Big Bang Fic: G-Ri
lessons on love (and other things)
jiyong/seungri, romance
A/N: I'm in a horrible writing funk where I can't seem to pound anything out anymore. It just comes across as...sloppy. And gross. But w/e. The best cure to that, I've found, is to work through it. My BETA is going to have to fucking slave at this thing. lol. Sorry. :(
x-posted to bigbang_fanfic, yokshim, and gd♥ri.
There are ants in your bathroom. They're crawling around on the towel laying next to the tub on the tiled floor. You reach over the side of the bath, flipping over the corner of the towel on top of the ant, and press. Of course it does nothing. So you press harder and harder until you're sure that there's absolutely no possible way that anything - even an ant - could live through such pressure.
And then it starts climbing up your arm and you pinch it and flick it over toward the sink because holy shit you hate those things. And it's still moving.
Finally you press with your bare thumb. Only this time it feels a bit more like actual murder.
You see another ant curled up on the towel a few inches away. Probably crippled from your earlier fight with the first ant. You wonder if they're lovers. You wonder if either cares if the other is alive.
You wonder if any ant cares if either of them are alive.
And then you wonder if you've lost your mind because, what?
So you wash your hair, quickly because now you're paranoid that ants are going to get into the bath itself, and climb out and wrap a towel around your waist and vow to call an exterminator tomorrow. You've about had it with this ant problem.
It's making you crazy.
The first time you fall in love is at summer band camp. It's a ridiculous little thing, really, because you are you and she's, well. She's out of your reach. And you know that. But somehow you can't choose who or when or what you fall for. Somehow it just happens. And so you fall and she plays Moonlight Sonata on the piano while the little kids laugh and chatter and push each other around and all you can hear, all that you can feel is the sound of your own heart beating unsteadily in your chest.
You smile at her. She smiles at the music.
“I think,” you start to say, pausing only because there's this hesitating, wavering force in your chest that keeps pushing your courage down. Not fear, not uncertainty, just a strong sense of nerves and it freaks you the hell out. “Uhm.”
She stares expectantly up at you from the piano bench, fingers still poised mid-play.
“I think you sound. Wonderful. I mean, I think you're great. I mean, no. I mean.” You let out a shaky breath and attempt to laugh at yourself because you have no idea what else to do. “I mean. You sound great. Wonderful.”
She smiles slowly, a corner of her mouth lifting up in an easy, natural movement. “Thanks,” she says and then she grins, full and toothy.
And you resolve to learn piano.
For her.
So you learn piano. Slowly. You aren't great. You aren't wonderful. You aren't like her, but that's okay. You don't really want to be.
You play quietly in the background, soft enough to not draw everyone's attention, loud enough to intrigue her, and like you had expected, as soon as your fingers press down on the keys, her head's turning along with her heels. She seats herself next to you at the piano bench.
“You know piano?” she asks with a sort of half breathlessness that makes you feel proud.
“I'm learning,” you say. “But yeah. I guess you could say that.”
She harmonizes to the simple song that you had been playing seconds before and you think, never. Never can you be like her.
And then you confess. Because it's the last day of camp. Because it's the first (and possibly last, you reason to yourself) time that you're able to get your heart out of your throat. Because she had looked so content and perfect, sitting once again at the piano with such a soft smile and.
You just couldn't help yourself.
She continues to play, but her smile drops slightly and the tempo decreases.
“Seunghyun,” she starts, pauses. “Seunghyun, I. I don't.” Her fingers, you notice, never falter. “It's not that you're not nice or that I don't like you, I just.” You wish her fingers would falter. You wish that this was a hard decision for her. You wish she looked a bit more like she cared. “I don't like you like that.”
You quit piano lessons.
“Why am I here?” you mumble to yourself, fingers pushing up against your spiked bangs. You're young and childish, like you've always been, and that impulsive side of you is a side that you think you'll never really outgrow. Which, in retrospect, would explain why you're in this reception hall, uninvited and out of place (with your jeans and sneakers and ripped t-shirt) with men in three piece suits flanking either of your sides with champagne and gold watches seemingly adorning each one's attire.
“Are you...a friend of the bride?” one asks, champagne glass half-empty.
You reply, “No. Uhm. A friend of her, ah, son,” to which the other man cocks a suspecting eyebrow and you turn quickly toward the exit to make a quick escape. You open the double doors, shutting them behind you with a click, only to find yourself in something of a storage room.
“Fuck,” you hiss, kicking at the brick wall. “This is not an exit.”
“Obviously,” someone says and you whirl around with your heart hammering in your chest.
Got'cha, this boy's face says, smirk easy and gleeful and, god, damn, fuck fuck fuck, you do not want to be here right now (you should not be here right now) and. Well.
“I can, ah. Help you find the way out. If you want.” He's laughing. Not out loud, but you can tell anyway. He's laughing on the inside.
“I'm not blind. I know where I am,” you spit at him in hopes that he'll just back off and leave you in your own embarrassed misery.
“A storage room?” he says, incredulity lacing his words. “What the hell are you in a storage room for?” He leans back and pushes himself up onto a short, dusty cabinet stationed behind him. He's looking down at you figuratively and somewhat literally (which is, albeit, a tad hard considering the boy is a good head or so shorter than you) and it's pissing you off.
You settle for glaring at him. “I could ask you the same thing.”
“I'm here to practice,” he says with a shrug and a vague, sweeping gesture toward a piano sitting decrepit and old and forgotten in the corner. “Because I'm actually supposed to be here. At the wedding. You know,” he laughs, “the thing you just crashed?”
You choose to not reply at all this time and just pout stubbornly and hope he'll let you off. Kids like him rub you the wrong way.
He shrugs once more. “But okay. Feel free to stay and listen.” He slides onto the piano bench and winks all saucily and over-the-top with implications and, goddamn, this boy is cocky. “I like an audience,” he adds. Just to see how far he can push you.
“I'm leaving,” you announce unnecessarily. “Thank you for being an asshole, but you don't have to worry about me. I've got myself covered.” He laughs again, but lays his fingers down on the keys and presses into a somewhat messy chord.
You find, embarrassingly enough, that your feet don't really want to follow your mouth's orders.
“You should stay,” he says softly. “There aren't that many people my age around here.” His fingers move leisurely - carelessly - across the piano and the sound is loud and brash, but. But it's good. You have to admit that it's good.
“For someone so lonely, you sure weren't very convincing a second ago,” you mumble crossly, though you find your resolve slowly dissolving. You breath slowly, in through your mouth, out through your nose, and suddenly you feel like you're in middle school again, tutoring little kids at band camp, and, shit, why does this feel familiar?
You seat yourself next to him at the piano.
There's no music nor are the notes he's playing coming together as something you really recognize (which isn't saying much because most of the composers you know are Bach, Mozart, and Tchaikovsky) and you're kind of in awe.
“I didn't know assholes could play piano,” you admit quietly, something like a secret falling from your mouth and onto the dusty, ivory keys in front of you.
He just laughs again, shrugging in that conceited way that you've found he does often (though you've only known him for a few short minutes) and says, “I bet there's a lot you don't know.”
Suddenly you want to learn piano again.
He offers to give you a lesson.
In return, you offer to punch him in the face.
It's not so much that the suggestion repulses you, it's just that. Well, you've got your pride. And he's still sort of a cocky bastard and that is an absolute 'no' in your books. So okay, yes, it repulses you. In a way. You guess.
"I'll be here tomorrow, if you'd like," he continues on anyway, as if you hadn't just thrown a total bitch fit a few seconds ago. "It'd be nice if you came. Kept me company."
You want to be angry (more than you actually are) because he's smirking - smirking - and he's intentionally trying to piss you off, you can just tell, but. God.
He's drawing you in.
You slam the door behind you without so much as a backward glance and promise yourself, in your head, that you're going to pretend that this day never happened. He was just. A dream. And you.
You are not going crazy.
You think it's just a little bit fucked up that you have to pretend about that last bit.
You're buried under piles of sheets and blankets, pillows tossed and crinkled at the side of your bed. You dream of wedding cakes and Tchaikovsky and Bach and tea parties and you awake a sweaty, mussed heap of tangled limbs.
Something, you think, is definitely wrong with you.
"I knew you'd come back," he taunts. Except he's smiling a little bit sweeter than yesterday which makes you realize (grudgingly) that he doesn't look half bad when he's dropped that obnoxious, shit-eating grin.
You choose not to reply and sit next to him silently on the piano bench as he plays some piece called Adagio in G Minor.
It sounds a little bit like love, you think.
He does not teach you but rather sits and watches you learn. Occasionally he'll correct your finger placement or help you out with some particularly difficult chords, but otherwise it's almost as if he's not even there. Just some shadow on the wall, observing whatever you do with a keen eye.
"Are you someone who holds on to the past?" he asks one day, chin on his arms, arms folded and resting against the lower half of the piano keys. They make clanging, echoing noises before fading out to silence.
You furrow your brows at him skeptically. "What?"
And he blinks back at you, all uncharacteristic seriousness, as if your answer means life or death.
"Who would be so stupid..." you fill in for an answer instead of. Well. An actual answer. But he takes it, runs with it, and laughs laughs laughs.
"I do say, young one," he says bitingly through peels of laughter. "You have much to learn."
Over the next few days, the days following his performance at the wedding, you find yourself...unnaturally drawn to him. Whether it be thighs touching at the piano or pushing and shoving and playing around, there seems to be a constant need for a connection. It's not one-sided. Because he leans in further, dips down to lay his jaw on your shoulder and blow puffs of air onto your neck, leisurely, carelessly, like his piano playing.
You ask him to play a piece for you, something soft, something sweet.
"I don't play soft and sweet," he whines, but positions his fingers over they keys anyway.
He plays Pachelbel's Canon in D, and it is soft. It is sweet. But most of all, it's bright and happy, like him, and you love that, love that you can see him in his playing.
Somehow you feel like crying when he laughs and announces that, while it wasn't perfect, "I finished it." And he smiles at you which makes your tummy go all weird and shit, he gives you butterflies. Butterflies. Like a school girl.
This was not how anything was supposed to go. This was not what you had planned.
There is a week where you wonder when you stopped coming to practice feeling confused and dizzy, where you wonder why you've continued coming at all, and it scares the shit out of you.
You stand outside the doors to the storage room, hand shaking and sweaty on the knob, while he plays Moonlight Sonata softly, so unlike him, on the other side and goddammit, you just can't do this.
It took you five minutes to build up the courage to put your feet in front of the door. Yet all it takes is five seconds to run away. Maybe you really are going insane, you think to yourself.
Or maybe, a small voice in your head says, echoing like an empty threat. Maybe you're just a coward.
You snap after almost a month. A month of not seeing him. A month of no music.
You don't think you can run fast enough.
He's at the piano again and his fingers are hovering over the keys like he's readying himself to play, only he doesn't. He just sits there and hovers and thinks with closed eyes.
"I-" you start and stumble over your words. "God, fuck."
He looks up at you with such broken, hopeful - hopeful, hopeful - eyes and in a matter of seconds you have his face in between your palms, fingertips digging marks into his skin, and you kiss him.
There are so many things you want to say, so many things you could say - I'm sorry, god, I'm so sorry, I love you, I don't know you, but I love you, I love you so much, and maybe this was fate, you and I, maybe we're fated - but you don't because you can't find the will to stop kissing him. Not when he feels so right when he's pressed up against you. And. In all honesty, you're scared of losing that.
"Seunghyun," he moans against your lips and presses hands to your chest until suddenly there's pressure and you're no longer touching him, no contact whatsoever but that between his hands and your shirt.
"Seunghyun," he says again. And his voice sounds like a canon, a sonata, a poem, a rhyme, the entity of music itself. "Seunghyun..."
"You never told me your name," you gasp, heart finally slowing to a more natural, normal beat. "You never...Of all the days we've been together, you never. You never told me."
"It's Jiyong," he whispers. "My name..."
But you're kissing him again and saying his name over and over and fuck fuck fuck, when did all of this happen?
(When did you fall in love?)
So maybe you are a little crazy. Maybe both of you are fucked up in the head. But if there's one thing Jiyong has taught you throughout his lessons, it's that love... Love never makes sense. Which, in turn, makes sense because anyone with good sense would never fall in love.
It's a good thing you're crazy, you think and kiss him that much harder with ivory keys and sleek black wood fitting perfectly underneath your fingertips.
For my wifey. ♥ With love.
> 3> *chu*
jiyong/seungri, romance
A/N: I'm in a horrible writing funk where I can't seem to pound anything out anymore. It just comes across as...sloppy. And gross. But w/e. The best cure to that, I've found, is to work through it. My BETA is going to have to fucking slave at this thing. lol. Sorry. :(
x-posted to bigbang_fanfic, yokshim, and gd♥ri.
There are ants in your bathroom. They're crawling around on the towel laying next to the tub on the tiled floor. You reach over the side of the bath, flipping over the corner of the towel on top of the ant, and press. Of course it does nothing. So you press harder and harder until you're sure that there's absolutely no possible way that anything - even an ant - could live through such pressure.
And then it starts climbing up your arm and you pinch it and flick it over toward the sink because holy shit you hate those things. And it's still moving.
Finally you press with your bare thumb. Only this time it feels a bit more like actual murder.
You see another ant curled up on the towel a few inches away. Probably crippled from your earlier fight with the first ant. You wonder if they're lovers. You wonder if either cares if the other is alive.
You wonder if any ant cares if either of them are alive.
And then you wonder if you've lost your mind because, what?
So you wash your hair, quickly because now you're paranoid that ants are going to get into the bath itself, and climb out and wrap a towel around your waist and vow to call an exterminator tomorrow. You've about had it with this ant problem.
It's making you crazy.
The first time you fall in love is at summer band camp. It's a ridiculous little thing, really, because you are you and she's, well. She's out of your reach. And you know that. But somehow you can't choose who or when or what you fall for. Somehow it just happens. And so you fall and she plays Moonlight Sonata on the piano while the little kids laugh and chatter and push each other around and all you can hear, all that you can feel is the sound of your own heart beating unsteadily in your chest.
You smile at her. She smiles at the music.
“I think,” you start to say, pausing only because there's this hesitating, wavering force in your chest that keeps pushing your courage down. Not fear, not uncertainty, just a strong sense of nerves and it freaks you the hell out. “Uhm.”
She stares expectantly up at you from the piano bench, fingers still poised mid-play.
“I think you sound. Wonderful. I mean, I think you're great. I mean, no. I mean.” You let out a shaky breath and attempt to laugh at yourself because you have no idea what else to do. “I mean. You sound great. Wonderful.”
She smiles slowly, a corner of her mouth lifting up in an easy, natural movement. “Thanks,” she says and then she grins, full and toothy.
And you resolve to learn piano.
For her.
So you learn piano. Slowly. You aren't great. You aren't wonderful. You aren't like her, but that's okay. You don't really want to be.
You play quietly in the background, soft enough to not draw everyone's attention, loud enough to intrigue her, and like you had expected, as soon as your fingers press down on the keys, her head's turning along with her heels. She seats herself next to you at the piano bench.
“You know piano?” she asks with a sort of half breathlessness that makes you feel proud.
“I'm learning,” you say. “But yeah. I guess you could say that.”
She harmonizes to the simple song that you had been playing seconds before and you think, never. Never can you be like her.
And then you confess. Because it's the last day of camp. Because it's the first (and possibly last, you reason to yourself) time that you're able to get your heart out of your throat. Because she had looked so content and perfect, sitting once again at the piano with such a soft smile and.
You just couldn't help yourself.
She continues to play, but her smile drops slightly and the tempo decreases.
“Seunghyun,” she starts, pauses. “Seunghyun, I. I don't.” Her fingers, you notice, never falter. “It's not that you're not nice or that I don't like you, I just.” You wish her fingers would falter. You wish that this was a hard decision for her. You wish she looked a bit more like she cared. “I don't like you like that.”
You quit piano lessons.
“Why am I here?” you mumble to yourself, fingers pushing up against your spiked bangs. You're young and childish, like you've always been, and that impulsive side of you is a side that you think you'll never really outgrow. Which, in retrospect, would explain why you're in this reception hall, uninvited and out of place (with your jeans and sneakers and ripped t-shirt) with men in three piece suits flanking either of your sides with champagne and gold watches seemingly adorning each one's attire.
“Are you...a friend of the bride?” one asks, champagne glass half-empty.
You reply, “No. Uhm. A friend of her, ah, son,” to which the other man cocks a suspecting eyebrow and you turn quickly toward the exit to make a quick escape. You open the double doors, shutting them behind you with a click, only to find yourself in something of a storage room.
“Fuck,” you hiss, kicking at the brick wall. “This is not an exit.”
“Obviously,” someone says and you whirl around with your heart hammering in your chest.
Got'cha, this boy's face says, smirk easy and gleeful and, god, damn, fuck fuck fuck, you do not want to be here right now (you should not be here right now) and. Well.
“I can, ah. Help you find the way out. If you want.” He's laughing. Not out loud, but you can tell anyway. He's laughing on the inside.
“I'm not blind. I know where I am,” you spit at him in hopes that he'll just back off and leave you in your own embarrassed misery.
“A storage room?” he says, incredulity lacing his words. “What the hell are you in a storage room for?” He leans back and pushes himself up onto a short, dusty cabinet stationed behind him. He's looking down at you figuratively and somewhat literally (which is, albeit, a tad hard considering the boy is a good head or so shorter than you) and it's pissing you off.
You settle for glaring at him. “I could ask you the same thing.”
“I'm here to practice,” he says with a shrug and a vague, sweeping gesture toward a piano sitting decrepit and old and forgotten in the corner. “Because I'm actually supposed to be here. At the wedding. You know,” he laughs, “the thing you just crashed?”
You choose to not reply at all this time and just pout stubbornly and hope he'll let you off. Kids like him rub you the wrong way.
He shrugs once more. “But okay. Feel free to stay and listen.” He slides onto the piano bench and winks all saucily and over-the-top with implications and, goddamn, this boy is cocky. “I like an audience,” he adds. Just to see how far he can push you.
“I'm leaving,” you announce unnecessarily. “Thank you for being an asshole, but you don't have to worry about me. I've got myself covered.” He laughs again, but lays his fingers down on the keys and presses into a somewhat messy chord.
You find, embarrassingly enough, that your feet don't really want to follow your mouth's orders.
“You should stay,” he says softly. “There aren't that many people my age around here.” His fingers move leisurely - carelessly - across the piano and the sound is loud and brash, but. But it's good. You have to admit that it's good.
“For someone so lonely, you sure weren't very convincing a second ago,” you mumble crossly, though you find your resolve slowly dissolving. You breath slowly, in through your mouth, out through your nose, and suddenly you feel like you're in middle school again, tutoring little kids at band camp, and, shit, why does this feel familiar?
You seat yourself next to him at the piano.
There's no music nor are the notes he's playing coming together as something you really recognize (which isn't saying much because most of the composers you know are Bach, Mozart, and Tchaikovsky) and you're kind of in awe.
“I didn't know assholes could play piano,” you admit quietly, something like a secret falling from your mouth and onto the dusty, ivory keys in front of you.
He just laughs again, shrugging in that conceited way that you've found he does often (though you've only known him for a few short minutes) and says, “I bet there's a lot you don't know.”
Suddenly you want to learn piano again.
He offers to give you a lesson.
In return, you offer to punch him in the face.
It's not so much that the suggestion repulses you, it's just that. Well, you've got your pride. And he's still sort of a cocky bastard and that is an absolute 'no' in your books. So okay, yes, it repulses you. In a way. You guess.
"I'll be here tomorrow, if you'd like," he continues on anyway, as if you hadn't just thrown a total bitch fit a few seconds ago. "It'd be nice if you came. Kept me company."
You want to be angry (more than you actually are) because he's smirking - smirking - and he's intentionally trying to piss you off, you can just tell, but. God.
He's drawing you in.
You slam the door behind you without so much as a backward glance and promise yourself, in your head, that you're going to pretend that this day never happened. He was just. A dream. And you.
You are not going crazy.
You think it's just a little bit fucked up that you have to pretend about that last bit.
You're buried under piles of sheets and blankets, pillows tossed and crinkled at the side of your bed. You dream of wedding cakes and Tchaikovsky and Bach and tea parties and you awake a sweaty, mussed heap of tangled limbs.
Something, you think, is definitely wrong with you.
"I knew you'd come back," he taunts. Except he's smiling a little bit sweeter than yesterday which makes you realize (grudgingly) that he doesn't look half bad when he's dropped that obnoxious, shit-eating grin.
You choose not to reply and sit next to him silently on the piano bench as he plays some piece called Adagio in G Minor.
It sounds a little bit like love, you think.
He does not teach you but rather sits and watches you learn. Occasionally he'll correct your finger placement or help you out with some particularly difficult chords, but otherwise it's almost as if he's not even there. Just some shadow on the wall, observing whatever you do with a keen eye.
"Are you someone who holds on to the past?" he asks one day, chin on his arms, arms folded and resting against the lower half of the piano keys. They make clanging, echoing noises before fading out to silence.
You furrow your brows at him skeptically. "What?"
And he blinks back at you, all uncharacteristic seriousness, as if your answer means life or death.
"Who would be so stupid..." you fill in for an answer instead of. Well. An actual answer. But he takes it, runs with it, and laughs laughs laughs.
"I do say, young one," he says bitingly through peels of laughter. "You have much to learn."
Over the next few days, the days following his performance at the wedding, you find yourself...unnaturally drawn to him. Whether it be thighs touching at the piano or pushing and shoving and playing around, there seems to be a constant need for a connection. It's not one-sided. Because he leans in further, dips down to lay his jaw on your shoulder and blow puffs of air onto your neck, leisurely, carelessly, like his piano playing.
You ask him to play a piece for you, something soft, something sweet.
"I don't play soft and sweet," he whines, but positions his fingers over they keys anyway.
He plays Pachelbel's Canon in D, and it is soft. It is sweet. But most of all, it's bright and happy, like him, and you love that, love that you can see him in his playing.
Somehow you feel like crying when he laughs and announces that, while it wasn't perfect, "I finished it." And he smiles at you which makes your tummy go all weird and shit, he gives you butterflies. Butterflies. Like a school girl.
This was not how anything was supposed to go. This was not what you had planned.
There is a week where you wonder when you stopped coming to practice feeling confused and dizzy, where you wonder why you've continued coming at all, and it scares the shit out of you.
You stand outside the doors to the storage room, hand shaking and sweaty on the knob, while he plays Moonlight Sonata softly, so unlike him, on the other side and goddammit, you just can't do this.
It took you five minutes to build up the courage to put your feet in front of the door. Yet all it takes is five seconds to run away. Maybe you really are going insane, you think to yourself.
Or maybe, a small voice in your head says, echoing like an empty threat. Maybe you're just a coward.
You snap after almost a month. A month of not seeing him. A month of no music.
You don't think you can run fast enough.
He's at the piano again and his fingers are hovering over the keys like he's readying himself to play, only he doesn't. He just sits there and hovers and thinks with closed eyes.
"I-" you start and stumble over your words. "God, fuck."
He looks up at you with such broken, hopeful - hopeful, hopeful - eyes and in a matter of seconds you have his face in between your palms, fingertips digging marks into his skin, and you kiss him.
There are so many things you want to say, so many things you could say - I'm sorry, god, I'm so sorry, I love you, I don't know you, but I love you, I love you so much, and maybe this was fate, you and I, maybe we're fated - but you don't because you can't find the will to stop kissing him. Not when he feels so right when he's pressed up against you. And. In all honesty, you're scared of losing that.
"Seunghyun," he moans against your lips and presses hands to your chest until suddenly there's pressure and you're no longer touching him, no contact whatsoever but that between his hands and your shirt.
"Seunghyun," he says again. And his voice sounds like a canon, a sonata, a poem, a rhyme, the entity of music itself. "Seunghyun..."
"You never told me your name," you gasp, heart finally slowing to a more natural, normal beat. "You never...Of all the days we've been together, you never. You never told me."
"It's Jiyong," he whispers. "My name..."
But you're kissing him again and saying his name over and over and fuck fuck fuck, when did all of this happen?
(When did you fall in love?)
So maybe you are a little crazy. Maybe both of you are fucked up in the head. But if there's one thing Jiyong has taught you throughout his lessons, it's that love... Love never makes sense. Which, in turn, makes sense because anyone with good sense would never fall in love.
It's a good thing you're crazy, you think and kiss him that much harder with ivory keys and sleek black wood fitting perfectly underneath your fingertips.
For my wifey. ♥ With love.
> 3> *chu*