Restless
Title: Restless
Pairing: Onho (kind of)
Length: 1684 words
Rating: PG-15
Genre: angst?,
Summary: Minho couldn't sleep with someone watching him so closely.
Minho tossed and turned in bed before sighing and giving up on trying to find a comfortable position. He was tired, exhausted even, yet sleep simply couldn’t seem to steal him away and for that he was silently suffering.
He had an early morning and it was already late as it was. He couldn’t afford to stay up any longer. Frustration wasn’t a hard emotion to pick out from his state on the mattress, legs and arms spread wide and taking over the entire bed as he stared up at the cracked ceiling. His head was starting to pound from the lack of sleep, his eyes itchy and probably turning red. It’d been a while since he’d woken in the middle of the night to an empty, stale room like this. The same thing he saw when he opened his eyes for the past few weeks.
Because he was alone now. And every day that he forgot he had to remind himself all over again.
Well, Minho knew he wasn’t really alone.
While moving into his apartment a little while back (right around the time he and his former girlfriend decided to split) he took note of a few things.
The first thing was that according to the landlord it’d been a long time since anyone had set foot in this specific room. Room 525. Therefore when he first inspected it (trying to decide whether or not to give it a chance, which later on he did) he took the peeling wallpaper and scratched wood in stride. He had enough money to fix it.
The only problem was he was always busy and that’s why, given more than enough time to make needed improvements, it still looked the same.
The second thing was that he kept getting strange calls. Minho thought it was the landline at first and thereafter told the strangers who were asking for a ‘Jinki’ character that he had moved out a long time ago and that they had the wrong number. Subsequently he figured the calls would stop, and they did.
For a while.
Whoever those people were on the other end of the phone, they were pretty damn persistent and wouldn’t take no for an answer. Even when informing them repeatedly (to the point where he was getting annoyed, and it took a quite a bit to annoy Choi Minho) that they had the wrong number they would not stop.
So he tried a different approach to the minor (yet very aggravating) glitch in his life. That was changing his number; and when that did not work, it was disconnecting his phone.
He was surprised they hadn’t discovered a way to reach him on his mobile phone. Now that would have been much weirder.
What was creepier than that was the third realization.
When Minho moved in, the person/people before hadn’t left a whole lot of anything behind (naturally they must have wanted everything since it did belong to them). What they did leave was a mirror. It was tall, not taller than Minho but just about, stocky and remarkably unscathed, sitting in the far corner of the room. It was so flawless that sometimes when Minho saw his reflection in it, it looked almost too real. As if he could sink right into it if he tried.
His initial reaction to finding it in the bedroom was to get rid of it, of course. It wasn’t his so why should he keep it? However seeing as he was already too busy to unpack the rest of his clothes, it seemed he never had time to carry it down to the front and throw it in the trash on his way to or from work. Plus, he kind of needed a mirror. He was a model and checking himself out in the bathroom mirror helped him see about as much of his body as Jonghyun's -his co-worker’s -height (which wasn’t actually much, by the way). A full body mirror would do him good.
That wasn’t the scary part, no. The scary part was when Minho went to sleep -or when he tried to. Once the phone calls finally stopped and Minho began to get more comfortable around his place, more peaceful, other strange things began to happen.
He felt eyes watching him. The kind that gave him the chills. The kind that gave him a creeping suspicion that if he turned around he wouldn’t be able to see them, but they’d still be there. The kind that forced him to stay up some nights because he was concerned (read: afraid) something would pop out and attempt to murder him. Minho didn’t like being stared at despite what his job was.
The mirror thing started out barely noticeable. Minho observed how it would move a few centimeters at a time, closer to his bed. He paid no mind to it at first, figuring he must have hit it accidentally when he was walking around and getting dressed. Minho wasn’t one to believe silly superstitions.
Eventually those centimeters turned into inches, and those inches into feet, until the mirror was at the edge of his bed one evening when he got home. The chill that ran down his spine as he dropped his bag and frantically began to search his apartment for an intruder was one that could never be rivaled.
Evidently he found no one and couldn’t think up a plausible excuse for the movement of an inanimate object. And so because of that he ignored it. Out of sight out of mind, right?
Jinki was a handsome young man with plump lips, a distinguishable nose, chubby cheeks and a bright smile. He wore simple clothes: a navy blue hoodie, dark washed jeans and a scuffed up pair of converse. Minho had never seen anyone like him around in the whole time he’d lived in the city. Which was…basically forever. He was sure he would have taken notice of someone like Jinki outside, on the way to buy groceries or heading to Jonghyun and Kibum’s place. It was a fairly small town where anyone could find anyone.
Jinki seemed to have this pleasant aura that followed him and affected the people he was around; that drew people to him.
Well, that’s what Minho assumed. He never actually knew him himself. He was only going by the appearance of a man who watched him every night from inside of a mirror.
He put two and two together at some point. It wasn’t very difficult. The abandoned apartment, the spooky phone calls, the repositioning of the mirror, and then seeing him, Jinki, when he woke up to take a greatly needed whizz in the dead of the night. Here he had, in his apartment, someone who wasn’t willing to let go just yet.
Sleep didn’t come easy to Minho anymore -as if it ever did -after he located the reason for his lack of it. It was determinedly harder to fall asleep when someone was watching him -believe him, he tried -and Minho, being the natural-born competitor that he was, gave up one night and decided to just…stare back.
As happy and smiling and all around unconcerned with life -not that he necessarily had one -as Jinki looked, his eyes were dim. They held no light at all. They had no fight, no challenge and it drove Minho crazy to stare at someone so lifeless when he had more vivacity than probably the entire town combined. He had to be dead; there was no way he wasn’t. Still Minho couldn’t believe it. Someone like Jinki couldn’t make him feel the way he felt from a stare.
What was he anyway? Was he one of those ghosts that Taemin talked adamantly about while Minho was driving him to school? (He had books upon books about everything concerning the supernatural, the little punk). The ones that stalked the place they died and did not leave until they got closure? Is that what Jinki was going to do?
Or maybe he was a demon? No. He couldn’t be a demon; he was far too cheerful looking. All he did was smile and it would have freaked Minho out but for some reason it didn’t. It wasn’t some serial killer smile. He felt like behind that grin was a whole lot of pain that he had no place to discern. The flash of teeth was a cover up.
He used to be someone, used to sleep in the same room Minho was lying in. At some point he had been a living, breathing human being just like Minho, who had gone through rough times and perhaps an even tougher end. He wished he had met Jinki before. Whatever had happened to Jinki, he wanted to know. Maybe he could have helped, made things a little better. He would have made sure of it or died trying.
Jinki never made any attempts to communicate with Minho. Chances were he wasn’t going to. However, if Minho had a chance he would have taken the initiative to speak to him. He wasn’t sure how but sometimes he wanted to.
Nevertheless, not connecting became okay with Minho after a while. He liked the company, even if it was a false imitation of someone who used to be. They didn’t really have to talk. How would he look speaking to a ghost?
Those eyes, they never left his form. As soon as he entered his room they were on him and weren’t letting off until he made an exit. Sometimes he would cover the mirror with one of his jackets (in the daylight of course, when Jinki wasn’t watching; Jinki only showed up at night and Minho wasn’t sure he wanted to find out what Jinki would do if he saw him cover it) just so he could get a decent amount of sleep. Most nights he wouldn’t though, nights like tonight.
He wouldn’t be getting any rest. Not with those deep, foreboding, almond-shaped eyes scrutinizing him so crucially. Watching his every move. It made him more than a little restless.
a/n - i'm so not happy with this at all :c i admit it's very scrambled and random, awkward setnence fragments and all. i'll edit it later maybe ^__^
Pairing: Onho (kind of)
Length: 1684 words
Rating: PG-15
Genre: angst?,
Summary: Minho couldn't sleep with someone watching him so closely.
Minho tossed and turned in bed before sighing and giving up on trying to find a comfortable position. He was tired, exhausted even, yet sleep simply couldn’t seem to steal him away and for that he was silently suffering.
He had an early morning and it was already late as it was. He couldn’t afford to stay up any longer. Frustration wasn’t a hard emotion to pick out from his state on the mattress, legs and arms spread wide and taking over the entire bed as he stared up at the cracked ceiling. His head was starting to pound from the lack of sleep, his eyes itchy and probably turning red. It’d been a while since he’d woken in the middle of the night to an empty, stale room like this. The same thing he saw when he opened his eyes for the past few weeks.
Because he was alone now. And every day that he forgot he had to remind himself all over again.
Well, Minho knew he wasn’t really alone.
While moving into his apartment a little while back (right around the time he and his former girlfriend decided to split) he took note of a few things.
The first thing was that according to the landlord it’d been a long time since anyone had set foot in this specific room. Room 525. Therefore when he first inspected it (trying to decide whether or not to give it a chance, which later on he did) he took the peeling wallpaper and scratched wood in stride. He had enough money to fix it.
The only problem was he was always busy and that’s why, given more than enough time to make needed improvements, it still looked the same.
The second thing was that he kept getting strange calls. Minho thought it was the landline at first and thereafter told the strangers who were asking for a ‘Jinki’ character that he had moved out a long time ago and that they had the wrong number. Subsequently he figured the calls would stop, and they did.
For a while.
Whoever those people were on the other end of the phone, they were pretty damn persistent and wouldn’t take no for an answer. Even when informing them repeatedly (to the point where he was getting annoyed, and it took a quite a bit to annoy Choi Minho) that they had the wrong number they would not stop.
So he tried a different approach to the minor (yet very aggravating) glitch in his life. That was changing his number; and when that did not work, it was disconnecting his phone.
He was surprised they hadn’t discovered a way to reach him on his mobile phone. Now that would have been much weirder.
What was creepier than that was the third realization.
When Minho moved in, the person/people before hadn’t left a whole lot of anything behind (naturally they must have wanted everything since it did belong to them). What they did leave was a mirror. It was tall, not taller than Minho but just about, stocky and remarkably unscathed, sitting in the far corner of the room. It was so flawless that sometimes when Minho saw his reflection in it, it looked almost too real. As if he could sink right into it if he tried.
His initial reaction to finding it in the bedroom was to get rid of it, of course. It wasn’t his so why should he keep it? However seeing as he was already too busy to unpack the rest of his clothes, it seemed he never had time to carry it down to the front and throw it in the trash on his way to or from work. Plus, he kind of needed a mirror. He was a model and checking himself out in the bathroom mirror helped him see about as much of his body as Jonghyun's -his co-worker’s -height (which wasn’t actually much, by the way). A full body mirror would do him good.
That wasn’t the scary part, no. The scary part was when Minho went to sleep -or when he tried to. Once the phone calls finally stopped and Minho began to get more comfortable around his place, more peaceful, other strange things began to happen.
He felt eyes watching him. The kind that gave him the chills. The kind that gave him a creeping suspicion that if he turned around he wouldn’t be able to see them, but they’d still be there. The kind that forced him to stay up some nights because he was concerned (read: afraid) something would pop out and attempt to murder him. Minho didn’t like being stared at despite what his job was.
The mirror thing started out barely noticeable. Minho observed how it would move a few centimeters at a time, closer to his bed. He paid no mind to it at first, figuring he must have hit it accidentally when he was walking around and getting dressed. Minho wasn’t one to believe silly superstitions.
Eventually those centimeters turned into inches, and those inches into feet, until the mirror was at the edge of his bed one evening when he got home. The chill that ran down his spine as he dropped his bag and frantically began to search his apartment for an intruder was one that could never be rivaled.
Evidently he found no one and couldn’t think up a plausible excuse for the movement of an inanimate object. And so because of that he ignored it. Out of sight out of mind, right?
Jinki was a handsome young man with plump lips, a distinguishable nose, chubby cheeks and a bright smile. He wore simple clothes: a navy blue hoodie, dark washed jeans and a scuffed up pair of converse. Minho had never seen anyone like him around in the whole time he’d lived in the city. Which was…basically forever. He was sure he would have taken notice of someone like Jinki outside, on the way to buy groceries or heading to Jonghyun and Kibum’s place. It was a fairly small town where anyone could find anyone.
Jinki seemed to have this pleasant aura that followed him and affected the people he was around; that drew people to him.
Well, that’s what Minho assumed. He never actually knew him himself. He was only going by the appearance of a man who watched him every night from inside of a mirror.
He put two and two together at some point. It wasn’t very difficult. The abandoned apartment, the spooky phone calls, the repositioning of the mirror, and then seeing him, Jinki, when he woke up to take a greatly needed whizz in the dead of the night. Here he had, in his apartment, someone who wasn’t willing to let go just yet.
Sleep didn’t come easy to Minho anymore -as if it ever did -after he located the reason for his lack of it. It was determinedly harder to fall asleep when someone was watching him -believe him, he tried -and Minho, being the natural-born competitor that he was, gave up one night and decided to just…stare back.
As happy and smiling and all around unconcerned with life -not that he necessarily had one -as Jinki looked, his eyes were dim. They held no light at all. They had no fight, no challenge and it drove Minho crazy to stare at someone so lifeless when he had more vivacity than probably the entire town combined. He had to be dead; there was no way he wasn’t. Still Minho couldn’t believe it. Someone like Jinki couldn’t make him feel the way he felt from a stare.
What was he anyway? Was he one of those ghosts that Taemin talked adamantly about while Minho was driving him to school? (He had books upon books about everything concerning the supernatural, the little punk). The ones that stalked the place they died and did not leave until they got closure? Is that what Jinki was going to do?
Or maybe he was a demon? No. He couldn’t be a demon; he was far too cheerful looking. All he did was smile and it would have freaked Minho out but for some reason it didn’t. It wasn’t some serial killer smile. He felt like behind that grin was a whole lot of pain that he had no place to discern. The flash of teeth was a cover up.
He used to be someone, used to sleep in the same room Minho was lying in. At some point he had been a living, breathing human being just like Minho, who had gone through rough times and perhaps an even tougher end. He wished he had met Jinki before. Whatever had happened to Jinki, he wanted to know. Maybe he could have helped, made things a little better. He would have made sure of it or died trying.
Jinki never made any attempts to communicate with Minho. Chances were he wasn’t going to. However, if Minho had a chance he would have taken the initiative to speak to him. He wasn’t sure how but sometimes he wanted to.
Nevertheless, not connecting became okay with Minho after a while. He liked the company, even if it was a false imitation of someone who used to be. They didn’t really have to talk. How would he look speaking to a ghost?
Those eyes, they never left his form. As soon as he entered his room they were on him and weren’t letting off until he made an exit. Sometimes he would cover the mirror with one of his jackets (in the daylight of course, when Jinki wasn’t watching; Jinki only showed up at night and Minho wasn’t sure he wanted to find out what Jinki would do if he saw him cover it) just so he could get a decent amount of sleep. Most nights he wouldn’t though, nights like tonight.
He wouldn’t be getting any rest. Not with those deep, foreboding, almond-shaped eyes scrutinizing him so crucially. Watching his every move. It made him more than a little restless.
a/n - i'm so not happy with this at all :c i admit it's very scrambled and random, awkward setnence fragments and all. i'll edit it later maybe ^__^