Tucked away inside your sleeves -- 2.2
Sixty-two miles; Jinki/Taemin; PG-13
note: Last update for a while; the life of a student.
part 1.1 | part 1.2 | part 1.3 | part 1.4 | part 1.5 | int. i | part 2.1 | part 2.2
Seven -- l’arc-en-ciel
Taemin wasn’t sure how he ended up in that situation, but wrinkling his nose at the sharp scent of organic solvent, he set down the three small glass bottles, warm from his grip, and carefully balanced the two used cotton swabs across the cap of the one that stood taller than the rest. There. Why hadn’t he done that sooner?
Rubbing his fingertips together, he sniffed at them gingerly.
Acetone.
This stuff can’t possibly be good for you, he thought. Gazing at the display spread across the floor before him - thirteen bottles and a box of Q-tips - he curiously reached for the one closest to his knee. Silver cursive letters proudly proclaimed its contents to be Pearl Turquoise. He was half a turn into unscrewing the long cylindrical cap when a muffled sneeze interrupted the silence.
Haerim shoved the brush back into her bottle of Hot Magenta and all but threw the thing at Taemin. With determination burning in her eyes, she stuck one hand against Joohyo’s forehead and, without skipping a beat, shoved the tissue box into the younger girl’s lap.
“Are you okay? Is your cold getting worse? How’s the headache? See I told you this is a stupid idea. You should be lying down, staying put, and sleeping it all away, not sitting up and making me give you a manicure. Why in the world did I let you talk me into this?” She fired off her sentences like bullets, tugging the outer blanket tighter around her sister. “Here, finish your water so I can go pour you another cup. You need lots of fluids when you’re sick. And Taemin-sshi, do you mind turning up the-”
“Eonni!” Joohyo moaned.
“Got it.” Taemin set down Hot Magenta - it reminded him simultaneously of a certain eye-catching denizen of Kibum’s colorful closet and those little plastic spoons they gave out at Baskin-Robbins - but hung on to Pearl Turquoise as he leaned out sideways, balanced on one elbow, and cranked up the electric heater by another notch.
Righting himself again, he found Haerim still adamantly holding the half-filled cup towards an equally adamant (albeit watery-eyed) Joohyo who, in her nearly mummified glory, resembled something between a giant jjongjeu and a life-size matryoshka doll. But the girl had something neither the jjongjeu nor the doll had and it was that one odd hand, sticking out from under a flap of fabric, two nails painted in Baby Blue and Sunflower Yellow and part of one in Hot Magenta.
“I’m fine.”
“You’re sick! You’re not fine. Now drink-”
“Well no, I’m sweating like a pig.”
“Which means it’s working! And which means you should rehydrate.”
“Which means it doesn’t need to be any hotter in this room…”
“It does if it makes you get better faster.”
“Eonni, you’re sweating.”
“No I’m not. Now stop sniffling and blow your nose.”
“But my nails…”
Haerim frowned as she placed the cup back down next to the desk lamp and pulled out a tissue, holding it up to her sister’s face. The two of them went on bickering, but her efforts grew more and more half-hearted until she finally settled herself back down and resigned to grabbing Joohyo’s wiggling fingers.
Right on cue, Taemin quietly offered up the Hot Magenta.
Maybe it was the hot air baking the right half of his body. Or maybe it was his tiredness. But somehow Taemin felt like he was drifting on the edge of a dream. Like Time was taking a vacation and everything had slowed down enough to lose the race against the pitch drop experiment (which had seen the inky tar derivative drip a grand total of eight times in the last eighty years). He blinked at the mellow silence, at the identical looks of concentration adorning both girls’ faces, at the bottle of Pearl Turquoise still in his hand.
And then softly, softly, an ache began building behind his Adam’s apple. As if someone were playing with the tuning pegs that held his vocal cords in place.
Twisting the black plastic cap, Taemin pulled out the small brush on its end, heavy with the bright lacquer. He dabbed the tip experimentally against the nail of his left thumb. It left a spot of blue-green, too thick to be proper, so he lined up the brush with his cuticle and dragged it slowly downward right through the first blob, hoping to spread it out. The plan fell through though. For whatever reason, the stroke wasn’t steady and the bristles splayed too much; bits of polish ended up on his skin as well as the underside of his nail.
He tried to fix the situation by wiping away the excess. But the more he wiped, the messier things got. As the specks and blotches began to dry, they refused to come out no matter how hard he rubbed and scratched. Surveying at his newly decorated hands, he sighed in surrender.
Jinki-oppa bought me the whole set right before my junior high school graduation.
Haerim blew carefully over Joohyo’s nail, scrutinizing it from all sides till she was satisfied before asking Taemin for a fourth color. Taking the Hot Magenta from her, he relinquished his Pearl Turquoise.
My friends all had them and so I spent the whole summer eyeing this one glittery set. He got me these instead, less fancy but there are more colors. I’ve been hoarding each and every bottle ever since and I haven’t let anyone else touch them, not even Joohyo, so she made oppa promise to get her the same set when it’s her turn to graduate.
Taemin watched the deftness with which Haerim brushed a neat coat of blue-green onto the nail of Joohyo’s pinkie. Absently, he ran his index finger over the uneven and slightly moist stripe of lacquer on his own thumb. The texture was pleasantly smooth and the color made him think of a dozen different things. Sagittarius, of which Jinki was one; nurses’ smocks; that one lazy afternoon in freshman year when Jinki fell asleep over his calculus textbook and Kibum used his gel pens to doodle hearts all over the unsuspecting boy’s forearms.
It reminded him mainly of the sky though. Of skies in old photographs; or Polaroids, maybe. In memories. Where the details of a single moment were captured on film exactly as they had been, except the chemical process wasn’t perfect so the hue was skewed and everything came out a little too yellow.
But see, it was the sky.
So even if it were full out green, you’d still know that it had been blue.
You’d still know.
‘Here’, ‘now’, these moments in time - they were all a little hazy, like the periphery of a dream.
And when Taemin turned to look over his shoulder, he was caught off guard by the sight of Jinki leaning in the doorway, a small smile tugging at his lips in spite of the heaviness weighing on his brows. The younger boy hadn’t heard the front door open and close, but there he stood anyway, unruly hair and chapped lips, smelling slightly of cold air and something Taemin couldn’t quite put his finger on.
Eventually, the girls noticed too. Staring up at her brother, Haerim clenched her jaw as if bracing for what was to come. And slowly, painfully slowly, she curled her fingers around the bottle of purple she’d been about to pick up.
I wore Sweet Orchid on all my fingers and toes on the day of my graduation. Everyone thought it looked pretty! I got scolded for it the night before though, because I’d refused to go to bed until I could get all twenty nails done right.
“It-” He cleared his throat. “It’s going to be tomorrow.”
His announcement was met with blank stares and mute voices. Jinki lingered for another second, hesitating between taking a step forward and a step backward, before he retreated down the hallway and out of sight.
Belatedly, Haerim’s jaw slackened and her lips parted in a way that foreshadowed some form of complaint. What ultimately came out, however, was a boneless whisper of an ‘okay’. She climbed onto the bed, pushing tissues out of the way, and latched onto her sister as much for the younger girl’s benefit as for her own. Okay, she repeated. Okay, okay…
Joohyo wept into her shoulder.
Taemin scrambled up and ran after Jinki.
......
Taemin’s first time seeing any copious amount of blood was shortly after his seventh birthday. His brother had slipped in the process of running up a slide and knocked his face straight into the metal platform at the top. The accident had given the ten-year-old a profuse nosebleed, a cut lip, and several streaks of red dribbling down his chin. Taemin remembered running home from the playground on the heels of his brother. He remembered waking their mother up even though it hadn’t been time yet for her night shift at the hospital. He remembered watching her fuss over the bleeding boy in the bathroom.
But besides feeling regretful about ruining his new Wolverine T-shirt, his brother hadn’t been much worse for wear. He hadn’t cried at all.
Almost a year later though, his brother - despite being in perfect physical condition - wouldn’t stop crying.
Taemin remembered the flower stands lining the hallway, the white chrysanthemum his dad had handed to him. He remembered the box, the envelopes, the book on the table. He remembered the steady stream of men and women quietly entering and exiting the small room, smelling of candles and incense. He remembered his uncle dressed from head to toe in hemp, bowing and bowing and bowing. And he remembered the large photo frame hanging beyond the brazier.
The face surveying the room had been in stark black and white, the absence of color magnifying the severity of the man’s expression.
He had been their grandmother’s oldest brother, someone his parents had apparently known well enough but someone he and his brother used to encounter no more than once or twice a year. And yet his brother wouldn’t stop crying. Their parents had had to take turns consoling him and apologizing on his behalf, and people would come by, pat his head, and offer a few kind words. No one could figure out why he’d been so upset.
Even years after the fact, squirming under the adults’ curious attention, he could only come up with half a reason:
I dunno.
Well, there was this one time...
He secretly gave me bungeoppang after mom told me I couldn’t have any more sweet things.
......
Jinki was sitting by himself on the parquet floor, inside the trapezoid of blue that fell through the window. He had his knees drawn up and arms crossed over them, forehead nested into the crook of his left arm. That was the position Taemin found him in when the younger boy crept into the unlit living room at half past midnight. Taemin had meant to talk to him. About anything, or everything, rather, but maybe not all at once. So the little things then, yes, the little things would have made a good starting point because somewhere in their midst, he was sure he could find a segue into the big things. The important things that he wished he had the articulation for. Like Jinki or Haerim or Joohyo. Like thoughts and feelings, ‘you’ and ‘me’ and ‘them’ and ‘us’, and every ‘it-is-going-to-get-better’ in the world.
But his brain emptied out the moment he squatted down next to the older boy and finally noticed the periodic tremors pouring off those shoulders.
“Hyung?” He called out.
What Jinki was cradling between his chest and thighs was a manila envelope. He held some of its contents in one hand but the much larger portion sat in piles on either side of him. In the dim moonlight, Taemin recognized the familiar faces of Yi I and Sejong the Great.
The paper notes crumpled in Jinki’s grip.
“I ran into my third grade homeroom teacher.” He gasped out, as if in pain, rushing the syllables so that his throat couldn’t change its mind and eat them up again. “She still lives t-two buildings over, so she saw me when I was coming h-home.”
Whenever he hiccuped, the words would stumble and Taemin would hang on a little tighter to his sleeve.
“She watched Haerim and Joohyo a-and I grow up, pretty much. A-all three of us were in her class back in elementary school. She’s retired now, but…” Jinki finally lifted up his head, wiping his face - his nose - with one sleeve. “She gave me this and she says it’s from everyone. Our old teach-chers, the neighbors, my pa-parents’ coworkers, th-” He stared down at the money as he smooth out the wrinkles that he had made. “She says she’s sorry they c-can’t do more.”
The ‘more’ was in a different pitch, a little less breathy and a little more drawn out, the way words became right before they forsook a person. Jinki tilted his head and tucked in his chin, digging the heel of his right hand into his right eye.
Neither of them noticed how the fabric of his shirt was stretched over Taemin’s knuckles like bubble gum.
Then without warning, Jinki bowed forward, forehead colliding with the wood. If it weren’t for the soft noises that slipped past his gritted teeth, if it weren’t for the shudders that rocked his body, no one would have known what he was doing. But even upon knowing, the best that Taemin could manage was to clumsily gather the boy up into his lap.
The bank notes that Jinki had been clutching fluttered away like awkward butterflies, red and green, littering the floor.
“Let’s go to sleep, hyung. You’ve got to get some rest. Let’s go to sleep.” He murmured down at the boy who was curled up into his side like a baby.
......
It was a brief affair.
Two hours to reduce a man’s one hundred and sixty pounds into six. Two hours to end his three hundred and ninety odd thousand hours on this Earth. Ashes to ashes, dust to dust; from a home, a family to the inside of an urn. Taemin can recall it with perfect clarity - the sky was blue, impossibly blue. But what is a thing when no one is there to see it?
That morning, the four of them woke up to a world in grayscale.
Jinki donned a charcoal suit with an armband, filling it up in all the right places, looking every bit like the man who used to wear those clothes (and wear those leather shoes too). Haerim and Joohyo were decked out their best like their brother: dark dresses, black stockings, a white ribbon in their hair. Taemin remembers standing behind them, woefully underdressed, out of place.
Maybe he is still too young to say ‘this is what I’ll remember for the rest of my life’, but there is that one thing, the thing that he remembers so acutely it seems impossible he’d ever forget. Or two things, rather - Joohyo’s hands. The young girl kept them clasped behind her back and she would, from time to time, pick at her nails. Eyes drawn by her subconscious fidgeting, he couldn’t help but stare at those two rows of vivid rainbow colors.
They stood out bright, so so bright, as if in defiance of the whole thing, the whole idea of grief, of death, of impermanence.
Sunburst Tangerine and Apple Green and Crimson Rose, Electric Indigo and Golden Peach and Sweet Orchid, Baby Blue and Sunflower Yellow and Hot Magenta. And Pearl Turquoise.
That day, running a finger over his left thumb nail, he felt like he had stolen a piece of the rainbow.
And he would do that, be a thief. He would steal all the pieces and all the rainbows, if it meant he could build one inside Jinki’s world, Jinki’s eyes, Jinki’s heart.
He really, really would.
......
____a/n: argh. don't mind the weird/lame color names... doth the story drag? methinks it doth drag.
armband, ribbon, chrysanthemum - it's pretty clear right? I debated about confucian tradition vs christian tradition, ordinary circumstances vs extraordinary circumstances...and somehow it became like this. I know normally that's not how things proceed.
[definitions]
쫑즈. Glutinous rice with various fillings wrapped in a bamboo leaf.
Turquoise. It is considered a calming color and thus commonly used for nurse/hospital volunteer uniforms.
붕어빵. Fish-shaped bread with red bean paste filling.
이이 and 세종대왕. They are on the ₩5000 and ₩10 000 notes respectively. So yes, they gave him money.
想いだけが独り言みたいに
途絶えた会話をつなぐ »
......
part 2.3
note: Last update for a while; the life of a student.
part 1.1 | part 1.2 | part 1.3 | part 1.4 | part 1.5 | int. i | part 2.1 | part 2.2
Seven -- l’arc-en-ciel
Taemin wasn’t sure how he ended up in that situation, but wrinkling his nose at the sharp scent of organic solvent, he set down the three small glass bottles, warm from his grip, and carefully balanced the two used cotton swabs across the cap of the one that stood taller than the rest. There. Why hadn’t he done that sooner?
Rubbing his fingertips together, he sniffed at them gingerly.
Acetone.
This stuff can’t possibly be good for you, he thought. Gazing at the display spread across the floor before him - thirteen bottles and a box of Q-tips - he curiously reached for the one closest to his knee. Silver cursive letters proudly proclaimed its contents to be Pearl Turquoise. He was half a turn into unscrewing the long cylindrical cap when a muffled sneeze interrupted the silence.
Haerim shoved the brush back into her bottle of Hot Magenta and all but threw the thing at Taemin. With determination burning in her eyes, she stuck one hand against Joohyo’s forehead and, without skipping a beat, shoved the tissue box into the younger girl’s lap.
“Are you okay? Is your cold getting worse? How’s the headache? See I told you this is a stupid idea. You should be lying down, staying put, and sleeping it all away, not sitting up and making me give you a manicure. Why in the world did I let you talk me into this?” She fired off her sentences like bullets, tugging the outer blanket tighter around her sister. “Here, finish your water so I can go pour you another cup. You need lots of fluids when you’re sick. And Taemin-sshi, do you mind turning up the-”
“Eonni!” Joohyo moaned.
“Got it.” Taemin set down Hot Magenta - it reminded him simultaneously of a certain eye-catching denizen of Kibum’s colorful closet and those little plastic spoons they gave out at Baskin-Robbins - but hung on to Pearl Turquoise as he leaned out sideways, balanced on one elbow, and cranked up the electric heater by another notch.
Righting himself again, he found Haerim still adamantly holding the half-filled cup towards an equally adamant (albeit watery-eyed) Joohyo who, in her nearly mummified glory, resembled something between a giant jjongjeu and a life-size matryoshka doll. But the girl had something neither the jjongjeu nor the doll had and it was that one odd hand, sticking out from under a flap of fabric, two nails painted in Baby Blue and Sunflower Yellow and part of one in Hot Magenta.
“I’m fine.”
“You’re sick! You’re not fine. Now drink-”
“Well no, I’m sweating like a pig.”
“Which means it’s working! And which means you should rehydrate.”
“Which means it doesn’t need to be any hotter in this room…”
“It does if it makes you get better faster.”
“Eonni, you’re sweating.”
“No I’m not. Now stop sniffling and blow your nose.”
“But my nails…”
Haerim frowned as she placed the cup back down next to the desk lamp and pulled out a tissue, holding it up to her sister’s face. The two of them went on bickering, but her efforts grew more and more half-hearted until she finally settled herself back down and resigned to grabbing Joohyo’s wiggling fingers.
Right on cue, Taemin quietly offered up the Hot Magenta.
Maybe it was the hot air baking the right half of his body. Or maybe it was his tiredness. But somehow Taemin felt like he was drifting on the edge of a dream. Like Time was taking a vacation and everything had slowed down enough to lose the race against the pitch drop experiment (which had seen the inky tar derivative drip a grand total of eight times in the last eighty years). He blinked at the mellow silence, at the identical looks of concentration adorning both girls’ faces, at the bottle of Pearl Turquoise still in his hand.
And then softly, softly, an ache began building behind his Adam’s apple. As if someone were playing with the tuning pegs that held his vocal cords in place.
Twisting the black plastic cap, Taemin pulled out the small brush on its end, heavy with the bright lacquer. He dabbed the tip experimentally against the nail of his left thumb. It left a spot of blue-green, too thick to be proper, so he lined up the brush with his cuticle and dragged it slowly downward right through the first blob, hoping to spread it out. The plan fell through though. For whatever reason, the stroke wasn’t steady and the bristles splayed too much; bits of polish ended up on his skin as well as the underside of his nail.
He tried to fix the situation by wiping away the excess. But the more he wiped, the messier things got. As the specks and blotches began to dry, they refused to come out no matter how hard he rubbed and scratched. Surveying at his newly decorated hands, he sighed in surrender.
Jinki-oppa bought me the whole set right before my junior high school graduation.
Haerim blew carefully over Joohyo’s nail, scrutinizing it from all sides till she was satisfied before asking Taemin for a fourth color. Taking the Hot Magenta from her, he relinquished his Pearl Turquoise.
My friends all had them and so I spent the whole summer eyeing this one glittery set. He got me these instead, less fancy but there are more colors. I’ve been hoarding each and every bottle ever since and I haven’t let anyone else touch them, not even Joohyo, so she made oppa promise to get her the same set when it’s her turn to graduate.
Taemin watched the deftness with which Haerim brushed a neat coat of blue-green onto the nail of Joohyo’s pinkie. Absently, he ran his index finger over the uneven and slightly moist stripe of lacquer on his own thumb. The texture was pleasantly smooth and the color made him think of a dozen different things. Sagittarius, of which Jinki was one; nurses’ smocks; that one lazy afternoon in freshman year when Jinki fell asleep over his calculus textbook and Kibum used his gel pens to doodle hearts all over the unsuspecting boy’s forearms.
It reminded him mainly of the sky though. Of skies in old photographs; or Polaroids, maybe. In memories. Where the details of a single moment were captured on film exactly as they had been, except the chemical process wasn’t perfect so the hue was skewed and everything came out a little too yellow.
But see, it was the sky.
So even if it were full out green, you’d still know that it had been blue.
You’d still know.
‘Here’, ‘now’, these moments in time - they were all a little hazy, like the periphery of a dream.
And when Taemin turned to look over his shoulder, he was caught off guard by the sight of Jinki leaning in the doorway, a small smile tugging at his lips in spite of the heaviness weighing on his brows. The younger boy hadn’t heard the front door open and close, but there he stood anyway, unruly hair and chapped lips, smelling slightly of cold air and something Taemin couldn’t quite put his finger on.
Eventually, the girls noticed too. Staring up at her brother, Haerim clenched her jaw as if bracing for what was to come. And slowly, painfully slowly, she curled her fingers around the bottle of purple she’d been about to pick up.
I wore Sweet Orchid on all my fingers and toes on the day of my graduation. Everyone thought it looked pretty! I got scolded for it the night before though, because I’d refused to go to bed until I could get all twenty nails done right.
“It-” He cleared his throat. “It’s going to be tomorrow.”
His announcement was met with blank stares and mute voices. Jinki lingered for another second, hesitating between taking a step forward and a step backward, before he retreated down the hallway and out of sight.
Belatedly, Haerim’s jaw slackened and her lips parted in a way that foreshadowed some form of complaint. What ultimately came out, however, was a boneless whisper of an ‘okay’. She climbed onto the bed, pushing tissues out of the way, and latched onto her sister as much for the younger girl’s benefit as for her own. Okay, she repeated. Okay, okay…
Joohyo wept into her shoulder.
Taemin scrambled up and ran after Jinki.
......
Taemin’s first time seeing any copious amount of blood was shortly after his seventh birthday. His brother had slipped in the process of running up a slide and knocked his face straight into the metal platform at the top. The accident had given the ten-year-old a profuse nosebleed, a cut lip, and several streaks of red dribbling down his chin. Taemin remembered running home from the playground on the heels of his brother. He remembered waking their mother up even though it hadn’t been time yet for her night shift at the hospital. He remembered watching her fuss over the bleeding boy in the bathroom.
But besides feeling regretful about ruining his new Wolverine T-shirt, his brother hadn’t been much worse for wear. He hadn’t cried at all.
Almost a year later though, his brother - despite being in perfect physical condition - wouldn’t stop crying.
Taemin remembered the flower stands lining the hallway, the white chrysanthemum his dad had handed to him. He remembered the box, the envelopes, the book on the table. He remembered the steady stream of men and women quietly entering and exiting the small room, smelling of candles and incense. He remembered his uncle dressed from head to toe in hemp, bowing and bowing and bowing. And he remembered the large photo frame hanging beyond the brazier.
The face surveying the room had been in stark black and white, the absence of color magnifying the severity of the man’s expression.
He had been their grandmother’s oldest brother, someone his parents had apparently known well enough but someone he and his brother used to encounter no more than once or twice a year. And yet his brother wouldn’t stop crying. Their parents had had to take turns consoling him and apologizing on his behalf, and people would come by, pat his head, and offer a few kind words. No one could figure out why he’d been so upset.
Even years after the fact, squirming under the adults’ curious attention, he could only come up with half a reason:
I dunno.
Well, there was this one time...
He secretly gave me bungeoppang after mom told me I couldn’t have any more sweet things.
......
Jinki was sitting by himself on the parquet floor, inside the trapezoid of blue that fell through the window. He had his knees drawn up and arms crossed over them, forehead nested into the crook of his left arm. That was the position Taemin found him in when the younger boy crept into the unlit living room at half past midnight. Taemin had meant to talk to him. About anything, or everything, rather, but maybe not all at once. So the little things then, yes, the little things would have made a good starting point because somewhere in their midst, he was sure he could find a segue into the big things. The important things that he wished he had the articulation for. Like Jinki or Haerim or Joohyo. Like thoughts and feelings, ‘you’ and ‘me’ and ‘them’ and ‘us’, and every ‘it-is-going-to-get-better’ in the world.
But his brain emptied out the moment he squatted down next to the older boy and finally noticed the periodic tremors pouring off those shoulders.
“Hyung?” He called out.
What Jinki was cradling between his chest and thighs was a manila envelope. He held some of its contents in one hand but the much larger portion sat in piles on either side of him. In the dim moonlight, Taemin recognized the familiar faces of Yi I and Sejong the Great.
The paper notes crumpled in Jinki’s grip.
“I ran into my third grade homeroom teacher.” He gasped out, as if in pain, rushing the syllables so that his throat couldn’t change its mind and eat them up again. “She still lives t-two buildings over, so she saw me when I was coming h-home.”
Whenever he hiccuped, the words would stumble and Taemin would hang on a little tighter to his sleeve.
“She watched Haerim and Joohyo a-and I grow up, pretty much. A-all three of us were in her class back in elementary school. She’s retired now, but…” Jinki finally lifted up his head, wiping his face - his nose - with one sleeve. “She gave me this and she says it’s from everyone. Our old teach-chers, the neighbors, my pa-parents’ coworkers, th-” He stared down at the money as he smooth out the wrinkles that he had made. “She says she’s sorry they c-can’t do more.”
The ‘more’ was in a different pitch, a little less breathy and a little more drawn out, the way words became right before they forsook a person. Jinki tilted his head and tucked in his chin, digging the heel of his right hand into his right eye.
Neither of them noticed how the fabric of his shirt was stretched over Taemin’s knuckles like bubble gum.
Then without warning, Jinki bowed forward, forehead colliding with the wood. If it weren’t for the soft noises that slipped past his gritted teeth, if it weren’t for the shudders that rocked his body, no one would have known what he was doing. But even upon knowing, the best that Taemin could manage was to clumsily gather the boy up into his lap.
The bank notes that Jinki had been clutching fluttered away like awkward butterflies, red and green, littering the floor.
“Let’s go to sleep, hyung. You’ve got to get some rest. Let’s go to sleep.” He murmured down at the boy who was curled up into his side like a baby.
......
It was a brief affair.
Two hours to reduce a man’s one hundred and sixty pounds into six. Two hours to end his three hundred and ninety odd thousand hours on this Earth. Ashes to ashes, dust to dust; from a home, a family to the inside of an urn. Taemin can recall it with perfect clarity - the sky was blue, impossibly blue. But what is a thing when no one is there to see it?
That morning, the four of them woke up to a world in grayscale.
Jinki donned a charcoal suit with an armband, filling it up in all the right places, looking every bit like the man who used to wear those clothes (and wear those leather shoes too). Haerim and Joohyo were decked out their best like their brother: dark dresses, black stockings, a white ribbon in their hair. Taemin remembers standing behind them, woefully underdressed, out of place.
Maybe he is still too young to say ‘this is what I’ll remember for the rest of my life’, but there is that one thing, the thing that he remembers so acutely it seems impossible he’d ever forget. Or two things, rather - Joohyo’s hands. The young girl kept them clasped behind her back and she would, from time to time, pick at her nails. Eyes drawn by her subconscious fidgeting, he couldn’t help but stare at those two rows of vivid rainbow colors.
They stood out bright, so so bright, as if in defiance of the whole thing, the whole idea of grief, of death, of impermanence.
Sunburst Tangerine and Apple Green and Crimson Rose, Electric Indigo and Golden Peach and Sweet Orchid, Baby Blue and Sunflower Yellow and Hot Magenta. And Pearl Turquoise.
That day, running a finger over his left thumb nail, he felt like he had stolen a piece of the rainbow.
And he would do that, be a thief. He would steal all the pieces and all the rainbows, if it meant he could build one inside Jinki’s world, Jinki’s eyes, Jinki’s heart.
He really, really would.
......
____a/n: argh. don't mind the weird/lame color names... doth the story drag? methinks it doth drag.
armband, ribbon, chrysanthemum - it's pretty clear right? I debated about confucian tradition vs christian tradition, ordinary circumstances vs extraordinary circumstances...and somehow it became like this. I know normally that's not how things proceed.
[definitions]
쫑즈. Glutinous rice with various fillings wrapped in a bamboo leaf.
Turquoise. It is considered a calming color and thus commonly used for nurse/hospital volunteer uniforms.
붕어빵. Fish-shaped bread with red bean paste filling.
이이 and 세종대왕. They are on the ₩5000 and ₩10 000 notes respectively. So yes, they gave him money.
想いだけが独り言みたいに
途絶えた会話をつなぐ »
......
part 2.3