BLACK DAY 12: Rocks Await
Title: Rocks Await
Written by: officiallykris
A remix of " Now my feet won't touch the ground" by pillowfrost
Pairing: broken Sehun/Luhan, broken Kai/Sehun
Rating: PG-13
Warnings: mild language, mentioned sexual content
Summary: Lu Han comes back. Jongin is unprepared. Sehun has been waiting.
“Lu Han is coming.”
The words are static through Jongin’s shitty cell reception but the message is as clear in his mind as it would be if Yixing were sitting right next to him. They don’t really startle him like they probably should, but they do give him reason to pause, to look around himself, at the fogged mirrors of the basement practice room at his studio, the gleaming polished floors. His reflection is jagged, distorted, in both.
“Are you sure,” he asks. For good reason. Yixing is one of the most receptive people Jongin has ever met-always has been, even when language and cultural barriers should have made it impossible for him to be-but he has always been a little off when it comes to reading his best friend.
Jongin understands. Everyone is susceptible to a little false hope where Lu Han is concerned.
“Would I be telling you if I wasn’t?” Another truth to be taken with a grain of salt, but this time for a completely different reason.
He thinks about saying, “yes,” but he keeps his mouth shut for the sake of lost time. He’s got a class starting in twenty minutes-beginners. He needs this conversation to take up as little of his energy as possible. He’s been running low lately. He runs a sweaty palm over the tuft of hair that refuses to stay down at the crown of his head and sighs.
“I’ll let him know.” He doesn’t mean to keep Sehun’s name unmentioned. It’s just become habit recently.
Regardless, Yixing is on the same page. “S’why I called you first.”
“Are you telling any of the others?”
The bark of laughter cracks in the middle and Jongin pulls the phone away before he can suffer a busted eardrum.
“You know I won’t. What kind of surprise appearance would that be?” Yixing is saying when he brings the phone back within hearing distance. “I just thought I’d give you a heads up. ‘Cause-you know.”
He does know, and that’s probably more than half of his problem.
“Yeah, thanks,” he says, though he’s not really sure what he’s thankful for.
Thanks for putting this shit on him? Thanks for giving him the information that could-and likely would-break down all the little defensive walls he’s helped his best friend put up in the last three years? Thanks for being the conduit between them all and the guy that decided a long time ago he wanted nothing to do with them?
He hangs up after Yixing shouts an enthusiastic “No problem, Jonginnie!” and fights the urge to throw his phone across the room. Eventually, he tucks it away into his duffle, safe in one corner of the room, away from him and his sudden unease. He goes back to planning out the last of the routine he would be teaching, goes through familiar motions and counts beats aloud to the empty room.
But he thinks about Sehun. He thinks about tired smiles and night-long conversations. He thinks about airports and showcases and comebacks. He thinks about reunions. And he thinks about Lu Han.
He ends up cutting class short that day.
Jongin was 20 when he fell in love.
It wasn’t a sudden realization and it wasn’t surprising at all. It was gradual and he thinks that’s probably the most painful part. It wasn’t a moment, but a string of moments. It was a series of snapshots in his life that shouldn’t have felt cohesive at all but made sense in his mind anyway.
It was a hotel room in Bangkok with the air conditioning cranked so high his fingers turned purple, and shrieking laughter when he tried to bury them under Sehun’s freakishly warm thighs. It was a night in the dorm right before the release of their second album, with pain shooting up his side and relief only after Sehun called him an idiot and shoved two little white pills in his hand. It was a perfected routine that they get to use in one of their MVs, and the smile Sehun shot him from across the room that was both proud and relieved, a reflected image of his own.
It was a moment on a plane, watching Sehun rest his head against Lu Han’s shoulder, listening to their quiet conversation from a seat away. It was another moment when they landed, when Sehun’s eyes lingered a little too long on Lu Han’s face before moving on to catch Jongin’s gaze. It was an even longer moment of guilt and understanding and sudden, overwhelming, exhaustion.
Sehun was 20 when he fell in love. And it was fitting. They’d always done things in pairs. It was just. Jongin was in love with Sehun. But Sehun wasn’t in love with Jongin.
Sehun is sitting in their kitchen when Jongin gets home that night, shoving noodles into his mouth and jotting down the recipe from the cooking show playing on the flat screen in their living room. They’d bought the T.V. as a kind of commemoratory gift to each other when they’d moved in together almost four years ago. It was always on, but they hardly ever sat down to watch it.
“Is food all you ever think about?” he asks, completely aware of how contradicting it is to say as he rifles through their fridge for the leftover take out box with his name scribbled across the top. Its contents are a few days old, sludgy brown rice and clumps of meat and vegetables. He probably should just throw it out. But it’s either this or pizza again and he doesn’t feel like searching through the junk drawer for the menus.
“S’rich coming from you, fatty,” is the response, mumbled around the sticky noodle-and-sauce paste Sehun has made in his mouth. He glances up from his writing as Jongin comes up behind him, but only to throw him an incredulous look. “How much do you weigh now? 70 kilos?”
“64, thank you very much.”
He grabs the fork from Sehun’s fingers and licks the dripping sauce from the end before shoving it down into his own box to spear a cold stalk of broccoli. It mushes too easy between his teeth and he makes a face to show his disgust. Sehun waits until Jongin peers over his shoulder at the recipe before snatching his fork back.
“Italian?”
“We should start cooking. We eat too much junk.”
Jongin hums, tilts his body sideways until he lands sprawled on one of the kitchen chairs. He picks through his box with his fingers for a piece of chicken. He half expects Sehun to laugh and call him gross, but the room remains silent apart from the TV host’s excited commentary on goat cheese and their chewing. Sehun continues writing in hurried sloppy blocks of text that Jongin doesn’t have to struggle to read. He thinks that probably says something about how long they’ve been together.
Jongin can stand the quiet for about half a minute before he’s searching for something to say. And he wonders when they’d gotten to a point in their relationship that silence had become awkward again. Coming full circle shouldn’t be this uncomfortable.
“New class started today,” he says. Sehun acknowledges him with a nod, but he doesn’t look up. “Got some talent.”
A hum.
“I think I’m gonna tell one kid’s parents he should take up ballet.”
A swallow and a nod. Sehun pauses in writing for a moment, but goes right back into it.
“He’s got these really long legs. And he’s scary skinny, yeah? Kinda reminded me of you.”
Nothing this time. Jongin looks down at his food.
“Lu Han’s coming.”
“I know.”
“How-”
Sehun sighs, like he’s tired and sore. Jongin can relate, but it still irritates him.
“It’s a reunion. The word inherently suggests everyone is coming.”
Jongin figures there’s some truth to that, but it doesn’t make him feel any better about it. If anything, it makes him feel worse. That it’s even being called a reunion at all is making him feel worse. It’s hardly a reunion. It’s a party. Sure, there will be photographers and reporters and they’re going to be featured in some magazines, but they’re not getting back together. They’re just going to be in the same room at the same time for a couple hours of forced conversation.
Jongin didn’t really want anything to do with it.
“It’ll be okay.”
He doesn’t even realize he needs to hear it until he does. Sehun is looking at him now, watching him, like he’s waiting for some reaction. Jongin sighs, tired and sore, trying to turn Sehun’s amusement into irritation.
It doesn’t work.
They’re early to the party because Jongin is too anxious to sit around their apartment after he gets ready. Sehun’s reflection, when he peers into the bathroom to whine about being hungry, rolls its eyes at him and says, not unkindly, “I thought getting old made you more patient.”
He sticks his tongue out and gets a slammed door to the face for his efforts. He swears Sehun takes an extra fifteen minutes out of spite, but they’re still the second to arrive. Joonmyun is there, and he pulls them both in for hugs so tight it makes pain flare in his side. They talk. It’s nice. Sehun laughs like he’s okay and Jongin’s nerves settle. The champagne has a lot to do with that last bit, but he’s not complaining. The others come straggling in, ones and twos at a time. Chanyeol and Kyungsoo. Baekhyun. Jongdae, Yifan, Minseok.
When Yixing walks in, Lu Han straggles behind him.
The cease in movement is less than momentary. Chanyeol is the first to greet them, a flurry of long limbs and flame-red hair. It sends the room into a frenzy that Jongin tries to stay back from. He catches Lu Han’s eye just long enough to send what is probably an unconvincing smile, but it’s returned a little tentatively and it’s difficult then to stay angry. It’s even more difficult not to gravitate toward them, toward Lu Han, to throw his arms around Lu Han’s neck and press his face against Lu Han’s shoulder for a long, old spice-scented, hug.
He’d be lying if he said he hadn’t missed the bastard too.
He doesn’t notice when Sehun sneaks off to the bathroom, but when he comes up to Jongin a couple hours later, he’s got a haunted look in his eyes and a handful of papers he had not come in with and Jongin wants to gather him up in his arms and protect him from whatever it was that hurt him this time. He has an idea, thinks if he followed the trail back to the bathroom he’d find Lu Han waiting at the end.
“We should leave,” Sehun says, voice shaking.
He can only nod.
It’s not as if he couldn’t understand. Even when they were young and naiveté was an excusable form of stupidity, Jongin knew that he couldn’t just make Sehun stop loving Lu Han. He didn’t have that kind of control, though that doesn’t necessarily mean he didn’t try. They would talk, and Sehun would say things that Jongin didn’t want to hear, so he’d tell Sehun to shut up, forget about it, forget about him. Because Lu Han has always been a little bit of an asshole, but it never seemed to matter.
They kissed on Valentine’s Day a couple years before the break up. He found out through one of those conversations, lying across Sehun’s bed in the dark, whispers soft sighs between them because Joonmyun was sleeping across the room. And Jongin had expected the words but not the look that came over Sehun’s face. Resignation.
He stopped telling Sehun to shut up when their conversations turned to Lu Han after that. It was only fair, he told himself, to let Sehun come to his own realizations, to let his friend work through the emotions and the reasons in some relative peace.
They had sex the night of their final performance. He found out not through any explicit words, but because when he walked into Sehun’s room the next morning-just across the hall from his own, the distance had never felt so far, so significant-it was to the smell of rank hangover over would-be realized dreams. And Sehun was sitting on the edge of his bed, eyes a step away from vacant, mouth a flat line.
Acceptance doesn’t look anything like relief.
“He’s gone.”
Jongin still thinks it should have made him happy. It didn’t. It just made him hurt.
There are love songs strewn across their kitchen table that neither of them wrote, stacks of words and notations and rhythms. They are all painfully obvious. And Jongin sits as Sehun reads them aloud in drunken, emotionless slurs, lets Sehun work through each one, doesn’t call bullshit when Sehun pretends to be unaffected.
When they finish, when Sehun says he’s done-with all this shit, so fucking tired of it all-Jongin twines their fingers together and tugs him back into his bedroom. It’s too clean, clinically so, and Jongin remembers a time when the two of them had made a mess of the place, fucking trashed it, because Sehun had needed to destroy memories and bury emotions.
He lays Sehun back on his bed, pulls his shoes off his stupidly huge feet, tugs his slacks free of his ass and legs and drops them to the floor. This is familiar, in a chest-ache way. And when he moves to unbutton Sehun’s stiff black shirt, he doesn’t hesitate to press his lips against the bumps of Sehun’s throat. It earns him a sigh and strong fingers in his hair, so he doesn’t stop. He doesn’t stop when he’s got Sehun’s shirt open, bunched up near his perfect shoulders, just kisses a line down the flat of Sehun’s chest. He doesn’t stop when Sehun hisses, fixes his teeth over the little fleshy area just under Sehun’s navel that he’s gained since he quit dancing.
“It isn’t going to help this time.”
That’s when he stops. That’s when he pulls back and blinks the moisture from his eyes. That’s when he acknowledges the burning in his throat and the trembling of his hands.
“You should stop letting him hurt you,” he says. He hopes the words sound angrier to Sehun’s ears than they do to his own.
But Sehun doesn’t respond, so he’ll probably never know. He tells himself it doesn’t matter, slips out of Sehun’s room and into the kitchen to clean off the table. He thinks about burning the songs, wonders if Sehun will even remember them the next morning, wonders if Lu Han would ever mention them if Sehun doesn’t.
In the end, he packs them up, slides the papers into the drawer with the take out menus and puts the little disc of recordings in their shelf beside Kyungsoo’s solo albums. And he thinks, not for the first time, that maybe he should take his own advice.
Written by: officiallykris
A remix of " Now my feet won't touch the ground" by pillowfrost
Pairing: broken Sehun/Luhan, broken Kai/Sehun
Rating: PG-13
Warnings: mild language, mentioned sexual content
Summary: Lu Han comes back. Jongin is unprepared. Sehun has been waiting.
“Lu Han is coming.”
The words are static through Jongin’s shitty cell reception but the message is as clear in his mind as it would be if Yixing were sitting right next to him. They don’t really startle him like they probably should, but they do give him reason to pause, to look around himself, at the fogged mirrors of the basement practice room at his studio, the gleaming polished floors. His reflection is jagged, distorted, in both.
“Are you sure,” he asks. For good reason. Yixing is one of the most receptive people Jongin has ever met-always has been, even when language and cultural barriers should have made it impossible for him to be-but he has always been a little off when it comes to reading his best friend.
Jongin understands. Everyone is susceptible to a little false hope where Lu Han is concerned.
“Would I be telling you if I wasn’t?” Another truth to be taken with a grain of salt, but this time for a completely different reason.
He thinks about saying, “yes,” but he keeps his mouth shut for the sake of lost time. He’s got a class starting in twenty minutes-beginners. He needs this conversation to take up as little of his energy as possible. He’s been running low lately. He runs a sweaty palm over the tuft of hair that refuses to stay down at the crown of his head and sighs.
“I’ll let him know.” He doesn’t mean to keep Sehun’s name unmentioned. It’s just become habit recently.
Regardless, Yixing is on the same page. “S’why I called you first.”
“Are you telling any of the others?”
The bark of laughter cracks in the middle and Jongin pulls the phone away before he can suffer a busted eardrum.
“You know I won’t. What kind of surprise appearance would that be?” Yixing is saying when he brings the phone back within hearing distance. “I just thought I’d give you a heads up. ‘Cause-you know.”
He does know, and that’s probably more than half of his problem.
“Yeah, thanks,” he says, though he’s not really sure what he’s thankful for.
Thanks for putting this shit on him? Thanks for giving him the information that could-and likely would-break down all the little defensive walls he’s helped his best friend put up in the last three years? Thanks for being the conduit between them all and the guy that decided a long time ago he wanted nothing to do with them?
He hangs up after Yixing shouts an enthusiastic “No problem, Jonginnie!” and fights the urge to throw his phone across the room. Eventually, he tucks it away into his duffle, safe in one corner of the room, away from him and his sudden unease. He goes back to planning out the last of the routine he would be teaching, goes through familiar motions and counts beats aloud to the empty room.
But he thinks about Sehun. He thinks about tired smiles and night-long conversations. He thinks about airports and showcases and comebacks. He thinks about reunions. And he thinks about Lu Han.
He ends up cutting class short that day.
Jongin was 20 when he fell in love.
It wasn’t a sudden realization and it wasn’t surprising at all. It was gradual and he thinks that’s probably the most painful part. It wasn’t a moment, but a string of moments. It was a series of snapshots in his life that shouldn’t have felt cohesive at all but made sense in his mind anyway.
It was a hotel room in Bangkok with the air conditioning cranked so high his fingers turned purple, and shrieking laughter when he tried to bury them under Sehun’s freakishly warm thighs. It was a night in the dorm right before the release of their second album, with pain shooting up his side and relief only after Sehun called him an idiot and shoved two little white pills in his hand. It was a perfected routine that they get to use in one of their MVs, and the smile Sehun shot him from across the room that was both proud and relieved, a reflected image of his own.
It was a moment on a plane, watching Sehun rest his head against Lu Han’s shoulder, listening to their quiet conversation from a seat away. It was another moment when they landed, when Sehun’s eyes lingered a little too long on Lu Han’s face before moving on to catch Jongin’s gaze. It was an even longer moment of guilt and understanding and sudden, overwhelming, exhaustion.
Sehun was 20 when he fell in love. And it was fitting. They’d always done things in pairs. It was just. Jongin was in love with Sehun. But Sehun wasn’t in love with Jongin.
Sehun is sitting in their kitchen when Jongin gets home that night, shoving noodles into his mouth and jotting down the recipe from the cooking show playing on the flat screen in their living room. They’d bought the T.V. as a kind of commemoratory gift to each other when they’d moved in together almost four years ago. It was always on, but they hardly ever sat down to watch it.
“Is food all you ever think about?” he asks, completely aware of how contradicting it is to say as he rifles through their fridge for the leftover take out box with his name scribbled across the top. Its contents are a few days old, sludgy brown rice and clumps of meat and vegetables. He probably should just throw it out. But it’s either this or pizza again and he doesn’t feel like searching through the junk drawer for the menus.
“S’rich coming from you, fatty,” is the response, mumbled around the sticky noodle-and-sauce paste Sehun has made in his mouth. He glances up from his writing as Jongin comes up behind him, but only to throw him an incredulous look. “How much do you weigh now? 70 kilos?”
“64, thank you very much.”
He grabs the fork from Sehun’s fingers and licks the dripping sauce from the end before shoving it down into his own box to spear a cold stalk of broccoli. It mushes too easy between his teeth and he makes a face to show his disgust. Sehun waits until Jongin peers over his shoulder at the recipe before snatching his fork back.
“Italian?”
“We should start cooking. We eat too much junk.”
Jongin hums, tilts his body sideways until he lands sprawled on one of the kitchen chairs. He picks through his box with his fingers for a piece of chicken. He half expects Sehun to laugh and call him gross, but the room remains silent apart from the TV host’s excited commentary on goat cheese and their chewing. Sehun continues writing in hurried sloppy blocks of text that Jongin doesn’t have to struggle to read. He thinks that probably says something about how long they’ve been together.
Jongin can stand the quiet for about half a minute before he’s searching for something to say. And he wonders when they’d gotten to a point in their relationship that silence had become awkward again. Coming full circle shouldn’t be this uncomfortable.
“New class started today,” he says. Sehun acknowledges him with a nod, but he doesn’t look up. “Got some talent.”
A hum.
“I think I’m gonna tell one kid’s parents he should take up ballet.”
A swallow and a nod. Sehun pauses in writing for a moment, but goes right back into it.
“He’s got these really long legs. And he’s scary skinny, yeah? Kinda reminded me of you.”
Nothing this time. Jongin looks down at his food.
“Lu Han’s coming.”
“I know.”
“How-”
Sehun sighs, like he’s tired and sore. Jongin can relate, but it still irritates him.
“It’s a reunion. The word inherently suggests everyone is coming.”
Jongin figures there’s some truth to that, but it doesn’t make him feel any better about it. If anything, it makes him feel worse. That it’s even being called a reunion at all is making him feel worse. It’s hardly a reunion. It’s a party. Sure, there will be photographers and reporters and they’re going to be featured in some magazines, but they’re not getting back together. They’re just going to be in the same room at the same time for a couple hours of forced conversation.
Jongin didn’t really want anything to do with it.
“It’ll be okay.”
He doesn’t even realize he needs to hear it until he does. Sehun is looking at him now, watching him, like he’s waiting for some reaction. Jongin sighs, tired and sore, trying to turn Sehun’s amusement into irritation.
It doesn’t work.
They’re early to the party because Jongin is too anxious to sit around their apartment after he gets ready. Sehun’s reflection, when he peers into the bathroom to whine about being hungry, rolls its eyes at him and says, not unkindly, “I thought getting old made you more patient.”
He sticks his tongue out and gets a slammed door to the face for his efforts. He swears Sehun takes an extra fifteen minutes out of spite, but they’re still the second to arrive. Joonmyun is there, and he pulls them both in for hugs so tight it makes pain flare in his side. They talk. It’s nice. Sehun laughs like he’s okay and Jongin’s nerves settle. The champagne has a lot to do with that last bit, but he’s not complaining. The others come straggling in, ones and twos at a time. Chanyeol and Kyungsoo. Baekhyun. Jongdae, Yifan, Minseok.
When Yixing walks in, Lu Han straggles behind him.
The cease in movement is less than momentary. Chanyeol is the first to greet them, a flurry of long limbs and flame-red hair. It sends the room into a frenzy that Jongin tries to stay back from. He catches Lu Han’s eye just long enough to send what is probably an unconvincing smile, but it’s returned a little tentatively and it’s difficult then to stay angry. It’s even more difficult not to gravitate toward them, toward Lu Han, to throw his arms around Lu Han’s neck and press his face against Lu Han’s shoulder for a long, old spice-scented, hug.
He’d be lying if he said he hadn’t missed the bastard too.
He doesn’t notice when Sehun sneaks off to the bathroom, but when he comes up to Jongin a couple hours later, he’s got a haunted look in his eyes and a handful of papers he had not come in with and Jongin wants to gather him up in his arms and protect him from whatever it was that hurt him this time. He has an idea, thinks if he followed the trail back to the bathroom he’d find Lu Han waiting at the end.
“We should leave,” Sehun says, voice shaking.
He can only nod.
It’s not as if he couldn’t understand. Even when they were young and naiveté was an excusable form of stupidity, Jongin knew that he couldn’t just make Sehun stop loving Lu Han. He didn’t have that kind of control, though that doesn’t necessarily mean he didn’t try. They would talk, and Sehun would say things that Jongin didn’t want to hear, so he’d tell Sehun to shut up, forget about it, forget about him. Because Lu Han has always been a little bit of an asshole, but it never seemed to matter.
They kissed on Valentine’s Day a couple years before the break up. He found out through one of those conversations, lying across Sehun’s bed in the dark, whispers soft sighs between them because Joonmyun was sleeping across the room. And Jongin had expected the words but not the look that came over Sehun’s face. Resignation.
He stopped telling Sehun to shut up when their conversations turned to Lu Han after that. It was only fair, he told himself, to let Sehun come to his own realizations, to let his friend work through the emotions and the reasons in some relative peace.
They had sex the night of their final performance. He found out not through any explicit words, but because when he walked into Sehun’s room the next morning-just across the hall from his own, the distance had never felt so far, so significant-it was to the smell of rank hangover over would-be realized dreams. And Sehun was sitting on the edge of his bed, eyes a step away from vacant, mouth a flat line.
Acceptance doesn’t look anything like relief.
“He’s gone.”
Jongin still thinks it should have made him happy. It didn’t. It just made him hurt.
There are love songs strewn across their kitchen table that neither of them wrote, stacks of words and notations and rhythms. They are all painfully obvious. And Jongin sits as Sehun reads them aloud in drunken, emotionless slurs, lets Sehun work through each one, doesn’t call bullshit when Sehun pretends to be unaffected.
When they finish, when Sehun says he’s done-with all this shit, so fucking tired of it all-Jongin twines their fingers together and tugs him back into his bedroom. It’s too clean, clinically so, and Jongin remembers a time when the two of them had made a mess of the place, fucking trashed it, because Sehun had needed to destroy memories and bury emotions.
He lays Sehun back on his bed, pulls his shoes off his stupidly huge feet, tugs his slacks free of his ass and legs and drops them to the floor. This is familiar, in a chest-ache way. And when he moves to unbutton Sehun’s stiff black shirt, he doesn’t hesitate to press his lips against the bumps of Sehun’s throat. It earns him a sigh and strong fingers in his hair, so he doesn’t stop. He doesn’t stop when he’s got Sehun’s shirt open, bunched up near his perfect shoulders, just kisses a line down the flat of Sehun’s chest. He doesn’t stop when Sehun hisses, fixes his teeth over the little fleshy area just under Sehun’s navel that he’s gained since he quit dancing.
“It isn’t going to help this time.”
That’s when he stops. That’s when he pulls back and blinks the moisture from his eyes. That’s when he acknowledges the burning in his throat and the trembling of his hands.
“You should stop letting him hurt you,” he says. He hopes the words sound angrier to Sehun’s ears than they do to his own.
But Sehun doesn’t respond, so he’ll probably never know. He tells himself it doesn’t matter, slips out of Sehun’s room and into the kitchen to clean off the table. He thinks about burning the songs, wonders if Sehun will even remember them the next morning, wonders if Lu Han would ever mention them if Sehun doesn’t.
In the end, he packs them up, slides the papers into the drawer with the take out menus and puts the little disc of recordings in their shelf beside Kyungsoo’s solo albums. And he thinks, not for the first time, that maybe he should take his own advice.