Un-love
Title: Un-love
Author: club_hypnotic in calorie_zero
Pairing: Aoiha, ninja!Reituki
Rating: R
Disclaimer: Unfortunately fiction. *tear*
Summary: Aoi tries to un-love. But the world looks so much better through Uruha's eyes.
Notes: Because Sai demanded I post this as an Aoiha, I did.
one.
It’s been kind of rainy lately. Aoi grumbles, yanking his keys from the car ignition and reluctantly steps out onto the wet pavement in the open parking lot. The sound of water, definitely not rain, draws his attention to a fountain in the middle of the apartment complex he’s never noticed before. A girl is leaning against the side of it, tossing coins over her shoulder.
Too blue, he thinks while standing idly on the way up to the apartment. The button he pushed for floor fourteen stares back, bright blue, fading and letting him go just when he feels slightly sick from the elevator’s shaky reels.
Uruha is huddled under his covers when he opens their bedroom door in search of where everybody has gone. The other beds are still neatly made. Aoi kneels on the floor and strokes Uruha’s chin and makes him purr and stirs him from his sleep by pressing his cold fingers against his warm pulse. A soft techno beat, a chorus of sangcheo nul mu ri heurigeo, from the kitchen makes him want to crawl into bed with Uruha, to wipe the darkness from under his eyes with his thumbs and to eat away his passion, his-
“Aoi?” he mumbles, his face close enough for Aoi to see that his irises are outlined in the same color blue as the fountain water. He sits up in bed, pushing the covers aside, and stumbles into Aoi’s lap. “Everybody else went out drinking but my eyes are puffy and I didn’t want to cook dinner for you only to let it get cold.” The two things don’t relate.
He goes back to sleep on Aoi’s shoulder.
“I’ll just order take-out,” Aoi says aloud to nobody in particular. He wonders how Uruha, who is naked except for his thinning flannel sweatpants, doesn’t feel cold.
From their room, he can still see the fountain. He puts his hand over the back of Uruha’s neck, cradling him closer. The girl is gone and it’s just a blotch of bright white against green and gray and indigo of concrete and perfectly trimmed gardens. But it suddenly hits him that it’s a wishing fountain, like the kind they have in fancy television dramas, and in the moments that he is holding Uruha, the blue water seems just right.
As he’s telling the cashier what he wants in his noodles and Uruha is slumped against the kitchen table, he finds that his open hand fits against the small of Uruha’s back.
It breaks his heart to know.
two.
Uruha won’t stop gravitating towards Reita while Aoi is talking to the camera. And Aoi hopes that if he kisses Reita enough times, Uruha will let him go. Reita might be Uruha’s best friend but Aoi is Uruha’s-pathetically only his.
Aoi tries to focus his attention away from the mating calls, the touches of Reita’s hand upon Uruha’s arm and Uruha’s foot tugging Reita’s leg just a little bit closer, that are making him bite his lip. He sees an empty chair in the corner, painted bright red just like Uruha’s favorite shirts, a vending machine-Aoi-kun, grapefruit juice will make you feel better in the summer hea-Ruki! How can you drink all that coffee in one sip? Your throat must be burned by now-and slowly, he can feel the insanity creeping upon him.
If the world came in two versions-the truth and Uruha shapes-and he had to choose before birth which one he wanted to live in, Aoi would rather have not been born.
The flashing red light on the camera dies and Aoi shoves his way through the crowd of photographers and staff and knocks his shoulder into Uruha especially hard. He doesn’t come home for dinner. Even though Uruha knows, he still sits at the dinner table, knees curled up to his chest and waits.
He feels Aoi slump tiredly into him some hours later, clothes smelling like sweat and nightclubs and alcohol he didn’t get around to drinking, and grasps Aoi’s face with both hands. “I’m really grateful that you were born.”
They’re so close they’re stealing each other’s air.
It breaks his heart to know.
three.
Aoi purposefully takes up all the space on the bed. Uruha is curled up into a ball against his side, cramped in the tiny space between his body and the wall. In the middle of the night, when he’s still awake, he can feel Uruha pushing on his hip, trying to move his heavy limbs so he can have more room.
They open their eyes in the morning and they fight. It’s loud enough to wake Kai and Ruki-not Reita because he’s in the other room, asleep on his keyboard-and because they have an audience, their voices are louder than ever.
“I just need you to move over enough so I have enough room. It’s not like I’m asking you to sleep on the floor or go away!” Uruha is sitting on top of Aoi’s stomach, smothering him with a pillow. “I’m not tiny and I’m not soft and so what if I don’t whimper and mewl when you fuck me. I’m a man too. I’m not a girl that fits perfectly into this triangle of space you’ve left me!”
Kai doesn’t understand why Uruha has to bring up everything over this little nothing. Ruki leaves the room to wake Reita, in case things get uglier.
Aoi manages to grab the pillow he’s practically being forced to eat and throws it across the room. “Maybe we shouldn’t sleep in the same bed then,” he bites out, his voice low, and he jabs at Uruha’s chest with his finger. “And maybe you should start whimpering and mewling if you think that’s what I like so much about you.”
Uruha punches him in the face. “I love you, you dumb fuck.” He climbs off Aoi and goes to the balcony to steal a couple of drags from Reita’s morning cigarette.
It breaks his heart to know.
four.
Aoi is sitting in a pile of fan mail. His fingers have more paper cuts than he thought possible but he reads each letter, feeling burdened and disturbed and somewhat loved. Out of a blue envelope falls a white card.
It makes him laugh when he reads it. The front door clicks open and Uruha walks in, plastic bags crinkling when he sets them on the coffee table. He holds out a glass bottle of Bacardi rum for Aoi and tries to peek over his shoulder at the neatly printed words. The bruise on Aoi’s face is yellowing now and barely visible.
“She says she’s going to marry me and have twenty-five of my kids just fine,” Aoi tells him, grinning at the ridiculousness of even attempting to fulfill that idea. A photo drops out of the envelope into his lap. “Oh, she’s pretty too. Mum would like her.”
“She’s not as pretty as your last girlfriend,” Uruha points out. The hurt is hidden in his voice. “You could do better.” You could do me. You could let me be yours.
It breaks his heart to know.
five.
Aoi doesn’t know what’s wrong with himself. He’s outside at two in the morning, soaked all the way to the bone from stomping in the fountain water because there was a sign that read “do not swim” tacked to the side that pissed him off-the sign destroyed the fountain’s aesthetic-and he’s screaming. The silver coins shift beneath his shoes, disappear from sight under the waves he’s making.
He can’t stop screaming. He can’t even hear himself screaming anymore, his skull rattling from the noise and frustration and he doesn’t know what else to do.
Another scream, much louder than his, cuts into the blankness.
Uruha is standing on the ground, wearing only a white button-up shirt and boxers, screaming back at him. Aoi’s brow creases and he screams even louder and Uruha follows his example until they both are both so light-headed it feels like they’re going to die from not breathing enough and they waver on their feet. Uruha tries to stop screaming first, but when he does, the first breath slices through his throat, leaves him wheezing and screaming all over again.
When he realizes how close Uruha is, Aoi reaches out to grab him and pulls him into the water. Gasping at the new chill numbing him from the inside out, Uruha claws at what he can, knocks Aoi down into the water with him, submerging them both. The water tastes like metal, like the coins and wishes so many people threw away into the fountain.
If Uruha could speak at that very moment, Aoi knows what he would say.
You shouldn’t steal other peoples’ wishes and step on them like this. Every coin looks useless in your coin collection but in here, they look like they could grow wings and come true.
And Aoi would shove him further into the water, punching the limestone and shouting uncontrollably. You don’t know what that means to me. You don’t know what its like to put a coin into that container and feel the same pain from before. You don’t know how stupid I feel sometimes, thinking of all the people who try to do the same thing I did all those years before but they can’t. You don’t even know.
You don’t even know.
But Uruha does know. Uruha knows the world is not made of sugar and spice and everything nice and he knows that people claim and let go better than anyone else, that they’re not permanent, and Aoi starts to cry because he realizes that when Uruha is with him, as whatever, things seem better than they are.
Uruha hauls him out of the fountain. They stumble up the stairs to their apartment, slam open the front door so hard that a cup on the edge of the kitchen counter shatters on the tile, and Uruha drops Aoi onto the shower floor. Reita frowns when he hears the shower turn on this late at night.
By the time Uruha has all of Aoi’s clothes cornered in a pile, Aoi is only just sliding the white shirt down Uruha’s shoulders. They’re kissing, hot and hectic and attempting to breathe through water, and Aoi fits his hands into the curve in Uruha’s back just like before and lets Uruha run his fingers over the dips of his spine. Their skin slides together like a broken record, stopslidestopslide, and Uruha pins him to the wall, limbs clambering over his, the softest part of his inner thigh rubbing between Aoi’s legs. Everything moves in a dreamlike fashion, gentle, cariñoso, and unreal and-
He hears a familiar suck of breath, of pain right next to his ear, a soft moan muted by the splash of water. Hips thrusting back clumsily, Aoi clutches at Uruha and he’s the one whimpering, eyes screwed shut and hoping that it’ll be over soon so he can stop feeling so jumbled up inside.
When Uruha comes, lips on his and hands nearly crushing his ribcage, Aoi comes with him, a strangled cry echoing off the tiles. They stay like that for a long while, Aoi crying into Uruha’s chest, reduced to a mess, and Uruha forcing back the sting of it in his eyes.
They eat breakfast early. Together. It’s not as much as usual, only cereal, and they mull their relationship over a bowl of frosted flakes and milk.
“You know, I really liked your smile when your teeth were kind of crooked here.” Uruha touches the corners of his lips and takes a bite of his cereal. “’Cos it made your lips dent in at those points so you looked like you were always smiling, but I knew you only really smiled at me when you thought no cameras were around.”
Aoi cringes at the thought, but his lower lip curls into half-smile knowing that Uruha hadn’t really cared when he’d been disastrously imperfect.
“There’s always somebody who nobody can match up to,” Uruha begins slowly and smoothes a wrinkle in Aoi’s t-shirt. “Even if you get married and have all those children and grandchildren and even if I do the same, you’ll always be number one. She’ll say it’s unfair for her to be second but you can’t reverse these kinds of things,” he says all this almost nonchalantly, rocking back and forth with one knee up on the seat. “After all the material things I have disappear and I’m old and can’t remember who I am for the life of me, I still want the memory of you to be left over.”
“I don’t really know why it’s this way.”
Biting his lip to choke back the rushing feelings, Aoi wonders if he will even remember these words in twenty years. He tugs Uruha into his lap, drapes his arms over those shoulders pale in the dawn light, and glances down through the window at the fountain. It reminds him of the leak in the living room ceiling that needs to get fixed soon and of Uruha struggling with him through the muddled friendship they’ve nurtured.
I’m sorry I can’t un-love you.
Uruha’s eyes follow his gaze there and back. Their hands are fitted together against the windowsill, glass fogged up from their breathing, fingertips cold, and Aoi lets out the sigh he’s been holding since they first met.
He knows their life will fall back into its usual rhythm of early mornings and late nights. They’ll do what they do best, Uruha will mess up their filming because he’ll find his reflection in Aoi’s eyes hilarious, Reita will poke fun until Ruki accidentally cries and Kai eats the refrigerator in Ruki’s distress, and they have to learn to comfort each other all over again. They’ll pick up the pieces of what they leave behind in the chaos of the day and duct-tape them back together for tomorrow.
And Aoi knows that when they’re in the studio, recording their solo songs for their mini-album, Uruha will look at him from the other side of the glass and see him for more than he is worth.
Though there will always be duct-tape for those bruising comments and aching truths-
it still breaks his heart to know.
_________
notes: The original version of this, as Yunho/Jaejoong from DBSK, can be found here.
Essentially, I translated this from Yunjae to Aoiha so there might be a couple of discrepancies here and there (and those orange italics are somewhat obnoxious, I’m sorry). I guess I’ll continue dabble in this fandom from time to time, but this is not a comeback. Hope you guys still liked it nonetheless.
Comments are love~
Author: club_hypnotic in calorie_zero
Pairing: Aoiha, ninja!Reituki
Rating: R
Disclaimer: Unfortunately fiction. *tear*
Summary: Aoi tries to un-love. But the world looks so much better through Uruha's eyes.
Notes: Because Sai demanded I post this as an Aoiha, I did.
one.
It’s been kind of rainy lately. Aoi grumbles, yanking his keys from the car ignition and reluctantly steps out onto the wet pavement in the open parking lot. The sound of water, definitely not rain, draws his attention to a fountain in the middle of the apartment complex he’s never noticed before. A girl is leaning against the side of it, tossing coins over her shoulder.
Too blue, he thinks while standing idly on the way up to the apartment. The button he pushed for floor fourteen stares back, bright blue, fading and letting him go just when he feels slightly sick from the elevator’s shaky reels.
Uruha is huddled under his covers when he opens their bedroom door in search of where everybody has gone. The other beds are still neatly made. Aoi kneels on the floor and strokes Uruha’s chin and makes him purr and stirs him from his sleep by pressing his cold fingers against his warm pulse. A soft techno beat, a chorus of sangcheo nul mu ri heurigeo, from the kitchen makes him want to crawl into bed with Uruha, to wipe the darkness from under his eyes with his thumbs and to eat away his passion, his-
“Aoi?” he mumbles, his face close enough for Aoi to see that his irises are outlined in the same color blue as the fountain water. He sits up in bed, pushing the covers aside, and stumbles into Aoi’s lap. “Everybody else went out drinking but my eyes are puffy and I didn’t want to cook dinner for you only to let it get cold.” The two things don’t relate.
He goes back to sleep on Aoi’s shoulder.
“I’ll just order take-out,” Aoi says aloud to nobody in particular. He wonders how Uruha, who is naked except for his thinning flannel sweatpants, doesn’t feel cold.
From their room, he can still see the fountain. He puts his hand over the back of Uruha’s neck, cradling him closer. The girl is gone and it’s just a blotch of bright white against green and gray and indigo of concrete and perfectly trimmed gardens. But it suddenly hits him that it’s a wishing fountain, like the kind they have in fancy television dramas, and in the moments that he is holding Uruha, the blue water seems just right.
As he’s telling the cashier what he wants in his noodles and Uruha is slumped against the kitchen table, he finds that his open hand fits against the small of Uruha’s back.
It breaks his heart to know.
two.
Uruha won’t stop gravitating towards Reita while Aoi is talking to the camera. And Aoi hopes that if he kisses Reita enough times, Uruha will let him go. Reita might be Uruha’s best friend but Aoi is Uruha’s-pathetically only his.
Aoi tries to focus his attention away from the mating calls, the touches of Reita’s hand upon Uruha’s arm and Uruha’s foot tugging Reita’s leg just a little bit closer, that are making him bite his lip. He sees an empty chair in the corner, painted bright red just like Uruha’s favorite shirts, a vending machine-Aoi-kun, grapefruit juice will make you feel better in the summer hea-Ruki! How can you drink all that coffee in one sip? Your throat must be burned by now-and slowly, he can feel the insanity creeping upon him.
If the world came in two versions-the truth and Uruha shapes-and he had to choose before birth which one he wanted to live in, Aoi would rather have not been born.
The flashing red light on the camera dies and Aoi shoves his way through the crowd of photographers and staff and knocks his shoulder into Uruha especially hard. He doesn’t come home for dinner. Even though Uruha knows, he still sits at the dinner table, knees curled up to his chest and waits.
He feels Aoi slump tiredly into him some hours later, clothes smelling like sweat and nightclubs and alcohol he didn’t get around to drinking, and grasps Aoi’s face with both hands. “I’m really grateful that you were born.”
They’re so close they’re stealing each other’s air.
It breaks his heart to know.
three.
Aoi purposefully takes up all the space on the bed. Uruha is curled up into a ball against his side, cramped in the tiny space between his body and the wall. In the middle of the night, when he’s still awake, he can feel Uruha pushing on his hip, trying to move his heavy limbs so he can have more room.
They open their eyes in the morning and they fight. It’s loud enough to wake Kai and Ruki-not Reita because he’s in the other room, asleep on his keyboard-and because they have an audience, their voices are louder than ever.
“I just need you to move over enough so I have enough room. It’s not like I’m asking you to sleep on the floor or go away!” Uruha is sitting on top of Aoi’s stomach, smothering him with a pillow. “I’m not tiny and I’m not soft and so what if I don’t whimper and mewl when you fuck me. I’m a man too. I’m not a girl that fits perfectly into this triangle of space you’ve left me!”
Kai doesn’t understand why Uruha has to bring up everything over this little nothing. Ruki leaves the room to wake Reita, in case things get uglier.
Aoi manages to grab the pillow he’s practically being forced to eat and throws it across the room. “Maybe we shouldn’t sleep in the same bed then,” he bites out, his voice low, and he jabs at Uruha’s chest with his finger. “And maybe you should start whimpering and mewling if you think that’s what I like so much about you.”
Uruha punches him in the face. “I love you, you dumb fuck.” He climbs off Aoi and goes to the balcony to steal a couple of drags from Reita’s morning cigarette.
It breaks his heart to know.
four.
Aoi is sitting in a pile of fan mail. His fingers have more paper cuts than he thought possible but he reads each letter, feeling burdened and disturbed and somewhat loved. Out of a blue envelope falls a white card.
It makes him laugh when he reads it. The front door clicks open and Uruha walks in, plastic bags crinkling when he sets them on the coffee table. He holds out a glass bottle of Bacardi rum for Aoi and tries to peek over his shoulder at the neatly printed words. The bruise on Aoi’s face is yellowing now and barely visible.
“She says she’s going to marry me and have twenty-five of my kids just fine,” Aoi tells him, grinning at the ridiculousness of even attempting to fulfill that idea. A photo drops out of the envelope into his lap. “Oh, she’s pretty too. Mum would like her.”
“She’s not as pretty as your last girlfriend,” Uruha points out. The hurt is hidden in his voice. “You could do better.” You could do me. You could let me be yours.
It breaks his heart to know.
five.
Aoi doesn’t know what’s wrong with himself. He’s outside at two in the morning, soaked all the way to the bone from stomping in the fountain water because there was a sign that read “do not swim” tacked to the side that pissed him off-the sign destroyed the fountain’s aesthetic-and he’s screaming. The silver coins shift beneath his shoes, disappear from sight under the waves he’s making.
He can’t stop screaming. He can’t even hear himself screaming anymore, his skull rattling from the noise and frustration and he doesn’t know what else to do.
Another scream, much louder than his, cuts into the blankness.
Uruha is standing on the ground, wearing only a white button-up shirt and boxers, screaming back at him. Aoi’s brow creases and he screams even louder and Uruha follows his example until they both are both so light-headed it feels like they’re going to die from not breathing enough and they waver on their feet. Uruha tries to stop screaming first, but when he does, the first breath slices through his throat, leaves him wheezing and screaming all over again.
When he realizes how close Uruha is, Aoi reaches out to grab him and pulls him into the water. Gasping at the new chill numbing him from the inside out, Uruha claws at what he can, knocks Aoi down into the water with him, submerging them both. The water tastes like metal, like the coins and wishes so many people threw away into the fountain.
If Uruha could speak at that very moment, Aoi knows what he would say.
You shouldn’t steal other peoples’ wishes and step on them like this. Every coin looks useless in your coin collection but in here, they look like they could grow wings and come true.
And Aoi would shove him further into the water, punching the limestone and shouting uncontrollably. You don’t know what that means to me. You don’t know what its like to put a coin into that container and feel the same pain from before. You don’t know how stupid I feel sometimes, thinking of all the people who try to do the same thing I did all those years before but they can’t. You don’t even know.
You don’t even know.
But Uruha does know. Uruha knows the world is not made of sugar and spice and everything nice and he knows that people claim and let go better than anyone else, that they’re not permanent, and Aoi starts to cry because he realizes that when Uruha is with him, as whatever, things seem better than they are.
Uruha hauls him out of the fountain. They stumble up the stairs to their apartment, slam open the front door so hard that a cup on the edge of the kitchen counter shatters on the tile, and Uruha drops Aoi onto the shower floor. Reita frowns when he hears the shower turn on this late at night.
By the time Uruha has all of Aoi’s clothes cornered in a pile, Aoi is only just sliding the white shirt down Uruha’s shoulders. They’re kissing, hot and hectic and attempting to breathe through water, and Aoi fits his hands into the curve in Uruha’s back just like before and lets Uruha run his fingers over the dips of his spine. Their skin slides together like a broken record, stopslidestopslide, and Uruha pins him to the wall, limbs clambering over his, the softest part of his inner thigh rubbing between Aoi’s legs. Everything moves in a dreamlike fashion, gentle, cariñoso, and unreal and-
He hears a familiar suck of breath, of pain right next to his ear, a soft moan muted by the splash of water. Hips thrusting back clumsily, Aoi clutches at Uruha and he’s the one whimpering, eyes screwed shut and hoping that it’ll be over soon so he can stop feeling so jumbled up inside.
When Uruha comes, lips on his and hands nearly crushing his ribcage, Aoi comes with him, a strangled cry echoing off the tiles. They stay like that for a long while, Aoi crying into Uruha’s chest, reduced to a mess, and Uruha forcing back the sting of it in his eyes.
They eat breakfast early. Together. It’s not as much as usual, only cereal, and they mull their relationship over a bowl of frosted flakes and milk.
“You know, I really liked your smile when your teeth were kind of crooked here.” Uruha touches the corners of his lips and takes a bite of his cereal. “’Cos it made your lips dent in at those points so you looked like you were always smiling, but I knew you only really smiled at me when you thought no cameras were around.”
Aoi cringes at the thought, but his lower lip curls into half-smile knowing that Uruha hadn’t really cared when he’d been disastrously imperfect.
“There’s always somebody who nobody can match up to,” Uruha begins slowly and smoothes a wrinkle in Aoi’s t-shirt. “Even if you get married and have all those children and grandchildren and even if I do the same, you’ll always be number one. She’ll say it’s unfair for her to be second but you can’t reverse these kinds of things,” he says all this almost nonchalantly, rocking back and forth with one knee up on the seat. “After all the material things I have disappear and I’m old and can’t remember who I am for the life of me, I still want the memory of you to be left over.”
“I don’t really know why it’s this way.”
Biting his lip to choke back the rushing feelings, Aoi wonders if he will even remember these words in twenty years. He tugs Uruha into his lap, drapes his arms over those shoulders pale in the dawn light, and glances down through the window at the fountain. It reminds him of the leak in the living room ceiling that needs to get fixed soon and of Uruha struggling with him through the muddled friendship they’ve nurtured.
I’m sorry I can’t un-love you.
Uruha’s eyes follow his gaze there and back. Their hands are fitted together against the windowsill, glass fogged up from their breathing, fingertips cold, and Aoi lets out the sigh he’s been holding since they first met.
He knows their life will fall back into its usual rhythm of early mornings and late nights. They’ll do what they do best, Uruha will mess up their filming because he’ll find his reflection in Aoi’s eyes hilarious, Reita will poke fun until Ruki accidentally cries and Kai eats the refrigerator in Ruki’s distress, and they have to learn to comfort each other all over again. They’ll pick up the pieces of what they leave behind in the chaos of the day and duct-tape them back together for tomorrow.
And Aoi knows that when they’re in the studio, recording their solo songs for their mini-album, Uruha will look at him from the other side of the glass and see him for more than he is worth.
Though there will always be duct-tape for those bruising comments and aching truths-
it still breaks his heart to know.
_________
notes: The original version of this, as Yunho/Jaejoong from DBSK, can be found here.
Essentially, I translated this from Yunjae to Aoiha so there might be a couple of discrepancies here and there (and those orange italics are somewhat obnoxious, I’m sorry). I guess I’ll continue dabble in this fandom from time to time, but this is not a comeback. Hope you guys still liked it nonetheless.
Comments are love~