with more feeling and gusto [ fic ]
all together now
gd/top | r, 2193 words, canon
no one else will have me like you do.
you and i got something but it's all and then it's nothing to me
i got my defenses when it comes to your intentions to me
and we wake up in the breakdown in the things we never thought we could be
HERE IS GONE/THE GOOGOO DOLLS
August.
"Happy birthday," Seunghyun says, and he slides into the booth directly behind yours, flicks you a package that is the size of your pinkie and lands in your lap. The wrapping paper is sparse, folded over where it shouldn't be and taped so badly it takes you longer than it should to open. A mouse keychain.
"Wow," you say, "that's original."
Seunghyun laughs, you laugh, and you both smell like beer, still. Chaerin and Taeji are singing Kanye West on the portable karaoke machine when you dig your fingers in a fistful of his shirt and press your mouths together.
September.
The best part of smoking is the high you get. The best part of smoking is how it feels flying out of your mouth and curling into the night air, past your teeth and blooming outwards like an ink stain. Is coughing and coughing and coughing again the first time, skulking out at three AM, when nobody is looking, for those lites like a baby before graduating to the Reds that you carry proudly outside of your pockets.
Seunghyun laughs at you because he smokes the imported kind, but he lets you take up most of the room on the balcony swing, slippered feet balanced on the metal posts from which it's propped. You take your iPod, too: one earbud for him, one for you, and press play on the playlist you made. He comments on the music each time a new song starts ("I don't really like this song," "reminds me of middle school," "my ear hurts," "what is this, I kind of like it,"), until he gets tired of it and leans back into the cushions. Sometimes he taps ash off the end of his cigarette before bringing it to your lips.
The best part of smoking is when you don't have to because Seunghyun does it for you. The best part of smoking is he does it too.
November.
"Read this over for me," Seunghyun says. He slides his notebook across the table, and you wonder how long its been from the last time you both slept. Judging from the status of his hair, the way your eyes keep blurring out underneath the studio lights, you're guessing too long. You blink down at the page.
"Your handwriting is too messy." Wrinkle your nose, push it away from you, keep prodding at the spot above his elbow with your ragged nail until he looks away from the computer screen. Seunghyun is silent for a minute. You wait for it.
"Maybe your eyes are too neat," he decides mildly - and there it is, the laugh wrenching out of your throat even though you're too tired to think about why (or if) it's funny. Who knows, anymore.
"Read this over for me," Seunghyun says again, half an hour later. You take the notebook from his hands - distracted, annoyed, in the middle of a lyric that's stuttering too much to get out from your fingertips - so it takes you a minute to work out that the shit on the page aren't words, but a terrible, jagged, disproportionate drawing of - "Jiyongie" it reads, underneath what you think is your desk chair. Jiyongie, with feet as big as your head and Seungri-sized bags under your Daesung-sized eyes.
Seunghyun is the one waiting for it this time - for you to laugh - before he does too.
February.
You get kind of drunk doing shots with Yoochun on the counter of a Japanese bar because you just finished another fucking album (and you don't know anybody else in Japan).
"Jiyong-sshi," Jaejoong says, "pace yourself, you're turning purple," but you don't listen because it's time to celebrate. You drink more and you spill things and Hyunjoong snorts and Seunghyun sighs and Yoochun pours you another even though Jaejoong is yelling at him about too much vodka. You end up drooling all over Seunghyun's shoulder in the cab back, the directions to your apartment that Youngbae wrote smeared all over your cheek instead of the back of your hand.
"Youuuu foundit," you remember crowing when you stumble out onto the pavement. The sound of fabric tearing, fingers in the snow, someone saying fuck - then Seunghyun's helping you up the front steps.
"You're a belligerent little shit," he grumbles.
"Shuddsup," you say, frowning, and then you sit down.
(And pass out.)
When you come to, you're sleeping on the floor of the elevator with a pillow from Seunghyun's bed beneath your head, currently traveling between the fifth and sixth floors. Seunghyun's sitting with his back against the steel walls. His shoes are off and his leather jacket has been replaced with a bright hoodie. A mouse keychain dangles from your phone in his hands.
"What the fuck," you slur.
Ding. The doors wobble open to an unfamiliar hallway.
Seunghyun shrugs, the corners of his mouth curling up on his hungover face. "I couldn't lift you." He presses the button for 8.
May.
"You're not supposed to," Youngbae protests, but it's halfhearted. You break your fish-shaped waffle that Dara scavenged off the streets into two anyway and stuff the bigger half in Seunghyun's hands.
"Don't tell Master Hwang," you whisper. He chuckles.
"Guess I'm Bom-noona."
Seunghyun doesn't eat it, but it's really the look on his face (the look that doesn't happen a whole lot, the one you've learned to recognize and tell apart from other shades of happiness even though you'd like to think nobody else can) that you wanted.
July.
You keep thinking all the stupid schoolboy infatuation will go away. You even know all the signs, now. When Seunghyun's about to kiss you his eyes flicker a lot to, not your lips, but the freckle below your eye. And he purses his lips like he's unsure, but his laugh fills and settles deep inside of you somewhere, and his hands are always the opposite, always sure, when he brushes underneath your jaw or on the back of your neck, in your hair or palming the front of your jeans, depending.
Sometimes he tastes like mint from his toothpaste, oranges from the fruit Daesung cut up for after dinner, or wine after you make him turn off his computer and stop working for the night. Lozenges when he's sick and you don't care, gross in the mornings and you're hogging his blankets. Or smoke from the cigs, weed when he has it - and those times are frantic, rushed, sloppy - like grade-schoolers doing it in the back-seat of their best friend's car.
You've tried to figure him out before, but it makes no sense. A jumble of letters with no vowels; no words.
You keep thinking all the stupid in you will go away, but it doesn't. He says your name and you forget what you were going to say back. The grin makes your face hurt.
August.
When you break up, you forget why.
You forget the constant prickling annoyance, the not being good for each other in the studio and the passive aggressive arguments;
(November. Your nails finally break Seunghyun's skin and draw blood after he stops paying attention to you. You hang out in Kush's studio for a week after that, duck your head and work until you get stuck again and again; he doesn't come to see you and his only communication is by means of text. Finished the song.)
The way he'd make you feel like shit because of the offhand comments he didn't know were offensive;
(September. You thought Seunghyun liked your music, the two of you still in the mindset of sixteen year olds with your Run DMC and your Wutang and your "this is gonna be us someday." But he starts saying more of "this song is weird" and "this is so loud" than anything else, and after a few weeks, Seunghyun starts bringing his own iPod to the balcony. Yours lays untouched in your room next to the unsettled feeling in your stomach, Seunghyun's left earbud tucked into your ear while you watch him smoke.)
How you kept worming your way into his life outside of Big Bang, outside of you, and wouldn't quit;
(February. Seunghyun likes Hyunjoong, likes Jaejoong and Yoochun so you show up because you like them, too. You ignore Hyunjoong's clipped politeness in his tone of voice when he speaks to you or that Jaejoong looks a little disappointed every time Seunghyun has to go home early because of your schedules, that Yoochun doesn't understand your sense of humor. That Seunghyun doesn't always tell you when they get together. The night Jaejoong and Hyunjoong leave for Canada, you tell Seunghyun it's okay because you can spend more time together, working and stuff. And stuff. You can ignore Seunghyun's terrible poker face, too: just bury your face into his neck until it's gone.)
How you kept him up too long when he was sick, how he wasn't concerned enough when you were - when you would disappear and he would go the other way and how the only good moments after a while were the ones in between, when you slipped him little fifty-won snacks he couldn't eat instead of I'm-sorry's or when he kissed you or fucked you or tried to make you laugh because he didn't know how to fix it either.
(May, June, July - you know he has a penchance for street food. He says he's sticking to his diet but he's not. He's a terrible liar.)
Yea, it was bad, they (Youngbae, Seungho, Chaerin, Seungri) tell you. It got really bad, sometimes.
But to you, it's what Seunghyun sounded like when he laughed. The look on his face that was so different from everything else, even if nobody else could see the difference. How you felt when you were together, so happy it hurt - even if it was far and rare and in between.
You wouldn't have cared about any of the bad things if he hadn't.
"Happy birthday," Seunghyun says. Inside the box he gives you is a pair of shoes; an expensive, expensive pair of shoes.
August again.
The keychain this year is an American-style hot-dog, a squiggle of yellow mustard down the middle and four stubbly legs. It emits a high-pitched squeal when you press on it.
Seunghyun is sitting a few tables down, between Hyuksoo and Kyungil. Underneath the dim lights of the restaurant he looks like somebody else, dark blazer he'd never wear a year ago, hair in the eyes that are softer and stranger now when he looks at you. You texted him to bring a date but the chair across from his is vacant. You shift your eyes to your drink and wind the hot-dog around your finger. Squeak. It starts annoying Seungri halfway through the appetizers.
He stops by your table before you cut the cake to say hi, and you tell him a sausage isn't a present, but then he's gone and you don't see him again until the end of the night, in the hallway between the exit and the party. He smells like smoke and the thick summer air outside. You've given up trying to figure him out.
The hot-dog bounces against your leg and chirps; you laugh, he laughs. "I got you something else, it's in the pile," he says, "but I didn't want that to get lost."
"I don't get it."
"The mouse on your phone," he explains, "it's falling off."
"Oh." You have nothing to say to that. "You didn't bring a date."
Seunghyun blinks, confused, but after a second his mouth twists into what you think is a smile. "Nope," he agrees. Or maybe it's a grimace, maybe it's holding back how tired he is because he's been trying more, working on the album with you in the studio when everyone else is sleeping and even Teddy has gone home. Maybe it's something else entirely because you're another year older and so is he, your hair is different and he's not the same, either. He notices when your cell phone charms wear off and buys you something else, something equally as ridiculous.
You say, "I thought you were seeing that girl."
"I was, but we broke up."
"Why?"
And then he looks at you - looks at you like he used to. Your breath hitches in your throat. "Because," he says. "Because it's always been you, Ji," and then you forget entirely what you were going to say back. Two years later and nothing in you has changed. You still stop when he says your name and you still want to buy him street snacks just to keep that look on his face. Changed, and older, and softer like his eyes, but still the one you want.
When you kiss him, sounds from the other room float back to you; Chaerin and Taeji are singing some old love song in the karaoke machine.
note: hi again :) i'm not entirely sure that this is a good first fic ~back into fandom~ lmao. it was originally supposed to be a lot shorter than it turned out being, and i wrote most of it in under an hour but the ending took me a while to figure out. i hope i have more to offer this year ;A;. this is dedicated to whetstone, who has held my hand for the past four months while i struggled with the entire writing process and complained to her way more than i should have. also, because she beta'd this and made me rewrite the ending three times lol. ♥
gd/top | r, 2193 words, canon
no one else will have me like you do.
you and i got something but it's all and then it's nothing to me
i got my defenses when it comes to your intentions to me
and we wake up in the breakdown in the things we never thought we could be
HERE IS GONE/THE GOOGOO DOLLS
August.
"Happy birthday," Seunghyun says, and he slides into the booth directly behind yours, flicks you a package that is the size of your pinkie and lands in your lap. The wrapping paper is sparse, folded over where it shouldn't be and taped so badly it takes you longer than it should to open. A mouse keychain.
"Wow," you say, "that's original."
Seunghyun laughs, you laugh, and you both smell like beer, still. Chaerin and Taeji are singing Kanye West on the portable karaoke machine when you dig your fingers in a fistful of his shirt and press your mouths together.
September.
The best part of smoking is the high you get. The best part of smoking is how it feels flying out of your mouth and curling into the night air, past your teeth and blooming outwards like an ink stain. Is coughing and coughing and coughing again the first time, skulking out at three AM, when nobody is looking, for those lites like a baby before graduating to the Reds that you carry proudly outside of your pockets.
Seunghyun laughs at you because he smokes the imported kind, but he lets you take up most of the room on the balcony swing, slippered feet balanced on the metal posts from which it's propped. You take your iPod, too: one earbud for him, one for you, and press play on the playlist you made. He comments on the music each time a new song starts ("I don't really like this song," "reminds me of middle school," "my ear hurts," "what is this, I kind of like it,"), until he gets tired of it and leans back into the cushions. Sometimes he taps ash off the end of his cigarette before bringing it to your lips.
The best part of smoking is when you don't have to because Seunghyun does it for you. The best part of smoking is he does it too.
November.
"Read this over for me," Seunghyun says. He slides his notebook across the table, and you wonder how long its been from the last time you both slept. Judging from the status of his hair, the way your eyes keep blurring out underneath the studio lights, you're guessing too long. You blink down at the page.
"Your handwriting is too messy." Wrinkle your nose, push it away from you, keep prodding at the spot above his elbow with your ragged nail until he looks away from the computer screen. Seunghyun is silent for a minute. You wait for it.
"Maybe your eyes are too neat," he decides mildly - and there it is, the laugh wrenching out of your throat even though you're too tired to think about why (or if) it's funny. Who knows, anymore.
"Read this over for me," Seunghyun says again, half an hour later. You take the notebook from his hands - distracted, annoyed, in the middle of a lyric that's stuttering too much to get out from your fingertips - so it takes you a minute to work out that the shit on the page aren't words, but a terrible, jagged, disproportionate drawing of - "Jiyongie" it reads, underneath what you think is your desk chair. Jiyongie, with feet as big as your head and Seungri-sized bags under your Daesung-sized eyes.
Seunghyun is the one waiting for it this time - for you to laugh - before he does too.
February.
You get kind of drunk doing shots with Yoochun on the counter of a Japanese bar because you just finished another fucking album (and you don't know anybody else in Japan).
"Jiyong-sshi," Jaejoong says, "pace yourself, you're turning purple," but you don't listen because it's time to celebrate. You drink more and you spill things and Hyunjoong snorts and Seunghyun sighs and Yoochun pours you another even though Jaejoong is yelling at him about too much vodka. You end up drooling all over Seunghyun's shoulder in the cab back, the directions to your apartment that Youngbae wrote smeared all over your cheek instead of the back of your hand.
"Youuuu foundit," you remember crowing when you stumble out onto the pavement. The sound of fabric tearing, fingers in the snow, someone saying fuck - then Seunghyun's helping you up the front steps.
"You're a belligerent little shit," he grumbles.
"Shuddsup," you say, frowning, and then you sit down.
(And pass out.)
When you come to, you're sleeping on the floor of the elevator with a pillow from Seunghyun's bed beneath your head, currently traveling between the fifth and sixth floors. Seunghyun's sitting with his back against the steel walls. His shoes are off and his leather jacket has been replaced with a bright hoodie. A mouse keychain dangles from your phone in his hands.
"What the fuck," you slur.
Ding. The doors wobble open to an unfamiliar hallway.
Seunghyun shrugs, the corners of his mouth curling up on his hungover face. "I couldn't lift you." He presses the button for 8.
May.
"You're not supposed to," Youngbae protests, but it's halfhearted. You break your fish-shaped waffle that Dara scavenged off the streets into two anyway and stuff the bigger half in Seunghyun's hands.
"Don't tell Master Hwang," you whisper. He chuckles.
"Guess I'm Bom-noona."
Seunghyun doesn't eat it, but it's really the look on his face (the look that doesn't happen a whole lot, the one you've learned to recognize and tell apart from other shades of happiness even though you'd like to think nobody else can) that you wanted.
July.
You keep thinking all the stupid schoolboy infatuation will go away. You even know all the signs, now. When Seunghyun's about to kiss you his eyes flicker a lot to, not your lips, but the freckle below your eye. And he purses his lips like he's unsure, but his laugh fills and settles deep inside of you somewhere, and his hands are always the opposite, always sure, when he brushes underneath your jaw or on the back of your neck, in your hair or palming the front of your jeans, depending.
Sometimes he tastes like mint from his toothpaste, oranges from the fruit Daesung cut up for after dinner, or wine after you make him turn off his computer and stop working for the night. Lozenges when he's sick and you don't care, gross in the mornings and you're hogging his blankets. Or smoke from the cigs, weed when he has it - and those times are frantic, rushed, sloppy - like grade-schoolers doing it in the back-seat of their best friend's car.
You've tried to figure him out before, but it makes no sense. A jumble of letters with no vowels; no words.
You keep thinking all the stupid in you will go away, but it doesn't. He says your name and you forget what you were going to say back. The grin makes your face hurt.
August.
When you break up, you forget why.
You forget the constant prickling annoyance, the not being good for each other in the studio and the passive aggressive arguments;
(November. Your nails finally break Seunghyun's skin and draw blood after he stops paying attention to you. You hang out in Kush's studio for a week after that, duck your head and work until you get stuck again and again; he doesn't come to see you and his only communication is by means of text. Finished the song.)
The way he'd make you feel like shit because of the offhand comments he didn't know were offensive;
(September. You thought Seunghyun liked your music, the two of you still in the mindset of sixteen year olds with your Run DMC and your Wutang and your "this is gonna be us someday." But he starts saying more of "this song is weird" and "this is so loud" than anything else, and after a few weeks, Seunghyun starts bringing his own iPod to the balcony. Yours lays untouched in your room next to the unsettled feeling in your stomach, Seunghyun's left earbud tucked into your ear while you watch him smoke.)
How you kept worming your way into his life outside of Big Bang, outside of you, and wouldn't quit;
(February. Seunghyun likes Hyunjoong, likes Jaejoong and Yoochun so you show up because you like them, too. You ignore Hyunjoong's clipped politeness in his tone of voice when he speaks to you or that Jaejoong looks a little disappointed every time Seunghyun has to go home early because of your schedules, that Yoochun doesn't understand your sense of humor. That Seunghyun doesn't always tell you when they get together. The night Jaejoong and Hyunjoong leave for Canada, you tell Seunghyun it's okay because you can spend more time together, working and stuff. And stuff. You can ignore Seunghyun's terrible poker face, too: just bury your face into his neck until it's gone.)
How you kept him up too long when he was sick, how he wasn't concerned enough when you were - when you would disappear and he would go the other way and how the only good moments after a while were the ones in between, when you slipped him little fifty-won snacks he couldn't eat instead of I'm-sorry's or when he kissed you or fucked you or tried to make you laugh because he didn't know how to fix it either.
(May, June, July - you know he has a penchance for street food. He says he's sticking to his diet but he's not. He's a terrible liar.)
Yea, it was bad, they (Youngbae, Seungho, Chaerin, Seungri) tell you. It got really bad, sometimes.
But to you, it's what Seunghyun sounded like when he laughed. The look on his face that was so different from everything else, even if nobody else could see the difference. How you felt when you were together, so happy it hurt - even if it was far and rare and in between.
You wouldn't have cared about any of the bad things if he hadn't.
"Happy birthday," Seunghyun says. Inside the box he gives you is a pair of shoes; an expensive, expensive pair of shoes.
August again.
The keychain this year is an American-style hot-dog, a squiggle of yellow mustard down the middle and four stubbly legs. It emits a high-pitched squeal when you press on it.
Seunghyun is sitting a few tables down, between Hyuksoo and Kyungil. Underneath the dim lights of the restaurant he looks like somebody else, dark blazer he'd never wear a year ago, hair in the eyes that are softer and stranger now when he looks at you. You texted him to bring a date but the chair across from his is vacant. You shift your eyes to your drink and wind the hot-dog around your finger. Squeak. It starts annoying Seungri halfway through the appetizers.
He stops by your table before you cut the cake to say hi, and you tell him a sausage isn't a present, but then he's gone and you don't see him again until the end of the night, in the hallway between the exit and the party. He smells like smoke and the thick summer air outside. You've given up trying to figure him out.
The hot-dog bounces against your leg and chirps; you laugh, he laughs. "I got you something else, it's in the pile," he says, "but I didn't want that to get lost."
"I don't get it."
"The mouse on your phone," he explains, "it's falling off."
"Oh." You have nothing to say to that. "You didn't bring a date."
Seunghyun blinks, confused, but after a second his mouth twists into what you think is a smile. "Nope," he agrees. Or maybe it's a grimace, maybe it's holding back how tired he is because he's been trying more, working on the album with you in the studio when everyone else is sleeping and even Teddy has gone home. Maybe it's something else entirely because you're another year older and so is he, your hair is different and he's not the same, either. He notices when your cell phone charms wear off and buys you something else, something equally as ridiculous.
You say, "I thought you were seeing that girl."
"I was, but we broke up."
"Why?"
And then he looks at you - looks at you like he used to. Your breath hitches in your throat. "Because," he says. "Because it's always been you, Ji," and then you forget entirely what you were going to say back. Two years later and nothing in you has changed. You still stop when he says your name and you still want to buy him street snacks just to keep that look on his face. Changed, and older, and softer like his eyes, but still the one you want.
When you kiss him, sounds from the other room float back to you; Chaerin and Taeji are singing some old love song in the karaoke machine.
note: hi again :) i'm not entirely sure that this is a good first fic ~back into fandom~ lmao. it was originally supposed to be a lot shorter than it turned out being, and i wrote most of it in under an hour but the ending took me a while to figure out. i hope i have more to offer this year ;A;. this is dedicated to whetstone, who has held my hand for the past four months while i struggled with the entire writing process and complained to her way more than i should have. also, because she beta'd this and made me rewrite the ending three times lol. ♥