Meteors [Chapter 9]
Chapter: 9
Pairings: YooMin
Rating: PG
Genre: Romance, Fluff, slight Angst
Summary:
There is only one truth, Changmin believes, and only one question - is it the one you want?
There is only chance, Yoochun thinks - the meteor crashes, or it doesn’t. And if it does the only question is, will you run fast enough or let the stars collide?
Part 9. Of fleeing and flying.
It’s a familiar scene. They are both lying on Yoochun’s bed, furiously jabbing their game controllers while their characters try to rip each other’s heads off on the TV screen. The video game is not a fancy one; Yoochun got it years ago for his birthday, but it’s always that one they end up playing when they don’t feel like doing anything in particular.
He supposes Changmin should be home to help Jungmi put their new place in order. He supposed he should be searching for a present for Yoowhan’s birthday next week. He supposes what they should be doing doesn’t matter - they just felt the need to be together today, and that is actually important.
Yoochun groans when Changmin’s character kicks his with a particularly vicious move that dents his health points badly. That one came close. Any other day Changmin would have teased and bragged but as it is he doesn’t even smile and stays focused on the game, a grim look on his face. Yoochun didn’t need that to understand he was in a bad mood. He could tell the moment the other arrived.
It takes one minute more for Changmin to finish him off. Yoochun surrenders without putting much of a fight. He was never a competitor anyway, he muses, watching his character stumble like a drunk and collapse while Changmin’s shows off ridiculous bodybuilder’s muscles to boast its victory. Rather pathetic, truthfully. Yoochun never understood why his parents bought him that game. Maybe they were hoping it’d kick some pride and will to win in him, he thinks dryly, reaching for the remote control.
“So. Who is it that you want to kill?” he asks aloud, turning off the TV. “Not me, I hope?”
“Unless you try to feed me seeds and soybean milk.”
“Jungmi?”
“That diet of hers is getting on my nerves” Changmin mutters darkly, vengefully grabbing a pack of crisps near and swallowing a handful of it. “I don’t get why she wants to bring me into this.”
“Maybe she thinks you’re fat.”
“Maybe I think you’re dumb.”
“Don’t worry, I find your double chin very sexy.”
Changmin throws him a murderous glare.
“I’m okay with the love handles too” Yoochun goes on nonchalantly, “but I’m sorry to say your ass is getting bigger than Junsu’s and now that’s something to worry about.”
This time Changmin can’t repress a laugh.
“Idiot” he says, a smile tugging at his lips.
Yoochun grins at him and flops on his back on the bed, stretching his arms above his head. Changmin does the same next to him and rolls on his stomach. They both fall quiet - the comfortable kind of quiet.
Yoochun once read that silence was the way to tell mere acquaintances and friends apart… if it was awkward, and you soon felt the need to say something. Or on the contrary, if it felt natural and easy. It didn’t say anything about what silence was for lovers, but Yoochun could easily provide an answer for that one. He turns his head to the right.
Changmin is still lying on his stomach, his face turned toward Yoochun but not looking at him. He is absently tugging at the bed duvet, thoughtful, his eyes fixed on his own hand as he plays with the thick fabric. He still looks distant but is more relaxed now. Yoochun’s gaze travels from his eyes to his lips, to his neck, to his shoulder and his hand, like a ghostly caress. It stops here, fixed on Changmin’s fingers. He can’t call them ‘slender’ or ‘strong’, it’s a little of both. Yoochun knows Changmin’s grip, he held his hand before. He made sure to engrave it in his memories too.
When he looks at Changmin’s face again, the young man closed his eyes.
It becomes one of those rare, precious moments when Yoochun has him all to himself. When it’s easy to forget what they really are and discard facts, ignore the truth, and play out dreams instead.
They say silence is awkward for acquaintances and comfortable for friends. Yoochun would add that silence is thick once love comes into the equation. Palpable. Tense. Alive.
It’s only when it’s silent that his heart can take up all the space, not confined anymore in the narrow cage of his chest but extending tendrils of feelings wherever it can reach. Daring yet shy… painfully aware that this is not real, but craving ‘it’ so badly - ‘it’, an illusion, a mirage, a lie, anything as long there is something to feel and cherish - craving existence, for once not being denied and repressed like a shameful secret.
Yoochun watches him. He thinks ‘mine’, and lets his heart lead the way.
Now every second is shaking with untold emotions. Quiet wishes linger heavily in the air, yearning, reaching out, sending across wave after wave of longing, promises, and questions. So close, he thinks, gazing at Changmin’s face eagerly. So damn close. He can count his eyelashes from here. Study every small imperfection, fantasize the warmth of his skin, contemplate where he’d want his fingers to lay first and where he’d place a light kiss. The mole under his left eye. The corner of his lips.
Silence is so dense already that it’d carry the words burning within his heart effortlessly… just air gliding through air, just a few muffled sounds sending across a small world of immense feelings.
Yoochun doesn’t know what changed.
He doesn’t why it changed… he supposes it has to do with what Jaejoong told him. Or Junsu. Or both. Maybe it was just bound to happen. Maybe he loves him too much or maybe it’s his heart that’s too weak. Either way he feels stretched.
Now he only needs to reach a hand out. Touch his cheek. Look into his eyes. Say the words.
Tear silence, free his heart, and lose him.
“What are you thinking about?”
Changmin is looking at him. Yoochun stares back unblinkingly and not for the first time, he wonders just how much of himself he lost into those eyes. He figures it’s too late. He doesn’t want it back anyway. Changmin can keep everything, if it’s all that Yoochun will ever be able to give him.
“You remember when I bought you roses?” he asks, the smile on Changmin’s face that day still vivid in his memories. Their very first meeting.
“Of course” Changmin smiles a little, “why?”
Because I think that’s when I fell in love with you.
“Because if you get some for Jungmi, she might remember that she’s supposed to look at flowers. Not eat them.”
Changmin laughs, bright and loud, and Yoochun watches him. He watches, he watches… he watches, and desperately, he wonders why Changmin can’t see. It’s everywhere in his heart, in his mind, in his eyes, he knows it is… I love you, everything is screaming, raw, hopeless, struggling against secrets and fears… I love you, and Yoochun isn’t sure anymore what hurts most. That he isn’t brave enough to say the words, or that Changmin doesn’t care enough to read them through silences.
One week later the same scene reenacts.
They are at Yoochun’s place. They played video games in spite of everything they both should be doing. Today however, Changmin is happy. Beyond happy. His eyes are sparkling. He’s speaking fast, animatedly, random at times and that is very unlike him. He didn’t even complain when he lost all three rounds earlier, which is even more telling. Obviously his mind is elsewhere. Yoochun dreads to learn where exactly.
“I need to tell you something” Changmin says out of the blue as soon as they stop the game.
Yoochun didn’t need that to understand something had happened. The lump in his throat refuses to go away, like the hand clawing at his heart, or the ominous feeling he’s been trying to shake off since the young man showed up at his door with a blissful grin on his face, looking happier than Yoochun had ever seen him.
“Maybe it’s weird but I wanted to tell you first” Changmin goes on as he leans forward, his voice impatient and loud like he doesn’t quite control it, brown eyes luminous yet too small for the feelings brimming inside. Happiness radiates off him, irrepressible and true, and Yoochun wonders how he even managed to keep it to himself for the past hour. He looks like his heart is about to burst out of his chest, literally.
Yoochun tries to brace himself. He tries.
“I proposed to Jungmi” Changmin announces brightly, “we are getting married!”
He fails.
Everything goes silent in a split second. His heart sinks and feelings fall away from him, beaten and useless. It’s cotton in his ears and ice freezing his hands. Yoochun isn’t sure he’s breathing right - it’s tight and narrow, and dark, his surroundings closing around him. His chest constricts painfully around a shattered heart, like trying to squeeze out the last tears he hasn’t shed yet. He should’ve known.
He should’ve known.
He blinks, and in that other world Yoochun doesn’t want to be part of, Changmin is still talking. Clueless. Happy. Excited. In love, and breaking his heart further with every smile, with every word he says. Yoochun thought it hurt before, but this is ten times worse. He watches and says nothing as Changmin himself rips his last dream to shreds. His words, and the way his eyes shine. The hope in his voice. The joy on his face.
In the end it’s Changmin’s smile… it has always been Changmin’s smile, Yoochun now realizes.
He feels his heart quiver, love and heartbreak embracing and curling on themselves, crying. He lost. He’s known from the start he would lose. But he thought Changmin’s smile was worth it… he just… just wanted to come close, Yoochun just wanted a glimpse, nothing more, he didn’t ask for much. He never asked for much. He never asked for anything. He remembers Junsu’s words and for the first time Yoochun wonders if he was wrong and he should’ve at least tried. Too late, of course.
Way too late.
He lost.
He lost, Yoochun tells himself again and again, the thought echoing emptily through his mind, and now it’s over. There is nothing left for him to protect. It was fake lights. It was a fake star, a cold selfish glow. It was meant to die. He looks at Changmin now. He looks at the truth, and the truth is that Yoochun doesn’t want him anymore. Not like this. He needed the dream, not the reality.
“Of course we just started talking about it but we thought we could marry next year, in June, it is-“
“I love you.”
Changmin stops talking. Yoochun can’t read the look on his face. He can’t tell what he’s feeling himself. Everything he held on all that time has collapsed soundlessly around him, and the dazzling lights he draped around Changmin have gone out. Grey and dull. Just a shade. It’s sad, too sad for tears. He feels halfway between numb and broken. He doesn’t know who he is anymore.
“I love you” he says again, because it’s true.
It’s true of course. It’s the only thing that’s true about them both as far as he’s concerned. Yoochun doesn’t care about friendship. It’s love that he wants. He thinks Junsu was right about the look on Changmin’s face when he’d finally realize what it was all about, that friendship he was so proud of… the bond that made them special, complete trust, knowing all about each other - lies, all of it. Changmin actually never knew. And Yoochun is sorry. Truly. Too late.
“Yoochun…”
“I can’t do this anymore.”
He stands up from the bed.
“I’m sorry, I can’t.”
He’s walking to the door and Changmin doesn’t move, stunned, until suddenly he seems to realize what’s happening. Yoochun sees him tense. He sees him pale. Shock. Denial. Pain. He never hurt Changmin before, never. He’s sorry. He should’ve known. He grabs the handle and pushes the door open.
“Yoochun!”
He leaves just as the young man rises from the bed. He starts running as soon as he’s out. He doesn’t turn back when Changmin calls his name. He doesn’t stop when it becomes hard to breathe and his legs threaten to give in. He runs like the younger man once taught him, deaf and blind to the world, his pain chasing after him. But this time he doesn’t where he’s running to.
The dreams have gone, all of them.
He has only shards of them left now, memories sharp as glass and piercing feelings no one ever embraced. Only useless remnants of a useless hope, crooked and lifeless. Yoochun thought they were beautiful. He still believes they are… he still wishes to grab them with both hands and hold on, but he never thought they would come to hurt so much that he’d have no choice but to let go.
He lets go now. They fall away from him, tainted with blood and tears. They go back to the stars, cold and unreachable, and leave nothing behind.
Somehow he ends up at Jaejoong’s. Yoochun barely needs to do any explaining - “Changmin”, “wedding”, “told him” and his swollen eyes easily sum up it all. He feels empty. He doesn’t want a hug, kind words, anything. He wants it to stop hurting. He watches as Jaejoong fusses about, saying this and that and “told you so”, “bastard”, “idiot”, and “blow your nose you’re gross”.
Yoochun says nothing, mechanically blinking tears away as they rise. He watches without understanding what’s going on as Jaejoong throws toothpaste, lemon cakes, instant coffee and more in a counterfeit Michael Kors handbag, before the other grabs his arm and drags him out of the apartment.
“Where are we going?” Yoochun asks once they are outside, wiping his nose on his sleeve as his friend waves frantically for a taxi to stop.
“Your beloved is harassing me” Jaejoong answers briskly, brandishing his phone right under Yoochun’s nose. He barely has the time to glimpse a dozen missed calls from Changmin and at least as many unread texts before the taxi pulls over and the other ushers him inside.
“He’s sure you’re with me. He’ll pop in here any second” Jaejoong mutters after he gave the driver an address, “…demanding explanations like the nice guy he is, but maybe you feel alright after all, and we can go back, wait for him, and have a nice chat about it together around a cup of tea?”
Yoochun just stares blankly.
“That’s what I thought.”
Jaejoong’s phone rings again. Yoochun sees him tense and grab it, and for a split second he thinks the other will throw it out the car window.
“STOP CALLING ME!” Jaejoong shrieks in the phone instead. The taxi swerves and Yoochun makes a quick prayer that the driver doesn’t have a heart condition. “I DON’T KNOW WHERE HE IS!! TRY LOST AND FOUND! OR THE FAIRIES! BUT NO ME!!”
He hangs up. They have all but three seconds of peace till the phone rings again. Yoochun sees Jaejoong’s eye twitch and he hastily takes the device from the other’s hands and switches it off, muttering an apology.
“Where are we going?” he asks again, searching his pockets in the hope of miraculously finding a handkerchief somewhere. He keeps sniffing. He feels as gross as Jaejoong’s disgusted looks tell him.
“My parents” the other answers, sighing as he leans back on his seat. “Jinhee is abroad for an exchange program and Seonhee is staying at her university campus. You can use one of their rooms.”
There’s a long silence.
“He’ll come to the convenient store tomorrow” Yoochun blurts out, feeling every bit of the pathetic coward he is.
“Don’t go to work. Call and tell them you’re sick.”
“He’ll come again the next day.”
“Tell them you’re still sick.”
“I can’t be sick forever.”
“Tell them you died.”
“Very funny.”
“Tell them you quit.”
Yoochun doesn’t answer. Jaejoong gives him a prolonged look, his eyes softening after a while.
“Honestly Yoochun, what do you have to lose now?”
The answer is ‘nothing’, of course. Nothing. Nothing will ever be the same. No more video games and lazing in his bedroom. No more meetings at the coffee shop. No more hot chocolates, text messages and easy embraces. No more long talks at night about the past, about Yoochun’s future and Changmin’s father. No more confidences. No more secrets. No more looking at him from afar, and making believe dreams come true. It’s lost… Changmin’s hands, Changmin’s eyes, Changmin’s smile… he can never pretend they are his again. All lost. Forever.
Yoochun waits for tears to rise to his eyes again but this time they remain dry. The pain in his heart is still here but it changed - it’s over. A closed door. A dream gone.
It’s over.
He squeezes Jaejoong’s hand and closes his eyes. When he opens them again, he promises himself, it’s the real world he’ll finally be facing.
~
Two weeks later, Yoochun is in Incheon airport, hovering alone around departure gate 112.
His shirt is still damp with Jaejoong’s tears, and he hopes his friend won’t throw himself under a bus like he once swore he would if Yoochun ever dared to leave him. He’d like to be convinced it was just a joke, but you never quite know with Jaejoong. It’s safer not to assume things, especially when he’s upset. And Jaejoong was very upset, judging by how he was wailing in his arms like a boat horn. Yoochun never had so many people stare at him unkindly before.
He starts when a voice announces the start of boarding for flight KA121 to Sydney. His heart jumps inside his chest and he hurriedly gets in line, his palms a bit sweaty, and Yoochun realizes as he shows his boarding pass that this is the closest he’s felt to excitement in months. Maybe years.
The evening he arrived at Jaejoong’s parents’, Yoochun called his manager at the convenient store and announced that he was resigning. The guy wasn’t pleased. He said they wouldn’t take him back if he changed his mind, to which Yoochun answered he had no intention to.
He went to his place the next day, when he knew Changmin would be at work. There was a note on the door, with a familiar handwriting. Yoochun pretended not to see it. He quickly packed everything he wanted to keep, set aside what could be sold, threw away the rest, and left. He found a buyer for Veruca three days later, and let go of his car for a ridiculously cheap price. He strongly suspects they will take it to pieces and sell whatever useable spare parts they’ll find. It makes him feel oddly guilty.
During the last days Yoochun gathered the money he had managed to save. He met Yoowhan and called his parents. He watched dumb TV shows and stuffed his face with junk food. Two days ago he received his visa for Australia, and booked a one-way plane ticket for Sydney.
Leaving was Jaejoong’s idea. Australia was Yooseon’s.
“The visa will only allow you to do small work” Jaejoong’s sister had warned, “nothing fancy. Picking fruits or building fences, most likely”.
Yoochun had shrugged. It’s not like he intends to come back a millionaire. He just wants an ocean between the ‘before’ and ‘after’. Literally.
Now here he is, in the plane. No going back.
Until the very last minute, Yoochun expected something to happen. They would snatch his visa away saying it’s no good. He’d trip in the escalators, break both legs and trade Australia for a merry trip to the hospital. Someone would call out his name “Park Yoochun, Park Yoochun from flight KA121 to Sydney” and he’d be dragged back to the main hall, where they’d tell him that a certain Shim Changmin had started a hunger strike in the President’s office and a certain Kim Jaejoong had tried a suicide attack on a bus, and both were blaming him.
Nothing happened though, and now Yoochun is on his own, and doing his best not to make it obvious he’s never been on a plane before. He refrains from playing with the speakers and the booklets in front of him. He purposefully ignores the paper bag, praying air sickness will spare him. But when the stewardess starts showing everything he must do not to die and he anxiously peeks above the seat before him to see her better, his neighbor throws him an amused look and Yoochun knows he’s been found out.
Just then the plane starts moving and he throws dignity away, gluing his face to the window pane.
Finally it starts. The roar of engines. Gaining speed.
Yoochun’s heartbeat follows along, faster, louder, fuller. He’s enjoying every sensation, letting every second fill him and trying hard not to grin as gravity pushes him back in his seat, because here, it’s happening… his heart is swelling, getting bigger, lighter, a crushing weight being lifted from his chest, and a huge smile breaks on his face the moment they leave the ground. He wants to laugh. He’s light, young, crazy, happy, all of it and more, and it’s only once they are high in the sky and above the clouds that he can put a name on it.
‘Free’ he thinks euphorically, his face illuminated by a smile.
Changmin would say he’s running away again but no, not this time… this time Yoochun is flying, and the sky around him stretches without limits, giving him the horizon he never realized he had been searching for.
Of course the beginning isn’t easy - the very beginning. As in, the first ten minutes.
Yoochun undergoes a small panic attack the moment he steps inside Sydney airport, when he realizes he has absolutely no idea what to do now.
‘Australia’ in itself was such a huge step that he only focused on getting there, and he didn’t stop to think of what would happen next. The basics: where to sleep, where to eat, what to do tomorrow and the day after that with barely enough money to last a week or so. Not to mention his English skills, that can be summed up as vocabulary cobbled together for the sake of the rare foreigners who incidentally landed in his convenient store.
He’s already wondering how much begging it’d take for Yoowhan to buy him a return ticket when he remembers the papers Jaejoong’s sister slid inside his rucksack before he left the house.
“Try not to die there” Yooseon had said, glancing at her brooding brother, “or he will disavow me and claim I’m adopted till even our parents start doubting I’m theirs.”
“He wouldn’t.”
“He had the entire school believe Jinhee was a boy when she forgot to pick him up after class once.”
“Who’d believe that??”
“Her boyfriend broke up with her.”
Yoochun had promised to take care.
Now looking through the papers she gave him, he feels very much like kissing Yooseon. She listed addresses and phone numbers for him, of the friends she made when she stayed in Australia two years ago. Maps of bus and train lines. Cheap restaurants and hotels. Places where to search for jobs and find them. And a letter of four pages covered with purple ink and Jaejoong’s messy handwriting.
By the time he’s done reading that one, Yoochun wants nothing more than sit down on the floor and weep. He’s about to do just that when he feels a tap on his shoulder. He turns around, sniffing, and recognizes his neighbor on the plane. The guy’s grin is suspiciously bright and Yoochun goes for a wary ‘what do you want with me?’ kind of smile. They didn’t speak a word to each other during the trip. The guy was asleep the moment the plane took off; he spent nine of the flight’s ten hours drooling all over his small pillow, and the remaining time messing with the seat-back screen settings.
That same guy is talking now. Fast, and not in Korean, much to Yoochun’s dismay.
“I no English” he interrupts, waving Yooseon’s papers in the other’s face to make him shut up.
The guy stares and shakes his head.
“There” he says again in Korean this time. He adds some gibberish that Yoochun can’t grasp at all till he notices that the other is pointing at an address on one of the papers.
“Rowe Street?”
He isn’t sure he said that right but the guy nods.
“There. You go there?” he asks in Korean again.
His pronunciation is as lame as Yoochun’s English one but that’s a start, and Yoochun knows luck when he sees it.
“Yes” he says in English, nodding frantically without even glancing at the address on the paper, “yes, yes, yes!”
“I go there!” the guy exclaims brightly, before he reverts back to English blabbering.
Yoochun waits till he’s done. The last words sound like a question so he says “yes yes yes” again. It must have been the right thing to do because the guy makes a sign like “follow me” and starts leading him out of the airport, to what Yoochun hopes is a place with food, a bed, and no Australian madmen searching for Korean lost boys to murder.
Much, much later, when they’d have both improved a lot as far as communication goes, Yoochun will ask Yunho why he even bothered to help him that day.
“You were cute” the older man answers.
“I wasn’t.”
“And lost.”
“I wasn’t.”
“Like a koala.”
By then Yoochun knows that comparing people to kangaroos, koalas and quokkas is not an Australian obsession, but Yunho’s favorite way to entertain himself at the expense of wide-eyed foreigners. Most of them feel flattered, but Yoochun’s first encounter with an actual koala taught him better.
“I don’t pee on people.”
“You’re just as grumpy.”
“If you knew I’d try to bite your ear off the first chance I’d get, why did you help me?”
Yunho smiles. It’s not the enigmatic, somewhat seductive smirk Yoochun sometimes glimpsed on that face, nor the wide clueless grin he keeps for strangers. There’s fondness in the way his eyes soften, the corners of his lips upturning just enough for sincere affection to be conveyed - Yunho isn’t one for enthusiast displays of emotions. He goes for gentle smiles, when no one is looking. Small gestures and words that’d go unnoticed if someone else hadn’t already taught Yoochun how to read those.
“Do I need a reason to want to help people?” he asks.
Where Changmin is all about answers, for him, Yunho only has questions. Questions that Yoochun can’t reply to. He only shrugs - call it fate, or chance, you don’t decide of the important things.
Part 10.
Note: SOOOOO. Here it is. I don't think I'm sorry for this one lol, I guess such a turn of events was quite predictable at this point. I'm just going to say "HI YUNHO GORGEOUS", I want JJ as my bff, and oh, if you find that Changmin's wedding news comes kinda fast, just know that I agree with you (great I'm being cryptic now on top of excruciatingly slow).
Quick reminder that Veruca is Yoochun's car, and in case you are having a bad day, here is a quokka for you.
For information, we're about halfway through the story word count wise, extra long chapter coming next week~
Thank you always for reading/commenting~ <3
Pairings: YooMin
Rating: PG
Genre: Romance, Fluff, slight Angst
Summary:
There is only one truth, Changmin believes, and only one question - is it the one you want?
There is only chance, Yoochun thinks - the meteor crashes, or it doesn’t. And if it does the only question is, will you run fast enough or let the stars collide?
Part 9. Of fleeing and flying.
It’s a familiar scene. They are both lying on Yoochun’s bed, furiously jabbing their game controllers while their characters try to rip each other’s heads off on the TV screen. The video game is not a fancy one; Yoochun got it years ago for his birthday, but it’s always that one they end up playing when they don’t feel like doing anything in particular.
He supposes Changmin should be home to help Jungmi put their new place in order. He supposed he should be searching for a present for Yoowhan’s birthday next week. He supposes what they should be doing doesn’t matter - they just felt the need to be together today, and that is actually important.
Yoochun groans when Changmin’s character kicks his with a particularly vicious move that dents his health points badly. That one came close. Any other day Changmin would have teased and bragged but as it is he doesn’t even smile and stays focused on the game, a grim look on his face. Yoochun didn’t need that to understand he was in a bad mood. He could tell the moment the other arrived.
It takes one minute more for Changmin to finish him off. Yoochun surrenders without putting much of a fight. He was never a competitor anyway, he muses, watching his character stumble like a drunk and collapse while Changmin’s shows off ridiculous bodybuilder’s muscles to boast its victory. Rather pathetic, truthfully. Yoochun never understood why his parents bought him that game. Maybe they were hoping it’d kick some pride and will to win in him, he thinks dryly, reaching for the remote control.
“So. Who is it that you want to kill?” he asks aloud, turning off the TV. “Not me, I hope?”
“Unless you try to feed me seeds and soybean milk.”
“Jungmi?”
“That diet of hers is getting on my nerves” Changmin mutters darkly, vengefully grabbing a pack of crisps near and swallowing a handful of it. “I don’t get why she wants to bring me into this.”
“Maybe she thinks you’re fat.”
“Maybe I think you’re dumb.”
“Don’t worry, I find your double chin very sexy.”
Changmin throws him a murderous glare.
“I’m okay with the love handles too” Yoochun goes on nonchalantly, “but I’m sorry to say your ass is getting bigger than Junsu’s and now that’s something to worry about.”
This time Changmin can’t repress a laugh.
“Idiot” he says, a smile tugging at his lips.
Yoochun grins at him and flops on his back on the bed, stretching his arms above his head. Changmin does the same next to him and rolls on his stomach. They both fall quiet - the comfortable kind of quiet.
Yoochun once read that silence was the way to tell mere acquaintances and friends apart… if it was awkward, and you soon felt the need to say something. Or on the contrary, if it felt natural and easy. It didn’t say anything about what silence was for lovers, but Yoochun could easily provide an answer for that one. He turns his head to the right.
Changmin is still lying on his stomach, his face turned toward Yoochun but not looking at him. He is absently tugging at the bed duvet, thoughtful, his eyes fixed on his own hand as he plays with the thick fabric. He still looks distant but is more relaxed now. Yoochun’s gaze travels from his eyes to his lips, to his neck, to his shoulder and his hand, like a ghostly caress. It stops here, fixed on Changmin’s fingers. He can’t call them ‘slender’ or ‘strong’, it’s a little of both. Yoochun knows Changmin’s grip, he held his hand before. He made sure to engrave it in his memories too.
When he looks at Changmin’s face again, the young man closed his eyes.
It becomes one of those rare, precious moments when Yoochun has him all to himself. When it’s easy to forget what they really are and discard facts, ignore the truth, and play out dreams instead.
They say silence is awkward for acquaintances and comfortable for friends. Yoochun would add that silence is thick once love comes into the equation. Palpable. Tense. Alive.
It’s only when it’s silent that his heart can take up all the space, not confined anymore in the narrow cage of his chest but extending tendrils of feelings wherever it can reach. Daring yet shy… painfully aware that this is not real, but craving ‘it’ so badly - ‘it’, an illusion, a mirage, a lie, anything as long there is something to feel and cherish - craving existence, for once not being denied and repressed like a shameful secret.
Yoochun watches him. He thinks ‘mine’, and lets his heart lead the way.
Now every second is shaking with untold emotions. Quiet wishes linger heavily in the air, yearning, reaching out, sending across wave after wave of longing, promises, and questions. So close, he thinks, gazing at Changmin’s face eagerly. So damn close. He can count his eyelashes from here. Study every small imperfection, fantasize the warmth of his skin, contemplate where he’d want his fingers to lay first and where he’d place a light kiss. The mole under his left eye. The corner of his lips.
Silence is so dense already that it’d carry the words burning within his heart effortlessly… just air gliding through air, just a few muffled sounds sending across a small world of immense feelings.
Yoochun doesn’t know what changed.
He doesn’t why it changed… he supposes it has to do with what Jaejoong told him. Or Junsu. Or both. Maybe it was just bound to happen. Maybe he loves him too much or maybe it’s his heart that’s too weak. Either way he feels stretched.
Now he only needs to reach a hand out. Touch his cheek. Look into his eyes. Say the words.
Tear silence, free his heart, and lose him.
“What are you thinking about?”
Changmin is looking at him. Yoochun stares back unblinkingly and not for the first time, he wonders just how much of himself he lost into those eyes. He figures it’s too late. He doesn’t want it back anyway. Changmin can keep everything, if it’s all that Yoochun will ever be able to give him.
“You remember when I bought you roses?” he asks, the smile on Changmin’s face that day still vivid in his memories. Their very first meeting.
“Of course” Changmin smiles a little, “why?”
Because I think that’s when I fell in love with you.
“Because if you get some for Jungmi, she might remember that she’s supposed to look at flowers. Not eat them.”
Changmin laughs, bright and loud, and Yoochun watches him. He watches, he watches… he watches, and desperately, he wonders why Changmin can’t see. It’s everywhere in his heart, in his mind, in his eyes, he knows it is… I love you, everything is screaming, raw, hopeless, struggling against secrets and fears… I love you, and Yoochun isn’t sure anymore what hurts most. That he isn’t brave enough to say the words, or that Changmin doesn’t care enough to read them through silences.
One week later the same scene reenacts.
They are at Yoochun’s place. They played video games in spite of everything they both should be doing. Today however, Changmin is happy. Beyond happy. His eyes are sparkling. He’s speaking fast, animatedly, random at times and that is very unlike him. He didn’t even complain when he lost all three rounds earlier, which is even more telling. Obviously his mind is elsewhere. Yoochun dreads to learn where exactly.
“I need to tell you something” Changmin says out of the blue as soon as they stop the game.
Yoochun didn’t need that to understand something had happened. The lump in his throat refuses to go away, like the hand clawing at his heart, or the ominous feeling he’s been trying to shake off since the young man showed up at his door with a blissful grin on his face, looking happier than Yoochun had ever seen him.
“Maybe it’s weird but I wanted to tell you first” Changmin goes on as he leans forward, his voice impatient and loud like he doesn’t quite control it, brown eyes luminous yet too small for the feelings brimming inside. Happiness radiates off him, irrepressible and true, and Yoochun wonders how he even managed to keep it to himself for the past hour. He looks like his heart is about to burst out of his chest, literally.
Yoochun tries to brace himself. He tries.
“I proposed to Jungmi” Changmin announces brightly, “we are getting married!”
He fails.
Everything goes silent in a split second. His heart sinks and feelings fall away from him, beaten and useless. It’s cotton in his ears and ice freezing his hands. Yoochun isn’t sure he’s breathing right - it’s tight and narrow, and dark, his surroundings closing around him. His chest constricts painfully around a shattered heart, like trying to squeeze out the last tears he hasn’t shed yet. He should’ve known.
He should’ve known.
He blinks, and in that other world Yoochun doesn’t want to be part of, Changmin is still talking. Clueless. Happy. Excited. In love, and breaking his heart further with every smile, with every word he says. Yoochun thought it hurt before, but this is ten times worse. He watches and says nothing as Changmin himself rips his last dream to shreds. His words, and the way his eyes shine. The hope in his voice. The joy on his face.
In the end it’s Changmin’s smile… it has always been Changmin’s smile, Yoochun now realizes.
He feels his heart quiver, love and heartbreak embracing and curling on themselves, crying. He lost. He’s known from the start he would lose. But he thought Changmin’s smile was worth it… he just… just wanted to come close, Yoochun just wanted a glimpse, nothing more, he didn’t ask for much. He never asked for much. He never asked for anything. He remembers Junsu’s words and for the first time Yoochun wonders if he was wrong and he should’ve at least tried. Too late, of course.
Way too late.
He lost.
He lost, Yoochun tells himself again and again, the thought echoing emptily through his mind, and now it’s over. There is nothing left for him to protect. It was fake lights. It was a fake star, a cold selfish glow. It was meant to die. He looks at Changmin now. He looks at the truth, and the truth is that Yoochun doesn’t want him anymore. Not like this. He needed the dream, not the reality.
“Of course we just started talking about it but we thought we could marry next year, in June, it is-“
“I love you.”
Changmin stops talking. Yoochun can’t read the look on his face. He can’t tell what he’s feeling himself. Everything he held on all that time has collapsed soundlessly around him, and the dazzling lights he draped around Changmin have gone out. Grey and dull. Just a shade. It’s sad, too sad for tears. He feels halfway between numb and broken. He doesn’t know who he is anymore.
“I love you” he says again, because it’s true.
It’s true of course. It’s the only thing that’s true about them both as far as he’s concerned. Yoochun doesn’t care about friendship. It’s love that he wants. He thinks Junsu was right about the look on Changmin’s face when he’d finally realize what it was all about, that friendship he was so proud of… the bond that made them special, complete trust, knowing all about each other - lies, all of it. Changmin actually never knew. And Yoochun is sorry. Truly. Too late.
“Yoochun…”
“I can’t do this anymore.”
He stands up from the bed.
“I’m sorry, I can’t.”
He’s walking to the door and Changmin doesn’t move, stunned, until suddenly he seems to realize what’s happening. Yoochun sees him tense. He sees him pale. Shock. Denial. Pain. He never hurt Changmin before, never. He’s sorry. He should’ve known. He grabs the handle and pushes the door open.
“Yoochun!”
He leaves just as the young man rises from the bed. He starts running as soon as he’s out. He doesn’t turn back when Changmin calls his name. He doesn’t stop when it becomes hard to breathe and his legs threaten to give in. He runs like the younger man once taught him, deaf and blind to the world, his pain chasing after him. But this time he doesn’t where he’s running to.
The dreams have gone, all of them.
He has only shards of them left now, memories sharp as glass and piercing feelings no one ever embraced. Only useless remnants of a useless hope, crooked and lifeless. Yoochun thought they were beautiful. He still believes they are… he still wishes to grab them with both hands and hold on, but he never thought they would come to hurt so much that he’d have no choice but to let go.
He lets go now. They fall away from him, tainted with blood and tears. They go back to the stars, cold and unreachable, and leave nothing behind.
Somehow he ends up at Jaejoong’s. Yoochun barely needs to do any explaining - “Changmin”, “wedding”, “told him” and his swollen eyes easily sum up it all. He feels empty. He doesn’t want a hug, kind words, anything. He wants it to stop hurting. He watches as Jaejoong fusses about, saying this and that and “told you so”, “bastard”, “idiot”, and “blow your nose you’re gross”.
Yoochun says nothing, mechanically blinking tears away as they rise. He watches without understanding what’s going on as Jaejoong throws toothpaste, lemon cakes, instant coffee and more in a counterfeit Michael Kors handbag, before the other grabs his arm and drags him out of the apartment.
“Where are we going?” Yoochun asks once they are outside, wiping his nose on his sleeve as his friend waves frantically for a taxi to stop.
“Your beloved is harassing me” Jaejoong answers briskly, brandishing his phone right under Yoochun’s nose. He barely has the time to glimpse a dozen missed calls from Changmin and at least as many unread texts before the taxi pulls over and the other ushers him inside.
“He’s sure you’re with me. He’ll pop in here any second” Jaejoong mutters after he gave the driver an address, “…demanding explanations like the nice guy he is, but maybe you feel alright after all, and we can go back, wait for him, and have a nice chat about it together around a cup of tea?”
Yoochun just stares blankly.
“That’s what I thought.”
Jaejoong’s phone rings again. Yoochun sees him tense and grab it, and for a split second he thinks the other will throw it out the car window.
“STOP CALLING ME!” Jaejoong shrieks in the phone instead. The taxi swerves and Yoochun makes a quick prayer that the driver doesn’t have a heart condition. “I DON’T KNOW WHERE HE IS!! TRY LOST AND FOUND! OR THE FAIRIES! BUT NO ME!!”
He hangs up. They have all but three seconds of peace till the phone rings again. Yoochun sees Jaejoong’s eye twitch and he hastily takes the device from the other’s hands and switches it off, muttering an apology.
“Where are we going?” he asks again, searching his pockets in the hope of miraculously finding a handkerchief somewhere. He keeps sniffing. He feels as gross as Jaejoong’s disgusted looks tell him.
“My parents” the other answers, sighing as he leans back on his seat. “Jinhee is abroad for an exchange program and Seonhee is staying at her university campus. You can use one of their rooms.”
There’s a long silence.
“He’ll come to the convenient store tomorrow” Yoochun blurts out, feeling every bit of the pathetic coward he is.
“Don’t go to work. Call and tell them you’re sick.”
“He’ll come again the next day.”
“Tell them you’re still sick.”
“I can’t be sick forever.”
“Tell them you died.”
“Very funny.”
“Tell them you quit.”
Yoochun doesn’t answer. Jaejoong gives him a prolonged look, his eyes softening after a while.
“Honestly Yoochun, what do you have to lose now?”
The answer is ‘nothing’, of course. Nothing. Nothing will ever be the same. No more video games and lazing in his bedroom. No more meetings at the coffee shop. No more hot chocolates, text messages and easy embraces. No more long talks at night about the past, about Yoochun’s future and Changmin’s father. No more confidences. No more secrets. No more looking at him from afar, and making believe dreams come true. It’s lost… Changmin’s hands, Changmin’s eyes, Changmin’s smile… he can never pretend they are his again. All lost. Forever.
Yoochun waits for tears to rise to his eyes again but this time they remain dry. The pain in his heart is still here but it changed - it’s over. A closed door. A dream gone.
It’s over.
He squeezes Jaejoong’s hand and closes his eyes. When he opens them again, he promises himself, it’s the real world he’ll finally be facing.
~
Two weeks later, Yoochun is in Incheon airport, hovering alone around departure gate 112.
His shirt is still damp with Jaejoong’s tears, and he hopes his friend won’t throw himself under a bus like he once swore he would if Yoochun ever dared to leave him. He’d like to be convinced it was just a joke, but you never quite know with Jaejoong. It’s safer not to assume things, especially when he’s upset. And Jaejoong was very upset, judging by how he was wailing in his arms like a boat horn. Yoochun never had so many people stare at him unkindly before.
He starts when a voice announces the start of boarding for flight KA121 to Sydney. His heart jumps inside his chest and he hurriedly gets in line, his palms a bit sweaty, and Yoochun realizes as he shows his boarding pass that this is the closest he’s felt to excitement in months. Maybe years.
The evening he arrived at Jaejoong’s parents’, Yoochun called his manager at the convenient store and announced that he was resigning. The guy wasn’t pleased. He said they wouldn’t take him back if he changed his mind, to which Yoochun answered he had no intention to.
He went to his place the next day, when he knew Changmin would be at work. There was a note on the door, with a familiar handwriting. Yoochun pretended not to see it. He quickly packed everything he wanted to keep, set aside what could be sold, threw away the rest, and left. He found a buyer for Veruca three days later, and let go of his car for a ridiculously cheap price. He strongly suspects they will take it to pieces and sell whatever useable spare parts they’ll find. It makes him feel oddly guilty.
During the last days Yoochun gathered the money he had managed to save. He met Yoowhan and called his parents. He watched dumb TV shows and stuffed his face with junk food. Two days ago he received his visa for Australia, and booked a one-way plane ticket for Sydney.
Leaving was Jaejoong’s idea. Australia was Yooseon’s.
“The visa will only allow you to do small work” Jaejoong’s sister had warned, “nothing fancy. Picking fruits or building fences, most likely”.
Yoochun had shrugged. It’s not like he intends to come back a millionaire. He just wants an ocean between the ‘before’ and ‘after’. Literally.
Now here he is, in the plane. No going back.
Until the very last minute, Yoochun expected something to happen. They would snatch his visa away saying it’s no good. He’d trip in the escalators, break both legs and trade Australia for a merry trip to the hospital. Someone would call out his name “Park Yoochun, Park Yoochun from flight KA121 to Sydney” and he’d be dragged back to the main hall, where they’d tell him that a certain Shim Changmin had started a hunger strike in the President’s office and a certain Kim Jaejoong had tried a suicide attack on a bus, and both were blaming him.
Nothing happened though, and now Yoochun is on his own, and doing his best not to make it obvious he’s never been on a plane before. He refrains from playing with the speakers and the booklets in front of him. He purposefully ignores the paper bag, praying air sickness will spare him. But when the stewardess starts showing everything he must do not to die and he anxiously peeks above the seat before him to see her better, his neighbor throws him an amused look and Yoochun knows he’s been found out.
Just then the plane starts moving and he throws dignity away, gluing his face to the window pane.
Finally it starts. The roar of engines. Gaining speed.
Yoochun’s heartbeat follows along, faster, louder, fuller. He’s enjoying every sensation, letting every second fill him and trying hard not to grin as gravity pushes him back in his seat, because here, it’s happening… his heart is swelling, getting bigger, lighter, a crushing weight being lifted from his chest, and a huge smile breaks on his face the moment they leave the ground. He wants to laugh. He’s light, young, crazy, happy, all of it and more, and it’s only once they are high in the sky and above the clouds that he can put a name on it.
‘Free’ he thinks euphorically, his face illuminated by a smile.
Changmin would say he’s running away again but no, not this time… this time Yoochun is flying, and the sky around him stretches without limits, giving him the horizon he never realized he had been searching for.
Of course the beginning isn’t easy - the very beginning. As in, the first ten minutes.
Yoochun undergoes a small panic attack the moment he steps inside Sydney airport, when he realizes he has absolutely no idea what to do now.
‘Australia’ in itself was such a huge step that he only focused on getting there, and he didn’t stop to think of what would happen next. The basics: where to sleep, where to eat, what to do tomorrow and the day after that with barely enough money to last a week or so. Not to mention his English skills, that can be summed up as vocabulary cobbled together for the sake of the rare foreigners who incidentally landed in his convenient store.
He’s already wondering how much begging it’d take for Yoowhan to buy him a return ticket when he remembers the papers Jaejoong’s sister slid inside his rucksack before he left the house.
“Try not to die there” Yooseon had said, glancing at her brooding brother, “or he will disavow me and claim I’m adopted till even our parents start doubting I’m theirs.”
“He wouldn’t.”
“He had the entire school believe Jinhee was a boy when she forgot to pick him up after class once.”
“Who’d believe that??”
“Her boyfriend broke up with her.”
Yoochun had promised to take care.
Now looking through the papers she gave him, he feels very much like kissing Yooseon. She listed addresses and phone numbers for him, of the friends she made when she stayed in Australia two years ago. Maps of bus and train lines. Cheap restaurants and hotels. Places where to search for jobs and find them. And a letter of four pages covered with purple ink and Jaejoong’s messy handwriting.
By the time he’s done reading that one, Yoochun wants nothing more than sit down on the floor and weep. He’s about to do just that when he feels a tap on his shoulder. He turns around, sniffing, and recognizes his neighbor on the plane. The guy’s grin is suspiciously bright and Yoochun goes for a wary ‘what do you want with me?’ kind of smile. They didn’t speak a word to each other during the trip. The guy was asleep the moment the plane took off; he spent nine of the flight’s ten hours drooling all over his small pillow, and the remaining time messing with the seat-back screen settings.
That same guy is talking now. Fast, and not in Korean, much to Yoochun’s dismay.
“I no English” he interrupts, waving Yooseon’s papers in the other’s face to make him shut up.
The guy stares and shakes his head.
“There” he says again in Korean this time. He adds some gibberish that Yoochun can’t grasp at all till he notices that the other is pointing at an address on one of the papers.
“Rowe Street?”
He isn’t sure he said that right but the guy nods.
“There. You go there?” he asks in Korean again.
His pronunciation is as lame as Yoochun’s English one but that’s a start, and Yoochun knows luck when he sees it.
“Yes” he says in English, nodding frantically without even glancing at the address on the paper, “yes, yes, yes!”
“I go there!” the guy exclaims brightly, before he reverts back to English blabbering.
Yoochun waits till he’s done. The last words sound like a question so he says “yes yes yes” again. It must have been the right thing to do because the guy makes a sign like “follow me” and starts leading him out of the airport, to what Yoochun hopes is a place with food, a bed, and no Australian madmen searching for Korean lost boys to murder.
Much, much later, when they’d have both improved a lot as far as communication goes, Yoochun will ask Yunho why he even bothered to help him that day.
“You were cute” the older man answers.
“I wasn’t.”
“And lost.”
“I wasn’t.”
“Like a koala.”
By then Yoochun knows that comparing people to kangaroos, koalas and quokkas is not an Australian obsession, but Yunho’s favorite way to entertain himself at the expense of wide-eyed foreigners. Most of them feel flattered, but Yoochun’s first encounter with an actual koala taught him better.
“I don’t pee on people.”
“You’re just as grumpy.”
“If you knew I’d try to bite your ear off the first chance I’d get, why did you help me?”
Yunho smiles. It’s not the enigmatic, somewhat seductive smirk Yoochun sometimes glimpsed on that face, nor the wide clueless grin he keeps for strangers. There’s fondness in the way his eyes soften, the corners of his lips upturning just enough for sincere affection to be conveyed - Yunho isn’t one for enthusiast displays of emotions. He goes for gentle smiles, when no one is looking. Small gestures and words that’d go unnoticed if someone else hadn’t already taught Yoochun how to read those.
“Do I need a reason to want to help people?” he asks.
Where Changmin is all about answers, for him, Yunho only has questions. Questions that Yoochun can’t reply to. He only shrugs - call it fate, or chance, you don’t decide of the important things.
Part 10.
Note: SOOOOO. Here it is. I don't think I'm sorry for this one lol, I guess such a turn of events was quite predictable at this point. I'm just going to say "HI YUNHO GORGEOUS", I want JJ as my bff, and oh, if you find that Changmin's wedding news comes kinda fast, just know that I agree with you (great I'm being cryptic now on top of excruciatingly slow).
Quick reminder that Veruca is Yoochun's car, and in case you are having a bad day, here is a quokka for you.
For information, we're about halfway through the story word count wise, extra long chapter coming next week~
Thank you always for reading/commenting~ <3