DARK NIGHT, STILL MORN for EVERYONE [1/2]
For: EVERYONE
Title: Dark Night, Still Morn
Pairing(s): Chanyeol/Baekhyun
Rating: PG-13
Warning(s): Swearing.
Length: ~12900w
Summary: All he wants to do is capture this moment in time.
Author's note: Thank you to my beta for walking with me from the beginning of the tunnel to the end. Thank you to the mod for being patient and understanding despite my shortcomings. To my recipient: I sincerely hope that you will like this fic. I know it may not live up to your expectations, and I do apologize for that. After reveals, I am willing to make any changes if need be.
Black. White. Light. Dark. Black. White. Light. Dark. Black. White. White. Light. White. Black. Dark. Dark. Dark. Dark --
Park Chanyeol feels the edges of his consciousness crumble into shadows, and he lowers the camera that he’s raised to eye level. Sunset washes the room in cornfield yellow. A few feet away from him, his subject is leaning against a backdrop of orange satin, her body covered in yards of white muslin. Dark hair spills across half of her face, her gaze silent, eerie even, as she takes in the sight of Chanyeol looking far less lost than he feels.
“It’s not working, is it?”
Chanyeol shakes his head. The girl, Soojung, sighs and starts winding the cloth up her arms and down her legs, twisting and pulling and wrapping until it resembles a dress. She stands up, her feet still bare.
“I guess that’s it,” she says, tilting her head. “It doesn’t matter how beautiful your subject is. You’re just not that inspired these days.”
“I don’t know what’s wrong,” Chanyeol says, frowning as he makes his way over to her and begins unpinning the satin from its wooden frame. He feels it slide against his fingers -- soft, gentle to the touch. He’d spent days trying to find this fabric, downtown where the people flowed in streams and intersected within the walls of every shop. There was a single roll of it tucked three rows to the back of a seamstress’ place, the shade of the orange reaching out to him through curtains of dust motes and the light of flickering bulbs. It reminded him of autumn, of a flame dancing on a candle’s wick, of the skies when the sunset bled its life through the clouds.
Even something like this cannot call back his muse.
He doesn’t know where it is. He doesn’t know if he’d dropped it by the wayside one day when he thought he could do things on his own -- that he could look through the lens and see a story worth telling. Maybe his muse had fallen in a tub of developer chemicals, processed into a 4x4 square photograph with corners sharp enough to leave scars.
Next to him, Soojung shifts from foot to foot. His best friend is a beautiful girl, Chanyeol knows. Part-time model, full-time heartbreaker.Somehow they’d both been hoping that taking pictures of someone whose facial structure the fashion world had lauded would set him back on track.
“Maybe you need to take a break.” Her voice is staccato. It is a sieve, never holding that much emotion, but Chanyeol knows the concern that writes itself beneath the surface of Soojung’s skin.
“The gallery wants to exhibit new portraits,” he says, taking out the last pin. He and Soojung watch as the satin falls from the frame. “They need them in a couple of months. I can’t just take a break.”
“Take a walk, then. Maybe your muse wants you to do landscapes instead of portraits.”
Chanyeol chuckles. “I don’t have any interest in doing landscapes, Soojung. Nothing against those who choose to do so, but I want something human. Someone human, with a story threaded into every feature.”
The corners of Soojung’s lips lift up. “So you’re saying I don’t have a story?”
“You do,” Chanyeol says. “But I don’t know how to tell it.”
His best friend is quiet. The cornfield streaked across the floorboards turns into roses. Outside, Chanyeol hears the sounds of cars on the mad rush home.
“Just put away your camera for a week,” Soojung says after a while. “If you’re not always thinking of what something will look like through your lens, maybe your mind will be freer. Less restricted.”
Chanyeol exhales. “Maybe.”
The two of them stand there, until dusk opens its petals and floats down to cover the world. Then, in the moonlight that pours through the windows, Chanyeol and Soojung leave the studio.
Three days after Soojung tells him to put away his camera, Chanyeol decides to do it. It’s unsettling how he’s grown used to the weight of it, to the strap that chafes against his nape, and his hands skitter across his pants in an attempt to chase away the nervousness he feels about leaving his camera behind. The morning’s bright and awake when he steps out, and he catches himself thinking about proper aperture settings. Chanyeol shakes his head at himself.
His daily routines often consist of walking through the city, leaving traces of himself on asphalt and wooden surfaces. There’s something about the hustle and bustle that makes people less prone to keeping their masks on. Maybe it’s the heat, melting off their guards; maybe it’s the friction of body brushing body, wearing away the thin veneer of pretenses. Either way, he finds his subjects swimming through the chaos, their stories pulsing in their irises.
Today he feels disconnected, hesitant. The world through his eyes is not as magical as the world through his lens. It feels as though something is missing as he pushes past fruit vendors and window shoppers. He can’t see the stories anywhere. All he finds are people with walls hovering in the air around them, unwilling to let him take a peek. Chanyeol doesn’t want this. He feels like a thumb hanging off of a foot, a toe growing on a spine. Out of place. Unwanted. Unnecessary.
He contemplates calling Soojung, but he knows his best friend will roll her eyes and tell him to call her when he has more substantial problems. In the typical voice she adopts when he’s doing something she can’t make sense of, she’ll tell him that it’s all in your head, Dobi, all in your head.
“Ah, screw this.” He scans the shops lined up like soldiers along the sidewalk and spots the signage of a cafe. When his walks don’t turn up anything, Chanyeol almost always finds himself knocking back espresso with his feet on the table and a magazine on his lap. It’s a pick-me-up, a time when he forgets how objects drip shadows all over people.
The cafe is almost bare of faces and bodies running on caffeine. Chanyeol orders three cups of espresso to duel with the headache that’s taken up a significant portion of his brain. He finds a corner table pressed up against the tinted glass walls of the place, the chair behind it sagging with the weight of a thousand souls come and gone. He closes his eyes and tries to forget the phantom burden of a camera hanging from his neck. There is the clinking of cups being laid down on the table; he’s reminded of a shutter, the way it drops, that millisecond of space and breath when light comes rushing in and then the click, the falling of the curtain to bury the photo in darkness. He open his eyes. Sitting right in front of him are enamel mugs with designs painted on them, steam drawing lazy curls over the surface of the espresso. He picks one up, takes a sip, and lets the taste take over the senses that have not yet frayed.
The image of Soojung nestled in yards of muslin stains the wooden grain of the coffee table. Chanyeol scowls. He doesn’t want his frustration here, forming mounds in the humidity and reaching up to suffocate him. It’s not going to be a permanent thing. Maybe he just needs a couple of days, the short fizzle of a soda pop break while cycling around the city at dusk; maybe his muse needs a bit of rest. He tries to convince himself it’s alright.
He wonders if he’s climbed over mountains and reached the peak way before the scheduled time.
The second cup of coffee’s dry in his hand when a customer walks in. Chanyeol studies the way light pools on her cheek and in the hollow of her throat, sunlight spun into her hair as she recites her order to the barista. She takes a seat three tables away and sits on the side facing him. He frames her in a vignette, in the silence of monochrome, and watches her story drift away. It doesn’t settle. In the developer chemicals that he sets up in the roof of his mind, he watches her aura, the edges of her beauty, and the way her lips tremble melt in the stop bath.
He sets down his cup, hard enough to register a clatter that causes the barista’s head to turn his way. Chanyeol ignores him, ignores the girl. He examines the veins in his hands and the way they branch out, diving deeper and deeper, tracing his life and dreams on onion-thin skin.
He can’t have forgotten what it is to capture things, to get his hands around them mid-flight for a moment, a blink, before they continue shooting past him to the receding horizon. The fear burns through him and leaves him a smoking pile of doubt.
Chanyeol gulps down the contents of the third cup, trying to calm himself down. It doesn’t work. All the caffeine does is turn his heart into a skittering rabbit. He can’t stay here -- the walls are pressing closer and closer, the jazz music is morphing into a funeral dirge, and the girl sitting at the nearby table is a book with blank pages. He stands up, his chair almost tipping over at how fast he does it, and he tries to walk in steady steps.
By the time Chanyeol gets to his apartment, the key in his hand feels slippery and cold. He unlocks the door, closes it behind him, and lets himself fall into a heap. The thudding in his chest rains down on his fingers. It takes him a while to realize that he’s shaking.
Everything in this place is off-kilter. He looks around at the frames hanging on the wall, the faces that have sewn themselves into his life and written his name on every corner of the artistic community. In his mind he sees his accolades, the critiques, the praises, the conferences where he’s delivered tips and speeches about condensing the ordinary into frozen moments.
The camera sits on the table where he’d left it, black and bulky, its lens covered. Chanyeol walks toward it and picks it up. It feels heavy in his hand, like it’s got enough weight to drag him down, down, down. He raises it to his left eye and sees only darkness.
What in the world, he wonders, is he going to say to the gallery and to the rest of the world?
“You’re overthinking things,” Jongdae declares when they meet in the boiled broth heat of a noodle shop tucked into a city corner and gathering dust. He slurps up his noodles with as much grace as an elephant in an isolation room. “You’re probably stressed, that’s all. Taking so many pictures of people walking on the street can seem mind-numbing after a while.”
“But I couldn’t even take a picture of Soojung --”
“Since when have you ever done well with studio photography?” Jongdae interrupts. “Your photos hold grit, Chanyeol, not varnish and glamor and the dazzling glare of manufactured lighting. You don’t plan who you’ll take pictures of, you just come across them when they’re walking out of Taco Bell with sauce staining their shirt collar.”
Chanyeol frowns, scooping up soup with more aggression than necessary. “I can do studio photography,” he says, sulking.
“Nope, you can’t,” Jongdae says. Chanyeol flicks a noodle over at him, but Jongdae just brushes it off. “Sorry, but that’s the truth. Your photos are better when you take them off the road, on the fly, with no preparations whatsoever.”
“Fine. Okay. But none of the photographs I’ve been taking from the street are any good.” Chanyeol dips the meat in hoisin sauce, trying to fix the architecture of his thoughts.
“They’re not bad,” Jongdae says.
“Not bad, yes,” Chanyeol says. “A check mark for every element. But they’re not good -- at least, they’re nothing other than technically appealing.”
“Maybe you just need a better subject,” Jongdae ventures. “I don’t know, maybe you need to hole yourself up in a room, so that when you go outside, things don’t seem so similar anymore.”
“I can’t do that, Jongdae. I can’t hole up. The gallery needs the photos in a month and a half. If this continues, maybe I can pick a few decent photos to exhibit, but there won’t be anything good enough to be the main piece.”
“I’m not telling you to not take pictures for a long time,” Jongdae says. “I’m telling you to give it a day, maybe two. Just breathe. Relax. Don’t think so much about taking pictures of people.”
“That’s what Soojung said as well,” Chanyeol mutters.
“Well, why don’t you listen to her?” Jongdae taps his chopsticks on the rim of his bowl. “It’s not like it’s that difficult to put down your camera for a few days. Do something else. Play your guitar or whatever.”
Chanyeol spears a piece of meat. “I’ll think about it.”
He thinks about it for a grand total of five minutes, when he’s home and cocooned in his blankets. The answer that comes back is a resounding no. Chanyeol nods to himself. How silly of his friends to think it’s that easy for him to take a break, to set aside the gear that’s an extension of his body. He rolls over and goes to sleep.
The next day he’s back out on the street, sweating as he scours the crowd for someone memorable, someone with impact and expression and that intangible aura that pushes through pixels. He snaps ten, twenty, flagging down the people who don’t seem to be in so much hurry to turn him down. They smile, they cock their heads, they look away as the wind tosses their hair. At noon, Chanyeol slips inside a restaurant and goes over his photographs.
It’s not that they’re awful. It’s that they’re missing something, something so important, that the picture is left to lie flat in one’s consciousness. The picture is wavering, empty of any real meaning, and Chanyeol buries his face in his hands in frustration.
He’s done this for a long, long time. Fresh out of secondary with his first DSLR as his graduation gift, gigabytes of memory taken up by the ceremony where he’d taken pictures of everyone going up the stage. He’d pursued a career in it, dumped the Politics degree he’d applied for, and gone around uni to scout for the best backdrops.
Street photography didn’t tug at him until much, much later, when he was 21 and walking home after a shoot where he’d taken shot after shot of models doused in glitter and oil. It was seven in the morning and the sky was blue in the face. Chanyeol had been looking for a cab but abandoned the endeavor maybe thirty minutes into the waiting game. He fiddled with his camera as he walked.
When he looked up, there was a guy dressed in a suit, sitting cross-legged on the pavement and drinking beer. Chanyeol had not let his thoughts catch up to him. He raised the camera, pressed the shutter, and before the audible click made its way to the guy’s ears, the picture was shivering on the playback screen.
The guy had not even reacted. Chanyeol waited for him to curse, to run after him, to demand him to delete the photo. Instead, he’d simply turned to Chanyeol and offered him a bottle. “Do you want a drink?”
“It’s seven in the morning.”
“Who cares if it’s seven in the morning?” the guy said. “Seven in the morning, seven in the evening -- it’s still seven, and you might as well drink seven bottles of beer.”
Chanyeol sat down beside the guy. “Don’t you have a job later? I don’t think your boss will like the fact that you’re clocking in drunk.”
“Nope,” the guy said. “The suit’s for a date that’s gone to ruins, so I think beer’s in order.”
“Oh.” Chanyeol looked down at his hands, not quite knowing what to say. “I’m sorry.”
“Don’t be. The guy was an asshole. I’m just mad that I agreed to do it when I could have just stayed at home, playing video games and watching TV and falling asleep in my boxers.” He stopped for a beat. “Does that bother you?”
“It doesn’t.”
The guy flashed him a glance, as if weighing him and the truth of his words. “I’m Jongdae.”
“I’m Chanyeol.”
Chanyeol had ended up not drinking any of the beer that Jongdae had offered him, but it didn’t matter much. He and Jongdae ended up walking home together after throwing the bottles to a nearby trash can, Jongdae so inebriated that he could not walk in a straight line, and by the time Chanyeol had dropped him off at his apartment they’d become friends. Three months later, he submitted Jongdae’s portrait as his final project. It got him more than an A -- it got him initial recognition and a spot in the school gallery.
Then, Chanyeol had realized that he wanted nothing more than to be on the street, taking pictures of the people who floated by in one mass, seeming so similar to each other that there was no point in presenting frames of uniformity. But more than once he’d spotted someone in the crowd, and Chanyeol had stepped closer and pressed the shutter, and added the photo to a growing collection of portraits.
He turns his camera on again and flips through the playback. All perfectly composed photos with the right settings, the light hitting the subjects in creative angles.
So what is wrong?
On Friday, Chanyeol is whisked away from his apartment by a leather-clad Jongdae. The day is hot, the sun beating on the windows of Jongdae’s silver Audi, and Chanyeol tries not to be so much of an awkward fit in a space not designed for someone of his height. He swears Jongdae’s trying to get back at him for all those days Chanyeol had rested his elbow on the shorter guy’s head.
“Are you taking me hostage in broad daylight?” Chanyeol asks, deciding that if he keeps still he’s less likely to bump into things.
“I am not at liberty to speak of the Boss’ orders,” Jongdae recites in a flat tone. Then he steps on the gas and overtakes a red Honda, and Chanyeol’s head hits the ceiling.
“Do you even know what liberty means?”
“Do you want to be gagged?” Jongdae fires back. Chanyeol contemplates answering yes, but he doesn’t know how far Jongdae’s going to keep playing this game.
They edge into the seedier parts of the city, the areas where night life’s in full bloom past midnight and dead to the world when the rooster crows along with the whining of police car sirens. Chanyeol watches, confused, as Jongdae parks right in front of the bar they frequented on Saturday nights, not Friday mornings. Jongdae hauls him out of the car and into the bar, depositing him on a stool at the counter. Before Chanyeol can blink, there is a cocktail glowing phosphorescent in front of him, and the bartender is watching him with heavily-lidded eyes.
“Jongdae,” Chanyeol manages to say, “Jongdae it’s fucking nine in the fucking morning. Why are we here?”
“To drink, of course,” Jongdae says with a shrug. “You need to fall into the pit of intoxication, let the alcohol steal away your worries, until you float off into the realm of the unknown and rediscover your muse.”
Chanyeol squints. “Why does it sound like you’ve memorized this speech?”
“I’m sorry, you must be mistaken --” Jongdae stops. He takes a deep breath. Then he swipes the cocktail right under Chanyeol’s nose and gulps it down, chest heaving. “I didn’t plan this, okay, it was Soojung’s idea and she’s holding something over me, so drink, Yeol.”
“It’s nine,” Chanyeol says. “It’s nine, Jongdae.”
“Then go drink nine cocktails, I don’t know,” Jongdae says. “Just drink. They say artists work better drunk.”
“I’m calling Soojung.”
“Go ahead.” Jongdae snaps his fingers and signals to the bartender for a bottle of beer. “If she picks up, tell her I got you here and you’re drinking, alright?”
“But I’m not drinking,” Chanyeol whispers, already hitting dial beside Soojung’s number.
Static crackles on the other end for a good fifteen seconds before Soojung picks up. When she does, Chanyeol hears shouts in the background and the unmistakable drone of a blow dryer. “Yes, Dobi?”
“Soojung,” Chanyeol says, “what are you planning?”
“I take it that you’re not yet drunk,” Soojung says. “Well, it was probably too much to hope that you’d follow whatever Jongdae told you to do.”
“Listen, Soojung, okay, listen,” Chanyeol says. “It is nine in the morning. I have no intentions of drinking at nine in the morning, and I have no idea why you think it’s going to help me. Okay?”
“You think too much,” Soojung replies. “Maybe it would do you some good if you didn’t really have to think about your photographs.”
“That’s honestly not something I can do,” Chanyeol says. He watches as Jongdae begins to strike up a conversation with the bartender, the liquid in his glass changing color every time he drains it. “I know you’re trying to help but, Soojung, I don’t think there’s anything that can be done.”
He hears her sigh and imagines her surrounded by make-up artists and stylists, teasing her hair and accentuating her features. Masking her exhaustion with smudges of concealer and dots of berry-red lipstick, propping her up in front of the glare of spotlights and draining out a smile from her with every click.
“Well, I tried,” she says. “If you do want a drink, though, don’t worry. It’s on me.”
“Jongdae’s guzzling the alcohol straight out of the bottle,” Chanyeol says, the corner of his lips lifting up in a smile when she swears. “I’ll leave you to it. Bye, Soojung.”
“That idiot. Bye, Chanyeol, and look where you’re going.”
Chanyeol doesn’t bother to tell Jongdae he’s leaving, because by the time he hangs up, his friend is somehow all over the bartender. He pushes Soojung’s business card onto the counter, and because he feels bad, he adds his as well. The door clicks shut behind him when he walks out.
Outside, his pants and his shirt cling to his skin, sticky with sweat and humidity. He’s glad he still remembers the route back to the main areas of the city, information he’s gleaned from all those alcohol-washed nights he and Jongdae had driven here on a prayer of a bus, which plied the downtown streets before six. Somehow they managed to never run into a cop in blue uniform, which would be sure to slash off all the years of good press he and Jongdae have had in their respective fields. Chanyeol’s works would be scrutinized the world over for vestiges of cocaine madness and the taint of addiction. Meanwhile, Jongdae’s songs would be pared down to a liquid mess streaming out of radio stations and mainstream frequencies. Together they created vomit trails back to the city.
Chanyeol had fallen in love with the streets because he’d fallen in love with the Jongdae he’d met years ago, his body a crumbling tower on the sidewalk, fenced in by the brown glass cones of beer. He couldn’t tell Jongdae that he found him beautiful that way, caught in the concave lens of a dawn-streaked landscape. On the way home, he couldn’t tell him that he wanted to hold him close forever, that at the doorstep he wanted something more than a see you soon.
Love, Chanyeol knew, was not something he could put in his pocket and take out on rainy days. So he went out on the streets every day and splattered his love all over, left spots of red and blue and black and white; he bled his emotions in the dark room, wiped them over the surfaces of his pictures. It was the only way.
Somehow, he thinks, he’s become jaded. He doesn’t love Jongdae anymore -- he can look at him once, twice, without wanting to make him his masterpiece. But he’s starting to realize that his muse hadn’t gone away. No, he’d been the one to chase it out, sweep it in the dustpan, and throw it into the dumpster. It was a coagulated pile of things that he knew he would never be able to hold on to. The way he knew that day, sitting beside Jongdae on the pavement, that some things could be so close yet so distant.
He turns a corner and finds himself staring at the great, yawning mouth of the city filled with smoke and vehicles and a blob of noise rising to take over the atmosphere. Rivers of people flow right into each other, and Chanyeol takes a deep breath before diving straight in.
It’s somewhere past the city park that he sees him standing still with confusion on his shoulders.
He’s tiny in this crowd, with heat-flushed cheeks and fists balled up at his sides. There’s something angular about his frame, softness dripping over it in a way that Chanyeol doesn’t quite understand, and it seems like he’s looking for something. There’s nothing special about him, not his brown hair or his build or the air around him, and yet -- yet Chanyeol’s rooted in place, watching him as he peels away from the crowd to ask a policeman something, shoulders drooping forward through the fabric of his shirt. Chanyeol makes his way to a spot discreet enough to continue spying on the guy.
Then the guy turns, and for a brief second, their gazes lock.
Later, when Chanyeol’s made it to the gallery after watching the guy swim back into the crowd, still frozen and unable to chase after him, he tries to organize his thoughts. He tries to make sense of what he’d seen, sewn into every line and curve of the guy’s face. In the cool blast of the air conditioner and the classical music underlining every step he takes, he remembers the quiver in the guy’s brow, the worry staining his lips, the anxiety a backlit glare on his cheeks, and the prose in his eyes. He remembers a thing, a feeling, zipping across the distance and laying its palm on his chest, telling him that what he’s looking for is right there.
Right there, in the gleam of day and the howls of weary souls -- right there, in the midst of books with blank pages and pens without ink -- right there, goddamit, just right there, in a blue polo and jeans and sneakers, his hair the slightest bit askew, with a story in his eyes and his arms and his legs, in the very fact of his existence.
And his camera hadn’t been in his hands. And he had been a coward, kept in place by a fear he hadn’t met for the longest time.
Chanyeol stares at a painting and hopes the guy will still be lost tomorrow.
“I found my muse,” Chanyeol says three days later, over dainty china cups of tea that he gulps down so as not to offend Soojung. They’re sitting on top of thick carpets found everywhere in Soojung’s chair-free studio. Chanyeol has given up on getting her to buy a couch.
Soojung blinks at him, her features devoid of any expression. “When do I get to meet this person?”
“I haven’t met him yet, myself,” Chanyeol says. “Found him the Friday that you asked Jongdae to try to get me drunk. I wasn’t able to come closer and ask him to be my subject because he was gone before I could blink.” He lets the green tea wash his mouth of guilt for not telling Soojung the whole truth.
She sets down her teacup. “I thought Jongdae was the idiot,” she says, tone still calm. “Is it infectious now? Should I refrain from talking to you?”
Chanyeol frowns. “We were going opposite directions, how could I have stopped him?”
“You could have,” she says. “You really do underestimate how much I know you, don’t you? For future reference, your right hand twitches when you’re lying.”
Chanyeol’s immediate response is to look down at his right hand. When he looks back up, Soojung rolls her eyes at him.
“How are you supposed to ask him to model for you now?” she asks. “You of all people should know that once a moment’s gone, it’s gone.”
“I know, I know,” Chanyeol says. He watches the leaves swirl at the bottom of his cup -- lets them form a shape, a face that he’s captured in his mind but not on film. He wishes he’d done something, then. Wishes he’d reached out, taken the extra steps and cut off the distance between them; wishes he’d brought his camera, that he’d seen the guy earlier, that he had not choked on his words upon seeing the story swirling beneath the lost look on the guy’s face.
“Well,” Soojung says with a sigh, “you’ll have to pray for some sort of miracle to happen. You might never see him again.”
The tea, Chanyeol decides, is bitter down to the last dregs.
The thing is, Soojung is right. Chanyeol knows how fleeting a moment is, how fragile and how delicate it can be, like a moth with paper-thin wings drifting too close to an open flame. He knows it, and it’s the reason why he’s almost always got his camera with him, ready to let that moment last as long as he can. Even then it falls short of capturing every single detail.
So he continues to walk through the streets, fingers reaching for the shutter again and again and again. He may not find many of them satisfying enough, but on a technical standpoint they’re fit enough to exhibit. On weekends he spends hours with chemicals pooling in his palms, dripping through the cracks between his fingers in a bid to encase time; to let it linger on canvas, in print, on paper glossy with want.
Sometimes he thinks of the guy, frames him in a sea of people with eyes fixed on their feet and forever moving forward. He sees him turn around, sees him with the wind contouring his form, sees him take the few steps to the policeman with confusion casting his eyes in shadow. He thinks of that second they’d shared, that inhale-exhale they’d both taken with gazes intertwined. Chanyeol regrets. He regrets, but that moment has slipped out of his hands.
One Wednesday afternoon, he finds himself at the point separating downtown and the rest of the city. For a while he stands there, gazing at the highways that spin off into distance and unfamiliar places, his camera hanging off of his neck as always.
A movement to his left catches his eye. The door to a music store is opening, regurgitating a figure in an ocean of a sweater and faded jeans. Chanyeol doesn’t know why, but he stares at the person and how he bends over to tie his shoelaces. He watches as the guy looks right and left, still not noticing him despite the heaviness of his stare, and begins to walk in the direction of the nearby bus stop. There, he sits on an iron bench painted neon orange, hands clutching the edges of the bench. The sight makes Chanyeol smile.
He doesn’t dwell too much on it, on his decision to come closer and ask the person if he can take a picture of him. It’s simply that the scene is so pure, so light and void of darkness, and he wants to record it before it floats off on a whisper of a breeze.
When he’s maybe just a few steps away, with his voice ready to rise out of his throat, Chanyeol stills.
It’s him -- it’s the same guy he’d seen, several Fridays ago. He’s sitting right there, not looking at Chanyeol at all, but just his profile is enough to confirm Chanyeol’s suspicions. The story hasn’t faded in the time since he’d last seen him. It’s still there, scrawled all over his too-long sleeves and the dragging hems of his jeans, climbing along the slope of his jaw and clinging to his eyelashes. Chanyeol wants to take a picture of him right then and there, but he manages to recover just enough of his senses to clear his throat.
The guy looks around for the source of the sound before turning his way, eyes wide. Chanyeol resists the urge to attach a macro lens to his camera and take a picture of those eyes. Instead he says, with all the civility and restraint that he’s surprised he has, “May I take a picture of you?”
“M-me?” the guy asks, uncertainty crossing his features.
“Yes, you,” Chanyeol says. He clenches his fists to keep himself from taking the picture, model release form be damned. “It’s for an exhibit I’m having.”
The guy seems to shrink in on himself. Chanyeol is reminded of a house at the end of the lane, all the doors and windows closing one by one. The story is there but the ink is smeared across the pages, impossible to decipher, difficult to grasp. His heart sinks -- it is a pebble in a river, tossed down the bed and turning over, under, over, under.
“I’m sorry,” the guy says, his voice so soft it’s as if he’s afraid to be heard, “but I don’t feel comfortable with that.”
“It’s alright,” Chanyeol says, trying to convey that it is alright, he’s allowed to refuse, even if the disappointment’s coloring his chest with a black crayon. “Um, but, just in case you change your mind,” he fishes out a business card from his bag and puts it beside the guy, “you can contact me. My name’s Chanyeol, by the way.”
The guy picks up the card, fingers on the edges, and he glances at the contact information before looking up at Chanyeol. “Alright,” he says. “I’m Baekhyun.” Then, after a second’s hesitation, he smiles. The light seems to awaken in the depths of his irises, pouring down his veins and over his skin, and he looks so bright and aglow that Chanyeol has to swallow down a Are you sure you don’t want to be photographed?
He can’t stop the grin that’s prying his lips upward, either. “Nice to meet you, Baekhyun.”
The bus arrives, and Baekhyun inclines his head in Chanyeol’s direction, standing up and dusting off his jeans. “I have to go,” he says, smile tempered to something that’s still gentle but now turned down low. It’s a light bulb flickering in an empty room.
“Okay,” Chanyeol says. “I hope you’ll consider being photographed.”
Baekhyun’s nod is tiny, but hope still scrambles up Chanyeol’s rib cage. “I’ll consider it.”
With that he’s gone, the bus speeding down a route that Chanyeol’s never taken. He watches it, fingers clutching the strap of his camera, and he tries not to linger too much on the fluorescence of Baekhyun’s smile.
“So you talked to him,” Jongdae says, mouth stuffed full with meat, “and he refused?”
“Yes,” Chanyeol says. In the cloying fragrance of bodies rubbing against each other and alcohol dancing in shot glasses, his head is pounding. The music beats against the walls and stomps all over the counter. He’s only here because of Jongdae, and Jongdae’s here because of the bartender named Zitao who is most likely his boyfriend. They’ve been cooing at each other when Zitao’s free to wander over to their corner. Chanyeol wants to hurl and see what they’ll do with the bile.
“But you gave him your business card?” Jongdae asks for what must be the third time.
“Yes,” Chanyeol hisses. “Look, Jongdae, if you’re going to say I’m stupid for hoping, then --”
“I’m not saying it’s stupid,” Jongdae says, taking a swig of his beer. “I’m just surprised you gave him your business card. Usually when someone turns you down, you just move on and find a new subject.”
Brown eyes and a light-bulb smile occupies Chanyeol’s thoughts, and his tongue feels rough when he says, “Yeah, but I can’t seem to let go of him.”
Jongdae narrows his eyes. “Go on.”
“There’s something about him, Jongdae,” he says, running his fingers through his hair. Again and again, he sees before him the image of Baekhyun sitting on the bus stop bench, nestled in the brightness of orange paint. “And I don’t know why I feel this way, but I need to have his portrait in my exhibit. I’m actually pretty close to making him the only subject of the exhibit.”
“He hasn’t agreed, Chanyeol,” Jongdae says, and he sounds almost sad. There is a frown curled over his lips.
“I know.” The words come out in a sigh, an exhale that Chanyeol doesn’t know he’s been holding in; they come out in clouds that drift and evaporate in smoke trails of emotions. “But I can still hope, can’t I?”
Jongdae watches him over the rim of his bottle, with a look that’s hard to pick apart. “Yeah, you can.”
Chanyeol decides to order another beer.
►
Title: Dark Night, Still Morn
Pairing(s): Chanyeol/Baekhyun
Rating: PG-13
Warning(s): Swearing.
Length: ~12900w
Summary: All he wants to do is capture this moment in time.
Author's note: Thank you to my beta for walking with me from the beginning of the tunnel to the end. Thank you to the mod for being patient and understanding despite my shortcomings. To my recipient: I sincerely hope that you will like this fic. I know it may not live up to your expectations, and I do apologize for that. After reveals, I am willing to make any changes if need be.
Black. White. Light. Dark. Black. White. Light. Dark. Black. White. White. Light. White. Black. Dark. Dark. Dark. Dark --
Park Chanyeol feels the edges of his consciousness crumble into shadows, and he lowers the camera that he’s raised to eye level. Sunset washes the room in cornfield yellow. A few feet away from him, his subject is leaning against a backdrop of orange satin, her body covered in yards of white muslin. Dark hair spills across half of her face, her gaze silent, eerie even, as she takes in the sight of Chanyeol looking far less lost than he feels.
“It’s not working, is it?”
Chanyeol shakes his head. The girl, Soojung, sighs and starts winding the cloth up her arms and down her legs, twisting and pulling and wrapping until it resembles a dress. She stands up, her feet still bare.
“I guess that’s it,” she says, tilting her head. “It doesn’t matter how beautiful your subject is. You’re just not that inspired these days.”
“I don’t know what’s wrong,” Chanyeol says, frowning as he makes his way over to her and begins unpinning the satin from its wooden frame. He feels it slide against his fingers -- soft, gentle to the touch. He’d spent days trying to find this fabric, downtown where the people flowed in streams and intersected within the walls of every shop. There was a single roll of it tucked three rows to the back of a seamstress’ place, the shade of the orange reaching out to him through curtains of dust motes and the light of flickering bulbs. It reminded him of autumn, of a flame dancing on a candle’s wick, of the skies when the sunset bled its life through the clouds.
Even something like this cannot call back his muse.
He doesn’t know where it is. He doesn’t know if he’d dropped it by the wayside one day when he thought he could do things on his own -- that he could look through the lens and see a story worth telling. Maybe his muse had fallen in a tub of developer chemicals, processed into a 4x4 square photograph with corners sharp enough to leave scars.
Next to him, Soojung shifts from foot to foot. His best friend is a beautiful girl, Chanyeol knows. Part-time model, full-time heartbreaker.Somehow they’d both been hoping that taking pictures of someone whose facial structure the fashion world had lauded would set him back on track.
“Maybe you need to take a break.” Her voice is staccato. It is a sieve, never holding that much emotion, but Chanyeol knows the concern that writes itself beneath the surface of Soojung’s skin.
“The gallery wants to exhibit new portraits,” he says, taking out the last pin. He and Soojung watch as the satin falls from the frame. “They need them in a couple of months. I can’t just take a break.”
“Take a walk, then. Maybe your muse wants you to do landscapes instead of portraits.”
Chanyeol chuckles. “I don’t have any interest in doing landscapes, Soojung. Nothing against those who choose to do so, but I want something human. Someone human, with a story threaded into every feature.”
The corners of Soojung’s lips lift up. “So you’re saying I don’t have a story?”
“You do,” Chanyeol says. “But I don’t know how to tell it.”
His best friend is quiet. The cornfield streaked across the floorboards turns into roses. Outside, Chanyeol hears the sounds of cars on the mad rush home.
“Just put away your camera for a week,” Soojung says after a while. “If you’re not always thinking of what something will look like through your lens, maybe your mind will be freer. Less restricted.”
Chanyeol exhales. “Maybe.”
The two of them stand there, until dusk opens its petals and floats down to cover the world. Then, in the moonlight that pours through the windows, Chanyeol and Soojung leave the studio.
Three days after Soojung tells him to put away his camera, Chanyeol decides to do it. It’s unsettling how he’s grown used to the weight of it, to the strap that chafes against his nape, and his hands skitter across his pants in an attempt to chase away the nervousness he feels about leaving his camera behind. The morning’s bright and awake when he steps out, and he catches himself thinking about proper aperture settings. Chanyeol shakes his head at himself.
His daily routines often consist of walking through the city, leaving traces of himself on asphalt and wooden surfaces. There’s something about the hustle and bustle that makes people less prone to keeping their masks on. Maybe it’s the heat, melting off their guards; maybe it’s the friction of body brushing body, wearing away the thin veneer of pretenses. Either way, he finds his subjects swimming through the chaos, their stories pulsing in their irises.
Today he feels disconnected, hesitant. The world through his eyes is not as magical as the world through his lens. It feels as though something is missing as he pushes past fruit vendors and window shoppers. He can’t see the stories anywhere. All he finds are people with walls hovering in the air around them, unwilling to let him take a peek. Chanyeol doesn’t want this. He feels like a thumb hanging off of a foot, a toe growing on a spine. Out of place. Unwanted. Unnecessary.
He contemplates calling Soojung, but he knows his best friend will roll her eyes and tell him to call her when he has more substantial problems. In the typical voice she adopts when he’s doing something she can’t make sense of, she’ll tell him that it’s all in your head, Dobi, all in your head.
“Ah, screw this.” He scans the shops lined up like soldiers along the sidewalk and spots the signage of a cafe. When his walks don’t turn up anything, Chanyeol almost always finds himself knocking back espresso with his feet on the table and a magazine on his lap. It’s a pick-me-up, a time when he forgets how objects drip shadows all over people.
The cafe is almost bare of faces and bodies running on caffeine. Chanyeol orders three cups of espresso to duel with the headache that’s taken up a significant portion of his brain. He finds a corner table pressed up against the tinted glass walls of the place, the chair behind it sagging with the weight of a thousand souls come and gone. He closes his eyes and tries to forget the phantom burden of a camera hanging from his neck. There is the clinking of cups being laid down on the table; he’s reminded of a shutter, the way it drops, that millisecond of space and breath when light comes rushing in and then the click, the falling of the curtain to bury the photo in darkness. He open his eyes. Sitting right in front of him are enamel mugs with designs painted on them, steam drawing lazy curls over the surface of the espresso. He picks one up, takes a sip, and lets the taste take over the senses that have not yet frayed.
The image of Soojung nestled in yards of muslin stains the wooden grain of the coffee table. Chanyeol scowls. He doesn’t want his frustration here, forming mounds in the humidity and reaching up to suffocate him. It’s not going to be a permanent thing. Maybe he just needs a couple of days, the short fizzle of a soda pop break while cycling around the city at dusk; maybe his muse needs a bit of rest. He tries to convince himself it’s alright.
He wonders if he’s climbed over mountains and reached the peak way before the scheduled time.
The second cup of coffee’s dry in his hand when a customer walks in. Chanyeol studies the way light pools on her cheek and in the hollow of her throat, sunlight spun into her hair as she recites her order to the barista. She takes a seat three tables away and sits on the side facing him. He frames her in a vignette, in the silence of monochrome, and watches her story drift away. It doesn’t settle. In the developer chemicals that he sets up in the roof of his mind, he watches her aura, the edges of her beauty, and the way her lips tremble melt in the stop bath.
He sets down his cup, hard enough to register a clatter that causes the barista’s head to turn his way. Chanyeol ignores him, ignores the girl. He examines the veins in his hands and the way they branch out, diving deeper and deeper, tracing his life and dreams on onion-thin skin.
He can’t have forgotten what it is to capture things, to get his hands around them mid-flight for a moment, a blink, before they continue shooting past him to the receding horizon. The fear burns through him and leaves him a smoking pile of doubt.
Chanyeol gulps down the contents of the third cup, trying to calm himself down. It doesn’t work. All the caffeine does is turn his heart into a skittering rabbit. He can’t stay here -- the walls are pressing closer and closer, the jazz music is morphing into a funeral dirge, and the girl sitting at the nearby table is a book with blank pages. He stands up, his chair almost tipping over at how fast he does it, and he tries to walk in steady steps.
By the time Chanyeol gets to his apartment, the key in his hand feels slippery and cold. He unlocks the door, closes it behind him, and lets himself fall into a heap. The thudding in his chest rains down on his fingers. It takes him a while to realize that he’s shaking.
Everything in this place is off-kilter. He looks around at the frames hanging on the wall, the faces that have sewn themselves into his life and written his name on every corner of the artistic community. In his mind he sees his accolades, the critiques, the praises, the conferences where he’s delivered tips and speeches about condensing the ordinary into frozen moments.
The camera sits on the table where he’d left it, black and bulky, its lens covered. Chanyeol walks toward it and picks it up. It feels heavy in his hand, like it’s got enough weight to drag him down, down, down. He raises it to his left eye and sees only darkness.
What in the world, he wonders, is he going to say to the gallery and to the rest of the world?
“You’re overthinking things,” Jongdae declares when they meet in the boiled broth heat of a noodle shop tucked into a city corner and gathering dust. He slurps up his noodles with as much grace as an elephant in an isolation room. “You’re probably stressed, that’s all. Taking so many pictures of people walking on the street can seem mind-numbing after a while.”
“But I couldn’t even take a picture of Soojung --”
“Since when have you ever done well with studio photography?” Jongdae interrupts. “Your photos hold grit, Chanyeol, not varnish and glamor and the dazzling glare of manufactured lighting. You don’t plan who you’ll take pictures of, you just come across them when they’re walking out of Taco Bell with sauce staining their shirt collar.”
Chanyeol frowns, scooping up soup with more aggression than necessary. “I can do studio photography,” he says, sulking.
“Nope, you can’t,” Jongdae says. Chanyeol flicks a noodle over at him, but Jongdae just brushes it off. “Sorry, but that’s the truth. Your photos are better when you take them off the road, on the fly, with no preparations whatsoever.”
“Fine. Okay. But none of the photographs I’ve been taking from the street are any good.” Chanyeol dips the meat in hoisin sauce, trying to fix the architecture of his thoughts.
“They’re not bad,” Jongdae says.
“Not bad, yes,” Chanyeol says. “A check mark for every element. But they’re not good -- at least, they’re nothing other than technically appealing.”
“Maybe you just need a better subject,” Jongdae ventures. “I don’t know, maybe you need to hole yourself up in a room, so that when you go outside, things don’t seem so similar anymore.”
“I can’t do that, Jongdae. I can’t hole up. The gallery needs the photos in a month and a half. If this continues, maybe I can pick a few decent photos to exhibit, but there won’t be anything good enough to be the main piece.”
“I’m not telling you to not take pictures for a long time,” Jongdae says. “I’m telling you to give it a day, maybe two. Just breathe. Relax. Don’t think so much about taking pictures of people.”
“That’s what Soojung said as well,” Chanyeol mutters.
“Well, why don’t you listen to her?” Jongdae taps his chopsticks on the rim of his bowl. “It’s not like it’s that difficult to put down your camera for a few days. Do something else. Play your guitar or whatever.”
Chanyeol spears a piece of meat. “I’ll think about it.”
He thinks about it for a grand total of five minutes, when he’s home and cocooned in his blankets. The answer that comes back is a resounding no. Chanyeol nods to himself. How silly of his friends to think it’s that easy for him to take a break, to set aside the gear that’s an extension of his body. He rolls over and goes to sleep.
The next day he’s back out on the street, sweating as he scours the crowd for someone memorable, someone with impact and expression and that intangible aura that pushes through pixels. He snaps ten, twenty, flagging down the people who don’t seem to be in so much hurry to turn him down. They smile, they cock their heads, they look away as the wind tosses their hair. At noon, Chanyeol slips inside a restaurant and goes over his photographs.
It’s not that they’re awful. It’s that they’re missing something, something so important, that the picture is left to lie flat in one’s consciousness. The picture is wavering, empty of any real meaning, and Chanyeol buries his face in his hands in frustration.
He’s done this for a long, long time. Fresh out of secondary with his first DSLR as his graduation gift, gigabytes of memory taken up by the ceremony where he’d taken pictures of everyone going up the stage. He’d pursued a career in it, dumped the Politics degree he’d applied for, and gone around uni to scout for the best backdrops.
Street photography didn’t tug at him until much, much later, when he was 21 and walking home after a shoot where he’d taken shot after shot of models doused in glitter and oil. It was seven in the morning and the sky was blue in the face. Chanyeol had been looking for a cab but abandoned the endeavor maybe thirty minutes into the waiting game. He fiddled with his camera as he walked.
When he looked up, there was a guy dressed in a suit, sitting cross-legged on the pavement and drinking beer. Chanyeol had not let his thoughts catch up to him. He raised the camera, pressed the shutter, and before the audible click made its way to the guy’s ears, the picture was shivering on the playback screen.
The guy had not even reacted. Chanyeol waited for him to curse, to run after him, to demand him to delete the photo. Instead, he’d simply turned to Chanyeol and offered him a bottle. “Do you want a drink?”
“It’s seven in the morning.”
“Who cares if it’s seven in the morning?” the guy said. “Seven in the morning, seven in the evening -- it’s still seven, and you might as well drink seven bottles of beer.”
Chanyeol sat down beside the guy. “Don’t you have a job later? I don’t think your boss will like the fact that you’re clocking in drunk.”
“Nope,” the guy said. “The suit’s for a date that’s gone to ruins, so I think beer’s in order.”
“Oh.” Chanyeol looked down at his hands, not quite knowing what to say. “I’m sorry.”
“Don’t be. The guy was an asshole. I’m just mad that I agreed to do it when I could have just stayed at home, playing video games and watching TV and falling asleep in my boxers.” He stopped for a beat. “Does that bother you?”
“It doesn’t.”
The guy flashed him a glance, as if weighing him and the truth of his words. “I’m Jongdae.”
“I’m Chanyeol.”
Chanyeol had ended up not drinking any of the beer that Jongdae had offered him, but it didn’t matter much. He and Jongdae ended up walking home together after throwing the bottles to a nearby trash can, Jongdae so inebriated that he could not walk in a straight line, and by the time Chanyeol had dropped him off at his apartment they’d become friends. Three months later, he submitted Jongdae’s portrait as his final project. It got him more than an A -- it got him initial recognition and a spot in the school gallery.
Then, Chanyeol had realized that he wanted nothing more than to be on the street, taking pictures of the people who floated by in one mass, seeming so similar to each other that there was no point in presenting frames of uniformity. But more than once he’d spotted someone in the crowd, and Chanyeol had stepped closer and pressed the shutter, and added the photo to a growing collection of portraits.
He turns his camera on again and flips through the playback. All perfectly composed photos with the right settings, the light hitting the subjects in creative angles.
So what is wrong?
On Friday, Chanyeol is whisked away from his apartment by a leather-clad Jongdae. The day is hot, the sun beating on the windows of Jongdae’s silver Audi, and Chanyeol tries not to be so much of an awkward fit in a space not designed for someone of his height. He swears Jongdae’s trying to get back at him for all those days Chanyeol had rested his elbow on the shorter guy’s head.
“Are you taking me hostage in broad daylight?” Chanyeol asks, deciding that if he keeps still he’s less likely to bump into things.
“I am not at liberty to speak of the Boss’ orders,” Jongdae recites in a flat tone. Then he steps on the gas and overtakes a red Honda, and Chanyeol’s head hits the ceiling.
“Do you even know what liberty means?”
“Do you want to be gagged?” Jongdae fires back. Chanyeol contemplates answering yes, but he doesn’t know how far Jongdae’s going to keep playing this game.
They edge into the seedier parts of the city, the areas where night life’s in full bloom past midnight and dead to the world when the rooster crows along with the whining of police car sirens. Chanyeol watches, confused, as Jongdae parks right in front of the bar they frequented on Saturday nights, not Friday mornings. Jongdae hauls him out of the car and into the bar, depositing him on a stool at the counter. Before Chanyeol can blink, there is a cocktail glowing phosphorescent in front of him, and the bartender is watching him with heavily-lidded eyes.
“Jongdae,” Chanyeol manages to say, “Jongdae it’s fucking nine in the fucking morning. Why are we here?”
“To drink, of course,” Jongdae says with a shrug. “You need to fall into the pit of intoxication, let the alcohol steal away your worries, until you float off into the realm of the unknown and rediscover your muse.”
Chanyeol squints. “Why does it sound like you’ve memorized this speech?”
“I’m sorry, you must be mistaken --” Jongdae stops. He takes a deep breath. Then he swipes the cocktail right under Chanyeol’s nose and gulps it down, chest heaving. “I didn’t plan this, okay, it was Soojung’s idea and she’s holding something over me, so drink, Yeol.”
“It’s nine,” Chanyeol says. “It’s nine, Jongdae.”
“Then go drink nine cocktails, I don’t know,” Jongdae says. “Just drink. They say artists work better drunk.”
“I’m calling Soojung.”
“Go ahead.” Jongdae snaps his fingers and signals to the bartender for a bottle of beer. “If she picks up, tell her I got you here and you’re drinking, alright?”
“But I’m not drinking,” Chanyeol whispers, already hitting dial beside Soojung’s number.
Static crackles on the other end for a good fifteen seconds before Soojung picks up. When she does, Chanyeol hears shouts in the background and the unmistakable drone of a blow dryer. “Yes, Dobi?”
“Soojung,” Chanyeol says, “what are you planning?”
“I take it that you’re not yet drunk,” Soojung says. “Well, it was probably too much to hope that you’d follow whatever Jongdae told you to do.”
“Listen, Soojung, okay, listen,” Chanyeol says. “It is nine in the morning. I have no intentions of drinking at nine in the morning, and I have no idea why you think it’s going to help me. Okay?”
“You think too much,” Soojung replies. “Maybe it would do you some good if you didn’t really have to think about your photographs.”
“That’s honestly not something I can do,” Chanyeol says. He watches as Jongdae begins to strike up a conversation with the bartender, the liquid in his glass changing color every time he drains it. “I know you’re trying to help but, Soojung, I don’t think there’s anything that can be done.”
He hears her sigh and imagines her surrounded by make-up artists and stylists, teasing her hair and accentuating her features. Masking her exhaustion with smudges of concealer and dots of berry-red lipstick, propping her up in front of the glare of spotlights and draining out a smile from her with every click.
“Well, I tried,” she says. “If you do want a drink, though, don’t worry. It’s on me.”
“Jongdae’s guzzling the alcohol straight out of the bottle,” Chanyeol says, the corner of his lips lifting up in a smile when she swears. “I’ll leave you to it. Bye, Soojung.”
“That idiot. Bye, Chanyeol, and look where you’re going.”
Chanyeol doesn’t bother to tell Jongdae he’s leaving, because by the time he hangs up, his friend is somehow all over the bartender. He pushes Soojung’s business card onto the counter, and because he feels bad, he adds his as well. The door clicks shut behind him when he walks out.
Outside, his pants and his shirt cling to his skin, sticky with sweat and humidity. He’s glad he still remembers the route back to the main areas of the city, information he’s gleaned from all those alcohol-washed nights he and Jongdae had driven here on a prayer of a bus, which plied the downtown streets before six. Somehow they managed to never run into a cop in blue uniform, which would be sure to slash off all the years of good press he and Jongdae have had in their respective fields. Chanyeol’s works would be scrutinized the world over for vestiges of cocaine madness and the taint of addiction. Meanwhile, Jongdae’s songs would be pared down to a liquid mess streaming out of radio stations and mainstream frequencies. Together they created vomit trails back to the city.
Chanyeol had fallen in love with the streets because he’d fallen in love with the Jongdae he’d met years ago, his body a crumbling tower on the sidewalk, fenced in by the brown glass cones of beer. He couldn’t tell Jongdae that he found him beautiful that way, caught in the concave lens of a dawn-streaked landscape. On the way home, he couldn’t tell him that he wanted to hold him close forever, that at the doorstep he wanted something more than a see you soon.
Love, Chanyeol knew, was not something he could put in his pocket and take out on rainy days. So he went out on the streets every day and splattered his love all over, left spots of red and blue and black and white; he bled his emotions in the dark room, wiped them over the surfaces of his pictures. It was the only way.
Somehow, he thinks, he’s become jaded. He doesn’t love Jongdae anymore -- he can look at him once, twice, without wanting to make him his masterpiece. But he’s starting to realize that his muse hadn’t gone away. No, he’d been the one to chase it out, sweep it in the dustpan, and throw it into the dumpster. It was a coagulated pile of things that he knew he would never be able to hold on to. The way he knew that day, sitting beside Jongdae on the pavement, that some things could be so close yet so distant.
He turns a corner and finds himself staring at the great, yawning mouth of the city filled with smoke and vehicles and a blob of noise rising to take over the atmosphere. Rivers of people flow right into each other, and Chanyeol takes a deep breath before diving straight in.
It’s somewhere past the city park that he sees him standing still with confusion on his shoulders.
He’s tiny in this crowd, with heat-flushed cheeks and fists balled up at his sides. There’s something angular about his frame, softness dripping over it in a way that Chanyeol doesn’t quite understand, and it seems like he’s looking for something. There’s nothing special about him, not his brown hair or his build or the air around him, and yet -- yet Chanyeol’s rooted in place, watching him as he peels away from the crowd to ask a policeman something, shoulders drooping forward through the fabric of his shirt. Chanyeol makes his way to a spot discreet enough to continue spying on the guy.
Then the guy turns, and for a brief second, their gazes lock.
Later, when Chanyeol’s made it to the gallery after watching the guy swim back into the crowd, still frozen and unable to chase after him, he tries to organize his thoughts. He tries to make sense of what he’d seen, sewn into every line and curve of the guy’s face. In the cool blast of the air conditioner and the classical music underlining every step he takes, he remembers the quiver in the guy’s brow, the worry staining his lips, the anxiety a backlit glare on his cheeks, and the prose in his eyes. He remembers a thing, a feeling, zipping across the distance and laying its palm on his chest, telling him that what he’s looking for is right there.
Right there, in the gleam of day and the howls of weary souls -- right there, in the midst of books with blank pages and pens without ink -- right there, goddamit, just right there, in a blue polo and jeans and sneakers, his hair the slightest bit askew, with a story in his eyes and his arms and his legs, in the very fact of his existence.
And his camera hadn’t been in his hands. And he had been a coward, kept in place by a fear he hadn’t met for the longest time.
Chanyeol stares at a painting and hopes the guy will still be lost tomorrow.
“I found my muse,” Chanyeol says three days later, over dainty china cups of tea that he gulps down so as not to offend Soojung. They’re sitting on top of thick carpets found everywhere in Soojung’s chair-free studio. Chanyeol has given up on getting her to buy a couch.
Soojung blinks at him, her features devoid of any expression. “When do I get to meet this person?”
“I haven’t met him yet, myself,” Chanyeol says. “Found him the Friday that you asked Jongdae to try to get me drunk. I wasn’t able to come closer and ask him to be my subject because he was gone before I could blink.” He lets the green tea wash his mouth of guilt for not telling Soojung the whole truth.
She sets down her teacup. “I thought Jongdae was the idiot,” she says, tone still calm. “Is it infectious now? Should I refrain from talking to you?”
Chanyeol frowns. “We were going opposite directions, how could I have stopped him?”
“You could have,” she says. “You really do underestimate how much I know you, don’t you? For future reference, your right hand twitches when you’re lying.”
Chanyeol’s immediate response is to look down at his right hand. When he looks back up, Soojung rolls her eyes at him.
“How are you supposed to ask him to model for you now?” she asks. “You of all people should know that once a moment’s gone, it’s gone.”
“I know, I know,” Chanyeol says. He watches the leaves swirl at the bottom of his cup -- lets them form a shape, a face that he’s captured in his mind but not on film. He wishes he’d done something, then. Wishes he’d reached out, taken the extra steps and cut off the distance between them; wishes he’d brought his camera, that he’d seen the guy earlier, that he had not choked on his words upon seeing the story swirling beneath the lost look on the guy’s face.
“Well,” Soojung says with a sigh, “you’ll have to pray for some sort of miracle to happen. You might never see him again.”
The tea, Chanyeol decides, is bitter down to the last dregs.
The thing is, Soojung is right. Chanyeol knows how fleeting a moment is, how fragile and how delicate it can be, like a moth with paper-thin wings drifting too close to an open flame. He knows it, and it’s the reason why he’s almost always got his camera with him, ready to let that moment last as long as he can. Even then it falls short of capturing every single detail.
So he continues to walk through the streets, fingers reaching for the shutter again and again and again. He may not find many of them satisfying enough, but on a technical standpoint they’re fit enough to exhibit. On weekends he spends hours with chemicals pooling in his palms, dripping through the cracks between his fingers in a bid to encase time; to let it linger on canvas, in print, on paper glossy with want.
Sometimes he thinks of the guy, frames him in a sea of people with eyes fixed on their feet and forever moving forward. He sees him turn around, sees him with the wind contouring his form, sees him take the few steps to the policeman with confusion casting his eyes in shadow. He thinks of that second they’d shared, that inhale-exhale they’d both taken with gazes intertwined. Chanyeol regrets. He regrets, but that moment has slipped out of his hands.
One Wednesday afternoon, he finds himself at the point separating downtown and the rest of the city. For a while he stands there, gazing at the highways that spin off into distance and unfamiliar places, his camera hanging off of his neck as always.
A movement to his left catches his eye. The door to a music store is opening, regurgitating a figure in an ocean of a sweater and faded jeans. Chanyeol doesn’t know why, but he stares at the person and how he bends over to tie his shoelaces. He watches as the guy looks right and left, still not noticing him despite the heaviness of his stare, and begins to walk in the direction of the nearby bus stop. There, he sits on an iron bench painted neon orange, hands clutching the edges of the bench. The sight makes Chanyeol smile.
He doesn’t dwell too much on it, on his decision to come closer and ask the person if he can take a picture of him. It’s simply that the scene is so pure, so light and void of darkness, and he wants to record it before it floats off on a whisper of a breeze.
When he’s maybe just a few steps away, with his voice ready to rise out of his throat, Chanyeol stills.
It’s him -- it’s the same guy he’d seen, several Fridays ago. He’s sitting right there, not looking at Chanyeol at all, but just his profile is enough to confirm Chanyeol’s suspicions. The story hasn’t faded in the time since he’d last seen him. It’s still there, scrawled all over his too-long sleeves and the dragging hems of his jeans, climbing along the slope of his jaw and clinging to his eyelashes. Chanyeol wants to take a picture of him right then and there, but he manages to recover just enough of his senses to clear his throat.
The guy looks around for the source of the sound before turning his way, eyes wide. Chanyeol resists the urge to attach a macro lens to his camera and take a picture of those eyes. Instead he says, with all the civility and restraint that he’s surprised he has, “May I take a picture of you?”
“M-me?” the guy asks, uncertainty crossing his features.
“Yes, you,” Chanyeol says. He clenches his fists to keep himself from taking the picture, model release form be damned. “It’s for an exhibit I’m having.”
The guy seems to shrink in on himself. Chanyeol is reminded of a house at the end of the lane, all the doors and windows closing one by one. The story is there but the ink is smeared across the pages, impossible to decipher, difficult to grasp. His heart sinks -- it is a pebble in a river, tossed down the bed and turning over, under, over, under.
“I’m sorry,” the guy says, his voice so soft it’s as if he’s afraid to be heard, “but I don’t feel comfortable with that.”
“It’s alright,” Chanyeol says, trying to convey that it is alright, he’s allowed to refuse, even if the disappointment’s coloring his chest with a black crayon. “Um, but, just in case you change your mind,” he fishes out a business card from his bag and puts it beside the guy, “you can contact me. My name’s Chanyeol, by the way.”
The guy picks up the card, fingers on the edges, and he glances at the contact information before looking up at Chanyeol. “Alright,” he says. “I’m Baekhyun.” Then, after a second’s hesitation, he smiles. The light seems to awaken in the depths of his irises, pouring down his veins and over his skin, and he looks so bright and aglow that Chanyeol has to swallow down a Are you sure you don’t want to be photographed?
He can’t stop the grin that’s prying his lips upward, either. “Nice to meet you, Baekhyun.”
The bus arrives, and Baekhyun inclines his head in Chanyeol’s direction, standing up and dusting off his jeans. “I have to go,” he says, smile tempered to something that’s still gentle but now turned down low. It’s a light bulb flickering in an empty room.
“Okay,” Chanyeol says. “I hope you’ll consider being photographed.”
Baekhyun’s nod is tiny, but hope still scrambles up Chanyeol’s rib cage. “I’ll consider it.”
With that he’s gone, the bus speeding down a route that Chanyeol’s never taken. He watches it, fingers clutching the strap of his camera, and he tries not to linger too much on the fluorescence of Baekhyun’s smile.
“So you talked to him,” Jongdae says, mouth stuffed full with meat, “and he refused?”
“Yes,” Chanyeol says. In the cloying fragrance of bodies rubbing against each other and alcohol dancing in shot glasses, his head is pounding. The music beats against the walls and stomps all over the counter. He’s only here because of Jongdae, and Jongdae’s here because of the bartender named Zitao who is most likely his boyfriend. They’ve been cooing at each other when Zitao’s free to wander over to their corner. Chanyeol wants to hurl and see what they’ll do with the bile.
“But you gave him your business card?” Jongdae asks for what must be the third time.
“Yes,” Chanyeol hisses. “Look, Jongdae, if you’re going to say I’m stupid for hoping, then --”
“I’m not saying it’s stupid,” Jongdae says, taking a swig of his beer. “I’m just surprised you gave him your business card. Usually when someone turns you down, you just move on and find a new subject.”
Brown eyes and a light-bulb smile occupies Chanyeol’s thoughts, and his tongue feels rough when he says, “Yeah, but I can’t seem to let go of him.”
Jongdae narrows his eyes. “Go on.”
“There’s something about him, Jongdae,” he says, running his fingers through his hair. Again and again, he sees before him the image of Baekhyun sitting on the bus stop bench, nestled in the brightness of orange paint. “And I don’t know why I feel this way, but I need to have his portrait in my exhibit. I’m actually pretty close to making him the only subject of the exhibit.”
“He hasn’t agreed, Chanyeol,” Jongdae says, and he sounds almost sad. There is a frown curled over his lips.
“I know.” The words come out in a sigh, an exhale that Chanyeol doesn’t know he’s been holding in; they come out in clouds that drift and evaporate in smoke trails of emotions. “But I can still hope, can’t I?”
Jongdae watches him over the rim of his bottle, with a look that’s hard to pick apart. “Yeah, you can.”
Chanyeol decides to order another beer.
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