[fic] gravity [AU][yoosu]
title: gravity
fandom: TVXQ
pairings: Yoochun/Junsu, minor Yoochun/Jaejoong.
rating: R
summary: Tall buildings block out the light and Yoochun writes songs that no one wants to hear. For Junsu, singing is breathing. It doesn't matter that the city is falling apart around them.
author's notes: AU fic, written for mimei for a whole sea of prompts but mostly cities will suck you dry. Warnings for dystopic cities and angst and not-quite-happy endings.
word count: 4300 approx.
In this city, the streets are broken and the only thing holding them together are the rows of houses which wall you in and all those poles strung with cables which keep you all wired up, connected and safe even when you’re all alone. Probably, you’ve lived in this city all your life. It could be any city but it just happens to be this one.
Yoochun is just a boy with no fire in his eyes who writes songs no one seems to want to hear. He sung on a street corner once and felt something close to alive. He’d only earned himself a few silver coins and a plethora of pitying looks but he would have done it forever if he hadn’t been moved along by rich kid with a violin and a busking license who smirked at the way Yoochun’s jeans were all frayed and almost white.
Junsu sings at a jazz club with a piano accompaniment played by a friend who always wanted to be a dancer and would have been if he’d thought he could make a living out of it. Junsu is all show and seriousness because singing means everything to him. Singing means he can get lost for a while and not come back.
Junsu sings whenever he can, he’d sing every word he says if his vocal chords would stand it. When he isn’t singing, he sits in his apartment, waiting for the phone to ring. It never does and this is probably because the only people who care are his family and they won’t call, not because they don’t want to but because they think he’s living the life of his dreams and it would be heartbreaking to keep calling a son who won’t pick up.
Yoochun goes to the jazz club sometimes-when the sky feels heavier on his shoulders than usual or when the apartments empty because what Yoochun hates more than anything is being alone. But he only ever arrives early enough to hear Junsu’s last song of the evening. It’s that one where his voice goes higher and higher like spirals of smoke until the piano’s final note has tailed off and the whole crowd ought to be holding their breath but aren’t. Or it’s the other one, the one where Junsu’s mouth stumbles around the English words but still manages to make the most amazing sounds.
After each show, Yoochun always insists on playing him a song he’s written and Junsu’s pianist always asks for sheet music which Yoochun never has. When Yoochun is eventually allowed to take to the piano each time, his fingers warble ineptly across the keys and they have to wait through ten minutes of painful cacophony before he’s ready to play the song. Junsu imagines that Yoochun composes all these songs on the spot, but the truth is that they’re all written note-for-note in Yoochun’s head, he just has no piano to practise them on.
Each of Yoochun’s songs is a trite pop ballad with lyrics made of phrases he’s heard somewhere else. But each of them sounds beautifully raw coming from Yoochun’s clumsy fingers and untrained throat. Every song echoes empty and forgettable but somehow beautiful so they let him play every time. They let him play even though it’s always the same response: Junsu doesn’t have any room for new songs and even if he did no one would want to hear them. He’s just a singer in a jazz club and every song he’s ever sung is owned by someone else.
But one night, Yoochun sings a song which isn’t a ballad, isn’t an anything, and his fingers skate across the keys with such grace that Junsu isn’t listening to the piano anymore, he hears it but it’s just a perfect backdrop, like it was always there. Yoochun sings a song about the city, about how the city will suck you dry and how those lights will blind you and how it’s your dreams which, in the end, will suffocate you. And Yoochun’s scarred voice is a voice of experience, a tired voice who knows the real meaning of all those words he’s saying, a very different voice from the one he’d used to sing all those contrived ballads.
The response is still the same, because this song is even less usable than all the others, because no one wants to hear the truth. But at the end of this song, Junsu asks where Yoochun lives and if he can call him a taxi. Yoochun doesn’t live far, the worst parts of the city are always near the centre of it, like the circles of hell.
He says he’ll walk but the hole in the toe of his right shoe says different and Junsu’s insistent and has him sharing a ride to that big high-rise where Jaejoong is waiting and will laugh at him if he gets any hint of what’s happened.
Yoochun imagines that Junsu doesn’t live a life that’s anything like his. He imagines a big sitting room with polished wood floors, a grand piano and a leather couch. So when he asks and Junsu gives the name of the street not so far from Yoochun’s own, Yoochun says you’re kidding and won’t accept Junsu’s seriousness saying but you’re- and maybe that sentence was meant to end with ’famous’ or ’successful’ but Junsu slaps his arm, hard enough that it stings and will probably bruise, and laughs a far-too-loud laugh stopping Yoochun in his tracks.
Junsu is so different outside of the jazz club’s mood lighting. He looks so much more real with the city lights framing his face in the window, so much more real and so much more alive.
By contrast, the city lights only serve to make Yoochun look more tired, more broken. The glare of the city pulls the colour from Yoochun’s skin and reflects itself in his empty eyes but Junsu thinks that there’s still something about Yoochun which is attractive. Attractive like a hurricane or a car crash, maybe, but Junsu’s seen more crash sites than beribboned wedding cars so maybe that’s just what he thinks love is.
At the corner before Yoochun’s street, Yoochun has the driver stop. Junsu asks why and Yoochun says it’s because of his roommate. Of course, Junsu asks if it’s a girl and when Yoochun replies that it’s nothing like that he’s probably not being entirely truthful. Jaejoong might as well be a girl, if being ‘a girl’ implies that Yoochun has touched every inch of his skin and woken up tangled in his limbs more times than he can remember, and Yoochun’s sure that’s what Junsu means. The only difference between what Junsu means and the reality of Jaejoong is that Yoochun’s never ever been in love with him. They live together because they can survive together, because they know each other’s flaws and can check them. Once or twice, they’d pretended it could be a romance and they’d tried all those clichéd things but somehow it just didn’t work and they’d fallen back into that old routine and worn each other’s clothes like they were their own.
Yoochun gets out of the taxi, onto the street corner, under a streetlamp which looks like it should be in a movie but there are so many things which ruin the effect. Like the way Yoochun doesn’t look as though he’s feeling anything at all, or the way the light shows up every flaw, that one acne scarred cheek that Junsu hadn’t noticed before. And, oh, the way the building behind him makes him look miniscule and insignificant like he could never ever be a hero.
He hands Junsu what must be more than half the fare-because he feels awkward and he just wants to go home and because he doesn’t understand what’s supposed to happen here-and then he closes the door shut on Junsu and it clangs louder than he’d meant it to.
By the next time they meet, the streets have cracked open and the fissures in the asphalt only grow under the chants of war. Yoochun stops watching the news but he still hears about it every day. The women in the office in their sheer-waisted blazers, pencil skirts and three inch heels talk about it as though it were happening in some other city, some place they’ve never even been.
Yoochun can’t get to sleep most nights for the screams of protest.
When one of the men in the office says impressively to the pretty secretary-rings in her ears you could put a fist through, eyes painted like a Monet-that there was an explosion on Yoochun’s street last night as though it were some novelty, some amusing story from another world, it takes all of Yoochun’s self-control not to deck the guy.
Yoochun’s been working for the same company for almost a year now. They’re just a small firm, perched on a single floor high up in a tower block, but their contracts are phenomenal. Most of what they do is music for TV commercials. The song that plays in the advert where the woman walks down a street and the crowd parts like waves, the company Yoochun works for wrote that. Yoochun had taken the job there hoping to become a session musician but all he’s done all year is fetch coffee for men in designer suits and purchase confectionary for the visiting artistic directors of this or that big company who wanted an eerily calm song to play over the advert for their new range of cars or a catchy melody to play whilst they plug their holiday packages in voiceover so incessantly that no one will ever hear the music.
The one perk of the job is the practice room. It is full of instruments, including some Yoochun doesn’t even know the names of. The company’s composers work, mostly, from home and never use the practice room except for collaborations so it’s almost always empty. Yoochun retreats there whenever he dares and is only caught occasionally and the stern words he receives aren’t enough to deter him from doing it again. He loves the piano in the practice room more than any other he’s ever played not because it looks or sounds better but because it’s perched precariously close to a wall of glass overlooking the city. On nights working overtime for a maverick producer with a crooked smile, he goes into the practice room and plays looking out over the glaring black and phosphorescent city and feels like he’s close to falling out of the room and down into the oblivion of it. (And he wonders if it would be the lights or the darkness which would eat him alive.)
Sometimes the empty practice room is the only thing keeping Yoochun from giving up on his job and spending his afternoons with Jaejoong in the café three streets away which is full of street kids and failed musicians who share their stories, their misery and alcohol in paper bags. Yoochun talks with Jaejoong once or twice about taking to the frontline and actually doing something. Their apartment is full up some nights with refugees whose apartments were broken into in raids (and no one can tell the difference between police raids and gang raids anymore) and other nights its filled with people Jaejoong knows who’ve joined the riots and tell them about what it’s like out there. And Yoochun feels like that world is so much more his own than the office world where his best clothes are still met with frowns and disapproval.
On one of those nights where he’s working overtime for that one producer who prefers to work in an empty building and ignores Yoochun to the extent that its pointless for him to be there at all, Yoochun hears a commotion from down the hall which makes him falter in his attempt at playing a popular sonata he’d found sheet music for in the stack by the coffee machine. It sounds like an argument, an unfamiliar impetuous voice and silences in which he must be being given calm responses. All evening Jaejoong’s been sending him a flurry of messages about how someone started a fire in an apartment down the hall and how no one knows who that person is or why they did it. But all Yoochun has time to think about is how he’s going to deal with this task which isn’t in his job description but which he’s sure he’s expected to do.
In the corridor, outside the door to the editing suite, the producer is facing off with a man in a fancy suit but no tie. On the arm of the stranger is Junsu.
Yoochun stands by the producer’s side asking, as if with authority, what’s going on and Junsu looks up at him eyes wide, like an animal soon to be road kill, but says nothing.
The stranger seems disgruntled, faced with two men who are practically kids and whose shoulders are broader than his and faces handsomer. But the story comes out anyway, he is the CEO of a big company whose commercial they’re making the music for. He says he’s pulling rank on that poor excuse for an artistic director and he wants Junsu’s voice in his commercial. He has to have it. He gets what he wants. There’s no calling anyone this late at night and there’s no telling this guy to call again in the morning to sort it, not if they want to keep the contract, so the producer agrees and the CEO leaves them standing opposite a Junsu who still seems shell-shocked.
Yoochun makes coffee whilst the producer explains how this has got to be finished tonight. They’re playing it to the artistic team tomorrow and all their necks are on the line if they lose this contract because it’s one hell of a contract.
And, somehow, Yoochun’s become a part of this. He’s sat behind the glass in the studio with a set of headphones on listening to Junsu straining downwards to fit with the track they’d had laid down last week but the track’s all bass and synth and not built for any voice at all, let alone Junsu’s. It’s for one of those car adverts, one of those adverts which starts in a tunnel and then emerges onto that big green landscape and mountains and a long road winding endless and empty. One of those nowhere landscapes which could be anywhere, anywhere but here.
Junsu sings over and over, sings lyrics taken from a stock pile, sings wordless melodies. Once, the producer tells him to sing his favourite song and Junsu sings, neck craning toward the ceiling, voice high and beautiful and it’s a lullaby, the kind that Yoochun’s mother never sang him.
When they play it back with the instrumental track, the voice and the synth grate and it’s all out of tune.
It isn’t until a second coffee break, that Junsu asks why Yoochun doesn’t just lay down a piano track for it. It seems both obvious and ridiculous. Yoochun’s not a professional, he’s not even very good but they’ve trawled through enough stock tapes to know that the studio hasn’t got any alternative music to offer.
The piano in the studio is imposingly perfect. Its black top is all gloss and its keys are perfect white like the teeth of actors on TV.
They don’t warm up, just go straight into recording endless compositions which have been sat in the stock room for probably longer than Yoochun’s been there. Some of them have words and some of them don’t so sometimes Junsu is left to improvise over the top of them or sing strange wordless harmonies eerie enough to put Yoochun on edge.
Jaejoong doesn’t stop calling or sending messages all night so Yoochun has to turn his phone off because this feels, somehow, more important.
Soon, Junsu’s voice is starting to wear out and time seems to be plummeting faster and faster, they’re all losing patience and optimism. And then Junsu says, in a whisper but all theatrical like this is a game and he’s playing the conspirator, that Yoochun should play that song, the one about the city, the one about the lights. And Yoochun writes the lyrics, clumsy and half illegible over a typed copy of a song about first love. And Junsu tells the producer that he thinks he’s found a good one.
For the first take, they record Junsu and the piano both at once, and it crumbles and unravels because Yoochun’s tired and he barely even remembers the song, he thinks that it’s just another song, and because Junsu can’t read that word in the bridge and has to make it up. But the producer, who knows a good thing when he sees it, and who’s young and idealistic enough to want to make a clumsy and imperfect song pristine, tells Yoochun to play it over and asks Junsu to learn the words by the time he’s done recording the piano. And it works, and it’s beautiful.
Yoochun listens to it when he’s back on the other side of the glass, listens to Junsu’s voice as it aches, all rough edges because he’s been singing all night. Junsu sings like this is the last song he’ll ever sing, as if he were selling his voice just for this one song to be perfect. In truth, Junsu sings every song this way, eyes closed, neck arching, as if singing were breathing but Yoochun’s never noticed it before because he’s never felt this desperate for something to go right.
When the producer sends them home at five a.m. and tells them to get some sleep because they deserve it, he doesn’t tell them which song he’s going to mix because it’s obvious. They can feel it in their bones.
Outside, under the glare of streetlamps and passing headlights, Junsu suggests a taxi. Yoochun doesn’t know why he agrees. He’s got to be at work in a few hours and he hasn’t got the money. He ought to lie curled up on a cold metal bench and try to sleep for a few hours. But he says, yeah, alright, why not.
The taxi driver is a man with a cut above his eye and who rolls down the window to say that there’s rioting, to say that everywhere within half a mile of Yoochun’s apartment is unapproachable. They still clamber in without thinking about it until Junsu says the name of the road he lives on just as Yoochun asks the driver to take them as close to his apartment as he dares. And they turn to look at each other for a few long seconds before Yoochun tells the driver to ignore him and go with what Junsu said because he was going to have to walk almost as far anyway.
The streets are as near empty as they get but, aside from the eerie glow of sunrise, there’s no sign that the city’s any different from the last time they’d taken a taxi together, awkward and near silent. Junsu thinking that Yoochun ought to be beautiful and almost is. Yoochun wondering what it would be like to be Junsu.
When they pull up outside Junsu’s apartment building, Junsu pays the driver without consulting Yoochun.
The light outside the taxi is still barely existent because the buildings are overshadowing the sun. Yoochun mumbles something about thank you for the ride and makes as if to leave but Junsu grabs his wrist to stop him. He says that if it’s as bad as the taxi driver made out, maybe Yoochun shouldn’t go back there, not right now at least. And Yoochun can’t tell if Junsu’s really scared for him or whether Junsu just doesn’t want to be alone but the look in Junsu’s eyes is so strangely desperate and so incredibly alive that Yoochun goes with him.
Junsu only lets go of his wrist when they’re in the lobby of the building and he lets it go slow and reluctant as if he thinks Yoochun will try to leave again or as if he needs to keep holding on to know that Yoochun is real.
Junsu’s apartment is tiny. Yoochun imagines that the rent might be close to what he and Jaejoong pay but that Junsu sacrificed size for a postcode that was a little more respectable. Nevertheless, Junsu’s street still sits perched on the edge of the badlands and might easily fall in.
The apartment itself is clean but messy. The bed, though made, is all creases and untucked edges.
When Junsu kisses Yoochun it’s almost the same, standard but with deviations, occasionally edging into desperation-not giving Yoochun a chance to breathe, hands in his hair which pull more than they probably ought to. But there’s a tenderness in Junsu, in the way he touches Yoochun’s skin, runs a fingertip over Yoochun’s ribs slow and methodical as though he could read their rise and fall like Braille. In the way he responds to Yoochun’s occasional hesitance (because Yoochun’s never felt comfortable inside his own skin).
Once, he says “kiss me” and bares his neck and when Yoochun does Junsu makes noises like singing.
None of the lights are on in the apartment, so it just gets brighter and brighter as the sun climbs the height of the building.
Yoochun emerges from Junsu’s shower smelling like herbs but with that hard synthetic edge which tells you that none of those products ever saw the real thing.
Junsu presents him with a silk shirt and tells him to keep it. When Yoochun protests on the grounds that Junsu can’t be any better off than he is, Junsu tells him that he didn’t pay for the shirt and he laughs at Yoochun’s naivety. Singing doesn’t pay for pretty clothes, singing barely pays the rent. But there are a lot of men who don’t even need a reason to buy him a silk shirt or a new watch or to take him out to dinner. To them, Junsu says, it’s as small a thing as shouting someone a drink. So Yoochun takes it and it feels cold against his skin as if it were stone.
Yoochun is ten minutes late for work because he miscalculated how long the walk would be but no one seems to notice. He makes the coffee for the presentation of the song they recorded last night and the fact that he’ll miss it, will probably be taking messages back and forth across the building and not get to see the looks on their faces as Junsu sings that first harrowing note, makes him feel emptier than he’d like to admit. He ought to feel wonderful, ought to feel as though his dreams were coming true. He doesn’t.
It isn’t until after a lunchtime spent in the practice room, writing a song about a boy with desperate eyes, that he hears about the outcome of the presentation. It’s the producer who tells him. He says that they didn’t like it and that they lost the contract and that his neck’s on the line, for sure. And Yoochun doesn’t quite process it even when he gets dragged into a meeting with management where he’s asked why he pulled a stunt like this. The producer defends him because Yoochun can’t seem to muster the energy to defend himself. But the discussion keeps coming in circles back to Yoochun.
Once the damage assessment’s been done on the loss of the contract, all the figures blown wildly out of proportion, Yoochun is fired.
He calls Jaejoong, who asks him where he was last night and then says, all awe, “Yoochun, the apartment, it’s all gone up in flames.”
At the site of his apartment building is strange black exoskeleton and a crowd staring up at it as if it were worse than the things which have been happening every day on these streets.
It doesn’t take long for Yoochun to realise that he’s got nothing left to tie him to the city and he feels so free. He has no rent to pay and no job to show up to. But, instead of running, he stays in the city and clings even closer to the things he’s got: to Jaejoong and the street kids and the childhood friends who’ve fought for the place they grew up. But he’s not staying because he wants to but because he doesn’t know where he’s supposed to run to.
When he goes to the jazz club he takes Jaejoong with him but they don’t mention the fire or about how Yoochun doesn’t have a job anymore and how there won’t be any commercial. And Yoochun doesn’t have any more songs to play-apart from the one about the boy and his eyes and he’s not sure he wants to play that. So they just sit down together and they talk about insignificant things and, when they leave, Jaejoong says that, man, Junsu’s pianist friend is hot. Yoochun laughs and says he’s probably straight.
When Jaejoong asks where next, Yoochun says home and they both laugh even more.
A few months later, Junsu reports that he saw the commercial, the one with their song in it, on TV. He says it was beautiful. Yoochun thinks Junsu must have imagined it until he sees it for himself and then he laughs and he kisses Junsu and says that it’s probably only a matter of time until Junsu’s famous and Junsu laughs, too.
fandom: TVXQ
pairings: Yoochun/Junsu, minor Yoochun/Jaejoong.
rating: R
summary: Tall buildings block out the light and Yoochun writes songs that no one wants to hear. For Junsu, singing is breathing. It doesn't matter that the city is falling apart around them.
author's notes: AU fic, written for mimei for a whole sea of prompts but mostly cities will suck you dry. Warnings for dystopic cities and angst and not-quite-happy endings.
word count: 4300 approx.
In this city, the streets are broken and the only thing holding them together are the rows of houses which wall you in and all those poles strung with cables which keep you all wired up, connected and safe even when you’re all alone. Probably, you’ve lived in this city all your life. It could be any city but it just happens to be this one.
Yoochun is just a boy with no fire in his eyes who writes songs no one seems to want to hear. He sung on a street corner once and felt something close to alive. He’d only earned himself a few silver coins and a plethora of pitying looks but he would have done it forever if he hadn’t been moved along by rich kid with a violin and a busking license who smirked at the way Yoochun’s jeans were all frayed and almost white.
Junsu sings at a jazz club with a piano accompaniment played by a friend who always wanted to be a dancer and would have been if he’d thought he could make a living out of it. Junsu is all show and seriousness because singing means everything to him. Singing means he can get lost for a while and not come back.
Junsu sings whenever he can, he’d sing every word he says if his vocal chords would stand it. When he isn’t singing, he sits in his apartment, waiting for the phone to ring. It never does and this is probably because the only people who care are his family and they won’t call, not because they don’t want to but because they think he’s living the life of his dreams and it would be heartbreaking to keep calling a son who won’t pick up.
Yoochun goes to the jazz club sometimes-when the sky feels heavier on his shoulders than usual or when the apartments empty because what Yoochun hates more than anything is being alone. But he only ever arrives early enough to hear Junsu’s last song of the evening. It’s that one where his voice goes higher and higher like spirals of smoke until the piano’s final note has tailed off and the whole crowd ought to be holding their breath but aren’t. Or it’s the other one, the one where Junsu’s mouth stumbles around the English words but still manages to make the most amazing sounds.
After each show, Yoochun always insists on playing him a song he’s written and Junsu’s pianist always asks for sheet music which Yoochun never has. When Yoochun is eventually allowed to take to the piano each time, his fingers warble ineptly across the keys and they have to wait through ten minutes of painful cacophony before he’s ready to play the song. Junsu imagines that Yoochun composes all these songs on the spot, but the truth is that they’re all written note-for-note in Yoochun’s head, he just has no piano to practise them on.
Each of Yoochun’s songs is a trite pop ballad with lyrics made of phrases he’s heard somewhere else. But each of them sounds beautifully raw coming from Yoochun’s clumsy fingers and untrained throat. Every song echoes empty and forgettable but somehow beautiful so they let him play every time. They let him play even though it’s always the same response: Junsu doesn’t have any room for new songs and even if he did no one would want to hear them. He’s just a singer in a jazz club and every song he’s ever sung is owned by someone else.
But one night, Yoochun sings a song which isn’t a ballad, isn’t an anything, and his fingers skate across the keys with such grace that Junsu isn’t listening to the piano anymore, he hears it but it’s just a perfect backdrop, like it was always there. Yoochun sings a song about the city, about how the city will suck you dry and how those lights will blind you and how it’s your dreams which, in the end, will suffocate you. And Yoochun’s scarred voice is a voice of experience, a tired voice who knows the real meaning of all those words he’s saying, a very different voice from the one he’d used to sing all those contrived ballads.
The response is still the same, because this song is even less usable than all the others, because no one wants to hear the truth. But at the end of this song, Junsu asks where Yoochun lives and if he can call him a taxi. Yoochun doesn’t live far, the worst parts of the city are always near the centre of it, like the circles of hell.
He says he’ll walk but the hole in the toe of his right shoe says different and Junsu’s insistent and has him sharing a ride to that big high-rise where Jaejoong is waiting and will laugh at him if he gets any hint of what’s happened.
Yoochun imagines that Junsu doesn’t live a life that’s anything like his. He imagines a big sitting room with polished wood floors, a grand piano and a leather couch. So when he asks and Junsu gives the name of the street not so far from Yoochun’s own, Yoochun says you’re kidding and won’t accept Junsu’s seriousness saying but you’re- and maybe that sentence was meant to end with ’famous’ or ’successful’ but Junsu slaps his arm, hard enough that it stings and will probably bruise, and laughs a far-too-loud laugh stopping Yoochun in his tracks.
Junsu is so different outside of the jazz club’s mood lighting. He looks so much more real with the city lights framing his face in the window, so much more real and so much more alive.
By contrast, the city lights only serve to make Yoochun look more tired, more broken. The glare of the city pulls the colour from Yoochun’s skin and reflects itself in his empty eyes but Junsu thinks that there’s still something about Yoochun which is attractive. Attractive like a hurricane or a car crash, maybe, but Junsu’s seen more crash sites than beribboned wedding cars so maybe that’s just what he thinks love is.
At the corner before Yoochun’s street, Yoochun has the driver stop. Junsu asks why and Yoochun says it’s because of his roommate. Of course, Junsu asks if it’s a girl and when Yoochun replies that it’s nothing like that he’s probably not being entirely truthful. Jaejoong might as well be a girl, if being ‘a girl’ implies that Yoochun has touched every inch of his skin and woken up tangled in his limbs more times than he can remember, and Yoochun’s sure that’s what Junsu means. The only difference between what Junsu means and the reality of Jaejoong is that Yoochun’s never ever been in love with him. They live together because they can survive together, because they know each other’s flaws and can check them. Once or twice, they’d pretended it could be a romance and they’d tried all those clichéd things but somehow it just didn’t work and they’d fallen back into that old routine and worn each other’s clothes like they were their own.
Yoochun gets out of the taxi, onto the street corner, under a streetlamp which looks like it should be in a movie but there are so many things which ruin the effect. Like the way Yoochun doesn’t look as though he’s feeling anything at all, or the way the light shows up every flaw, that one acne scarred cheek that Junsu hadn’t noticed before. And, oh, the way the building behind him makes him look miniscule and insignificant like he could never ever be a hero.
He hands Junsu what must be more than half the fare-because he feels awkward and he just wants to go home and because he doesn’t understand what’s supposed to happen here-and then he closes the door shut on Junsu and it clangs louder than he’d meant it to.
By the next time they meet, the streets have cracked open and the fissures in the asphalt only grow under the chants of war. Yoochun stops watching the news but he still hears about it every day. The women in the office in their sheer-waisted blazers, pencil skirts and three inch heels talk about it as though it were happening in some other city, some place they’ve never even been.
Yoochun can’t get to sleep most nights for the screams of protest.
When one of the men in the office says impressively to the pretty secretary-rings in her ears you could put a fist through, eyes painted like a Monet-that there was an explosion on Yoochun’s street last night as though it were some novelty, some amusing story from another world, it takes all of Yoochun’s self-control not to deck the guy.
Yoochun’s been working for the same company for almost a year now. They’re just a small firm, perched on a single floor high up in a tower block, but their contracts are phenomenal. Most of what they do is music for TV commercials. The song that plays in the advert where the woman walks down a street and the crowd parts like waves, the company Yoochun works for wrote that. Yoochun had taken the job there hoping to become a session musician but all he’s done all year is fetch coffee for men in designer suits and purchase confectionary for the visiting artistic directors of this or that big company who wanted an eerily calm song to play over the advert for their new range of cars or a catchy melody to play whilst they plug their holiday packages in voiceover so incessantly that no one will ever hear the music.
The one perk of the job is the practice room. It is full of instruments, including some Yoochun doesn’t even know the names of. The company’s composers work, mostly, from home and never use the practice room except for collaborations so it’s almost always empty. Yoochun retreats there whenever he dares and is only caught occasionally and the stern words he receives aren’t enough to deter him from doing it again. He loves the piano in the practice room more than any other he’s ever played not because it looks or sounds better but because it’s perched precariously close to a wall of glass overlooking the city. On nights working overtime for a maverick producer with a crooked smile, he goes into the practice room and plays looking out over the glaring black and phosphorescent city and feels like he’s close to falling out of the room and down into the oblivion of it. (And he wonders if it would be the lights or the darkness which would eat him alive.)
Sometimes the empty practice room is the only thing keeping Yoochun from giving up on his job and spending his afternoons with Jaejoong in the café three streets away which is full of street kids and failed musicians who share their stories, their misery and alcohol in paper bags. Yoochun talks with Jaejoong once or twice about taking to the frontline and actually doing something. Their apartment is full up some nights with refugees whose apartments were broken into in raids (and no one can tell the difference between police raids and gang raids anymore) and other nights its filled with people Jaejoong knows who’ve joined the riots and tell them about what it’s like out there. And Yoochun feels like that world is so much more his own than the office world where his best clothes are still met with frowns and disapproval.
On one of those nights where he’s working overtime for that one producer who prefers to work in an empty building and ignores Yoochun to the extent that its pointless for him to be there at all, Yoochun hears a commotion from down the hall which makes him falter in his attempt at playing a popular sonata he’d found sheet music for in the stack by the coffee machine. It sounds like an argument, an unfamiliar impetuous voice and silences in which he must be being given calm responses. All evening Jaejoong’s been sending him a flurry of messages about how someone started a fire in an apartment down the hall and how no one knows who that person is or why they did it. But all Yoochun has time to think about is how he’s going to deal with this task which isn’t in his job description but which he’s sure he’s expected to do.
In the corridor, outside the door to the editing suite, the producer is facing off with a man in a fancy suit but no tie. On the arm of the stranger is Junsu.
Yoochun stands by the producer’s side asking, as if with authority, what’s going on and Junsu looks up at him eyes wide, like an animal soon to be road kill, but says nothing.
The stranger seems disgruntled, faced with two men who are practically kids and whose shoulders are broader than his and faces handsomer. But the story comes out anyway, he is the CEO of a big company whose commercial they’re making the music for. He says he’s pulling rank on that poor excuse for an artistic director and he wants Junsu’s voice in his commercial. He has to have it. He gets what he wants. There’s no calling anyone this late at night and there’s no telling this guy to call again in the morning to sort it, not if they want to keep the contract, so the producer agrees and the CEO leaves them standing opposite a Junsu who still seems shell-shocked.
Yoochun makes coffee whilst the producer explains how this has got to be finished tonight. They’re playing it to the artistic team tomorrow and all their necks are on the line if they lose this contract because it’s one hell of a contract.
And, somehow, Yoochun’s become a part of this. He’s sat behind the glass in the studio with a set of headphones on listening to Junsu straining downwards to fit with the track they’d had laid down last week but the track’s all bass and synth and not built for any voice at all, let alone Junsu’s. It’s for one of those car adverts, one of those adverts which starts in a tunnel and then emerges onto that big green landscape and mountains and a long road winding endless and empty. One of those nowhere landscapes which could be anywhere, anywhere but here.
Junsu sings over and over, sings lyrics taken from a stock pile, sings wordless melodies. Once, the producer tells him to sing his favourite song and Junsu sings, neck craning toward the ceiling, voice high and beautiful and it’s a lullaby, the kind that Yoochun’s mother never sang him.
When they play it back with the instrumental track, the voice and the synth grate and it’s all out of tune.
It isn’t until a second coffee break, that Junsu asks why Yoochun doesn’t just lay down a piano track for it. It seems both obvious and ridiculous. Yoochun’s not a professional, he’s not even very good but they’ve trawled through enough stock tapes to know that the studio hasn’t got any alternative music to offer.
The piano in the studio is imposingly perfect. Its black top is all gloss and its keys are perfect white like the teeth of actors on TV.
They don’t warm up, just go straight into recording endless compositions which have been sat in the stock room for probably longer than Yoochun’s been there. Some of them have words and some of them don’t so sometimes Junsu is left to improvise over the top of them or sing strange wordless harmonies eerie enough to put Yoochun on edge.
Jaejoong doesn’t stop calling or sending messages all night so Yoochun has to turn his phone off because this feels, somehow, more important.
Soon, Junsu’s voice is starting to wear out and time seems to be plummeting faster and faster, they’re all losing patience and optimism. And then Junsu says, in a whisper but all theatrical like this is a game and he’s playing the conspirator, that Yoochun should play that song, the one about the city, the one about the lights. And Yoochun writes the lyrics, clumsy and half illegible over a typed copy of a song about first love. And Junsu tells the producer that he thinks he’s found a good one.
For the first take, they record Junsu and the piano both at once, and it crumbles and unravels because Yoochun’s tired and he barely even remembers the song, he thinks that it’s just another song, and because Junsu can’t read that word in the bridge and has to make it up. But the producer, who knows a good thing when he sees it, and who’s young and idealistic enough to want to make a clumsy and imperfect song pristine, tells Yoochun to play it over and asks Junsu to learn the words by the time he’s done recording the piano. And it works, and it’s beautiful.
Yoochun listens to it when he’s back on the other side of the glass, listens to Junsu’s voice as it aches, all rough edges because he’s been singing all night. Junsu sings like this is the last song he’ll ever sing, as if he were selling his voice just for this one song to be perfect. In truth, Junsu sings every song this way, eyes closed, neck arching, as if singing were breathing but Yoochun’s never noticed it before because he’s never felt this desperate for something to go right.
When the producer sends them home at five a.m. and tells them to get some sleep because they deserve it, he doesn’t tell them which song he’s going to mix because it’s obvious. They can feel it in their bones.
Outside, under the glare of streetlamps and passing headlights, Junsu suggests a taxi. Yoochun doesn’t know why he agrees. He’s got to be at work in a few hours and he hasn’t got the money. He ought to lie curled up on a cold metal bench and try to sleep for a few hours. But he says, yeah, alright, why not.
The taxi driver is a man with a cut above his eye and who rolls down the window to say that there’s rioting, to say that everywhere within half a mile of Yoochun’s apartment is unapproachable. They still clamber in without thinking about it until Junsu says the name of the road he lives on just as Yoochun asks the driver to take them as close to his apartment as he dares. And they turn to look at each other for a few long seconds before Yoochun tells the driver to ignore him and go with what Junsu said because he was going to have to walk almost as far anyway.
The streets are as near empty as they get but, aside from the eerie glow of sunrise, there’s no sign that the city’s any different from the last time they’d taken a taxi together, awkward and near silent. Junsu thinking that Yoochun ought to be beautiful and almost is. Yoochun wondering what it would be like to be Junsu.
When they pull up outside Junsu’s apartment building, Junsu pays the driver without consulting Yoochun.
The light outside the taxi is still barely existent because the buildings are overshadowing the sun. Yoochun mumbles something about thank you for the ride and makes as if to leave but Junsu grabs his wrist to stop him. He says that if it’s as bad as the taxi driver made out, maybe Yoochun shouldn’t go back there, not right now at least. And Yoochun can’t tell if Junsu’s really scared for him or whether Junsu just doesn’t want to be alone but the look in Junsu’s eyes is so strangely desperate and so incredibly alive that Yoochun goes with him.
Junsu only lets go of his wrist when they’re in the lobby of the building and he lets it go slow and reluctant as if he thinks Yoochun will try to leave again or as if he needs to keep holding on to know that Yoochun is real.
Junsu’s apartment is tiny. Yoochun imagines that the rent might be close to what he and Jaejoong pay but that Junsu sacrificed size for a postcode that was a little more respectable. Nevertheless, Junsu’s street still sits perched on the edge of the badlands and might easily fall in.
The apartment itself is clean but messy. The bed, though made, is all creases and untucked edges.
When Junsu kisses Yoochun it’s almost the same, standard but with deviations, occasionally edging into desperation-not giving Yoochun a chance to breathe, hands in his hair which pull more than they probably ought to. But there’s a tenderness in Junsu, in the way he touches Yoochun’s skin, runs a fingertip over Yoochun’s ribs slow and methodical as though he could read their rise and fall like Braille. In the way he responds to Yoochun’s occasional hesitance (because Yoochun’s never felt comfortable inside his own skin).
Once, he says “kiss me” and bares his neck and when Yoochun does Junsu makes noises like singing.
None of the lights are on in the apartment, so it just gets brighter and brighter as the sun climbs the height of the building.
Yoochun emerges from Junsu’s shower smelling like herbs but with that hard synthetic edge which tells you that none of those products ever saw the real thing.
Junsu presents him with a silk shirt and tells him to keep it. When Yoochun protests on the grounds that Junsu can’t be any better off than he is, Junsu tells him that he didn’t pay for the shirt and he laughs at Yoochun’s naivety. Singing doesn’t pay for pretty clothes, singing barely pays the rent. But there are a lot of men who don’t even need a reason to buy him a silk shirt or a new watch or to take him out to dinner. To them, Junsu says, it’s as small a thing as shouting someone a drink. So Yoochun takes it and it feels cold against his skin as if it were stone.
Yoochun is ten minutes late for work because he miscalculated how long the walk would be but no one seems to notice. He makes the coffee for the presentation of the song they recorded last night and the fact that he’ll miss it, will probably be taking messages back and forth across the building and not get to see the looks on their faces as Junsu sings that first harrowing note, makes him feel emptier than he’d like to admit. He ought to feel wonderful, ought to feel as though his dreams were coming true. He doesn’t.
It isn’t until after a lunchtime spent in the practice room, writing a song about a boy with desperate eyes, that he hears about the outcome of the presentation. It’s the producer who tells him. He says that they didn’t like it and that they lost the contract and that his neck’s on the line, for sure. And Yoochun doesn’t quite process it even when he gets dragged into a meeting with management where he’s asked why he pulled a stunt like this. The producer defends him because Yoochun can’t seem to muster the energy to defend himself. But the discussion keeps coming in circles back to Yoochun.
Once the damage assessment’s been done on the loss of the contract, all the figures blown wildly out of proportion, Yoochun is fired.
He calls Jaejoong, who asks him where he was last night and then says, all awe, “Yoochun, the apartment, it’s all gone up in flames.”
At the site of his apartment building is strange black exoskeleton and a crowd staring up at it as if it were worse than the things which have been happening every day on these streets.
It doesn’t take long for Yoochun to realise that he’s got nothing left to tie him to the city and he feels so free. He has no rent to pay and no job to show up to. But, instead of running, he stays in the city and clings even closer to the things he’s got: to Jaejoong and the street kids and the childhood friends who’ve fought for the place they grew up. But he’s not staying because he wants to but because he doesn’t know where he’s supposed to run to.
When he goes to the jazz club he takes Jaejoong with him but they don’t mention the fire or about how Yoochun doesn’t have a job anymore and how there won’t be any commercial. And Yoochun doesn’t have any more songs to play-apart from the one about the boy and his eyes and he’s not sure he wants to play that. So they just sit down together and they talk about insignificant things and, when they leave, Jaejoong says that, man, Junsu’s pianist friend is hot. Yoochun laughs and says he’s probably straight.
When Jaejoong asks where next, Yoochun says home and they both laugh even more.
A few months later, Junsu reports that he saw the commercial, the one with their song in it, on TV. He says it was beautiful. Yoochun thinks Junsu must have imagined it until he sees it for himself and then he laughs and he kisses Junsu and says that it’s probably only a matter of time until Junsu’s famous and Junsu laughs, too.