I had to get this out of me, and I'm quite happy with how it turned out. Enjoy.
Title: Love in the First Degree
Rating: PG-13
Fandom: Dong Bang Shin Ki
Pairing: Yoochun/Changmin
Disclaimer: This is only fiction.
Summary: Changmin vacates his seat and although he is the one leaving, his heart is the one being broken.
Love in the First Degree
I’m still accused of love in the first degree
Guilty of love in the first degree
-- Bananarama
You rest a fist against the wall, and extend trembling fingers outwards, mirroring the tentative blooming of a flower. Your other fist comes up, and knocks - once, twice. The sound is hollow and lonely in the empty room.
“Yoochun,” you say.
The wall does not answer.
They are sitting at a table. There are four chairs.
Changmin occupies one, Yoochun occupies another, loneliness occupies the third, propping its feet up on the fourth. Yoochun’s beauty is subdued, careless and merciless as it arrests Changmin.
“I don’t love you anymore,” Changmin says.
Yoochun smiles sadly, and does not tear apart Changmin’s flimsy lie and pretence. He has always understood Changmin the best. If this is how you’re going to leave me, let me leave you, Changmin thinks.
“I don’t love you anymore,” Changmin repeats.
“Okay,” Yoochun agrees.
Changmin vacates his seat and although he is the one leaving, his heart is the one being broken.
The wall is grey and cold. The cracks that creep from the floor to the ceiling are like rivers snaking across a map, leading nowhere, nowhere at all. You tap one finger against the wall; try to find a way to get to where you want to be.
You walk the length of the room, searching for a heartbeat, and finding only the powdery scales of peeling paint.
“Yoochun,” you whisper against the wall, and you allow your forehead to strike the wall.
Changmin thinks of the best way to say goodbye.
He stands in the middle of the apartment they share - shared - armed with a pad of yellow Post-It notes, and a black pen.
You can have this; he writes and sticks the note onto the television. It’s okay if you don’t play for me anymore; he writes and sticks the note onto the piano. Coffee stains are hard to remove; he writes and sticks the note onto the coffee table, right next to a brown coffee ring, courtesy of one Park Yoochun. Buy spare light bulbs; he writes and climbs onto a chair to stick it onto the ceiling next to the light.
He decorates every room, and marks nearly every item with yellow Post-It notes, and his presence. He sticks them inside pages of books, underneath boxes in the fridge, hides them among instant coffee packets, between folded shirts, the underside of tables, on a leg of a chair, at the back of the medicine cabinet, so Yoochun will always be reminded of him. Surprise, you found me; he writes and sticks the note inside a box of shoes.
Before he leaves, he attaches the last note onto the mirror. Goodbye, remember the way I used to love you.
He does not leave his name. Yoochun knows his handwriting the way he knows Changmin still loves him.
You slowly turn your back against the wall and slide down along it, hitting ground. You turn to your left, and look out the open window.
Outside, the sky is heavy with storm clouds.
The grey of the sky waits for rain, and you wait for him.
You shift, so you’re sitting sideways, one ear plastered against the wall. “Yoochun,” you try again, and you don’t know if you still expect an answer.
Yoochun kisses him. He is drunk but Changmin is not.
He reeks of alcohol and nostalgia.
Yoochun’s hands still runs up and down Changmin’s back with painful familiarity. Yoochun’s body still remembers how to fit itself to Changmin’s perfectly, like the last remaining piece of puzzle, like the other half of a heart.
It is hard to forget how it feels like (to be complete). Changmin hisses as Yoochun’s grinds, hard and unforgiving into him. Fuck, he thinks, and he knows he should push Yoochun away, so neither of them will have anything to regret in the morning.
“Hey, genius,” Yoochun whispers, slurring out a long-lost nickname, rolling it across tongue as though they have never stopped, as though they have never fallen apart, as though they are still Yoochun-and-Changmin.
Changmin thinks, fuck regret, and kisses back, and pretends that Yoochun still loves him, and this is not just mindless drunken sex that Yoochun will regret in the morning.
The room is empty like you are.
You came in looking for an answer to a question, but you realise now that it was never a question. It was merely a statement you have always wanted to confess.
You don’t need an answer, you need him.
Alone, sitting against a wall, you think that if you had swallowed your pride, as bitter as it was, got down on your knees and begged him not to go, maybe, just maybe-
You drum fingers against the wall before turning to face it.
You cup your hands around your mouth and whisper to it (not a secret, a declaration), “I still love you,” you confess. The words you should have said. You get onto your knees, and raise your voice. “I still love you,” you say, and it’s not a question.
You press your lips against the wall (not a kiss goodbye, never that), and Yoochun’s face flickers into view behind your eyelids then dulls like a dying flame.
The wall tastes like loss, abandonment and the slow gradual rusting of a heart.
b-side to this:
The Heartbeat of Rain Comments? The line "If this is how you’re going to leave me, let me leave you." is taken from the poem Boats, by Cyril Wong.
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