[oneshot] from the enduring past and future (2/2)
Title: from the enduring past and future
Pairing: gtop
Rating: pg13
Genre: au, romance
Warnings: swearing, discussion of mental illness
Author: gdgdbaby
Notes: legit, full-fledged doctor who au after an anon on tumblr asked me for a scrap of it over the summer, though it's turned out to be more of an alternate reality than anything. top is the doctor. gd is his (on-again, off-again) companion. 12,290 words.
< < < PART 1 < < <
The itch comes back some time between their visit to ancient Rome (mostly to snicker inappropriately at all the dick graffiti plastered everywhere, at least until they get attacked by fucking phantom gladiators) and their pit stop in the early 90s (so Jiyong can watch Wu-Tang perform live, and also attempt to fill in the woeful educational gaps in TOP's basic understanding of Terran rap).
The TARDIS, like some sort of intergalactic Room of Requirement, seems able to anticipate Jiyong's needs almost before he's even aware that they exist. When he leaves the control room in TOP's capable hands in favor of exploring, a grand piano's waiting for him in a wide, spacious room off one of the hallways, complete with spiral-bound notebook and stubby pencil perched precariously on the edge of the closed lid.
Jiyong slides them onto the music rack and pops the lid open, lifts the rack, fingers tracing the bump of black keys before launching into a quick, easy Liszt, muscle memory guiding his fingers along all the flourishes and arpeggios.
One of the last psychologists he'd been sent to had suggested music as therapy, and so his mother had strong-armed him into lessons with a severe-faced piano teacher that continued concurrently with his training at YG. A loose background in classical music hadn't seemed so at odds with a future career in rapping back then-and at the end of their time together, a few months before he was set to debut, his teacher had pulled him aside, told Jiyong gruffly, "You have a real talent for music. Don't lose it."
He hadn't really understood at the time, and he's still not sure he does even now. How do you lose talent? Certainly it could be wasted, and atrophy from lack of proper development. But surely not lost forever? Perhaps she'd been urging him not to lose sight of it, to keep pursuing it.
Jiyong shifts into something dreamier, one of Chopin's nocturnes that he'd only ever played once and can't believe he actually remembers. That turns into Rachmaninoff, and Debussy-and then an old, half-forgotten hook he'd written back at home that evolves into something else, something better. He scribbles everything into the notebook, the messy notation of an entire song streaming out across the page.
"I don't recognize that last one," comes a voice from the entrance. Jiyong looks up to see TOP at the door, hands shoved in his pockets.
"It's mine," Jiyong replies, and jots the last notes down before closing the journal.
"Ah," TOP says. He strides forward, drops down on the bench, body leaning in warm and solid. "Right. You're a musician. What else can you play?"
"I'm not even sure how I remembered half the ones I did play," Jiyong admits. He fiddles with the tassel on his jeans. "It's been a long time."
"The TARDIS enhances memory, among other things," he explains, placing his hands on the keyboard and banging out something loud and fast and jazzy.
Jiyong applauds when it's over, snorts when TOP gives him a little bow and nearly hits his head on the lacquered wood.
Over the years, Jiyong's gotten used to living off very little food and even less sleep. It is not that he particularly enjoys or abhors that kind of lifestyle-only that having a schedule that spans from the crack of dawn to the wee hours of the next day necessitates it, whether he likes it or not.
All things considered, then, it's a fairly predictable turn of events when Jiyong jolts awake in an unfamiliar bed, with no knowledge of having fallen asleep in the first place. It's been several days since they'd narrowly avoided having their souls sucked out by a truly frightening group of weeping angels gone rogue in deep space. Jiyong had nearly lost a finger, but sacrificed a couple of rings to retain all of his extremities; nothing like some deranged, psychopathic statues to put things into perspective.
As he blinks the cobwebs of sleep away, it occurs to him that he can't really recall the last time he'd even taken a nap-certainly before they'd left Youngbae alone in the dressing room at the SBS Open Hall. He peers around groggily, scrapes a hand over his eyes. The room he's in is sparsely furnished, tasteful and clean, and the entire expanse of the wall to his right is like a looking glass that shows everything the TARDIS is whirling past, all the stars and planets glittering in through the window. He leans back against the pillows, yawning, and just watches for a while.
"You're a heavy motherfucker, you know that?" TOP says when he strolls in. He drops a stack of dusty books onto the bedside drawer and curls up in the armchair like an overgrown cat.
"What happened?" Jiyong croaks, throat clicking as he tries to swallow. He stretches his arms out and palms the painful crick in his neck. "Eurgh."
TOP eyes him shrewdly. "You don't sleep often, do you?"
"How long was I out?"
"Hours, days, weeks," TOP says, shrugging, "who knows? It's all the same, really."
"I don't think I've slept for more than four hours at a time since I debuted," Jiyong tells him. "Why don't you give me a straight answer?"
"Demanding," TOP notes, lips lifting in a ghost of a smile, and leans forward to pat the dark blue comforter. "I found you in the library, face planted in a cozy pile of books on Silurian war chants, and carried you up here. This is the thanks I get?"
Jiyong raises his eyebrows. "Don't change the subject."
He sighs. "The TARDIS does this thing where it automatically monitors your life signals and maintains a sort of equilibrium for your body."
"What does that mean?"
"Haven't you noticed that you don't really have to eat or sleep when we're flying around?" Jiyong nods. "You could, if you wanted to, but it isn't necessary. That's also how you're able to speak and understand all the alien languages we come into contact with, even though it seems to you that you're still just speaking Korean. It's hard to explain."
"Try me."
"She makes it so that we can function at optimal level without really having to do to much besides spend time inside the ship. Something about airborne particles that we inhale while we're here. She must have found you somewhat lacking, though, and made you actually go to sleep."
"That's not creepy at all," Jiyong says mildly. "Your time machine can drug people?"
"Don't be ridiculous," TOP says. "All she did was manipulate a few of the environmental settings to maximize probability that you would fall asleep."
"Look at you, using all these big words. I'm so proud." Jiyong grins when TOP sticks his tongue out at him. "I do feel better," he concedes a beat later, bunching a fistful of sheet in his right hand. "Normally I just do too much, you know? It's hard to remember to take care of myself when I have so many other things to worry about: work, music, friends, everything. Much easier to just inhale coffee, take catnaps here and there and not sleep properly, because once I do, there's no contest. It's all or nothing." He frowns. "I lied, earlier. I've slept for days on end before, when I let it get that far. I just hate it, because-"
"It's a loss of control," TOP finishes for him. "Yeah, I'm beginning to see how that's a thing with you."
At Jiyong's insistence, TOP takes him to an alien club owned by Sigma-2, one of his Ood friends, a couple of light years away from the interstellar freeway in Sector 242. They proceed to get trashed off strange-looking fruity drinks and finger shots of something that Jiyong imagines pure alcoholic Yakult would taste like, an acid yellow color that makes his fingertips glow in the dark after each sip slides down his throat.
Somehow (the details are a little foggy, admittedly) they end up caught in the crossfire of what Jiyong's pretty sure is the single most terrifying bar fight that he's ever witnessed. Later, Sigma-2 tells him that the brawls are a fairly harmless occurrence-but in the heat of the moment, with all manner of stings and swords and shuriken flying around, Jiyong can hardly breathe, his heart pounding a mile a minute.
TOP must have some level of foreknowledge, though, because all he does is giggle into Jiyong's shoulder when an enraged Pyrovile erupts into flame a few feet away and singes most of Jiyong's shirt into oblivion.
"Jieun-noona's going to be pissed," is the only thing he can think to say as he drags TOP back to the TARDIS.
"Don't you have a million more of the same shirt where that one came from?" TOP slurs into his neck.
"Sure," Jiyong says. The whole world lurches unpleasantly as TOP leans in harder. He roots around in TOP's jacket to find the sonic screwdriver. "But it's the principle of the thing, you know?"
"I really don't. They're just clothes."
"You know, if I weren't so profoundly drunk," Jiyong says, fingers scrabbling for purchase around the screwdriver, "I'd kick your ass for that. Nothing's just anything."
"That's deep," TOP says. "You should write a song about it."
Jiyong's about to respond with something suitably scathing when the door finally swings open and gravity does its work. TOP's elbow digs deep into his gut as they topple inside, the breath whooshing straight out of Jiyong's lungs. "Fuck," he squawks as the back of his head connects with the floor. "You're crushing me, asshole."
TOP rolls off him with a grunt, and then they're both just lying on the ground of the control room, dazed and giddy as they wait for the alcohol to wear off. Jiyong heaves himself onto his side and stares at TOP's profile, the bob of his neck as he swallows, the mussed sweep of turquoise hair.
"I think I need a new shirt," he says at length, though it's difficult to remember why.
"You could just walk around in the nude," TOP suggests, laughter rasping out of his throat in a way that makes Jiyong's mouth go a little dry, too.
"Is that what you do when you're alone?" he asks, trying to go for sardonic faux-indignation but veering more toward genuinely interested than he'd like. "No companion to dress for-guess I'll just waltz into the unknown naked today? Ah, the truth comes out."
"What can I say?" TOP turns his head and their noses nearly brush. Jiyong's vision blurs until he forces himself to refocus on TOP's shit-eating grin, the deepening of his dimples as his eyes crinkle. "I'm a class act."
"Oh, yeah," Jiyong says, amused. "Textbook definition."
TOP blinks, as if he's only noticing now how close they are, the downward arc of his lashes casting shadows on his face. Jiyong's fingers catch against one of the gold buttons on his jacket.
The kiss, when Jiyong finally bites the bullet and just goes for it, seems a mere, natural progression: a culmination of something he can barely wrap his mind around, as if everything that's happened so far has all been leading up to this one pivotal point in space-time. Or maybe it's just his blood alcohol content and TOP's capitulation talking, because nine centuries have obviously done his technique some favors.
Jiyong's kissed people before, of course he has, but the context of this particular situation makes him lose his breath completely when TOP's tongue slips into his mouth, like all the air's been sucked out of the room, warm hands coming up to map out the contours of Jiyong's bare skin because-oh. Right. His shirt, the Pyrovile, fire raining down-poof.
Jiyong inhales sharply as a hand trails across his stomach-and that's what snaps TOP out of it, his eyes flying wide open, a firm forearm pressed against Jiyong's collarbone as he pushes him away.
"What the fuck do you think you're doing?"
"One would think you'd know what a kiss was," Jiyong murmurs, clasping TOP's wrist and trying to reel him in again. "Or are you a nine-hundred year-old virgin?"
"Yes-what? No! I've-" TOP licks his bottom lip. "Don't be an ass, this is serious."
Jiyong blinks, ripped unceremoniously back into sobriety at the look on TOP's face. "Oh, believe me. I'm being very serious."
"We can't do this." There's a panicked sort of vehemence in his voice, as if he's-afraid, that's it, like he's absolutely scared shitless. "Okay, it doesn't end well, this-" He scrambles off the floor and Jiyong sits up, watches him make frantic gestures through the distance between them. "This won't work."
"What do you mean? It felt fine-great, actually-"
TOP runs a hand through his hair and glowers at him. "That isn't the point."
"Are you not into dudes?" Jiyong cocks his head to the side. "That's interesting, I didn't think aliens would be strictly heterosexual but maybe I was wrong-"
"Shut up, Jiyong," TOP cuts in, bending down to shake his shoulders. "Listen to me. We can't do this."
"Why not?"
He lets out an agitated noise. "Because-I-me, I just regenerate, over and over again, and I'm going to be like that forever. Humans grow old. You age. It always happens. You can't stop it, you can't change it, not even a little bit. Do you understand?"
Jiyong leans up and presses their mouths together again, feels vaguely vindicated when TOP clutches at his shoulders for a moment before they break apart.
Broad hands slide in to palm his neck. TOP rests his forehead on Jiyong's, exhales long and slow. "You don't get it, do you?"
"I think I understand perfectly, to be honest," he says. "You're afraid of getting hurt."
TOP rears back, brow furrowed. "It isn't that simple."
"But it is," he insists. "So this has happened to you before, but-hey, aren't you even going to try? You deliberately put yourself in dangerous, life-threatening scenarios all the time. How is this any different?"
Jiyong frowns when he doesn't get a response.
"You know, you haven't said once that you didn't want it-just that you can't have it. That's bullshit. You're a lot of things, TOP, but I didn't think you were a coward."
"Fuck," TOP says at last, the word coming out less like a curse than it does a prayer, something small and quiet and fragile. He eases himself down onto the floor again, knees skating across the glass, like he doesn't have enough strength to keep himself upright anymore. "Why did I bring you with me?"
Jiyong shrugs, legs crossed loosely, his thumb rubbing absent circles against the inside of TOP's wrist. "Because I'm always right."
"Hey, slow down," he says, mouth twisting upward. "I wouldn't go that far."
Jiyong smiles beatifically. TOP still doesn't look totally convinced; his face is the most readable it's ever been, old baggage lurking just below the surface. Jiyong never expected it to be that easy, anyway, but it feels like they're teetering at the brink-of what, he isn't sure, but he thinks he might've been waiting his entire life just to find out.
It's only fitting, then, that it's during this pregnant moment of deliberation that the distress call from Earth comes through.
"Is that a phone ringing?" Jiyong asks, head snapping toward the hexagonal console to try and locate the sound. "How is there a phone ringing? That defies all logic-"
"And yet, here we are," TOP says, pulling both of them up and sprinting to the communication panels. "Thought you'd learned to expect everything unexpected already." He pulls a lever and a receiver sails out and narrowly misses Jiyong's head. "Take that, will you? I've got coordinates to lock on to."
Jiyong gingerly lifts the phone to his ear. "Hello?"
"Jiyong? Is that you?"
His jaw drops. "Who is it?" TOP asks, flicking ten switches in quick succession. The TARDIS starts rumbling.
"Youngbae?"
"Look, I don't know where you are, but you have to get back right now, and bring TOP with you, because-"
"How the hell did you even get this number?"
"I called your cell phone-that's not important-listen, Jiyong, some really weird stuff is happening and the only person I can think of who might even remotely begin to help is your imaginary friend who shouldn't even exist-"
The TARDIS rocks wildly and the receiver's torn clean out of his hands. "We're here," TOP yells, waving plumes of steam out of his face. Jiyong scrambles to the door and rips it wide open. Youngbae's standing outside in Jiyong's dressing room, cell phone in hand, gaping at him.
"How long have we been gone?"
"Twenty minutes at most," Youngbae stammers. "What happened to your shirt?"
"No time for explanations," TOP says. He shoves Jiyong out the door, grabs the varsity jacket off the chair in front of the vanity and tosses it at his head. "Put that on."
"How long till Inkigayo starts?" Jiyong asks.
"About half an hour, now."
Jiyong turns to TOP, eyebrows cocked high. "Think you can fix whatever the fuck is going on in half an hour?"
TOP grins. "How is that even a question?"
Youngbae leads them out of the dressing room, voice pitched low as he rattles off the finer details. "After you left, I went to check on the back-up dancers."
They push into the warm-up room and Jiyong blinks, pokes Jaewook's arm where he's conked out in one of the swivel chairs. "They're all asleep."
"They won't wake up," Youngbae confirms. "I tried everything."
TOP purses his lips and scans a couple of the other dancers with his screwdriver.
"What is he doing?" Youngbae whispers into Jiyong's ear.
"It's, um, a thing," Jiyong says, sighing. "A thing he does. Collecting information. Vital signs and shit."
Youngbae squints at TOP. "Wait, is he wearing the coat Daesung was supposed to-"
"They aren't asleep," TOP announces before Youngbae can finish his sentence, a grim expression on his face as he studies the readout. "In their heads, they think they're still preparing for the show. It's-I don't know, it's like they're being kept in stasis on purpose." The lights flicker for a moment. He pokes his head out into the hallway. "Doesn't it seem a bit quiet to you? Didn't you say that some people start lining up for shows the night before?"
Youngbae gulps uneasily. "Where is everybody?"
Every other live performer on the show is trapped in their dream-reality in the dressing rooms when they go around knocking. Even the temporary emcees of the week have been knocked out cold, gathered in a circle around Ha Yeonjoo backstage.
The view out the window is even more unsettling-groups of fans gathered to see them perform are still and silent, eyes wide open but unseeing. It's as if someone's taken them all and turned them into stone-
"Don't blink," Jiyong and TOP say at the same time. The lights flicker again.
"What?" Youngbae says, flabbergasted.
"Not fucking this again," Jiyong groans. "I thought we'd gotten rid of all of them the first time around."
"They're called weeping angels," TOP explains to Youngbae. "We stumbled across a coven of them a week ago, but I thought we'd lost them in that crack in space-time. They feed off-oh, no." He takes off without another word back toward the dressing rooms.
"Does he do this often?" Youngbae pants as they run after him.
"You wouldn't believe."
TOP's bending over Jaewook's hand when they burst into the room behind him. "Look at this."
It takes Jiyong a second to get it. And then-"You're fucking kidding me. How is that even possible? We saw it fall in the crack-"
"Explanation, please?" Youngbae says, arms folded together across his chest.
TOP scrubs a hand over his face. "We were running from a group of weeping angels intent on stealing our souls. It's the life force they feed on, see? Jiyong's hand got caught in their leader's grip right before we got back to the TARDIS, and the crack was about to swallow all of us, but he slipped a couple of rings off-those same rings, the ones on this guy's hand right now-and got away scot free. No missing fingers."
"So what does it mean?" Youngbae asks, white-lipped.
"It means this is personal," says Jiyong. "It's about me. This angel wants me. Why?"
"I have a theory," TOP says slowly, "but you aren't going to like it."
"Fame," Jiyong repeats flatly. "Why wouldn't it take you, then? Everyone knows who you are."
"I'm the only Time Lord left. I might be tasty, but I couldn't lead it to a bigger food source."
"I still don't get it," Youngbae decides.
They're back in Jiyong's dressing room, the door barricaded shut with anything bulky enough to be of use. The minutes keep ticking away, the steady beat of time marching on.
"See how those fans outside were frozen, not dreaming?" TOP says.
"Yeah. Hard to miss."
"Somehow, the lone angel used Jiyong's rings as anchors to find its way here." TOP fiddles with the cuff of his jacket, lips canted down. "Those people out there-they're the ones generating the energy it wants to tap into. A few of them are just casual fans, of course. Some of them-a lot of them-are obsessed. Some of them hate you and love others. They buy your albums and your merchandise; they have your faces plastered all over the walls of their bedrooms, in their phones, on their computers. They listen to your music, watch your shows. All of them certainly think about you, because that's what fans do-especially here, now. They've come to see you perform."
"The angel must've figured out how to channel and suck out the life force of all of those people, through their fixations on us," Jiyong finishes heavily. "That's what it's after."
"Why didn't it get me?" Youngbae asks.
"You were the bait," says Jiyong. "You had to lure us here. I told you, this is personal-this is about me. I helped destroy all the other angels, and those were my rings. And-" His lips turn up here, a sardonic smile spreading wide across his face. "I'm G-Dragon. Everyone who even remotely knows who I am has an opinion about me. I'd be its biggest meal." Jiyong sets his shoulders straight and wheels around to look at TOP. "Which is why I should give it what it wants."
"No fucking way," TOP says, at the same time Youngbae yells, "Are you stupid?"
"It came for me," Jiyong points out. "Maybe it'll leave if it gets me."
TOP scowls. "Even if I were to let you follow through with that phenomenally stupid idea-which I absolutely would not, for the record-what on earth makes you think it would stop once it was finished with you? You'd just give it enough strength to call the rest of them here. They would suck the entire world dry if they were given the chance, every age of it."
"What do you propose then, wise guy?" Jiyong snaps. "Do you have a better plan?"
"I'm working on it," TOP says. "One that doesn't lead to you dying, preferably."
"It's nice to know that you care." He flicks his gaze to the wall clock. "You're running out of time."
"Yes, thank you, I'm well aware." TOP paces around the room in tight circles like a wolf in a cage, mumbling under his breath.
The lights take this opportunity to go out completely. Jiyong scrabbles for his phone on the vanity and Youngbae holds his aloft, a halo of light around his face.
"TOP," Jiyong says.
"What?"
He holds his breath, looses it out in one long exhale. "I have to go out there."
"I'm not going to let you die," TOP yells. He clutches Jiyong's arms and giving him a furious little shake, eyes flashing in the low light. "I-"
"I know," Jiyong says. He coughs, heart beating painfully in his chest. "But I have a plan."
On the ground floor, bits of afternoon light are still slanting in through the windows even though all the electricity's been eaten away.
It'll still be slow, he can hear TOP saying in his head, voice pitched high, almost feverish. Slower than usual, anyway. The crack in the space-time continuum should've wiped its existence from history. It came back, but it's weak from clawing itself out of that vortex. It isn't strong enough to send people to the past. Yet.
The main stage is still set up with the remnants of his live dress rehearsal, which is what he'd been counting on. As he takes the steps up two at the time, the backup lighting around the edges of the stage fade out too. Jiyong can hear a steady creaking noise coming from behind him, echoing out into the arena.
"Aren't you going to show yourself?" he asks. The creaking noise, the scrape of marble on marble, gets closer.
Jiyong walks to the center of the stage, hands in his pockets. It's very quiet, and as his eyes adjust, he begins to see the slack, wide-eyed faces of frozen people waiting in the darkness for something that might never come. A cold feeling shoots down his spine. He resists the urge to take a bow.
"They were just here to have a good time, you know," Jiyong mutters.
He closes his eyes, ears straining. A skittering noise comes from his right.
"They didn't expect a weeping angel to come and try to farm them for energy," he continues, voice rising. "That's fucked up, man, taking something that's supposed to make people happy and twisting it into this caricature of itself."
There's a brush of icy stone against the back of his hand.
"Youngbae, now!"
With a resounding crash, the two enormous halves of the apple Jiyong was supposed to perform in slam shut around them. Jiyong uses his other hand to pull a light-stick out of his pocket, brings it up to his face and turns it on.
The weeping angel-its surface wind-worn and eroded, the tip of one of its giant wings cracked clean off-is baring its teeth at him, one stone hand clasped around his wrist. "Weren't expecting that, were you?"
He remembers belatedly that he won't be getting any sort of response and swallows, unblinking.
"Since you can't turn your head, I'll tell you where you are. The entire inside of this thing is a reflective surface." He pauses for dramatic flourish. "An image of an angel becomes itself an angel. You'll have to stare at each other for as long as this thing's battery keeps up, by which time TOP should be able to find a nice final resting spot to dump both of you. Good luck with that." He wriggles his arm out of his jacket, frees his wrist from the fabric and, by extension, the angel's loose grip. "You're losing your touch. Oh, and one more thing-"
He leans forward pulls the rings off the angel's stone fingers.
"Those are mine."
He stomps twice on the ground, and the floor beneath his feet starts descending, the stage lift bringing him down below. TOP's tense face swims into view, the TARDIS whirring in the background. He catches Jiyong as he half-collapses, breathing hard. "You didn't look it in the eyes, did you?"
"Nope," he says, rubbing his wrist. "What are you going to do with it?"
"I could tether the entire thing to the TARDIS and fly it into the sun if I wanted, though I don't think that'd kill them. Once I tow them off the planet, everything will snap back to normal."
"So you're leaving," Jiyong says.
"You have a performance," TOP reminds him. "This is what you do. You love it. You live for it. You were born to do this. I'm just a pit stop along the way."
Jiyong opens his mouth to protest but TOP waves him quiet.
"Hey-I'll be back. I'll come back for you, after this is all sorted out."
"Will you?"
"Yeah," he says, thumbing the skin behind Jiyong's ear. "I will." He presses dry lips to Jiyong's forehead and lets him go. "See you soon, Kwon Jiyong."
The lights come back on with ten minutes to spare when TOP's gone. Outside, the dull roar of people milling around starts up again; Jiyong doesn't think he's ever heard anything so inherently comforting. Youngbae spends half a minute clucking over him before he's swept off for last minute tweaks, varsity jacket bunched up around his elbows.
There's a mad scramble all throughout the building to make up the lost prep time, and of course the gaping hole in the middle of his stage is a little difficult to explain away. One of the stage directors asks where the hell his enormous apple prop went. "It's a long story," Jiyong finally says, blowing his bangs up. "Can't we just use a sheet or something?"
Jieun, predictably, gets angry about the missing shirt ("What do you mean, you just lost it? How do you just lose something you're wearing?"), but she replaces it in about two seconds, so there's not really much of a problem in the long run.
The show, against all odds, starts on time: business as usual, nothing amiss here. There's a weird sort of cognitive dissonance in his head, a voice screaming you were all about to die half an hour ago as he's getting his make-up retouched and going through the dances with Sungmin and Jungheon again. He catches flashes of Youngbae's face between performances and knows he's feeling it, too.
Jiyong goes last, a simpler makeshift stage scrounged together for him as KARA shuffles off. Even after the weeks he's been away, every move comes to him with a fluid grace, as if he'd only just been training the day before. The TARDIS enhances memory, comes the whispered thought, and he grins out at the audience in the middle of Breathe, microphone dangling from his hand.
It's during his goodbye stage in November that he spots a familiar pair of deep-set eyes and that slow smile in the crush of people at the back of the concert hall. TOP's changed outfits-and hair, for that matter: it's a light auburn now, like he'd tried to dye it red and just missed the mark.
He's waiting for Jiyong in the dressing room after the show, talking to Chaerin and Dara on the couch in the corner.
"Dude, I didn't know you had cool friends, Jingyo," Chaerin says, laughing when Jiyong makes a face at her. Minji calls from across the hall and they hop up, say their goodbyes. He thinks he sees Dara slip her number into TOP's pocket.
"I enjoyed the performance," TOP says.
"I saw you dancing," Jiyong tells him. "You're terrible."
"I have a very high learning curve," he sniffs. "You could teach me."
"Sure, if you like," he says, smiling. A pause, and then: "You came back."
"Was there ever any doubt that I would?"
Jiyong shrugs. He plucks a towel off the coffee table and wipes at the sweat dripping down his shirt. "I didn't expect it to be so soon. But then-how long has it been for you?"
TOP lifts his eyes to the ceiling, does the math in his head. "Three months, maybe longer. I had to disguise myself from a bunch of Cybermen and decided to take your advice. To dye my hair, I mean."
"I noticed," Jiyong says, reaching a hand up to touch it. "It looks good. What happened to the Cybermen?"
"I don't think the hair helped," he says.
"Shocker."
"I've temporarily shaken them off my trail," TOP continues. "Lost them after an unfortunate run-in with the Daleks and some particularly persistent Autons. They were all pretty confused to see each other, and I slipped away during the resulting chaos."
Jiyong lets out an incredulous laugh and shakes his head. "Jesus."
"What?"
"This is just life for you, isn't it?" He bites his lip, makes a vague gesture in the air. "Going off on adventures and getting yourself into worlds of trouble. All in a day's work."
"Will you come with me?" TOP blurts out. "We can go anywhere you want, we-we can finally figure out where the damn swimming pool is. I'm getting, you know, tired of saying something out loud and thinking you're there when-"
"Not this again," Jiyong says. He crosses his arms. "What did I tell you the first time?"
TOP hikes his brows, leans in close. "I need to hear you say it."
"Demanding," he snorts, rolling his eyes. "Yes. Yes, let's go. Let's do it."
TOP smiles slow and easy, fringe falling into his eyes as he claps Jiyong on the shoulder. "Come along, then. No time to lose."
Youngbae barges in just as they get up, flyaway bits of hair coming apart from his gelled Mohawk. "Chaerin told me you were here," he says, an incredibly putout expression on his face. "You're running away, again?"
Jiyong sighs, grabs the lapels of Youngbae's jacket and smacks a kiss straight on his mouth. "Get a girlfriend, Youngbae. We'll be back before you can count to three."
He pivots on a foot, lips turning up in answer to TOP's amused look. Behind him, Youngbae starts counting.
TOP extends a hand. Jiyong takes it and steps over the threshold.
fin
A/N: i deliberately left this rather open-ended, so the possibility that i'll return to dabble in this universe in the future is very high! especially since i want to incorporate/expand on some of the characters that i didn't have time to touch upon in this (i.e. more yb and daesung and seungri, more 2ne1). ~we shall see~. title is adapted from the end of this john cheever quote. anon commenting, as usual, is always welcome!
Pairing: gtop
Rating: pg13
Genre: au, romance
Warnings: swearing, discussion of mental illness
Author: gdgdbaby
Notes: legit, full-fledged doctor who au after an anon on tumblr asked me for a scrap of it over the summer, though it's turned out to be more of an alternate reality than anything. top is the doctor. gd is his (on-again, off-again) companion. 12,290 words.
< < < PART 1 < < <
The itch comes back some time between their visit to ancient Rome (mostly to snicker inappropriately at all the dick graffiti plastered everywhere, at least until they get attacked by fucking phantom gladiators) and their pit stop in the early 90s (so Jiyong can watch Wu-Tang perform live, and also attempt to fill in the woeful educational gaps in TOP's basic understanding of Terran rap).
The TARDIS, like some sort of intergalactic Room of Requirement, seems able to anticipate Jiyong's needs almost before he's even aware that they exist. When he leaves the control room in TOP's capable hands in favor of exploring, a grand piano's waiting for him in a wide, spacious room off one of the hallways, complete with spiral-bound notebook and stubby pencil perched precariously on the edge of the closed lid.
Jiyong slides them onto the music rack and pops the lid open, lifts the rack, fingers tracing the bump of black keys before launching into a quick, easy Liszt, muscle memory guiding his fingers along all the flourishes and arpeggios.
One of the last psychologists he'd been sent to had suggested music as therapy, and so his mother had strong-armed him into lessons with a severe-faced piano teacher that continued concurrently with his training at YG. A loose background in classical music hadn't seemed so at odds with a future career in rapping back then-and at the end of their time together, a few months before he was set to debut, his teacher had pulled him aside, told Jiyong gruffly, "You have a real talent for music. Don't lose it."
He hadn't really understood at the time, and he's still not sure he does even now. How do you lose talent? Certainly it could be wasted, and atrophy from lack of proper development. But surely not lost forever? Perhaps she'd been urging him not to lose sight of it, to keep pursuing it.
Jiyong shifts into something dreamier, one of Chopin's nocturnes that he'd only ever played once and can't believe he actually remembers. That turns into Rachmaninoff, and Debussy-and then an old, half-forgotten hook he'd written back at home that evolves into something else, something better. He scribbles everything into the notebook, the messy notation of an entire song streaming out across the page.
"I don't recognize that last one," comes a voice from the entrance. Jiyong looks up to see TOP at the door, hands shoved in his pockets.
"It's mine," Jiyong replies, and jots the last notes down before closing the journal.
"Ah," TOP says. He strides forward, drops down on the bench, body leaning in warm and solid. "Right. You're a musician. What else can you play?"
"I'm not even sure how I remembered half the ones I did play," Jiyong admits. He fiddles with the tassel on his jeans. "It's been a long time."
"The TARDIS enhances memory, among other things," he explains, placing his hands on the keyboard and banging out something loud and fast and jazzy.
Jiyong applauds when it's over, snorts when TOP gives him a little bow and nearly hits his head on the lacquered wood.
Over the years, Jiyong's gotten used to living off very little food and even less sleep. It is not that he particularly enjoys or abhors that kind of lifestyle-only that having a schedule that spans from the crack of dawn to the wee hours of the next day necessitates it, whether he likes it or not.
All things considered, then, it's a fairly predictable turn of events when Jiyong jolts awake in an unfamiliar bed, with no knowledge of having fallen asleep in the first place. It's been several days since they'd narrowly avoided having their souls sucked out by a truly frightening group of weeping angels gone rogue in deep space. Jiyong had nearly lost a finger, but sacrificed a couple of rings to retain all of his extremities; nothing like some deranged, psychopathic statues to put things into perspective.
As he blinks the cobwebs of sleep away, it occurs to him that he can't really recall the last time he'd even taken a nap-certainly before they'd left Youngbae alone in the dressing room at the SBS Open Hall. He peers around groggily, scrapes a hand over his eyes. The room he's in is sparsely furnished, tasteful and clean, and the entire expanse of the wall to his right is like a looking glass that shows everything the TARDIS is whirling past, all the stars and planets glittering in through the window. He leans back against the pillows, yawning, and just watches for a while.
"You're a heavy motherfucker, you know that?" TOP says when he strolls in. He drops a stack of dusty books onto the bedside drawer and curls up in the armchair like an overgrown cat.
"What happened?" Jiyong croaks, throat clicking as he tries to swallow. He stretches his arms out and palms the painful crick in his neck. "Eurgh."
TOP eyes him shrewdly. "You don't sleep often, do you?"
"How long was I out?"
"Hours, days, weeks," TOP says, shrugging, "who knows? It's all the same, really."
"I don't think I've slept for more than four hours at a time since I debuted," Jiyong tells him. "Why don't you give me a straight answer?"
"Demanding," TOP notes, lips lifting in a ghost of a smile, and leans forward to pat the dark blue comforter. "I found you in the library, face planted in a cozy pile of books on Silurian war chants, and carried you up here. This is the thanks I get?"
Jiyong raises his eyebrows. "Don't change the subject."
He sighs. "The TARDIS does this thing where it automatically monitors your life signals and maintains a sort of equilibrium for your body."
"What does that mean?"
"Haven't you noticed that you don't really have to eat or sleep when we're flying around?" Jiyong nods. "You could, if you wanted to, but it isn't necessary. That's also how you're able to speak and understand all the alien languages we come into contact with, even though it seems to you that you're still just speaking Korean. It's hard to explain."
"Try me."
"She makes it so that we can function at optimal level without really having to do to much besides spend time inside the ship. Something about airborne particles that we inhale while we're here. She must have found you somewhat lacking, though, and made you actually go to sleep."
"That's not creepy at all," Jiyong says mildly. "Your time machine can drug people?"
"Don't be ridiculous," TOP says. "All she did was manipulate a few of the environmental settings to maximize probability that you would fall asleep."
"Look at you, using all these big words. I'm so proud." Jiyong grins when TOP sticks his tongue out at him. "I do feel better," he concedes a beat later, bunching a fistful of sheet in his right hand. "Normally I just do too much, you know? It's hard to remember to take care of myself when I have so many other things to worry about: work, music, friends, everything. Much easier to just inhale coffee, take catnaps here and there and not sleep properly, because once I do, there's no contest. It's all or nothing." He frowns. "I lied, earlier. I've slept for days on end before, when I let it get that far. I just hate it, because-"
"It's a loss of control," TOP finishes for him. "Yeah, I'm beginning to see how that's a thing with you."
At Jiyong's insistence, TOP takes him to an alien club owned by Sigma-2, one of his Ood friends, a couple of light years away from the interstellar freeway in Sector 242. They proceed to get trashed off strange-looking fruity drinks and finger shots of something that Jiyong imagines pure alcoholic Yakult would taste like, an acid yellow color that makes his fingertips glow in the dark after each sip slides down his throat.
Somehow (the details are a little foggy, admittedly) they end up caught in the crossfire of what Jiyong's pretty sure is the single most terrifying bar fight that he's ever witnessed. Later, Sigma-2 tells him that the brawls are a fairly harmless occurrence-but in the heat of the moment, with all manner of stings and swords and shuriken flying around, Jiyong can hardly breathe, his heart pounding a mile a minute.
TOP must have some level of foreknowledge, though, because all he does is giggle into Jiyong's shoulder when an enraged Pyrovile erupts into flame a few feet away and singes most of Jiyong's shirt into oblivion.
"Jieun-noona's going to be pissed," is the only thing he can think to say as he drags TOP back to the TARDIS.
"Don't you have a million more of the same shirt where that one came from?" TOP slurs into his neck.
"Sure," Jiyong says. The whole world lurches unpleasantly as TOP leans in harder. He roots around in TOP's jacket to find the sonic screwdriver. "But it's the principle of the thing, you know?"
"I really don't. They're just clothes."
"You know, if I weren't so profoundly drunk," Jiyong says, fingers scrabbling for purchase around the screwdriver, "I'd kick your ass for that. Nothing's just anything."
"That's deep," TOP says. "You should write a song about it."
Jiyong's about to respond with something suitably scathing when the door finally swings open and gravity does its work. TOP's elbow digs deep into his gut as they topple inside, the breath whooshing straight out of Jiyong's lungs. "Fuck," he squawks as the back of his head connects with the floor. "You're crushing me, asshole."
TOP rolls off him with a grunt, and then they're both just lying on the ground of the control room, dazed and giddy as they wait for the alcohol to wear off. Jiyong heaves himself onto his side and stares at TOP's profile, the bob of his neck as he swallows, the mussed sweep of turquoise hair.
"I think I need a new shirt," he says at length, though it's difficult to remember why.
"You could just walk around in the nude," TOP suggests, laughter rasping out of his throat in a way that makes Jiyong's mouth go a little dry, too.
"Is that what you do when you're alone?" he asks, trying to go for sardonic faux-indignation but veering more toward genuinely interested than he'd like. "No companion to dress for-guess I'll just waltz into the unknown naked today? Ah, the truth comes out."
"What can I say?" TOP turns his head and their noses nearly brush. Jiyong's vision blurs until he forces himself to refocus on TOP's shit-eating grin, the deepening of his dimples as his eyes crinkle. "I'm a class act."
"Oh, yeah," Jiyong says, amused. "Textbook definition."
TOP blinks, as if he's only noticing now how close they are, the downward arc of his lashes casting shadows on his face. Jiyong's fingers catch against one of the gold buttons on his jacket.
The kiss, when Jiyong finally bites the bullet and just goes for it, seems a mere, natural progression: a culmination of something he can barely wrap his mind around, as if everything that's happened so far has all been leading up to this one pivotal point in space-time. Or maybe it's just his blood alcohol content and TOP's capitulation talking, because nine centuries have obviously done his technique some favors.
Jiyong's kissed people before, of course he has, but the context of this particular situation makes him lose his breath completely when TOP's tongue slips into his mouth, like all the air's been sucked out of the room, warm hands coming up to map out the contours of Jiyong's bare skin because-oh. Right. His shirt, the Pyrovile, fire raining down-poof.
Jiyong inhales sharply as a hand trails across his stomach-and that's what snaps TOP out of it, his eyes flying wide open, a firm forearm pressed against Jiyong's collarbone as he pushes him away.
"What the fuck do you think you're doing?"
"One would think you'd know what a kiss was," Jiyong murmurs, clasping TOP's wrist and trying to reel him in again. "Or are you a nine-hundred year-old virgin?"
"Yes-what? No! I've-" TOP licks his bottom lip. "Don't be an ass, this is serious."
Jiyong blinks, ripped unceremoniously back into sobriety at the look on TOP's face. "Oh, believe me. I'm being very serious."
"We can't do this." There's a panicked sort of vehemence in his voice, as if he's-afraid, that's it, like he's absolutely scared shitless. "Okay, it doesn't end well, this-" He scrambles off the floor and Jiyong sits up, watches him make frantic gestures through the distance between them. "This won't work."
"What do you mean? It felt fine-great, actually-"
TOP runs a hand through his hair and glowers at him. "That isn't the point."
"Are you not into dudes?" Jiyong cocks his head to the side. "That's interesting, I didn't think aliens would be strictly heterosexual but maybe I was wrong-"
"Shut up, Jiyong," TOP cuts in, bending down to shake his shoulders. "Listen to me. We can't do this."
"Why not?"
He lets out an agitated noise. "Because-I-me, I just regenerate, over and over again, and I'm going to be like that forever. Humans grow old. You age. It always happens. You can't stop it, you can't change it, not even a little bit. Do you understand?"
Jiyong leans up and presses their mouths together again, feels vaguely vindicated when TOP clutches at his shoulders for a moment before they break apart.
Broad hands slide in to palm his neck. TOP rests his forehead on Jiyong's, exhales long and slow. "You don't get it, do you?"
"I think I understand perfectly, to be honest," he says. "You're afraid of getting hurt."
TOP rears back, brow furrowed. "It isn't that simple."
"But it is," he insists. "So this has happened to you before, but-hey, aren't you even going to try? You deliberately put yourself in dangerous, life-threatening scenarios all the time. How is this any different?"
Jiyong frowns when he doesn't get a response.
"You know, you haven't said once that you didn't want it-just that you can't have it. That's bullshit. You're a lot of things, TOP, but I didn't think you were a coward."
"Fuck," TOP says at last, the word coming out less like a curse than it does a prayer, something small and quiet and fragile. He eases himself down onto the floor again, knees skating across the glass, like he doesn't have enough strength to keep himself upright anymore. "Why did I bring you with me?"
Jiyong shrugs, legs crossed loosely, his thumb rubbing absent circles against the inside of TOP's wrist. "Because I'm always right."
"Hey, slow down," he says, mouth twisting upward. "I wouldn't go that far."
Jiyong smiles beatifically. TOP still doesn't look totally convinced; his face is the most readable it's ever been, old baggage lurking just below the surface. Jiyong never expected it to be that easy, anyway, but it feels like they're teetering at the brink-of what, he isn't sure, but he thinks he might've been waiting his entire life just to find out.
It's only fitting, then, that it's during this pregnant moment of deliberation that the distress call from Earth comes through.
"Is that a phone ringing?" Jiyong asks, head snapping toward the hexagonal console to try and locate the sound. "How is there a phone ringing? That defies all logic-"
"And yet, here we are," TOP says, pulling both of them up and sprinting to the communication panels. "Thought you'd learned to expect everything unexpected already." He pulls a lever and a receiver sails out and narrowly misses Jiyong's head. "Take that, will you? I've got coordinates to lock on to."
Jiyong gingerly lifts the phone to his ear. "Hello?"
"Jiyong? Is that you?"
His jaw drops. "Who is it?" TOP asks, flicking ten switches in quick succession. The TARDIS starts rumbling.
"Youngbae?"
"Look, I don't know where you are, but you have to get back right now, and bring TOP with you, because-"
"How the hell did you even get this number?"
"I called your cell phone-that's not important-listen, Jiyong, some really weird stuff is happening and the only person I can think of who might even remotely begin to help is your imaginary friend who shouldn't even exist-"
The TARDIS rocks wildly and the receiver's torn clean out of his hands. "We're here," TOP yells, waving plumes of steam out of his face. Jiyong scrambles to the door and rips it wide open. Youngbae's standing outside in Jiyong's dressing room, cell phone in hand, gaping at him.
"How long have we been gone?"
"Twenty minutes at most," Youngbae stammers. "What happened to your shirt?"
"No time for explanations," TOP says. He shoves Jiyong out the door, grabs the varsity jacket off the chair in front of the vanity and tosses it at his head. "Put that on."
"How long till Inkigayo starts?" Jiyong asks.
"About half an hour, now."
Jiyong turns to TOP, eyebrows cocked high. "Think you can fix whatever the fuck is going on in half an hour?"
TOP grins. "How is that even a question?"
Youngbae leads them out of the dressing room, voice pitched low as he rattles off the finer details. "After you left, I went to check on the back-up dancers."
They push into the warm-up room and Jiyong blinks, pokes Jaewook's arm where he's conked out in one of the swivel chairs. "They're all asleep."
"They won't wake up," Youngbae confirms. "I tried everything."
TOP purses his lips and scans a couple of the other dancers with his screwdriver.
"What is he doing?" Youngbae whispers into Jiyong's ear.
"It's, um, a thing," Jiyong says, sighing. "A thing he does. Collecting information. Vital signs and shit."
Youngbae squints at TOP. "Wait, is he wearing the coat Daesung was supposed to-"
"They aren't asleep," TOP announces before Youngbae can finish his sentence, a grim expression on his face as he studies the readout. "In their heads, they think they're still preparing for the show. It's-I don't know, it's like they're being kept in stasis on purpose." The lights flicker for a moment. He pokes his head out into the hallway. "Doesn't it seem a bit quiet to you? Didn't you say that some people start lining up for shows the night before?"
Youngbae gulps uneasily. "Where is everybody?"
Every other live performer on the show is trapped in their dream-reality in the dressing rooms when they go around knocking. Even the temporary emcees of the week have been knocked out cold, gathered in a circle around Ha Yeonjoo backstage.
The view out the window is even more unsettling-groups of fans gathered to see them perform are still and silent, eyes wide open but unseeing. It's as if someone's taken them all and turned them into stone-
"Don't blink," Jiyong and TOP say at the same time. The lights flicker again.
"What?" Youngbae says, flabbergasted.
"Not fucking this again," Jiyong groans. "I thought we'd gotten rid of all of them the first time around."
"They're called weeping angels," TOP explains to Youngbae. "We stumbled across a coven of them a week ago, but I thought we'd lost them in that crack in space-time. They feed off-oh, no." He takes off without another word back toward the dressing rooms.
"Does he do this often?" Youngbae pants as they run after him.
"You wouldn't believe."
TOP's bending over Jaewook's hand when they burst into the room behind him. "Look at this."
It takes Jiyong a second to get it. And then-"You're fucking kidding me. How is that even possible? We saw it fall in the crack-"
"Explanation, please?" Youngbae says, arms folded together across his chest.
TOP scrubs a hand over his face. "We were running from a group of weeping angels intent on stealing our souls. It's the life force they feed on, see? Jiyong's hand got caught in their leader's grip right before we got back to the TARDIS, and the crack was about to swallow all of us, but he slipped a couple of rings off-those same rings, the ones on this guy's hand right now-and got away scot free. No missing fingers."
"So what does it mean?" Youngbae asks, white-lipped.
"It means this is personal," says Jiyong. "It's about me. This angel wants me. Why?"
"I have a theory," TOP says slowly, "but you aren't going to like it."
"Fame," Jiyong repeats flatly. "Why wouldn't it take you, then? Everyone knows who you are."
"I'm the only Time Lord left. I might be tasty, but I couldn't lead it to a bigger food source."
"I still don't get it," Youngbae decides.
They're back in Jiyong's dressing room, the door barricaded shut with anything bulky enough to be of use. The minutes keep ticking away, the steady beat of time marching on.
"See how those fans outside were frozen, not dreaming?" TOP says.
"Yeah. Hard to miss."
"Somehow, the lone angel used Jiyong's rings as anchors to find its way here." TOP fiddles with the cuff of his jacket, lips canted down. "Those people out there-they're the ones generating the energy it wants to tap into. A few of them are just casual fans, of course. Some of them-a lot of them-are obsessed. Some of them hate you and love others. They buy your albums and your merchandise; they have your faces plastered all over the walls of their bedrooms, in their phones, on their computers. They listen to your music, watch your shows. All of them certainly think about you, because that's what fans do-especially here, now. They've come to see you perform."
"The angel must've figured out how to channel and suck out the life force of all of those people, through their fixations on us," Jiyong finishes heavily. "That's what it's after."
"Why didn't it get me?" Youngbae asks.
"You were the bait," says Jiyong. "You had to lure us here. I told you, this is personal-this is about me. I helped destroy all the other angels, and those were my rings. And-" His lips turn up here, a sardonic smile spreading wide across his face. "I'm G-Dragon. Everyone who even remotely knows who I am has an opinion about me. I'd be its biggest meal." Jiyong sets his shoulders straight and wheels around to look at TOP. "Which is why I should give it what it wants."
"No fucking way," TOP says, at the same time Youngbae yells, "Are you stupid?"
"It came for me," Jiyong points out. "Maybe it'll leave if it gets me."
TOP scowls. "Even if I were to let you follow through with that phenomenally stupid idea-which I absolutely would not, for the record-what on earth makes you think it would stop once it was finished with you? You'd just give it enough strength to call the rest of them here. They would suck the entire world dry if they were given the chance, every age of it."
"What do you propose then, wise guy?" Jiyong snaps. "Do you have a better plan?"
"I'm working on it," TOP says. "One that doesn't lead to you dying, preferably."
"It's nice to know that you care." He flicks his gaze to the wall clock. "You're running out of time."
"Yes, thank you, I'm well aware." TOP paces around the room in tight circles like a wolf in a cage, mumbling under his breath.
The lights take this opportunity to go out completely. Jiyong scrabbles for his phone on the vanity and Youngbae holds his aloft, a halo of light around his face.
"TOP," Jiyong says.
"What?"
He holds his breath, looses it out in one long exhale. "I have to go out there."
"I'm not going to let you die," TOP yells. He clutches Jiyong's arms and giving him a furious little shake, eyes flashing in the low light. "I-"
"I know," Jiyong says. He coughs, heart beating painfully in his chest. "But I have a plan."
On the ground floor, bits of afternoon light are still slanting in through the windows even though all the electricity's been eaten away.
It'll still be slow, he can hear TOP saying in his head, voice pitched high, almost feverish. Slower than usual, anyway. The crack in the space-time continuum should've wiped its existence from history. It came back, but it's weak from clawing itself out of that vortex. It isn't strong enough to send people to the past. Yet.
The main stage is still set up with the remnants of his live dress rehearsal, which is what he'd been counting on. As he takes the steps up two at the time, the backup lighting around the edges of the stage fade out too. Jiyong can hear a steady creaking noise coming from behind him, echoing out into the arena.
"Aren't you going to show yourself?" he asks. The creaking noise, the scrape of marble on marble, gets closer.
Jiyong walks to the center of the stage, hands in his pockets. It's very quiet, and as his eyes adjust, he begins to see the slack, wide-eyed faces of frozen people waiting in the darkness for something that might never come. A cold feeling shoots down his spine. He resists the urge to take a bow.
"They were just here to have a good time, you know," Jiyong mutters.
He closes his eyes, ears straining. A skittering noise comes from his right.
"They didn't expect a weeping angel to come and try to farm them for energy," he continues, voice rising. "That's fucked up, man, taking something that's supposed to make people happy and twisting it into this caricature of itself."
There's a brush of icy stone against the back of his hand.
"Youngbae, now!"
With a resounding crash, the two enormous halves of the apple Jiyong was supposed to perform in slam shut around them. Jiyong uses his other hand to pull a light-stick out of his pocket, brings it up to his face and turns it on.
The weeping angel-its surface wind-worn and eroded, the tip of one of its giant wings cracked clean off-is baring its teeth at him, one stone hand clasped around his wrist. "Weren't expecting that, were you?"
He remembers belatedly that he won't be getting any sort of response and swallows, unblinking.
"Since you can't turn your head, I'll tell you where you are. The entire inside of this thing is a reflective surface." He pauses for dramatic flourish. "An image of an angel becomes itself an angel. You'll have to stare at each other for as long as this thing's battery keeps up, by which time TOP should be able to find a nice final resting spot to dump both of you. Good luck with that." He wriggles his arm out of his jacket, frees his wrist from the fabric and, by extension, the angel's loose grip. "You're losing your touch. Oh, and one more thing-"
He leans forward pulls the rings off the angel's stone fingers.
"Those are mine."
He stomps twice on the ground, and the floor beneath his feet starts descending, the stage lift bringing him down below. TOP's tense face swims into view, the TARDIS whirring in the background. He catches Jiyong as he half-collapses, breathing hard. "You didn't look it in the eyes, did you?"
"Nope," he says, rubbing his wrist. "What are you going to do with it?"
"I could tether the entire thing to the TARDIS and fly it into the sun if I wanted, though I don't think that'd kill them. Once I tow them off the planet, everything will snap back to normal."
"So you're leaving," Jiyong says.
"You have a performance," TOP reminds him. "This is what you do. You love it. You live for it. You were born to do this. I'm just a pit stop along the way."
Jiyong opens his mouth to protest but TOP waves him quiet.
"Hey-I'll be back. I'll come back for you, after this is all sorted out."
"Will you?"
"Yeah," he says, thumbing the skin behind Jiyong's ear. "I will." He presses dry lips to Jiyong's forehead and lets him go. "See you soon, Kwon Jiyong."
The lights come back on with ten minutes to spare when TOP's gone. Outside, the dull roar of people milling around starts up again; Jiyong doesn't think he's ever heard anything so inherently comforting. Youngbae spends half a minute clucking over him before he's swept off for last minute tweaks, varsity jacket bunched up around his elbows.
There's a mad scramble all throughout the building to make up the lost prep time, and of course the gaping hole in the middle of his stage is a little difficult to explain away. One of the stage directors asks where the hell his enormous apple prop went. "It's a long story," Jiyong finally says, blowing his bangs up. "Can't we just use a sheet or something?"
Jieun, predictably, gets angry about the missing shirt ("What do you mean, you just lost it? How do you just lose something you're wearing?"), but she replaces it in about two seconds, so there's not really much of a problem in the long run.
The show, against all odds, starts on time: business as usual, nothing amiss here. There's a weird sort of cognitive dissonance in his head, a voice screaming you were all about to die half an hour ago as he's getting his make-up retouched and going through the dances with Sungmin and Jungheon again. He catches flashes of Youngbae's face between performances and knows he's feeling it, too.
Jiyong goes last, a simpler makeshift stage scrounged together for him as KARA shuffles off. Even after the weeks he's been away, every move comes to him with a fluid grace, as if he'd only just been training the day before. The TARDIS enhances memory, comes the whispered thought, and he grins out at the audience in the middle of Breathe, microphone dangling from his hand.
It's during his goodbye stage in November that he spots a familiar pair of deep-set eyes and that slow smile in the crush of people at the back of the concert hall. TOP's changed outfits-and hair, for that matter: it's a light auburn now, like he'd tried to dye it red and just missed the mark.
He's waiting for Jiyong in the dressing room after the show, talking to Chaerin and Dara on the couch in the corner.
"Dude, I didn't know you had cool friends, Jingyo," Chaerin says, laughing when Jiyong makes a face at her. Minji calls from across the hall and they hop up, say their goodbyes. He thinks he sees Dara slip her number into TOP's pocket.
"I enjoyed the performance," TOP says.
"I saw you dancing," Jiyong tells him. "You're terrible."
"I have a very high learning curve," he sniffs. "You could teach me."
"Sure, if you like," he says, smiling. A pause, and then: "You came back."
"Was there ever any doubt that I would?"
Jiyong shrugs. He plucks a towel off the coffee table and wipes at the sweat dripping down his shirt. "I didn't expect it to be so soon. But then-how long has it been for you?"
TOP lifts his eyes to the ceiling, does the math in his head. "Three months, maybe longer. I had to disguise myself from a bunch of Cybermen and decided to take your advice. To dye my hair, I mean."
"I noticed," Jiyong says, reaching a hand up to touch it. "It looks good. What happened to the Cybermen?"
"I don't think the hair helped," he says.
"Shocker."
"I've temporarily shaken them off my trail," TOP continues. "Lost them after an unfortunate run-in with the Daleks and some particularly persistent Autons. They were all pretty confused to see each other, and I slipped away during the resulting chaos."
Jiyong lets out an incredulous laugh and shakes his head. "Jesus."
"What?"
"This is just life for you, isn't it?" He bites his lip, makes a vague gesture in the air. "Going off on adventures and getting yourself into worlds of trouble. All in a day's work."
"Will you come with me?" TOP blurts out. "We can go anywhere you want, we-we can finally figure out where the damn swimming pool is. I'm getting, you know, tired of saying something out loud and thinking you're there when-"
"Not this again," Jiyong says. He crosses his arms. "What did I tell you the first time?"
TOP hikes his brows, leans in close. "I need to hear you say it."
"Demanding," he snorts, rolling his eyes. "Yes. Yes, let's go. Let's do it."
TOP smiles slow and easy, fringe falling into his eyes as he claps Jiyong on the shoulder. "Come along, then. No time to lose."
Youngbae barges in just as they get up, flyaway bits of hair coming apart from his gelled Mohawk. "Chaerin told me you were here," he says, an incredibly putout expression on his face. "You're running away, again?"
Jiyong sighs, grabs the lapels of Youngbae's jacket and smacks a kiss straight on his mouth. "Get a girlfriend, Youngbae. We'll be back before you can count to three."
He pivots on a foot, lips turning up in answer to TOP's amused look. Behind him, Youngbae starts counting.
TOP extends a hand. Jiyong takes it and steps over the threshold.
fin
A/N: i deliberately left this rather open-ended, so the possibility that i'll return to dabble in this universe in the future is very high! especially since i want to incorporate/expand on some of the characters that i didn't have time to touch upon in this (i.e. more yb and daesung and seungri, more 2ne1). ~we shall see~. title is adapted from the end of this john cheever quote. anon commenting, as usual, is always welcome!