a day in the life [ fic ]
THE iTUNES SHUFFLE FIC MEME stolen from bitterwhitejam:
1. Pick a character, pairing, or fandom you like.
2. Turn on your music player and put it on random/shuffle.
3. Write a drabble related to each song that plays. You only have the time frame of the song to finish the drabble; you start when the song starts, and stop when it's over. No lingering afterwards!
4. Do ten of these, then post them.
i drove to new york in the van, with my friend
we slept in parking lots, i don't mind, i don't mind
i was in love with the place in my mind, in my mind
i made a lot of mistakes in my mind, in my mind
CHICAGO/SUFJAN STEVENS
They really had no destination in mind - only to drive. It wasn't like Seunghyun to leave everybody and everything behind for somebody who he'd met six days prior, but then again, his life needed a little change and really, Jiyong right now was everything he was not.
It was exhilarating, with only a small book bag full of clothes and other items of sentimental value he'd thrown together at the last minute in the trunk with Jiyong's odds and ends, watching the sun come up and down bordered by the dashboard in the passenger seat of Jiyong's old truck. Every day was different, full of grimy motels, and the world's biggest or smallest or weirdest somethings or others, and Polaroid pictures, and fucking in the back seat with the seat belts pressed against their backs.
Sometimes people he left behind would call, and Jiyong would reach over and close Seunghyun's fingers over the 'ignore' button. Freedom, he'd say to him, and kiss him hard.
Freedom was their rusty set of wheels, and six thousand won in cash stuffed in the glove compartment, and Jiyong's face silhouetted by the twilight as he sang to whatever song he could find on the radio.
"When are we going to stop?" Seunghyun finally thought to ask one day, and Jiyong grinned at him, lacing their ink-smudged fingers together.
"When we're home, baby," he said, and Seunghyun found that, actually, he already was.
maybe you want her, maybe you need her
maybe you've started to compare to someone not there
maybe you want it, maybe you need it
maybe it's all you're running from
ALL AT ONCE/THE FRAY
I love him, I love him, I love him, Jiyong mutters to himself. He stares at Seunghyun sleeping through the doorway in his bed, quite tangled in the Egyptian cotton sheets and his messy hair strewn across his eyes like spider webs.
Seunghyun may be an asshole, and a slob, and an inconsiderate bastard, but he was Jiyong's asshole-slob-bastard. Jiyong rakes his hair away from his own face, staring at the countertop where he has uncrumpled and crumpled the same sheet of paper for what seems like ten thousand years. I love him, he thinks, and tears a hole through the paper with his pen.
How is it that he's only managed to write Seunghyun's name over and over again when he is thinking about anything but? Goddammit, Jiyong grimaces, and throws the pen down, grabbing his coat to wrap the fabric around his thin shoulders in an attempt to ward away the demons hiding in the shadows of the room.
When Seunghyun wakes, Jiyong is gone and he is left with a ghost in the bathtub and a scrap of paper on the floor with his name written on it so many times it is bleeding black.
so you say, it's not okay to be gay
well i think you're just evil. you're just some racist
who can't tie my laces; your point of view is not legal
GUESS WHO BATMAN/LILY ALLEN
"I mean, I like girls, hyung."
Seunghyun has been twiddling his thumbs awkwardly for the last half hour as Jiyong rambles on, swiveling around and around in Seunghyun's desk chair too nervous to look at him. He feels like he's been talking to a cryptoquip instead of Kwon Jiyong for the last half hour.
"Today's fan service was just fan service. Okay?"
Seunghyun blinks, and Jiyong looks flustered, nervously retracting his hands into the large hoodie he's cowering under. "I don't mean that I didn't enjoy it, hyung! I just, um...." he clears his throat. "No, I mean, enjoy it as in... not--that. Just, I don't want you to get the wrong idea."
"Uh." Seunghyun would nod and say yes, but he has no clue what exactly the 'wrong idea' that Jiyong is talking about would entail. Seunghyun hasn't actually thought about the groping and fondling and nuzzling onstage much, but now that Jiyong's stuttering around it, the touching pops back into his head again. "Okay?" Seunghyun tries, hoping that's a satisfactory answer.
"Because I still respect you, but I just--boys, to me, are just... to be friends with." He shoots nervous glances with shifty eyes back at Seunghyun, like he's waiting for him to agree. "I like you though, hyung."
"Ji. Spit it out." Seunghyun says, trying to bite back a laugh, or a sob, or something in between.
Half an hour later Jiyong is getting pounded into Seunghyun's mattress, and the desk chair is still reeling from how fast Jiyong deserted it, and Youngbae, Daesung, and Seungri are sitting awkwardly in their living room listening to Jiyong's rather embarrassing sounding moans echoing out from Seunghyun's room.
"Maybe they're just watching a movie," Daesung says, and Youngbae gives him a rather sour look.
it hurts when the kind of words you write
kind of turn themselves into knives and
don't mind my nerve you could call it fiction
but i like being submerged in your contradictions dear
cause here we are, and what a beautiful mess this is
A BEAUTIFUL MESS/JASON MRAZ
Sometimes Seunghyun felt like Jiyong was only with him because he needed somebody to blame, and Seunghyun was only with Jiyong because he couldn't think of anybody better to take the blame for. He wouldn't exactly call it happiness. He wakes every day with bleak trepidation, and the blue sky is always a shade of gray to him, and the curtains always drawn until the sun disappears and Jiyong stops squinting.
The world left Jiyong behind because he was made of steel, but Seunghyun is that last little bit of magnet still trailing after what was once a god but is now a rusting, clanking suit of armor full of holes.
Jiyong has good days and bad days, and he spends most all of them cooped up in Seunghyun's room with the dust swirls and yellow light writing his lyrics nobody listens to anymore. At the end of the day Seunghyun has to wade around the piles of trash to get to him, and Jiyong throws at least half of it at him, but afterwards will cry tears of salt and grime, clinging to Seunghyun like a wounded coyote. Seunghyun is left to weld the scraps of his dinged metal existence back together.
At night Jiyong sits at the windowsill with his forehead pressed against the pane of glass, marking it. He doesn't let Seunghyun sleep either, and grips onto the older man's hand tight with his own crumbling fingers. Other times Seunghyun jerks awake in the middle of the night and looks down to see nail marks raked down his arm, and Jiyong curled up at his side with blood and skin underneath his chipped fingernails.
His old bag of cosmetics sits unopened on Seunghyun's bathroom countertop, and on days he drinks too much, Jiyong clambers inside smelling of whiskey and rum and paints his face until all Seunghyun recognizes are his blurred, haunted eyes.
"Tell me I'm still beautiful to you," Jiyong pleads before he shuts the door on him, and Seunghyun knows Jiyong sees the whole world still bowing before his eyes, so for them, for Jiyong, for himself, he does.
california dreaming on such a winter's day
CALIFORNIA DREAMING/DJ SAMMY
California. Was not a thing on their map--hell, they hadn't even started expanding towards the USA's direction--but Jiyong insisted day and night for two full weeks that he wanted to go, and explicitly only with Seunghyun.
"Are you crazy?" Seunghyun would growl at him when Jiyong would burst into his room at night to show him a pinpoint right below Santa Barbara that he'd marked on a map he'd gotten off one of their coffee table books, but after another week of persistent nagging, when even Jiyong's greetings to him were replaced with "California!", Seunghyun loaded up his stuffed animals and technicolor suits, and finally agreed to go.
The plane ride was hell. Seunghyun could have spent it sleeping, but Jiyong's head was permanently fused to his shoulder and it was uncomfortable as shit. He spent the whole way glaring at his leader's apple haircut.
"We're here, it's cold as motherfuck, and you'd better tell me in the next five seconds why exactly I'm standing here in the middle of nowhere freezing and not in my bed or I'm drowning you," Seunghyun shouted, but half his curses were blown away by the wind that felt like it was eating his face off. Jiyong, who'd been kicking aimlessly at the waves, turned to him and suddenly pushed Seunghyun onto the sand.
"I hear sex on the beach," he whispered, crawling on top of him and pinning him down with strength he reserved for occasions like these, "is apparently fantastic."
And he nipped at Seunghyun's earlobe, and after that it everything went kind of fuzzy and warm for Seunghyun. Take that, northern winds.
when we die, some sink and some lay but at least i don't see you float away
oh gotta see, gotta know right now what's that riding on your everything? it isn't anything at all
GRAVITY RIDES EVERYTHING/MODEST MOUSE
"You don't know it's going to work," Seunghyun says. He lingers back way behind the guard rails, feet stuck to the cement as he watches Jiyong dance around the edge. "We weren't made for things like this."
"Only because we don't believe we can," Jiyong tells him. His hair is growing too long these days, and the breeze combs through the dark strands, whipping it around his face in leaping patterns like it is ready for the journey. Seunghyun scuffs his toe on the concrete of the rooftop. He can't even see the bottom from where he is standing, just an endless expanse of gray rock, but Jiyong has his toe between gravity and vertigo, perhaps more, as his lanky torso tilts towards the latter.
"You're not a bird," Seunghyun says, not sure if Jiyong can even hear him anymore on the high he's riding on. "You don't have wings, Jiyong. Christ. Come down."
And the way Jiyong turns back, to look at him, makes Seunghyun feel like he isn't being left behind. "We weren't built for wings, hyung," he says. "They would only weigh us down." And the fool spreads his arms wide like he is taking the world in in a single embrace--
And then he, he drops, Seunghyun almost hurdling after him the way he shoots towards the edge to see him go--
And Jiyong - he flies.
faint light of dawn
i'm listening to you breathing in and out
needing nothing. you're honey dipped
you are beautiful, floating clouds, soft world
DON'T BRING ME DOWN/SIA
Seunghyun doesn't come out of the bathroom after two hours, so Jiyong goes back in to him. The light seems eerie here, and the older boy is sitting in the water where Jiyong left him, staring off into space with his arms floating like two hollow buoys. Jiyong kneels at the edge of the porcelain tub and tenderly takes Seunghyun's hands in his, and one by one unwinds the soggy bandages around his wrists. The scars are angry, fresh, dotted with red and crust and maybe Seunghyun made a pattern here, or there, or maybe it's just all random. Jiyong gags and wants a little to throw up, but instead, he bites the inside of his cheek and washes it best he can with the lukewarm water. The blood stains it pink, and the color drifts like neglected ghosts to circle around Seunghyun's knees and torso. Jiyong sighs, and Seunghyun closes his eyes and rests the back of his head against the tiled wall, and some of the turbulent water spills onto the floor.
i've had a little bit too much, oh oh oh
all of the people start to rush, start to rush by
how does he twist the dance? can't find a drink, oh man
where are my keys? i lost my phone, phone
JUST DANCE/LADY GAGA
"We're almost there," Seunghyun says between gritted teeth. Jiyong is like deadweight hanging off his shoulders and goddamn, why the fuck does he always end up with this job at the end of the night?
"Come on, just take one step, one step, Ji," he coaxes as they stop at Jiyong's front stoop. Jiyong reeks of vodka and cheap cologne and sweat, and when he shakes his head, Seunghyun gets another whiff straight into his nostrils and grimaces. "Goddammit, I am never going clubbing with you again," he grumbles, and by sheer force of will drags Jiyong through his door and into his living room, somehow managing to click the hallway light on as they stumble past.
Jiyong immediately flops into the couch but then gets an idea and shoots back up again with startling speed. "Dance with me, hyung," he slurs, draping himself around Seunghyun's shoulders. Seunghyun sighs as the smaller man starts to bounce aimlessly around, knocking into his couch, then the end table, finally bashing his head against the wall but losing none of his fervor.
"You need to get your drunk ass to bed," he insists, but Jiyong is humming a tune he doesn't recognize and playfully pressing a wet and rather sloppy kiss on what Seunghyun decides was supposed to be his lips, but ended up being his chin. Seunghyun sighs and halfheartedly starts to move with him, feeling foolish. Mostly it's his fault for believing that he's won something after this exchange, that he must be coveted because even though Jiyong spends the whole night on the dance floor clinging to strangers he calls lovers, he always leaves with Seunghyun.
"I love you, hyung," Jiyong tells him rather perkily, and then he throws up all over Seunghyun's shoes.
c-c-c-cinnamon lips and candy kisses, on my tongue. fun!
b-b-b-buttery eyes, if only cries could come from those eyes. oh!
have you landed yet and, if so, would you let me know?
i'm tired of looking up into those starry eyes.
C-C-C-CINNAMON LIPS/OK GO
The main reason Seunghyun kept drugs away from Jiyong is not because he was afraid Jiyong would become an addict, or lose half his body weight and make up for it by the number of scars on his body, or shed all his hair, or forget who Seunghyun was and end up in a hospital with a feeding tube up his nose like those scary commercials showed, but because any type of drug Jiyong took immediately gave him a horribly severe case of the munchies.
And if there was no food to be had, Seunghyun would automatically melt into a gingerbread man, with gumdrops for eyes and licorice for hair. He always feared when Jiyong's blurry, drug-induced look would turn primal, because that would mean the shorter, wiry man was about 2.3 seconds away from pouncing on him.
"God hyung, your skin is so sweet," he would say while biting down. "I just want to eat your fingers. They taste like chocolate." Seunghyun really hoped he didn't. "You taste like milk and honey, hyung. Isn't that something? God, you're just so good."
One would think the experience would be a lot more pleasurable than it actually turned out to be. Seunghyun mostly just felt like a gummy bear being torn apart by a particularly sadistic little boy.
single when you get to the top
single when you want it, when you want to stop
we could, we could crash, we could, we could burn burn
we could take it, we could we could take it take it in turns
GETTING DOWN/THE KILLS
The makeup goes on, the hair is slicked back or teased up or shaken down, the platinum bracelets and diamond rings and titanium-frame sunglasses are put on over the overpriced jackets and thousand-dollar pants and hand-stitched-imported-from-Sri-Lanka shoes, and then nobody really sees them anymore. Get on stage, they say; sing louder, dance harder, they say; kill it, make your mark, go down in history, sweat, tear up, cry, laugh, wave at the cameras, smile, show your teeth, BE. In the end, they're just a product of the state. Puppets clothed in gold.
Seunghyun stands backstage, in a suit far too stiff for his liking and Dolce and Whoever shades he can't see shit out of. Bass music pounds around him, and he wishes he were somebody, somebody with a name and a life and a family and a purpose, in the crowd so he could walk away from it all.
A hand finds his in the darkness, slick with sweat already, the pulse underneath quick and irregular.
"You ready?" Jiyong says, and his voice is too low to be heard even though Seunghyun hears his every word. Hangs on them.
Seunghyun grips his wrist, and Jiyong briefly raises their interlaced fingers up to press his lips against Seunghyun's knuckles. This is why he's here. "Ready," he replies.
Three, two, one. The lights flash.
1. Pick a character, pairing, or fandom you like.
2. Turn on your music player and put it on random/shuffle.
3. Write a drabble related to each song that plays. You only have the time frame of the song to finish the drabble; you start when the song starts, and stop when it's over. No lingering afterwards!
4. Do ten of these, then post them.
i drove to new york in the van, with my friend
we slept in parking lots, i don't mind, i don't mind
i was in love with the place in my mind, in my mind
i made a lot of mistakes in my mind, in my mind
CHICAGO/SUFJAN STEVENS
They really had no destination in mind - only to drive. It wasn't like Seunghyun to leave everybody and everything behind for somebody who he'd met six days prior, but then again, his life needed a little change and really, Jiyong right now was everything he was not.
It was exhilarating, with only a small book bag full of clothes and other items of sentimental value he'd thrown together at the last minute in the trunk with Jiyong's odds and ends, watching the sun come up and down bordered by the dashboard in the passenger seat of Jiyong's old truck. Every day was different, full of grimy motels, and the world's biggest or smallest or weirdest somethings or others, and Polaroid pictures, and fucking in the back seat with the seat belts pressed against their backs.
Sometimes people he left behind would call, and Jiyong would reach over and close Seunghyun's fingers over the 'ignore' button. Freedom, he'd say to him, and kiss him hard.
Freedom was their rusty set of wheels, and six thousand won in cash stuffed in the glove compartment, and Jiyong's face silhouetted by the twilight as he sang to whatever song he could find on the radio.
"When are we going to stop?" Seunghyun finally thought to ask one day, and Jiyong grinned at him, lacing their ink-smudged fingers together.
"When we're home, baby," he said, and Seunghyun found that, actually, he already was.
maybe you want her, maybe you need her
maybe you've started to compare to someone not there
maybe you want it, maybe you need it
maybe it's all you're running from
ALL AT ONCE/THE FRAY
I love him, I love him, I love him, Jiyong mutters to himself. He stares at Seunghyun sleeping through the doorway in his bed, quite tangled in the Egyptian cotton sheets and his messy hair strewn across his eyes like spider webs.
Seunghyun may be an asshole, and a slob, and an inconsiderate bastard, but he was Jiyong's asshole-slob-bastard. Jiyong rakes his hair away from his own face, staring at the countertop where he has uncrumpled and crumpled the same sheet of paper for what seems like ten thousand years. I love him, he thinks, and tears a hole through the paper with his pen.
How is it that he's only managed to write Seunghyun's name over and over again when he is thinking about anything but? Goddammit, Jiyong grimaces, and throws the pen down, grabbing his coat to wrap the fabric around his thin shoulders in an attempt to ward away the demons hiding in the shadows of the room.
When Seunghyun wakes, Jiyong is gone and he is left with a ghost in the bathtub and a scrap of paper on the floor with his name written on it so many times it is bleeding black.
so you say, it's not okay to be gay
well i think you're just evil. you're just some racist
who can't tie my laces; your point of view is not legal
GUESS WHO BATMAN/LILY ALLEN
"I mean, I like girls, hyung."
Seunghyun has been twiddling his thumbs awkwardly for the last half hour as Jiyong rambles on, swiveling around and around in Seunghyun's desk chair too nervous to look at him. He feels like he's been talking to a cryptoquip instead of Kwon Jiyong for the last half hour.
"Today's fan service was just fan service. Okay?"
Seunghyun blinks, and Jiyong looks flustered, nervously retracting his hands into the large hoodie he's cowering under. "I don't mean that I didn't enjoy it, hyung! I just, um...." he clears his throat. "No, I mean, enjoy it as in... not--that. Just, I don't want you to get the wrong idea."
"Uh." Seunghyun would nod and say yes, but he has no clue what exactly the 'wrong idea' that Jiyong is talking about would entail. Seunghyun hasn't actually thought about the groping and fondling and nuzzling onstage much, but now that Jiyong's stuttering around it, the touching pops back into his head again. "Okay?" Seunghyun tries, hoping that's a satisfactory answer.
"Because I still respect you, but I just--boys, to me, are just... to be friends with." He shoots nervous glances with shifty eyes back at Seunghyun, like he's waiting for him to agree. "I like you though, hyung."
"Ji. Spit it out." Seunghyun says, trying to bite back a laugh, or a sob, or something in between.
Half an hour later Jiyong is getting pounded into Seunghyun's mattress, and the desk chair is still reeling from how fast Jiyong deserted it, and Youngbae, Daesung, and Seungri are sitting awkwardly in their living room listening to Jiyong's rather embarrassing sounding moans echoing out from Seunghyun's room.
"Maybe they're just watching a movie," Daesung says, and Youngbae gives him a rather sour look.
it hurts when the kind of words you write
kind of turn themselves into knives and
don't mind my nerve you could call it fiction
but i like being submerged in your contradictions dear
cause here we are, and what a beautiful mess this is
A BEAUTIFUL MESS/JASON MRAZ
Sometimes Seunghyun felt like Jiyong was only with him because he needed somebody to blame, and Seunghyun was only with Jiyong because he couldn't think of anybody better to take the blame for. He wouldn't exactly call it happiness. He wakes every day with bleak trepidation, and the blue sky is always a shade of gray to him, and the curtains always drawn until the sun disappears and Jiyong stops squinting.
The world left Jiyong behind because he was made of steel, but Seunghyun is that last little bit of magnet still trailing after what was once a god but is now a rusting, clanking suit of armor full of holes.
Jiyong has good days and bad days, and he spends most all of them cooped up in Seunghyun's room with the dust swirls and yellow light writing his lyrics nobody listens to anymore. At the end of the day Seunghyun has to wade around the piles of trash to get to him, and Jiyong throws at least half of it at him, but afterwards will cry tears of salt and grime, clinging to Seunghyun like a wounded coyote. Seunghyun is left to weld the scraps of his dinged metal existence back together.
At night Jiyong sits at the windowsill with his forehead pressed against the pane of glass, marking it. He doesn't let Seunghyun sleep either, and grips onto the older man's hand tight with his own crumbling fingers. Other times Seunghyun jerks awake in the middle of the night and looks down to see nail marks raked down his arm, and Jiyong curled up at his side with blood and skin underneath his chipped fingernails.
His old bag of cosmetics sits unopened on Seunghyun's bathroom countertop, and on days he drinks too much, Jiyong clambers inside smelling of whiskey and rum and paints his face until all Seunghyun recognizes are his blurred, haunted eyes.
"Tell me I'm still beautiful to you," Jiyong pleads before he shuts the door on him, and Seunghyun knows Jiyong sees the whole world still bowing before his eyes, so for them, for Jiyong, for himself, he does.
california dreaming on such a winter's day
CALIFORNIA DREAMING/DJ SAMMY
California. Was not a thing on their map--hell, they hadn't even started expanding towards the USA's direction--but Jiyong insisted day and night for two full weeks that he wanted to go, and explicitly only with Seunghyun.
"Are you crazy?" Seunghyun would growl at him when Jiyong would burst into his room at night to show him a pinpoint right below Santa Barbara that he'd marked on a map he'd gotten off one of their coffee table books, but after another week of persistent nagging, when even Jiyong's greetings to him were replaced with "California!", Seunghyun loaded up his stuffed animals and technicolor suits, and finally agreed to go.
The plane ride was hell. Seunghyun could have spent it sleeping, but Jiyong's head was permanently fused to his shoulder and it was uncomfortable as shit. He spent the whole way glaring at his leader's apple haircut.
"We're here, it's cold as motherfuck, and you'd better tell me in the next five seconds why exactly I'm standing here in the middle of nowhere freezing and not in my bed or I'm drowning you," Seunghyun shouted, but half his curses were blown away by the wind that felt like it was eating his face off. Jiyong, who'd been kicking aimlessly at the waves, turned to him and suddenly pushed Seunghyun onto the sand.
"I hear sex on the beach," he whispered, crawling on top of him and pinning him down with strength he reserved for occasions like these, "is apparently fantastic."
And he nipped at Seunghyun's earlobe, and after that it everything went kind of fuzzy and warm for Seunghyun. Take that, northern winds.
when we die, some sink and some lay but at least i don't see you float away
oh gotta see, gotta know right now what's that riding on your everything? it isn't anything at all
GRAVITY RIDES EVERYTHING/MODEST MOUSE
"You don't know it's going to work," Seunghyun says. He lingers back way behind the guard rails, feet stuck to the cement as he watches Jiyong dance around the edge. "We weren't made for things like this."
"Only because we don't believe we can," Jiyong tells him. His hair is growing too long these days, and the breeze combs through the dark strands, whipping it around his face in leaping patterns like it is ready for the journey. Seunghyun scuffs his toe on the concrete of the rooftop. He can't even see the bottom from where he is standing, just an endless expanse of gray rock, but Jiyong has his toe between gravity and vertigo, perhaps more, as his lanky torso tilts towards the latter.
"You're not a bird," Seunghyun says, not sure if Jiyong can even hear him anymore on the high he's riding on. "You don't have wings, Jiyong. Christ. Come down."
And the way Jiyong turns back, to look at him, makes Seunghyun feel like he isn't being left behind. "We weren't built for wings, hyung," he says. "They would only weigh us down." And the fool spreads his arms wide like he is taking the world in in a single embrace--
And then he, he drops, Seunghyun almost hurdling after him the way he shoots towards the edge to see him go--
And Jiyong - he flies.
faint light of dawn
i'm listening to you breathing in and out
needing nothing. you're honey dipped
you are beautiful, floating clouds, soft world
DON'T BRING ME DOWN/SIA
Seunghyun doesn't come out of the bathroom after two hours, so Jiyong goes back in to him. The light seems eerie here, and the older boy is sitting in the water where Jiyong left him, staring off into space with his arms floating like two hollow buoys. Jiyong kneels at the edge of the porcelain tub and tenderly takes Seunghyun's hands in his, and one by one unwinds the soggy bandages around his wrists. The scars are angry, fresh, dotted with red and crust and maybe Seunghyun made a pattern here, or there, or maybe it's just all random. Jiyong gags and wants a little to throw up, but instead, he bites the inside of his cheek and washes it best he can with the lukewarm water. The blood stains it pink, and the color drifts like neglected ghosts to circle around Seunghyun's knees and torso. Jiyong sighs, and Seunghyun closes his eyes and rests the back of his head against the tiled wall, and some of the turbulent water spills onto the floor.
i've had a little bit too much, oh oh oh
all of the people start to rush, start to rush by
how does he twist the dance? can't find a drink, oh man
where are my keys? i lost my phone, phone
JUST DANCE/LADY GAGA
"We're almost there," Seunghyun says between gritted teeth. Jiyong is like deadweight hanging off his shoulders and goddamn, why the fuck does he always end up with this job at the end of the night?
"Come on, just take one step, one step, Ji," he coaxes as they stop at Jiyong's front stoop. Jiyong reeks of vodka and cheap cologne and sweat, and when he shakes his head, Seunghyun gets another whiff straight into his nostrils and grimaces. "Goddammit, I am never going clubbing with you again," he grumbles, and by sheer force of will drags Jiyong through his door and into his living room, somehow managing to click the hallway light on as they stumble past.
Jiyong immediately flops into the couch but then gets an idea and shoots back up again with startling speed. "Dance with me, hyung," he slurs, draping himself around Seunghyun's shoulders. Seunghyun sighs as the smaller man starts to bounce aimlessly around, knocking into his couch, then the end table, finally bashing his head against the wall but losing none of his fervor.
"You need to get your drunk ass to bed," he insists, but Jiyong is humming a tune he doesn't recognize and playfully pressing a wet and rather sloppy kiss on what Seunghyun decides was supposed to be his lips, but ended up being his chin. Seunghyun sighs and halfheartedly starts to move with him, feeling foolish. Mostly it's his fault for believing that he's won something after this exchange, that he must be coveted because even though Jiyong spends the whole night on the dance floor clinging to strangers he calls lovers, he always leaves with Seunghyun.
"I love you, hyung," Jiyong tells him rather perkily, and then he throws up all over Seunghyun's shoes.
c-c-c-cinnamon lips and candy kisses, on my tongue. fun!
b-b-b-buttery eyes, if only cries could come from those eyes. oh!
have you landed yet and, if so, would you let me know?
i'm tired of looking up into those starry eyes.
C-C-C-CINNAMON LIPS/OK GO
The main reason Seunghyun kept drugs away from Jiyong is not because he was afraid Jiyong would become an addict, or lose half his body weight and make up for it by the number of scars on his body, or shed all his hair, or forget who Seunghyun was and end up in a hospital with a feeding tube up his nose like those scary commercials showed, but because any type of drug Jiyong took immediately gave him a horribly severe case of the munchies.
And if there was no food to be had, Seunghyun would automatically melt into a gingerbread man, with gumdrops for eyes and licorice for hair. He always feared when Jiyong's blurry, drug-induced look would turn primal, because that would mean the shorter, wiry man was about 2.3 seconds away from pouncing on him.
"God hyung, your skin is so sweet," he would say while biting down. "I just want to eat your fingers. They taste like chocolate." Seunghyun really hoped he didn't. "You taste like milk and honey, hyung. Isn't that something? God, you're just so good."
One would think the experience would be a lot more pleasurable than it actually turned out to be. Seunghyun mostly just felt like a gummy bear being torn apart by a particularly sadistic little boy.
single when you get to the top
single when you want it, when you want to stop
we could, we could crash, we could, we could burn burn
we could take it, we could we could take it take it in turns
GETTING DOWN/THE KILLS
The makeup goes on, the hair is slicked back or teased up or shaken down, the platinum bracelets and diamond rings and titanium-frame sunglasses are put on over the overpriced jackets and thousand-dollar pants and hand-stitched-imported-from-Sri-Lanka shoes, and then nobody really sees them anymore. Get on stage, they say; sing louder, dance harder, they say; kill it, make your mark, go down in history, sweat, tear up, cry, laugh, wave at the cameras, smile, show your teeth, BE. In the end, they're just a product of the state. Puppets clothed in gold.
Seunghyun stands backstage, in a suit far too stiff for his liking and Dolce and Whoever shades he can't see shit out of. Bass music pounds around him, and he wishes he were somebody, somebody with a name and a life and a family and a purpose, in the crowd so he could walk away from it all.
A hand finds his in the darkness, slick with sweat already, the pulse underneath quick and irregular.
"You ready?" Jiyong says, and his voice is too low to be heard even though Seunghyun hears his every word. Hangs on them.
Seunghyun grips his wrist, and Jiyong briefly raises their interlaced fingers up to press his lips against Seunghyun's knuckles. This is why he's here. "Ready," he replies.
Three, two, one. The lights flash.