#97: cortisol parties
Prompt: #97
Title: cortisol parties
Pairing: Chen/Chanyeol
Rating: PG-13
Word count: 4629w
Summary: Jongdae stands in his kitchen with a pair of musical tickets burning his palm into soggy ashes.
There is a man standing absolutely stock still in a dark room and there are a hundred paper cranes.
The man with cartridge paper for skin -
(easily stained, a little harder to tear)
- is called Kim Jongdae. The dark room with the linoleum tiles carved into a thousand ribcages, a thousand black and streetlight-orange X-ray films, is his kitchen come living room come workroom. And the hundred paper cranes -
(their feathers are printed with the coffee receipts of last week, stained with the pesto of cheap and cheerful restaurants, scrawled with abandoned love song lyrics)
- are the work of a man called Park Chanyeol.
Mister Park is a man who likes to smile and record songs and rewrite the campaigns of idealists. He is also a man who gives Jongdae gifts, and Jongdae is someone whose only gifts are his internal organs. Chanyeol gave Jongdae a scarf - Jongdae’s gut was already sold to Chanyeol with the way that it knots itself with every shutter blink of Chanyeol’s eyelids -
(memories like polaroids; blurring, fading, tearing at the corners until you can scarcely remember what the image was originally but what you wanted the image to be is clear as sunlit day).
And Chanyeol gave Jongdae cookies, too, but the only organs that really resemble cookies are Jongdae’s kidneys and they are too busy removing excess dopamine, serotonin, oxytocin from his bloodstream to consider moving out.
Right now, his kidneys are preparing for a spike in cortisol, preparing for a party with Jongdae’s lungs, making small talk before the show like how do you do, yeah we’re okay, the family’s good too, oh no, honey, you should stop working so hard, there’s no need for overtime or tachypnea just yet, he hasn’t got a plan of action yet. Yeah, it’s true! He’s only had the last, like, three hours to consider whether he’s going to accept Chanyeol’s gift of musical tickets or not. Jeez, yeah, I know. Slow much.
But Jongdae’s sarcastic lungs are those of a flight animal, not a fighter, and they’re gearing up for a sprint, all the way to his bed to collapse and pull the covers up over his head until he can’t think any more because -
(he might be in love)
- because Chanyeol shouldn’t be paying this much for a musical ticket for Jongdae, that’s why, not when Chanyeol’s scraping stuff together to pay for his studio time as it is.
That’s why.
That’s totally why.
(if you saw the blood test reports with the levels of attraction, affection, shattered logic in the bin, please don’t mention it to our protagonist)
The tickets to see Seoul’s most acclaimed musical are burning Jongdae’s palms into soggy ashes and time is ticking on. Time to examine the history - it’ll take Jongdae long enough to decide, so we might as well get the full scoop.
Sitting comfortably?
-
( << r e w i n d << )
Well, Jongdae wasn’t, the first time the two met. Jongdae was damp, jeans soaked with globs of cloud spit and hair sticking up between the wires of his headphones as he slipslipslid discs between his fingers. He was disc-jockeying, DJ-ing, letting his mouth fall open to ease the process of drowning in artificial dubstep that’s like water in that it crushes your chest and constricts your nose. It winds around the strands of your hair, ionic with sweat, and chases into your pores, runs after your blood until you feel you could explode with it. But Jongdae did not explode because he bends. He is ductile. His malleable skin and salt-dough bones contained the explosion and if someone noticed the thud of the discs as he dropped a couple, they’d forgotten about it by the time they’d turned around.
Park Chanyeol was the man sitting at the back of the club, quite at home in the sand and the grit of having a good time -
(he’s one of those that lives in the sea)
- and clutching a parcel of dreams in his hand, a paper crane. A bleached tree-pulp one, pitted with the marks left by nervous hands clutching half-empty biros.
It asks if Kim Jongdae, DJ Chen at Seoul’s Beagle Club, would consider helping Park Chanyeol, political activist, radio jingle composer and singer-songwriter, mix the sound for his first demo tape because he’s asked around everyone he can get to stand still for long enough about who’s the best guy to mix sound, and they all said, “DJ Chen.”
So here he is.
And here Jongdae is, pulled to the discs by a contract he signed three years ago when he didn’t realise that he’d actually grow to kind of like his DJ-ing job with its unsociable hours and its frankly insulting pay because it’s better to drown in water where nobody can breathe and where the flooding of the alveoli is a fact for everyone than it is to drown in air where everyone can breathe, oxygenate, function -
(everyone except you)
.
And to skip forward a few hours of bass and people and mascara dripping like tears and sweat glossing collarbones into metal, Chanyeol handed Jongdae his paper crane, his begging letter, and then left.
Jongdae had had enough of the whirlpool of vodka shots and disconnected sinews that was, is the club and headed home, crane burning in his pocket -
(steam rose from the pocket of his skinny thigh as he walked)
- and sleep chewing at the corners of his eyes. Jongdae pushed his apartment door open, pulled his clothes over his head and drowned in the stomach acid of the beast they call sleep. It was too early in the morning for dreams.
-
(update: kimjongdae is still standing in his x-rayed kitchen, still staring at the two tickets and overlaying them with park chanyeol’s hopeful smile)
-
( >> twelve hours later )
The next morning, Jongdae heaved his drowned bones and sand-crusted hair into the swivel chair behind the counter of the record store. Li Yin told him that he looked and sounded like roadkill and he whined at her.
She worried about his health (Jongdae barely slept - side effect number three five eight of DJ-ing) and his happiness (she was convinced that he was lonely), and he finally snapped at her and told her that he didn’t want a boyfriend and that he was perfectly fine, would get an A in the exam, thank Zhang Li Yin very much.
Plus, he showed her the paper crane letter to prove that he was going to take up fewer shifts at the club because the mysterious tall man with the pretty eyes -
(so many contrasts; dark pupils and irises against white sclera, white sclera against dark lashes, dark lashes brushing pale cheeks, whispering over skin that today’s jongdae wants to kiss)
- had offered to pay Jongdae for his expertise. Admittedly, it was barely above minimum wage, but Chanyeol would be buying food as well and Jongdae was really, really sick of the instant ramen that he always picked up on the way home.
Plus he’d never been able to do anything with his mixing talents except DJ-ing and that’s a wholly thankless job and he wanted to do something useful, so why not take the chance? When you’re drowning, you haven’t got a lot of time left before the pressure of the depths crushes your lungs to a paper bag, the kind you see floating around the back streets, unloved and chased by bored cats with furry balls, so you might as well take chances.
Jongdae called Chanyeol with nervous fingers and asked when Chanyeol wanted to start.
-
( >> next day )
First impressions are supposed to be grand and if you’re Jongdae, seeing Chanyeol for the first time in the daylight did have its own grandeur. Chanyeol’s dark coat swept his knees, his hair swept his cheekbones into startling grace and his eyes bugged out when he saw Jongdae.
But Jongdae didn’t see that last bit because he was focusing on the two subs in Chanyeol’s hand and so his impression of Chanyeol is of dark beauty and gifts.
Something like that, anyway.
They talked for a long, long time about nothing -
(“my friend hyoyeon said -” / “wait, kimhyoyeon? kimjongin’s friend?” / “you know hyoyeon?” / “sure i do”)
- and everything -
(“i don’t want a record label because music should be recorded for enjoyment, not money. art and money are not two sides of the same coin.” - chanyeol)
(“let me get this straight - you write love songs for no one?” - jongdae)
(“i fold paper cranes as a kind of default activity. i have to have something to do with my hands. but these sub napkins are pretty bad for origami.” - chanyeol)
(“oh my god, you drink decaf. parkchanyeol, my heart bleeds for you.” - jongdae)
- and Jongdae came out of the shell he’s built himself, just a little, poking his wispy head out into the winter breeze of “do you agree with this chord here” and “you should stick with a simple fill here”, and they arranged to meet up next week.
Chanyeol smiled at Jongdae when he left, a bright little thing in a shadowed face, and Jongdae saw that flash of light as he drowned in the club’s bass, and he couldn’t tell the difference between its burn behind his eyelids and that of the moon when he walked home from the club in the thick night. The cranes that Chanyeol left on the table burned in his pocket until he set them on his kitchen counter, where they soaked up the streetlights and burned orange in the morning.
-
( >> next week)
(in the interim: son seungwan was teased some more about her purportedly non-existent crush on byunbaekhyun, zhang li yin pestered kimjongdae some more about making himself happy, and the tiniest feather jongdae had ever seen landed on his bathroom windowsill as he showered)
(he wondered which bird it was from. it was grey and the length of the proximal phalanx on his left hand and he knows that because he measured it.)
Chanyeol had been busy in that week whilst Jongdae dossed around at the record store, avoiding his boss out of habit and avoiding the new shipment that had to be stacked out of laziness - Chanyeol dropped a sheaf of papers on the studio table and said, “Cleaned up some old songs that I thought we could have a go at.”
(“we” being the key word here)
Jongdae said that they should get going given that Chanyeol had produced half an album’s worth of drafts, and Chanyeol laughed and unlocked his guitar case. Jongdae most certainly did not get lost in the curves of the guitar fitting against Chanyeol’s side, under his arm, and he definitely could breathe when he watched Chanyeol lacing and unlacing his fingers.
One hundred percent. That’s how sure he was that he didn’t find Park Chanyeol and his shadows/highlights contrasts, his callused fingers, pretty -
(pretty is what jongdae called luhan)
(and there will be more on that story later)
- but something more must have happened, something that made time run from them with winged feet because they only realised that it was time to leave the studio when the cleaner poked her head in the door and politely asked them to leave.
Chanyeol took his song sheets home, scrawled over in orange pen and in need of reworking, and Jongdae cleared up all the paper cranes that Chanyeol made of the unworkable songs once the latter had left. The cleaner smiled at him, said that he was too kind and that it was her job to clean up.
Jongdae just laughed and bobbed his head and omitted to tell her that Li Yin must have been having some impact on him because he was collecting Chanyeol’s cranes because they made him happy.
-
( >> three days later)
Jongdae boggled at the stack of papers in Chanyeol’s hand when the latter entered the studio. “Jesus, how did you have time to do all this?” Jongdae exclaimed.
Chanyeol shuffled a few song sheets, presented Jongdae with a latte -
(which he seized like a marmoset seizes tree gum)
(or that’s what chanyeol said later, anyway)
- and looked down. “I like writing songs,” he mumbled.
Jongdae pressed for elaboration.
“I only write radio jingles at work,” Chanyeol explained, “but my pent-up passion is songwriting. I work in campaigning, so I help to make activists’ work more palatable to the public but I’ve always had a knack for writing songs so I get to make jingles too. But I really want to write songs.”
Jongdae wasn’t going to argue with that. Chanyeol did have a knack for writing songs -
(his deep voice, soft guitar melodies had been looping through jongdae’s headphones since their first studio session, winding their ways around his kidneys until he could feel the songs pushing at the salt ions in his blood, pulling his organs tighter together)
- and Jongdae seemed to have a knack for spilling his secrets to men with pretty eyes and nice voices and a little bit of time for Jongdae because he and Chanyeol had only met three times and yet Chanyeol knew a few of his idiosyncrasies -
(jongdae can’t abide people tapping their fingers on things)
(jongdae dislikes wearing his contacts for extended periods of time and so brings glasses to the studio so that they can slip down his nose and fall onto the song sheets and make chanyeol laugh)
(jongdae is broke as hell and barely scrapes by on his apartment rent and will eat any food that chanyeol produces, even if it is the over-garlicked falafel from the animal rights campaign group lunch that taste like mortar)
- and that scares Jongdae.
Although not enough to stop him from chirping “sure!” when Chanyeol asks to meet up next week.
-
(jongdae is still in his kitchen, by the way; he’s just pacing now, putting gritty footprints on the x-ray film)
-
( >> two days later )
“Jongdae, you have an admirer.”
Jongdae sputtered into his glass of water. “Come again?”
Li Yin waved a brown paper parcel at him. “A man came in and dropped this parcel off earlier.”
“Tall, wide eyes.” Seungwan did an impression of the mystery man’s face - Jongdae resisted the urge to push her eyeballs back into their sockets because they looked like they were going to fall out if she didn’t stop soon. “Long dark coat.”
“Nice hands,” Li Yin supplied.
“Asked for a Mister Kim Jongdae,” Seungwan noted. “Polite.”
Jongdae’s eyebrows shot up to the ceiling. “Chanyeol?”
“You tell us,” grinned Li Yin as she tossed him the package. She sensed his hesitation. “Go on, open it!”
Jongdae weighed the parcel in his hands. It was relatively dense but soft, almost fluid. When he opened the paper, a crane fell out and his breath caught.
Seungwan had to smack him on the back to dislodge it, and Jongdae’s fingers shook as he unfolded the crane. Shook like the legs of the tiny kitten that Lu Han had taken into their apartment back when Jongdae shared an apartment with him, when Jongdae was a nervous boy trying to improve his Chinese by sacrificing his lungs to the Beijing smog.
your cheeks were really pink and you looked really cold last recording session. don’t get too cold!
Seungwan had to tip the scarf out of its brown paper jacket because Jongdae couldn’t do it. His throat was choked up over the note, the affection that he doesn’t deserve, and when he tried to speak, all that came out were the mewling noises that Jongdae remembers from Lu Han cooing over the kitten whilst Jongdae tried to pretend that he wasn’t falling in love with Lu Han.
Now Jongdae was pretending that he couldn’t hear his heart protesting as it sped up and up and up at the thought of Chanyeol’s tenderness, and he wound the scarf so tightly around his neck when he left that Li Yin ran out after him and rearranged it so that he didn’t strangle himself with the hand-knitted scarf (the stitches were too uneven to be anything but hand-made).
-
( >> just under one month later )
Jongdae span on his swivel chair as the door to the studio opened. “The valiant hero returns!”
Chanyeol rolled his eyes and set his guitar case down. “I come bearing gifts.”
“Ooh, you can come again. Never mind the fact that you’re employing me.” The tin foil package rustled as Chanyeol laid it on the table. “What is it? It looks good.”
“I made us some cookies,” Chanyeol said -
(nonchalant except for the reef knots he failed to tie in his fumbling fingers and succeeded in tying in jongdae’s pulmonary artery)
- and Jongdae gaped.
(he heard the word “us” with as much emphasis as chanyeol said it)
(namely, quite a lot)
“You - thank you,” he finally stuttered. He peeled back the foil. Chocolate chips looked back from their vanilla dough kingdoms. “Chocolate chip is my favourite!”
It was a fucking lame-ass comment, but thankfully all Chanyeol said was, “I remember. You said a few weeks ago.”
Jongdae’s blood temperature was going to melt the cookies if he didn’t take his hand away quickly, so he grabbed one and stuffed it in his mouth.
“Fuck, this tastes like heaven,” he tried to say. Crumbs sprayed across Chanyeol’s music sheets and Chanyeol laughed.
“I’m glad you’re enjoying them. My friend invited me to see the new musical last night but I really didn’t want to go. Musicals aren’t my thing, so I stayed home and baked.”
Jongdae jetted some more crumbs onto the table in indignation. “You don’t want to see the new musical? God, why do I know you? It’s so good! It’s, like, Seoul’s best acclaimed musical in years, and the cast are all stellar and the pictures and trailers online make me sob just watching them.”
“Maybe that’s why I don’t like them. Too many cute people snottering on me.” Chanyeol picked up a pencil and pointed at his sheets. “So, I made some changes?”
Jongdae shook his head. “You heathen. If I hadn’t already, I would have sold my vinyl collection to see that musical.” He shifted closer to see the music sheets and found a new distraction - the soft, slow burn of Chanyeol’s thigh next to his.
Chanyeol didn’t move.
Neither did Jongdae.
-
( >> one month )
October evenings were muggy summer air wrapping around the skyscrapers and telegraph cables like chiffon skirts around girls’ legs, Jongdae breathing through the folds of his scarf -
(it’s like an extension of his neck by this point)
- and the moon staring down at Seoul, its light bleeding through the serrated edges of the clouds. Something thumped on the door to Jongdae’s heart as he pored over Chanyeol’s newest set of lyrics, orange pen in hand (Chanyeol dislikes red ink). Jongdae’s hand leapt across the page -
(a thick, deep orange scar across the word love)
- and he swore, softly, so as not to wake the mass of blankets on the sofa.
Park Chanyeol was sleeping in his apartment and Jongdae was in the jittery state that usually only accompanied twenty cups of coffee and atrial fibrillation. The mass of blankets on the sofa moved a little, made a soft grunty noise of sleep.
Jongdae swore again and shrugged on his coat, slipped out of his own apartment like a fugitive. The rooftop was cold and quiet and Jongdae sat on the very edge, heels bouncing off the brick and hands recoiling from the rough concrete, as he whispered to the moon and asked it why on earth he said that Chanyeol could sleep in his apartment after today’s student rights protest, and why on earth Chanyeol’s smile and eyes and fingertips and handwriting and goddamn snapback made his heart warm.
The moon glared back at him and bled some more moonlight.
-
( >> three weeks later)
“So you’ve been out to dinner with this guy, like, three times in the last month and he crashes at your place out of habit and you don’t count this as a love life?”
Jongdae glared at Seungwan. “No, actually, I do not. And for the record, one of the times he crashed at mine was for all of five minutes whilst he borrowed some jeans that Yifan left at my place because I spilt coffee on him.”
“Spilt coffee dates,” Seungwan murmured, winding a strand of hair around her finger. “So cute. Marry Park Chanyeol, please.”
Jongdae yanked on her ponytail and she yelped. Lu Han chose this moment to walk by and Jongdae gulped. “Jongdae, just the person I wanted to see!”
Surely it was far too early for such a radiant smile. Jongdae blinked but no, Lu Han continued to beam at him. “Can you teach Seungwan how to do the tax records?” Jongdae started to squint and his boss’ smile dimmed a little. “Please?”
“But you’re the boss.”
“Precisely why I can hand this task on to you.”
“Can you get me lunch then, please?”
“Exactly where I’m going. Seungwan, do you want anything?” Lu Han smiled at her and she placed her order.
“Okay, a BLT with mustard, no mayo and a blueberry muffin for Jongdae, chicken tikka wrap for Seungwan,” Lu Han confirmed. “See you guys later!”
He left, the door tinkling closed, and Seungwan turned her raised eyebrows on Jongdae. “How does he know your lunch order off by heart?”
“We’ve been friends for years,” Jongdae mumbled. “Now, see this column here? The revenue gets -”
“You don’t sound very happy about that,” Seungwan said.
Jongdae tapped his pencil on the finances sheet irritably. “Are you even listening? The revenue needs to be -”
“Let’s talk about Lu Han.”
“Let’s talk about how you need to calculate the fucking revenue -”
“What is wrong with you today? Why do you have such a bee in your bonnet?”
“Hey, Seungwan, I don’t even have a bonnet, and if I did, there certainly wouldn’t be a bee in it. I am one hundred percent fine and goddamn dandy. Can we please talk about revenue?”
“Just saying that you seem kind of, like, awkward and overly deferral around Lu Han,” she groused. “He’s a nice guy.”
“I fucking know that,” Jongdae gritted.
“Look, just calm -”
“No, you look, Seungwan. I was up until five fucking am this morning cleaning puke out from between club bathroom tiles that haven’t seen a bottle of bleach for at least three months, I’m not even going to get paid overtime for that cleaning because Hyoyeon is short of cash and whilst I can’t blame her, I’d really appreciate the money because my microwave is shot and I need to fix it so that I can eat hot food, and I have a song stuck in my head that I really fucking wish I didn’t because it reminds me of some tall-ass probable dirtbag that I want to let into my life even though that’s a really bad idea because I don’t do people, people are difficult, and now I have to do finances and the one course that I failed in high school was, you got it, economics and business, so please, do me a favour, just shut up and listen to me about goddamn fucking revenues!”
Seungwan shut up and listened to him about goddamn fucking revenues.
-
( >> forty minutes later )
“Sorry I exploded at you,” he said later, picking out the lettuce from his BLT.
She waved a chopstick at him. “Don’t worry. I understand that you’re having a bad day.”
Lu Han reached over and ruffled his hair. “Cheer up, man.”
Jongdae made a noncommittal noise. Of all the people to try to make him feel better, it would be the one that Seungwan was convinced that Jongdae hated. Or something. He caught her eyeing Lu Han’s hand in his hair and wiped mustard away from the corner of his mouth.
“Did Jongdae manage to explain the finances sheet to you?” Lu Han asked, after a silence.
Seungwan perked up. “Yes! It seems kind of simple but I’ve never done it before so I hope I don’t, like, screw up.”
“I’m sure you won’t, but you can ask if you have any problems. I’m good at finance.”
“That’s why you own a record store,” Jongdae mumbled.
“That’s the reason you didn’t starve your ass off when you lived with me in Beijing,” Lu Han retorted. Seungwan’s mouth formed a circle as she put one and one together and made two. Jongdae hoped that she wasn’t putting two and two together to make four years of Jongdae living with Lu Han and crushing on him desperately, even though that would have been the right answer.
There was a silence. Seungwan poked at her wrap. “Wait, did I tell you guys about the time -”
The doorchime tinkled as someone entered the shop and all three of them whipped their lunches under the counter. Professionalism, Lu Han had said too many times, is key. And apparently lunch did not equal professionalism. Today, however, was the one day that Jongdae was grateful for Lu Han’s professional outlook because he was still gagging on his rice as Lu Han said, “Hello, sir, can I help you?”
Chanyeol inclined his head. “Thank you, but I’m actually looking for Jongdae.”
Jongdae’s eyes watered as he forced the rice down his throat along with several chunks of oesophagus. “Chanyeol?” he wheezed.
Seungwan’s eyebrows were working overtime today.
“The one and only,” he smiled. “I - is this a bad time?”
“Oh - no, not at all,” Jongdae said quickly. “We were just eating lunch.”
“Please take as long as you like,” Seungwan butted in, “because when you release Jongdae, he’s going to teach me how to do even more financial things and I hate finance.”
Jongdae shot her a glare as Lu Han mumbled an excuse and packed up his lunch. “I wasn’t sure you even knew where this place was.”
“There are only so many Chinese record stores in Seoul,” Chanyeol shrugged. “I was - I’m friends with a guy in the theatre and he’s given me a pair of tickets to see the new musical. I was wondering if you wanted to go. To see it. With me.”
Jongdae’s heart thudded to a stop.
-
(we already established what happened in the ten hours since chanyeol offered the tickets to jongdae - now for the present moment)
-
( << downtown Seoul, twelfth floor >> )
Jongdae’s blood cortisol levels are pretty much through the roof. His kidneys have started their party and his thumb is jittery on his phone keys, muscles quivering like they’re cold but he’s hot, so so hot. His cheeks are flushed and perhaps he’s made a decision, perhaps not - his eyes are watering and his retinas are screaming at the white light of his phone, bright bright, thumb tapping out a message, pat pat.
He hits send.
i’d love to go to the musical <3
His heart thumps -
(firework celebrations at the party of his internal organs, where proceedings are lubricated by a healthy dose of fuck it alland stress and oh my god text back quickly-
-
( >> another shitty downtown Seoul apartment, one minute later )
i’d love to go to the musical <3
Chanyeol whoops so loudly that he hears the bed in the apartment above creak a little as the occupants wake up and grumble to themselves.
Author's note: Thank you so much to the mods for their friendliness and for running this event, and to the prompter for the wonderful idea (I tried to do it justice).
Title: cortisol parties
Pairing: Chen/Chanyeol
Rating: PG-13
Word count: 4629w
Summary: Jongdae stands in his kitchen with a pair of musical tickets burning his palm into soggy ashes.
There is a man standing absolutely stock still in a dark room and there are a hundred paper cranes.
The man with cartridge paper for skin -
(easily stained, a little harder to tear)
- is called Kim Jongdae. The dark room with the linoleum tiles carved into a thousand ribcages, a thousand black and streetlight-orange X-ray films, is his kitchen come living room come workroom. And the hundred paper cranes -
(their feathers are printed with the coffee receipts of last week, stained with the pesto of cheap and cheerful restaurants, scrawled with abandoned love song lyrics)
- are the work of a man called Park Chanyeol.
Mister Park is a man who likes to smile and record songs and rewrite the campaigns of idealists. He is also a man who gives Jongdae gifts, and Jongdae is someone whose only gifts are his internal organs. Chanyeol gave Jongdae a scarf - Jongdae’s gut was already sold to Chanyeol with the way that it knots itself with every shutter blink of Chanyeol’s eyelids -
(memories like polaroids; blurring, fading, tearing at the corners until you can scarcely remember what the image was originally but what you wanted the image to be is clear as sunlit day).
And Chanyeol gave Jongdae cookies, too, but the only organs that really resemble cookies are Jongdae’s kidneys and they are too busy removing excess dopamine, serotonin, oxytocin from his bloodstream to consider moving out.
Right now, his kidneys are preparing for a spike in cortisol, preparing for a party with Jongdae’s lungs, making small talk before the show like how do you do, yeah we’re okay, the family’s good too, oh no, honey, you should stop working so hard, there’s no need for overtime or tachypnea just yet, he hasn’t got a plan of action yet. Yeah, it’s true! He’s only had the last, like, three hours to consider whether he’s going to accept Chanyeol’s gift of musical tickets or not. Jeez, yeah, I know. Slow much.
But Jongdae’s sarcastic lungs are those of a flight animal, not a fighter, and they’re gearing up for a sprint, all the way to his bed to collapse and pull the covers up over his head until he can’t think any more because -
(he might be in love)
- because Chanyeol shouldn’t be paying this much for a musical ticket for Jongdae, that’s why, not when Chanyeol’s scraping stuff together to pay for his studio time as it is.
That’s why.
That’s totally why.
(if you saw the blood test reports with the levels of attraction, affection, shattered logic in the bin, please don’t mention it to our protagonist)
The tickets to see Seoul’s most acclaimed musical are burning Jongdae’s palms into soggy ashes and time is ticking on. Time to examine the history - it’ll take Jongdae long enough to decide, so we might as well get the full scoop.
Sitting comfortably?
-
( << r e w i n d << )
Well, Jongdae wasn’t, the first time the two met. Jongdae was damp, jeans soaked with globs of cloud spit and hair sticking up between the wires of his headphones as he slipslipslid discs between his fingers. He was disc-jockeying, DJ-ing, letting his mouth fall open to ease the process of drowning in artificial dubstep that’s like water in that it crushes your chest and constricts your nose. It winds around the strands of your hair, ionic with sweat, and chases into your pores, runs after your blood until you feel you could explode with it. But Jongdae did not explode because he bends. He is ductile. His malleable skin and salt-dough bones contained the explosion and if someone noticed the thud of the discs as he dropped a couple, they’d forgotten about it by the time they’d turned around.
Park Chanyeol was the man sitting at the back of the club, quite at home in the sand and the grit of having a good time -
(he’s one of those that lives in the sea)
- and clutching a parcel of dreams in his hand, a paper crane. A bleached tree-pulp one, pitted with the marks left by nervous hands clutching half-empty biros.
It asks if Kim Jongdae, DJ Chen at Seoul’s Beagle Club, would consider helping Park Chanyeol, political activist, radio jingle composer and singer-songwriter, mix the sound for his first demo tape because he’s asked around everyone he can get to stand still for long enough about who’s the best guy to mix sound, and they all said, “DJ Chen.”
So here he is.
And here Jongdae is, pulled to the discs by a contract he signed three years ago when he didn’t realise that he’d actually grow to kind of like his DJ-ing job with its unsociable hours and its frankly insulting pay because it’s better to drown in water where nobody can breathe and where the flooding of the alveoli is a fact for everyone than it is to drown in air where everyone can breathe, oxygenate, function -
(everyone except you)
.
And to skip forward a few hours of bass and people and mascara dripping like tears and sweat glossing collarbones into metal, Chanyeol handed Jongdae his paper crane, his begging letter, and then left.
Jongdae had had enough of the whirlpool of vodka shots and disconnected sinews that was, is the club and headed home, crane burning in his pocket -
(steam rose from the pocket of his skinny thigh as he walked)
- and sleep chewing at the corners of his eyes. Jongdae pushed his apartment door open, pulled his clothes over his head and drowned in the stomach acid of the beast they call sleep. It was too early in the morning for dreams.
-
(update: kimjongdae is still standing in his x-rayed kitchen, still staring at the two tickets and overlaying them with park chanyeol’s hopeful smile)
-
( >> twelve hours later )
The next morning, Jongdae heaved his drowned bones and sand-crusted hair into the swivel chair behind the counter of the record store. Li Yin told him that he looked and sounded like roadkill and he whined at her.
She worried about his health (Jongdae barely slept - side effect number three five eight of DJ-ing) and his happiness (she was convinced that he was lonely), and he finally snapped at her and told her that he didn’t want a boyfriend and that he was perfectly fine, would get an A in the exam, thank Zhang Li Yin very much.
Plus, he showed her the paper crane letter to prove that he was going to take up fewer shifts at the club because the mysterious tall man with the pretty eyes -
(so many contrasts; dark pupils and irises against white sclera, white sclera against dark lashes, dark lashes brushing pale cheeks, whispering over skin that today’s jongdae wants to kiss)
- had offered to pay Jongdae for his expertise. Admittedly, it was barely above minimum wage, but Chanyeol would be buying food as well and Jongdae was really, really sick of the instant ramen that he always picked up on the way home.
Plus he’d never been able to do anything with his mixing talents except DJ-ing and that’s a wholly thankless job and he wanted to do something useful, so why not take the chance? When you’re drowning, you haven’t got a lot of time left before the pressure of the depths crushes your lungs to a paper bag, the kind you see floating around the back streets, unloved and chased by bored cats with furry balls, so you might as well take chances.
Jongdae called Chanyeol with nervous fingers and asked when Chanyeol wanted to start.
-
( >> next day )
First impressions are supposed to be grand and if you’re Jongdae, seeing Chanyeol for the first time in the daylight did have its own grandeur. Chanyeol’s dark coat swept his knees, his hair swept his cheekbones into startling grace and his eyes bugged out when he saw Jongdae.
But Jongdae didn’t see that last bit because he was focusing on the two subs in Chanyeol’s hand and so his impression of Chanyeol is of dark beauty and gifts.
Something like that, anyway.
They talked for a long, long time about nothing -
(“my friend hyoyeon said -” / “wait, kimhyoyeon? kimjongin’s friend?” / “you know hyoyeon?” / “sure i do”)
- and everything -
(“i don’t want a record label because music should be recorded for enjoyment, not money. art and money are not two sides of the same coin.” - chanyeol)
(“let me get this straight - you write love songs for no one?” - jongdae)
(“i fold paper cranes as a kind of default activity. i have to have something to do with my hands. but these sub napkins are pretty bad for origami.” - chanyeol)
(“oh my god, you drink decaf. parkchanyeol, my heart bleeds for you.” - jongdae)
- and Jongdae came out of the shell he’s built himself, just a little, poking his wispy head out into the winter breeze of “do you agree with this chord here” and “you should stick with a simple fill here”, and they arranged to meet up next week.
Chanyeol smiled at Jongdae when he left, a bright little thing in a shadowed face, and Jongdae saw that flash of light as he drowned in the club’s bass, and he couldn’t tell the difference between its burn behind his eyelids and that of the moon when he walked home from the club in the thick night. The cranes that Chanyeol left on the table burned in his pocket until he set them on his kitchen counter, where they soaked up the streetlights and burned orange in the morning.
-
( >> next week)
(in the interim: son seungwan was teased some more about her purportedly non-existent crush on byunbaekhyun, zhang li yin pestered kimjongdae some more about making himself happy, and the tiniest feather jongdae had ever seen landed on his bathroom windowsill as he showered)
(he wondered which bird it was from. it was grey and the length of the proximal phalanx on his left hand and he knows that because he measured it.)
Chanyeol had been busy in that week whilst Jongdae dossed around at the record store, avoiding his boss out of habit and avoiding the new shipment that had to be stacked out of laziness - Chanyeol dropped a sheaf of papers on the studio table and said, “Cleaned up some old songs that I thought we could have a go at.”
(“we” being the key word here)
Jongdae said that they should get going given that Chanyeol had produced half an album’s worth of drafts, and Chanyeol laughed and unlocked his guitar case. Jongdae most certainly did not get lost in the curves of the guitar fitting against Chanyeol’s side, under his arm, and he definitely could breathe when he watched Chanyeol lacing and unlacing his fingers.
One hundred percent. That’s how sure he was that he didn’t find Park Chanyeol and his shadows/highlights contrasts, his callused fingers, pretty -
(pretty is what jongdae called luhan)
(and there will be more on that story later)
- but something more must have happened, something that made time run from them with winged feet because they only realised that it was time to leave the studio when the cleaner poked her head in the door and politely asked them to leave.
Chanyeol took his song sheets home, scrawled over in orange pen and in need of reworking, and Jongdae cleared up all the paper cranes that Chanyeol made of the unworkable songs once the latter had left. The cleaner smiled at him, said that he was too kind and that it was her job to clean up.
Jongdae just laughed and bobbed his head and omitted to tell her that Li Yin must have been having some impact on him because he was collecting Chanyeol’s cranes because they made him happy.
-
( >> three days later)
Jongdae boggled at the stack of papers in Chanyeol’s hand when the latter entered the studio. “Jesus, how did you have time to do all this?” Jongdae exclaimed.
Chanyeol shuffled a few song sheets, presented Jongdae with a latte -
(which he seized like a marmoset seizes tree gum)
(or that’s what chanyeol said later, anyway)
- and looked down. “I like writing songs,” he mumbled.
Jongdae pressed for elaboration.
“I only write radio jingles at work,” Chanyeol explained, “but my pent-up passion is songwriting. I work in campaigning, so I help to make activists’ work more palatable to the public but I’ve always had a knack for writing songs so I get to make jingles too. But I really want to write songs.”
Jongdae wasn’t going to argue with that. Chanyeol did have a knack for writing songs -
(his deep voice, soft guitar melodies had been looping through jongdae’s headphones since their first studio session, winding their ways around his kidneys until he could feel the songs pushing at the salt ions in his blood, pulling his organs tighter together)
- and Jongdae seemed to have a knack for spilling his secrets to men with pretty eyes and nice voices and a little bit of time for Jongdae because he and Chanyeol had only met three times and yet Chanyeol knew a few of his idiosyncrasies -
(jongdae can’t abide people tapping their fingers on things)
(jongdae dislikes wearing his contacts for extended periods of time and so brings glasses to the studio so that they can slip down his nose and fall onto the song sheets and make chanyeol laugh)
(jongdae is broke as hell and barely scrapes by on his apartment rent and will eat any food that chanyeol produces, even if it is the over-garlicked falafel from the animal rights campaign group lunch that taste like mortar)
- and that scares Jongdae.
Although not enough to stop him from chirping “sure!” when Chanyeol asks to meet up next week.
-
(jongdae is still in his kitchen, by the way; he’s just pacing now, putting gritty footprints on the x-ray film)
-
( >> two days later )
“Jongdae, you have an admirer.”
Jongdae sputtered into his glass of water. “Come again?”
Li Yin waved a brown paper parcel at him. “A man came in and dropped this parcel off earlier.”
“Tall, wide eyes.” Seungwan did an impression of the mystery man’s face - Jongdae resisted the urge to push her eyeballs back into their sockets because they looked like they were going to fall out if she didn’t stop soon. “Long dark coat.”
“Nice hands,” Li Yin supplied.
“Asked for a Mister Kim Jongdae,” Seungwan noted. “Polite.”
Jongdae’s eyebrows shot up to the ceiling. “Chanyeol?”
“You tell us,” grinned Li Yin as she tossed him the package. She sensed his hesitation. “Go on, open it!”
Jongdae weighed the parcel in his hands. It was relatively dense but soft, almost fluid. When he opened the paper, a crane fell out and his breath caught.
Seungwan had to smack him on the back to dislodge it, and Jongdae’s fingers shook as he unfolded the crane. Shook like the legs of the tiny kitten that Lu Han had taken into their apartment back when Jongdae shared an apartment with him, when Jongdae was a nervous boy trying to improve his Chinese by sacrificing his lungs to the Beijing smog.
your cheeks were really pink and you looked really cold last recording session. don’t get too cold!
Seungwan had to tip the scarf out of its brown paper jacket because Jongdae couldn’t do it. His throat was choked up over the note, the affection that he doesn’t deserve, and when he tried to speak, all that came out were the mewling noises that Jongdae remembers from Lu Han cooing over the kitten whilst Jongdae tried to pretend that he wasn’t falling in love with Lu Han.
Now Jongdae was pretending that he couldn’t hear his heart protesting as it sped up and up and up at the thought of Chanyeol’s tenderness, and he wound the scarf so tightly around his neck when he left that Li Yin ran out after him and rearranged it so that he didn’t strangle himself with the hand-knitted scarf (the stitches were too uneven to be anything but hand-made).
-
( >> just under one month later )
Jongdae span on his swivel chair as the door to the studio opened. “The valiant hero returns!”
Chanyeol rolled his eyes and set his guitar case down. “I come bearing gifts.”
“Ooh, you can come again. Never mind the fact that you’re employing me.” The tin foil package rustled as Chanyeol laid it on the table. “What is it? It looks good.”
“I made us some cookies,” Chanyeol said -
(nonchalant except for the reef knots he failed to tie in his fumbling fingers and succeeded in tying in jongdae’s pulmonary artery)
- and Jongdae gaped.
(he heard the word “us” with as much emphasis as chanyeol said it)
(namely, quite a lot)
“You - thank you,” he finally stuttered. He peeled back the foil. Chocolate chips looked back from their vanilla dough kingdoms. “Chocolate chip is my favourite!”
It was a fucking lame-ass comment, but thankfully all Chanyeol said was, “I remember. You said a few weeks ago.”
Jongdae’s blood temperature was going to melt the cookies if he didn’t take his hand away quickly, so he grabbed one and stuffed it in his mouth.
“Fuck, this tastes like heaven,” he tried to say. Crumbs sprayed across Chanyeol’s music sheets and Chanyeol laughed.
“I’m glad you’re enjoying them. My friend invited me to see the new musical last night but I really didn’t want to go. Musicals aren’t my thing, so I stayed home and baked.”
Jongdae jetted some more crumbs onto the table in indignation. “You don’t want to see the new musical? God, why do I know you? It’s so good! It’s, like, Seoul’s best acclaimed musical in years, and the cast are all stellar and the pictures and trailers online make me sob just watching them.”
“Maybe that’s why I don’t like them. Too many cute people snottering on me.” Chanyeol picked up a pencil and pointed at his sheets. “So, I made some changes?”
Jongdae shook his head. “You heathen. If I hadn’t already, I would have sold my vinyl collection to see that musical.” He shifted closer to see the music sheets and found a new distraction - the soft, slow burn of Chanyeol’s thigh next to his.
Chanyeol didn’t move.
Neither did Jongdae.
-
( >> one month )
October evenings were muggy summer air wrapping around the skyscrapers and telegraph cables like chiffon skirts around girls’ legs, Jongdae breathing through the folds of his scarf -
(it’s like an extension of his neck by this point)
- and the moon staring down at Seoul, its light bleeding through the serrated edges of the clouds. Something thumped on the door to Jongdae’s heart as he pored over Chanyeol’s newest set of lyrics, orange pen in hand (Chanyeol dislikes red ink). Jongdae’s hand leapt across the page -
(a thick, deep orange scar across the word love)
- and he swore, softly, so as not to wake the mass of blankets on the sofa.
Park Chanyeol was sleeping in his apartment and Jongdae was in the jittery state that usually only accompanied twenty cups of coffee and atrial fibrillation. The mass of blankets on the sofa moved a little, made a soft grunty noise of sleep.
Jongdae swore again and shrugged on his coat, slipped out of his own apartment like a fugitive. The rooftop was cold and quiet and Jongdae sat on the very edge, heels bouncing off the brick and hands recoiling from the rough concrete, as he whispered to the moon and asked it why on earth he said that Chanyeol could sleep in his apartment after today’s student rights protest, and why on earth Chanyeol’s smile and eyes and fingertips and handwriting and goddamn snapback made his heart warm.
The moon glared back at him and bled some more moonlight.
-
( >> three weeks later)
“So you’ve been out to dinner with this guy, like, three times in the last month and he crashes at your place out of habit and you don’t count this as a love life?”
Jongdae glared at Seungwan. “No, actually, I do not. And for the record, one of the times he crashed at mine was for all of five minutes whilst he borrowed some jeans that Yifan left at my place because I spilt coffee on him.”
“Spilt coffee dates,” Seungwan murmured, winding a strand of hair around her finger. “So cute. Marry Park Chanyeol, please.”
Jongdae yanked on her ponytail and she yelped. Lu Han chose this moment to walk by and Jongdae gulped. “Jongdae, just the person I wanted to see!”
Surely it was far too early for such a radiant smile. Jongdae blinked but no, Lu Han continued to beam at him. “Can you teach Seungwan how to do the tax records?” Jongdae started to squint and his boss’ smile dimmed a little. “Please?”
“But you’re the boss.”
“Precisely why I can hand this task on to you.”
“Can you get me lunch then, please?”
“Exactly where I’m going. Seungwan, do you want anything?” Lu Han smiled at her and she placed her order.
“Okay, a BLT with mustard, no mayo and a blueberry muffin for Jongdae, chicken tikka wrap for Seungwan,” Lu Han confirmed. “See you guys later!”
He left, the door tinkling closed, and Seungwan turned her raised eyebrows on Jongdae. “How does he know your lunch order off by heart?”
“We’ve been friends for years,” Jongdae mumbled. “Now, see this column here? The revenue gets -”
“You don’t sound very happy about that,” Seungwan said.
Jongdae tapped his pencil on the finances sheet irritably. “Are you even listening? The revenue needs to be -”
“Let’s talk about Lu Han.”
“Let’s talk about how you need to calculate the fucking revenue -”
“What is wrong with you today? Why do you have such a bee in your bonnet?”
“Hey, Seungwan, I don’t even have a bonnet, and if I did, there certainly wouldn’t be a bee in it. I am one hundred percent fine and goddamn dandy. Can we please talk about revenue?”
“Just saying that you seem kind of, like, awkward and overly deferral around Lu Han,” she groused. “He’s a nice guy.”
“I fucking know that,” Jongdae gritted.
“Look, just calm -”
“No, you look, Seungwan. I was up until five fucking am this morning cleaning puke out from between club bathroom tiles that haven’t seen a bottle of bleach for at least three months, I’m not even going to get paid overtime for that cleaning because Hyoyeon is short of cash and whilst I can’t blame her, I’d really appreciate the money because my microwave is shot and I need to fix it so that I can eat hot food, and I have a song stuck in my head that I really fucking wish I didn’t because it reminds me of some tall-ass probable dirtbag that I want to let into my life even though that’s a really bad idea because I don’t do people, people are difficult, and now I have to do finances and the one course that I failed in high school was, you got it, economics and business, so please, do me a favour, just shut up and listen to me about goddamn fucking revenues!”
Seungwan shut up and listened to him about goddamn fucking revenues.
-
( >> forty minutes later )
“Sorry I exploded at you,” he said later, picking out the lettuce from his BLT.
She waved a chopstick at him. “Don’t worry. I understand that you’re having a bad day.”
Lu Han reached over and ruffled his hair. “Cheer up, man.”
Jongdae made a noncommittal noise. Of all the people to try to make him feel better, it would be the one that Seungwan was convinced that Jongdae hated. Or something. He caught her eyeing Lu Han’s hand in his hair and wiped mustard away from the corner of his mouth.
“Did Jongdae manage to explain the finances sheet to you?” Lu Han asked, after a silence.
Seungwan perked up. “Yes! It seems kind of simple but I’ve never done it before so I hope I don’t, like, screw up.”
“I’m sure you won’t, but you can ask if you have any problems. I’m good at finance.”
“That’s why you own a record store,” Jongdae mumbled.
“That’s the reason you didn’t starve your ass off when you lived with me in Beijing,” Lu Han retorted. Seungwan’s mouth formed a circle as she put one and one together and made two. Jongdae hoped that she wasn’t putting two and two together to make four years of Jongdae living with Lu Han and crushing on him desperately, even though that would have been the right answer.
There was a silence. Seungwan poked at her wrap. “Wait, did I tell you guys about the time -”
The doorchime tinkled as someone entered the shop and all three of them whipped their lunches under the counter. Professionalism, Lu Han had said too many times, is key. And apparently lunch did not equal professionalism. Today, however, was the one day that Jongdae was grateful for Lu Han’s professional outlook because he was still gagging on his rice as Lu Han said, “Hello, sir, can I help you?”
Chanyeol inclined his head. “Thank you, but I’m actually looking for Jongdae.”
Jongdae’s eyes watered as he forced the rice down his throat along with several chunks of oesophagus. “Chanyeol?” he wheezed.
Seungwan’s eyebrows were working overtime today.
“The one and only,” he smiled. “I - is this a bad time?”
“Oh - no, not at all,” Jongdae said quickly. “We were just eating lunch.”
“Please take as long as you like,” Seungwan butted in, “because when you release Jongdae, he’s going to teach me how to do even more financial things and I hate finance.”
Jongdae shot her a glare as Lu Han mumbled an excuse and packed up his lunch. “I wasn’t sure you even knew where this place was.”
“There are only so many Chinese record stores in Seoul,” Chanyeol shrugged. “I was - I’m friends with a guy in the theatre and he’s given me a pair of tickets to see the new musical. I was wondering if you wanted to go. To see it. With me.”
Jongdae’s heart thudded to a stop.
-
(we already established what happened in the ten hours since chanyeol offered the tickets to jongdae - now for the present moment)
-
( << downtown Seoul, twelfth floor >> )
Jongdae’s blood cortisol levels are pretty much through the roof. His kidneys have started their party and his thumb is jittery on his phone keys, muscles quivering like they’re cold but he’s hot, so so hot. His cheeks are flushed and perhaps he’s made a decision, perhaps not - his eyes are watering and his retinas are screaming at the white light of his phone, bright bright, thumb tapping out a message, pat pat.
He hits send.
i’d love to go to the musical <3
His heart thumps -
(firework celebrations at the party of his internal organs, where proceedings are lubricated by a healthy dose of fuck it alland stress and oh my god text back quickly-
-
( >> another shitty downtown Seoul apartment, one minute later )
i’d love to go to the musical <3
Chanyeol whoops so loudly that he hears the bed in the apartment above creak a little as the occupants wake up and grumble to themselves.
Author's note: Thank you so much to the mods for their friendliness and for running this event, and to the prompter for the wonderful idea (I tried to do it justice).