Tucked away inside your sleeves -- 1.3
Sixty-two miles; Jinki/Taemin; PG-13
note: Okay, finally found a title to replace the working title. Half of me wants to reorganize/edit this into a proper three-shot one of these days but I don't love it enough (yet) to put in the effort.
part 1.1 | part 1.2 | part 1.3
Three -- les craintes
And after that twelve-year gap, the interval between Taemin’s wishes suddenly shortened into hours, minutes.
He didn’t give much thought to the fact that unmade wishes weren’t some sort of collectible credit, automatically carrying over year after year; he simply made them one after the other, now that he actually had the occasion to do so. He wished for all that he couldn’t do and couldn’t have and couldn’t stand to be without, as if behind his back, procedural memory were guiding his fingers into creasing the vowels, folding the consonants, tucking in the punctuations. Turning ordinary words into paper cranes and ordinary thoughts into straw stars.
It wasn’t that he was greedy though. No.
It’d never been about greed.
Even if that was what it felt like, sometimes.
......
Taemin found himself in front of his dorm room, three metallic numbers glaring back at him and the air too thin for his liking. It took approximately three and half seconds longer than usual for him to fit the key into the lock, almost six more to turn it clockwise. And it was only then that he realized the door hadn’t even been locked in the first place.
Soundlessly, he pushed on the handle, and there, framed in that sliver of space, was a familiar figure standing by the foot of their beds. The older boy was half-shielding his eyes as he desperately wiped at something on his face, his chest rising and falling arrhythmically. The ragged noises met Taemin’s eardrums like a knife against his wrist.
Crack.
He lifted a hand to his chest. Was that his seventh rib?
Taemin saw himself flying across the distance between them, outdoor shoes and jacket and backpack and all, and throwing himself at Jinki like a defensive tackle at a ball carrier. Although he was not of the right height or build to be a real lineman, his target had always lacked the right sense of balance to stay upright anyway. It never took much to knock him off his feet.
But the younger boy blinked once and he found that he wasn’t slamming into the floor with his best friend flailing beneath him. Instead, he was toeing off his boots and unzipping his jacket. Instead, he was putting his shoes away. When he straightened up, he was met with the sight of Jinki's back.
His mind stalled then.
And the silence stretched.
The silence stretched and stretched until there wasn't enough room between it and the walls for him to ask the questions he already had answers to - what was wrong, was he feeling okay, why wasn’t he at his lab. But other than those useless things, what else was there? Did he confess that he knew? Did he explain how he found out? Did he tell him how sorry he was?
Taemin wished he knew what to say at a time like this.
......
As the corners of his mouth lifted themselves into a ‘hey’ that never quite left his vocal cords, Taemin plucked one foot out of the knee-deep cement that seemingly filled the room and set it down in front of him. Then he tugged his back leg free and moved it forward. It hit him some time between his third and fourth step that he was no longer able to tell what distance was too close, what distance was too far. He thought he probably should hug the older boy, sit him down, rub his back, hold his hand, but the actions - as much as he rehearsed them inside his head - came as easily as the words did.
Taemin’s hand was hovering a few inches away from Jinki’s hunched shoulder when the older boy flinched away, almost as if burnt by the guilty hesitation pooling in the younger boy’s fingertips. But in his attempt to put some space between them, Jinki’s foot managed to catch the back leg of a chair. Taemin instinctively grabbed a handful of Jinki’s clothes and stepped forward to brace himself against the shift in their center of gravity, but for once it didn't help. The heel of Jinki’s other foot was in the way.
The floor rushed up to meet them.
“I’m sorry! I’m sorry!”
Even before Taemin could scramble up onto his hands and knees, the apologies rushed out. Apologies, not so much for falling on top of him as for all the things that weighed more heavily than his own one hundred and twenty pounds. “God, are you okay? Sorry. I’m sorry I didn’t mean to…”
Jinki didn’t respond. He didn’t even attempt to turn over and get up. If anything, he adjusted his head so that he had his nose perfectly pressed against the wooden floorboards. Taemin panicked. The appropriate thing to do - the right thing to do - was a needle lost in a haystack and all he could be certain about was that he was coming up with fistful after fistful of nothing but hay. Using more force than he meant to, he grabbed Jinki’s right shoulder and flipped him over. The moment he did so, however, Jinki’s hands flew up to his face and the older boy twisted further to the right, trying to complete a three-sixty log roll in order to hide again.
I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I'm sorry...
Everything was smudging together, everything he wanted and everything he feared.
The colors that made up Jinki were bleeding over the lines, thinning out the syllables falling from his lips and pooling in the triangular dip between those familiar collarbones. I'm sorry. Taemin forgot for a moment whether he was pleading with Jinki or trying to comfort him, but he figured it all amounted to the same if he could keep that door open. Or maybe it was a window and not a door. But what it was, wasn't important; he just had to be on the same side of it as Jinki.
Even if it cost him all his fingers and toes, they had to be on the same side of it.
It was the first time Taemin had ever fought for something.
The first time he'd felt threatened enough to fight.
To need to fight.
And by the end of it, he was half-sitting on Jinki's stomach, arms shaking from the effort it took to pry the older boy's hands away from his face and fingers still tightly clamped around two surprisingly bony wrists. The left sleeve of Jinki's gray sweater had ridden up his arm during the struggle and Taemin could feel it - an erratic beat thumping against his fingernails.
The older boy had surrendered.
Trying to swallow the almost tangible pressure building up at the back of his throat, Taemin shifted his knee off of Jinki's torso and gently let go. Two limp hands dropped immediately to the floor like lifeless stones, knuckles banging against the wood. He blinked, once, twice, and then furiously, but even so, the image swimming before him refused to bring itself into focus.
Jinki's eyes were tightly shut against the world and the skin surrounding them red from friction. That much he knew.
But is he crying? Is he crying?
Taemin couldn't tell.
No matter how far in he leaned, he couldn't tell.
And then suddenly the pair of hands that had been resting motionlessly on the floor came to life. Catching Taemin by surprise, they shoved him to the side and the back of his head was accidentally introduced to the armrest of the chair that Jinki had tripped over. Inhaling sharply, Taemin drew up his knees and toppled over as his own hands flew up to nurse the burst of pain in his skull.
"Fuck...!"
The air trembled with the soft falsetto note.
It took Taemin a few seconds to realize that he had sworn out loud.
In his dictionary, expletives had always been inarticulate things, but suddenly there was so much clarity in this one simple word. So much clarity that he could feel his ears buzzing from the way the exclamation was bouncing off the roof of his mouth, the walls of his sinuses. His chest swelled with something in the sloppy likeness of renewed courage as it rippled down the fibers of his body. It filled him with enough wonder to put him on the verge of chuckling, except he couldn't. He couldn't laugh.
The idea of it rattled around inside his lungs for a while, but his mouth refused to form the right shape.
When the physical pain had dulled, he lifted his watering eyes to the gray shape peaking over the edge of the bed. Jinki had drawn up the hood of his sweater and was huddled in the narrow space between his bed and the wall. Had the mattress been taller, he would have been perfectly concealed from sight. Invisible. Out of reach. Safe.
That was all it took to undo the joints that held Taemin's bones together.
"Fuck."
The single syllable tumbled from his lips again, but less naturally so this time.
His voice was a little louder, a little deeper, and the word weighed a little heavier on his tongue.
He might have lost the fight after all.
This isn't fair, he wanted to say.
A husky "I'm sorry" - not his own - bridged the gap of silence before Taemin said it a third time:
"Fuck..."
This one was spelled out with despair instead of letters. He knew how scared he sounded, how scared he was. And the profanity was beginning to taste completely wrong in his mouth, a persistent caustic bitterness creeping up the insides of his cheeks. Pulling down the sleeves of his shirt past his fingertips, he mopped up the mess spilling from his eyes.
"I'm sorry." The crack in Jinki's voice was muffled by the fabric of his sweater. "Sorry."
Taemin bit his lip and said nothing. Absently, he pressed his finger nails into the fissure between two floorboards and began running them back and forth. With the perfectly straight groove guiding his motions, he could almost believe that his hands weren't shaking.
"Um...something......something came up at home, a-and......sorry, I just need a moment." Jinki paused. "I just need a moment to calm down... I've been try...trying to get...myself together...mm......it hasn't been......working so well. Sorry. I don't know I just...I j-just...... I'm sorry about being like this. It's just...um......but I really need to call my sister...to talk to her and stuff, so......so...you know......"
Hyung...
"I just n-need a moment."
I understand.
I know. I know.
"I know." Taemin breathed. "Hyung, it's okay, I know..."
But Jinki didn't hear him.
......
____a/n: currently rather conflicted about this story; I don't like how I'm articulating it. and the bit with taemin's weight is...a sort of arbitrary number.
taembb's character is that of a boy genius whose intellect has left every other part of him in the dust. he's an almost-adult who isn't ready to be an adult. he hasn't been through any emotional turmoil, doesn't know how to deal with it, and doesn't know how to express what he feels. and as such he becomes rather awkward around jinki. yeah...
and yes, jinki has a sister in this story. two, in fact. both younger.
......
part 1.4
note: Okay, finally found a title to replace the working title. Half of me wants to reorganize/edit this into a proper three-shot one of these days but I don't love it enough (yet) to put in the effort.
part 1.1 | part 1.2 | part 1.3
Three -- les craintes
And after that twelve-year gap, the interval between Taemin’s wishes suddenly shortened into hours, minutes.
He didn’t give much thought to the fact that unmade wishes weren’t some sort of collectible credit, automatically carrying over year after year; he simply made them one after the other, now that he actually had the occasion to do so. He wished for all that he couldn’t do and couldn’t have and couldn’t stand to be without, as if behind his back, procedural memory were guiding his fingers into creasing the vowels, folding the consonants, tucking in the punctuations. Turning ordinary words into paper cranes and ordinary thoughts into straw stars.
It wasn’t that he was greedy though. No.
It’d never been about greed.
Even if that was what it felt like, sometimes.
......
Taemin found himself in front of his dorm room, three metallic numbers glaring back at him and the air too thin for his liking. It took approximately three and half seconds longer than usual for him to fit the key into the lock, almost six more to turn it clockwise. And it was only then that he realized the door hadn’t even been locked in the first place.
Soundlessly, he pushed on the handle, and there, framed in that sliver of space, was a familiar figure standing by the foot of their beds. The older boy was half-shielding his eyes as he desperately wiped at something on his face, his chest rising and falling arrhythmically. The ragged noises met Taemin’s eardrums like a knife against his wrist.
Crack.
He lifted a hand to his chest. Was that his seventh rib?
Taemin saw himself flying across the distance between them, outdoor shoes and jacket and backpack and all, and throwing himself at Jinki like a defensive tackle at a ball carrier. Although he was not of the right height or build to be a real lineman, his target had always lacked the right sense of balance to stay upright anyway. It never took much to knock him off his feet.
But the younger boy blinked once and he found that he wasn’t slamming into the floor with his best friend flailing beneath him. Instead, he was toeing off his boots and unzipping his jacket. Instead, he was putting his shoes away. When he straightened up, he was met with the sight of Jinki's back.
His mind stalled then.
And the silence stretched.
The silence stretched and stretched until there wasn't enough room between it and the walls for him to ask the questions he already had answers to - what was wrong, was he feeling okay, why wasn’t he at his lab. But other than those useless things, what else was there? Did he confess that he knew? Did he explain how he found out? Did he tell him how sorry he was?
Taemin wished he knew what to say at a time like this.
......
As the corners of his mouth lifted themselves into a ‘hey’ that never quite left his vocal cords, Taemin plucked one foot out of the knee-deep cement that seemingly filled the room and set it down in front of him. Then he tugged his back leg free and moved it forward. It hit him some time between his third and fourth step that he was no longer able to tell what distance was too close, what distance was too far. He thought he probably should hug the older boy, sit him down, rub his back, hold his hand, but the actions - as much as he rehearsed them inside his head - came as easily as the words did.
Taemin’s hand was hovering a few inches away from Jinki’s hunched shoulder when the older boy flinched away, almost as if burnt by the guilty hesitation pooling in the younger boy’s fingertips. But in his attempt to put some space between them, Jinki’s foot managed to catch the back leg of a chair. Taemin instinctively grabbed a handful of Jinki’s clothes and stepped forward to brace himself against the shift in their center of gravity, but for once it didn't help. The heel of Jinki’s other foot was in the way.
The floor rushed up to meet them.
“I’m sorry! I’m sorry!”
Even before Taemin could scramble up onto his hands and knees, the apologies rushed out. Apologies, not so much for falling on top of him as for all the things that weighed more heavily than his own one hundred and twenty pounds. “God, are you okay? Sorry. I’m sorry I didn’t mean to…”
Jinki didn’t respond. He didn’t even attempt to turn over and get up. If anything, he adjusted his head so that he had his nose perfectly pressed against the wooden floorboards. Taemin panicked. The appropriate thing to do - the right thing to do - was a needle lost in a haystack and all he could be certain about was that he was coming up with fistful after fistful of nothing but hay. Using more force than he meant to, he grabbed Jinki’s right shoulder and flipped him over. The moment he did so, however, Jinki’s hands flew up to his face and the older boy twisted further to the right, trying to complete a three-sixty log roll in order to hide again.
I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I'm sorry...
Everything was smudging together, everything he wanted and everything he feared.
The colors that made up Jinki were bleeding over the lines, thinning out the syllables falling from his lips and pooling in the triangular dip between those familiar collarbones. I'm sorry. Taemin forgot for a moment whether he was pleading with Jinki or trying to comfort him, but he figured it all amounted to the same if he could keep that door open. Or maybe it was a window and not a door. But what it was, wasn't important; he just had to be on the same side of it as Jinki.
Even if it cost him all his fingers and toes, they had to be on the same side of it.
It was the first time Taemin had ever fought for something.
The first time he'd felt threatened enough to fight.
To need to fight.
And by the end of it, he was half-sitting on Jinki's stomach, arms shaking from the effort it took to pry the older boy's hands away from his face and fingers still tightly clamped around two surprisingly bony wrists. The left sleeve of Jinki's gray sweater had ridden up his arm during the struggle and Taemin could feel it - an erratic beat thumping against his fingernails.
The older boy had surrendered.
Trying to swallow the almost tangible pressure building up at the back of his throat, Taemin shifted his knee off of Jinki's torso and gently let go. Two limp hands dropped immediately to the floor like lifeless stones, knuckles banging against the wood. He blinked, once, twice, and then furiously, but even so, the image swimming before him refused to bring itself into focus.
Jinki's eyes were tightly shut against the world and the skin surrounding them red from friction. That much he knew.
But is he crying? Is he crying?
Taemin couldn't tell.
No matter how far in he leaned, he couldn't tell.
And then suddenly the pair of hands that had been resting motionlessly on the floor came to life. Catching Taemin by surprise, they shoved him to the side and the back of his head was accidentally introduced to the armrest of the chair that Jinki had tripped over. Inhaling sharply, Taemin drew up his knees and toppled over as his own hands flew up to nurse the burst of pain in his skull.
"Fuck...!"
The air trembled with the soft falsetto note.
It took Taemin a few seconds to realize that he had sworn out loud.
In his dictionary, expletives had always been inarticulate things, but suddenly there was so much clarity in this one simple word. So much clarity that he could feel his ears buzzing from the way the exclamation was bouncing off the roof of his mouth, the walls of his sinuses. His chest swelled with something in the sloppy likeness of renewed courage as it rippled down the fibers of his body. It filled him with enough wonder to put him on the verge of chuckling, except he couldn't. He couldn't laugh.
The idea of it rattled around inside his lungs for a while, but his mouth refused to form the right shape.
When the physical pain had dulled, he lifted his watering eyes to the gray shape peaking over the edge of the bed. Jinki had drawn up the hood of his sweater and was huddled in the narrow space between his bed and the wall. Had the mattress been taller, he would have been perfectly concealed from sight. Invisible. Out of reach. Safe.
That was all it took to undo the joints that held Taemin's bones together.
"Fuck."
The single syllable tumbled from his lips again, but less naturally so this time.
His voice was a little louder, a little deeper, and the word weighed a little heavier on his tongue.
He might have lost the fight after all.
This isn't fair, he wanted to say.
A husky "I'm sorry" - not his own - bridged the gap of silence before Taemin said it a third time:
"Fuck..."
This one was spelled out with despair instead of letters. He knew how scared he sounded, how scared he was. And the profanity was beginning to taste completely wrong in his mouth, a persistent caustic bitterness creeping up the insides of his cheeks. Pulling down the sleeves of his shirt past his fingertips, he mopped up the mess spilling from his eyes.
"I'm sorry." The crack in Jinki's voice was muffled by the fabric of his sweater. "Sorry."
Taemin bit his lip and said nothing. Absently, he pressed his finger nails into the fissure between two floorboards and began running them back and forth. With the perfectly straight groove guiding his motions, he could almost believe that his hands weren't shaking.
"Um...something......something came up at home, a-and......sorry, I just need a moment." Jinki paused. "I just need a moment to calm down... I've been try...trying to get...myself together...mm......it hasn't been......working so well. Sorry. I don't know I just...I j-just...... I'm sorry about being like this. It's just...um......but I really need to call my sister...to talk to her and stuff, so......so...you know......"
Hyung...
"I just n-need a moment."
I understand.
I know. I know.
"I know." Taemin breathed. "Hyung, it's okay, I know..."
But Jinki didn't hear him.
......
____a/n: currently rather conflicted about this story; I don't like how I'm articulating it. and the bit with taemin's weight is...a sort of arbitrary number.
taembb's character is that of a boy genius whose intellect has left every other part of him in the dust. he's an almost-adult who isn't ready to be an adult. he hasn't been through any emotional turmoil, doesn't know how to deal with it, and doesn't know how to express what he feels. and as such he becomes rather awkward around jinki. yeah...
and yes, jinki has a sister in this story. two, in fact. both younger.
......
part 1.4