kpfw 9.0 15 min challenge

[warmboys]

Over at kpfw, there was a series of challenges - you're given 15 minutes to respond to a picture, word, or song prompt. I experimented with more fandoms and pairings than ever. My favorite is probably the jaechun, but the 2pm ones were a lot of fun to write. Best challenge ever ♥ and I'm pretty sure I've talked about potatoes before. For some reason they're always at the back of my mind.

Also, I don't know where else to say this, but @anon here, I did not start that thread but I do remember you! I don't know what's stopping you, but whenever you want :)

SJ: kangin/leeteuk

When it gets really late, the blinking cursor starts to resemble an omen, and that's what Kangin focuses on. If he looks really hard, he starts thinking about ticking bombs and wires, and then cars.

He calls Leeteuk, because Leeteuk is good for late nights and usually answers his phone. "Hey," he says breezily.

"Hey," comes Leeteuk's voice, light and easy. Soft wool against Kangin's ears. Buttons. Focus. "What's up?"

"Nothing. Missing you." Kangin shrugs. He nearly drops the phone. The goldfish jerks in the tank, startled behind glass.

Leeteuk is laughing. His laugh has always been professional, carefully designated for television programs. Kangin thinks about his dimples and stabs at the air as if he were poking them. If it weren't for the damn physical boundaries.

"Such a sweet-talker," Leeteuk says. "I miss you too. Are you drinking?"

Kangin bares his teeth, forgetting that he's invisible in the dark, on the other end of the line. They are just isolated voices doing a familiar dance around each other. He should've graduated from this a long time ago, but here they are. "No," he lies. "I can miss you sober. I can miss you whenever..."

"Kangin."

"What?"

"I drank a little, too."

2PM: ??/Junho

When you are little, you don't understand why they take dogs away and never bring them back. You sit by the door waiting for Jay's familiar bark, the papery tongue that licks your knees as you bend over to scoop him into your arms. After the hundredth day, your mother tells you that maybe you should stop spending so much time by the door; it's almost winter, and it's cold.

At school they start teaching about potatoes. Potatoes are not dead but dormant says the biology teacher. They are sleeping. "Sleepy," you think, like how Junho looks all the time. It's okay to make fun of him because he has a nice smile. Sometimes he puts his head down on the desk while the teacher keeps talking about roots and dirt and you try to guess if his eyes are open or closed. You wonder how his eyelids might feel against your lips. If he let you, you would try it, but you're afraid he might stop smiling.

The day you get socked in the stomach, you decide that tears are salty because salt is tough. Tough enough to melt ice. In the bathroom you wash your face and dry your hands and write down carefully the word "fag" to look up later, when you get home.

SJ: Ryeowook

Ryeowook enters the library to find that there are no seats left. He needs a desk.

He decides easily that the jock in the first cubicle to his left needs to go.

He walks up to the guy and taps his shoulder. When the guy turns, Ryeowook notes to himself that the jock's got a nice head of full, black hair, just before he reaches out and snaps his neck in one deft motion.

The guy falls to the floor like a heavy tree trunk. The girl in the next seat stirs and then screams.

Ryeowook dusts off his pants and sits down. The chair is still warm, just as he likes it. He opens his textbook Art and Scince to page 15 and starts to read.

SJ: Han Geng/Cinderella

There's this new thing going around the school, passed from sweaty hand to sweaty hand in the bathrooms. Han Geng tries his best to avoid it, until the pressure of exams finally gets to him. His grades are passable, but he's promised his parents to get above a B this semester--in order to continue ballet. He doesn't want to let them down. More importantly, he doesn't want to quit.

The first time Han Geng takes a hit of Cinderella, he feels like he's dying. His nose starts running instantly, until he realizes it's blood staining his shirt, not snot. The taste is familiar, tangy, bitter. When he opens his eyes, the world is suddenly so much bigger than before. His ears are ringing. His pants are tight.

He finishes his exam ten minutes early and walks into the bathroom to jerk off.

The second time, he writes a love poem. He's never written a poem before. "Dear my Cinderella," he scrawls, hand tilting left, and starts laughing halfway. He's addressing something that's taken over his body, and as he writes he becomes aware that it's inside him. It's spreading. His fingers feel light.

By the third time it's obvious he's fallen in love.

SJ: kibum/?

It starts as a seed, as all things do. With water and nourishment, it will grow. With love and sunlight, it will flourish. Someday it might be plucked gingerly from the ground and relocated to a windowpane overlooking a vast cityscape. There is hope in the beginning.

Around noon people start bustling out of their buildings, speed-walking towards their favorite delis for that Italiano panini they’ve been daydreaming about over Excel spreadsheets. The city is noisy. A homeless man sits on a milk carton at the corner of 94th and Lex and smokes a lone cigarette. It’s a mystery where he found it.

It happens very quickly, the body tumbling from the top of a four-story brownstone. Kibum is sipping on his Americano when he catches the blur out of the corner of his eye. Michael Buble is interrupted by a high-pitched puppy whine, and when he takes off his headphones it starts to sound more like a woman screaming. By the time he gets his coat on, a crowd has formed on the sidewalk. Pedestrians carefully sidestep the crumpled mass on the ground, the pool of red slowly enlarging.

The face is no longer recognizable, but the little dolphin charm dangling from the cell phone in the man’s jacket pocket catches Kibum’s eye. He’s reaching for his own phone when the realization hits, and in a span of a second he feels his lungs empty and his heart clench, like a fist.

2PM: chansung

Chansung has trouble controlling his smile. Everything else is working fine, his limbs are in top-notch condition. But the tic in the face, lifting up the corners of his mouth, it’s something he’s still trying to figure out. He practices every day, not only because the Doctor makes him, but because he wants to get better. He was built to be good.

He practices eating, something much easier than smiling because it feels pleasant somehow to have things filling you up inside. It’s like throwing stones into the bottom of a well--memories that were given to him, like film strips. He plans on trying it out someday--someday, when he gets a chance.

He likes eating.

The Doctor tells him not to smile when he eats. “Your face was not made for that. You’ll scare away little children.”

Chansung opens up a tiny Notepad window in an unpreoccupied corner of his mind and types in Do not eat children. It’s an easy command, because he hasn’t fully finished developing his “appetite” yet. He’s working on it.

The Doctor spends a lot of time with Chansung, and as a result one of the first emotions Chansung learns to feel is insecurity. He wonders if he’s special or inadequate somewhere. The Doctor has relatively soft (relative to the steel of Chansung’s cranium, or to the fine marble that makes up the laboratory countertop) fingers, Chansung notices when his eardrum is drilled in for the third time.

YG: chaerin/jiyong

Something changes after that night. Chaerin starts seeing him in everything. The boy in front of her waiting to pay for a pack of gum in the bright yellow skinny jeans has a way of standing that reminds her of him. She blinks and the vision is gone. The boy gives her a brief glance before reaching into his pocket to pull out a couple bills. The face is nothing like Jiyong-oppa.

She pulls her coat closer to her chest. “It’s okay,” she says to herself. It’s a mantra by now. “It’s okay,” she says every morning before pulling on her sweats and joining Bom in the gym.

Bom tells her time is a good healer of things. Chaerin doesn’t think she needs healing, and it’s part denial, maybe, because part of her still hopes that he’d seen something in her worth staying for. Bom takes a sip of her gigantic water bottle and is out of breath when she says, “Honey, ‘I love you’ doesn’t mean a thing if you were both intoxicated.”

The thing is, she had been drinking, but not much. Maybe she was intoxicated--on the taste of him. The way he invited himself over, the mischievous curve of his stupid mouth. The way a movie is never just a movie but also hands and fingers and lips. When he touched her, she was sure she trembled and that he felt it too. But it was dark

DBSK: jaejoong/yoochun

Some mornings it’s so quiet he isn’t sure he’s awake. The warm body beside him tells him he is. The knowledge that he isn’t alone.

They’ve been here for at least a month. He still gets sick the days the sky looks so furious Yoochun predicts 85% chance rainfall. “Mild breeze. Pollen levels insignificant. Two men lost at sea.”

Jaejoong sneezes before he hurls himself over the side of the boat. The aftertaste is of fish. He convulses once more, while Yoochun pulls back his hair.

Yoochun says, “Imagine we’re on a giant waterbed. The sea is singing you a lullabye.”

Jaejoong says, “It’s offkey.” He finds Yoochun’s mouth somewhere in the mess of hair that’s taken over his face. Some of it prickles. They both need to brush their teeth. Yoochun pretends that a toothbrush is on the horizon. “You see that cloud? That means we’re almost home.” Jaejoong says it looks like Yoochun’s dick when he’s wearing tight pants, when it curves in that uncanny way to the left. Yoochun says left is where the heart is, and kisses Jaejoong on the forehead. His lips are sunburnt, chapped. Jaejoong has never found him more attractive.

2PM: taecyeon/jay

Taecyeon and Jay have a system they call foolproof. When Jay likes a girl, he walks circles around her until she turns her head, and then he goes straight and doesn’t look back. He asks what she’s drinking, if it’s anything good. If it sucks, he recommends something else. (Taecyeon says China Blue’s a safe bet--it’s got lychee in it. Who doesn’t love lychee?) It’s all about the smile, self-confidence, and the angle at which his faux-hawk is pointing. Forty-five degrees, baby. Taecyeon stands back against the wall and watches, grinning.

When Taecyeon likes a girl, he looks at her closely before deciding how to make his move. If she’s with a group of friends, he woos them first. He does funny impressions of celebrities (“Dude - that is not funny,” Jay says when they’re practicing in the bathroom, but Taecyeon rips off the piece of toilet paper from his shoe and moves his eyebrows up and down before letting his bro know it’s all about the delivery) until the girls are clapping in delight--and then he closes in on the target. She’s probably feeling neglected at this point, neglected but nevertheless impressed, and that’s exactly where he wants her. Psychologically dependent on his next move, desperate for his attention. He puts his arm around her, and soon they’re cuddling in the corner, away from the dance floor.

If she’s alone, he sits two seats away and tries his best to look lonely. They’ll lock eyes accidentally, and then he’ll ask how her day’s been, making sure to emphasize how crappy his has been. Sympathy, coupled with his smoldering good looks, will pique her interest, and she’ll inch closer. Checkmate.

Jay and Taecyeon have this system, and it’s all good until they wander into the wrong club, and they find that the only fine ladies on the dance floor are the ones dressed in drag.

They don’t talk about it the next morning. Jay starts training Wooyoung to be his new clubbing buddy.

SJ: kibum/heechul

I accept and I collect upon my body
the memories of your devotion

Heechul’s favorite song for November is by Antony and the Johnsons. He can’t pronounce any of the words but he sings along to it anyway. Then when he is tired, he just listens. He makes out the word “Love” in the title. Everything else is superfluous, he supposes.

He calls Kibum when he’s not MCing. He likes Kibum - Kibum and he go for drives, Kibum knows how to navigate the road well, he memorizes the routes to their favorite locations, while Heechul claims control over the radio console. The buildings kind of look the same after a while, so Heechul plays that one song over and over again, until Kibum laughs and asks if he knows what they’re singing.

They park over a hill - Heechul has a vague sense they’ve been here before but can’t recall where they are. He’s getting sleepy. Kibum puts an arm around him. Heechul doesn’t resist. Kibum smells like fresh laundry.

Kibum touches his face just below the eye and asks if it still hurts. Heechul is too tired to scoff, so he shakes his head no. Somewhere he makes out the chirping of cicadas, but summer’s long over. “I’m glad you didn’t bruise,” Kibum says, and his voice sounds very faraway.

I'm all written out.