Fic: Rolls Off the Tongue Like a Cyanide Pill
Title: Rolls Off the Tongue Like a Cyanide Pill
Fandom: VIXX
Pairing/Characters: Taekwoon, Hongbin
Rating: G
Wordcount: 400-ish
A/n: This was meant to be funny and ended up kind of sad.
Words roll off Hongbin's tongue like a cyanide pill.
That is to say, they don't.
It melts in his saliva and clings to his tongue as he passes it of to another as a gift. It stays, clinging to the inside of his mouth.
Faint edges of nothing creeping into his insides.
It is words, even in the form of an amalgamation of pixels that masquerade as sense through the touchscreen of overpriced phones, can have the oddest effect on the most unlikely of people. It is words, even spoken in jest and filled with mirth or the heat of the moment with acidic lashes, that have the ability to wear down the hardest of wills and conceptions of self.
And it is a combination of these forms of words, that Hongbin finds, have changed his hyung.
Leaning on the doorframe, out of Taekwoon's line of sight, he watches.
The towel that had been used to dry Taekwoon's hair, the hair that is still sticking up at odd angles and waiting to be smoothed and ruffled by Hongbin's fingers that itch for their own form of disarray, hangs loosely around his neck. No shirt, skin of his back still damp from lack of attention. Taekwoon puffs up his cheeks in a form of aegyo that makes Hongbin's stomach turn uncomfortably. Raising hands clenched in fists, he turns them against his cheeks and Hongbin's had enough.
He turns up the artwork in his viens and lets it filter into his face, his eyes. Essence of light exuding.
And he laughs.
Because the words have pulled his principles apart and reassembled as something intangible.
They distort, they split, come back together as something dreamed.
It's called development, it's called business.
It has been boiled down to a science.
He flinches as he's shoved roughly from the bathroom, and a door slammed in his face.
The silence that follows eats at his facade, jaws nipping at his resolve and conceptions.
A visual, an artwork.
He sits against the door frame, all senses of being self assured shedding from his skin. His grin falters and falls, forming a practiced neutral expression and then devolving in to a form that's sure to bring on wrinkles. Yet, he cannot bring himself to care. Lips twitch toward the curl of a smirk, born of both irritation and amusement. Business, science, art.
Being an idol is all and none.
"Hyung," he voice pulls from his throat before he's ready for it and breaks in a reminiscence of early puberty. Cough, clear thoat, continue, smile. Always smile, it creeps in out of habit, out of drills aimed at perfection of the human persona, and a persona of another self falls back into place "Food's ready. Come eat."