[valentines] starlight song
starlight song
b1a4 + block b, jinyoung/zico
pg, 1848w
fox spirit au. hundreds of years later, jinyoung finds jiho again.
--for mangafanxd ♥
--b1a4, "starlight song"
Jinyoung wakes up because he hears a ghost.
The ghost is a song, low and lilting and with a mournful minor chord at the end of every melodic phrase. It’s a love song, but with a touch of bitterness. It always sounds a little different every time someone sings it, but he can still recognize it now: its gently rolling phrases, the way it keeps flowing back on itself like a twirling ribbon. He hasn’t heard it in a long time, except in his dreams, and even then it’s been a while. How long, exactly, he can’t remember. He’s spent the last few centuries in motion, picking up and resettling every decade or so, never staying in one place - or with one person - long enough to cause suspicion. And the more time and places he accumulates, the less either of them seem to matter.
It’s been a long time, too, that he’s stopped thinking about his oldest life, the one he lived before the point when his lifespan continued longer than he’d thought it would, or desired it to. He no longer thinks about his mother or his older sister, long buried; his father, the immortal one, is no more present in his life now than he’d ever been when he was a child. In the past four centuries he’s gone through everything: been a lover, a cheater, an honest man, a thief. None of it has killed him, and he doesn’t know why.
When he hears the song and opens his eyes, he thinks, This is why.
He doesn’t know if it’s real, or if it’s only a wisp of memory that’s happened to surface after a few hundred years, but it calls to him. He staggers upright, and barely remembers to grab his winter jacket before he follows it out the door and down the street. The sun is low in the pink sky, but this is normal. The longer he lives, the less regular his sleep pattern has been getting; he’d only gone to sleep an hour or two before the song woke him up.
He’s lived in Seoul a few times now - he still calls it “Hanseong”, sometimes, when he forgets - but never in this area. He likes what it’s become: it’s busy, full of young people and artists and music. He’d adopted the style quickly, and he likes how it looks on him. More than that, it lets him become just one in any number of young men as he hurries down the street, his keen ears picking up the melody above the babble of street talk and piped-in music from the stores and cafés he passes by.
It grows stronger and stronger. Finally, he reaches the source, in an alleyway off the street he’d been following. It’s a young man, too, wearing a huge parka and sitting on a stool outside of a row of closed-up shops, playing a guitar. He’s not singing, but talking over the chords he picks with steady, slightly rough fingers. The song is a little different every time someone sings it; his speaking is smooth and rhythmic, curling around the plucks of the strings or dipping between them, but telling the same story of slightly bitter love.
Jinyoung moves closer. “Hey, how do you know that song?” he asks. The man looks up, and when he does his fingers freeze on the guitar, and Jinyoung feels frozen, too. Even though it’s been hundreds of years, hundreds of years and places and people, one face is still as fresh in his memory as if he’d only looked at it days ago.
In his first lifetime he’d been as much of a loner as he is now, though under different circumstances. He’d been known in his village as the half-breed, and his mother was looked down upon for lying with a man who had only been passing through. Just how much of a half-breed he was was a secret, though there were enough rumours that the other villagers avoided him for fear of being cursed. He’d spent his empty time teaching himself to play music, collecting as many instruments as he could find and figuring them all out by ear.
The fox, Jiho, had appeared in their village one day disguised as a travelling musician, twenty years after their last visitor. He’d been drawn to Jinyoung right away, doing nothing to ease the villagers’ suspicions of either of them, but even now, Jinyoung knows it was because of the music.
“I’ve never heard anyone play like you before,” he’d told him, squatting down beside him in the patch of grass where Jinyoung had gone to play alone. “Do it again.”
Jinyoung had heard enough stories about foxes. He wasn’t stupid, even if he didn’t go to the village school. “You won’t eat me?”
Jiho stared at him with his wild eyes. “How did you know?”
Demon, Jinyoung thought, half-breed. What he told Jiho was, “You are not exactly subtle.” The fox had been so surprised that he’d laughed, and Jinyoung swore for a moment he caught a glimpse of three brushy tails dangling beneath his long coat.
Jinyoung had brought him into his house to show him his collection of bruised and battered instruments. As Jiho touched them, his fingers tracing along the polished wood and unevenly cut animal skins, Jinyoung’s breath caught in his throat.
“You know, these are all garbage,” Jiho said, holding a busted drum up to his eye level. “Why do you keep these?”
“They’re lonely,” Jinyoung said.
Jiho raised an eyebrow at him, his eyes bright and sharp. “That’s no excuse for keeping junk.” He put the drum down. “How long do you think it’ll take to repair all these?”
In the end, it had taken over two months of diligent, constant work. Jiho insisted he was only doing it because Jinyoung’s collection was so depressing, but even Jinyoung could see through that. They never spent the night together; Jiho would flit off, and reappear the next morning with fresh materials gathered from God knows where. Jinyoung never complained, even as something inside his core longed for Jiho to stay. The instruments did sound better repaired, especially the songs that Jiho played for him, which were never the same: loud, clashing compositions one day, delicate tunes like birdsong the next. He’d made no secret of his pride in his work; whenever Jinyoung played one of his compositions, he made suggestions for improvement that they argued about for hours, but he always ended with, “You’re getting better.”
Two months was about the time it took for the villagers to start getting suspicious again.
They’d written the song together at their last meeting, or maybe neither of them had written it and it had only come to them. Jinyoung can’t remember now. He only remembers the way it had sounded then, swirling and lilting and all around them. He’d thought it would bind them together, then; and for hundreds of years, he’d thought he had been wrong.
“Jiho,” he says. He feels as embarrassed saying the name out loud as if it were a confession; maybe, he thinks, it is.
“Where the hell have you been?” Jiho says. It’s not angry, but low and drawling. “I’ve been looking.”
“I--” I had given up, Jinyoung is about to say, but he stops himself. He hesitates, then says, “Maybe if you played the song a little better, you would have found me sooner.”
Jiho looks up at him sharply, and Jinyoung’s insides feel suddenly alive when he sees the brilliance of those eyes. For a moment, neither of them says anything. Then Jiho gets up and starts packing away his guitar. His coat is long, but for a moment, Jinyoung thinks he sees something dangling below the hem, at the back.
Jiho zips the guitar case shut, then puts it on his back and stands up. “If you’re going to make me wait for four hundred fucking years,” he says, “you should buy me some meat.”
He eats savagely, with his hands and mouth; he’d have picked the hot meat off the barbecue grill himself if Jinyoung hadn’t stopped him. “Have you been trapped in a painting or something for three hundred years?” Jinyoung asks him, disgusted.
Jiho slurps some stew from his metal bowl, sets it down and wipes his chin with the back of his hand. “I just don’t wanna waste time,” he says with a grin. It’s horrifying to watch, but his energy spills into Jinyoung, too, and he smiles. Despite his appearances, he hasn’t felt young in a long time.
They don’t talk much; there’s too much to say, and anyway, Jinyoung thinks he can understand just by looking at Jiho. “I haven’t been in Seoul long,” Jiho tells him. He glances outside. “I need a place to sleep.”
“This was your plan all along,” says Jinyoung smoothly, trying to cover up his suddenly racing heart. He chuckles and looks up so Jiho can’t look into his eyes. “Never trust a fox.”
Jinyoung’s apartment isn’t far from the restaurant. When they enter and the automatic lights snap on, he feels weirdly displaced, like he’s nineteen years old again, showing Jiho his room full of discarded instruments. By contrast, this apartment is almost empty, just a room with a bed and a table.
“You don’t collect junk anymore,” Jiho says.
“I realized there’s too much of it.” Jinyoung glances at Jiho. “I’m sure you know.”
Jiho shrugs off his guitar bag. “Yeah.”
He starts to unzip his parka, and Jinyoung suddenly turns around, not wanting to look. Instead, he looks out his window at the unfamiliar view of Seoul. “How do I know?” he says.
The zipper noise stops halfway. “That I’m not going to eat you?” says Jiho. “We’ve been over this.”
The landscape is always changing, Jinyoung thinks; all he can see when he looks at it is the centuries that have come and gone and left only their detritus. “That you’re going to stay,” he says plainly. He still doesn’t turn around, even as Jiho’s footsteps pound right up behind him.
“I shouldn’t, just because you said that,” says Jiho. He doesn’t sound angry, only tired. “Who knows? Maybe I won’t be able to. A day isn’t a lot of time for me.”
Jinyoung thinks of the song, winding all the way up to him from almost a kilometre away, still as full of life as it had been when he first heard it. “Or for me,” he says. He turns around. He can see Jiho’s tails, he thinks, if he doesn’t look directly at them; they’re wisps at the corners of his vision. He doesn’t know what he was so afraid of. Jiho looks into his eyes, and they’re the same eyes. He wonders if his are the same too.
Jiho sleeps curled around him, the weight of his tails like a blanket over Jinyoung’s legs. For what feels like the first time, Jinyoung sleeps, and when he wakes up, it’s morning, and Jiho is still there.
notes:
- i'm running a bit behind/off schedule. i'm hoping i can get back on track after this weekend. i'm sorry if your fic is affected ;;
- happy valentine's day ^3^
- easter egg~
b1a4 + block b, jinyoung/zico
pg, 1848w
fox spirit au. hundreds of years later, jinyoung finds jiho again.
--for mangafanxd ♥
--b1a4, "starlight song"
Jinyoung wakes up because he hears a ghost.
The ghost is a song, low and lilting and with a mournful minor chord at the end of every melodic phrase. It’s a love song, but with a touch of bitterness. It always sounds a little different every time someone sings it, but he can still recognize it now: its gently rolling phrases, the way it keeps flowing back on itself like a twirling ribbon. He hasn’t heard it in a long time, except in his dreams, and even then it’s been a while. How long, exactly, he can’t remember. He’s spent the last few centuries in motion, picking up and resettling every decade or so, never staying in one place - or with one person - long enough to cause suspicion. And the more time and places he accumulates, the less either of them seem to matter.
It’s been a long time, too, that he’s stopped thinking about his oldest life, the one he lived before the point when his lifespan continued longer than he’d thought it would, or desired it to. He no longer thinks about his mother or his older sister, long buried; his father, the immortal one, is no more present in his life now than he’d ever been when he was a child. In the past four centuries he’s gone through everything: been a lover, a cheater, an honest man, a thief. None of it has killed him, and he doesn’t know why.
When he hears the song and opens his eyes, he thinks, This is why.
He doesn’t know if it’s real, or if it’s only a wisp of memory that’s happened to surface after a few hundred years, but it calls to him. He staggers upright, and barely remembers to grab his winter jacket before he follows it out the door and down the street. The sun is low in the pink sky, but this is normal. The longer he lives, the less regular his sleep pattern has been getting; he’d only gone to sleep an hour or two before the song woke him up.
He’s lived in Seoul a few times now - he still calls it “Hanseong”, sometimes, when he forgets - but never in this area. He likes what it’s become: it’s busy, full of young people and artists and music. He’d adopted the style quickly, and he likes how it looks on him. More than that, it lets him become just one in any number of young men as he hurries down the street, his keen ears picking up the melody above the babble of street talk and piped-in music from the stores and cafés he passes by.
It grows stronger and stronger. Finally, he reaches the source, in an alleyway off the street he’d been following. It’s a young man, too, wearing a huge parka and sitting on a stool outside of a row of closed-up shops, playing a guitar. He’s not singing, but talking over the chords he picks with steady, slightly rough fingers. The song is a little different every time someone sings it; his speaking is smooth and rhythmic, curling around the plucks of the strings or dipping between them, but telling the same story of slightly bitter love.
Jinyoung moves closer. “Hey, how do you know that song?” he asks. The man looks up, and when he does his fingers freeze on the guitar, and Jinyoung feels frozen, too. Even though it’s been hundreds of years, hundreds of years and places and people, one face is still as fresh in his memory as if he’d only looked at it days ago.
In his first lifetime he’d been as much of a loner as he is now, though under different circumstances. He’d been known in his village as the half-breed, and his mother was looked down upon for lying with a man who had only been passing through. Just how much of a half-breed he was was a secret, though there were enough rumours that the other villagers avoided him for fear of being cursed. He’d spent his empty time teaching himself to play music, collecting as many instruments as he could find and figuring them all out by ear.
The fox, Jiho, had appeared in their village one day disguised as a travelling musician, twenty years after their last visitor. He’d been drawn to Jinyoung right away, doing nothing to ease the villagers’ suspicions of either of them, but even now, Jinyoung knows it was because of the music.
“I’ve never heard anyone play like you before,” he’d told him, squatting down beside him in the patch of grass where Jinyoung had gone to play alone. “Do it again.”
Jinyoung had heard enough stories about foxes. He wasn’t stupid, even if he didn’t go to the village school. “You won’t eat me?”
Jiho stared at him with his wild eyes. “How did you know?”
Demon, Jinyoung thought, half-breed. What he told Jiho was, “You are not exactly subtle.” The fox had been so surprised that he’d laughed, and Jinyoung swore for a moment he caught a glimpse of three brushy tails dangling beneath his long coat.
Jinyoung had brought him into his house to show him his collection of bruised and battered instruments. As Jiho touched them, his fingers tracing along the polished wood and unevenly cut animal skins, Jinyoung’s breath caught in his throat.
“You know, these are all garbage,” Jiho said, holding a busted drum up to his eye level. “Why do you keep these?”
“They’re lonely,” Jinyoung said.
Jiho raised an eyebrow at him, his eyes bright and sharp. “That’s no excuse for keeping junk.” He put the drum down. “How long do you think it’ll take to repair all these?”
In the end, it had taken over two months of diligent, constant work. Jiho insisted he was only doing it because Jinyoung’s collection was so depressing, but even Jinyoung could see through that. They never spent the night together; Jiho would flit off, and reappear the next morning with fresh materials gathered from God knows where. Jinyoung never complained, even as something inside his core longed for Jiho to stay. The instruments did sound better repaired, especially the songs that Jiho played for him, which were never the same: loud, clashing compositions one day, delicate tunes like birdsong the next. He’d made no secret of his pride in his work; whenever Jinyoung played one of his compositions, he made suggestions for improvement that they argued about for hours, but he always ended with, “You’re getting better.”
Two months was about the time it took for the villagers to start getting suspicious again.
They’d written the song together at their last meeting, or maybe neither of them had written it and it had only come to them. Jinyoung can’t remember now. He only remembers the way it had sounded then, swirling and lilting and all around them. He’d thought it would bind them together, then; and for hundreds of years, he’d thought he had been wrong.
“Jiho,” he says. He feels as embarrassed saying the name out loud as if it were a confession; maybe, he thinks, it is.
“Where the hell have you been?” Jiho says. It’s not angry, but low and drawling. “I’ve been looking.”
“I--” I had given up, Jinyoung is about to say, but he stops himself. He hesitates, then says, “Maybe if you played the song a little better, you would have found me sooner.”
Jiho looks up at him sharply, and Jinyoung’s insides feel suddenly alive when he sees the brilliance of those eyes. For a moment, neither of them says anything. Then Jiho gets up and starts packing away his guitar. His coat is long, but for a moment, Jinyoung thinks he sees something dangling below the hem, at the back.
Jiho zips the guitar case shut, then puts it on his back and stands up. “If you’re going to make me wait for four hundred fucking years,” he says, “you should buy me some meat.”
He eats savagely, with his hands and mouth; he’d have picked the hot meat off the barbecue grill himself if Jinyoung hadn’t stopped him. “Have you been trapped in a painting or something for three hundred years?” Jinyoung asks him, disgusted.
Jiho slurps some stew from his metal bowl, sets it down and wipes his chin with the back of his hand. “I just don’t wanna waste time,” he says with a grin. It’s horrifying to watch, but his energy spills into Jinyoung, too, and he smiles. Despite his appearances, he hasn’t felt young in a long time.
They don’t talk much; there’s too much to say, and anyway, Jinyoung thinks he can understand just by looking at Jiho. “I haven’t been in Seoul long,” Jiho tells him. He glances outside. “I need a place to sleep.”
“This was your plan all along,” says Jinyoung smoothly, trying to cover up his suddenly racing heart. He chuckles and looks up so Jiho can’t look into his eyes. “Never trust a fox.”
Jinyoung’s apartment isn’t far from the restaurant. When they enter and the automatic lights snap on, he feels weirdly displaced, like he’s nineteen years old again, showing Jiho his room full of discarded instruments. By contrast, this apartment is almost empty, just a room with a bed and a table.
“You don’t collect junk anymore,” Jiho says.
“I realized there’s too much of it.” Jinyoung glances at Jiho. “I’m sure you know.”
Jiho shrugs off his guitar bag. “Yeah.”
He starts to unzip his parka, and Jinyoung suddenly turns around, not wanting to look. Instead, he looks out his window at the unfamiliar view of Seoul. “How do I know?” he says.
The zipper noise stops halfway. “That I’m not going to eat you?” says Jiho. “We’ve been over this.”
The landscape is always changing, Jinyoung thinks; all he can see when he looks at it is the centuries that have come and gone and left only their detritus. “That you’re going to stay,” he says plainly. He still doesn’t turn around, even as Jiho’s footsteps pound right up behind him.
“I shouldn’t, just because you said that,” says Jiho. He doesn’t sound angry, only tired. “Who knows? Maybe I won’t be able to. A day isn’t a lot of time for me.”
Jinyoung thinks of the song, winding all the way up to him from almost a kilometre away, still as full of life as it had been when he first heard it. “Or for me,” he says. He turns around. He can see Jiho’s tails, he thinks, if he doesn’t look directly at them; they’re wisps at the corners of his vision. He doesn’t know what he was so afraid of. Jiho looks into his eyes, and they’re the same eyes. He wonders if his are the same too.
Jiho sleeps curled around him, the weight of his tails like a blanket over Jinyoung’s legs. For what feels like the first time, Jinyoung sleeps, and when he wakes up, it’s morning, and Jiho is still there.
notes:
- i'm running a bit behind/off schedule. i'm hoping i can get back on track after this weekend. i'm sorry if your fic is affected ;;
- happy valentine's day ^3^
- easter egg~