take my soul, take my heart [ fic ]
flagrancy in slow
gd/top | r, 2016 words, ar
a last attempt at something worthwhile.
in slow motion, even death is beautiful
SLOW MOTION/EPIK HIGH
Diagnosis: three months.
i.
Three months now.
That's twelve weeks. Or ninety one days. Or two thousand, one hundred and eighty four hours, or one hundred thirty one thousand and forty seconds - Seunghyun writes the numbers onto his hand, multiplying and multiplying them until they almost touch that infinity, until Jiyong is practically made immortal.
Sometimes Seunghyun tries staying awake at night to count and see how long he can make it before the time slips between his top and bottom lash lines and into the cracks in the floor panels. He pretends he doesn't hear the coughs next door coming through those same gaps in the wood, pretends he doesn't spend the whole night with his ear pressed to the ground with a bottle of wine hugged to his chest like a bedfellow, cold and smooth against his fingertips. Pretends that he isn't counting the seconds that Jiyong has left instead of just reciting numbers. Just numbers for the simple sake of saying their names aloud.
He falls asleep before he makes it.
In the mornings he has back aches from the hard surface, and unintelligible trace marks smeared from his hands onto his face, his chest, the walls around him. And Jiyong is the one who notices the final smudge of black Seunghyun doesn't see, Jiyong is the one with tired eyes and sallow skin who still exerts enough force to rub the ink from the corner of Seunghyun's mouth.
"Hyung," he says disapprovingly, "that's four days in a row now. What are you doing in there every night, writing songs?" And he'll smile, heartbreak and dry irony because Kwon Jiyong doesn't care enough to tread eggshells, not now, not ever, not for others, and certainly not for himself. "Hey, if you finish in the next week, I think I'll still be around to record them with you."
No, Seunghyun thinks, because you're counting too.
(number the stars and count them how you like they're still just a piece of a second in the end)
ii.
Two months now.
Jiyong wonders, in spare moments sitting in the van and laying in his bed, what he has left.
(Youngbae and Seungri and Seunghyun and Daesung, who will cry at his funeral; Chaerin with the backs of her hands in her eyes until she sees stars; Seungho who will probably drink himself into oblivion and forget to come. Hyunsuk-hyung, sent to the poorhouse trying to build some sort of ridiculously gaudy shrine with too many gold and diamonds. His father will never fully recover; maybe his mother will follow him to the grave. And the VIP's; Jiyong is a little morbidly curious, those poor VIP's, at how big a dent he'll be leaving on their little hearts.)
It's enough to tide him over until his nails break, until his hair starts to go and his vision blurs a little at the edges. Maybe that's the trigger, the pushing over the edge that corrects what he has left into what he's leaving behind, sends him looking between the door and wall of the bathroom after Seunghyun goes inside. "Enough" is not a word Jiyong has ever held in value: at the end, he just wants to do something worthwhile.
So there is Seunghyun, with his careful eyes, and his fisted hands, and his wobbly breath on the other side of the wall, all of which spell maybe I can be worthwhile. Maybe it's a little too convenient - that Jiyong's noticed for a while, now - that being discreet has never been one of the older boy's strong suits.
Seunghyun is bent over the sink, sleeves rolled up and eyes closed face wet with water when Jiyong reaches over and turns the tap off.
His eyes snap open at the sudden absence of noise. "Jiyong," he says, surprise in his voice and droplets of water sliding from the tips of his lashes. "Do you need the bathroom? Jiyong," he repeats when Jiyong steps closer, when Jiyong cups the back of Seunghyun's head and crushes their lips together and feels the tap water transfer onto his own rough skin.
"Wha - I--" Seunghyun manages, and then he falls backwards trying to get away. He pulls Jiyong and one of the towel racks down with him, and all of them go crashing onto the floor in a heap of tangled limbs and clanging metal.
Seunghyun scrambles up onto his elbows before the spots have even disappeared from Jiyong's vision. "Shit, I didn't - Jiyong, are you - I didn't," and Jiyong swears that he's getting little of his breath back when he feels a laugh tumble from his lips.
"Oh my god," he says, "you're so damn clumsy," and then he raises himself up until they're pressed together again to kiss Seunghyun, undeterred.
Their lips taste like his medicine that stopped working months ago, and the hospital he quit going to after they told him so. It's quiet, Seunghyun's breaths hitting Jiyong's chin and the bathroom tile, his hands clinging to Jiyong's thin hair. The next time he says Jiyong's name, it's from the sounds of a sob, his eyes wet against Jiyong's chest.
"I want to do this for you," Jiyong says. He might actually believe he is doing it for Seunghyun's sake, too, but in reality - and he knows this, at the back of his mind - he is just another slowly dying man with too little left in his system to be anything else but selfish.
(take what you can and leave behind what you can't when you're hanging by this thin a thread)
iii.
One month now.
Seunghyun has no idea what is happening, except that he's falling for it.
He's known Jiyong for so long that his intent should be painfully obvious, but given the timing, he fools himself into a circular lull of maybe, if I don't need it then at least Jiyong might, but if Jiyong needs it then maybe I do, too, unless I don't but still maybe Jiyong does -
Around and around, replay and rewind. He avoids the other members' eyes and takes painkillers from the drugstore when the ache starts. It doesn't do anything but make him lightheaded, but maybe that's not such a bad thing.
Jiyong's hair falls out in bunches, now, clogging the sinks and the showers and mixing with his vomit in the basins until somebody like Youngbae manages to pick them out and throw them away. Seunghyun half expects for Jiyong to wear this as another statement badge on his skinny chest, for him to find some powerhouse publisher to set up a controversial photoshoot and stage fearless death as the concept.
Instead, he catches Jiyong in the mirror staring at his shadow of a colorless face like it's someone foreign. And before long, Jiyong starts wearing his old collection of knitted beanies and caps again, not even shedding them when he crawls into bed with Seunghyun in the dark.
Jiyong doesn't taste like medicine anymore, even that fading away into another ghost for another corner. Jiyong doesn't taste like much of anything, and most nights he grows tired of kissing after only a few minutes and instead will lie on his side, eyes half-open as he runs bony fingers up and down Seunghyun's body.
"You should touch me," Jiyong whispers, and when Seunghyun's fingers shake, he'll purse his lips, voice unkind. "Pretend I'm healthy. You always had a good imagination." Sometimes he'll punctuate this with a laugh, like doing so is like saying 'just kidding,' like it makes what he is saying okay.
Seunghyun smokes on the balcony and Jiyong leans on the railings beside him, follows the gray clouds with his hands and stretching out his fingers to curl them around the smoke before it dissipates.
"God, I hope these make you die sooner than later so we can haunt things together," he jokes, frostbitten and lost inside his thin sweater, and yet it is Seunghyun who shivers and stubs out his cigarette and asks to go inside.
Between the bedsheets and bones, Seunghyun feels too close to the surface of Jiyong's skin, like they're fighting to be freed.
"You love me," Jiyong says, "don't you?"
Seunghyun nods. The ache starts when he means it.
He wonders how he let himself get so invested in this mockery; wonders which one of them is the one dying now.
(say something worth it to your brother your friend college educations yet we create our own hells)
iv.
One week now.
Jiyong can't understand why Seunghyun's under-eye circles look darker than his. Why Seunghyun's clothes don't fit him as well anymore, why he skips dinner in favor of staying with Jiyong in his room when he's not the one with a body that won't take in any.
"If I didn't know better, I'd say you were doing it for sympathy," Jiyong says, voice like old crinkled paper, and doesn't like the look Seunghyun throws him, crazy written all over his gaunt face.
Seunghyun makes to leave sometimes but Jiyong won't let him stay away for long, because he can't leave the insides of his room anymore and he can't stand the silence inside his own head. There's nothing inside but white noise and wisps of air where music used to fill the space, like even the wires to his own thoughts are short-fusing one by one. Seunghyun helps take away some of the horrible quiet, even though he barely talks to him anymore.
The older boy skips another meal, stays up another night, and Jiyong doesn't like it. "I won't let you follow me," he tells him. "I'm doing this by myself." Because he wants Seunghyun to live - or because Kwon Jiyong doesn't share.
When Seunghyun stiffens, Jiyong knows how to smooth things over. "I'm sorry I did this to you," he says. Like clockwork, he feels Seunghyun's fingers around his own.
Jiyong wonders if he is lying. If Seunghyun knows. If he cares. If either of them, at this point, can afford to.
(keep the lies hidden in the framework of your mind sometimes in the dark nothing works out well)
v.
One day now.
Right before it happens Seunghyun is in a narrow alley, Jiyong standing in the middle with his head tilted upwards to the sky. The closeness of the walls on both sides has them pressed against each other, chests alternating between inhale and exhale so both of them can breathe. Seunghyun can't seem to find how to escape the maze except by going up, a strip of blue sky high above them between the buildings that trap them in.
Then Jiyong jumps up - and up, and up until he is soaring in the sky and all Seunghyun sees are his shoes, the knitted cap on his head that he tosses back down to him.
He waits for what seems like hours in the alley, neck stiff from staring up at that tiny little sky, but Jiyong doesn't come back. After a while he starts to count the seconds that pass him by, one-mississippi, two-mississippi, three.
He stops when he gets to one hundred thirty one thousand and forty, trailing off mid-number.
(maybe you have to believe it was something worthwhile while it lasted what do you leave behind but your time?)
When Seunghyun wakes up, it's because Jiyong doesn't (need to anymore).
note: thanks to _syunikiss_ for inspiring me with one of her epik high icons she put up today. fic love meme :D?
gd/top | r, 2016 words, ar
a last attempt at something worthwhile.
in slow motion, even death is beautiful
SLOW MOTION/EPIK HIGH
Diagnosis: three months.
i.
Three months now.
That's twelve weeks. Or ninety one days. Or two thousand, one hundred and eighty four hours, or one hundred thirty one thousand and forty seconds - Seunghyun writes the numbers onto his hand, multiplying and multiplying them until they almost touch that infinity, until Jiyong is practically made immortal.
Sometimes Seunghyun tries staying awake at night to count and see how long he can make it before the time slips between his top and bottom lash lines and into the cracks in the floor panels. He pretends he doesn't hear the coughs next door coming through those same gaps in the wood, pretends he doesn't spend the whole night with his ear pressed to the ground with a bottle of wine hugged to his chest like a bedfellow, cold and smooth against his fingertips. Pretends that he isn't counting the seconds that Jiyong has left instead of just reciting numbers. Just numbers for the simple sake of saying their names aloud.
He falls asleep before he makes it.
In the mornings he has back aches from the hard surface, and unintelligible trace marks smeared from his hands onto his face, his chest, the walls around him. And Jiyong is the one who notices the final smudge of black Seunghyun doesn't see, Jiyong is the one with tired eyes and sallow skin who still exerts enough force to rub the ink from the corner of Seunghyun's mouth.
"Hyung," he says disapprovingly, "that's four days in a row now. What are you doing in there every night, writing songs?" And he'll smile, heartbreak and dry irony because Kwon Jiyong doesn't care enough to tread eggshells, not now, not ever, not for others, and certainly not for himself. "Hey, if you finish in the next week, I think I'll still be around to record them with you."
No, Seunghyun thinks, because you're counting too.
(number the stars and count them how you like they're still just a piece of a second in the end)
ii.
Two months now.
Jiyong wonders, in spare moments sitting in the van and laying in his bed, what he has left.
(Youngbae and Seungri and Seunghyun and Daesung, who will cry at his funeral; Chaerin with the backs of her hands in her eyes until she sees stars; Seungho who will probably drink himself into oblivion and forget to come. Hyunsuk-hyung, sent to the poorhouse trying to build some sort of ridiculously gaudy shrine with too many gold and diamonds. His father will never fully recover; maybe his mother will follow him to the grave. And the VIP's; Jiyong is a little morbidly curious, those poor VIP's, at how big a dent he'll be leaving on their little hearts.)
It's enough to tide him over until his nails break, until his hair starts to go and his vision blurs a little at the edges. Maybe that's the trigger, the pushing over the edge that corrects what he has left into what he's leaving behind, sends him looking between the door and wall of the bathroom after Seunghyun goes inside. "Enough" is not a word Jiyong has ever held in value: at the end, he just wants to do something worthwhile.
So there is Seunghyun, with his careful eyes, and his fisted hands, and his wobbly breath on the other side of the wall, all of which spell maybe I can be worthwhile. Maybe it's a little too convenient - that Jiyong's noticed for a while, now - that being discreet has never been one of the older boy's strong suits.
Seunghyun is bent over the sink, sleeves rolled up and eyes closed face wet with water when Jiyong reaches over and turns the tap off.
His eyes snap open at the sudden absence of noise. "Jiyong," he says, surprise in his voice and droplets of water sliding from the tips of his lashes. "Do you need the bathroom? Jiyong," he repeats when Jiyong steps closer, when Jiyong cups the back of Seunghyun's head and crushes their lips together and feels the tap water transfer onto his own rough skin.
"Wha - I--" Seunghyun manages, and then he falls backwards trying to get away. He pulls Jiyong and one of the towel racks down with him, and all of them go crashing onto the floor in a heap of tangled limbs and clanging metal.
Seunghyun scrambles up onto his elbows before the spots have even disappeared from Jiyong's vision. "Shit, I didn't - Jiyong, are you - I didn't," and Jiyong swears that he's getting little of his breath back when he feels a laugh tumble from his lips.
"Oh my god," he says, "you're so damn clumsy," and then he raises himself up until they're pressed together again to kiss Seunghyun, undeterred.
Their lips taste like his medicine that stopped working months ago, and the hospital he quit going to after they told him so. It's quiet, Seunghyun's breaths hitting Jiyong's chin and the bathroom tile, his hands clinging to Jiyong's thin hair. The next time he says Jiyong's name, it's from the sounds of a sob, his eyes wet against Jiyong's chest.
"I want to do this for you," Jiyong says. He might actually believe he is doing it for Seunghyun's sake, too, but in reality - and he knows this, at the back of his mind - he is just another slowly dying man with too little left in his system to be anything else but selfish.
(take what you can and leave behind what you can't when you're hanging by this thin a thread)
iii.
One month now.
Seunghyun has no idea what is happening, except that he's falling for it.
He's known Jiyong for so long that his intent should be painfully obvious, but given the timing, he fools himself into a circular lull of maybe, if I don't need it then at least Jiyong might, but if Jiyong needs it then maybe I do, too, unless I don't but still maybe Jiyong does -
Around and around, replay and rewind. He avoids the other members' eyes and takes painkillers from the drugstore when the ache starts. It doesn't do anything but make him lightheaded, but maybe that's not such a bad thing.
Jiyong's hair falls out in bunches, now, clogging the sinks and the showers and mixing with his vomit in the basins until somebody like Youngbae manages to pick them out and throw them away. Seunghyun half expects for Jiyong to wear this as another statement badge on his skinny chest, for him to find some powerhouse publisher to set up a controversial photoshoot and stage fearless death as the concept.
Instead, he catches Jiyong in the mirror staring at his shadow of a colorless face like it's someone foreign. And before long, Jiyong starts wearing his old collection of knitted beanies and caps again, not even shedding them when he crawls into bed with Seunghyun in the dark.
Jiyong doesn't taste like medicine anymore, even that fading away into another ghost for another corner. Jiyong doesn't taste like much of anything, and most nights he grows tired of kissing after only a few minutes and instead will lie on his side, eyes half-open as he runs bony fingers up and down Seunghyun's body.
"You should touch me," Jiyong whispers, and when Seunghyun's fingers shake, he'll purse his lips, voice unkind. "Pretend I'm healthy. You always had a good imagination." Sometimes he'll punctuate this with a laugh, like doing so is like saying 'just kidding,' like it makes what he is saying okay.
Seunghyun smokes on the balcony and Jiyong leans on the railings beside him, follows the gray clouds with his hands and stretching out his fingers to curl them around the smoke before it dissipates.
"God, I hope these make you die sooner than later so we can haunt things together," he jokes, frostbitten and lost inside his thin sweater, and yet it is Seunghyun who shivers and stubs out his cigarette and asks to go inside.
Between the bedsheets and bones, Seunghyun feels too close to the surface of Jiyong's skin, like they're fighting to be freed.
"You love me," Jiyong says, "don't you?"
Seunghyun nods. The ache starts when he means it.
He wonders how he let himself get so invested in this mockery; wonders which one of them is the one dying now.
(say something worth it to your brother your friend college educations yet we create our own hells)
iv.
One week now.
Jiyong can't understand why Seunghyun's under-eye circles look darker than his. Why Seunghyun's clothes don't fit him as well anymore, why he skips dinner in favor of staying with Jiyong in his room when he's not the one with a body that won't take in any.
"If I didn't know better, I'd say you were doing it for sympathy," Jiyong says, voice like old crinkled paper, and doesn't like the look Seunghyun throws him, crazy written all over his gaunt face.
Seunghyun makes to leave sometimes but Jiyong won't let him stay away for long, because he can't leave the insides of his room anymore and he can't stand the silence inside his own head. There's nothing inside but white noise and wisps of air where music used to fill the space, like even the wires to his own thoughts are short-fusing one by one. Seunghyun helps take away some of the horrible quiet, even though he barely talks to him anymore.
The older boy skips another meal, stays up another night, and Jiyong doesn't like it. "I won't let you follow me," he tells him. "I'm doing this by myself." Because he wants Seunghyun to live - or because Kwon Jiyong doesn't share.
When Seunghyun stiffens, Jiyong knows how to smooth things over. "I'm sorry I did this to you," he says. Like clockwork, he feels Seunghyun's fingers around his own.
Jiyong wonders if he is lying. If Seunghyun knows. If he cares. If either of them, at this point, can afford to.
(keep the lies hidden in the framework of your mind sometimes in the dark nothing works out well)
v.
One day now.
Right before it happens Seunghyun is in a narrow alley, Jiyong standing in the middle with his head tilted upwards to the sky. The closeness of the walls on both sides has them pressed against each other, chests alternating between inhale and exhale so both of them can breathe. Seunghyun can't seem to find how to escape the maze except by going up, a strip of blue sky high above them between the buildings that trap them in.
Then Jiyong jumps up - and up, and up until he is soaring in the sky and all Seunghyun sees are his shoes, the knitted cap on his head that he tosses back down to him.
He waits for what seems like hours in the alley, neck stiff from staring up at that tiny little sky, but Jiyong doesn't come back. After a while he starts to count the seconds that pass him by, one-mississippi, two-mississippi, three.
He stops when he gets to one hundred thirty one thousand and forty, trailing off mid-number.
(maybe you have to believe it was something worthwhile while it lasted what do you leave behind but your time?)
When Seunghyun wakes up, it's because Jiyong doesn't (need to anymore).
note: thanks to _syunikiss_ for inspiring me with one of her epik high icons she put up today. fic love meme :D?