#349: these, our bodies, possessed by light
prompt: #349
title: these, our bodies, possessed by light
pairing: chensoo
rating: pg
word count: 2630
summary: a slow romance of two people falling in love, parsec by parsec.
One day, Jongdae teaches Kyungsoo to dance with the music of the spheres.
“Like this,” he whispers, breath blowing warm in Kyungsoo’s ear, eyes crinkled into a smile. “Move like this, step one, yes, two, three, four.” His arm curls around a soft, pliant waist. Kyungsoo folds his lips together into a straight line and looks down at their feet, his legs tangling with Jongdae’s in careful rhythm. “Good, good.” Jongdae’s voice carries the current of a delighted laugh. “I can’t believe I’m teaching you how to dance.”
“I can’t believe I’m doing this,” Kyungsoo grunts, limbs still hesitant. A blue veil of dust cloaks them as Jongdae gently hums a careful melody and lights the path of their feet with flares.
-
Jongdae’s not a terribly great dancer. It took him centuries to learn how to do it--how to move in alignment to his neighbors and keep the rhythm, spinning gently until the clusters flared in answer. He lost a lot of stars in the first few centuries.
He wonders if it might be easier to dance with a partner. (Let us sing for you. Close your eyes--open your ears.) A quiet hope blooms in his chest at the thought.
-
“Can’t you hear it?” Jongdae looks puzzled.
“Hear what?” Kyungsoo says shortly, his eyebrows furrowing. The ship’s engines spark up at him, wires melted together at the fury of his last atmospheric re-entry. He fumbles in his tool box for the right object, excavating its depths for a miniature plasma cutter.
“The music of the spheres.”
Jongdae settles warm hands on Kyungsoo’s, stilling his movements. “Close your eyes,” he whispers. “Open your ears. You’ve traveled for so long among them, so. Just listen to us.” Kyungsoo relaxes his grip on the plasma cutter; he can see its hot-blue flame fizzle out as it falls from his hands and into the depths of his ship’s open engines.
The song pours its way into his senses like water.
-
“Sometimes,” Kyungsoo says quietly, “I’ll put the ship to sleep and let us float in space, and we’ll be suspended among the stars and go nowhere.” Jongdae gathers stellar plumes and lets them light up his face, the glow reflecting in his eyes. He settles his head against Kyungsoo’s thigh and stares up at the sky, at the pale line of his jaw working out gentle words. “It’s really peaceful out there.”
“It is,” Jongdae agrees.
“I like it, though.” His voice sounds soft, and Jongdae lets him twine slender fingers in his hair. He makes a low sound in his throat, halfway to a purr, and the plumes turn a hot, bright white. “I passed by a central reflection nebula a while ago, with these two lines that curved together. It looked just like an eye.”
“And how long was a while ago?”
“Ten years,” Kyungsoo admits. “Or twenty. I was chased out of the Fostrix Galaxy after,” his laugh warms the clouds with puffs of oxygen. “After I accidentally insulted their military leader. And I, well, I lost them after a few megaparsecs out of Barclowan orbit. When I slowed down, my ship carried me to a place I’d never been to before--and I saw it there, that nebula. I put my ship to sleep for a few days and watched it break up rocks and color itself in.” Kyungsoo sounds as if he were talking to himself. “It was so cold there. My ship’s engines kept me alive, but it was wonderful to see it all happen. I’ve never seen colors like those.”
“Nine hundred years,” Jongdae teases. “And it took a little nebula to show you that?” Kyungsoo thwocks him on the forehead with a stern hand, but when Jongdae whines, he smooths over his brow. “I’m glad you got to see that,” he adds. “I don’t have any reflection lines.”
“Parked my ship on a quasar once. It fried the plasmic hull for a while.” Kyungsoo sounds like he’s joking, maybe.
“Then I’m glad I don’t have any quasars, either,” Jongdae declares. He sits up and leans his head against Kyungsoo’s shoulder, and looks up at the skies, at the vast stretch of space. “I’ve got that little patch over here, though.” He smiles, and the point in the heavens grows brighter.
Kyungsoo studies his face. “Are these your eyes?”
“No, it’s this bit.” He laughs, hands pointing to the upturned edge of his mouth. Kyungsoo turns his focus to study the sky intently. “It’s beautiful,” he murmurs. He reaches up a hand--as if he could wash his fingertips in the starlight.
“You think it’s beautiful?” Jongdae sounds mildly curious, his mouth’s curve frozen in place. Kyungsoo catches the searchlight ray of Jongdae’s eye with a smile of his own, answers the silent question on a separate frequency.
“Yes.”
-
A year and a day after Jongdae last pressed kisses to the backs of his hands, the stars are dying out. Kyungsoo punches in hazy coordinates--hoping for accuracy but expecting none--as his ship rattles its way across galaxies in search of a specific place and person.
He disembarks, dropping a grateful pat on the still-shuddering console after navigating his way back. Jongdae sits where he’d seen him last, and looks mildly surprised to see him again “You’re here.” The breeze ruffles at his hair, marks of surprise written in the stars.
Little gifts never sent clink in Jongdae’s pocket, the muted starlight casting gentle shadows on Kyungsoo’s face. “I’m here,” he agrees.
“I thought you’d be gone … For longer.”
He holds out his hands, the soft light of Jongdae’s work like dying embers in the dark. “They were disappearing.” The I missed you goes unspoken.
“I’m sorry.” Kyungsoo’s truth breaks the sky open.
Stay a little longer.
-
Jongdae plucks the smallest ones to keep at his side.
A network of stars and nebulae suspended in space--and also in love with an intergalactic traveler--has nothing but time. Jongdae sows little seeds of gravel and bygone planets, waits to see them mature into sweet protostars.
He coaxes their glow, breath blowing on them until they learn how to emit light. His garden swells with them, and he nests them into little patterns. Jongdae picks the smallest stars out of orbit like ripe fruit, keeping them as gifts until he can see Kyungsoo again, to light up his expression with tiny gems.
Time signifies something else to him. It means the way his edges spread out a little more, decades flashing by, gravity stretching at his boundaries. Old enough to be aware, Jongdae wonders if there are others like himself. If they, too, save up these gifts capable of powering whole systems. If they keep glittering jewels in their pockets to warm someone else’s darkness.
He has no concept of letters.
-
I want to do something for you.
Kyungsoo lets the stars on his hands burn into his memories. They glimmer, little threads of light floating midair as he deftly steers his broken ship away--toward someplace new. He remembers Jongdae painting them on his skin with care, soft kisses pressing a new warmth to the backs of his hands. A gift to remember me by: it’s Circinus. Kyungsoo lets the console room’s lights fade to a bare glow, until the brightest sources of light are the backs of his hands.
Far away, Jongdae’s eyes dim as he tracks Kyungsoo’s ship across the horizon.
-
“I have to go.” Blurted out in the middle of the day, Jongdae halts the little storm he’d been pushing around a core planet when he hears Kyungsoo’s voice.
“Of course you do,” he answers, but his voice sounds funny to his own ears. The storm dissolves over the young planet’s equator, leaving behind an ash-grey sky.
“I need to … Be at this place.” The excuse sounds lame to his own ears; Kyungsoo, running away from the past--running away from the possible future. “I need to help these people.”
The crackle of a bigger storm brews over a sun. “Then you should go,” Jongdae agrees. “You should be where you’re needed.”
-
The nights Kyungsoo has nightmares, he sleeps on Jongdae’s shoulder.
He’ll fall off the bed on-deck and glare up at the ceiling, as if the ship were to blame for his sleeping habits. When he pushes open the bay doors, he lets his slipper-clad feet dangle as he sits on the edge of the deck to stare at Jongdae’s sky. “What the hell,” he says to himself. Kyungsoo leaves the noise of warfare and the cold sweat behind him, slippers scuffling the tamped-down soil. He always brings a blanket from the ship.
Underneath a familiar canopy, the dark purple trunks curl around him like smoke. “It’s peaceful out here,” he says. He can tell Jongdae is listening. “There’s less of everything else here, you know? Nine hundred years, and I still can’t tell what peace is like.”
Tell me a story, please. Let me know what light brings to the darkness.
“I’m not ageless.” Jongdae smooths Kyungsoo’s hair off his brow. He looks young like this: pale and wide-eyed, afraid and alone. “I’m only thirteen billion years old.” He drops a kiss atop Kyungsoo’s bared forehead. “I think I’ve forgotten what it was like to know fear.”
“I’ve seen plenty,” Kyungsoo manages.
“Once, I saw what people could do out of fear. I watched these little creatures, with the lifespan of nothing I know--they live such short lives, and it’s. Sad. They’re so afraid, but somehow still lonely. They saw a Wolf-Rayet star fling something into their orbit. It gave off a strange, radioactive air to the whole area--and these creatures, they needed it to survive.” Jongdae’s eyes fix on a distant point, the unearthly light of galaxies trapped in his irises. He knits his hands together. The stars fold themselves into each other, a little.
“Generations of these little creatures--they’re like sparks. Flaring and then fading. And once, they looked up at their atmosphere, at the meteorite, and they must have been so afraid to see what was up there. I saw them black out their sky with smoke and fog, building little machines to generate a veil across their planet’s eyes. And they lived like that, I guess. I never saw creatures like that ever again. Little pieces flaming and dying. I don’t know if they’re still alive.”
Jongdae points up at the sky and lets his finger pick out a little diamond from the night-black, lets it rest on his fingertip like a grain of dust. “I think they ripped apart their planet to do it. It had the metals they needed to make those machines, and when they hid themselves from every eye, the world disappeared.” He lets the star roll down his finger and rest in his palm, glowing warm and yellow.
“And the field started like this. Little worlds, winking out, one by one.” Jongdae lets the star soar back up to its place, as if hung by a thread of light. He curls his fingers against the sky and lets it cling to him, cobwebs of interstellar gas dragging darkness across the faces of stars. “It was lonely without those creatures.”
Jongdae brushes a hand over Kyungsoo’s eyes, lets his palm press over his lashes and closes them.
"It's lonely out here all the time. Distance lets me see the way they flame and the way they die--but you get to see them when they’re alive. That’s a good thing.”
-
A ship sears a streak across Jongdae’s closed eyelids, burning white-blue and broadcasting scrambled signals across multiple frequencies. It trails the smell of melted copper through his airspace and gives him a headache.
He watches it crash on sunlit ground and makes a choice.
-
“NGC 568.” The words leave his surprised mouth, quickfire. “The … Galactic designation?”
“I can give you polar coordinates, if you like.” He sounds cheerful. Kyungsoo, who travels light years and aeons across the entirety of time and space, has never seen something like this. “I’m a sentient mass of stars and planets. You broke one of mine, by the way. But it’s very nice to meet you.”
“Likewise,” he mumbles, eyes never quite leaving the trails of light-emitting particles from his irises. He looks unearthly. “I’m sorry about the planet.”
-
Crashing is never his preferred way to arrive. The ship’s always irreparably broken, with the brakes always on and the groaning noise of technology grinding to a halt around his ears. But that’s what he does: he crash-lands with style and the roar of a dying sun. Supernovae could be more discreet.
“Again,” Kyungsoo groans, clutching his bruised ribs and glaring up at the console. “You’re terrible at this. I think you like me when I’m hurt.”
The lights blink innocently. She’s pushing him to explore--so he does, tucking the keys in his pocket and shooting a parting glare at the ship’s cheerily closing doors. The planet is a new one, the smell of freshly-formed terrafirma tickling his nose. “This sucks,” he whines. “It looks like Oz out here.” The door locks shut behind him.
Kyungsoo pushes a path through tall, purple grass to something that looks a lake. At least, the stuff looks liquid. It ripples in the mint scented wind.
“Interesting.”
He marks the pair of eyes watching him, staying on him since he left the ship. The eyes follow his path as he picks his road past the rocks and crumbling clay foundations of soaring trees. “It’s very pretty,” he comments--and out of the corner of his eye, he can see the eyes blink in response. “What a very lovely glade,” he adds. The eyes curve--and depending on what the being is, it could be a sign of aggression or pleasure.
Kyungsoo stretches out a hand and doesn’t let it shake, pats a tree trunk curving up skyward in violet streaks, and the curving eyes look happy. He’s probably not going to die. He sticks his hands in his pockets and moves on past the little oasis, passing the trees and coming to a quiet meadow of red grass and a stretched-out sky.
The eyes stay near the trees, the silhouetted shape of something leaning against the trees barely staying in his field of vision. Kyungsoo gauges the size of it: it looks like he could take it in a fight. Something like a fight. He shrugs, flopping down on the soft grass and closes his eyes. He can hear footsteps thudding gently on the ground, the stranger’s footfall lightweight and easy.
He keeps his eyes closed.
“You shouldn’t sleep unawares like this,” a voice chides. It’s melodic and low, a male voice with a depth that Kyungsoo’s never heard before. “It could be dangerous.”
“I’m dangerous,” he replies (it’s true). “And if sleeping is dangerous, to a dangerous man, it’s something he should be used to.”
“I guess you can’t argue with that.” Kyungsoo cracks one eye open to see something humanoid. A smile. “Are you comfortable here?”
“You could say that. It’s very nice out here, wherever I am.”
“In my hair,” the stranger laughs. “But if it’s comfortable, I don’t suppose it’ll matter where you are. At any rate, I’m glad you like it.”
Kyungsoo considers the facts. “I can help you. I saw your ship crash--but I can help you.” He studies him with round, dark eyes, the glint of curiosity overwhelmed by a shadow. “I can repair my ship by myself,” he says flatly.
“I won’t hurt you. And it looks like your ship could use all the help it can get.” He offers up a hand, palm facing upward: the universal sign of peace.
The stranger looks at his hand, at his face, and back down to the ruined ship. He crosses his arms and stares at him, eyes boring into his own. Jongdae smiles. “Trust me.”
author's note: title and cut are taken from richard siken’s poem ‘scheherezade’--inspiration from arvo pärt's spiegel im spiegel. the names of places and settings from the doctor who universe (and a few other things ...?)
title: these, our bodies, possessed by light
pairing: chensoo
rating: pg
word count: 2630
summary: a slow romance of two people falling in love, parsec by parsec.
One day, Jongdae teaches Kyungsoo to dance with the music of the spheres.
“Like this,” he whispers, breath blowing warm in Kyungsoo’s ear, eyes crinkled into a smile. “Move like this, step one, yes, two, three, four.” His arm curls around a soft, pliant waist. Kyungsoo folds his lips together into a straight line and looks down at their feet, his legs tangling with Jongdae’s in careful rhythm. “Good, good.” Jongdae’s voice carries the current of a delighted laugh. “I can’t believe I’m teaching you how to dance.”
“I can’t believe I’m doing this,” Kyungsoo grunts, limbs still hesitant. A blue veil of dust cloaks them as Jongdae gently hums a careful melody and lights the path of their feet with flares.
-
Jongdae’s not a terribly great dancer. It took him centuries to learn how to do it--how to move in alignment to his neighbors and keep the rhythm, spinning gently until the clusters flared in answer. He lost a lot of stars in the first few centuries.
He wonders if it might be easier to dance with a partner. (Let us sing for you. Close your eyes--open your ears.) A quiet hope blooms in his chest at the thought.
-
“Can’t you hear it?” Jongdae looks puzzled.
“Hear what?” Kyungsoo says shortly, his eyebrows furrowing. The ship’s engines spark up at him, wires melted together at the fury of his last atmospheric re-entry. He fumbles in his tool box for the right object, excavating its depths for a miniature plasma cutter.
“The music of the spheres.”
Jongdae settles warm hands on Kyungsoo’s, stilling his movements. “Close your eyes,” he whispers. “Open your ears. You’ve traveled for so long among them, so. Just listen to us.” Kyungsoo relaxes his grip on the plasma cutter; he can see its hot-blue flame fizzle out as it falls from his hands and into the depths of his ship’s open engines.
The song pours its way into his senses like water.
-
“Sometimes,” Kyungsoo says quietly, “I’ll put the ship to sleep and let us float in space, and we’ll be suspended among the stars and go nowhere.” Jongdae gathers stellar plumes and lets them light up his face, the glow reflecting in his eyes. He settles his head against Kyungsoo’s thigh and stares up at the sky, at the pale line of his jaw working out gentle words. “It’s really peaceful out there.”
“It is,” Jongdae agrees.
“I like it, though.” His voice sounds soft, and Jongdae lets him twine slender fingers in his hair. He makes a low sound in his throat, halfway to a purr, and the plumes turn a hot, bright white. “I passed by a central reflection nebula a while ago, with these two lines that curved together. It looked just like an eye.”
“And how long was a while ago?”
“Ten years,” Kyungsoo admits. “Or twenty. I was chased out of the Fostrix Galaxy after,” his laugh warms the clouds with puffs of oxygen. “After I accidentally insulted their military leader. And I, well, I lost them after a few megaparsecs out of Barclowan orbit. When I slowed down, my ship carried me to a place I’d never been to before--and I saw it there, that nebula. I put my ship to sleep for a few days and watched it break up rocks and color itself in.” Kyungsoo sounds as if he were talking to himself. “It was so cold there. My ship’s engines kept me alive, but it was wonderful to see it all happen. I’ve never seen colors like those.”
“Nine hundred years,” Jongdae teases. “And it took a little nebula to show you that?” Kyungsoo thwocks him on the forehead with a stern hand, but when Jongdae whines, he smooths over his brow. “I’m glad you got to see that,” he adds. “I don’t have any reflection lines.”
“Parked my ship on a quasar once. It fried the plasmic hull for a while.” Kyungsoo sounds like he’s joking, maybe.
“Then I’m glad I don’t have any quasars, either,” Jongdae declares. He sits up and leans his head against Kyungsoo’s shoulder, and looks up at the skies, at the vast stretch of space. “I’ve got that little patch over here, though.” He smiles, and the point in the heavens grows brighter.
Kyungsoo studies his face. “Are these your eyes?”
“No, it’s this bit.” He laughs, hands pointing to the upturned edge of his mouth. Kyungsoo turns his focus to study the sky intently. “It’s beautiful,” he murmurs. He reaches up a hand--as if he could wash his fingertips in the starlight.
“You think it’s beautiful?” Jongdae sounds mildly curious, his mouth’s curve frozen in place. Kyungsoo catches the searchlight ray of Jongdae’s eye with a smile of his own, answers the silent question on a separate frequency.
“Yes.”
-
A year and a day after Jongdae last pressed kisses to the backs of his hands, the stars are dying out. Kyungsoo punches in hazy coordinates--hoping for accuracy but expecting none--as his ship rattles its way across galaxies in search of a specific place and person.
He disembarks, dropping a grateful pat on the still-shuddering console after navigating his way back. Jongdae sits where he’d seen him last, and looks mildly surprised to see him again “You’re here.” The breeze ruffles at his hair, marks of surprise written in the stars.
Little gifts never sent clink in Jongdae’s pocket, the muted starlight casting gentle shadows on Kyungsoo’s face. “I’m here,” he agrees.
“I thought you’d be gone … For longer.”
He holds out his hands, the soft light of Jongdae’s work like dying embers in the dark. “They were disappearing.” The I missed you goes unspoken.
“I’m sorry.” Kyungsoo’s truth breaks the sky open.
Stay a little longer.
-
Jongdae plucks the smallest ones to keep at his side.
A network of stars and nebulae suspended in space--and also in love with an intergalactic traveler--has nothing but time. Jongdae sows little seeds of gravel and bygone planets, waits to see them mature into sweet protostars.
He coaxes their glow, breath blowing on them until they learn how to emit light. His garden swells with them, and he nests them into little patterns. Jongdae picks the smallest stars out of orbit like ripe fruit, keeping them as gifts until he can see Kyungsoo again, to light up his expression with tiny gems.
Time signifies something else to him. It means the way his edges spread out a little more, decades flashing by, gravity stretching at his boundaries. Old enough to be aware, Jongdae wonders if there are others like himself. If they, too, save up these gifts capable of powering whole systems. If they keep glittering jewels in their pockets to warm someone else’s darkness.
He has no concept of letters.
-
I want to do something for you.
Kyungsoo lets the stars on his hands burn into his memories. They glimmer, little threads of light floating midair as he deftly steers his broken ship away--toward someplace new. He remembers Jongdae painting them on his skin with care, soft kisses pressing a new warmth to the backs of his hands. A gift to remember me by: it’s Circinus. Kyungsoo lets the console room’s lights fade to a bare glow, until the brightest sources of light are the backs of his hands.
Far away, Jongdae’s eyes dim as he tracks Kyungsoo’s ship across the horizon.
-
“I have to go.” Blurted out in the middle of the day, Jongdae halts the little storm he’d been pushing around a core planet when he hears Kyungsoo’s voice.
“Of course you do,” he answers, but his voice sounds funny to his own ears. The storm dissolves over the young planet’s equator, leaving behind an ash-grey sky.
“I need to … Be at this place.” The excuse sounds lame to his own ears; Kyungsoo, running away from the past--running away from the possible future. “I need to help these people.”
The crackle of a bigger storm brews over a sun. “Then you should go,” Jongdae agrees. “You should be where you’re needed.”
-
The nights Kyungsoo has nightmares, he sleeps on Jongdae’s shoulder.
He’ll fall off the bed on-deck and glare up at the ceiling, as if the ship were to blame for his sleeping habits. When he pushes open the bay doors, he lets his slipper-clad feet dangle as he sits on the edge of the deck to stare at Jongdae’s sky. “What the hell,” he says to himself. Kyungsoo leaves the noise of warfare and the cold sweat behind him, slippers scuffling the tamped-down soil. He always brings a blanket from the ship.
Underneath a familiar canopy, the dark purple trunks curl around him like smoke. “It’s peaceful out here,” he says. He can tell Jongdae is listening. “There’s less of everything else here, you know? Nine hundred years, and I still can’t tell what peace is like.”
Tell me a story, please. Let me know what light brings to the darkness.
“I’m not ageless.” Jongdae smooths Kyungsoo’s hair off his brow. He looks young like this: pale and wide-eyed, afraid and alone. “I’m only thirteen billion years old.” He drops a kiss atop Kyungsoo’s bared forehead. “I think I’ve forgotten what it was like to know fear.”
“I’ve seen plenty,” Kyungsoo manages.
“Once, I saw what people could do out of fear. I watched these little creatures, with the lifespan of nothing I know--they live such short lives, and it’s. Sad. They’re so afraid, but somehow still lonely. They saw a Wolf-Rayet star fling something into their orbit. It gave off a strange, radioactive air to the whole area--and these creatures, they needed it to survive.” Jongdae’s eyes fix on a distant point, the unearthly light of galaxies trapped in his irises. He knits his hands together. The stars fold themselves into each other, a little.
“Generations of these little creatures--they’re like sparks. Flaring and then fading. And once, they looked up at their atmosphere, at the meteorite, and they must have been so afraid to see what was up there. I saw them black out their sky with smoke and fog, building little machines to generate a veil across their planet’s eyes. And they lived like that, I guess. I never saw creatures like that ever again. Little pieces flaming and dying. I don’t know if they’re still alive.”
Jongdae points up at the sky and lets his finger pick out a little diamond from the night-black, lets it rest on his fingertip like a grain of dust. “I think they ripped apart their planet to do it. It had the metals they needed to make those machines, and when they hid themselves from every eye, the world disappeared.” He lets the star roll down his finger and rest in his palm, glowing warm and yellow.
“And the field started like this. Little worlds, winking out, one by one.” Jongdae lets the star soar back up to its place, as if hung by a thread of light. He curls his fingers against the sky and lets it cling to him, cobwebs of interstellar gas dragging darkness across the faces of stars. “It was lonely without those creatures.”
Jongdae brushes a hand over Kyungsoo’s eyes, lets his palm press over his lashes and closes them.
"It's lonely out here all the time. Distance lets me see the way they flame and the way they die--but you get to see them when they’re alive. That’s a good thing.”
-
A ship sears a streak across Jongdae’s closed eyelids, burning white-blue and broadcasting scrambled signals across multiple frequencies. It trails the smell of melted copper through his airspace and gives him a headache.
He watches it crash on sunlit ground and makes a choice.
-
“NGC 568.” The words leave his surprised mouth, quickfire. “The … Galactic designation?”
“I can give you polar coordinates, if you like.” He sounds cheerful. Kyungsoo, who travels light years and aeons across the entirety of time and space, has never seen something like this. “I’m a sentient mass of stars and planets. You broke one of mine, by the way. But it’s very nice to meet you.”
“Likewise,” he mumbles, eyes never quite leaving the trails of light-emitting particles from his irises. He looks unearthly. “I’m sorry about the planet.”
-
Crashing is never his preferred way to arrive. The ship’s always irreparably broken, with the brakes always on and the groaning noise of technology grinding to a halt around his ears. But that’s what he does: he crash-lands with style and the roar of a dying sun. Supernovae could be more discreet.
“Again,” Kyungsoo groans, clutching his bruised ribs and glaring up at the console. “You’re terrible at this. I think you like me when I’m hurt.”
The lights blink innocently. She’s pushing him to explore--so he does, tucking the keys in his pocket and shooting a parting glare at the ship’s cheerily closing doors. The planet is a new one, the smell of freshly-formed terrafirma tickling his nose. “This sucks,” he whines. “It looks like Oz out here.” The door locks shut behind him.
Kyungsoo pushes a path through tall, purple grass to something that looks a lake. At least, the stuff looks liquid. It ripples in the mint scented wind.
“Interesting.”
He marks the pair of eyes watching him, staying on him since he left the ship. The eyes follow his path as he picks his road past the rocks and crumbling clay foundations of soaring trees. “It’s very pretty,” he comments--and out of the corner of his eye, he can see the eyes blink in response. “What a very lovely glade,” he adds. The eyes curve--and depending on what the being is, it could be a sign of aggression or pleasure.
Kyungsoo stretches out a hand and doesn’t let it shake, pats a tree trunk curving up skyward in violet streaks, and the curving eyes look happy. He’s probably not going to die. He sticks his hands in his pockets and moves on past the little oasis, passing the trees and coming to a quiet meadow of red grass and a stretched-out sky.
The eyes stay near the trees, the silhouetted shape of something leaning against the trees barely staying in his field of vision. Kyungsoo gauges the size of it: it looks like he could take it in a fight. Something like a fight. He shrugs, flopping down on the soft grass and closes his eyes. He can hear footsteps thudding gently on the ground, the stranger’s footfall lightweight and easy.
He keeps his eyes closed.
“You shouldn’t sleep unawares like this,” a voice chides. It’s melodic and low, a male voice with a depth that Kyungsoo’s never heard before. “It could be dangerous.”
“I’m dangerous,” he replies (it’s true). “And if sleeping is dangerous, to a dangerous man, it’s something he should be used to.”
“I guess you can’t argue with that.” Kyungsoo cracks one eye open to see something humanoid. A smile. “Are you comfortable here?”
“You could say that. It’s very nice out here, wherever I am.”
“In my hair,” the stranger laughs. “But if it’s comfortable, I don’t suppose it’ll matter where you are. At any rate, I’m glad you like it.”
Kyungsoo considers the facts. “I can help you. I saw your ship crash--but I can help you.” He studies him with round, dark eyes, the glint of curiosity overwhelmed by a shadow. “I can repair my ship by myself,” he says flatly.
“I won’t hurt you. And it looks like your ship could use all the help it can get.” He offers up a hand, palm facing upward: the universal sign of peace.
The stranger looks at his hand, at his face, and back down to the ruined ship. He crosses his arms and stares at him, eyes boring into his own. Jongdae smiles. “Trust me.”
author's note: title and cut are taken from richard siken’s poem ‘scheherezade’--inspiration from arvo pärt's spiegel im spiegel. the names of places and settings from the doctor who universe (and a few other things ...?)