The One who Follows and the One who Stays [Part 1]
Chapter: 1/4 (?)
Pairings: HoMin
Rating: PG
Genre: Romance, Angst, Supernatural
Summary:
They say the only death for shadows is to stop moving. That's all he knows, all that matters, all he lives by. He flies, changes shapes, changes places, and will be forever. Until the day he stops. Until opposites meet, and he unknowingly treads on a path of light.
He… he is a shadow.
Just one among countless others… shadows like him, filling the spaces between lights, shifting as they’re pleased, casting darkness on walls. He has no name, no shape, nothing to call his own and no place where he belongs.
He has the whole world - slipping from shade to shade and traveling as fast as light itself. Spreading over the earth when night falls, shrinking back within narrow contours as soon as daylight takes over.
He enters locked rooms as easily as if he was air itself. He hears secrets, and sees what eyes can’t see. How much could he tell, if he just had a voice, if he just knew how to… but as it is, none of it actually makes sense to him. He forgets all as soon as he sees it anyway.
He doesn’t remember… he has no memories. He is just a shadow.
Nameless, shapeless, ageless.
There are countless like him. No one knows where they come from; they exist, that’s all. Intangible, ungraspable… the flickering black spots dancing on the ceiling, as candles die on the table of a spread feast. The cold darkness cast on a lively street by one tall building, every day the same slow transformation following the sun’s course. Lifeless monsters running on the walls bordering a highway. The funny way shades morph when too many lights move, distorted a thousandth times but their natures unchanged.
If anything, shadows are much stronger than lights. They last - as eternal as night.
No one ever notices but they’re here at all times. He could be anywhere… one moment crouching in a corner of your kitchen, the next racing against the wind rushing under a suburban train. And a while after that, playing between the shimmering sparks reflected in a waterfall no one knows, in a part of the world you never even heard about.
Distance and time don’t matter to him.
To him, the pace of human lives is excruciatingly slow, their days painfully boring. They drag their bodies in circles, follow repetitive lines, and draw tired patterns within that small squared space they’ll never dare to leave - afraid or weak, he doesn’t know. He doesn’t care.
He doesn’t feel… he doesn’t have a heart.
Even his own existence, the consciousness of himself… that is as elusive as the rest. He’s only reminded of it once in a while; when he lingers too long in the same place and someone abruptly turns around, because they’re feeling watched.
He exists, and even that fact only, he never tried to understand.
He slips from shade to shade, gliding amidst others… others like him, as empty, as vain, as free. He hears them at times. Whispers as low as a soft breeze, as velvety as spells, disembodied and light, rising at night when they’re most powerful - when it nearly feels like they have a substance. Sometimes he tries too, and strains to let out his own sound. He never managed it, but it doesn’t matter. Nothing matters to him.
He is just a shadow.
It took him by surprise.
Here he was, wandering at night in the empty sports grounds of a school, enjoying the feel of stretching all over a place where he can’t go during the day, when lights suddenly started pouring.
He scrambled around in the one split second it took for the whole area to be entirely lighted, hastily shrinking on himself, sliding from shade to shade impossibly fast until he finally found one that wasn’t a mere black dot under a lone pebble. He may be only a shadow, but there are still places too cramped to his liking.
Quite ironically, he could find shelter in the long dark line cast by a lamppost - one of the several spots disposed around the field to light it when it becomes too late, and for some reason now glaring in the night. It’s admittedly better than a stone, but still awfully narrow.
The shadow of the post doesn’t stretch far enough to reach the welcoming darkness surrounding the sports grounds, and he shifts uncomfortably. He’s stuck here, and if he’s unlucky it could be for the entire night. And maybe the day after that - which would be the longest he ever stayed in one place, by far. It has been five seconds and he’s bored already.
Shadows like him don’t like being trapped. They aren’t made for stillness; they aren’t the dead counterpart of lights. Granted, the only places they can visit are the ones where lights were obstructed, but that usually isn’t much of a restriction. Usually.
One minute. The time he’d need to entirely cross the labyrinthine city he’s currently in.
Three, for a whole country.
Five and he stopped counting, running restlessly along the thin line of his prison, back and forth, back and forth, and again, again, again…
That’s when he sees someone come. A man. He’s walking normally but to him it’s still awfully slow, and he soon loses interest in the newcomer, back to traveling his narrow darkness. Back and forth. Back and forth. And again. Again. Again.
Until the human comes close enough for his shadow to overlap with the lamppost’s. He doesn’t lose time then, immediately slipping into that new space and making himself comfortable here. Not so unlucky, then. Humans are slow but still, they move, and the directions they take are often unpredictable. This one is going straight though. And he soon stops, planted in the middle of the illuminated area. He is back to square one.
Back to going in circles in a closed space.
A cold breeze rises. It’s quiet. The man is shifting his weight from one foot to the other. He can’t his face well, but he looks young. It doesn’t matter. Up and down, left and right, bumping against lights like one would against invisible walls, and searching for a way to escape.
That’s all shadows care about. Moving. Flying. Shifting. They have eternity and the whole world to themselves, but can’t seem to stay in one place and one shape for too long.
Some of them do, he heard. Bodiless voices rising sweetly in the dead of the night, and speaking about frozen darkness. They say the only death for shadows is to stop moving.
Up and down, the shade cast by a hand, an arm, a head, filling that whole space then shriveling back into one tiny fleck before unfolding again. Endlessly. He already forgot how lights appeared earlier, and why he’s stuck here now.
Then the human moves and starts walking again. There’s another one, he notices belatedly. A man again, even younger - more of a boy actually - walking toward them in long, hurried strides.
“Sorry hyung, I-“
“I’m sure you’ve a good reason but you’d better hurry or we’ll be late.”
The second one makes a face, then smiles.
“Seriously though… the soccer field…”
“It’s Junsu we’re speaking about.”
“And we’re going to ruin his favorite place in the world?”
“We’re going to make it amazing because he’ll only turn eighteen once, you know.”
The talk goes on but he isn’t paying attention. He’s waiting for the moment when the two will come closer to each other - he needs to change places, and go to that other shadow lingering so close and yet unreachable, just one ribbon of light across. He needs to move. Always needs to move.
“You’ve it all ready?”
“It’s in my car.”
The younger one nods, turns around, and finally… finally shadows overlap. They barely touched that he poured out and in. For a moment, everything’s fine. The two are now walking side by side, neatly separated shadows clinging to their steps. He is stuck again, and will start searching for a way out soon. Soon.
Something is off.
He is roaming all over that new space like he did a millionth times before, stretching as far as he can, exploring every part of it. Smoothly gliding along the ground, floating right above it and up and down, left and right… the two are talking, they walk past a wall and shadows all blend together but he doesn’t notice.
Something is different.
He doesn’t feel, doesn’t remember, and the only filaments of thoughts he can actually produce are of the simplest sort. Change, move, stretch, leave… rarely more than that, not to say never. He exists and to keep existing, he needs to always move; that’s all he knows.
Yet this time it’s something foreign making him travel that enclosed blackness with impatience nearing frustration. Up and down, left and right, meticulously occupying every inch of it and studying a shifting form.
Something isn’t the same.
Seconds, minutes, hours pass - they’re all the same to him. Day is back before he sees it arrive.
A lot happened that night. People, noise, excitement. There were many occasions to leave, but here he still is - feverishly ranging within that same shadow of that same human, struggling to put together primitive pieces of thoughts. He doesn’t have words, doesn’t even have knowledge from before or others; only instincts, the faint imprint left by long-forgotten experiences.
Something is different, that’s all he can gather.
It’s only much later, as the sun is already high in the sky that he finally manages to keep his hold onto a new idea. That this particular shadow could be different, that it could be something about the one casting it.
They are no longer in the soccer field by then. The boy is alone. He’s walking down a street, countless patches of darkness cross his path, yet he isn’t leaving, still attached to his steps. He doesn’t know why. He forgot. Forgot what happened, and how he ended up here. He forgot, but something is different.
Something’s different.
Who knows how long it lasts.
That first night, the school, the sports grounds… all forgotten. The first days, the first nights too. Something’s different: that one pressing thought is screening what he’s always known - move, change, shift, leave. He relentlessly explores a painfully normal space, not bothering about the why and how, only caring about the troubling impression that keeps him caught inside.
Another thought surfaced.
His name.
He wants to know his name, and tries to remember every time he hears it but it always vanishes. His memory is untrained, as blank as a white winter sky and it retains nothing. He tries, again and again, unable to know how many times it has been. Each one could be the first, except he knows it isn’t. That itself means a lot.
Days, and days, and days, but time means nothing to him.
He keeps studying immaterial darkness, fills all of that bounded space, shrinks back into a finger’s shade, slides from one side to the other like water on a trail, and tries to place it… that foreign thing, the one he can’t pinpoint. He finds absolutely nothing.
But imperceptibly, he starts looking up more and more often. The smiles, words, habits and silences… he doesn’t care, doesn’t understand. He doesn’t know what is happy or sad, what’s pain, sorrow, or hope.
Yet imperceptibly, he starts noticing things.
He forgets every time, but days and days somehow began shaping his thoughts. They go faster now. They aren’t as simple, as scattered, as empty. He doesn’t realize it himself, but something is changing.
Months.
The first memories.
It starts with what keeps happening, the steady landmarks in a life he knows is boring but that he has no choice but to follow. The bus stop. A brown door. Concrete steps. A chestnut tree. Then linking things together. Morning and evening, for instance, and the bus. Or the chestnut tree… the chestnut tree means noon, curling around the boy’s feet as all shadows shrink under the sun’s high glare.
It has been a long time since he last heard the voices telling about stillness, and the death awaiting those who stop moving.
He is still trying to understand what’s different. He is now able to focus on other things, and they all revolve around one same boy.
Years.
Changmin.
That’s his name.
He still forgets from time to time, but it’s quite rare now. He knows what his days are made of, and what use they are, those things filling the crowded space of his life. He knows the difference between an hour and a day. He knows how to recognize some sounds - and his voice, Changmin’s voice is the easiest to tell apart.
He knows his face, the shape of his eyes, the shades in them and the lights too.
He still follows him everywhere, but gradually stopped bothering about that ‘something’ that’s different. He cares about so many things now.
He is here in the morning, when Changmin wakes up and drags his feet to the kitchen. He’s now able to tell if the young man is in a rush, if he slept well or not. He knows that if it rains outside, they’ll leave earlier. Sometimes he can make out other voices and even recognize whose they are, though ‘mother’ and ‘father’ don’t mean much to him.
He walks with him to school, follows him down hallways, during breaks and for lunch. He often stays still for hours, as classes go on and on and the sun slowly drifts in the sky outside. He doesn’t remember the times when he couldn’t bear staying in one place for more than five seconds. Instead, he stretches lazily in a space that still feels special but that he stopped examining, and waits.
He waits till evening comes. Going back to the bus, Changmin often runs then. It’s still terribly slow compared to how fast he can go, but it’s been so long since he last went on with his own speed, and he finds himself waiting for those moments. He finds himself liking them, just as he used to dislike everything too slow, too still, too unchanged.
He runs along, bound to the dark figure that follows Changmin everywhere and that no one notices.
And he’s here at night, when darkness blossoms… when others come and cross a space he has come to think of as his own. He doesn’t like sensing other shadows hovering around. He doesn’t like when they slide close to Changmin’s bed and spread above it, covering his face and sleep with empty blackness.
He doesn’t know when he started to think of himself as ‘different’. Not as void, not as vain as all the others. Different.
When night comes, he stretches as best as he can to fill the whole space of the room. He has nothing to do then but to watch Changmin sleep, and that’s when questions naturally arise; what he’s doing here, why he isn’t leaving, and how things came to this. He forgot how it happened.
He just feels comfortable, occupying the full space of a quiet room, tagging along an existence he can’t even begin to understand.
And years.
It’s a busy night. Changmin’s birthday.
He grasped it had to do with passing time, a year more. For now he’s mostly interested in the young man’s smile, the festive atmosphere, colorful lights flowing and music blasting loud. He can tell tonight’s special, and he thinks Changmin looks ‘happy’. He recognizes faces too, knows some of them are ‘friends’.
They bring the cake, and he waits patiently behind him as Changmin blows the candles amidst a concert of cheers. He only gets to take a look a few minutes later, and counts twenty-two candles.
That’s when it dawns on him.
Suddenly, he remembers other birthdays like this one, many of them, years piling up. Passing time.
And all of a sudden, he wonders how many… how many years? How much time did he spend here, motionless, forgetful of his very nature? How long since he last changed places, went elsewhere… the deep sea waters down in the south, rainforests and high peaks, other cities, other humans, gushing through their dull lives at full speed and free… free.
Clinging glasses. Excited chatter. Music, lights, laughter and smiles. Surrounding him, mundane and slow. And abruptly, what feels foreign is the way he thinks now. The very fact that he thinks. That he somehow found something interesting in the plain life of a plain human.
It takes only a split second for the shade he lived in for years to feel narrow… worn, and unfit.
He is gone the moment that follows.
Crawling under a table, along the wall and up to the window, slipping through a crack and into darkness. Leaving the lights behind, pouring in the night sky.
He unleashes his speed then, flying though the night like he hasn’t in years. Sliding from one puddle of dark to the other as fast as he can, filling the immense space of an unlighted park, stretching until he feels too thin and faint and he needs to fold up once more, running along the crevices of a low stone wall. Free again, he thinks… free, but something changed.
He isn’t going as fast as he used to. He feels somewhat clumsy, too big and no… no that’s not it. Solid. He isn’t as empty, there’s something hard about him that wasn’t here before and he goes faster… faster, like to leave it behind. He rushes through sleeping towns, crosses a tamed countryside, rises as high as he dares like hoping the wind would let him his wings. It’s not working.
He’s slowing down. He bumps against branches instead of slipping through them like he’s supposed to, twirls like a falling bird then stops moving altogether. Still, now.
He curls on himself at the base of a tree, under a crooked root. It’s dark. The underwood of a silent forest. There are plenty of others like him here; they’re everywhere, he sees them and he thinks he should stay. Right.
Here, he’ll go back to normal.
He’ll find again the way he used to be.
Others are hovering all around him, smoothly dashing through darkness without ever stopping, filling every crack and every corner. Black ghosts, vagabonds of the night. Silent. All he has to do is fade in them again, and just then he notices something he never saw before.
Shadows like him, but darker, stiller… with more substance, he thinks, and something that could very well be fear seizes him. Yet he can’t feel, he can’t… he’s just a shadow, and he realizes then that the others… the ones he used to resemble, they are moving past him. They don’t slide close like they used to, like they could blend with him - like they’re all part of a same infinite darkness, and individuality is just an illusion.
They don’t acknowledge him anymore. They just part and go past him in a moving flow, indifferent and blind.
He looks again and sees those darker shapes, motionless, and with that air about them… full. Like black rocks standing still in the bed of a dark river, dividing flows of silent waters. And then he hears them - that’s where they come from, those icy voices whispering about death; when shadows stop morphing and settle for one shape. For the first time, he hears the sadness in their words.
The cold hand gripping him tightens its hold, and this time he’s sure it’s fear.
He’s a stranger now. Different.
He doesn’t belong here anymore. He doesn’t want to. He doesn’t… he doesn’t know how to revert back to what he used to be anyway, and he finds there’s something threatening about the others… about those dark shapes filling the night, now so foreign to him.
And he wants to go back.
The one he left behind, that place with memory… he wants to go back there. There, he wasn’t afraid. He doesn’t think he was dying either… he thinks he doesn’t mind going slower or changing a little, as long as he can continue clinging onto those steps that taught him so much, day after day, year after year.
He wants to go back, and as soon as that thought comes up, he realizes he forgot.
He forgot the way, the place.
He forgot his voice.
He forgot his face.
His name too… he forgot his name, and as hard as he’s trying to remember now, it won’t come back to him.
“It’s not too late.”
On his left.
Another of those dark shadows, even bigger than the ones he saw before. Completely still. Its shape looks nearly human, he notices, and that somehow feels terribly wrong. It has a voice too, distinct words. It’s seemingly leaning toward him, like one of those rocks that morph into monsters when night falls dark enough.
“You don’t remember all…”
It has a voice, and sadness in it. Cold. It’s curling on itself, cradling something he can’t see in arms-shaped darkness.
“It’s not too late, they didn’t take everything.”
Fear. It’s fear, now he is sure.
He starts retreating back, away from words he doesn’t want to hear. They are dripping with feelings he can’t grasp… he is still too raw, too new, unshaped. Someone else would recognize utter despair there, and loneliness, and regrets, but as it is he just feels scared. His first emotion ever, in his entire existence.
“It’s not too late…”
He is running away.
He doesn’t know where to, forgot the place, his face, his name. He’ll have to find it. He’ll have to go back, somehow, because there’s fear inside him and only one way to make it go away.
***** ***** ***** ***** *****
The day that follows his 22nd birthday, Changmin wakes up with a headache. Not just any headache, no. One of the finest sort - the sort that has a heavy hammer and happily knocks the inside of your skull, as if trying to engrave an ‘I told you so’ there.
Which isn’t exactly surprising, seeing the monstrous party Yoochun and Junsu threw for him yesterday. Those two fail at most important things in life, but this they do well. Scarily so. Changmin just hopes he didn’t make a fool of himself. Thinking about the last time they got him wasted is still enough to trigger murderous impulses, and yes, he will deny it happened till the moment he dies.
He sits up straight in his bed after a while, looking around blearily.
He doesn’t feel so good… it’s not just the hangover though. Actually it started in the middle of the party yesterday. Probably something wrong with the cake. Too much chocolate, cream and more chocolate, and sweets, and alcohol on top.
Changmin grimaces, a hand on his stomach, and quickly erases all thoughts of food and alcohol. So not a good idea right now.
He gets out of bed once he’s sure he won’t be sick, and slowly gets ready for the day.
He wants to kill Yoochun and Junsu for doing this to him when he has classes the next day. He wants to kill his conscientious self for putting ‘skipping school’ at the top of the list of things he’ll never do. At least it’s afternoon classes.
Changmin arrives at the university right on time, a little before 2PM. And he wants to kill the rest of the world when he realizes that half of his classmates decided to stay home, probably peacefully sleeping through their own hangovers.
The last class just ended, after three hours that dragged on forever.
His headache isn’t any better. If anything it just got worse, without mentioning the slight nausea now making his stomach churn unpleasantly.
He’s in the middle of the university main hall, flooding Yoochun and Junsu’s phones with death curses and various kinds of murder threats when Changmin stops walking. He isn’t sure why. He’s felt weird all day, and just now that uneasy impression increased tenfold.
It’s far from nice, rather oppressive, like someone is watching him. There’s something heavy on his heart, something that has nothing to do with too much cake or alcohol this time.
He looks around, feeling a bit lost. Light-headed, maybe.
He’s cold. His legs feel weak under him, like about to give in. His mouth is dry, it’s a bit hard to breathe. There are people everywhere, walking hurriedly in all directions, talking loud and too much; that makes him feel dizzy. His head still hurts. It’s cold, his throat is tight and his chest constricted.
Then his eyes land on him.
His heart plummets. Cold becomes hot, a surge of heat. Like an invisible fist just punched him in the gut. Like air suddenly doubled weights.
And Changmin knows.
He’s been with others before. Teenage crushes… people he liked, sometimes liked a lot. He thinks he might even have been a little bit in love - 1st year of university, the chemistry classroom and a kiss he never forgot, though things never went beyond that. But this… this is different.
He stays absolutely still, eyes wide, silent, frozen on spot. His heart… his heart is pounding so hard it hurts.
Almond-shaped eyes. Dark hair framing a handsome face, serious yet kind. Young, tall, lean, a somewhat nervous strength in the way he moves, alert and curious, his gaze quickly taking in every detail around. He goes nearly unnoticed in plain black trousers and a brown jacket, and Changmin blinks, struggling to focus because for a split second, he even seemed to disappear.
He feels warm, too warm. Confused and faint. His heart is still pounding, his mind screaming at him to do something. His feet are like glued to the ground, and just as he thinks this can’t be happening, the other moves.
He is walking away.
Changmin doesn’t even get to think about it. His body reacts on his own; he crosses the space between them in just a few strides and before he can realize what he’s doing, his hand gripped a leather-clad arm.
Time stills, a heartbeat’s hesitation. The other stops, and turns around.
Changmin is staring stupidly at his hand, wondering if it’s really his own and when did he tell it to move. He’s scared to look up.
He’s afraid of what will happen when he meets that stranger’s eyes; he stares at his hand instead. His voice is gone. His heart is racing madly inside his chest, sending blood rushing through his veins, his senses thrown into a chaos of incoherent beats.
“Yeah…?”
He just talked, and Changmin shudders. He feels stupid. He doesn’t understand what’s going on, but still manages to oblige his hand to let go. It falls uselessly on his side, while his voice is still nowhere to be found. His eyes are fixed on the worn brown of a leather jacket.
“Are you okay?”
The words bear slight concern. Changmin looks up at last.
And his heart soars, his head ringing with muffled sounds. There are people around; he forgot about them.
Dark brown eyes draw him in, pulling at feelings supposed to stay hidden inside, stirring emotions that should build along with time. Changmin never saw him before… he knows, he knows that and yet already, he’ sure…
Blood is pounding at his temples. He opens his mouth, and not a sound comes out. Which might not be a bad thing, since the only thing he wants to say right now is ‘I love you’ and it’s stupid. Nonsense. The kind of thing that just don’t happen, not in real life. And certainly not in Shim Changmin’s life. That’s not him, no, not at all.
He thinks his heart might break open if the other just stares that way any longer.
“Hey there…”
A hand passes waving in front of his eyes, and Changmin blinks again. Oh god. He must look stupid. Awful.
He partied all night yesterday. There are dark rings the size of a continent under his eyes, and he can’t remember doing anything to his hair this morning. He must look tired, and cranky. ‘Hangover’ is surely written all over his face, and Changmin straightens up with a jolt.
He must say something.
“I…”
Good. Not a bad way to start, except he doesn’t know what’s supposed to come next.
The other’s eyes narrow as he frowns. He leans a little closer, studying his face with open concern, and all coherent words fly out the window.
There’s a tiny mole just above his upper lip, and Changmin is staring. He still feels abnormally hot, the world around faded to blurred shapes and he wishes he hadn’t drunk so much yesterday. Maybe it’s all there is to it. Post-drinking hallucinations.
He represses a nervous laugh right on time. Damn. Changmin doesn’t want to look insane on top of tired, sick and creepy.
“You should sit down, you don’t look well.”
That’s a complete understatement, but then the stranger starts pulling at his arm and his stomach twists in a funny way. There’s no helping it. Changmin follows along like an obedient child, crossing the university hall in a daze.
He somehow ends up seated on a bench in an empty hallway, with a bottle of fresh water in hand, and twin dark brown eyes watching him worriedly. Changmin wishes he’d look away.
He wishes he could think normally again, and just breathe without feeling like all the air around reduced to one tiny stream - barely enough, an ache in his lungs, breathing too fast, too sharp.
He wishes his heart would stop pounding so hard.
It’s not funny anymore, he wants to complain aloud to whoever did this to him.
The other’s hand moves up to rest on his forehead, gentle and cool. Perfect. Just perfect.
It’s not funny anymore, Changmin thinks, and to his utter dismay, tears start pooling in his eyes. He doesn’t understand. He doesn’t get it, has never felt that helpless before. He has no idea of what’s happening to him, his heart is beating way ahead of him and he can’t control it… can’t keep up with it, can’t even begin to apprehend the violence of emotions he never felt before.
“Sorry…”
He looks up, hastily blinking tears back. The other is smiling a bit sheepishly.
“This is when I’m supposed to tell if you’ve a fever or not”, the man adds, tilting his head to the side as he removes his hand from his forehead, “but I never quite got the hang of that.”
Changmin needs a while to put the words together. He manages a small smile.
He doesn’t trust himself to speak but as it seems that’s enough for the other, and he sits on the bench on his right. Changmin wonders if he’s aware of what’s going on next to him. The frenzied booming of feelings inside. The unrhythmic, painful, mad throbbing of his heart. The way he’s struggling hard not to give in, as his body desperately wants to lean closer.
He looks down at his hands; one of them lying flat on his thigh, the other holding the bottle of water. They are shaking.
Changmin closes his eyes, and counts to ten.
When he opens them, he nearly expects the stranger to be gone.
He turns his head, and finds brown irises again. He is watching him.
Changmin never saw him before but it does feel like those eyes could read deep inside of him, if that man just let them. Like he’s purposefully holding back… letting that silent gaze hover on the surface of things when he could have it all with just one prolonged stare. Secrets, surrenders, shames and sighs. All.
It makes him feel exposed like never before, yet Changmin already isn’t as scared.
They are kind, those eyes. True. Both soft and unyielding, like a will would bend a thousandth times rather than hurt someone, without ever crossing the lines it swore to himself it wouldn’t. Kind, but uncompromising. Confident… right, confidence is there in his every gesture, but there’s reserve too. Like he could, if he wanted… he could, but won’t do it. Whatever ‘it’ is.
“…I hope you don’t stare like that at every stranger you meet.”
Changmin blinks. He hopes the furious blush rising to his cheeks exists in his imagination only, but the other’s chuckle soon tells him otherwise. Dark eyes softened, lit with laughter, looking at him with unconcealed amusement.
“You are cute.”
Changmin’s eyes narrow.
Something finally gives way inside, like a sudden gush of fresh air, bringing him back to himself at last.
Damnit.
He has lines too, lines others would do better not to cross, and Yoochun and Junsu could tell that man that ‘cute’ isn’t a good idea. At all.
They gave up on that one at least five years ago, as soon as Changmin grew taller than them and got strong enough to make them regret every time they said it in the past - and there were many.
“Didn’t think I could look that frightening to someone…”
His fingers tighten around the bottle in his right hand.
“I mean, I know I’m handsome but-“
He opens the cap, stretches his arm out, and pours the whole bottle on top of the guy’s head.
Talk about random, but that is more like him at least.
The other freezes, eyes wide, mouth half-open in shock.
Changmin watches without saying a word, making sure the last drops of water fell before dropping the bottle. The sound of plastic hitting the ground resounds loudly in the empty hallway, and it becomes silent. He can even hear droplets crashing on the floor.
Changmin averts his eyes then, looking straight ahead at the wall facing them. That felt good, he thinks, breathing out slowly. That felt really good.
His heart is still beating too fast, he still feels hot and dizzy… something definitely happened but it doesn’t seem frightening anymore. The heaviness is gone. The helplessness as well. He breathes in deeply and turns his head after a few seconds, not too sure about how to explain that and avoid looking like a complete ass. But the other doesn’t look vexed, quite the contrary.
He is grinning at him from under his wet hair, and even manages to look nice in doing so. Changmin’s heart gives a little tug.
He smiles back at him tentatively, hoping it looks even remotely apologetic. He doesn’t know what to say. People pass in the hallway; they glance their way but soon avert their eyes, like uninterested.
He thinks they must look like a pair of fools though, smiling stupidly at each other, one of them drenched and the other… well, Changmin doesn’t want to picture how he must look like now. He doesn’t care. His gaze doesn’t leave the man’s face; the laughter sparkling at the corner of his eyes, the way he carelessly pushes wet strands of hair back, the flash of humor as he looks his way.
“…Feeling better now?”
“Much better.”
Changmin is relieved his voice didn’t waver.
He stands from the bench and puts his hands in his pockets, just to make sure the other won’t notice that they’re still shaking. He can’t say he feels great, but there’s definite improvement. At least he can think coherently again, and the one sure thing is that he isn’t letting that guy out of his sight any time soon.
“I can lend you dry clothes”, Changmin says, skipping the ‘I’m really sorry’ bit on purpose because there’s no way he can explain what happened when he doesn’t understand it himself, “I live just five minutes from here.”
He hopes the other won’t say ‘it’s fine, don’t worry’. He hopes he won’t turn down the offer and walk away now. He doesn’t want him to go. Changmin can’t let him go just like this, already thinking of ways to hold him back. Pride be damned.
If he must, he’ll just pretend he’s about to faint once more. He can hardly see how things could be worse at that point, at least as far as his image is concerned.
Changmin doesn’t realize how anxiously he’s waiting for the answer until the man nods, smile still in place on his face.
Relief gushes through him as the other stands in turn, waiting for him to lead the way. He has to repress the urge to take his hand. Changmin doesn’t even know his name yet, actually he knows absolutely nothing about him, and it already feels like he could disappear any time.
It’s because things like this aren’t supposed to exist in real life, he thinks as they step out under the sun.
It’s because perfection just doesn’t happen. Not like this. It doesn’t fall on people without reasons or without efforts.
It doesn’t wait for them at a corner of their existences then pops up out of nowhere, and it certainly doesn’t follow them around in streets with drenched hair, a bright smile, and that thing in their eyes that send your heart racing every time you see them.
He is right behind him.
Changmin feels his presence as clearly as if it had been missing for his entire life, and just now, an empty space was filled.
He fights the childish urge to stop abruptly so that the other will bump into him. He already needs more - an embrace, a caress, a brush of his fingers, something - and he shudders again just thinking of the hand that took hold of his arm earlier.
It’s cold under the sun.
Like lights lost all their warmth. Like he stole all of it, and Changmin wraps his arms around himself. He thinks… he thinks it’s not a dream, he’s walking in now. No.
Spreading all around him, it’s that other’s shadow.
Note: I honestly don't know where this comes from and I'm not even sure of where it's heading to... just can say there'll be angst and that I can't promise a glorious happy ending (=.=). You've been warned~ ^^
This being said, I hope you'll enjoy the read!! The beginning is a little confusing, I guess, but I mean to keep it that way so don't try too hard to read in between lines ;-)
Part 2.
Pairings: HoMin
Rating: PG
Genre: Romance, Angst, Supernatural
Summary:
They say the only death for shadows is to stop moving. That's all he knows, all that matters, all he lives by. He flies, changes shapes, changes places, and will be forever. Until the day he stops. Until opposites meet, and he unknowingly treads on a path of light.
He… he is a shadow.
Just one among countless others… shadows like him, filling the spaces between lights, shifting as they’re pleased, casting darkness on walls. He has no name, no shape, nothing to call his own and no place where he belongs.
He has the whole world - slipping from shade to shade and traveling as fast as light itself. Spreading over the earth when night falls, shrinking back within narrow contours as soon as daylight takes over.
He enters locked rooms as easily as if he was air itself. He hears secrets, and sees what eyes can’t see. How much could he tell, if he just had a voice, if he just knew how to… but as it is, none of it actually makes sense to him. He forgets all as soon as he sees it anyway.
He doesn’t remember… he has no memories. He is just a shadow.
Nameless, shapeless, ageless.
There are countless like him. No one knows where they come from; they exist, that’s all. Intangible, ungraspable… the flickering black spots dancing on the ceiling, as candles die on the table of a spread feast. The cold darkness cast on a lively street by one tall building, every day the same slow transformation following the sun’s course. Lifeless monsters running on the walls bordering a highway. The funny way shades morph when too many lights move, distorted a thousandth times but their natures unchanged.
If anything, shadows are much stronger than lights. They last - as eternal as night.
No one ever notices but they’re here at all times. He could be anywhere… one moment crouching in a corner of your kitchen, the next racing against the wind rushing under a suburban train. And a while after that, playing between the shimmering sparks reflected in a waterfall no one knows, in a part of the world you never even heard about.
Distance and time don’t matter to him.
To him, the pace of human lives is excruciatingly slow, their days painfully boring. They drag their bodies in circles, follow repetitive lines, and draw tired patterns within that small squared space they’ll never dare to leave - afraid or weak, he doesn’t know. He doesn’t care.
He doesn’t feel… he doesn’t have a heart.
Even his own existence, the consciousness of himself… that is as elusive as the rest. He’s only reminded of it once in a while; when he lingers too long in the same place and someone abruptly turns around, because they’re feeling watched.
He exists, and even that fact only, he never tried to understand.
He slips from shade to shade, gliding amidst others… others like him, as empty, as vain, as free. He hears them at times. Whispers as low as a soft breeze, as velvety as spells, disembodied and light, rising at night when they’re most powerful - when it nearly feels like they have a substance. Sometimes he tries too, and strains to let out his own sound. He never managed it, but it doesn’t matter. Nothing matters to him.
He is just a shadow.
It took him by surprise.
Here he was, wandering at night in the empty sports grounds of a school, enjoying the feel of stretching all over a place where he can’t go during the day, when lights suddenly started pouring.
He scrambled around in the one split second it took for the whole area to be entirely lighted, hastily shrinking on himself, sliding from shade to shade impossibly fast until he finally found one that wasn’t a mere black dot under a lone pebble. He may be only a shadow, but there are still places too cramped to his liking.
Quite ironically, he could find shelter in the long dark line cast by a lamppost - one of the several spots disposed around the field to light it when it becomes too late, and for some reason now glaring in the night. It’s admittedly better than a stone, but still awfully narrow.
The shadow of the post doesn’t stretch far enough to reach the welcoming darkness surrounding the sports grounds, and he shifts uncomfortably. He’s stuck here, and if he’s unlucky it could be for the entire night. And maybe the day after that - which would be the longest he ever stayed in one place, by far. It has been five seconds and he’s bored already.
Shadows like him don’t like being trapped. They aren’t made for stillness; they aren’t the dead counterpart of lights. Granted, the only places they can visit are the ones where lights were obstructed, but that usually isn’t much of a restriction. Usually.
One minute. The time he’d need to entirely cross the labyrinthine city he’s currently in.
Three, for a whole country.
Five and he stopped counting, running restlessly along the thin line of his prison, back and forth, back and forth, and again, again, again…
That’s when he sees someone come. A man. He’s walking normally but to him it’s still awfully slow, and he soon loses interest in the newcomer, back to traveling his narrow darkness. Back and forth. Back and forth. And again. Again. Again.
Until the human comes close enough for his shadow to overlap with the lamppost’s. He doesn’t lose time then, immediately slipping into that new space and making himself comfortable here. Not so unlucky, then. Humans are slow but still, they move, and the directions they take are often unpredictable. This one is going straight though. And he soon stops, planted in the middle of the illuminated area. He is back to square one.
Back to going in circles in a closed space.
A cold breeze rises. It’s quiet. The man is shifting his weight from one foot to the other. He can’t his face well, but he looks young. It doesn’t matter. Up and down, left and right, bumping against lights like one would against invisible walls, and searching for a way to escape.
That’s all shadows care about. Moving. Flying. Shifting. They have eternity and the whole world to themselves, but can’t seem to stay in one place and one shape for too long.
Some of them do, he heard. Bodiless voices rising sweetly in the dead of the night, and speaking about frozen darkness. They say the only death for shadows is to stop moving.
Up and down, the shade cast by a hand, an arm, a head, filling that whole space then shriveling back into one tiny fleck before unfolding again. Endlessly. He already forgot how lights appeared earlier, and why he’s stuck here now.
Then the human moves and starts walking again. There’s another one, he notices belatedly. A man again, even younger - more of a boy actually - walking toward them in long, hurried strides.
“Sorry hyung, I-“
“I’m sure you’ve a good reason but you’d better hurry or we’ll be late.”
The second one makes a face, then smiles.
“Seriously though… the soccer field…”
“It’s Junsu we’re speaking about.”
“And we’re going to ruin his favorite place in the world?”
“We’re going to make it amazing because he’ll only turn eighteen once, you know.”
The talk goes on but he isn’t paying attention. He’s waiting for the moment when the two will come closer to each other - he needs to change places, and go to that other shadow lingering so close and yet unreachable, just one ribbon of light across. He needs to move. Always needs to move.
“You’ve it all ready?”
“It’s in my car.”
The younger one nods, turns around, and finally… finally shadows overlap. They barely touched that he poured out and in. For a moment, everything’s fine. The two are now walking side by side, neatly separated shadows clinging to their steps. He is stuck again, and will start searching for a way out soon. Soon.
Something is off.
He is roaming all over that new space like he did a millionth times before, stretching as far as he can, exploring every part of it. Smoothly gliding along the ground, floating right above it and up and down, left and right… the two are talking, they walk past a wall and shadows all blend together but he doesn’t notice.
Something is different.
He doesn’t feel, doesn’t remember, and the only filaments of thoughts he can actually produce are of the simplest sort. Change, move, stretch, leave… rarely more than that, not to say never. He exists and to keep existing, he needs to always move; that’s all he knows.
Yet this time it’s something foreign making him travel that enclosed blackness with impatience nearing frustration. Up and down, left and right, meticulously occupying every inch of it and studying a shifting form.
Something isn’t the same.
Seconds, minutes, hours pass - they’re all the same to him. Day is back before he sees it arrive.
A lot happened that night. People, noise, excitement. There were many occasions to leave, but here he still is - feverishly ranging within that same shadow of that same human, struggling to put together primitive pieces of thoughts. He doesn’t have words, doesn’t even have knowledge from before or others; only instincts, the faint imprint left by long-forgotten experiences.
Something is different, that’s all he can gather.
It’s only much later, as the sun is already high in the sky that he finally manages to keep his hold onto a new idea. That this particular shadow could be different, that it could be something about the one casting it.
They are no longer in the soccer field by then. The boy is alone. He’s walking down a street, countless patches of darkness cross his path, yet he isn’t leaving, still attached to his steps. He doesn’t know why. He forgot. Forgot what happened, and how he ended up here. He forgot, but something is different.
Something’s different.
Who knows how long it lasts.
That first night, the school, the sports grounds… all forgotten. The first days, the first nights too. Something’s different: that one pressing thought is screening what he’s always known - move, change, shift, leave. He relentlessly explores a painfully normal space, not bothering about the why and how, only caring about the troubling impression that keeps him caught inside.
Another thought surfaced.
His name.
He wants to know his name, and tries to remember every time he hears it but it always vanishes. His memory is untrained, as blank as a white winter sky and it retains nothing. He tries, again and again, unable to know how many times it has been. Each one could be the first, except he knows it isn’t. That itself means a lot.
Days, and days, and days, but time means nothing to him.
He keeps studying immaterial darkness, fills all of that bounded space, shrinks back into a finger’s shade, slides from one side to the other like water on a trail, and tries to place it… that foreign thing, the one he can’t pinpoint. He finds absolutely nothing.
But imperceptibly, he starts looking up more and more often. The smiles, words, habits and silences… he doesn’t care, doesn’t understand. He doesn’t know what is happy or sad, what’s pain, sorrow, or hope.
Yet imperceptibly, he starts noticing things.
He forgets every time, but days and days somehow began shaping his thoughts. They go faster now. They aren’t as simple, as scattered, as empty. He doesn’t realize it himself, but something is changing.
Months.
The first memories.
It starts with what keeps happening, the steady landmarks in a life he knows is boring but that he has no choice but to follow. The bus stop. A brown door. Concrete steps. A chestnut tree. Then linking things together. Morning and evening, for instance, and the bus. Or the chestnut tree… the chestnut tree means noon, curling around the boy’s feet as all shadows shrink under the sun’s high glare.
It has been a long time since he last heard the voices telling about stillness, and the death awaiting those who stop moving.
He is still trying to understand what’s different. He is now able to focus on other things, and they all revolve around one same boy.
Years.
Changmin.
That’s his name.
He still forgets from time to time, but it’s quite rare now. He knows what his days are made of, and what use they are, those things filling the crowded space of his life. He knows the difference between an hour and a day. He knows how to recognize some sounds - and his voice, Changmin’s voice is the easiest to tell apart.
He knows his face, the shape of his eyes, the shades in them and the lights too.
He still follows him everywhere, but gradually stopped bothering about that ‘something’ that’s different. He cares about so many things now.
He is here in the morning, when Changmin wakes up and drags his feet to the kitchen. He’s now able to tell if the young man is in a rush, if he slept well or not. He knows that if it rains outside, they’ll leave earlier. Sometimes he can make out other voices and even recognize whose they are, though ‘mother’ and ‘father’ don’t mean much to him.
He walks with him to school, follows him down hallways, during breaks and for lunch. He often stays still for hours, as classes go on and on and the sun slowly drifts in the sky outside. He doesn’t remember the times when he couldn’t bear staying in one place for more than five seconds. Instead, he stretches lazily in a space that still feels special but that he stopped examining, and waits.
He waits till evening comes. Going back to the bus, Changmin often runs then. It’s still terribly slow compared to how fast he can go, but it’s been so long since he last went on with his own speed, and he finds himself waiting for those moments. He finds himself liking them, just as he used to dislike everything too slow, too still, too unchanged.
He runs along, bound to the dark figure that follows Changmin everywhere and that no one notices.
And he’s here at night, when darkness blossoms… when others come and cross a space he has come to think of as his own. He doesn’t like sensing other shadows hovering around. He doesn’t like when they slide close to Changmin’s bed and spread above it, covering his face and sleep with empty blackness.
He doesn’t know when he started to think of himself as ‘different’. Not as void, not as vain as all the others. Different.
When night comes, he stretches as best as he can to fill the whole space of the room. He has nothing to do then but to watch Changmin sleep, and that’s when questions naturally arise; what he’s doing here, why he isn’t leaving, and how things came to this. He forgot how it happened.
He just feels comfortable, occupying the full space of a quiet room, tagging along an existence he can’t even begin to understand.
And years.
It’s a busy night. Changmin’s birthday.
He grasped it had to do with passing time, a year more. For now he’s mostly interested in the young man’s smile, the festive atmosphere, colorful lights flowing and music blasting loud. He can tell tonight’s special, and he thinks Changmin looks ‘happy’. He recognizes faces too, knows some of them are ‘friends’.
They bring the cake, and he waits patiently behind him as Changmin blows the candles amidst a concert of cheers. He only gets to take a look a few minutes later, and counts twenty-two candles.
That’s when it dawns on him.
Suddenly, he remembers other birthdays like this one, many of them, years piling up. Passing time.
And all of a sudden, he wonders how many… how many years? How much time did he spend here, motionless, forgetful of his very nature? How long since he last changed places, went elsewhere… the deep sea waters down in the south, rainforests and high peaks, other cities, other humans, gushing through their dull lives at full speed and free… free.
Clinging glasses. Excited chatter. Music, lights, laughter and smiles. Surrounding him, mundane and slow. And abruptly, what feels foreign is the way he thinks now. The very fact that he thinks. That he somehow found something interesting in the plain life of a plain human.
It takes only a split second for the shade he lived in for years to feel narrow… worn, and unfit.
He is gone the moment that follows.
Crawling under a table, along the wall and up to the window, slipping through a crack and into darkness. Leaving the lights behind, pouring in the night sky.
He unleashes his speed then, flying though the night like he hasn’t in years. Sliding from one puddle of dark to the other as fast as he can, filling the immense space of an unlighted park, stretching until he feels too thin and faint and he needs to fold up once more, running along the crevices of a low stone wall. Free again, he thinks… free, but something changed.
He isn’t going as fast as he used to. He feels somewhat clumsy, too big and no… no that’s not it. Solid. He isn’t as empty, there’s something hard about him that wasn’t here before and he goes faster… faster, like to leave it behind. He rushes through sleeping towns, crosses a tamed countryside, rises as high as he dares like hoping the wind would let him his wings. It’s not working.
He’s slowing down. He bumps against branches instead of slipping through them like he’s supposed to, twirls like a falling bird then stops moving altogether. Still, now.
He curls on himself at the base of a tree, under a crooked root. It’s dark. The underwood of a silent forest. There are plenty of others like him here; they’re everywhere, he sees them and he thinks he should stay. Right.
Here, he’ll go back to normal.
He’ll find again the way he used to be.
Others are hovering all around him, smoothly dashing through darkness without ever stopping, filling every crack and every corner. Black ghosts, vagabonds of the night. Silent. All he has to do is fade in them again, and just then he notices something he never saw before.
Shadows like him, but darker, stiller… with more substance, he thinks, and something that could very well be fear seizes him. Yet he can’t feel, he can’t… he’s just a shadow, and he realizes then that the others… the ones he used to resemble, they are moving past him. They don’t slide close like they used to, like they could blend with him - like they’re all part of a same infinite darkness, and individuality is just an illusion.
They don’t acknowledge him anymore. They just part and go past him in a moving flow, indifferent and blind.
He looks again and sees those darker shapes, motionless, and with that air about them… full. Like black rocks standing still in the bed of a dark river, dividing flows of silent waters. And then he hears them - that’s where they come from, those icy voices whispering about death; when shadows stop morphing and settle for one shape. For the first time, he hears the sadness in their words.
The cold hand gripping him tightens its hold, and this time he’s sure it’s fear.
He’s a stranger now. Different.
He doesn’t belong here anymore. He doesn’t want to. He doesn’t… he doesn’t know how to revert back to what he used to be anyway, and he finds there’s something threatening about the others… about those dark shapes filling the night, now so foreign to him.
And he wants to go back.
The one he left behind, that place with memory… he wants to go back there. There, he wasn’t afraid. He doesn’t think he was dying either… he thinks he doesn’t mind going slower or changing a little, as long as he can continue clinging onto those steps that taught him so much, day after day, year after year.
He wants to go back, and as soon as that thought comes up, he realizes he forgot.
He forgot the way, the place.
He forgot his voice.
He forgot his face.
His name too… he forgot his name, and as hard as he’s trying to remember now, it won’t come back to him.
“It’s not too late.”
On his left.
Another of those dark shadows, even bigger than the ones he saw before. Completely still. Its shape looks nearly human, he notices, and that somehow feels terribly wrong. It has a voice too, distinct words. It’s seemingly leaning toward him, like one of those rocks that morph into monsters when night falls dark enough.
“You don’t remember all…”
It has a voice, and sadness in it. Cold. It’s curling on itself, cradling something he can’t see in arms-shaped darkness.
“It’s not too late, they didn’t take everything.”
Fear. It’s fear, now he is sure.
He starts retreating back, away from words he doesn’t want to hear. They are dripping with feelings he can’t grasp… he is still too raw, too new, unshaped. Someone else would recognize utter despair there, and loneliness, and regrets, but as it is he just feels scared. His first emotion ever, in his entire existence.
“It’s not too late…”
He is running away.
He doesn’t know where to, forgot the place, his face, his name. He’ll have to find it. He’ll have to go back, somehow, because there’s fear inside him and only one way to make it go away.
***** ***** ***** ***** *****
The day that follows his 22nd birthday, Changmin wakes up with a headache. Not just any headache, no. One of the finest sort - the sort that has a heavy hammer and happily knocks the inside of your skull, as if trying to engrave an ‘I told you so’ there.
Which isn’t exactly surprising, seeing the monstrous party Yoochun and Junsu threw for him yesterday. Those two fail at most important things in life, but this they do well. Scarily so. Changmin just hopes he didn’t make a fool of himself. Thinking about the last time they got him wasted is still enough to trigger murderous impulses, and yes, he will deny it happened till the moment he dies.
He sits up straight in his bed after a while, looking around blearily.
He doesn’t feel so good… it’s not just the hangover though. Actually it started in the middle of the party yesterday. Probably something wrong with the cake. Too much chocolate, cream and more chocolate, and sweets, and alcohol on top.
Changmin grimaces, a hand on his stomach, and quickly erases all thoughts of food and alcohol. So not a good idea right now.
He gets out of bed once he’s sure he won’t be sick, and slowly gets ready for the day.
He wants to kill Yoochun and Junsu for doing this to him when he has classes the next day. He wants to kill his conscientious self for putting ‘skipping school’ at the top of the list of things he’ll never do. At least it’s afternoon classes.
Changmin arrives at the university right on time, a little before 2PM. And he wants to kill the rest of the world when he realizes that half of his classmates decided to stay home, probably peacefully sleeping through their own hangovers.
The last class just ended, after three hours that dragged on forever.
His headache isn’t any better. If anything it just got worse, without mentioning the slight nausea now making his stomach churn unpleasantly.
He’s in the middle of the university main hall, flooding Yoochun and Junsu’s phones with death curses and various kinds of murder threats when Changmin stops walking. He isn’t sure why. He’s felt weird all day, and just now that uneasy impression increased tenfold.
It’s far from nice, rather oppressive, like someone is watching him. There’s something heavy on his heart, something that has nothing to do with too much cake or alcohol this time.
He looks around, feeling a bit lost. Light-headed, maybe.
He’s cold. His legs feel weak under him, like about to give in. His mouth is dry, it’s a bit hard to breathe. There are people everywhere, walking hurriedly in all directions, talking loud and too much; that makes him feel dizzy. His head still hurts. It’s cold, his throat is tight and his chest constricted.
Then his eyes land on him.
His heart plummets. Cold becomes hot, a surge of heat. Like an invisible fist just punched him in the gut. Like air suddenly doubled weights.
And Changmin knows.
He’s been with others before. Teenage crushes… people he liked, sometimes liked a lot. He thinks he might even have been a little bit in love - 1st year of university, the chemistry classroom and a kiss he never forgot, though things never went beyond that. But this… this is different.
He stays absolutely still, eyes wide, silent, frozen on spot. His heart… his heart is pounding so hard it hurts.
Almond-shaped eyes. Dark hair framing a handsome face, serious yet kind. Young, tall, lean, a somewhat nervous strength in the way he moves, alert and curious, his gaze quickly taking in every detail around. He goes nearly unnoticed in plain black trousers and a brown jacket, and Changmin blinks, struggling to focus because for a split second, he even seemed to disappear.
He feels warm, too warm. Confused and faint. His heart is still pounding, his mind screaming at him to do something. His feet are like glued to the ground, and just as he thinks this can’t be happening, the other moves.
He is walking away.
Changmin doesn’t even get to think about it. His body reacts on his own; he crosses the space between them in just a few strides and before he can realize what he’s doing, his hand gripped a leather-clad arm.
Time stills, a heartbeat’s hesitation. The other stops, and turns around.
Changmin is staring stupidly at his hand, wondering if it’s really his own and when did he tell it to move. He’s scared to look up.
He’s afraid of what will happen when he meets that stranger’s eyes; he stares at his hand instead. His voice is gone. His heart is racing madly inside his chest, sending blood rushing through his veins, his senses thrown into a chaos of incoherent beats.
“Yeah…?”
He just talked, and Changmin shudders. He feels stupid. He doesn’t understand what’s going on, but still manages to oblige his hand to let go. It falls uselessly on his side, while his voice is still nowhere to be found. His eyes are fixed on the worn brown of a leather jacket.
“Are you okay?”
The words bear slight concern. Changmin looks up at last.
And his heart soars, his head ringing with muffled sounds. There are people around; he forgot about them.
Dark brown eyes draw him in, pulling at feelings supposed to stay hidden inside, stirring emotions that should build along with time. Changmin never saw him before… he knows, he knows that and yet already, he’ sure…
Blood is pounding at his temples. He opens his mouth, and not a sound comes out. Which might not be a bad thing, since the only thing he wants to say right now is ‘I love you’ and it’s stupid. Nonsense. The kind of thing that just don’t happen, not in real life. And certainly not in Shim Changmin’s life. That’s not him, no, not at all.
He thinks his heart might break open if the other just stares that way any longer.
“Hey there…”
A hand passes waving in front of his eyes, and Changmin blinks again. Oh god. He must look stupid. Awful.
He partied all night yesterday. There are dark rings the size of a continent under his eyes, and he can’t remember doing anything to his hair this morning. He must look tired, and cranky. ‘Hangover’ is surely written all over his face, and Changmin straightens up with a jolt.
He must say something.
“I…”
Good. Not a bad way to start, except he doesn’t know what’s supposed to come next.
The other’s eyes narrow as he frowns. He leans a little closer, studying his face with open concern, and all coherent words fly out the window.
There’s a tiny mole just above his upper lip, and Changmin is staring. He still feels abnormally hot, the world around faded to blurred shapes and he wishes he hadn’t drunk so much yesterday. Maybe it’s all there is to it. Post-drinking hallucinations.
He represses a nervous laugh right on time. Damn. Changmin doesn’t want to look insane on top of tired, sick and creepy.
“You should sit down, you don’t look well.”
That’s a complete understatement, but then the stranger starts pulling at his arm and his stomach twists in a funny way. There’s no helping it. Changmin follows along like an obedient child, crossing the university hall in a daze.
He somehow ends up seated on a bench in an empty hallway, with a bottle of fresh water in hand, and twin dark brown eyes watching him worriedly. Changmin wishes he’d look away.
He wishes he could think normally again, and just breathe without feeling like all the air around reduced to one tiny stream - barely enough, an ache in his lungs, breathing too fast, too sharp.
He wishes his heart would stop pounding so hard.
It’s not funny anymore, he wants to complain aloud to whoever did this to him.
The other’s hand moves up to rest on his forehead, gentle and cool. Perfect. Just perfect.
It’s not funny anymore, Changmin thinks, and to his utter dismay, tears start pooling in his eyes. He doesn’t understand. He doesn’t get it, has never felt that helpless before. He has no idea of what’s happening to him, his heart is beating way ahead of him and he can’t control it… can’t keep up with it, can’t even begin to apprehend the violence of emotions he never felt before.
“Sorry…”
He looks up, hastily blinking tears back. The other is smiling a bit sheepishly.
“This is when I’m supposed to tell if you’ve a fever or not”, the man adds, tilting his head to the side as he removes his hand from his forehead, “but I never quite got the hang of that.”
Changmin needs a while to put the words together. He manages a small smile.
He doesn’t trust himself to speak but as it seems that’s enough for the other, and he sits on the bench on his right. Changmin wonders if he’s aware of what’s going on next to him. The frenzied booming of feelings inside. The unrhythmic, painful, mad throbbing of his heart. The way he’s struggling hard not to give in, as his body desperately wants to lean closer.
He looks down at his hands; one of them lying flat on his thigh, the other holding the bottle of water. They are shaking.
Changmin closes his eyes, and counts to ten.
When he opens them, he nearly expects the stranger to be gone.
He turns his head, and finds brown irises again. He is watching him.
Changmin never saw him before but it does feel like those eyes could read deep inside of him, if that man just let them. Like he’s purposefully holding back… letting that silent gaze hover on the surface of things when he could have it all with just one prolonged stare. Secrets, surrenders, shames and sighs. All.
It makes him feel exposed like never before, yet Changmin already isn’t as scared.
They are kind, those eyes. True. Both soft and unyielding, like a will would bend a thousandth times rather than hurt someone, without ever crossing the lines it swore to himself it wouldn’t. Kind, but uncompromising. Confident… right, confidence is there in his every gesture, but there’s reserve too. Like he could, if he wanted… he could, but won’t do it. Whatever ‘it’ is.
“…I hope you don’t stare like that at every stranger you meet.”
Changmin blinks. He hopes the furious blush rising to his cheeks exists in his imagination only, but the other’s chuckle soon tells him otherwise. Dark eyes softened, lit with laughter, looking at him with unconcealed amusement.
“You are cute.”
Changmin’s eyes narrow.
Something finally gives way inside, like a sudden gush of fresh air, bringing him back to himself at last.
Damnit.
He has lines too, lines others would do better not to cross, and Yoochun and Junsu could tell that man that ‘cute’ isn’t a good idea. At all.
They gave up on that one at least five years ago, as soon as Changmin grew taller than them and got strong enough to make them regret every time they said it in the past - and there were many.
“Didn’t think I could look that frightening to someone…”
His fingers tighten around the bottle in his right hand.
“I mean, I know I’m handsome but-“
He opens the cap, stretches his arm out, and pours the whole bottle on top of the guy’s head.
Talk about random, but that is more like him at least.
The other freezes, eyes wide, mouth half-open in shock.
Changmin watches without saying a word, making sure the last drops of water fell before dropping the bottle. The sound of plastic hitting the ground resounds loudly in the empty hallway, and it becomes silent. He can even hear droplets crashing on the floor.
Changmin averts his eyes then, looking straight ahead at the wall facing them. That felt good, he thinks, breathing out slowly. That felt really good.
His heart is still beating too fast, he still feels hot and dizzy… something definitely happened but it doesn’t seem frightening anymore. The heaviness is gone. The helplessness as well. He breathes in deeply and turns his head after a few seconds, not too sure about how to explain that and avoid looking like a complete ass. But the other doesn’t look vexed, quite the contrary.
He is grinning at him from under his wet hair, and even manages to look nice in doing so. Changmin’s heart gives a little tug.
He smiles back at him tentatively, hoping it looks even remotely apologetic. He doesn’t know what to say. People pass in the hallway; they glance their way but soon avert their eyes, like uninterested.
He thinks they must look like a pair of fools though, smiling stupidly at each other, one of them drenched and the other… well, Changmin doesn’t want to picture how he must look like now. He doesn’t care. His gaze doesn’t leave the man’s face; the laughter sparkling at the corner of his eyes, the way he carelessly pushes wet strands of hair back, the flash of humor as he looks his way.
“…Feeling better now?”
“Much better.”
Changmin is relieved his voice didn’t waver.
He stands from the bench and puts his hands in his pockets, just to make sure the other won’t notice that they’re still shaking. He can’t say he feels great, but there’s definite improvement. At least he can think coherently again, and the one sure thing is that he isn’t letting that guy out of his sight any time soon.
“I can lend you dry clothes”, Changmin says, skipping the ‘I’m really sorry’ bit on purpose because there’s no way he can explain what happened when he doesn’t understand it himself, “I live just five minutes from here.”
He hopes the other won’t say ‘it’s fine, don’t worry’. He hopes he won’t turn down the offer and walk away now. He doesn’t want him to go. Changmin can’t let him go just like this, already thinking of ways to hold him back. Pride be damned.
If he must, he’ll just pretend he’s about to faint once more. He can hardly see how things could be worse at that point, at least as far as his image is concerned.
Changmin doesn’t realize how anxiously he’s waiting for the answer until the man nods, smile still in place on his face.
Relief gushes through him as the other stands in turn, waiting for him to lead the way. He has to repress the urge to take his hand. Changmin doesn’t even know his name yet, actually he knows absolutely nothing about him, and it already feels like he could disappear any time.
It’s because things like this aren’t supposed to exist in real life, he thinks as they step out under the sun.
It’s because perfection just doesn’t happen. Not like this. It doesn’t fall on people without reasons or without efforts.
It doesn’t wait for them at a corner of their existences then pops up out of nowhere, and it certainly doesn’t follow them around in streets with drenched hair, a bright smile, and that thing in their eyes that send your heart racing every time you see them.
He is right behind him.
Changmin feels his presence as clearly as if it had been missing for his entire life, and just now, an empty space was filled.
He fights the childish urge to stop abruptly so that the other will bump into him. He already needs more - an embrace, a caress, a brush of his fingers, something - and he shudders again just thinking of the hand that took hold of his arm earlier.
It’s cold under the sun.
Like lights lost all their warmth. Like he stole all of it, and Changmin wraps his arms around himself. He thinks… he thinks it’s not a dream, he’s walking in now. No.
Spreading all around him, it’s that other’s shadow.
Note: I honestly don't know where this comes from and I'm not even sure of where it's heading to... just can say there'll be angst and that I can't promise a glorious happy ending (=.=). You've been warned~ ^^
This being said, I hope you'll enjoy the read!! The beginning is a little confusing, I guess, but I mean to keep it that way so don't try too hard to read in between lines ;-)
Part 2.