springtides: the gravity of our hearts.
Title: the gravity of our hearts.
Author: spinintriangles -> springtides
Pairings: Yunho/Jaejoong, Yoochun/Junsu
Rating: PG13
Summary: From the very beginning, he’s a boy with a heart made of fire, an accident waiting to happen. His eyes say: give me your heart and I will burn it for you.
Disclaimer: DBSK are their own people under the management of SM Entertainment. The portrayals here are fictional and no money is being made.
Word count: 10 105
From the very beginning, he’s a boy with a name and a heart made of fire, an accident waiting to happen. There’s gasoline in his veins and his fingers aren’t fingers, they’re matchsticks, and he is the one spark that razes the city to the ground.
His eyes say: give me your heart and I will burn it for you.
One.
The first time isn’t really the first time, because Jaejoong’s been doing this for so long that it’s a part of himself, but this is the first time he does it without ever meaning to. He’s about to say, ‘i’ve missed you,’ or ‘it’s been a while’ or anything, anything at all, but he’s just met Yunho and it’s enough to turn his soul inside-out.
There’s a sound of steel rivets screaming loose, glass windows blowing outwards like fireworks before the force of the gas tank igniting throws the frame right into the air. When it comes back to earth it’s not a car anymore, it’s a carbonized skeleton collapsed in on itself. There’s a taste of smoke sticking to Jaejoong’s lips, and all he’s thinking is, not again. The needle is stuck in the groove of the record and it’s not coming back out. It’s playing the same song.
It’s two minutes past five. Thirty seconds ago, the street had been an average not-yet-autumn kind of street, the trees on the sidewalk just beginning to stain with russet and letting their leaves go. Businessmen dodge college students on bicycles and Yunho has just stumbled over his untied shoelaces and bumped into Jaejoong; they’re both full of sorrys for a moment before Jaejoong looks up and he says ‘Hey, aren’t you-’ before he catches himself. He knows this boy, knows the way he holds his shoulders like he is completely at ease with the world and the way his lips curve. It’s pulling him away from his comfort zone and into a place that he doesn’t know but will.
It’s two minutes past five, and Jaejoong is staring at the car wreck, watching pieces of upholstery float upwards, glowing red. The rubber tires are seeping in the asphalt and ripples of heat shudder in the dusty air.
‘Nice work,’ Yunho says, just as the driver’s door of the Cadillac twists off its hinges and tumbles to the ground with a crash that makes a group of teenage girls nearby squeal. The metal goes scattering across the asphalt like a handful of dice.
Jaejoong’s still watching the wreck, nonchalant, phone still in hand.
‘You’re bleeding,’ Yunho says, and Jaejoong pulls his eyes away from the fire to meet Yunho’s only to look away, heart skipping a beat. When he reaches up to touch his cheek his fingers come away sticky, blood clinging to the skin. His vision is clearing like a camera focusing, lenses flickering. The car is still burning just meters away. They’re the only two people on the street still standing, and the wreck is as natural as breathing, but the distance between them isn’t.
‘Listen,’ Yunho says. There’s a siren in the distance. People are starting to pull out their cell phones and snap pictures. ‘How about we get a coffee.’
They go to a tiny place that’s halfway between a café and a restaurant. There is a miniature chef standing in front with round spectacles and a moustache holding a sign reading BEST STEAK IN TOWN! in pink chalk. It’s too warm inside, the air-conditioning turned up too high. Jaejoong’s feeling the awkwardness that always comes with meeting new people, but this isn’t someone new, this is Yunho. He can’t stop stealing glances of him, hungry for reassurance that the boy beside him is real. They sit opposite each other in a little booth with worn red seats and a table that looks like it has been recently vacated and wiped down in a hurry, wet smudges drying before their eyes. The sole waitress has hot pink hair and too much make-up on, eyeliner heavy and mascara clotting on her lashes. Yunho slips into the seat opposite Jaejoong, resting his elbows on the tabletop. The waitress twirls a strand of pink around her finger nervously, staring at the blood on Jaejoong’s face until he smiles at her and she forces one back in response. Yunho asks for two coffees and she totters away to get them, her stilettoed footsteps like gunshots.
Jaejoong peers into his reflection in the glass of the shop window, dabbing at the blood with a napkin. At the same time he’s looking at Yunho out of the corner of his eye, already beginning to forget what the younger Yunho had looked like, displacing his memories. ‘I think some glass from that car hit me.’
‘Your own fault,’ Yunho says, dry. ‘You’ve missed a spot. There.’
The cut is horizontal, just above his cheekbone, open and red inside, the blue of bruised plums around the outside edges. Half an inch higher and it would have performed a dissection to his eye, a miniature glass scientist carving through the retina with his miniature glass fingertip. Jaejoong turns away from the window just as the waitress brings them their coffee. It’s lukewarm and too strong, but Yunho drinks half of his in one go. Jaejoong’s toying with a packet of sugar, not touching his cup. Where have you been, Jaejoong wants to say. What are you doing here? Where does this leave us, he wants to say.
Yunho says, ‘Your self-control doesn’t seem to have improved.’
Jaejoong’s napkin immediately catches fire, and he uses his saucer to squash out the flames before the waitress can notice. Yunho hasn’t moved, eyes watching him in amusement and the corners of his mouth curled up. Jaejoong’s seeing double, a younger Yunho superimposed over this one. He can feel every cell in his body and gravity weighing him down, dragging at his wrists. It’s subtle enough that you wouldn’t notice it until someone says, hey, what’s that? And then you do, and you wish they hadn’t told you.
‘Like I said,’ Yunho says, and Jaejoong’s hands are fisting, nails pressed into his palms. ‘I’m not going to learn how to,’ he says. ‘You couldn’t teach me last time either.’
Yunho laughs, softly. Outside, the sun wears down the sky. Jaejoong’s trying not to think about younger years when he says, ‘I can’t do it, Yunho.’
‘I didn’t ask you to,’ Yunho says.
Jaejoong takes a moment but not a breath, feels his lungs ache in absence. ‘Sorry,’ he says, and it’s too small to hold all of his apologies. It’s been too long. They’re not the same people.
‘Me too,’ Yunho says, and Jaejoong’s taken off guard. Yunho’s never been one for saying sorry even if he was wrong, never let himself be the one to be taken apart. Jaejoong looks down at his hands. They’re not clenched anymore, red marks showing up angry against his skin. His watch is too big for him and it’s slipped so that it’s on the wrong side of his wrist, and Jaejoong realizes that the only train home tonight is leaving in five minutes. He stands up, saying, ‘I have to go.’
Yunho’s unreadable, but he always has been, and he says, ‘See you,’ as if they might meet again, and Jaejoong’s taken one step away when Yunho grabs his hand and pushes a piece of paper into it. Jaejoong feels the edges crumple, curled into his fingers. ‘Just in case,’ Yunho says. Jaejoong doesn’t ask.
It’s not until he’s on the train that he reads it; and it’s a phone number, the handwriting as familiar to Jaejoong as his own. He doesn’t need to look closer to know that the numbers aren’t penned, but burned into the paper.
The second time is an accident, again. Jaejoong’s been doing this ever since he was a child, but most of the time it’s just scorch marks left in the shape of his hand when he presses down too hard onto something, window glass overheating and cracking. Sometimes he’ll be angry, frightened, surprised, and the nearest sheaf of paper will burst into flames, or when he’s tired and stumbling home half-asleep, miss the light switch and drop to his knees only to realize that the carpet under his palms is burning. Sometimes he’ll be laughing at a joke he’s just heard on the radio, or wishing he was somewhere or someone else, and there’ll be a crack as the bracelet he’s wearing melts right off his wrist. He never burns if it’s his own, never scars, never even feels the fire even if he puts his hand in it, but if he switches a fire onto the gas stove and tries touching it, it will give him second degree burns that are always worth a trip to the hospital; not that he ever goes, because his medicine cupboard is always equipped with burn salve and bandages. They’re not there for himself, usually- they’re there if he hurts someone else, and he has, too many times to count.
He knows how to stop once he’s begun, but he doesn’t know how to do it pre-blaze. Yunho had gotten halfway to teaching him, but then that was only because Yunho wanted to know exactly when and where they would go about the burnings. Jaejoong doesn’t like watching television anymore because the channels always seem to be picking up stories about fires, cars and boats and shop items, like the whole city is beginning to turn to smoke.
Jaejoong has only been in Seoul for three, or two months. He still can’t get used to the skyscrapers and the way they seem to touch the clouds, and the hundreds of thousands of planes going past and the way the pavement rumbles when a train worms away underground. He thinks that with all this radiation from computers and dirty smog coming through the space between window and frame and car exhaust he might as well go back to making his way through half a cigarette packet a day.
The second time, Jaejoong is thinking about Yunho without meaning to, without wanting to. He’s memorized Yunho’s phone number the way you will remember anything if you look at it for long enough. He can recite it without thinking now, as though it is a favorite song from his childhood that he has listened to a thousand times, his mouth forming the numbers without him realizing until he hears himself saying them and when he does, he stops himself but five minutes later he’s doing it again.
He hasn’t called Yunho, and he thinks that he never will, but he hasn’t thrown the number out either. It’s still in the pocket of his jacket, which has been hanging over a chair ever since Jaejoong had dropped it there three days ago, sleeves empty and cuffs fading in color from too many washes.
The microwave pings. Jaejoong can smell the kimchi, filtered through the door. His mother had made him bring home two jars of it the last time he visited her. ‘You look skinny,’ she said. ‘You’re going to waste away and no girl will ever date you.’ His mother had never liked Yunho, he remembers- his father even less. ‘Stop bringing that boy home,’ he’d said, frowning at Jaejoong over his morning newspaper; ‘he’s a bad influence.’ And maybe Yunho was, always showing Jaejoong his newest haunts. Jaejoong always came back with soot in his hair, dirt on his knees and under his fingernails, and his parents didn’t approve, they didn’t like him running through the streets with that Jung Yunho, but no matter what they said, Jaejoong still went every time Yunho asked.
After dinner Jaejoong watches a black-and-white movie until he falls asleep on the couch, but the next day he wakes up to find that the whole apartment is on fire. He pushes himself up, throwing a monstrous shadow across the walls. There are flames running along the edge of the carpet, edging up the peeling wallpaper. ‘Shit,’ he says, and then, ‘Stop that.’
The fire snuffs out like a giant had breathed on it. Jaejoong drags a hand over his eyes and through his hair, mouth sour.
This happens half a dozen times, before Jaejoong doesn’t wake up in time and the fire alarm goes off; the entire building scrambles out in their dressing gowns, and Jaejoong ends up having to go into the hallway to get the fire extinguisher. Half of his rooms get covered in foam and Jaejoong has to answer a hundred questions explaining that no, he had no idea how the fire started, he was asleep like most people are at three a.m. in the morning. He calls Yunho just as the sun starts to rise.
Yunho’s bad at the customer service. He says, ‘First things first,’ and takes Jaejoong to meet the rest of the crew. Once it had just been them, two boys made of fire, but now there’s two more. Yunho doesn’t tell Jaejoong what their names are. Jaejoong’s expecting secret hideouts and mafia dealings but Yunho just takes him down to the Han River. They catch a bus and Yunho seems to know the driver, grinning and saying, ‘This is my friend Jaejoong! Say hi, Jae.’
They’re still keeping their distance, Jaejoong subdued, not wanting to admit that he needs Yunho’s help and at the same time not wanting to think about how things would be without Yunho around. Yunho’s casual, nonchalant, and if Jaejoong doesn’t think and just lets himself feel, he could believe that they’re still the best friends they were.
The Han River stings Jaejoong’s eyes when they first get there: sunlight shines from the rim of every wave like they are scales of a serpent, overlapping. There are two boys sitting shoulder to shoulder at the end of the pier. Both of them are holding rods, and there are a couple of round fishless buckets of water nearby. A shirt printed with all the initials of the Beatles members floats in one of them, polyester, silent. Their ages are indeterminable from behind. They don’t turn around until Yunho says, ‘Hey.’
The one still wearing his shirt scoots around at the sound of Yunho’s voice, smiling charmingly up at them. He looks like he could still be in high school, mouth curved in a laughing kind of way, hair home-dyed brown. The other is older, quieter, collarbones showing up white. He looks like a poet or someone that would always keep his own secrets to himself, clandestine but hard to forget.
‘This is the new kid,’ Yunho says. His hand is on Jaejoong’s shoulder, every finger bone outlined, hot enough to scald Jaejoong if he pressed down any harder, but there’s something reassuring about the touch. Two fire-boys. ‘New kid, this is Junsu and this is Yoochun.’
Junsu gets up, dusting off his shorts. His knees are sunburned red, his cheekbones defined under his skin and a smudge of white zinc above his eyebrow. ‘Hi new kid,’ he says, sticking out his hand. Jaejoong takes it, shakes it twice; Junsu feels just like Yunho, spark-bright. His hands are wet from the water, trickles of it looping around his wrist and the sunlight glancing off the moisture like a bracelet of embers. ‘Come to watch the show?’
‘What show?’ Jaejoong has a feeling he already knows, but he’s asking anyway.
‘What’s your name?’ Junsu responds. Yoochun has picked up a pair of binoculars and is peering through the lenses up at them, eyes magnified into blowfly proportions.
‘Jaejoong.’
‘Pretty,’ Junsu says. ‘Welcome to our show. It won’t be long before the curtains go up. Have a seat, eat some popcorn, and if you catch a fish then you will be hailed as the star. This is our third screening and we haven’t yet caught anything unless you count the crab that Yoochun found in his shoe.’
Jaejoong sits between Yoochun and Yunho, dipping his feet into the water and kicking at the waves. The foam is off-white, riding over the water. There is a flock of gulls sitting on the water like a fleet miniature boats. Jaejoong can see a scrap of horizon from behind a small boat that’s just coming in from round the curve of the river. Beside him, Yoochun says, ‘Jaejoong is a nice name.’
‘Thanks,’ Jaejoong says, looking up- Yoochun grins at him and hands him his rod. ‘Maybe you’ll have a talent for catching fish,’ he says.
‘Hey!’ Junsu says, sitting up straight and peering at the water. ‘I’ve got a bite!’
He awkwardly starts reeling the line in, going too fast and laughing all the while, and when he gives a tug they see the fish for a second, flopping into the air at the other end, before it drops away and disappears into the depths of the water. Junsu shouts, ‘Bye fish,’ and waves, and Yoochun says, ‘Your dolphin laugh is going to scare away the rest of them’ before adding, ‘It’s here.’ He’s pointing at a ship that’s just coming into the bay, nosing through the waves, pulled along by the boat Jaejoong had seen earlier.
Junsu forgets the fish immediately, snatching up the binoculars and looking through them. ‘Too far away,’ he says speculatively.
‘Actually,’ says Yoochun, and there’s a crack kind of noise as the deck near the front of the ship goes up in flames. A siren starts screaming, sound rolling across to them and stabbing at Jaejoong’s ears. It’s still too far away to see the sailors on board. Junsu says, ‘Show off,’ and Yoochun says, ‘You’re welcome.’ Yunho nudges Jaejoong with his shoulder and says, ‘Don’t look so worried, it’s only small.’
‘Anything smaller than a bonfire is small in your dictionary,’ Jaejoong says, absently picking at an empty oyster shell stuck to the side of the plank he’s sitting on. Something near his fingernail ignites; the shell peels away from the wood, half-molten, and Jaejoong catches it before it tumbles away. It rolls into the hollow of his palm as he holds it up to the sun, watching the light glimmer across the inside of the shell, glazed purple. There’s still a lick of flame eating at the shell’s edges.
‘It’s nothing,’ Yunho says. ‘They’ll have it out in a minute. This isn’t the first time we’ve done this, you know.’
Jaejoong just drops the shell into the water ripples and watches the flames go out. He doesn’t say, car accidents don’t always happen with first-time drivers.
(This is an old argument. Yunho said, it can’t be that hard! And Jaejoong tried to put the flames out with shaking hands. So far the fires just start, and they won’t end if Jaejoong wishes them to even if Yunho can control both. It’s like dyslexia, Jaejoong said once; it just doesn’t stick with me. But Yunho’s not a patient boy, the way most boys are, when they’re sixteen and even more so when they can do things that you cannot.
It’s after the first fight of many that Jaejoong runs away. He’s done this before, when he was fourteen and his parents were fighting and there was china all over the floor in the kitchen where someone had thrown a mug (Jaejoong’s birthday present from his uncle) and a stain on the wallpaper shaped like a broken heart, tealeaves clinging to it like they didn’t dare fall to the floor. Jaejoong’s dog had managed to dig out from under the fence a week ago and a man had come to the house saying that he was so sorry but he had hit the labrador when it had run across the road and he had taken it to the vet as fast as he could, but.
He was middle-aged, hair going the gray of cigarette ash and mouth turned down at the corners by the beginnings of wrinkles. He’d worn a suit and a blue tie and expensive shoes that were now worn down from days of going to and from his office job and sad brown eyes. He tried to give Jaejoong an envelope that could only have held money but Jaejoong had made him take it back and the man eventually left. The next day Jaejoong had come home and there was a bunch of white lilies on the doorstep, tied together by their stems, their faces wide open.
And one week later Jaejoong had taken the next train out of the city. He didn’t know where either of his parents had gone, but his mother had left a note on the fridge reading: Home soon. The letters were rushed and the ink smeared and the corner of the paper was wrinkled and slightly torn from where she had ripped it from her planner. Jaejoong had taken one look at it and gone to his room and pushed some clothes into a bag and taken his wallet and walked out of the house. He didn’t lock the door.
The station had been quiet when he’d got there. There was a train sitting dormant on one platform and the driver had been taking a break, sitting on a bench and reading the newspaper with one leg crossed over the other. He’d looked up when Jaejoong had come up the stairs, raising his eyebrows and saying, ‘This train goes to Incheon in three minutes,’ and Jaejoong had said, ‘Okay,’ and found a seat in the nearest carriage, his bag next to him. The three minutes was more like fifteen and in that time and old lady with tired feet and a tired mother with three kids all asking for candy had come into the same carriage before a whistle blew outside and the doors slid shut and the train lurched forwards.
Jaejoong had watched the scenery go past, trees and buildings and streets and cars and shopfronts. He’d tried to count the number of people he had seen and wondered if it would be possible to have met all of the six billion people on the face of the planet in one lifetime and thinking of foreign places like America and its big loud cities and tall Paris and places where he could just be him and stop trying to be someone else.
The train went underground, and there were just occasional flashes of tunnel lights, the train’s speed roaring through the window and Jaejoong closes it to muffle the noise, but every other window in the carriage is open so it didn’t make much of a difference. When he finally arrived in Incheon, it was the same as he remembers, smoggy and unfamiliar and the buildings looking like they were pushing up out of the ground like overgrown plants. Jaejoong could hear aeroplanes going overhead but he couldn’t see any of them through the heavy clouds. The traffic was heavy, fifty percent exhaust and fifty percent vehicle. There were semi-trailers between the white lane lines and taxi cabs waiting impatiently before red lights. Jaejoong didn’t know where to go from here, knowing he should be somewhere else but not wanting to be anywhere but here.
He passed a street vendor selling tteokbokki and he bought some, hot enough to scald his tongue. The lady running the stall asked him if he’d like to buy some bird seed- he asked what for and she pointed at the end of the road. ‘There is a park, down there,’ she said. ‘Next to the sea. Lots of pigeons and seagulls to feed.’
Jaejoong bought a plastic bag of it, and the park was further away than the lady made it sound, but it was easy to find and there were more birds than he expected- flocks and flocks, some in the trees and some on the ground, all of them in every shade between white and gray. Jaejoong made a circuit of the park, strewing seed, and soon there was a line of birds stretching out behind him and he pulled out his cell phone and snapped a picture. It’s not good quality but when he looks at the picture later on, his memory fills in all the spaces where the pixels have dissolved the color information; a hundred birds in a haphazard queue, the overcast sky, the buildings going in and out of focus between the trees and the damp grass.
At six pm, Jaejoong was still there, blinking up what he can see of the sky, laid out in the long wet grass and trying to see past the clouds. Stars blink back, a million light years away, and all Jaejoong is thinking about is how hard it must be to make just one star.
Later Yunho calls him. He doesn’t say hey or how are you or anything even close, just ‘where are you?’ and Jaejoong thinks of lying but says, ‘Incheon’ and Yunho says, ‘Incheon?’, like it’s equivalent to the moon or Jupiter. And Jaejoong says, ‘Incheon.’ Yunho says, ‘You’re a long way from home.’
‘Come and get me,’ Jaejoong says, and he’s ten percent joking and ninety percent hoping that he would, and Yunho says, ‘Okay.’
First of many. Later Yunho says, I can’t do this anymore, and Jaejoong says, it’s not my fault. It’s not his fault but they don’t end up meeting each other for the next two years, and in that time he doesn’t ever forget.)
At first they’re just acquaintances, accomplices that set fires and put them out. Neither of them talk about the past, not even Yunho, although Jaejoong can still remember when he picked up every tiny thing and looked at it from every angle and let it be if he liked it and turned it to ashes if he didn’t. Sometimes Yunho calls, says, hey, do you want to-? And Jaejoong says, okay, come pick me up and Yunho will drive up in twenty minutes. Other times, it’s Jaejoong who calls, but it’s always Yunho who comes to him.
They drive out to the forests, long dry distances, the city melting into the horizon behind them. Yunho likes to follow the angles of the coast, till they find a place where the trees are tallest and civilization is furthest. Humans are trespassers here, and Yunho looks less of a person and more of a woodland creature when he’s standing in the space between light and shadow. Jaejoong sees a wolf when he looks at him, filtered through the trees, all watchful eyes and concealed teeth.
Jaejoong’s wearing frayed jeans and an old shirt that’s too thin for this weather, the cold setting into his skin. He sticks his fingers into his pockets, shivering. Yunho has combat boots on and a long coat, There are singe marks near the cuffs. When he stops walking, Jaejoong does too, leaning against a tree, beneath its birch arms and gray leaves, watching Yunho.
The air is kind of still, the way it seems to hold onto time and seconds. Jaejoong thinks, we could be the only two people in the world. Yunho has his hands in his pockets, eyes half-closed, half-open, lashes long. He doesn’t look like he is breathing. Jaejoong is remembering Dali and melting clocks spread out under a dying star. This is not a painting.
When Yunho moves, it’s to raise his hand and Jaejoong doesn’t recognize the object in it until Yunho fires.
Pigeons startle away, wings swirling. Jaejoong is backed up against the birch, wide-eyed, a deer after the headlights have gone right over it. His voice comes out hoarse, shaking all the way down his throat and spine. ‘Are you crazy?’
‘I’m not sure how we’d test that,’ Yunho says, putting the pistol away. ‘What do you say to some back burning? I should get paid to do this.’
‘You pyromaniac,’ Jaejoong says, letting his head fall back. The bark scratches against his hair, presses up against his shoulder blades.
‘Fellow pyromaniac,’ Yunho corrects. ‘We are compatriots of the land of pyromaniacs.’
‘Speak for yourself. You could have told me you were going to do something like that.’
‘It’s April Fool’s Day, idiot.’
The grass Yunho is standing on lights up with a crackle and burns at his leather soles. He says, ‘Fuck you Jaejoong’ and stamps out the flames, singeing the hems of his trousers. ‘April Fool,’ Jaejoong says with a grin and a laugh, and Yunho says, ‘Very funny,’ but he’s laughing too.
They burn small things at first, up close and personal. It gets easier, Yunho says, and it does. It’s not as hard as Jaejoong remembers, but there’s moments when there is a sensation beneath his rings like a fresh burn, skin peeling away, quick like a breath on wintered glass that blooms smoke white for a second before fading. Other times it’s like opening a wound in your heart and someone sticking their fingers straight into it, and air is only a redundant concept.
Sometimes it’s easier and sometimes Jaejoong wants to run into the ocean and sink away under the water but most of the time he just sets things like piles of sticks and trashcans full of newspapers and Yunho’s hair aflame. Jaejoong doesn’t like staying so close to whatever he’s burning, when he can feel the heat on his face and see it rippling through the air like snakes but later they’re climbing apartment blocks via rusty fire escapes and looking down at the streets below, daring each other to lean out further and make spot fires just by looking. Yunho once stands on the railing with his arms out for balance and feet set apart and Jaejoong thinks that if Yunho fell now he wouldn’t know if it was intentional or not- then Yunho does jump, but backwards, and when he lands it’s with a splash of sparks that go skittering across the rooftop, sunbright. Jaejoong wants to say something but he doesn’t know what, so he burns a stray leaf of paper as it goes tumbling down the street below and the two of them lean on the railing and watch, shoulders bumping and unsaid words turning to ashes between them.
Jaejoong’s tired today, like his bones are wearing right out from inside him. They haven’t even been doing much, just walking like strays through the city, setting little fires, so small that no one would take any notice, just streaks of charred fabric in clothes stores and melted tar on forgotten alleyways and that near-invisible handprint on a window where the glass has melted around someone’s fingers. They share earphones on the subway when they head home, Yunho going with Jaejoong because he’s left his car outside Jaejoong’s apartment building. They play foreign songs on repeat to the beat of the train wheels going over every section of track, looping tunes from the 60s, 70s, making their way up to the present and humming the future, Yunho’s breath against that space of skin where Jaejoong’s jaw meets his throat. Jaejoong thinks that he should be anxious about this proximity, but he’s not, and vaguely he thinks that maybe they’re okay right now, back to being best friends.
Yunho eventually runs out of ideas for new songs, and takes to makes stupid jokes about burning music and they step on each other’s feet and Jaejoong goes scrolling through Yunho’s iPod and renaming all of his albums and renaming the iPod itself so that it’s called ‘JAEJOONG WAS HERE’ like tiny glowing graffiti. They miss their stop and keep going because Yunho says that when they get to the end of the line they’ll turn back eventually, but the end of the line turns out to be an hour away and they just keep going until Jaejoong falls asleep and accidentally ignites Yunho’s hair when his head lolls onto his shoulder.
Later they’re just meeting up in coffee shops, in parks, in CD stores. They don’t burn anything tangible, just resolutions and the familiarity of being just friends because they’re not, not really, or at least Jaejoong thinks so. It’s a kind of love, but Jaejoong’s mind is still catching up to his heart.
Jaejoong meets Yunho by mistake in the laundromat two blocks down. Jaejoong’s there getting his clothes washed, legs bent so that his knees are almost touching the floor, dropping his last quarter into the machine. It rumbles in response, its familiar thank you for feeding me your change. Jaejoong watches his clothes go round and round, wondering what it might be like if he were his varsity sweater and getting thrown around like that. But clothes always come down soft, so it wouldn’t matter at all, he supposes, getting to his feet. There is a girl to his right doing sudoku puzzles with a purple pen, perched on top of her washing machine. She has small pretty hands and long legs crossed at the ankles, and Jaejoong thinks that she looks a little familiar. He says, ‘Yoona?’ and she looks up, pen still poised, eyebrows raised as she remembers and says, ‘Oh- Jaejoong?’
‘How come I wasn’t invited to the reunion?’ Yunho’s voice says, and Jaejoong turns around to come face to face with him. ‘Hey Yoona,’ Yunho says, looking over Jaejoong’s head. ‘Hey Jae,’ he says, patting Jaejoong’s hair. ‘Why didn’t you say you knew Yoona?’
‘You didn’t ask,’ Jaejoong says snippily, leaning against a washing machine.
‘Oppa is stupid,’ Yoona says, swinging her legs so that they catch Yunho’s knees. ‘Excuse my big ugly no-good wet blanket brother,’ she tells Jaejoong sweetly.
‘I’m under such heavy fire. How do you know my delightful younger sister?’ Yunho plucks Yoona’s pen from her hand and uses it to draw a sloppy smiley face onto her palm.
‘Old classmates,’ Jaejoong says, as Yunho begins sketching spaghetti hair around the face.
Yoona’s washing machine whirs to a stop and pings. ‘Out of the way,’ she commands Yunho. ‘Before I singe your dresses again?’ he says. Yoona glances at Jaejoong, looking nervous for the first time.
‘It’s okay,’ Yunho says, opening up her washing machine for her. ‘He’s the same.’
‘Get away from my clothes,’ she says immediately. ‘Both of you.’
‘The volatile substances will be getting away now,’ Yunho announces, grabs Jaejoong’s wrist and steers him out of the laundromat. ‘She can be quite vicious,’ he tells Jaejoong, once they’re outside. ‘I put just the tiniest, tiniest burn on her prom dress and she almost stabbed my eyes out with a fork and ate them. Pretty on the outside but very nasty on the inside.’
‘Isn’t that us?’ Jaejoong says, kicking a piece of stone so that it skitters across the pavement and off the curbside, rolling in the dirty gutter. ‘Normal on the outside and not normal on the inside.’
Yunho snaps his fingers in front of Jaejoong’s eyes; there’s a flicker of flame, and Yunho leans in, blows it out so that it just barely scorches Jaejoong’s cheeks. There’s a responding stir in his chest, nestled in his flesh, between the plasma and glucose and platelets and blood cells, an ache, a momentary lull in conversation when he rubs his collarbone, because it’s so distant that he could be imagining it, like the fire is drawing his soul right from his body. Then Yunho smiles at him, bright as bonfires, and Jaejoong has forgotten the feeling.
One week. The air tastes like winter and not-yet rain. Clouds huddle gray and wet in the sky, swollen with water and Jaejoong can feel the damp of them getting under his nails. He pulls his fingers into his sleeves as far as they can go. He needs a new jacket, he thinks, leaning back into the signpost. He’s standing at bus stop waiting for the 72; it’s ten minutes late and counting, but Jaejoong’s never known it to be on time. He runs his eyes over the other people at the stop: there are a couple of girls with tall boots and full pink lips, cooing over a fashion magazine, and a businessman sitting on the sole bench with a laptop balanced on his knees and eyes squinting at the screen nearsightedly. Jaejoong feels like someone is watching him, and when he turns around to look across the street, he sees Yunho outlined against the whitewashed brick wall opposite, moving his thumb like he’s flicking a cigarette lighter on and off, a spark appearing and disappearing over his fist. Jaejoong knows his hand is empty. He mouths, what do you think you’re doing? And Yunho smiles at him just as there is a hiss from behind him and Jaejoong turns his head in time to see the businessman’s laptop crash to the ground, spitting flames and smoke. Jaejoong’s not hearing anything but the wind in his hair as he looks back across the street, but Yunho’s not there anymore.
Three days after this incident, Jaejoong says to Yunho, eyes on a paradise bird, ‘Why did you do that the other day?’
‘Do what?’ Yunho says. They’re in the zoo, by the covered aviaries. Yunho’s sitting on the bench with his legs stretched out in front of him, and Jaejoong has his crossed. The bird is upside-down, violet-green tail feathers splayed like the fingers of an open hand.
Jaejoong just waits, still watching the bird flit from branch to branch to cage bar to branch, as if it’s not satisfied with any of this space. The zoo is full of the trapped. The bird is sitting on the floor of the cage now, and it almost seems to be looking back at him with one gold eye.
‘It was my old landlord,’ Yunho says presently, twisting the paper entry bracelet around his wrist. ‘He kicked me out two months ago and didn’t bother to give a reason. It was also a crap, exorbitant apartment and he wouldn’t let me keep pets.’
‘You don’t have any pets,’ Jaejoong says.
‘Too right I don’t,’ Yunho says.
‘Okay,’ Jaejoong says. The bird is still staring at him and it’s more unsettling than curious now. ‘Do you want to go see the dolphins?’
A month and they meet Changmin. He’s younger than all of them, younger than even Junsu, and they don’t go to the same high school but, as Junsu says, it’s a good thing because Changmin had burnt down half of his school during a science experiment. He’s tall enough to pass for a college student but he says he’s only sixteen. Yoochun picked him up after playing detective and snooping around the school after it had inexplicably turned to cinders, and Changmin is more excited than anything else when Yunho gives him the low down. ‘Are you for real,’ he keeps saying. ‘I’m pyrokinetic.’
He keeps accidentally-on-purpose setting things on fire and putting them out again and even when he is asking Yunho if he can light his cigarette for him or burning Junsu’s English essays or turning Yoochun’s lunch to charcoal or apologizing to Jaejoong for singeing his shirt, Jaejoong thinks of deer, thin-legged and doe-eyed. His hair is too long for him and his trousers too short and his girlfriend’s name is Tiffany and she is louder than he is, her smile blinding. She keeps asking Changmin to do fire tricks for her but he keeps burning the wrong things, but it’s okay, because they’d all been there. Jaejoong was six when he’d more or less set fire to the roof of his house, and after that it had just been a gathering collection of similar incidents. Then Yunho had turned up and said: why, can’t you control it? No, Jaejoong had retorted, can you? And Yunho could. Maybe it’s different for everyone, Yunho had said, and Jaejoong had only shrugged. Later it didn’t matter, because Jaejoong just didn’t like doing it anymore.
Two weeks and it’s Christmas. It’s snowing and Jaejoong is sitting in the driver’s seat of Yunho’s car, keys in the ignition but the engine not running. Yunho says: ‘Are you going to drive or not?’
And Jaejoong says, ‘Yeah.’ He feels charged up with energy today, but he doesn’t know how to use any of it. He thinks that if he starts driving now he’ll burn the road so badly that they’ll fall straight into the core of the earth and if they are lucky they will fall out the other side, punch a whole straight through Brazil and drop into orbit. He thinks that maybe, he could kiss Yunho right now and it would be okay, but just as he thinks this, Yunho shifts, leaning forwards to twist at the radio dials and Jaejoong sighs, leans back into the seat. It’s shaped like Yunho’s back, and Jaejoong feels like an imposter, shoulders not wide enough, spine not long enough. Yunho is getting more static than song, just fragments of tired commercials and new music, a voice saying, ‘until we-’ before Yunho snaps a cassette into sound; it’s one of those old ballet songs that everyone has heard but no one ever knows the name. Jaejoong’s cousin’s name is Sooyoung and she is ten this year. Jaejoong drove her to her dance lessons every Tuesday night for three years and sat on the side watching her and telling her that she was the star of the show even when she fell on stage. Sooyoung has the biggest smile of anyone Jaejoong has ever seen and she’ll be there tonight, and all his cousins and family. The dashboard clock reads ten past seven.
Jaejoong takes a deep breath. There’s a stab of alarm somewhere in his chest, hurt, angry inside him like drinking water just as it comes to the boil, and a nearby bush sparks into light; it only burns for a second before the fire goes out. Yunho says, ‘Be careful.’
‘I know,’ Jaejoong says, and starts up the engine.
The snow makes it hard to see and hard to drive and the cold goes right into Jaejoong’s bones. He says, ‘I hate winter.’
Yunho doesn’t say anything, just puts his feet up onto the dashboard, shoe soles pressed against the windscreen. The defrost doesn’t seem to be working, and Jaejoong can see his breath coming out as though he’s a zephyr and making clouds out of thin air. There’s a plastic sun with a cheery face swinging from the rearview mirror, and it glows orange under the passing streetlights. Yunho says, ‘I wish it were summer,’ then adds, ‘Have a good Christmas dinner.’
It’s Jaejoong’s aunt who answers the door. She’s young for a parent, and tonight she has red and green streaks in her hair and little gold bells tinkling off her ears. ‘Jaejoong!’ she says, greeting him with a hug. She smells like perfume and flowers and home. ‘Just in time. How are you? I hope you’re up for babysitting.’
The house is covered with messy paper chains that don’t seem to follow the usual Christmas color schemes and Jaejoong suspects that someone let Sooyoung and Yuri and Eunhye run away with their purple and pink creativity. He lets his aunt drag him to the kitchen, where everyone is busy cooking, taking it in turns to say, ‘Hi Jaejoong, can you watch the kids?’ in varying tones of voice and choice of words. His mother kisses both his cheeks and pats his cheeks with her floury fingers before sending him off to the living room, saying, ‘Dinner will be ready in half an hour.’
Sungmin is playing Guitar Hero with Jungmin in front of the TV, both of them standing too close to the screen, whilst Heechul lies around in all his thirteen-year-old glory draped over a couch and reading what looks like a teenage girl magazine out loud to his sisters.
‘Take me to your leader,’ Jaejoong says, in way of greeting. Sooyoung looks up, jumps to her feet and grabs him around the middle, saying something that sounded like ‘I missed you oppa’. Her arms are only barely long enough to reach all the way around him, and even then her chin digs into his stomach. When she lets go, she’s smiling like she knows a big secret that’s about to be revealed and Jaejoong is about to ask her why she’s looking so happy when Yuri creeps up from behind Jaejoong to pounce onto his back and Eunhye throws a cushion at his head. Heechul nods in approval and says, ‘I’m gathering my army, Jaejoong. Just remember to buy me a compact mirror and some new earrings for my birthday or I’ll unleash my soldiers.
Sooyoung grins, ‘Oppa, Heechul says he’s going to show me how to paint my nails.’
Yuri shrieks, ‘He did mine for me,’ and Eunhye says, ‘Mine are better,’ and both of them are holding their hands out to Jaejoong. Yuri’s are rainbow and Eunhye’s are alternated pink and white. ‘I am a nail polish extraordinaire,’ Heechul says, lifting his hands up as well, and his are all painted a different shade of blue, varying from navy to cloud-pale. ‘Who knew these magazines could be so useful?’
Jaejoong’s about to say something tactful about how they all look very pretty when Jungmin screams, ‘Shit,’ and throws his guitar controller at Sungmin. ‘You always beat me.’
‘And you shouldn’t be such a sore loser,’ Sungmin retorts.
Jungmin says, ‘I hate you Sungmin,’ to which Sungmin replies, ‘Likewise. Rematch?’ And Jungmin says, ‘I’m definitely winning this time.’
He loses, predictably, and makes Sungmin play Mortal Kombat, which Sungmin loses, predictably, in a great shower of blood and gore throughout which Heechul makes retching noises. In between switching discs they do look up and say ‘Hi hyung!’ to Jaejoong, but then the game boots up and they are fixated with putting all their energy into kicking each other into a messy digital death.
‘How have you been oppa,’ Sooyoung asks Jaejoong, as she paints his nails purple. ‘I hope you’ve been good.’
Jaejoong thinks about Yunho for a second, then says, ‘When am I not good?’
Sooyoung giggles and ends up getting more polish onto Jaejoong’s cuticles than his nails.
Over dinner there is a lot of champagne and orange juice passed around, and Jungmin steals some of his mother’s when she’s not looking but gets violently sick halfway through the turkey and for ten minutes afterwards everyone tries to ignore the sounds of him throwing up in the bathroom. Sungmin unhelpfully stands outside the door and laughs at him for the entire ten minutes but when Jungmin comes out, he opened the door outwards and hit Sungmin with it, which effectively shut him up.
There is an awkward moment when Jaejoong’s mother asks, ‘How are you and Taeyeon?’ and Jaejoong chokes on his piece of turkey and Heechul happily beats him on the back harder than needed. ‘Um,’ he says, ‘we broke up six months ago.’
His uncle says, ‘That’s a shame,’ just as his mother says, ‘Personally I think it’s because he doesn’t eat enough. Girls don’t like skinny men. Or the ones that burn their house down,’ she adds.
‘I’m getting better,’ Jaejoong says, in what he hopes is a nonchalant manner. ‘It’s not so spontaneous anymore.’
‘Does that mean you can cook?’ she asks. ‘Girls don’t like men that can’t cook.’
Yunho calls him after dinner, when Jaejoong is teaching Sooyoung how to play We Wish You a Merry Christmas on the piano. She sits on his lap and she giggles at random intervals, turning her head so that her hair tickles Jaejoong’s chin. Whilst she plays the first couple of bars, she tells him about the kitten they had found the other day and how they will put up found posters and how she will make these with lots of pink and purple paper because they are her favorite colors. ‘Come see the kitty,’ she says, jumping off Jaejoong’s knees. ‘But you haven’t finished the song,’ he says. ‘It’s waiting for you to get to the end.’
Sooyoung chews her lip. ‘If I finish it, we can go see the kitty, right?’
‘Right,’ Jaejoong tells her, and she climbs back onto his knees. She plays the song through, fumbling some parts and humming the lyrics and the moment she is done she gets up, takes a bow, accepts Jaejoong’s applause and she says, ‘Now we can go see the kitty?’ and before Jaejoong can answer, his phone rings.
It’s Yunho and when Jaejoong picks up, he can hear background noises that sound like Yunho is in a bar, all loud voices and clinking glasses. Yunho says something and Jaejoong says, ‘What?’ and Yunho says again, ‘I kind of wish you were here. Or me where you are.’
‘Oh,’ Jaejoong says. There’s a pause, and Yunho says, ‘You missed your cue.’ Jaejoong is about to reply when Yunho adds, ‘Merry Christmas!’ and hangs up.
Sooyoung is tugging on his sleeve. ‘Hey oppa,’ she whispers, conspirator. ‘Is Yunho oppa your boyfriend.’ She pronounces the word ‘boyfriend’ like it’s the most important word in the world. And maybe, Jaejoong thinks dryly, it is, in the world of Sooyoung, if she’s been exposed to Heechul’s girl magazines.
He says, ‘Maybe.’
Sooyoung beams up at him. Her dimples are high in her cheeks, Jaejoong realizes. She says, ‘I’ll dance at your wedding, okay?’ and drags him off to see the kitten, which is being housed in the laundry. They spend most of their night in there, playing with the cat until it falls asleep in Sooyoung’s lap, and Sooyoung falls asleep on Jaejoong’s shoulder. He gets caught between sleep and awake for an hour or more, standing in a hallway with only two doors that don’t open for him, and when he does dream, it’s about Yunho and he’s drowning.
On New Years Eve, they climb an apartment building. It’s still halfway in the construction stage, just unpainted surfaces and loose gravel, concrete walls. No windows and the sense of ghosts lurking behind corners, but there’s five of them, all with fire running through their veins and Jaejoong’s thinking about how easy it is to control himself these days.
There’s five minutes to the fireworks. Junsu is counting backwards so that the first explosion will be synced with his zero, and Changmin is counting upwards so that they’ll be synced to his three hundred. Yoochun calls them geeks and lies on the ground with his head on Junsu’s lap. Jaejoong is sitting on the railing, legs off the edge, Yunho’s left glove on his hand. It’s slightly too big for him, too much length in the fingers, but it’s warm, and Yunho’s shoulder is against his, channeling heat through the contact. Jaejoong can barely feel the earth and its gravity, and it feels like Yunho’s the only thing keeping him here.
Junsu says ‘ten!’ just as Changmin says, ‘two hundred and ninety!’ Jaejoong touches Yunho’s wrist with his bare fingers, pallid. He’d once read a story as a child about someone that you could trust to the end of the universe. Dying stars couldn’t erase this, it said. Jaejoong can hear Yunho’s heartbeat, and he can still hear it when the first firework goes off.
‘Happy New Year,’ Yunho says, and Jaejoong’s hand tightens in his.
Afterwards, Yunho says he’ll take Jaejoong home. The quiet of the streets is strange after the fireworks, and Jaejoong’s still running them through his head, his pulse still expecting a jump and a thud as the next explosion goes off. It’s cold, and Jaejoong is looking at his own reflection in the passenger mirror. He can barely feel his feet in his shoes and he knows that his body temperature is meant to be higher than this, and there’s just a sense of the cold and Yunho in the car with him, side by side. The engine is rumbling gently, gas tank almost empty, and they’re still thirty miles from home. They’re not going anywhere, paused in a standstill in the middle of a street Jaejoong doesn’t recognize, lit up with the headlights. The dashboard clock ticks as the numbers change to one a.m. just as Yunho says, ‘Jaejoong,’ and Jaejoong turns his head to look at him. Yunho’s got both hands on the steering wheel, one gloved, one not, but then the bare one is on Jaejoong’s shoulder, pulling them together and there’s a flicker of flame that goes right through his body and into Jaejoong’s when he kisses him.
It’s like being set on fire, all at once.
They go to the beach on the first of March. Yunho calls it an expedition. Jaejoong calls it time in the sun. Winter has ended early this year, he says. We need our Vitamin D.
They take Yunho’s car, but Yoochun drives because Yunho says he doesn’t want to. When they leave, it’s 6.32 a.m. and the city’s still asleep. Jaejoong takes the middle of the backseat, Changmin behind Yoochun and Yunho on Jaejoong’s right. Yoochun plays the radio obnoxiously loud and Junsu changes the station every song. They get onto the highway just as the sun starts to rise from behind them, reflecting off the cars in front of them. They take it slow until they get onto the freeway, which is when Yoochun revs the car into going ten miles over the speed limit, weaving in and out of lanes. Junsu stops playing with the radio and starts on Mario Kart instead. Changmin is dozing, head lolling every time Yoochun changes lanes. Yunho is amusing himself with a box of tissues, turning them one by one to ash. Jaejoong can’t stop drinking in the sight of all of the passing scenery.
‘Anyone hungry?’ Yoochun asks, at ten.
‘Starving,’ Yunho says. ‘I could eat a cow. Or three.’
Changmin mumbles something that sounds like ‘McDonalds’ and Yoochun sighs. ‘Junk food junkie.’
They go by the drive-thru and Yoochun digs a few dollars out of the glovebox and talks to the service girl for too long. She lets them have extra fries for no extra charge and Yoochun waves at her as they leave and Jaejoong knows she laughs without hearing it. ‘Player,’ he says.
‘Free fries,’ Yoochun replies.
They pull off the highway and to the side of a road. Yoochun cuts the engine and the car rattles to a stop.
‘Where to next?’ Junsu asks, around a mouthful of burger. He has a map spread out all over the front seats, green fields and blue waters and brown unfamiliar lands.
‘Leave the navigating to Captain Yoochun,’ says Yoochun. ‘You’ll probably lead us into a ditch or off a cliff or into a city taken over by zombies.’
‘I’m a Mario Kart pro,’ Junsu argues. ‘All you ever play is Playboy Mansion.’
‘Driving is not a game,’ Yoochun says solidly, and after lunch he proceeds to drive them in the wrong direction for half an hour before Changmin says, ‘Hey, aren’t we going towards Seoul?’ To which Yoochun replies, ‘Oh crap.’ And Jaejoong interjects, ‘Loser.’
Yoochun’s half cousin’s best friend’s uncle owns this house, with its own private beach spread out in front of it. Jaejoong doesn’t want to know how much all of this costs, but when they dump their bags in the house and get onto the sand, the first thing Junsu does is find a crab and drop it down Jaejoong’s shirt so he doesn’t get an opportunity to even think about it anyway.
Yoochun collects seashells and builds castles out of sand that crumble before he is even halfway finished but he keeps on building them, a whole city of bucket buildings. Junsu helps him dig an enormous moat but when they try to fill it with water it just seeps between the grains and leaves them wet and heavy. Changmin runs around building miniature bonfires on the sand, and when he remembers that glass is made of sand, he tries to make some but all he ends up doing is making lots of sparks that look like tiny fireworks.
Yunho stands in the water thigh-deep, facing the horizon. His hair is wet but Jaejoong can’t remember seeing him dive under the waves, and when he goes out to stand by him, the water comes almost up to his waist in an endless crash of salt and sea. His feet are sunk up to the ankles in clean sand, and the ocean feels like it’s drawing Jaejoong under. Yunho doesn’t seem to notice he’s there till he touches his wrist underwater, and when he turns to look at him it’s like he’s seeing straight through him before his eyes focus and he smiles and says, ‘What do you think would happen if-’ and there’s a glow of warmth blossoming from his skin and when he takes Jaejoong’s hand, there’s a hiss, a flash, a moment where all the water surrounding their fingers evaporates, but the empty space is crashed through again when the next wave arrives and when they laugh it’s long and loud and Jaejoong can’t think of any place that he would rather be.
They have a barbeque on the beach for dinner. Yoochun and Junsu went to the local convenience store just before sunset and came back with frozen pork ribs and vegetables and Changmin is given the job of skewering these, whilst Yunho has to fix the barbeque so that it won’t turn into a bonfire every time they turn it on. Jaejoong sits on the sand and watches, snapping photos with Junsu’s Polaroid camera and weighing each fresh one down with a seashell. By the time Yunho has figured out that the barbeque comes alight so easily because it’s more or less doused in lighter oil, there are a dozen photos pinned down against the sand, showing Yunho on his knees peering beneath the machine, setting it on fire, setting it on fire, putting the fire out with a snap of his fingers and setting it on fire again before there’s a photo of him waving at the camera, mouth open in a laugh and his eyes creased and the wind carding through his hair and blowing it around his face, frozen in time.
Changmin tries to light up the beach with candles that he found in the beach house but they keep going out, no matter how much he tries- he gives up and roots around in the space underneath the house where Yoochun says that there are lanterns and drags out six, all rust and cracked glass, but they work fine, shining bright as the stars. They eat with their fingers, sitting in the sand, one lantern to each and one in the middle of their circle. ‘Some campfire,’ Yoochun says, and Junsu says, ‘I’ll show you campfire,’ and these’s a bang as the centre lantern explodes. There’s a pile of black when it burns out and they pile driftwood onto it to make a bonfire, moving so that they sit in a half circle because the wind blew the smoke into Yunho’s and Changmin’s eyes. Yunho’s now sitting against Jaejoong, and he could be leaning on Jaejoong’s shoulder or it could be the other way around and neither of them are quite sure of which way it is but they don’t care. Yoochun gets bored later and says, ‘One sec,’ and walks off into the shadows, only to return ten seconds later by taking a running dive in to Junsu, who knocks into Jaejoong and all three of them tumble into the fire; they roll out in a tangle of limbs and fire and scattering embers, shrieking half in surprise and half with laughter and Junsu rolls around on the sand trying to put the flames out whilst Changmin rolls around on the sand trying to stop laughing. Jaejoong’s clothes are still on fire and he has enough time to say ‘You owe me a new shirt-’ to Yoochun before Yunho grabs him by the wrist to drag him headfirst into the ocean.
They’re both submerged for a second of airlessness and Jaejoong catches sight of Yunho’s face through the layers of water before their heads break the waves, gasping for oxygen. They float for a minute, tasting the salt and their proximity and the distance to the sky and satellites and not looking at each other, just drifting. Then Yunho pulls Jaejoong from the sea by the fingers, hand, wrist, heart, burning bright, and they are like two mermaids coming to land with new feet and no voices to sing with.
But this is love. It doesn’t need a song.
Art Post
Author: spinintriangles -> springtides
Pairings: Yunho/Jaejoong, Yoochun/Junsu
Rating: PG13
Summary: From the very beginning, he’s a boy with a heart made of fire, an accident waiting to happen. His eyes say: give me your heart and I will burn it for you.
Disclaimer: DBSK are their own people under the management of SM Entertainment. The portrayals here are fictional and no money is being made.
Word count: 10 105
From the very beginning, he’s a boy with a name and a heart made of fire, an accident waiting to happen. There’s gasoline in his veins and his fingers aren’t fingers, they’re matchsticks, and he is the one spark that razes the city to the ground.
His eyes say: give me your heart and I will burn it for you.
One.
The first time isn’t really the first time, because Jaejoong’s been doing this for so long that it’s a part of himself, but this is the first time he does it without ever meaning to. He’s about to say, ‘i’ve missed you,’ or ‘it’s been a while’ or anything, anything at all, but he’s just met Yunho and it’s enough to turn his soul inside-out.
There’s a sound of steel rivets screaming loose, glass windows blowing outwards like fireworks before the force of the gas tank igniting throws the frame right into the air. When it comes back to earth it’s not a car anymore, it’s a carbonized skeleton collapsed in on itself. There’s a taste of smoke sticking to Jaejoong’s lips, and all he’s thinking is, not again. The needle is stuck in the groove of the record and it’s not coming back out. It’s playing the same song.
It’s two minutes past five. Thirty seconds ago, the street had been an average not-yet-autumn kind of street, the trees on the sidewalk just beginning to stain with russet and letting their leaves go. Businessmen dodge college students on bicycles and Yunho has just stumbled over his untied shoelaces and bumped into Jaejoong; they’re both full of sorrys for a moment before Jaejoong looks up and he says ‘Hey, aren’t you-’ before he catches himself. He knows this boy, knows the way he holds his shoulders like he is completely at ease with the world and the way his lips curve. It’s pulling him away from his comfort zone and into a place that he doesn’t know but will.
It’s two minutes past five, and Jaejoong is staring at the car wreck, watching pieces of upholstery float upwards, glowing red. The rubber tires are seeping in the asphalt and ripples of heat shudder in the dusty air.
‘Nice work,’ Yunho says, just as the driver’s door of the Cadillac twists off its hinges and tumbles to the ground with a crash that makes a group of teenage girls nearby squeal. The metal goes scattering across the asphalt like a handful of dice.
Jaejoong’s still watching the wreck, nonchalant, phone still in hand.
‘You’re bleeding,’ Yunho says, and Jaejoong pulls his eyes away from the fire to meet Yunho’s only to look away, heart skipping a beat. When he reaches up to touch his cheek his fingers come away sticky, blood clinging to the skin. His vision is clearing like a camera focusing, lenses flickering. The car is still burning just meters away. They’re the only two people on the street still standing, and the wreck is as natural as breathing, but the distance between them isn’t.
‘Listen,’ Yunho says. There’s a siren in the distance. People are starting to pull out their cell phones and snap pictures. ‘How about we get a coffee.’
They go to a tiny place that’s halfway between a café and a restaurant. There is a miniature chef standing in front with round spectacles and a moustache holding a sign reading BEST STEAK IN TOWN! in pink chalk. It’s too warm inside, the air-conditioning turned up too high. Jaejoong’s feeling the awkwardness that always comes with meeting new people, but this isn’t someone new, this is Yunho. He can’t stop stealing glances of him, hungry for reassurance that the boy beside him is real. They sit opposite each other in a little booth with worn red seats and a table that looks like it has been recently vacated and wiped down in a hurry, wet smudges drying before their eyes. The sole waitress has hot pink hair and too much make-up on, eyeliner heavy and mascara clotting on her lashes. Yunho slips into the seat opposite Jaejoong, resting his elbows on the tabletop. The waitress twirls a strand of pink around her finger nervously, staring at the blood on Jaejoong’s face until he smiles at her and she forces one back in response. Yunho asks for two coffees and she totters away to get them, her stilettoed footsteps like gunshots.
Jaejoong peers into his reflection in the glass of the shop window, dabbing at the blood with a napkin. At the same time he’s looking at Yunho out of the corner of his eye, already beginning to forget what the younger Yunho had looked like, displacing his memories. ‘I think some glass from that car hit me.’
‘Your own fault,’ Yunho says, dry. ‘You’ve missed a spot. There.’
The cut is horizontal, just above his cheekbone, open and red inside, the blue of bruised plums around the outside edges. Half an inch higher and it would have performed a dissection to his eye, a miniature glass scientist carving through the retina with his miniature glass fingertip. Jaejoong turns away from the window just as the waitress brings them their coffee. It’s lukewarm and too strong, but Yunho drinks half of his in one go. Jaejoong’s toying with a packet of sugar, not touching his cup. Where have you been, Jaejoong wants to say. What are you doing here? Where does this leave us, he wants to say.
Yunho says, ‘Your self-control doesn’t seem to have improved.’
Jaejoong’s napkin immediately catches fire, and he uses his saucer to squash out the flames before the waitress can notice. Yunho hasn’t moved, eyes watching him in amusement and the corners of his mouth curled up. Jaejoong’s seeing double, a younger Yunho superimposed over this one. He can feel every cell in his body and gravity weighing him down, dragging at his wrists. It’s subtle enough that you wouldn’t notice it until someone says, hey, what’s that? And then you do, and you wish they hadn’t told you.
‘Like I said,’ Yunho says, and Jaejoong’s hands are fisting, nails pressed into his palms. ‘I’m not going to learn how to,’ he says. ‘You couldn’t teach me last time either.’
Yunho laughs, softly. Outside, the sun wears down the sky. Jaejoong’s trying not to think about younger years when he says, ‘I can’t do it, Yunho.’
‘I didn’t ask you to,’ Yunho says.
Jaejoong takes a moment but not a breath, feels his lungs ache in absence. ‘Sorry,’ he says, and it’s too small to hold all of his apologies. It’s been too long. They’re not the same people.
‘Me too,’ Yunho says, and Jaejoong’s taken off guard. Yunho’s never been one for saying sorry even if he was wrong, never let himself be the one to be taken apart. Jaejoong looks down at his hands. They’re not clenched anymore, red marks showing up angry against his skin. His watch is too big for him and it’s slipped so that it’s on the wrong side of his wrist, and Jaejoong realizes that the only train home tonight is leaving in five minutes. He stands up, saying, ‘I have to go.’
Yunho’s unreadable, but he always has been, and he says, ‘See you,’ as if they might meet again, and Jaejoong’s taken one step away when Yunho grabs his hand and pushes a piece of paper into it. Jaejoong feels the edges crumple, curled into his fingers. ‘Just in case,’ Yunho says. Jaejoong doesn’t ask.
It’s not until he’s on the train that he reads it; and it’s a phone number, the handwriting as familiar to Jaejoong as his own. He doesn’t need to look closer to know that the numbers aren’t penned, but burned into the paper.
The second time is an accident, again. Jaejoong’s been doing this ever since he was a child, but most of the time it’s just scorch marks left in the shape of his hand when he presses down too hard onto something, window glass overheating and cracking. Sometimes he’ll be angry, frightened, surprised, and the nearest sheaf of paper will burst into flames, or when he’s tired and stumbling home half-asleep, miss the light switch and drop to his knees only to realize that the carpet under his palms is burning. Sometimes he’ll be laughing at a joke he’s just heard on the radio, or wishing he was somewhere or someone else, and there’ll be a crack as the bracelet he’s wearing melts right off his wrist. He never burns if it’s his own, never scars, never even feels the fire even if he puts his hand in it, but if he switches a fire onto the gas stove and tries touching it, it will give him second degree burns that are always worth a trip to the hospital; not that he ever goes, because his medicine cupboard is always equipped with burn salve and bandages. They’re not there for himself, usually- they’re there if he hurts someone else, and he has, too many times to count.
He knows how to stop once he’s begun, but he doesn’t know how to do it pre-blaze. Yunho had gotten halfway to teaching him, but then that was only because Yunho wanted to know exactly when and where they would go about the burnings. Jaejoong doesn’t like watching television anymore because the channels always seem to be picking up stories about fires, cars and boats and shop items, like the whole city is beginning to turn to smoke.
Jaejoong has only been in Seoul for three, or two months. He still can’t get used to the skyscrapers and the way they seem to touch the clouds, and the hundreds of thousands of planes going past and the way the pavement rumbles when a train worms away underground. He thinks that with all this radiation from computers and dirty smog coming through the space between window and frame and car exhaust he might as well go back to making his way through half a cigarette packet a day.
The second time, Jaejoong is thinking about Yunho without meaning to, without wanting to. He’s memorized Yunho’s phone number the way you will remember anything if you look at it for long enough. He can recite it without thinking now, as though it is a favorite song from his childhood that he has listened to a thousand times, his mouth forming the numbers without him realizing until he hears himself saying them and when he does, he stops himself but five minutes later he’s doing it again.
He hasn’t called Yunho, and he thinks that he never will, but he hasn’t thrown the number out either. It’s still in the pocket of his jacket, which has been hanging over a chair ever since Jaejoong had dropped it there three days ago, sleeves empty and cuffs fading in color from too many washes.
The microwave pings. Jaejoong can smell the kimchi, filtered through the door. His mother had made him bring home two jars of it the last time he visited her. ‘You look skinny,’ she said. ‘You’re going to waste away and no girl will ever date you.’ His mother had never liked Yunho, he remembers- his father even less. ‘Stop bringing that boy home,’ he’d said, frowning at Jaejoong over his morning newspaper; ‘he’s a bad influence.’ And maybe Yunho was, always showing Jaejoong his newest haunts. Jaejoong always came back with soot in his hair, dirt on his knees and under his fingernails, and his parents didn’t approve, they didn’t like him running through the streets with that Jung Yunho, but no matter what they said, Jaejoong still went every time Yunho asked.
After dinner Jaejoong watches a black-and-white movie until he falls asleep on the couch, but the next day he wakes up to find that the whole apartment is on fire. He pushes himself up, throwing a monstrous shadow across the walls. There are flames running along the edge of the carpet, edging up the peeling wallpaper. ‘Shit,’ he says, and then, ‘Stop that.’
The fire snuffs out like a giant had breathed on it. Jaejoong drags a hand over his eyes and through his hair, mouth sour.
This happens half a dozen times, before Jaejoong doesn’t wake up in time and the fire alarm goes off; the entire building scrambles out in their dressing gowns, and Jaejoong ends up having to go into the hallway to get the fire extinguisher. Half of his rooms get covered in foam and Jaejoong has to answer a hundred questions explaining that no, he had no idea how the fire started, he was asleep like most people are at three a.m. in the morning. He calls Yunho just as the sun starts to rise.
Yunho’s bad at the customer service. He says, ‘First things first,’ and takes Jaejoong to meet the rest of the crew. Once it had just been them, two boys made of fire, but now there’s two more. Yunho doesn’t tell Jaejoong what their names are. Jaejoong’s expecting secret hideouts and mafia dealings but Yunho just takes him down to the Han River. They catch a bus and Yunho seems to know the driver, grinning and saying, ‘This is my friend Jaejoong! Say hi, Jae.’
They’re still keeping their distance, Jaejoong subdued, not wanting to admit that he needs Yunho’s help and at the same time not wanting to think about how things would be without Yunho around. Yunho’s casual, nonchalant, and if Jaejoong doesn’t think and just lets himself feel, he could believe that they’re still the best friends they were.
The Han River stings Jaejoong’s eyes when they first get there: sunlight shines from the rim of every wave like they are scales of a serpent, overlapping. There are two boys sitting shoulder to shoulder at the end of the pier. Both of them are holding rods, and there are a couple of round fishless buckets of water nearby. A shirt printed with all the initials of the Beatles members floats in one of them, polyester, silent. Their ages are indeterminable from behind. They don’t turn around until Yunho says, ‘Hey.’
The one still wearing his shirt scoots around at the sound of Yunho’s voice, smiling charmingly up at them. He looks like he could still be in high school, mouth curved in a laughing kind of way, hair home-dyed brown. The other is older, quieter, collarbones showing up white. He looks like a poet or someone that would always keep his own secrets to himself, clandestine but hard to forget.
‘This is the new kid,’ Yunho says. His hand is on Jaejoong’s shoulder, every finger bone outlined, hot enough to scald Jaejoong if he pressed down any harder, but there’s something reassuring about the touch. Two fire-boys. ‘New kid, this is Junsu and this is Yoochun.’
Junsu gets up, dusting off his shorts. His knees are sunburned red, his cheekbones defined under his skin and a smudge of white zinc above his eyebrow. ‘Hi new kid,’ he says, sticking out his hand. Jaejoong takes it, shakes it twice; Junsu feels just like Yunho, spark-bright. His hands are wet from the water, trickles of it looping around his wrist and the sunlight glancing off the moisture like a bracelet of embers. ‘Come to watch the show?’
‘What show?’ Jaejoong has a feeling he already knows, but he’s asking anyway.
‘What’s your name?’ Junsu responds. Yoochun has picked up a pair of binoculars and is peering through the lenses up at them, eyes magnified into blowfly proportions.
‘Jaejoong.’
‘Pretty,’ Junsu says. ‘Welcome to our show. It won’t be long before the curtains go up. Have a seat, eat some popcorn, and if you catch a fish then you will be hailed as the star. This is our third screening and we haven’t yet caught anything unless you count the crab that Yoochun found in his shoe.’
Jaejoong sits between Yoochun and Yunho, dipping his feet into the water and kicking at the waves. The foam is off-white, riding over the water. There is a flock of gulls sitting on the water like a fleet miniature boats. Jaejoong can see a scrap of horizon from behind a small boat that’s just coming in from round the curve of the river. Beside him, Yoochun says, ‘Jaejoong is a nice name.’
‘Thanks,’ Jaejoong says, looking up- Yoochun grins at him and hands him his rod. ‘Maybe you’ll have a talent for catching fish,’ he says.
‘Hey!’ Junsu says, sitting up straight and peering at the water. ‘I’ve got a bite!’
He awkwardly starts reeling the line in, going too fast and laughing all the while, and when he gives a tug they see the fish for a second, flopping into the air at the other end, before it drops away and disappears into the depths of the water. Junsu shouts, ‘Bye fish,’ and waves, and Yoochun says, ‘Your dolphin laugh is going to scare away the rest of them’ before adding, ‘It’s here.’ He’s pointing at a ship that’s just coming into the bay, nosing through the waves, pulled along by the boat Jaejoong had seen earlier.
Junsu forgets the fish immediately, snatching up the binoculars and looking through them. ‘Too far away,’ he says speculatively.
‘Actually,’ says Yoochun, and there’s a crack kind of noise as the deck near the front of the ship goes up in flames. A siren starts screaming, sound rolling across to them and stabbing at Jaejoong’s ears. It’s still too far away to see the sailors on board. Junsu says, ‘Show off,’ and Yoochun says, ‘You’re welcome.’ Yunho nudges Jaejoong with his shoulder and says, ‘Don’t look so worried, it’s only small.’
‘Anything smaller than a bonfire is small in your dictionary,’ Jaejoong says, absently picking at an empty oyster shell stuck to the side of the plank he’s sitting on. Something near his fingernail ignites; the shell peels away from the wood, half-molten, and Jaejoong catches it before it tumbles away. It rolls into the hollow of his palm as he holds it up to the sun, watching the light glimmer across the inside of the shell, glazed purple. There’s still a lick of flame eating at the shell’s edges.
‘It’s nothing,’ Yunho says. ‘They’ll have it out in a minute. This isn’t the first time we’ve done this, you know.’
Jaejoong just drops the shell into the water ripples and watches the flames go out. He doesn’t say, car accidents don’t always happen with first-time drivers.
(This is an old argument. Yunho said, it can’t be that hard! And Jaejoong tried to put the flames out with shaking hands. So far the fires just start, and they won’t end if Jaejoong wishes them to even if Yunho can control both. It’s like dyslexia, Jaejoong said once; it just doesn’t stick with me. But Yunho’s not a patient boy, the way most boys are, when they’re sixteen and even more so when they can do things that you cannot.
It’s after the first fight of many that Jaejoong runs away. He’s done this before, when he was fourteen and his parents were fighting and there was china all over the floor in the kitchen where someone had thrown a mug (Jaejoong’s birthday present from his uncle) and a stain on the wallpaper shaped like a broken heart, tealeaves clinging to it like they didn’t dare fall to the floor. Jaejoong’s dog had managed to dig out from under the fence a week ago and a man had come to the house saying that he was so sorry but he had hit the labrador when it had run across the road and he had taken it to the vet as fast as he could, but.
He was middle-aged, hair going the gray of cigarette ash and mouth turned down at the corners by the beginnings of wrinkles. He’d worn a suit and a blue tie and expensive shoes that were now worn down from days of going to and from his office job and sad brown eyes. He tried to give Jaejoong an envelope that could only have held money but Jaejoong had made him take it back and the man eventually left. The next day Jaejoong had come home and there was a bunch of white lilies on the doorstep, tied together by their stems, their faces wide open.
And one week later Jaejoong had taken the next train out of the city. He didn’t know where either of his parents had gone, but his mother had left a note on the fridge reading: Home soon. The letters were rushed and the ink smeared and the corner of the paper was wrinkled and slightly torn from where she had ripped it from her planner. Jaejoong had taken one look at it and gone to his room and pushed some clothes into a bag and taken his wallet and walked out of the house. He didn’t lock the door.
The station had been quiet when he’d got there. There was a train sitting dormant on one platform and the driver had been taking a break, sitting on a bench and reading the newspaper with one leg crossed over the other. He’d looked up when Jaejoong had come up the stairs, raising his eyebrows and saying, ‘This train goes to Incheon in three minutes,’ and Jaejoong had said, ‘Okay,’ and found a seat in the nearest carriage, his bag next to him. The three minutes was more like fifteen and in that time and old lady with tired feet and a tired mother with three kids all asking for candy had come into the same carriage before a whistle blew outside and the doors slid shut and the train lurched forwards.
Jaejoong had watched the scenery go past, trees and buildings and streets and cars and shopfronts. He’d tried to count the number of people he had seen and wondered if it would be possible to have met all of the six billion people on the face of the planet in one lifetime and thinking of foreign places like America and its big loud cities and tall Paris and places where he could just be him and stop trying to be someone else.
The train went underground, and there were just occasional flashes of tunnel lights, the train’s speed roaring through the window and Jaejoong closes it to muffle the noise, but every other window in the carriage is open so it didn’t make much of a difference. When he finally arrived in Incheon, it was the same as he remembers, smoggy and unfamiliar and the buildings looking like they were pushing up out of the ground like overgrown plants. Jaejoong could hear aeroplanes going overhead but he couldn’t see any of them through the heavy clouds. The traffic was heavy, fifty percent exhaust and fifty percent vehicle. There were semi-trailers between the white lane lines and taxi cabs waiting impatiently before red lights. Jaejoong didn’t know where to go from here, knowing he should be somewhere else but not wanting to be anywhere but here.
He passed a street vendor selling tteokbokki and he bought some, hot enough to scald his tongue. The lady running the stall asked him if he’d like to buy some bird seed- he asked what for and she pointed at the end of the road. ‘There is a park, down there,’ she said. ‘Next to the sea. Lots of pigeons and seagulls to feed.’
Jaejoong bought a plastic bag of it, and the park was further away than the lady made it sound, but it was easy to find and there were more birds than he expected- flocks and flocks, some in the trees and some on the ground, all of them in every shade between white and gray. Jaejoong made a circuit of the park, strewing seed, and soon there was a line of birds stretching out behind him and he pulled out his cell phone and snapped a picture. It’s not good quality but when he looks at the picture later on, his memory fills in all the spaces where the pixels have dissolved the color information; a hundred birds in a haphazard queue, the overcast sky, the buildings going in and out of focus between the trees and the damp grass.
At six pm, Jaejoong was still there, blinking up what he can see of the sky, laid out in the long wet grass and trying to see past the clouds. Stars blink back, a million light years away, and all Jaejoong is thinking about is how hard it must be to make just one star.
Later Yunho calls him. He doesn’t say hey or how are you or anything even close, just ‘where are you?’ and Jaejoong thinks of lying but says, ‘Incheon’ and Yunho says, ‘Incheon?’, like it’s equivalent to the moon or Jupiter. And Jaejoong says, ‘Incheon.’ Yunho says, ‘You’re a long way from home.’
‘Come and get me,’ Jaejoong says, and he’s ten percent joking and ninety percent hoping that he would, and Yunho says, ‘Okay.’
First of many. Later Yunho says, I can’t do this anymore, and Jaejoong says, it’s not my fault. It’s not his fault but they don’t end up meeting each other for the next two years, and in that time he doesn’t ever forget.)
At first they’re just acquaintances, accomplices that set fires and put them out. Neither of them talk about the past, not even Yunho, although Jaejoong can still remember when he picked up every tiny thing and looked at it from every angle and let it be if he liked it and turned it to ashes if he didn’t. Sometimes Yunho calls, says, hey, do you want to-? And Jaejoong says, okay, come pick me up and Yunho will drive up in twenty minutes. Other times, it’s Jaejoong who calls, but it’s always Yunho who comes to him.
They drive out to the forests, long dry distances, the city melting into the horizon behind them. Yunho likes to follow the angles of the coast, till they find a place where the trees are tallest and civilization is furthest. Humans are trespassers here, and Yunho looks less of a person and more of a woodland creature when he’s standing in the space between light and shadow. Jaejoong sees a wolf when he looks at him, filtered through the trees, all watchful eyes and concealed teeth.
Jaejoong’s wearing frayed jeans and an old shirt that’s too thin for this weather, the cold setting into his skin. He sticks his fingers into his pockets, shivering. Yunho has combat boots on and a long coat, There are singe marks near the cuffs. When he stops walking, Jaejoong does too, leaning against a tree, beneath its birch arms and gray leaves, watching Yunho.
The air is kind of still, the way it seems to hold onto time and seconds. Jaejoong thinks, we could be the only two people in the world. Yunho has his hands in his pockets, eyes half-closed, half-open, lashes long. He doesn’t look like he is breathing. Jaejoong is remembering Dali and melting clocks spread out under a dying star. This is not a painting.
When Yunho moves, it’s to raise his hand and Jaejoong doesn’t recognize the object in it until Yunho fires.
Pigeons startle away, wings swirling. Jaejoong is backed up against the birch, wide-eyed, a deer after the headlights have gone right over it. His voice comes out hoarse, shaking all the way down his throat and spine. ‘Are you crazy?’
‘I’m not sure how we’d test that,’ Yunho says, putting the pistol away. ‘What do you say to some back burning? I should get paid to do this.’
‘You pyromaniac,’ Jaejoong says, letting his head fall back. The bark scratches against his hair, presses up against his shoulder blades.
‘Fellow pyromaniac,’ Yunho corrects. ‘We are compatriots of the land of pyromaniacs.’
‘Speak for yourself. You could have told me you were going to do something like that.’
‘It’s April Fool’s Day, idiot.’
The grass Yunho is standing on lights up with a crackle and burns at his leather soles. He says, ‘Fuck you Jaejoong’ and stamps out the flames, singeing the hems of his trousers. ‘April Fool,’ Jaejoong says with a grin and a laugh, and Yunho says, ‘Very funny,’ but he’s laughing too.
They burn small things at first, up close and personal. It gets easier, Yunho says, and it does. It’s not as hard as Jaejoong remembers, but there’s moments when there is a sensation beneath his rings like a fresh burn, skin peeling away, quick like a breath on wintered glass that blooms smoke white for a second before fading. Other times it’s like opening a wound in your heart and someone sticking their fingers straight into it, and air is only a redundant concept.
Sometimes it’s easier and sometimes Jaejoong wants to run into the ocean and sink away under the water but most of the time he just sets things like piles of sticks and trashcans full of newspapers and Yunho’s hair aflame. Jaejoong doesn’t like staying so close to whatever he’s burning, when he can feel the heat on his face and see it rippling through the air like snakes but later they’re climbing apartment blocks via rusty fire escapes and looking down at the streets below, daring each other to lean out further and make spot fires just by looking. Yunho once stands on the railing with his arms out for balance and feet set apart and Jaejoong thinks that if Yunho fell now he wouldn’t know if it was intentional or not- then Yunho does jump, but backwards, and when he lands it’s with a splash of sparks that go skittering across the rooftop, sunbright. Jaejoong wants to say something but he doesn’t know what, so he burns a stray leaf of paper as it goes tumbling down the street below and the two of them lean on the railing and watch, shoulders bumping and unsaid words turning to ashes between them.
Jaejoong’s tired today, like his bones are wearing right out from inside him. They haven’t even been doing much, just walking like strays through the city, setting little fires, so small that no one would take any notice, just streaks of charred fabric in clothes stores and melted tar on forgotten alleyways and that near-invisible handprint on a window where the glass has melted around someone’s fingers. They share earphones on the subway when they head home, Yunho going with Jaejoong because he’s left his car outside Jaejoong’s apartment building. They play foreign songs on repeat to the beat of the train wheels going over every section of track, looping tunes from the 60s, 70s, making their way up to the present and humming the future, Yunho’s breath against that space of skin where Jaejoong’s jaw meets his throat. Jaejoong thinks that he should be anxious about this proximity, but he’s not, and vaguely he thinks that maybe they’re okay right now, back to being best friends.
Yunho eventually runs out of ideas for new songs, and takes to makes stupid jokes about burning music and they step on each other’s feet and Jaejoong goes scrolling through Yunho’s iPod and renaming all of his albums and renaming the iPod itself so that it’s called ‘JAEJOONG WAS HERE’ like tiny glowing graffiti. They miss their stop and keep going because Yunho says that when they get to the end of the line they’ll turn back eventually, but the end of the line turns out to be an hour away and they just keep going until Jaejoong falls asleep and accidentally ignites Yunho’s hair when his head lolls onto his shoulder.
Later they’re just meeting up in coffee shops, in parks, in CD stores. They don’t burn anything tangible, just resolutions and the familiarity of being just friends because they’re not, not really, or at least Jaejoong thinks so. It’s a kind of love, but Jaejoong’s mind is still catching up to his heart.
Jaejoong meets Yunho by mistake in the laundromat two blocks down. Jaejoong’s there getting his clothes washed, legs bent so that his knees are almost touching the floor, dropping his last quarter into the machine. It rumbles in response, its familiar thank you for feeding me your change. Jaejoong watches his clothes go round and round, wondering what it might be like if he were his varsity sweater and getting thrown around like that. But clothes always come down soft, so it wouldn’t matter at all, he supposes, getting to his feet. There is a girl to his right doing sudoku puzzles with a purple pen, perched on top of her washing machine. She has small pretty hands and long legs crossed at the ankles, and Jaejoong thinks that she looks a little familiar. He says, ‘Yoona?’ and she looks up, pen still poised, eyebrows raised as she remembers and says, ‘Oh- Jaejoong?’
‘How come I wasn’t invited to the reunion?’ Yunho’s voice says, and Jaejoong turns around to come face to face with him. ‘Hey Yoona,’ Yunho says, looking over Jaejoong’s head. ‘Hey Jae,’ he says, patting Jaejoong’s hair. ‘Why didn’t you say you knew Yoona?’
‘You didn’t ask,’ Jaejoong says snippily, leaning against a washing machine.
‘Oppa is stupid,’ Yoona says, swinging her legs so that they catch Yunho’s knees. ‘Excuse my big ugly no-good wet blanket brother,’ she tells Jaejoong sweetly.
‘I’m under such heavy fire. How do you know my delightful younger sister?’ Yunho plucks Yoona’s pen from her hand and uses it to draw a sloppy smiley face onto her palm.
‘Old classmates,’ Jaejoong says, as Yunho begins sketching spaghetti hair around the face.
Yoona’s washing machine whirs to a stop and pings. ‘Out of the way,’ she commands Yunho. ‘Before I singe your dresses again?’ he says. Yoona glances at Jaejoong, looking nervous for the first time.
‘It’s okay,’ Yunho says, opening up her washing machine for her. ‘He’s the same.’
‘Get away from my clothes,’ she says immediately. ‘Both of you.’
‘The volatile substances will be getting away now,’ Yunho announces, grabs Jaejoong’s wrist and steers him out of the laundromat. ‘She can be quite vicious,’ he tells Jaejoong, once they’re outside. ‘I put just the tiniest, tiniest burn on her prom dress and she almost stabbed my eyes out with a fork and ate them. Pretty on the outside but very nasty on the inside.’
‘Isn’t that us?’ Jaejoong says, kicking a piece of stone so that it skitters across the pavement and off the curbside, rolling in the dirty gutter. ‘Normal on the outside and not normal on the inside.’
Yunho snaps his fingers in front of Jaejoong’s eyes; there’s a flicker of flame, and Yunho leans in, blows it out so that it just barely scorches Jaejoong’s cheeks. There’s a responding stir in his chest, nestled in his flesh, between the plasma and glucose and platelets and blood cells, an ache, a momentary lull in conversation when he rubs his collarbone, because it’s so distant that he could be imagining it, like the fire is drawing his soul right from his body. Then Yunho smiles at him, bright as bonfires, and Jaejoong has forgotten the feeling.
One week. The air tastes like winter and not-yet rain. Clouds huddle gray and wet in the sky, swollen with water and Jaejoong can feel the damp of them getting under his nails. He pulls his fingers into his sleeves as far as they can go. He needs a new jacket, he thinks, leaning back into the signpost. He’s standing at bus stop waiting for the 72; it’s ten minutes late and counting, but Jaejoong’s never known it to be on time. He runs his eyes over the other people at the stop: there are a couple of girls with tall boots and full pink lips, cooing over a fashion magazine, and a businessman sitting on the sole bench with a laptop balanced on his knees and eyes squinting at the screen nearsightedly. Jaejoong feels like someone is watching him, and when he turns around to look across the street, he sees Yunho outlined against the whitewashed brick wall opposite, moving his thumb like he’s flicking a cigarette lighter on and off, a spark appearing and disappearing over his fist. Jaejoong knows his hand is empty. He mouths, what do you think you’re doing? And Yunho smiles at him just as there is a hiss from behind him and Jaejoong turns his head in time to see the businessman’s laptop crash to the ground, spitting flames and smoke. Jaejoong’s not hearing anything but the wind in his hair as he looks back across the street, but Yunho’s not there anymore.
Three days after this incident, Jaejoong says to Yunho, eyes on a paradise bird, ‘Why did you do that the other day?’
‘Do what?’ Yunho says. They’re in the zoo, by the covered aviaries. Yunho’s sitting on the bench with his legs stretched out in front of him, and Jaejoong has his crossed. The bird is upside-down, violet-green tail feathers splayed like the fingers of an open hand.
Jaejoong just waits, still watching the bird flit from branch to branch to cage bar to branch, as if it’s not satisfied with any of this space. The zoo is full of the trapped. The bird is sitting on the floor of the cage now, and it almost seems to be looking back at him with one gold eye.
‘It was my old landlord,’ Yunho says presently, twisting the paper entry bracelet around his wrist. ‘He kicked me out two months ago and didn’t bother to give a reason. It was also a crap, exorbitant apartment and he wouldn’t let me keep pets.’
‘You don’t have any pets,’ Jaejoong says.
‘Too right I don’t,’ Yunho says.
‘Okay,’ Jaejoong says. The bird is still staring at him and it’s more unsettling than curious now. ‘Do you want to go see the dolphins?’
A month and they meet Changmin. He’s younger than all of them, younger than even Junsu, and they don’t go to the same high school but, as Junsu says, it’s a good thing because Changmin had burnt down half of his school during a science experiment. He’s tall enough to pass for a college student but he says he’s only sixteen. Yoochun picked him up after playing detective and snooping around the school after it had inexplicably turned to cinders, and Changmin is more excited than anything else when Yunho gives him the low down. ‘Are you for real,’ he keeps saying. ‘I’m pyrokinetic.’
He keeps accidentally-on-purpose setting things on fire and putting them out again and even when he is asking Yunho if he can light his cigarette for him or burning Junsu’s English essays or turning Yoochun’s lunch to charcoal or apologizing to Jaejoong for singeing his shirt, Jaejoong thinks of deer, thin-legged and doe-eyed. His hair is too long for him and his trousers too short and his girlfriend’s name is Tiffany and she is louder than he is, her smile blinding. She keeps asking Changmin to do fire tricks for her but he keeps burning the wrong things, but it’s okay, because they’d all been there. Jaejoong was six when he’d more or less set fire to the roof of his house, and after that it had just been a gathering collection of similar incidents. Then Yunho had turned up and said: why, can’t you control it? No, Jaejoong had retorted, can you? And Yunho could. Maybe it’s different for everyone, Yunho had said, and Jaejoong had only shrugged. Later it didn’t matter, because Jaejoong just didn’t like doing it anymore.
Two weeks and it’s Christmas. It’s snowing and Jaejoong is sitting in the driver’s seat of Yunho’s car, keys in the ignition but the engine not running. Yunho says: ‘Are you going to drive or not?’
And Jaejoong says, ‘Yeah.’ He feels charged up with energy today, but he doesn’t know how to use any of it. He thinks that if he starts driving now he’ll burn the road so badly that they’ll fall straight into the core of the earth and if they are lucky they will fall out the other side, punch a whole straight through Brazil and drop into orbit. He thinks that maybe, he could kiss Yunho right now and it would be okay, but just as he thinks this, Yunho shifts, leaning forwards to twist at the radio dials and Jaejoong sighs, leans back into the seat. It’s shaped like Yunho’s back, and Jaejoong feels like an imposter, shoulders not wide enough, spine not long enough. Yunho is getting more static than song, just fragments of tired commercials and new music, a voice saying, ‘until we-’ before Yunho snaps a cassette into sound; it’s one of those old ballet songs that everyone has heard but no one ever knows the name. Jaejoong’s cousin’s name is Sooyoung and she is ten this year. Jaejoong drove her to her dance lessons every Tuesday night for three years and sat on the side watching her and telling her that she was the star of the show even when she fell on stage. Sooyoung has the biggest smile of anyone Jaejoong has ever seen and she’ll be there tonight, and all his cousins and family. The dashboard clock reads ten past seven.
Jaejoong takes a deep breath. There’s a stab of alarm somewhere in his chest, hurt, angry inside him like drinking water just as it comes to the boil, and a nearby bush sparks into light; it only burns for a second before the fire goes out. Yunho says, ‘Be careful.’
‘I know,’ Jaejoong says, and starts up the engine.
The snow makes it hard to see and hard to drive and the cold goes right into Jaejoong’s bones. He says, ‘I hate winter.’
Yunho doesn’t say anything, just puts his feet up onto the dashboard, shoe soles pressed against the windscreen. The defrost doesn’t seem to be working, and Jaejoong can see his breath coming out as though he’s a zephyr and making clouds out of thin air. There’s a plastic sun with a cheery face swinging from the rearview mirror, and it glows orange under the passing streetlights. Yunho says, ‘I wish it were summer,’ then adds, ‘Have a good Christmas dinner.’
It’s Jaejoong’s aunt who answers the door. She’s young for a parent, and tonight she has red and green streaks in her hair and little gold bells tinkling off her ears. ‘Jaejoong!’ she says, greeting him with a hug. She smells like perfume and flowers and home. ‘Just in time. How are you? I hope you’re up for babysitting.’
The house is covered with messy paper chains that don’t seem to follow the usual Christmas color schemes and Jaejoong suspects that someone let Sooyoung and Yuri and Eunhye run away with their purple and pink creativity. He lets his aunt drag him to the kitchen, where everyone is busy cooking, taking it in turns to say, ‘Hi Jaejoong, can you watch the kids?’ in varying tones of voice and choice of words. His mother kisses both his cheeks and pats his cheeks with her floury fingers before sending him off to the living room, saying, ‘Dinner will be ready in half an hour.’
Sungmin is playing Guitar Hero with Jungmin in front of the TV, both of them standing too close to the screen, whilst Heechul lies around in all his thirteen-year-old glory draped over a couch and reading what looks like a teenage girl magazine out loud to his sisters.
‘Take me to your leader,’ Jaejoong says, in way of greeting. Sooyoung looks up, jumps to her feet and grabs him around the middle, saying something that sounded like ‘I missed you oppa’. Her arms are only barely long enough to reach all the way around him, and even then her chin digs into his stomach. When she lets go, she’s smiling like she knows a big secret that’s about to be revealed and Jaejoong is about to ask her why she’s looking so happy when Yuri creeps up from behind Jaejoong to pounce onto his back and Eunhye throws a cushion at his head. Heechul nods in approval and says, ‘I’m gathering my army, Jaejoong. Just remember to buy me a compact mirror and some new earrings for my birthday or I’ll unleash my soldiers.
Sooyoung grins, ‘Oppa, Heechul says he’s going to show me how to paint my nails.’
Yuri shrieks, ‘He did mine for me,’ and Eunhye says, ‘Mine are better,’ and both of them are holding their hands out to Jaejoong. Yuri’s are rainbow and Eunhye’s are alternated pink and white. ‘I am a nail polish extraordinaire,’ Heechul says, lifting his hands up as well, and his are all painted a different shade of blue, varying from navy to cloud-pale. ‘Who knew these magazines could be so useful?’
Jaejoong’s about to say something tactful about how they all look very pretty when Jungmin screams, ‘Shit,’ and throws his guitar controller at Sungmin. ‘You always beat me.’
‘And you shouldn’t be such a sore loser,’ Sungmin retorts.
Jungmin says, ‘I hate you Sungmin,’ to which Sungmin replies, ‘Likewise. Rematch?’ And Jungmin says, ‘I’m definitely winning this time.’
He loses, predictably, and makes Sungmin play Mortal Kombat, which Sungmin loses, predictably, in a great shower of blood and gore throughout which Heechul makes retching noises. In between switching discs they do look up and say ‘Hi hyung!’ to Jaejoong, but then the game boots up and they are fixated with putting all their energy into kicking each other into a messy digital death.
‘How have you been oppa,’ Sooyoung asks Jaejoong, as she paints his nails purple. ‘I hope you’ve been good.’
Jaejoong thinks about Yunho for a second, then says, ‘When am I not good?’
Sooyoung giggles and ends up getting more polish onto Jaejoong’s cuticles than his nails.
Over dinner there is a lot of champagne and orange juice passed around, and Jungmin steals some of his mother’s when she’s not looking but gets violently sick halfway through the turkey and for ten minutes afterwards everyone tries to ignore the sounds of him throwing up in the bathroom. Sungmin unhelpfully stands outside the door and laughs at him for the entire ten minutes but when Jungmin comes out, he opened the door outwards and hit Sungmin with it, which effectively shut him up.
There is an awkward moment when Jaejoong’s mother asks, ‘How are you and Taeyeon?’ and Jaejoong chokes on his piece of turkey and Heechul happily beats him on the back harder than needed. ‘Um,’ he says, ‘we broke up six months ago.’
His uncle says, ‘That’s a shame,’ just as his mother says, ‘Personally I think it’s because he doesn’t eat enough. Girls don’t like skinny men. Or the ones that burn their house down,’ she adds.
‘I’m getting better,’ Jaejoong says, in what he hopes is a nonchalant manner. ‘It’s not so spontaneous anymore.’
‘Does that mean you can cook?’ she asks. ‘Girls don’t like men that can’t cook.’
Yunho calls him after dinner, when Jaejoong is teaching Sooyoung how to play We Wish You a Merry Christmas on the piano. She sits on his lap and she giggles at random intervals, turning her head so that her hair tickles Jaejoong’s chin. Whilst she plays the first couple of bars, she tells him about the kitten they had found the other day and how they will put up found posters and how she will make these with lots of pink and purple paper because they are her favorite colors. ‘Come see the kitty,’ she says, jumping off Jaejoong’s knees. ‘But you haven’t finished the song,’ he says. ‘It’s waiting for you to get to the end.’
Sooyoung chews her lip. ‘If I finish it, we can go see the kitty, right?’
‘Right,’ Jaejoong tells her, and she climbs back onto his knees. She plays the song through, fumbling some parts and humming the lyrics and the moment she is done she gets up, takes a bow, accepts Jaejoong’s applause and she says, ‘Now we can go see the kitty?’ and before Jaejoong can answer, his phone rings.
It’s Yunho and when Jaejoong picks up, he can hear background noises that sound like Yunho is in a bar, all loud voices and clinking glasses. Yunho says something and Jaejoong says, ‘What?’ and Yunho says again, ‘I kind of wish you were here. Or me where you are.’
‘Oh,’ Jaejoong says. There’s a pause, and Yunho says, ‘You missed your cue.’ Jaejoong is about to reply when Yunho adds, ‘Merry Christmas!’ and hangs up.
Sooyoung is tugging on his sleeve. ‘Hey oppa,’ she whispers, conspirator. ‘Is Yunho oppa your boyfriend.’ She pronounces the word ‘boyfriend’ like it’s the most important word in the world. And maybe, Jaejoong thinks dryly, it is, in the world of Sooyoung, if she’s been exposed to Heechul’s girl magazines.
He says, ‘Maybe.’
Sooyoung beams up at him. Her dimples are high in her cheeks, Jaejoong realizes. She says, ‘I’ll dance at your wedding, okay?’ and drags him off to see the kitten, which is being housed in the laundry. They spend most of their night in there, playing with the cat until it falls asleep in Sooyoung’s lap, and Sooyoung falls asleep on Jaejoong’s shoulder. He gets caught between sleep and awake for an hour or more, standing in a hallway with only two doors that don’t open for him, and when he does dream, it’s about Yunho and he’s drowning.
On New Years Eve, they climb an apartment building. It’s still halfway in the construction stage, just unpainted surfaces and loose gravel, concrete walls. No windows and the sense of ghosts lurking behind corners, but there’s five of them, all with fire running through their veins and Jaejoong’s thinking about how easy it is to control himself these days.
There’s five minutes to the fireworks. Junsu is counting backwards so that the first explosion will be synced with his zero, and Changmin is counting upwards so that they’ll be synced to his three hundred. Yoochun calls them geeks and lies on the ground with his head on Junsu’s lap. Jaejoong is sitting on the railing, legs off the edge, Yunho’s left glove on his hand. It’s slightly too big for him, too much length in the fingers, but it’s warm, and Yunho’s shoulder is against his, channeling heat through the contact. Jaejoong can barely feel the earth and its gravity, and it feels like Yunho’s the only thing keeping him here.
Junsu says ‘ten!’ just as Changmin says, ‘two hundred and ninety!’ Jaejoong touches Yunho’s wrist with his bare fingers, pallid. He’d once read a story as a child about someone that you could trust to the end of the universe. Dying stars couldn’t erase this, it said. Jaejoong can hear Yunho’s heartbeat, and he can still hear it when the first firework goes off.
‘Happy New Year,’ Yunho says, and Jaejoong’s hand tightens in his.
Afterwards, Yunho says he’ll take Jaejoong home. The quiet of the streets is strange after the fireworks, and Jaejoong’s still running them through his head, his pulse still expecting a jump and a thud as the next explosion goes off. It’s cold, and Jaejoong is looking at his own reflection in the passenger mirror. He can barely feel his feet in his shoes and he knows that his body temperature is meant to be higher than this, and there’s just a sense of the cold and Yunho in the car with him, side by side. The engine is rumbling gently, gas tank almost empty, and they’re still thirty miles from home. They’re not going anywhere, paused in a standstill in the middle of a street Jaejoong doesn’t recognize, lit up with the headlights. The dashboard clock ticks as the numbers change to one a.m. just as Yunho says, ‘Jaejoong,’ and Jaejoong turns his head to look at him. Yunho’s got both hands on the steering wheel, one gloved, one not, but then the bare one is on Jaejoong’s shoulder, pulling them together and there’s a flicker of flame that goes right through his body and into Jaejoong’s when he kisses him.
It’s like being set on fire, all at once.
They go to the beach on the first of March. Yunho calls it an expedition. Jaejoong calls it time in the sun. Winter has ended early this year, he says. We need our Vitamin D.
They take Yunho’s car, but Yoochun drives because Yunho says he doesn’t want to. When they leave, it’s 6.32 a.m. and the city’s still asleep. Jaejoong takes the middle of the backseat, Changmin behind Yoochun and Yunho on Jaejoong’s right. Yoochun plays the radio obnoxiously loud and Junsu changes the station every song. They get onto the highway just as the sun starts to rise from behind them, reflecting off the cars in front of them. They take it slow until they get onto the freeway, which is when Yoochun revs the car into going ten miles over the speed limit, weaving in and out of lanes. Junsu stops playing with the radio and starts on Mario Kart instead. Changmin is dozing, head lolling every time Yoochun changes lanes. Yunho is amusing himself with a box of tissues, turning them one by one to ash. Jaejoong can’t stop drinking in the sight of all of the passing scenery.
‘Anyone hungry?’ Yoochun asks, at ten.
‘Starving,’ Yunho says. ‘I could eat a cow. Or three.’
Changmin mumbles something that sounds like ‘McDonalds’ and Yoochun sighs. ‘Junk food junkie.’
They go by the drive-thru and Yoochun digs a few dollars out of the glovebox and talks to the service girl for too long. She lets them have extra fries for no extra charge and Yoochun waves at her as they leave and Jaejoong knows she laughs without hearing it. ‘Player,’ he says.
‘Free fries,’ Yoochun replies.
They pull off the highway and to the side of a road. Yoochun cuts the engine and the car rattles to a stop.
‘Where to next?’ Junsu asks, around a mouthful of burger. He has a map spread out all over the front seats, green fields and blue waters and brown unfamiliar lands.
‘Leave the navigating to Captain Yoochun,’ says Yoochun. ‘You’ll probably lead us into a ditch or off a cliff or into a city taken over by zombies.’
‘I’m a Mario Kart pro,’ Junsu argues. ‘All you ever play is Playboy Mansion.’
‘Driving is not a game,’ Yoochun says solidly, and after lunch he proceeds to drive them in the wrong direction for half an hour before Changmin says, ‘Hey, aren’t we going towards Seoul?’ To which Yoochun replies, ‘Oh crap.’ And Jaejoong interjects, ‘Loser.’
Yoochun’s half cousin’s best friend’s uncle owns this house, with its own private beach spread out in front of it. Jaejoong doesn’t want to know how much all of this costs, but when they dump their bags in the house and get onto the sand, the first thing Junsu does is find a crab and drop it down Jaejoong’s shirt so he doesn’t get an opportunity to even think about it anyway.
Yoochun collects seashells and builds castles out of sand that crumble before he is even halfway finished but he keeps on building them, a whole city of bucket buildings. Junsu helps him dig an enormous moat but when they try to fill it with water it just seeps between the grains and leaves them wet and heavy. Changmin runs around building miniature bonfires on the sand, and when he remembers that glass is made of sand, he tries to make some but all he ends up doing is making lots of sparks that look like tiny fireworks.
Yunho stands in the water thigh-deep, facing the horizon. His hair is wet but Jaejoong can’t remember seeing him dive under the waves, and when he goes out to stand by him, the water comes almost up to his waist in an endless crash of salt and sea. His feet are sunk up to the ankles in clean sand, and the ocean feels like it’s drawing Jaejoong under. Yunho doesn’t seem to notice he’s there till he touches his wrist underwater, and when he turns to look at him it’s like he’s seeing straight through him before his eyes focus and he smiles and says, ‘What do you think would happen if-’ and there’s a glow of warmth blossoming from his skin and when he takes Jaejoong’s hand, there’s a hiss, a flash, a moment where all the water surrounding their fingers evaporates, but the empty space is crashed through again when the next wave arrives and when they laugh it’s long and loud and Jaejoong can’t think of any place that he would rather be.
They have a barbeque on the beach for dinner. Yoochun and Junsu went to the local convenience store just before sunset and came back with frozen pork ribs and vegetables and Changmin is given the job of skewering these, whilst Yunho has to fix the barbeque so that it won’t turn into a bonfire every time they turn it on. Jaejoong sits on the sand and watches, snapping photos with Junsu’s Polaroid camera and weighing each fresh one down with a seashell. By the time Yunho has figured out that the barbeque comes alight so easily because it’s more or less doused in lighter oil, there are a dozen photos pinned down against the sand, showing Yunho on his knees peering beneath the machine, setting it on fire, setting it on fire, putting the fire out with a snap of his fingers and setting it on fire again before there’s a photo of him waving at the camera, mouth open in a laugh and his eyes creased and the wind carding through his hair and blowing it around his face, frozen in time.
Changmin tries to light up the beach with candles that he found in the beach house but they keep going out, no matter how much he tries- he gives up and roots around in the space underneath the house where Yoochun says that there are lanterns and drags out six, all rust and cracked glass, but they work fine, shining bright as the stars. They eat with their fingers, sitting in the sand, one lantern to each and one in the middle of their circle. ‘Some campfire,’ Yoochun says, and Junsu says, ‘I’ll show you campfire,’ and these’s a bang as the centre lantern explodes. There’s a pile of black when it burns out and they pile driftwood onto it to make a bonfire, moving so that they sit in a half circle because the wind blew the smoke into Yunho’s and Changmin’s eyes. Yunho’s now sitting against Jaejoong, and he could be leaning on Jaejoong’s shoulder or it could be the other way around and neither of them are quite sure of which way it is but they don’t care. Yoochun gets bored later and says, ‘One sec,’ and walks off into the shadows, only to return ten seconds later by taking a running dive in to Junsu, who knocks into Jaejoong and all three of them tumble into the fire; they roll out in a tangle of limbs and fire and scattering embers, shrieking half in surprise and half with laughter and Junsu rolls around on the sand trying to put the flames out whilst Changmin rolls around on the sand trying to stop laughing. Jaejoong’s clothes are still on fire and he has enough time to say ‘You owe me a new shirt-’ to Yoochun before Yunho grabs him by the wrist to drag him headfirst into the ocean.
They’re both submerged for a second of airlessness and Jaejoong catches sight of Yunho’s face through the layers of water before their heads break the waves, gasping for oxygen. They float for a minute, tasting the salt and their proximity and the distance to the sky and satellites and not looking at each other, just drifting. Then Yunho pulls Jaejoong from the sea by the fingers, hand, wrist, heart, burning bright, and they are like two mermaids coming to land with new feet and no voices to sing with.
But this is love. It doesn’t need a song.
Art Post