holiday (hanchul)

[warmboys]

Holiday
Heechul-centric, PG, 820 words
A listing of possibilities.
A/N: This was bound to happen eventually! But you can blame this on Hilary Duff, rofl.

Holiday

Maybe in two years.

“Hey.”

“Hey yourself.” Easy smiles, droopier eyes (with age comes crow’s feet. You want to smooth them out. You know you can’t).

Are you feeling better? Are you healthy now? You want to ask, but the words get stuck in the stiff exchange of pleasantries. Two years is all it takes for tight hugs to turn into tentative handshakes. But his hand is still as warm as ever.

“You look good,” he says. He touches your face light as a feather, a vestige of your closeness. You brush the thought aside a second too late (these things extinguish quickly).

“So do you. You have some color in your cheeks now,” you observe, thumbing the inside of your left-hand coat pocket.

“It’s the cold,” he answers.

It’s remarkable, the way you can barely recall being angry, the sense of betrayal pressing so tightly into your chest it hurt to speak. Regardless, those days you talked and grinned and tucked loose strands of hair behind your ear with a coy smile, allowing the cameras to catch you in only those select, painstakingly planned moments. You guess, maybe, all things crumble in the presence of time.

Maybe in seven or eight.

Pictures are good at distorting the truth, but the truth must exist in the first place. You can lower your jaw, hide a double chin, and still. Not every angle will flatter your contours, straighten that spine, condense the fat in your tummy.

You find the news on page thirty of the morning paper, a smudged photograph refracted through the half-filled glass of water under your thumb just barely grazing the page, blackening. Former Pop Idol Gets Married. The bride’s face just obscured by a modest lace veil, but you don’t doubt the look on her eyes is of unblemished adoration. You move your gaze over slowly, with something like fear (but you’re thirty-four, you’ve gone to the military and back, aren’t you a little too old to be afraid? The brain rationalizes; the heart refuses to listen. The heart keeps you alive; the brain has to listen).

His tuxedo comes off as a matte black in the photo, and you berate him silently for the lopsided tie. But his mouth is open like he’s just told a funny joke, and the way he smiles with his whole face-eyebrows, ears-lets you know nothing you say will matter, even if you’d sat through the three hour ceremony and afterparty, the slow dancing and cake-cutting and Chinese ballads nostalgic to everyone but you. You’d tossed the invitation, thanking him for the thought, all apologies for your whirlwind schedule (“Comes with the profession, you remember”-cruelly, you realized a second later, but he didn’t notice or didn’t mind. Happiness turns you dull like that). You made the right decision in not going.

You wipe your hands on a napkin, grab your coat, and run down the stairs two at a time. You bark (friendly and familiar, the way they like it) directions at the driver. At the first red light he looks over and points out, “Your buttons are done wrong.”

You look down and snort, start redoing them. Where is your mind?

Maybe after it’s all over.

You suppose he’ll come to the final concert, because these goodbyes are relevant to him just as much as to you and everyone else. Even if his came earlier and abruptly.

You suppose you’ll finally have the courage to let him know you didn’t mean the tight-lipped insults over the phone. “My tongue was too sharp,” you might say. “It’s all in the past now.”

“It cut,” he’ll nod, shortly, and someone else, Siwon will come up from behind and sweep the both of you in one big communal hug.

Your faces might touch, you might feel a brief shock from the sudden contact. A wave of old memories, things, surge to your head. You wiggle yourself out of the embrace when it gets to be too much.

“I thought it was a holiday,” you might continue, one arm absentmindedly stroking Siwon’s back (he’s crying, and you, despite your awkwardness with children, have never been able to resist the tears of hardened men). He’ll look at you quiet and confused and you might continue, “I thought you were taking a holiday. A couple days off. Weeks, months, maybe. But you’d eventually come back. The apartment, it was never the same after that. It wasn’t like with Kibum or Kangin, because they lived apart from us anyway. But you lived with us. I hated cooking for myself or ordering out. I got so fat after that. And then I wanted to call you, I thought, screw it, I’m dialing, but something always stopped me. Call it pride, or I was hurt. I don’t know. Leeteuk thinks-we still talk about it, he thinks that I’m bad at giving up.”

Or you might not.