[Fanfiction] Quiet Places (One-shot)
Title: Quiet Places
Theme: 016. Quiet Places
Genre: Angst, light humour and a touch of fluff
Pairing: Yesung/Ryeowook (A true fangirl wouldn't need to squint for the hints >D)
Rating: PG
Warnings: A Yesung who thinks, and, just maybe, broods.
Word Count: 3,175
Comments: miracle______ 100 Suju Fics Challenge prompt. Innuendo is never what it seems~
Summary: It is a misleading thing to think that bed-rooms are used solely for rest and sleep. Morning-afters are almost always pleasant save for the aches that come along with it.
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Quiet Places
“Do you ever get the feeling that you’d want to stop doing all of this - everything - if you could?”
The voice was quiet and low, but he heard it anyway through the thick silence of their shared room.
His room-mate had the occasional habit of getting oddly pensive on certain nights as they lay in their respective beds staring at the same ceiling trying to coax themselves to sleep.
Some times, he wondered if he might have protested to their rooming arrangements had he known that his hyung possessed a philosophical streak; that, and a mulling sort of temperament most of the other members knew little about. The other members still wondered why he became uncharacteristically wry whenever they mentioned sleep deprivation. He didn’t deign to explain. They weren’t the ones who had quiet conversations till daybreak because their room-mate happened to be at his most articulate after midnight.
He peeled his eyes open and blinked tiredly at the ceiling. It remained quiet for a few moments before he spoke.
“I’m not sure I know what you mean, hyung.”
He had always had keen hearing - something which had proven useful beyond music composition - and in the silence of the room, every sound was translated with exceeding clarity.
There was the rustling of sheets as his room-mate shifted to face him. He didn’t bother doing the same, quietly determined to return to sleep as soon as the conversation was over. Eeteuk had informed them earlier that they had an early start tomorrow and he had little patience to deal with cryptic suppositions at three in the morning.
He could hear the considering pause from his room-mate and immediately wished his room-mate wasn’t so much of the creepy empath that he was. Had his response really been so clipped?
“If you’re tired, we’ll leave it, Ryeowook.”
His low voice was, as usual, gently accommodating (concerned, even) and guilt-inducingly apologetic.
Defeated and feeling slightly contrite, Ryeowook sighed before stifling a yawn.
“It’s okay, hyung,” Ryeowook tried his best to sound lively (three in the morning was really pushing it) and managed a mildly affected tone before continuing. “You were saying?”
He could hear the uncertain pause which lingered in the space between them as he waited.
“If you were given the chance, would you leave all of this behind tomorrow?”
More awake than he had been the first time when he had heard the question, Ryeowook started slightly, caught off-guard. He lifted his head from the pillow and blinked at the darkness across the room, searching for his room-mate’s familiar form.
“I beg your pardon?” Ryeowook responded after a pregnant pause, trying to the best of his abilities to keep the squeak from his voice.
He heard Yesung’s quiet laugh before the familiar creaking of springs and soft sound of padding feet. Yesung rested his back against the side of Ryeowook’s bed with a sigh before continuing.
“Was I to take that as a ‘no’ or as a hint that you’d rather not answer it?” he murmured, curling his arms around his knees with his back facing the younger man.
Ryeowook exhaled heavily and frowned.
“Should I be worried that you’re asking?”
“Maybe.”
“It’s a terrible time to be cryptic, hyung.”
“I was being honest, to tell the truth,” Yesung responded as he brought his hand up to stifle a yawn, “I suppose I was wondering how it would be like if we all went back to being average again.”
“Or if we all ended up being strangers to each other again?” Ryeowook countered warily. It came out sharper than he had intended it to.
There was another aggravating contemplative pause.
“Perhaps, that too, yes,” Yesung answered, sounding cautious.
“What’s being a burden to you, hyung?” Ryeowook asked quietly, inching closer to Yesung and snaking a bony arm across his room-mate’s chest. “The fame? The lack of it? Us?”
“Sensitive, aren’t we?” Yesung countered wryly, resting his head in the crook of Ryeowook’s elbow, “You should know better than anyone that the issue on fame no longer bothers me.”
“What does, then?” Ryeowook felt the occasional sweep of Yesung’s eye-lashes on his forearm as his hyung blinked, mulling silently. Ryeowook waited and counted the number of blinks.
“Fame itself?” Yesung ventured at last, sounding a little uncertain and wary. “I suppose I expected too much from it and it never really delivered.”
“You said it didn’t bother you any more, Jongwoon-hyung.”
Yesung smiled.
“It doesn’t. I wasn’t referring to that, Ryeowook,” he shifted, withdrawing from Ryeowook, and sat up, leaning away from the younger man before sighing heavily as he sprawled out on the floor. “I’m saying that I don’t know how much more I can give to this industry without losing more than can be replaced.”
When Ryeowook didn’t respond, Yesung took it as an indication to continue.
“I’m older than you are, Ryeowookie. I was in training for longer than you were. I waited for my time to come for longer than you did,” there was a pause as Yesung seemed to struggle for words. “I suppose I’m tired. I’m tired and I’m not sure who to be in front of the camera any more. It’s not like I need to find myself. I know who I am, I really do. I just… need some time for it to come back to me, and being ‘Yesung’ isn’t allowing it to.”
Ryeowook wanted badly to panic.
He desperately wanted to fetch Eeteuk-hyung and Kangin-hyung to beat some sense into his room-mate. Even Heechul-hyung might work. At the very least, he could threaten psychological damage if Yesung refused to see the light. However, panicking was as far from an appropriate reaction as he could get.
Ryeowook bit down on the insides of his cheeks and took a slow, steady breath.
“Would you take the chance to give it all up if it came, hyung?”
There was no denying the certainty in Yesung’s voice this time.
“Yes.”
Ryeowook could feel something welling up in his chest that was causing his eyes to sting. He ignored it in favour of ascertaining Yesung’s reply.
“Even if it came tomorrow and you didn’t have time for goodbyes?” he asked quietly. So quietly that Yesung almost missed it. Any louder and his voice would have threatened to quiver, and that was the very last thing he wanted happening.
There was a short pause that soothed the ache in Ryeowook’s chest for awhile, but it was only for a moment.
“Yes,” Yesung disclosed after some thought. “Yes, I would.”
There was only so much that continuous steady breathing could do. Ryeowook wondered if it was another one of Yesung’s odd ideas of a joke. He wished it was. Maybe he was dreaming.
There was an awkward silence that hung between them which was only interrupted by Ryeowook’s breathing.
Unsure of what else to say and uncomfortably aware that he had caused his room-mate some grief, Yesung attempted to apologise, but was interrupted.
“What about all of us, Jongwoon-hyung?” Ryeowook implored softly. “Won’t you miss us?”
Yesung wished Ryeowook wouldn’t use his name. Just this once. It was making him feel immensely guilty. He preferred it when his name was just another identity that he could discard at will. He didn’t use to have this much trouble with names or aliases.
He sighed.
“Of course I would,” he began gently, lowering his voice to a murmur, “You and the members are like family to me now. I see you more often than I see my own family. Of course I’d miss you if I left. All of you.”
Yesung didn’t really know how to continue.
Ryeowook did what he always did. He waited.
“But,” he continued after a long while, “Some things if left alone for too long, might not be there any more when you finally remember it. I might forget. Ryeowook, some times I’m afraid that I’ll just forget what it’s like to be normal.”
“Don’t we all? At some point in time?” Ryeowook’s own voice surprised him. He sounded calm.
“It’s not really the same.”
“How so?” Ryeowook retorted lightly.
“Ryeowook?”
“Mm?”
“Do you still remember what it’s like to be sixteen?”
Ryeowook blinked, confused.
“Yes?”
Yesung’s answering laugh sounded oddly bitter.
“I don’t, Ryeowookie. I don’t remember what it’s like to be sixteen.”
“People forget, hyung.”
“I don’t remember how I was like when I was sixteen. I don’t remember being sixteen.”
Sleep was the furthest thing away from Ryeowook’s mind at the moment. He didn’t think he liked how small Yesung had sounded. It was disconcerting for someone who had been so strong under the pressure of the media - or lack thereof - and their fans to sound so terribly disjointed. Ryeowook almost wished he didn’t have to deal with this, but he couldn’t.
He knew he was needed here, right now.
“Leaving everything behind now and running away isn’t going to change any of that, Jongwoon-hyung,” Ryeowook replied harshly, even as a surge of regret and guilt coursed through him. “Some memories just aren’t meant to be remembered. You leave them and you make new ones.”
His words were like pins dropping on the hardwood floor in the dead silence that followed.
“I know that,” Yesung replied at last in a voice so devoid of emotion that Ryeowook couldn’t tell if he was upset. “It still doesn’t stop me from wanting to remember it some times. It doesn’t stop me from wondering what I would’ve been like if I’d just remained Jongwoon.”
“Probably a lot less famous,” Ryeowook blurted rashly, desperate to change the atmosphere. “And a lot less successful.”
“We don’t know that.”
“You would have been a lot less loved,” Ryeowook said quietly, finally rolling over in his bed and peering down at Yesung from the edge of his mattress.
“Maybe,” Yesung mused, staring straight past Ryeowook at the ceiling.
If Ryeowook had possessed the capacity to scowl, he would have done so; but being devoid of such ability, he settled for gathering his comforters together about him - pillows and all - and rolled off the bed with a determined huff. He landed quite precisely on Yesung, knocking the wind out from the older man.
Good, the git deserved it for being so moody.
Ryeowook’s little vindictive streak ebbed away as Yesung coughed, propping himself up to wheeze. Ryeowook squashed whatever traces of guilt he felt tugging traitorously at his gut by reasoning that it had been for a good cause. If it helped to keep nonsensical thoughts from Yesung’s head, he’d do it again, and without Kangin-hyung’s help too.
Yesung lay back down on the floor after a moment, figuring that Ryeowook might have misunderstood the phrase ‘adventure between the sheets’ a little too enthusiastically, and forgave him with a reproachful glare.
Ryeowook, on his part, looked decidedly unrepentant. He burrowed further into Yesung’s side and sprawled with every deliberation of invading his hyung’s personal space. If he was going to have to guilt the man into never leaving all of them, so be it.
“If you hadn’t become Yesung,” Ryeowook began, interrupting the companionable silence they had been slipping into, “You wouldn’t have known us either. Didn’t you say we were like family?”
He felt, more than heard, Yesung heave a resigned sigh.
“Oh, we’re one big, happy family, all right,” Yesung muttered after a moment, sounding a little grudging, “We’ve got the enthusiastic, overly responsible, occasionally bi-polar mother; then there’s his princess of a sister with a god-complex and the adopted foreign kid who ended up being the unfortunate play-mate; the over-protective father who drinks too much, but always listens to his wife even if he bullies his own kids all the time…”
Ryeowook felt a smile tugging at his lips and wondered, if he ratted on Yesung later to all the hyungs, would they be able to force him to stay? (If only to beat the living daylights out of him, but whatever worked.)
“… And then, there are the kids. The eldest one that takes after his father’s appetite, just not with soju; the kid with the cute face and the bunnies who looks harmless until you find out he does karate-”
“Sungmin-hyung does martial arts, hyung,” Ryeowook interjected, stifling a laugh.
“Same difference. It doesn’t matter as long as we know he can kick our asses in a fight if he wants,” Yesung groused. “Then, there’re the twins - fraternal; I’d say the younger one’s better looking - who might as well have been joined at the hip. They must have been born in a dance studio, at any rate. I’ll kill them if they choreograph another dance they think normal human beings can do. Insensitive bastards.”
“Eunhyuk-hyung and Donghae-hyung just think very highly of us,” Ryeowook reasoned with a wince as he recalled their enthusiastic efforts to teach the other members the dance they had choreographed specially for their next Music Bank performance. They had been the only ones, apart from Hankyung and Shindong (they didn’t count), who had managed to complete the whole dance without almost pulling a muscle or bruising anything.
“We’re normal. They’re crazy. End of story,” Yesung dismissed. “There’s the kid with all those manners and gestures. God knows where he learnt them from. It’s definitely not in the genes… Finally, we have one of the littlest who should stop back-packing around the whole world and come round to visit more often, or his mother’s going to start worrying again that he’d accidentally disowned him in his sleep. The youngest kid? I swear he’s not related. There’s some evil blood in him somewhere that’s only controlled by the other kid who kick-boxes-”
“It’s martial arts, hyung.”
“- Yes, that. Kangin must have picked the youngest one up from somewhere. At least he’s in good hands now. Maybe the stupidity of the whole family might corrupt his base instincts. Ah, and before I forget, there’re those two Chinese cousins several times removed from the adopted kid’s side.”
Ryeowook wondered if he should express indignance at having been excluded.
“There’s this last one who’s amazing with music,” Yesung didn’t meet Ryeowook’s eyes as he said this, preferring to toy around with the hem of the comforter. “He’d make it anywhere in the world as long as he has his music and his voice. He’s got some talent.”
Ryeowook smiled, but did not comment.
It became apparent that Yesung wasn’t going to continue with his list after a moment or two. He had gone quiet, absently tracing circles on the comforters. Blinking back the frustration that had mounted when he’d realised this, Ryeowook propped himself up, folded his arms on Yesung’s chest and rested his chin on them. Yesung eyebrows rose questioningly, but he remained silent, bringing up an arm to hold Ryeowook steady.
“The children have this hyung of theirs that they don’t really know,” Ryeowook murmured, “because he never really lets us near him, so most of us aren’t sure of what to say some times, but he’s nice. Just bad at expressing himself and a little… eccentric. We get all that, you see, and we still like being around him. He makes sure we eat when mom isn’t at home or mom’s sister is throwing a fit and fighting with dad. He makes sure we don’t overwork. He’s the last one to sleep because he’s the eldest in the dorm and he goes around making sure everyone else sleeps first-”
Ryeowook broke off here and laughed at the rueful expression on Yesung’s face.
“- He’s also under the impression that we don’t know this. We love our hyung, really, and we wish he’d stop being so behind-the-scenes and just be there. Like, joining Eunhyuk-hyung and Donghae-hyung in pranking the upper dorms, bugging Kyuhyun when he’s gaming and not joining in our singing practices like he should or painting Sungmin-hyung’s room black for one day and watching him scream-”
“I don’t believe it,” Yesung interrupted flatly, “that was you?”
Ryeowook shifted guiltily. “It was Shindong-hyung and Heechul-hyung’s idea. I couldn’t exactly say no. All I did was distract Sungmin-hyung long enough for them to do it.”
Yesung looked faintly impressed.
“My point is,” Ryeowook mumbled, his gaze softening as Yesung’s expression slipped back into the blank, unreadable one once more, “The family’s here for you, hyung. We all know who Jongwoon is and where he is. Being ‘Yesung’ can’t do anything beyond hiding him.”
Yesung closed his eyes and exhaled heavily, bringing one hand up to shield his face, something he did whenever he felt unsure of how to react to anything.
Ryeowook lowered his gaze. Unfolding his arms, he slipped them around Yesung’s neck and hugged him fiercely.
“You’re one and the same, hyung,” he whispered warmly, tightening his hold around Yesung. “Jongwoon-hyung.”
Ryeowook chose to be quiet when he felt arms slipping hesitantly around his frame, then with more certainty and a hint of desperation. He didn’t comment when Yesung’s arms finally wrapped themselves around him tight enough for him to feel breathless, or when a face buried itself into the crook of his neck to muffle a harsh dry sob. Ryeowook waited, sweet in his silence, even as he felt lips moving against the column of his neck after a better part of the hour that they had remained in that position, unwilling to move.
He didn’t have to understand the murmur to know what Yesung had said.
It was in the quiet moments of the night, in the quiet refuge of their shared room that silence was the keenest listening ear. The calming quiet was what sealed the tacit agreement they shared for what had been exchanged during the night to remain in their room.
Ryeowook had never slept sounder.
Even the sound of Kyuhyun’s snickering that jolted him awake three hours later failed to intrude on the sense of calm in the room.
Kyuhyun eyed the both of them sprawled in a heap in the middle of the room, tangled in covers and draped comfortably over each other, before announcing - with as smug a grin as you could get - that Eeteuk-hyung was on his way down to hustle them off for their schedules and, if they didn’t want their happy matrimony to end in early-morning screaming, they had best start getting ready.
Ryeowook had the decency to blush as Kyuhyun left the room.
He laughed lightly as Yesung stirred behind him and let out a string of choice profanities as the after-effects of sleeping on the polished wood floors hit him.
“Morning,” Yesung grumbled tiredly, voice hoarse and thick with sleep.
“Morning, Jongwoon-hyung,” Ryeowook returned with a soft smile.
Yesung blinked consideringly at him, gaze searching and warm, before quirking his lips into a vague smile and squeezing Ryeowook’s hand gently in response, relating the same sentiments he had three hours ago.
Thank you.
It was in the quiet of the night, in the quiet refuge of their shared room, where those words belonged to and stayed.
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A/N: \O/ Cheers to first fic for the comm's challenge posted! ♥ -- says I before I should crawl back under a rock and camp out there till my exams are over a little under two months from now. 'Tis a terribly time to be writing fic for fandom, but I plead de-stressing tool for the better-ment of my mind, and the balancing of my sanity (which has never been quite present, as much as I am loathe to admit...). Fandom lj-cuts work differently from my own journal's, for some reason. So, if this turns out whacked (the usual font size discrepancies... accidental clicking of the 'post' button before I'm done -apologies- etc...), my sincerest apologies.
I hope this was as enjoyable as writing it was. Concrit and squeeing are very much welcomed if you appreciated the flailing. ♥
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