sheen of red-rimmed eyes, Jaejoong knows this isn't his father, the man whose lips he remembers pressed to his forehead during the painful burn of a fever, the slow circle of hands on his narrow back as illness worked its way out of him. No, this man is a stranger, a face of similar features and shared blood that doesn't matter anymore, that's been severed cleanly, no fragments left behind to sew back together.
“You've always had her eyes,” Jaejoong is told, his father grasping at his chin with the gentle apathy of a child staring at a bug. Jaejoong can only look up, frozen, sunk into the pit of his own stomach, watching the scene unfold from somewhere within through a mist of disbelief. It's not until he finds himself on the floor, cheek pressed into the grain of cool wood, that he understands he's been hit, that like a viper, his father's other hand had shot up to try and destroy all that's left of his wife, her image, her memory. The fetal position is an instinct that saves him from the brunt of force that comes from the unbalanced kicks aimed at his ribs. It keeps them from cracking, turning in to dangle sharp next to his heart, though they can't tear it further than it already is.
When his creator, the man who helped bring him into this world is finished, when he collapses back onto the sofa a few feet away, he speaks, voice blank, stiff.
“I never want to see you again, Jaejoong,” he says in a faraway voice, the kind that comes out when urging away someone trying to interrupt a good dream, trying to peel back the deep layers of sleep to reveal the blotted-out dew of morning's cold intrusions. “Take what you need and get out.”
He leaves with blood on his teeth, with it dried and cracking on his lips. The first night is the hardest.
Stop it, he begs, a passenger in his own mind. But the memory draws back anyway, tendrils rolling away, leaving him sharp, clearer than he's been in what feels like forever. Awareness returns, the shade of darkness too inky to be anything but a few hours after nightfall. Time seems to stretch here, packing as many events into its hours as possible, a pace Jaejoong isn't used to keeping. But something's off, because what bleeds through Jaejoong's vision, what makes his arms rise to cover his face, back arching into the hard ground below, twisting away from a shriek of light that tries to pierce through his eyelids.
“Sorry, sorry!” Hands clamp down on his shoulders, attached to the male voice peppering him with apologies that brush his essence, his aura, his what-fucking-ever with truth. He reaches out without meaning to, a phantom limb reacting to what it feels is an attack. It's taking a deep breath on the downturn of a roller coaster's first big drop, the sensation that a part of his body, one he can't see or even really control is moving outside himself, searching. What it finds is the first honeyed sip of tea after work, a pulse that fireworks out as he flickers against it, winding around like a cat around a leg, fluid and velvet at once. It ripples like water in him, each circle expanding outwards to caress him once before moving on, spreading out into infinity, waving goodbye as they go. He's shuddering, chest catching as each breath trips out of him, consciousness wavering between himself and whoever he's tied up in. Then it slips away, the thread that had wrapped him deftly into an embrace without arms.
But he is in arms, held up with strength that belies the grace of the lithe forearms leading to muscular shoulders.
Changmin.
Self-preservation should be guiding him away, should be telling his arms to thrash and his legs to kick, to increase the space between them but something else quiets the impulse, whispers that he should remain, should allow himself to look into those alien eyes and let them absorb him because they're even more beautiful at night, a constellation of champagne patchwork, filaments like cool, white flame ringed in the darkness of Changmin's pupil. A crush of thoughts, droning like an ocean wave just before it hits the surf readies itself, firing half-signals of actions, pulling Jaejoong in different directions. Go, run away from him. Stay, stay here. Learn. Motion evades them both, leaving them suspended, gripping at nothing but held up nonetheless.
And then Changmin clears his throat.
“You don't feel bad,” he whispers in sticky tones, the kind that would prefer to remain nestled in his throat (skin Jaejoong doesn't think of tasting, imaginary sips of salt and dandelion wine lacing around his taste buds). “You're not bad.”
The peace of the moment, the quiet, accidental intertwining of unwilling spirit and emotion withers with the reminder that here, Jaejoong is guilty until proven innocent.
“Thanks for letting me know.” He's louder, rougher, breaks the hush of the night and sparks the surrounding trees' disapproval, though the rebuke is too strange to have any real effect. With a rough shrug, Jaejoong is free of Changmin's grip, watches as the other man's hands go back to his own sides, ordinary, save for the fact that they're glowing. Now he remembers-the first time Changmin saved him, pushed him out of the way of that tree; his hands had cast that soft light then as well.
“You-” Air buzzes around his head as he gestures to it, lets the unasked question hang, waiting for the Fae to address it.
“I-I could have hurt you tonight, Jaejoong.”
He's using my name. Jaejoong's blood pumps a little faster, rushes to his cheeks as he watches the Fae's gaze drop to the ground.
“And no matter what's happened in my past, it was wrong. I-I knew it when you brushed past me, when I felt your hea-your words.” He smiles, an embarrassed twist of lips, self-conscious mirth playing at the corners of generous flesh. “Ki was a few steps ahead of us all.”
“Thank you.” The words come out like cardboard, but they're all that can be mustered. It's-just all of this is too much. He can't trust Changmin, right? Can't want to like him. It doesn't make sense, goes against cold street logic, everything that's guided him so far. The stiffness isn't lost on Changmin, though he doesn't leave it at that.
“The past can swallow us up,” he murmurs before unfolding long legs, leaning back to stand up before holding out a still-glowing palm, looking for all the world like he's clutching at a star. The first willing glide of his hand into the Fae's brings an unfurling of pins and needles in ribbons around his spine. He just grasps harder, and for a second before his legs remember how to support themselves, he is weightless, anchored only by Changmin's willingness to hold on, to keep their fingers entwined, warm palms touching. The radiance, as Jaejoong finds his footing, doesn't fade immediately; rather, it shines brighter, engulfs his hand before absorbing into the skin there.
“What did-”
“I don't want to become the thing I hate.” The tree Changmin's turned his face toward doesn't reply; its gnarled bark remains impassive to the Fae's soft admission, though Jaejoong could swear he feels a pang of sympathy ripple through the trees, shaking their leaves in silver trills like the tracks of tears on faces.
“Come on. I'll take you back to your quarters.”
The walk isn't long, but it is silent. Jaejoong steps where Changmin's feet have already fallen, choosing to walk his path without really noticing until his legs begin to burn from stretching them farther than usual. With the Fae in front of him, Jaejoong has a chance to examine the wings, the not-quite early appendages that speak of endless skies and the freedom of breaking away from the ground, of seeking up to get a better view of the sun instead of knocking down trees to rid the world of shadows. They glimmer, but like ice, the shine of strength and danger, though they're thinner than a single digit. There are no feathers, nothing like that of a bird but they're not the light flesh of a butterfly either. It pains him not to know, to recognize what they are, and without thought or consideration he reaches out to touch, to satiate the curiosity that burns in his throat like the thirst for water in a desert. Before Changmin comes to a dead stop, before he all but hisses as he turns around to glare at Jaejoong, those eyes brighter than spotlights and pinpointed on only him, he feels them. They're humidity made physical, lightning transformed into tissue. They're silken under the calloused pads of his fingers but firm, like stretched cartilage.
“Don't,” Changmin licks his lips before pressing them together, disapproval drawing his brows down into a thick line. “Not without-just don't.”
The walk continues, though Jaejoong now walks with Changmin, shoulders flirting due to mismatched gaits. He's led to an opening he doesn't remember coming out of, a cave-like mouth that leads down, though anything else is obscured.
“This isn't where I was before.”
“You're staying in one of my rooms now,” Changmin answers, and without looking back descends, leaving Jaejoong to stumble after him. They stop at a door covered with a sort of tarp hanging from hooks attached to the ceiling.
“This is you.” The other man turns on his heel, content to leave Jaejoong to it.
“Changmin,” he calls, soft as a moth's beating wing, half-hoping the Fae's sharp hearing won't catch his hesitant words. But the taller man stops, looks back and raises his chin, waiting.
“You said I didn't feel bad, right?” Jaejoong avoids Changmin's gaze, an easy enough task in the dark.
“Mmh,” Changmin breathes, a sighed affirmation.
“What do I feel like?”
When the Fae's voice, the low trickle of hidden depths, doesn't come, Jaejoong's cheeks burn, embarrassment rushing to color him scarlet. He shakes his head, moves to pull back the tarp but his hand is caught halfway, held still.
“You know the pressure that comes before you cry?”
Jaejoong nods, mute. He knows the tightness of a constricting throat, muscles bent on strangling, squeezing the salt from a body lest it drown itself.
“You hurt like that.”
And then he's gone, and Jaejoong is alone in a suddenly torch-illuminated room.