The Procrastination Chronicles

[warmboys]

A couple of things written while I should've been doing something else /_\ These are unedited rush jobs mostly for Joie because she's always screaming about chanbaek. Posted to AO3 first.

Kafka, Chanyeol/Baekhyun, ~740 words
Chanyeol is a changed man. written 1/8/13

I don't know how we got from "oh i found a pic of chan's family" to this??

It is a beautiful morning, Chanyeol decides right before opening his eyes to the harsh light. In a few moments he will go for a stretch and find that he cannot move his arms. In a panic, he’ll try to jump out of bed, only to realize he has no control over his legs either, and that this isn’t his bed. His bed is soft, fluffy, nothing like this cold hard metal surface. He will look down in a panic and in the process almost break off his head trying. The truth is, he has no neck. He does, however, have a pair of beady black eyeballs capable of 360 degree rotation in their tiny moist sockets. Forcing his eyeballs into motion, he notices three buttons in a line down the middle of his chest. They look like giant M&Ms, and this is his bare chest. In fact everything is bare. He is not wearing any clothes and, he realizes with terror, he has lost his penis.

His skin is a strange orange-brown texture. He has not been to a tanning salon in ages.

“I’m going to eat you,” says a familiar voice from above.

It is Baekhyun. Words cannot express the wave of relief that comes over Chanyeol, like the promise of a blue horizon to a man lost in the desert. Chanyeol can smell Baekhyun as he never could before-of comfort, familiarity, something he recognizes.

“You look delicious,” Baekhyun continues, and his head has been magnified a thousand times.

Chanyeol shrieks.

Baekhyun shrieks back. “You can talk!” His eyes are rounder, larger than Chanyeol’s ever seen them, and Chanyeol has seen them an exhausting number of times, awake and in his dreams.

“It’s me,” Chanyeol says desperately. “Chanyeol.”

And Baekhyun stops screaming. He pokes at Chanyeol, on his forehead. “Chanyeol?” he asks, peering closely.

“Yes,” Chanyeol says eagerly.

Baekhyun looks horrified. “But you are a gingerbread man.”

Baekhyun doesn’t eat him.

“I want to, but I won’t. I can’t eat my best friend. I’m not that heartless,” he says, and it is a touching soliloquy.

“My toe is itchy,” Chanyeol complains. Baekhyun tells him he doesn’t have toes anymore; it is phantom limb syndrome. Chanyeol wants to cry and he does, leaving tear tracks that smell of brown sugar and soften the bread in his cheeks.

Baekhyun moves him to his room. He hides him behind the laptop so the others won’t see. Jongin will wonder where the last gingerbread man went and he will accuse Joonmyun first. The accusation will sound like a joke but also like a veiled personal attack, and Joonmyun will worry himself with it for days.

“These are the sacrifices I make for you,” says Baekhyun. “Our band will begin to crumble, starting with Joonmyun’s insecurities.”

“Is that what you’re concerned with?” Chanyeol huffs. “When I go to sleep at night praying my head is still intact the next morning.”

Chanyeol’s head is fine the next morning. It’s his left leg that’s gone.

“I was hungry,” is Baekhyun’s apology. He has been crying, but tears will not bring Chanyeol’s leg back to life. Tears will not make Baekhyun regurgitate it in its whole consummate glory.

“I have nothing to say to you,” Chanyeol tells him. “You are dead to me.”

“But I’m all you have now,” Baekhyun says.

When Chanyeol dreams, it is of movement. Of being useful. Of going from one place to another, doing things for people he cares about.

He wakes up stupid and immobile. His other leg has disappeared in the night.

One by one they go, until all that is left of him is a head.

“I’m sorry,” Baekhyun says over and over again, and Chanyeol believes him. He isn’t mad anymore. He can’t remember exactly how anger feels.

Most of him is now in Baekhyun, or has passed through Baekhyun. At one point in his life, his previous human life, this would have filled him with a bashful pride, the kind that seeks to burst out of your heart and makes you shout embarrassing confessions of love from your window.

“I just wanted to be close to you. Seeing you like this hurts me the most,” Baekhyun says, his lips a quivering few inches away from Chanyeol. Inches feel like forever when you’re a gingerbread man.

“I know,” Chanyeol says. He adds, “Me too,” before slipping into the dark abyss of Baekhyun’s mouth.

Being Tony, Luhan/Lay, ~1500 words
EXO-M is SM's first co-ed idol group. AKA Scenes from Zhang Yixing is a Girl. started 1/27/13, maybe in progress?

1

No one says it, but Yixing is Gwen; Yixing is definitely Gwen. Lu Han thinks it whenever they do an interview and Yixing gets drilled on her favorite designers, which member she’d be most willing to date, what it’s like as a girl among a brood of five hot-blooded males?

“Um, it’s okay,” Yixing says, tucking a piece of hair behind her ear. She says she prefers jeans and sweats but would like to get married in Vera Wang, maybe, someday. She says Kris, because who wouldn’t? But Minseok is the most down-to-earth, she adds, and the oldest, and would make a great oppa.

“You mean he’s not already a great oppa,” jokes the Sina hostess, who’s always trying to stay a step ahead, teasing something more interesting out of them than they have to offer.

No, no, they rush to say, and Yixing is lost in the mild chaos, kind of forgotten. They drew her a wing today, flicking up from the corner of her eye, and it makes her look smart and mysterious. They’re dressed in suits and she’s in a sleeveless silk blouse with a rounded black collar, showing off her skinny biceps. The past three weeks have been painful: no grains, no fruit, minimal water for the last five days. Coffee okay. Lu Han was famished just watching her, but Yixing didn’t sweat the small stuff, just peed out the last three kilos. It was probably her greatest asset, besides the dancing. Dancing came with the territory.

Not too much flirting, they’d repeated the weeks before debut. The fans will hate you enough as is.

“It’s okay if you guys do it though,” Hyunkyun-hyung said, meaning the guys, meaning Lu Han, who learned fast. Lu Han pulled his lips apart into a crazed joker grin and swept an arm around Minseok, wouldn’t let go for the next five minutes.

“Got it,” Yixing said and rolled her shoulders back. She was a soldier, designed to take orders.

Lu Han had a week to move in with Zitao and Minseok. He left the giant Stitch doll on his bed, which would later be replaced with a couch and bookcase, as “a memento to remember me by,” he said, drawing his arms in front of him like a ghost as he floated out of the room. Yixing shook her head, a flop of bangs lifting away from her left eye, forging a clear path of vision between them. It was weird how often they looked at each other and how little of each other they actually saw.

Two years ago, she had a choice and she said, “Lu Han-because I don’t see him as a man.” At the time Lu Han’s hair was longer than hers and the only time he used the company gym was to hop on the treadmill. “Ow,” Lu Han said, clutching his heart, and then grinned, because two years ago he didn’t see her as anything either.

2

“You’re actually pretty manly,” Yixing says. She’s looking at the hair on Lu Han’s legs, soft and sticking up from the static of his bathrobe.

Lu Han feigns hurt, or tries to. But he’s too lazy to really move his face. “You just noticed,” he says, hoping the pain of being boxed in as the token pretty boy comes across in his voice. They need to work on emoting, the whole band. Right now he’s one of the better ones, and that’s a scary thought. Yixing is the worst, which drives Hyunkyun-hyung nuts because, “You’re a girl. You’re supposed to bring emotions to the table.” His blowup came after one of their first interviews. Someone had brought out a cake and she couldn’t stop staring at it. All her answers thereafter were monosyllabic-“Yeah,” she said, or “Kris,” who had everything memorized. The problem was he looked like he had everything memorized.

Yixing had bowed past her hip and repeated that she would try harder. She clasped the back of her knees as she folded from the waist and her shirt rode up a little, revealing a delicate jut of her spine. Sometimes, in the past, when she turned around to change in their room Lu Han could count them like rungs on a ladder. It used to make him nervous.

He’s thought about telling Kris. They smoke in the bathroom some days; he sits over the edge of the sink and leans his head against the mirror, lets Kris unload all his shit on him. Someone has to do it, be the cushion that catches. The job used to fall on Yixing, but they all know where that led. The six months Lu Han spent as roommates with Jongdae remain the worst memory of their predebut lives. In the morning Yixing ducked out of Kris’ room with a happily fucked glow that no one wanted to witness and everyone was secretly devastated over. Not because it was Yixing, but because it was unfair. Jongdae hadn’t touched a boob in over a year. But their misery helped Kris cultivate an ego, which came handy later.

They’re alright now. After the breakup Yixing said that “the haze had lifted,” that she could write better songs for it, and Kris said, to Zitao, “Lend me some of your porn.” Zitao said, “Okay, the password’s ‘ramen blowjob’,” and Minseok said, “What?” He understood the word for blowjob. It was one of the first things Lu Han had taught him. Neither of them has had the chance to use it since.

“Hey,” Yixing is saying. “I always noticed, even before you started working out.”

It’s not a secret that Lu Han’s trying to gain muscle mass, and failing. “Slow gains are the best,” Hyukjae-hyung had told him, clapping a firm hand on his shoulder. It almost sent him toppling over. That night he researched protein powders, poring over reviews on bodybuilding.com.

“The fuck is this,” Hyunkyun-hyung had said a few months later, staring at his baby bicep. Lu Han was wearing a tank that day, feeling a little proud of himself. “No, no, no.”

He doesn’t know what to say back to Yixing. Compliments, especially matter-of-fact ones, make him feel stripped down, not just looked at but carefully observed. He likes them, just never knows how to respond to them.

He props his feet on the bed where she’s dangling her legs and rests them near her knees.

“Uh, can you put on some underwear before you do that,” Yixing says. She has her head turned away like the view of Lu Han’s balls is toxic to her eyes.

Lu Han spots an opening and snatches it. “Real men don’t need underwear,” he says triumphantly.

Yixing looks like she’s going to fight him on that. Instead she reaches over to twist a tuft of leg hair between her fingers and makes him scream.

3

They get caught in the early germinations of a scandal, sharing drinks with a couple of older girls at a restaurant. How it develops now is up to the carpet-sweeping prowess of their fans, and nobody’s dumb enough to underestimate a well-trained militia of teenage girls. That’s not to say they aren’t pretty fucking stupid for letting it happen in the first place.

In one photo Minseok’s walking ahead, hands shoved into his coat pockets. Kris is just behind him, a beanie pulling his hair down flat over his eyes. Lu Han looks the worst of the three, frizzy hair and mossy sideburns, the skin above his upper lip shadowing with stubble. Of course they’d zoom in on him. He leaves the room while everyone’s crowded around the computer, shocked into nerveless silence. Yixing finds him in the bathroom. She closes the door and frowns through the smoke.

“I could’ve been taking a piss,” Lu Han says weakly. It would be a lie to pretend he doesn’t want company right now. He just doesn’t think he deserves it.

“Please tell me you at least got a handjob out of it,” Yixing says. Her smile is twitchy, given with effort.

He snuffs out the cigarette against the sink, tosses it into the toilet. “I’m an idiot.”

“No,” Yixing says. “The three of you collectively are idiots. You should form your own subgroup. EXO-I.”

Lu Han looks down at his nails. They’re yellowing from all his vices. “Maybe the M in EXO-M actually stands for moron.”

“In that case I think I deserve to go solo already.”

“You probably do,” he says, lifting his head.

She lets him sleep over. They share a bed for the first time since she started seeing Kris. It wasn’t a tradition, just a fallback plan for the late nights of talking when suddenly the distance to his own bed across the room stretched as wide as a moat. They never picked it up again after the breakup. The six months were enough to let them know how precarious all their relationships were.

He sleeps on his back, a compromise between what he wants and what is right. She watches him. He feels it, in the heat that centers in his chest and ripples further and lower.

His heart has always been the eye of the tornado; his dick, a corollary response.

The next time he sees Yixing, she is a boy.

Into the Woods, Baekhyun/Kris, Baekhyun/Chanyeol, ~1300 words
Baekhyun was not the best woodworker around, but he was the most popular. written 2/4/13

Baekhyun was not the best woodworker around, but he was the most popular. Children strayed from their mothers and flew to him while he waited in line for Joonmyun’s croissants every morning. “Mr. Byun,” they cried. “Dolly’s nose fell.” Dolly, or Hilda, or Melvin could have been a goat, a hamster, a pig with a curly wire tail. Baekhyun would crouch down until he met the child’s eyes and ask permission for a closer inspection of the broken figurine. Carving gender unspecific toys for the children of the town was his specialty and most favorite hobby, the fragrance of black cherry wood skimming under his fingers as he pried at it with a knife. Every fortnight he pillaged through the forest behind his cabin for new materials, his handy axe strapped to his belt and satchel.

For years he did not take a wife, but nosier villagers claimed that they’d spied a strange man visiting in the winter, a taller and more masculine silhouette disappearing into his home. Baekhyun did not confirm or deny the whispers, and the whispers did not subside. Kris was a nomad he’d met in his younger and firmer years, before he took up the craft. One day on the way to the schoolhouse Baekhyun had found him bleeding against a white pine tree, staining the bark with his injury. He had carried him home and tended to the chest wound for three days and nights. “How should I repay you?” Kris inquired on the fourth night, finally lucid despite the pain. The latest change of gauze had not reddened with fresh blood; the wound had closed. Baekhyun breathed a sigh of relief. He had barely eaten in three days.

“Tell me a story,” he said. “That is the only compensation I ask for.”

Kris spoke of the world outside the village, of people who looked similar but sounded different. He touched the corner of Baekhyun’s eye and then touched his own eye. Baekhyun’s nose and then his nose. Baekhyun’s mouth and then his own, meeting Baekhyun’s. Showing the difference was so slight where it mattered.

Kris was gone every spring, when it became warm enough to sleep in just a thin undershirt. The ground had not dried from the melting snow. This time he’d left a gift, a stump of cedar on the floor beside the cot and a scribbled note on parchment that read, “If you’re lonely-invent your own company.”

Baekhyun began work at once. He first made the body, and then the legs. Limber legs that stretched too long for a doll, but he was not making it for anyone else. This was a gift, a personal indulgence. He would allow himself this.

He carved in shallow indents for the eyes, painting them as dark as browning fruit. The nose as always, came last. He took care in fashioning lifelike nostrils into the triangular block of wood before gluing it onto the face.

The undertaking had spanned an entire workweek. His stomach growled with impatience as he reached for the bread basket that Joonmyun had hand-delivered earlier. “Better to you than the pigeons,” he had said jovially, before pedaling back up the road.

The doll was a little awkward. It was only upon taking a step back that he noticed an asymmetry in the eyes and how uncommonly long he’d made its limbs. He took another bite of his roll, which had hardened from the day, and thought to himself how fortunate it was that he hadn’t been commissioned for this sad creation.

“But I am not sad,” said the doll. “I am very handsome, unlike you.”

Baekhyun had not yet swallowed the bread in his throat when he heard the utterance. Bits of bread and spittle spewed forth onto the speaking doll. “E-excuse me?” He cried, as the doll began to stretch out its arms and legs, as though he had awoken from a long slumber.

“I suppose you are not so terrible yourself,” the doll said, winking his newly dried eye at Baekhyun. He seemed to think for a moment before adding, “Master.”

“You look nothing like him,” Baekhyun spat out now, his honesty a consequence of mindless terror. But the doll was not offended. In fact, he seemed delighted.

“That is to be expected, sir,” said the possessed puppet. “I am my own man.”

And so he was. Chanyeol, he called himself as he danced across the table to break off a piece of Baekhyun’s half-eaten roll and placed it between the two fitted pieces of wood that made up his mouth. He clapped them together in an obscene show of chewing and Baekhyun had to look away, at once mortified and embarrassed. What was embarrassing was his secret intrigue.

Chanyeol breathed and followed him around the habit, tugging on the hem of his pant legs, twining his rigid arms around the legs themselves, sometimes preventing him from walking. “Don’t leave me,” he said, teasingly. Baekhyun was only heading to light the fire.

He was deathly afraid of the fire, of course.

The grass greened outside, as spring phased into summer. Chanyeol took to sleeping with Baekhyun, hugging his hard wooden body against his master’s back. He had been growing throughout the months; he was now of human height.

In another few, he would surpass Baekhyun. When he raised his arm, it grazed the thatched ceiling above. Baekhyun did not realize it until one day he looked up, and Chanyeol’s smile was further away.

“Is this better?” Chanyeol asked, and laughed, lowering his head to Baekhyun’s height. His eyes had taken on a shine that Baekhyun didn’t recall putting there.

Sometimes as he slept he felt the exactness of Chanyeol’s humanity, pressed stiffly into his spine. He didn’t remember creating that either.

It was terrifying. But not for a second that entire summer did he feel alone.

“That’s because I’m here,” Chanyeol said, rolling his eyes. His voice had deepened, too, as though they originated from a faraway place. Baekhyun heard it as a vibration that climbed up his arm, prickling across his skin.

The weather cooled. In a few months, Baekhyun thought, peering out of the window. The idea was disrupted by Chanyeol hugging him from behind. There was a softness in him that hadn’t been there before, or maybe Baekhyun was forgetting.

Inexplicably, one night, Chanyeol kissed him.

Baekhyun pushed him away, wiping at the sweet cedar taste in his mouth, but Chanyeol persisted, leaning in to do it again, and again. Nothing was as it was. Chanyeol’s lips were soft and pliant, following Baekhyun’s lead.

“I can’t-“ Baekhyun whispered, but he did.

By December they had seen their first snowfall together. The snow piled up over the door, blocking their windows, and the cabin grew too cold to leave.

Outside, the children of the village were distraught. It had been a year since they last saw their favorite woodworker, and Dolly’s, Melvin’s, Hilda’s nose had fallen off again. Rumors were that he had fallen ill, and not of the normal sort. His mind had yielded first, the body would inevitably follow. The grown-ups ceased their babbling at the sign of their children eavesdropping behind the doorway, concern painted anew on their little faces, and placated them with promises of newer and better toys. There was another woodworker, they said, sitting their children on their laps now, in a village on the other side of the forest, one who went by Yifan. The name rolled around on their tongues like an uncertain pebble. They would brave the woods for their children, to commission their happiness, in the spring.