Tell Me, What Is Real; for snapbaeks
Title: Tell Me, What is Real
For: snapbaeks
By: ANONYMOUS
Rating: M
Side Pairing: Sehun/Kyungsoo
Length: 3,640 words
Summary: Baekhyun doesn’t know how to deal with a character who insists on coming to life; he can only deal with Jongin, whoever, whatever he is.
Warning: Implied sexual content, References to possible insanity, Slight supernatural element
“Jongin, Jongin, are you really going to do this and give me so much grief, huh? Huh? Really?”
Baekhyun’s fingers fly across the keys of his laptop even as he talks to himself. It’s three in the morning, his eyes are so focused on the story at hand he hasn’t even noticed that everything else is blurry and his head is pounding. Baekhyun pauses for just a moment to readjust his glasses which have slipped down the bridge of his noise. There’s a faint touch on his shoulders, faint fingers massaging sore muscles. Baekhyun barely holds back a moan of relief, even if the pressure isn’t as deep as he’d like. He has to concentrate, he has to get this scene done today. Jongin, his protagonist isn’t cooperating like he’s supposed to.
Then again, Jongin never does.
“Come to bed, you’re exhausted. You need a break.” Phantom whispers in Baekhyun’s ears send a chill down his spine, even as he ignores it.
“Can’t. Gotta write.”
“You can write tomorrow.” The figure hunches closer to Baekhyun’s side, causing him to shiver as soft breaths tickle the hair behind his ear. “Write during the day, Baekhyun, when I’m not here.”
Baekhyun nods, but still his fingers continue to type. Fast, faster, for his brain is on a roll and when the source of his inspiration is standing, hovering, just behind him, he doesn’t want it to go away.
Minutes later, or is it actually hours… his fingers stop. The clock behind him ticks softly into the night. There’s a buzz echoing from the refrigerator and the faint drills of the air conditioning unit cycling through its systems. His computer is silent. The man behind him is not.
“Come to bed, Baekhyun… You’re tired.”
This time, Baekhyun obeys. He lets his head fall heavily onto the chair back while Jongin rolls it away from the desk. Strong, soft arms pull on his body until Baekhyun is standing up. Then he’s guided onto the bed, covers shoved hastily aside, and Jongin climbs right in on top of him.
Jongin’s moans are soft and muffled when he kisses Baekhyun’s lips. There’s a slow-fire hunger to them, as if Jongin’s been waiting for this all night. And he has. Sleep tugs at Baekhyun’s body, and he fights it half-heartedly, instead closing his eyes but only to revel in the weight and warmth of Jongin’s slight body hovering over his. His head sinks into the pillow, bearing his neck as his lower body arches upwards. There’s friction, but it’s barely enough.
“Jongin… please…” he whines shamelessly.
He pulls his shirt up, shoves his pajama pants down. Then there’s a hand wrapped just where Baekhyun wants. Pleasure shoots up his body, burns a fire in his belly.
“Like that?” Jongin whispers.
“Y-yeahh… exactly like that.”
Baekhyun stifles a yawn the next evening and stares vaguely in the direction of Joonmyun’s head. His editor is giving Baekhyun his best ‘I’m concerned’ expression, but Baekhyun sees none of it. He’s too tired.
“You look awful. Are you sleeping at night? Are you eating right?”
Baekhyun laughs his answer away. “I think so?”
Joonmyun narrows his eyes and attempts to look threatening. It’s the same conversation they have every week, interspersed with the occasional serious discussion about where he is with the plot, and how much longer does Joonmyun need to keep the higher-ups at bay. In this case, they shouldn’t have to wait very long. Baekhyun may be half dead, but he’s writing faster. He doesn’t tell Joonmyun why, doesn’t need his editor to also worry about his mental state.
“Try taking a day off, no?” Joonmyun softly suggests. “You need a break. Every author needs a bit of a break, okay?”
Baekhyun nods, but he already knows it’s not going to happen.
Hours later, he twists the knob of his writing lamp and opens his laptop computer. Lines and lines of last night’s progress jump onto the screen. Baekhyun adjusts the brightness to protect his eyes and then digs in, re-calculating whether the scenes he’s written are actually good, or else just a waste of space. He’s never been good with plotting. Most often, after setting the characters, background, and setting, he’s still grappling with the follow-through plot for months at a time, willing each scene to happen as… it happens. A year ago he’d cheerfully decided he didn’t even need to try, that “real life doesn’t contain carefully crafted plots. Real life just, happens.”
That, however, was before real life… started to blur.
And Kim Jongin, kind of just… happened.
Perhaps he should have seen it coming. In between writing books, Baekhyun works a normal nine-to-five job in an office firm, but once he’s set upon a new creation, his nights start to go, sleep disappears, the weeks stretch into months, and by the time a few months have gone by with Baekhyun eating nothing but chips and drinking nothing but coffee, it’s not a mystery that his mind too seems to… go.
That’s how he started talking to Jongin at half past three in the morning. That’s how he started to feel his presence, imaging him there, beside him, whispering into his ear, talking about his character’s life choices.
Some writers start to feel a strange affinity for their protagonists after months and years of work. It’s inevitable, Baekhyun’s been told. After that much work, after that much sweat and grime, the mental strain it requires to poor life into a fictional being, dug up entirely from the recesses of one’s own mind, who wouldn’t grow attached? Who wouldn’t start to eat, sleep and breathe their characters. When you’re inside their head, when you are their head, it’s just going to be like that. That’s what Baekhyun’s been told. But no one told him it was possible to actually feel them, inherently feel them. And know them. And hear them.
“You should drink more water, not coffee.”
“Shut up, not your problem. That’s my problem,” Baekhyun babbles. “This is my problem, Jongin. I need coffee to sustain myself, you wouldn’t know what it’s like.”
“I wouldn’t? Why then, won’t you make me?”
On the page, Jongin is a moody loner who wanders the streets at night looking for a hint of life to justify his existence. Back alleyways, nightclubs, drug dens, the shadiest part of the shadiest time of night, doomed for tragedy. Baekhyun always writes tragedies. His readers love them, and who can tell why. Maybe they appeal to the darker side of nature, the taboo, the depression inside of every person's mind, however deep it goes. And in the dark of night, it makes sense that Baekhyun can write it. His day is full of the mundane, the light, worthless things that won't matter at the end of the day, when he can finally put aside those things and delve into something different, into fiction.
A fiction that has, however, come to life.
Jongin. Kim Jongin. Baekhyun wrote him dark. But Kim Jongin came to life in the dark. He awoke from the dark, his hair is dark, his skin is dark, the part of him that never sees the daylight, never quite illuminates in the lamplight. He's a creature of the shadows, imagined solely from the hidden confines of Baekhyun's mind, and therefore somehow... a part of him, part of Baekhyun's soul.
But also so so much more than that.
"You really like to imagine me as the worst, don't you?" Jongin's soft chuckles reverberate in Baekhyun's ear, like a fly buzzing through the air, but not nearly as annoying. A fly makes Baekhyun want to smack it to death. Jongin just makes Baekhyun's toes curl up and his body tingle.
"You're my character, Jongin. I can make you however I want to make you. And right now... you're looking for a murdered body."
"I'd rather touch your body," Jongin whispers sulkily in his ear.
"No." Baekhyun smacks away the hand that's caressing his neck. "Later, Jongin, later. I've got to get you to this next scene first. Hey, since you're not doing anything but bothering me, remind me what we decided. You run into the detective behind the hotel, right?"
"Hmmm. Kim Minseok yes. And what is he again, my long lost half-brother or something dreamy like that?"
Baekhyun snickers.
Jongin is a creature of his night, but he's infused with Baekhyun's own droll personality. Eery how it comes out, even in times like this.
"That's right," Baekhyun whispers back, his fingers already remembering their trail. Long shadows upon pavement, dilapidated buildings, bricks tumbling down from a long abandoned car stop, footsteps in the night that sound a whole lot like Jongin's restless pacing here, in Baekhyun's room. "That's right... and no getting a crush on him. He's your half-brother, okay?"
Jongin answers by pressing a kiss right behind Baekhyun's ear. "Warning, received."
Baekhyun's fingers still while he represses a pleasured shudder. "J-Jongin, cut it out okay... I've got to make it to this next scene..."
The feeling of Jongin's lips recede, although Baekhyun can still feel the warm spot on his neck. He shakes his head, blinks his eyes in rapid fire, then guzzles another half cup of cold coffee. The bitter taste drizzles down his throat and Baekhyun moans, not in pleasure this time, but in exasperation.
"My imagination...." he exhales, "is too good. Too good, and way too detailed for my OWN," his hands momentarily flutter while he smashes the keyboard, "DAMN, GOOD!"
More laughter from the recesses of his mind. The words, "You think you're going crazy, Baekhyun, but you don't even realize... I'm real."
Baekhyun shouts. Eyes clamped shut, hands over his ears. Crazy, he's going crazy. People said his mother was crazy, but who knows anymore. Who even knows what crazy even means. All Baekhyun knows is that he's got to make Jongin and Minseok meet, and he needs to do that before he loses control of his faculties.
Jongin... why did he ever start writing Jongin? Why did he ever fall in love with Jongin? Jongin isn't real. He's a character, a character of fiction, a figment of Baekhyun's overactive imagination, and if he'd just stay on the word document like a good little character, then Baekhyun wouldn't be so freaked out every night of his life.
He also wouldn't be so eager to write. To get to know his creation, every ounce of him, every detail, every whisp.
Because there's a part of his brain, and maybe this is the crazy part talking, but there's a drop in all that doubt that says, maybe he isn't crazy. Maybe Jongin really is... real. Because when he finally stops for the night, and Jongin claims his body, the feelings he gets, are so very real. And the sounds Jongin makes when Baekhyun clenches every muscle in his body, aren't so distant at all. When has Baekhyun ever had a partner who could make him feel this way? Something had to have fueled his imagination, and Jongin is unlike anyone Baekhyun has ever met.
"Real, real, I want you to be real," he tells the last remnants of his fading dream.
And it's surely part of the dream, when that character holds him close and whispers, "For you, I am."
It's a rare evening where Baekhyun isn't at home working on his novel. It does happen every now and then. Joonmyun's words get to him eventually, and his friends drag him away from his apartment, away from his laptop, away from Jongin-though of course they don't know it.
They have all the best intentions of course. Oh Sehun works an even more boring day job than Baekhyun, and Do Kyungsoo is his partner-in-crime. They've been friends since college, and now they date each other while Baekhyun... dates a character out of fiction.
"So how's your detective novel going?" Kyungsoo asks over a half-empty mug of beer.
Baekhyun nods instead of answering. He's unintentionally glancing around the room, memorizing how the inside of this establishment looks, the grimy windows, the unwashed tables. All of it will no doubt be featured somewhere in the book, because Baekhyun is nothing if not industrious. He requires glimmers of real life to shine a look of authenticity into a novel, and that takes experience and study.
"What he means," Sehun translates facetiously, "is that he's currently picturing us dead in some street corner when we stumble out of here drunk."
Kyungsoo chuckles, but Baekhyun smirks, huffing slightly. "I'm not working... I'm not imagining anything. I'm just, hanging out. Because you told me to."
"And we believe that, right," says Sehun.
Baekhyun forces himself to focus, to look straight at his friends and not around the bar. He's picturing Jongin in every corner booth, watching him, smiling at Baekhyun, waiting for when he'll return home and Baekhyun can be all his again, soon. Soon enough.
Will Jongin even be waiting for him tonight? Sometimes he refuses to show when Baekhyun takes a writing vacation. It's one of the reasons Baekhyun rarely takes a break.
"Just, drinking with my friends, what's wrong with that?" He holds up his glass, clinks it dramatically against his friends' cups and smiles wryly to himself. Then he overturns the glass and drains it down his throat with his head turned away.
Jongin holds up a beer from the other side of the bar and does the same. Baekhyun flinches and looks away.
Sehun and Kyungsoo make dating look simple. Friends turned into lovers, turned into easy companions. They laugh at each other and tease each other and sometimes when they don't care about their surroundings, they'll kiss each other. Not lingering, passionate affairs, like what Jongin does to Baekhyun at night, but sweet, chaste, endearing little moments. Baekhyun can't help feel a twinge of jealousy every time he witnesses it. He's never had a real boyfriend, never had a relationship that went beyond a few flings. Nothing even since that time a few years ago where he got wasted at a club and fancied himself in love with the bartender. But Kim Minseok was nothing more than a professional who casually backed away from him advances. Good looking and stoic, he would have made a horrible boyfriend, but instead became a great detective character for Baekhyun's novel, the perfect foil to Jongin's rogue underdog.
Why then wasn't it Minseok who came to life? Why Jongin? What's so special about Jongin that of all the protagonists Baekhyun has ever put down in ink, Jongin is the one he's come to be so enraptured by?
He muses on this, and tries not to muse on this, for the rest of the evening. So much for a hiatus. So much for an evening without his novel on the brain. Baekhyun is never going to escape until he finishes this book, but then what... Does Jongin end too with the final page of the book? Will he disappear forever, or linger on? Baekhyun should want him to go away but then again... when Jongin is sitting so still in the booth across the aisle, with so smug a look, with so smoldering a pair of eyes and those full, beer-licked lips, why would Baekhyun ever want him to go away?
"Baekhyun? Baekhyun? Heeey, Baekhyun? Are you drunk?"
Someone, not Jongin, waves a hand in front of his nose. Baekhyun's eyes follow it just long enough to find himself cross-eyed and dizzy.
"Yep, he's drunk."
Kyungsoo sighs long and heavy. "Guess that means we'll have to drag him to his apartment again."
"Don't we always?" Sehun quips. He laughs, but Baekhyun doesn't remember much more. He remembers pulling out a few bills to pay his friends for the drinks, then the chill air of the outside world. Somehow, he gets up the stairs of his apartment building and into his place, passes out and falls asleep to the sound of Jongin's voice, novel entirely forgotten.
The next morning he wakes up with a killer hangover and several unread texts on his cell phone. One is from Kyungsoo asking how he feels. The other is from Sehun wondering who was the guy who opened Baekhyun's door and tucked him into bed.
At some point this has to come to an end. Before Baekhyun finishes the book, after Baekhyun finishes the book. Sometime, somewhere, he has to make it stop. Before he literally goes insane. Or finds himself heartbroken. It’s one or the other and Baekhyun wants neither of them.
He hasn't even written a word this evening. Not a single, itty bitty word. His laptop is open, the page blaring at him across the darkness of the room. Baekhyun doesn't even look at it. How can he when he's on his back, tailbone arching against the mattress with Jongin's hand wrapped behind on his hips, Jongin's lips caressing hungrily along his jaw.
"Jongin... Jongin..." he moans, half to make him stop, half to make sure Jongin never, ever stops.
It feels so real, like all the other times, it feels so fucking real!
The only response he gets is renewed energy and vigor. It's times like this where Baekhyun almost doesn't care how cracked up he is in the head. Jongin has been his relationship for the past six months, his lover for all this time, and why would Baekhyun ever want that to come to an end?
Except he really doesn't trust himself anymore. How can he when every night, he dreams up a being that's no more real than the graphics on his computer screen? Jongin is fiction, he's made-up. Baekhyun made him up, and there's no getting around that no matter how much Baekhyun wants to try.
"Jongin..." he tries again. "Jongin, we have to..." Baekhyun's breath hitches when teeth scrape gently against his skin. Some mornings, he swears he wakes up to see those very same marks. But how? His eyes must be deceiving him too. Like everything else in this life.
Jongin moans but finally pulls his head away. "We have to, what?" He's shirtless. How did Baekhyun even make him shirtless? And why do the strong planes of his chest and abs feel so defined under Baekhyun's fingertips, when Baekhyun has never been with anybody this built, ever before?
"We have to... stop, I don't know... Jongin, I'm going insane. I'm crazy. I'm going fucking crazy..."
He pushes Jongin to the side, chest heaving as he tries to maintain his breath, to get his body back in control. He shuts his eyes, hoping when he opens them again, that Jongin won't be there. Hoping too, that Jongin will still be there.
He is, and Baekhyun sighs.
Jongin is as real as ever. He feels like flesh and blood, and he smells like a man. He gives off warmth like Baekhyun has never known, even lying side by side, Jongin's fingers lazily gliding across Baekhyun's clothed hip bone. How much more real does Jongin need to feel for Baekhyun to count himself thoroughly lost?
"You think I'm a ghost, don't you?" says Jongin. His voice is soft, distant. And ‘yes,’ Baekhyun wants to respond. Yes, he does. Only Jongin doesn't feel like one. He feels like a man with hurt feelings, a man who routinely makes Baekhyun's blood boil and his heart skip beats. A man Baekhyun has been using for six months in a push-and-pull relationship.
"I'm not, you know."
"What?" Baekhyun opens his eyes.
"I'm not just part of your imagination."
Baekhyun groans. "Impossible."
"It's not," Jongin insists. “You think you’re crazy, but then what does that make me?”
Baekhyun spares him a glance, this creature that shouldn’t be real, can’t be real. He’s pouting. The doomed protagonist who never expresses himself in the book, is pouting.
“It’s not real,” he says slowly, like explaining it to a child. “You’re talking to me only because I want you to talk to me.”
“And?”
“And what?” Baekhyun dares a small giggle. It’s the most unreal conversation he could be having now, and yet it’s happening. Jongin, is making them have this conversation. He rolls onto his side, further exasperating Baekhyun by dragging his hand up Baekhyun’s torso and slowly caressing his chin. Baekhyun is forced to look at him deeply in the eyes.
“I’m real, Baekhyun, whether you think so or not. However I got here, I’m real.”
Perhaps the question should have been, what is real? But Baekhyun doesn’t know how to ask that. No one ever prepared him for how to deal with a character who insists on being real. It’s not one of those classes you get in college, or even after. There is no crash course, no writers’ workshop. Only the judgment of one’s own mind, and how scary is that.
“You can’t be real.”
“But I can,” Jongin still insists.
Baekhyun stares at him. His skin is warm, flawed in so many small, measureless ways. His bangs fall across his forehead, and he’s breathing. Baekhyun can feel it fanning against his face, in and out, in and out. He puts his hand across Jongin’s heart, and there too… is a heartbeat. Already Baekhyun knows that inside and out, Jongin is a man who knows how to use his body, who knows how best to put it to use when they’re laying side to say, hip to hip. And he makes Baekhyun feel real too. So real, and so alive.
Is he arguing with a vision? A phantom? A figment of Baekhyun’s own mind? Or is he dealing with something else, something supernatural, some phenomenon?
Is it worth trying to make that distinction?
“Do something for me, please,” says Jongin softly, his eyes pleading, his fingers trembling as they touch Baekhyun’s lower lip.
“What?” Baekhyun whispers back.
“Believe me or not. But don’t… don’t ever finish that book.”
For: snapbaeks
By: ANONYMOUS
Rating: M
Side Pairing: Sehun/Kyungsoo
Length: 3,640 words
Summary: Baekhyun doesn’t know how to deal with a character who insists on coming to life; he can only deal with Jongin, whoever, whatever he is.
Warning: Implied sexual content, References to possible insanity, Slight supernatural element
“Jongin, Jongin, are you really going to do this and give me so much grief, huh? Huh? Really?”
Baekhyun’s fingers fly across the keys of his laptop even as he talks to himself. It’s three in the morning, his eyes are so focused on the story at hand he hasn’t even noticed that everything else is blurry and his head is pounding. Baekhyun pauses for just a moment to readjust his glasses which have slipped down the bridge of his noise. There’s a faint touch on his shoulders, faint fingers massaging sore muscles. Baekhyun barely holds back a moan of relief, even if the pressure isn’t as deep as he’d like. He has to concentrate, he has to get this scene done today. Jongin, his protagonist isn’t cooperating like he’s supposed to.
Then again, Jongin never does.
“Come to bed, you’re exhausted. You need a break.” Phantom whispers in Baekhyun’s ears send a chill down his spine, even as he ignores it.
“Can’t. Gotta write.”
“You can write tomorrow.” The figure hunches closer to Baekhyun’s side, causing him to shiver as soft breaths tickle the hair behind his ear. “Write during the day, Baekhyun, when I’m not here.”
Baekhyun nods, but still his fingers continue to type. Fast, faster, for his brain is on a roll and when the source of his inspiration is standing, hovering, just behind him, he doesn’t want it to go away.
Minutes later, or is it actually hours… his fingers stop. The clock behind him ticks softly into the night. There’s a buzz echoing from the refrigerator and the faint drills of the air conditioning unit cycling through its systems. His computer is silent. The man behind him is not.
“Come to bed, Baekhyun… You’re tired.”
This time, Baekhyun obeys. He lets his head fall heavily onto the chair back while Jongin rolls it away from the desk. Strong, soft arms pull on his body until Baekhyun is standing up. Then he’s guided onto the bed, covers shoved hastily aside, and Jongin climbs right in on top of him.
Jongin’s moans are soft and muffled when he kisses Baekhyun’s lips. There’s a slow-fire hunger to them, as if Jongin’s been waiting for this all night. And he has. Sleep tugs at Baekhyun’s body, and he fights it half-heartedly, instead closing his eyes but only to revel in the weight and warmth of Jongin’s slight body hovering over his. His head sinks into the pillow, bearing his neck as his lower body arches upwards. There’s friction, but it’s barely enough.
“Jongin… please…” he whines shamelessly.
He pulls his shirt up, shoves his pajama pants down. Then there’s a hand wrapped just where Baekhyun wants. Pleasure shoots up his body, burns a fire in his belly.
“Like that?” Jongin whispers.
“Y-yeahh… exactly like that.”
Baekhyun stifles a yawn the next evening and stares vaguely in the direction of Joonmyun’s head. His editor is giving Baekhyun his best ‘I’m concerned’ expression, but Baekhyun sees none of it. He’s too tired.
“You look awful. Are you sleeping at night? Are you eating right?”
Baekhyun laughs his answer away. “I think so?”
Joonmyun narrows his eyes and attempts to look threatening. It’s the same conversation they have every week, interspersed with the occasional serious discussion about where he is with the plot, and how much longer does Joonmyun need to keep the higher-ups at bay. In this case, they shouldn’t have to wait very long. Baekhyun may be half dead, but he’s writing faster. He doesn’t tell Joonmyun why, doesn’t need his editor to also worry about his mental state.
“Try taking a day off, no?” Joonmyun softly suggests. “You need a break. Every author needs a bit of a break, okay?”
Baekhyun nods, but he already knows it’s not going to happen.
Hours later, he twists the knob of his writing lamp and opens his laptop computer. Lines and lines of last night’s progress jump onto the screen. Baekhyun adjusts the brightness to protect his eyes and then digs in, re-calculating whether the scenes he’s written are actually good, or else just a waste of space. He’s never been good with plotting. Most often, after setting the characters, background, and setting, he’s still grappling with the follow-through plot for months at a time, willing each scene to happen as… it happens. A year ago he’d cheerfully decided he didn’t even need to try, that “real life doesn’t contain carefully crafted plots. Real life just, happens.”
That, however, was before real life… started to blur.
And Kim Jongin, kind of just… happened.
Perhaps he should have seen it coming. In between writing books, Baekhyun works a normal nine-to-five job in an office firm, but once he’s set upon a new creation, his nights start to go, sleep disappears, the weeks stretch into months, and by the time a few months have gone by with Baekhyun eating nothing but chips and drinking nothing but coffee, it’s not a mystery that his mind too seems to… go.
That’s how he started talking to Jongin at half past three in the morning. That’s how he started to feel his presence, imaging him there, beside him, whispering into his ear, talking about his character’s life choices.
Some writers start to feel a strange affinity for their protagonists after months and years of work. It’s inevitable, Baekhyun’s been told. After that much work, after that much sweat and grime, the mental strain it requires to poor life into a fictional being, dug up entirely from the recesses of one’s own mind, who wouldn’t grow attached? Who wouldn’t start to eat, sleep and breathe their characters. When you’re inside their head, when you are their head, it’s just going to be like that. That’s what Baekhyun’s been told. But no one told him it was possible to actually feel them, inherently feel them. And know them. And hear them.
“You should drink more water, not coffee.”
“Shut up, not your problem. That’s my problem,” Baekhyun babbles. “This is my problem, Jongin. I need coffee to sustain myself, you wouldn’t know what it’s like.”
“I wouldn’t? Why then, won’t you make me?”
On the page, Jongin is a moody loner who wanders the streets at night looking for a hint of life to justify his existence. Back alleyways, nightclubs, drug dens, the shadiest part of the shadiest time of night, doomed for tragedy. Baekhyun always writes tragedies. His readers love them, and who can tell why. Maybe they appeal to the darker side of nature, the taboo, the depression inside of every person's mind, however deep it goes. And in the dark of night, it makes sense that Baekhyun can write it. His day is full of the mundane, the light, worthless things that won't matter at the end of the day, when he can finally put aside those things and delve into something different, into fiction.
A fiction that has, however, come to life.
Jongin. Kim Jongin. Baekhyun wrote him dark. But Kim Jongin came to life in the dark. He awoke from the dark, his hair is dark, his skin is dark, the part of him that never sees the daylight, never quite illuminates in the lamplight. He's a creature of the shadows, imagined solely from the hidden confines of Baekhyun's mind, and therefore somehow... a part of him, part of Baekhyun's soul.
But also so so much more than that.
"You really like to imagine me as the worst, don't you?" Jongin's soft chuckles reverberate in Baekhyun's ear, like a fly buzzing through the air, but not nearly as annoying. A fly makes Baekhyun want to smack it to death. Jongin just makes Baekhyun's toes curl up and his body tingle.
"You're my character, Jongin. I can make you however I want to make you. And right now... you're looking for a murdered body."
"I'd rather touch your body," Jongin whispers sulkily in his ear.
"No." Baekhyun smacks away the hand that's caressing his neck. "Later, Jongin, later. I've got to get you to this next scene first. Hey, since you're not doing anything but bothering me, remind me what we decided. You run into the detective behind the hotel, right?"
"Hmmm. Kim Minseok yes. And what is he again, my long lost half-brother or something dreamy like that?"
Baekhyun snickers.
Jongin is a creature of his night, but he's infused with Baekhyun's own droll personality. Eery how it comes out, even in times like this.
"That's right," Baekhyun whispers back, his fingers already remembering their trail. Long shadows upon pavement, dilapidated buildings, bricks tumbling down from a long abandoned car stop, footsteps in the night that sound a whole lot like Jongin's restless pacing here, in Baekhyun's room. "That's right... and no getting a crush on him. He's your half-brother, okay?"
Jongin answers by pressing a kiss right behind Baekhyun's ear. "Warning, received."
Baekhyun's fingers still while he represses a pleasured shudder. "J-Jongin, cut it out okay... I've got to make it to this next scene..."
The feeling of Jongin's lips recede, although Baekhyun can still feel the warm spot on his neck. He shakes his head, blinks his eyes in rapid fire, then guzzles another half cup of cold coffee. The bitter taste drizzles down his throat and Baekhyun moans, not in pleasure this time, but in exasperation.
"My imagination...." he exhales, "is too good. Too good, and way too detailed for my OWN," his hands momentarily flutter while he smashes the keyboard, "DAMN, GOOD!"
More laughter from the recesses of his mind. The words, "You think you're going crazy, Baekhyun, but you don't even realize... I'm real."
Baekhyun shouts. Eyes clamped shut, hands over his ears. Crazy, he's going crazy. People said his mother was crazy, but who knows anymore. Who even knows what crazy even means. All Baekhyun knows is that he's got to make Jongin and Minseok meet, and he needs to do that before he loses control of his faculties.
Jongin... why did he ever start writing Jongin? Why did he ever fall in love with Jongin? Jongin isn't real. He's a character, a character of fiction, a figment of Baekhyun's overactive imagination, and if he'd just stay on the word document like a good little character, then Baekhyun wouldn't be so freaked out every night of his life.
He also wouldn't be so eager to write. To get to know his creation, every ounce of him, every detail, every whisp.
Because there's a part of his brain, and maybe this is the crazy part talking, but there's a drop in all that doubt that says, maybe he isn't crazy. Maybe Jongin really is... real. Because when he finally stops for the night, and Jongin claims his body, the feelings he gets, are so very real. And the sounds Jongin makes when Baekhyun clenches every muscle in his body, aren't so distant at all. When has Baekhyun ever had a partner who could make him feel this way? Something had to have fueled his imagination, and Jongin is unlike anyone Baekhyun has ever met.
"Real, real, I want you to be real," he tells the last remnants of his fading dream.
And it's surely part of the dream, when that character holds him close and whispers, "For you, I am."
It's a rare evening where Baekhyun isn't at home working on his novel. It does happen every now and then. Joonmyun's words get to him eventually, and his friends drag him away from his apartment, away from his laptop, away from Jongin-though of course they don't know it.
They have all the best intentions of course. Oh Sehun works an even more boring day job than Baekhyun, and Do Kyungsoo is his partner-in-crime. They've been friends since college, and now they date each other while Baekhyun... dates a character out of fiction.
"So how's your detective novel going?" Kyungsoo asks over a half-empty mug of beer.
Baekhyun nods instead of answering. He's unintentionally glancing around the room, memorizing how the inside of this establishment looks, the grimy windows, the unwashed tables. All of it will no doubt be featured somewhere in the book, because Baekhyun is nothing if not industrious. He requires glimmers of real life to shine a look of authenticity into a novel, and that takes experience and study.
"What he means," Sehun translates facetiously, "is that he's currently picturing us dead in some street corner when we stumble out of here drunk."
Kyungsoo chuckles, but Baekhyun smirks, huffing slightly. "I'm not working... I'm not imagining anything. I'm just, hanging out. Because you told me to."
"And we believe that, right," says Sehun.
Baekhyun forces himself to focus, to look straight at his friends and not around the bar. He's picturing Jongin in every corner booth, watching him, smiling at Baekhyun, waiting for when he'll return home and Baekhyun can be all his again, soon. Soon enough.
Will Jongin even be waiting for him tonight? Sometimes he refuses to show when Baekhyun takes a writing vacation. It's one of the reasons Baekhyun rarely takes a break.
"Just, drinking with my friends, what's wrong with that?" He holds up his glass, clinks it dramatically against his friends' cups and smiles wryly to himself. Then he overturns the glass and drains it down his throat with his head turned away.
Jongin holds up a beer from the other side of the bar and does the same. Baekhyun flinches and looks away.
Sehun and Kyungsoo make dating look simple. Friends turned into lovers, turned into easy companions. They laugh at each other and tease each other and sometimes when they don't care about their surroundings, they'll kiss each other. Not lingering, passionate affairs, like what Jongin does to Baekhyun at night, but sweet, chaste, endearing little moments. Baekhyun can't help feel a twinge of jealousy every time he witnesses it. He's never had a real boyfriend, never had a relationship that went beyond a few flings. Nothing even since that time a few years ago where he got wasted at a club and fancied himself in love with the bartender. But Kim Minseok was nothing more than a professional who casually backed away from him advances. Good looking and stoic, he would have made a horrible boyfriend, but instead became a great detective character for Baekhyun's novel, the perfect foil to Jongin's rogue underdog.
Why then wasn't it Minseok who came to life? Why Jongin? What's so special about Jongin that of all the protagonists Baekhyun has ever put down in ink, Jongin is the one he's come to be so enraptured by?
He muses on this, and tries not to muse on this, for the rest of the evening. So much for a hiatus. So much for an evening without his novel on the brain. Baekhyun is never going to escape until he finishes this book, but then what... Does Jongin end too with the final page of the book? Will he disappear forever, or linger on? Baekhyun should want him to go away but then again... when Jongin is sitting so still in the booth across the aisle, with so smug a look, with so smoldering a pair of eyes and those full, beer-licked lips, why would Baekhyun ever want him to go away?
"Baekhyun? Baekhyun? Heeey, Baekhyun? Are you drunk?"
Someone, not Jongin, waves a hand in front of his nose. Baekhyun's eyes follow it just long enough to find himself cross-eyed and dizzy.
"Yep, he's drunk."
Kyungsoo sighs long and heavy. "Guess that means we'll have to drag him to his apartment again."
"Don't we always?" Sehun quips. He laughs, but Baekhyun doesn't remember much more. He remembers pulling out a few bills to pay his friends for the drinks, then the chill air of the outside world. Somehow, he gets up the stairs of his apartment building and into his place, passes out and falls asleep to the sound of Jongin's voice, novel entirely forgotten.
The next morning he wakes up with a killer hangover and several unread texts on his cell phone. One is from Kyungsoo asking how he feels. The other is from Sehun wondering who was the guy who opened Baekhyun's door and tucked him into bed.
At some point this has to come to an end. Before Baekhyun finishes the book, after Baekhyun finishes the book. Sometime, somewhere, he has to make it stop. Before he literally goes insane. Or finds himself heartbroken. It’s one or the other and Baekhyun wants neither of them.
He hasn't even written a word this evening. Not a single, itty bitty word. His laptop is open, the page blaring at him across the darkness of the room. Baekhyun doesn't even look at it. How can he when he's on his back, tailbone arching against the mattress with Jongin's hand wrapped behind on his hips, Jongin's lips caressing hungrily along his jaw.
"Jongin... Jongin..." he moans, half to make him stop, half to make sure Jongin never, ever stops.
It feels so real, like all the other times, it feels so fucking real!
The only response he gets is renewed energy and vigor. It's times like this where Baekhyun almost doesn't care how cracked up he is in the head. Jongin has been his relationship for the past six months, his lover for all this time, and why would Baekhyun ever want that to come to an end?
Except he really doesn't trust himself anymore. How can he when every night, he dreams up a being that's no more real than the graphics on his computer screen? Jongin is fiction, he's made-up. Baekhyun made him up, and there's no getting around that no matter how much Baekhyun wants to try.
"Jongin..." he tries again. "Jongin, we have to..." Baekhyun's breath hitches when teeth scrape gently against his skin. Some mornings, he swears he wakes up to see those very same marks. But how? His eyes must be deceiving him too. Like everything else in this life.
Jongin moans but finally pulls his head away. "We have to, what?" He's shirtless. How did Baekhyun even make him shirtless? And why do the strong planes of his chest and abs feel so defined under Baekhyun's fingertips, when Baekhyun has never been with anybody this built, ever before?
"We have to... stop, I don't know... Jongin, I'm going insane. I'm crazy. I'm going fucking crazy..."
He pushes Jongin to the side, chest heaving as he tries to maintain his breath, to get his body back in control. He shuts his eyes, hoping when he opens them again, that Jongin won't be there. Hoping too, that Jongin will still be there.
He is, and Baekhyun sighs.
Jongin is as real as ever. He feels like flesh and blood, and he smells like a man. He gives off warmth like Baekhyun has never known, even lying side by side, Jongin's fingers lazily gliding across Baekhyun's clothed hip bone. How much more real does Jongin need to feel for Baekhyun to count himself thoroughly lost?
"You think I'm a ghost, don't you?" says Jongin. His voice is soft, distant. And ‘yes,’ Baekhyun wants to respond. Yes, he does. Only Jongin doesn't feel like one. He feels like a man with hurt feelings, a man who routinely makes Baekhyun's blood boil and his heart skip beats. A man Baekhyun has been using for six months in a push-and-pull relationship.
"I'm not, you know."
"What?" Baekhyun opens his eyes.
"I'm not just part of your imagination."
Baekhyun groans. "Impossible."
"It's not," Jongin insists. “You think you’re crazy, but then what does that make me?”
Baekhyun spares him a glance, this creature that shouldn’t be real, can’t be real. He’s pouting. The doomed protagonist who never expresses himself in the book, is pouting.
“It’s not real,” he says slowly, like explaining it to a child. “You’re talking to me only because I want you to talk to me.”
“And?”
“And what?” Baekhyun dares a small giggle. It’s the most unreal conversation he could be having now, and yet it’s happening. Jongin, is making them have this conversation. He rolls onto his side, further exasperating Baekhyun by dragging his hand up Baekhyun’s torso and slowly caressing his chin. Baekhyun is forced to look at him deeply in the eyes.
“I’m real, Baekhyun, whether you think so or not. However I got here, I’m real.”
Perhaps the question should have been, what is real? But Baekhyun doesn’t know how to ask that. No one ever prepared him for how to deal with a character who insists on being real. It’s not one of those classes you get in college, or even after. There is no crash course, no writers’ workshop. Only the judgment of one’s own mind, and how scary is that.
“You can’t be real.”
“But I can,” Jongin still insists.
Baekhyun stares at him. His skin is warm, flawed in so many small, measureless ways. His bangs fall across his forehead, and he’s breathing. Baekhyun can feel it fanning against his face, in and out, in and out. He puts his hand across Jongin’s heart, and there too… is a heartbeat. Already Baekhyun knows that inside and out, Jongin is a man who knows how to use his body, who knows how best to put it to use when they’re laying side to say, hip to hip. And he makes Baekhyun feel real too. So real, and so alive.
Is he arguing with a vision? A phantom? A figment of Baekhyun’s own mind? Or is he dealing with something else, something supernatural, some phenomenon?
Is it worth trying to make that distinction?
“Do something for me, please,” says Jongin softly, his eyes pleading, his fingers trembling as they touch Baekhyun’s lower lip.
“What?” Baekhyun whispers back.
“Believe me or not. But don’t… don’t ever finish that book.”