Starspeak and Our Cosmic Heartbeat [2/2]
Two
After dinner that night, the three of them head to the hot springs again, partially dressed this time. Jongin has swim trunks large enough to fit Sehun, and Baekhyun takes a pair and tries his best to fit his hips into the things.
Jongin’s a funny kid. There’s a part of him that Baekhyun notices is a lot like Sehun, right off the bat. It’s incredible, how quickly he begins to lose his reluctance to talk to them, and Baekhyun thinks it’s largely because Sehun is here-they seem to understand each other when it comes to personality, both of them reserved when the environment is foreign, but loud as anyone when they’re as ease. During the hike in the morning, Baekhyun had led the flow of conversation, Jongin answering questions, and it was Sehun who despite being electrified awake by the cold interjected only once every so often with something meaningful to say. Baekhyun realized that slowly Jongin was gaining an awareness that beneath Sehun’s stoicness is the same level of depth he himself had, and because of this the two of them became quickly comfortable around each other. Baekhyun wonders if Jongin can sense him too, almost through some intuitive way, wonders what kind of impression he gives.
The hot spring seems to boil the debris out of his system. He climbs out first, hoping he could get things sorted out back home. It turns out that the absent shower of the inn rooms is found outside the hot springs. There’s no one in the room except for him, so he dumps his things on the bench and locks himself into a stall. He switches on a shower head, waits until the water turns warm.
The speakers in the change room are playing some 1980’s ballads Baekhyun recognizes, and without realizing he starts singing along. He’s washing soap out of his hair, the shower raining loud on the tiles when a voice speaks up from the stall next to him.
“Didn’t know you sang, hyung.”
“Jesus-”
His heart leaps, and on reflex an arm jerks and rams into the wall of the shower. “Oh my God, I didn’t even hear you,” he pants, rubbing at his hand.
“You’re pretty good,” Jongin’s voice comes, and past the noise of the water Baekhyun can’t hear him clearly enough to catch his tone, whether he’s serious or teasing or a little embarrassed.
“Thanks,” he says, and without thinking attaches “I’m a part time singer.”
Then his stomach flops. Jongin laughs from the other side of the wall, but Baekhyun’s lost his smile now. It’s not even a Freudian slip, it’s just him forgetting his brain to mouth again, and it brings up way too many things he suddenly doesn’t want to think about. Like why Jongdae sent him here, like what it all is supposed to mean, or what he’s going to do when he goes back if he can’t stop feeling like he doesn’t belong in that office. Baekhyun gets out, dries himself off and puts on his robe again. He isn’t going to think about it, he promises.
He dries his hair, whistling along to the music, and Jongin’s shower door opens. From the benches Baekhyun watches Jongin practically moonwalk out into the room, grooving along with the upbeat song with a towel around his neck. He locks eyes with Baekhyun, who’s still whistling, and dances his way to his locker, pulling out a tshirt.
“Are you gonna tell me you’re a part time dancer too?”
The red locker door blocks his face as he rummages. Baekhyun dries his neck, tries to work out the knots in his hair. Sehun’s still nowhere to be found. Jongin’s quiet for a moment, and then he leans around the door on his locker, smiling softly. His eyes sparkle. “Nah, full time dancer.”
÷
When Baekhyun goes back to his room that night, he uses the inn’s phone to call his grandma, and lets her know he won’t be visiting until mostly likely the summer. He also tries his luck and calls Jongdae, which only gets him as far as voicemail. He waits for the beep at the end, hoping he could at least leave him a present when he wakes up next morning, but at the end of Jongdae’s standard “you have reached…” recording, there’s an extension Baekhyun’s never heard before.
It goes,
...if you have any business please leave me a message, and if you’re Byun Baekhyun…
There’s a pause, and Baekhyun’s expecting him to start laughing, but when he starts up again the tone of his voice is more serious than he’d imagined,
I hope you will make the best out of your vacation.
He wants to. Baekhyun believes in milestones, and turning points, believes in the significance of ruptures in his routine, and he wants to think it’ll lead him out of something, maybe a monotony. The night before he’d fallen asleep promising that when he leaves this place with a lungful of its fresh air he will rev himself up again and get out of this kind of stalemate. Get the hell out of it. It’s tiring, battling with his doubts, one foot in and the other out on anything he’s reckless enough to prompt himself to do. He will leave here, and he’ll take with him enough bravery to make a decision.
In the end he doesn’t record anything for Jongdae, but listening to the message has put the smile that he lost in the shower room back on his face. Once he’s set for sleep, he goes to pay a good night visit to Sehun next door, and finds Jongin sitting on the edge of the bed, both of them watching something intently on Sehun’s glowing laptop screen.
He switches on the light, and Sehun hisses at him. Jongin squints. There’s the six pack that Sehun brought with him on his bedside table, and two of them have been torn off, tab pulled and sitting half finished beside them. Baekhyun cocks his brow.
“Since when did you guys get along so well?”
“You’re our common enemy,” Sehun deadpans, not once taking his eyes off the screen. Jongin grins up at him-he’s changed into more comfortable clothes, cotton shirt with a worn off print, sweatpants for pajamas, and feet bare crossed at the ankles. Baekhyun walks over to the beer, shaking each can. They’re both empty.
“Are you even old enough to drink?” He looks down, and finds where he couldn’t see at the door, a stack of manga books piled on the chair. “Really?”
Jongin swats his arm, “yeah, really.” Baekhyun picks the top one up, and Sehun looks over for a second, then turns back.
“You’re a functioning adult, you wouldn’t understand us kids.”
Baekhyun scoffs, kind of incredulous. “Really, Sehun? What’re you even doing?” He leans behind Jongin, and then it finally makes sense, watching Sehun play League, fingers gliding across his laptop keyboard. They all watch in silence for a while, until Sehun’s match ends, then he tells them to wait and leaves, before coming back with his own laptop. “You think I’m too old for you, kid?”
Sehun’s punk face is back on, eyes narrowed and smirking. “You sure you wanna embarrass yourself, uncle?”
“You know what, fuck you, I’m young,” he says laughing. Baekhyun signs in to the game, cracking his knuckles. He settles at the foot of Sehun’s bed, and sticks his freezing feet right into his blanket. It kicks someone’s leg, and Jongin shoots up shouting from the cold. He kicks at Baekhyun’s legs till he touches Sehun, and Sehun kicks him against the wall. They manage to get into the same match, and that’s when Baekhyun notices that Sehun still uses the same in game username as he did when they were kids.
Sehun tilts his head towards Jongin, “whoses side are you on?”
Baekhyun looks over at them, and Jongin doesn’t respond, just points at the screen. “Here here here.” A moment later he lifts his head, and he looks almost as bratty as Sehun. Next moment, Jongin leans over and whispers something in Sehun’s ear, and Sehun chokes on a laugh, whole face contorted and gasping for air. “Shit, okay, let’s do it-”
“Do what?”
“Nothing.”
“Do wh-”
And then he looks down at his screen, and suddenly Sehun’s character disappears off the map, and the system tells him he’s quit his team. There’s a swarm of mobs coming for him right now, and Sehun just upped and left. “Did you just leave me alone to die?” Baekhyun slams at his keyboard, trying to save himself, and the other two are laughing, choking on it. “I should have never told you I had a clean death record, fuck you to hell, Oh Sehun.” He dies, and that’s that. He threatens the brats, but they play on, a new game begins.
They two of them are so boyish. It stirs things in him, makes him remember the past, back in high school when he played MMO’s with Sehun, and they tag teamed almost every game they came across, sometimes Skyping each other in their blankets at 2 in the morning to catch some boss that spawns in the middle of the night. They’d teamed with friends, and all instructions were typed in chat, but the silence between their speakers would be broken when Sehun asked him things like, have you ever wanted to get out of here? Like do you ever wonder what you’re gonna end up doing after university? And Baekhyun would talk occasionally about singing, or about becoming a vet, and Sehun would laugh at him sometimes. What if you regret it? He’d ask, while the crew buffed up for the dungeon, and in between typing instructions Baekhyun would tell him, then you start over.
Maybe he’s still got it. Maybe he can still pretend to be naive and take himself back, make up for the lost years with more years to be lost, trying to fill a hole from the past. He’s always thinking about it, it’s always at his fingertips. But maybe he’s still got it, you know? He could do anything, he was still young, still fearless.
It’s getting late, and he’s finishing up a quest when he breathes in deeply, and lets it all out in a long sigh. “Hey, have I really become that old?”
But when he lifts his head, he finds the laptop on Jongin’s legs, and Jongin holding up a finger by his mouth, gesturing to Sehun who’s already fallen asleep against the wall. Baekhyun’s cheeks flame a little bit, but he nods, and he turns back. “We should go sleep,” he types in chat, and he’s just about to send it when he hears Jongin whisper.
“I don’t think so.”
Baekhyun looks up, and Jongin looks sleepy, and shy, and pretty. “I don’t think you’re that old.”
Baekhyun smiles at him, crooked at one corner. He nudges him with his foot, then looks back down at his hands, deletes the text in chat, and logs off the game.
“Thanks, kid.”
÷
They follow Jongin around for the next few days. The town wasn’t especially tourism based, so the only thing they find interesting is following Jongin around helping out with the chores. Baekhyun guesses Jongdae didn’t plan on paying for a super long vacation, so he estimates the days in accordance to the alcohol consumed every night, and in his heart thanks Sehun for his foresight.
Mrs. Kim is trying to show his son and Sehun how to prepare fish in the kitchen, when Baekhyun hangs out in the living room digging his gloved hands into a big bowl of kimchi, watching whatever drama there is on TV. The content fills the silence, but it escapes him mostly, and the things Baekhyun registers are the voices in the kitchen in the next room, and the sound of Jongin’s laughter escaping past the curtains.
When the program ends, he walks in front of the TV, looking for something to plug into the DVD player in the little cabinet underneath.
When he opens the little doors, the shelves are stacked full. It’s hard to pull anything out, and even harder to put anything back in, but he manages to tug out a random DVD box, and on the cover there’s nothing but a date written in black pen: 2006-April. The disk inside isn’t labeled either, and it looks like a homemade recording of some sort. He takes out another box, and it’s the same: 2006-May. Baekhyun’s wondering if he should ask Mrs. Kim what they are when Jongin comes out with two bowls of rice in his hands, and immediately notices Baekhyun on the floor.
“Whoa whoa whoa, put it down!”
He sets the bowls down with a clatter, and steps over with a frightening speed, ripping the boxes right out of Baekhyun’s hands. Baekhyun’s eyes are wide, staring up at Jongin, who looks like he might be genuinely angry. Jongin snaps shut the cases, and dodges right around Baekhyun, trying to cram them back into the slit they were taken out from.
Baekhyun watches him, silent for a while. “What is it?” He asks gently. Jongin squeezes them back with Baekhyun’s help, then flops down onto the ground beside him, face flushed red.
“Sorry, hyung. These are,” he takes a few deep breaths, “just…tapes of me dancing. When I was younger.”
Baekhyun’s brows shoot up, “oh?”
“I used to take lessons, and my father would film my progress. I don’t like looking at them, really. It’s taken me a lot to get here.”
Jongin gets called back into the kitchen, and comes out with more dishes. He sits down on a stool.
“You really take dancing seriously then, huh?”
Jongin nods, pulling his lips back over his teeth. He starts to set the table, pairing chopsticks together, and Baekhyun watches him, and something boils, just under the surface of his skin. He thinks maybe he’s onto something, at last, things are starting to fall into place. Jongin sets the table, and Baekhyun looks at him and thinks he’s starting to see what he felt was missing since the day he met him, the empty space in their friendship, the vibrating space between their fingertips.
“Will you show me how you dance?”
“You want to see it?”
“Show me.”
÷
Jongin shows him how he dances. It’s dusk, and the house is empty save for the three of them, Sehun on the couch and Baekhyun on the floor, waiting for Jongin to come back from his room. He walks back into the living room in a white shirt and loose sweat pants. In the threshold, he turns off the lights, and Sehun turns off the screen on his phone. “I’m setting the mood,” he chuckles.
Sehun leans back on his hands, “this better be a good show.”
“One day you’ll have to pay for this,” Baekhyun says. He meets Jongin’s eyes, and feels his face heat in the darkness.
The sky’s a bruise purple. In the wood floors of the living room the heater rumbles, warming their bare feet. There’s a window with the blinds drawn behind him, slits of dull light seeping through, and then there’s the square box of a TV on its stand across the room from where they sit, and Jongin standing before it, a silhouette before a light projector. Together they push the coffee table out of the way. The TV glows blue, until Jongin picks up a remote and crouches down, fixes a disc into the DVD player.
“Here is my hero,” he says fondly, right before the music begins, and the selection screen flashes. Jongin presses play, and then he throws the remote to Sehun, who puts it on his lap. Jongin rolls his head once, stretching his neck. His fingers curl and straighten again.
The programs starts in utter darkness, and then a white screen is lit, where a huge projection of a man is frozen in the middle of the screen. Jongin’s back is turned to the TV, but with some practiced fluidity he puts himself in the same pose. Snapping sounds from the speakers, and Jongin does the same with his fingers. Behind him, Sehun suddenly sits up straight.
“MJ?”
In the darkness, Jongin face breaks into a smile, but he whispers a shh, before suddenly the music starts, and his face loses all expressions.
The TV plays a Michael Jackson concert. In the total darkness, the light of the screen lights up Jongin’s silhouette when he stands proud before it, all six feet of him with his chest out but head lowered, hair like a curtain over his eyes. Baekhyun finds himself wanting to see them glitter the way they have those few times in the past few days, more than anything in this moment. The music starts, and Jongin counts to himself, barely tapping a foot. Suddenly the beat stops for a breath, and in that moment he snaps his head up.
And Jongin dances. Baekhyun can’t look away. Beside him Sehun’s shrugging along, but Baekhyun sits with the wind knocked out of him and he can’t move. Jongin is everything, part time everything, part time fire tender, wax maker, carpenter, gardener, lifeguard, part time everything, but he’s nothing but a dancer. He can do anything, he’s so clever he can do anything, but this is what he is, and in that moment Baekhyun’s convinced he’s never felt closer to anybody. It fountains in him, shoots out to the tips of his hair and his toes-this feeling of kinship, beyond what he knows he could feel. Jongin spells it out with the motions of his body, every share of passion, of ambition, of life he has ever found within himself.
When Jongin finishes Baekhyun’s trying not to cry, not to tell him he loves him.
÷
It’s been some number of days since they have exhausted their supply and the inn’s supply of canned beer, and upon Sehun’s approval, the three of them have finally decided to share the half a bottle of whiskey Sehun was saintly enough to bring (largely for himself, but sucks for him).
They all help set up the celebration, because that’s what Jongin suggests, and that’s what they decide on. In the morning Jongin climbs a half mile up the hill to the only mid sized supermarket in town and comes back near noon with two sacks of snacks and pack after pack of marshmallows. Sehun does his homework googling the weather forecast, and when he finds none on this little corner of the world, sits beside the radio for an hour listening to local reports on weather. Baekhyun packs their bags, sets up the big tent on the top of the hill where Jongin showed them during their hike, and clears the snow as best as he could for the fire.
Jongin’s dad has some leftover wood in the boiler room. Apparently days ago they were left out for having gotten damp, but the moisture has slowly left, and it isn’t hard for them to light it. Jongin comes up the hill with stones to ring off the fire while Baekhyun fans at the flames starting up from the twigs at the bottom of the pile. Sehun’s napping in their tent, readying himself for an all nighter.
It’s already dark out when they finally get the fire going, and Sehun wakes up and takes over Baekhyun’s job fanning at it. Jongin’s standing on the edge of the hill, a slope so steep it’s almost a cliff, overlooking the town with his hands in his pockets, breathing white into the air.
“A toast to us,” Sehun calls from his spot on the ground. He fills three Dixie cups with whichever bottle of alcohol he grabbed from Jongin’s loot bags, passes them out. The three of them drink shot after shot, and Jongin looks so drunk and sleepy that Baekhyun worries he’ll slip off the hill. Sehun’s full of energy for the first few hours, making skewer after skewer of marshmallows which eventually everyone gets sick of eating, and then he crawls back into their tent and goes to sleep. Baekhyun pulls out two towels from their bag and lays them down on the edge of the hill, and lies down on his stomach, bags of snacks standing in the snow between the two of them.
He looks over, and Jongin’s eyes are barely open. He chews his wafer sticks slowly, staring off into the distance, where the trails of smoke from the hot springs rise in ribbons, only thing at their eye level save for the trees, and the light snow falling with no end. Suddenly, he crawls onto his elbows, lifts his torso off the towel, and opens his mouth to scream.
“GOOD NIGHT WORLD. I AM KIM JONGIN.”
Baekhyun’s laughing hysterically when he flops back down, one eye open and the other closed, one step from looking dead. He does the same, props his upper body up, coughing a few times before he shouts into the echoing chasm,
“I AM BYUN BAEKHYUN, AND I DON’T KNOW WHAT TO DO WITH MY LIFE.”
Baekhyun falls down, all energy exhausted, and he rolls over. “Wanna know the truth, Jongin? I was once like you. Just like you, man.”
Jongin has his eyes closed. “What do you mean?”
“When I was young…the only thing I’d ever wanted to do was sing.” He rolls himself onto his side, arms wrapped around himself, and Jongin does the same after a moment. They watch each other, eyes a foot or less apart, breath mingling between them. “And then when I was 17, I missed an audition and it changed my life.”
“It was on the same day as the college exams, so I went to that instead. I got into an okay school, and I got a great job, but every single day.”
“Every single day I think about singing. Singing, with a mic, with an audience, with my eyes closed.”
“I always thought I was meant for this, singing. I wanted to sing. I was going to sing, and one day my music was going to matter. I was going to prove I was alive, I was going to sing.”
Baekhyun watches Jongin now, and his eyes had slowly fallen closed. Baekhyun thinks he fell asleep, but it doesn’t really matter. He can’t remember what he said. Then, Jongin’s eyes open again, like a clam shell opening, and the pearls are speaking to him, whispering some language of the stars.
“Wanna know the truth, Baekhyun?”
Baekhyun nods slowly.
“Today is my birthday.”
Baekhyun lies there, dumbfounded, breathing slowing. He blinks his lids, trying to focus.
“I didn’t even get you anything.”
When he realizes it, Jongin is already reaching across the distance, and pressing their lips together.
÷
When they come back down the mountain the next morning, they’re greeted by the smell of breakfast in the doorway.
Mrs. Kim had made a feast, which says something, considering she usually cooks a damn good meal anyway. All three of them are hungover and dazed, lacking sleep, and Baekhyun thinks so much of the night he must have forgotten, that the only thing he remembers is the warmth of the boy’s lips pressed against his own, for an indefinite amount of time which, in his memory, seems infinite, really, like it’s always been happening, still happening, will always be happening without end. Jongin’s eating his rice when his mom calls his name in a quiet voice, Jongin-ah, and slowly pulls out an envelope from beneath the table.
The atmosphere instantly freezes. It’s the back side that faces the table, but even with nothing written everybody knows, this is important.
Jongin drops his bowl.
From across him Baekhyun thinks he sees his eyes well up in the matter of a second, and his skin loses color. She hands him the envelope, and he doesn’t look at it, or look at her searching for his gaze, and simply stands up and leaves the table. Sehun looks at Baekhyun, and Baekhyun looks back. Both are more than awake now, but neither move or say a word. Mrs. Kim whispers to them, “eat”, but even then none of the three touch their chopsticks again.
It is the longest five minutes of Baekhyun’s life, he thinks, waiting for Jongin to come out of his room again. When he does, when he walks out of the hallway, there’s no expression on his face, until he stops in front of the dining table. He stops and suddenly the tears spring streak after streak out the corners of his eyes.
He looks to his mother, and with a voice full of rust says to her, “I got in, ma.”
She nods at him, tears already staining her collar wet.
He looks over to Baekhyun, right at him with eyes never brighter and says, “I got in.”
÷
A car pulls up outside the inn at noon, and nobody is surprised it’s Jongdae.
They leave the town at midnight, three boys and a tour bus driver, crammed into the back seats with shotgun still untouched. It’d taken an afternoon to calm his nerves, and for his mother to tell him she already knew, for Jongdae to show up and be crushed in a hug on sight by Jongin, his second cousin. It’d taken another few hours to pack, during which all Baekhyun did was shake his head, repeat the exclamation “unbelievable”, and call Jongdae a myriad of bad names, but hug him tightly afterwards. At midnight they’re crammed into the back of Jongdae’s little Honda Civic, and Jongin rolls down the window and waves at his mother outside. “Don’t cry anymore, ma. I won’t be gone forever.”
Jongin gets tired. Baekhyun warns him about the consequences of falling asleep at night in a car with Jongdae behind the wheel, and Jongin laughs, hooking two of his fingers around Baekhyun’s pinky and falling into sleep anyway. A week later, he would end up finding Jongin slumped the same way on the table of the security monitor room, and the only reason that he had to woke him up was to tell him he was oversleeping his dance lessons. Baekhyun hums to the radio, sings a few lines here and there, only the bits and pieces he remembers.
It’s nearing dawn when they get back on familiar roads.
“Hey, Jongdae.”
“Yeah?”
“How would you feel if I started working part time for you?”
There’s a silence, and then Baekhyun chances a glance at the side mirrors and sees Jongdae rigidly frowning at him through the window. His brows jump for a moment.
“What? What’s that look? Isn’t this the conclusion you wanted me to find?”
“What?!” Jongdae’s voice rings, octave rising, and his eyes are bug wide. Jongin stirs, and Jongdae forces his voice down, “I send you on vacation, and this is the idea you come back wi-”
“HOLY MOTHERFUCKING SHIT-”
Baekhyun jumps in his seat, almost squeezing entirely onto Jongin, trying to get as far from Sehun as possible. Jongdae’s car swerves. Sehun has never looked so animated, so awake as he is right now staring down at the phone in his hands. Baekhyun wants to stab a fork onto his foot, so he stomps him, scowling with his whole face. “What the hell is it now?”
Sehun shakes his head, and slowly with a trembling hand holds up his phone.
“He just proposed.”
Jongdae’s car swerves again. Baekhyun’s eyes are nearly out of their sockets as he reads the text message: “Marry me.”
He sinks back onto his seat. Sehun sinks back, too.
“That’s not even possible in Korea.”
Slowly, Sehun looks over at him, past his shoulder.
“Who said he lived in Korea?”
A/N:
Hello dear recipient!! I had gone through so much writing this fic, and I want to thank you from the bottom of my heart for giving me this chance. Thank you for the amazing prompts you gave, I do hope I'd done this one the way you were hoping for. <3
One | Two