Flying Isn't Hard [Part 1]
[Part 1] This will be pretty short. But I just had a sudden thought. How many blind!Yunho, helpless!Jae fics have I read? Ummm. None?? It's usually blind!Yoosu-ness of some awesome concoction of the writer and wonderful smut is soon to follow. 8D *cough* Well, anyway, enjoy! ^^ May the Yunjae be with you. ^^
There came a point when the toxic smell of medicine, disinfectant and sickness felt like home. The cramped feeling of curling up on the same green, coffee-stained waiting room chair and drifting off to dreamless sleep was like his second bed. Watching nurses and doctors and frazzled relatives rush in and out at all hours of the day was like watching ESPN on TV while someone in the background yelled, “Get off your lazy butt and get a job!”
“Mr. Kim…. Wake up, Mr. Kim…”
The sound of the nurse’s voice was like the sound a mother makes when she must tell her children that mommy and daddy are going separate ways.
Jaejoong blinked the empty dreams from his heavy lids and uncurled him from his-after three weeks, it had officially become his-green, coffee-stained waiting room chair.
The nurse spoke, but as always, Jaejoong stared off into the wall opposite from him, waiting for the words he’d been anticipating since three weeks ago. All other words were irrelevant. His condition is stable. Irrelevant. He is slowly recovering. Irrelevant. But there are still some serious issues. Irrelevant, irrelevant.
“Since he has improved so much in the past few weeks, we are now letting visitors other than immediate family visit him. But-“
The rhythm of Jaejoong’s thundering heart matched his footsteps as one after another, they lead him almost flying down the hallway like love could give him wings, while the nurse’s protests behind him were lost in the whirr of air rushing past his ears.
He must have been tired-no, exhausted. And maybe starving just a little bit. Because the way Yunho’s room wobbled in his blurry vision and the too bright lights pierced through his brain, giving Jaejoong a sudden splitting headache and the funny lurch his stomach gave as he laid eyes on Yunho’s bandage-wrapped form consumed under cool sheets just did not seem all too healthy. Maybe he should have sat down or thrown up or something but nothing else really registered at the time.
It barely registered that Yunho’s face had hardly turned to look at him. Just his face mattered at all. His face was not the sickly pale white color it had been three weeks ago. Glowing white with the high beams of a Kia before Yunho wasn’t standing just four steps off the sidewalk anymore. Everything was white that night. The moon was white. The one star somehow visible hanging in the city sky. The bright white man in the crosswalk sign blinking Go.
Just before Jaejoong’s smile went out quicker than a lit candle someone had sneezed on, Yunho had turned to him to ask a question. The end of his sentence disappeared just as quick. But even now Jaejoong still had his lips poised to reply to the unfinished question only he knew the answer to.
“I do.”
Jaejoong’s heart only resumed beating the moment he finally saw Yunho’s bruised face again three weeks later. It stopped again as a faint smile twitched under his nose and he inhaled the hospital air of syringes and white tiled floors. It resumed again as he exhaled relief, touched Yunho’s warm hand and stole a peck on the lips. It stopped again once Yunho’s blank, brown eyes flew open wide and he jerked back, shouting things that made Jaejoong wish he could turn back time.
Jaejoong jumped back so far his back was suddenly touching the opposite wall and let Yunho’s name skirt passed his lips as his chest heaved uncontrollably.
“Who’s there?” It was short and coarse, the way you speak to a stray mutt that sniffs too close to the children.
A lifetime passed before Jaejoong found the sense to form Korean in the back of his throat.
“Y-Yunho…. What’s going-“
“I said who’s there?” He spoke to the wall, but his voice carried defense and offense in all directions. “You’re voice doesn’t sound like my mom’s or my dad’s and unless you’re my new doctor who strongly believes touching his patients in such a way is like Jesus therapy, I expect you to provide some good answers now.”
Another lifetime passed and Jaejoong dully wondered how many chances he’d get. “Yunho…”
“I know my name!” It surged from somewhere deep inside of him as if he were trying desperately to convince himself. Yunho’s knuckles turned white against his grip on the crisp sheets and Jaejoong’s breath shook with Yunho’s clenched fists.
Maybe as an excuse to beat the sobs that threaten to break the surface, Jaejoong let his voice, small and frail hang on the air as if hoping that alone would make things right. Fix things. Repair whatever God forsaken thing that remained shattered within Yunho after that night Chinese food meant everything and crosswalk signs blinked lies.
“Jaejoong.” He said it almost like a question, but it wasn’t and Jaejoong wondered himself what kind of statement he was trying to make. Yunho blinked vacantly as the other’s voice lingered in his head until the confusion welled up inside him and he scowled.
Jaejoong wished the hurried footsteps he heard were his own heading in the other direction.
“Mr. Kim,” The doctor Jaejoong had come to know and nearly love and hate all at the same time these past few weeks appeared at the door, winded and shocked with the nurse from before peering warily over his shoulder and fumbling with the hem of her uniform.
Yunho’s head perked up, the first sign of recognition he’d shown since Jaejoong had dropped his heart on the floor only minutes before.
“I’m sorry, Mr. Kim,” Dr. Choi said in a low, low voice and placed a sanitized hand on the other’s quaking shoulder. “I didn’t want you to see him without me filling you in.”
The nurse behind him bowed and fumbled some more.
“Mr. Jung’s injuries from the accident are healing nicely, though he will need to take some pain medications for a while. His head injuries are what are troubling.”
Jaejoong nodded but he didn’t know why.
“The brain damage took his eyesight and part of his memories is gone. After much questioning, we discovered that all his memories from the past seven years have been wiped out.”
“9/11 did only happen last year…” Yunho insisted to no one in particular. Jaejoong tried not to notice the disoriented way his eyes searched the air in front of him for answers no one knew. Seven years. It would happen to be exactly the same time Jaejoong first found Yunho bravely standing on the railing of the bridge, not about to jump, but enjoying the feeling of the wind hitting him at a different level. It didn’t take all seven years for the two to fall in love, but that was irrelevant, anyway.
“Will they come back?” As soon as Jaejoong said it, he realized he didn’t want to know the answer.
Dr. Choi inhaled deeply in an effort to straighten his own slumping shoulders. He had many other patients to see fall apart. He must get through the day. “If eyes could see miracles…” And Jaejoong wasn’t even perfectly sure if the doctor realized what he had not said barely made sense. “But I have hope for his memory. If he could live with someone familiar with the memories he’s lost, he could slowly rehabilitate. Do you have any information on his family? All three weeks, I have yet to see any parental figures visit.”
Of course Jaejoong had been in too much of a selfish daze to answer any nurse’s prying questions with any response close to, “His parents died five years ago.” A twenty-one day oath to silence was the only thing that kept Jaejoong from crumbling to pieces.
“I’m his only family,” He finally breathed and breathed again. Fear was caught in his throat.
Yunho’s face went beet red against the white, pure whiteness of the sheets, the walls, the lab coats and the happy puffs of clouds that meandered between the dingy window and the blue, blue sky.
“Impossible!” He spat, face contorted in resentment. “I don’t even know this guy. Where are my parents? Find them. Now.”
“He’s an only child,” Jaejoong continued, wishing he could make himself look Dr. Choi in the eye rather than remain glued to Yunho’s shrinking form before him.
“How would you know that? Get out.”
“He has no extended family.”
“Shut up!”
“His parents were in a plane crash two years after we met.”
There was a brief moment of silence when fire heaved in Yunho’s chest and Liar hung on the tip of his tongue. The wall Jaejoong kept himself pressed against felt cold again.
Dr. Choi inhaled without exhaling and kneeled down beside Yunho’s bed like a father he’s only had for the past three weeks. “Yunho, do you trust me?”
He turned his head slightly in the direction of the doctor’s voice, but the sensation of the faceless voice piercing through his darkness and so much more kept his eyes focused towards nowhere.
“You must go with Mr. Kim,” His voice was stern and warm. “I assure you that even though you may not remember, this man is very important to you. And you must be of equal importance to him if he bothered to stay curled up in the waiting room for three weeks straight.” Dr. Choi punctuated with a smile.
He rubbed Yunho’s back as protests and rejection poured from him and smack into Jaejoong’s face before they began to weaken and dwindle with the hum of the air conditioner. It amazed and scared and revolted Jaejoong to see just how this brave twenty-four year old man could be reduced to whatever may remain of a scarred eight-year-old. The last thing that fluttered, barely audible past Yunho’s unwilling lips cracked the atmosphere right in half.
“But he kissed me.”
No one knew who started crying first.
***
Two days later, Yunho still refused to sleep in Jaejoong’s only bed, because the other’s insistence that for a little over five years, they had slept together under the same blankets was obviously a lie. Five years ago, Yunho was only twelve. Obviously.
And he refused to sleep on the couch because it was obviously a lie that it was the same place Junsu had gotten over excited at something Yoochun said and dropped every last crumb of Yunho’s surprise birthday cake on his twenty-first birthday. Obviously a lie. He was only seventeen. And Junsu had moved away to an all boy’s boarding school all during high school. And who was Yoochun?
The floor was his safest bet. It was cold and belonged to everyone. Its smooth, contourless surface did nothing to soothe Yunho’s growing fear that he would never be able to watch the moon change shape again. But then again, nothing did.
He lay there, back rigid, staring up at the ceiling he was positive still existed past his dark veil with the single cloth sheet he allowed Jaejoong to give him. When he wasn’t lying deathly still in that same position, he would sit upright in that same spot and look out the window he didn’t realize he was gazing at. He had memorized the path to the bathroom after Jaejoong’s initial quiet and clumsy tour of his house and refused to speak unless the sentence had the word liar in it.
The floor was always so cold.
Jaejoong presented Yunho with a permanent view of his back as he muddled around in the kitchen making something involving eggplant and lots of seasoning. The only sounds that could be heard were the usual noises a kitchen normally makes when pregnant with anxiety.
Jaejoong cut a carrot and the tension with a knife.
“Who are you?” It was so quiet, Jaejoong wouldn’t have heard it if the pot had come to boil any earlier. He silently willed it to hurry up.
He kept his back turned to a man who couldn’t see it and opened the fridge for something, something.
“Who are you?” Louder and with more grate to it. If Jaejoong had the strength to face him, he would’ve guessed Yunho was sitting on the floor, eyes boring into whatever space he thought was making the most noise, legs neatly crossed and back impeccably straight in the way he always did when he was angry and failing to hide it.
It took almost a full minute for Jaejoong to find the courage to speak while he attacked the eggplant. Right about the time he could practically feel the air shift as Yunho sucked in to ask the wrong question again.
“Jaejoong.”
“I know that,” Yunho said it fast and harsh. Like the way you grit your teeth together when the sound of shattering glass pummels your eardrums. “Who are you…to me?”
Staring reproachfully at a tomato as it rolled off the table and away from his feet, Jaejoong was sure he had left all reason to live somewhere back at the hospital. Or perhaps somewhere three weeks ago after the last unspoken words on Yunho’s smiling lips were left as, “Jaejoong, will you-“
Weightlessly, yet with all the doubt in the world, Jaejoong pried himself away from the kitchen and into the next room separated only by a table and a few dining chairs and sat on the floor with his legs folded underneath him in front of Yunho, who only shifted slightly as Jaejoong’s warm breeze brushed past his face.
“Everything.” Short and simple and Jaejoong could hardly place what he himself could’ve meant.
“Too vague,” Yunho’s brown eyes darted left and right as if it were his head shaking off a ridiculous notion.
“So were we,” And nothing made sense anymore.
“We?” Yunho’s eyes darkened with accusation and wandered somewhere over Jaejoong’s eye brows.
Jaejoong nodded. Uselessly. “We met seven years ago.”
“How convenient,” His voice was filled to the brim with suspicion, but he let the other continue.
“I didn’t even know you the first time I saw you standing on the edge of the bridge and I thought I would die with you if you jumped. But you smiled down at me and stretched your arms out wide as if you could fly. I felt small beneath you.”
“Sounds cheesy,” Yunho deadpanned, but Jaejoong tricked himself to believe that maybe the flush in his cheeks was from embarrassment.
“It was,” His voice shook. “But you were everything to me from that point on.”
“And what was my perception of you?” It seemed as though Yunho grew more and more curious with each drop of control Jaejoong let seep through his fingers.
“Find out for yourself,” He clasped his hands around Yunho’s warm wrists and brought them up to his face, watching as the other’s expression morphed through mild surprise and confusion.
“Your face…”
“Remember it,” It was a well concealed command.
Jaejoong’s eyelids fluttered as Yunho’s long, slender fingers hesitantly explored every detail of his face. His fingertips slid over his pale skin, his straight nose, his pierced earlobes, his misty eyes, his feminine jaw line until he felt as though he had the old days back when Yunho would stroke his cheek and whisper with a chuckle, “I’ll steal you away.”
“You must be…beautiful,” Jaejoong convinced himself that Yunho was stricken with a lack for any words resembling handsome, good-looking or manly because he knew. The picture of his raven black hair and gray black eyes must have been imprinted somewhere in his mind, flashing with schizophrenic fury, but Yunho just couldn’t recall a name for the image permanently lodged in his brain. Jaejoong told himself that his lack of sight had jumbled his mind up a bit, but he would remember after a while. But then again, maybe Jaejoong was a liar.
He jolted back to reality as Yunho’s hands floated back down to his lap and he stared straight ahead, rapidly blinking the uncertainty away.
Without thinking (because thought was for scholars and dreaming was for love) Jaejoong hastily reached for Yunho’s face before the other man could object and searched imploringly, urgently. His brow crinkled in the same confusion Jaejoong remembered he’d had when Junsu had called, trying to explain why he was coming back to Seoul. His neck was a bit cooler than it used to be when Jaejoong would trail his fingers along his collarbone and watch him flush happily; but it was the same neck. Same Yunho.
His hands zigzagged down past Yunho’s stiff shoulders, across his rising and falling chest, and finally settled somewhere on his sides, tracing lightly up and down, occasionally thumbing his hips.
“I’m not gay,” Yunho whispered through gritted teeth. His vacant gaze had wandered somewhere near Jaejoong’s own and he shivered under the cold authority of the other’s black pupils.
“You weren’t gay,” Jaejoong’s heart rate was telling him to shut up and walk away. “You were in love.”
He wished time would move slower as his lips met Yunho’s in an almost plea.
His luck and his courage ran out when Yunho roughly shoved him away, cursing and hissing and the fire alarm went off in the kitchen, pouring gray-white smoke like the cigarettes Jaejoong used to puff before Yunho made him stop years ago.
“Smoking is like happy suicide,” He used to say.
And Jaejoong threw dinner in the trash.
***
After neither man ate their instant ramen, Yunho sat on the floor because it was his spot and Jaejoong sat on the couch because he couldn’t leave.
It was silent again, but after two days-three weeks for Jaejoong-it was nearing comfortable. Jaejoong began to wonder if Yunho thought he had long left the living room and was sitting, thinking of ways to escape and find his parents without knowing how or where to find the next phone.
Almost forty minutes skulked by before Jaejoong began to consider that maybe he should have either turned the TV on, risking stomping Yunho’s pride in the hardwood floor or picked up a blanket and pillow before settling himself on the couch. The moon had long slung itself high across the sky.
“Where are they?” His voice was quiet, but the strength behind each syllable was painfully evident to both of them.
Even now, Jaejoong realized he still shared something beyond communication with this man blinking at the floor. The abrupt question needed no explanation.
“It was a Tuesday five years ago when your dad wanted to take Mrs. Jung on a third honeymoon. It was bizarre even to me, but your parents were spontaneous like that,” Jaejoong smiled to himself, forgetting that Yunho would miss it and the next one completely.
“I know my own parents,” Yunho muttered, but let him continue a story that had already ended. It was still for a moment before Jaejoong just barely caught the rise in one of Yunho’s eyebrows.
“There’s not much else. They took a plane to Delhi and never arrived. The plane’s weight was overloaded or something. You were afraid to fly ever since.”
Jaejoong never considered how brief and callous he may have sounded while describing his parents’ death. Never considered that the other man would have to deal with the grief of losing his loved ones twice in one lifetime. Never considered that Yunho may want to cry again.
It was sudden, the tears that sprung from his directionless eyes. So sudden that Jaejoong had not prepared himself. Could not prepare himself and the roar of his own pulse deafened him. Deaf to Yunho’s blindness. How cruel.
It was disconcerting, the weight of Jaejoong’s watch on his slim wrist.
And the night remained flightless as Yunho’s single blanket said hello to silent tears and Jaejoong shivered against the cold of his own air conditioner, too afraid to turn it off, too ashamed with the bleak knowledge that there was nothing a newly complete stranger could do for a crying boy lost in darkness with no one to call home.
The ramen was cold and soggy by morning.
----------------------------
Comment because you like Yunjae donuts in the morning~
There came a point when the toxic smell of medicine, disinfectant and sickness felt like home. The cramped feeling of curling up on the same green, coffee-stained waiting room chair and drifting off to dreamless sleep was like his second bed. Watching nurses and doctors and frazzled relatives rush in and out at all hours of the day was like watching ESPN on TV while someone in the background yelled, “Get off your lazy butt and get a job!”
“Mr. Kim…. Wake up, Mr. Kim…”
The sound of the nurse’s voice was like the sound a mother makes when she must tell her children that mommy and daddy are going separate ways.
Jaejoong blinked the empty dreams from his heavy lids and uncurled him from his-after three weeks, it had officially become his-green, coffee-stained waiting room chair.
The nurse spoke, but as always, Jaejoong stared off into the wall opposite from him, waiting for the words he’d been anticipating since three weeks ago. All other words were irrelevant. His condition is stable. Irrelevant. He is slowly recovering. Irrelevant. But there are still some serious issues. Irrelevant, irrelevant.
“Since he has improved so much in the past few weeks, we are now letting visitors other than immediate family visit him. But-“
The rhythm of Jaejoong’s thundering heart matched his footsteps as one after another, they lead him almost flying down the hallway like love could give him wings, while the nurse’s protests behind him were lost in the whirr of air rushing past his ears.
He must have been tired-no, exhausted. And maybe starving just a little bit. Because the way Yunho’s room wobbled in his blurry vision and the too bright lights pierced through his brain, giving Jaejoong a sudden splitting headache and the funny lurch his stomach gave as he laid eyes on Yunho’s bandage-wrapped form consumed under cool sheets just did not seem all too healthy. Maybe he should have sat down or thrown up or something but nothing else really registered at the time.
It barely registered that Yunho’s face had hardly turned to look at him. Just his face mattered at all. His face was not the sickly pale white color it had been three weeks ago. Glowing white with the high beams of a Kia before Yunho wasn’t standing just four steps off the sidewalk anymore. Everything was white that night. The moon was white. The one star somehow visible hanging in the city sky. The bright white man in the crosswalk sign blinking Go.
Just before Jaejoong’s smile went out quicker than a lit candle someone had sneezed on, Yunho had turned to him to ask a question. The end of his sentence disappeared just as quick. But even now Jaejoong still had his lips poised to reply to the unfinished question only he knew the answer to.
“I do.”
Jaejoong’s heart only resumed beating the moment he finally saw Yunho’s bruised face again three weeks later. It stopped again as a faint smile twitched under his nose and he inhaled the hospital air of syringes and white tiled floors. It resumed again as he exhaled relief, touched Yunho’s warm hand and stole a peck on the lips. It stopped again once Yunho’s blank, brown eyes flew open wide and he jerked back, shouting things that made Jaejoong wish he could turn back time.
Jaejoong jumped back so far his back was suddenly touching the opposite wall and let Yunho’s name skirt passed his lips as his chest heaved uncontrollably.
“Who’s there?” It was short and coarse, the way you speak to a stray mutt that sniffs too close to the children.
A lifetime passed before Jaejoong found the sense to form Korean in the back of his throat.
“Y-Yunho…. What’s going-“
“I said who’s there?” He spoke to the wall, but his voice carried defense and offense in all directions. “You’re voice doesn’t sound like my mom’s or my dad’s and unless you’re my new doctor who strongly believes touching his patients in such a way is like Jesus therapy, I expect you to provide some good answers now.”
Another lifetime passed and Jaejoong dully wondered how many chances he’d get. “Yunho…”
“I know my name!” It surged from somewhere deep inside of him as if he were trying desperately to convince himself. Yunho’s knuckles turned white against his grip on the crisp sheets and Jaejoong’s breath shook with Yunho’s clenched fists.
Maybe as an excuse to beat the sobs that threaten to break the surface, Jaejoong let his voice, small and frail hang on the air as if hoping that alone would make things right. Fix things. Repair whatever God forsaken thing that remained shattered within Yunho after that night Chinese food meant everything and crosswalk signs blinked lies.
“Jaejoong.” He said it almost like a question, but it wasn’t and Jaejoong wondered himself what kind of statement he was trying to make. Yunho blinked vacantly as the other’s voice lingered in his head until the confusion welled up inside him and he scowled.
Jaejoong wished the hurried footsteps he heard were his own heading in the other direction.
“Mr. Kim,” The doctor Jaejoong had come to know and nearly love and hate all at the same time these past few weeks appeared at the door, winded and shocked with the nurse from before peering warily over his shoulder and fumbling with the hem of her uniform.
Yunho’s head perked up, the first sign of recognition he’d shown since Jaejoong had dropped his heart on the floor only minutes before.
“I’m sorry, Mr. Kim,” Dr. Choi said in a low, low voice and placed a sanitized hand on the other’s quaking shoulder. “I didn’t want you to see him without me filling you in.”
The nurse behind him bowed and fumbled some more.
“Mr. Jung’s injuries from the accident are healing nicely, though he will need to take some pain medications for a while. His head injuries are what are troubling.”
Jaejoong nodded but he didn’t know why.
“The brain damage took his eyesight and part of his memories is gone. After much questioning, we discovered that all his memories from the past seven years have been wiped out.”
“9/11 did only happen last year…” Yunho insisted to no one in particular. Jaejoong tried not to notice the disoriented way his eyes searched the air in front of him for answers no one knew. Seven years. It would happen to be exactly the same time Jaejoong first found Yunho bravely standing on the railing of the bridge, not about to jump, but enjoying the feeling of the wind hitting him at a different level. It didn’t take all seven years for the two to fall in love, but that was irrelevant, anyway.
“Will they come back?” As soon as Jaejoong said it, he realized he didn’t want to know the answer.
Dr. Choi inhaled deeply in an effort to straighten his own slumping shoulders. He had many other patients to see fall apart. He must get through the day. “If eyes could see miracles…” And Jaejoong wasn’t even perfectly sure if the doctor realized what he had not said barely made sense. “But I have hope for his memory. If he could live with someone familiar with the memories he’s lost, he could slowly rehabilitate. Do you have any information on his family? All three weeks, I have yet to see any parental figures visit.”
Of course Jaejoong had been in too much of a selfish daze to answer any nurse’s prying questions with any response close to, “His parents died five years ago.” A twenty-one day oath to silence was the only thing that kept Jaejoong from crumbling to pieces.
“I’m his only family,” He finally breathed and breathed again. Fear was caught in his throat.
Yunho’s face went beet red against the white, pure whiteness of the sheets, the walls, the lab coats and the happy puffs of clouds that meandered between the dingy window and the blue, blue sky.
“Impossible!” He spat, face contorted in resentment. “I don’t even know this guy. Where are my parents? Find them. Now.”
“He’s an only child,” Jaejoong continued, wishing he could make himself look Dr. Choi in the eye rather than remain glued to Yunho’s shrinking form before him.
“How would you know that? Get out.”
“He has no extended family.”
“Shut up!”
“His parents were in a plane crash two years after we met.”
There was a brief moment of silence when fire heaved in Yunho’s chest and Liar hung on the tip of his tongue. The wall Jaejoong kept himself pressed against felt cold again.
Dr. Choi inhaled without exhaling and kneeled down beside Yunho’s bed like a father he’s only had for the past three weeks. “Yunho, do you trust me?”
He turned his head slightly in the direction of the doctor’s voice, but the sensation of the faceless voice piercing through his darkness and so much more kept his eyes focused towards nowhere.
“You must go with Mr. Kim,” His voice was stern and warm. “I assure you that even though you may not remember, this man is very important to you. And you must be of equal importance to him if he bothered to stay curled up in the waiting room for three weeks straight.” Dr. Choi punctuated with a smile.
He rubbed Yunho’s back as protests and rejection poured from him and smack into Jaejoong’s face before they began to weaken and dwindle with the hum of the air conditioner. It amazed and scared and revolted Jaejoong to see just how this brave twenty-four year old man could be reduced to whatever may remain of a scarred eight-year-old. The last thing that fluttered, barely audible past Yunho’s unwilling lips cracked the atmosphere right in half.
“But he kissed me.”
No one knew who started crying first.
***
Two days later, Yunho still refused to sleep in Jaejoong’s only bed, because the other’s insistence that for a little over five years, they had slept together under the same blankets was obviously a lie. Five years ago, Yunho was only twelve. Obviously.
And he refused to sleep on the couch because it was obviously a lie that it was the same place Junsu had gotten over excited at something Yoochun said and dropped every last crumb of Yunho’s surprise birthday cake on his twenty-first birthday. Obviously a lie. He was only seventeen. And Junsu had moved away to an all boy’s boarding school all during high school. And who was Yoochun?
The floor was his safest bet. It was cold and belonged to everyone. Its smooth, contourless surface did nothing to soothe Yunho’s growing fear that he would never be able to watch the moon change shape again. But then again, nothing did.
He lay there, back rigid, staring up at the ceiling he was positive still existed past his dark veil with the single cloth sheet he allowed Jaejoong to give him. When he wasn’t lying deathly still in that same position, he would sit upright in that same spot and look out the window he didn’t realize he was gazing at. He had memorized the path to the bathroom after Jaejoong’s initial quiet and clumsy tour of his house and refused to speak unless the sentence had the word liar in it.
The floor was always so cold.
Jaejoong presented Yunho with a permanent view of his back as he muddled around in the kitchen making something involving eggplant and lots of seasoning. The only sounds that could be heard were the usual noises a kitchen normally makes when pregnant with anxiety.
Jaejoong cut a carrot and the tension with a knife.
“Who are you?” It was so quiet, Jaejoong wouldn’t have heard it if the pot had come to boil any earlier. He silently willed it to hurry up.
He kept his back turned to a man who couldn’t see it and opened the fridge for something, something.
“Who are you?” Louder and with more grate to it. If Jaejoong had the strength to face him, he would’ve guessed Yunho was sitting on the floor, eyes boring into whatever space he thought was making the most noise, legs neatly crossed and back impeccably straight in the way he always did when he was angry and failing to hide it.
It took almost a full minute for Jaejoong to find the courage to speak while he attacked the eggplant. Right about the time he could practically feel the air shift as Yunho sucked in to ask the wrong question again.
“Jaejoong.”
“I know that,” Yunho said it fast and harsh. Like the way you grit your teeth together when the sound of shattering glass pummels your eardrums. “Who are you…to me?”
Staring reproachfully at a tomato as it rolled off the table and away from his feet, Jaejoong was sure he had left all reason to live somewhere back at the hospital. Or perhaps somewhere three weeks ago after the last unspoken words on Yunho’s smiling lips were left as, “Jaejoong, will you-“
Weightlessly, yet with all the doubt in the world, Jaejoong pried himself away from the kitchen and into the next room separated only by a table and a few dining chairs and sat on the floor with his legs folded underneath him in front of Yunho, who only shifted slightly as Jaejoong’s warm breeze brushed past his face.
“Everything.” Short and simple and Jaejoong could hardly place what he himself could’ve meant.
“Too vague,” Yunho’s brown eyes darted left and right as if it were his head shaking off a ridiculous notion.
“So were we,” And nothing made sense anymore.
“We?” Yunho’s eyes darkened with accusation and wandered somewhere over Jaejoong’s eye brows.
Jaejoong nodded. Uselessly. “We met seven years ago.”
“How convenient,” His voice was filled to the brim with suspicion, but he let the other continue.
“I didn’t even know you the first time I saw you standing on the edge of the bridge and I thought I would die with you if you jumped. But you smiled down at me and stretched your arms out wide as if you could fly. I felt small beneath you.”
“Sounds cheesy,” Yunho deadpanned, but Jaejoong tricked himself to believe that maybe the flush in his cheeks was from embarrassment.
“It was,” His voice shook. “But you were everything to me from that point on.”
“And what was my perception of you?” It seemed as though Yunho grew more and more curious with each drop of control Jaejoong let seep through his fingers.
“Find out for yourself,” He clasped his hands around Yunho’s warm wrists and brought them up to his face, watching as the other’s expression morphed through mild surprise and confusion.
“Your face…”
“Remember it,” It was a well concealed command.
Jaejoong’s eyelids fluttered as Yunho’s long, slender fingers hesitantly explored every detail of his face. His fingertips slid over his pale skin, his straight nose, his pierced earlobes, his misty eyes, his feminine jaw line until he felt as though he had the old days back when Yunho would stroke his cheek and whisper with a chuckle, “I’ll steal you away.”
“You must be…beautiful,” Jaejoong convinced himself that Yunho was stricken with a lack for any words resembling handsome, good-looking or manly because he knew. The picture of his raven black hair and gray black eyes must have been imprinted somewhere in his mind, flashing with schizophrenic fury, but Yunho just couldn’t recall a name for the image permanently lodged in his brain. Jaejoong told himself that his lack of sight had jumbled his mind up a bit, but he would remember after a while. But then again, maybe Jaejoong was a liar.
He jolted back to reality as Yunho’s hands floated back down to his lap and he stared straight ahead, rapidly blinking the uncertainty away.
Without thinking (because thought was for scholars and dreaming was for love) Jaejoong hastily reached for Yunho’s face before the other man could object and searched imploringly, urgently. His brow crinkled in the same confusion Jaejoong remembered he’d had when Junsu had called, trying to explain why he was coming back to Seoul. His neck was a bit cooler than it used to be when Jaejoong would trail his fingers along his collarbone and watch him flush happily; but it was the same neck. Same Yunho.
His hands zigzagged down past Yunho’s stiff shoulders, across his rising and falling chest, and finally settled somewhere on his sides, tracing lightly up and down, occasionally thumbing his hips.
“I’m not gay,” Yunho whispered through gritted teeth. His vacant gaze had wandered somewhere near Jaejoong’s own and he shivered under the cold authority of the other’s black pupils.
“You weren’t gay,” Jaejoong’s heart rate was telling him to shut up and walk away. “You were in love.”
He wished time would move slower as his lips met Yunho’s in an almost plea.
His luck and his courage ran out when Yunho roughly shoved him away, cursing and hissing and the fire alarm went off in the kitchen, pouring gray-white smoke like the cigarettes Jaejoong used to puff before Yunho made him stop years ago.
“Smoking is like happy suicide,” He used to say.
And Jaejoong threw dinner in the trash.
***
After neither man ate their instant ramen, Yunho sat on the floor because it was his spot and Jaejoong sat on the couch because he couldn’t leave.
It was silent again, but after two days-three weeks for Jaejoong-it was nearing comfortable. Jaejoong began to wonder if Yunho thought he had long left the living room and was sitting, thinking of ways to escape and find his parents without knowing how or where to find the next phone.
Almost forty minutes skulked by before Jaejoong began to consider that maybe he should have either turned the TV on, risking stomping Yunho’s pride in the hardwood floor or picked up a blanket and pillow before settling himself on the couch. The moon had long slung itself high across the sky.
“Where are they?” His voice was quiet, but the strength behind each syllable was painfully evident to both of them.
Even now, Jaejoong realized he still shared something beyond communication with this man blinking at the floor. The abrupt question needed no explanation.
“It was a Tuesday five years ago when your dad wanted to take Mrs. Jung on a third honeymoon. It was bizarre even to me, but your parents were spontaneous like that,” Jaejoong smiled to himself, forgetting that Yunho would miss it and the next one completely.
“I know my own parents,” Yunho muttered, but let him continue a story that had already ended. It was still for a moment before Jaejoong just barely caught the rise in one of Yunho’s eyebrows.
“There’s not much else. They took a plane to Delhi and never arrived. The plane’s weight was overloaded or something. You were afraid to fly ever since.”
Jaejoong never considered how brief and callous he may have sounded while describing his parents’ death. Never considered that the other man would have to deal with the grief of losing his loved ones twice in one lifetime. Never considered that Yunho may want to cry again.
It was sudden, the tears that sprung from his directionless eyes. So sudden that Jaejoong had not prepared himself. Could not prepare himself and the roar of his own pulse deafened him. Deaf to Yunho’s blindness. How cruel.
It was disconcerting, the weight of Jaejoong’s watch on his slim wrist.
And the night remained flightless as Yunho’s single blanket said hello to silent tears and Jaejoong shivered against the cold of his own air conditioner, too afraid to turn it off, too ashamed with the bleak knowledge that there was nothing a newly complete stranger could do for a crying boy lost in darkness with no one to call home.
The ramen was cold and soggy by morning.
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Comment because you like Yunjae donuts in the morning~