Title: In Between
Author:
virdantLength: 598 words; super-short
Rating: PG-13
Genre: Romance
Pairing: JaeHo-ish-maybe-kinda
Summary: The space between Jaejoong and Hero
Warning: Death-ish-maybe-kinda.
Notes: A bit more of an exploratory fic. Just thinking about concepts. Probably will expand this one day, but at the rate I'm writing, that's not going to happen.
In Between
Jaejoong falls in love hard.
Yunho looks at him, eyes slanted, a smile on his lips, care in his voice, and Jaejoong forgets suddenly that this is all planned, that in the next few minutes, Yunho will be nothing but his friend again, and falls in love.
Yoochun shakes his head when Jaejoong realizes, slowly, like a flower unfurling, that he truly deeply madly does love Yunho. “Don't do this,” he warns Jaejoong, because he's already started to learn what love means.
“I love him,” Jaejoong retorts, unwilling to accept that there could be possibilities that he had yet to see.
“Don't,” Yoochun warns, and turns off the lights so Jaejoong can fall deep into sleep.
*
Each day is torture, knowing that Yunho does not love Jaejoong, that it is merely U-Know Yunho who loves Hero Jaejoong. The differences are subtle, but Jaejoong is not quite Hero yet, and no matter how hard Jaejoong yearns, U-Know will never be Yunho.
“Give up,” Changmin says, in one of his more violent and blunt fits. He is not Max right now, but rather Changmin, and Changmin is warning him of something that Changmin is foreseeing. “It's not a right love. Society will never accept it. At the current perception that the general population holds at this moment of time...”
Jaejoong stops listening after the first sentence. The rest of the words, he doesn't even hear.
What makes a love right and wrong?
*
Outside his window, a couple breaks up. The girl bows, the boy bows, and they both apologize and walk their separate ways.
It is almost innocent, their separation. There is no intimacy in their parting, there is nothing to suggest that perhaps something before they were in love.
But this is right.
*
“Yunho?” Jaejoong asks. It is dark tonight, because none of them have the lights on at this early time in the morning, after the glow of staying late has faded off, but the joy of the early morning has not come.
“Jaejoong,” Yunho responds.
Jaejoong thinks about confessing, about saying his feelings, about telling Yunho that he fell in love that day.
Then he thinks. Thinks about Yoochun, thinks about Changmin, and in the seconds that he is thinking of them, he realizes that he has nothing to say now.
*
Junsu shakes his head. “This isn't right, Jaejoong.”
“I know,” Jaejoong responds. He has words rehearsed, he has thoughts in his head that he has yet to say.
“Don't,” Junsu says, and Jaejoong thinks of Yoochun, thinks of Changmin, and thinks of Yunho and the fact that they have said nothing to each other.
He thinks of Hero and U-Know, on stage, smiles etched permanently onto their lips and happiness never far away. He thinks he would like that, being happy. He thinks he would like that, loving U-Know Yunho, who loves him deeply, madly, back.
*
“Jaejoong.”
“U-Know,” Hero Jaejoong responds, even though they are not on stage yet. They will be soon, and already, there are eyes watching them. Paid, perhaps, by the company to watch them for hints of a relationship that does not exist between Jaejoong and Yunho.
“What did you...” U-Know begins.
But Jaejoong does not hear the rest. Instead, he hears love love love for the rest of his life, trapped behind the lenses of Hero.
Jaejoong is happy. Jaejoong is content. Jaejoong knows nothing.
Jaejoong is dead.
*
Love is a chaste infant and violence.
-“Love you to death”, Karen Mok