Spread Fire Through the Soul
rated pg
About thirty minutes before I had to go to bed and listening to Kyuhyun sing ‘smile’ I found myself in a New York speakeasy in the 1920s. I loved the image and had to get it down. So this story isn’t about anything except an image and an emotion.
---
Spread Fire Through the Soul
---
Smoke drifted through the dusky lounge as painted women held their cgarrettes and men swirrled their brandy in glasses, adding off-beat tinkling of glass and ice to the quiet twilight atmosphere of the room. All muted colors and golden fringe.
The deep mohogany of the furniture and the panelled walls was given a soft sheen from years of polish and the lamps that lined the room. None of that new fancy electric crap - the proprietor wanted to keep the atmosphere of his club real. Honest. Even as he broke another law with every beer he poured, every glass of wine that his waiters placed in a gloved hand. But they were all here to break laws.
Kyuhyun couldn’t say he knew more than a few phrases of the buzz that drifted through the room. High end foreign dignitaries unused to prohibition would come and lounge with politicians who weren’t politicians the moment they stepped through the disguised back doors of the Club With No Name. They were faces he recognized and names he couldn’t pronounce, and words of praise that drifted from insincere tongues of men and women who only came here to see and be seen and hear something in the background while they did it, something that wasn’t the sound of their own voices.
Despite the language barrier, though, Kyuhyun was fairly certain that there were a good many of them who would have loved to hear it anyways.
What brought him to the Big Apple wasn’t any dream of becoming rich or making his fortune in America. Any city, any country would have done the job as long as it had jazz, the lazy flow of the piano below a sultry voice as the socialites got quietly stoned. Sometimes a trumpet would send out its sad cry to the night, its voice rising to heights that sent goosebumps racing up his arms, ice down his spine. He had no idea why a jazz band would ever find itself on the streets of Busan, but the next day he had bribed and talked his way onto a ship headed for New York.
He had never looked back.
Because in his gut, in his mind, he could feel the music in every pore of his body when he first heard that piano man play. He would feel lighthearted and sick all at once, the strange strands of a foreign tongue drifting around his ears and sending sparks deep into his gut to settle an odd pressure in his stomach. Women, work, family, none of them could fill the void left when the song ended and the musicians packed their cases. It took just one exposure. Music was a drug, and he was hopelessly addicted.
He spent the next few months at sea drowning his seasickness in the strains of unfamiliar words. Sailors that didn’t speak a word of Korean babbled to him and somehow mimed the odd jobs they wanted him to do - clean the mess hall, scrub the decks, clean the latrines - and in return they never complained or made a comment he could understand about him sitting on the edges of their circles when they were done with their shifts, passing a guitar and singing slow songs that Kyuhyun learned word for word but never understood.
Even standing here in New York, he wasn’t sure if he ever wanted to learn the language he was singing. The nonsense was part of its charm. It reflected the visceral effect the music had on his body. He didn’t understand it, but he knew, he knew exactly what it meant. A shift in key, a change in voice, and suddenly a familiar song was foreign and the feeling it produced very different. The music was very much alive with emotion it its own, like the smoke from lamps and cigars twisting into abstract shapes in the air above the patrons.
It was an odd feeling, this groundlessness, this drifting. He was sure he was getting ripped off for his rent at every single rat infested flat he tried out. But he couldn’t find it in him to feel unhappy. There were flashes of anger, like when yet another suit had been eaten by moths, but then he just started storing them with the chef’s aprons in the closet behind the bar, and the problem never returned. There were flashes of joy when he heard the familiar role of his native language as a new family moved into the floor below him.
But as he stepped onto the stage, he knew that none of those brief sparks could match the fire spreading through his veins as the man at the piano opened the keyboard and he stepped up into the light. The platform was only slightly raised above the tables, and the lights were only a little brighter, but the eyes of flappers and gigolos and dignitaries and politicians and fair ladies in evening gowns were all on him.
In the end, they were all here for the same thing. What they wanted but couldn’t keep, so every night they put on their diamond cufflinks and south sea pearls and made their way back for the feeling of being lost - in the booze, or the company, or the simple, melancholy strains of a piano that ran sort of flat but could always, always sing.
Lithe fingers danced across ivory keys, and Kyuhyun knew the song instantly. The pit returned to his stomach, prodding his body and his mind into wakefulness, the pressure travelling up and tightening in his chest. He let out a deep breath he hadn’t known he was holding, and his voice followed, foreign but familiar.
And here in the dimness, surrounded by people he didn’t know who watched him with varying degrees of interest and aggravation (how many of them would go to bed knowing their partners were thinking of someone else? Kyuhyun felt a smirk tug on his lips at the thought. Yes, those eyes were on him), here was where he knew that he was alive.
---
a/n: Love? Hate? Confused? Please tell me!
About thirty minutes before I had to go to bed and listening to Kyuhyun sing ‘smile’ I found myself in a New York speakeasy in the 1920s. I loved the image and had to get it down. So this story isn’t about anything except an image and an emotion.
---
Spread Fire Through the Soul
---
Smoke drifted through the dusky lounge as painted women held their cgarrettes and men swirrled their brandy in glasses, adding off-beat tinkling of glass and ice to the quiet twilight atmosphere of the room. All muted colors and golden fringe.
The deep mohogany of the furniture and the panelled walls was given a soft sheen from years of polish and the lamps that lined the room. None of that new fancy electric crap - the proprietor wanted to keep the atmosphere of his club real. Honest. Even as he broke another law with every beer he poured, every glass of wine that his waiters placed in a gloved hand. But they were all here to break laws.
Kyuhyun couldn’t say he knew more than a few phrases of the buzz that drifted through the room. High end foreign dignitaries unused to prohibition would come and lounge with politicians who weren’t politicians the moment they stepped through the disguised back doors of the Club With No Name. They were faces he recognized and names he couldn’t pronounce, and words of praise that drifted from insincere tongues of men and women who only came here to see and be seen and hear something in the background while they did it, something that wasn’t the sound of their own voices.
Despite the language barrier, though, Kyuhyun was fairly certain that there were a good many of them who would have loved to hear it anyways.
What brought him to the Big Apple wasn’t any dream of becoming rich or making his fortune in America. Any city, any country would have done the job as long as it had jazz, the lazy flow of the piano below a sultry voice as the socialites got quietly stoned. Sometimes a trumpet would send out its sad cry to the night, its voice rising to heights that sent goosebumps racing up his arms, ice down his spine. He had no idea why a jazz band would ever find itself on the streets of Busan, but the next day he had bribed and talked his way onto a ship headed for New York.
He had never looked back.
Because in his gut, in his mind, he could feel the music in every pore of his body when he first heard that piano man play. He would feel lighthearted and sick all at once, the strange strands of a foreign tongue drifting around his ears and sending sparks deep into his gut to settle an odd pressure in his stomach. Women, work, family, none of them could fill the void left when the song ended and the musicians packed their cases. It took just one exposure. Music was a drug, and he was hopelessly addicted.
He spent the next few months at sea drowning his seasickness in the strains of unfamiliar words. Sailors that didn’t speak a word of Korean babbled to him and somehow mimed the odd jobs they wanted him to do - clean the mess hall, scrub the decks, clean the latrines - and in return they never complained or made a comment he could understand about him sitting on the edges of their circles when they were done with their shifts, passing a guitar and singing slow songs that Kyuhyun learned word for word but never understood.
Even standing here in New York, he wasn’t sure if he ever wanted to learn the language he was singing. The nonsense was part of its charm. It reflected the visceral effect the music had on his body. He didn’t understand it, but he knew, he knew exactly what it meant. A shift in key, a change in voice, and suddenly a familiar song was foreign and the feeling it produced very different. The music was very much alive with emotion it its own, like the smoke from lamps and cigars twisting into abstract shapes in the air above the patrons.
It was an odd feeling, this groundlessness, this drifting. He was sure he was getting ripped off for his rent at every single rat infested flat he tried out. But he couldn’t find it in him to feel unhappy. There were flashes of anger, like when yet another suit had been eaten by moths, but then he just started storing them with the chef’s aprons in the closet behind the bar, and the problem never returned. There were flashes of joy when he heard the familiar role of his native language as a new family moved into the floor below him.
But as he stepped onto the stage, he knew that none of those brief sparks could match the fire spreading through his veins as the man at the piano opened the keyboard and he stepped up into the light. The platform was only slightly raised above the tables, and the lights were only a little brighter, but the eyes of flappers and gigolos and dignitaries and politicians and fair ladies in evening gowns were all on him.
In the end, they were all here for the same thing. What they wanted but couldn’t keep, so every night they put on their diamond cufflinks and south sea pearls and made their way back for the feeling of being lost - in the booze, or the company, or the simple, melancholy strains of a piano that ran sort of flat but could always, always sing.
Lithe fingers danced across ivory keys, and Kyuhyun knew the song instantly. The pit returned to his stomach, prodding his body and his mind into wakefulness, the pressure travelling up and tightening in his chest. He let out a deep breath he hadn’t known he was holding, and his voice followed, foreign but familiar.
And here in the dimness, surrounded by people he didn’t know who watched him with varying degrees of interest and aggravation (how many of them would go to bed knowing their partners were thinking of someone else? Kyuhyun felt a smirk tug on his lips at the thought. Yes, those eyes were on him), here was where he knew that he was alive.
---
a/n: Love? Hate? Confused? Please tell me!