Refraction ; Yoochun/Changmin
The second part of The Sound of Flight won't be up so soon. Anyway, in case anyone wants to know, I'll be able to retrieve most of my information from my laptop, so it'll all be okay. It'll just take a while :D
This is inspired by Gut Symmetries by Jeanette Winterson.
Title: Refraction
Rating: PG-13
Fandom: Dong Bang Shin Ki
Pairing(s): Yoochun/Changmin (Yoochun/OFC, Changmin/OFC)
Disclaimer: The boys do not belong to me. This is also nothing but pure fiction.
Summary: Changmin knows that Yoochun is having an affair.
Refraction
Laundry on a clothesline. Faded jeans, t-shirts, underwear, freshly washed white bedsheets.
Changmin slides the glass door to the balcony open, and inhales the smell of the breeze and washing powder. He imagines that on the other side of the fluttering white fabric is the happiness he deserves. When he pushes the bedsheets aside, he sees the endless blue sky and the burn of the sun. It's beautiful, but he doesn't see any promises.
Yoochun is having an affair. Changmin knows because he notices things, and Yoochun is not as careful as he thinks he is. Changmin brings Yoochun's shirt to his nose and smells the poisonous scent of perfume, sweet and tangy. It's a woman, just like Changmin guessed. A woman.
Where is she?
Changmin drops the shirt back into the laundry basket, starts to pace the length of the bedroom. Their bedroom. He pulls the door open, swings it shut, where is she hiding? Is she in this room right at this moment, laughing at him? If he gets a screwdriver, removes the door from its hinges, might he find her left with no shadows to retreat into? Perhaps if he empties every closet, every drawer, checks every corner and every crevice, she might run out of places to hide.
Where is she?
Changmin presses his forehead into the wall. Bits of her presence clogs his pores, his throat. The particles of her cling to his hair, his skin. It makes him shudder and pant.
Changmin wonders if Yoochun made love to her on this bed. Their bed. The bed Changmin sleeps in every night. He wonders if she has ever stepped into the shower stall, bare footed on tip-toes, standing where Changmin stands every day.
Changmin will find her. He will tear apart the entire house to find her. Even if she is not in his house, Changmin reasons calmly, there will be a phone number, an address, somewhere. He will find her.
He must not let Yoochun know that he knows. Changmin greets Yoochun at the door like he always does. Yoochun toes off his shoes, puts his arms around Changmin. They kiss.
Changmin can taste the betrayal, salty and bitter in Yoochun's mouth. It stings like acid.
"Welcome home," Changmin says. "I missed you."
When they have sex at night, Changmin is not thinking of Yoochun.
He is thinking of the woman. Her body. Her body pressed below Yoochun's, her breasts, the elegant arch of her spine, her milky skin, her long glossy hair. The silent graceful way the two of them move together, practiced gymnastics, a slow rocking rhythm. Not Yoochun's erratic thrusts into Changmin, and the raw vulgar sound of skin slapping against skin.
Changmin moans, the sound escaping from his lips and Yoochun shudders above him, hissing his name.
For a moment, Changmin thinks that maybe he made a mistake, maybe Yoochun is faithful. Maybe he's wrong. He wants to be wrong.
And then Changmin closes his eyes, and the images come into his mind again. Vivid. Colourful. The images are so real he can feel her heat, smell the way the room reeks of their sex.
Changmin holds Yoochun tight, and whispers, "stay with me, stay with me," into Yoochun's neck, too quiet to be heard, but he knows that the words will sink into Yoochun's skin, a tattoo, a birthmark.
Changmin has never seen her before, but the moment she walks into the place, he knows.
He knows from the way her feet look as though they never touch the ground, the way her lips curve up at the corners, the brush of her eyelashes against her pale skin. He sees the way she tugs at the ends of her hair, and he's certain.
He moves across the dance-floor, and she sees him coming. When he takes her hand in his, he studies her fingers, her palm. He sees the faint stain of ink on the pads of her fingers, and notices the way the dark red of nail polish on one of her nails has chipped at the corners.
She takes her hand back politely, wearing a quizzical smile. She smells the way Yoochun's shirt did.
Changmin is certain that she likes to read. She keeps a diary. She loves animals. She wears the same perfume every day, and the scent stays on her skin even after a shower, faint, subtle and alluring. She cries at sappy movies, sings love songs, and plays with her hair when she's uncomfortable.
Changmin dances with her.
Changmin doesn't like to dance, but she seems to enjoy it. She moves on the dance floor with a kind of natural grace, and once in a while, when she catches his eye, she smiles at him. Neither of them say a word. She doesn't stop him when he dances closer, and he doesn't stop her when she grabs hold of his hands.
She is warm and soft. Braced above her, Changmin imagines that Yoochun must feel the same way. He must also like the way her hair fans out beneath her head, the way her cheeks flush, and the fever in her eyes as she writhes on the bed.
Changmin doesn't like hotels. He prefers the comfort of a home, lived-in and cozy. The hotel room is small, their clothes are all over the place, and in the aftermath, she makes coffee.
Changmin uses the bathroom, hating the way the glasses are turned over, and the way the towels smell. When he opens the door, she is sitting on the bed, clutching at a cup of coffee with both hands. Changmin estimates that she is twenty, maybe nineteen. The kind of young girl that is all too easy to impress, especially if you were Park Yoochun.
Changmin was twenty when he met Yoochun. He still remembers how that felt like.
"Coffee?" she says, gesturing to the table. Another cup sits next to her yellow-and-pink bra, and the small room is filled with the thick aroma of coffee.
Changmin drinks the coffee. He doesn't like coffee, but he drinks the entire cup, just to be polite.
When he puts down the cup, he realizes that she is crying- in that silent, pitiful way that girls do sometimes. Without any warning, it turns into noisy, gulping sobs. Changmin isn't sure what to do, so he just stands next to the bed, wearing nothing but his underwear. She's still naked, the blanket wrapped loosely around her slender body.
She keeps on crying, and Changmin lets her cry until she falls asleep, tears drying into salt tracks on her face. Changmin goes through her bag, finds a card, memorizes her name, her address, her phone number.
Changmin gets dressed, picks up her clothes from various places in the room, folds them neatly and sets them on the edge of the bed. He doesn't leave a note. Not a name, a number, a thank you or I'm sorry. He wonders if she'll even remember what happened when she wakes up in the morning.
Changmin doesn't smell her on Yoochun's clothes any more. Yoochun smells like the washing powder they use, and once in a while like smoke or alcohol, but never of that familiar perfume.
She doesn't haunt Changmin any longer. When Yoochun touches him, he is not plagued by images of the two of them entwined together, all naked skin and long limbs.
Once, he dreams of her. But only once. And he doesn't remember what it was about, just that she was in the dream. She might have been wearing yellow, but that's not important.
Two weeks and three days after the night in the hotel, he calls her number, but no one picks up. In the afternoon, he takes a train and takes more than an hour to get to the address that he memorized. It's unoccupied, empty. A neighbour tells him the pretty girl who lived there has moved away. One morning, she was standing at her doorstep staring up into the sky, and by noon, she was gone.
"When was that?" Changmin asks.
Two days after the night in the hotel.
Changmin wonders what she was crying about. On hindsight, he should have asked. Changmin doesn't quite think of it as a mistake. He thinks of it as an incident. The incident in the hotel, he labels it mentally. On his way home, he tries to recall any conversation they might have had, and comes with nothing.
In the evening, Yoochun brings home Changmin's favourite kind of chocolate, a six-pack of beer, a carton of milk which Changmin called earlier to tell him they just ran out of, and two new boxes of condoms. The combination of items makes Changmin laugh when he looks through the shopping bag.
When Changmin kisses Yoochun's neck, he breathes deeply and doesn't smell her. After they make love, Yoochun disappears into the shower. Changmin sits on the sofa, and looks through Yoochun's messages.
There is no trace of her. He doesn't find anything out of the ordinary. Yoochun could have deleted all her messages. He looks for her name in his list of contacts, and comes up with nothing. He calls her number with Yoochun's phone, but no one picks up.
About a month later, Changmin thinks he sees her, in a train station during rush-hour, her face a blur among the flood of people. He thinks it's her, but he's not sure.
Half a year after the hotel incident, Yoochun says, I want you to meet my parents. He says, I want to tell them, this is the man I want to spend the rest of my life with. He gives Changmin a ring, a beautiful silver band that he slips onto Changmin's fingers. He wears a matching one on his left hand, and develops a habit of twisting it round and round when he's bored.
They move out of their apartment into a bigger one, and Changmin publishes his first book. The one that he's been working on for two and a half years since his graduation. Yoochun talks about going on a fortnight-long holiday to Paris. We deserve a break, he insists, even though Changmin's not quite as enthusiastic, I want to go the city of love with the love of my life. Changmin starts drafting his second book, and tries his hand at lyrics-writing. Every now and again, when Yoochun says I love you, Changmin can't find anything other than sincerity.
It's as though she never existed.
Optical illusion, refraction of light.
I don't know what to think about this. It's quite different from anything I've written so far. So, feedback? :D
MASTERLIST OF FICS HERE
This is inspired by Gut Symmetries by Jeanette Winterson.
Title: Refraction
Rating: PG-13
Fandom: Dong Bang Shin Ki
Pairing(s): Yoochun/Changmin (Yoochun/OFC, Changmin/OFC)
Disclaimer: The boys do not belong to me. This is also nothing but pure fiction.
Summary: Changmin knows that Yoochun is having an affair.
Refraction
Laundry on a clothesline. Faded jeans, t-shirts, underwear, freshly washed white bedsheets.
Changmin slides the glass door to the balcony open, and inhales the smell of the breeze and washing powder. He imagines that on the other side of the fluttering white fabric is the happiness he deserves. When he pushes the bedsheets aside, he sees the endless blue sky and the burn of the sun. It's beautiful, but he doesn't see any promises.
Yoochun is having an affair. Changmin knows because he notices things, and Yoochun is not as careful as he thinks he is. Changmin brings Yoochun's shirt to his nose and smells the poisonous scent of perfume, sweet and tangy. It's a woman, just like Changmin guessed. A woman.
Where is she?
Changmin drops the shirt back into the laundry basket, starts to pace the length of the bedroom. Their bedroom. He pulls the door open, swings it shut, where is she hiding? Is she in this room right at this moment, laughing at him? If he gets a screwdriver, removes the door from its hinges, might he find her left with no shadows to retreat into? Perhaps if he empties every closet, every drawer, checks every corner and every crevice, she might run out of places to hide.
Where is she?
Changmin presses his forehead into the wall. Bits of her presence clogs his pores, his throat. The particles of her cling to his hair, his skin. It makes him shudder and pant.
Changmin wonders if Yoochun made love to her on this bed. Their bed. The bed Changmin sleeps in every night. He wonders if she has ever stepped into the shower stall, bare footed on tip-toes, standing where Changmin stands every day.
Changmin will find her. He will tear apart the entire house to find her. Even if she is not in his house, Changmin reasons calmly, there will be a phone number, an address, somewhere. He will find her.
He must not let Yoochun know that he knows. Changmin greets Yoochun at the door like he always does. Yoochun toes off his shoes, puts his arms around Changmin. They kiss.
Changmin can taste the betrayal, salty and bitter in Yoochun's mouth. It stings like acid.
"Welcome home," Changmin says. "I missed you."
When they have sex at night, Changmin is not thinking of Yoochun.
He is thinking of the woman. Her body. Her body pressed below Yoochun's, her breasts, the elegant arch of her spine, her milky skin, her long glossy hair. The silent graceful way the two of them move together, practiced gymnastics, a slow rocking rhythm. Not Yoochun's erratic thrusts into Changmin, and the raw vulgar sound of skin slapping against skin.
Changmin moans, the sound escaping from his lips and Yoochun shudders above him, hissing his name.
For a moment, Changmin thinks that maybe he made a mistake, maybe Yoochun is faithful. Maybe he's wrong. He wants to be wrong.
And then Changmin closes his eyes, and the images come into his mind again. Vivid. Colourful. The images are so real he can feel her heat, smell the way the room reeks of their sex.
Changmin holds Yoochun tight, and whispers, "stay with me, stay with me," into Yoochun's neck, too quiet to be heard, but he knows that the words will sink into Yoochun's skin, a tattoo, a birthmark.
Changmin has never seen her before, but the moment she walks into the place, he knows.
He knows from the way her feet look as though they never touch the ground, the way her lips curve up at the corners, the brush of her eyelashes against her pale skin. He sees the way she tugs at the ends of her hair, and he's certain.
He moves across the dance-floor, and she sees him coming. When he takes her hand in his, he studies her fingers, her palm. He sees the faint stain of ink on the pads of her fingers, and notices the way the dark red of nail polish on one of her nails has chipped at the corners.
She takes her hand back politely, wearing a quizzical smile. She smells the way Yoochun's shirt did.
Changmin is certain that she likes to read. She keeps a diary. She loves animals. She wears the same perfume every day, and the scent stays on her skin even after a shower, faint, subtle and alluring. She cries at sappy movies, sings love songs, and plays with her hair when she's uncomfortable.
Changmin dances with her.
Changmin doesn't like to dance, but she seems to enjoy it. She moves on the dance floor with a kind of natural grace, and once in a while, when she catches his eye, she smiles at him. Neither of them say a word. She doesn't stop him when he dances closer, and he doesn't stop her when she grabs hold of his hands.
She is warm and soft. Braced above her, Changmin imagines that Yoochun must feel the same way. He must also like the way her hair fans out beneath her head, the way her cheeks flush, and the fever in her eyes as she writhes on the bed.
Changmin doesn't like hotels. He prefers the comfort of a home, lived-in and cozy. The hotel room is small, their clothes are all over the place, and in the aftermath, she makes coffee.
Changmin uses the bathroom, hating the way the glasses are turned over, and the way the towels smell. When he opens the door, she is sitting on the bed, clutching at a cup of coffee with both hands. Changmin estimates that she is twenty, maybe nineteen. The kind of young girl that is all too easy to impress, especially if you were Park Yoochun.
Changmin was twenty when he met Yoochun. He still remembers how that felt like.
"Coffee?" she says, gesturing to the table. Another cup sits next to her yellow-and-pink bra, and the small room is filled with the thick aroma of coffee.
Changmin drinks the coffee. He doesn't like coffee, but he drinks the entire cup, just to be polite.
When he puts down the cup, he realizes that she is crying- in that silent, pitiful way that girls do sometimes. Without any warning, it turns into noisy, gulping sobs. Changmin isn't sure what to do, so he just stands next to the bed, wearing nothing but his underwear. She's still naked, the blanket wrapped loosely around her slender body.
She keeps on crying, and Changmin lets her cry until she falls asleep, tears drying into salt tracks on her face. Changmin goes through her bag, finds a card, memorizes her name, her address, her phone number.
Changmin gets dressed, picks up her clothes from various places in the room, folds them neatly and sets them on the edge of the bed. He doesn't leave a note. Not a name, a number, a thank you or I'm sorry. He wonders if she'll even remember what happened when she wakes up in the morning.
Changmin doesn't smell her on Yoochun's clothes any more. Yoochun smells like the washing powder they use, and once in a while like smoke or alcohol, but never of that familiar perfume.
She doesn't haunt Changmin any longer. When Yoochun touches him, he is not plagued by images of the two of them entwined together, all naked skin and long limbs.
Once, he dreams of her. But only once. And he doesn't remember what it was about, just that she was in the dream. She might have been wearing yellow, but that's not important.
Two weeks and three days after the night in the hotel, he calls her number, but no one picks up. In the afternoon, he takes a train and takes more than an hour to get to the address that he memorized. It's unoccupied, empty. A neighbour tells him the pretty girl who lived there has moved away. One morning, she was standing at her doorstep staring up into the sky, and by noon, she was gone.
"When was that?" Changmin asks.
Two days after the night in the hotel.
Changmin wonders what she was crying about. On hindsight, he should have asked. Changmin doesn't quite think of it as a mistake. He thinks of it as an incident. The incident in the hotel, he labels it mentally. On his way home, he tries to recall any conversation they might have had, and comes with nothing.
In the evening, Yoochun brings home Changmin's favourite kind of chocolate, a six-pack of beer, a carton of milk which Changmin called earlier to tell him they just ran out of, and two new boxes of condoms. The combination of items makes Changmin laugh when he looks through the shopping bag.
When Changmin kisses Yoochun's neck, he breathes deeply and doesn't smell her. After they make love, Yoochun disappears into the shower. Changmin sits on the sofa, and looks through Yoochun's messages.
There is no trace of her. He doesn't find anything out of the ordinary. Yoochun could have deleted all her messages. He looks for her name in his list of contacts, and comes up with nothing. He calls her number with Yoochun's phone, but no one picks up.
About a month later, Changmin thinks he sees her, in a train station during rush-hour, her face a blur among the flood of people. He thinks it's her, but he's not sure.
Half a year after the hotel incident, Yoochun says, I want you to meet my parents. He says, I want to tell them, this is the man I want to spend the rest of my life with. He gives Changmin a ring, a beautiful silver band that he slips onto Changmin's fingers. He wears a matching one on his left hand, and develops a habit of twisting it round and round when he's bored.
They move out of their apartment into a bigger one, and Changmin publishes his first book. The one that he's been working on for two and a half years since his graduation. Yoochun talks about going on a fortnight-long holiday to Paris. We deserve a break, he insists, even though Changmin's not quite as enthusiastic, I want to go the city of love with the love of my life. Changmin starts drafting his second book, and tries his hand at lyrics-writing. Every now and again, when Yoochun says I love you, Changmin can't find anything other than sincerity.
It's as though she never existed.
Optical illusion, refraction of light.
I don't know what to think about this. It's quite different from anything I've written so far. So, feedback? :D
MASTERLIST OF FICS HERE