Treasures (1/1)
Title: Treasures
Pairing: Taemin-centric
Length: 2,599
Summary: "Problems could be painted over, covered up, shrouded in silence, but they were still there." (Call Me Oppa 'verse)
This has sat in my WIP folder for ages. And by ages I literally mean years. It was the original inspiration for the story of Call Me Oppa, and can be considered canon.
T R E A S U R E SOn a Tuesday, Taemin faked a cold and stayed home from school. She got out of bed at her alarm, sniffling and groaning, and puttered around the kitchen for twenty minutes, going through her morning routine in slow motion, with plenty of pauses and breaks to cough into her sleeve and gulp air through her mouth. Her mother watched the pathetic display, and instead of hurrying her into the car, she put her hand over Taemin's forehead.
"You're not going to school, mister," she said. "You look like the walking dead."
Taemin's older brother already had his backpack over one shoulder. "He's faking it," Taesun said, rolling his eyes.
"I'm okay," Taemin said. She cleared her throat. "I have test review in math class today, and I don't want to miss it. I'm fine. Really."
The reverse psychology never failed. Taemin's mother sighed loudly and would hear nothing of it. Her baby had to go straight back to bed, and she would call in a few hours to make sure that Taemin had eaten. There was aspirin in the cupboard.
Taesun stuck his tongue out, and then their mother hurried him out the door. Taemin locked up behind them.
Home alone.
Taemin dropped the sick act as soon as she saw her mother's car leave the driveway. She did a moonwalk over the kitchen tiles, singing some English song she didn't really know the words to, and finished with a spin at the bottom of the stairs.
With no one around, nobody watching her, no one judging, Taemin let herself go. She walked on the balls of his feet, and talked in a soft voice, a little higher than her natural register. She glided up the stairs to her bedroom and closed all of the curtains.
Under her bed, in a cardboard box innocuously labelled "old books", Taemin kept her treasures.
As Taemin's collection grew over the years, so did the ritual around it. When she was home alone, her parents at work and Taesun over at a friend's or in school, Taemin pulled the box from under her bed and brought it to the bathroom.
In a pencil case, she kept all of the makeup that she had managed to squirrel away from her mother, or inherited from Sully, her only friend at school. In front of the bathroom mirror, Taemin carefully began her transformation.
She no longer slathered on makeup like a clown; she'd learned to accentuate, to use the makeup to soften the sharper lines of her cheeks, and to draw attention to the feminine parts of her face. Her eyes, rimmed in black with a slight silver shimmer on the inner corners, were wide and dark. She painted her lips a deep pink, and when she pouted the gloss caught the light and glistened. The lightest dusting of blush across her cheeks made her look flushed and sweet.
She pinned her hair and pulled a black wig over her growing-out bowl cut, and painted her nails - fingers and toes - a pale pink. The nail varnish had to come off quick, chipped in the shower and then rubbed off with alcohol, but it was worth it to see the effect, Taemin's hands soft and girlish.
It took more than an hour for Taemin to finish her hair and makeup, and then she slipped into a navy-striped tee shirt dress. She stood on the toilet to see the full length of her reflection in the mirror, and for a while she just stared, soaking up how pretty she felt, how natural it was with her legs free and her hair long, and her face blinking back at her like a beautiful stranger's.
She spent the day like that, smiling at herself every time she caught her reflection. She made lunch in the kitchen with the radio on, twirling on the balls of her feet to the music and loving the way her dress ballooned around her, kissing her bare thighs as it settled. She watched daytime television with her feet on the coffee table, pink toes in front of the screen.
Ten minutes before Taesun got home from school, Taemin ran for the shower. She scrubbed off the makeup, chipped at the nailpolish. She emerged from the bathroom rubbed raw, nothing but her rosary around her wrist.
Dressing up, in the end, only made Taemin feel worse. She could almost be happy in girls' clothes; when she looked in the mirror, she saw a close approximation of how she felt inside. Pretty, soft. Girlish. Stripping it off made the point painfully real: Taemin was not, and never would be a real girl.
The decision to move had come about with very little family discussion. They were at the dinner table, eating in silence, just the quiet clink of chopsticks, and then Taemin's father cleared his throat. The sound was too loud, out-of-place in the still air, and everyone looked up from their plates.
"We're moving," Taemin's father said simply. "I've bought a new house, closer to work."
"It's a new start for everyone," her mother added. She smiled like that was supposed to mean something.
Taesun put his chopsticks down. He spoke with his mouth full. "Are we transferring schools?"
"Of course," their mother said. "Everyone needs a new beginning."
Taemin said nothing.
A new house wasn't going to change anything. Problems could be painted over, covered up, shrouded in silence, but they were still there. A new house wasn't going to fix a marriage. It wouldn't stop problems at school. And it wasn't going to make Taemin any more of a man.
A few days before the move, Taemin's father knocked on his youngest son's door. He had a garbage bag in his hands, and he held it wide open. "Everything goes in here," he said.
Taemin looked up from her desk and blinked. She'd packed most of her room into cardboard boxes already, save what toiletries and clothes she could fit into a duffel bag. Her father gestured to a hairbrush sitting on the edge of the desk.
"All of that. It goes in the bag."
Taemin didn't bother to point out that she had hair; regardless of length, she needed the brush. But she knew what her father meant.
Reluctantly, she reached into the desk drawer and pulled out the black pencil case. She upended the contents - compact cases of concealer, thick tubes of mascara, eyeliner pencils, several tubes of lip gloss - into the garbage bag. Her father continued to eye her expectantly, and Taemin shrugged. "I still need to brush my hair," she said.
"We'll get it cut."
"It still needs to be brushed."
Her father scowled, and turned on his heel. Taemin didn't have time to protest before her father was ripping up the tape on the cardboard boxes, pulling the flaps open and rifling through folded clothes and books to find where Taemin had squirreled away her things. He found bottles of nail varnish, tens of them in a metal lunchbox shoved between Taemin's CDs. He found the wig, a fistful of black hair, folded into one of Taemin's shirts. All of Taemin's clothes were unpacked and dumped onto the floor, and anything with a female size or label on it went into the bag - jeans, tee shirts, cardigans. Taemin's father made a sound, a loud "Hah!", when he found the rest of Taemin's makeup, in sweater pockets, stuffed with socks into the toes of his sneakers, wedged between school books. He pulled fashion magazines from the pile and tossed those too. The bag was bulging, and clinked with every movement, all of the glass bottles clinking together.
"That too," Taemin's father said, pointing.
Taemin followed the line of her father's finger to her neck, weighted down with a long necklace. Taemin would have cried if she could; the shock was too heavy, too new. She pulled the chain over her head and dropped it into the bag. Without prompting, she started pulling the bracelets from under her sleeves, the jellies that she knotted around one wrist, the beads that clinked when she moved her hands.
She held up her wrist when all she had left was her rosary beads. Her father nodded; she could keep those, at least. He'd take away all that made her happy, but she could keep her faith.
Taemin dropped her hands to her sides and tried to focus on the point where her feet touched the floor, trying to anchor herself against the sinking feeling in her gut, the incredible emptiness that all of her things had barely filled in the first place. She clenched her hands into fists. Tried to breathe steadily.
"Finish packing up, neh?" Her father said. He swung the bag over his shoulder like a sack of potatoes, and Taemin winced at the thought of all of her powder cases cracked, dusting the hair on the wig like dandruff. At the door, her father turned around and looked at her, eyes imploring. "This new house... it's going to be different from now on, okay? We're all going to change."
The night before the move, Taemin lay in bed and listened to her parents arguing in the kitchen. They weren't screaming, but their wrath was obvious from the force of their syballance, spitting S's at each other from across the breakfast bar. Taesun had come home earlier in the day with a black eye, all of the skin on his knuckles grazed back and bleeding. No one mentioned it.
So far, it looked like Taemin was the only one being made to change.
The new house was nice enough. The lawn was small and tidy, and the siding was brand new. Taemin's parents led the way in, doing the grand tour. There was a foyer with mirrored cabinets. The kitchen and its stainless steel appliances off to one side. The master bedroom was at the other end of the hall, and after a quick peek inside, Taemin's mother smiled her soft smile, and said, "Taesun gets this room."
"The master?" Taemin asked, but was drowned out by Taesun's shout of joy.
"I thought that you might need the space to study, since it's your last year of high school," their father said.
Taesun whooped and spun around, arms outstretched, savouring the space that surrounded him.
The other bedrooms were upstairs. Taemin's was right across the hall from her parents'. Taemin's new room wasn't better or worse than the old one; it had dull carpet, plain walls. The stucco ceiling looked like cottage cheese.
"Why this room?" Taemin asked.
"It's the smaller of the two," her mother said apologetically, "but it gets a lot of natural light."
Taemin nodded. She lingered a moment longer in the room, trying to imagine it as something other than a drab prison cell. She wasn't feeling very creative today.
At night, Taemin kneeled on the floor beside her new bed and slipped her rosary beads onto her palm. She hadn't said the rosary in a long time, but as she fingered each bead and whispered the prayers out loud, she found herself feeling grateful that God had allowed her this one small allowance, one bracelet, one reminder that she could still feel pretty.
Dance was out of the question. Taemin's father made a big deal about paying studio fees and instructors - "This move has been expensive, Taemin; how much money do you think we have?" - and no matter how much Taemin begged and pleaded, her father wouldn't budge.
"This has nothing to do with money," Taemin said, arms crossed, tears prickling behind her eyes. "You just bought Taesun a whole new soccer kit."
Her father grunted. "That's because soccer's-"
Taemin waited for the word like a slap. Her father took in Taemin's wince, her bracing for the blow, and cleared his throat.
"Because soccer is appropriate," her father backpedaled. It did nothing to change the meaning of his words.
Taemin was shaking, standing behind the couch with her hands fisted into her sleeves while her father watched the news report on the television. Taemin swallowed heavily, and when her father's hand raised to wave her away, she left the room.
The fluorescent lights in the mall made Taemin feel senseless, out-of-body, like she was floating from store-to-store on autopilot. Her mother walked a step ahead of her, and she followed her lead without thought; into the tailor's, where she was measured for the new school uniforms, ugly brown pants and a jacket; the stationery shop, for ballpoint pens and notepaper. Taemin didn't think about where her feet went until her mother breezed into a shop with an offhand comment, "I just need something to match a dress," and Taemin looked up from her sneakers.
They were in a women's clothing store. Taemin gave herself a count of five to glance around, to soak up the sight of all the pretty things. There was a display of scarves to her left, dyed deep rich colours, and to her right there was a rotating rack of jewelery - rings and bracelets and chain necklaces weighted with pendants. The clothes hung in rows, so much denimn and silk, in beautiful shapes. Taemin must have made a sound, some quiet moan of longing, because her mother turned around and her brows knit together.
"Taeminnie," she whispered. There was an apology in her tone. "We'll only be a minute."
Taemin swallowed and nodded. She looked at her shoes. Her stomach felt like it was full of stones, heavy and uncomfortable. The urge to reach out, just to touch something, was overwhelming. Taemin closed her eyes and thought that if she could just run her fingers over one of the silk scarves, not even wear it, just feel its softness, how pretty it was, she'd be okay.
She must have looked pathetic. Her mother reached out and squeezed her fingers. "You remember my dress, right? The blue one? Will you help me pick some earrings to match?"
Taemin let herself be led to the jewelery rack, and with a long sigh she opened her eyes and looked. She was immediately drawn to the bracelets - she loved the weight of them on her arms, how they slid on her wrists and made her movements slow and heavy. She touched one knitted bracelet, rolled the beads between her fingers.
"I've been talking to your father about dance lessons," her mother said. She was watching Taemin out of the corner of her eye as she picked several plastic earring cards off the rack. "He's willing to let you attend a studio here, as long as you keep your grades up. You can do that, can't you? You're a good boy."
The way she said boy made Taemin feel sick. Guilty. Taemin put the bracelet back and found a pair of gold earrings with turquoise hanging stones. "This will match," she said. Her mother held the earrings up to see in the mirror how they would dangle, and Taemin suspected that she bought them more because she felt sorry for Taemin than how well they matched her dress.
When they sat down in the car, Taemin in shotgun with the seatbelt under her arm, her mother peeled open the tape on the package and quietly placed a smaller one on Taemin's lap. "Don't let your father see," she said.
It was a tiny silver bracelet. Delicate, almost invisible like it'd been spun from fairy silk. Taemin blinked back tears and looked resolutely out the window as her mother started the car. "Thank you," she whispered.
Her mother pressed her lips into a firm line and watched the road that stretched out in front of them.
끝.
wynnetimate's master list.
Pairing: Taemin-centric
Length: 2,599
Summary: "Problems could be painted over, covered up, shrouded in silence, but they were still there." (Call Me Oppa 'verse)
This has sat in my WIP folder for ages. And by ages I literally mean years. It was the original inspiration for the story of Call Me Oppa, and can be considered canon.
T R E A S U R E SOn a Tuesday, Taemin faked a cold and stayed home from school. She got out of bed at her alarm, sniffling and groaning, and puttered around the kitchen for twenty minutes, going through her morning routine in slow motion, with plenty of pauses and breaks to cough into her sleeve and gulp air through her mouth. Her mother watched the pathetic display, and instead of hurrying her into the car, she put her hand over Taemin's forehead.
"You're not going to school, mister," she said. "You look like the walking dead."
Taemin's older brother already had his backpack over one shoulder. "He's faking it," Taesun said, rolling his eyes.
"I'm okay," Taemin said. She cleared her throat. "I have test review in math class today, and I don't want to miss it. I'm fine. Really."
The reverse psychology never failed. Taemin's mother sighed loudly and would hear nothing of it. Her baby had to go straight back to bed, and she would call in a few hours to make sure that Taemin had eaten. There was aspirin in the cupboard.
Taesun stuck his tongue out, and then their mother hurried him out the door. Taemin locked up behind them.
Home alone.
Taemin dropped the sick act as soon as she saw her mother's car leave the driveway. She did a moonwalk over the kitchen tiles, singing some English song she didn't really know the words to, and finished with a spin at the bottom of the stairs.
With no one around, nobody watching her, no one judging, Taemin let herself go. She walked on the balls of his feet, and talked in a soft voice, a little higher than her natural register. She glided up the stairs to her bedroom and closed all of the curtains.
Under her bed, in a cardboard box innocuously labelled "old books", Taemin kept her treasures.
As Taemin's collection grew over the years, so did the ritual around it. When she was home alone, her parents at work and Taesun over at a friend's or in school, Taemin pulled the box from under her bed and brought it to the bathroom.
In a pencil case, she kept all of the makeup that she had managed to squirrel away from her mother, or inherited from Sully, her only friend at school. In front of the bathroom mirror, Taemin carefully began her transformation.
She no longer slathered on makeup like a clown; she'd learned to accentuate, to use the makeup to soften the sharper lines of her cheeks, and to draw attention to the feminine parts of her face. Her eyes, rimmed in black with a slight silver shimmer on the inner corners, were wide and dark. She painted her lips a deep pink, and when she pouted the gloss caught the light and glistened. The lightest dusting of blush across her cheeks made her look flushed and sweet.
She pinned her hair and pulled a black wig over her growing-out bowl cut, and painted her nails - fingers and toes - a pale pink. The nail varnish had to come off quick, chipped in the shower and then rubbed off with alcohol, but it was worth it to see the effect, Taemin's hands soft and girlish.
It took more than an hour for Taemin to finish her hair and makeup, and then she slipped into a navy-striped tee shirt dress. She stood on the toilet to see the full length of her reflection in the mirror, and for a while she just stared, soaking up how pretty she felt, how natural it was with her legs free and her hair long, and her face blinking back at her like a beautiful stranger's.
She spent the day like that, smiling at herself every time she caught her reflection. She made lunch in the kitchen with the radio on, twirling on the balls of her feet to the music and loving the way her dress ballooned around her, kissing her bare thighs as it settled. She watched daytime television with her feet on the coffee table, pink toes in front of the screen.
Ten minutes before Taesun got home from school, Taemin ran for the shower. She scrubbed off the makeup, chipped at the nailpolish. She emerged from the bathroom rubbed raw, nothing but her rosary around her wrist.
Dressing up, in the end, only made Taemin feel worse. She could almost be happy in girls' clothes; when she looked in the mirror, she saw a close approximation of how she felt inside. Pretty, soft. Girlish. Stripping it off made the point painfully real: Taemin was not, and never would be a real girl.
The decision to move had come about with very little family discussion. They were at the dinner table, eating in silence, just the quiet clink of chopsticks, and then Taemin's father cleared his throat. The sound was too loud, out-of-place in the still air, and everyone looked up from their plates.
"We're moving," Taemin's father said simply. "I've bought a new house, closer to work."
"It's a new start for everyone," her mother added. She smiled like that was supposed to mean something.
Taesun put his chopsticks down. He spoke with his mouth full. "Are we transferring schools?"
"Of course," their mother said. "Everyone needs a new beginning."
Taemin said nothing.
A new house wasn't going to change anything. Problems could be painted over, covered up, shrouded in silence, but they were still there. A new house wasn't going to fix a marriage. It wouldn't stop problems at school. And it wasn't going to make Taemin any more of a man.
A few days before the move, Taemin's father knocked on his youngest son's door. He had a garbage bag in his hands, and he held it wide open. "Everything goes in here," he said.
Taemin looked up from her desk and blinked. She'd packed most of her room into cardboard boxes already, save what toiletries and clothes she could fit into a duffel bag. Her father gestured to a hairbrush sitting on the edge of the desk.
"All of that. It goes in the bag."
Taemin didn't bother to point out that she had hair; regardless of length, she needed the brush. But she knew what her father meant.
Reluctantly, she reached into the desk drawer and pulled out the black pencil case. She upended the contents - compact cases of concealer, thick tubes of mascara, eyeliner pencils, several tubes of lip gloss - into the garbage bag. Her father continued to eye her expectantly, and Taemin shrugged. "I still need to brush my hair," she said.
"We'll get it cut."
"It still needs to be brushed."
Her father scowled, and turned on his heel. Taemin didn't have time to protest before her father was ripping up the tape on the cardboard boxes, pulling the flaps open and rifling through folded clothes and books to find where Taemin had squirreled away her things. He found bottles of nail varnish, tens of them in a metal lunchbox shoved between Taemin's CDs. He found the wig, a fistful of black hair, folded into one of Taemin's shirts. All of Taemin's clothes were unpacked and dumped onto the floor, and anything with a female size or label on it went into the bag - jeans, tee shirts, cardigans. Taemin's father made a sound, a loud "Hah!", when he found the rest of Taemin's makeup, in sweater pockets, stuffed with socks into the toes of his sneakers, wedged between school books. He pulled fashion magazines from the pile and tossed those too. The bag was bulging, and clinked with every movement, all of the glass bottles clinking together.
"That too," Taemin's father said, pointing.
Taemin followed the line of her father's finger to her neck, weighted down with a long necklace. Taemin would have cried if she could; the shock was too heavy, too new. She pulled the chain over her head and dropped it into the bag. Without prompting, she started pulling the bracelets from under her sleeves, the jellies that she knotted around one wrist, the beads that clinked when she moved her hands.
She held up her wrist when all she had left was her rosary beads. Her father nodded; she could keep those, at least. He'd take away all that made her happy, but she could keep her faith.
Taemin dropped her hands to her sides and tried to focus on the point where her feet touched the floor, trying to anchor herself against the sinking feeling in her gut, the incredible emptiness that all of her things had barely filled in the first place. She clenched her hands into fists. Tried to breathe steadily.
"Finish packing up, neh?" Her father said. He swung the bag over his shoulder like a sack of potatoes, and Taemin winced at the thought of all of her powder cases cracked, dusting the hair on the wig like dandruff. At the door, her father turned around and looked at her, eyes imploring. "This new house... it's going to be different from now on, okay? We're all going to change."
The night before the move, Taemin lay in bed and listened to her parents arguing in the kitchen. They weren't screaming, but their wrath was obvious from the force of their syballance, spitting S's at each other from across the breakfast bar. Taesun had come home earlier in the day with a black eye, all of the skin on his knuckles grazed back and bleeding. No one mentioned it.
So far, it looked like Taemin was the only one being made to change.
The new house was nice enough. The lawn was small and tidy, and the siding was brand new. Taemin's parents led the way in, doing the grand tour. There was a foyer with mirrored cabinets. The kitchen and its stainless steel appliances off to one side. The master bedroom was at the other end of the hall, and after a quick peek inside, Taemin's mother smiled her soft smile, and said, "Taesun gets this room."
"The master?" Taemin asked, but was drowned out by Taesun's shout of joy.
"I thought that you might need the space to study, since it's your last year of high school," their father said.
Taesun whooped and spun around, arms outstretched, savouring the space that surrounded him.
The other bedrooms were upstairs. Taemin's was right across the hall from her parents'. Taemin's new room wasn't better or worse than the old one; it had dull carpet, plain walls. The stucco ceiling looked like cottage cheese.
"Why this room?" Taemin asked.
"It's the smaller of the two," her mother said apologetically, "but it gets a lot of natural light."
Taemin nodded. She lingered a moment longer in the room, trying to imagine it as something other than a drab prison cell. She wasn't feeling very creative today.
At night, Taemin kneeled on the floor beside her new bed and slipped her rosary beads onto her palm. She hadn't said the rosary in a long time, but as she fingered each bead and whispered the prayers out loud, she found herself feeling grateful that God had allowed her this one small allowance, one bracelet, one reminder that she could still feel pretty.
Dance was out of the question. Taemin's father made a big deal about paying studio fees and instructors - "This move has been expensive, Taemin; how much money do you think we have?" - and no matter how much Taemin begged and pleaded, her father wouldn't budge.
"This has nothing to do with money," Taemin said, arms crossed, tears prickling behind her eyes. "You just bought Taesun a whole new soccer kit."
Her father grunted. "That's because soccer's-"
Taemin waited for the word like a slap. Her father took in Taemin's wince, her bracing for the blow, and cleared his throat.
"Because soccer is appropriate," her father backpedaled. It did nothing to change the meaning of his words.
Taemin was shaking, standing behind the couch with her hands fisted into her sleeves while her father watched the news report on the television. Taemin swallowed heavily, and when her father's hand raised to wave her away, she left the room.
The fluorescent lights in the mall made Taemin feel senseless, out-of-body, like she was floating from store-to-store on autopilot. Her mother walked a step ahead of her, and she followed her lead without thought; into the tailor's, where she was measured for the new school uniforms, ugly brown pants and a jacket; the stationery shop, for ballpoint pens and notepaper. Taemin didn't think about where her feet went until her mother breezed into a shop with an offhand comment, "I just need something to match a dress," and Taemin looked up from her sneakers.
They were in a women's clothing store. Taemin gave herself a count of five to glance around, to soak up the sight of all the pretty things. There was a display of scarves to her left, dyed deep rich colours, and to her right there was a rotating rack of jewelery - rings and bracelets and chain necklaces weighted with pendants. The clothes hung in rows, so much denimn and silk, in beautiful shapes. Taemin must have made a sound, some quiet moan of longing, because her mother turned around and her brows knit together.
"Taeminnie," she whispered. There was an apology in her tone. "We'll only be a minute."
Taemin swallowed and nodded. She looked at her shoes. Her stomach felt like it was full of stones, heavy and uncomfortable. The urge to reach out, just to touch something, was overwhelming. Taemin closed her eyes and thought that if she could just run her fingers over one of the silk scarves, not even wear it, just feel its softness, how pretty it was, she'd be okay.
She must have looked pathetic. Her mother reached out and squeezed her fingers. "You remember my dress, right? The blue one? Will you help me pick some earrings to match?"
Taemin let herself be led to the jewelery rack, and with a long sigh she opened her eyes and looked. She was immediately drawn to the bracelets - she loved the weight of them on her arms, how they slid on her wrists and made her movements slow and heavy. She touched one knitted bracelet, rolled the beads between her fingers.
"I've been talking to your father about dance lessons," her mother said. She was watching Taemin out of the corner of her eye as she picked several plastic earring cards off the rack. "He's willing to let you attend a studio here, as long as you keep your grades up. You can do that, can't you? You're a good boy."
The way she said boy made Taemin feel sick. Guilty. Taemin put the bracelet back and found a pair of gold earrings with turquoise hanging stones. "This will match," she said. Her mother held the earrings up to see in the mirror how they would dangle, and Taemin suspected that she bought them more because she felt sorry for Taemin than how well they matched her dress.
When they sat down in the car, Taemin in shotgun with the seatbelt under her arm, her mother peeled open the tape on the package and quietly placed a smaller one on Taemin's lap. "Don't let your father see," she said.
It was a tiny silver bracelet. Delicate, almost invisible like it'd been spun from fairy silk. Taemin blinked back tears and looked resolutely out the window as her mother started the car. "Thank you," she whispered.
Her mother pressed her lips into a firm line and watched the road that stretched out in front of them.
끝.
wynnetimate's master list.