DAY TEN ★ le garçon aux yeux gris
Username: asukaflying
Prompt #: 310 [prompt details]au. Yifan hasn't really thought about dating, or who he likes or anything like that. He's too busy with studying and school and keeping one foot ahead of the other. But then he meets Xu Jinglei, an older woman, and everything changes. Except it hasn't really.
Title: Le Garçon aux Yeux Gris
Ship: Xu Jinglei (actress, producer: Somewhere Only We Know)/Yifan
Rating: PG
Word count: 2,477 words
Warnings: [click to view]age gap?
Summary: He has grey eyes; she stares, watching unabashedly as he turns away.
Notes: I would like to acknowledge A’s enormous help in terms of brainstorming, and for suggesting the film Les Égarés from which this title was taken, it being the title of the novel the film was based upon. I would also like to extend a grateful thank you to C, C, F and I for helping me decipher a particularly obscure French expression in two contexts; I very much appreciate it.
The painting in front of her is of a landscape, green and lush, the leaves painted with exquisite detail, so that she can almost smell the thickness of the forest, the denseness of the pigment, the way the trees keep advancing, fencing her in, looming over her-
"It's a terrible painting," a voice says quietly, not directed towards her exactly, just a voice. Jinglei turns her neck, just a tiny gesture, the discrete flick of her eyes towards the side, where she can tell someone is standing, a step behind her, barely in her peripheral vision as she turns-
it's a young man, perhaps a student? He has black plastic-framed glasses, and yet he doesn't seem the typical art student, though Jinglei knows she's jumping to conclusions.
She nods her head.
"It's suffocating," she says quietly, the words hanging in the air before her, just a private commentary but the sound waves carry, rippling out like the after effects of a tiny stone dropping into a pool of water, just one among the echoes of all the voices in the gallery; he might hear it, or he might not.
It's not important, even though it is important, a moment shared between strangers who will probably never meet again.
Just as she's turning to move to the next painting, she catches a better glimpse of him, the honest one.
He has grey eyes; she stares, watching unabashedly as he turns away.
It's not that she's still thinking about the painting, or the young man-was he a student?-she wonders, in spite of the fact that she's not thinking about him at all, as she takes another sip of coffee and watches the glide of her fountain pen over paper.
In that summer green
searching for your face, my leaves
were lost to autumn.
"You're too old to be thinking about random students," she scolds herself, catching her reflection in the glass of the window, hair tucked behind one ear, red glasses perched low on her nose. "Even your subconscious is telling you that."
Turning back to Imma von Bodmershof, she begins again.
Lange schon fleht die Drossel -
der Mond kommt sie schweigt.
Gab er ihr Antwort?
The German runs thick over her tongue like the green of the painting, shadowed by the reflections of passersby who don't stop to look, to notice the ugliness in the apparent beauty; the answer is lost to them.
Her mind drifts back to the green, but instead of the painting, she thinks about picnics in the park, back when she was in university, the conversations between her group of friends a hodgepodge of European languages as they drank wine and lay on the grass and traced the clouds with their fingertips-
the places they would go, the things they would do, the people they would meet-
before the white fluffy clouds turned to grey, rain clouds approaching and the wind picking up as they found themselves laughing, rain-drenched and heading for home.
The young man's grey eyes swim back into her thoughts, superimposing themselves upon her memory, just a moment but it's enough. Jinglei sighs, drags her attention back to the screen.
It's not an art gallery this time, contrary to what Yang Mi might think, shaking her head at her older cousin when they meet up for coffee at the place overlooking the park, bobbing umbrellas when it rains, dawdling students sprawled across the grass bordering the sidewalks when the weather is nice.
"I'm a translator," Jinglei always argues, frowning at the crema on her espresso; it's not thick enough today and she wonders if they've switched the roast or something. For all she drinks too much coffee, she still doesn't know enough about it.
"You're a poet," Yang Mi retorts, uncrossing and recrossing her legs, glancing at the clock. Jinglei watches her, hiding a laugh behind a raised hand.
"If you have to be somewhere. . ." she begins, but Yang Mi only frowns.
"Have to be, yes. Want to be, absolutely not."
The corners of Jinglei's mouth turn up in a smile as she winks at her cousin. "I can have a sudden mid-life crisis that you absolutely must talk me out of," she begins, waving a hand for the waiter, "to get you out of dinner with Auntie."
"And what would that mid-life crisis be this time?" Yang Mi replies, ordering a glass of wine and sitting back in her hair.
"Well," Jinglei pauses considerately, "I might be interested in a much younger man?" Grey eyes flash through her mind as the words cross her lips; she finds herself frowning slightly.
"Wait, what!" Yang Mi leans forward, fingers hovering above the handle of her mostly empty coffee cup. "You met somebody?"
"No, no, no," Jinglei is quick to gloss it over, "I was just thinking of pretexts," but she can't help the way her thoughts linger, a certain voice hovering just out of hearing.
Even after Yang Mi leaves, Jinglei sits at the table for a moment longer; outside it's begun to drizzle, and she watches the couples walking by, sharing an umbrella. If she's late to the photography exhibit, it won't matter much anyway.
Except it does matter.
If she'd been a moment earlier, or he'd been a moment later, but life is like that, a tapestry of stolen seconds, brushes of skin against skin, murmured apologies that turn to gazes meeting in silence as the sound of the room hollows out.
Raindrops in my eyes;
I blink, worlds form, sudden, in
your complexities.
Jinglei is dashing from the subway exit to the door, not bothering to open her umbrella, still dripping on her foot as she weaves between pedestrians, trying to outrun the rain that insists on falling anyway. Complacence about the time had turned to a mad dash, lest she miss the exhibit altogether.
Would it be so bad if you missed the exhibit? she had asked herself, swaying on the subway rather than attempt to flag down a taxi on a rain-sodden afternoon in the city, and she'd been surprised to realize the answer had been yes.
Perhaps something had been telling her so, she wonders, a fleeting thought, standing in the doorway of the exhibit, the rain falling just behind her on the street, water dotting her hair and sparkling in her eyelashes, too surprised to wipe the moisture away.
"Oh," she says, because she's not sure what to say; what does one say to a stranger one has never even been introduced to?
The young man with the grey eyes seems equally-well not exactly surprised-Jinglei can't really read the expression on his face, waiting for. . .
something that never comes.
"Yifan!" a voice calls from outside, between raindrops; the young man nods, Jinglei and the moment already dissolving from his awareness as he unfurls his red umbrella, brown-paper package tucked protectively under his arm as he disappears into the crowd of pedestrians, a sea of black umbrellas through which Jinglei traces the solitary red blot of colour until it's faded from sight.
The photographer exhibiting, Kim Myungsoo, is an excellent photographer and his arrangement of the tiny, the profound in the vastness of large spaces, is excellent, but Jinglei finds herself drawn to a single photograph. A crimson poppy against a backdrop of dark earth.
Afghanistan the caption says, a single word that can't begin to explain the effect the photograph has on Jinglei, as she circles the exhibit but ends up back where she started, eventually succumbing to her irrational need to purchase a print.
The man at the small desk nods as she makes the payment, swiping her card through the machine and gesturing for her to sign the electronic pad.
"It's interesting," he says, as he wraps the print up in brown paper. "You and a young man about an hour ago are the only ones who seem interested in that photograph."
And suddenly, Jinglei has to know. "Did he have grey eyes?" she asks, the words tumbling out before she can stuff them back into her mouth; the man looks up, fixing her with his gaze for a moment, before he smiles.
"Oh, you know Yifan too?" he asks, and Jinglei is too embarrassed to do more than nod, quickly making her escape into the evening dusk that's fallen so suddenly from the sky.
Jinglei is unsettled. She's hung the photograph of the poppy over her desk, a single spot of red against the dark, but every time she looks at it she thinks about the man's voice at the desk, "Oh, you know Yifan too?"
It feels like she's stolen something without permission, stumbled into some contraband knowledge with no one to tell it to as she eyes her phone, tossed on the desk, and quickly discards the idea of messaging Yang Mi, because Yang Mi will want to know and there's nothing to tell.
"I don't even know him," Jinglei says to no one in particular, her voice echoing in the room, before she runs her fingers through her hair and tries to focus.
Le mort moucheron
dans les huit bras de l'aragne
bénit-il son sort ?
But Jacques Arnold can't hold her attention, the gnat in the arms of the spider.
If only I could know. . . Jinglei finds herself wondering, fingers poised over the keyboard before she gives her head a good shake and gets up in search of more coffee, or perhaps a glass of Malbec and a few squares of extra dark chocolate.
The chocolate helps her get through the targeted project list, but Satie's Gnossienne No. 4 leaves her with a trace of mystery on her tongue, as her fingers twitch, clicking away from the document she's supposed to be working on and scrolling instead through her favourite sites.
It's almost an accident when she catches the corner of a familiar image, but her mind is so conditioned by her favourites that she's scrolling down before she even realizes it, the excitement only hitting a moment later when she realizes that there's going to be a screening of her absolute favourite film, Les Égarés.
Jinglei eyes the clock; she has a few more hours to finish this project and still be able to make it in time, but her fingers flying over the keyboard prove her determination, a rain of words cascading across the screen.
She doesn't see him at first, sinking into the velvet of the cinema seat, still slightly out of breath from running from the subway exit. She can picture Yang Mi now, shaking her head at Jinglei's disheveled appearance, but she doesn't even care because it's her favourite film and there are far too few chances to see it on the big screen.
But it's as the opening frames, black and white, words swimming out of darkness over the sound of a plaintive melody, the black and white images of war, buildings falling in silence, in anticipation of the familiar chills running up and down her spine as she hears the small voice asking questions, "Pourquoi ils s'en vont si vite, qu'est-ce que c'est la bête du diable, c'est quand le diable est là, . .oui le diable veut emporter les enfants, mais pourquoi il veut emporter les enfants, on n'a rien fait de mal. . ."-
she glances to the side as someone slides into the next seat.
It is he, Yifan, as D'après le roman "Le Garçon aux Yeux Gris" de Gilles Perrault Publié aux Éditions Fayard appears on the screen, and Jinglei feels her breath catching in her throat, even though she wasn't running, trying to hide, she still feels almost cornered as he slips out of his wet jacket, slinging it over the arm of the seat to his other side before he turns and notices her, sitting there with wide eyes too startled to look away.
"Hi," he says, a warm smile on his face, and Jinglei can feel her heart beating in her throat.
"Hi," she says, and tries to turn back to the film, but she's so distracted by the boy with the grey eyes, watching him react to the film instead of the film itself, Odile teaching Yvan how to read, the encounter in the woods, the lighter, the moments that have always hit her so hard as viewed through the eyes of someone else.
She always has tears in her eyes at the end, despite knowing the outcome, but today her eyes are dry as she watches him cry instead, holding a fist up to his mouth as Odile lies to her son and says that everything is okay.
Jinglei reaches into her bag and pulls out a package of tissue to hand him, and it feels right, in the moment, the surprise in Yifan's eyes as he accepts the offer.
"Thank you," he says, and he seems embarrassed but Jinglei waves that away with a gesture of her hand, as they sit in the cinema in the dark, their faces only dimly illuminated by the credits scrolling down the screen.
"It's my favourite film," she says, and pauses, biting her lip, before she continues, "I'm Jinglei by the way; I think I've seen you before?"
He pauses, tissue crumpled to his eyes before he brings his hand down, curling his fingers gently around the white. "It's my first time seeing it," he says, "but it might be my favourite too." There's a silence, as he looks at his fingers, flickering dark and light in the cinema. "I'm Yifan," he says, after a moment, turning to look at Jinglei. "Nice to you meet you."
The lights go on then, and Jinglei blinks, startled; Yifan smiles though his eyes are still puffy. She finds she wants to give him a hug, reassure him that he's only sad because the movie is sad, but that it's a happy movie too, but that seems too forward after barely exchanging their names.
"I'm going to the café next door after this," she says, curling her fingers into her palms as she goes out on a limb. "Would you care to join me?" He's going to say no, she thinks, already steeling herself for the blow, thinking about laughing her shame off tomorrow with Yang Mi and a bottle of wine, when he surprises her instead.
"That sounds nice," he says, and nods. "I'd be happy to."
They file out along the row, over the swirls of violin as the names keep scrolling on the screen before it fades to silence; he holds the first door open for her and she returns the favour with the second, smiling as he laughs and nods his head in acquiescence.
I can't believe this, Jinglei thinks, except she can.
That tear in your eye:
not sadness, rather a smile
waiting to happen.
Prompt #: 310 [prompt details]au. Yifan hasn't really thought about dating, or who he likes or anything like that. He's too busy with studying and school and keeping one foot ahead of the other. But then he meets Xu Jinglei, an older woman, and everything changes. Except it hasn't really.
Title: Le Garçon aux Yeux Gris
Ship: Xu Jinglei (actress, producer: Somewhere Only We Know)/Yifan
Rating: PG
Word count: 2,477 words
Warnings: [click to view]age gap?
Summary: He has grey eyes; she stares, watching unabashedly as he turns away.
Notes: I would like to acknowledge A’s enormous help in terms of brainstorming, and for suggesting the film Les Égarés from which this title was taken, it being the title of the novel the film was based upon. I would also like to extend a grateful thank you to C, C, F and I for helping me decipher a particularly obscure French expression in two contexts; I very much appreciate it.
The painting in front of her is of a landscape, green and lush, the leaves painted with exquisite detail, so that she can almost smell the thickness of the forest, the denseness of the pigment, the way the trees keep advancing, fencing her in, looming over her-
"It's a terrible painting," a voice says quietly, not directed towards her exactly, just a voice. Jinglei turns her neck, just a tiny gesture, the discrete flick of her eyes towards the side, where she can tell someone is standing, a step behind her, barely in her peripheral vision as she turns-
it's a young man, perhaps a student? He has black plastic-framed glasses, and yet he doesn't seem the typical art student, though Jinglei knows she's jumping to conclusions.
She nods her head.
"It's suffocating," she says quietly, the words hanging in the air before her, just a private commentary but the sound waves carry, rippling out like the after effects of a tiny stone dropping into a pool of water, just one among the echoes of all the voices in the gallery; he might hear it, or he might not.
It's not important, even though it is important, a moment shared between strangers who will probably never meet again.
Just as she's turning to move to the next painting, she catches a better glimpse of him, the honest one.
He has grey eyes; she stares, watching unabashedly as he turns away.
It's not that she's still thinking about the painting, or the young man-was he a student?-she wonders, in spite of the fact that she's not thinking about him at all, as she takes another sip of coffee and watches the glide of her fountain pen over paper.
In that summer green
searching for your face, my leaves
were lost to autumn.
"You're too old to be thinking about random students," she scolds herself, catching her reflection in the glass of the window, hair tucked behind one ear, red glasses perched low on her nose. "Even your subconscious is telling you that."
Turning back to Imma von Bodmershof, she begins again.
Lange schon fleht die Drossel -
der Mond kommt sie schweigt.
Gab er ihr Antwort?
The German runs thick over her tongue like the green of the painting, shadowed by the reflections of passersby who don't stop to look, to notice the ugliness in the apparent beauty; the answer is lost to them.
Her mind drifts back to the green, but instead of the painting, she thinks about picnics in the park, back when she was in university, the conversations between her group of friends a hodgepodge of European languages as they drank wine and lay on the grass and traced the clouds with their fingertips-
the places they would go, the things they would do, the people they would meet-
before the white fluffy clouds turned to grey, rain clouds approaching and the wind picking up as they found themselves laughing, rain-drenched and heading for home.
The young man's grey eyes swim back into her thoughts, superimposing themselves upon her memory, just a moment but it's enough. Jinglei sighs, drags her attention back to the screen.
It's not an art gallery this time, contrary to what Yang Mi might think, shaking her head at her older cousin when they meet up for coffee at the place overlooking the park, bobbing umbrellas when it rains, dawdling students sprawled across the grass bordering the sidewalks when the weather is nice.
"I'm a translator," Jinglei always argues, frowning at the crema on her espresso; it's not thick enough today and she wonders if they've switched the roast or something. For all she drinks too much coffee, she still doesn't know enough about it.
"You're a poet," Yang Mi retorts, uncrossing and recrossing her legs, glancing at the clock. Jinglei watches her, hiding a laugh behind a raised hand.
"If you have to be somewhere. . ." she begins, but Yang Mi only frowns.
"Have to be, yes. Want to be, absolutely not."
The corners of Jinglei's mouth turn up in a smile as she winks at her cousin. "I can have a sudden mid-life crisis that you absolutely must talk me out of," she begins, waving a hand for the waiter, "to get you out of dinner with Auntie."
"And what would that mid-life crisis be this time?" Yang Mi replies, ordering a glass of wine and sitting back in her hair.
"Well," Jinglei pauses considerately, "I might be interested in a much younger man?" Grey eyes flash through her mind as the words cross her lips; she finds herself frowning slightly.
"Wait, what!" Yang Mi leans forward, fingers hovering above the handle of her mostly empty coffee cup. "You met somebody?"
"No, no, no," Jinglei is quick to gloss it over, "I was just thinking of pretexts," but she can't help the way her thoughts linger, a certain voice hovering just out of hearing.
Even after Yang Mi leaves, Jinglei sits at the table for a moment longer; outside it's begun to drizzle, and she watches the couples walking by, sharing an umbrella. If she's late to the photography exhibit, it won't matter much anyway.
Except it does matter.
If she'd been a moment earlier, or he'd been a moment later, but life is like that, a tapestry of stolen seconds, brushes of skin against skin, murmured apologies that turn to gazes meeting in silence as the sound of the room hollows out.
Raindrops in my eyes;
I blink, worlds form, sudden, in
your complexities.
Jinglei is dashing from the subway exit to the door, not bothering to open her umbrella, still dripping on her foot as she weaves between pedestrians, trying to outrun the rain that insists on falling anyway. Complacence about the time had turned to a mad dash, lest she miss the exhibit altogether.
Would it be so bad if you missed the exhibit? she had asked herself, swaying on the subway rather than attempt to flag down a taxi on a rain-sodden afternoon in the city, and she'd been surprised to realize the answer had been yes.
Perhaps something had been telling her so, she wonders, a fleeting thought, standing in the doorway of the exhibit, the rain falling just behind her on the street, water dotting her hair and sparkling in her eyelashes, too surprised to wipe the moisture away.
"Oh," she says, because she's not sure what to say; what does one say to a stranger one has never even been introduced to?
The young man with the grey eyes seems equally-well not exactly surprised-Jinglei can't really read the expression on his face, waiting for. . .
something that never comes.
"Yifan!" a voice calls from outside, between raindrops; the young man nods, Jinglei and the moment already dissolving from his awareness as he unfurls his red umbrella, brown-paper package tucked protectively under his arm as he disappears into the crowd of pedestrians, a sea of black umbrellas through which Jinglei traces the solitary red blot of colour until it's faded from sight.
The photographer exhibiting, Kim Myungsoo, is an excellent photographer and his arrangement of the tiny, the profound in the vastness of large spaces, is excellent, but Jinglei finds herself drawn to a single photograph. A crimson poppy against a backdrop of dark earth.
Afghanistan the caption says, a single word that can't begin to explain the effect the photograph has on Jinglei, as she circles the exhibit but ends up back where she started, eventually succumbing to her irrational need to purchase a print.
The man at the small desk nods as she makes the payment, swiping her card through the machine and gesturing for her to sign the electronic pad.
"It's interesting," he says, as he wraps the print up in brown paper. "You and a young man about an hour ago are the only ones who seem interested in that photograph."
And suddenly, Jinglei has to know. "Did he have grey eyes?" she asks, the words tumbling out before she can stuff them back into her mouth; the man looks up, fixing her with his gaze for a moment, before he smiles.
"Oh, you know Yifan too?" he asks, and Jinglei is too embarrassed to do more than nod, quickly making her escape into the evening dusk that's fallen so suddenly from the sky.
Jinglei is unsettled. She's hung the photograph of the poppy over her desk, a single spot of red against the dark, but every time she looks at it she thinks about the man's voice at the desk, "Oh, you know Yifan too?"
It feels like she's stolen something without permission, stumbled into some contraband knowledge with no one to tell it to as she eyes her phone, tossed on the desk, and quickly discards the idea of messaging Yang Mi, because Yang Mi will want to know and there's nothing to tell.
"I don't even know him," Jinglei says to no one in particular, her voice echoing in the room, before she runs her fingers through her hair and tries to focus.
Le mort moucheron
dans les huit bras de l'aragne
bénit-il son sort ?
But Jacques Arnold can't hold her attention, the gnat in the arms of the spider.
If only I could know. . . Jinglei finds herself wondering, fingers poised over the keyboard before she gives her head a good shake and gets up in search of more coffee, or perhaps a glass of Malbec and a few squares of extra dark chocolate.
The chocolate helps her get through the targeted project list, but Satie's Gnossienne No. 4 leaves her with a trace of mystery on her tongue, as her fingers twitch, clicking away from the document she's supposed to be working on and scrolling instead through her favourite sites.
It's almost an accident when she catches the corner of a familiar image, but her mind is so conditioned by her favourites that she's scrolling down before she even realizes it, the excitement only hitting a moment later when she realizes that there's going to be a screening of her absolute favourite film, Les Égarés.
Jinglei eyes the clock; she has a few more hours to finish this project and still be able to make it in time, but her fingers flying over the keyboard prove her determination, a rain of words cascading across the screen.
She doesn't see him at first, sinking into the velvet of the cinema seat, still slightly out of breath from running from the subway exit. She can picture Yang Mi now, shaking her head at Jinglei's disheveled appearance, but she doesn't even care because it's her favourite film and there are far too few chances to see it on the big screen.
But it's as the opening frames, black and white, words swimming out of darkness over the sound of a plaintive melody, the black and white images of war, buildings falling in silence, in anticipation of the familiar chills running up and down her spine as she hears the small voice asking questions, "Pourquoi ils s'en vont si vite, qu'est-ce que c'est la bête du diable, c'est quand le diable est là, . .oui le diable veut emporter les enfants, mais pourquoi il veut emporter les enfants, on n'a rien fait de mal. . ."-
she glances to the side as someone slides into the next seat.
It is he, Yifan, as D'après le roman "Le Garçon aux Yeux Gris" de Gilles Perrault Publié aux Éditions Fayard appears on the screen, and Jinglei feels her breath catching in her throat, even though she wasn't running, trying to hide, she still feels almost cornered as he slips out of his wet jacket, slinging it over the arm of the seat to his other side before he turns and notices her, sitting there with wide eyes too startled to look away.
"Hi," he says, a warm smile on his face, and Jinglei can feel her heart beating in her throat.
"Hi," she says, and tries to turn back to the film, but she's so distracted by the boy with the grey eyes, watching him react to the film instead of the film itself, Odile teaching Yvan how to read, the encounter in the woods, the lighter, the moments that have always hit her so hard as viewed through the eyes of someone else.
She always has tears in her eyes at the end, despite knowing the outcome, but today her eyes are dry as she watches him cry instead, holding a fist up to his mouth as Odile lies to her son and says that everything is okay.
Jinglei reaches into her bag and pulls out a package of tissue to hand him, and it feels right, in the moment, the surprise in Yifan's eyes as he accepts the offer.
"Thank you," he says, and he seems embarrassed but Jinglei waves that away with a gesture of her hand, as they sit in the cinema in the dark, their faces only dimly illuminated by the credits scrolling down the screen.
"It's my favourite film," she says, and pauses, biting her lip, before she continues, "I'm Jinglei by the way; I think I've seen you before?"
He pauses, tissue crumpled to his eyes before he brings his hand down, curling his fingers gently around the white. "It's my first time seeing it," he says, "but it might be my favourite too." There's a silence, as he looks at his fingers, flickering dark and light in the cinema. "I'm Yifan," he says, after a moment, turning to look at Jinglei. "Nice to you meet you."
The lights go on then, and Jinglei blinks, startled; Yifan smiles though his eyes are still puffy. She finds she wants to give him a hug, reassure him that he's only sad because the movie is sad, but that it's a happy movie too, but that seems too forward after barely exchanging their names.
"I'm going to the café next door after this," she says, curling her fingers into her palms as she goes out on a limb. "Would you care to join me?" He's going to say no, she thinks, already steeling herself for the blow, thinking about laughing her shame off tomorrow with Yang Mi and a bottle of wine, when he surprises her instead.
"That sounds nice," he says, and nods. "I'd be happy to."
They file out along the row, over the swirls of violin as the names keep scrolling on the screen before it fades to silence; he holds the first door open for her and she returns the favour with the second, smiling as he laughs and nods his head in acquiescence.
I can't believe this, Jinglei thinks, except she can.
That tear in your eye:
not sadness, rather a smile
waiting to happen.