hey now, hey now, when the world comes in [ fic ]
for the (dis)quiet days
top-centric (+ gd/top), pg, 2365 words, canon
things happen, people change.
there is freedom within, there is freedom without; try to catch the deluge in a paper cup
you'll never reach the end of the road while you're traveling with me
DON'T DREAM/SIXPENCE NONE THE RICHER
there is something different about today.
today, choi seunghyun wakes up at six in the morning fifteen minutes ahead of his alarm clock and stares at the shadows on the ceiling until it's time to go.
they're shuttled into the van and seunghyun's head lolls against the back of his seat as they bump down a highway towards a corporate building. somewhere between the end of a song on a radio and a commercial, jiyong comments on seunghyun's nondescript hoodie and jeans.
they're given steaming coffees in the lobby of their destination, bitter espresso that shoots down seunghyun's tired spine and burns his tongue; he stumbles over his feet and is the last in line to their interview where he stares at the journalist's imitation-lacroix shoes and forgets the lines he's supposed to relay.
"are you okay?" youngbae says, during a break, or is it lunch, a hand on his shoulder and his small eyes concerned beneath the bill of his cap, "are you sick?"
no, he's not sick.
the sky is covered with clouds by early afternoon, but seunghyun can barely see it from between the gaps of the tall buildings, the road signs that bleed into the gray with their fluorescent colors and the spindly power lines winding like a spider web across the horizons. he falls asleep en route to their second destination.
and then jiyong is kicking him in the shin, studded sneakers catching him on a bruise, and seungri is apologizing to the photographer with a line about how seunghyun has been ever since he got back from filming, and seunghyun feels it again at daesung's shoulder, wrapped in a smile and a shirt that costs more than his first paycheck.
on their way home, they fall into a single-file line with corresponding footsteps. seunghyun mumbles bathroom, and then he backtracks down the hallway and finds a back door.
the scream is painted on a wall by a bus station. seunghyun doesn't believe in signs, but he pulls the door open anyway and scans the departure times, ignoring the buzzing of his phone in his pocket.
"where are you? where are you?" jiyong says. "are you hurt?"
the alarm in his voice hurts seunghyun's ears, a tinny whine loud enough to catch from the seat across the aisle even over the rumble of the bus engine. seunghyun pulls the mobile slightly away from his face and looks out the plexiglass for maybe a street sign, but all he sees are stacks of crumbling buildings, the side of an alley, a few children with backpacks chasing a dirty white dog.
"i'm fine." seunghyun catches a glimpse of himself in the window as the sun flashes out from behind a block of trees, naked fingers coming up to rub at the puffiness under his eyes. "i don't know."
"what do you mean you--well then what do you--what," jiyong splutters; seunghyun imagines them all sitting on the hard leather couches in the living room huddled around jiyong's phone, dinners untouched, and feels a little bad.
"i just," he says, and searches for the right answer. "i need a little time."
"we don't have time! we have a fucking schedule, or did you forget that too in your fit of insanity?" jiyong stops short. seunghyun thinks that youngbae must have jabbed him in the ribs because when he speaks again, his tone is lower, harder around the edges like he's biting his tongue. "i haven't told hyunsuk yet." he pauses. "should i?"
the bus turns a bumpy corner and rumbles to a stop. cheonhae street, the driver says, this is the cheonhae stop.
maybe jiyong heard that. maybe he is already looking it up online.
"if you want to." seunghyun shrugs, a gesture he is too familiar using around all of them even when he can't see any of them, and he tucks his phone back in his pocket before hoisting himself up, down the steps, and onto the asphalt.
the outside air stings his face, penetrates through his thin hoodie straight to bone. seunghyun wonders how seoul can even call this spring. if he's even in seoul anymore.
he learns to stop looking for designer boutiques and fast food chains as landmarks in a couple hours, because out here, there are none. out here, he passes stone buildings splashed with the remnants of whitewash and flood stains, painted over with neon-brite graffiti marks signifying construction points that have yet to happen, perhaps never will happen.
a lone family mart on the corner block surrounded by chain-link fence and teenagers ditching class buzzes on and off, open-notopen, open-notopen. seunghyun hangs a left and cautiously tugs the hood off his face to see where he's going better. for once, he's forgotten his ipod, and a faint wind brushes around his ears.
nobody even looks at him twice.
at the end of the road is a small park dotted with people in the distance; a vendor sells bean-paste buns, 600 won for four. seunghyun hands the elderly woman a thousand and tells her to keep the change, then sits down on a metal bench to eat and warm his hands.
even the knock-offs haven't made it this far out. a few girls with pretty faces pass by, toting nameless cloth bags, their hands left free, vacant.
he wonders what it'd be like here. youngbae would finally get some fresh air. seungri could work at the family mart and complain about nobody recognizing him, stock shelves, and fall asleep at the register. maybe daesung would like it, he thinks. jiyong wouldn't. jiyong would try and mail-order his galliano, would write and rap and record until three in the morning and sleep till three in the afternoon and whine about the quiet and leave cigarette butts all over the gutters. jiyong would gloss the town over in a week before he packed his bags again. jiyong probably wouldn't even come at all.
so maybe if it were just him, then. maybe without the ipod.
the bean paste is sticky on his lips, rolling sweet over his tongue and between his teeth; seunghyun crumbles up the wax paper and watches the sun dip into the sky before he stands. cheonhae street. there would be too much space between his fingers, but he files it away in his mind for future reference anyway, just in case.
on his way out of the town, seunghyun loses his pack of cigarettes. it doesn't matter; he can never seem to remember where his lighters are.
a girl recognizes him on the bus.
"oh my god," is all that comes out of her mouth, full of ohmygodohmygod and pointing, and seunghyun gets this so often he knows what she means to say. it's his fault for letting his guard down, his fault he'd dozed off for a moment and forgotten that they were heading towards the city again.
"you're, you're," she's stuttering.
he stares up at her, and in his disorientation of half-sleep, isn't sure who she wants him to be, who she expects to see and what he's supposed to give. he isn't ready, he can't remember, doesn't have the respective supporting cast(s) at his elbows or the right clothes on and his music is on his desk at home. for a second seunghyun's brain is scattergories. war, sweat, thousand-dollar shoes, metal chain around his neck - gunshots and fireworks and his sister screaming look at you, look at you.
the camera flash doesn't help - he's not even sure if he sees spotlight, searchlight, or just the light from his mother's room slatted in the darkness of the hallway (or, on the off chance, the flickering neon sign of the family mart) - but in the end, the fan doesn't expect anything at all from him except a face on her camera phone. he could've been anybody.
seunghyun scribbles something unrecognizable on the notepad she shoves at him before handing it back to her, and he gets off at the next stop. there will always be another bus.
while he's waiting, he receives a text message.
please come home. did i do something wrong???
this isn't about you, seunghyun sends, and idly plays with the mobile in his hands for ten minutes before it buzzes again.
seungri says sorry. you know he doesn't think before he opens his mouth.
and maybe it's the physical distance that makes him feel like a third-party observer, but for the first time in a long time, seunghyun thinks that they're all doing it wrong. gwangju, busan, tokyo, los angeles, plus countless cities in europe for jiyong - and all it's done is close their world in tighter.
seunghyun doesn't know how to tell jiyong that it's bigger than just the last few weeks. that it's more than him spending more time on the balcony zoning out, or wearing muted clothes, or keeping the door to his room shut; more than some careless comment seungri said that maybe years ago would have bothered him for a month but that now he doesn't even remember hearing.
sometimes he thinks jiyong has said enough, grown up enough, to understand things like this, but after he slides into an empty row of another bus, seunghyun concludes that he doesn't even know what this is. maybe it's only ever as big as himself.
this isn't about any of you, he types.
the bus merges onto the freeway. after reading the marquee five times, seunghyun realizes they're airport-bound.
they're almost to the terminal when a good man starts playing from the bus speakers. something jolts in his stomach, and seunghyun still remembers feeling for this song from the first time.
it's still a good high.
(geoure bichin nae moseup na oemyeoneul hane, (1) he mouths. for three minutes, he's back on stage.)
on a map, illuminated by backlighting and aesthetically pleasing colors, it looks so easy to fly from korea to, say, switzerland. only two hand-spans of a graceful red arch before he's somewhere less like seoul, somewhere more like cheonhae street. and it's not that seunghyun thinks switzerland will have molding buildings, or empty parks with smiling old grandmothers selling snacks. but he could sit down for a while, there, too.
his finger slips over to greece. what would his name be in greek? maybe it'd be easier to figure out than it is here in the korean he's been speaking for too long, in seoul. seunghyun traces a connect-the-dots from athens to sicily, then london, down to cairo, to morocco.
the automatic ticketing counter tells him it's a little over a million won to fly, and seunghyun cards a hand through his hair. he probably has about five times that in his checking account right now. and he can just buy clothes over there. they have clothes there. and food, and hotels, and places to see, things to do.
he'll probably come back five shades darker. everyone will probably be jealous. he'll probably be happy, or at least everything else will be sun-baked out of mind, out of soul. or something.
"can i help you, sir?" the woman behind the korea air counter says.
yg will probably send him to counseling. seunghyun will probably refuse to go. they'll probably think he's nuts.
he probably is.
seunghyun is the one who calls and says hi first, this time.
"hi," jiyong says back, sounding like he does when he works all night. there's a brief lull before he speaks again. "how are you?"
seunghyun chews on his lower lip and stares down at the stapled papers in his lap. "i just bought a non-refundable ticket to abu dhabi."
"you what?"
"i'm not using it," seunghyun says, "i'm coming back, i just." his head bumps against the pane of glass that he is sitting against, watching people flying the red-eye hurry past him with their rolling louis vuitton suitcases and their matching manolo blahnik heels.
jiyong is silent, and seunghyun feels like he should at least try. "i just," he says again. "i needed..." he shakes his head, amends his statement. "actually, i'm not sure what i need, so. i thought i should - at least - see if... this was it."
"abu dhabi?"
"i guess."
he hears jiyong sigh, breath blowing so slow and close to his ear he almost feels it. "i'm not sure i get it."
"yea," seunghyun says. "me, neither." it comes out heavier than he means for it to. in some space of his head, seunghyun still likes things explained to him, still likes falling in line behind someone and likes relying on someone smaller and younger and more restricted than he because kwon jiyong knows things that he doesn't, like the choruses of songs, and movements of the choreography, and where g-dragon goes and how t.o.p stands and when taeyang and daesung and seungri come in. but at the end of the day kwon jiyong goes places like europe to unknot everything that isn't scripted, and he maybe knows even less than seunghyun does.
there's a rustling in the background that could be blankets; seunghyun looks over his shoulder at the night outside and all of the sudden wishes he were home. and maybe that's progress, or maybe that's circling back around to square one.
"can i do anything?" jiyong says.
seunghyun shakes his head. "this is enough," he says.
they fall into silence, then, but jiyong stays with him on the line until the cab arrives twenty minutes later.
"sajangnim is going to kill me," seunghyun says.
"he doesn't know. i didn't tell him." jiyong yawns, scoots in closer and rests his forehead on seunghyun's chest, arm tangled somewhere between his sheets and seunghyun's hair.
"things will get better tomorrow." jiyong says. "or we'll go to cheonhae street."
for the similar days
jiyong hates cheonhae street and all its cracking foundations. he chain-smokes, scoffs at the teenagers, gets bored after ten minutes in the park, says the bean paste is too sweet for him, prods seunghyun to go looking for a club as soon as it gets passably dark.
but he walks with seunghyun in the park, fingers linked around his and both of them quiet, and he's there.
(he's there every time.)
_____________
(1) = lyrics from a good man: "my reflection in the mirror ignores me"
note: aufwoeirle;glsk. this came out a lot more all over the place and unsure and odd than i initially meant for it to be. born out of recent interviews with top like this and this, particularly lines like "the hardest thing is all the different roles inside of me.... in order to become like oh jangbum, i can't not lose myself." lastly, to quote envoler (though her fic that followed this quote didn't suck at all), i realize this may be terrible, but i mostly did it to help myself get over a long period of writer's block.
top-centric (+ gd/top), pg, 2365 words, canon
things happen, people change.
there is freedom within, there is freedom without; try to catch the deluge in a paper cup
you'll never reach the end of the road while you're traveling with me
DON'T DREAM/SIXPENCE NONE THE RICHER
there is something different about today.
today, choi seunghyun wakes up at six in the morning fifteen minutes ahead of his alarm clock and stares at the shadows on the ceiling until it's time to go.
they're shuttled into the van and seunghyun's head lolls against the back of his seat as they bump down a highway towards a corporate building. somewhere between the end of a song on a radio and a commercial, jiyong comments on seunghyun's nondescript hoodie and jeans.
they're given steaming coffees in the lobby of their destination, bitter espresso that shoots down seunghyun's tired spine and burns his tongue; he stumbles over his feet and is the last in line to their interview where he stares at the journalist's imitation-lacroix shoes and forgets the lines he's supposed to relay.
"are you okay?" youngbae says, during a break, or is it lunch, a hand on his shoulder and his small eyes concerned beneath the bill of his cap, "are you sick?"
no, he's not sick.
the sky is covered with clouds by early afternoon, but seunghyun can barely see it from between the gaps of the tall buildings, the road signs that bleed into the gray with their fluorescent colors and the spindly power lines winding like a spider web across the horizons. he falls asleep en route to their second destination.
and then jiyong is kicking him in the shin, studded sneakers catching him on a bruise, and seungri is apologizing to the photographer with a line about how seunghyun has been ever since he got back from filming, and seunghyun feels it again at daesung's shoulder, wrapped in a smile and a shirt that costs more than his first paycheck.
on their way home, they fall into a single-file line with corresponding footsteps. seunghyun mumbles bathroom, and then he backtracks down the hallway and finds a back door.
the scream is painted on a wall by a bus station. seunghyun doesn't believe in signs, but he pulls the door open anyway and scans the departure times, ignoring the buzzing of his phone in his pocket.
"where are you? where are you?" jiyong says. "are you hurt?"
the alarm in his voice hurts seunghyun's ears, a tinny whine loud enough to catch from the seat across the aisle even over the rumble of the bus engine. seunghyun pulls the mobile slightly away from his face and looks out the plexiglass for maybe a street sign, but all he sees are stacks of crumbling buildings, the side of an alley, a few children with backpacks chasing a dirty white dog.
"i'm fine." seunghyun catches a glimpse of himself in the window as the sun flashes out from behind a block of trees, naked fingers coming up to rub at the puffiness under his eyes. "i don't know."
"what do you mean you--well then what do you--what," jiyong splutters; seunghyun imagines them all sitting on the hard leather couches in the living room huddled around jiyong's phone, dinners untouched, and feels a little bad.
"i just," he says, and searches for the right answer. "i need a little time."
"we don't have time! we have a fucking schedule, or did you forget that too in your fit of insanity?" jiyong stops short. seunghyun thinks that youngbae must have jabbed him in the ribs because when he speaks again, his tone is lower, harder around the edges like he's biting his tongue. "i haven't told hyunsuk yet." he pauses. "should i?"
the bus turns a bumpy corner and rumbles to a stop. cheonhae street, the driver says, this is the cheonhae stop.
maybe jiyong heard that. maybe he is already looking it up online.
"if you want to." seunghyun shrugs, a gesture he is too familiar using around all of them even when he can't see any of them, and he tucks his phone back in his pocket before hoisting himself up, down the steps, and onto the asphalt.
the outside air stings his face, penetrates through his thin hoodie straight to bone. seunghyun wonders how seoul can even call this spring. if he's even in seoul anymore.
he learns to stop looking for designer boutiques and fast food chains as landmarks in a couple hours, because out here, there are none. out here, he passes stone buildings splashed with the remnants of whitewash and flood stains, painted over with neon-brite graffiti marks signifying construction points that have yet to happen, perhaps never will happen.
a lone family mart on the corner block surrounded by chain-link fence and teenagers ditching class buzzes on and off, open-notopen, open-notopen. seunghyun hangs a left and cautiously tugs the hood off his face to see where he's going better. for once, he's forgotten his ipod, and a faint wind brushes around his ears.
nobody even looks at him twice.
at the end of the road is a small park dotted with people in the distance; a vendor sells bean-paste buns, 600 won for four. seunghyun hands the elderly woman a thousand and tells her to keep the change, then sits down on a metal bench to eat and warm his hands.
even the knock-offs haven't made it this far out. a few girls with pretty faces pass by, toting nameless cloth bags, their hands left free, vacant.
he wonders what it'd be like here. youngbae would finally get some fresh air. seungri could work at the family mart and complain about nobody recognizing him, stock shelves, and fall asleep at the register. maybe daesung would like it, he thinks. jiyong wouldn't. jiyong would try and mail-order his galliano, would write and rap and record until three in the morning and sleep till three in the afternoon and whine about the quiet and leave cigarette butts all over the gutters. jiyong would gloss the town over in a week before he packed his bags again. jiyong probably wouldn't even come at all.
so maybe if it were just him, then. maybe without the ipod.
the bean paste is sticky on his lips, rolling sweet over his tongue and between his teeth; seunghyun crumbles up the wax paper and watches the sun dip into the sky before he stands. cheonhae street. there would be too much space between his fingers, but he files it away in his mind for future reference anyway, just in case.
on his way out of the town, seunghyun loses his pack of cigarettes. it doesn't matter; he can never seem to remember where his lighters are.
a girl recognizes him on the bus.
"oh my god," is all that comes out of her mouth, full of ohmygodohmygod and pointing, and seunghyun gets this so often he knows what she means to say. it's his fault for letting his guard down, his fault he'd dozed off for a moment and forgotten that they were heading towards the city again.
"you're, you're," she's stuttering.
he stares up at her, and in his disorientation of half-sleep, isn't sure who she wants him to be, who she expects to see and what he's supposed to give. he isn't ready, he can't remember, doesn't have the respective supporting cast(s) at his elbows or the right clothes on and his music is on his desk at home. for a second seunghyun's brain is scattergories. war, sweat, thousand-dollar shoes, metal chain around his neck - gunshots and fireworks and his sister screaming look at you, look at you.
the camera flash doesn't help - he's not even sure if he sees spotlight, searchlight, or just the light from his mother's room slatted in the darkness of the hallway (or, on the off chance, the flickering neon sign of the family mart) - but in the end, the fan doesn't expect anything at all from him except a face on her camera phone. he could've been anybody.
seunghyun scribbles something unrecognizable on the notepad she shoves at him before handing it back to her, and he gets off at the next stop. there will always be another bus.
while he's waiting, he receives a text message.
please come home. did i do something wrong???
this isn't about you, seunghyun sends, and idly plays with the mobile in his hands for ten minutes before it buzzes again.
seungri says sorry. you know he doesn't think before he opens his mouth.
and maybe it's the physical distance that makes him feel like a third-party observer, but for the first time in a long time, seunghyun thinks that they're all doing it wrong. gwangju, busan, tokyo, los angeles, plus countless cities in europe for jiyong - and all it's done is close their world in tighter.
seunghyun doesn't know how to tell jiyong that it's bigger than just the last few weeks. that it's more than him spending more time on the balcony zoning out, or wearing muted clothes, or keeping the door to his room shut; more than some careless comment seungri said that maybe years ago would have bothered him for a month but that now he doesn't even remember hearing.
sometimes he thinks jiyong has said enough, grown up enough, to understand things like this, but after he slides into an empty row of another bus, seunghyun concludes that he doesn't even know what this is. maybe it's only ever as big as himself.
this isn't about any of you, he types.
the bus merges onto the freeway. after reading the marquee five times, seunghyun realizes they're airport-bound.
they're almost to the terminal when a good man starts playing from the bus speakers. something jolts in his stomach, and seunghyun still remembers feeling for this song from the first time.
it's still a good high.
(geoure bichin nae moseup na oemyeoneul hane, (1) he mouths. for three minutes, he's back on stage.)
on a map, illuminated by backlighting and aesthetically pleasing colors, it looks so easy to fly from korea to, say, switzerland. only two hand-spans of a graceful red arch before he's somewhere less like seoul, somewhere more like cheonhae street. and it's not that seunghyun thinks switzerland will have molding buildings, or empty parks with smiling old grandmothers selling snacks. but he could sit down for a while, there, too.
his finger slips over to greece. what would his name be in greek? maybe it'd be easier to figure out than it is here in the korean he's been speaking for too long, in seoul. seunghyun traces a connect-the-dots from athens to sicily, then london, down to cairo, to morocco.
the automatic ticketing counter tells him it's a little over a million won to fly, and seunghyun cards a hand through his hair. he probably has about five times that in his checking account right now. and he can just buy clothes over there. they have clothes there. and food, and hotels, and places to see, things to do.
he'll probably come back five shades darker. everyone will probably be jealous. he'll probably be happy, or at least everything else will be sun-baked out of mind, out of soul. or something.
"can i help you, sir?" the woman behind the korea air counter says.
yg will probably send him to counseling. seunghyun will probably refuse to go. they'll probably think he's nuts.
he probably is.
seunghyun is the one who calls and says hi first, this time.
"hi," jiyong says back, sounding like he does when he works all night. there's a brief lull before he speaks again. "how are you?"
seunghyun chews on his lower lip and stares down at the stapled papers in his lap. "i just bought a non-refundable ticket to abu dhabi."
"you what?"
"i'm not using it," seunghyun says, "i'm coming back, i just." his head bumps against the pane of glass that he is sitting against, watching people flying the red-eye hurry past him with their rolling louis vuitton suitcases and their matching manolo blahnik heels.
jiyong is silent, and seunghyun feels like he should at least try. "i just," he says again. "i needed..." he shakes his head, amends his statement. "actually, i'm not sure what i need, so. i thought i should - at least - see if... this was it."
"abu dhabi?"
"i guess."
he hears jiyong sigh, breath blowing so slow and close to his ear he almost feels it. "i'm not sure i get it."
"yea," seunghyun says. "me, neither." it comes out heavier than he means for it to. in some space of his head, seunghyun still likes things explained to him, still likes falling in line behind someone and likes relying on someone smaller and younger and more restricted than he because kwon jiyong knows things that he doesn't, like the choruses of songs, and movements of the choreography, and where g-dragon goes and how t.o.p stands and when taeyang and daesung and seungri come in. but at the end of the day kwon jiyong goes places like europe to unknot everything that isn't scripted, and he maybe knows even less than seunghyun does.
there's a rustling in the background that could be blankets; seunghyun looks over his shoulder at the night outside and all of the sudden wishes he were home. and maybe that's progress, or maybe that's circling back around to square one.
"can i do anything?" jiyong says.
seunghyun shakes his head. "this is enough," he says.
they fall into silence, then, but jiyong stays with him on the line until the cab arrives twenty minutes later.
"sajangnim is going to kill me," seunghyun says.
"he doesn't know. i didn't tell him." jiyong yawns, scoots in closer and rests his forehead on seunghyun's chest, arm tangled somewhere between his sheets and seunghyun's hair.
"things will get better tomorrow." jiyong says. "or we'll go to cheonhae street."
for the similar days
jiyong hates cheonhae street and all its cracking foundations. he chain-smokes, scoffs at the teenagers, gets bored after ten minutes in the park, says the bean paste is too sweet for him, prods seunghyun to go looking for a club as soon as it gets passably dark.
but he walks with seunghyun in the park, fingers linked around his and both of them quiet, and he's there.
(he's there every time.)
_____________
(1) = lyrics from a good man: "my reflection in the mirror ignores me"
note: aufwoeirle;glsk. this came out a lot more all over the place and unsure and odd than i initially meant for it to be. born out of recent interviews with top like this and this, particularly lines like "the hardest thing is all the different roles inside of me.... in order to become like oh jangbum, i can't not lose myself." lastly, to quote envoler (though her fic that followed this quote didn't suck at all), i realize this may be terrible, but i mostly did it to help myself get over a long period of writer's block.