nocturnes: These Wings of Ours (Part 1/2)
Title: These Wings of Ours
Author: nocturnes
Pairing/Focus: Jaejoong/Yoochun, Yunho/Jaejoong, Jaejoong/Changmin, Changmin/Junsu
Rating: R
Final word count: 13,380 words
Summary: Yoochun meets Jaejoong at the roof’s edge. Jaejoong has always wanted to fly. Highschool!AU. Inspired by My So-Called Life. When you really look closely, people are so strange and so complicated that they're actually... beautiful. - Angela Chase, My So-Called Life
Warnings: alcohol abuse, abusive relationships (parental and romantic), language, suicidal thoughts, implied sex
Author's Note: Thank you to Navneet for the absolutely wonderful work editing, as always, for the Junsu!love, and for encouraging me to actually post because I am ridiculous that way. ♥ Thank you to Chantelle for editing my first draft despite not being into this fandom, and for helping me flesh out the plot so much better. ♥ The POV switches between most sections. Last names are reversed (e.g. Yunho Jung instead of Jung Yunho), because it’s meant to be a North American high school. Written to the soundtrack of Volcano by Damien Rice.
They meet on the roof during their third period. Jaejoong is supposed to be in chemistry, Yoochun in calculus.
Jaejoong comes up here as many times a day as it takes for him to be able to breathe again, to feel the rays of sunlight collide with each cell of his skin as he imagines the glow of it becoming an orb of warmth steady over his heart. He likes to stand right on the edge where there is no barrier, the tips of his black shoes over just slightly, so that if the wind were to tip him forwards just so, he would careen over the edge onto the worn out parking lot pavement below. Jaejoong likes the adrenaline rush of knowing that at any second, it could all be over. It makes each second all that much more exhilarating.
Yoochun climbs up when he needs his nicotine fix, walking up the narrow rusty stairs with his hands still shoved deeply into his pockets from when he had placed them there in class to fight the temptation of reaching for his lighter. He always keeps to the middle, standing under the shade cast by the ventilation ducts on sunny days. He fixes his eyes towards the ground because if he stands too close to the edge, the height induces vertigo until all he can see is a kaleidoscope of blurred colours behind his eyes, spelling out how he's never good enough to fix anything on his own.
Yoochun pulls himself up the last step on an afternoon in early October as he retrieves a cheap gas station lighter and a pack of cigarettes from his pocket at last. He starts when he sees another boy standing near the edge of the roof, both because he is usually here quite alone, and because the boy could fall off any second with the way he is standing. He shuffles his way to the edge, careful not to look down to the parking lot two floors below them, as this part of the roof lacks any sort of guardrail at all. The boy remains silent, his eyes closed and his arms outspread, palms facing forward. The wind catches the back of his school jacket and fans the fabric out behind him like a cape.
“Um,” Yoochun mumbles, hand now shielding his eyes from looking downwards.
“Shh,” the boy says, scrunching his eyes more tightly while he sways slightly with the wind. Yoochun can only stare. The boy’s eyelashes cast shadows that are soft like pencil marks over the tired purple under his eyes. His lip is bleeding and the cut is just starting to dry around the edges.
Yoochun jumps a little when the boy finally opens his eyes. They are huge and almost alien, coloured blue with contacts.
“Sorry about that,” he says, shaking out his arms. “I like how it almost feels like falling.”
“Yeah,” Yoochun says, as if this were the most normal thing in the world to say, and not like it terrifies him to even think about it.
“Oh!” the boy says, jumping up so suddenly that Yoochun wonders again if he will fall off the edge of the roof and become a human pancake, how is he going to explain this to the principal if he finds out both of them were up here-
“I’m Jaejoong,” he says, hand stretched out, and Yoochun realizes a bit late into his slightly panicked reverie that perhaps he should introduce himself too.
“Yoochun,” he says, taking Jaejoong’s hand and shaking it. “You smoke?”
“Sure,” Jaejoong replies, taking a cigarette from Yoochun’s proffered box and pulling a lighter out of his own pocket. He sits down on the edge of the roof with his legs dangling, glancing up at Yoochun expectantly.
Yoochun sits down next to him, wondering how he even manages to light his own cigarette while his hands are shaking so badly. If Jaejoong notices, he says nothing.
“So…” Yoochun asks, pondering whether it would be rude to just close his eyes and pretend he is not centimetres away from death, “… why were you standing so close to the edge?”
“When I was little I always wanted to fly,” Jaejoong says. Yoochun stares at him, wondering if that is really supposed to be his answer. Jaejoong isn’t paying attention to him anymore, his eyes diverted towards the clouds passing slowly overhead.
*
Over the next week and a half, Yoochun finds out that speaking to Jaejoong of your own volition even once involves being accosted in the hallway on your way to every single class you have, if he can help it.
“Hey, do you want to come up to the roof for a smoke?”
“Hey, have you been to the sushi restaurant a few blocks down? We should go!”
“Hey, why are you going to biology when you could hang out with me?”
Jaejoong seems to be friends with almost everyone, and Yoochun has no idea how he manages to get any work done, but he supposes the answer is that he doesn’t. Yoochun agrees more than half of the time to whatever Jaejoong wants to do, because when Jaejoong puts on his pleading face, there is no denying him. The evil grins of victory to follow make him regret his decisions, but Jaejoong always manages to make him give in the next time.
Jaejoong only pauses his excited rambles to anyone who will listen when Yunho Jung passes by on his way to class. Yunho’s smile makes you feel like it’s pressing you into the wall, suffocating and charming simultaneously. He’s constantly grinning at everyone, but Jaejoong only notices when it’s directed his way.
*
The only class Yoochun won’t let Jaejoong convince him to skip is band, because music is one of the few things that doesn’t have his hands creeping into his pockets as the back of his throat itches for a smoke. The notes come to him flowing and basic, like he could keep playing for weeks in a trance and still be breathing by the end. Most of the kids in band are there for the arts credit, talking and screeching out their parts when forced, but Yoochun likes to make the best of it and play on his own.
His best friend Junsu shares the class with him, playing drums because it was the loudest instrument he could find and play right away without practice, since he had taken lessons before. Yoochun sometimes wonders why Junsu is even there at all when he could be singing in front of thousands of adoring fans in a few months, if he just went to the right auditions. He’s only heard Junsu sing a few times, but the melody that he had sung last time made Yoochun’s chest constrict like Junsu was trying to steal his soul through the spaces between his ribs.
On a Friday afternoon a month and a half after Yoochun meets Jaejoong, Yoochun and Junsu sit in the band room surrounded by chaos because their usual teacher hasn’t bothered to show up. Yoochun is messing around with the piano, playing a melody that he’s been working on for a while. When he plays it he pictures a cottage room in summer with sunlight dappling the white curtains, the spots of light shifting as they move with the material in the breeze. Junsu is sitting on the piano bench next to him, humming along to the tune and adding his own notes wherever he feels like.
“Hey,” Junsu says, “do you know that guy?”
“Who?”
“Back there, with the glasses? Long-ish hair, kind of nerdy.”
Yoochun scans the classroom, eyes finally spotting who Junsu is talking about.
“Oh, him?” Junsu nods, head ducked down.
“I don’t, sorry. Why?”
“Just curious, no reason,” Junsu replies awkwardly, quickly returning to his humming.
Yoochun looks away from Junsu to notice Jaejoong peeking through the narrow pane of wired glass in the door, pointing furiously to the doorknob and then to Yoochun. He waves his arms wildly once he sees he has Yoochun’s full attention. Yoochun glares at him but walks over anyway, opening the door and closing it behind him not entirely gently.
“What?” Jaejoong pouts when he notices Yoochun’s displeasure.
“No need to scowl at me, soulmate-” Yoochun rolls his eyes at the new ridiculous nickname Jaejoong made up for him after he found out that music is as basic to his existence as it is to Yoochun’s. “-I have something to show you.”
Yoochun digs his feet into the floor in protest, but allows Jaejoong to drag him up to the roof anyway.
*
Yoochun finds out that Jaejoong likes jazz music, old stuff, New Orleans tinged with Deep South blues. They sit on the roof with Jaejoong's iPod and a headphone each between them as Jaejoong laments the lack of texture in digital recordings. To make up for it he narrates the melody for Yoochun: here, the saxophone, like a soul breathing; here, the bass, the heartbeat, fading in and out; here, the piano, the wings, like flying, easy. What Yoochun loves the most is the way that Jaejoong talks with his hands while he describes the music, his smile as bright as the clarinet's improv.
In history class two weeks later, Yoochun stares out the window at the students playing soccer in Phys. Ed. to avoid his scheduled meeting with Jaejoong on the roof. He tries hard to fight the daydream that has kept creeping up in his head ever since Jaejoong played him his favourite Miles Davis record: He is kissing Jaejoong over his smile, messy and awkward because Jaejoong jumps a little in surprise, still caught up in the song they’re listening to. He kisses Yoochun back as he reaches for the pause button, pulling him closer with a first wrapped loosely around his school tie and¬-
Yoochun shakes his head to snap himself out of it, pulling out the sketchbook that he takes to class sometimes to ease the boredom. He reaches for a pencil and chews on his bottom lip as he draws the first lines of Jaejoong’s hands illustrating a melody that only plays in Yoochun’s head.
*
When he had been younger, Jaejoong was convinced that he could fly, if only he were given a chance. All it would take would be a moment away from his mother's watchful eye, her disbelief. She would see him soar on the breeze and take everything back, all the warnings and reprimands.
Jaejoong ties a sheet-race cars today or sometimes dinosaurs, whichever is lying on the bottom of his closet-around his neck and climbs onto a swing, the only form of flight his mother will allow. It isn't the same as flying, being attached by the chains, but it's movement and the wind in his eyes, cape spread out behind him as he looks down at the tops of skyscrapers, heading towards a low-hanging cloud. He'll show her one day. He can fly, he really can. Just watch me.
The summer after Jaejoong turns five he is in the playground with his mother, climbing to the top of the monkey bars while she talks to a friend, distracted. At the top the ground looks so far away, much farther than he imagined it would be. He stands on the outer bar with its chipped red paint and reassures himself out of vertigo-it's all right; he has wings, after all. The cape is just for show, and he likes the way it whips around in the wind; he could be a superhero like this, watching over the world.
Before he jumps he hears his mother's scream, her reaction too late. For a second he is flying like he's meant to, sun bright in his eyes and wind driving his hair wild. The cape streams out behind him, suddenly thin, threadbare in places with no wings underneath. He crashes to the ground, the playground pebbles digging cuts into his knees and his palms. There is a sharp pain in his arm, and then Jaejoong doesn't remember anything else.
He wakes up in the hospital to his mother kissing him on the forehead and to his arm encased in a cast-it's blue, his mother says, she thought he would like that.
Then, "What were you thinking, Jaejoong? I was afraid I might lose you."
"I was trying to fly," he says, convinced that it just hadn't be high enough, if he were to try again, maybe from the roof of his house, maybe then-
"Oh sweetie," his mother says, eyes shining, "I'm so sorry, but you can't fly. Not like that."
Jaejoong doesn't talk to her for the rest of the day, until she offers him chocolate chip cookies as restitution and he forgets to be angry.
*
Jaejoong has had a crush on Yunho since the seventh grade when he ran into Yunho in art class while holding a container of paint-filled water and had managed to spill it down the front of Yunho’s white t-shirt. Yunho had smiled at Jaejoong then, and the bright white of it against his tanned skin almost made Jaejoong want to turn away. He had apologized profusely, but Yunho had shrugged it off, just laughing. When they had ended up in the same high school, Jaejoong had thanked a god he didn’t believe in for his good fortune, promising to pay him back for it later if he ever figured out how that sort of thing was supposed to work.
Jaejoong has eight sisters, and as the youngest and only male, once he reached high school his parents had pressured him to try harder in school. There would be no more messing around with keyboards instead of working on homework, no more skipping classes, no more phone calls home about broken microscopes. Jaejoong resists all but the last request, as that had been his clumsiness taking over, and if they wanted him to stop breaking equipment, he would make it easier for everyone by simply not attending biology. Nothing that will make any second of his life unhappy is worth it to him.
In his sophomore year he goes to a party one of Yunho’s friends is holding. Jaejoong knows Yunho will be there, and he can’t shut off the burning desire in his chest driving him to see Yunho every second it’s possible, even if it’s only a glimpse out of the corner of his eye. When he gets there, he spots Yunho immediately. He’s in the centre of the crowd, dancing smoothly to the throbbing beat of the music and making Jaejoong think of sex all over again. He walks to the kitchen with the intent to drink as much alcohol as necessary to ease the longing.
Later he finds himself pressed up against the wall of a dark bedroom upstairs with no recollection of how or why he got there. Yunho is sucking on his neck hard enough to leave a mark that he will never be able to explain to his parents, but it’s the last thing Jaejoong cares about at that moment. Yunho bites down on his collarbone and Jaejoong bangs his head against the wall, gasping as Yunho soothes the mark with his tongue. It starts like this.
When they get back to school on Monday, it’s like nothing ever happened. Yunho passes Jaejoong in the hallway and his eyes skate over him like Jaejoong’s just an echo. Jaejoong can’t decide if he’s happy he finally got what he wanted, or if the hurt overpowers that because Yunho was drunk and probably doesn’t even remember.
Two weeks later Yunho is shoving Jaejoong into a utility closet and kissing him breathless, hot and deep. He stops soon afterwards, something flashing behind his eyes that Jaejoong doesn’t want to classify as revulsion. Yunho walks out without a word. Jaejoong leans against the wall with his eyes closed, heat still pooled in his stomach along with a tightening nervousness he hates. When Yunho pulls him into a dark room for the second, the third, the twentieth time, Jaejoong shuts off the voice in the back of his head asking why.
In October of his junior year, warm hands grab Jaejoong roughly and pull him by the back of his shirt into an empty classroom. The blinds have already been drawn. As he’s shoved against the wall, Jaejoong catches a glimpse of Yunho’s face; he looks almost angry, face flushed and panting hard. It’s the first time he’s tried anything this year, and Jaejoong had stopped hoping for it a while ago. His heart feels like it’s going to tear itself out of his chest if it keeps pounding so violently. He wants this more than anything and hasn’t been able to stop thinking about it for more than a few hours since Yunho had stopped coming to find him.
He ignores the faint voice in his head telling him that this isn’t going to end well for him.
Yunho attacks him, his fingers digging into Jaejoong’s hips so harshly that Jaejoong knows he’ll find bruises when he looks later. Their teeth knock together painfully, and Jaejoong tastes the coppery tang of blood on his tongue when Yunho bites too hard on his lip, tearing it. He can’t breathe anymore. Spots of colour start to appear behind his eyes and the world is spinning, his knees trembling.
Yunho pulls away abruptly, wiping his mouth with the back of his hand before almost running from the room, not looking back at Jaejoong once. His back has disappeared before Jaejoong can ask, Why now?
Jaejoong seeks refuge on the roof where he knows he’ll be able to breathe again. He stands near the edge with his arms spread because almost being in freefall always helps him forget everything but how easy it would be to tip over the edge. He imagines Yunho next to him, their fingers tangled together gently like it never is when they’re together. When he tugs softly on Yunho’s hand to tell him he’s ready, they’re flying through the air together, weightless.
When a boy interrupts him, Jaejoong closes his eyes more tightly in an attempt to hang on to Yunho, to his daydream of him-he’s not sure which one anymore.
Jaejoong meets Yoochun after he counts down from ten.
*
On their way out of the school building one afternoon in December, Jaejoong and Yoochun are accosted by a tall boy with shoulder length hair whose arms are full of books. He’s still wearing his lab coat, and Yoochun tries very hard not to pay attention to the smears of something unspeakable all over its bottom half.
“Hey,” he says, voice muffled into the textbooks he’s carrying. “Could I have the chem textbook I loaned you back now? I really need it for tonight.”
Yoochun looks over at Jaejoong because he’s pretty sure neither of them has seen this kid before in their lives, and maybe he just can’t quite make out who they are over all the books he’s holding.
“Sure,” Jaejoong says, “I’ll just go and get it from my locker. Yoochun, you wait here, okay?”
Yoochun just shrugs, watching as Jaejoong weaves his way back through the crowded hallway. The boy sets down his textbooks as they wait. As he straightens up, recognition flashes somewhere in the back of Yoochun’s mind.
“Wait,” he says, “do we have band together?”
The boy regards him carefully, head tilted sideways. “I would venture to say that we do, yes. Do you play the piano?”
“I do, yeah. You? I’m Yoochun, by the way.”
“Changmin. And I play clarinet. Badly. Music doesn’t come to me nearly so easily as science. I like the puzzle of fitting evidence together and¬-”
Yoochun is fighting a losing battle to pretend he’s interested.
“Hey, can I say something?”
Yoochun shakes his head a little to focus on what Changmin is saying again.
“Sure…” he says, not sure what Changmin could possibly want to talk to him about.
“Jaejoong and I… we’ve known each other for a long time. Back to the sandbox and everything. And I just… be careful with him, all right? He’s more fragile than he looks most of the time.”
“Wait,” Yoochun mumbles, fighting the flush now spreading across his cheeks, “you don’t think… Jaejoong and I… are… together, do you?”
“You’re not?” Changmin looks way too pleased about this for Yoochun’s liking.
“Hell no,” Yoochun says, more emphatically than he needs to. He guiltily fingers the edge of the drawing of Jaejoong’s hands inside of his bag. He had tucked it into his notebook after that class and has spent too many nights at home staring at it before he has to shut the notebook again to hide it away.
“We’re just-” he pauses when he sees Jaejoong emerging through the crowd again.
“Here,” Jaejoong says, holding out the book, “I didn’t use it much anyway.”
“You wouldn’t,” Changmin replies, smirking.
“Oh shut up,” Jaejoong says, trying to look angry, but his smile gives him away. He punches Changmin’s shoulder and Changmin winces. He reaches out to punch Jaejoong back, but Jaejoong dodges, grabbing Yoochun’s arm and dragging him outside, leaving Changmin laughing in the hallway.
“So…” Jaejoong says, rubbing his hands together to warm them, “…sorry for leaving you with him back there. He can be a bit much to handle sometimes. You get used to it.”
“It’s okay,” Yoochun says, trying to block the latter half of the conversation from his mind.
Jaejoong grins at him, his laughter rising to hang over their heads in the cold air as he starts to run down the street, jacket flying and schoolbag bumping against his hip. Yoochun chases after him, wind rushing through his hair.
*
The first time either of them actually goes to the other’s house, Jaejoong asks Yoochun if they can go to Yoochun’s house, because his eight sisters have a tendency to frighten off any male friends he brings home by flirting with them incessantly. He’s still not sure if they’re doing it just to bug him or if they’re actually interested.
When they get to Yoochun’s house, Yoochun mumbles something-Jaejoong only makes out the words "bad idea"-and asks Jaejoong to wait in the bushes outside until he can let him in through his bedroom window. Yoochun looks nervous; he's pulling on the end of his school tie and can only glance at Jaejoong briefly before his gaze returns to the ground. This Yoochun is so different from the carefree, ‘nothing can touch me’ Yoochun that Jaejoong is used to that he doesn't push it, nodding instead as he watches Yoochun push open his front door and close it behind him with a snap.
Jaejoong shuffles his feet in the grass while he waits, failing when he tries not to think about Yunho kissing him brutally in a bathroom stall earlier that day, forcing Jaejoong’s hands above his head as he had unbuttoned Jaejoong’s shirt with his free hand. Yunho had run his hand all over his chest and down over his stomach, thumb rubbing circles around his navel. Jaejoong almost bit through his lip to keep from moaning too loudly when Yunho’s fingers ran along the waistband of his pants. Then Yunho had withdrawn as though he had been burned, freeing Jaejoong’s hands and backing away as far as he could in the tiny amount of space available to him. Afterwards they had stood there awkwardly, still gasping for air as they waited for the bathroom to be empty enough for people not to ask questions. Yunho had left, again without looking back, and Jaejoong did up his shirt again, struggling to force the buttons through the holes with shaking fingers.
Jaejoong tries to quell the little voice in his head that wants to ask why Yoochun is hiding him like this, but he only ends up thinking about it even more. Yoochun might pretend to take whatever life throws at him, but Jaejoong thinks he’s much more breakable than the impression he likes to give. When Yoochun opens up a window above him and he has to dodge the fire ladder thrown down towards him, Jaejoong tries and fails not to look guilty, ducking his head as he climbs it and heaves himself through the open window.
"Welcome to my humble abode," Yoochun says, and Jaejoong decides not to ask about the ladder, sitting down on top of the mattress instead.
Jaejoong glances around the room, trying to be surreptitious about it. Yoochun has the bare minimum: white walls with peeling paint in some places, a mattress on the floor with a worn duvet, and a dilapidated chest of drawers in the corner, all of it immaculately clean.
The walls draw Jaejoong's attention immediately-Yoochun has tacked pencil sketches of everything from a little boy smiling to a city skyline all over them. Jaejoong vaguely recognizes some of the subjects as people from school who he has seen but whose names he doesn't know. Yoochun coughs awkwardly to break the silence as Jaejoong stares at a sketch of a pair of hands in motion.
"I like this one," Jaejoong says, pointing to it and failing to notice Yoochun's slight blush when he realizes which drawing Jaejoong means.
"Oh, um, yeah," Yoochun mumbles, "I, uh... I like drawing hands."
"You're really good."
"Thanks." Yoochun takes out a cigarette and Jaejoong bums one off him, pulling his own lighter out of his pocket.
"So…” Yoochun starts, “…the ladder…"
"You don't need to explain," Jaejoong says, despite the morbid curiosity that has held him ever since Yoochun asked him to wait. He's not entirely sure whether or not he wants to know.
Yoochun brushes off Jaejoong's response, tapping ash off the end of his cigarette onto a paper he had pulled out of his pocket and placed between them on the floor.
"My parents are just… a bit difficult to deal with, most of the time. I've learned from experience that it's easier like this."
Jaejoong just nods before blowing smoke up towards the ceiling. He fights the urge to close his eyes.
When he hears what he guesses was a plate smashing against a wall downstairs, Jaejoong pretends not to notice Yoochun's wince.
"That was," Yoochun says, fidgeting with his tie like he had outside, "just um, my dad… sometimes he just… he likes a lot of alcohol, let’s put it that way."
Jaejoong covers Yoochun's free hand with his so he won’t forget he isn’t there alone.
"Do you want to go somewhere else instead?" Jaejoong asks, feeling guilty for being here although he's not quite sure why.
"All right." Yoochun stubs out his cigarette on the paper, waiting for Jaejoong to do the same.
"I know just the place."
Jaejoong grins at Yoochun through the open window as he starts to climb back down the ladder, trying to quell the slightly sick feeling in his stomach that he doesn't want to acknowledge as either pity or guilt.
Yoochun follows only after he stows the ladder safely back in his closet. He leans against the wall with a sigh as he looks back at the drawing of Jaejoong's hands pinned to the wall and then closes the door softly behind him.
*
“I spend a lot of time here on weekends,” Jaejoong says, leading Yoochun by the hand into a run-down little shop with dust gathering on the window displays of old guitars and music books. The bell above the door rings cheerily as Jaejoong pushes it open. A middle-aged woman behind the counter glances up and beckons them over with the hand she’s not using to write on the paper in front of her.
“Hello, darling,” she says, and Yoochun bites back a snigger. “New shipment of piano books came in today!”
“Hi, Mrs. Ryu,” Jaejoong says, eyes wide in his best impression of innocence. “Would you mind if I used one of your pianos to show my friend here a song I’ve been working on?”
“Oh, course, of course,” she simpers, and Yoochun wonders if he is imagining her free hand slowly rising like she wants to reach out and pinch Jaejoong’s cheeks until they’re glowing pink.
“Thank you.” Jaejoong rushes away from the desk, his usual smirk back on his face as he pulls Yoochun with him towards the back of the store.
“Someone loves you,” Yoochun snickers, finally letting it out.
“Oh shut up,” Jaejoong says. “I’ll have you know that I am quite lovable. And besides, what could possibly be wrong with something that gets me free access to a piano that doesn’t have one or all of my sisters sitting next to it?”
“Fair enough.” Yoochun takes a seat next to Jaejoong on the piano bench when Jaejoong gestures for him to sit.
“Okay, um,” Jaejoong says, a little nervously, “I guess I’ll just… start.” Yoochun looks at him questioningly, because nervous really doesn’t really belong in Jaejoong’s emotional repertoire.
The melody Jaejoong plays is tight with emotion, flowing in waves so strongly that Yoochun feels like he’s adrift at sea, salt-water stinging his eyes and crusting white as drops of it dry on his skin. When Jaejoong stops and Yoochun opens his eyes, he’s almost surprised to see the piano back in front of him.
“I like it,” Yoochun says softly, not quite sure what to say, or whether or not he should look at Jaejoong now. Sometimes when he plays alone he feels like he’s in his own private world, and he doesn’t want to impose himself on Jaejoong’s.
“You don’t have to say that,” Jaejoong laughs lightly, brushing it off. “I know it needs a lot of work. I don’t really know why I wrote it like this in the first place-it’s just how it ended up.”
“I mean it though,” Yoochun says, looking at Jaejoong’s face so that he can know he’s telling the truth.
Jaejoong smiles, real this time.
Yoochun dreams about Jaejoong that night. They’re standing on the edge of the school roof, arms outstretched and fingers just close enough to brush at the tips. Ocean waves hit the school walls below with enough force to mist the two of them with the spray even as high up as they are. Water stretches out as far as they can see in every direction. Yoochun can almost feel himself floating above his body as he stares out at the horizon, not sure where the air ends and the water begins.
The ground they’re standing on disappears, and then they’re suspended in dark blue, floating in something too dense to be just air. The ocean has disappeared. Yoochun glances at Jaejoong and Jaejoong looks back at him hollowly, any colour that was in his eyes swallowed up in black. Then Jaejoong is falling, drowning in layers of blue until Yoochun can’t see anything in the dark below him. He tries to reach forward to go after him, but his hands are bound with chains he can’t see.
Yoochun wakes up sweaty with his arm extended towards his ceiling. He holds his hand up close to his face in the darkness and wiggles his fingers in front of his eyes to make sure he’s still real.
*
Yoochun hates the entire holiday season. Everything from the green and red decorations sparkling in his face everywhere, to the cheerful music constantly playing over the radio, to the cold seeping in underneath his coat and making his bones ache.
It’s the time of year when his mother likes to do her best to pretend that the three of them are a happy family. Every year, there is a extravagant home-cooked meal sitting on the kitchen table, the smell of it making Yoochun’s stomach rumble even as they wait for his father to come home from wherever he is, only to be left waiting. Yoochun’s mother packs up the leftovers, and they both go to bed early, still hungry.
Yoochun pretends he can’t hear the sound of his mother crying creeping through the thin walls of his bedroom. He easily pictures her clutching a photo of herself and his father-when they were young and happy and in love-to her chest and wondering how that feeling had disappeared. He almost likes it better this way. Everything gets worse when his father actually decides to show up.
In his freshman year of high school, Yoochun had brought an American exchange student¬ whose name he couldn’t pronounce home with him. At the time it had seemed like a perfectly decent idea. His father would never know, because at that point he had been showing up at the house three nights a week at most, and Yoochun’s mother liked to pretend her son didn’t really exist, off in a world of her own imagining where everything was still right and beautiful and perfect.
Yoochun and the boy are sitting on the couch in Yoochun’s living room, the boy’s hands up the front of Yoochun’s shirt, rubbing in circles over his chest as he straddles his lap, kissing him furiously. Yoochun does the best he can to keep up, sliding his hands up the boy’s back until his shirt is rucked up to his waist. Yoochun hears the front door slam open and his father stumbles in drunk, tripping as he attempts to walk down the hallway and into the room where Yoochun and the American boy are still sitting on the couch, now motionless. Yoochun can’t breathe, can’t think, and he wants the boy to move more than anything because this is not going to end well if he doesn’t, but his limbs are suddenly weighed down as though it’s lead flowing inside his veins instead of blood.
When Yoochun’s father walks into the room, drunk out of his mind, Yoochun does the only thing he can and whispers to the boy to run, one of the only English words he knows. The boy does, managing to sneak past Yoochun’s father in the hallway. Yoochun draws in shallow breaths around the grapefruit-sized lump now clogging his throat. His father’s face reddens before he hauls Yoochun up by the collar of his shirt and knocks him unconscious.
Yoochun had woken up on the floor of the living room hours later with a throbbing headache and feeling angrier than he had ever been before in his life. When he had shown up at school the next day with a black eye and half his face swollen, the American boy had taken one look at him and run in the opposite direction.
Since then, Yoochun’s father’s favourite pastime has been telling Yoochun that he will not tolerate any son of his to acting like a dirty little faggot. He spits out the last word with contempt, glaring at Yoochun heatedly like he’s a particularly annoying spot of dirt stuck on his shoe. He talks to Yoochun about how he will forgive him for his teenage phases if he will go to therapy to cure himself of his filthy disease.
Every time, Yoochun feels the anger bubbling up under the surface until he’s sure it will come bursting out of every pore of his skin, hotter and faster than lava could. He is able to get through the conversations, just barely. Afterwards he goes up to his room to draw, the lines often indistinguishable on the page, just anger and nothing else.
Less often, Yoochun’s father comes home completely drunk and decides that Yoochun is his preferred punching bag of the evening. After the third time Yoochun finds himself digging through his father’s liquor cabinet for a fifth of vodka, knowing he’s going to pay for this later if his father ever notices. If his father wants him to be his perfect little puppet of a son, he will do everything in his power to become exactly the opposite. He takes the bottle up to his room and drinks a third of it, wincing as it burns its way down his throat. Later that night, after he’s sure his mother is asleep, he sneaks back downstairs and shoves the bottle near the back of the cabinet.
During the holiday break of his junior year of high school, Yoochun’s mother makes her yearly wish for togetherness as she cooks their holiday dinner. When Yoochun’s father calls in from a pay phone who knows where to say he’ll be home for dinner this time, Yoochun sneaks a bottle of wine from the cabinet as his mother cries in the kitchen. He’s learned the hard way that his father is more likely to be angry about discovering a half-empty bottle than he is to notice one that has gone missing completely. It’s easier now to be drunk whenever his father is around. He hardly ever gets proper notice about his father coming home, so he’s going to take advantage of knowing while he can.
He takes the bottle up to his room and downs the whole thing while blaring music from his headphones. He hides the bottle in his dresser to dispose of later and goes into the bathroom to brush his teeth in an attempt to hide the scent of alcohol on his breath. He can barely recognize himself when he looks in the mirror. His bones are more prominent than ever, and his eyes are swollen with fatigue, dark purple tattooed underneath them.
After dinner when Jaejoong calls Yoochun to ask him to go with him to a New Year’s Eve party Yunho is holding, Yoochun says yes without thinking. The alcohol still clings to him at the edges. Yoochun thinks that maybe he understands now what Jaejoong meant when he said he liked standing centimetres from the edge of the roof, so close to tipping over, to freefall.
When Yoochun is like this, he can’t tell Jaejoong no even if he wants to.
*
Changmin met Jaejoong before the two of them could even properly talk. They had lived down the street from each other; their mothers were friends and had brought them over for play-dates that had stopped once they were old enough that all of their play together turned violent. When he thinks of his childhood, it’s Jaejoong that Changmin remembers-Jaejoong with his perfectly smooth hair that was always falling into his eyes.
Jaejoong is beautiful. If Changmin were to be honest with himself, he would say that half the time he is with Jaejoong, sees Jaejoong, or even thinks about Jaejoong, he can’t quite remember how to breathe anymore.
Changmin likes to excuse the way his stomach rises into his throat whenever Jaejoong passes in the hallway by saying that Jaejoong is so pretty that he looks a little like a girl anyway, so this is totally reasonable, totally rational, definitely normal, somehow related to teenage hormones, all very scientific. He would, of course, still produce perfect grandchildren and a sweet, capable daughter-in-law for his parents someday.
Changmin has pushed some days out of his mind, like the time he saw Jaejoong shirtless doing yard work outside of his house on a summer afternoon before their junior year of high school. Bits of grass stuck to the sweatiness of his skin, and his arms were buried in topsoil up to his elbows. When he lifted a hand to brush his hair away from his eyes, a streak of dirt had stuck above his eyebrow and Changmin had to quell the sudden urge to walk over and wipe it off or to lick off the sweat running down Jaejoong’s neck. He had blushed furiously, ashamed but still wanting to enact every bit of the daydream. He walked home as quickly as he could manage before taking a cold shower for the next half-hour.
They had kept up their friendship until the beginning of high school mostly at their mother’s encouragement. Jaejoong would come over to do his homework with Changmin, and he would always let Jaejoong copy everything without really understanding why ‘no’ was such a hard thing to say when it shouldn’t have been. They had spent Sunday nights huddled under the flickering incandescent light hanging over Changmin’s kitchen table, pencilling in answers to questions about osmosis or obtuse triangles. Changmin had snuck glances at Jaejoong over the edge of his textbook while Jaejoong doodled in the margins of his notebook. This isn’t okay, he’s using you, was Changmin’s mantra on these nights, but he never really cared because at least it meant that Jaejoong wanted him for something.
In the middle of their junior year of high school Jaejoong has given up talking to Changmin almost entirely. The few times they do speak, it’s when Jaejoong needs to borrow a book or to get help with an assignment he has left too late. Changmin wants to say ‘no’ because this can’t be okay after Jaejoong had ignored him for such a long time, but he always says yes before he realizes that the answer is leaving his mouth. Then he finds excuses to talk to Jaejoong for no good reason just to watch his lips move as he speaks. He goes home at night to imagine Jaejoong kissing along his neck and sucking hard enough to leave marks as his own hand slinks downwards. Afterwards he takes showers hot enough to scald his skin bright pink.
When Changmin finds out about Yunho’s party, he knows Jaejoong will be there. He has spent so much time watching Jaejoong that he hasn’t missed the way he looks at Yunho like he is standing under a helicopter’s spotlight. Still, it doesn’t bother Changmin enough to stop him from going to the party just to watch Jaejoong himself.
He spends two hours getting ready and finishes an hour too early, sitting around and wringing his hands together in an attempt to fight off the nerves while he waits. He glances in the mirror quickly one last time before he finally leaves, not wanting to risk looking too long, because if did he would want to fix everything.
The house is already almost full when he gets there, the sound of the music audible all the way down the empty suburban street. Changmin walks around the yellow circles of light cast by the streetlamps, wanting to stick to the darkness when he is struck with another bout of nerves. He can’t quite see clearly-he had opted to wear glasses instead of his usual contacts, and his lenses need replacing.
Changmin can feel the beat of the current song vibrating through his chest a soon as he walks in the door. He looks around for Jaejoong immediately, instead seeing a few people he thinks he might know. They look surprised as they glance over him and then fix their eyes sharply back in his direction. He shrugs it off, moving on.
He pushes himself through the living room turned dance floor with difficulty as he tries to catch sight of Jaejoong’s hair, the side of his face, even the back of his head, because he has no doubt that he would be able to recognize him from any angle. Unable to find him, Changmin walks up the stairs and peeks in the doors that are still wide open, finding couples making-out and a few people still dancing to the music downstairs but no sign of Jaejoong.
He is almost ready to give up when he sees that the last door on the left is still slightly ajar, and he is powerless against the curiosity that overwhelms him. He squints through the narrow opening, vaguely distinguishing two figures against the back wall in the half-light from the street that streams in through the bare window.
Changmin hears a voice, decidedly male, whisper, “Yunho…” in a ragged moan.
Yunho’s reply is gruff as he forces it out in between pants for air. “I want you on your knees. Now.”
Changmin sees with sudden clarity as Jaejoong sinks to the floor in front of Yunho, his calves extending into the squares of light the window casts on the floor. Changmin turns around before he can actually see anything, wondering how he didn’t notice who it was right away as his stomach ties itself into a dry knot in his throat, cutting off air. He almost runs for it but slumps against the wall instead, trying to catch his breath and block out the sounds now coming from inside the room. It hadn’t looked like this was the first time.
Changmin walks downstairs before he can convince himself that staying to watch would actually be a pretty good idea, at least in theory. He makes it into the garden to get some fresh air, stumbling a little in the dark. Changmin leans his head against the back fence, willing his heartbeat to slow down. All he can think of is Jaejoong slowly sinking to his knees in front of Yunho, Yunho’s hands tangling in Jaejoong’s hair as he urges him to continue.
The part of himself he hates most places himself in Yunho’s position, witnessing Jaejoong lick his lips before staring up at him, eyelids heavy with wanting him so much. Jaejoong unbuttons his jeans, almost teasingly slow, and slides the zipper down, the sound of it seeming to echo through the silence of the room-
A voice somewhere in front of him asks, “Are you all right?” and Changmin jumps, hitting his head on the fence. His face flushes with guilt, and he hopes the other person isn’t able to notice.
He opens his eyes slowly to find a boy he sort of recognizes wearing a concerned expression.
“Oh, um… yeah, great… thanks,” he says, rubbing the back of his head self-consciously.
“This is going to sound weird,” says the boy, coming over to stand beside him, “but I think I know you from somewhere?”
Changmin wonders if he is the victim of some random person’s drunken dare or if this is some bizarre attempt at a pick up line, but then it clicks.
“I… I think we might have band together.”
When the boy smiles his whole face transforms, and Changmin thinks that the darkness won’t help him hide anything anyway, if he keeps smiling like that.
“Yeah, I think that’s it,” he replies, and his laugh matches his smile. “I’m Junsu.”
Changmin tilts his head towards Junsu, curious as to why he’s here, but not wanting to go as far as asking. “Changmin.”
“Come back inside, all right? It’s cold out here.” Junsu smiles again as he looks back at him from the doorway.
Changmin follows.
*
Jaejoong drags Yoochun to the party just after ten thirty, not wanting to appear overeager.
“So,” Jaejoong says, louder as they step through the doorway into the pounding music, “do you want to get drinks or something?” Yoochun just nods.
They find Junsu next to the punch bowl in the kitchen. He smiles as he sees them approach.
“Thank God,” Junsu says, “people I actually know.”
“You have a problem with people?” Yoochun replies. Junsu shrugs.
“It’s the principle of the thing, I guess.”
“Hey… um,” Jaejoong says, “do you guys mind if I… um, go look for someone?” He downs three shots of vodka in a row like he has to prepare himself for it. When he offers some to them Yoochun waves it off.
“Sure, fine,” Yoochun says, wondering why he agreed to come here in the first place. Jaejoong sends him a weird look over his shoulder before he’s lost in the crowd.
“Great.” Yoochun sighs. Junsu looks at him almost like he knows.
“Maybe I can distract you from your depressive musings with my dancing prowess?” Yoochun stares at him. “What? It’s true. I’m the best.”
Yoochun laughs. “All right. But you’d better make it good.”
Junsu’s smile is slightly sinister. “Easy.”
When they step off the dance floor an hour later, Yoochun is wheezing a little.
“So,” Junsu says smugly, “proved you right, didn’t I? Though it helps to be next to your two left feet.”
“Hey!”
“I only speak the truth,” Junsu says, putting on his innocent face, and Yoochun hates how he can pull it off.
“Is that Changmin?” Yoochun asks, peering through the crowd at a tall boy weaving his way outside. “Wow, he looks really different.”
“Who?” Junsu asks, looking around Yoochun to catch a glimpse. Changmin is wearing glasses and has left his hair loose so that it almost brushes his shoulders. Yoochun smirks when he sees Junsu blush.
“Oh. I forgot to tell you. That guy you pointed out in band that one time. His name is Changmin.”
“Changmin.” Junsu rolls the name around his mouth like he’s trying to figure out its flavour.
“Maybe one of us should go get him,” he says, “it’s kind of cold to be outside and he looked upset.”
Yoochun tries hard to school his amusement into submission. “Be my guest.”
Junsu leads Changmin back inside five minutes later.
“Hey,” Changmin says quickly, once Junsu has led him over to Yoochun. “I need to, um, speak to you.” He glances at Junsu out of the corner of his eye. “Alone.”
Junsu pouts, dejected. “All right,” he says, “I’ll just go stand in the corner. By myself. In the corner…” As he walks away he peeks back to see if they’re looking.
“Don’t mind him,” Yoochun says, laughing. “What’s up?”
“You’re… you’re friends with Jaejoong, right? Or… whatever you are… with him. Jaejoong, I mean,” Changmin says, wringing his hands together until his knuckles start to turn white. He keeps looking at his shoes, unable to meet Yoochun’s eyes.
“Uh… yeah. We’re friends.”
“I just, um-” Changmin pauses to run his shaking hands over his face. “-I saw. Upstairs…” He hesitates. “…Jaejoong upstairs.”
Yoochun almost tells him to just spit it out, but the look on Changmin’s face stops him.
“Yeah?” he prompts.
“Jaejoong and… Yunho. You know who he is I guess, um, if you’re here? They were upstairs… in a bedroom… doing things.” Changmin sighs, face flushing so much that Yoochun can almost feel the heat radiating outwards. He whispers so softly that Yoochun almost doesn’t hear him over the music playing in the other room. “Sexual… things.”
Yoochun barely manages to control the jealousy that courses through him. “Are… are you sure? It was definitely them?”
Changmin sighs. “I’m sure. I couldn’t… um. Yeah, it was them. Positive.”
“Why are you telling me?”
“I just… needed to tell someone. I don’t know. I just… yeah.”
“Okay,” Yoochun says, “okay. Um, then…” He tries his best to empty his mind of the onslaught of images of Jaejoong and Yunho having sex in every position he can think of.
“I’ll just… go somewhere else,” Changmin says, looking mortified. He almost knocks a girl’s punch out of her hand as turns around.
Junsu walks back over after Changmin leaves, and Yoochun shakes his head in an attempt to clear it.
“You have a crush on him, don’t you?” Yoochun says, more to distract himself than anything else.
Junsu chokes on his punch. “N… no! Of course not, he’s a guy and I’m a guy and…” Yoochun looks at him with raised eyebrows.
Junsu sighs. “Fine. H… how did you notice?” His cheeks flush red and Yoochun could hug him for being so adorable.
“You pointed him out in band. I didn’t realize until a while later, but you wouldn’t have done that if you hadn’t noticed him a while before that, with that one-track mind of yours. And then tonight it become really obvious.” He throws in a wink just to watch Junsu squirm.
“Oh. Right.”
Yoochun laughs. “It’s all right with me, you know.” Junsu smiles, the one he could take over the world with if he put in the effort.
“So…” Yoochun says, “how did you get him to come in here with you?”
“I… um,” Junsu mumbles, while he suddenly becomes interested in the floor, “I pretended I didn’t know who he was, and told him to get out of the cold.”
“Always the charmer, our Junsu.” Yoochun sniggers as Junsu glares at him.
“Maybe,” Yoochun says, “you should offer to walk him home. He was a bit upset earlier. He wouldn’t say why.” The lie comes easily along with the denial.
“Yeah, okay… yeah,” Junsu says, and when he smiles Yoochun manages to return it.
Yoochun leaves during the countdown after he looks for Jaejoong but can’t find him anywhere.
*
Yoochun confronts Jaejoong about what Changmin said as soon as they get back to school.
“Hey,” he says, pulling Jaejoong by the wrist into an empty classroom, “I really need to talk to you.” Fear of saying what he knows he needs to washes over him as he closes the door behind them as softly as he can.
“Okay, Agent Park,” Jaejoong says, plopping himself down on top of the teacher’s desk and grinning, “why so secretive?”
“Someone told me… about you… about you and Yunho at the party.”
Jaejoong’s smile disappears as quickly as it had come. “What?”
“They said… they said they saw you having sex. Or… yeah.”
“Who the fuck told you that?”
“It doesn’t matter.”
“The fuck it doesn’t.”
“Just. Be careful okay? If he’s using you for sex…”
“We didn’t have sex!” Jaejoong yells and jumps to his feet, fists clenched tightly against his thighs. Yoochun glances at the door to make sure no one is listening. He takes a deep breath.
“I just don’t want to see you get hurt. If you’re emotionally attached and he isn’t-”
“It’s really none of your fucking business, but if you absolutely have to know, I sucked him off, all right? Nothing else. Are you happy now?” Yoochun tries to look away as Jaejoong starts to shake with anger.
“Do not fucking judge me, Yoochun Park. I’m done with this.”
Yoochun blinks away the sting at the back of his eyes as Jaejoong slams the door on his way out.
Part 2
Author: nocturnes
Pairing/Focus: Jaejoong/Yoochun, Yunho/Jaejoong, Jaejoong/Changmin, Changmin/Junsu
Rating: R
Final word count: 13,380 words
Summary: Yoochun meets Jaejoong at the roof’s edge. Jaejoong has always wanted to fly. Highschool!AU. Inspired by My So-Called Life. When you really look closely, people are so strange and so complicated that they're actually... beautiful. - Angela Chase, My So-Called Life
Warnings: alcohol abuse, abusive relationships (parental and romantic), language, suicidal thoughts, implied sex
Author's Note: Thank you to Navneet for the absolutely wonderful work editing, as always, for the Junsu!love, and for encouraging me to actually post because I am ridiculous that way. ♥ Thank you to Chantelle for editing my first draft despite not being into this fandom, and for helping me flesh out the plot so much better. ♥ The POV switches between most sections. Last names are reversed (e.g. Yunho Jung instead of Jung Yunho), because it’s meant to be a North American high school. Written to the soundtrack of Volcano by Damien Rice.
They meet on the roof during their third period. Jaejoong is supposed to be in chemistry, Yoochun in calculus.
Jaejoong comes up here as many times a day as it takes for him to be able to breathe again, to feel the rays of sunlight collide with each cell of his skin as he imagines the glow of it becoming an orb of warmth steady over his heart. He likes to stand right on the edge where there is no barrier, the tips of his black shoes over just slightly, so that if the wind were to tip him forwards just so, he would careen over the edge onto the worn out parking lot pavement below. Jaejoong likes the adrenaline rush of knowing that at any second, it could all be over. It makes each second all that much more exhilarating.
Yoochun climbs up when he needs his nicotine fix, walking up the narrow rusty stairs with his hands still shoved deeply into his pockets from when he had placed them there in class to fight the temptation of reaching for his lighter. He always keeps to the middle, standing under the shade cast by the ventilation ducts on sunny days. He fixes his eyes towards the ground because if he stands too close to the edge, the height induces vertigo until all he can see is a kaleidoscope of blurred colours behind his eyes, spelling out how he's never good enough to fix anything on his own.
Yoochun pulls himself up the last step on an afternoon in early October as he retrieves a cheap gas station lighter and a pack of cigarettes from his pocket at last. He starts when he sees another boy standing near the edge of the roof, both because he is usually here quite alone, and because the boy could fall off any second with the way he is standing. He shuffles his way to the edge, careful not to look down to the parking lot two floors below them, as this part of the roof lacks any sort of guardrail at all. The boy remains silent, his eyes closed and his arms outspread, palms facing forward. The wind catches the back of his school jacket and fans the fabric out behind him like a cape.
“Um,” Yoochun mumbles, hand now shielding his eyes from looking downwards.
“Shh,” the boy says, scrunching his eyes more tightly while he sways slightly with the wind. Yoochun can only stare. The boy’s eyelashes cast shadows that are soft like pencil marks over the tired purple under his eyes. His lip is bleeding and the cut is just starting to dry around the edges.
Yoochun jumps a little when the boy finally opens his eyes. They are huge and almost alien, coloured blue with contacts.
“Sorry about that,” he says, shaking out his arms. “I like how it almost feels like falling.”
“Yeah,” Yoochun says, as if this were the most normal thing in the world to say, and not like it terrifies him to even think about it.
“Oh!” the boy says, jumping up so suddenly that Yoochun wonders again if he will fall off the edge of the roof and become a human pancake, how is he going to explain this to the principal if he finds out both of them were up here-
“I’m Jaejoong,” he says, hand stretched out, and Yoochun realizes a bit late into his slightly panicked reverie that perhaps he should introduce himself too.
“Yoochun,” he says, taking Jaejoong’s hand and shaking it. “You smoke?”
“Sure,” Jaejoong replies, taking a cigarette from Yoochun’s proffered box and pulling a lighter out of his own pocket. He sits down on the edge of the roof with his legs dangling, glancing up at Yoochun expectantly.
Yoochun sits down next to him, wondering how he even manages to light his own cigarette while his hands are shaking so badly. If Jaejoong notices, he says nothing.
“So…” Yoochun asks, pondering whether it would be rude to just close his eyes and pretend he is not centimetres away from death, “… why were you standing so close to the edge?”
“When I was little I always wanted to fly,” Jaejoong says. Yoochun stares at him, wondering if that is really supposed to be his answer. Jaejoong isn’t paying attention to him anymore, his eyes diverted towards the clouds passing slowly overhead.
*
Over the next week and a half, Yoochun finds out that speaking to Jaejoong of your own volition even once involves being accosted in the hallway on your way to every single class you have, if he can help it.
“Hey, do you want to come up to the roof for a smoke?”
“Hey, have you been to the sushi restaurant a few blocks down? We should go!”
“Hey, why are you going to biology when you could hang out with me?”
Jaejoong seems to be friends with almost everyone, and Yoochun has no idea how he manages to get any work done, but he supposes the answer is that he doesn’t. Yoochun agrees more than half of the time to whatever Jaejoong wants to do, because when Jaejoong puts on his pleading face, there is no denying him. The evil grins of victory to follow make him regret his decisions, but Jaejoong always manages to make him give in the next time.
Jaejoong only pauses his excited rambles to anyone who will listen when Yunho Jung passes by on his way to class. Yunho’s smile makes you feel like it’s pressing you into the wall, suffocating and charming simultaneously. He’s constantly grinning at everyone, but Jaejoong only notices when it’s directed his way.
*
The only class Yoochun won’t let Jaejoong convince him to skip is band, because music is one of the few things that doesn’t have his hands creeping into his pockets as the back of his throat itches for a smoke. The notes come to him flowing and basic, like he could keep playing for weeks in a trance and still be breathing by the end. Most of the kids in band are there for the arts credit, talking and screeching out their parts when forced, but Yoochun likes to make the best of it and play on his own.
His best friend Junsu shares the class with him, playing drums because it was the loudest instrument he could find and play right away without practice, since he had taken lessons before. Yoochun sometimes wonders why Junsu is even there at all when he could be singing in front of thousands of adoring fans in a few months, if he just went to the right auditions. He’s only heard Junsu sing a few times, but the melody that he had sung last time made Yoochun’s chest constrict like Junsu was trying to steal his soul through the spaces between his ribs.
On a Friday afternoon a month and a half after Yoochun meets Jaejoong, Yoochun and Junsu sit in the band room surrounded by chaos because their usual teacher hasn’t bothered to show up. Yoochun is messing around with the piano, playing a melody that he’s been working on for a while. When he plays it he pictures a cottage room in summer with sunlight dappling the white curtains, the spots of light shifting as they move with the material in the breeze. Junsu is sitting on the piano bench next to him, humming along to the tune and adding his own notes wherever he feels like.
“Hey,” Junsu says, “do you know that guy?”
“Who?”
“Back there, with the glasses? Long-ish hair, kind of nerdy.”
Yoochun scans the classroom, eyes finally spotting who Junsu is talking about.
“Oh, him?” Junsu nods, head ducked down.
“I don’t, sorry. Why?”
“Just curious, no reason,” Junsu replies awkwardly, quickly returning to his humming.
Yoochun looks away from Junsu to notice Jaejoong peeking through the narrow pane of wired glass in the door, pointing furiously to the doorknob and then to Yoochun. He waves his arms wildly once he sees he has Yoochun’s full attention. Yoochun glares at him but walks over anyway, opening the door and closing it behind him not entirely gently.
“What?” Jaejoong pouts when he notices Yoochun’s displeasure.
“No need to scowl at me, soulmate-” Yoochun rolls his eyes at the new ridiculous nickname Jaejoong made up for him after he found out that music is as basic to his existence as it is to Yoochun’s. “-I have something to show you.”
Yoochun digs his feet into the floor in protest, but allows Jaejoong to drag him up to the roof anyway.
*
Yoochun finds out that Jaejoong likes jazz music, old stuff, New Orleans tinged with Deep South blues. They sit on the roof with Jaejoong's iPod and a headphone each between them as Jaejoong laments the lack of texture in digital recordings. To make up for it he narrates the melody for Yoochun: here, the saxophone, like a soul breathing; here, the bass, the heartbeat, fading in and out; here, the piano, the wings, like flying, easy. What Yoochun loves the most is the way that Jaejoong talks with his hands while he describes the music, his smile as bright as the clarinet's improv.
In history class two weeks later, Yoochun stares out the window at the students playing soccer in Phys. Ed. to avoid his scheduled meeting with Jaejoong on the roof. He tries hard to fight the daydream that has kept creeping up in his head ever since Jaejoong played him his favourite Miles Davis record: He is kissing Jaejoong over his smile, messy and awkward because Jaejoong jumps a little in surprise, still caught up in the song they’re listening to. He kisses Yoochun back as he reaches for the pause button, pulling him closer with a first wrapped loosely around his school tie and¬-
Yoochun shakes his head to snap himself out of it, pulling out the sketchbook that he takes to class sometimes to ease the boredom. He reaches for a pencil and chews on his bottom lip as he draws the first lines of Jaejoong’s hands illustrating a melody that only plays in Yoochun’s head.
*
When he had been younger, Jaejoong was convinced that he could fly, if only he were given a chance. All it would take would be a moment away from his mother's watchful eye, her disbelief. She would see him soar on the breeze and take everything back, all the warnings and reprimands.
Jaejoong ties a sheet-race cars today or sometimes dinosaurs, whichever is lying on the bottom of his closet-around his neck and climbs onto a swing, the only form of flight his mother will allow. It isn't the same as flying, being attached by the chains, but it's movement and the wind in his eyes, cape spread out behind him as he looks down at the tops of skyscrapers, heading towards a low-hanging cloud. He'll show her one day. He can fly, he really can. Just watch me.
The summer after Jaejoong turns five he is in the playground with his mother, climbing to the top of the monkey bars while she talks to a friend, distracted. At the top the ground looks so far away, much farther than he imagined it would be. He stands on the outer bar with its chipped red paint and reassures himself out of vertigo-it's all right; he has wings, after all. The cape is just for show, and he likes the way it whips around in the wind; he could be a superhero like this, watching over the world.
Before he jumps he hears his mother's scream, her reaction too late. For a second he is flying like he's meant to, sun bright in his eyes and wind driving his hair wild. The cape streams out behind him, suddenly thin, threadbare in places with no wings underneath. He crashes to the ground, the playground pebbles digging cuts into his knees and his palms. There is a sharp pain in his arm, and then Jaejoong doesn't remember anything else.
He wakes up in the hospital to his mother kissing him on the forehead and to his arm encased in a cast-it's blue, his mother says, she thought he would like that.
Then, "What were you thinking, Jaejoong? I was afraid I might lose you."
"I was trying to fly," he says, convinced that it just hadn't be high enough, if he were to try again, maybe from the roof of his house, maybe then-
"Oh sweetie," his mother says, eyes shining, "I'm so sorry, but you can't fly. Not like that."
Jaejoong doesn't talk to her for the rest of the day, until she offers him chocolate chip cookies as restitution and he forgets to be angry.
*
Jaejoong has had a crush on Yunho since the seventh grade when he ran into Yunho in art class while holding a container of paint-filled water and had managed to spill it down the front of Yunho’s white t-shirt. Yunho had smiled at Jaejoong then, and the bright white of it against his tanned skin almost made Jaejoong want to turn away. He had apologized profusely, but Yunho had shrugged it off, just laughing. When they had ended up in the same high school, Jaejoong had thanked a god he didn’t believe in for his good fortune, promising to pay him back for it later if he ever figured out how that sort of thing was supposed to work.
Jaejoong has eight sisters, and as the youngest and only male, once he reached high school his parents had pressured him to try harder in school. There would be no more messing around with keyboards instead of working on homework, no more skipping classes, no more phone calls home about broken microscopes. Jaejoong resists all but the last request, as that had been his clumsiness taking over, and if they wanted him to stop breaking equipment, he would make it easier for everyone by simply not attending biology. Nothing that will make any second of his life unhappy is worth it to him.
In his sophomore year he goes to a party one of Yunho’s friends is holding. Jaejoong knows Yunho will be there, and he can’t shut off the burning desire in his chest driving him to see Yunho every second it’s possible, even if it’s only a glimpse out of the corner of his eye. When he gets there, he spots Yunho immediately. He’s in the centre of the crowd, dancing smoothly to the throbbing beat of the music and making Jaejoong think of sex all over again. He walks to the kitchen with the intent to drink as much alcohol as necessary to ease the longing.
Later he finds himself pressed up against the wall of a dark bedroom upstairs with no recollection of how or why he got there. Yunho is sucking on his neck hard enough to leave a mark that he will never be able to explain to his parents, but it’s the last thing Jaejoong cares about at that moment. Yunho bites down on his collarbone and Jaejoong bangs his head against the wall, gasping as Yunho soothes the mark with his tongue. It starts like this.
When they get back to school on Monday, it’s like nothing ever happened. Yunho passes Jaejoong in the hallway and his eyes skate over him like Jaejoong’s just an echo. Jaejoong can’t decide if he’s happy he finally got what he wanted, or if the hurt overpowers that because Yunho was drunk and probably doesn’t even remember.
Two weeks later Yunho is shoving Jaejoong into a utility closet and kissing him breathless, hot and deep. He stops soon afterwards, something flashing behind his eyes that Jaejoong doesn’t want to classify as revulsion. Yunho walks out without a word. Jaejoong leans against the wall with his eyes closed, heat still pooled in his stomach along with a tightening nervousness he hates. When Yunho pulls him into a dark room for the second, the third, the twentieth time, Jaejoong shuts off the voice in the back of his head asking why.
In October of his junior year, warm hands grab Jaejoong roughly and pull him by the back of his shirt into an empty classroom. The blinds have already been drawn. As he’s shoved against the wall, Jaejoong catches a glimpse of Yunho’s face; he looks almost angry, face flushed and panting hard. It’s the first time he’s tried anything this year, and Jaejoong had stopped hoping for it a while ago. His heart feels like it’s going to tear itself out of his chest if it keeps pounding so violently. He wants this more than anything and hasn’t been able to stop thinking about it for more than a few hours since Yunho had stopped coming to find him.
He ignores the faint voice in his head telling him that this isn’t going to end well for him.
Yunho attacks him, his fingers digging into Jaejoong’s hips so harshly that Jaejoong knows he’ll find bruises when he looks later. Their teeth knock together painfully, and Jaejoong tastes the coppery tang of blood on his tongue when Yunho bites too hard on his lip, tearing it. He can’t breathe anymore. Spots of colour start to appear behind his eyes and the world is spinning, his knees trembling.
Yunho pulls away abruptly, wiping his mouth with the back of his hand before almost running from the room, not looking back at Jaejoong once. His back has disappeared before Jaejoong can ask, Why now?
Jaejoong seeks refuge on the roof where he knows he’ll be able to breathe again. He stands near the edge with his arms spread because almost being in freefall always helps him forget everything but how easy it would be to tip over the edge. He imagines Yunho next to him, their fingers tangled together gently like it never is when they’re together. When he tugs softly on Yunho’s hand to tell him he’s ready, they’re flying through the air together, weightless.
When a boy interrupts him, Jaejoong closes his eyes more tightly in an attempt to hang on to Yunho, to his daydream of him-he’s not sure which one anymore.
Jaejoong meets Yoochun after he counts down from ten.
*
On their way out of the school building one afternoon in December, Jaejoong and Yoochun are accosted by a tall boy with shoulder length hair whose arms are full of books. He’s still wearing his lab coat, and Yoochun tries very hard not to pay attention to the smears of something unspeakable all over its bottom half.
“Hey,” he says, voice muffled into the textbooks he’s carrying. “Could I have the chem textbook I loaned you back now? I really need it for tonight.”
Yoochun looks over at Jaejoong because he’s pretty sure neither of them has seen this kid before in their lives, and maybe he just can’t quite make out who they are over all the books he’s holding.
“Sure,” Jaejoong says, “I’ll just go and get it from my locker. Yoochun, you wait here, okay?”
Yoochun just shrugs, watching as Jaejoong weaves his way back through the crowded hallway. The boy sets down his textbooks as they wait. As he straightens up, recognition flashes somewhere in the back of Yoochun’s mind.
“Wait,” he says, “do we have band together?”
The boy regards him carefully, head tilted sideways. “I would venture to say that we do, yes. Do you play the piano?”
“I do, yeah. You? I’m Yoochun, by the way.”
“Changmin. And I play clarinet. Badly. Music doesn’t come to me nearly so easily as science. I like the puzzle of fitting evidence together and¬-”
Yoochun is fighting a losing battle to pretend he’s interested.
“Hey, can I say something?”
Yoochun shakes his head a little to focus on what Changmin is saying again.
“Sure…” he says, not sure what Changmin could possibly want to talk to him about.
“Jaejoong and I… we’ve known each other for a long time. Back to the sandbox and everything. And I just… be careful with him, all right? He’s more fragile than he looks most of the time.”
“Wait,” Yoochun mumbles, fighting the flush now spreading across his cheeks, “you don’t think… Jaejoong and I… are… together, do you?”
“You’re not?” Changmin looks way too pleased about this for Yoochun’s liking.
“Hell no,” Yoochun says, more emphatically than he needs to. He guiltily fingers the edge of the drawing of Jaejoong’s hands inside of his bag. He had tucked it into his notebook after that class and has spent too many nights at home staring at it before he has to shut the notebook again to hide it away.
“We’re just-” he pauses when he sees Jaejoong emerging through the crowd again.
“Here,” Jaejoong says, holding out the book, “I didn’t use it much anyway.”
“You wouldn’t,” Changmin replies, smirking.
“Oh shut up,” Jaejoong says, trying to look angry, but his smile gives him away. He punches Changmin’s shoulder and Changmin winces. He reaches out to punch Jaejoong back, but Jaejoong dodges, grabbing Yoochun’s arm and dragging him outside, leaving Changmin laughing in the hallway.
“So…” Jaejoong says, rubbing his hands together to warm them, “…sorry for leaving you with him back there. He can be a bit much to handle sometimes. You get used to it.”
“It’s okay,” Yoochun says, trying to block the latter half of the conversation from his mind.
Jaejoong grins at him, his laughter rising to hang over their heads in the cold air as he starts to run down the street, jacket flying and schoolbag bumping against his hip. Yoochun chases after him, wind rushing through his hair.
*
The first time either of them actually goes to the other’s house, Jaejoong asks Yoochun if they can go to Yoochun’s house, because his eight sisters have a tendency to frighten off any male friends he brings home by flirting with them incessantly. He’s still not sure if they’re doing it just to bug him or if they’re actually interested.
When they get to Yoochun’s house, Yoochun mumbles something-Jaejoong only makes out the words "bad idea"-and asks Jaejoong to wait in the bushes outside until he can let him in through his bedroom window. Yoochun looks nervous; he's pulling on the end of his school tie and can only glance at Jaejoong briefly before his gaze returns to the ground. This Yoochun is so different from the carefree, ‘nothing can touch me’ Yoochun that Jaejoong is used to that he doesn't push it, nodding instead as he watches Yoochun push open his front door and close it behind him with a snap.
Jaejoong shuffles his feet in the grass while he waits, failing when he tries not to think about Yunho kissing him brutally in a bathroom stall earlier that day, forcing Jaejoong’s hands above his head as he had unbuttoned Jaejoong’s shirt with his free hand. Yunho had run his hand all over his chest and down over his stomach, thumb rubbing circles around his navel. Jaejoong almost bit through his lip to keep from moaning too loudly when Yunho’s fingers ran along the waistband of his pants. Then Yunho had withdrawn as though he had been burned, freeing Jaejoong’s hands and backing away as far as he could in the tiny amount of space available to him. Afterwards they had stood there awkwardly, still gasping for air as they waited for the bathroom to be empty enough for people not to ask questions. Yunho had left, again without looking back, and Jaejoong did up his shirt again, struggling to force the buttons through the holes with shaking fingers.
Jaejoong tries to quell the little voice in his head that wants to ask why Yoochun is hiding him like this, but he only ends up thinking about it even more. Yoochun might pretend to take whatever life throws at him, but Jaejoong thinks he’s much more breakable than the impression he likes to give. When Yoochun opens up a window above him and he has to dodge the fire ladder thrown down towards him, Jaejoong tries and fails not to look guilty, ducking his head as he climbs it and heaves himself through the open window.
"Welcome to my humble abode," Yoochun says, and Jaejoong decides not to ask about the ladder, sitting down on top of the mattress instead.
Jaejoong glances around the room, trying to be surreptitious about it. Yoochun has the bare minimum: white walls with peeling paint in some places, a mattress on the floor with a worn duvet, and a dilapidated chest of drawers in the corner, all of it immaculately clean.
The walls draw Jaejoong's attention immediately-Yoochun has tacked pencil sketches of everything from a little boy smiling to a city skyline all over them. Jaejoong vaguely recognizes some of the subjects as people from school who he has seen but whose names he doesn't know. Yoochun coughs awkwardly to break the silence as Jaejoong stares at a sketch of a pair of hands in motion.
"I like this one," Jaejoong says, pointing to it and failing to notice Yoochun's slight blush when he realizes which drawing Jaejoong means.
"Oh, um, yeah," Yoochun mumbles, "I, uh... I like drawing hands."
"You're really good."
"Thanks." Yoochun takes out a cigarette and Jaejoong bums one off him, pulling his own lighter out of his pocket.
"So…” Yoochun starts, “…the ladder…"
"You don't need to explain," Jaejoong says, despite the morbid curiosity that has held him ever since Yoochun asked him to wait. He's not entirely sure whether or not he wants to know.
Yoochun brushes off Jaejoong's response, tapping ash off the end of his cigarette onto a paper he had pulled out of his pocket and placed between them on the floor.
"My parents are just… a bit difficult to deal with, most of the time. I've learned from experience that it's easier like this."
Jaejoong just nods before blowing smoke up towards the ceiling. He fights the urge to close his eyes.
When he hears what he guesses was a plate smashing against a wall downstairs, Jaejoong pretends not to notice Yoochun's wince.
"That was," Yoochun says, fidgeting with his tie like he had outside, "just um, my dad… sometimes he just… he likes a lot of alcohol, let’s put it that way."
Jaejoong covers Yoochun's free hand with his so he won’t forget he isn’t there alone.
"Do you want to go somewhere else instead?" Jaejoong asks, feeling guilty for being here although he's not quite sure why.
"All right." Yoochun stubs out his cigarette on the paper, waiting for Jaejoong to do the same.
"I know just the place."
Jaejoong grins at Yoochun through the open window as he starts to climb back down the ladder, trying to quell the slightly sick feeling in his stomach that he doesn't want to acknowledge as either pity or guilt.
Yoochun follows only after he stows the ladder safely back in his closet. He leans against the wall with a sigh as he looks back at the drawing of Jaejoong's hands pinned to the wall and then closes the door softly behind him.
*
“I spend a lot of time here on weekends,” Jaejoong says, leading Yoochun by the hand into a run-down little shop with dust gathering on the window displays of old guitars and music books. The bell above the door rings cheerily as Jaejoong pushes it open. A middle-aged woman behind the counter glances up and beckons them over with the hand she’s not using to write on the paper in front of her.
“Hello, darling,” she says, and Yoochun bites back a snigger. “New shipment of piano books came in today!”
“Hi, Mrs. Ryu,” Jaejoong says, eyes wide in his best impression of innocence. “Would you mind if I used one of your pianos to show my friend here a song I’ve been working on?”
“Oh, course, of course,” she simpers, and Yoochun wonders if he is imagining her free hand slowly rising like she wants to reach out and pinch Jaejoong’s cheeks until they’re glowing pink.
“Thank you.” Jaejoong rushes away from the desk, his usual smirk back on his face as he pulls Yoochun with him towards the back of the store.
“Someone loves you,” Yoochun snickers, finally letting it out.
“Oh shut up,” Jaejoong says. “I’ll have you know that I am quite lovable. And besides, what could possibly be wrong with something that gets me free access to a piano that doesn’t have one or all of my sisters sitting next to it?”
“Fair enough.” Yoochun takes a seat next to Jaejoong on the piano bench when Jaejoong gestures for him to sit.
“Okay, um,” Jaejoong says, a little nervously, “I guess I’ll just… start.” Yoochun looks at him questioningly, because nervous really doesn’t really belong in Jaejoong’s emotional repertoire.
The melody Jaejoong plays is tight with emotion, flowing in waves so strongly that Yoochun feels like he’s adrift at sea, salt-water stinging his eyes and crusting white as drops of it dry on his skin. When Jaejoong stops and Yoochun opens his eyes, he’s almost surprised to see the piano back in front of him.
“I like it,” Yoochun says softly, not quite sure what to say, or whether or not he should look at Jaejoong now. Sometimes when he plays alone he feels like he’s in his own private world, and he doesn’t want to impose himself on Jaejoong’s.
“You don’t have to say that,” Jaejoong laughs lightly, brushing it off. “I know it needs a lot of work. I don’t really know why I wrote it like this in the first place-it’s just how it ended up.”
“I mean it though,” Yoochun says, looking at Jaejoong’s face so that he can know he’s telling the truth.
Jaejoong smiles, real this time.
Yoochun dreams about Jaejoong that night. They’re standing on the edge of the school roof, arms outstretched and fingers just close enough to brush at the tips. Ocean waves hit the school walls below with enough force to mist the two of them with the spray even as high up as they are. Water stretches out as far as they can see in every direction. Yoochun can almost feel himself floating above his body as he stares out at the horizon, not sure where the air ends and the water begins.
The ground they’re standing on disappears, and then they’re suspended in dark blue, floating in something too dense to be just air. The ocean has disappeared. Yoochun glances at Jaejoong and Jaejoong looks back at him hollowly, any colour that was in his eyes swallowed up in black. Then Jaejoong is falling, drowning in layers of blue until Yoochun can’t see anything in the dark below him. He tries to reach forward to go after him, but his hands are bound with chains he can’t see.
Yoochun wakes up sweaty with his arm extended towards his ceiling. He holds his hand up close to his face in the darkness and wiggles his fingers in front of his eyes to make sure he’s still real.
*
Yoochun hates the entire holiday season. Everything from the green and red decorations sparkling in his face everywhere, to the cheerful music constantly playing over the radio, to the cold seeping in underneath his coat and making his bones ache.
It’s the time of year when his mother likes to do her best to pretend that the three of them are a happy family. Every year, there is a extravagant home-cooked meal sitting on the kitchen table, the smell of it making Yoochun’s stomach rumble even as they wait for his father to come home from wherever he is, only to be left waiting. Yoochun’s mother packs up the leftovers, and they both go to bed early, still hungry.
Yoochun pretends he can’t hear the sound of his mother crying creeping through the thin walls of his bedroom. He easily pictures her clutching a photo of herself and his father-when they were young and happy and in love-to her chest and wondering how that feeling had disappeared. He almost likes it better this way. Everything gets worse when his father actually decides to show up.
In his freshman year of high school, Yoochun had brought an American exchange student¬ whose name he couldn’t pronounce home with him. At the time it had seemed like a perfectly decent idea. His father would never know, because at that point he had been showing up at the house three nights a week at most, and Yoochun’s mother liked to pretend her son didn’t really exist, off in a world of her own imagining where everything was still right and beautiful and perfect.
Yoochun and the boy are sitting on the couch in Yoochun’s living room, the boy’s hands up the front of Yoochun’s shirt, rubbing in circles over his chest as he straddles his lap, kissing him furiously. Yoochun does the best he can to keep up, sliding his hands up the boy’s back until his shirt is rucked up to his waist. Yoochun hears the front door slam open and his father stumbles in drunk, tripping as he attempts to walk down the hallway and into the room where Yoochun and the American boy are still sitting on the couch, now motionless. Yoochun can’t breathe, can’t think, and he wants the boy to move more than anything because this is not going to end well if he doesn’t, but his limbs are suddenly weighed down as though it’s lead flowing inside his veins instead of blood.
When Yoochun’s father walks into the room, drunk out of his mind, Yoochun does the only thing he can and whispers to the boy to run, one of the only English words he knows. The boy does, managing to sneak past Yoochun’s father in the hallway. Yoochun draws in shallow breaths around the grapefruit-sized lump now clogging his throat. His father’s face reddens before he hauls Yoochun up by the collar of his shirt and knocks him unconscious.
Yoochun had woken up on the floor of the living room hours later with a throbbing headache and feeling angrier than he had ever been before in his life. When he had shown up at school the next day with a black eye and half his face swollen, the American boy had taken one look at him and run in the opposite direction.
Since then, Yoochun’s father’s favourite pastime has been telling Yoochun that he will not tolerate any son of his to acting like a dirty little faggot. He spits out the last word with contempt, glaring at Yoochun heatedly like he’s a particularly annoying spot of dirt stuck on his shoe. He talks to Yoochun about how he will forgive him for his teenage phases if he will go to therapy to cure himself of his filthy disease.
Every time, Yoochun feels the anger bubbling up under the surface until he’s sure it will come bursting out of every pore of his skin, hotter and faster than lava could. He is able to get through the conversations, just barely. Afterwards he goes up to his room to draw, the lines often indistinguishable on the page, just anger and nothing else.
Less often, Yoochun’s father comes home completely drunk and decides that Yoochun is his preferred punching bag of the evening. After the third time Yoochun finds himself digging through his father’s liquor cabinet for a fifth of vodka, knowing he’s going to pay for this later if his father ever notices. If his father wants him to be his perfect little puppet of a son, he will do everything in his power to become exactly the opposite. He takes the bottle up to his room and drinks a third of it, wincing as it burns its way down his throat. Later that night, after he’s sure his mother is asleep, he sneaks back downstairs and shoves the bottle near the back of the cabinet.
During the holiday break of his junior year of high school, Yoochun’s mother makes her yearly wish for togetherness as she cooks their holiday dinner. When Yoochun’s father calls in from a pay phone who knows where to say he’ll be home for dinner this time, Yoochun sneaks a bottle of wine from the cabinet as his mother cries in the kitchen. He’s learned the hard way that his father is more likely to be angry about discovering a half-empty bottle than he is to notice one that has gone missing completely. It’s easier now to be drunk whenever his father is around. He hardly ever gets proper notice about his father coming home, so he’s going to take advantage of knowing while he can.
He takes the bottle up to his room and downs the whole thing while blaring music from his headphones. He hides the bottle in his dresser to dispose of later and goes into the bathroom to brush his teeth in an attempt to hide the scent of alcohol on his breath. He can barely recognize himself when he looks in the mirror. His bones are more prominent than ever, and his eyes are swollen with fatigue, dark purple tattooed underneath them.
After dinner when Jaejoong calls Yoochun to ask him to go with him to a New Year’s Eve party Yunho is holding, Yoochun says yes without thinking. The alcohol still clings to him at the edges. Yoochun thinks that maybe he understands now what Jaejoong meant when he said he liked standing centimetres from the edge of the roof, so close to tipping over, to freefall.
When Yoochun is like this, he can’t tell Jaejoong no even if he wants to.
*
Changmin met Jaejoong before the two of them could even properly talk. They had lived down the street from each other; their mothers were friends and had brought them over for play-dates that had stopped once they were old enough that all of their play together turned violent. When he thinks of his childhood, it’s Jaejoong that Changmin remembers-Jaejoong with his perfectly smooth hair that was always falling into his eyes.
Jaejoong is beautiful. If Changmin were to be honest with himself, he would say that half the time he is with Jaejoong, sees Jaejoong, or even thinks about Jaejoong, he can’t quite remember how to breathe anymore.
Changmin likes to excuse the way his stomach rises into his throat whenever Jaejoong passes in the hallway by saying that Jaejoong is so pretty that he looks a little like a girl anyway, so this is totally reasonable, totally rational, definitely normal, somehow related to teenage hormones, all very scientific. He would, of course, still produce perfect grandchildren and a sweet, capable daughter-in-law for his parents someday.
Changmin has pushed some days out of his mind, like the time he saw Jaejoong shirtless doing yard work outside of his house on a summer afternoon before their junior year of high school. Bits of grass stuck to the sweatiness of his skin, and his arms were buried in topsoil up to his elbows. When he lifted a hand to brush his hair away from his eyes, a streak of dirt had stuck above his eyebrow and Changmin had to quell the sudden urge to walk over and wipe it off or to lick off the sweat running down Jaejoong’s neck. He had blushed furiously, ashamed but still wanting to enact every bit of the daydream. He walked home as quickly as he could manage before taking a cold shower for the next half-hour.
They had kept up their friendship until the beginning of high school mostly at their mother’s encouragement. Jaejoong would come over to do his homework with Changmin, and he would always let Jaejoong copy everything without really understanding why ‘no’ was such a hard thing to say when it shouldn’t have been. They had spent Sunday nights huddled under the flickering incandescent light hanging over Changmin’s kitchen table, pencilling in answers to questions about osmosis or obtuse triangles. Changmin had snuck glances at Jaejoong over the edge of his textbook while Jaejoong doodled in the margins of his notebook. This isn’t okay, he’s using you, was Changmin’s mantra on these nights, but he never really cared because at least it meant that Jaejoong wanted him for something.
In the middle of their junior year of high school Jaejoong has given up talking to Changmin almost entirely. The few times they do speak, it’s when Jaejoong needs to borrow a book or to get help with an assignment he has left too late. Changmin wants to say ‘no’ because this can’t be okay after Jaejoong had ignored him for such a long time, but he always says yes before he realizes that the answer is leaving his mouth. Then he finds excuses to talk to Jaejoong for no good reason just to watch his lips move as he speaks. He goes home at night to imagine Jaejoong kissing along his neck and sucking hard enough to leave marks as his own hand slinks downwards. Afterwards he takes showers hot enough to scald his skin bright pink.
When Changmin finds out about Yunho’s party, he knows Jaejoong will be there. He has spent so much time watching Jaejoong that he hasn’t missed the way he looks at Yunho like he is standing under a helicopter’s spotlight. Still, it doesn’t bother Changmin enough to stop him from going to the party just to watch Jaejoong himself.
He spends two hours getting ready and finishes an hour too early, sitting around and wringing his hands together in an attempt to fight off the nerves while he waits. He glances in the mirror quickly one last time before he finally leaves, not wanting to risk looking too long, because if did he would want to fix everything.
The house is already almost full when he gets there, the sound of the music audible all the way down the empty suburban street. Changmin walks around the yellow circles of light cast by the streetlamps, wanting to stick to the darkness when he is struck with another bout of nerves. He can’t quite see clearly-he had opted to wear glasses instead of his usual contacts, and his lenses need replacing.
Changmin can feel the beat of the current song vibrating through his chest a soon as he walks in the door. He looks around for Jaejoong immediately, instead seeing a few people he thinks he might know. They look surprised as they glance over him and then fix their eyes sharply back in his direction. He shrugs it off, moving on.
He pushes himself through the living room turned dance floor with difficulty as he tries to catch sight of Jaejoong’s hair, the side of his face, even the back of his head, because he has no doubt that he would be able to recognize him from any angle. Unable to find him, Changmin walks up the stairs and peeks in the doors that are still wide open, finding couples making-out and a few people still dancing to the music downstairs but no sign of Jaejoong.
He is almost ready to give up when he sees that the last door on the left is still slightly ajar, and he is powerless against the curiosity that overwhelms him. He squints through the narrow opening, vaguely distinguishing two figures against the back wall in the half-light from the street that streams in through the bare window.
Changmin hears a voice, decidedly male, whisper, “Yunho…” in a ragged moan.
Yunho’s reply is gruff as he forces it out in between pants for air. “I want you on your knees. Now.”
Changmin sees with sudden clarity as Jaejoong sinks to the floor in front of Yunho, his calves extending into the squares of light the window casts on the floor. Changmin turns around before he can actually see anything, wondering how he didn’t notice who it was right away as his stomach ties itself into a dry knot in his throat, cutting off air. He almost runs for it but slumps against the wall instead, trying to catch his breath and block out the sounds now coming from inside the room. It hadn’t looked like this was the first time.
Changmin walks downstairs before he can convince himself that staying to watch would actually be a pretty good idea, at least in theory. He makes it into the garden to get some fresh air, stumbling a little in the dark. Changmin leans his head against the back fence, willing his heartbeat to slow down. All he can think of is Jaejoong slowly sinking to his knees in front of Yunho, Yunho’s hands tangling in Jaejoong’s hair as he urges him to continue.
The part of himself he hates most places himself in Yunho’s position, witnessing Jaejoong lick his lips before staring up at him, eyelids heavy with wanting him so much. Jaejoong unbuttons his jeans, almost teasingly slow, and slides the zipper down, the sound of it seeming to echo through the silence of the room-
A voice somewhere in front of him asks, “Are you all right?” and Changmin jumps, hitting his head on the fence. His face flushes with guilt, and he hopes the other person isn’t able to notice.
He opens his eyes slowly to find a boy he sort of recognizes wearing a concerned expression.
“Oh, um… yeah, great… thanks,” he says, rubbing the back of his head self-consciously.
“This is going to sound weird,” says the boy, coming over to stand beside him, “but I think I know you from somewhere?”
Changmin wonders if he is the victim of some random person’s drunken dare or if this is some bizarre attempt at a pick up line, but then it clicks.
“I… I think we might have band together.”
When the boy smiles his whole face transforms, and Changmin thinks that the darkness won’t help him hide anything anyway, if he keeps smiling like that.
“Yeah, I think that’s it,” he replies, and his laugh matches his smile. “I’m Junsu.”
Changmin tilts his head towards Junsu, curious as to why he’s here, but not wanting to go as far as asking. “Changmin.”
“Come back inside, all right? It’s cold out here.” Junsu smiles again as he looks back at him from the doorway.
Changmin follows.
*
Jaejoong drags Yoochun to the party just after ten thirty, not wanting to appear overeager.
“So,” Jaejoong says, louder as they step through the doorway into the pounding music, “do you want to get drinks or something?” Yoochun just nods.
They find Junsu next to the punch bowl in the kitchen. He smiles as he sees them approach.
“Thank God,” Junsu says, “people I actually know.”
“You have a problem with people?” Yoochun replies. Junsu shrugs.
“It’s the principle of the thing, I guess.”
“Hey… um,” Jaejoong says, “do you guys mind if I… um, go look for someone?” He downs three shots of vodka in a row like he has to prepare himself for it. When he offers some to them Yoochun waves it off.
“Sure, fine,” Yoochun says, wondering why he agreed to come here in the first place. Jaejoong sends him a weird look over his shoulder before he’s lost in the crowd.
“Great.” Yoochun sighs. Junsu looks at him almost like he knows.
“Maybe I can distract you from your depressive musings with my dancing prowess?” Yoochun stares at him. “What? It’s true. I’m the best.”
Yoochun laughs. “All right. But you’d better make it good.”
Junsu’s smile is slightly sinister. “Easy.”
When they step off the dance floor an hour later, Yoochun is wheezing a little.
“So,” Junsu says smugly, “proved you right, didn’t I? Though it helps to be next to your two left feet.”
“Hey!”
“I only speak the truth,” Junsu says, putting on his innocent face, and Yoochun hates how he can pull it off.
“Is that Changmin?” Yoochun asks, peering through the crowd at a tall boy weaving his way outside. “Wow, he looks really different.”
“Who?” Junsu asks, looking around Yoochun to catch a glimpse. Changmin is wearing glasses and has left his hair loose so that it almost brushes his shoulders. Yoochun smirks when he sees Junsu blush.
“Oh. I forgot to tell you. That guy you pointed out in band that one time. His name is Changmin.”
“Changmin.” Junsu rolls the name around his mouth like he’s trying to figure out its flavour.
“Maybe one of us should go get him,” he says, “it’s kind of cold to be outside and he looked upset.”
Yoochun tries hard to school his amusement into submission. “Be my guest.”
Junsu leads Changmin back inside five minutes later.
“Hey,” Changmin says quickly, once Junsu has led him over to Yoochun. “I need to, um, speak to you.” He glances at Junsu out of the corner of his eye. “Alone.”
Junsu pouts, dejected. “All right,” he says, “I’ll just go stand in the corner. By myself. In the corner…” As he walks away he peeks back to see if they’re looking.
“Don’t mind him,” Yoochun says, laughing. “What’s up?”
“You’re… you’re friends with Jaejoong, right? Or… whatever you are… with him. Jaejoong, I mean,” Changmin says, wringing his hands together until his knuckles start to turn white. He keeps looking at his shoes, unable to meet Yoochun’s eyes.
“Uh… yeah. We’re friends.”
“I just, um-” Changmin pauses to run his shaking hands over his face. “-I saw. Upstairs…” He hesitates. “…Jaejoong upstairs.”
Yoochun almost tells him to just spit it out, but the look on Changmin’s face stops him.
“Yeah?” he prompts.
“Jaejoong and… Yunho. You know who he is I guess, um, if you’re here? They were upstairs… in a bedroom… doing things.” Changmin sighs, face flushing so much that Yoochun can almost feel the heat radiating outwards. He whispers so softly that Yoochun almost doesn’t hear him over the music playing in the other room. “Sexual… things.”
Yoochun barely manages to control the jealousy that courses through him. “Are… are you sure? It was definitely them?”
Changmin sighs. “I’m sure. I couldn’t… um. Yeah, it was them. Positive.”
“Why are you telling me?”
“I just… needed to tell someone. I don’t know. I just… yeah.”
“Okay,” Yoochun says, “okay. Um, then…” He tries his best to empty his mind of the onslaught of images of Jaejoong and Yunho having sex in every position he can think of.
“I’ll just… go somewhere else,” Changmin says, looking mortified. He almost knocks a girl’s punch out of her hand as turns around.
Junsu walks back over after Changmin leaves, and Yoochun shakes his head in an attempt to clear it.
“You have a crush on him, don’t you?” Yoochun says, more to distract himself than anything else.
Junsu chokes on his punch. “N… no! Of course not, he’s a guy and I’m a guy and…” Yoochun looks at him with raised eyebrows.
Junsu sighs. “Fine. H… how did you notice?” His cheeks flush red and Yoochun could hug him for being so adorable.
“You pointed him out in band. I didn’t realize until a while later, but you wouldn’t have done that if you hadn’t noticed him a while before that, with that one-track mind of yours. And then tonight it become really obvious.” He throws in a wink just to watch Junsu squirm.
“Oh. Right.”
Yoochun laughs. “It’s all right with me, you know.” Junsu smiles, the one he could take over the world with if he put in the effort.
“So…” Yoochun says, “how did you get him to come in here with you?”
“I… um,” Junsu mumbles, while he suddenly becomes interested in the floor, “I pretended I didn’t know who he was, and told him to get out of the cold.”
“Always the charmer, our Junsu.” Yoochun sniggers as Junsu glares at him.
“Maybe,” Yoochun says, “you should offer to walk him home. He was a bit upset earlier. He wouldn’t say why.” The lie comes easily along with the denial.
“Yeah, okay… yeah,” Junsu says, and when he smiles Yoochun manages to return it.
Yoochun leaves during the countdown after he looks for Jaejoong but can’t find him anywhere.
*
Yoochun confronts Jaejoong about what Changmin said as soon as they get back to school.
“Hey,” he says, pulling Jaejoong by the wrist into an empty classroom, “I really need to talk to you.” Fear of saying what he knows he needs to washes over him as he closes the door behind them as softly as he can.
“Okay, Agent Park,” Jaejoong says, plopping himself down on top of the teacher’s desk and grinning, “why so secretive?”
“Someone told me… about you… about you and Yunho at the party.”
Jaejoong’s smile disappears as quickly as it had come. “What?”
“They said… they said they saw you having sex. Or… yeah.”
“Who the fuck told you that?”
“It doesn’t matter.”
“The fuck it doesn’t.”
“Just. Be careful okay? If he’s using you for sex…”
“We didn’t have sex!” Jaejoong yells and jumps to his feet, fists clenched tightly against his thighs. Yoochun glances at the door to make sure no one is listening. He takes a deep breath.
“I just don’t want to see you get hurt. If you’re emotionally attached and he isn’t-”
“It’s really none of your fucking business, but if you absolutely have to know, I sucked him off, all right? Nothing else. Are you happy now?” Yoochun tries to look away as Jaejoong starts to shake with anger.
“Do not fucking judge me, Yoochun Park. I’m done with this.”
Yoochun blinks away the sting at the back of his eyes as Jaejoong slams the door on his way out.
Part 2