trees without leaves (1/2)
yoochun/junsu & jaejoong/yunho & junsu/boa
angst
pg13
8097 words
Yunho is half reading by the window, skimming sentences and skipping words when Jaejoong knocks hesitant, admitting himself in and closing the door behind him before there’s even time for Yunho to mark his page.
“I need to-…” he begins before pausing for a moment, turning back to lock the door almost as an afterthought.
“I need to tell you something.”
An unsettled feel gathers in Jaejoong’s corner of the room and Yunho lays his paperback onto his lap, watches the other man slump hopeless against the door, trying to piece thoughts into words.
Seconds lurch clumsy into a minute, two stretching lazy to three and Jaejoong stares at the floor, the walls, sheets of the bed; makes it seem as if he’d find answers in the pale colored duvet or the right words somewhere in the shades of wallpaper colors dark.
“Jaejoong.”
The sound of his own name somewhat jolts him back into the room and Yunho toys with the cover of his book, running fingertips over broken spines.
“Are you going to tell me?” he asks softly and waits until Jaejoong does, in halting sentences, hushed revelations.
-
“I hate it, I hate it so much,” whispered at the end, bitter tasting and it drains him, every syllable said bringing him a little more closer to his knees until he sits with his back against the door, folding and unfolding his fingers. Steeples falling, rebuilding.
“Yunho, what do we do?”
There is a heartbeat’s worth of silence before the words are out of Yunho’s mouth, a little too fast and a little too loud, regret-tinged breath following after.
“This has nothing to do with us.”
“Define us.”
Jaejoong raises his voice a little, meeting Yunho’s eyes when he looks up from his hands.
“Tell me again how they aren’t us.”
“Leave band politics out of this; how can you even be sure anyways?”
“Can you honestly say you haven’t noticed anything? Nothing at all?” he retorts, skirting round the question.
He starts twining his fingers together again, Yunho watching him, always watching but never doing anything beyond the call of duty.
“Junho is a bad liar, I can’t just do nothing,” he finally says, voice back to something over a whisper and this is Jaejoong at his best, his worst; loyal to a breaking point.
“You’ll have to.”
“And watch it come undone knowing I could have stopped it? It’s not that this has nothing to do with us, it’s just the fact that you don’t want to have anything to do with this.”
“Listen to yourself, Jae-ah. Just listen. You could have stopped it? Nothing is ever just that simple anymore, okay? It’s not just the fact of sitting him down and talking sense to him because at this point and time, do you even know who to lay the blame on?”
“Yoochun loves him,” he hisses back in a reply that’s almost furious, getting up so he can talk without looking up to Yunho; without feeling small and naïve and just so utterly hopeless.
“He loves him so fucking much and you still don’t know who’s at fault here?”
“Is it that simple? Untangling who loves who more and why?”
In the next room, Changmin turns the music up on his headphones to drown out the sound of voices, doors slamming. Jaejoong stalks past the empty rooms and some part of him makes him wait a few seconds at the door; another part of him expecting another set of footsteps to his and a voice saying no, wait Jaejoong. He turns at the silence and Yunho is standing in the corridor to the living room, wordless.
“I’m sorry, I just need to get my thoughts together,” he mumbles in Yunho’s general direction and grasps for the car keys on the table. Yunho watches him leave, a mouthful of unsaid words lodged in his throat.
“I’m sorry, too.”
The door clicks shut and he wonders if Jaejoong heard him. Later, when elevator doors slide open, he’ll push past Yoochun, “No I’m fine,” to a “Do you want me come?”
-
There is the unmistakable click whirr click of a camera from their left when they step into 2am illuminated hotel lobbies, hands untangling to instinctively to shield guilty faces. He swears under his breath and over the haze of adrenaline highs, the tastes of things a few steps down from forbidden, he tells the photographer to kindly back off; something rehearsed about privacy and how if he doesn’t hand the memory card over in five four three two one, he’ll be out of a job at this time tomorrow.
The photographer stares him down, hand tightening over the precious black leather casing.
“No.”
“What do you-”
The other man breaks into a run, taking off in the midst of sleepy eyed tourists waiting to check in at the lobby and Junsu calls a “Wait for me at the car; I’ll meet you there,” over his shoulder before going after the fleeing man, past wide-eyed receptionist and doormen, weaving through a jet-lagged crowd at the entrance.
Damn he thinks in his head and watches the man start to sprint towards the road, camera bag slung over one shoulder.
-
Jaejoong drives unfocused to the sound of his cell buzzing in the shotgun seat, four missed calls, two texts and counting; Changmin probably wanting something from a convenience store, Yunho probably calling to check where he is and when he’ll be back. The fifth one starts up and Jaejoong lets it ring on, cutting into late night Seoul traffic as he takes an exit back into the city.
Hotels, drab business buildings with some of their windows still lighted from the inside spring up on his right and the thin needle of the speedometer forces itself upwards like it always does when he passes commercial areas, road disappearing a little faster under moving metal frames. There’s another text now and the car interior is lighted up for a quarter of a moment, Jaejoong tapping his fingers thoughtfully on the wheel as he contemplates reading it.
Pick up damn you, let me know you’re not lying on some street dying and btw Changmin wants milk
He smiles at the screen, Yunho’s almost sad attempt at pretending to be flippant starting to tug a reply from him and one thumb brushes over the keypad, ask if he wants full cream or
Something darts across the road, goes sprawling before his car and Jaejoong swears out loud, swerves too fast and brakes too slow, crashing through the now seemingly flimsy barrier that separates road from river. For a moment, it holds.
And gives way.
-
It’s true, what they say about not being able to look away from car accidents.
Junsu stands transfixed at the revolving doors, watches in stunned silence as the photographer trips in the middle of the road, car missing the unmoving body by mere inches before spinning out of control. “Oh my god,” comes a whisper from behind him and the car goes under, people trickling out from the hotel at the sound of crunching metal.
“Oh my god.”
-
Dying is more painful, far scarier than he expects and Jaejoong claws at the door and the glass until his hands are bloody, skin of his fingertips broken in a dozen places from too futile, too desperate attempts. Water seeps in from the cracks he makes and one final blow to the driver seat’s window pane lets in an icy flow that takes his breath away, steals air in the form of escaping bubbles that race away when he forgets to not breathe; pushing himself through, past the jagged edges of glass into the murky darkness.
Did I hit him god no don’t let me die, don’t let him die no please did anyone see did
Coherent thought fights to separate itself away from his fading consciousness, fear and the sudden burning in his lungs making him gasp, shiver from the inside out when cold water forces itself down his throat.
don’t let me die don’t let me don’t let
He thrashes and for a moment, for two, four, ten it seems like he doesn’t know which way the surface is, bubbles leading the way far too fast for him to follow.
Yunho, he thinks. Yunho Junsu mother Yoochun father Changmin everyone
Another wave of terror makes him inhale and he finds he can’t stop; a vicious cycle of screaming, breathing, a bitter rush to the end.
don’t let me
Kim Jaejoong dies a hand’s reach away from the surface.
-
Half a city away, Changmin dangles Yunho’s phone by its strap, eating cereal straight from the box.
ask if he wants full cream or
Another handful of frosted cornflakes and it’s odd, the fact that he’s still waiting after a good five minutes for the usual ah damn sorry hit send before I meant to.
“Yah, Yunho, come here a minute.”
-
“Junsu.”
Someone pulls at his elbow and he tears his eyes away from the skid marks, the gaping hole in the metal barrier. Far off in the distance, he thinks he hears the wail of ambulance sirens.
“Junsu we need to go.”
There’s a small crowd gathering at the riverside, the sound of voices shouting, panicky tones that drift ethereal towards them from a road away. The tug on his elbow turns into a firm grasp now and he turns to follow, two backs retreating inconspicuous against the flow of people into the lobby. Later, when they drive past the accident scene in his car, Junsu slows down despite himself and he guesses that they’ve got the body out of the water, paramedics swarming round it like ants to a corpse.
“That poor man,” she says softly before the scene peels away from his window and Junsu mumbles a prayer out of habit; feels the extraordinary urge to call home after just find out who’s still awake, who’s going to be glaring him down when he troops through the door at 3am.
“Watch the road.”
“Sorry.”
The feeling passes and he drives one handed, her hand intertwined with his other.
-
We are sorry, the number you are trying to reach is not available. Please try again later.
“Should we be worried?”
“Nah. Come to the store down the road with me for a moment? Eight chances out of ten, he probably won’t even remember the milk.”
“Yoochun?”
“Out on the roof, probably won’t be back before 3am. God, why he can’t compose in a room like the rest of us normal people constantly eludes me.”
-
Arms are lifting him when he comes to, vision blurred to the point where colors merge and shift every few seconds.
“Who should we contact?”
“Oh my god is that really him?”
“Everyone out of the way please, out of the way.”
Trying to breathe hurts, the sound of his own lungs striving far too hard to draw breaths through the oxygen mask scaring him to the point where it makes sense to stop. It hurts, hurts far more than anything he’s ever known, something pulling him away from himself, conscious thought a haze as he tries to grip on to something, anything, the sound of crowd murmurs, the feel of fingers pressed against his wrist.
“We lost the pulse.”
No, he thinks, no I’m right here, I’m still here.
“Time of death, 2.32am.”
He wants to shake the paramedic, yell for him to fucking look at me, I’m alive, I’m alive I-
And it all comes crashing down that no, he isn’t, can’t be. Not when he’s watching them cover his face with the sheet, not when he’s staring down at himself from a viewpoint that feels too wrong.
I’m here. Look at me, I’m here.
No one hears him, feels him when he reaches for them skin and flesh now something more like…
I’m still here.
Something more like smoke and mirrors.
-
You have: 3 new messages. Press 1 to hear the first message.
#1- Is Jaejoong with you? Call me back as soon as you can, I just got something from management and it isn’t good.
#2- Why aren’t any of you picking up? Don’t tell me everyone’s already asleep, I’ll be back soon I swear. Yunho-yah don’t kill me I swear I’ll be able to wake up tomorrow okay?
#3- Call me back right now.
You now have no new messages.
-
Junsu’s cell beeps in its holder and he puts the call on speaker, passenger seat now empty.
“Yeah?”
“Where is everyone? I tried their cells, the house, nothing. Ok that’s not important now, I’m pretty sure it’s nothing but I need to know, where’s Jaejoong?”
His manager’s voice comes out strained through the tinny cell speakers, Junsu stopping for a red light.
“Jaejoong? I’m out now, I have no idea. I tried the house a moment ago and it’s the same, didn’t go for their cells though. Most likely they’ve gone on some exodus to the store for something and forgot to take their phones with them.”
“…you’re right, that’s more likely than-…”
“Than what?”
Junsu lets a nervous suspicion creep into his words and the car behind him honks impatiently, urging him to move.
“Ah it’s nothing really, some fan called the management all hysterical, convinced that one of Dongbangshinki just died in front of her eyes in some horrendous road accident, just wait until Jaejoong hears this.”
There’s a pause here for nervous laughter, sleep tinged and a little too relieved.
“We always get a few of them in a year and-…”
“It’s a road accident, right? He didn’t drown or anything, did he?”
“How’d you know? Heh, the story must’ve been more popular than I thought, according to her, his car went through the barrier and straight into the Han River, apparently swerved to avoid some bozo in the middle of the road, lost control and all that. If you ask me, that’s a tad more detailed than the ones we usually get but…Junsu? Junsu you still there?”
-
Jaejoong stands beside his body, watches the world pass by, through, around him in a haze. The shrill scream of ambulance sirens, the sound of too many people and too many conversations, cameras flashing. He reaches for the white sheet they’ve covered his face with, grasps and tries to just fucking touch but it feels like reaching for sunlight, hand going through like some complicated illusion. A wild thought winds its way past the mayhem and perhaps, perhaps you are the illusion but Jaejoong wills it away; there’ll be time for that soon enough.
A second try, third, sixth, seventh and it takes grit teeth and narrowed eyes for the cloth to materialize for a split second under his fingers before it falls away again, exposing ashen skin to the crowd that Jaejoong turns his face from, breathing hard from the effort of just touching; forcing it. Colors seep slow from his fingertips and he can feel the sour taste of bile rise from the back of his throat, the thought from before coming up with it.
Perhaps you are the illusion
“No, no I’m here,” he whispers to himself and watches them take his body away, harsh floodlights from filming television crews throwing no shadows on the ground where he stands.
Perhaps you are
“No.”
A newscaster walks past him and a sharp floral scent trails after her, last minute perfume for a last minute late night story. He reaches for her jacket and it flutters through his fingers.
Perhaps.
-
He rides in the ambulance, careful not to touch anything, not the metal railing of the bed his body lies on, not the white walls he’s tempted to lean on. Only the spaces where his feet touch the ground feel real enough for now and he takes to sitting cross legged on the floor now, studies the worn sneakers of the lone medical attendant riding in the back with him.
“I like your shoes,” he says softly to the sound of one man’s silence and they go over a bump, the man swearing something about the bloody roads and how he should’ve traded this shift for the next.
He thinks he won’t be able to look when they call his parents, his family, the other members to identify the body but the moment they stumble wordless through the double doors, he’s fixated. Can’t stop watching, memorizing how his mother looks like when she cries, how his sisters break off into tiny huddles in different ends of the room to hold each other because
Perhaps you are an illusion
Yunho clasps a shaky hand on his mother’s shoulder when they pass each other on her way out, him going in with the rest of Dongbangshinki in tow. It’s Yoochun who cries first, as always, Junsu tugging him away from the bedside with wet eyes, Changmin shepherding them out without even so much a glance at the body on the table.
“And then there was one,” Jaejoong whispers close to him and Yunho stands alone, pulls back the covers from his face and touches his hair, the side of his cheek. He closes his eyes and the feeling is gone, flutter of phantom fingers shrinking back when Yunho jerks his hand away almost guiltily.
“Jaejoong,” he says to an empty room and Jaejoong echoes with his name, “Yunho, Yunho,” twofold, twice as loud, twice as hurting because doesn’t it always hurt more to watch and never have rather than to leave and never turn back?
You are an illusion
For a moment, he reaches for Yunho, tries to catch hold and for a moment he half stops, makes as if to turn at the brush of his fingers against his back but it passes and he’s gone; Jaejoong on his knees watching Yunho leave, taking a little of his color away with him.
-
They bury him in the shade of a small grassy hill, a silent car drive away from the little town he used to dream big from, plain wood casket that looks almost forlorn in the sandy hole they’ve lowered it into. There’s an empty seat between Yoochun and Changmin, a handful of wildflowers where he would have sat and their sad little colorful heads droop, slowly wilting in the noonday heat.
Yoochun hides red rimmed eyes behind dark shades but he takes them off soon enough, blinking back tears that mark obvious trails down his cheek in the sunshine. He’s not the only one crying, others having saved enough tears from the wake to hunch with shaking shoulders.
Family members comprising of blank faced sisters, bewildered nieces trying to comprehend the fact that the nice man who used to take pictures with them and do their hair up in messy pony tails won’t ever be coming back. They take up the two foremost rows, Dongbangshinki (“We are, we are,” Changmin tells the rest of them through grit teeth on the very first night and doesn’t let anyone clean up the mess Jaejoong made before he left) pushed back into the third.
“I...I actually had everything written out here.”
Yunho is standing in the front, crumpled sheet of paper making dry, dying sounds as he crushes it in his fist. “A whole eulogy and the works, things I think and I know I should say but...yeah.” He steals a glance at the sad, deformed paper ball he’s created and slips it discreetly into his pocket.
“Words don’t really justify what I want to say.”
Jaejoong has folded himself in front of his chair, legs pulled up to his chin on the dry ground where he can feel the dirt beneath his palms but not the grass, phantom blades of green wavering through his fingers the one time he forgets and tries to pick at them, distractions in the form of little deaths that elude him now.
“...it’s the little things, like standing in formation only to realize we’re one man short, finding his things in our closets, simple things like these that-...”
Frustrating, to reach for something you know you can’t touch and Jaejoong digs his nails into his palm instead, stares at the half moon imprints he leaves. Distractions in the form of temporary tattoos that fade too soon and hurt too little.
“-...and eight years aren’t enough to know a person, barely enough to say we actually had an inkling about what it really meant to know, to love Jaejoong. But we had eight years; at least, we can say we tried. Eight crazy, rollercoaster ride-wild, unforgettable years to skim the surface of him and for that, we’re thankful enough.”
He pauses for a moment, the beginnings of a sad little smile playing at the corners of his lips when he looks over to the one empty seat in the mass of black clad mourners and Jaejoong can feel him look right through him.
It’s the saddest he feels in a long time.
-
There are flowers on the makeshift table in the shade of leafy trees; white blooms he can’t name, stalks of chrysanthemums left over from the ones they border his photo with lying beside a handful of folded letters penned hastily when Junsu had mentioned flip about Heaven’s Postman and how Jaejoong would have gotten a kick out of this. Jaejoong stands in the shadows of trees now, having left the others the moment Changmin started crying quietly above him, tears exchanged for leaves falling every now and then, and they pass right through him like everything else.
It’s doesn’t even have to be discreet when he picks up the first one, no one looking his way as he snatches the topmost from the pile and sinks to his knees behind the table from the exertion, the sight of fleeing colors making him dizzy. He reads to himself over the sound of his own eulogy, Yunho’s words sounding far away enough to feel surreal from where he’s huddled.
I’ll miss you, the first one says simply with Changmin’s name scrawled on the bottom right hand corner and the sight of it brings another wave of nausea, Jaejoong standing to let it fall back on the pile, hands shaky.
“When we first debuted, no one really knew what to do with Jaejoong, the way he’d blurt out things we were all thinking but would never dare to say, the way he did each performance like it was his last.”
There’s something here I don’t think I’ll ever tell anyone else, not even Junho, not Yoochun, not anyone, Junsu’s starts off, and there’s a crossed out sentence after that, messy and done hard enough to make the paper tear, black mark stark and ugly.
Do people in heaven already know everything? They never did find the camera after that, god knows where it is now. Maybe on the river bank, maybe crushed beyond recognition. Is it alright for me to be glad? Because I am and she is too, I don’t think any of us would be able to go through another round of media frenzies. No no, just look at me now, Jae. Talking about simple things like that to you when you’re dead, isn’t it just stupid and me-ish. I’m sorry. I’m sorry for being selfish, I’m sorry for being the catalyst in this, I’m sorry I lied but I’m still doing it now.
“Most people, fans, usually, always have the most inaccurate notions when it comes to characterizing each of our roles outside of the industry, but one of the few things they got right was the fact that Jaejoong is, I say is because he’s still alive to us in too many ways to count, Jaejoong is the…the bond, glue, if you will, that holds us all together. Of course, there isn’t a Dongbangshinki anymore now-”
I’m sorry you never got to tell Yoochun what you knew was happening, I’m sorry you kept it to yourself until the very last minute, Yunho can’t look me in the eye some days now, it doesn’t take the guilt away but… but what, it makes me feel better? Makes me want to stop? I can’t, Jae-ah, that’s the worst part, I don’t think I ever will.
An addiction, you should know something about that shouldn’t you? With you and your late night smoke, Yunho always, always nagging you to stop. I’ll miss that. You and Yoochun going up to the roof to compose, sneaking the cigarettes along, did you know I always knew? That something I’ve wanted to say is somewhere up there now, now that I’ve said it, would you ever find it in yourself to forgive me? Because I don’t think I could, myself.
Jaejoong reads it a few times over, a quiet sort of hurt in his almost-heart causing almost-tears to gather in his eyes but they don’t fall, something that tastes like regret, a tinge of bitterness behind it all making him blink them away. Maybe ghosts aren’t supposed to cry for the living, not for themselves, not for anything.
It’s vague, whatever Junsu really wanted to say but there’re enough words to convince Jaejoong that he was right the first time around, making him feel a surge of sadness for Yoochun, for Junsu. For things that should and could’ve been. He looks over to where they’re still sitting, set apart from the rest by one unfilled chair, Junsu leaning over to Yoochun’s shoulder to whisper something about some shared memory Yunho has brought up.
“It’s okay,” Jaejoong says aloud and sets the letter back in its place, voice unheard. Junsu hides a sad smile behind one hand and Yoochun reaches for a hand that’s pulled away too fast.
“It’s okay.”
-
Yoochun’s is straightforward enough, something about him hating Jaejoong for being a stupid bastard and getting himself killed, now he would have to write a tribute as expected and this is going to sound insane, sickly so, but I always thought we would leave together. All five of us, Dongbangshinki to the end. We still are, aren’t we? I’m talking like some deluded fangirl now, I’m sorry, grief does that to a person. Wherever you are, Jaejoong (you’d better be in heaven or I’ll kick you), whoever you might be now (please don’t be reborn as something stupid like Junsu), whatever you’re doing (is the afterlife fun?) now, don’t forget us. Because we sure won’t ever forget you.
“I’m not going to say anything along the lines of how he died living or how we’re here to celebrate his life since Jaejoong would probably hit me in the arm for saying that but I just want everyone here to know that he lived; he lived life, loved it, and I would like to think he loved the people in it as well, with just as much passion as we loved him back.”
When he comes to Yunho’s, he’s not even sure that he wants to read it, the thin sheet of paper suddenly far too heavy in his grasp, but Yunho is finishing up their memories, their old hopes and dreams and he’s going to have to read this now or live (ha.ha.ha. he thinks in a sudden bout of choking dark humor) not ever knowing.
“Yunho-ah, will I regret this?”
Somewhere not too far away, Yunho pauses for a heartbeat too long between sentences, Jaejoong unfolding the letter with unsteady hands. Ghosts aren’t supposed to cry anyway.
I have so many questions left for you, too many for one lifetime to contain but there you go, moving onto the next. Jaejoong Jaejoong Jaejoong, there’s still so many things I want you to promise me, promise me that somehow you’ll still love, still find a way to live because you’ll be living for us both, it feels hard to do that right now.
I love you, how many times will I have to say it before you hear me? You can hear me from up there, right?
“I just hope heaven is still in one piece when the rest of us get there.”
I love you.
Jaejoong finds that ghosts can cry.
-
Jaejoong stands with the rest of them when the pastor in the front tells them to; Let us pray ringing in his ears as he shuffles his feet on the dirt, watching Changmin keep his eyes open as usual. Yunho stares at the ground with his hands clasped loosely, Junsu slipping his own out of Yoochun’s to lace fingers together in a tight inseparable mess of skin and bone that turns his knuckles white.
He puts Yunho’s letter down almost reluctantly on the pile and when it’s all over, Jaejoong stands teetering on the edges of his open grave as they fill it; dirt over hidden regrets, promises, confessions penned down.
Junsu crumples his before he throws it, tear stains making the words run as he does and Yunho adds the forgotten eulogy in his pocket almost as an afterthought, Jaejoong watching with the extraordinary urge to go down there and retrieve it. Changmin is the last to throw his in, paper crane of almost empty writing paper fluttering onto its side before it disappears under another shovelful of soil, him turning his face away when that happens.
-
Later, walking back to the car, someone will breathe look in a half whisper and heads will crane skyward, Yunho crying openly now as they watch pearl-red balloons drift towards the summer clouds, up up and away to wherever freed balloons go.
“They never stop, don’t they?”
“Catch a few for us, Jae-ah.”
Changmin is the one that gathers them together; one last time with Jaejoong’s space left empty in their unusually loose circle.
“Dongbangshinki, hwaiting!” he says softly, the sound of three other voices loud enough to drown his out and make people stop and stare as usual. Jaejoong stands a little to the side, mouthing along to the words, no space for him left now.
-
When they get back, life tries to ease itself into some sort of normality, circles trying to fit in spaces made for squares. Time feels like city traffic; slow, lurching forward in sudden bursts of life, moving even when it feels like everything has come to a standstill.
There’s no need for managers now and there’s more than enough rooms left over for everyone, Yoochun silently claiming their old workroom as his and locking himself inside, composing. Jaejoong follows him inside most days, watches him smoke with the window open and play snippets of sad melodies on their keyboard, lyrical sounding words penned down every now and then.
“Won’t an F sound better?” Jaejoong wants to suggest but Yunho does it for him, Junsu stammering out a suggestion when Yoochun stops him by the door on his way out. “A minor third apart,” he says as Yoochun hums the main theme and shuts the door.
Yunho hadn’t been lying when he’d said he was still alive in too many ways, one of them being his music taste intermingling with their own personal ones until no one can really tell whose is whose. It almost makes Jaejoong smile to hear them saying things he would have said had they been able to hear him, things he would have suggested, and when Yoochun emerges one 3am night with a finished piece and a half empty box of smokes, there’s enough Jaejoong in it to make it sound as if he’d never left.
-
Changmin only nods his approval when Yoochun turns to each of them after the semi-final draft, getting more and more quiet with each day that Jaejoong isn’t there to cook him early morning 4am breakfasts and ask him how the hell he’s supposed to download this mp4 file. There’re hints of unspoken worries on everyone’s faces but there are too many demons to deal with, too many memories to recreate and word out; too many more important things other than a grieving magnae holed up in his room.
“He’ll be fine in a while.”
Yunho voices expectations over a store bought dinner (I could have made something better, thinks Jaejoong almost disdainfully).
“He’ll be alright.”
But by the tail end of two months, Changmin isn’t, sleeping most of the day away, falling into dreamless comfort with his headphones on, music turned loud and staying up through lonely nights at the window, watching Seoul traffic wind itself away from 16 stories up. Junsu goes to sit with him the nights he comes back late (“Talks. Soloing,” he mumbles to Yoochun in half truths and full faced lies), the both of them taking what they can get from this.
“We’re listening, just so you know,” Junsu says and Changmin just nods, face staring out the glass. There’s this tinny sound of bass, guitars, vocals seeping out from Changmin’s ipod and Junsu wonders if he had heard him.
I know.
“Talk to me?”
One hand creeps for another and it feels lifeless in Junsu’s, limp. He squeezes it anyway but it doesn’t feel the same.
-
There should be a sort of sick exhilaration to knowing what the others don’t, hearing secrets meant for one but spoken in a house of four. Junsu calls her every other day, tells her things that make Jaejoong sad for Yoochun, one sided conversations that he sits through for lack of things to do, for Yoochun’s sake some days.
“I haven’t told them yet.”
“When? Soon, I don’t know.”
“Junho found a place.”
“I…I don’t think I can stay here. It’s got nothing to do with him, rest assured but it’s just that…Jaejoong. Everyone else. Facing them, knowing.”
“Of course they don’t know. No one knows.”
A pause while he thinks, biting his bottom lip.
“No. I won’t. Not now at least, what kind of closure will it bring anyway? You won’t either, right?”
“Imagine if they found the camera one day.”
Nervous smile, hint of laughter insincere.
“Near enough, I suppose, living alone is going to be hard for the first few days.”
There is a laugh here now, far from the usual eukyangkyang reserved for five and not four, not one, but Jaejoong doesn’t think he could feel sad for long when Junsu is this happy, eyes lighting up or perhaps that’s just a late afternoon sun illusion.
“Of course you can come over.”
“Yeah. Ok. Ok, I’ll see you then, I can already hear your manager in the background.”
“Go already, scram, you.”
“Have a good stage.”
“I love you.” It comes out far less hesitant than Jaejoong would have expected, the slight pause before it making his heart clench for things that shouldn’t be.
Two rooms and a still unbroken heart away, Yoochun plays one of their sad love songs on the piano.
-
No one really tries to keep things together; nothing much left to keep together anyway after Junsu tells them one morning, Changmin getting up mid-sentence with an unreadable face to go back to sleep, treating it like another bad dream.
“I suppose it’s for the best,” Yunho says slowly and Yoochun stares at the table, the walls, anywhere but at Junsu who sits back straight in his chair, eyes lowered. Yunho waits for an answer from either two before leaving as if nothing happened, as if Junsu hadn’t just told everyone he would be moving out by the end of the week and no, it had nothing to do with Jaejoong.
“Maybe a little,” he lies when Yoochun asks him later, the both of them seated at the kitchen table. Jaejoong stands behind Yunho’s empty seat, tries his hand at guessing conversation flow directions.
“It’s okay.”
“You’re not going to write a song about it, are you?”
Junsu lands a playful punch on Yoochun’s shoulder across the table, standing and almost toppling his coffee when he does.
“Perhaps, I’ll name it The Day I Could Finally Use the Bathroom Without Waiting. It’ll be your first single.”
There is a shred of blessed normality for a moment and it feels like any second now, their managers will walk through the door with Yunho bringing up the rear to yell at them to move move move what part of photo shoot in an hour do you not understand, Changmin slamming doors behind him because yet another download got interrupted.
Junsu’s cell rings and the moment flees, him getting up to take the call someplace where he doesn’t have to hold back so many things at once.
“Do you know?” asks Jaejoong and of course, Yoochun doesn’t reply, just quietly takes Junsu’s coffee mug to the sink to rinse, standing there a few minutes too long for one ceramic mug.
“I would tell you if I could figure out which would hurt less.”
-
Jaejoong follows Yunho around most days, rides in the backseat of his car (a difficult process to master, having to sit with his feet somehow touching the upholstery lest he fall through but he’s got all the time in the world now, doesn’t he?) and plays the silent row of backseat driver, talks to Yunho about his almost-day.
“What do you think of Junsu moving out? Does anyone even know where he’s going?”
The silence is stifling, Yunho tapping a half-hearted rhythm on the steering wheel as he waits for a red light, Jaejoong humming a made up melody to it.
“Where’re we going today?”
Listening to one sided conversations from Junsu makes this sound far easier than it is and Jaejoong lapses into silence, Yunho tuning in to the radio to fill the empty air.
“I like this song.”
“Do you remember who sang it?”
Yunho takes a corner and circles the block for a parking space, Jaejoong pointing out the ones he sees noisily, causing a ruckus in the back that no one can hear and Yunho misses them all the way he usually does, finally slipping into an empty bay after more time than really necessary. It seems like they’re going to pick his younger sister up from school today, no one else free to do it and Yunho having all the time in the world (just like me, thinks Jaejoong with a touch of glee) now that the company is still finalizing their admin positions.
“You really do need me around,” Jaejoong says mock sadly and follows Yunho into the street to wait, talking shadow making one-sided small talk that no one hears.
-
They’re going through Yoochun’s closet together, hunting for lost socks and misplaced shirts that had somehow made their lost, confused ways into the wrong places. There are not-so-neat piles of Junsu’s things in the living room, a growing mound of reclaimed CDs and long lost clothes, creased, forgotten. In the next room, there’s the sound of Yunho’s voice, muffled words through walls as he talks to and not with Changmin, sorting out their own pile of Junsu’s things.
“Why are you really leaving?”
It’s a conversational kind of tone, Yoochun picking out a familiar looking tee from the depths of his cupboard, folding it into a neat square as Junsu picks at the carpet, trying to find the right kind of half truth in its dusty fibers.
“It’s okay if you don’t want to tell me,” he continues on, moving forward to the drawers now, dumping odds and ends onto the floor to shift through. Junsu helps, fingers going out of the way to avoid Yoochun’s.
“It’s not that,” Junsu finally says slowly, hand closing round a faded metal cross that Yoochun had borrowed too many concerts back to count, rusted arms flaking dying-metal flecks as he lifts it up to the light. “It’s not that, Chun-ah. I just don’t know what it really is, myself.” But of course he does, deep down buried beneath nights of fading (rusted, offers his sub consciousness with a hint of self malice tagged onto the ends of the thought, ignored, forgotten) love and hasty kisses to suddenly distant touches, he does know why.
“It’s okay,” Yoochun says again, softer this time and doesn’t mean it.
-
It’s a sunny Thursday when Junsu moves out, boxes of memories pushed across their apartment floor making dry, goodbye kind of noises.
“I don’t want you to go,” is Yoochun’s goodbye to him and this is the part where Junsu is supposed to say ok, I won’t but no one is really going by their roles anymore, Changmin wandering out of his room at ten in the morning only to go back in again at the sight of packed lives dragged away, Yunho standing around just watching another part of himself walking away.
“I really don’t want you to go.”
And this is the part where Junsu should say what if you came with me? but he doesn’t, just says “Come over, okay?” and kisses Yoochun on the neck when no one is looking, no one except a ghost in a lonely corner who turns his face away at the sight, watches the movers tramp in and out the open front door.
Changmin won’t come out of his room so Junsu goes to him instead, sits beside him on the bed for a minute before he figures Changmin isn’t going to say anything unless he does and even then, he can’t be too sure.
“You’ll be okay?”
He waits for a curt if I said no, it won’t change a thing now wouldn’t it? but today is a day of unspoken things, Changmin angling himself ever so slightly away from Junsu when he lays a hand on a on terse shoulder.
“Changmin.”
It’s shrugged off and Junsu takes his hand back, hides the hurt in his eyes by standing to go.
“You’ll call me when you want to talk, right?”
Changmin locks the door after Junsu walks out; can’t bear to watch another person leave.
-
Their apartment is something close to empty now, Jaejoong walking in and out of rooms through walls and closed doors to pass the time. Sometimes he talks to Changmin, a reenactment of past one sided phone conversations eavesdropped on; tells Changmin what he thinks of that new song he’s just listened to, wondering out loud what time Yunho will be back today.
Other times he sits up on the roof with Yoochun, breathing in tasteless cigarette smoke and catching fleeing sheets of torn notebook pages before they float away on smog tinted winds the nights Yoochun falls asleep under the sky, forgets to weigh his thoughts down.
“Careless bugger,” Jaejoong scolds him and topples over and out into open air one autumn twilight while chasing a song about lost love, the world tilting skywards as the painted clouds fall up above him.
He thinks he would have screamed if the air hadn’t ripped itself out of his lungs on the way down, arms flailing and heart thump thump thumping a painful tattoo in his throat. It doesn’t hurt when he hits the ground, like one of those falling dreams where you wake up with a start in your own bed except for the fact that this time around, it’s hard sidewalk asphalt instead of 400 thread count sheets.
Jaejoong lies breathless on his back the very first time around, staring up at the falling sheets of paper and it’s only a cold realization that ghosts can’t die later, watching Yoochun stride out onto the street to rescue runaway lines from the night damp that he finds it in himself to stand, shaky.
“I’m okay,” he tells a turned back and closing door.
-
By the time the trees are starting to lose their leaves, Jaejoong has jumped far too many times to count, taken running leaps off the tallest buildings he can find.
Under starlight, in the rain but nothing can beat taking the stairs to the top floor of anywhere just before first light, standing on the edge and falling spread-eagled back down to a waking world. Amidst fake suicides half-fueled by boredom and something like bad bungee jumps, Jaejoong finds that he’s missing something very important.
He’s doing it alone.
-
Jaejoong tries to memorize the roads Yunho takes to Junsu’s place, staring out the semi-tinted glass at passing signs, people, places. Yoochun fiddles with the radio and something jazz-tinged fills the car, Changmin pausing his iPod when no one is looking (“I saw what you did there,” says Jaejoong without looking away from the window, Changmin’s reflection giving no sign that he had heard) to listen as well.
Junsu’s new apartment is three and a half songs away, Yunho stopping the car and getting out with the others in the middle of some crooning oldie that sticks in Jaejoong’s head the rest of the day.
Little things I should have said and done
It’s on one of the lower floors, #8142 with a cream colored door and nothing to set it apart from the other units.
I just never took the time
“So how’s life alone?”
“Busy; it’s like I only use this place to sleep at night. I hardly see it in the day.”
“Then you could have just slept at our place, y’know.”
Changmin sits on the couch with the rest but doesn’t say a word, just listens to the conversation flow and take in the sparse interior décor - earth tones, whites. Jaejoong doesn’t like sitting on bare floors so he walks instead, pries unnoticed through closed doors and rooms with opened curtains.
Sunlit, happy rooms, the kind with feather queen sized beds with the sheets ruffled, the smell of far too light scents that Junsu would never wear lingering in the still air. Outside, he can hear the sounds of people leaving and he’s just in time to see them out the door, Junsu waving and touching Changmin’s arm on the way out, the latter giving a sad little smile before slipping his sneakers on, leaving.
“Do you miss it?”
There are signs, of course, the way there’s somehow still some of their things in his closet and vice versa; the way Yoochun puts his feet on the coffee table and Junsu gets a kick of out getting to yell at him, Jaejoong’s job passed down, Yunho getting it done back home with just narrowed eyes.
Junsu clears up the small messes left around the living room, a toppled pile of magazines (Yoochun, a wry comment about how by the time they come back the next time, there’ll be enough old newsprint for Junsu to open a street side kiosk), the empty coffee mug (Yunho, black with a dash of sugar) and the one with cold tea, untouched (Changmin, cradling it in his hands until the warmth is gone).
The phone rings and Junsu dumps the magazines in a corner, the mugs in the sink before running to get it.
“Hey.”
“Yeah I left my cell in the room, they came over just now.”
“Mm. Just left.”
“So how was your afternoon?”
A laugh and Jaejoong stares out the eighth storey, squinting against the sun, thinks about how much he misses hearing this bounce off the walls in their quiet, too big apartment these days.
“Of course it was good. You free for dinner tonight?”
“It’s okay, I’m off today. Anytime, anytime will do.”
“8-ish? Ok, there’s this new ddukbokki stall just a street away.”
“Love you too.”
Jaejoong kinda misses these one sided conversations.
-
8.03pm and he’s wandering around an empty living room, watching the city light itself up and airplanes blink steady across the sky. Junsu is out for the previously mentioned ddukbokki and has been for the past five minutes, probably a three minute walk there, five or more to buy it, another three minutes back. There’s another six minutes to go and Jaejoong wishes he’d tagged along but that thought evaporates the moment the doorbell rings, once, twice.
Another five minutes.
Jaejoong thinks he doesn’t really want to know who it is behind that door, the one that used to call Junsu up every night and probably fell asleep with him on the phone the first week after five dwindled to four, the half-cause of four going down to three now. The buzz of electronic door bells gives way to light knocking now, delicate sounding knuckles on painted doors.
“Junsu?”
He steps outside to watch Junsu run helter skelter out from an opening elevator door with a bag of still hot takeaway in one hand; right into Boa’s arms.
part 2
angst
pg13
8097 words
Yunho is half reading by the window, skimming sentences and skipping words when Jaejoong knocks hesitant, admitting himself in and closing the door behind him before there’s even time for Yunho to mark his page.
“I need to-…” he begins before pausing for a moment, turning back to lock the door almost as an afterthought.
“I need to tell you something.”
An unsettled feel gathers in Jaejoong’s corner of the room and Yunho lays his paperback onto his lap, watches the other man slump hopeless against the door, trying to piece thoughts into words.
Seconds lurch clumsy into a minute, two stretching lazy to three and Jaejoong stares at the floor, the walls, sheets of the bed; makes it seem as if he’d find answers in the pale colored duvet or the right words somewhere in the shades of wallpaper colors dark.
“Jaejoong.”
The sound of his own name somewhat jolts him back into the room and Yunho toys with the cover of his book, running fingertips over broken spines.
“Are you going to tell me?” he asks softly and waits until Jaejoong does, in halting sentences, hushed revelations.
-
“I hate it, I hate it so much,” whispered at the end, bitter tasting and it drains him, every syllable said bringing him a little more closer to his knees until he sits with his back against the door, folding and unfolding his fingers. Steeples falling, rebuilding.
“Yunho, what do we do?”
There is a heartbeat’s worth of silence before the words are out of Yunho’s mouth, a little too fast and a little too loud, regret-tinged breath following after.
“This has nothing to do with us.”
“Define us.”
Jaejoong raises his voice a little, meeting Yunho’s eyes when he looks up from his hands.
“Tell me again how they aren’t us.”
“Leave band politics out of this; how can you even be sure anyways?”
“Can you honestly say you haven’t noticed anything? Nothing at all?” he retorts, skirting round the question.
He starts twining his fingers together again, Yunho watching him, always watching but never doing anything beyond the call of duty.
“Junho is a bad liar, I can’t just do nothing,” he finally says, voice back to something over a whisper and this is Jaejoong at his best, his worst; loyal to a breaking point.
“You’ll have to.”
“And watch it come undone knowing I could have stopped it? It’s not that this has nothing to do with us, it’s just the fact that you don’t want to have anything to do with this.”
“Listen to yourself, Jae-ah. Just listen. You could have stopped it? Nothing is ever just that simple anymore, okay? It’s not just the fact of sitting him down and talking sense to him because at this point and time, do you even know who to lay the blame on?”
“Yoochun loves him,” he hisses back in a reply that’s almost furious, getting up so he can talk without looking up to Yunho; without feeling small and naïve and just so utterly hopeless.
“He loves him so fucking much and you still don’t know who’s at fault here?”
“Is it that simple? Untangling who loves who more and why?”
In the next room, Changmin turns the music up on his headphones to drown out the sound of voices, doors slamming. Jaejoong stalks past the empty rooms and some part of him makes him wait a few seconds at the door; another part of him expecting another set of footsteps to his and a voice saying no, wait Jaejoong. He turns at the silence and Yunho is standing in the corridor to the living room, wordless.
“I’m sorry, I just need to get my thoughts together,” he mumbles in Yunho’s general direction and grasps for the car keys on the table. Yunho watches him leave, a mouthful of unsaid words lodged in his throat.
“I’m sorry, too.”
The door clicks shut and he wonders if Jaejoong heard him. Later, when elevator doors slide open, he’ll push past Yoochun, “No I’m fine,” to a “Do you want me come?”
-
There is the unmistakable click whirr click of a camera from their left when they step into 2am illuminated hotel lobbies, hands untangling to instinctively to shield guilty faces. He swears under his breath and over the haze of adrenaline highs, the tastes of things a few steps down from forbidden, he tells the photographer to kindly back off; something rehearsed about privacy and how if he doesn’t hand the memory card over in five four three two one, he’ll be out of a job at this time tomorrow.
The photographer stares him down, hand tightening over the precious black leather casing.
“No.”
“What do you-”
The other man breaks into a run, taking off in the midst of sleepy eyed tourists waiting to check in at the lobby and Junsu calls a “Wait for me at the car; I’ll meet you there,” over his shoulder before going after the fleeing man, past wide-eyed receptionist and doormen, weaving through a jet-lagged crowd at the entrance.
Damn he thinks in his head and watches the man start to sprint towards the road, camera bag slung over one shoulder.
-
Jaejoong drives unfocused to the sound of his cell buzzing in the shotgun seat, four missed calls, two texts and counting; Changmin probably wanting something from a convenience store, Yunho probably calling to check where he is and when he’ll be back. The fifth one starts up and Jaejoong lets it ring on, cutting into late night Seoul traffic as he takes an exit back into the city.
Hotels, drab business buildings with some of their windows still lighted from the inside spring up on his right and the thin needle of the speedometer forces itself upwards like it always does when he passes commercial areas, road disappearing a little faster under moving metal frames. There’s another text now and the car interior is lighted up for a quarter of a moment, Jaejoong tapping his fingers thoughtfully on the wheel as he contemplates reading it.
Pick up damn you, let me know you’re not lying on some street dying and btw Changmin wants milk
He smiles at the screen, Yunho’s almost sad attempt at pretending to be flippant starting to tug a reply from him and one thumb brushes over the keypad, ask if he wants full cream or
Something darts across the road, goes sprawling before his car and Jaejoong swears out loud, swerves too fast and brakes too slow, crashing through the now seemingly flimsy barrier that separates road from river. For a moment, it holds.
And gives way.
-
It’s true, what they say about not being able to look away from car accidents.
Junsu stands transfixed at the revolving doors, watches in stunned silence as the photographer trips in the middle of the road, car missing the unmoving body by mere inches before spinning out of control. “Oh my god,” comes a whisper from behind him and the car goes under, people trickling out from the hotel at the sound of crunching metal.
“Oh my god.”
-
Dying is more painful, far scarier than he expects and Jaejoong claws at the door and the glass until his hands are bloody, skin of his fingertips broken in a dozen places from too futile, too desperate attempts. Water seeps in from the cracks he makes and one final blow to the driver seat’s window pane lets in an icy flow that takes his breath away, steals air in the form of escaping bubbles that race away when he forgets to not breathe; pushing himself through, past the jagged edges of glass into the murky darkness.
Did I hit him god no don’t let me die, don’t let him die no please did anyone see did
Coherent thought fights to separate itself away from his fading consciousness, fear and the sudden burning in his lungs making him gasp, shiver from the inside out when cold water forces itself down his throat.
don’t let me die don’t let me don’t let
He thrashes and for a moment, for two, four, ten it seems like he doesn’t know which way the surface is, bubbles leading the way far too fast for him to follow.
Yunho, he thinks. Yunho Junsu mother Yoochun father Changmin everyone
Another wave of terror makes him inhale and he finds he can’t stop; a vicious cycle of screaming, breathing, a bitter rush to the end.
don’t let me
Kim Jaejoong dies a hand’s reach away from the surface.
-
Half a city away, Changmin dangles Yunho’s phone by its strap, eating cereal straight from the box.
ask if he wants full cream or
Another handful of frosted cornflakes and it’s odd, the fact that he’s still waiting after a good five minutes for the usual ah damn sorry hit send before I meant to.
“Yah, Yunho, come here a minute.”
-
“Junsu.”
Someone pulls at his elbow and he tears his eyes away from the skid marks, the gaping hole in the metal barrier. Far off in the distance, he thinks he hears the wail of ambulance sirens.
“Junsu we need to go.”
There’s a small crowd gathering at the riverside, the sound of voices shouting, panicky tones that drift ethereal towards them from a road away. The tug on his elbow turns into a firm grasp now and he turns to follow, two backs retreating inconspicuous against the flow of people into the lobby. Later, when they drive past the accident scene in his car, Junsu slows down despite himself and he guesses that they’ve got the body out of the water, paramedics swarming round it like ants to a corpse.
“That poor man,” she says softly before the scene peels away from his window and Junsu mumbles a prayer out of habit; feels the extraordinary urge to call home after just find out who’s still awake, who’s going to be glaring him down when he troops through the door at 3am.
“Watch the road.”
“Sorry.”
The feeling passes and he drives one handed, her hand intertwined with his other.
-
We are sorry, the number you are trying to reach is not available. Please try again later.
“Should we be worried?”
“Nah. Come to the store down the road with me for a moment? Eight chances out of ten, he probably won’t even remember the milk.”
“Yoochun?”
“Out on the roof, probably won’t be back before 3am. God, why he can’t compose in a room like the rest of us normal people constantly eludes me.”
-
Arms are lifting him when he comes to, vision blurred to the point where colors merge and shift every few seconds.
“Who should we contact?”
“Oh my god is that really him?”
“Everyone out of the way please, out of the way.”
Trying to breathe hurts, the sound of his own lungs striving far too hard to draw breaths through the oxygen mask scaring him to the point where it makes sense to stop. It hurts, hurts far more than anything he’s ever known, something pulling him away from himself, conscious thought a haze as he tries to grip on to something, anything, the sound of crowd murmurs, the feel of fingers pressed against his wrist.
“We lost the pulse.”
No, he thinks, no I’m right here, I’m still here.
“Time of death, 2.32am.”
He wants to shake the paramedic, yell for him to fucking look at me, I’m alive, I’m alive I-
And it all comes crashing down that no, he isn’t, can’t be. Not when he’s watching them cover his face with the sheet, not when he’s staring down at himself from a viewpoint that feels too wrong.
I’m here. Look at me, I’m here.
No one hears him, feels him when he reaches for them skin and flesh now something more like…
I’m still here.
Something more like smoke and mirrors.
-
You have: 3 new messages. Press 1 to hear the first message.
#1- Is Jaejoong with you? Call me back as soon as you can, I just got something from management and it isn’t good.
#2- Why aren’t any of you picking up? Don’t tell me everyone’s already asleep, I’ll be back soon I swear. Yunho-yah don’t kill me I swear I’ll be able to wake up tomorrow okay?
#3- Call me back right now.
You now have no new messages.
-
Junsu’s cell beeps in its holder and he puts the call on speaker, passenger seat now empty.
“Yeah?”
“Where is everyone? I tried their cells, the house, nothing. Ok that’s not important now, I’m pretty sure it’s nothing but I need to know, where’s Jaejoong?”
His manager’s voice comes out strained through the tinny cell speakers, Junsu stopping for a red light.
“Jaejoong? I’m out now, I have no idea. I tried the house a moment ago and it’s the same, didn’t go for their cells though. Most likely they’ve gone on some exodus to the store for something and forgot to take their phones with them.”
“…you’re right, that’s more likely than-…”
“Than what?”
Junsu lets a nervous suspicion creep into his words and the car behind him honks impatiently, urging him to move.
“Ah it’s nothing really, some fan called the management all hysterical, convinced that one of Dongbangshinki just died in front of her eyes in some horrendous road accident, just wait until Jaejoong hears this.”
There’s a pause here for nervous laughter, sleep tinged and a little too relieved.
“We always get a few of them in a year and-…”
“It’s a road accident, right? He didn’t drown or anything, did he?”
“How’d you know? Heh, the story must’ve been more popular than I thought, according to her, his car went through the barrier and straight into the Han River, apparently swerved to avoid some bozo in the middle of the road, lost control and all that. If you ask me, that’s a tad more detailed than the ones we usually get but…Junsu? Junsu you still there?”
-
Jaejoong stands beside his body, watches the world pass by, through, around him in a haze. The shrill scream of ambulance sirens, the sound of too many people and too many conversations, cameras flashing. He reaches for the white sheet they’ve covered his face with, grasps and tries to just fucking touch but it feels like reaching for sunlight, hand going through like some complicated illusion. A wild thought winds its way past the mayhem and perhaps, perhaps you are the illusion but Jaejoong wills it away; there’ll be time for that soon enough.
A second try, third, sixth, seventh and it takes grit teeth and narrowed eyes for the cloth to materialize for a split second under his fingers before it falls away again, exposing ashen skin to the crowd that Jaejoong turns his face from, breathing hard from the effort of just touching; forcing it. Colors seep slow from his fingertips and he can feel the sour taste of bile rise from the back of his throat, the thought from before coming up with it.
Perhaps you are the illusion
“No, no I’m here,” he whispers to himself and watches them take his body away, harsh floodlights from filming television crews throwing no shadows on the ground where he stands.
Perhaps you are
“No.”
A newscaster walks past him and a sharp floral scent trails after her, last minute perfume for a last minute late night story. He reaches for her jacket and it flutters through his fingers.
Perhaps.
-
He rides in the ambulance, careful not to touch anything, not the metal railing of the bed his body lies on, not the white walls he’s tempted to lean on. Only the spaces where his feet touch the ground feel real enough for now and he takes to sitting cross legged on the floor now, studies the worn sneakers of the lone medical attendant riding in the back with him.
“I like your shoes,” he says softly to the sound of one man’s silence and they go over a bump, the man swearing something about the bloody roads and how he should’ve traded this shift for the next.
He thinks he won’t be able to look when they call his parents, his family, the other members to identify the body but the moment they stumble wordless through the double doors, he’s fixated. Can’t stop watching, memorizing how his mother looks like when she cries, how his sisters break off into tiny huddles in different ends of the room to hold each other because
Perhaps you are an illusion
Yunho clasps a shaky hand on his mother’s shoulder when they pass each other on her way out, him going in with the rest of Dongbangshinki in tow. It’s Yoochun who cries first, as always, Junsu tugging him away from the bedside with wet eyes, Changmin shepherding them out without even so much a glance at the body on the table.
“And then there was one,” Jaejoong whispers close to him and Yunho stands alone, pulls back the covers from his face and touches his hair, the side of his cheek. He closes his eyes and the feeling is gone, flutter of phantom fingers shrinking back when Yunho jerks his hand away almost guiltily.
“Jaejoong,” he says to an empty room and Jaejoong echoes with his name, “Yunho, Yunho,” twofold, twice as loud, twice as hurting because doesn’t it always hurt more to watch and never have rather than to leave and never turn back?
You are an illusion
For a moment, he reaches for Yunho, tries to catch hold and for a moment he half stops, makes as if to turn at the brush of his fingers against his back but it passes and he’s gone; Jaejoong on his knees watching Yunho leave, taking a little of his color away with him.
-
They bury him in the shade of a small grassy hill, a silent car drive away from the little town he used to dream big from, plain wood casket that looks almost forlorn in the sandy hole they’ve lowered it into. There’s an empty seat between Yoochun and Changmin, a handful of wildflowers where he would have sat and their sad little colorful heads droop, slowly wilting in the noonday heat.
Yoochun hides red rimmed eyes behind dark shades but he takes them off soon enough, blinking back tears that mark obvious trails down his cheek in the sunshine. He’s not the only one crying, others having saved enough tears from the wake to hunch with shaking shoulders.
Family members comprising of blank faced sisters, bewildered nieces trying to comprehend the fact that the nice man who used to take pictures with them and do their hair up in messy pony tails won’t ever be coming back. They take up the two foremost rows, Dongbangshinki (“We are, we are,” Changmin tells the rest of them through grit teeth on the very first night and doesn’t let anyone clean up the mess Jaejoong made before he left) pushed back into the third.
“I...I actually had everything written out here.”
Yunho is standing in the front, crumpled sheet of paper making dry, dying sounds as he crushes it in his fist. “A whole eulogy and the works, things I think and I know I should say but...yeah.” He steals a glance at the sad, deformed paper ball he’s created and slips it discreetly into his pocket.
“Words don’t really justify what I want to say.”
Jaejoong has folded himself in front of his chair, legs pulled up to his chin on the dry ground where he can feel the dirt beneath his palms but not the grass, phantom blades of green wavering through his fingers the one time he forgets and tries to pick at them, distractions in the form of little deaths that elude him now.
“...it’s the little things, like standing in formation only to realize we’re one man short, finding his things in our closets, simple things like these that-...”
Frustrating, to reach for something you know you can’t touch and Jaejoong digs his nails into his palm instead, stares at the half moon imprints he leaves. Distractions in the form of temporary tattoos that fade too soon and hurt too little.
“-...and eight years aren’t enough to know a person, barely enough to say we actually had an inkling about what it really meant to know, to love Jaejoong. But we had eight years; at least, we can say we tried. Eight crazy, rollercoaster ride-wild, unforgettable years to skim the surface of him and for that, we’re thankful enough.”
He pauses for a moment, the beginnings of a sad little smile playing at the corners of his lips when he looks over to the one empty seat in the mass of black clad mourners and Jaejoong can feel him look right through him.
It’s the saddest he feels in a long time.
-
There are flowers on the makeshift table in the shade of leafy trees; white blooms he can’t name, stalks of chrysanthemums left over from the ones they border his photo with lying beside a handful of folded letters penned hastily when Junsu had mentioned flip about Heaven’s Postman and how Jaejoong would have gotten a kick out of this. Jaejoong stands in the shadows of trees now, having left the others the moment Changmin started crying quietly above him, tears exchanged for leaves falling every now and then, and they pass right through him like everything else.
It’s doesn’t even have to be discreet when he picks up the first one, no one looking his way as he snatches the topmost from the pile and sinks to his knees behind the table from the exertion, the sight of fleeing colors making him dizzy. He reads to himself over the sound of his own eulogy, Yunho’s words sounding far away enough to feel surreal from where he’s huddled.
I’ll miss you, the first one says simply with Changmin’s name scrawled on the bottom right hand corner and the sight of it brings another wave of nausea, Jaejoong standing to let it fall back on the pile, hands shaky.
“When we first debuted, no one really knew what to do with Jaejoong, the way he’d blurt out things we were all thinking but would never dare to say, the way he did each performance like it was his last.”
There’s something here I don’t think I’ll ever tell anyone else, not even Junho, not Yoochun, not anyone, Junsu’s starts off, and there’s a crossed out sentence after that, messy and done hard enough to make the paper tear, black mark stark and ugly.
Do people in heaven already know everything? They never did find the camera after that, god knows where it is now. Maybe on the river bank, maybe crushed beyond recognition. Is it alright for me to be glad? Because I am and she is too, I don’t think any of us would be able to go through another round of media frenzies. No no, just look at me now, Jae. Talking about simple things like that to you when you’re dead, isn’t it just stupid and me-ish. I’m sorry. I’m sorry for being selfish, I’m sorry for being the catalyst in this, I’m sorry I lied but I’m still doing it now.
“Most people, fans, usually, always have the most inaccurate notions when it comes to characterizing each of our roles outside of the industry, but one of the few things they got right was the fact that Jaejoong is, I say is because he’s still alive to us in too many ways to count, Jaejoong is the…the bond, glue, if you will, that holds us all together. Of course, there isn’t a Dongbangshinki anymore now-”
I’m sorry you never got to tell Yoochun what you knew was happening, I’m sorry you kept it to yourself until the very last minute, Yunho can’t look me in the eye some days now, it doesn’t take the guilt away but… but what, it makes me feel better? Makes me want to stop? I can’t, Jae-ah, that’s the worst part, I don’t think I ever will.
An addiction, you should know something about that shouldn’t you? With you and your late night smoke, Yunho always, always nagging you to stop. I’ll miss that. You and Yoochun going up to the roof to compose, sneaking the cigarettes along, did you know I always knew? That something I’ve wanted to say is somewhere up there now, now that I’ve said it, would you ever find it in yourself to forgive me? Because I don’t think I could, myself.
Jaejoong reads it a few times over, a quiet sort of hurt in his almost-heart causing almost-tears to gather in his eyes but they don’t fall, something that tastes like regret, a tinge of bitterness behind it all making him blink them away. Maybe ghosts aren’t supposed to cry for the living, not for themselves, not for anything.
It’s vague, whatever Junsu really wanted to say but there’re enough words to convince Jaejoong that he was right the first time around, making him feel a surge of sadness for Yoochun, for Junsu. For things that should and could’ve been. He looks over to where they’re still sitting, set apart from the rest by one unfilled chair, Junsu leaning over to Yoochun’s shoulder to whisper something about some shared memory Yunho has brought up.
“It’s okay,” Jaejoong says aloud and sets the letter back in its place, voice unheard. Junsu hides a sad smile behind one hand and Yoochun reaches for a hand that’s pulled away too fast.
“It’s okay.”
-
Yoochun’s is straightforward enough, something about him hating Jaejoong for being a stupid bastard and getting himself killed, now he would have to write a tribute as expected and this is going to sound insane, sickly so, but I always thought we would leave together. All five of us, Dongbangshinki to the end. We still are, aren’t we? I’m talking like some deluded fangirl now, I’m sorry, grief does that to a person. Wherever you are, Jaejoong (you’d better be in heaven or I’ll kick you), whoever you might be now (please don’t be reborn as something stupid like Junsu), whatever you’re doing (is the afterlife fun?) now, don’t forget us. Because we sure won’t ever forget you.
“I’m not going to say anything along the lines of how he died living or how we’re here to celebrate his life since Jaejoong would probably hit me in the arm for saying that but I just want everyone here to know that he lived; he lived life, loved it, and I would like to think he loved the people in it as well, with just as much passion as we loved him back.”
When he comes to Yunho’s, he’s not even sure that he wants to read it, the thin sheet of paper suddenly far too heavy in his grasp, but Yunho is finishing up their memories, their old hopes and dreams and he’s going to have to read this now or live (ha.ha.ha. he thinks in a sudden bout of choking dark humor) not ever knowing.
“Yunho-ah, will I regret this?”
Somewhere not too far away, Yunho pauses for a heartbeat too long between sentences, Jaejoong unfolding the letter with unsteady hands. Ghosts aren’t supposed to cry anyway.
I have so many questions left for you, too many for one lifetime to contain but there you go, moving onto the next. Jaejoong Jaejoong Jaejoong, there’s still so many things I want you to promise me, promise me that somehow you’ll still love, still find a way to live because you’ll be living for us both, it feels hard to do that right now.
I love you, how many times will I have to say it before you hear me? You can hear me from up there, right?
“I just hope heaven is still in one piece when the rest of us get there.”
I love you.
Jaejoong finds that ghosts can cry.
-
Jaejoong stands with the rest of them when the pastor in the front tells them to; Let us pray ringing in his ears as he shuffles his feet on the dirt, watching Changmin keep his eyes open as usual. Yunho stares at the ground with his hands clasped loosely, Junsu slipping his own out of Yoochun’s to lace fingers together in a tight inseparable mess of skin and bone that turns his knuckles white.
He puts Yunho’s letter down almost reluctantly on the pile and when it’s all over, Jaejoong stands teetering on the edges of his open grave as they fill it; dirt over hidden regrets, promises, confessions penned down.
Junsu crumples his before he throws it, tear stains making the words run as he does and Yunho adds the forgotten eulogy in his pocket almost as an afterthought, Jaejoong watching with the extraordinary urge to go down there and retrieve it. Changmin is the last to throw his in, paper crane of almost empty writing paper fluttering onto its side before it disappears under another shovelful of soil, him turning his face away when that happens.
-
Later, walking back to the car, someone will breathe look in a half whisper and heads will crane skyward, Yunho crying openly now as they watch pearl-red balloons drift towards the summer clouds, up up and away to wherever freed balloons go.
“They never stop, don’t they?”
“Catch a few for us, Jae-ah.”
Changmin is the one that gathers them together; one last time with Jaejoong’s space left empty in their unusually loose circle.
“Dongbangshinki, hwaiting!” he says softly, the sound of three other voices loud enough to drown his out and make people stop and stare as usual. Jaejoong stands a little to the side, mouthing along to the words, no space for him left now.
-
When they get back, life tries to ease itself into some sort of normality, circles trying to fit in spaces made for squares. Time feels like city traffic; slow, lurching forward in sudden bursts of life, moving even when it feels like everything has come to a standstill.
There’s no need for managers now and there’s more than enough rooms left over for everyone, Yoochun silently claiming their old workroom as his and locking himself inside, composing. Jaejoong follows him inside most days, watches him smoke with the window open and play snippets of sad melodies on their keyboard, lyrical sounding words penned down every now and then.
“Won’t an F sound better?” Jaejoong wants to suggest but Yunho does it for him, Junsu stammering out a suggestion when Yoochun stops him by the door on his way out. “A minor third apart,” he says as Yoochun hums the main theme and shuts the door.
Yunho hadn’t been lying when he’d said he was still alive in too many ways, one of them being his music taste intermingling with their own personal ones until no one can really tell whose is whose. It almost makes Jaejoong smile to hear them saying things he would have said had they been able to hear him, things he would have suggested, and when Yoochun emerges one 3am night with a finished piece and a half empty box of smokes, there’s enough Jaejoong in it to make it sound as if he’d never left.
-
Changmin only nods his approval when Yoochun turns to each of them after the semi-final draft, getting more and more quiet with each day that Jaejoong isn’t there to cook him early morning 4am breakfasts and ask him how the hell he’s supposed to download this mp4 file. There’re hints of unspoken worries on everyone’s faces but there are too many demons to deal with, too many memories to recreate and word out; too many more important things other than a grieving magnae holed up in his room.
“He’ll be fine in a while.”
Yunho voices expectations over a store bought dinner (I could have made something better, thinks Jaejoong almost disdainfully).
“He’ll be alright.”
But by the tail end of two months, Changmin isn’t, sleeping most of the day away, falling into dreamless comfort with his headphones on, music turned loud and staying up through lonely nights at the window, watching Seoul traffic wind itself away from 16 stories up. Junsu goes to sit with him the nights he comes back late (“Talks. Soloing,” he mumbles to Yoochun in half truths and full faced lies), the both of them taking what they can get from this.
“We’re listening, just so you know,” Junsu says and Changmin just nods, face staring out the glass. There’s this tinny sound of bass, guitars, vocals seeping out from Changmin’s ipod and Junsu wonders if he had heard him.
I know.
“Talk to me?”
One hand creeps for another and it feels lifeless in Junsu’s, limp. He squeezes it anyway but it doesn’t feel the same.
-
There should be a sort of sick exhilaration to knowing what the others don’t, hearing secrets meant for one but spoken in a house of four. Junsu calls her every other day, tells her things that make Jaejoong sad for Yoochun, one sided conversations that he sits through for lack of things to do, for Yoochun’s sake some days.
“I haven’t told them yet.”
“When? Soon, I don’t know.”
“Junho found a place.”
“I…I don’t think I can stay here. It’s got nothing to do with him, rest assured but it’s just that…Jaejoong. Everyone else. Facing them, knowing.”
“Of course they don’t know. No one knows.”
A pause while he thinks, biting his bottom lip.
“No. I won’t. Not now at least, what kind of closure will it bring anyway? You won’t either, right?”
“Imagine if they found the camera one day.”
Nervous smile, hint of laughter insincere.
“Near enough, I suppose, living alone is going to be hard for the first few days.”
There is a laugh here now, far from the usual eukyangkyang reserved for five and not four, not one, but Jaejoong doesn’t think he could feel sad for long when Junsu is this happy, eyes lighting up or perhaps that’s just a late afternoon sun illusion.
“Of course you can come over.”
“Yeah. Ok. Ok, I’ll see you then, I can already hear your manager in the background.”
“Go already, scram, you.”
“Have a good stage.”
“I love you.” It comes out far less hesitant than Jaejoong would have expected, the slight pause before it making his heart clench for things that shouldn’t be.
Two rooms and a still unbroken heart away, Yoochun plays one of their sad love songs on the piano.
-
No one really tries to keep things together; nothing much left to keep together anyway after Junsu tells them one morning, Changmin getting up mid-sentence with an unreadable face to go back to sleep, treating it like another bad dream.
“I suppose it’s for the best,” Yunho says slowly and Yoochun stares at the table, the walls, anywhere but at Junsu who sits back straight in his chair, eyes lowered. Yunho waits for an answer from either two before leaving as if nothing happened, as if Junsu hadn’t just told everyone he would be moving out by the end of the week and no, it had nothing to do with Jaejoong.
“Maybe a little,” he lies when Yoochun asks him later, the both of them seated at the kitchen table. Jaejoong stands behind Yunho’s empty seat, tries his hand at guessing conversation flow directions.
“It’s okay.”
“You’re not going to write a song about it, are you?”
Junsu lands a playful punch on Yoochun’s shoulder across the table, standing and almost toppling his coffee when he does.
“Perhaps, I’ll name it The Day I Could Finally Use the Bathroom Without Waiting. It’ll be your first single.”
There is a shred of blessed normality for a moment and it feels like any second now, their managers will walk through the door with Yunho bringing up the rear to yell at them to move move move what part of photo shoot in an hour do you not understand, Changmin slamming doors behind him because yet another download got interrupted.
Junsu’s cell rings and the moment flees, him getting up to take the call someplace where he doesn’t have to hold back so many things at once.
“Do you know?” asks Jaejoong and of course, Yoochun doesn’t reply, just quietly takes Junsu’s coffee mug to the sink to rinse, standing there a few minutes too long for one ceramic mug.
“I would tell you if I could figure out which would hurt less.”
-
Jaejoong follows Yunho around most days, rides in the backseat of his car (a difficult process to master, having to sit with his feet somehow touching the upholstery lest he fall through but he’s got all the time in the world now, doesn’t he?) and plays the silent row of backseat driver, talks to Yunho about his almost-day.
“What do you think of Junsu moving out? Does anyone even know where he’s going?”
The silence is stifling, Yunho tapping a half-hearted rhythm on the steering wheel as he waits for a red light, Jaejoong humming a made up melody to it.
“Where’re we going today?”
Listening to one sided conversations from Junsu makes this sound far easier than it is and Jaejoong lapses into silence, Yunho tuning in to the radio to fill the empty air.
“I like this song.”
“Do you remember who sang it?”
Yunho takes a corner and circles the block for a parking space, Jaejoong pointing out the ones he sees noisily, causing a ruckus in the back that no one can hear and Yunho misses them all the way he usually does, finally slipping into an empty bay after more time than really necessary. It seems like they’re going to pick his younger sister up from school today, no one else free to do it and Yunho having all the time in the world (just like me, thinks Jaejoong with a touch of glee) now that the company is still finalizing their admin positions.
“You really do need me around,” Jaejoong says mock sadly and follows Yunho into the street to wait, talking shadow making one-sided small talk that no one hears.
-
They’re going through Yoochun’s closet together, hunting for lost socks and misplaced shirts that had somehow made their lost, confused ways into the wrong places. There are not-so-neat piles of Junsu’s things in the living room, a growing mound of reclaimed CDs and long lost clothes, creased, forgotten. In the next room, there’s the sound of Yunho’s voice, muffled words through walls as he talks to and not with Changmin, sorting out their own pile of Junsu’s things.
“Why are you really leaving?”
It’s a conversational kind of tone, Yoochun picking out a familiar looking tee from the depths of his cupboard, folding it into a neat square as Junsu picks at the carpet, trying to find the right kind of half truth in its dusty fibers.
“It’s okay if you don’t want to tell me,” he continues on, moving forward to the drawers now, dumping odds and ends onto the floor to shift through. Junsu helps, fingers going out of the way to avoid Yoochun’s.
“It’s not that,” Junsu finally says slowly, hand closing round a faded metal cross that Yoochun had borrowed too many concerts back to count, rusted arms flaking dying-metal flecks as he lifts it up to the light. “It’s not that, Chun-ah. I just don’t know what it really is, myself.” But of course he does, deep down buried beneath nights of fading (rusted, offers his sub consciousness with a hint of self malice tagged onto the ends of the thought, ignored, forgotten) love and hasty kisses to suddenly distant touches, he does know why.
“It’s okay,” Yoochun says again, softer this time and doesn’t mean it.
-
It’s a sunny Thursday when Junsu moves out, boxes of memories pushed across their apartment floor making dry, goodbye kind of noises.
“I don’t want you to go,” is Yoochun’s goodbye to him and this is the part where Junsu is supposed to say ok, I won’t but no one is really going by their roles anymore, Changmin wandering out of his room at ten in the morning only to go back in again at the sight of packed lives dragged away, Yunho standing around just watching another part of himself walking away.
“I really don’t want you to go.”
And this is the part where Junsu should say what if you came with me? but he doesn’t, just says “Come over, okay?” and kisses Yoochun on the neck when no one is looking, no one except a ghost in a lonely corner who turns his face away at the sight, watches the movers tramp in and out the open front door.
Changmin won’t come out of his room so Junsu goes to him instead, sits beside him on the bed for a minute before he figures Changmin isn’t going to say anything unless he does and even then, he can’t be too sure.
“You’ll be okay?”
He waits for a curt if I said no, it won’t change a thing now wouldn’t it? but today is a day of unspoken things, Changmin angling himself ever so slightly away from Junsu when he lays a hand on a on terse shoulder.
“Changmin.”
It’s shrugged off and Junsu takes his hand back, hides the hurt in his eyes by standing to go.
“You’ll call me when you want to talk, right?”
Changmin locks the door after Junsu walks out; can’t bear to watch another person leave.
-
Their apartment is something close to empty now, Jaejoong walking in and out of rooms through walls and closed doors to pass the time. Sometimes he talks to Changmin, a reenactment of past one sided phone conversations eavesdropped on; tells Changmin what he thinks of that new song he’s just listened to, wondering out loud what time Yunho will be back today.
Other times he sits up on the roof with Yoochun, breathing in tasteless cigarette smoke and catching fleeing sheets of torn notebook pages before they float away on smog tinted winds the nights Yoochun falls asleep under the sky, forgets to weigh his thoughts down.
“Careless bugger,” Jaejoong scolds him and topples over and out into open air one autumn twilight while chasing a song about lost love, the world tilting skywards as the painted clouds fall up above him.
He thinks he would have screamed if the air hadn’t ripped itself out of his lungs on the way down, arms flailing and heart thump thump thumping a painful tattoo in his throat. It doesn’t hurt when he hits the ground, like one of those falling dreams where you wake up with a start in your own bed except for the fact that this time around, it’s hard sidewalk asphalt instead of 400 thread count sheets.
Jaejoong lies breathless on his back the very first time around, staring up at the falling sheets of paper and it’s only a cold realization that ghosts can’t die later, watching Yoochun stride out onto the street to rescue runaway lines from the night damp that he finds it in himself to stand, shaky.
“I’m okay,” he tells a turned back and closing door.
-
By the time the trees are starting to lose their leaves, Jaejoong has jumped far too many times to count, taken running leaps off the tallest buildings he can find.
Under starlight, in the rain but nothing can beat taking the stairs to the top floor of anywhere just before first light, standing on the edge and falling spread-eagled back down to a waking world. Amidst fake suicides half-fueled by boredom and something like bad bungee jumps, Jaejoong finds that he’s missing something very important.
He’s doing it alone.
-
Jaejoong tries to memorize the roads Yunho takes to Junsu’s place, staring out the semi-tinted glass at passing signs, people, places. Yoochun fiddles with the radio and something jazz-tinged fills the car, Changmin pausing his iPod when no one is looking (“I saw what you did there,” says Jaejoong without looking away from the window, Changmin’s reflection giving no sign that he had heard) to listen as well.
Junsu’s new apartment is three and a half songs away, Yunho stopping the car and getting out with the others in the middle of some crooning oldie that sticks in Jaejoong’s head the rest of the day.
Little things I should have said and done
It’s on one of the lower floors, #8142 with a cream colored door and nothing to set it apart from the other units.
I just never took the time
“So how’s life alone?”
“Busy; it’s like I only use this place to sleep at night. I hardly see it in the day.”
“Then you could have just slept at our place, y’know.”
Changmin sits on the couch with the rest but doesn’t say a word, just listens to the conversation flow and take in the sparse interior décor - earth tones, whites. Jaejoong doesn’t like sitting on bare floors so he walks instead, pries unnoticed through closed doors and rooms with opened curtains.
Sunlit, happy rooms, the kind with feather queen sized beds with the sheets ruffled, the smell of far too light scents that Junsu would never wear lingering in the still air. Outside, he can hear the sounds of people leaving and he’s just in time to see them out the door, Junsu waving and touching Changmin’s arm on the way out, the latter giving a sad little smile before slipping his sneakers on, leaving.
“Do you miss it?”
There are signs, of course, the way there’s somehow still some of their things in his closet and vice versa; the way Yoochun puts his feet on the coffee table and Junsu gets a kick of out getting to yell at him, Jaejoong’s job passed down, Yunho getting it done back home with just narrowed eyes.
Junsu clears up the small messes left around the living room, a toppled pile of magazines (Yoochun, a wry comment about how by the time they come back the next time, there’ll be enough old newsprint for Junsu to open a street side kiosk), the empty coffee mug (Yunho, black with a dash of sugar) and the one with cold tea, untouched (Changmin, cradling it in his hands until the warmth is gone).
The phone rings and Junsu dumps the magazines in a corner, the mugs in the sink before running to get it.
“Hey.”
“Yeah I left my cell in the room, they came over just now.”
“Mm. Just left.”
“So how was your afternoon?”
A laugh and Jaejoong stares out the eighth storey, squinting against the sun, thinks about how much he misses hearing this bounce off the walls in their quiet, too big apartment these days.
“Of course it was good. You free for dinner tonight?”
“It’s okay, I’m off today. Anytime, anytime will do.”
“8-ish? Ok, there’s this new ddukbokki stall just a street away.”
“Love you too.”
Jaejoong kinda misses these one sided conversations.
-
8.03pm and he’s wandering around an empty living room, watching the city light itself up and airplanes blink steady across the sky. Junsu is out for the previously mentioned ddukbokki and has been for the past five minutes, probably a three minute walk there, five or more to buy it, another three minutes back. There’s another six minutes to go and Jaejoong wishes he’d tagged along but that thought evaporates the moment the doorbell rings, once, twice.
Another five minutes.
Jaejoong thinks he doesn’t really want to know who it is behind that door, the one that used to call Junsu up every night and probably fell asleep with him on the phone the first week after five dwindled to four, the half-cause of four going down to three now. The buzz of electronic door bells gives way to light knocking now, delicate sounding knuckles on painted doors.
“Junsu?”
He steps outside to watch Junsu run helter skelter out from an opening elevator door with a bag of still hot takeaway in one hand; right into Boa’s arms.
part 2