seattle rain - 1/1
seattle rain: a character study. (gen)
3 443 words. pg.
◦ with prompted inspiration from kpopficwank
life goes on, even after natural disasters.
you wonder what it's like to have your world come crashing around you, to have the floor taken away from your feet when you've just begun to run. park jaebum doesn't sleep once during those four days.
--
taecyeon has a pair of green, velvet pants that he insists a fan sent him as a joke. but jaebum remembers seeing them in the back of his closet, back before they debuted. and he remembers the way taecyeon's eyes would flash every time someone brought up colours like lime and grass and emerald and vert and go go go go go go.
jaebum digs them out of the laundry basket and brings them to seattle with him.
--
jay is taking out the trash when the first call comes. his mother is leaning out the window, phone in her hand with a mildly surprised expression on her face when jay turns around at her voice.
"you have a call," she says, faintly.
"from who?" he asks, closing the green plastic lid and dusting his hands off on his sweatpants. sometimes it surprises him how quickly and easily things returned to normal, as though he'd never left in the first place. he still has the same room, the same bedspread, the same chores, the same odd jobs around the neighbourhood. sometimes he wonders if it was intentional.
"i don't know," she says in that same, distant, vague voice. "come in."
he's suspicious and wary until he holds the phone to his ear and is greeted by taecyeon's loud, enthusiastic hello. the sound of it shocks him into stillness, and some part of him is aware that his mother is standing about two feet off and staring right at him but somehow she still feels too far away compared to taecyeon's familiar voice in his ear. he doesn't even get the chance to reply before taecyeon launches into a rant about how heartbeat is still a shitty song and that the choreography is still impossible to pick up and that wooyoung still can't hit his high notes and that nichkhun should have practiced his korean more because his pronunciation started to suck after he came back from that week trip to thailand and that chansung finally lost those last five pounds but he still looks like the same old fatass and that junho's shoulder is still sore but he got that pretty coordi to rub salve on it for the past few days so he's fine and junsu still sucks at writing music but he's rapping now and it's so funny isn't it isn't it isn't it.
and then the line goes dead.
jay stands there, breathless, head throbbing and stomach heaving like he's about to throw up. his mother is saying something to him, her hands reaching out for his shoulders but he can't hear a word over the loud, incessant ringing in his ears. she eventually pries the phone from his clenched fingers and manages to work her arms around his chest, silent and steady. but the calls don't stop. they come daily, always from a different member, always in rapidfire speech like they're reading off a script and never leaving pauses long enough for jay to respond, to ask questions, always talking as though jay knows exactly what's going on. they talk as though he'd never left. at first he'd wondered if it was some sick joke, until one day nichkhun ended a call with a faltering, "i miss you so much it makes me feel dead sometimes," and then for two weeks after that wooyoung would call instead of nichkhun.
the first person to skip his turn is junsu. by then, jay had figured out the rotation they were working on and usually sat by the phone all morning, refusing to leave the house just in case junsu ended up calling later. he needed to know if junsu nailed that adlib yet. he needed to know if junsu had done his laundry like chansung had said he was going to. he needed to know what was going to happen next, what junsu was going to do or going to see or going to say and the obsession made him dizzy but it wasn't enough to make him leave his spot next to the telephone. he only realises he's spent all day there when the phone rings and the person on the line is junho, saying things that junsu would have said and continuing stories that junsu had started. jay doesn't question it. he can't.
over time, junsu's skipped calls stop being replaced by junho's, who eventually stops calling completely. chansung and wooyoung call twice as much to make up for it for a while, but after chansung's first falter, they begin to decline in frequency too. nichkhun's calls make up for the days he misses, running twice as long to fill up on the things he would have said the previous week. taecyeon is the only one who seems strangely adamant about his schedule, never making up anyone else's calls, always exactly at nine am and always exactly three minutes long.
but eventually, the calls stop altogether. the last thing jay ever hears from them is in nichkhun's accented, incredulous english as he realises out loud, "i don't want us to win anything this year." the line goes dead before jay can question if he's still included in that we.
there is no real goodbye or subtle warning that it would be the last time, which is just as well. this way, at least, all their departures from each other's lives remain consistent: abrupt and unexpected and unwanted. two days later, jay receives a call from jype. these calls are nothing like the ones from before. these ones come during reasonable hours of the day, early morning before his jogs or late evening when he's helping wash the dishes. these ones wait for jay's response, and always have a lengthy, backhanded retort. these ones talk about september, and these ones have battle plans and strategies mixed in with explanations and accusations. these ones have no end to them, continuing well into december, into the new year.
these are the ones jay wishes would stop. they don't.
--
jay is sitting on the highest bleacher with chico's phone balanced on his stomach. he's three hundred points away from the high score, if he manages get that stupid car out of his way for the final lap. he swerves, hard, and his entire body tilts to follow the movement.
"yo, what're you doing? you've been here all day," someone says near his ear. it's probably yoon. he looks quickly. it is.
"shut up man, i'm owning this," jay mutters back, banking left. twenty metres away from the finish line, and that stupid cpu is still ahead of him.
"chico wants his phone back," yoon says, sitting down next to him. "he says his sister's going to call soon."
"shit, can't she wait? it'll ruin my score, i'm like five points away from owning your ass."
yoon clicks his tongue against his teeth. "yeah right. you're going to crash and then my ghost car will speed past yours and then his sister will call and you'll blame your failure on her."
"shut the hell up man, i've got this," jay grumbles. yoon is silent, for a while. then he leans into jay's ear and coos, "baby boy you've been on my mind, fulfill my fantasies." jay swears and his thumb slips off the control pad. his car crashes into the side and yoon's ghost car speeds past him. two seconds later the phone starts to ring.
"motherfucker!' jay spits, throwing the phone at yoon. "you did that on purpose!"
yoon grins and shrugs, picking the phone off his lap answering the call. he mentions something about not being home for dinner and buying milk. he jumps down the steps, calling over his shoulder, "whatever, you have to get out of here anyway. gym's closing in a few minutes."
"there's nothing to do in this city," jay mutters at the polished hardwood floor, stalking after yoon with his hands shoved into his pockets. "it's so boring here." he expects yoon to immediately agree and offer to do something together to burn time, but instead jay receives a tense, prolonged silence in response.
"well," yoon starts cautiously. "you could start dancing again."
jay stops. he hasn't stepped inside a studio since he landed in seattle, and he hasn't contacted a single person from their old dance crew. he still dances, in the privacy of his locked room or in his vivid spotlit dreams at night, but he hasn't properly been with a crew for weeks. he'd written off dance as another hobby for him to drop when he got back, trying to convince himself that it would be useless to continue with an activity like that when it didn't do anything useful for his future. but still, he found himself moving rhythmically every time he heard music being played a little louder than usual, tapping his feet to the sound of jehan's piano, and picturing in his mind all the group choreography he would have used to some song on the radio. more than anything, jay worries that he won't ever get dance completely out of his system. but jay stares yoon as if the possibility hadn't occurred to him. he stares back, then turns away and pushes open the auditorium door with his shoulder.
"chico and i are going to the golf course. i think gil and neil and the rest of them will be there too. you should come," yoon says quickly, and rushes through the door without waiting for jay's reply. he stares after yoon's retreating figure growing smaller and smaller down the hallway from the other side of the door, wires on the little windows cutting his walking body into neat, uniform squares. his hands feels strangely clammy.
he doesn't go to the golf game with yoon and chico and gil and neil and the rest of them. he goes to the dance studio, their dance studio, and sits in a corner and watches their faces melt with relief when they walk in half an hour later.
something inside jay's chest wakes up. it whispers to him, move.
--
jay goes to the beach every saturday. sometimes with chico, sometimes without. once in a while, jehan will stuff on a pair of jay's old sneakers, mumble that he has nothing better to do, and tag along. most of the time, he takes the bus down to the shore by himself. he isn't entirely sure what keeps bringing him back, if it's the familiar taste of humid salt in the air, or the birds that soar like they could make it across the ocean if they tried, or the dense, heavy sand that gives under his weight so reluctantly. he likes it better during the cold, late-autumn months, especially in the rain, when he sits on the log with the shape of a ragged heart carved into its side with the initials tpm scratched inside of it. he doesn't go to write theses on human nature or to create philosophies on life. he goes to stare across the biggest ocean in the world, all 12,300 miles of it, and wonders how long it would take him to swim across. he plans it out, down to the color of his swimsuit and the shape of his flippers. he's discussed it with chico once or twice, but each time, chico only turned back to the ocean, away from jay, and asked, "did you forget?"
no, he hadn't forgotten. no. stupid. how could he possibly forget? and it's after these quiet, insistent reminders that jay would pull his hands out of his jacket pockets to cup the grey blue rain, standing as still as he could with his fingers pushed so closely together that they would turn white from the pressure and the cold, until the water filled all the crevasses in the cup of his hands and brimmed over. then he'd open his palms and watch it all pour away, darkening the sand in front of him before he could even register that he'd let go.
then the sky would clear and jay and chico and sometimes jehan would pick up long branches to write rude things in the sand, jay's stupid, whimsical dreams washed away in the waves until the next time he went down to the beach alone, to sit on that log with his fingers tracing over that carved, shaky heart and to stare and drown in the relentless, unending stretch of water.
--
jay sits in the audition room, nervous and fidgety. chacha is checking his standing in some video contest on chico's iphone, complaining out loud about how low his standing is to anyone near enough to listen. beside him, hep is bobbing his head to something on his mp3; jay sneaks a look over his shoulder and snorts when he sees hep's playing taylor swift. hep looks over, scowls as if offended, and switches to something by hannah montana. jay laughs once and turns back to his hands, swirling his thumbs around each other. neil is going through some popping sequence in the corner with junior and gil; they look stupid and off-beat but jay chews his bottom lip and says anything. his words, unspoken, feel thick and dense in the back of his throat. he doesn't want to be here. they're not ready. bowzer is on the phone with his girlfriend somewhere in the hallway, phe and steproc went to the convenience store half an hour ago and still won't answer his texts, and no one is bothering to even sit together in the waiting room. he misses being in a team. he misses being the oldest, being the advice-giver, the morale-booster, the foundation and roof and windows of their house. he wishes he could stand and try to round them up, say a word or two about how it's more than just winning a competition, but about them working together to celebrate the fact that they're doing what they love the most with the people they trust the most, but he knows his words would just fall flat and chacha would laugh it off with another too-hard shove to jay's shoulders.
wooyoung would have liked something like that before an audition, something so friendly and encouraging. he would have smiled in that tucked, nervous way of his and sighed low and long like jay had verbally defeated all his demons. junsu would have said something like, "yo man," something nonsensical and ridiculous like always, and grinned into his high collar even though he knew that jay knew exactly what he looked like when he was happy and open like that. junho would have clapped his back, grinned that wide, relieved grin whenever jay acted his age, and leaned into chansung. and chansung, he would have looked down at his feet and toed the ground and snorted like he thought jay was stupid but jay would have seen the way chansung's chest would puff out, his shoulders would square, his spine would straighten. nichkhun would have laughed, the fond, silly way that he always did whenever jay did something right, like he was proud of him. like seeing jay lead 2pm made him happier than seeing them win competitions and battles and contests. and taecyeon, god, taecyeon would have had the best reaction. he would have stood behind jay and called him a stupid sap and put his hands on jay's neck and rubbed at the bone where his spine started and jay would look up to see taecyeon staring away from him, see the way his throat worked up and down and jay would have laughed and punched him in the stomach. he would have asked them what time it was. they would have answered.
"it's eight-fifty," chico says. jay looks up from his fingers, disoriented and tired.
"what?" he says.
"you asked what time it was," chico explains, sitting down across from jay. "it's eight-fifty." chico is staring at him like he could bore holes into jay's skull and read his thoughts that way. jay rubs his hands over his face, to block out the stare and the concern and the weight of their impending failure.
"did i? just thinking out loud, sorry," he mumbles into his palms. "i'm so sorry."
they don't make it past the first two minutes of their routine before the judge cuts the music short and thanks them for coming. jay expected nothing less.
--
jay actually doesn't remember much about being a celebrity. when days melted away into weeks, into months, and eventually into years, he stopped counting the anniversaries from the dates when he boarded planes with one-way tickets, when he signed termination contracts, when he picked up the phone to say one last farewell and apology before the line went dead without a sound. he doesn't remember any coordinated choreography, any pretty awards, any extravagant gifts. he doesn't remember what it was like to have his name screamed in loud, delirious clouds that pressed in on all sides, doesn't remember what it was like to receive his pay cheques in the mail with a fancy loopy signature from jype. he doesn't remember what it was like to win triple crowns, doesn't remember the warm rise that inflated his lungs and expanded out his glowing red ears. he doesn't remember what the contracts said in their small, severe hangul characters or what the representatives told him to do over the phone an entire ocean away. all the supposedly interesting things, the important things. none of that, he doesn't remember any of it. he watches videos, reads articles sometimes, to remind himself that it actually happened once, but all of it feels vague and distant, like someone else lived it and told him about it in hushed whispers and gleeful, boastful titters.
what he does remember is the throbbing, consistent ache in his muscles, the scratchiness in his throat from overuse, the burning in his eyes from lack of sleep and the feeling that it was all worth it. he remembers the faces of strangers that would stutter his name like they were friends, like they loved him. he remembers being awoken by the sound of nichkhun singing in his room in the middle of the night, voice cracking and faltering as he tried to conquer all his failures. he remembers watching his reflection move in sync with wooyoung and junho in the studio mirrors, remembers the curled, tired form of chansung in the corner as he watched and replayed their soundtrack for them whenever it came to a skittering stop. he remembers the shape of junsu's fingernails digging into his scores of music, eyes bright and hopeful as he held them out for jinyoung. he remembers taecyeon speaking english to him. that's the only thing he remembers about taecyeon, his english.
a korean publisher mailed him a letter once, with a writing opportunity. they'd offered to send a ghostwriter to america for him, so he could tell his story and they would publish the book under an alias so that no one would know it was him even if everyone would know it was him. he'd refused, told his mother that he wasn't interested in commercialising his experience. but the truth was, he just couldn't remember any of it. only the little, boring things, the things that would never sell for a buck in any brightly lit bookstore but were worth so much to him that sometimes the mere memory of it left him breathless and aching.
--
it's raining when he wakes up one morning. that gray, suffocating rain, the same rain that ruined his backpack when he was seven and the same rain that ruined his suitcases when he was twenty one. he pulls on a jacket and joins the handful of anonymous umbrellas on the streets. the rain doesn't leave streaks of discoloured make up on his face anymore, the bottoms of his jeans drag on the sidewalk and grow heavy with water and dirt, torn at the edges without paid seamstresses to hem them. it's no longer hard for him to walk to convenience stores for water, but harder for him than before to walk home alone to a quiet, half-filled house. it's easier for him to wake up every morning, and even easier to turn on a stereo and dance to moves that aren't choreographed and sing to lyrics that aren't his. he doesn't know if he misses the expectations and the pressure, but at least he can still dance and still sing.
he might not be invincible leader park jaebum anymore, but at least he gets to be jay park. there's still a future out there for him.
he just has to find it.
3 443 words. pg.
◦ with prompted inspiration from kpopficwank
life goes on, even after natural disasters.
you wonder what it's like to have your world come crashing around you, to have the floor taken away from your feet when you've just begun to run. park jaebum doesn't sleep once during those four days.
--
taecyeon has a pair of green, velvet pants that he insists a fan sent him as a joke. but jaebum remembers seeing them in the back of his closet, back before they debuted. and he remembers the way taecyeon's eyes would flash every time someone brought up colours like lime and grass and emerald and vert and go go go go go go.
jaebum digs them out of the laundry basket and brings them to seattle with him.
--
jay is taking out the trash when the first call comes. his mother is leaning out the window, phone in her hand with a mildly surprised expression on her face when jay turns around at her voice.
"you have a call," she says, faintly.
"from who?" he asks, closing the green plastic lid and dusting his hands off on his sweatpants. sometimes it surprises him how quickly and easily things returned to normal, as though he'd never left in the first place. he still has the same room, the same bedspread, the same chores, the same odd jobs around the neighbourhood. sometimes he wonders if it was intentional.
"i don't know," she says in that same, distant, vague voice. "come in."
he's suspicious and wary until he holds the phone to his ear and is greeted by taecyeon's loud, enthusiastic hello. the sound of it shocks him into stillness, and some part of him is aware that his mother is standing about two feet off and staring right at him but somehow she still feels too far away compared to taecyeon's familiar voice in his ear. he doesn't even get the chance to reply before taecyeon launches into a rant about how heartbeat is still a shitty song and that the choreography is still impossible to pick up and that wooyoung still can't hit his high notes and that nichkhun should have practiced his korean more because his pronunciation started to suck after he came back from that week trip to thailand and that chansung finally lost those last five pounds but he still looks like the same old fatass and that junho's shoulder is still sore but he got that pretty coordi to rub salve on it for the past few days so he's fine and junsu still sucks at writing music but he's rapping now and it's so funny isn't it isn't it isn't it.
and then the line goes dead.
jay stands there, breathless, head throbbing and stomach heaving like he's about to throw up. his mother is saying something to him, her hands reaching out for his shoulders but he can't hear a word over the loud, incessant ringing in his ears. she eventually pries the phone from his clenched fingers and manages to work her arms around his chest, silent and steady. but the calls don't stop. they come daily, always from a different member, always in rapidfire speech like they're reading off a script and never leaving pauses long enough for jay to respond, to ask questions, always talking as though jay knows exactly what's going on. they talk as though he'd never left. at first he'd wondered if it was some sick joke, until one day nichkhun ended a call with a faltering, "i miss you so much it makes me feel dead sometimes," and then for two weeks after that wooyoung would call instead of nichkhun.
the first person to skip his turn is junsu. by then, jay had figured out the rotation they were working on and usually sat by the phone all morning, refusing to leave the house just in case junsu ended up calling later. he needed to know if junsu nailed that adlib yet. he needed to know if junsu had done his laundry like chansung had said he was going to. he needed to know what was going to happen next, what junsu was going to do or going to see or going to say and the obsession made him dizzy but it wasn't enough to make him leave his spot next to the telephone. he only realises he's spent all day there when the phone rings and the person on the line is junho, saying things that junsu would have said and continuing stories that junsu had started. jay doesn't question it. he can't.
over time, junsu's skipped calls stop being replaced by junho's, who eventually stops calling completely. chansung and wooyoung call twice as much to make up for it for a while, but after chansung's first falter, they begin to decline in frequency too. nichkhun's calls make up for the days he misses, running twice as long to fill up on the things he would have said the previous week. taecyeon is the only one who seems strangely adamant about his schedule, never making up anyone else's calls, always exactly at nine am and always exactly three minutes long.
but eventually, the calls stop altogether. the last thing jay ever hears from them is in nichkhun's accented, incredulous english as he realises out loud, "i don't want us to win anything this year." the line goes dead before jay can question if he's still included in that we.
there is no real goodbye or subtle warning that it would be the last time, which is just as well. this way, at least, all their departures from each other's lives remain consistent: abrupt and unexpected and unwanted. two days later, jay receives a call from jype. these calls are nothing like the ones from before. these ones come during reasonable hours of the day, early morning before his jogs or late evening when he's helping wash the dishes. these ones wait for jay's response, and always have a lengthy, backhanded retort. these ones talk about september, and these ones have battle plans and strategies mixed in with explanations and accusations. these ones have no end to them, continuing well into december, into the new year.
these are the ones jay wishes would stop. they don't.
--
jay is sitting on the highest bleacher with chico's phone balanced on his stomach. he's three hundred points away from the high score, if he manages get that stupid car out of his way for the final lap. he swerves, hard, and his entire body tilts to follow the movement.
"yo, what're you doing? you've been here all day," someone says near his ear. it's probably yoon. he looks quickly. it is.
"shut up man, i'm owning this," jay mutters back, banking left. twenty metres away from the finish line, and that stupid cpu is still ahead of him.
"chico wants his phone back," yoon says, sitting down next to him. "he says his sister's going to call soon."
"shit, can't she wait? it'll ruin my score, i'm like five points away from owning your ass."
yoon clicks his tongue against his teeth. "yeah right. you're going to crash and then my ghost car will speed past yours and then his sister will call and you'll blame your failure on her."
"shut the hell up man, i've got this," jay grumbles. yoon is silent, for a while. then he leans into jay's ear and coos, "baby boy you've been on my mind, fulfill my fantasies." jay swears and his thumb slips off the control pad. his car crashes into the side and yoon's ghost car speeds past him. two seconds later the phone starts to ring.
"motherfucker!' jay spits, throwing the phone at yoon. "you did that on purpose!"
yoon grins and shrugs, picking the phone off his lap answering the call. he mentions something about not being home for dinner and buying milk. he jumps down the steps, calling over his shoulder, "whatever, you have to get out of here anyway. gym's closing in a few minutes."
"there's nothing to do in this city," jay mutters at the polished hardwood floor, stalking after yoon with his hands shoved into his pockets. "it's so boring here." he expects yoon to immediately agree and offer to do something together to burn time, but instead jay receives a tense, prolonged silence in response.
"well," yoon starts cautiously. "you could start dancing again."
jay stops. he hasn't stepped inside a studio since he landed in seattle, and he hasn't contacted a single person from their old dance crew. he still dances, in the privacy of his locked room or in his vivid spotlit dreams at night, but he hasn't properly been with a crew for weeks. he'd written off dance as another hobby for him to drop when he got back, trying to convince himself that it would be useless to continue with an activity like that when it didn't do anything useful for his future. but still, he found himself moving rhythmically every time he heard music being played a little louder than usual, tapping his feet to the sound of jehan's piano, and picturing in his mind all the group choreography he would have used to some song on the radio. more than anything, jay worries that he won't ever get dance completely out of his system. but jay stares yoon as if the possibility hadn't occurred to him. he stares back, then turns away and pushes open the auditorium door with his shoulder.
"chico and i are going to the golf course. i think gil and neil and the rest of them will be there too. you should come," yoon says quickly, and rushes through the door without waiting for jay's reply. he stares after yoon's retreating figure growing smaller and smaller down the hallway from the other side of the door, wires on the little windows cutting his walking body into neat, uniform squares. his hands feels strangely clammy.
he doesn't go to the golf game with yoon and chico and gil and neil and the rest of them. he goes to the dance studio, their dance studio, and sits in a corner and watches their faces melt with relief when they walk in half an hour later.
something inside jay's chest wakes up. it whispers to him, move.
--
jay goes to the beach every saturday. sometimes with chico, sometimes without. once in a while, jehan will stuff on a pair of jay's old sneakers, mumble that he has nothing better to do, and tag along. most of the time, he takes the bus down to the shore by himself. he isn't entirely sure what keeps bringing him back, if it's the familiar taste of humid salt in the air, or the birds that soar like they could make it across the ocean if they tried, or the dense, heavy sand that gives under his weight so reluctantly. he likes it better during the cold, late-autumn months, especially in the rain, when he sits on the log with the shape of a ragged heart carved into its side with the initials tpm scratched inside of it. he doesn't go to write theses on human nature or to create philosophies on life. he goes to stare across the biggest ocean in the world, all 12,300 miles of it, and wonders how long it would take him to swim across. he plans it out, down to the color of his swimsuit and the shape of his flippers. he's discussed it with chico once or twice, but each time, chico only turned back to the ocean, away from jay, and asked, "did you forget?"
no, he hadn't forgotten. no. stupid. how could he possibly forget? and it's after these quiet, insistent reminders that jay would pull his hands out of his jacket pockets to cup the grey blue rain, standing as still as he could with his fingers pushed so closely together that they would turn white from the pressure and the cold, until the water filled all the crevasses in the cup of his hands and brimmed over. then he'd open his palms and watch it all pour away, darkening the sand in front of him before he could even register that he'd let go.
then the sky would clear and jay and chico and sometimes jehan would pick up long branches to write rude things in the sand, jay's stupid, whimsical dreams washed away in the waves until the next time he went down to the beach alone, to sit on that log with his fingers tracing over that carved, shaky heart and to stare and drown in the relentless, unending stretch of water.
--
jay sits in the audition room, nervous and fidgety. chacha is checking his standing in some video contest on chico's iphone, complaining out loud about how low his standing is to anyone near enough to listen. beside him, hep is bobbing his head to something on his mp3; jay sneaks a look over his shoulder and snorts when he sees hep's playing taylor swift. hep looks over, scowls as if offended, and switches to something by hannah montana. jay laughs once and turns back to his hands, swirling his thumbs around each other. neil is going through some popping sequence in the corner with junior and gil; they look stupid and off-beat but jay chews his bottom lip and says anything. his words, unspoken, feel thick and dense in the back of his throat. he doesn't want to be here. they're not ready. bowzer is on the phone with his girlfriend somewhere in the hallway, phe and steproc went to the convenience store half an hour ago and still won't answer his texts, and no one is bothering to even sit together in the waiting room. he misses being in a team. he misses being the oldest, being the advice-giver, the morale-booster, the foundation and roof and windows of their house. he wishes he could stand and try to round them up, say a word or two about how it's more than just winning a competition, but about them working together to celebrate the fact that they're doing what they love the most with the people they trust the most, but he knows his words would just fall flat and chacha would laugh it off with another too-hard shove to jay's shoulders.
wooyoung would have liked something like that before an audition, something so friendly and encouraging. he would have smiled in that tucked, nervous way of his and sighed low and long like jay had verbally defeated all his demons. junsu would have said something like, "yo man," something nonsensical and ridiculous like always, and grinned into his high collar even though he knew that jay knew exactly what he looked like when he was happy and open like that. junho would have clapped his back, grinned that wide, relieved grin whenever jay acted his age, and leaned into chansung. and chansung, he would have looked down at his feet and toed the ground and snorted like he thought jay was stupid but jay would have seen the way chansung's chest would puff out, his shoulders would square, his spine would straighten. nichkhun would have laughed, the fond, silly way that he always did whenever jay did something right, like he was proud of him. like seeing jay lead 2pm made him happier than seeing them win competitions and battles and contests. and taecyeon, god, taecyeon would have had the best reaction. he would have stood behind jay and called him a stupid sap and put his hands on jay's neck and rubbed at the bone where his spine started and jay would look up to see taecyeon staring away from him, see the way his throat worked up and down and jay would have laughed and punched him in the stomach. he would have asked them what time it was. they would have answered.
"it's eight-fifty," chico says. jay looks up from his fingers, disoriented and tired.
"what?" he says.
"you asked what time it was," chico explains, sitting down across from jay. "it's eight-fifty." chico is staring at him like he could bore holes into jay's skull and read his thoughts that way. jay rubs his hands over his face, to block out the stare and the concern and the weight of their impending failure.
"did i? just thinking out loud, sorry," he mumbles into his palms. "i'm so sorry."
they don't make it past the first two minutes of their routine before the judge cuts the music short and thanks them for coming. jay expected nothing less.
--
jay actually doesn't remember much about being a celebrity. when days melted away into weeks, into months, and eventually into years, he stopped counting the anniversaries from the dates when he boarded planes with one-way tickets, when he signed termination contracts, when he picked up the phone to say one last farewell and apology before the line went dead without a sound. he doesn't remember any coordinated choreography, any pretty awards, any extravagant gifts. he doesn't remember what it was like to have his name screamed in loud, delirious clouds that pressed in on all sides, doesn't remember what it was like to receive his pay cheques in the mail with a fancy loopy signature from jype. he doesn't remember what it was like to win triple crowns, doesn't remember the warm rise that inflated his lungs and expanded out his glowing red ears. he doesn't remember what the contracts said in their small, severe hangul characters or what the representatives told him to do over the phone an entire ocean away. all the supposedly interesting things, the important things. none of that, he doesn't remember any of it. he watches videos, reads articles sometimes, to remind himself that it actually happened once, but all of it feels vague and distant, like someone else lived it and told him about it in hushed whispers and gleeful, boastful titters.
what he does remember is the throbbing, consistent ache in his muscles, the scratchiness in his throat from overuse, the burning in his eyes from lack of sleep and the feeling that it was all worth it. he remembers the faces of strangers that would stutter his name like they were friends, like they loved him. he remembers being awoken by the sound of nichkhun singing in his room in the middle of the night, voice cracking and faltering as he tried to conquer all his failures. he remembers watching his reflection move in sync with wooyoung and junho in the studio mirrors, remembers the curled, tired form of chansung in the corner as he watched and replayed their soundtrack for them whenever it came to a skittering stop. he remembers the shape of junsu's fingernails digging into his scores of music, eyes bright and hopeful as he held them out for jinyoung. he remembers taecyeon speaking english to him. that's the only thing he remembers about taecyeon, his english.
a korean publisher mailed him a letter once, with a writing opportunity. they'd offered to send a ghostwriter to america for him, so he could tell his story and they would publish the book under an alias so that no one would know it was him even if everyone would know it was him. he'd refused, told his mother that he wasn't interested in commercialising his experience. but the truth was, he just couldn't remember any of it. only the little, boring things, the things that would never sell for a buck in any brightly lit bookstore but were worth so much to him that sometimes the mere memory of it left him breathless and aching.
--
it's raining when he wakes up one morning. that gray, suffocating rain, the same rain that ruined his backpack when he was seven and the same rain that ruined his suitcases when he was twenty one. he pulls on a jacket and joins the handful of anonymous umbrellas on the streets. the rain doesn't leave streaks of discoloured make up on his face anymore, the bottoms of his jeans drag on the sidewalk and grow heavy with water and dirt, torn at the edges without paid seamstresses to hem them. it's no longer hard for him to walk to convenience stores for water, but harder for him than before to walk home alone to a quiet, half-filled house. it's easier for him to wake up every morning, and even easier to turn on a stereo and dance to moves that aren't choreographed and sing to lyrics that aren't his. he doesn't know if he misses the expectations and the pressure, but at least he can still dance and still sing.
he might not be invincible leader park jaebum anymore, but at least he gets to be jay park. there's still a future out there for him.
he just has to find it.