Tucked away inside your sleeves -- 1.4
Sixty-two miles; Jinki/Taemin; PG-13
note: Update! Spurred on by finding new readers. :') When I planned out this part inside my head, things were most definitely not in this order...
part 1.1 | part 1.2 | part 1.3 | part 1.4
Four -- les rêves
Taemin has a very faint scar on his right elbow. He still scratches at it absently sometimes, picking at the abnormally smooth patch of skin despite how there really is nothing to pick at, but it's rare for him to think about how he got it in the first place.
It’d been early summer, one of those days where the air smelled like sprinkler-made rainbows and freshly cut grass but the sun wasn’t scorching enough to add to that a trace of burnt asphalt wafting over from the roads. His brother and his rowdy friends were over at the community center’s basketball court, all lanky and rough around the edges like the adolescents that they were.
Taemin was a little ways removed from the pack, sitting on the swings by himself. The edge of the plastic seat was biting into the underside of his thighs and the metal chains felt slippery beneath his tender calluses, but he didn’t mind it too much. Somewhere along the line, he stopped paying attention to his brother’s game and started swinging in earnest.
Back and forth, back and forth.
Legs bent then straight, bent then straight.
When he was flying as high as the swing could go, bit by bit, with each oscillation, he inched his hands down the metal chains and leaned further and further back. Ignoring the rusty iron bar overhead with its peeling green paint, all he could see was blue, perfect homogeneous blue.
The ceiling of his bedroom was just as homogenous, albeit white, but this blue felt nothing like a ceiling. Because as close and as solid as it seemed, Taemin knew it wasn’t. It was air, sixty-two miles of it, straight up - 78.09% nitrogen, 20.96% oxygen, 0.93% argon, 0.039% carbon dioxide, 0.001818% neon, 0.000524% helium, 0.000179% methane… And on the other side of these sixty-two miles of gases was outer space. And with outer space came a whole new horizon, forty-seven billion light years away.
He remembered his third grade teacher asking his class what they wanted to be when they grew up after a careers presentation. He wasn’t the only one to raise his hand when the soft-spoken woman asked for potential astronauts in the crowd. It was an idea he still entertained, two years later, and whenever he looked up, he couldn’t help imagining what it would be like one day to be on the other side of the sky.
But until he could cross the Kármán line, this blue would be the most beautiful and limitless thing.
He spread his arms wide, so wide that he couldn’t even see his fingertips. But between them was an ellipse of pure uninterrupted blue.
Blue was the color of dreams.
Blue was the color of hope.
Blue was-
He fell out of the swing.
.....
I want to ma-make that phone call...again.
Taemin doesn’t answer. Instead, he keeps Jinki’s jaw cupped in his hands.
Before he knew it, the ellipse of blue between his fingertips had become a human face. Jinki isn’t the most beautiful thing in the world. He isn’t as porcelain smooth. And he definitely isn’t a deep, seemingly endless blue. He is 60% water, otherwise made out of proteins and lipids, carbohydrates and DNA, inorganic ions and free radicals.
But he is a lot closer, a lot more tangible. And as long as he isn’t sick, he is a perfect 98.6 degrees.
I w-want…mm…want to d-do it again.
Already, Taemin can’t make out a single thing. He sniffs to keep his nose from running and pulls Jinki’s forehead against his own. Physiology tells him it’s the globus sensation that’s making it seem like his airway has closed up, but his heart disagrees and believes the cause to be the involuntary stutter in Jinki’s speech.
It’s as if the older boy’s voice is stumbling through the bushes and the words can’t help but snag on the twigs here and there.
I just want…a-a second ch-chance.
......
“I just want…w……a second chance.” Jinki finally enunciated the thing that he’d been mumbling to himself about.
Taemin wiggled around a bit where he was perched in one corner of Jinki’s bed. He didn’t know where to put his eyes or what to do with his hands, so he opted to pick at the paper towel wrapped around the zip-lock bag of ice cubes resting over Jinki’s foot. Or not ice cubes per se - there were star-shaped ones and heart-shaped ones, all thanks to the flamingo pink ice tray Kibum had insisted on giving them at one point or another.
“I’m not a-asking to redo everything. Doesn’t…it doesn’t h-have to be everything.” He subconsciously waved his hands around a little, making abstract gestures as if they could somehow clarify his words. “J-just a few…a few…… A few things would be good. O-or one even. I just want…just… Let me redo one thing.”
Taemin glanced up at him with worry written in the angle of his eyebrows and Jinki suddenly panicked. His features erupted into life as if he were actually engaged in a bargaining war with Taemin, as if he were about to be denied his last chance at redemption.
“Just one thing!” He held up a single finger, eyes wide and stricken. Taemin flinched at the sudden boom of the older boy’s voice, expression unknowingly mimicking Jinki’s because he didn’t know what was going on. “Only one thing! One thing’s enough…one thing……one thing…”
Taemin’s lips parted but no sound came out.
“Please?” The word fell out in a sharp little rush of air. Jinki twined his fingers together as if in prayer. “Please, please…just one thing……”
Please, please, please, please…
Taemin feared that he would hyperventilate.
“Hyung…?” He felt his own heart rate picking up pace. “What are you doing? Stop. Hyung, stop! Breathe slowly! Calm down!”
The younger boy reached towards Jinki, but before his hands were halfway there, the older boy pounced forward and closed the rest of the distance between them. Clutching onto a startled Taemin, he begged, “I w-want to make that phone call...again. Just let me ta-I…I need to make it up to-”
“Ow, Jinki-hyung you’re hurting me!” Taemin whimpered, involuntarily shrinking into himself.
The older boy’s grip didn’t slacken but he bowed his head. He bowed his head so low that his nose was almost touching Taemin’s knee. Heat pricked along the rims of Taemin's eyes at the sight of his best friend practically grovelling in front of him. And so instead of complaining again of the pain in his arms, the younger boy shifted himself into a kneeling position. When he tried and tried but couldn’t get Jinki’s fingers to loosen, he settled instead for holding onto Jinki in return.
“It’s okay.” He made himself say. “It’s okay. It’s okay…”
As if he could channel reassurance up through his palms into Jinki’s elbows.
“I need it. I really, really need it.”
There was silence.
“I’m sorry.”
“Hyung…” Taemin trailed off when he realized that he didn’t know what Jinki was apologizing for.
But then for one brief moment, he was met with a pair of dark bottomless eyes.
“I’m sorry. I know it doesn’t work like that. I know…”
Jinki left the rest unsaid.
I know I can’t. I know. But I want it and I need it.
Taemin almost hugged him then, but he couldn’t do so even when Jinki finally let go. The tension evaporated from his overly taut muscles and along with it went all of his strength. He felt as if he didn’t have a single bone propping up his body. Softly, he apologized as well: for being weak, for being helpless, for being scared.
“I’m sorry, hyung.”
Jinki considered him for a moment before falling back onto his pillows, head turned away from Taemin and arms wrapped around himself. They stayed like that in perfect silence until Taemin gingerly leaned closer to see if Jinki was asleep.
Jinki's eyelashes weren’t very long but they were very straight.
The soft shadows they cast were a light slate gray against his pale skin.
“I just want another chance to talk to them.”
......
Eight years after he fell out of the swing (and skipped two grades), Taemin changed his mind about the color blue.
It was a Thursday.
At their college, their student union runs a bunch of extracurricular mini-courses scheduled for late evenings or weekends. They are designed to be ‘life-enriching’, a chance for disgruntled students to pull their noses out of their textbooks and enjoy themselves, without alcohol (whether legally or illegally acquired). You just have to pay and sign up, then show up.
There are mini-courses for all sorts of things: salsa dancing, horticulture, Italian cuisine. But when Taemin felt the weight of Jinki’s head landing on his shoulder as the ghostly white boy finally drifted off after two sleepless nights, he wished there had been a course for mending hearts. He wished that rather than learning how to make splints and practicing how to use an AED, he’d learned how to save a person whose wounds you couldn’t see and couldn’t touch, even if you cut him open on an operating table.
A person who bled life and hope and happiness rather than blood.
Taemin’s hand ghosted over the top of Jinki’s head and he smiled tiredly at how the static made fine strands of ebony hair float up to his fingertips. He allowed himself to be a little bit proud, proud of the fact that although he had lost the first battle, he might not have lost the war. After all, on the very same day, late at night, he had won the second battle - he had argued and threatened and begged and promised his way into accompanying Jinki back home.
Fuck, hyung, you need me more than I need my fucking GPA or my goddamned honors project!
He allowed himself to be a little proud of that declaration, swear words and all. The only thing that could have made it better was if he’d also admitted that he too needed Jinki. He needed Jinki more than he could put into words. Although his whole life had been defined by his academic achievements, he realized that there was more to it more now. More to it than his midterm next week, than the lab sessions he planned on skipping, than the classes he won’t attend.
And so Taemin reached quietly into Jinki’s lap and picked up his right index finger. Eyes flickering nervously to the older boy’s face, he held his breath and gingerly pulled Jinki’s hand into his own.
Jinki’s palm was broader than his, thicker, fleshier, but his fingers weren’t as long. They looked kind of funny because he always kept his nails clipped almost all the way even though his nail beds were already naturally short. There were calluses at the base of every digit (except his thumb) and on the sides of his index and middle fingers. Two healing paper cuts decorated the back of his pinkie. And when Taemin examined the ridges carved out on the pads of Jinki’s fingers, he counted the number of arches, loops, and whorls.
He looked up when he felt the train moving again, pulling out of the small midway station. But before long, he couldn’t see anything except miles and miles of brown field exposed after snowmelt and miles and miles of blue sky. A few strokes of white had been painted with a flick of the wrist across the azure canvas; cirrus uncinus, he thought, all the while tracing lullabies into the valleys between Jinki’s knuckles, into the webs between his fingers, into the rivers that traversed his palm. There was no sign of where they’d come from, no sign of where they were going. It was easy to imagine a different purpose for their trip, easy to imagine a different identity for both him and the boy sleeping on his shoulder.
A soft sigh escaped his lips; a deep rumbling filled his ears.
Taemin gently squeezed Jinki’s index finger as the world shook and crumbled outside the window, all of its colors fragmented by the moisture in his eyes. He squinted a little harder and the scenery that filled his field of vision blurred even more around the edges. And...and somehow everything was alright.
They were headed for the horizon, that was all.
They were headed for the horizon.
Where the sky wasn’t a brilliant blue.
Where the earth wasn’t a steady brown.
Where shapes faded and colors were washed out and everything became a hazy shade of pale slate gray.
Where the world seemed to end, but no! No, the world didn’t end there. Of course not.
It was just a place where trees and ants were about the same height and red was no different from yellow and yellow was no different from green. It was a place that made no sense unless you looked out of the corner of your eye in pretend halfheartedness and secretly sketched in the details yourself. A place meant to prove you both right and wrong.
Taemin imagined that that was what the future looked like.
The future. Dreams. Hope.
A hazy shade of slate gray.
Gray, with a hint of azure that said: maybe, just maybe.
......
____a/n: they found out the news on a tuesday, sorted some stuff out on wednesday, and took a train to jinki's hometown first thing thursday morning. this summarizes the flashbacks. (in the present, the boys are back at the dorm and jinki is packing his things.) I had a whole lot better of an explanation for why hope is slate gray, but I forgot it all when I woke up and tried to write it down.
to be clear, college semesters in this au follow the sk system where each academic year begins in march, not september, but everything about classes and exams and whatever else obviously reflects life on another continent.
......
part 1.5
note: Update! Spurred on by finding new readers. :') When I planned out this part inside my head, things were most definitely not in this order...
part 1.1 | part 1.2 | part 1.3 | part 1.4
Four -- les rêves
Taemin has a very faint scar on his right elbow. He still scratches at it absently sometimes, picking at the abnormally smooth patch of skin despite how there really is nothing to pick at, but it's rare for him to think about how he got it in the first place.
It’d been early summer, one of those days where the air smelled like sprinkler-made rainbows and freshly cut grass but the sun wasn’t scorching enough to add to that a trace of burnt asphalt wafting over from the roads. His brother and his rowdy friends were over at the community center’s basketball court, all lanky and rough around the edges like the adolescents that they were.
Taemin was a little ways removed from the pack, sitting on the swings by himself. The edge of the plastic seat was biting into the underside of his thighs and the metal chains felt slippery beneath his tender calluses, but he didn’t mind it too much. Somewhere along the line, he stopped paying attention to his brother’s game and started swinging in earnest.
Back and forth, back and forth.
Legs bent then straight, bent then straight.
When he was flying as high as the swing could go, bit by bit, with each oscillation, he inched his hands down the metal chains and leaned further and further back. Ignoring the rusty iron bar overhead with its peeling green paint, all he could see was blue, perfect homogeneous blue.
The ceiling of his bedroom was just as homogenous, albeit white, but this blue felt nothing like a ceiling. Because as close and as solid as it seemed, Taemin knew it wasn’t. It was air, sixty-two miles of it, straight up - 78.09% nitrogen, 20.96% oxygen, 0.93% argon, 0.039% carbon dioxide, 0.001818% neon, 0.000524% helium, 0.000179% methane… And on the other side of these sixty-two miles of gases was outer space. And with outer space came a whole new horizon, forty-seven billion light years away.
He remembered his third grade teacher asking his class what they wanted to be when they grew up after a careers presentation. He wasn’t the only one to raise his hand when the soft-spoken woman asked for potential astronauts in the crowd. It was an idea he still entertained, two years later, and whenever he looked up, he couldn’t help imagining what it would be like one day to be on the other side of the sky.
But until he could cross the Kármán line, this blue would be the most beautiful and limitless thing.
He spread his arms wide, so wide that he couldn’t even see his fingertips. But between them was an ellipse of pure uninterrupted blue.
Blue was the color of dreams.
Blue was the color of hope.
Blue was-
He fell out of the swing.
.....
I want to ma-make that phone call...again.
Taemin doesn’t answer. Instead, he keeps Jinki’s jaw cupped in his hands.
Before he knew it, the ellipse of blue between his fingertips had become a human face. Jinki isn’t the most beautiful thing in the world. He isn’t as porcelain smooth. And he definitely isn’t a deep, seemingly endless blue. He is 60% water, otherwise made out of proteins and lipids, carbohydrates and DNA, inorganic ions and free radicals.
But he is a lot closer, a lot more tangible. And as long as he isn’t sick, he is a perfect 98.6 degrees.
I w-want…mm…want to d-do it again.
Already, Taemin can’t make out a single thing. He sniffs to keep his nose from running and pulls Jinki’s forehead against his own. Physiology tells him it’s the globus sensation that’s making it seem like his airway has closed up, but his heart disagrees and believes the cause to be the involuntary stutter in Jinki’s speech.
It’s as if the older boy’s voice is stumbling through the bushes and the words can’t help but snag on the twigs here and there.
I just want…a-a second ch-chance.
......
“I just want…w……a second chance.” Jinki finally enunciated the thing that he’d been mumbling to himself about.
Taemin wiggled around a bit where he was perched in one corner of Jinki’s bed. He didn’t know where to put his eyes or what to do with his hands, so he opted to pick at the paper towel wrapped around the zip-lock bag of ice cubes resting over Jinki’s foot. Or not ice cubes per se - there were star-shaped ones and heart-shaped ones, all thanks to the flamingo pink ice tray Kibum had insisted on giving them at one point or another.
“I’m not a-asking to redo everything. Doesn’t…it doesn’t h-have to be everything.” He subconsciously waved his hands around a little, making abstract gestures as if they could somehow clarify his words. “J-just a few…a few…… A few things would be good. O-or one even. I just want…just… Let me redo one thing.”
Taemin glanced up at him with worry written in the angle of his eyebrows and Jinki suddenly panicked. His features erupted into life as if he were actually engaged in a bargaining war with Taemin, as if he were about to be denied his last chance at redemption.
“Just one thing!” He held up a single finger, eyes wide and stricken. Taemin flinched at the sudden boom of the older boy’s voice, expression unknowingly mimicking Jinki’s because he didn’t know what was going on. “Only one thing! One thing’s enough…one thing……one thing…”
Taemin’s lips parted but no sound came out.
“Please?” The word fell out in a sharp little rush of air. Jinki twined his fingers together as if in prayer. “Please, please…just one thing……”
Please, please, please, please…
Taemin feared that he would hyperventilate.
“Hyung…?” He felt his own heart rate picking up pace. “What are you doing? Stop. Hyung, stop! Breathe slowly! Calm down!”
The younger boy reached towards Jinki, but before his hands were halfway there, the older boy pounced forward and closed the rest of the distance between them. Clutching onto a startled Taemin, he begged, “I w-want to make that phone call...again. Just let me ta-I…I need to make it up to-”
“Ow, Jinki-hyung you’re hurting me!” Taemin whimpered, involuntarily shrinking into himself.
The older boy’s grip didn’t slacken but he bowed his head. He bowed his head so low that his nose was almost touching Taemin’s knee. Heat pricked along the rims of Taemin's eyes at the sight of his best friend practically grovelling in front of him. And so instead of complaining again of the pain in his arms, the younger boy shifted himself into a kneeling position. When he tried and tried but couldn’t get Jinki’s fingers to loosen, he settled instead for holding onto Jinki in return.
“It’s okay.” He made himself say. “It’s okay. It’s okay…”
As if he could channel reassurance up through his palms into Jinki’s elbows.
“I need it. I really, really need it.”
There was silence.
“I’m sorry.”
“Hyung…” Taemin trailed off when he realized that he didn’t know what Jinki was apologizing for.
But then for one brief moment, he was met with a pair of dark bottomless eyes.
“I’m sorry. I know it doesn’t work like that. I know…”
Jinki left the rest unsaid.
I know I can’t. I know. But I want it and I need it.
Taemin almost hugged him then, but he couldn’t do so even when Jinki finally let go. The tension evaporated from his overly taut muscles and along with it went all of his strength. He felt as if he didn’t have a single bone propping up his body. Softly, he apologized as well: for being weak, for being helpless, for being scared.
“I’m sorry, hyung.”
Jinki considered him for a moment before falling back onto his pillows, head turned away from Taemin and arms wrapped around himself. They stayed like that in perfect silence until Taemin gingerly leaned closer to see if Jinki was asleep.
Jinki's eyelashes weren’t very long but they were very straight.
The soft shadows they cast were a light slate gray against his pale skin.
“I just want another chance to talk to them.”
......
Eight years after he fell out of the swing (and skipped two grades), Taemin changed his mind about the color blue.
It was a Thursday.
At their college, their student union runs a bunch of extracurricular mini-courses scheduled for late evenings or weekends. They are designed to be ‘life-enriching’, a chance for disgruntled students to pull their noses out of their textbooks and enjoy themselves, without alcohol (whether legally or illegally acquired). You just have to pay and sign up, then show up.
There are mini-courses for all sorts of things: salsa dancing, horticulture, Italian cuisine. But when Taemin felt the weight of Jinki’s head landing on his shoulder as the ghostly white boy finally drifted off after two sleepless nights, he wished there had been a course for mending hearts. He wished that rather than learning how to make splints and practicing how to use an AED, he’d learned how to save a person whose wounds you couldn’t see and couldn’t touch, even if you cut him open on an operating table.
A person who bled life and hope and happiness rather than blood.
Taemin’s hand ghosted over the top of Jinki’s head and he smiled tiredly at how the static made fine strands of ebony hair float up to his fingertips. He allowed himself to be a little bit proud, proud of the fact that although he had lost the first battle, he might not have lost the war. After all, on the very same day, late at night, he had won the second battle - he had argued and threatened and begged and promised his way into accompanying Jinki back home.
Fuck, hyung, you need me more than I need my fucking GPA or my goddamned honors project!
He allowed himself to be a little proud of that declaration, swear words and all. The only thing that could have made it better was if he’d also admitted that he too needed Jinki. He needed Jinki more than he could put into words. Although his whole life had been defined by his academic achievements, he realized that there was more to it more now. More to it than his midterm next week, than the lab sessions he planned on skipping, than the classes he won’t attend.
And so Taemin reached quietly into Jinki’s lap and picked up his right index finger. Eyes flickering nervously to the older boy’s face, he held his breath and gingerly pulled Jinki’s hand into his own.
Jinki’s palm was broader than his, thicker, fleshier, but his fingers weren’t as long. They looked kind of funny because he always kept his nails clipped almost all the way even though his nail beds were already naturally short. There were calluses at the base of every digit (except his thumb) and on the sides of his index and middle fingers. Two healing paper cuts decorated the back of his pinkie. And when Taemin examined the ridges carved out on the pads of Jinki’s fingers, he counted the number of arches, loops, and whorls.
He looked up when he felt the train moving again, pulling out of the small midway station. But before long, he couldn’t see anything except miles and miles of brown field exposed after snowmelt and miles and miles of blue sky. A few strokes of white had been painted with a flick of the wrist across the azure canvas; cirrus uncinus, he thought, all the while tracing lullabies into the valleys between Jinki’s knuckles, into the webs between his fingers, into the rivers that traversed his palm. There was no sign of where they’d come from, no sign of where they were going. It was easy to imagine a different purpose for their trip, easy to imagine a different identity for both him and the boy sleeping on his shoulder.
A soft sigh escaped his lips; a deep rumbling filled his ears.
Taemin gently squeezed Jinki’s index finger as the world shook and crumbled outside the window, all of its colors fragmented by the moisture in his eyes. He squinted a little harder and the scenery that filled his field of vision blurred even more around the edges. And...and somehow everything was alright.
They were headed for the horizon, that was all.
They were headed for the horizon.
Where the sky wasn’t a brilliant blue.
Where the earth wasn’t a steady brown.
Where shapes faded and colors were washed out and everything became a hazy shade of pale slate gray.
Where the world seemed to end, but no! No, the world didn’t end there. Of course not.
It was just a place where trees and ants were about the same height and red was no different from yellow and yellow was no different from green. It was a place that made no sense unless you looked out of the corner of your eye in pretend halfheartedness and secretly sketched in the details yourself. A place meant to prove you both right and wrong.
Taemin imagined that that was what the future looked like.
The future. Dreams. Hope.
A hazy shade of slate gray.
Gray, with a hint of azure that said: maybe, just maybe.
......
____a/n: they found out the news on a tuesday, sorted some stuff out on wednesday, and took a train to jinki's hometown first thing thursday morning. this summarizes the flashbacks. (in the present, the boys are back at the dorm and jinki is packing his things.) I had a whole lot better of an explanation for why hope is slate gray, but I forgot it all when I woke up and tried to write it down.
to be clear, college semesters in this au follow the sk system where each academic year begins in march, not september, but everything about classes and exams and whatever else obviously reflects life on another continent.
......
part 1.5