simulation breathing
thrice swallowed, four times consumed
800w; pg-13 (lay/irene)
joohyun starts fires and yixing forgets about them.
When Yixing comes to, he’s sitting in the driver’s seat of a Volkswagen that’s parked on the shoulder of a highway, window rolled down so the noise of passing traffic pounds through. It’s so loud that he doesn’t realize that the radio’s on until a small hand with nails painted cherry turns it off.
He turns to look at her. Large pair of sunglasses covering most of her face, dark hair pulled back into a ponytail, lips stained the same shade of cherry as her nails. A half-finished bottle of cola in her other hand, the one that didn’t turn off the radio. He doesn’t know her name.
She takes a sip. Her lipstick leaves a mark on the bottle’s rim. She swallows. He swallows.
“Drive,” she says, voice soft. Maybe he knew her name, once. Yixing puts the key in the ignition without much of a second thought.
The name’s Joohyun. Bae Joohyun. Or at least that’s what she tells him when he asks, after wetting her lips in deep thought sometime in between late afternoon and dusk. They’ve had this conversation at least two times before, he learns, which explains the itching sensation of déjà vu, if not more. She - Joohyun, Yixing trains himself to remember - doesn’t keep track.
Yixing forgets a lot of things, he’s told. From the innocuous birthdays and old math formulas to the more extreme - names of friends and cities he’s lived in for decades. He forgets the names of cities they pass right after he’s finished reading the sign. He forgets the insistent beating of two hearts in his chest, two spit up, four swallowed. He forgets the way Joohyun pulls matchsticks between her teeth, lighting them with a lighter. And when the flame dances dangerously close to her cherry red lips, she picks the unburnt tip between her fingers and ingests the fire.
There’s a place for people like them somewhere in the desert. That’s where they’re going, and that’s all Yixing knows. When he tries to ask Joohyun for more, she’s either asleep - head resting on her shoulder, lips slightly parted and blue in the midnight, the brief light of the moon and stars holding her cheek - or silent, like he’s a child who’s asked the same question too many times before.
They’re eating fast food in the car when Yixing asks her about it for what he thinks is the first time.
“Can I try?” when she’s got another matchstick between her teeth. The desert air filtering in through her half-open window is sandy and hot.
Joohyun doesn’t reply. Her hands shake as she handles the lighter. Yixing takes it from her and lights the tip for her.
“You’ll only get burned,” she says, voice trembling. The match quivers with her lips. Those deep, cherry red lips. They leave marks on everything.
He considers. “Wouldn’t be the first time.”
Joohyun looks at him pointedly and he can hear his two hearts going fast in an off-kilter beat. “Hearts and matchsticks aren’t the same.”
One night, he wakes up and forgets who she is.
And then, Yixing smells the earthy scent of smoke, plumes of ivory escaping a small mouth painted cherry red, the way she coughs up wildfires and his hearts go into overdrive, the pale sliver of skin when her shirt rode up and before she pulled it down prudishly for all her fires and flames and burns, and for all the hearts he’d swallowed and beat out of his chest before -
And then he remembers.
(He’s been burned before, with her matchsticks and the fires she starts with her tongue, rolling off like the way she can’t quite say Yixing like his parents did, no matter how many times he repeated it for her to listen to. He was burned the moment she - Joohyun, Joohyun - tangled her tongue with his and forced Soojung and Qian’s hearts out of him, the smoke of her uncontainable brush fires choking him until he reached for hers. Her heart.
He swallowed. She swallowed. Cherry red lips. Cola bottle pressed to said lips. Sliver of skin in flux. Matchsticks between her teeth. Shaky hand - his shaky hand - reaching through the ivory peels of smoke, broken record of i’m sorry, i’m sorry, i’m sorry playing for someone who didn’t want to listen.
Shoulder of a highway.)
So this time Joohyun lights the match between her teeth, Yixing puts his lips on hers. Catches the stick with his tongue and swallows it down - flame and all - the smoke smothering his lungs.
He coughs, chokes. Breaths in again before coughing some more. Joohyun watches him with what Yixing thinks is a blurry concern.
And just when Yixing thinks he’s going to die, it happens. He presses his open mouth against Joohyun’s and gives her heart back.
spring cleaning
503w; g (seulgi/sungjoo)
the dust in between.
"Do you ever feel like a speck of dust?"
Sungjoo looks up from where he's lifting one of Seulgi's boxes. The late afternoon sunlight, a plain but unadulterated shade of honey, filters in through the single square window in her attic, illuminating the dust they keep kicking up like stars in the daytime. Seulgi, from her perch on one of her decades-old lock-top plastic boxes, dangling her legs above the ground, cards a hand through the air, opening and closing her fist as if she's trying to catch something he can't see. Every time she uncurls her fingers, she frowns, palms coming up empty again.
In his momentary distraction, Sungjoo drops the box on his toes. Seulgi smiles lazily when he curses, stretching languidly across her face like a sunbeam, and laughs a moment too late.
"Why do you say that?" Sungjoo finally replies after deciding to give up. Seulgi shrugs, swiping her palm against the stack of boxes next to her and then observing the subsequent dust that sticks to it.
They did this a lot - drowning in did you ever's, if you could's, and what would you do's - and called it a game. Wenhan called them boring. Sungjoo called it fun, fun until he found himself staring at one of the hypotheticals becoming reality in the face, suddenly not knowing if he would be able to uphold all his earnest answers from before. It looks suspiciously like Seulgi staring back at him.
She sighs, deflating. "You know. Floating aimlessly by yourself." Shakes a loose strand of hair away from her face. Sungjoo sees her lips quivering, moth wings against the brightness of the window. "Meaningless without others."
Something shrinks in his chest, somewhere around his lungs, and where there should be air is just him, holding his breath in a collapsed vacuum of space. "Seulgi," he says, hearing the warning in his voice, but not knowing how it got there. All he knows is that Seulgi is looking at her sneakers and that two days from now, she'll be an entire ocean away.
Sungjoo walks overs to her, hands leaning against the sides of the box she's sitting on, nose almost touching hers. Seulgi meets his eyes when he doesn't back away, lips pressed into a small semblance of a smile. He tucks the loose strand of hair behind her ear, the dust from his fingertips burying itself there.
She puts her palm close to her mouth, the one with all the dust stuck to it, and blows. The specks scatter between them and Sungjoo coughs, leaning back a bit, only for Seulgi to laugh again, more quiet and hollow this time. She wipes whatever didn't come off onto the sleeve of his t-shirt.
"It'll be fine," Sungjoo insists when Seulgi wraps her arms around his waist. (he doesn't know this)
But as they watch each other through the dust suspended in the air, twinkling stars in the daytime, Sungjoo makes the futile wish that everything really will be.
the clapping sound of hands
812w; g (wonwoo/jun)
wonwoo goes on a road trip to escape.
May eighteenth. Jeon Wonwoo, stepping out of a cheap rental car, slams the door closed. A hand shields his eyes from the yellow sun hung high in a never-ending blue sky.
In the middle of nowhere, you’re supposed to find yourself. Self-discovery in the midst of nothing, or something of the kind. In the middle of nowhere, with a flat tire preventing him from escaping such nothingness, Wonwoo finds himself in a conundrum instead.
There are car repair shops. And then there are car repair shops run by Chinese immigrants. Wonwoo didn’t even know those existed until an hour of leaning against the burning hood of the car later, when a local asked if he needed help. The middle-aged man had been the first to ask Wonwoo for anything in a week.
“And where is your car?” the young man across the counter asks Wonwoo, still scribbling down words with a scratchy pen. Moon Joonhwi, is the name pinned onto his dark shirt. The fringe falling into his face sticks to his forehead. Wonwoo finally feels the one fan in the shop full-force against his back. He steps slightly to the left, thinking.
“Maybe twenty minutes away.” Moon Joonhwi. What does that sound like in Chinese? “On the long road that’s next to the ocean.”
Joonhwi smiles slightly, politely. “Did you like the view?”
Wonwoo blinks. “I’m sorry?”
“The view,” Joonhwi smiles again, with teeth this time. A very toothy smile. “The ocean view,” he elaborates when Wonwoo doesn’t reply. He goes back to scrawling things down on the slip of paper.
“Oh, yeah,” Wonwoo says. The twinkling of the water under the yellow sun on a day too hot for May. It blinded his peripherals. “It was beautiful.”
Joonhwi nods. “Sign here,” he directs, pointing the pen to the bottom line of the paper. Wonwoo gives him a tight-lipped smile and takes both objects. Their fingers do not brush.
“Jeon Wonwoo,” Moon Joonhwi says in the silence sandwiched between the engine of the car, the wheels against the bumpy pavement, and the occasional roar of a wave hitting the shore. Wonwoo looks over at him from the road that he doesn’t remember leading him to the Moon’s car repair shop.
“Yes?” he asks. Joonhwi doesn’t take his eyes off the road.
“Jeon Wonwoo,” he repeats. Wonwoo feels insect legs tickling his shoulders. “Sounds familiar,” Joonhwi adds, glancing at him this time - too quick to know, too slow to try to figure him out.
Wonwoo forces a laugh, thick in his chest. “There’s probably more Jeon Wonwoo’s out there in the world.”
Joonhwi lets a smile past his lips at that. “Well, I’m pretty sure you’re the first one I’ve met.”
It doesn’t take long for Joonhwi to change the tire. As he’s working, Wonwoo stands behind, hands clammy inside his pockets, using his shadow to give him shade. One car passes by.
“How do you say your name?” he asks when Joonhwi takes the time to wipe the sweat off his forehead. “Moon Joonhwi?”
Joonhwi catches his breath. “Junhui. Wen Junhui.”
“Wen Junhui?” Wonwoo repeats back to him, words hesitant. Then, more confident: “Wen Junhui.”
Junhui laughs. “Jeon Wonwoo,” he replies, reaching for the towel hanging off the side of the car. Wonwoo feels the insect legs tickling his skin again.
“Well, I guess that’s everything,” Wonwoo says after stuffing his wallet back into his pocket. He puts his hand there, too. Junhui has a streak of something dark against his cheek. “Thank you, Wen Junhui.”
“You got a full tank of a gas?” Junhui asks. Wonwoo nods before getting into the cheap rental car.
Wonwoo slams the door closed. The yellow sun still hangs in the never-ending blue sky, tilting a fraction closer to the horizon, the only indication that time passed at all. He rolls his window down after U-turning on the empty road, leaning so Junhui can hear him, the insect legs all over his skin.
“An ant falls into a molehill,” Wonwoo says, in a voice sandwiched between the engine of the car and the sweeping tides of the ocean against the sand.
Junhui pauses before laughing, face betraying utter confusion. “Drive safe, Jeon Wonwoo.”
Wonwoo nods stiffly before pulling away. A tiny Wen Junhui with an even tinier Moon Joonhwi nametag pinned to his dark shirt waves for a moment before turning back to his car.
And in the middle of nowhere, Wonwoo finds his chest swelling with a sudden sense of loss. He isn’t sure if this was what he was looking for when he let himself drive into the middle of nowhere. All he’s sure of is that he shouldn’t have said anything.
On the spine of a dusty novel in the Moon’s car repair shop, the bent edges of a well-read book: An Ant in a Molehill Finds Home by Jeon Wonwoo.
800w; pg-13 (lay/irene)
joohyun starts fires and yixing forgets about them.
When Yixing comes to, he’s sitting in the driver’s seat of a Volkswagen that’s parked on the shoulder of a highway, window rolled down so the noise of passing traffic pounds through. It’s so loud that he doesn’t realize that the radio’s on until a small hand with nails painted cherry turns it off.
He turns to look at her. Large pair of sunglasses covering most of her face, dark hair pulled back into a ponytail, lips stained the same shade of cherry as her nails. A half-finished bottle of cola in her other hand, the one that didn’t turn off the radio. He doesn’t know her name.
She takes a sip. Her lipstick leaves a mark on the bottle’s rim. She swallows. He swallows.
“Drive,” she says, voice soft. Maybe he knew her name, once. Yixing puts the key in the ignition without much of a second thought.
The name’s Joohyun. Bae Joohyun. Or at least that’s what she tells him when he asks, after wetting her lips in deep thought sometime in between late afternoon and dusk. They’ve had this conversation at least two times before, he learns, which explains the itching sensation of déjà vu, if not more. She - Joohyun, Yixing trains himself to remember - doesn’t keep track.
Yixing forgets a lot of things, he’s told. From the innocuous birthdays and old math formulas to the more extreme - names of friends and cities he’s lived in for decades. He forgets the names of cities they pass right after he’s finished reading the sign. He forgets the insistent beating of two hearts in his chest, two spit up, four swallowed. He forgets the way Joohyun pulls matchsticks between her teeth, lighting them with a lighter. And when the flame dances dangerously close to her cherry red lips, she picks the unburnt tip between her fingers and ingests the fire.
There’s a place for people like them somewhere in the desert. That’s where they’re going, and that’s all Yixing knows. When he tries to ask Joohyun for more, she’s either asleep - head resting on her shoulder, lips slightly parted and blue in the midnight, the brief light of the moon and stars holding her cheek - or silent, like he’s a child who’s asked the same question too many times before.
They’re eating fast food in the car when Yixing asks her about it for what he thinks is the first time.
“Can I try?” when she’s got another matchstick between her teeth. The desert air filtering in through her half-open window is sandy and hot.
Joohyun doesn’t reply. Her hands shake as she handles the lighter. Yixing takes it from her and lights the tip for her.
“You’ll only get burned,” she says, voice trembling. The match quivers with her lips. Those deep, cherry red lips. They leave marks on everything.
He considers. “Wouldn’t be the first time.”
Joohyun looks at him pointedly and he can hear his two hearts going fast in an off-kilter beat. “Hearts and matchsticks aren’t the same.”
One night, he wakes up and forgets who she is.
And then, Yixing smells the earthy scent of smoke, plumes of ivory escaping a small mouth painted cherry red, the way she coughs up wildfires and his hearts go into overdrive, the pale sliver of skin when her shirt rode up and before she pulled it down prudishly for all her fires and flames and burns, and for all the hearts he’d swallowed and beat out of his chest before -
And then he remembers.
(He’s been burned before, with her matchsticks and the fires she starts with her tongue, rolling off like the way she can’t quite say Yixing like his parents did, no matter how many times he repeated it for her to listen to. He was burned the moment she - Joohyun, Joohyun - tangled her tongue with his and forced Soojung and Qian’s hearts out of him, the smoke of her uncontainable brush fires choking him until he reached for hers. Her heart.
He swallowed. She swallowed. Cherry red lips. Cola bottle pressed to said lips. Sliver of skin in flux. Matchsticks between her teeth. Shaky hand - his shaky hand - reaching through the ivory peels of smoke, broken record of i’m sorry, i’m sorry, i’m sorry playing for someone who didn’t want to listen.
Shoulder of a highway.)
So this time Joohyun lights the match between her teeth, Yixing puts his lips on hers. Catches the stick with his tongue and swallows it down - flame and all - the smoke smothering his lungs.
He coughs, chokes. Breaths in again before coughing some more. Joohyun watches him with what Yixing thinks is a blurry concern.
And just when Yixing thinks he’s going to die, it happens. He presses his open mouth against Joohyun’s and gives her heart back.
spring cleaning
503w; g (seulgi/sungjoo)
the dust in between.
"Do you ever feel like a speck of dust?"
Sungjoo looks up from where he's lifting one of Seulgi's boxes. The late afternoon sunlight, a plain but unadulterated shade of honey, filters in through the single square window in her attic, illuminating the dust they keep kicking up like stars in the daytime. Seulgi, from her perch on one of her decades-old lock-top plastic boxes, dangling her legs above the ground, cards a hand through the air, opening and closing her fist as if she's trying to catch something he can't see. Every time she uncurls her fingers, she frowns, palms coming up empty again.
In his momentary distraction, Sungjoo drops the box on his toes. Seulgi smiles lazily when he curses, stretching languidly across her face like a sunbeam, and laughs a moment too late.
"Why do you say that?" Sungjoo finally replies after deciding to give up. Seulgi shrugs, swiping her palm against the stack of boxes next to her and then observing the subsequent dust that sticks to it.
They did this a lot - drowning in did you ever's, if you could's, and what would you do's - and called it a game. Wenhan called them boring. Sungjoo called it fun, fun until he found himself staring at one of the hypotheticals becoming reality in the face, suddenly not knowing if he would be able to uphold all his earnest answers from before. It looks suspiciously like Seulgi staring back at him.
She sighs, deflating. "You know. Floating aimlessly by yourself." Shakes a loose strand of hair away from her face. Sungjoo sees her lips quivering, moth wings against the brightness of the window. "Meaningless without others."
Something shrinks in his chest, somewhere around his lungs, and where there should be air is just him, holding his breath in a collapsed vacuum of space. "Seulgi," he says, hearing the warning in his voice, but not knowing how it got there. All he knows is that Seulgi is looking at her sneakers and that two days from now, she'll be an entire ocean away.
Sungjoo walks overs to her, hands leaning against the sides of the box she's sitting on, nose almost touching hers. Seulgi meets his eyes when he doesn't back away, lips pressed into a small semblance of a smile. He tucks the loose strand of hair behind her ear, the dust from his fingertips burying itself there.
She puts her palm close to her mouth, the one with all the dust stuck to it, and blows. The specks scatter between them and Sungjoo coughs, leaning back a bit, only for Seulgi to laugh again, more quiet and hollow this time. She wipes whatever didn't come off onto the sleeve of his t-shirt.
"It'll be fine," Sungjoo insists when Seulgi wraps her arms around his waist. (he doesn't know this)
But as they watch each other through the dust suspended in the air, twinkling stars in the daytime, Sungjoo makes the futile wish that everything really will be.
the clapping sound of hands
812w; g (wonwoo/jun)
wonwoo goes on a road trip to escape.
May eighteenth. Jeon Wonwoo, stepping out of a cheap rental car, slams the door closed. A hand shields his eyes from the yellow sun hung high in a never-ending blue sky.
In the middle of nowhere, you’re supposed to find yourself. Self-discovery in the midst of nothing, or something of the kind. In the middle of nowhere, with a flat tire preventing him from escaping such nothingness, Wonwoo finds himself in a conundrum instead.
There are car repair shops. And then there are car repair shops run by Chinese immigrants. Wonwoo didn’t even know those existed until an hour of leaning against the burning hood of the car later, when a local asked if he needed help. The middle-aged man had been the first to ask Wonwoo for anything in a week.
“And where is your car?” the young man across the counter asks Wonwoo, still scribbling down words with a scratchy pen. Moon Joonhwi, is the name pinned onto his dark shirt. The fringe falling into his face sticks to his forehead. Wonwoo finally feels the one fan in the shop full-force against his back. He steps slightly to the left, thinking.
“Maybe twenty minutes away.” Moon Joonhwi. What does that sound like in Chinese? “On the long road that’s next to the ocean.”
Joonhwi smiles slightly, politely. “Did you like the view?”
Wonwoo blinks. “I’m sorry?”
“The view,” Joonhwi smiles again, with teeth this time. A very toothy smile. “The ocean view,” he elaborates when Wonwoo doesn’t reply. He goes back to scrawling things down on the slip of paper.
“Oh, yeah,” Wonwoo says. The twinkling of the water under the yellow sun on a day too hot for May. It blinded his peripherals. “It was beautiful.”
Joonhwi nods. “Sign here,” he directs, pointing the pen to the bottom line of the paper. Wonwoo gives him a tight-lipped smile and takes both objects. Their fingers do not brush.
“Jeon Wonwoo,” Moon Joonhwi says in the silence sandwiched between the engine of the car, the wheels against the bumpy pavement, and the occasional roar of a wave hitting the shore. Wonwoo looks over at him from the road that he doesn’t remember leading him to the Moon’s car repair shop.
“Yes?” he asks. Joonhwi doesn’t take his eyes off the road.
“Jeon Wonwoo,” he repeats. Wonwoo feels insect legs tickling his shoulders. “Sounds familiar,” Joonhwi adds, glancing at him this time - too quick to know, too slow to try to figure him out.
Wonwoo forces a laugh, thick in his chest. “There’s probably more Jeon Wonwoo’s out there in the world.”
Joonhwi lets a smile past his lips at that. “Well, I’m pretty sure you’re the first one I’ve met.”
It doesn’t take long for Joonhwi to change the tire. As he’s working, Wonwoo stands behind, hands clammy inside his pockets, using his shadow to give him shade. One car passes by.
“How do you say your name?” he asks when Joonhwi takes the time to wipe the sweat off his forehead. “Moon Joonhwi?”
Joonhwi catches his breath. “Junhui. Wen Junhui.”
“Wen Junhui?” Wonwoo repeats back to him, words hesitant. Then, more confident: “Wen Junhui.”
Junhui laughs. “Jeon Wonwoo,” he replies, reaching for the towel hanging off the side of the car. Wonwoo feels the insect legs tickling his skin again.
“Well, I guess that’s everything,” Wonwoo says after stuffing his wallet back into his pocket. He puts his hand there, too. Junhui has a streak of something dark against his cheek. “Thank you, Wen Junhui.”
“You got a full tank of a gas?” Junhui asks. Wonwoo nods before getting into the cheap rental car.
Wonwoo slams the door closed. The yellow sun still hangs in the never-ending blue sky, tilting a fraction closer to the horizon, the only indication that time passed at all. He rolls his window down after U-turning on the empty road, leaning so Junhui can hear him, the insect legs all over his skin.
“An ant falls into a molehill,” Wonwoo says, in a voice sandwiched between the engine of the car and the sweeping tides of the ocean against the sand.
Junhui pauses before laughing, face betraying utter confusion. “Drive safe, Jeon Wonwoo.”
Wonwoo nods stiffly before pulling away. A tiny Wen Junhui with an even tinier Moon Joonhwi nametag pinned to his dark shirt waves for a moment before turning back to his car.
And in the middle of nowhere, Wonwoo finds his chest swelling with a sudden sense of loss. He isn’t sure if this was what he was looking for when he let himself drive into the middle of nowhere. All he’s sure of is that he shouldn’t have said anything.
On the spine of a dusty novel in the Moon’s car repair shop, the bent edges of a well-read book: An Ant in a Molehill Finds Home by Jeon Wonwoo.