between dawn
between dawn
yoochun/jaejoong
pg, 2090 wc
They all know they aren't a precedent. Dong Bang Shin Ki only happens once.
join/watch
Out here, Yoochun can almost kid himself that he’s the last person alive, too far gone from gravity and time to be able to live forever. Today he’s waking from a dream, where he’d walked for hours up and down the beach, footprints sinking ankle-deep into the sand. There’s someone in the water, but he’s gone by the time Yoochun gets to the rising tide. This dream exists in two planes: Yoochun, stranded, solitary, and the ocean that the other boy breathes. If Yoochun looks hard enough, he can make out dark eyes, a mouth open in the shape of his name. Yoochun says, ‘Jaejoong-’
Yoochun, from experience, believes that there’s a few ways that your brain will handle dreams. One, forgetting it the moment you wake up, leaving behind only a feeling of what it was like, and after a few minutes, once you’ve bypassed getting your clothes on and brushing your teeth, you’ll look at yourself in the mirror and suddenly realize that there’s nothing left of the dream at all, just the knowledge that it was there. Two, some lingering aftertaste that’ll last you through the day, coming to you in pieces you can’t hold onto for more than a heartbeat. Three, remembering in such clarity that for a while you’ll lie in bed thinking it was real. You won’t forget these kinds of dreams, because they’re vivid enough that they’re almost real, like in your sleep you’ve gone somewhere else and when you’ve come back, you’ve got all these memories, and they’re all yours, even though you never left your bed.
Yoochun’s most familiar with the first. Those dreams are the ones of thunderstorms and childhood friends, compensation for those halfway between being asleep and lucid. Waking up to the sound of Jaejoong in the kitchen or the screen door swinging on its hinges, sounds of home. If he lies in bed for a few minutes, he might remember the small details but not what they’re part of- overgrown gardens, his own hands, long endless roads.
In the next room, Jaejoong gets insomnia every other night. More often than not, he’ll end up crawling into Yoochun’s room, to have someone to talk to, a body to fall asleep beside. Winter by the ocean is too cold for either of their tastes and Jaejoong’s always been in love with spring, transitions to open skies and new air to breathe.
The definition of dawn: pale shafts of light that fall across the beach like they’re children and the clouds are toys to play with, Jaejoong singing with his legs hanging out of the window as though all of his dreams are coming alive. Yoochun will roll over, drag a hand over his eyes, smile and stretch. These are the only situations where they’ll look back: when either one of them is still lingering at the threshold of falling asleep, or if they’re still trying to close the gap to waking. They don’t talk about it often, and while Yoochun turns the television off when one of the channels is running a segment on Dong Bang Shin Ki’s last concert, or their first days apart, Jaejoong will watch in some kind of fascination, propped up on his elbows and wide-eyed like he can’t believe that it was once him on the stage. But he’ll open his mouth and sing along, and sound just the same.
Occasionally they’ll get a postcard from Changmin, telling them how his latest photobook of Prague has sold out, or a phone call from Jaejoong’s sisters inviting them to brunch on the twelfth. Jaejoong’s got a wall in one of the back rooms, next to the piano, that he sticks the small, important things to. Pictures of all of their dogs, family photographs in sepia. Envelopes with the letters tacked underneath, folded and unfolded like origami pulled out of their creases, copies of Junsu’s solo lyrics, dried flowers, and a world map with yellow pins marking all of the places they’ve visited, red ones on the ones they’re planning to. They haven’t decided on anything yet, and Yoochun thinks they just need more time to build someplace they can depart from, so that when they come back, there’ll be a home to wait for them.
Yoochun has a dream about mermaids and horizons, seawater. Jaejoong wakes him up when he drops a cup accidentally into the sink. It doesn’t break, but there’s a chip on the handle when Yoochun makes it into the kitchen later to find Jaejoong sitting on the counter eating yoghurt, one knee drawn up to his chest. All of the windows have been flung wide open to let in the early morning breeze, the curtains turned transparent from overexposure to sunlight. Jaejoong smiles around his spoon and pulls it out to say, ‘sleep well?’
‘You could say that,’ Yoochun says, opening the fridge and drinking milk straight out of the carton. They always buy two cartons, Jaejoong’s skim and Yoochun’s full cream. Sometimes they get recognised in the supermarket, women with toddlers coming up and asking if they’re Dong Bang Shin Ki. Yoochun’s always the one to say, ‘we were,’ and he’s almost gotten over all of this changing, turning themselves around so they can fit into this new world. He laughs when he goes to wake Jaejoong up on a cold morning and Jaejoong’s first reaction is to shy away from imagined cameras, hiding his untidy hair, but at the same time he’s wondering, when can we get used to this?
The days and the weeks and the months all run together until they’re only recognizable by the seasons. Yoochun doesn’t think about how far they’ve come, until they’re handed a reminder, carefully wrapped, and they look at it like it’s something they never expected to receive; they’ll open it and be so surprised and spend hours thinking about it, and what it must represent. Yunho calls one afternoon to tell them that he’s getting married, the main purpose being that his fiancé is pregnant, and Jaejoong screams things like ‘shotgun marriage!’ and ‘scandalousss’ into the phone before demanding a celebration with fountains of champagne.
The wedding is small and private. Changmin flies in from Paris, and Junsu writes a new song that they sing together, for the first time in so long. In the middle of it, Yoochun’s reminded of one of their performances, on a larger stage and in front of a larger audience, the first time he’d realized that he wasn’t afraid of singing like this. They finish to applause and all of them make a speech of congratulations and afterwards, everyone gets drunk and end up staying the night at nearby hotels.
Yunho and his wife go on a honeymoon to Bora Bora and move into their new house (or mansion, as Changmin likes to call it) when they come back. A couple of months later, everyone is invited there to meet their new baby boy before the media can. Jaejoong says, ‘going to teach him how to dance?’ and Yunho says, ‘of course.’ Jaejoong tickles the baby, saying, ‘he’s going to be Dong Bang Junior.’
‘Baby TVXQ,’ Junsu puts in, and all of them laugh.
They all know they aren’t a precedent. Dong Bang Shin Ki only happens once.
The summer is warm and humid. Their house doesn’t have air-conditioning, so the ceiling fans stir every unsecured paper to the floor instead. Jaejoong wakes Yoochun up by stealing his pillow and beating him in the face with it until Yoochun gets out of bed. They have breakfast on the porch, facing the ocean and sitting on the floorboards instead of the table because there’s too much sun there. Jaejoong rigs up some extension cords so that they can make toast outside, using a plastic knife to spread raspberry jam over every slice and eating pieces of watermelon in between. After a while, the wind starts picking up and sand goes everywhere, so they pack up all of the food and put it in the pantry. ‘Pity Changmin’s too busy taking pictures and not here,’ says Jaejoong. ‘He’d eat it all up, and half the beach for dessert.’
Yoochun says, ‘He’s probably getting fat on croissants.’
‘The boy has faster than light metabolism,’ replies Jaejoong. ‘Croissants won’t be a problem.’
Yoochun leans against the frame of the door. His shirt’s already beginning to stick to him; Jaejoong’s has fallen off one shoulder. He pulls it down further and parades around regally when Yoochun says he looks like Julius Caesar without the laurels.
They hang around the house like this most of the time, wasting the hours like they have more than they need. When they were younger, Jaejoong wore a sense of bravado, like being who they were would make them immune. Without Dong Bang Shin Ki, he was a lost child, and all Yoochun could do was try to find them both something to keep constant.
The only conclusion was this one: when in love, do as the lovers do. They bought the house, and at the beginning, when the furniture still hadn’t arrived, the place seemed full of ghosts, passing through each other. Jaejoong was never one for this, too used to living where there wasn’t any room for secrets. He’d started smoking again, shadows under his eyes and craving company at times and solitude at others.
There weren’t any curtains on the windows and Yoochun kept waking up in the middle of night, to look outside and see Jaejoong on the porch, cigarette in hand. It would be cold outside, and both of them would be barefoot, Yoochun shivering awake and taking his place beside Jaejoong. On still nights, the taste of his cigarettes lingers, the air going smoky in consistency. If they wait till dawn, Jaejoong will be asleep, cigarettes rolling across the porch because the box had opened sometime in the night, and Yoochun will watch the sun rise.
By the time it’s cleared the horizon, Yoochun will have woken Jaejoong, and they’d be fixing breakfast. A group of seagulls wheel around in circles above the water, before heading out to sea and disappearing from view. Jaejoong sings along to the radio and spends ten minutes looking for his car keys because he’d forgotten he’d left them by the vase in the front hall. For the rest of the day, he’d be clingy and laughing, following Yoochun around the place. Like this, Yoochun couldn’t be sure if he hadn’t simply dreamed up the nights, and he didn’t ask Jaejoong, who had still talked about releasing more albums with just the two of them. At the time it had seemed possible, already tangible, but he’s long since given up on those ideas. Neither of them did anything about it then, and it’s too late for them now. They keep their songs to themselves.
Jaejoong always chooses the days where there won’t be any people to go down to the beach, even if this means they’ll always end up with the leftover days, the ones no one wants, the cold and the wet and the desolate. The water’s rarely warm enough to swim in, so they keep to the edges, foam riding over their feet and ankles. In the sky, the clouds cluster like they’re afraid to be alone, the same way Jaejoong hates empty rooms and silence. The colour of them looks too heavy to keep together, rain already breaking across the waves a few miles out. On these days, the anonymity is enough for Yoochun to feel like he’s drowning, and he’ll kiss Jaejoong like he is.
Sometimes Yoochun can almost believe that this is a dream, that he’ll wake up any moment and everyone will be in their old cramped apartment, Jaejoong sprawled on the floor because he thinks it’s more comfortable, their manager yawning just outside the bedroom door. They’ll have schedule from six till midnight and eat their meals in the car, travelling between television appearances. None of them could say that being who they were was a bad thing, but they all knew that after all of these years, there’d only be five of them left over, and each would be less than the boys they had started as. Yoochun, on these days, thinks that he’ll soon wake up and still be Dong Bang Shin Ki, but it doesn’t work that way. In the end, he’ll just wait and listen to the ocean, the sound of air inside a shell, Jaejoong’s voice, and remember that out here, there’s room for them to exist.
yoochun/jaejoong
pg, 2090 wc
They all know they aren't a precedent. Dong Bang Shin Ki only happens once.
join/watch
Out here, Yoochun can almost kid himself that he’s the last person alive, too far gone from gravity and time to be able to live forever. Today he’s waking from a dream, where he’d walked for hours up and down the beach, footprints sinking ankle-deep into the sand. There’s someone in the water, but he’s gone by the time Yoochun gets to the rising tide. This dream exists in two planes: Yoochun, stranded, solitary, and the ocean that the other boy breathes. If Yoochun looks hard enough, he can make out dark eyes, a mouth open in the shape of his name. Yoochun says, ‘Jaejoong-’
Yoochun, from experience, believes that there’s a few ways that your brain will handle dreams. One, forgetting it the moment you wake up, leaving behind only a feeling of what it was like, and after a few minutes, once you’ve bypassed getting your clothes on and brushing your teeth, you’ll look at yourself in the mirror and suddenly realize that there’s nothing left of the dream at all, just the knowledge that it was there. Two, some lingering aftertaste that’ll last you through the day, coming to you in pieces you can’t hold onto for more than a heartbeat. Three, remembering in such clarity that for a while you’ll lie in bed thinking it was real. You won’t forget these kinds of dreams, because they’re vivid enough that they’re almost real, like in your sleep you’ve gone somewhere else and when you’ve come back, you’ve got all these memories, and they’re all yours, even though you never left your bed.
Yoochun’s most familiar with the first. Those dreams are the ones of thunderstorms and childhood friends, compensation for those halfway between being asleep and lucid. Waking up to the sound of Jaejoong in the kitchen or the screen door swinging on its hinges, sounds of home. If he lies in bed for a few minutes, he might remember the small details but not what they’re part of- overgrown gardens, his own hands, long endless roads.
In the next room, Jaejoong gets insomnia every other night. More often than not, he’ll end up crawling into Yoochun’s room, to have someone to talk to, a body to fall asleep beside. Winter by the ocean is too cold for either of their tastes and Jaejoong’s always been in love with spring, transitions to open skies and new air to breathe.
The definition of dawn: pale shafts of light that fall across the beach like they’re children and the clouds are toys to play with, Jaejoong singing with his legs hanging out of the window as though all of his dreams are coming alive. Yoochun will roll over, drag a hand over his eyes, smile and stretch. These are the only situations where they’ll look back: when either one of them is still lingering at the threshold of falling asleep, or if they’re still trying to close the gap to waking. They don’t talk about it often, and while Yoochun turns the television off when one of the channels is running a segment on Dong Bang Shin Ki’s last concert, or their first days apart, Jaejoong will watch in some kind of fascination, propped up on his elbows and wide-eyed like he can’t believe that it was once him on the stage. But he’ll open his mouth and sing along, and sound just the same.
Occasionally they’ll get a postcard from Changmin, telling them how his latest photobook of Prague has sold out, or a phone call from Jaejoong’s sisters inviting them to brunch on the twelfth. Jaejoong’s got a wall in one of the back rooms, next to the piano, that he sticks the small, important things to. Pictures of all of their dogs, family photographs in sepia. Envelopes with the letters tacked underneath, folded and unfolded like origami pulled out of their creases, copies of Junsu’s solo lyrics, dried flowers, and a world map with yellow pins marking all of the places they’ve visited, red ones on the ones they’re planning to. They haven’t decided on anything yet, and Yoochun thinks they just need more time to build someplace they can depart from, so that when they come back, there’ll be a home to wait for them.
Yoochun has a dream about mermaids and horizons, seawater. Jaejoong wakes him up when he drops a cup accidentally into the sink. It doesn’t break, but there’s a chip on the handle when Yoochun makes it into the kitchen later to find Jaejoong sitting on the counter eating yoghurt, one knee drawn up to his chest. All of the windows have been flung wide open to let in the early morning breeze, the curtains turned transparent from overexposure to sunlight. Jaejoong smiles around his spoon and pulls it out to say, ‘sleep well?’
‘You could say that,’ Yoochun says, opening the fridge and drinking milk straight out of the carton. They always buy two cartons, Jaejoong’s skim and Yoochun’s full cream. Sometimes they get recognised in the supermarket, women with toddlers coming up and asking if they’re Dong Bang Shin Ki. Yoochun’s always the one to say, ‘we were,’ and he’s almost gotten over all of this changing, turning themselves around so they can fit into this new world. He laughs when he goes to wake Jaejoong up on a cold morning and Jaejoong’s first reaction is to shy away from imagined cameras, hiding his untidy hair, but at the same time he’s wondering, when can we get used to this?
The days and the weeks and the months all run together until they’re only recognizable by the seasons. Yoochun doesn’t think about how far they’ve come, until they’re handed a reminder, carefully wrapped, and they look at it like it’s something they never expected to receive; they’ll open it and be so surprised and spend hours thinking about it, and what it must represent. Yunho calls one afternoon to tell them that he’s getting married, the main purpose being that his fiancé is pregnant, and Jaejoong screams things like ‘shotgun marriage!’ and ‘scandalousss’ into the phone before demanding a celebration with fountains of champagne.
The wedding is small and private. Changmin flies in from Paris, and Junsu writes a new song that they sing together, for the first time in so long. In the middle of it, Yoochun’s reminded of one of their performances, on a larger stage and in front of a larger audience, the first time he’d realized that he wasn’t afraid of singing like this. They finish to applause and all of them make a speech of congratulations and afterwards, everyone gets drunk and end up staying the night at nearby hotels.
Yunho and his wife go on a honeymoon to Bora Bora and move into their new house (or mansion, as Changmin likes to call it) when they come back. A couple of months later, everyone is invited there to meet their new baby boy before the media can. Jaejoong says, ‘going to teach him how to dance?’ and Yunho says, ‘of course.’ Jaejoong tickles the baby, saying, ‘he’s going to be Dong Bang Junior.’
‘Baby TVXQ,’ Junsu puts in, and all of them laugh.
They all know they aren’t a precedent. Dong Bang Shin Ki only happens once.
The summer is warm and humid. Their house doesn’t have air-conditioning, so the ceiling fans stir every unsecured paper to the floor instead. Jaejoong wakes Yoochun up by stealing his pillow and beating him in the face with it until Yoochun gets out of bed. They have breakfast on the porch, facing the ocean and sitting on the floorboards instead of the table because there’s too much sun there. Jaejoong rigs up some extension cords so that they can make toast outside, using a plastic knife to spread raspberry jam over every slice and eating pieces of watermelon in between. After a while, the wind starts picking up and sand goes everywhere, so they pack up all of the food and put it in the pantry. ‘Pity Changmin’s too busy taking pictures and not here,’ says Jaejoong. ‘He’d eat it all up, and half the beach for dessert.’
Yoochun says, ‘He’s probably getting fat on croissants.’
‘The boy has faster than light metabolism,’ replies Jaejoong. ‘Croissants won’t be a problem.’
Yoochun leans against the frame of the door. His shirt’s already beginning to stick to him; Jaejoong’s has fallen off one shoulder. He pulls it down further and parades around regally when Yoochun says he looks like Julius Caesar without the laurels.
They hang around the house like this most of the time, wasting the hours like they have more than they need. When they were younger, Jaejoong wore a sense of bravado, like being who they were would make them immune. Without Dong Bang Shin Ki, he was a lost child, and all Yoochun could do was try to find them both something to keep constant.
The only conclusion was this one: when in love, do as the lovers do. They bought the house, and at the beginning, when the furniture still hadn’t arrived, the place seemed full of ghosts, passing through each other. Jaejoong was never one for this, too used to living where there wasn’t any room for secrets. He’d started smoking again, shadows under his eyes and craving company at times and solitude at others.
There weren’t any curtains on the windows and Yoochun kept waking up in the middle of night, to look outside and see Jaejoong on the porch, cigarette in hand. It would be cold outside, and both of them would be barefoot, Yoochun shivering awake and taking his place beside Jaejoong. On still nights, the taste of his cigarettes lingers, the air going smoky in consistency. If they wait till dawn, Jaejoong will be asleep, cigarettes rolling across the porch because the box had opened sometime in the night, and Yoochun will watch the sun rise.
By the time it’s cleared the horizon, Yoochun will have woken Jaejoong, and they’d be fixing breakfast. A group of seagulls wheel around in circles above the water, before heading out to sea and disappearing from view. Jaejoong sings along to the radio and spends ten minutes looking for his car keys because he’d forgotten he’d left them by the vase in the front hall. For the rest of the day, he’d be clingy and laughing, following Yoochun around the place. Like this, Yoochun couldn’t be sure if he hadn’t simply dreamed up the nights, and he didn’t ask Jaejoong, who had still talked about releasing more albums with just the two of them. At the time it had seemed possible, already tangible, but he’s long since given up on those ideas. Neither of them did anything about it then, and it’s too late for them now. They keep their songs to themselves.
Jaejoong always chooses the days where there won’t be any people to go down to the beach, even if this means they’ll always end up with the leftover days, the ones no one wants, the cold and the wet and the desolate. The water’s rarely warm enough to swim in, so they keep to the edges, foam riding over their feet and ankles. In the sky, the clouds cluster like they’re afraid to be alone, the same way Jaejoong hates empty rooms and silence. The colour of them looks too heavy to keep together, rain already breaking across the waves a few miles out. On these days, the anonymity is enough for Yoochun to feel like he’s drowning, and he’ll kiss Jaejoong like he is.
Sometimes Yoochun can almost believe that this is a dream, that he’ll wake up any moment and everyone will be in their old cramped apartment, Jaejoong sprawled on the floor because he thinks it’s more comfortable, their manager yawning just outside the bedroom door. They’ll have schedule from six till midnight and eat their meals in the car, travelling between television appearances. None of them could say that being who they were was a bad thing, but they all knew that after all of these years, there’d only be five of them left over, and each would be less than the boys they had started as. Yoochun, on these days, thinks that he’ll soon wake up and still be Dong Bang Shin Ki, but it doesn’t work that way. In the end, he’ll just wait and listen to the ocean, the sound of air inside a shell, Jaejoong’s voice, and remember that out here, there’s room for them to exist.