three drabbles ... and a rant [ fic ]
three fifteen-minute challenges from kpopficwank.
here's to the next ten
cl/teddy | pg, 314 words, canon
from this prompt, originally posted here
when she's twelve years old, alone in her bedroom with his cd in her hands, chaerin finds it easy enough to trace the outline of his lips and imagine what it'd be like if maybe she was a little older, a little taller, a little closer. she makes it to the part when he'd brush her hair away from her eyes with his rough hands before she bursts into laughter and shakes the thought from her head.
sixteen, she shakes his hand for the first time and discovers they're calloused, like she's imagined. she sits across from him at four a.m. in the studio going over her lines for her recording, the dots of stubble on his chin especially apparent underneath the flourescent lighting, and misses a beat because she's too busy memorizing the curves of his jaw.
another two years. he lets her tease him, now, lets her curl up underneath his arms and punch him in the shoulder and steal the cap off his head. she borrows a sweatshirt when it's too cold in the studio and she's only wearing a tank top, and accidentally-on-purpose doesn't return it for a few weeks. he smells like honeysuckle and smoke, mint and stars.
when chaerin blows out the candles on her twenty-second birthday cake, there is a second of flashing light before it goes suddenly dark. teddy is standing across from her, eyes shining, laughter rough and soft as he stumbles over the lines to 'happy birthday', and she holds onto the tail end of a promise and inches forward, step by step, into the darkness until she smells him, feels him, presses against him,
kisses him, kisses him, kisses him.
teddy smells like sugar. teddy is clean-shaven, tastes like cake and stale alcohol and exhaustion. his hands stay at his side and her hair falls into her eyes, and there is nobody to fix any of it.
breathe in
gd/top | pg-13, 237 words, au
from this prompt, originally posted here with minor edits
the sun sets one day and never comes back, and the last dredges of the air slips quietly away with it. doomed, is what everybody thinks; we're doomed.
within the first thirty seconds as people hold their last full breath comes panic, silent screams passed only through the terror in each other's eyes, the tremble in their footsteps. what do we do, they gesture, clutch at their faces, what do we do?
and then life, as in times of chaos, is suddenly set onto a rampant fast-forward, quite literally being as short as the blink of an eye.
some choose to go quickly, breathing out and dropping to the ground a second later, their eyes glazing over before their bodies even hit the floor. some search for empty promise in sealed lockers, empty closets and basement cellars, for that last vestige of oxygen and hope--only to die sprawled in some empty container alone.
and then there are those who find each other.
jiyong watches the dark world with his hand in seunghyun's hand from at their bedroom window--pulls it up to his chest and writes in his palm instead of says i love you, you big idiot, and waits for that glimmer of familiar humor, for seunghyun's eyes to say it back.
their noses brush when jiyong raises himself up to press their lips together; the last thing he feels is seunghyun kissing him as jiyong breathes love into his mouth.
ps i love you
gd/top| pg-13, 376 words, canon
from this prompt, originally posted here
when jiyong is sent to europe, seunghyun is expecting some sort of sentiment to come from it all. jiyong has never been exactly quiet about how he feels, good or bad, and yet when he leaves with his bulky suitcases, the goodbye he gives boss is longer than the one for seunghyun.
he watches jiyong step into the van - watches the van back out of the driveway, head down the street, turn the corner, disappear - the spot on his elbow where jiyong briefly touched still burning from his icy fingers.
life goes on. seunghyun occasionally receives a random cross-continental text - tried escargot today, that's something even you wouldn't eat - fuck the french for making everything so goddamn expensive - i just saw the parisian version of seungri what the hell - but never anything substantial, never anything that tells him how he is, if he's getting better from the downward spiral yg called depression that prompted the entire trip in the first place.
he wonders if jiyong is just too tired to feel anymore.
seunghyun's replies are always the same: a simple i miss you that he never sends in the end because he doesn't want jiyong to feel suffocated or obligated to fly back to a place he associates with stress. so seunghyun just tucks his phone away.
the week before jiyong comes back, the doorbell rings early in the morning and a minute later youngbae is knocking on seunghyun's door to place a small package the size of his thumb in his hand.
seunghyun stares at it confusedly through the haze of sleep for a second before ripping open the cardboard.
when he sees the tiny figurine of the eiffel tower and the note attached in jiyong's messy scrawl that says something pretty for your stupid toy wall, seunghyun is tempted to just grimace and throw it in the trash.
he is setting it down when something else flutters out of the box, and he manages to catch the piece of white scrap paper in his hands before it hits the floor.
wish you were here.
the eiffel tower is hidden by a mound of bearbricks, but seunghyun likes it anyways. when jiyong shows up at the door exactly a week later, he is smiling.
rant.
it's been brought to my attention that people are bashing on the gd/top pairing, because, i don't know, they think people who ship gd/top only do it because we're jumping on some sort of bandwagon (since gd/top has gained a bit of popularity/more readership in fic). i've read things like "they only ship them because they're attractive", "gd and top don't even interact so the whole ship is baseless", and "other ships challenge you more as an author because it forces top to stop being badass/gd to stop being a damsel in distress".
the bandwagon claim: it's not the author's fault if her ship has become mainstream, especially rather suddenly as in this case. back when i first started getting into gd/top, i couldn't find fic anywhere except butterflyweb's, and that is primarily the reason why i started writing them myself. and i'm not calling myself a pioneer, but i (and anybody else who really does ship gd/top) am continue to write them because i like the pairing, not because i am jumping on some sort of prolific bandwagon to gain comments. it should be the same case for anybody. if you like a pairing, write your fuckin' pairing. it's fine if you want to try others to analyze them or to up your skills or to fulfill a request or whatever, but if you're writing something just because it's popular and you feel the pressure to 'conform' because otherwise you'll get no readership, it's a really bad reason. as far as i know this is a hobby, and something you should enjoy doing.
only shipping gd/top because they look good together, and the ship is baseless because they don't interact anyways: i feel like i've had to defend this so many times, so sorry if this comes off a bit bitter. i do not ship gd/top on a purely superficial level. i ship them because i like that their friendship is based on laughter, because gd and top were friends even when top was a fattie and gd had a snaggletooth and gd still thought top was cool, because gd and top have stupid inside jokes and crack the fuck up at each other when nobody else around them gets it and if you want to see visual proof i will show you, but the point is, i like and appreciate and remember moments like those. they aren't like gdragon/seungri in that their friendship is displayed for you to see, but remember that they've known each other since middle school, that gd was the one who recruited top into yg, that they hang out in the same group of friends and go shopping and out drinking and god knows what else. it would be churlish of me to not admit they don't look good on a superficial level together either, so yes, i like that too. again, forgive me if i sound stannish and angry but i've lost count of the times somebody has brushed them off as shallow and baseless when it's not. (and anyways, it's fiction, so i don't understand why this would be any less real or fake than any other ship.)
gd/top with each other are badass mafia asshole/helpless woman, and don't challenge you as much as other ships: i admit that it's the way i wrote gd/top in mercury in my veins, which is the reason why i'm redoing that fic altogether. but since then, i don't remember the last time i read a good fic with them in those stereotypical roles. i've read gd as a black friday maniac and top as his bag boy with sunscreen on his nose; top as a dead-end bartender and gd as a lonely art student; top coming home from army camp slightly jaded and gd still the same; top as a slave with no real idea of home and gd a naive leader hoping for a friend. gd and top are as challenging to write as any other pair. and i am more than offended when people suggest that maybe we're writing them because they think it's an easy opt-out and that it doesn't spark creativity. perhaps you, the accusers, just aren't inspired by them as a pair. and that's fine. just find somebody else that does inspire you instead of putting the rest of us down.
sorry this is so long, but it's been all sitting on my chest for a while and i'm sick of constantly having to defend gd/top when it's marginalized by so many people. basically, don't bash my ship and i won't bash yours. if you feel the need to, at least do it somewhere where i can't see it.
okay that's it.
here's to the next ten
cl/teddy | pg, 314 words, canon
from this prompt, originally posted here
when she's twelve years old, alone in her bedroom with his cd in her hands, chaerin finds it easy enough to trace the outline of his lips and imagine what it'd be like if maybe she was a little older, a little taller, a little closer. she makes it to the part when he'd brush her hair away from her eyes with his rough hands before she bursts into laughter and shakes the thought from her head.
sixteen, she shakes his hand for the first time and discovers they're calloused, like she's imagined. she sits across from him at four a.m. in the studio going over her lines for her recording, the dots of stubble on his chin especially apparent underneath the flourescent lighting, and misses a beat because she's too busy memorizing the curves of his jaw.
another two years. he lets her tease him, now, lets her curl up underneath his arms and punch him in the shoulder and steal the cap off his head. she borrows a sweatshirt when it's too cold in the studio and she's only wearing a tank top, and accidentally-on-purpose doesn't return it for a few weeks. he smells like honeysuckle and smoke, mint and stars.
when chaerin blows out the candles on her twenty-second birthday cake, there is a second of flashing light before it goes suddenly dark. teddy is standing across from her, eyes shining, laughter rough and soft as he stumbles over the lines to 'happy birthday', and she holds onto the tail end of a promise and inches forward, step by step, into the darkness until she smells him, feels him, presses against him,
kisses him, kisses him, kisses him.
teddy smells like sugar. teddy is clean-shaven, tastes like cake and stale alcohol and exhaustion. his hands stay at his side and her hair falls into her eyes, and there is nobody to fix any of it.
breathe in
gd/top | pg-13, 237 words, au
from this prompt, originally posted here with minor edits
the sun sets one day and never comes back, and the last dredges of the air slips quietly away with it. doomed, is what everybody thinks; we're doomed.
within the first thirty seconds as people hold their last full breath comes panic, silent screams passed only through the terror in each other's eyes, the tremble in their footsteps. what do we do, they gesture, clutch at their faces, what do we do?
and then life, as in times of chaos, is suddenly set onto a rampant fast-forward, quite literally being as short as the blink of an eye.
some choose to go quickly, breathing out and dropping to the ground a second later, their eyes glazing over before their bodies even hit the floor. some search for empty promise in sealed lockers, empty closets and basement cellars, for that last vestige of oxygen and hope--only to die sprawled in some empty container alone.
and then there are those who find each other.
jiyong watches the dark world with his hand in seunghyun's hand from at their bedroom window--pulls it up to his chest and writes in his palm instead of says i love you, you big idiot, and waits for that glimmer of familiar humor, for seunghyun's eyes to say it back.
their noses brush when jiyong raises himself up to press their lips together; the last thing he feels is seunghyun kissing him as jiyong breathes love into his mouth.
ps i love you
gd/top| pg-13, 376 words, canon
from this prompt, originally posted here
when jiyong is sent to europe, seunghyun is expecting some sort of sentiment to come from it all. jiyong has never been exactly quiet about how he feels, good or bad, and yet when he leaves with his bulky suitcases, the goodbye he gives boss is longer than the one for seunghyun.
he watches jiyong step into the van - watches the van back out of the driveway, head down the street, turn the corner, disappear - the spot on his elbow where jiyong briefly touched still burning from his icy fingers.
life goes on. seunghyun occasionally receives a random cross-continental text - tried escargot today, that's something even you wouldn't eat - fuck the french for making everything so goddamn expensive - i just saw the parisian version of seungri what the hell - but never anything substantial, never anything that tells him how he is, if he's getting better from the downward spiral yg called depression that prompted the entire trip in the first place.
he wonders if jiyong is just too tired to feel anymore.
seunghyun's replies are always the same: a simple i miss you that he never sends in the end because he doesn't want jiyong to feel suffocated or obligated to fly back to a place he associates with stress. so seunghyun just tucks his phone away.
the week before jiyong comes back, the doorbell rings early in the morning and a minute later youngbae is knocking on seunghyun's door to place a small package the size of his thumb in his hand.
seunghyun stares at it confusedly through the haze of sleep for a second before ripping open the cardboard.
when he sees the tiny figurine of the eiffel tower and the note attached in jiyong's messy scrawl that says something pretty for your stupid toy wall, seunghyun is tempted to just grimace and throw it in the trash.
he is setting it down when something else flutters out of the box, and he manages to catch the piece of white scrap paper in his hands before it hits the floor.
wish you were here.
the eiffel tower is hidden by a mound of bearbricks, but seunghyun likes it anyways. when jiyong shows up at the door exactly a week later, he is smiling.
rant.
it's been brought to my attention that people are bashing on the gd/top pairing, because, i don't know, they think people who ship gd/top only do it because we're jumping on some sort of bandwagon (since gd/top has gained a bit of popularity/more readership in fic). i've read things like "they only ship them because they're attractive", "gd and top don't even interact so the whole ship is baseless", and "other ships challenge you more as an author because it forces top to stop being badass/gd to stop being a damsel in distress".
the bandwagon claim: it's not the author's fault if her ship has become mainstream, especially rather suddenly as in this case. back when i first started getting into gd/top, i couldn't find fic anywhere except butterflyweb's, and that is primarily the reason why i started writing them myself. and i'm not calling myself a pioneer, but i (and anybody else who really does ship gd/top) am continue to write them because i like the pairing, not because i am jumping on some sort of prolific bandwagon to gain comments. it should be the same case for anybody. if you like a pairing, write your fuckin' pairing. it's fine if you want to try others to analyze them or to up your skills or to fulfill a request or whatever, but if you're writing something just because it's popular and you feel the pressure to 'conform' because otherwise you'll get no readership, it's a really bad reason. as far as i know this is a hobby, and something you should enjoy doing.
only shipping gd/top because they look good together, and the ship is baseless because they don't interact anyways: i feel like i've had to defend this so many times, so sorry if this comes off a bit bitter. i do not ship gd/top on a purely superficial level. i ship them because i like that their friendship is based on laughter, because gd and top were friends even when top was a fattie and gd had a snaggletooth and gd still thought top was cool, because gd and top have stupid inside jokes and crack the fuck up at each other when nobody else around them gets it and if you want to see visual proof i will show you, but the point is, i like and appreciate and remember moments like those. they aren't like gdragon/seungri in that their friendship is displayed for you to see, but remember that they've known each other since middle school, that gd was the one who recruited top into yg, that they hang out in the same group of friends and go shopping and out drinking and god knows what else. it would be churlish of me to not admit they don't look good on a superficial level together either, so yes, i like that too. again, forgive me if i sound stannish and angry but i've lost count of the times somebody has brushed them off as shallow and baseless when it's not. (and anyways, it's fiction, so i don't understand why this would be any less real or fake than any other ship.)
gd/top with each other are badass mafia asshole/helpless woman, and don't challenge you as much as other ships: i admit that it's the way i wrote gd/top in mercury in my veins, which is the reason why i'm redoing that fic altogether. but since then, i don't remember the last time i read a good fic with them in those stereotypical roles. i've read gd as a black friday maniac and top as his bag boy with sunscreen on his nose; top as a dead-end bartender and gd as a lonely art student; top coming home from army camp slightly jaded and gd still the same; top as a slave with no real idea of home and gd a naive leader hoping for a friend. gd and top are as challenging to write as any other pair. and i am more than offended when people suggest that maybe we're writing them because they think it's an easy opt-out and that it doesn't spark creativity. perhaps you, the accusers, just aren't inspired by them as a pair. and that's fine. just find somebody else that does inspire you instead of putting the rest of us down.
sorry this is so long, but it's been all sitting on my chest for a while and i'm sick of constantly having to defend gd/top when it's marginalized by so many people. basically, don't bash my ship and i won't bash yours. if you feel the need to, at least do it somewhere where i can't see it.
okay that's it.